I made the alpha 1 release of the EoC version 2.0 development series available. See the EoC home page for info. (EoC is my mailing list manager.)

No honking today; I guess there just isn't a big German population in Montreal. But, y'know, fourth place is pretty damn good, Portugal! Nothing to sneeze at. Still ahead of Brazil, for what it's worth. Tomorrow's the big finale, of course. The Paramount Famous Players on Ste. Catherine downtown is going to have a live showing, free for the first 300 people. I dunno... I guess it could be fun, but it seems a little impersonal. I think I'll be watching from Niko's again. It's easy to walk to Little Italy, or Barouf, from there. tags: montreal world cup germany portugal

Grillr I spent the day putting together household furniture. We stopped by Canadian Tire on Tuesday to buy lawn furniture, and we got a shipment from Ikea on Wednesday. This afternoon cleared out a lot of cardboard boxes from our house. First up was Amita June's big girl bed, which she got as a present for her month birthday. Yeah, Amita turned the big one-oh yesterday (10 months!), and although we've been doing wp:co-sleeping, we want her to start learning to sleep in her own bed. (Most co-sleeping babies want to move out after about 1 year.) She got a toddler bed, which is actually pretty cute, and fits perfectly in her room. Building Ikea furniture isn't really all that fun. First, they optimize for shipping size and storage, not for ease of building (or stability), so you get some really shaky stuff. Second, the instructions have no words -- assumably to avoid translation costs -- so you have to interpret their graphical V lapuk into some kind of reasonable instructions. Fortunately, just about the time I finished building it, Maj and Amita came home from a walk. Amita had just fallen asleep, so we put her in to see how it fit. Looks pretty good to me! After that, I watered my new lawn. The grass seeds I spread on Tuesday are coming up in teensity-tinesity leaves. Huzzah! Then I turned my attention to the wt:Muskoka chairs we got from Canadian Tire. These turned out to be a lot easier, and they were made from cedar wood, so they were pleasant to work with. Maj had invited over some friends for grilling, so she went to the store to buy food while I worked on the Muskokas. The baby hung out with me outside in her playpen. The chairs turned out great, and we had a nice grill. Brenda, Parise and Tony all came over. Brenda and Tony are librarians, and Brenda and Parise grew up together in wt:Moncton. The Muskokas were a hit; here are Brenda and Amita enjoying one. tags: ikea bed amitajune grill muskoka chairs lawn grill

Fireworks I can hear right now the dull thump thump tha-thump-thump of fireworks going off down at La Ronde, the amusement park in the middle of the St. Laurent River. They're the hosts of the International Fireworks Festival, which happens every summer. It's one of the great things about living in Montreal -- fireworks every Wednesday and Saturday from early June until the end of July. The festival is a competition -- national pyrotechnics teams each provide a half-hour long show on one of the nights, and then at some point after the festival they decide on a winner (I think... I've never actually checked who "won"). The fireworks are first-class, and it's just fun to have explosions over the city all the time. Tonight's team is wt:South Africa -- it's the first time there's been an African national team. Go SA! tags: south africa la ronde international fireworks festival pyrotechnics montreal fireworks

Best show ever One of the best music shows I ever went to was a "surprise" event by Camper Van Beethoven at the now-defunct Mint Platter record store on Telegraph Avenue in wt:Berkeley, California around 1990. Probably one of the next best music shows I ever went to was a surprise (for me) when Maj took me to see CVB at the Just pour Rire Theatre in Montreal in 2004, one week after we were married. (The band had recently reformed, and that night their equipment was stolen out of their tour bus in Mtl. Such a shame.) I'm just thinking about it because so many of the shows I love are on the etree section of the Internet Archive. Secret message to every taper I crabbed out because their big boom mike was blocking my view of the stage: sorry. You were right. Thanks. And what reminded me of that? The NPR Live Concert Series, aka All Songs Considered. Man, there's a lot of good music in there. tags: live music archives etree camper van beethoven

One So, has anyone offered Kyle Macdonald of One Red Paperclip a marketing job yet? Guy knows his marketing. tags: one red paperclip kyle macdonald

Bignose strikes again I'll be honest -- most of the time, I totally don't understand fellow piglogger Michael Bakunin's blog. Here's an excerpt from Gasoline: FD: small short position in one US refiner, and thinking about crack spreads. Does that mean something to some species of animal? I dunno. tags: michael bakunin piglog gasoline

Well, I've been conferencing again. I'm currently sitting in a train with Andreas Barth, returning from the Libre Software Meeting in Nancy, France. We attended the conference to take part in a workshop organized by EDOS, an EU-sponsored project which focuses on challenges the makers of Linux distributions are facing. Andreas, Enrico Zini and I gave overviews of various issues in Debian and the EDOS folks (which includes a number of people working on Mandriva) presented their work. Some of it seems pretty interesting and can potentially be integrated into Debian but time will tell. Andreas posted a summary to get a discussion going. Last week I attended FrOSCon near Bonn to present the keynote speech. I really liked the conference because it was a true community event, with lots of effort put in by the local organizers, and the event was pretty relaxing (at least for me, probably not for the organizers who did a great job hiding all the work that is required behind the scenes). Just before attending FrOSCon, I met up with a friend from high school and spent a few days in Amsterdam. A few weeks ago I attended FLOSSWorld in Brussels to talk about skill development in FLOSS communities. FLOSSWorld is a project to study free software communities all around the world as an extension of the work done a few years which focused on Europe. One of the nice things about FLOSSWorld was that my hotel was a few minutes on one side of the cathedral in Brussels and the conference venue a few minutes on the other side. So I finally managed to visit the cathedral, something I never managed to do in all the years I attended FOSDEM in Brussels.

Long hot days in Montreal -- which means a lot of fun for me. Yesterday, I had lunch with Marc Laporte, a Montreal Open Source developer and project lead for Tiki CMS/Groupware. Marc sent me email a week or so ago -- he saw on GeoURL that we lived right across Parc La Fontaine from each other, and since we had such similar interests it made sense to meet up. Wednesdays are my Daddy Day with Amita June. I try to work 4 10-hour days a week, and take Wednesday off to spend with the baby (and let Maj get some work done). It doesn't always work out that way -- I tend to work late night and weekends anyways, and Wikitravel never sleeps -- but at least theoretically I take the baby on Wednesdays. So I had the baby, and we went and met Marc at Universel Caf on Cherrier and Parc L.F. It's a nice place -- not too pricey and the food is good. It's also got a terrasse so we could sit outside in the sun. Marc is a lot of fun -- Tiki's got such an active user and developer community, and such a unique development strategy (very liberal CVS access) that we had a lot of fun and things to talk about. Marc spent six months in wt:Buenos Aires developing software, which is just about my dream job. I've wanted to go there for a long time, and it's on our list of "next places to live". We also talked a lot about how active Wiki culture is becoming, and how great that is, and how many blechy parts there are too. As when most Wiki makers come together, we bemoaned the lack of a Wiki markup standard, but hopefully the development of a text/wiki RFC will spur its growth. At least I hope so! tags: marc laporte amitajune montreal universel geourl tiki buenos aires wiki wiki markup standard

Allez les bleus On the way back from lunch, Amita and I stopped in the great playground by the baby pools in Parc La Fontaine, when my friend Niko called and invited me over to watch the World Cup semi-finals between France and Portugal. Niko lives on Marie-Anne and DeBullion -- about half-way between the Portuguese neighborhood surrounding Iglesia Santa Cruz at rue Rachel and St Urbain, and the Barouf, a bar on St. Denis that has become the unofficial centroid of French World Cup fans in Montreal. Amita June fell asleep on the way there, so we didn't get to Niko's until the game was almost over. But that was OK -- it was kind of a boring game, as far as I can tell, and France won 1-0. What was fun was walking out to St. Denis afterwards. The police had blocked off the street for several blocks in both directions, so we were able to walk up and down the street, while people cheered allez les bleus and waved the tricolor and generally had a mad good time. We couldn't help ourselves -- we had to walk down rue Rachel and see how the other half was doing. Which was, in fact, not well -- there were an awful lot of glum Portuguese people hanging out at Rachel and St Laurent. The street wasn't blocked officially, but cars really couldn't get through the crowd of mopey, extremely well-costumed folks. It got a little ugly -- one drunk France fan came around waving a tricolor and nearly got his hat handed to him by 12 angry Portuguese, including one guy in a red, yellow and green wig with a big red clown nose. A car with a French flag driving up St. Laurent also got stopped. We figured it was time to get out, so I took the baby home and put her to sleep and hacked on my OpenID MediaWiki extension for a few hours. Things are going well -- I'm really close to a consumer and a server. The little UI niceties will have to come later -- right now I'm concentrating on the mainline functionality. tags: openid mediawiki world cup montreal amitajune france portugal allez les bleus

We were a bit cooler for most of the day, but the evening sun is starting to raise the temperature again. Updated part one with a link to a recent BBC report of the Energy Saving Trust predicting an upwards trend. An interesting comparison from Monday: two bottles of frozen water, one stood in the house (temperature controlled with these tips) and one in an office (not controlled like this): the office one was all water by noon and the house one still part-ice at 4pm. Finally, had a nice email from some friends that said they're enjoying this series and "we moved our freezer out of the (light and warm) kitchen into the (cool and dark) garage, where we hope it'll use less power (cooler environment) and it won't be churning out heat somewhere that's hot enough already." I remember the freezer at my childhood home being in the garage: are we just rediscovering old ways?

We hit Movies 4 Mommies again this morning, although some horrible construction project on Av Papineau around Jean Talon made us about 20 minutes late. They say that there are two seasons in Quebec: winter, and construction. I think they say that about a lot of places, though. Today's movie was The Devil Wears Prada, which reads much better in French on the posters at the theater: Le Diable s'habille en Prada. It's the story of a girl who wants to be a journalist and takes a job as the assistant to a powerful fashion publisher. It stars Anne Hathaway of The Princess Diaries as the earnest young striver and Meryl Streep as the Andy Warhol-like cruel and judgemental boss-lady. The girl learns about love, life, and being true to yourself. In other words, it was sappy dreck. But it was watchable dreck, unlike the horrible Click we saw last week. I didn't feel stupid for sitting through this movie, which is pretty low praise but for the Mommy Matinee there's only so much you can do. The only bummer is that Streep's character spoke in a ferocious, disdainful whisper, which was hard to hear over the crying babies. tags: movies movies 4 mommies devil wears prada crying quebec late

Lawn After the movie we stopped by the Canada Tire in March Central for some garden supplies. I'd promised Maj for a Mother's Day gift that I'd convert the 10'x10' square of weeds and trash outside the front door of our apartment into a nice lawn for sitting on and drinking white wine, but it was raining on Mother's Day and one thing or another got in the way of me actually doing what I said I was going to do. Until now. I had weeded the lawn on Sunday, which was pretty damn hard -- the weeds were waist-high and full of barbs and fluff and procrastination and other defense mechanisms. But I managed to rip out almost everything with a leafspan greater than half a centimeter, which left most of the area bare of plants. We spread out some grass seed given to us by friends Tara and Chris, but I wanted to give it a little more care. So I got one of those pushy lawn mowers at Canada Tire, and a big rake, and some grass seed with fertilizer mixed in since I'm apparently too lazy to mix it together myself. I assembled the mower when we got home, then mowed what was left of the grass down to a low buzzcut. I raked the little square like the dickens to get out the old leaves and dead grass and rocks and sticks and cigarette butts and wrappers, which had the side benefit of turning over the soil, too. Then I threw big handfuls of grass-seed with fertilizer pellets all over the resulting mulched up soil. Some water, some cleanup, and voila: I have what looks like a patch of dirt with seeds in it. Hopefully this will become a lush lawn sometime in the near future, because we also bought some beautiful fold-up wt:Muskoka chairs to put on the front lawn. I think these are just about the same as wp:Adirondack chairs, but I'm sure some expert in patio furniture could explain the difference. They are, however, my favorite kind of chair, and I'm looking forward to sitting out there with some white wine in a few weeks once the lawn grows in. Like, I dunno... maybe Labo[u]r Day. tags: lawn canada tire mower grass muskoka chairs adirondack chairs

Hey, Baby Speaking of national (international?) holidays, in the aristo calendar it's the 4th of July. Happy Independence Day, everyone. My favorite 4th of July media item is the great song "4th of July" by X from their album See How We Are. X has an X the Band myspace thingy, which seems to play 4th of July when you navigate to it today. Which, like, hooray for them. Go, X. Amita June and I danced around the house this morning singing the "America -- Fuck Yeah!" song from Team America: World Police. Sometimes I wonder how Amita June is going to feel about her "dual heritage" when she grows up. She's got a Canadian passport and an American one; I hope for her that she'll be better able to appreciate the world by having that dual perspective. I've heard that there are parts of the world where Americans living abroad get together on the 4th of July and have hot dogs and toss the ol' pigskin around and stuff. I don't know if there's an Americans get-together in Montreal, and I kind of don't care. It's not like we're stationed in Siberia here, and we need to congregate once a year to remember what "home" was like. Quebec isn't so far from the US that I feel homesick for American culture -- just homesick for the people. I think the US Embassy in wt:Ottawa has a big party, but the Montreal US Consulate doesn't seem to. Which is probably just as well -- it's at the top floor of a 30-story building, which would make barbecuing hard, and playing tag football on the roof would probably be dangerous ("Go long!"). tags: 4th of july x canada usa consulate montreal

.de vs. .it Of course, there aren't any Stars and Stripes flying in Montreal today -- all the houses we passed today were flying the Italian flag, for the World Cup semifinals. Montreal has a vibrant Little Italy, and the residents and other Italians in Quebec are going nuts for the Cup games. I can't imagine what's going to happen tonight if Italy wins. I saw one car driving around with a German flag on the roof today... I hope they guy makes it home in one piece, is all I can say. I like the name "Little Italy" -- it makes me think of a cross between wt:Palermo and wp:Munchkinland. Like, 1-meter-tall Italians drinking espresso and playing tarantellas and dancing and cheering with those tiny squeaky speeded-up Alvin-and-the-Chipmunk voices. Teensy-weensy Italy! Itty-bitty Italy! It's so cute! tags: italy little italy montreal world cup quebec munchkins

Grilling After reading the Meathenge slapdown for once-a-year barbecuers, I'm once again happy that I'm a vegetarian (more or less). I just can't compete in that league, and my little propane BBQ with veggie burgers, portabellos and an occasional trout is enough for me, thanks. tags: bbq meat grilling meathenge

Wikitravel 10K Party I just announced on wt:Wikitravel:4 July 2006 that Maj and I are going to throw a little Wikitravel 10K Party during Wikimania 2006. I'm going to be presenting about Wikitravel and travel guide wikis, so it's going to be an exciting event for us. On a side note, it looks like we'll be in wt:Odense for Wikisym. Lots of people we like there, and Maj has always wanted to be in wt:Saint Petersburg for her birthday, so this will probably be close enough. tags: conferences wikitravel wiki wikimania wikisym 10k

El Destino One of the great minds of the Internet goes incognito as El Destino on Pigdog Journal. He may be one of the best media commentators I've ever read, and I'm proud to say that I know him well. Or, well, used to. He's written two articles for Pigdog Journal lately after a 3-4 year hiatus (I think... something like that). His article on the Devo + Disney combination is really funny and good. I hope I hear his voice more often; sometimes I wonder what he thinks of the Web in 2006. tags: el destino destiny pigdog journal devo disney

Stephen Hawking and the Long View Dr. Stephen Hawking asked Yahoo! Answers, " How can the human race survive the next hundred years?". tags: yahoo yahoo answers stephen hawking

Gar! It looks like life's not so rosy after all with this blog. YULblog, the Montreal blog aggregator, apparently uses TrackBack for updating the aggregator. So I'm going to have to build some kind of trackback system into WiLiKi. At some point I should probably collect my customizations for WiLiKi into a nice WikiBlog? add-on -- but there's still a lot Todo before that'd be ready. On the same subject, it seems that I'm getting more and more frequent WikiSpam on the About This Site page. I'm going to have to start instituting some anti-spam measures. Using regexps to refuse submissions with blacklisted URLs works very well for Wikitravel (see wt:Wikitravel:Spam filter), so I'm tempted to try it here. tag: wiliki trackback yulblog aggregator wikispam wikitravel spam filter

Piknik missed We were going to head to Piknic Electronik yesterday -- we had a great time a few weeks ago, and Piknik is such a harbinger of Montreal summer -- but Amita June is going through some freaky personal schedule issues, and she wouldn't take an afternoon nap. By the time to leave for the Parc, she was wiggin' out from sleep deprivation, and we couldn't really force her to go out to the island and dance to big fun beats. Which was kind of a bummer, since our friends Meg and Patti were out there, and it would have been good to see them. They came by on Friday night for Pizza Night Chez les Bads, and we talked about Ignition 2006 (yes, Montreal Burners, it is going to happen... I think) and kids and dancing and weddings and fun. Amita June and Meg get along like gang-busters; they have a lot of fun together. So instead of going out to the Island Amita June and I went across the street to Parc La Fontaine and played in the baby pools right next to the playground. How is that for lucky? We have two huge pools, about 18 inches deep, right across the street, next to the baby playground. Oh, and there's a good bar a block and a half away. This is the greatest apartment ever. We moved in this time last year, and I feel so at home here now. So many important things have happened to us in the last year -- Amita June, Wikitravel -- and this apartment has been a part of it. We're going to look for a house to buy in the fall, but right now this feels like home. tag: 1481 rue rachel parc la fontaine amitajune pizza night meg patti piknik electronik parc jean drapeau montreal home

Two months I almost forgot that it's my two-month blogiversary. Yes, I just made that word up. And it's months in the French Revolutionary Calendar, not, like, real months. But close. tag: french revolutionary calendar blogs

My mom For those of you who asked: yes, my Mom's doing great. She was bit by a rattlesnake last week (!), but now she's back on her feet, the swelling is down, and she's doing all the stuff she did before. Good for her; she's pretty resilient. tag: mom rattlesnake recovery bite

Microburst I now officially have a new phobia, since a Quebec woman was recently killed in her trailer by a microburst. Apparently a wp:microburst is a localized gust of wind that can reach speeds of 100 kph, kind of like a tornado. Unlike a tornado, a microburst doesn't spin around -- it goes straight down. It's usually accompanied by rain, and can be devastating. These freak winds happen several times a year in Quebec. Great. tags: quebec microburst death trailer wind

OpenID My current work project is enabling single-signon for all the language versions of Wikitravel. My preferred method for this is OpenID, since it will allow sign-on not only to Wikitravel language versions, but in the future other sites as well. So I'm writing an extension for MediaWiki to allow logging in to MediaWiki with an OpenID URL, and for making MW an authentication server for other sites. I realize this is a little roundabout for Wikitravel's needs, but for interfacing with new partner World66, as well as other MW sites like Wikipedia or Wikia servers, it'd be fantastic. I'm using the great OpenID Enabled libraries from JanRain. They're working out pretty well, although they're a little flaky around the Yadis edges. Given that I don't really care about Yadis -- sorry, LID and inames -- having to deal with those errors is pretty annoying. Even so, I managed to get a working consumer-side system going today. It was pretty exciting logging into my development machine for the first time with an OpenID, and having it work. Hooray for OpenID! tags: openid mediawiki php lid openid enabled inames yadis wikitravel

I’ve seen several requests for a simple set of instructions that test a distribution against the LSB. I wrote some Debian-specific instructions in a mailing list post back in October, and thought they’d do better as more general instructions. Before you start, you have to find out two things about the distribution you want to test:

• How to install the LSB on your distribution. At minimum, your distro should provide something like a “lsb” package. Make sure that’s installed.
• How to install LSB packages on your distribution. RPM-based distros have it easy here, since the procedure is likely to be the same as installing any other package on your system. Debian users (and users of Debian derivatives) need to use alien; I’ve found that you get the best results with alien -ick [package]. Other distributions will have their own ways, possibly involving alien as well.

Go to the LSB download page and start downloading everything under the Runtime Tests for the LSB version and architecture you want to test. Make sure you don’t get the betas unless that’s what you want to test. You will also need the lsb-python package from the Application Battery list. Install all of these packages. Once all of the packages are installed, run the tests:

• /opt/lsb/bin/lsblibchk
• /opt/lsb/bin/lsbcmdchk
• Add /usr/opt/lsb/appbat/bin to your PATH, run gcc -dumpmachine to get your machine triplet, and run /opt/lsb/share/test/qmtest_libstdcpp_[version]/run_tests. Answer the questions as appropriate.
• For the X test suites, install enough of XFree86 or X.org on your system for proper client support, as well as the Xvfb X server. Debian users can install the x-window-system-core and xvfb packages, but see below about problems with Xvfb. After this is done, go to the directory /opt/lsb/test/vsw4 and run the run_vsw4.sh script found there.
• For the main runtime test, make sure the loop driver is loaded. (This is mostly a problem on systems using udev.) After the test package is installed, set passwords for the “vsx0″, “vsx1″, and “vsx2″ users, log in as vsx0 at a system console, and run run_tests. Logging in is required; su or sudo won’t work. The default answers to the questions asked are mostly OK, but a few don’t have good defaults. In particular, you’ll have to tell the script the right passwords for the vsx users, and you should make sure the test block device is /home/tet/test_sets/nonexistb. Be prepared to type the root password several times to set up various things the tests need.

Most of the tests are quick, taking less than 15 minutes usually per test. The runtime test takes somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours, and often looks like it has hung. Don’t assume the runtime test has hung until it’s run overnight. If you’re using an emulator, don’t give up on runtime until it’s run for at least 24 hours. The tests create two kinds of files: journal files, and the official runtime report (created by the runtime test). Where you ran the tests, look for files with names starting with “journal” in the current directory, or for paths like results/0001e/journal. The C++ tests create a directory called “qmtest_libstdcpp_[version]”. There’s a handy utility called tjreport in /opt/lsb/bin; run that on the journal to get a quick summary of the results. If you want to post results, use tjreport. The official runtime report (in /home/tet/test_sets/results) has some additional information: a list of FIP (Further Information Provided) results. What to do with failures: First, make sure it’s really a failure of the environment, and not a failure of the tests. The LSB publishes a list of official waivers for test failures; check that your failures aren’t on that list. For failures not on that list, Google is your best resource; most likely, someone else has experienced the same failure, and will have more information about it. If you really can’t figure it out, come over to one of the LSB’s mailing lists and ask around. On Xvfb: The Xvfb versions shipped with most distributions have bugs that can cause problems. Anything running XFree86 will likely not be able to complete the X tests, and anything running X.org may see a number of failures. Because Xvfb is not required by the LSB, you can replace Xvfb with one that doesn’t have these bugs. Recent Debian xvfb packages for etch don’t have these bugs, so Debian and derivatives can use them for testing. (The sarge backport of Xvfb can be installed on vanilla sarge without upgrading any of the other XFree86 packages; missing packages can also be pulled from the sarge backport without affecting the packages that do ship.) Please post questions, problems, criticisms, etc. in the comments. A version of this might end up on the LSB site someday, so any improvements would be appreciated.

This MUST stop now! If every DD would express his opinion and anger and frustration on the thread, then it would be the mother of all flamewars and it will suck the life out of all other Debian lists and stop the development outright. Flames shall not pass! In case someone did not get the joke - it is fun. Join the fun. Display all the traditional flamewar tactics and frases in absurd and hyper overstated ways. Let off some steam in a fictional debate about nothing. Have a bit of fun. It is curiose after all.

It’s almost the end of financial year in Australia, so what better time to take stock? I’m actually a bit surprised at just how much I need to do that – I knew being DPL would involve some new challenges, but it’s barely two months in and I’m already just about in shock. Guess it serves me right for putting “increasing Debian’s tempo” in my platform…

---

The two other roles I’ve been in that I would have expected to prepare me more have been Debian release manager, and secretary of Linux Australia. They’re both similar in a way – the release manager does a lot of cat herding within Debian, and has to make some calls that will leave people aggrieved; and Linux Australia has some contact with the press, and some reasonably serious projects going on. So a few issues were completely expected: a random initial slashdotting, a press report, an interview or two, some requests for quotes in articles and press releases, or ongoing opposition and arguments from dedicated Debianites who don’t happen to agree with me on some decision. There were other things that were new and interesting though not really surprising. The leader@ mail address turned out to have just as much spam as I expected, though also some unexpected interesting stuff too, including my first ever personally addressed open letter – in this case by Keith Curtis who also wrote the 10,000 bugs away from World Domination article that got slashdotted a while back. A tidbit:

Everyone agrees that Ubuntu couldn’t exist without Debian, but I also believe that Debian is better setup to take Ubuntu where it needs to go. There are hints that the Ubuntu team feels like they brought a pork chop suit to a lions den. Ubuntu’s user base and development team is growing exponentially, but I believe they could get there much faster with more of Debian’s help.

Keith also forwarded an open letter he’d written to Mark Shuttleworth, and had some interesting comments on the whole Java thing. As well, I suddenly started receiving SPI board mail, as Debian’s advisory representative to the SPI board, and started getting a couple of requests for authorising expenditures (Debian UK reimbursing Matthew Garrett for travel costs to the Gnome Advisory Board meeting in 2005) or providing a Debian representative for a meeting or joining the Google Summer of Code. And then there were the cool things I knew absolutely nothing about, like the excellent news Christian Perrier passed on about the launch of Dzongkha Linux, featured in news reports from Bhutan, India, and Australia. Of course, I completely expected that all this would overload me a bit, and I’d end up getting distracted from what I wanted to do, and not being able to keep up with stuff other people wanted me to do. To help with this a little, I delegated Steve McIntyre as, essentially, a co-DPL, and he’s been working on a few things, including the now successful switch of irc.debian.org over to OFTC, and another fun little endeavour that I won’t spoil just yet. Things started getting a bit weird as I was preparing to travel off to debconf in Mexico – with some frustrated comments from damog and Marga and Gunnar, which was odd coming from the conference organisers themselves; and independently the reinflamation of some old tension on the debian-installer team. That got compounded at debconf itself, with the controversy over the inclusion of Sun Java in non-free extending not just to the lists, but an article in LWN (with a followup) as well as numerous other places around the net. That issue came to something of a climax when John Goerzen (with whom I’ve had some entertaining disagreements in the past) questioned whether SPI had been sufficiently involved in the decision (“I am becoming increasingly concerned at the unilateral method in which you and/or the archive maintainers have taken this decision.”), to which I responded fairly curtly to defend the way Debian makes decisions (“If SPI wish to withdraw from their relationship with Debian, then that’s entirely possible to arrange. I don’t think it’s at all proper that you try to obtain veto power of Debian’s activities as conducted by the duly authorised members of that organisation.”). Nothing’s really news there – flamewar on Debian lists between influential project members? Next thing you know the sun will rise in the East every morning, and then where will we be? What’s not so normal is those flamewars getting front page coverage on slashdot, or noted in an article on distrowatch. As far as Debian’s concerned, we had a couple more rounds, both in public and on the developer only -private list, then moved onto actually getting the legal advice John wanted. That’s actually still pending, and the debate has pretty much abated while that’s going on. And meanwhile, Wouter Verhelst, Manoj Srivastava, and others have started a much more productive look at Debian’s relationship with SPI and similar organisations, which has continued on to a draft of a constitutional amendment. But there was more stress and chaos at debconf than just the Java stuff, but what’s really impressive is the way people ended up dealing with it. Take damog for example:

Just as Tore said: This is the best DebConf ever. Isn’t it great? I started really enjoying this DebConf once I stopped worrying about bullshit, once I stopped worrying about senseless things and started to really give a shit about almost anything. Why do I need Gunnar to tell my girlfriend Ana, “you picked up the irresponsible one”? Why do I have to worry about the DPL giving a shit or not on the Latinamerican Debian community, even after being invited to meet the guys or to attend our BOF? […] I enjoy people here, thanks to all the organization cabal, thanks for your effort and your time on this. […] But after leaving all of this behind, I think Ana and me are having a great time sharing time with friends around us (the friends, los cuates, we are here for).

After seeing that post, and figuring out who damog actually was when he gave a lightning talk towards the end of the conference, we had a chance to briefly chat about what was going on – somehow I hadn’t taken in the invitation to attend the BOF, and had been told it was all in Spanish anyway, so hadn’t gone; meanwhile they’ve been thinking about holding a Debian miniconf in Latin America somewhere and wanting to know what sort of support they can get from the rest of the project – particularly moral support rather than financial, at that. Hopefully we’ll see news on that score in the coming months. But really, damog was right in the first place anyway: why care if the DPL supports you or not? Debian’s about everyone doing what they think is good and worthwhile, and that combining to produce something great – it’s not about what some guy who got six votes more than the next guy happens to think is important. But support is important, whether it comes in the form of a DPL saying “good idea!”, or something else. Gunnar’s response to the latter, eg:

Debian is love. After my scream for help a couple of days ago, and after a mountain of hard work, things are just running. No, we are not -by far- free of incidents, and it would be foolish to expect it to be so, but we are working nicely. And by the way, thank you, I have been receiving the largest amount of hugs ever, and believe me, each of them has been important. […] Thank you all, folks. I am in Cristoph Berg’s talk about reworking NM - And this comes very good to wrap up my post. Debian is much, much more than technical work. It is a social club. I love this social club. Just sitting here makes long months of work really worth it. A great hug back to you all!

And in the end we got quite a bit out of debconf6, for example more movement on the forthcoming release, improvements on i18n stuff, a new publicity project, movement on updating python, amongst other things. Who knows if the next debconf will manage to be anywhere near as much of an experience, but at least we’ll find out fairly soon where it’s going to be (though that process isn’t without hiccups of its own). Post debconf, there’s also been a notable influx of trolling going on too; with the most obvious and odious example being the insane, anonymously-posted prayers for a female developer’s death. Fortunately those have mostly been ignored as the mindless spam they are, though one might argue that Marcela Tiznado’s acceptance as a DD on her birthday, and the inclusion of women.debian.org in the official debian.org namespace are a more appropriate response to that sort of harassment than any sort of direct reply anyway. Not all our problems have conveniently been resolved right now, of course, the difficulties related to the installer team I alluded to above are ongoing, and at the moment a really good solution is still eluding us, though development continues anyway. And then, of course, there’s more to come – half the point of posting this is so I can stop worrying about all the stuff that’s been and gone, and get on with interesting things like the next point release, and the various other projects that I’ve let languish for the past few weeks.

I haven't played with VMware in ages, and last time it was on Windows. #375552 reminded me that VMware had done some funky free (as in beer) stuff with their products lately, so I took another look, rather than playing moreinfo ping pong with the bug submitter via the BTS. I grabbed the RPMs, and used the very cool alien to convert them to Debian packages, including the maintainer scripts, and they installed faultlessly. I ran the /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl script, and it also faultlessly built a kernel module, chucked stuff in the menus, and I was in business. The VMware console app looks nice and GNOME-like, and installing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in a VM was a fairly painless experience. The whole thing was very easy and the product seems nice.

I upgraded my CUPS to 1.2 today, and had a bit of trouble with getting the ML-2010 to work with it. Given my other issues with this printer, I thought I would expound on how I fixed yet another problem with this semi-supported printer.
The Samsung printing uses the linuxprint system, which uses a configuration file in an XML format which isn't specified. In the default install for the Samsung linux tool, it is installed in /usr/local/linuxprinter/linuxprint.cfg with a link from /etc/linuxprint.cfg to it. My file, after being setup, looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<linux root="/usr/local/linuxprinter" system="cups">
  <option name="ghostscript" value="/usr/bin/gs-esp"/>
  <option name="address" value="localhost"/>
  <option name="port" value="631"/>
  <option name="lpr" value="/usr/bin/lp"/>
  <option name="llpr-default-printer" value="lp"/>
  <printer ppd="ppd/C/ML-2010spl2.ppd" queue="lp">
    <option name="Resolution" value="600"/>
    <option name="PageSize" value="Letter"/>
    <option name="InputSlot" value="AUTO"/>
    <option name="MediaType" value="PRINTER"/>
    <option name="JCLJamrecovery" value="RWJOff"/>
    <option name="JCLEconomode" value="PRINTERDEFAULT"/>
  </printer>
</linux>
 

I discovered the hard way that if this file isn't there, the filter which is installed (ppmtospl2) doesn't work that well. In this case, the printer queue is lp. If this file is setup correctly, you can setup CUPS yourself, using the ppd file which is referenced in the linuxprint.cfg file. If you have lost your linuxprint.cfg, I suspect you can just modify the above with the correct ppd - the Samsung package has many of them for different printers. If you don't want to go that way, you can rerun the /usr/local/linuxprinter/bin/linux-config as before, but you will have to open your CUPS 1.2 server wide open while you are configuring it so that it can add the printer. Also, I had to have a printer existing in the CUPS 1.2 server in order to have the linux-config program work at all. I solved this by just adding a virtual pdf printer (using the package cups-pdf). Even when you get linux-config to add the printer, it will not add it correctly for CUPS 1.2 - the device is incorrect - so you will have to reconfigure it via the web interface and give it the ppd which is in the directory anyway.
At least I have my printer back again.

Until recently, I wasn’t really bothered by the poor OpenGL performance of my laptop. Though it has a Radeon Mobility 9200, the OpenGL “experience” was really bad. But since I was not using GL enabled applications, that was not an issue. Then, I tried Google Earth and thought “well, it’s slow, but it’s huge, I don’t know, maybe it’s normal”. A few days later I heard about neverball and gave it a try. It was even slower than Google Earth, and that seemed pretty hard to believe this time. Thanks to clues from people on #d-d, I figured out I didn’t have the libgl1-mesa-dri package installed. Quite simple to know if you are in the same case : first, grep “Direct rendering” in your X.org log file to be sure DRI is enabled on the server side. Then check for “direct rendering” in glxinfo’s output to know if it’s enabled on the client side. If not, try to apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri. Trying neverball again was delightful: the game was playable. I thought I was done with my OpenGL settings until yesterday, when, for some reason, I read the X.org log and noticed AGP mode was 1x. I didn’t know exactly about nowadays, but I was pretty sure 4x was reached at some point, and that the chip in my laptop might support it. My friend google helped me finding something about “xorg.conf radeon 9200 mobility agp”, and gave me hints about three parameters to add to the xorg.conf file that might improve GL performance:

Option "AGPMode" "8"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
Glxgears is not a benchmark, but still, it helps to make self comparisons. Before: ~260fps. After: ~1350fps. WAW ! Now Google Earth is really fast. Though I have a strange bug which appears whenever an X window (popup, balloon help, etc.) gets on top of the 3D frame: only the rightmost part appears… on the left. It appears on neverball, on glxgears, on Google Earth, but NOT on foobillard… moving or resizing the window usually fixes the display. Update: When switching to console and back to X, the glxgear performance gets back to ~260fps… Update 2: It seems my “before” score is not as bad as claimed. It’s actually ~950fps. Still a good improvement, though. The reason why i got ~260fps is that i almost never reboot my laptop nor restart X, and hibernate instead of shutting down the system. Which means I’m in the switched back from console case most of the time. Update 3: Thanks to Robert Hart for pointing to bug #363995. The patch from there works perfectly \o/. (If you can’t wait and want a patched .deb, send me a mail)

I'm trying to replace SourceSafe at work with Subversion but it is going slowly. If anybody has any Java Web development using Subversion from Windows experiences they want to share, please toss me an email

So, a little while ago, I wrote about why I like HP. This week, I'm starting to be annoyed at them.

My employer just bought nearly $100,000 worth of HP hardware. We get a new MSA1500cs Fibre Channel SAN (with redundant controllers, FC switches, disks, etc), a new blade enclosure system, three blades to start with (all of them, at minimum, dual dual-core Opterons with 4GB RAM, and some considerably more), a rack to put all this in, etc.

So we're starting to set all this stuff up. I've got Debian installed on an NFS root for testing the blades and how they interact with the SAN.

The blades have an integrated dual-port QLogic QLA2312 Fibre Channel adapter. The Linux kernel has a built-in driver for this (qla2xxx), which detects it and, so far at least, works fine. We want to run kernel 2.6.17 because it's the first version where XFS has decent semantics for write ordering to prevent corruption after a power failure. Plus we want at least a 2.6.16.x kernel because we want to run the latest Xen 3.0 on these blades. (Live migration of virtual servers from blade to blade -- this will be great.)

But we learn that HP does not support the kernel qla2xxx driver. HP does not say WHY they don't support it, just that their own driver is the only one that they support.

After plowing through several annoying scripts to get to their driver, I realize why it fails to install: it is OLD. At BEST, 2.6.14 is the most recent kernel it would even compile against (release date: October 2005), and I think the most recent version it supports is more like 2.6.8 (almost TWO YEARS OLD now). They reference a whole bunch of kernel symbols and macros that were removed somewhere between 2.6.8 and 2.6.17.

I sent a ticket to HP support. Their first request was to run their system information gathering tool and send them the results. Fine, that's reasonable. I did so. Next they say, gee, you're running Debian, and we don't support that.

Argh.... If they tried to compile it against 2.6.17.1 on RedHat or SuSE, they'd get the exact same problem. I told them what symbols they were erroneously using, and a simple grep would have showed them that.

Besides, how many customers are going to be pleased with no upgrade path available for 2 years? I wouldn't want our kernel version to be held hostage to HP's slow driver development process.

Sigh.

Does it make sense to use a wiki for issue tracking instead of using a standalone BTS? Martin Krafft suggested this might be a useful addition to ikiwiki. It seems to me that this would mostly be worthwhile if it took advantage of the free form, open nature of the wiki in useful ways. Reconciling that with some of the more structured needs of a BTS is an interesting challenge. Surveying a few examples of using a wiki as a BTS:

• jspwiki tracks issues in a BTS built using the wiki. They have a bug report form with several fields, basic queries for open and closed bugs, and wiki pages for each bug with a table of the fields at the top.
• ikiwiki tracks todo items using a blog. Metadata is currently limited to tagging an item as done. (All I've felt the need for so far; other tags could be used for things like severity, versions, etc.) Each todo item is its own wiki page. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of new or fixed items and use ikiwiki's standard subscription features to subscribe to diffs of changes to particular item(s).
• trac does not seems to actually use a wiki for its bug tracking component
• pmwiki has an issue tracker integrated into the wiki. Fairly similar to jspwiki though seems less refined. Includes a wacky voting system.

There is a definite feeling about all of these of finding a vaguely nail-shaped bit and pounding on it with the wiki-hammer, but I'm unsure whether it's really a nail or just an obvious pointy bit sticking up out of the main problem of issue tracking. On the other hand, the same could probably be said about a BTS built using a relational database.

Debian sid was installed and the installation log can be found here. There is a link to a list of the packages installed with the distribution update from etch and the resulting init scripts. Besides, bootcharts and other resources will be available in this section.
Using the same sid installation, from the hotspots yesterday I tried to load the hwclock on the background with a 2 seconds reduction in the boot time. The bootcharts and scripts are availabe here as well.
Finally, depmod is not used any more in sid's module-init-tools and this is one of the hotspots. This was removed as a result from a discussion started by Margarita Manterola in debian-devel. Just by adding it again from an old script, the 2 second reduction from hwclock was lost.

I flooded the Planet just by upgrading WordPress. So this weekend it’s happening in Caracas. The National Free Software Congress (CNSL) arrives to the capital in the second edition of the only nation-wide Free Software event. It will take place on Colegio Universitario de Caracas, in La Floresta, near the Indian Embassy, France Square and other nice landmarks of the city. The event is promoted by GLoVE, a national NGO which is currently organizing the CNSL and hosting several Linux User Groups (the whole list here in spanish, follow the links) including CHASLUG, the Free Software Users Group for the Young. I’m part of the group, but it’s currently run by three guys under 18. As in FLISOL Caracas, this will be a themed event featuring two days of conferences, keynote speakers, workgroups, expositions, installation festival and security related events. The first day is aimed to Free Software in Society, including presentations from government officials related to recent activities towards the Country migration. As Enrico pointed it in debconf-discuss and debian-project, some recent activities have been turning stronger the Free Software migration process in Venezuela. The announcement from the Department of Science and Technology of the mass capacitation of the citizens in the usage of computers featuring the Gnome Desktop Environment took everyone by surprise. Numbers are varying, being the more conservative around 400.000 people having their first computer relationship with Free Software, GNU/Linux and Gnome. Distribution? I haven’t see it yet, but most likely it will be Debian (the whole Department is using Debian) Saturday will also feature some conferences from community members about their experience on Free Software usage and how they can change the way people communicate and act with each other, specially noting the nationwide speech from Octavio Rossell about Free Software and GNU/Linux and the interesting presentation from Efra m M rquez-Arreaza on Business Models. Finally, on saturday, renowned economist Felipe P rez-Mart will be presenting his work Game Theory Applied to the Free Software Development Model. Sunday will be a hands-on day, like in FLISOL Caracas. The main speeches focus on development, featuring experienced programmers on PHP, Perl and Mono presenting Web and Desktop development tendencies in those programming languages. We will also feature an Ajax presentation and three workgroups about Linux Distributions, Web Development and Free Software and Education. On special guests, CNSL Caracas is proud to announce the visit of two fellow partners from IEEE Colombia: Erika Luque and Jeffrey Borb n from the District University of Bogot , and the special conference from Rafael N ez, who was apprehended in Miami, FL (US) for the massive attack of 679 servers in 2001, one of whom was the Air Force Training System in Colorado. He was also accused of attacking the Department of Defense servers and stealing confidential data from NASA. He made seven months of prision in Denver after declaring himself guilty of all charges and having the Judge to look on evidence of his work against child pornography with the Venezuelan CICPC. (more info in spanish) On the security side, Sunday will host the second Key Signing Party (guidelines in spanish here) and the first CACert assurance in Venezuela. We made the first KSP in CNSL Aragua (where I had the opportunity to speak about Debian and make a hands-on session on Marvelous Debian) with about 10 people. This time we’re aiming to something between 25 and 50 people. This is the first event promoting security culture in our Country and hopefully it will have a warm welcome in the public. Caracas will also be the inflexion point of the Congress, which will now travel to the Eastern part of the Country, usually forgotten by all the hacktivists in Venezuela. In states Sucre, Monagas and Bol var people is ready to have their first contact with free software through this Congress and hopefully next year the Congress will have a venue in each state of the Country (including the two most inhabited by natives, Delta Amacura and Amazonas) If you’re in Caracas, you’re welcome to pass by after registering (it’s free as in who cares) and if you’re not, you’re welcome to listen to the streaming that will be announced here. See you there!

The Latin American Infest finally ended yesterday. In Caracas, it was a week of hard work with people of the Science and Technology Department and the IT Office (government offices) but the event in Caracas ended succesfully. It was a world-class event featuring renowned keynote speakers who spoke about Web Development using Frameworks (featuring TurboGears, Rails and Catalyst) and software development paradigms migration from privative platforms to GNU/Linux (Gambas and Mono). Other talks included basic security in Debian GNU/Linux and a speak about electronic signature security by an officer of the Venezuelan Government CA. We had a speak about Clusters, hosted by a female member of the Venezuelan Free Software Community and Debian User, and a speak about Free Software in the Venezuelan Education, by a 16-year-old Venezuelan GNU/Linux user and a willing Debian Maintainer. Of course, the Installation Festival took place in the Knowledge Square, in the Auditorium Building Lobby, with the extraordinary support of the Venezuelan Free Software Users Community. Debian GNU/Linux Sarge netinst and CD1 was distributed (several hundreds) as well as Knoppix and Ubuntu Hoary. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (maintainer) and me wore Debian T-Shirts on Saturday, and he made a great speech about the Project, named “Debian is inexorable“. We had demonstrations of Linux on a Mac Mini, using XGl and presenting several applications, as well as Debian running Enlightenment on an old Presario 1246 laptop. I would like to thank all the speakers and the attendees for making of FLISOL Caracas a great event. More information about FLISOL Caracas is in my blog and the homepage (spanish). Pics are here.