Search Results: "Vasudev Kamath"

1 October 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Weekly Log - 01102012

Well this weeks log comes bit late as my week got extended till today ;-). I had working day at office on Saturday and Sunday due to 2nd Quarter end and instead today is declared as compensatory holiday and tomorrow any how is Gandhi Jayanti. So here it goes. Debian Related Most of my work this week was done for Debian-IN team Well most of this weeks work involved KGB ;-) Personal Works Misc Played Cricket after very long time (Guess after 10 long years). Well it was not official match or anything it was just another Gully Cricket. After the match it came to mind that I need regular physical workout :-P. Well that's it Cya till next week :-)

22 September 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Weekly Log - 22092012

After thinking a while I thought I should record my weekly FLOSS work and I'm starting by this week. This week I'm on vacation and in home town so I could give bit more time for my FLOSS activity. So here it goes this weeks work Bug Squashing
Both these packages are uploaded to unstable first RC bug was related to Debian Installer hence was unblocked before we could file unblock-request. Kartik filed an unblock-request and adsb unblocked it happily and both the packages landed in unstable. New Packages
Both these packages will be backported once Wheezy freezes. One pending wnpp is left on Debian-IN which I've left for Kartik to finish ;-). Font Package Helper I bumped version on dh-make-font[1] to 0.3 now it accepts upstream URL with -u, --upstream switch this will be placed in Homepage: field of control file and in Source: field of copyright file. Probably I need to think of introducing xz compression to original source tarball where upstream is not giving any tarball and probably rewrite it using Perl so it can get included dh-make package. Already a bug filed to get it included in dh-make package 658154. [1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-in/dh-make-font.git;a=summary Misc and Learnings
Well that is it for this week. Hopefully I will have new stuffs to put up here for the next week, till then Cya.

6 August 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Logging issue with Flask

While enabling logging for release of rewritten version of SILPA described in my previous post I faced a weird problem. I enabled Logging as described in the Flask documentation but SILPA won't log anything to the log even though log file is created in whatever location I gave while configuring the logging. Flask documentation suggests following way to use logging 
import logging
from logging.handlers import RequiredHandler
file_handler = RequiredHandler(...)
file_handler.setLevel(logging.WARNING)
app.logger.addHandler(file_handler)
After banging my head for some time I again wanted to look at Python's logging tutorials see if I'm doing something wrong and I found this example 
import logging
# create logger
logger = logging.getLogger('simple_example')
logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
# create console handler and set level to debug
ch = logging.StreamHandler()
ch.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
# create formatter
formatter = logging.Formatter('%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')
# add formatter to ch
ch.setFormatter(formatter)
# add ch to logger
logger.addHandler(ch)
# 'application' code
logger.debug('debug message')
logger.info('info message')
logger.warn('warn message')
logger.error('error message')
logger.critical('critical message')
So there it is I need to set the logging level even on logger to same level as what I set on my handler. Now I didn't take time to read the documentation because I wanted to see if my findings really does the trick so I modified function configuring logging to look something like below (I'm taking the example given in Flask documentation itself real code can be seen in SILPA code on Github) 
import logging
from logging.handlers import RequiredHandler
file_handler = RequiredHandler(...)
file_handler.setLevel(logging.WARNING)
app.logger.setLevel(logging.WARNING)
app.logger.addHandler(file_handler)
This actually did the trick and now Flask is happily logging whatever I give to app.logger.levelname So I don't know this was my stupidity or fault in Flask's documentation by forgetting to mention this crucial point. But in the end all is well :-) Do comment your thoughts.

5 August 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Rewriting SILPA with Flask microframework

As a introduction on what is SILPA you can read my previous post This application was written by Santhosh about 6-7 years ago in May 2010 2009 ( Correct me if I'm wrong Santhosh ;-) Thanks to Santhosh for correcting me ) in Python without using any web framework. He crafted whole system single handed and with very nice ideas. He wrote all the modules available in it for all possible Indian languages even though he is native Malayalam speaker. I joined him 3 years back and I was providing some or other improvements and he ultimately made me as the Co-Developer of SILPA. Recently I came across the Flask microframework and thought of rewriting SILPA to use Flask. You might ask me why Flask? So here are my reasonings 
 1. Why reinvent Python webframework when we can use existing? Besides maintaining a not so well known framework code which is not written by you will be difficult    and time consuming.
 2. All Python modules are useful even outside SILPA project why make them dependent on SILPA code?
 3. Templating system used is very old and can't be ported to new Python version lets use something which is new and portable
 4. If new contributor wanted to add a module he need to understand SILPA framework to write and integrate it. This might be discouraging new
    contributions so lets use pure python module and make integration with SILPA straight forward.
 5. I was overwhelmed by Flask :P
I had previously tried bottle microframework but for some reason I couldn't crack it so choosing of Flask is not because it was better among other available microframework or something like that. I choose it because I could easily understand it and it suited my needs better. So I proposed about this to Santhosh and he asked me for a POC code. I started working on April 8 2012 and today by August 5 I can say I've first stable version of SILPA rewritten using Flask deployable over WSGI on Apache2. It can also be deployed on other servers supporting WSGI interface. It took me quite a bit of time but to be frank in the middle I completely had stopped coding because of some other works. Here is the commit graph and code frequency graphs from Github.

Changes in New Version Here is some major changes in current version. 
1. Newly developed framework provides plug and play features for new modules.
2. You need to install the modules which you want to run on it separately using PIP and only minimal code change is required. Only configuration and webbridge.py 
   will be changed. Ofcourse you need to add html file to *templates* folder.
3. This version uses decent routing logic from Flask for page serving.
4. It also provides JSONRPC interface which is compatible with previous version but only with method name changed.
5. This version separates out run time module loading and routing the request to modules.
6. Dynamic module loading now happens only at the beginning of application, so if I want to implement caching for particular services it will be straight forward
   now.
7. Routing requests to proper module is adapted from old version with few modifications
8. All previous pages are now converted to use *Jinja2* template system.
Things Remaining TODO Below is some stuffs still pending before this version can completely replace http://silpa.org.in 
1. Separate all modules from original SILPA and get it uploaded to pypi
2. Provide RESTful interface
3. Provide proper LICENSE, AUTHORS file for all modules 
4. Prepare a Nice UI
5. Find a better name than *SILPA*
...
Update 
Forgot to provide the github link and demo link for the new version of SILPA. Thanks to Aravinda for pointing
it out. Here it goes
Github: http://github.com/copyninja/Silpa-Flask
Demo: http://flasksilpa-indic.rhcloud.com

22 July 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Compiling Harfbuzz on Debian

Harfbuzz (more correctly harfbuzz-ng) is a Text Layout/shaping engine. Mostly supporting rendering of Text including complex scripts. A quote taken from Wikipedia which describes harfbuzz
HarfBuzz (in Persian: ) is a layout/shaping engine for OpenType fonts. Its purpose is to standardize text layout in FOSS; its code originally started as part of the FreeType project, was then developed separately in Qt and Pango, and finally merged back into a common repository. Both Qt and Pango currently use HarfBuzz; other standalone users include Firefox and Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome.
Coming directly to the point. You can get Harfbuzz from its Git repository hosted on Freedesktop. It requires following library and binary compilation 
    1. ragel: Finite state machine code compiler
    2. libglib2.0-dev: Glib Development files
    3. libcairo2-dev : Cairo 2D graphics library development files
    4. libicu-dev: Development components for International components for Unicode
    5. libgraphite2-dev: Development files for libgraphite2
    6. libfreetype6-dev: Freetype 2 library development files
Once you install all the above package. Follow following commands to build the harfbuzz. 
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
You can skip make install if you don't like it to be installed on system.I actually wanted to work on the Debian package of Harfbuzz but since there is some one already working on it. Probably I will wait till the guy completes package. I will write on testing the text rendering of your language using harfbuzz in my next post. Till then Cya.

15 July 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Note to Self: Deleting Remote Branches and Tags in Git

Its been a while I'm using Git as a version control system for my various work whether it is FOSS related or my professional work. Every time I stumble into a case where I need to delete an accidentally pushed branch or tag on remote and every time I forget how I did it last time. Today I did it again and I had to search it again to find a method. So here it goes this is a note to myself so I won't forget it next time Deleting a remote branch 
git push origin :branchname
Deleting a remote tag 
git push origin :refs/tags/tagname
Where origin can be replaced by proper remote if you are using multiple remote for mirroring purpose. If you want to delete locally use following code 
git branch -d branchname
git tag -d tagname
Note: To delete tag remotes you need to delete it locally first and then push it. That's it hope it helps others too :-)

21 April 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Update: Issue in Kannada Dictionary Bot

Just a short update for those who are wondering what is Kannada Dictionary bot, it is a small Jabber chat bot written in Python which pulls out meaning for given English or Kannada word from Kannada Wiktionary. More about the usage of this bot can be found in my previous post Recently I've been getting many queries from users that they are not able to access the bot from their GTalk account. Of course no one contacted me directly they were pinging my friend Omshivaprakash and in turn he was pinging and telling that some one contacted him and told bot is not online. But I have monit service monitoring bot 24x7 additionally I could see it online all the time, even when shiv is telling me its offline!. Finally figured out the reason when I went to Jabber So here is the reason
As you ve probably noticed, the jabber.org service has been experiencing connectivity problems with gmail.com and other Google Talk domains (e.g., you might not be able to see if your contacts there are online). The folks at Google are working on a solution and we will post again once they have fixed the problem.
Now folks please have patience till a solution comes up and once its in place you should be able to use the bot without any issue.

15 April 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Update: Falcon Debian package Status

Recently I wrote about packaging Falcon programming language for Debian. So here is the status of package. Package builds multiple binaries and we have successfully separated modules from core Falcon language component
  1. falconpl (Falcon language itself )
  2. falconpl-dbg (Debug symbols)
  3. libfalconpl-engine1 (Falcon engine library)
  4. libfalconpl-engine1-dbg (Debug symbols for Falcon enging)
Core modules like feathers and modules writtein Falcon itself are part of libfalconpl-engine1. Rest of modules are separated into following packages
  1. falconpl-mongodb: Mongodb connector module
  2. falconpl-dbi : Database Abstraction layer
  3. falconpl-dbi-sqlite3: SQLite3 connector based on DBI module
  4. falconpl-dbi-postgresql: PostgreSQL connector based on DBI module
  5. falconpl-dbi-mysql: MySQL connector based on DBI module
  6. falconpl-dbi-firebird: Firebird DB server connector
  7. falconpl-curl: Curl bindings for Falcon
  8. falconpl-dbus: DBus bindings for Falcon
  9. falconpl-dmtx: Data Matrix reader/writer for Falcon
  10. falconpl-hpdf: Haru based PDF module for Falcon
  11. falconpl-gd2: Graphic manipulation module for Falcon
There are 4 modules which I'm not sure how to build (dependency) or if at all possible to build for Linux they are dynlib, wopi, sdl, conio. I need to consult upstream on these modules status and ability to build. Modules not built We didn't build dbi-oracle and dbi-odbc modules as these are proprietary software dependant. Additionally in a conversation with upstream on IRC it was told dynlib module can't be built for 64bit and X86 version of Linux because lack of assembler, but I've not fully confirmed this. Legal Issues To enable the curl bindings I added curl dependency which in turn has dependency on libssl1.0 library which is part of openssl source package which is causing lintian thrown GPL violation error. Kartik will be looking into this. Patches submitted I've submitted total of 6 patches of which 5 patches are already applied to upstream git repo and 6th one is waiting to be applied. In other words upstream is really helpful to us. Well thats all for this week more updates next week (or may be even before that ;-) )

6 April 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Packaging Falcon Programming Language for Debian

Falcon is a programming language which is not yet packaged for Debian. I saw that the ITP#460591 is owned by my Debian mentor and good friend Kartik Mistry. So I jumped in to help him finish this package. Ok enough of introduction now directly to point. We thought its better to base the Debian package on upstream Git repository itself so we can do snapshot release like Go Language package is doing. So in this post I'm going to give steps we used to do this and also guidelines on future packaging of Falcon.
    1. First step we need to clone the upstream Falcon's git repo. Then duplicate *master* branch into *upstream* branch. 
      git clone http://git.falconpl.org/falcon.git
  git checkout -b upstream
    2. Now by staying on *upstream* branch we made it track the upstream's git repo using following commands 
       git remote add upstream-falcon http://git.falconpl.org/falcon.git
   git branch --set-upstream upstream-falcon
    3. We made the master branch point to origin which is our collab-maint git repository. 
       git checkout master
   git remote set-url origin git.debian.org:/git/collab-maint/falconpl.git
    4. Next is creating the pristine-tar branch so that it will be easy for us to build using *git-buildpackage* tools. We just took snapshot of upstream's head and created a tarball and then used *pristine-tar* utility to commit it. Then we tagged upstream version 
       git checkout upstream
   git archive --format=tar HEAD   gzip -9 > ../falconpl_0.9.6.8-git20120403.orig.tar.gz
   git tag upstream/0.9.6.8-git20120403
   pristine-tar commit ../falconpl_0.9.6.8-git20120403.orig.tar.gz
    5. And finally we copied **debian** directory from Ubuntu's falconpl package into our master branch and modified the debian changelog to match our new snapshot version. To release a new version all we need to do is follow step 4 and then additionally merge the upstream with master
So our repo is now in proper shape to be built using git-buildpackage. But we are left with many things to clean and fix. So things which are currently pending are
  1. Make copyright file in Debian copyright format 1.0
  2. Separate out each module falcon builds into separate package. Looks like Ubuntu doesn't install any of modules
  3. Last but not the least upload it to Debian ( Kartik's task :-) )
Even though I'm packaging Falcon for Debian I'm not a Falcon programmer so if there are any Falcon programmer reading this post and want to help you are always welcome :-).

23 March 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Fixing hyde.el

Recently after changing my blog to use jekyll and Github I came across the hyde.el an emacs plugin which allows to maintain a jekyll powered blog from emacs. You can find the post by author here and source code here on Github. At first site I was very happy about plugin and started using it but I could successfully use it only once properly then whenever I launch the plugin I get error message
*zsh:cd blog path no such directory*
(Note: I'm a zsh user not sure if this error is particular to zsh only. If you face same error on other shell please let me know) After error hyde mode never showed jekyll blog properly. Looking at the source code I saw all the statements which were commands were executed using shell-command elisp function similar to following 
let (
(cmd (format "cd '%s' && git diff-files --quiet '%s' > /dev/null" repo file))
(= (shell-command cmd) 1))
The cd command in the string was failing some how spoiling all other stuff!.. Probably the ~ in the path to blog was not properly expanded by shell-command, So I thought why not use elisp in built cd function instead and bingo the hyde mode works perfectly fine now!.. I've raised a pull request as I don't like to maintain a fork. Hope author will consider merging my changes. Hope this fix helps others too. Cya.

13 March 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Tag Generation problem in Jekyll

After converting my blog to use Jekyll and hosting it on Github one problem I faced is missing tagging feature for post. I quickly came across this I used plugin from the site and copied and modified some files from authors websites git repository. Only way to use tags on Github was to generate tags locally and move it to Github. To put more light on the point Github disables jekyll plugin so it won't generate the tags after you push your changes to Github repository. You need to follow these steps.
  1. Create posts
  2. Generate site locally by running jekyll
  3. Copy out _site/tag to your website root folder
I did this and it worked. But funny part was when I created new post and tagged it and followed above step for some reason tags won't reflect on respective tag's page and I had no clue why. After banging head for a while I noticed that Previously coped tag folder in site's root is overwriting the tags generated by Jekyll plugin!. Gosh so much for my stupidity :). Now I've written a script to generate tags after writing each new post. It deletes the existing tag directory first and then regenerates tag and copies it out to website root and then it commits the tag directory. Here it is 
#!/bin/sh
TAG=tag/
SITE=_site/
if [ -d $ TAG  ]; then
    echo "Deleting $ TAG  directory..."
    rm -rf $ TAG 
fi
echo "Regenerating Site..."
jekyll
echo "Copying $ TAG  ..."
cp -a $ SITE /$ TAG  .
echo "Commiting Changes..."
git commit $ TAG  -m "Latest TAG build"
Hope that helps. Cya!

11 March 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Hello Planet! (Debian)

Hello Debian Folks!, This is my first post to Planet Debian. I'm vasudev a 24 year old Debian Maintainer from India. Thanks to Kartik for adding my blog feed to Planet Debian. Till next post. Cya!

Vasudev Kamath: Hello Planet! (Debian)

Hello Debian Folks!, This is my first post to Planet Debian. I'm vasudev a 24 year old Debian Maintainer from India. Thanks to Kartik for adding my blog feed to Planet Debian. Till next post. Cya!

10 March 2012

Vasudev Kamath: ttf-indic-fonts to fonts-indic transition complete!

We in Debian-IN team where maintaining ttf-indic-fonts a set of fonts for all Indian language fonts from various origin. This package used to build around 7 to 10 binary package of different Indian language. The source package ttf-indic-fonts was itself a mess. It was a native package it was mixing all fonts with active upstream and inactive upstream together which was hard to maintain. Last April I transitioned this package from old packaging style (which version I don't remember) to dh7 standard. At the same time bubulle asked me it would be great if I can rename the package to Fonts team new packaging policy Even though I was just beginning with Debian packaging I dared to propose a draft :) Well it was in May and now its March 2012 almost one year over and We have successfully finished the transition and Kartik uploaded all packages to Debian. Now Debian-IN team maintains 62 packages and me? Yeah my package count jumped from 12 to 38! Almost close to close to number of packages Kartik is maintaining :) Please do the testing report any bugs! Cya

Vasudev Kamath: ttf-indic-fonts to fonts-indic transition complete!

We in Debian-IN team where maintaining ttf-indic-fonts a set of fonts for all Indian language fonts from various origin. This package used to build around 7 to 10 binary package of different Indian language. The source package ttf-indic-fonts was itself a mess. It was a native package it was mixing all fonts with active upstream and inactive upstream together which was hard to maintain. Last April I transitioned this package from old packaging style (which version I don't remember) to dh7 standard. At the same time bubulle asked me it would be great if I can rename the package to Fonts team new packaging policy Even though I was just beginning with Debian packaging I dared to propose a draft :) Well it was in May and now its March 2012 almost one year over and We have successfully finished the transition and Kartik uploaded all packages to Debian. Now Debian-IN team maintains 62 packages and me? Yeah my package count jumped from 12 to 38! Almost close to close to number of packages Kartik is maintaining :) Please do the testing report any bugs! Cya

4 March 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Lato Fonts for Debian

For giving new look to my blog I was trying out a lot of fonts from the FontSquirrel website but none of them satisfied my taste. While searching for the fonts identi.ca website fonts attracted my notice and the font used was Lato. I found it and used in this website. I was wondering why such a nice font is not present on Debian. Since it was on FontSquirrel that means the license should be friendly. So searched for the font in DuckDuckGo and found their website. So after all Lato fonts where under Open Font License which is DFSG compilant. That was sufficient for me to package it for Debian. Here is the ITP for fonts-lato and its already uploaded to Debian and waiting in the NewQueue Thanks to bubulle for uploading it quickly. Hope Debian users will love this new font. And yeah I packaged it using dh-make-font which I wrote majorly with help of my friends. And one more news is its waiting to be added into dh-make package here.

15 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

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