Right - so things that have come up this week... I appear to not understand the world - or it doesn't understand me - I'm not sure which but either way it doesn't really matter, the world doesn't really exist (just how can you get something from nothing?). Apparently, according to people, I have a version of other people stored in my head that is not what those people really are - and my version of people apparently differs from other peoples version of the same people - I don't understand this - I base everything on what people say - I try not to extrapolate other information, and I'm quite used to being entirely ignored. I tend to see patterns, and believe in the patterns more than what's actually said, though - maybe that's where I go wrong? Anyways - this weekend - work permitting - I might finally get round to answering the e-mails that have been sitting in my INBOX for an age that I've been meaning to get round to for, well, months - especially NM questions - they really need answering, and I should get to that - so tomorrow morning, that's the goal - assuming that nothing break horribly between now and then! Today I've mostly been looking at some nasty SQL, it did however finally make total sense to me, and I think that it should now (mostly) work. There's some extra ideas that might be worth looking at, but nothing too taxing. Quite tired at the moment - which is strange as it's still before 10pm. That's not usual for me. Maybe I need to take up caffeine again, I actually really miss the taste of good coffee - which I wasn't expecting... but I refuse to drink decaff coffee on the basis that it's not what coffee should be - it's kinda like diet, caffeine free coke. Pointless, tasteless, boring. Anything else? Hmmm. Not at the moment - but I can tell this is going to be a strange month.

While ARM is a very important platform, support for it in Debian has faced a number of problems recently: there was no developer accessible machine for a long time (they're two now), buildds sometimes have a hard time keeping up, etc. Most importantly, there are not enough people actively involved in the ARM port. We need more people doing debian-installer and kernel work, and track other ARM related issues. One reason why few people are working on ARM is probably the lack of a cheap platform that can be used for development. Fortunately, this problem has now been addressed. Over the last few months, I worked (in collaboration of the NSLU2-Linux project) on debian-installer support for the Linksys NSLU2, a sub $100 device with 32 MB RAM, Ethernet (which unfortunately needs a non-free driver) and two USB ports. You can attach a USB disk and run a full Debian system on this device. While there have been some instructions on the web about how to get Debian going on the NSLU2, basic support for the device is now included in debian-installer. In other words, you can do a user-friendly installation and it will just work. Here are instructions. Future work In the future, the NSLU2-Linux people and I will add more support for other ARM based consumer devices, such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices (basically a hard drive with a CPU/RAM and Ethernet, sometimes also including wireless; in other words, a perfect platform for Debian). On a related note, I'm also working on getting debian-installer going on a number of MIPS based consumer devices, such as the Netgear WGT634U wireless router. However, this work has not reached the maturity of NSLU2 support yet. There is a status overview and TODO list. Acknowledgements

• The NSLU2-Linux team for doing most of the upstream work (e.g. kernel), and for donating a NSLU2 to me.
• The debian-installer team for creating such an excellent system to which new platforms can be added relatively easily.

My too-long absence from writing much here can be ascribed to two, differently pleasant, activities. First, a fantastic vacation in Cuba, and second, the redesign and launch of the XTech web site. Of the first, come to my place for dinner and I'll bore you at length about how amazing it was. Of the second, I'd like to bore you right now! Thanks to Ruby on Rails and a few late nights, the XTech site now has these new features:

• Full conference schedule (apart from 6 Mozilla talks I'm still nailing down)
• A blog. With go-faster Atom 1.0 stripes and everything!
• Details on the newly-added Ajax Developers' Day.

A few more details on the Ajax Developers' Day. As I mentioned before, when putting together the schedule we felt there was a lot of excellent content still missed out (I'm still feeling guilty at having rejected proposals from many good friends and excellent speakers). So, we put together an extra day at the beginning of the conference where we could go further into detail on Ajax technologies. This day, featuring speakers such as Simon Willison from Yahoo!, XML expert Kurt Cagle and OpenLaszlo's Max Carlson, will allow those working on Ajax projects--either deployment or toolkits--to meet, discuss best practice and move forward on new ideas. Although it's a day-long event, we didn't want to make the price tag as high as a full-day tutorial, so you can register for the cost of a half-day tutorial. A few implementation details If that all sounded a little like advertising, here are some technical details worth sharing. The site's CMS is built on Ruby on Rails. Development was done on Linux, with the help of WINE to check out the view from Internet Explorer. The newsletter is managed by the absurdly wonderful CampaignMonitor. This conference not for sale Before I went on vacation, there was some debate in various quarters about paid-for plenary and keynote slots in conferences. Though I hope it is obvious, I wanted to state where I, and thus the XTech conference, stand on this issue. It has always been my policy to maintain a strict separation between the commercial and editorial aspects of XTech. Although each year there's always a company who thinks they can buy a speaking slot, I never let this happen. The content of the conference is formed by editorial selection by the programme committee, who take the scores from the peer review panel as their primary guide. Aside from what I hope shows in the excellent quality of the talks and generally interesting keynotes (yes, we get it wrong occasionally!), there are two effects on the conference.

• Sponsors are that much more respected. When a sponsor respects the delegates' time and intelligence, but still attends, you know they're serious about engagement with attendees.
  
• A higher portion of the conference cost is in the registration fees than for some other conferences. We're still trying to keep the costs as low as we can, but we're not prepared to compromise the quality of the schedule by letting vendors buy talk time.

I hope this explains a little of my position. As a stance, it often creates more issues for me than it solves, but I believe it preserves XTech's reputation as a conference where you can hear some of the best no-fluff presentations on web technology.

The State Services Commission (SSC) (the NZ government body that oversees NZ government departments) released a guide to legal issues in using Open Source Software recently. The publication of this guide has caused a certain amount of consternation in the open source community and even manged to make it to Slashdot and Groklaw as well as spawning a fairly active thread on the NZ Open Source Society’s openchat mailing list. Through all of this I’ve found myself very much on the opposite side of opinion to most other people commenting on it. My initial thoughts on the document are quite nicely summarised by the Groklaw comment that Stuart points out. While the document uses some unfortunate language, there is nothing in it that is actually untrue. In fact my initial feelings towards the document (without having read it thoroughly) were that it was good to see the SSC taking enough notice of open source to feel the need to advise departments on the particular issues that it can bring up. Particularly dissapointing to me are the conspiracy theories that have been flying around. Groklaw surmises that the paper is a Microsoft hatchet job simply because it was authored by Chapman Tripp (a large NZ law firm) who happen to also represent Microsoft NZ on a range of intellectual property issues. I’ve yet to hear a single shred of evidence to back up this assertion and I find it quite ridiculous. Large firms working in a small market such as NZ will often run into conflict of interest issues and have well established procedures for dealing with them. Without seeing evidence to the contrary I cannot accept that a reputable firm like Chapman Tripp would risk their reputation by trying to intentionally mislead the goverment in a report like this. A far more like scenario, to my mind, is simply that the author(s) of the report are not very familiar with open source issues and didn’t do quite as much research as they should have to bring themselves up to speed with the unique IP features of open source licenses. Having read the document more thoroughly now, I can agree that it is far from perfect. I think the single most glaring problem is that it focusses only on open source software and doesn’t mention that many of the risks also exist when using proprietary software. This could leave an uneducated reader completely scared off open source due to a mistaken belief that it is far too risky. On the other hand we shouldn’t completely dismiss the document either as it does raise a number of clear risks that a department will face in adding open source software to their IT environment. We’re not going to do ourselves any favours by pretending that open source is a panacea to all the worlds software ills and can just be dropped in to any IT environment to make things better! It’s worth pointing out at this point that previous evidence from the SSC indicates that they are open source friendly. They have a very clear policy stating that Departments are encouraged to consider open source software alongside proprietary software and use it in cases where it wins on the basis of cost, functionality, interoperability, and security. Given this history, I am alarmed at the hostile reactions many participants on the NZOSS open-chat mailing list had to the document. Quite frankly I think some people are responding far too emotively to the language in the document (which is problematic - but not that bad) and missing the chance to evaluate the rest of it in an objective manner. We have a SSC that has indicated a friendliness towards open source in the past, and I don’t think that they would turn around and reverse their position in this manner. This report is intended to support their overall policy after all. Rather than jumping down their throats and shouting about how poor the document is we need to engage in a civil dialog, point out the issues with the document and offer constructive suggestions for how the document can be improved. To that end, Peter Harrisson has started some pages on the NZOSS wiki where we are going to co-ordinate our impressions and responses to the document so we can present a consistent NZOSS position to the SSC in response. I’d encourage everyone with an interest in the document to read and contribute to those pages. As for exactly what I form our response should take and what it should consist of? I’ll follow up with another post on that later in the weekend when I’ve had a bit more time to reflect.
What I do know (if you haven’t guessed already) is that I think we should be very careful not to respond in a hostile and emotive manner that will result in our relationship with the SSC becoming worse. That means we should take time to consider the document objectively, evaluate its propositions and provide a well researched and substantiated list of suggested improvements to the SSC.

Yes, I’m well aware of the 2.0.2 release of wordpress. Packages are ready and I am waiting on my usual sponsor Fabio Tranchitella to upload them to unstable. I wonder when I’ll get an AM. More than 2 years now in the process.

I had no idea what scrapbooking actually was until our friend Sarah showed us some of her handiwork when we were in Phoenix. It's just themed photo albums really. She'd done some nice work. Sarah's made friends with Louise, Sean's wife (they recently relocated here from Canberra, but we didn't know them in Canberra), and she's into scrapbooking too. Heck, it seems like everyone's into it. Today I went with Sarah to Scrapbook Dreams at Sunnyvale to get some bits and pieces for some cards that Sarah wants to make, and I got to see just how big a business scrapbooking is. This place had so much stuff. Card and paper stock, stickers, cutouts, tools, you name it. I can see how this could get very addictive, and it didn't seem all that expensive either. At the back of the store, they had some tables and heaps of stencils and other equipment so you could do some of your assembly work on the spot. I thought that was a great idea, because you've got all of the store's resources at your fingertips. They also do classes there apparently. I think what we might do for family Christmas presents this year is send home a scrapbook each of photos from the year in the US. Should be fun to make, and it's something that we can make progressively throughout the year.

Mono 1.1.8.1 was uploaded to Debian/Unstable on Wednesday and is now waiting in the NEW queue (because of the new packages like mono-classlib-1.0/2.0 which I blogged already about).
I also uploaded the packages to debian.meebey.net (versioned as preview packages), which are the same packages, so if you can't wait use the preview repository please. I just filed all removal requests that are needed to get Mono into Debian/Etch, when those are processed, it should go in. Also the CLI Policy draft is almost complete to be official, it defines basic rules now which are required for an user friendly, unified and stable CLI integration in Debian with Mono (and other CLRs like dotGNU) and CLI applications.
With the CLI Policy and Mono in Debian/Etch soon, the Mono Debian Plan is almost complete, only backports for Debian/Sarge are left then. On those I will work when the 1.1.8.1 packages are in the archive and some other packages are updated to the latest version (like Gtk# 1.0.10 and MonoDoc 1.0.7). Currently the following CLI applications are in Debian/Unstable:
MonoDevelop, MonoDoc, Muine, Blam, F-Spot, Tomboy, Nant, Kurush and last but not least IKVM Upcoming CLI applications going in Debian soon or later:
NUnit, NDoc, GFax, Sonance, Beagle and Smuxi Ready to use preview packages we have for:
GFax and MonoDevelop with Boo support
They are on debian.meebey.net, you can use:
deb http://debian.meebey.net/$package ./
or to get all:
deb http://debian.meebey.net/ ./ I personally think this is a big list of CLI applications being in Debian already (or go in when the packages are ready), it shows that Mono/CLI/C# is accepted in the opensource development community!

I really like the simplicity of Blosxom as blogging framework and I also like Perl very much. But somehow this Perl 4 alike global variables madness of Blosxom v2 sucks in several ways: It effectively prevents Blosxom from being used with mod_perl and it’s just not what I would call an API. I would like to have a more object-oriented plugin API and it should be save for use with FastCGI, mod_perl or similar possibilities to cache the parsed script code instead of reparsing with each request. Another thing should be a tagging facility. Had to write that by myself for Blosxom v2. (Wasn’t that hard though.) But since Blosxom v3 development seemed to have stopped in May 2004, I have been thinking about and looking for alternatives. First thought was to write a Blosxom clone by myself using Embperl as framework (as I did with web galleries after not finding any web gallery software fitting all my needs). But since I got infected with Ruby recently, I also thought about writting a Blosxom clone in Ruby, which would give me quite a lot of Ruby experience and would make a good fit since Ruby as well as Blosxom have some kind of Zen (or KISS) philosophy. The next thought was: I can’t be the first to come up with that idea and googled a little bit. First thing I digged up was Rage, some kind of Blosxom on Rails. But I didn’t find any source code although the author seems to prefer open source software. Seems as if it is seems to be ready for production but not ready for public release. The next thing I found was hint to some Blosxom clones in the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Unfortunately two of them (sakura and lily) seem to have Japanese only web pages. :-( But for luck the third Ruby based Blosxom clone found in the RAA, Blosxonomy, seems to be quite well featured, under actual development, has a english written web page and one of if its main concepts is taggability. And also the other core concepts sound fine: simplicity, extensibility and compatibility. Sounds really perfect and I’ll probably give it a try, but not on my current blog host: There is no Ruby installed and it’s not my own box.

Now playing: Rolling Stones — Ruby Tuesday

It’s 11:30pm right now, I spent the whole day coding and can’t sleep even though I’m tired. The only thing I can focus on right now is Debian and the complete mess the Project is trying not to become. So here we go. Following tbm’s last posts about DPLship, I think he’s right. It’s pretty obvious, the last few DPLs did not take any real decisions and we’ve become quite used to that. Saying that the Project is on the road to self-destruction may be a slight exaggeration right now, but that’s what we’ll end up with if we don’t react soon. The good news is, the DPL election is in the process. The bad news is, we don’t know yet if one of the candidates will be able to carry out much of the processes needed to get the Project back into shape. We’ll find out eventually. Before doing anything, we need a clear picture of the Project as it is today; nobody can claim that today, Joey’s resignation as SRM proves it: nobody knows what the fuck did or did not happen between Joey and ftpmasters, and there’s probably a metric fuckton of gory details to take into account too. So, getting a clear picture of the state of the Project. In one word: audit. Ask every individual delegate for a detailed, comprehensive status report including all the details, including sensitive ones — obviously those reports will be sent to the DPL. No report, and that’s one less delegate. Don’t ask for team reports, they’re biased; getting X copies of the same report from team members is out of the question too. While they’re at it, ask each delegate to reaffirm its commitment, or appoint somebody else. Play by the rules or get replaced (by a little shell script, wherever possible). Based on the information collected through those reports, decide a plan of action and discuss it with the delegates. Once the decision is taken, announce it, get some feedback, then implement it. Remember: always consider the Project as a whole. The only problem is, this may well take more than one DPL term to achieve. It’s so fucking simple and we’re so fucking incapable of doing it. Sit back, look at things the way they are. Pity.

Clint, you do realize that 2/3 of ftpmasters are 2/4 of the sysadmins?

Gianugo Rabellino, Matt Asay and others have been discussing "the meaning of open source". This touches on two things:

1. Free Software Business. How to make money with or from open source software. There was (still is, it's just not active) a mailing list, "Free Software Business" where this topic was rehashed several times in a number of interesting permutations, and all of the different business models were covered. The participants were all free software fans, with varying motivations that mostly centered around a free market view of the software world, and a desire to discuss ideas about how free software could be self-sustaining economically. Despite having some of the best minds in the business (people like Bob Young, Brian Behlendorf , Michael Tiemann, Russ Nelson [the list's host]) and a few economists, I don't think there was ever really a 'conclusion'. There are several models out there that work, but none of them is "perfect". They either involve holding something back (dual licensing, for instance), or don't really solve the problem of getting paid to produce software - service/support businesses are best when the consultants are working on paying gigs rather than creating software from scratch. It's more than obvious that there is a great deal of value in free software, and it's an extremely beneficial thing for companies that know how to take advantage of it. What's not so obvious is how to transfer enough of that value to the creators of the software to keep them going. The point being, "free software business" is not a solved problem, so expect to see various models, as people try things out. Some of them will have problems, and won't survive.
2. This leaves us with the crux of Gianugo's "rant", that some of these companies and groups are doing open source, but not in the true, open, community-oriented approach. I think he's right, but where I don't agree is with this:

   Also, I m not buying what Matt, Matthew and Ugo are saying about some sort of Darwinian selection being able to discriminate the good from the bad (assuming there is actually good and bad - I just tend to think we have different objectives): it s hard enough to move the CIO masses beyond the Open Source means Linux meme, go figure explaining why they should care to consider the difference between Open Source built within the virtuous cycle of community based development and Open Source as a pure distribution model of conceptually proprietary and closed to participation code.

   I see open source as being really strong right now, and do not deem it likely that that will change - it's survived Microsoft so far, survived the dot com bust, survived people trying to label it as a political movement, survived venture capital... Fundamentally, it just has too many things going for it. There's too much value, too much diversity, and ruddy health. So I think that where he sees people "not getting it", I see a competitive advantage for those who do. Things will sort themselves out with time.

As I already said, I wanted to do a little geek tour with Juerd, a fellow #perl6 guy. We did so and visited Fosdem, GPW and CLT. Some pictures of those events can be found here. Unfortunately I wasn't able to visit Amsterdam.PM for financial reasons. Nevertheless I had much fun on the tip! Therefor I'm already looking forward to go to the Easter Hegg, the German Linuxtag and some other events. See you there! PS: Did someone notice the fancy new CSS at http://perldition.org? :-)

As I already said, I wanted to do a little geek tour with Juerd, a fellow #perl6 guy. We did so and visited Fosdem, GPW and CLT. Some pictures of those events can be here. Unfortunately I wasn't able to visit Amsterdam.PM for financial reasons. Nevertheless I had much fun on the tip! Therefor I'm already looking forward to go to the Easter Hegg, the German Linuxtag and some other events. See you there! PS: Did any of you notice the fancy new CSS at http://perldition.org? :-)

It's that time time of the year again when the Debian Project gathers to elect a new leader. This year there are a record seven candidates. I just spent a couple of hours reading their platforms and a lot (not all, my eyes glazed over after a bit) of the discussions on debian-vote and these are my initial impressions. Jeroen Van Wolffelaar: Jeroen seems to have a good grasp of where the bottlenecks in the Debian system are. He supports the project Scud idea which has not really worked well so far (as far as I can see) but claims he knows what is wrong and how to fix it. He is young and still a student which might hamper his ability to travel which is a big part of being DPL. Astutely notes that Debian needs to stand out from the crowd more. Zeke the Cat: Does he have the balls to be an effective leader? Steve McIntyre: Not really high profile within the project as far as I can tell. Will he be able to "herd cats"? His platform is mainly about reforming Debians' social structure so this is a real concern. The idea of imposing some level of performance standard on developers is intriguing but he is rather short of details on how it is supposed to happen. Anthony Towns: Anthony is heavily involved in such roles as ftpmaster and release manager. It would be a shame if being DPL actually meant he would have less time for that sort of thing. He claims to be running mainly to introduce some new ideas. So hopefully he won't mind if we keep him in the boiler room instead of, um, athwart the foc'sle? Andreas Schuldei I like the idea of frequent face to face meetings. Andreas is a good fundraiser so if anyone can make this happen, he can. But in the absence of support from an eccentric billionaire is this really feasible? Also a member of project Scud. Johnathan 'Ted' Walther: Retar-ted. Bill Allombert: Also suffers from being relatively unknown (IMO.) A bit low on ideas and basically wants to maintain the status quo as far as social issues go. I can't consider him a viable contender. At the moment I'm leaning towards voting for Jeroen but Andreas and Anthony are still in the running. The IRC debate should be interesting.

Karl Fogel's Producing open source software: how to run a successful free software project covers many of the important aspects of free software projects, and concentrates on the parts that are different from, say, traditional in-house development projects. The book covers technical aspects like mailing lists, bug trackers, version control systems, and other infrastructure necessary for a project to survive. It also covers more social aspects, such as how to deal with flames, forking, or how to employ developers for free software projects. The book is written well, and is a light, fairly quick read. Those of us who have participated in free software for a long time can find the book as a nice summary of things that have been learned over the years. Those newer to free software development may find many new things to learn. Most of us will find something to think about. Despite the level of detail Fogel gets into, the book obviously only scratches the surface. Free software development is such a vast new territory that it is not realistic for one book to cover all of it. For example, this book does not cover conferences and other face-to-face meetings, which are important for keeping the community of free software developers alive. With the caveat that it doesn't make further volumes on this topic unnecessary, Fogel's book really is worth the time it takes to read it. Recommended.