Thomas Koch asked at DebConf 11 for a Skills Exchange session about Emacs. As nobody stepped up for that session for quite some time, I did. But I knew just the answers to half of his questions by mind, so I left the remainder for someone else. Luckily Kan-Ru Chen and Sebastian Tennant stepped up for most of the remainder. We had a quite full meeting room and the notes that Kan-Ru and me prepared in Gobby (debian package) got collaboratively extended from being a braindump and guide what to talk about to a quite helpful, but compact and dense Emacs introduction. I ll probably use this as a base for an Emacs tutorial or workshop at some European FLOSS events, but I wouldn t be able to have such a good and comprehensive base for that without that Skills Exchange session. So thanks to all who contributed! Update, 02:31: There also seem to exist an Emacs Lisp implementation of the Obby protocol called Ebby, but it doesn t seem to support the 0.5 version of Gobby, only version 0.3.

The group picture of the Debconf11 has been up for 33 hours now and finally I also had a moment of time to make the numbered version so you can add peoples names to it. I am pleased to say it is the one of the largest Debconf group photos yet with 263 people and 86 Mpix resolution. It took 10 separate images to stitch it together (from 44 images taken) and 15 fixes of stitching bugs deemed RC, 4 bugs were noted post-release, deemed minor. Most noticeable is on very skinny leg in the front row . Short links: http://is.gd/dc11group http://is.gd/dc11names

So there are two things I stumbled upon with caff:

• If you have two keys, you want to set $CONFIG 'local-user' to the content of $CONFIG 'keyid' . For some reason unbeknownst to me this option is not even listed in the configuration file template. keyid does something different that you'd expect
• More importantly it uses its own gpg.conf for whatever reason (probably because it sets its own GnuPG homedir and does not override the configuration file location). So if you, like me, put the right settings for strong signatures into ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf, you need to replicate them into ~/.caff/gnupghome/gpg.conf.

Thanks to Tom Marble for the hint. I'm still sad that I'd basically need to re-do yesterday's keysigning (which was about 100 e-mails), just to switch from the default SHA1 to SHA256

I ve actually spent a few hours searching around for a good backup solution for my mailbox until I decided to stick with getmail. What you ll be able to achieve after reading this HowTo and deploying the following setup is:

1. A full backup of your e-mail DATA in the Mbox format. (yes, Gmail s labels / folders as well)
2. Prevent getmail to mark all mails as read after delivering them. (this was a pretty bad issue since getmail was marking all my mails as read even if I did not access my e-mail at all)
3. Keep your backups up-to-date with the latest content from your mailbox. (by default getmail grabs all the DATA from your mailbox and fills up the Mbox / Maildir content keeping deleted mails. So let s say I deleted a mail two days ago, well it ll still appear on today s backups. This behaviour is definitely unwanted)

I ll now move to explain a few details about my new configuration but before moving to tweak getmail s main config file, please do the following change on _retrieverbases.py* :

return self._getmsgpartbyid(msgid, (RFC822) ) to return self._getmsgpartbyid(msgid, (BODY.PEEK[]) )

When done grab the following getmailrc and adapt it to your needs**:

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever ## or SimplePOP3SSLRetriever.
server = imap.gmail.com ## or pop.gmail.com for POP3.
username = example@gmail.com
password = password ## so-called Gmail s labels should be listed one by one here for getmail to retrieve mail from them successfully. mailboxes = ( INBOX , [Gmail]/Sent mail ,
ubuntu , gnome/example , linux/example ) [destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = ~/.getmail/backup.mbox [options]
delivered_to = false ## No delivered_to header added automatically.
received = false ## No received header added automatically.
verbose = 2 ## getmail will print messages about each of its actions.

When done we should go ahead setting up getmail s directories and config file:

mkdir $HOME/.getmail cp $HOME/getmailrc $HOME/.getmail/ ## Adapt $HOME/getmailrc to whatever dir you put that file into.

But pretty much all the remaining work will be done by a small shell script I wrote:

#!/bin/sh WORKDIR=$HOME/.getmail
date= date +%d-%m-%Y_%H:%M if [ ! -f $WORKDIR/backup.mbox ]
then
touch $WORKDIR/backup.mbox
fi getmail > $WORKDIR/getmail.log
OUT=$?
if [ $OUT -eq 0 ]
then
mkdir -p $WORKDIR/backups/ && mv $WORKDIR/backup.mbox $WORKDIR/backups/backup_$date.mbox ;
else [ $OUT -eq 1 ]
exit 1
fi ## Cleanup older than 3 days backups
find $WORKDIR/backups/* -mtime +3 -exec rm ;
cd $WORKDIR && rm -rf oldmail-* ;

This script will:

1. Run getmail using the getmailrc config file you previously worked on.
2. If the above command will be successful, it ll create a backups dir into $HOME/.getmail and move the latest Mbox file there appending a date and time to its name. (by doing this we are sure next getmail run will happen on an empty backup.mbox file, thus it will just contain the latest content from your mailbox)
3. It ll re-create a backup.mbox file on $HOME/.getmail to avoid the next getmail run to fail.
4. In the end, it ll clean up older than 3 days backups to avoid a too crowded backups folder. (it removes the oldmail file as well since it is useless in our case)

In the end set up a cronjob that will run the above script and generate the backups for you every one hour:

0 * * * * $HOME/.getmail/getmail_run.sh > /dev/null

Feel free to let me know if you ve encountered any issue while following the above HowTo. Enjoy! * /usr/share/getmail4/getmailcore/_retrieverbases.py on line 901. ** More documentation about the getmailrc file and syntax can be found on getmail s documentation page.

If you don't have any interest in tedious licensing discussion then I recommend not reading this. It's not going to be a great deal of fun.

Having said that:

I'm looking at the Canonical Individual Contributor License Agreement (pdf here). In contrast to the previous copyright assignment, it merely grants a broad set of rights to Canonical, including the right to relicense the work under any license they choose. Notably, it does not transfer copyright to Canonical. The contributor retains copyright.

So here's a thought experiment. Canonical release a project under the GPLv3. I produce a significant modification to it. It's now clearly a derived work of Canonical's project, so I have to distribute it under the GPLv3. I have no right to distribute it under a proprietary license. I sign the CLA and provide my modification to Canonical. The grant I give them includes giving them permission to relicense my work under any license they choose. As copyright holders to the original work, they may also change the license of that work. But, notably, I have not granted them copyright to my work. I continue to hold that.

Now someone else decides to extend the functionality that I added. By doing so they are creating a work that's both a derivative work of Canonical's code and also a derivative work of my code. How can they sign the CLA? I granted Canonical the right to grant extra permissions on my work. I didn't grant anyone else that right.

This wasn't a problem with the copyright assignment case, because as copyright holders Canonical could simply grant that permission to all downstream recipients. But Canonical aren't the copyright holder, and unless they explicitly relicense my work I don't see any way that they can accept derivatives of it. The only way I can see this working is if all Canonical code is actually distributed under an implicit license that's slightly more permissive than the GPLv3. But there's nothing saying that it is at present.

Now, I'm obviously not a lawyer. I may be entirely wrong about the above. But asymmetric CLAs introduce an additional level of complexity into the entire process of contributing that make it even more difficult for a potential contributor to become involved. I've spent far more time than most worrying about licenses and even I don't understand exactly what I'm giving up, which is ironic given that a stated aim is usually that they increase certainty about licensing. Is the opportunity to relicense really worth alienating people who would otherwise be doing free work for you?

As the main reason why I got Nokia N950 is that I promised to write some applications for that, I started to look deeply at available options how to write them. Unfortunately there are too many options and all documentation I've found is pretty confusing. The short story is that you should use Qt for user interface. However it is not that easy as it looks, you can use regular Qt, which can be run on the phone, but looks ugly in the end (maybe I did something wrong, but it did look completely different to anything else running in the phone). You can use Qt Quick, which is easy to write (simple UI definition and JavaScript variant for code), but it does not seem to support much of the widgets. And then there is Meego Touch library, which seems like a best option, however not mentioned at all on Nokia developer website. Looks like I need to learn few more things before actually starting to code.

Filed under: English Meego 7 comments Flattr this!

Sitting in , , (Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosna i Hercegovina) let s just say the country is pretty nice. People are okay, the beer is not called Nektar by accident, and the Mark (subunit Fennig, funnily enough) is worth 1 DM. Price niveau is below Germany (even when we had the DM) in some things, below or at modern European in others. In short, very affordable. They don t accept paper money though, it s really hard to get coins in most places, and they only want those. The food is okay, and my hotel is very luxurious. It s also got LAN. The weather is not so nice at the moment though: raining a lot, and expecting 30 C too-hot sun in two days. And there are still no Geocaches in the area. Anyway, DebConf is going on, I m acclimating and trying to get people, faces, nicknames and realnames connected. And accents. (And pronunciation of names for example, Ian differs totally from what I d use.) We even have working wire network (LAN) most of the time ;-) We re indeed still working on resurrecting m68k, but that s no news. More on that later, I d say.

Recently I received a bug report for psmisc that basically supplied a patch so psmisc works in a cygwin environment. Nothing terribly exciting in that and the changes are pretty uncontroversial. One of the changes is in that instead of using rawmemchr to find the end of the string, cygwin doesn t have that function and so it is replaced by strchr. I ve not seen the function rawmemchr before so I had a closer look. Initially I was a little worried, rawmemchr tries to find the given byte starting at a given pointer but unlike strchr it doesn t stop unless it finds the character. I think the only time this function is safe, or is no more evil than anything else, is when you are searching for the NUL character which is what fuser in psmisc does. Still, the string being checked is coming from getcwd which requires a string or buffer length so perhaps it would be better to use memchr which is a little slower but has a maximum length parameter. If you have code that uses this function, you may just want to check how it is being used because it seems like an old bad gets function that plagued a lot of programs.

If a single man can display so much hatred
think only of how much love we all can display together.

Stine Renate H heim

I wrote a Norwegian post explaining my experience at Ut ya. I had taken this blog for dead, and had entirely forgotten that it was syndicated on Planet Debian. I don t want to let Google Translate make this disaster any worse than it is the translation of bullets into balls being particularly bad so the international attention the massacre has garnered in consideration, I am writing an English translation of my experiences. I feel somehow duty-bound to make people aware of what happened, but I don t want to get into anything else but a sober description of the events and some very brief reflections. There are many details I have chosen to omit. Others have written their experiences of the events at Ut ya. I wanted to write mine down as well, and get it out there . Partly, I want to write this down because I m unsure if I will remember all the details at a later point in time, although I think I d prefer it if I couldn t. I m also writing this because people are asking about my experiences and it s much better to have an URL to give them, lest I have to keep going through the same spiel over and over again. Our former Prime Minister and current labour movement demigod Gro Harlem Brundtland had recently left the island. I had been the cameraman for a video interview of her talking about Ut ya, and I was in the media group room encoding the video into a file suitable for YouTube, when someone else in the room startled and said that Twitter was full of messages about a loud explosion in Oslo. As the newspapers brought us information about the extent of the damages, a consensus arose that an informational meeting was in order. As soon as the current round of talks finished, we were gathered into the main hall. The meeting was duly held, and after the statement was made that a TV feed would be made available, I took it upon myself as the local alpha geek to make it happen. Of course, the situation caused both the wireless network and the GPRS networks to become totally unusable. As I was waiting for someone to set up a password, I took the opportunity to face the consequences of having eaten two bits of a microwavable dish called Hold-It the local equivalent of a Hot Pocket and went to the toilet. As I was in there, I first heard agitated shouting, then screams, then gunshots coming from just outside the toilets. More than anything else, it sounded like a toy gun. I was convinced that someone was making a joke in incredibly bad taste and I stormed out of the booth with the intent of halting it. As I tore the door open, I saw two of my comrades hiding in a recessed corner. Their facial expressions left absolutely no doubt that this was no toy. They signalled for me to get back in the booth. I closed the door, did a mental double-take in utter, complete confusion, and opened it again. They were still signalling. Had they not stood there, I would have run straight into the gunman; they saved my life. I looked out into the hallway, and I made eye contact with a young boy lying in a pool of blood. He was motioning for me to help him. I heard more gunshots from inside the building and retreated back inside. As I was trying to think through my next move, I realized that the decidedly insubstantial wood-fiber door would not resist any kind of bullets. I made my way out into the hallway, with the intent of escaping outside. At that point, I was of course not aware that there was an intention to kill as many as possible, so I thought that the open spaces outside would be a place of relative safety. Of course, this proved to be wrong and my life was probably saved a second time by one of the caf volunteers taking me into a hard-to-spot employee s bathroom. We sat there for ninety minutes. Always ready to make a run for it, ready for just about anything. A peculiar group dynamic arose with these two people with whom I had barely previously spoken. We came to share a strange sense of common destiny and gallows humour. One of them had seen the shooter and described the police uniform. I perceived it to be realistic that we were the only ones aware of the wounded outside the toilet. I tried to reach the emergency services, but all their lines were busy; the terror attack in Oslo had probably clogged their lines. I finally got through to the fire services, who could inform me that the police did know about the situation and were on their way. This was to take 90 minutes and by the time we evacuated, the young boy outside my door had perished. The despair I first saw in his eyes as I passed him, fleeing from one room to the other and the empty, blank stare as we left, are burned into me and they are images I will never in my life forget. Finally, the real police arrived. We walked out. I chose the path through the minor conference hall something I now regret. The sight was simply beyond my capacity to describe fully, and so terrifying that I barely remember the sight only the terror it struck in me. There were several people bunched up in a corner, a big amorphous heap of bodies. Some were conscious and yelled at me not to do anything that could startle the police, others lay still. Their bodies were all covered in blood, and a thick pool of blood extended at least a half-metre in all directions around them. The policeman across the hall was screaming orders at me, but he was screaming so loudly that I couldn t make out his words at first. We were first moved into the camp newspaper s offices. There were about eight of us there, I think, in addition to one girl who lay wounded. Towards the end she was drifting in and out of consciousness. We covered her with sweaters to keep her warm and one of us tried to at least temper her bleeding. The bullet had missed her heart, but by the entry wound it was clear that it was not by far. I do not know who this girl was or how she is now. I sat behind and never saw her face. The wounded were evacuated first. I don t remember how long we remained; I had lost all concept of time. In spite of protests from the group who knew him, one kid was put in handcuffs. At the time I didn t understand why, and the policeman seemed to say something almost to the effect that there was no reason for it at all. I didn t see when they undid his cuffs, but I remember thinking that this treatment made a terrible experience even worse for him. I tried my best to comfort him but knew it would be little help. Later, when things stabilised a little, we were told that he was handcuffed because he had come from an unsecured area. The police was extremely good at carefully explaining what was happening and why; this was a big help and I am grateful for it. Eventually we were moved out into the main corridor of the building, where we joined up into a group of about fifty. Only when I saw the two people who saved my life did any emotion other than mild confusion arise. I broke down shivering in tears in one of their arms. After a few seconds, I came back to my senses and realised that this was not the time. I quickly gathered myself, got the shaking under control, and sat down. We were given some chocolate and soda from the kiosk. I remember making an offhand remark that an inability to find joy in free candy was a sure sign of a bad situation. We all laughed out loud. Gallows humour is a coping mechanism, but in retrospect one almost feels guilty for it. We were shown out in a single file with hands above our heads. I remember an intense concern that someone would slip in the steep, muddy slope and create a misunderstanding. Outside, there were more bodies. Some under improvised covers a tarpaulin from the waffle stand, the deflated bouncy castle but some simply lay there. Everyone I met displayed a courage, a mental discipline and unity of purpose far beyond anything one would ever wish to expect from people this young. Everyone conducted themselves with an attitude that could almost be described as stiff upper lip . Safely across the fjord we were offered blankets. I was asked if I was aware of any injuries, and asked to lift my shirt and show my abdominal region. We were shown into the bus which took us to the hotel used by the survivors and their family. I simply cannot describe in any words the relief I felt when I was able to embrace my living comrades. It was completely unlike anything I had ever felt before in my life. The euphoric feeling was tempered only by the realisation that there would be many I could never see again, comrades whom I had taken great pride in calling my friends, with futures in the service of all mankind, futures I had previously found such great joy in pondering and guessing about. The feeling which continues to upset me the most, is the feeling that so many of my comrades left behind grieving families and friends. Torn away senselessly. I do not know how much more than this relatively sober account of the events on Ut ya I can muster. I would, however, like to offer some reflections. First of all, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank the police who saved the lives of so many still on the island, the holidaymakers who took aboard swimmers into their boats and the rescue services staffed primarily by volunteers who have spared no effort in trying to soften the blow as much as they can. The opportunity to spend time with those comrades who underwent the same experience as myself has also been an immeasurable aid. I was also so relieved to find my very closest friend among the survivors, which has also been an indescribable help. If I can name a single positive in this tragedy: Had he arrived with his automatic weapon fifteen or twenty minutes prior, he would have arrived during the informational meeting, at a time when the major hall was absolutely jam-packed the death toll would be many times what it ended up being. I am agonisingly aware of the meager comfort this provides to those who have been bereft of their closest, but I do find some solace in this. We cannot sweep under a rug that this was without question! a political attack on the labour movement. But it is thankfully also an attack which has been perceived by everyone as an attack on the Norwegian society, and on a symbol of the wide recruitment to the participatory democracy which lies at our very national soul. I cannot thank the Norwegian people, and indeed the people in other nations who have offered their condolences, enough for their shows of support and shared grief. It really has been a tremendous help to me knowing that so many people feel with us. I also want to thank from the bottom of my heart the rock-steadiness of everyone in both the national and local wings of the Labour Party and Labour Youth in supporting us, and the political milieu in general for their resolute steadfastness saving me from losing yet more that I cherish; our freedoms in a participatory democracy. Our Party has lost many of its very brightest youngsters. Personally I feel an angry spite, a deep restless urge to get the wheels of society going again. I want to show his kind that we will not be broken. We re stronger than that. I will not be frightened into silence and passivity. I want to remember the dead, and honor them by carrying on our common work. I want to end this with a request to everyone who reads this, echoing a statement I read by one of my good friends and comrades: Please, don t let me see any messages of hatred, wishes for the death penalty, anything like that. If anyone should be of the belief that anything will improve by murdering this sad little person, they would be profoundly wrong. All attention now should be plowed into caring for those victims and their relatives who did not share my luck, and not giving an audience to a perpetrator who wants one. Tore Sinding Bekkedal

As I type this, it's just passed midnight. I'm in the back of a BMW somewhere in east Germany , and the Debian UK convoy is doing 110 mph on the autobahn, twenty hours into a twenty-five hour first leg of our trip to Banja Lunka. This all started out so sanely with a 3 am departure to catch the 6 am ferry at Dover. Followed by a couple of hours leisurely breakfast onboard. First hint that yes, this is a road trip in which things will go wrong was a minor bumper denting of one of the convoy's cars by a stray landrover during the ferry trip, but it didn't really phase us. On to Cologne, for a very nice lunch and to pick up another person. But we didn't anticipate how brutal the next leg to Gratz would be. Nor did we count on apparently half of Germany and the Netherlands getting out their campers and heading east this Friday. Spent multiple hours stop-and-go, and many more in constant traffic. Finally it opened out, so we can follow the night speed limit. And while we started out horsing around on the radio, we've developed some real comms discipline by now to keep the convoy together. Also people seem to be amazingly keeping rested while not driving. To add to the sleep debt to me, I flew in the day before, but I actually feel caught up now. Still I've not been driving at all due to mislaid license and general inability to safely drive a right side drive stick shift at 100 mph at night. Our 7 drivers are doing an amazing job. Update: Arrived safely in Gratz at 4 am. Austria tantilized with 30+ miles of tunnels thru the alps, but I've not seen an alp yet.

---

PS, you'll never appreciate a stinky, free bathroom until you're in a country where all the antiseptic bathrooms cost money and hoards of vacationers are doing the logical thing next to service stations.

Hello, world! So, now this blog is being syndicated on Planet Debian, and I decided to write something to introduce myself. I was born in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. I am married to Josy, a wonderful person; we do not have any kids yet, but anyone can notice we both discretely drooling when close to small children. I have a passion for building things, and making things work. Programming happens to be the better building toy that someone already invented. I became am official Debian Developer a little more than one week ago, but I have been working in the project for some time already. In the very beginning I was involved with the Perl group, but now almost all my work is in the Ruby team. I am a PhD student at Federal University of Bahia under supervision of professor Christina Chavez. My research involves three topics I am just fascinated about: Free ("and Open Source") Software, Software Design and Empirical Software Engineering. I am investigating whether it is possible to explain the variation in Structural Complexity by analyzing developer attributes. I want to answer questions such as "do developers with more experience in a project produce more complex code?", or "do developers that focus on a single part of the project produce more complex code than developers who work on the entire project?". As part of my PhD research I have been working on analizo, a multi-language source code analysis and visualization toolkit. I plan to write specifically about it in a later opportunity. My other job is running my own company, Colivre, together with several other great people. Colivre is a cooperative, which basically means that everyone who works there is also an owner of the company. We provide web solutions, in special social networking environments, social media websites and the like. Working on (and with) free software is our premise at Colivre, and most of our work involves either Noosfero or Foswiki. Right now I am taking some time off from Colivre to be able to concentrate on (and finish!) my PhD. Until late September I live at the beautiful Vancouver, BC, Canada, where I am currenly a visiting reasearcher at the Software Practices Lab at UBC under supervision of professor Gail Murphy. So that's it, I hope to post interesting stuff here and to get your feedback whenever you find it's worth. I also maintain a microblog at identi.ca, where you'll find shorter (and more frequent) updates.

The Wrong Answer story from these tales from the interview brings back some memories I ve written this code (well, I got halfway through it before I realised precisely how stupid an idea it was), and I ve counselled more than one developer against trying it again (always unsuccessfully, much to my chagrin and that of anyone who had to deal with it in the future, I m sure). The reason people do it is twofold:

1. It s more fun to write this sort of code than the sort that actually solves a real problem; and
2. Schema manipulation in SQL databases sucks rocks. There s usually limited (or at least painful) introspection capabilities, and manipulating the schema is annoying and usually is deeply balls, performance wise.

If the resources that have been spent building these databases-on-databases over the years were instead redirected into fixing problem 2, above, then it probably wouldn t be a problem any more. On the other hand, problem 1 would still exist, for which the only solution is regular beatings. Remember: always whack your programmers on the back of the head at least once a week. Even if you don t know why, they do.

... or TDDD and DEP8 context As a nice byproduct of the huge "rolling" discussion we had back in April/May, various people have brainstormed about applying Test-Driven Development (TDD) techniques to Debian development. Here is a brief summary of some opinions on the matter:

• a seminal conversation on identi.ca
• a couple of blog posts by Lars, discussing the general problem of how to use TDD in distribution development and to a lesser extent its instantiation to Debian
• a separate post by Daniel stressing the specific TDD advantage of increasing the confidence of maintainers in making far reaching changes

... and hey, they've also coined the cool TDDD acronym, which I hereby took the freedom to re-target to Test-Driven Development in Debian. Having a cool acronym, we are already half-way to actually having the process up and running *g*. more testing I believe Debian needs more testing and I've been advocating for that since quite a while e.g. at DebConf10, as one of the main goals we should pursue in the near future. Of course advocating alone is not enough in Debian to make things happen and that is probably why this goal has been (thus far) less successful that others we have put forward, such as welcoming non-packaging contributors as Debian Project members. There are important reasons for increasing testing in Debian. quality assurance Quality Assurance has always been, and still is, one of the distinctive traits of Debian. I often say that Debian has a widespread culture of technical excellence and that is visible in several places: the Debian Policy process, lintian, piuparts, periodic full archive rebuilds, the EDOS/Mancoosi QA tools, the cultural fact that maintainers tend to know a lot about the software they're packaging rather than only about packaging, the we release when it's ready mantra, etc. But caring about quality is not a boolean, it's rather something that should be continuously cherished, refining quality requirements over time. By simply maintaining the status quo in its QA tools and processes, Debian won't remain for long a distribution who could claim to care about package quality. Others will catch up and are in fact already doing that. In particular, we surely have room for improvements in our quality tools and processes for:

• Build time package testing. Several packages run their build-time test suites during package build. This aspect is somewhat supported by the Debian policy; we also do a best effort attempt to run build-time test suites via debhelper (starting from version 7). At the same time we could probably campaign more to encourage maintainers to look for build-time test suites which do not follow common Makefile target naming or, fwiw, which don't rely on make at all. TodoList.add("investigate and possibly file bug report against policy to encourage maintainers to run build-time test suites")
TodoList.add("investigate and possibly file bug report against lintian to spot the presence of [non-invoked] build-time test suites")
• Runtime package testing (AKA "as-installed package testing"). Some kinds of test-suites are difficult to run at build-time (e.g. complex applications that don't offer easy way to re-configure on the fly their filesystem paths) and some others are plainly impossible to run without having the packages to be tested properly setup (e.g. running services that are accessible only through the network) or an isolated, throw-away testbed (e.g. bootloaders, kernels, etc.). TTBOMK this kind of testing is not currently in use neither in Debian nor, indirectly, in any of its derivatives. autopkgtest (AKA DEP8) is a step in this direction; I will get back to it later on in this post.
• Integration testing. When applied in the context of distributions, integration testing is about testing package combinations, task (as in tasksel) combinations, basic system functionalities, automated installations, etc. This is the aspect that Lars has discussed the most (and in which he seems to be interested the most) so I don't feel like adding much. Still, it's interesting to note that on this front Debian has an important potential to exploit. The large base of its developers and the fact that the average Debian user is technical savvy mean that we can potentially collect a lot of test cases. It's "just" (with well-deserved double quotes) a matter of deciding a standard interface for test case submissions and developing a most likely virtualized test runner. At that point a continuous integration service that periodically run and publishes results can be setup independently from the rest of the Debian infrastructure and offered to interested eyes, such as Release Team's. Any taker?
• Automated code analysis and in particular automated bug finding is something which is becoming more and more common and finally, after decades of research viable. Successful proprietary tools and businesses are aplenty (a nice and very fun read on the subject is the story of Coverity), as well as FOSS solutions. For instance, the Linux kernel is routinely using Coccinelle to automatically find bugs and even produce the corresponding patches. Add to the above the fact that Debian is one of the largest software collection in existence (and quite probably the largest collection of Free software in existence) and is upstream of the packaging of that software for the most part. That turns Debian into a very peculiar platform for large scale automated code analyses. Not that we can aim at fixing all the bugs we are going to find, or even hope to tame all the false positives we are going to find. But we can offer an important service to the whole ecosystem of Free software and use it to pinpoint important class of bugs from a distribution point of view, such as nasty security bugs (as long as they can be automatically found ). DACA is a very good step in the right direction, even though it is still in its infancy.

reducing inertia Inertia is a recurring topic among Debian lovers (and haters). It is often argued how difficult it is to make changes in Debian, both small and large, due to several (alleged) hindrances such as the size of the archive, the number of ports, the number of maintainers that should agree before proceeding with a cross-package change, etc. It's undeniable that the more code/ports/diversity you have, the more difficult is to apply "global" changes. But at least for what concerns the archive size, I believe that for the most part it's just FUD: simply debunking the self-inflicted culture about how "dangerous" doing NMUs is might go and has already gone, imho a long way to fight inertia. Adding per-package and integration tests will make us go another long way in reducing inertia when it comes to performing archive-wide changes. Indeed if a package you are not entirely familiar with has extensive test suites, and if they still pass after your changes, you can be more confident in your changes. The barrier to contribution, possibly via NMU, gets reduced as a result. And if your change will turn out to be bad but still not spot by the test suites, then you can NMU (or otherwise contribute) again to extend the test suite and make the life easier for future contributors to that package. It smells a lot like an useful virtuous cycle to me. autopkgtest / DEP8 how you can help Of all the above, the topic that intrigues me the most is as-installed package testing. Work on that front has been started a few years ago by Ian Jackson when he was working for Canonical. The status quo is embodied by the autopkgtest package. At present, the package contains of various tools and the following two specs:

1. README.package-tests provides a standard format to declare per-package tests using the new debian/tests/control file. Tests come as executable files which will be run by the adt-run tool in a testbed where the package(s) to be tested is already installed. This part of the specs has been reified as DEP8 which I'm (supposedly) co-driving with Iustin Pop and Ian (for well-deserved credits).
2. README.virtualisation-sever describes the interface among the test runner and the testbed. A nice separation is provided among the runner and the testbed, enabling different testbed environments with a varying degree of isolation: you can have a "null" testbed which runs tests on your real machines (needless to say, this is highly discouraged, but is provided by the adt-virt-null tool), a chroot testbed (adt-chroot), or a XEN/LVM based testbed (adt-virt-xenlvm).

The specs allow for several runtime testing scenarios and look quite flexible. The tools on the other hand suffer a bit of bitrot, which is unsurprisingly given they haven't been used much for several years. At the very minimum the following Python development tasks are in need of some love:

• The usage of python-apt needs to be ported to recent API, as several used methods and attributes are now gone.
• Porting from dchroot to schroot is needed for the adt-virt-chroot backend.
• A kvm backend for the test runner would be nice.

If you are both interested in TDDD and grok Python, the above and many others tasks might whet your appetite. If this is the case don't hesitate to contact me, I'll be happy to provide some guidance.

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Note: this post is the basis for the TDDD BoF that I will co-host with Tom Marble at DebConf11. If you plan to come, we will appreciate your thoughts on this matter as well as your help in getting the autopkgtest toolchain up and running again.

From time to time I get e-mails about my wine-unstable packages being uninstallable. Most often it turns out, that the problem stems from using e.g. oldstable (Lenny) instead of at least stable (Squeeze). The same problem arises, if you wish to install the wine-unstable packages on a platform for which I don't offer binaries. In either case you need to build the package from source, which isn't as difficult, as many think. This entry in my ongoing tips mini-series of posts is thus going to detail how you setup pbuilder and afterwards use it to build a package. Please note, that I'm just focusing on pbuilder here and ignore things like cowbuilder. Preparations The following steps are needed just once, in general. Some would be needed again, if you want to create a second base.tgz, e.g. for a different distribution.

1. Install pbuilder with your favourite package manager, e.g. aptitude: aptitude install pbuilder
2. Become root
3. Configure pbuilder. Have a look at /etc/pbuilderrc, /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/examples/pbuilderrc and the manual page for pbuilderrc for reference. If you want to change some settings made in /etc/pbuilderrc, create a /root/.pbuilderrc and override any settings you don't like.
4. Create the base.tgz (the chroot environment for your builds). In the easiest case all your settings are made in the configuration files and you just need to run pbuilder --create, which creates the base.tgz in /var/cache/pbuilder, unless you changed the configuration.
   You should also note, that you can override certain settings, like the distribution or the path to (and name of) the base.tgz file created. See the manual page for pbuilder for all options and when they can be used.

Build a package The following steps are needed for every build:

1. Download the source package, you want to build. No matter how you fetch them (dget, apt-get source, ), you should end up with three files, one of them ending in .dsc.
2. Become root.
3. Update your base.tgz file: pbuilder --update. Again, see the manual page for further options. (You can skip this step, if you just created the base.tgz or you just updated it for another build.)
4. Build the source package: run pbuilder --build /path/to/source-package.dsc (obviously you need to replace the last argument with a real path)
5. If you haven't changed the configuration of pbuilder in that regard, then your binaries end up in /var/cache/pbuilder/result. Install the binaries, you want, from there (with dpkg -i).

Now you should be able to build your own packages from source! And to answer one question, that some of you might have now ("Why use pbuilder at all and not just build the package with dpkg-buildpackage directly?"): because pbuilder allows you to reliably build in a clean environment. That can safe you a lot of trouble, especially if you modified the source package. And it helps to keep the number of installed packages on your system down.

Martin Michlmayr is a Debian developer since 2000 and I share quite a few things with him, starting with his age and involvement in the quality assurance team. He managed to be elected Debian Project Leader in 2003 and 2004. He s no longer as active as he used to be but his input is always very valuable and he continues to do very interesting things in particular concerning the support of NAS devices. Read on for the details. Raphael: Who are you? Martin: I m Martin Michlmayr. I m 32, originally from Austria, and currently living in the UK. I ve contributed to various free software projects over the years but Debian is without doubt the one I m most passionate about. I joined Debian in 2000 when I was a student. I worked on Debian more or less full time for a few years while I was pretending to study. Later I started a PhD to do research about quality and management aspects of volunteer free software projects. I investigated the release process in several free software projects, in particular looking at time-based releases. After finishing my PhD in 2007, I joined Hewlett-Packard. I m part of HP s Open Source Program Office and work on various free software and open source activities, both internally and within the community. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Martin: I first used Debian in the days of 0.93R6, some time around the end of 1995. The 0.93R6 release was still based on a.out but I needed an ELF-based system for some application, so I moved to Slackware. I then quickly moved to Red Hat Linux where I stayed for several years. I rediscovered Debian in 2000 and quickly decided to join the project. I cannot recall how I rediscovered Debian but when I did, it was clear to me that Debian was the ideal project for me: I could identify with its philosophy, I liked the volunteer nature of the project, and I found the size and diversity of Debian interesting since a large project offers a lot of different challenges and opportunities. I remember how many new things there were to learn and back then the documentation and other resources for new contributors were nowhere as good as they are today. My application manager, Julian Gilbey, was a great help he was incredibly friendly and passionate about Debian. I also remember meeting up with Peter Palfrader (weasel) for key signing when we were both in the New Maintainer queue. I was incredibly lucky with my New Maintainer process and soon became an official Debian Developer. Because there was a shortage of application managers, my first major contribution in Debian was to become an application manager myself and help other people join the project. Debian is a large project with a long history and a rich culture, so new contributors should expect that it will take some time to become familiar with everything. Fortunately, there are many resources, such as documentation and the debian-mentors list, for new contributors. Another great way to become familiar with the way things are done in Debian is to subscribe to various Debian mailing lists and ideally to read some mailing list archives. It s also a great idea to attend the Debian Conference or other conferences since meeting people in real life is a great way to integrate. I remember attending Debian Conference 1 in Bordeaux where I gave my first public talk. Finally, new contributors should find an area where they can make a unique contribution. Most people in Debian maintain packages but there are so many other ways to contribute. For example, most of my contributions were not technical but were about coordination and other organizational activities. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Martin: I m particularly proud of a number of achievements:

• New Maintainer: I helped a lot of people join Debian. It s great to help someone join the project and then see how they contribute. Of course, some people join Debian and then quickly become inactive or retire you never know in advance how it will work out. But I had the pleasure to help some truly outstanding contributors to join Debian.
• Quality Assurance: I helped improve QA processes within Debian. In particular, I realized a few years ago that a lot of packages had maintainers who were inactive and that nobody did anything about it. I started to write to those maintainers to see what could be done. It s hard because you don t know the circumstance of someone they may be inactive because of an illness or for other good reasons so you have to be friendly, but yet persistent. Fortunately, most maintainers I contacted were truly inactive and so they couldn t complain when I took their packages away.
• DPL: I acted as the Debian Project Leader for two years. I m particularly proud of this because Debian is a great project and it was an honour to represent it. I performed important organizational and coordination tasks. I also traveled to a lot of conferences and had the pleasure to meet many Debian Developers as well as users of Debian. It s very motivating to meet users and to hear how they use Debian and how we can further improve it.
• Debian on NAS: Debian is without the doubt the Linux distro with the best support for NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. I was always impressed by what the OpenWRT folks have done to support wireless routers and wanted to do something similar for Debian. Unfortunately, wireless routers just don t have enough storage for a full distro. But then NAS devices came along and they obviously have enough space since they are meant for storage.

Raphael: Speaking about NAS devices: what exactly are you doing on this topic and how can people help? Martin: There are plenty of instructions on the Internet to install Linux distributions on NAS or various embedded devices by connecting a serial console and then typing in hundreds of commands. What I found is that such instructions significantly limit the user base because they are way too complicated for most users. There are just too many steps that can go wrong. So instead, in Debian, we provide a solution that just works: usually, you download a firmware image for your NAS device from Debian and when you upgrade you get the Debian installer. You connect to the installer via SSH and perform a normal installation. The installer knows about the device and will prepare everything for you automatically for example, it knows if the device has requirements for the partition layout and it will install the kernel where the device expects to find it; unfortunately, NAS devices are not like PCs, so the requirements are different for almost every device and therefore you need special code to support a new device. Finally, there are detailed installation guides and we provide help on our mailing lists. There are a number of technical areas for improvement. The installation could be made even easier, and it would be nice to support new platforms and devices. A bigger problem is that while we ve implemented a great solution for NAS devices, we haven t really extended this work to support other classes of devices. For example, tablets and mobile phones are getting incredibly popular and we don t have a compelling solution for such devices, mostly because of the lack of an appropriate GUI. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Martin: I ve recently been asked by Stefano Zacchiroli, our current Debian Project Leader, to coordinate the care-taking of Debian finances. Debian, as a volunteer project, relies on donations and in-kind gifts (e.g. hardware) to maintain its infrastructure and to support various development efforts, such as funding sprints and other developer gatherings. Debian s money and other assets are held by affiliate organizations around the world. My responsibility will be to keep track of money and other assets (e.g. hardware and trademarks), work with the DPL to establish procedures related to the use of Debian s assets, and make sure that the procedures are followed. Finally, we want to publish public statements so our donors know how we use their donations to further improve Debian. I just started working on this and this will be my main activity in Debian in the coming months. Raphael: Speaking of money, I plan to run a fundraising to get the Debian book I wrote with Roland Mas translated (cf. http://debian-handbook.info). Is this something Debian should support? Martin: First of all, I should make it clear that I don t decide how Debian spends its money. This is up to the DPL to decide together with the project at a whole. I ll just make sure that procedures are followed and expenses tracked and reported properly. Having said that, in my opinion, it s unlikely that Debian as a project will fund this effort. It would be inconsistent with the position of the project not to fund work directly (only some related expenses, such as travel costs to allow Debian teams to organize face-to-face meetings). Whether Debian should support the fundraising effort by helping to promote it is another question and that s probably not as clear cut. It looks like a worthwhile effort, but on the other hand it would be unfair for authors of other Debian books for Debian to put its weight behind one and there are many other efforts that are worth promoting if you promote one, where do you stop? So while it sounds worthwhile, it s probably better for Debian to stay out of it. But somehow related to this, I sometimes worry about the fact that there are so few paid opportunities around Debian. If you contribute to the Linux kernel for a while, you have an excellent chance to get hired by someone and to work on the kernel full time. The kernel may be an extreme example but there are a lot of projects that have more paid opportunities than Debian, e.g. Mono, GNOME, OpenOffice/LibreOffice and KDE. Obviously, there are some Debian Developers who can spend some time on Debian as part of their job. I know that some Canonical employees contribute to Debian, that support companies like credativ improve Debian as part of their work, and that system administrators fix bugs or package new software as they deploy Debian. But I think this is a minority of contributors and even they don t work full time on Debian. Instead what I see is that a lot of people leave university, get a job and then no longer have time for Debian or people start a family and no longer have time. I can take myself as an example since I don t have nearly as much time as I did in the past when I was a student. I guess there are different ways to deal with this problem one would be to create more paid opportunities around Debian outside the project, another one might be to make it easier for new volunteers to join the project. I don t have the answers to these questions but it s something I wonder about, and I also wonder whether pure volunteer projects can still keep up with projects with a lot of full time contributors. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Martin: Debian is a great project with a great mission, goals and people. I contribute to make Debian a better solution and to promote the free software philosophy. Finally, the community around Debian provides a lot of motivation. It s amazing how much I ve learned about other cultures because of my involvement in Debian and how many friends I ve made over the years all around the world. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Martin: Not really. I m pretty happy with the way things are going at the moment. We have made a lot of organizational changes in the last few years from which the project has greatly benefited. I m particularly pleased about the plans to adopt a time-based freeze. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Martin: There are many people I admire greatly. I d like to mention Joey Hess because he s a great example to follow. He doesn t get involved in politics, is easy to work with and does great technical work. In fact, he has made not one but several contributions that have completely changed Debian (debconf, debhelper, and debian-installer). Furthermore, Debian has a lot of contributors who have done great work over the years but who are not very vocal about it. People like Colin Watson or Peter Palfrader. Debian has many unique contributors and the list of people I admire is much longer than the few people I just mentioned.

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Thank you to Martin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. He raised some interesting questions. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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Our adventurous friends Eric and Katie had invited us to join them on a hike in the Grand Canyon over the 4th of July weekend. As this struck us as something we'd never have considered doing otherwise, we thought we'd accept their kind offer. We're so glad we did. It was quite a bit of traveling just to get there. We flew out of San Jose on Thursday night, got into Las Vegas, rented a car, and then drove to Peach Springs, Arizona, where we stayed the night. We didn't get in at the Grand Canyon Caverns Inn until around midnight, and we had to get up again for a 5:00am departure (I think we actually got away by more like 5:30am), to drive to the Hualapai Hilltop, where the trail head was. Zoe handled all of this very well. She didn't end up falling asleep in the car until about 10:30pm I think, and dealt with the transfer out of the car at midnight very well and went back to sleep. The drive to the Hualapai Hilltop, along Indian Road 18, took about an hour. We had to dodge a bit of livestock on the road. The road itself was sealed and of good quality. We remarked on the way back out that as soon as you left the Havasupai Reservation and entered the Hualapai Reservation that there was a distinct degradation in the quality of the road. We parked at the Hilltop, and got ourselves organised, and commenced our descent by about 7:10am. The first 1.5 miles was very steep. There were a bunch of switchbacks and there was a fair few people coming up the other way already. There were also a few mule trains coming in the opposite direction that we had to dodge. The mule trains have right of way, so we had to stop and get out of the way to let them pass. Zoe thought they were pretty cool because they invariably had a few dogs with them as well, and she thinks dogs are awesome. The remaining 6.5 miles (it was an 8 mile/13 kilometre hike in total) were fairly easy. There was a lot of variety in terrain. Rocks, sand, dirt. It wasn't all in the sun, which was made it more comfortable. Heat wise, I think it was in the high 30's Celsius, with pretty much no humidity, so it didn't feel too uncomfortable. Towards the end, as we got near the water, there was a distinct change in the canyon. There was more greenery, and we started hearing insects and seeing bird life. When we first saw the water, it was hard not to just jump in, it looked so inviting. The total hiking time was about 4 hours 45 minutes, which included a reasonable stop to give Zoe some breakfast. We arrived in the village at around midday. Unfortunately the lodge wasn't ready for check ins until 1pm, so we had to twiddle our thumbs for a little bit. Zoe handled the hike incredibly well. We used a Macpac Possum child carrier that Nigel had passed down to us, and she didn't complain the whole time. She even took a nap in it. We were very relieved that it wasn't a problem for her. Sarah carried her, and I carried everything else. (I'm so glad I didn't see the photo of how I looked until well afterwards). In hindsight we probably brought too much stuff, but we didn't really know what to expect down there, so we'd rather have too much than too little. The village completely exceeded my expectations. I had this (silly) mental picture of it being just the lodge and not much else, but somewhere between 450 and 700 people live in the village. It had two general-type stores, a cafe that was pretty much like a fast food/takeaway place, an elementary school, and some sort of basic medical clinic. There was also a small general purpose community centre of some sort. The main store had pretty much everything you'd need in the food department. The cafe frequently ran out of various different things, but you weren't going to go hungry. For the remainder of Friday, we just stayed put in the village and let Zoe stretch her legs. Eric and Katie and their kids explored the first set of falls down from the village, unofficially named Rock Falls. On Saturday, we all hiked down to Havasu Falls. We met a couple of other families (amusingly both from the Bay Area) along the way, so we had some interesting conversations. I have no idea how long the hike was. Havasu Falls was impressive. Quite tall and narrow at the top, and quite loud. Zoe was impressed. We took her for a bit of a swim in the pools in the bottom. We had lunch there, and then Zoe and Sarah stayed there (Zoe took a nap in the KinderKot (also courtesy of Nigel) in the shade by the falls, and I took the Macpac with a water bladder in it to refill it at the spring in the campground, which was further down stream, and to check out Mooney Falls with Eric and Katie (and their kids), which was further downstream again from the campground. Mooney Falls was pretty insane. A lot taller than Havasu Falls, and a lot more treacherous to get to the bottom of. Parts of it were vertical. Chains and rickety ladders were involved. Caves were involved. I'm so glad I didn't have Zoe in the Macpac, because on multiple occasions, the top of it got bashed into rocks, so without having Sarah with me also to act as a guide, there's no way I could have safely descended with Zoe in the backpack. My favourite photo illustrating how crazy this was is this one that I took of Eric and Katie. This photo highlights some of the craziness involved to get down. I pretty much got to the bottom, had a quick look around and left Eric and Katie to it, because I figured Zoe would have woken up by now, and was probably bored. Turned out I had all of the sunscreen with me as well. So I climbed back up, and trekked back to the campground, refilled at the spring, and headed back up to Havasu Falls. After we reunited, we then hiked back up to the village, which to be honest, was the hardest bit of hiking we did. I was carrying Zoe in the Macpac, and it was hot, and it was mostly loose sand all the way. We were very glad to get back to the village. Zoe started showing signs of coming down with a cold and a cough, so we decided to cut short our stay in the village and leave on Sunday instead of Monday. We'd been tossing up between getting a helicopter or horses out. We ended up opting for the helicopter after learning that the horses still took about 3.5 hours, and you basically had no control over the animal. We were dubious as to how Zoe would go being bounced around on the back of a horse for that long. The helicopter ride also took all of about 5 minutes. The tribal members get first dibs on the helicopter, and there had been a death in the village, and I think a lot of people had come to the village for the viewing (the casket itself was flown out earlier on Sunday morning for a burial out of the village), so I suspect there was a higher number of tribal passengers than usual. We didn't get out until 2pm. Again, Zoe was incredibly good. She just hung out with us while we waiting for a flight out. There were plenty of dogs for her to be entertained by, and some other kids. She also took a pretty decent nap. So we finally got out, and got back to our car, and then the heavens opened. It absolutely poured down with rain. Sarah was keen to check out Hoover Dam, so we decided to stay near Boulder City in Nevada, and got a suite in the Hacienda Hotel and Casino for cheap. The next day was the Monday public holiday for Independence Day, and we were tossing up whether or not to take Zoe to a doctor to get her checked to see if she had bronchitis (we've been a bit gun-shy about bronchitis since the time she came down with it when we were in Australia). She ended up falling asleep in the car while we were hunting around for an Urgent Care facility that was open, so we decided to let her sleep and drove to Las Vegas. After she woke up, we took her to see the flamingos at Flamingo and the lions at MGM Grand. Zoe absolutely loved all the lights, sights and sounds of Las Vegas. In the afternoon, we took her to a doctor, and got the "first child, huh?" from the doctor (she didn't have bronchitis). After that, we went and briefly checked out Hoover Dam (just walked half way across the bridge in front of it and walked across the dam itself). The following day, we packed up and spent the morning on the Las Vegas strip again. This time we went to the Venetian (Zoe thought the gondolas were pretty cool) and then we flew out in the afternoon. So it was a lovely little family vacation. We ended up spending about as much time in Las Vegas as we did in the Grand Canyon, but that was okay. I'd really like to go back to Supai again, but I'm not sure if the stars will align themselves appropriately. If we did, knowing what I know now, I'd take a lot less food and put all of the luggage on a horse, and just hike in with the minimum of stuff. I'd probably be game to hike out as well if the bulk of the luggage was on a horse. Photos from the trip are here.

Short version arrival was quite easy, the arrival wiki page is now up-to-date and my photos are uploaded every day to this Flickr set. I had a small problem departing from CDG to Zagreb after scanning my suit twice and complaining that it had too many electronic devices, they had me remove my Nexus S, Nokia N950 and Kindle 3 from the suit pockets and then scanned that all lot again. After that another security guy asked me to open my suitcase and started squishing my Ligo cheese and declaring in a grave voice that it was too soft to be legal . As I kept calm and explained the DebConf cheese party to him, he looked around, put the cheese back in the bag and said ok, ok, off you go . So I still have that softness for the party. I heard an even better anecdote from our next years hosts when they were travelling trough Germany, a border official asked a typical so, what are you here for? question. They answered that they were in transit for an IT conference and gave him the invitation letter. He read the letter, nodded and then said: DebConf, huh? So, who was the author of the Linux kernel? and when after the initial shock they gave the right answer, they were immediately waved trough. Now that s what I call good border security. I met up with the guys in the Zagreb airport caf , which was immediately after exiting the secure zone. We waited for dkg to arrive and get his baggage. The passport check too a couple of minutes, but the baggage claim looked to be taking almost a half an hour. After that was sorted out, we took out some local money in one of the 5 ATMs around and went to the bus. We were waived to just put our bags into the bus luggage space and get on, the driver went around to sell us tickets just before we drove off. It was one of the most comfortable and well air-conditioned buses I have been on in a long time. We were in the Zagreb bus station in less than half an hour. Then a funny part started an old man came up to dkg and immediately asked Are you going to Banja Luka? , and when he said yes, the man started dragging us along to the bus station saying that there is a bus to there that will leave in a couple minutes, but we were in luck, so we should follow him right to the bus. Driven by curiosity, we went on. The man dragged us to the far side of the bus terminal bus stops where there was a minibus with Bosnian number plates, but no official designation as a passenger transit bus and no other passengers. They asked a reasonable 120 kuna for the trip, but they looked very shady to me, so we refused. I think that if we agreed and we were lucky enough that they actually did get us to Banja Luka, the price would have risen along the way, for example using the highway tolls as an excuse. After getting cursed at by the old man and being demanded to buy him a beer for his efforts, we went upstairs to the real bus station where we were told that there were two buses to Banja Luka: one at 15:00 and another at 16:30, but that those two buses arrive in Banja Luka almost at the same time, so we got us tickets for the latter bus and went to a local bar to get some food and drinks. I somehow managed to get sausages in deepfried bread that for some reason cost almost triple of a hamburger and fries that others got, but it sure helped to pass the time and after all those 9 was not a bad price for a good meal. We were a bit surprised by the bus drivers asking us to pay 1 (or 8 kuna) for bags to be put into bus bag storage, especially as we for several minutes could not quite understand what they want of us as neither of them spoke either English, Russian or German. I don t remember when was the last time I crossed a real (i.e. non-Shengen) border in a bus, so getting out of the bus and walking one-by-one to the border official was a new experience. On the other border of two bus drivers collected the passports an then brought them back later, so that was less painful. And by then we were in Bosnia! And of the things that greeted us was a billboard for the casino in Banja Luka Hotel Bosna. By the time we got to Banja Luka, dkg had already made friends with an official from Croatian ministry of regional development that sat behind us on the bus and knew English very well (after living in Canada for some time). The bus station in Banja Luka looked almost abandoned like the bus stopped in the field with only a few taxi drivers and a bunch of buildings some distance away showing that this was indeed part of civilization. The taxi drivers would take you to the venue for 8-10 KM 5 or 50-100 kuna (if their meter is broken and you look to be really ignorant of the exchange rates). If you walk on a bit, there is a bus station with an ATM taking Visa cards and a bit further on a bus stop that will take you to the centre of the city for 1.5 KM. The train station looked fully abandoned when we went there, only a news kiosk was working there. The bus driver reacted well to the name Hotel Bosna and wave toward it when we passed by it. It is hard to miss, especially the blinking Casino sign or the white pillars with black letters Hotel Bosna on top. You just get off at the bus station Central and walk back a couple hundred meters. Then see all you Debian friends drinking in the cool bar and walk around the corner to the main entrance of the hotel to check in. The rooms are looking really great this is the best DebConf location that I have been to (I was not in Argentina). Soft beds with linens changed daily, nice air conditioning, towels (changed daily, if used), good shower, It is lacking in the speed and power of its free WiFi and in some place there is a clear impression that the hotel was built as a top of the line hotel a couple decades ago, but somehow has fallen into a disrepair since. Or it is simply used much more than expected. So far I would say that the DebCamp is running full steam two hacklabs have desks, chairs, power and network connection, one of them even has sufficient air conditioning. The network works great for me so far, at least in the venue. The hotel wireless is barely usable to read a blog post, preferably without photos. The food is being served well and on time. So far for lunch and dinner you walk up to the reception and get a food ticket based on your room number and go to the M level for the food (the M level is between the ground floor, labelled as PR , and first floor) where for breakfast and dinner there is a buffet, but for lunch you sit at a table and they bring you food. Vegetarians should clearly say vegetarian while pointing at themselves to get the special vegetarian option. So far food has been very good, except that that they often run out of popular items, such as fries, in the buffet. You can also ask for beer and other extra drinks with your food, but know that they cost extra up to 2.5KM for a beer, for example.

Before arriving to DebConf11, I arranged my flights so that I had a day and a night in Paris as I have not been there before. So after checking out of my work apartment in Tampere, going to work there with all the things from that apartment, then flying back to Riga, going to a midnight screening of the last Potter movie and finally getting back home around 2am, I quickly checked that I have everything needed for the conference and went off to sleep only to wake up at 8am again, pack everything (into a single carry-on bag, after a year of experience travelling by air weekly and watching Up in the Air twice) and be off to the plain to Paris. The CDG airport is quite huge, even compared to something like JFK it feels bigger and more concrete. And yet so dark and lacking interesting features that the only photo I got from it was this I then used the B line train to get to my hotel(9.1 ), drop my stuff there and another metro ticket (1.7 ) to go to Arc de Triomphe (M tro Charles de Gaulle-Etoile), went up there and walked the length of the Champs-Elys es right up to the Louvre. Then I walked to the river, crossed it to a small island to see the Notre Dame and then went back following the other bank of the river Seine seing both some more normal non-touristy streets of central Paris and also some other magnificent buildings, like Les Invalides and ending up at the Eifel tower. It was a rather easy walk that was only spoiled by some rain in the end so I did not get to take some night photos of the Eiffel tower as I wanted. But the experience still was breathtaking. The scale of the buildings was impressive. The pervasive gold-gilded decorations do expand on the splendour and the same time the full access to all the previously-royal places brings them down to people. The city looks well built and the planning mostly makes sense, especially if you are on foot. Car drivers might have a different opinion about it considering the maze of roads and traffic circles and underpasses I saw in central Paris. It is often said that Riga is a mini-Paris. Mostly, that is said in Riga. But walking the back streets of Paris I can see where that comes from the architecture, the street design, the small cafes and some cobblestone roads and some historical buildings with a few modern building thrown into the mix, and a tower too. Visually Riga does look like Paris a lot, but for the feeling, I still think that Riga feels more like Berlin with its mix of eastern and western Europe. I had one incident when some girl in front of Louvre started to ask me to sign something, gesturing to show that she was mute, it looked like a donation racket, but I did not get to find it out in detail as a swift security guard appeared and started running for the girl, who immediately took off running along with several friends. I guess the guards know them very well. On a more positive note, in one of many confetterie shops I noticed the macaron sweets that my friend advertised loudly some time ago, so I decided to buy and try some. They cost 7 for a box of 6. The taste was very, very sweet. Basically it tastes like froffed up and then frozen sugar made into cookie form with a cream layer between two cookies. So basically it is like an Oreo cookie, but much, much, much more tender, airy and sweet. The two of the 6 cookies were partly crushed while I tenderly carried them for 5 minutes in their box while searching for a place to sit down and eat them. After that I also had a proper dinner in a restaurant that was not too near the touristy paths, but still it was a bit lacking. The starter was quite nice I mean it is hard to screw up cutting off a piece of foie gras (basically a piece of liver paste with a layer of extra geese fat), but the main dish was disappointing I ordered a medium rare steak. First of all it came with a side of fries, that in itself was an insult to Paris, baked potatoes would have fit much better with this dish. And despite the main part of the steak being very nicely done to medium rare, the cut was done badly and the edges of the steak had sinew that was too chewy to eat or even cut normally. Other interesting things I liked about Paris:
* high street shops of fashion labels and car manufacturers, that showed off the concept cars and also sold small branded accessories, such as Mercedes Benz key chains * Statues some made of stone, some of iron, some covered in gold, everywhere and made with great quality * Bicycle rentals, I mostly saw the locals using them * Segway tourists * And countless classic postcard shots of very recognizable architecture The Eiffel tower was immensely impressive. It towers over everything around, especially because there simply is nothing high enough around it. It would not have been so impressive in the middle of New York, for example. The age and openness of the construction makes you really feel the massiveness of this marvel of functional architecture. But in the end Paris also looks like a great city to just kick back and relax in P.S. I am amazed that when I put a link to a Flickr image (such as http://www.flickr.com/photos/aigarius/5950187165/in/set-72157627230456160 in a separate paragraph in my WordPress article text, something along the way translates them into proper linked images with a reasonable size. Progress is amazing.

When I recently switched my blog over to Jekyll as my blog/site generation platform, one of the driving forces was implementing comments. I ve been a comment-free blogger for years, but I ve just decided to change my opinions on things and see what happens. (Turns out: you get some cool comments. And a lot of spam.) However, the standard advice when it comes to handling comments with Jekyll is use Disqus (or, very occasionally, some other Insert-Javascript-Here cloud commenting service). Not being one to stand for the conventional wisdom, and given that I m allergic to the cloud , I decided to go a different way an all-static comment handling system for Jekyll. First off, you need a way to render comments inside Jekyll. This was disturbingly easy with Jekyll s plugin system. With around 30 lines of Ruby, it was done. It simply reads a pile of YAML files from a _comments directory, and adds them to the individual blog post objects in the templating system, which can then be iterated over when rendering a post. Obviously, you need to also adjust your blog post templates to suit. This is fairly straightforward; just render each of page.comments in a list. Adding a comment submission form is also necessary, and similarly trivial. The only moving part in this whole system is the bit of code that handles comment form submissions. The simplest way to handle it, which is what I ve gone with, is a few lines of PHP that writes the contents of the form out as YAML and e-mails it to me. Although I m not a fan of PHP for web applications, this is sort of job is where PHP excels it s ubiquitous, trivial to deploy, and easy to understand (in small doses). Using a CGI or anything larger (like, say, a sinatra app) would be massive overkill. Since I m still a control freak at heart, I m hand-moderating all comments by the simple expedient of having all blog comments e-mailed to me¹, and I have to import them into the blog and re-upload. Mutt makes this trivial; I ve got a script that I trigger by pressing C (for comment) that pipes the message to formail to strip the RFC2822 header, then drops the rest into my blog s _comments directory. A quick rake upload and they re published. If you re not as obsessive as me about hand-moderating your comments, it wouldn t be hard to write a slightly different PHP script that commits the comment directly to a git repo² and re-renders the site. All you d have to do when you wanted to make a new post is merge those new comment commits from the live git repo and go to work. This would then be a completely static site (with all the performance benefits that implies) with immediate-gratification comments. So, if you re suspicious of the cloud, or just want to be the cool kid whose blog comments load even when people have turned cookies off, check out my Jekyll static comments plugin.

If I think back to fond memories of being with my dad during my childhood, there s one thing that always comes back first. It s those late summer evenings outside. Dad often had outdoor projects going on of some sort. I d go out there hanging around, maybe chatting, maybe playing with cats, or maybe doing something of my own. Dad often had an old AM radio sitting around and would be listening to a baseball game while working. As it got darker, lights would come on, and the bugs would start flying near them. Sometimes dad would be working just inside the barn, and the bugs would start flying in there, while some light poured out the big front door. There s something about that scratchy AM signal, the evening slowly getting darker, the slow pace of the baseball game, and just being around dad and a peripheral part of whatever he was doing that stirs a wonderfully fond recollection in me. I don t remember the specifics of any one of those times, nor do I really remember how often it happened, but it does stick with me. We ve had a routine in our house, starting early enough that neither of our boys know anything different, where right before bed, I read a book and sing a song to each of them individually. Last November, I was looking for some books to challenge Jacob a little more than what we had been reading. I found The Complete Winnie the Pooh used for $4 on Amazon. This contains the original A. A. Milne stories, not the Disney series. It had a few line drawings, but there were many pages without any. It s 352 pages and written in a rather dated form of British English. So for all these reasons, I wasn t sure if Jacob would like it. But it was $4 so I bought it. And Jacob was hooked. Each evening, we start bedtime with looking at the map of the 100-acre forest, just inside the cover. He gets to pick out 4 things for me to describe, and then we turn to our story. We usually read somewhere between 2 and 5 pages at bedtime, depending on how well he got ready without wasting time. And then we sing. A. A. Milne has his Pooh character make up songs throughout the book. They are printed with words only, no tune, so I make up a tune for them as we go. Jacob has taken to requesting these songs for his bedtime song as well. Jacob always gets to choose his bedtime story, and sometimes he chooses a different one but about 75% of the time, it s been Pooh. A few weeks ago, he started noticing that we were almost to the end. He got very concerned, asking what we d do next. I suggested a different book, which he didn t like. Then I pointed out that we could restart the Pooh stories from the beginning, which was exciting for him. Last night, we finished the book. The very last story was an interesting one, suggesting Christopher Robin growing up and no longer having imaginary adventures with the animals, but making Pooh promise to always be there for him. I don t think Jacob caught onto that meaning, though. When we finished it, we had this conversation: Jacob: Dad, is that the end? Me: Yes. Jacob, getting a big smile: Yay! So can we start back at the beginning tomorrow? Me: Sure! Jacob then gave a clap, shouted Yay! again, and was a very happy boy. Sometimes I wonder what our boys will remember in 25 years of their fun times with me. I don t know if Jacob will remember all the days reading about the animals in the 100-acre wood when he was 4, or maybe he ll remember watching train and combine videos, or playing radio hide-and-seek, or maybe something entirely different. But I have no doubt that I will remember sitting on the couch in his room, holding him on my lap, and reading a 350-page book to a loving 4-year-old. As Pooh aptly put it, Sometimes, the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.