Gammu 1.26.1 is out! This release just fixes few bugs in AT driver.
Full list of changes:
I finalised the initial upload of the ISC DHCP 4.1.0 packages a couple of
days ago, and it sat in NEW,
because I've renamed the source package (no more dhcp3). Today it
was ACCEPTed into experimental.
(Kudos to the ftp-team
for their quick processing of NEW)
It should deal with upgrading from dhcp3-client or
dhcp3-server to the newly-named equivalents, at least for the
common cases. The rest will come out in the wash (which is why it's in
experimental).
Thanks also to AJ for
letting me NMU
ifupdown twice to sort out some problems with the way it invokes
/sbin/dhclient (thinking it's the v2 client) as opposed to
/sbin/dhclient3.
I think the criteria for uploading to unstable will be:
In the interest of sharing best practices, here is my RC
bug squashing workflow:
apt-get source package , sudo cowbuilder
--build package_1.2-3.dsc , install the result and check for
bug reproducibility ), taking care of
not changing anything elsedch --nmudpkg-source -b package-1.2/ , sudo
cowbuilder --build package_1.2-3.1.dsc , check if the bug is
fixed and the package otherwise workinglintian package_1.2-3.1.changes , check that there
are no regressions in lintian errors wrt latest uploaded
versioninterdiff -z package_1.2-3.diff.gz
package_1.2-3.1.diff.gz , check that no unexpected changes
have slipped indebsign package_1.2-3.1*changes , dput -e 2
package_1.2-3.1*changes (as allowed by
devref 5.11.1)nmudiff --delay 2 , in the text: briefly describe
in what the patch consists, and mention devref 5.11.1
After a long time of ignoring (or at least not using) micro-blogging services such as Twitter, I recently tried the Free-Software based identi.ca service, and I'm beginning to like it.
The choice of service was pretty obvious while Twitter uses proprietary software and has custom Terms of Service, identi.ca is based on software under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the contents are CC-BY 3.0 licensed.
The code behind identi.ca is called Laconica (recently renamed to StatusNet) and is hosted at gitorious:
$ git clone git://gitorious.org/laconica/mainline.gitMy account details are available under http://identi.ca/uwehermann, where I'm posting smaller announcements and notes about random technical stuff I'm working on (slightly more regularly than in this blog). Sometimes I use the web interface for posting, but using the Jabber integration available at identi.ca is even more convenient. You can both be notified of new posts ("dents") in real time via Jabber, as well as post your own dents from within your Jabber client, which is nice. identi.ca seems to become more popular every day, which will hopefully make the proprietary Twitter pretty much irrelevant sooner or later.
After long deliberation (a good few months!), I today came to the decision that I no longer felt that I could be part of the Ubuntu IRC Team.
I have felt for a long time that the Ubuntu IRC team has become an elitist crowd, with a very cliquey inner circle, and those who are not in the inner circle being treated on multiple levels like second class citizens.
There are a lot of things that have pushed me to make this decision, and I ve not made it lightly. I ve voiced my concerns to the IRC Council previously, (via individual emails), and had no response. I don t see the situation getting any better. In fact, more and more, I see it getting worse.
I know that I m not the only person who s thinking this way, though I may be one of the only ones that feels that I need to lay down my cinnamon roll. I ve discussed these issues on multiple occassions with various members of the community (both in and out of the team), and with people linked to the Ubuntu IRC community in one way or another (Debian Developers, Freenode Staff, etc etc).
There are also other people who ve come out of the woodwork after I posted my resignation. Within minutes of doing so, one member forwarded my mail onto the community council, and another replied with his thoughts and feelings regarding the matter. I m glad to see that there are other people out there who ve seen what I ve seen, and like me, also dislike it.
I will however, retain my @ in #ubuntu-uk. This is a channel I participate regularly in, and the ops there are chosen by the LoCo Team, rather than the IRC council.
Ever since X server 1.5 was released, various regressions started affecting our GX2 code in xf86-video-geode. We couldn't figure out what went wrong since our GX2 code hadn't changed in ages and we couldn't think of any ABI or API migration that would cause these regressions.
Well, it turns out that someone had quietly rewritten part of the X server core, which broken things from under our feet.
In the end, the change required to restore operation was minimal, but it nonetheless caused problems for several thin client users who complained loudly while the xf86-video-geode team scratched their head wondering what went wrong.
Still, it essentially meant that GX2 users suffered through Intrepid and Jaunty without a solution in sight, which is of course unacceptable. I'm also aware of at least one startup who lost a fairly lucrative LTSP maintenance contract, simply because their customer's GX2-based thin clients could not be made to work on Ubuntu since Hardy. Ouch!
In order to prevent this from ever happening again and to ensure that regressions get noticed before they reach critical mass, I'd like to solicit a hardware donation: something GX2-based with a small hard-disk or CompactFlash socket and 100baseT Ethernet.
My contact info can be found on my homepage. Please make sure that you contact me upfront to agree on the delivery method, before sending me any hardware.
Thanks!
Something that has been annoying me recently with my bank has been that their website tells me that they will never ask for my password over the phone. And then their call centre asks me for my password. Over the phone. Of course the call centre doesn't mean my website password - they mean the special 'ultra-secure 5ekr1t code phrase', but they don't have a good, universally understood word to use for that. Hopefully they'll work one out, but they appear to have got the message anyway.
This got me to thinking about how these phrases are used, and how insecure they are in reality. After all when I store a website password I go to significant lengths to ensure that the same password is not represented by the same string of characters in my database. How vulnerable are our secrets in the databases of organisations we do business with?davical=# select username, password from usr; username password -------------+------------------------------------------------ user1 SSHA qCctCH5dirYCf29uxJiE68LvmLRDdnBkbldiWlE= user2 SSHA y8yOzjoh9fSkVwLaXGoVtWdiIYxmU2FCb2dOZXc= (2 rows)When the user wants to log in I apply the same transformation to their incoming password (appending the same salt) and compare against my stored hash. If they match then it must be the same password they used previously. Storing passwords in this way secures them from casual, or even reasonably determined access, although naturally they can still be logged at the beginning and end of the communication - or even in the middle, if we didn't encrypt that bit! The PHP function I use to salt and hash the password is as follows:
/**
* Make a salted SHA1 string, given a string and (possibly) a salt. PHP5 only (although it
* could be made to work on PHP4 (@see http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/347.html). The
* algorithm used here is compatible with OpenLDAP so passwords generated through this
* function should be able to be migrated to OpenLDAP.
*
* If no salt is supplied we will generate a random one.
*
* @param string $instr The string to be salted and SHA1'd
* @param string $salt Some salt to sprinkle into the string to be SHA1'd so we don't
* get the same PW always hashing to the same value.
* @return string SSHA followed by a base64 encoded SHA1 of the salted string.
*/
function session_salted_sha1( $instr, $salt = "" )
if ( $salt == "" )
$salt = substr( base64_encode(sha1(rand(100000,9999999),true))), 2, 9);
return ( sprintf(" SSHA %s", base64_encode(sha1($instr.$salt, true) . $salt)));
What about Secret Code Phrases?
The problem with these secret code phrases, apart from all of the forgetability and guessability problems that have repeatedly been identified elsewhere, is that they are much less likely to be stored in a one-way hash. Are you going to ask your call-centre staff to type in the customer's secret code phrase? Didn't think so. And if you did it's going to add pronouncability issues to the whole mix.
So this means that those organisations who have our secret code phrases in their database will, in all likelihood, have them stored directly as plain text, displaying them to the random call-centre staffer along with all of our other account details, and especially making them vulnerable to accidental disclosure. Disclosure of a sort that doesn't necessarily involve knowing they have been disclosed.
Proliferation of Use
These things provide the appearance of security - 'Security Theatre' as Bruce Schneier terms it - and because of that they're taken up in a kind of a cargo cult of security: "if the banks do it that way it must be a really good form of security". This makes the problem much worse, because now I have to remember a secret code phrases not only for banks, but for ISPs, phone companies, online auction websites, and so on.
How many mother's maiden names, favourite teachers and friend's phone numbers do I have? I'm sure I'm at well up whatever curve it is that measures the number of passwords a person has, because five years ago I had so many I started to store them all in an encrypted database - protected by a yet another password, of course. Now in order to get my story straight I have to store my 'secret code phrases' in there too.
If I didn't store my secret code phrases in that database, I'd obviously be re-using them everywhere, from a very small set - perhaps the same one that everyone around me overhears, every time I have to ring my bank to authorise another payment from my account.
Because the proliferation of use is not just the breadth of wannabe thespians hoping to climb on the stage of this latest play, but the way they want to use it all the time, too. In fact the only conversation I've had recently with my bank where they didn't want it was when they rang me. Obviously I was the only person who could answer a phone in my house, right? It isn't just security theatre: I think we can see that this analogy belongs much deeper into the sub-genre of 'Security Farce'.
Is there a solution?
I don't have any easy answers - other than the ones to my security questions, of course - but some improvements are possible.
Other banks have quizzed me about stuff like recent expenditure or credit card limits from time to time, but I've usually passed those tests by reading my last bank statement - or failed them by not having it to hand! I don't really think that the answers can lie in that direction because the information is only quite loosely tied to my identity.
For some parts of the call-centre handling of secret code phrases there are changes that could make them more secure, but in the fairly short term these organisations need to find a different way to perform these out of band identity checks.
For the actual storage of the code phrases it would be a marginal improvement if the database did not contain the actual phrase. Perhaps it could be encrypted with some application-known key, so that it can be unencrypted when it needs to be displayed, but never stored in the clear. Of course there's still the problem with that key...
Verification of the secret code phrase could be done by someone not involved in the transaction, so that the call could be temporarily passed into a 'verification stream' where a different person performed the verification step without the context of the account details or enquiry. Though this sort of complexity seems unlikely with call centres seemingly being outsourced to the cheapest supplier.
One thing does seem likely to become increasingly true: there is less and less private data in our lives, and every time we share one of these little nuggets with our bank, or our electricity company, or our on-line associates-we-call-friends, is one more chance that it escapes into the hands of the foaming-at-the-mouth-terrorist-cracker-communist-nazi-right-wing-religious-fruitcake hordes.
The highest bar for personal verification which any of my banks currently sets for me is a random choice from a set of personally entered questions, with a set of personally entered answers, for which I have to enter two randomly selected characters using my mouse. That's not bad for safe verification, and I'd have to be really impressed with their security if that was stored in the database by a passphrase-protected encryption key. With that bank I don't know what they do over the phone - I assume they've concluded they can trust my logged on persona enough that I can do what I want online, consequently I haven't had to call them and share those secrets with everyone in earshot.
Maybe paranoid freaks like me will go back to a chequebook and close down on-line access to their bank accounts entirely when they find themselves having to supply a skin scraping in order to authorise their next $500 payment. "Please insert your finger in the AccuYou(tm) BloodSucker(tm) to proceed with this payment" - well, I guess it might cut down my spending! In any case, biometrics need to be understood before they can be used effectively and appropriately - and remotely over the phone is probably not one of the ways that they can be trusted to work.
About four months ago I described how my EeePC survived the spilling of orange juice over its keyboard. No! I never spilled anything on it again, if that s what you re thinking But I noticed that some keys (those that got more juice on) began to malfunction. At the beginning I paid no attention to it, hoping that it would just go away, but, eventually, they just stop working And those are not just unimportant keys I am talking about arrows and the forward-slash (/) keys in the lower right corner of the keyboard!!! How could I survive without those keys, without a quick access to my bash history and vim search?
Well, I began googling around and found some good advice. Everything that made sense regarding how to cleanup my keyboard I compiled and, when I was enough confident it would work, I just follow the procedure I ve devised. This is what I did:
Today I had a nice and productive day, code-wise. Maybe that's a side effect from being unable to lose my time following E-mail?def days_for(who, what, how)
The code itself? Naah, too pedestrian, to simplistic. It will ruin the sight. It just looks so beautifully universal!
Ok, I am compelled to share, even if it spoils it and renders it into a completely regular, even stupid method.
Listening to Martin Krafft s talk at Debconf (related to his PhD) shed some new light on the idea that I expressed last year I wanted that each maintainer regularly answers a questionnaire so that he has to ask himself whether he does a good enough job with his packages.
When thinking of this idea, I only saw the QA side of ensuring good maintenance on all packages, however I believe that the root problem lies further and this project would not be enough: we are interdependent but we are not equipped to deal with this reality. Martin s only merit has been to mention that we are interdependent, but it s worth analyzing a bit.
Our organization is centered around individuals acting as package maintainers, and in theory each package maintainer can work on his corner and all goes well. We know that this model doesn t hold any more: transitions to testing require coordination of uploads and timely fixes of RC bugs, keeping up with the work frequently requires several volunteers that have to coordinate, etc. More and more of the work requires a level of availability that a single individual can t offer, yet in our day-to-day work we mainly interact with individuals. Wouldn t it be better if we could immediately know what we can expect from any Debian developer:
Drivel 3.0.0 (current SVN trunk) is now ready for GTK+3.0. libegg has gone, there is one remaining issue with the GtkRecentChooser replacement. libgnome and libgnomeui are going away too and these have been dropped from drivel (therefore bonobo has gone too). gtksourceview has been migrated from 1.0 to 2.0. GtkSpell now correctly finds all supported dictionaries and a whole load of console messages about invalid casts etc. have been fixed. There is no libglade anymore, it's GtkBuilder throughout. Essentially, everything needed to bring drivel up to date with GTK+3 is in place.Invalid request payload: xmlrpc element PARAM cannot be child of PARAM, so that's libsoup too.(drivel:32119): Drivel-WARNING **: parse_xml_journal_list: XML is not a- so libsoup again but it's quite possible that this error hides other errors too.
<feed>
"Could not understand server
response." and lots of complaints about syntax errors on the console.Drivel-Message: login_name_active = -1Any GTK+3.0 gurus who can help with that one - much appreciated.
(drivel:31084): Drivel-CRITICAL **: remove_username_cb: assertion
login_name_active > 0' failed
svn co https://drivel.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/drivel drivel 
First you need to setup iptables for ip forwarding and masquerading, in order to be able to connect the new laptop to the internet:
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.1 echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE
Then you need to enable dhcp and bootp. This means simply:
apt-get install dhcp3-server Eventually, you have to enable the tftp server, which only means:
apt-get install tftpd-hpa /srv/tftp (check ps -Af). You have to download the netboot tarball and untar its content in this directory.
while true; do sleep 0.1; ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.1; echo "done"; done. Yeah, that's hacky, but I wanted a quick solution :) After all of that, you boot the new laptop, select the network boot and... voila ! In conclusion, since it is not that difficult to setup, it would probably be nice to have some sort of standard script to enable PXE boot on a computer. Then we could claim that the new Debian release is committed to sustainable development and allows to install without wasting a CD :-D
A bit more than a week after Debconf9 ended here is a post summarising what I remember about it for myself to look back to later, for others that were there for a good memory, for those that were not there for insight and for organisers of future Debconfs to improve.
Let s start with something most people know I took photos, a lot of photos. The main photo naturally was the Debconf9 group photo (also http://tr.im/dc9group and an annotated version). Please look for people that are missing their IRC nicknames. I have uploaded the best of my photos on Flickr and all good photos in full resolution on the Gallery site. All of these photos are licensed CC-BY 2.0 or 3.0 or GPL v2 or v3 (your choice).
Now about the organisation. The place reasonably easy to get to but not particularly fast or cheap from airport to the venue it took 1 hour in metro, 3 hours in a bus or train and a half an hour walk (or 5 minutes in a taxi) for the sum of 22 and 4.5 hours or 27 and 4 hours one way. While we all accept the time waisted in airports, getting from the airport to the venue should be easier and cheaper than this.
While it was crazy hot outside (38-40 C) there was great air conditioning everywhere, so we did not feel the heat most of the time (except if you walked from bus/train to the venue or did the climb during the day trip). Having air conditioning in the room was a godsend I do not think I would be able to sleep otherwise. Also free water from a drinking fountain where you could also refill your water bottle was a great touch. The rooms were great two beds, air conditioning, bathroom, shower, desks and closets where one could unpack their things. And we did not have to move to other rooms in the middle, it allowed us to unpack and feel comfortable instead of living out of the suitcase the whole time. I m not sure if it will be possible for future Debconfs to get rooms with only two beds, but I think that even with 4 people per room would have been fine, provided that there are enough bathrooms/showers, enough space to unpack everyone s clothes, enough sockets to charge some stuff overnight and enough WiFi coverage in rooms to get some late emails without going to the hacklab.
Which brings me to Internet and hacklabs. I must say that Internet was great this year it was fast enough not be a major problem, it was almost everywhere (a bit more signal in the sleeping rooms would be better), it was up and running from day one of the Debcamp and it was stable through (I think there was one or two interruptions). It would be nice to see people write a blog entry about how exactly it was done. As far as I know it was very helpful to have several kilometres of CAT5 cable, several large switches and a huge amount of identical WiFi routers all flashed with OpenWRT (and then some more smaller routers also flashed with OpenWRT to plug some holes). I heard there were two Internet connections joined together and a complex firewall/transparent proxy/traffic shaper and also a local Debian mirror that was DNS-redirecting people to it from all the regular Debian mirrors people use at home. The hacklabs were also nice when the Debcamp started the second hacklab was lacking most tables and chairs, but when those arrived there was plenty of space. Other common issues such as access to a free switch port for people without wireless and access to power sockets were also handled well and fast. It was very nice that organisers always had a few spare power strips or a spare patch cable at hand.
This year there was a siesta break in the proceedings. While it was in line with local traditions (take a several hour break during the hottest hours), it did not do much for the secondary stated reason to get out and see the surrounding, because half of the attraction of getting out (shops and bars) were all closed during the same siesta time. IMHO we should have used the great aircon of the venue and continued the talks from mid day to 18:00 (when the siesta ends) and then make a break until dinner so that we could go out and enjoy shops and bars and historic places during a cooler time of day. If there is a break in proceedings, then it should be at the time when people are most likely to enjoy the surroundings. I doun t know the schedules in NY, but if the museums close at 18:00, then there should be a break during the day to allow people to get to those museums.
Food was there and it was there every day, but it was not particularly great. Aside from typical problems with vegetarians and vegans (even salads had pieces of meat in them), I did not find the food to be compelling most of the time. I do not like fish and there was a lot of fish. Mostly it was good fish and sometimes it was so well done that even I enjoyed eating it, but other times it was full of fish bones and/or tasteless. Too often the dinner consisted of a salad, a deep-fried piece of meat and spoonful of dry fries. It would not kill them to put more fries on the plate and have some kind of sauce for them. One thing that was great in food were the fruit deserts apples, oranges, peaches and nectarines were fresh and juicy and then there were melons! I typically hate melons because the ones I can get in shops in Latvia are dry and bitter, but the melons here were bursting with sweet juice heavenly stuff. In the future it would be nice if the food selection and amounts per portion could be checked and agreed upon with the caterer in advance. Also the timing should be adjusted it is too early to end breakfast at 10:00, especially with dinner starting at 21:30 there is way too little time to socialize with other people after dinner and then to get a decent sleep. Talks can start at 10:00, but breakfast should go up to 11! I did like the water bottles and wine jugs on the tables and the beer being served as part of the food that was a nice touch that many people enjoyed.
The daytrip was a nice distraction in the middle of the conference a trip to a swimming pool made from a river bed blocked by a damn with an optional hike up a mountain to a spectacular cascade of natural water pools and slides that a river has carved in the solid rock or the mountain valley. Most people did the hike it was steep and hot and rocky, but the payout (the water fun) was there at the end, and it was great! Wonderful warm water and unexpectedly deep pools that both locals and us jumped into from rocks of differing heights. I am more of a climber than a jumper so instead of jumping off a cliff, I spidermanned up the cliff up from the water. I did not have any safety, but if I did fall I would have fallen into the water, so felt almost safe 
After the hike, the jumps and a hike back downhill we went into the buses and joined up with the people relaxing in the pool or in the bar right next to it. And after an hour or two later the day trip was over. While this was fun I would have preferred if after the hike we would have gone to some castle or other tourist attraction for more of a trip experience than sitting by a pool chatting.
Formal dinner was another traditional thing that we did this year. We walked over to a restaurant overlooking the city, sat down at many different tables occupying most of the place and then the waiters brought us plates with bits of food. Each plate was basically a set of 4 snacks for 4 people a plate of cheese, a plate of ham cuts, a plate of steamed vegetables and a plate of grilled meat. After that was coffee and desert. In my opinion the grilled meat was overcooked, the vegetables were passable, 1 of 5 cheeses was great (the local soft speciality) while other were ok and the ham cuts were ok. Desert was average. In all I was neither impressed by the food nor filled by it. There was also entertainment a singer with two dancers. They ware way too loud, so loud in fact that police came and shut the performance down, I did get a few interesting photos but otherwise I did not like them. They came to our venue the next night to continue the performance, luckily it was in an isolated patio and did not disturb people sleeping.
Wine and cheese party on the other hand was simply great this year there was a huge selection of wine and cheese as we were in the right part of the world for that. There were 7 tables full of cheese, wine and bread and also some extra stuff such as a barrel of peanuts and some great tea from Taiwan. People were walking around for hours eating cheese, cleaning the taste off with bread and wine, chatting and doing it all over again at another table. I left the patio at around 2am and there were still several dozen people around chatting, eating, drinking wine and tea. I m not sure how to get an event of similar size in NY as it is not allowed for travellers to bring cheese into US, only commercial import with an appropriate licence is allowed.
I also have my praise for the video team, but I ll hold on to that and the feedback about the talks until I see the recordings of talks that I missed, so I can also recommend the must see recordings.
All in all it was a great event meeting all the great Debian people again, coding some stuff, having fun and talking about the future of Debian in a more relaxed atmosphere than an IRC chat room. Debconf 9 was great, see you all next year at Debconf 10 in New York!
Today I went to the La Merced area to finally buy a foldable bike. There were basically four options: Benotto's 20" Utopia, Alubike 16" Foldingbike, Alubike 24" and a custom-made bike at a smaller store, Bici Universo. In Mexico it is also possible to buy a Brompton, although they are not available in larger stores and their pricing is prohibitive. Sergio Mendoza advised me to look for the Dahon bikes at Benotto, but they have discontinued them in favor of their own making.
I ended up buying the Bici Universo one. I must say this: I sincerely hope not to regret this option I got this bike because neither of the other ones satisfied me, and this one was at about two thirds the price (MX$1800, plus some extras I requested, MX$2100 That means, US$187 or 113).
First of all, after thinking about it for a while, I decided I didn't want a larger, more normal wheel The Alubike 24 (which I'd have to build shopping piece by piece, as they had only the frame for sale Would be a good ocassion to learn more about the whole process!) is basically a great regular bike you can put in a regular car trunk, but is still too large for taking it into public transport or lugging along when travelling, by bus or by plane. Besides, the manubrium1 is not foldable. So it is basically as portable as this venerable Compaq.
The Benotto's manubrium does fold, but the bike does not hold itself together when folded, it is not stable. You have to explicitly keep it folded. Not exactly comfortable.
I had tested the smaller Alubike at another bike store closer to my home. It feels a bit freer than the Universo one (I'll get to it soon), but still feels a bit kludgy... And at a price about MX$1000 higher, I decided against it.
Now, why am I wary with the Universo? Because after all... It is just a bike for kids age 4-7 and 7-12 (?) cut in half, and with a hinge soldered on:
It is also a heavy bike (I have not weighed it yet, but comparative guesstimates puts it over the Alubikes), so it might be problematic when travelling... I'll see when in Nicaragua in a couple of weeks ;-) I have yet a couple of adjustments to make to it, but I am very looking forward to travelling with my bike on. I hope it turns out to be comfortable.
And in any case, I can of course! donate it to my nephews... who are in the right age group.
Some photos:
After reading Alan Pope s recent post on installing GPG keys for PPAs easily, I thought I d have a bit of a hack around.
Personally, I regularly add PPAs to my system, whether it be for Chromium Daily Builds, Bazaar, Gwibber, or anything else. I ve found the most annoying thing is the installation of the GPG keys.
Now, I wouldn t reccomend this for everyone, but, for some, it might be exactly what you ve been looking for.
Here s what I did:-
Firstly, I saved the Script that Alan linked to as /usr/local/bin/ppakeys and chmod d it to 755. I then created a new file, /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/05ppa containing the following line
APT::Update::Pre-Invoke "if [ -x /usr/local/bin/ppakeys ]; then /usr/local/bin/ppakeys; fi ; ;
Today I attended RubyCamp (schedule available), organized by my friends at Instituto de F sica, at my University. I presented three plugins I made and regularly use.
The organizers followed a short, more informal scheme than most conferences I am used to Talk slots range between 5 and 15 minutes, so we attended a whole day of semi-lightning talks. Of course, many people have run late, and although there was quite a bit of free space in the schedule, it has been practically non-stop I was thinking on also giving a talk on encodings (as many people really still don't understand what is UTF-8, what is Latin1, why all that mess People, please learn at least The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)), but the schedule is full by now. Interesting and successful experiment, I'd say. The talks are being taped, and the organizers say they will be soon made available online.
There are many cultural details to note here. First of all, yes, the Rails Fanboys _are_ a cult/sect. I think we have ~90% of MacBooks... I still fail to understand why a coder feels at ease on MacOS. I deeply despise it! Also, most of this community have bitten the Twitter plague. This is also a community very much into businessspeak, speaking a word in English for each two words in Spanish (I try to be consistent, not mixing languages at least). Some conferences have been quite business- and enterpeneur-oriented. Although I should not complain too much about this, as it is an important aspect for many people But I still don't feel at ease having talks on how to run a business if we were asked for presentations on technical aspects!
Anyway - I was quite happy to be here. This is the first real technical, code-oriented conference I have attended in a long time in Mexico. And we need more like this! We have too many entry-level, evangelization-oriented conferences, but very few like this one.
[update]: Group photo!
Next.