Note: This post written March 13, and posted after our return. Yesterday was a day of travel. We said goodbye to Jacob and Oliver in the morning. We had thought a lot about how to tell Jacob what was happening and when to tell him. Ultimately, he doesn t really understand time or distance very well yet, and we know that he worries about the unknown. So although he knew about the visit to Indiana for awhile, he didn t know that Terah and I would be going somewhere until th emorning. He wasn t pleased, but seemed to take it well. We told him that we re going to a hotel in Germany and reminded him of other times we ve gone to a hotel. I also reminded him that sometimes a babysitter comes to our house while Terah and I go somewhere else, but we always come back later. That seemed to help. We got to the Indianapolis International Airport in plenty of time for our flight. They have built a completely new terminal building; the old one we were familiar with is now abandoned. The new building is beautiful, sunny, open, and even inspiring. I was impressed. Newark Liberty International, on the other hand, had all the ambiance of a Greyhound station across from the county jail. It reminded me a lot of Chicago Midway, which I used to go through regularly: dark, a bit run down (water stains on the ceilings), and nowhere near enough seating in the gate areas. We wound up standing for an hour before our flight left (late). The food court in Concourse C was something special. As we were witting there, Terah remarked on the constant stream of passengers that walked up to the food court, glanced around, and made a look of THESE are my choices? Which was our exact reaction a few minutes before. Yep, it s the first food court I ve been in where McDonald s was the upscale choice. The sit-down Mexican Cafe had hamburgers with mexi-fries as its main attractions. Terah tried out the dodgy pizza place while I tried out the even more dodgy Chinese/sushi place (I was not silly enough to try sushi there). Ultimately we decided that perhaps the point of the food court was to make us eager for airplane food. The choices in Indianapolis sure put that to shame: TGI Fridays was a real gourmet option compared to the choices in Newark. I was really a bit embarrassed; Newark is a major international airport, and many visitors to the United States will be greeted by a foul-smelling food court and a dingy airport. Yay for being welcoming? Well, really we had a good day of travel and I shouldn t be ragging on the Newark airport so much, so I ll say something positive: there s a pharmacy right behind the food court, which is probably a very convenient location to meet the needs of many diners. Anyhow, our flight left Newark about an hour late, at about 7PM Eastern. As I write this, it s about 7:30 CET (1AM Eastern) and our plane will be on the ground in about an hour. I m excited for the coming week! I got some sleep on the plane, but not a lot. I m hoping that I will have the energy for a good weekend.

So, Thailand Mini-DebCamp 2010 in Khon Kaen has already ended. It's another memorable event I've joined, and especially for this one, been in the organizing team. We owed many people for its success. I'd like to thank our guest DDs for their talks, many of which are improvised. Special thanks to Paul Wise and Yakiharu Yabuki for preparing the talks on Debian Social Contract and Debian packaging in one night, so our audiences can prepare themselves for the Bug Squashing Party in the next 3 consecutive days. Thanks Paul Wise, Andrew Lee, Yakiharu Yabuki, Daiki Ueno, Christian Perrier and our local participants for their efforts in tackling more than 50 bugs during the BSP, 30 of which have been closed and 14 with proposed patches. Thanks Christian Perrier for several talks in the last two days. We also had Andrew Lee's talk on Debian EzGo project, along with talks from our local distro developers (Linux SIS, Linux TLE) on what are being worked on and what can be pushed into Debian. And Neutron Soutmun had presented some future plan on the RahuNAS, a captive portal software based on Debian. A special agenda had been arranged to improve Debian mirroring in Thailand. Chatchai Jantaraprim, the ftp.th.debian.org maintainer, had shared us the backgrounds and motivations behind the official mirror setup for Thailand. Andrew Lee, the ftp.tw.debian.org maintainer, had introduced us to the Debian mirroring infrastructure, and encouraged the local mirror Debian mirror maintainers to do it Debian way. We had exchanged experiences and problems found among the current mirror sites, which can be much useful for their improvements, as well as cooperation in the future. Christian Perrier had also introduced us to the Debian translation workflow and how to coordinate translation via mailing list. This can be useful in the future for Thai if we can form a team, rather than a single-handed translation as present. Christian's talk on Debian contribution paths, along with their fresh hands-on experience in the BSP, had indeed motivated many local people to join Debian. I've been told by some people that they wanted to actually join Debian after this event, after just having a wish to do so for a long time. And Christian's yet another talk on key signing, with live demonstration, was really helpful for Thai audiences, as few of us were familiar with the concept and practice. Yes, taking care of PGP key does require special cares! Night chats and parties were also cool. We enjoyed the drinks (especially, Debian wine!), snacks, and chats together, and exchanged many stories. For me personally, it made me feel Debian as a live community, with people living in it. For the record, we even had a real bug squashing party, as fried bugs are among well-known Esaan dishes. And we had immediately got new voluntary vegetarians because of it! Hee hee.. Hello Christian, I witnessed it. ;-) And thumbs up to Yabuki for his bravery! Yes, it's a wonderful event for me indeed. Thanks Khon Kaen University (Kitt Tientanopajai et. al.) for hosting it. Thanks NECTEC Information and Mobile Applications Program and Science Park KKU for the financial support. Thanks NECTEC people for taking care of foreign participants in traveling between Bangkok and Khon Kaen. And thanks all participants for their contributions to make this event a great one! Picture credits: Supphachoke Suntiwichaya, DebConf Gallery

Note: This post was written March 12, and posting was delayed until our return home. This is the first part of our trip: driving from Kansas to Indiana with Jacob and Oliver. From Indiana, we ll be flying to Germany while the boys stay with their grandparents. We normally don t like long road trips. Our preferred way to travel is by train. By air is second, and car is last. But this time, driving was all that made sense. We planned to make the 11-hour drive in two days to give the boys more of a chance to get out of the car and run around. It s always a bit demoralizing heading east from our place. You drive at highway speeds for an hour and are barely one county over. We left at about noon and made it as far as Kansas City before our first stop much to our surprise. We ate at a Cracker Barrel there. Afterwords, Jacob loved running in front of the restaurant. Meanwhile, Oliver chilled on a wooden bench. Jacob was excited to find this chair. He said Here is a chair just the size of me! We spent the night in a hotel on the eastern edge of the metro area. Then Thursday hit the road again. We stopped for a mid-morning snack, then ate lunch at Pizza Hut. Jacob ran around in the grass outside again. Jacob invented a new game with me. He d ask, How will we get there? I was supposed to guess. With a pickup? No With a boat? No Eventually he d come up with a silly answer: We ll ride a pile of bricks there! or We ll ride on top of a stop sign! Then he d sit there laughing for a little bit. Pretty soon: Hey dad. How will we get there? We had a few toy-throwing episodes, but overall Jacob did very well. Oliver did even better. He slept a good part of the way, and happily watched Jacob for most of the rest. The car trip went well. This morning, it s time to get ready to head to the airport, and to break the news to Jacob that we ll be gone for a few days. We ve learned that he worries a lot about change if he knows about it too much in advance, finding it hard to process and understand, so we ll tell him after he wakes up this morning. Then off to the airport for our flight to Newark. Then we get to sit around in New Jersey for a few hours before our 7.5-hour flight to Hamburg.

Maintaining stable life with unstable distro? This post may sound ludicrous to some of you but please hear me out. I ve been on Debian unstable/Sid for awhile now and it was all cool until yesterday. Besides my work on Debian DebConf/some devel, I m university student, also I do web devel which is my primary source of income, besides all those I try to go out on weekends and have some kind of social life. Somehow I manage to do all these things and I d say I manage them pretty successfully too. Now I m hardcore to the bone, but this is just too much, last week started working on immense web devel project didn t sleep more then 2hrs/day whole week; I also didn t shut down my notebook and just kept it on suspend as I usually do. Either way I was about to print/scan something and I connect my printer and what happens? My whole system freezes, now I ll let you figure out the result of doing hard reset and having a lot of gedit docs open at that time. And yes, I did had that bug reported awhile ago, can t find it now, but it was fixed, seems like it s back again. In the end I m left with weekend completing the lost work + late school work + eclipse 3.5.2-2 ought to be uploaded. I do almost all the work (didn t upload eclipse) and literally pass out on Sunday. Wake up sometime on Monday, wasn t able to get up from bed. Plan: Change my base distro, keep Sid as dualboot or virtual machine
Now, for my time of being Sid user this isn t the first time something like this happened, and by this I mean unexpected/unprovoked bugs. I might not be as hardcore as I used to be, or it s just that I don t have time anymore. So my plan is to get Stable or even Ubuntu for my work/study platform, while I d have dual boot or virtual machine of Debian Unstable/Sid. I m sure I can t be the only one who s doing this, so please give me your advice on this one.

1. Main question is dualboot or virtual machine? Reason I d like it to be a virtual machine instead of dual boot is that my notebook HDD is 64GB SSD (Lenovo X300). By todays standards 64GB is quite small, while the price of SSD is quite opposite of small. So I d like to use this only for my main/base OS, nothing else. Since I use external HDD s having it virtual it s more convenient for me to carry around my image/s. Other day I ordered 4GB of RAM so I shouldn t have problems with performance of this virtual machine. Or even with that much RAM, devel on virtual machine is just not possible? 2. In case I go for Ubuntu, and decide to start packaging for Ubuntu as well, what s the best way to have my work/packages synced within both Debian and Ubuntu (sshfs?). 3. How do I take my PGP keys with me? If I just copy .gnupg and .ssh will that be enough? 4. Can I have same keys both on my host machine and virtual machine at the same time? 5. Some other idea of sticking with Sid?

Input to any of these questions/other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Help! Help! Help wanted! Please help! Dear world, As many among you know, I have spent a good portion of the last year (together, of course, with a great and interesting group of people) working on Seminario de Construcci n Colaborativa del Conocimiento (Collaborative Construction of Knowledge Seminar, or SECO3), derived from the Encuentro en L nea de Educaci n y Software Libre (On-line Encounter of Education and Free Software, EDUSOL). We have been working on producing a book that illustrates several different aspects of knowledge-building communities Among them, of course, the Free Software movement. Now, we need some help: Although we do have the chapters from most of the authors, some did not manage to produce them. And we are very interested in having them as part of the book as well, even if only as an appendix (as, of course, the kind of work of a transcription is completely different than the ellaboration for a well-rounded and written chapter). As the little academic I am, I have to request for your help: I have no students assigned to me. But I would love to have interested people on board. We need to transcribe two of the videoconferences that were given as part of the seminar. Please, if you are interested, contact me so we can arrange (and have no work duplication!) Thanks a lot,

• Luk Claes resigned as Release Manager. Thanks Luk for all of your hard work!
  The rest of the release team keeps working in the release of Squeeze and they have sent a small update. A longer update will follow soon.
• Other teams has also sent updates to debian-devel-announce: ftp-master and new maintainer teams.
  If you are interested on them, you should be already subscribed to this list
• Eclipse 3.5.2 is now in Debian unstable. Special kudos to Niels Thykier.
• The Debian Kernel team is working in the kernel for Squeeze and Ben Hutchings has blogged some details about it.
• In the past week, there were two Debian mini-DebCamps in so distant places as Thailand and Panama.
  This week, Debian will have a booth in the OpenExpo 2010 in Bern and the Spanish Debian community will meet in the third edition of the Dudesconf in April 9-11.

Googles Summer of Code has Debian participating again. And this year I wrote a proposal on my own, to try and see if there is a student out there interested in taking it on. It is easy described, writing a SmartUploadServer and should also fit into the timeline of a GSoC project, at least the server itself. Adapting the upload tools in Debian should also be easy, depending on various decisions taken for the SUS (oh hey, who thought of Windows now?). Especially if one manages to have existing protocols for the transfer and not invent an own one. There are more things available to code all around the archive. Most of them are hard to put into a GSoC project, for example a dak code cleanup doesn t sound all that good. And actually requires more insight, the above Upload Server is a nice self-contained project. It should and has to use parts of dak code and be integrated, but all in all you do not need much prior knowledge there. One other GSoC proposal I like and would want to participate (in the mentors view) is the one from Marc about DeveloperPackageRepositories. His current proposal is limited on the buildd site, I am interested in the archive side of it. Much of what is required for this is actually already there in the code, at least functionality to support it, it just requires glue around it to make it work. And I think such kinds of repositories would be a nice thing to have. This whole thing, as nice as it sounds, has one drawback: I had to create a google account. Evil thing, evil bad data miners over there. I m pretty unhappy with that fact, as I have survived without one for a nice long time. But given my position in this part of Debian (there are only 2 people who currently can change the code that actually runs the archive, for example) I think letting this opportunity pass by would have been the wrong decision. Now it only needs a student to take it! :)

Turns out that I do get shortened urls in twirssi if I manage to install libwww-shorten-perl, so having now installed that it appears that I've got a fairly much fully working twirssi, which is rather nice.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave an exciting demonstration of new augmented reality mapping software from Microsoft that combines video (including live video) with static mapping data and pictures [1]. This is a significant advance over current mapping systems such as Google Earth but it s not released yet either. It will be interesting to see whether Google or Microsoft gets this released first. The New York Review of Books has an insightful atricle by Garry Kasparov about human/computer chess [2]. It s surprising the degree to which a combination of human and computer chess playing can give a good result. Amateur human chess players plus regular PCs can beat grandmasters with computers or high-end computers with human help. It s apparently the quality of human-computer interaction that determines the quality of play. But the article contains a lot more, I recommend reading it. Daniel Kahneman gave an interesting TED talk about the difference between experiential and memory happyness [3]. As the concept of the moment is so short (about 3 seconds) apparently most people try to optimise their actions for the best memories of being happy. But to do so requires some different strategies. For example a two week vacation gives a memory that s not much different from a one week vacation. Therefore it seems that you would be better off staying in a five star hotel for a week than a four star hotel for two weeks, and eat dinner at a Michelin Star restaurant at least once per holiday even if it means eating at McDonalds on other occasions due to lack of funds. Temple Grandin gave an interesting TED talk The World Needs all Kinds of Minds [4] which mostly focussed on teaching children who are on the Autism spectrum. She is concerned that autistic children won t end up where they belong in Silicon Valley . Anupam Mishra gave an interesting TED talk about how the people of India s Golden desert built structures to harvest and store water [5]. Some of their ideas should be copied in Australia, due to mismanagement and stupidity Australians are failing to survive in much more hospitable places. Michael Tieman wrote an insightful and well researched article about the OSI s rejection of the IIPA s attacks on Open Source [6]. This is worth reading by anyone who wants to make a business or social case for free software. Mark Shuttleworth wrote an interesting post about the new visual style for Ubuntu and Canonical [7]. Apparently this includes the creation of a new font set which will be available for free use. Divorced Before Puberty an informative New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof about the links between treatment of women and terrorism [8]. The New York Times has an interesting article on Human Flesh Searches on the Internet in China [9]. It s basically crowds targetting people to find private information and harass them (similar to what some griefers are known for doing on the English-language part of the Internet). But they seem more interested in vigilante justice than lulz. The New York Times has an informative article about the Cult of Scientology (Co$) [10]. Among other interesting news it suggests that the number of cult victims in the US has dropped from 55,000 to 25,000 in the 2001-2008 time period. Senator Xenophon has called for an inquiry into the crimes committed by the cult and a review of it s tax-exempt status [11]. As always Xenu.net is the authoritative source for information on the Cult of Scientology AKA the Church of Scientology. The New York Times has an interesting article about formally studying the skills related to school teaching [12]. It largely focuses on Doug Lemov s Taxonomy of Effective Teaching describes 49 techniques that improve school results and some other related research. The article also mentions that increasing teacher salaries is not going to help much due to the large number of teachers, it s only professions that employ small numbers of people that can potentially have their overall skills improved by increasing salaries. Andy Wingo wrote an interesting article about Julius Caesar [13] based on the book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People s History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti. It seems that Caesar was more of a populist than a despot. Interesting article in The Register about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [14]. Apparently one 3.5TeV proton beam has as much energy as a British aircraft carrier running at 8 knots.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html
• [2] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/anupam_mishra_the_ancient_ingenuity_of_water_harvesting.html
• [6] http://opensource.org/node/511
• [7] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/308
• [8] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html
• [9] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html
• [10] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/us/07scientology.html
• [11] http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/18/2745765.htm
• [12] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
• [13] http://advogato.org/person/wingo/diary/336.html
• [14] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/19/lhc_3_point_5_tev/

I'm now on my way back from The first miniDebCamp and miniDebconf that happened from March 13th to March 19th in Khon Kaen, Thailand. This even was organized locally by a team of very motivated Thai Debian enthusiasts and contributors, such as Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (*the* Thai DD), Neutron Soutmun, Kitt Tientanopajai, and all those whose name I'm not remembering as of now (I hope they won't mind). The even had kinda the structure of DebConfs, with a few days of "Debcamp" to begin. See the full schedule. We were hosted in Khon Kaen University (KKU), one one the most famous universities in Thailand, a small "town in town" in a city with a few hundred thousand inhabitants (dunno exactly). Lodging was done in a hotel located inside the university. Interestingly, the hotel was also hosting youg students participating to "Summer Camps" (apparently training systems to get good school results) gving to all this a very young atmosphere. The hacking lab and talks location was a 30-seat room in the university library, and meals were brought in there very efficiently, with the very specific way that Thai people have to transport each and every kind of meal (in small plastic bags closed by rubber). I arrived only in the 3rd day because I had commitments at home that made it impossible to me to come for the first day. During these days, people have been very busy hacking and participating to the Bug Squashing Party. During that BSP, about 50 bugs have been touched, without about 15 or so closed. Other non Thai attendees were Andrew Lee from TW, Paul Wise from AU, Daiki Ueno and Yukiharu Yabuki from JP. Organizers were expecting some attendees from neighbouring countries such as Laos, Vietnam or Cambodia. Unfortunately, none of them could come, including Anousak Soupavanh, leader of Lao free software localization efforts, who I was very impatient to meet. Transport difficulties, or visa problems, do not make things easy in that part of the world. On Wednesday we had a "DayTrip" as it is common for such event. We went abotu 50 km away from Khon Kaen, to visit a nice place, close to a dam lake, and climbed a hill surrounded by a big temple and a giant Buddha statue. Then we had a wonderful lunch in a fish restaurant in the very specific Thai way to share stuff: everything is on the table and you pick your food here and there, at you rconvenience. Of course, local advice before trying apparently innocent food is always worth it because the fire might be hidden anywhere (for instance in that soja plate which I tried and that set my mouth as a burning hell for 20 minutes). The journey ended by a visit of a great temple in Khon Kaen and, very noticeably by a dinner in a very popular barbecue restaurant in "all you can eat" style for...100Bath (so, about 2.5 euros). Maybe only vegetarian people had more trouble enjoying the meal as it was mostly made of various meat (and sea food). The talk days were very intense, at least in my opinion. Probably because I ended up giving four talks, some of them completely improvised (about IP-over-DNS, which I was using at the hotel and about which many wanted to learn a little bit more, and GPG keysigning processes). It turned out that the GPG talk was well received and, discussing with Paul later on, we agreed that such a talk, mostly meant to explain the DOs and DON'Ts For good GPG keys signing, could be a good idea even for Debconfs. There were also a few talks about local initiatives and efforts to develop (and not only promote) free software. We have no recordings of these talks as we were infortunately missing some video recording installation (maybe next time, Thep) just like the miniConf that was happening in Panama at about the same time was having. Due to local regulation on the university network, we had some limitations with Internet access (some firewalling that for instance was preventing SIP to work properly, which made a video-conference with a japanese user group fail, unfurtunately). The event ended in a round table discussion about ideas to organize something bigger in the future. The local community in Thailand has apparently the energy, maybe ressources and local support to be able to organize a slightly bigger event as first try (somethign like an Asian DebConf or something similar, targeting mostly Asian contributors and about 50-100 people. Thailand seems to be a good target to host such event, with many things being relatively inexpensive (and not only beer!). And they even think about possibly hosting a Debconf at some time in the future (actually, Martin Krafft should also be credited for bringing this idea). That isn't as crazy as it seems and, provided that potential organizers start involving themselves in the current Debconfs, everything seems to be possible. After all, if we look back to 2005, only one person (hello, Safir) was seriously thinking that Debconf could really happen in Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? After this week (followed by 2.5 days of sightseeing in Bangkok for me, plus a small meeting today with local Thai Linux corporate users and IT company owners), I feel like the mood in Asia about Debian development is high and full of potential. The miniconf last year in Taiwan was already a good success, by establishing a good connection between people.....we need to keep that alive and, hopefully, there will be other miniconfs in this part of the world. And, well, if I can be there, I'll be there.

So, a short while ago, the battery of my N900 had run flat. As in, completely, utterly flat. In itself, that's no big deal -- you connect it to a power outlet, wait until it's gone past the low-battery charging bits, then boot and use as usual. Except that it wouldn't. I'd recently installed a firmware update from Nokia (which contained some bug fix that I really was waiting for), and now the bloody thing wouldn't boot. Rather than do the low-battery charging dance, it thought the battery had enough power that it could just go ahead and boot. Of course it was wrong, so whenever I powered it on, it would sit there fore 30 seconds, try to boot, fail, power off for about a second, and start over. I left it like that for a night, but it didn't recharge. Needless to say, that was quite annoying. So I sent it in for repair, and today there was a package in the mail, containing my (repaired) N900. They'd reflashed it. A reasonable course of action, I guess, but of course that meant all data was gone. Good thing it has a backup application, and good thing I stored those backups on an external micro-SD card. Restoring those back-ups was a breeze; they'd also stored the contents of sources.list and have done something akin to "dpkg --get-selections", since now the application manager kindly asks me whether I wish to reinstall the applications that I had installed. Cute. At any rate, I'm very happy I finally got rid of this awful Samsung "cellphone". It's a SGH-C140 that I had as a replacement until my N900 got back, but there was something very very wrong with it; I don't know whether it's a design flaw or just a wear-and-tear issue (these replacement phones aren't usually handled in the best possible way), but it managed to lose connection to the network every once in a while. So people who would call me would immediately get my voicemail, and then they'd be angry with me later because I was unavailable. Well, duh. Anyway, that's over now. Whee.

Some time ago I wrote a description of the -Bsymbolic linker flag which could do with some further explanation. The original article is a good starting place. One interesting point that I didn't go into was the potential for code optimisation -Bsymbolic brings about. I'm not sure if I missed that at the time, or the toolchain changed, both are probably equally likely! Let me recap the example... In words; libtest.so provides test_foo(), which calls foo() to do the actual work. libtest-bsymbolic.so is simply built with the flag in question, -Bsymbolic. liboverride.so provides the alternative version of foo() designed to override the original via a LD_PRELOAD of the library. test is built against libtest.so, test-bsymbolic against libtest-bsymbolic.so. Running the examples, we can see that the LD_PRELOAD does not override the symbol in the library built with -Bsymbolic. There are a couple of things going on here. Firstly, you can see that the SYMBOLIC flag is set in the dynamic section, leading to the dynamic linker behaviour I explained in the original article: However, there is also an effect on generated code. Have a look at the PLTs: Notice the difference? There is no PLT entry for foo() when -Bsymbolic is used. Effectively, the toolchain has noticed that foo() can never be overridden and optimised out the PLT call for it. This is analogous to using "hidden" attributes for symbols, which I have detailed in another article on symbol visiblity attributes (which also goes into PLT's, if the above meant nothing to you). So -Bsymbolic does have some more side-effects than just setting a flag to tell the dynamic linker about binding rules -- it can actually result in optimised code. However, I'm still struggling to find good use-cases for -Bsymbolic that can't be better done with Version scripts and visibility attributes. I would certainly recommend using these methods if at all possible. Thanks to Ryan Lortie for comments on the original article.

The annual March Madness Half Marathon in Cary took place this morning. This is both one of Chicagoland's 'early races' to start the season as well as the classic Boston preparation due to the hilly course. I have now run this consecutively for six years (see 2005. 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009). As for the race conditions, we had fantastic weather all week with temperatures up to the sixties and then all of a sudden a forecast of rain, snow and even sleet for the weekend. Luckily, and while yesterday was sucky, today was allright or better. A little chilly and damp, but neither rain nor snow --- or even wind. So the conditions were good, with the course challenging as usual. The race itself went fine. I ran more or less steadily, never had to stop but was not particularly fast at 1:39:38 or a pace of 7:36.3. I had aimed for beating 1:40, had missed that target by miles 4 to 6 and was about 10 or 15 seconds behind but managed to get a negative split on the second half of the course to reach that goal. Which is nice, but the time is still the slowest I've ever run that race, and my slowest half-marathon since 2004. Training had been sluggish all winter. Oddly enough, already in last year's post I stated pretty much the same and feared that Boston may become tough --- which it did. But this year may well be a lot worse as I had no spring in my step all winter long. No fire in the belly for training will make for a long race. We'll see how it goes. Four weeks to go.

Today is the last day of this conference, which has been a great experience of interaction between Central America and Caribbean communities. Yesterday we had packaging, BTS, kernel, pbuilder and quilt related talks. We also expanded the web of trust with a key signing party with almost 30 participants. Even a BoF about people interested in VoIP was held before going downtown to share some beers :)

This morning we had talks about hands on maintaining and translation tasks, we had also a group photo, and a quick visit to the Panama Canal.

Although it has been hard for me to and others to identify common areas of interest towards future work in Debian, it seems to me that these could be centered around l10n and i18n issues, along with packaging and digital inclusion projects.

Sitting at my hotel room in Tijuana, about to hit the bed, quite tired because of a nice, long walk I will write more about tomorrow, I have been listening for at least five minutes to a long, stupid infomerciative spam in the History Channel: A fountain pen, a five-point pen, and three other pen-like implements (plus extra and extra and extra things... They are listing a case with 63 implements now!) Now, what is the hook into getting somebody to call for a classy pen? Elegance, of course! Just for the sake of this exercise, the spam continues to be played. And yes, it's only been two short paragraphs. But believe me, I am very tired, and trying to get some coherent English out of my brain is not as easy as it could. Elegance, I said, right? Good. How do you convey elegance to TV spam/infomercials? Well, what's more classy and refined than a 30 second sample of Haydn? Man, Haydn is *so* classy that the viewer will not even notice the snippets of blabber have incoherent redaction. Anyway... Spam goes on. I cannot stand any more repetitions of this 30 Haydn seconds. They are stronger than me. And that old lady says that anybody is writing in their computer now I will only write with my fountain pen from now on! I will surely follow her wise advise! (STOP IT WITH THE STUPID HORN!)

Ben Hutchings announced that the Debian kernel team are now building Xen flavoured kernels for Debian/Unstable [1]. Thanks to Max Attems and the rest of the kernel team for this and all their other great work! Thanks Ben for announcing it. The same release included OpenVZ, updated DRM, and the kernel mode part of Nouveau but Xen is what interests me most. I ve upgraded the Xen server that I use for my SE Linux Play Machine [2] to test this out. To get this working you first need to remove xen-tools as the Testing version of bash-completion has an undeclared conflict, see Debian bug report #550590. Then you need to upgrade to Unstable, this requires upgrading the kernel first as udev won t upgrade without it. If you have an existing system you need to install xen-hypervisor-3.4-i386 and purge xen-hypervisor-3.2-1-i386 as the older Xen hypervisor won t boot the newer kernel. This also requires installing xen-utils-3.4 and removing xen-utils-3.2-1 as the utilities have to match the kernel. You don t strictly need to remove the old hypervisor and utils packages as it should be possible to have dual-boot configured with old and new versions of Xen and matching Linux kernels. But this would be painful to manage as update-grub doesn t know how to match Xen and Linux kernel versions so you will get Grub entries that are not bootable it s best to just do a clean break and keep a non-Xen version of the older kernel installed in case it doesn t initially boot. A apt-get dist-upgrade operation will result in installing the grub-pc package. The update-grub2 command doesn t generate Xen entries. I ve filed Debian bug report #574666 about this. Because the Linux kernel doesn t want to reduce in size to low values I use xenhopt=dom0_mem=142000 in my GRUB 0.98 configuration so that the kernel doesn t allocate as much RAM to it s internal data structures. In the past I ve encountered a kernel memory management bug related to significantly reducing the size of the Dom0 memory after boot [3]. Before I upgraded I had the dom0_mem size set to 122880 but when running Testing that seems to get me a kernel Out Of Memory condition from udev in the early stages of boot which prevents LVM volumes from being scanned and therefore prevents swap from being enabled so the system doesn t work correctly (if at all). I had this problem with 138000M of RAM so I chose 142000 as a safe number. Now I admit that the system would probably boot with less RAM if I disabled SE Linux, but the SE Linux policy size of the configuration I m using in the Dom0 has dropped from 692K to 619K so it seems likely that the increase in required memory is not caused by SE Linux. The Xen Dom0 support on i386 in Debian/Unstable seems to work quite well. I wouldn t recommend it for any serious use, but for something that s inherently designed for testing (such as a SE Linux Play Machine) then it works well. My Play Machine has been offline for the last few days while I ve been working on it. It didn t take much time to get Xen working, it took a bit of time to get the SE Linux policy for Unstable working well enough to run Xen utilities in enforcing mode, and it took three days because I had to take time off to work on other projects.

• [1] http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/debian-linux-packages-the-big-bang-release
• [2] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/08/25/xen-and-linux-memory-assignment-bugs/

John Gilmore keynote What do we do next, having produced a free software system for our computers? Perhaps we should aim at Windows? Wine + an extended ndiswrapper to run other hardware drivers + a better system administration interface/resources/manuals. However that means knowing a lot about windows internals something that open source developers don t seem to want to do. We shouldn t just carry on tweaking its not inspiring; whats our stretch goal? Discussion followed reactos, continue integrating software and people with a goal of achieving really close integration: software as human rights issue! Desktop paradigm needs to be replaced : need to move away from a document based desktop to a device based desktop. Concern about the goal of running binary drivers for hardware: encourages manufacturers to sell hardware w/out specs; we shouldn t encourage the idea that that is ok. Lots of concern about cloning, lots of concern about what will bring more freedom to users, and what it will take to have a compelling vision to inspire 50000 free software hackers. Free software in cars lots of safety issues in .e.g brake controllers, accelerators. Eben Moglen We re at the inflection point of free software because any large scale global projects these days are not feasible without free software. Claims that doing something that scales from tiny to huge environment requires us A claim I would (sadly) dispute. Lots of incoming and remaining challenges. Entirely clear that the patent systems relationship to technology is pathological and dangerous that I agree with! Patent muggings are a problem patent holders are unhappy with patents granted to other people . Patent pools are helping slowly as they grow. Companies which don t care about the freedom aspect of GPLv3 are adopting it because of the patent protection aspects. Patent system is at the head of the list of causes-of-bad-things affecting free software. SFLC is building coalitions outside the core community to protect the interests of the free software community. We are starting to be taken for granted at the high end of mgmt in companies that build on free software. We face a problem in the erosion of privacy. We need to build a stack, running on commodity hardware that runs federated services rather than folk needing centralised services. Marina Zhurakhinskaya on GNOME Shell: Integrates old and new ideas in an overall comprehensive design. Marina ran through the various goals of the shell growing with users, being delightful, starting simply so new users are not overwhelmed. The activities screen looks pretty nice The workspace rearrangement UI is really good. The notifications thing is interesting; you can respond to a chat message in-line in the notification. Richard Stallman on Software as a Service he presented verbally the case made in the paper. Some key quotes All your data on a server is equivalent to total spyware I think this is a worst-case analogy; it suggests that you can never trust another party: kindof a sad state of paranoia to assume that all network servers are always out to get you all the time. And I have to ask should we get rid of Savannah then (because all the data is stored there) the argument for why Savannah is not SaaS is not convincing: its just file storage, so what makes it different to e.g. Ubuntu One? If there is a server and only a little bit of it is SaaS, perhaps just say don t worry about it because that little bit is often the hardest bit to replace. Lets write systems for collaborative word process that don t involve a central server abiword w/the sharing plugin ? RMS seems to be claiming that someone else sysadmining a server for you is better than someone else sysadmining a time-shared server for you: I don t actually see the difference, unless you re also asserting that you ll always have root over your own machine . The argument seems very fuzzy and unclear to me as to why there is really a greater risk in particular when there is a commercial relationship with the operator (as opposed to, say, an advertising supported relationship).

Yesterday began the central america and caribbean MiniDebconf at Panama. Over 50 people from Mexico, Belice, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela, among others, are here to share experiences around Free Software and Debian contributions. All this is possible to several sponsors from Panama and SPI, and the hard work from many people, specially Anto Recio, Mauro Rosero, Carolina Flores, Gunnar Wolf and the local team.

More info(in spanish), including live streaming url can be found on: http://softwarelibre.ca/wiki/MiniDebconf2010

update: Also, on a personal note, I'll take the chance of this event to start my transition to a stronger gpg key, so If you have signed my old one, please take a look at: http://people.debian.org/~alerios/key-transition-2010-03-20.txt

GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF. The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet. We started with some project updates:

• SipWitch a project to do discovery of SIP endpoints and setup encryption etc. This looks quite interesting, and is looking for contributors.
• Bazaar I presented an update on where Bazaar is at and what we re focusing on now and in the future:
  • short term: merging and collaboration:
    • merge behaviour
    • conflict behaviour
    • develop a rebase that can combine unrelated branches
    • looms to be polished, or pipelines extended something to manage long-standing patches for distributions, or other environments that need long lived patch sets.
  • long term
    • continuing optimisation of network and local perf
    • meta-branch operations mirror collections of branches,
    • work with many branches at once (many branches in one dir (a-la git, hopefully less confusing)
    • easier get up and go for new contributors
  • now and forever
    • keep fostering community growth
    • we re aiming for negative bug growth- get on top and stay there

Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:

• accessibility since 1st boot
• reconfigurable hardware development (FPGA tools) this is particularly relevant for handling e.g. wifi cards that have a FPGA in the card, so we can replace the non-free microcode.
• nonfree firmware issue

lunch John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively convert more to become developers. Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS. Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments. Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM GNU FM is a free last.fm site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/. 24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas! GNU advisory board discussion too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s GNU Source Release Collection project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.

Note: Please see RC-Bug statistics for Squeeze, calendar week 6 for an explanation of the numbers.

Total:	615	-84
Affecting Squeeze:	481	-78
Squeeze-only:	105	-12
Unfixed bugs remaining in Squeeze:	376	-66

Of these 376 bugs...

... are pending	20	-16
... are patched:	50	-15
... are duplicates:	49	+2
... are in Non-free or contrib:	7	-3
... are claimed by someone:	12	-2
... are fixed in the delayed queue:	1	-4
... are somehow marked as fixed:	42	-11

Or in other words:
Release critical bugs left in squeeze, when ignoring all these:
228 (-34 compared to previous statistics). With this release managers views, 402 (-70 compared to previous statistics) bugs remain to be fixed somehow before we can release.