After a fairly tiring (though exciting) semester of teaching, I have packed my books, lots of files, and other things I Can t Live Without, and shipped myself via Jet Blue to Puerto Rico where I will spend my summer. My reason for being here is simple: I want to see my mother who continues to live in a state of minimalism at a nursing home with Alzheimers. Coming home is never easy. Seeing her for the first time after an absence of months is especially hard and expect will continue to be as such, so long as I have periods away from her like I do. I never imagined that I would live between two cities as I do, but in general I am grateful I have a job that allows me to bridge these two places. When I am in NYC, I am so ridiculously busy (being an assistant professor is not unlike being a medical resident and doctor except the tempo slows down during our summers, at least to some extent) that I don t for better or for worse have my mother always perched on my mind. But being here is a different story. Not only do I have to structure my own time (so my mind can wander easily into those nether regions), but the house I stay in is nothing but filled with memories of my mom, most especially from the last 4 years she spent here with Alzheimers Along with visiting my mom, most of my time will be occupied in front of the computer working on the first draft of my book manuscript, which is due on September 15, 2009, 2 days before my birthday. I think I can hack it given that I have lots of time on my hands and when I get into work mode I can get a lot done. But the first month or so is going to be really really rough. I always find the transition into stare at your monitor mode for the entire day sort of tough. Puerto Rico also has a host of magnetic distractions like the garden and the beach, which I don t love but in fact adore. I also don t really associate the tropics/this house/the summer with mental work, but I will spend the next few weeks reversing that association or else I will be in deep trouble! Right now I am setting up the office, struggling to find the right a/c unit for the space, and in a few days I hope to be writing away

After a fairly tiring (though exciting) semester of teaching, I have packed my books, lots of files, and other things I Can t Live Without, and shipped myself via Jet Blue to Puerto Rico where I will spend my summer. My reason for being here is simple: I want to see my mother who continues to live in a state of minimalism at a nursing home with Alzheimers. Coming home is never easy. Seeing her for the first time after an absence of months is especially hard and expect will continue to be as such, so long as I have periods away from her like I do. I never imagined that I would live between two cities as I do, but in general I am grateful I have a job that allows me to bridge these two places. When I am in NYC, I am so ridiculously busy (being an assistant professor is not unlike being a medical resident and doctor except the tempo slows down during our summers, at least to some extent) that I don t for better or for worse have my mother always perched on my mind. But being here is a different story. Not only do I have to structure my own time (so my mind can wander easily into those nether regions), but the house I stay in is nothing but filled with memories of my mom, most especially from the last 4 years she spent here with Alzheimers Along with visiting my mom, most of my time will be occupied in front of the computer working on the first draft of my book manuscript, which is due on September 15, 2009, 2 days before my birthday. I think I can hack it given that I have lots of time on my hands and when I get into work mode I can get a lot done. But the first month or so is going to be really really rough. I always find the transition into stare at your monitor mode for the entire day sort of tough. Puerto Rico also has a host of magnetic distractions like the garden and the beach, which I don t love but in fact adore. I also don t really associate the tropics/this house/the summer with mental work, but I will spend the next few weeks reversing that association or else I will be in deep trouble! Right now I am setting up the office, struggling to find the right a/c unit for the space, and in a few days I hope to be writing away

Gone today, early afternoon, after ~ 8 years being the most insane and funny little bird I ever had.

Some people asked me how's the book writing is going. Ah you're right, it's a loooong time I didn't say anything of the progress, and here it is.

I've just turned the half of the book: about 10 days ago I've sent the 5th chapter (out of 10) and up to now I've covered this (high-level) contents by chapter:

1. installation & setup
   
2. first contact with mpl
3. some more stuff (like graph types)
4. OO style and some advanced things
5. GTK embedding

6th (and current) chapter is about Qt, so even KDE guys will be happy :)

I found several problems when working with GUI design programs: both Glade and Qt Designer made me scream a lot; but probably it's just me that I'm not so used to GUIs :)

Other arguments will be: Wx, web, real use cases.

In particular for the last part (real cases) I'd like to hear some proposals from you. I've already got something in mind, but users opinion will help me direct my work better.

Sorry, I've got to "drop/reduce" the science chapter (it was superseded by the real use-cases one) since I don't think this is the right place for it. Of course, a couple of "science examples" might come into the mentioned chapter, but your proposals have to be at a low-medium level.

It has been more than a month since I last wrote about my work on update-manager during this year s Google Summer Of Code and I am somewhat ashamed I wasn t able to provide you with updates more regularly. So first of all, yes, I did do some work and yes, there has been quite some progress. Basically both private and university stuff have kept me from writing and that s why I d like to start with this series of weekly updates today.
This series are meant to summarize what has happened during a week of writing code and give you an overview of what s happening. This first issue however will sum up the past month. So let me begin explaining what has happened since my last post. update-manager bazaar repository All code I have written so far is available through a public bazaar branch on launchpad.net. My branch s page can be found here and provides you with its history and of course instructions on how to obtain the code. The location is only temporary though, as I am going to move hosting over to alioth.debian.org. This is on my task list for next week. modular design I have ripped apart nearly all of update-manager and put it together in a more modular way, which should implementing new frontends or backends more easy, whilst also simplifying code maintenance. The new design consists of four major parts:

• The application class is responsible for parsing command line arguments, initializing all other components correctly and coordinate communication between the frontend and the backend.
• The backend itself is defined through the UpdateManager.Backend.BackendBase class and each implementation subclasses BackendBase. It is responsible for interacting with apt.
• The frontend is again defined through a base class, UpdateManager.Frontend.FrontendBase. This part of update-manager provides the userinterface, handles user input and starts operations accordingly.
• Lastly there is the distribution-specific part, which lives inside the UpdateManager.DistSpecific Python module and is defined by its own base class, DistBase.

backend implementation When I started working on update-manager it heavily relied on synaptic and used it to do the dirty-work. However, together with my mentor, mvo, I decided to drop synaptic support and rather concentrate on using python-apt. This means that the only backend implementation right now is a python-apt backend. The python-apt backend is currently a work in progress, but already includes some basic functionality. Right now it can (re-)load the package cache and package lists and is able to provide a list of packages which are upgradable to the frontend.
Whilst implementing these functions I noticed some shortcomings of python-apt itself, fixed those and got mvo included in his python-apt branch at launchpad. frontend implementation I started re-implementing the Gtk frontend as provided through current update-manager and right now it visualizes the package cache reloading process and provides users with a list of upgradable packages. However, that s pretty much all of the functionality it includes right now, which is why implementing more functions is pretty much on the top of my todo list. Additionally I have ported the text frontend, as included in Ubuntu, to the new modular system, and this frontend s code really shows how easy adding a frontend with the new modular design is. This frontend contains the same functionality as the Gtk frontend. distribution specific code The core described above does not include any distribution specific code anymore, which is the main focus of this project. The implementations of distribution-specific functionality contains classifiers for update categories for both Debian and Ubuntu, whilst I focused on getting things right with the Debian implementation for now. These classifiers allow the frontend to let the user know which kind of update they are about to install, like a security update, a recommended upgrade or a third-party (unofficial) upgrade. documentation As update-manager was poorly (read: hardly at all) documented I started documenting the API using sphinx. However, right now the generated documentation cannot be found anywhere yet. This should change as soon as an alioth project for update-manager has been created. next week s tasks I would also like to provide you with my task list for the coming week. The list, ordered by priority, is:

• Register an alioth project and move the bazaar branch to bzr.debian.org
• Generate an HTML version of the API documentation and put it on alioth.
• Implement changelog-fetching for the Debian-specific module and make use of that from within the code and the Gtk frontend.

As you can see this list is rather short. This can mainly be attributed to a few university assignments, and instead of providing a long list of tasks which I probably won t be able to finish I rather keep the list short and hopefully get things not on this list done too.

I wonder what this means. Is it a reference to the ftp and release teams thinking that they are entitled to block packages from being uploaded to unstable? Is it a reference to the core team members thinking that they are entitled to operate without transparency? I cannot guess.

Guess its my time to post something about my feelings on Jaunty.

The Good:
* armel successfully birthed
* powerpc well on the way to be well maintained
- Kernel and installer work mostly done by TheMuso (thanks :-))
- Image testing by the people of #ubuntu-ps3, myself, and TheMuso
- powerpc, and powerpc+ps3 both in the release annoucements for Kubuntu and Xubuntu :-)
* Kubuntu upgraded to KDE 4.2
* Xubuntu upgraded to Xfce 4.6
* PowerPC FTBFS rate in main very low. ia64, and sparc looking more improved.

The Bad:
* SPARC, ia64, and HPPA remain fairly foobar w.r.t. to the installer and kernel

The Ugly:
* The drama over notifications and update-manager

All and all though, I think its been a fairly good cycle. Looking forward to karmic.

If I say I got the third place in a scholarship application , it doesn t look bad.

But there is money only for the first two persons. Sometimes, close is not enough. So, without money, I won t be able to study in Europe damn Maybe next year maybe not. Note: The application was, as you can see, for a doctoral scholarship in Spain my broken English has no effect here

Apart from having been on vacation under the sun, I ve been busy working with a friend of mine on something we called vmfs-tools, which is partly why there is still no part 2 to the previous post. In case you don t know, VMFS is a clustered filesystem designed to store virtual machine disks for VMware ESX or ESXi Server hosts. Our ultimate goal is to give read-write access to these filesystems from some other host, for maintenance tasks such as, e.g. backup. Files within the VMFS file systems can be accessed either from a CLI tool, or through a FUSE filesystem. For the moment, only read support is available, and some known issues are still to be fixed, as well as a revamp of a part of the internal API. The (quite sparse) homepage for this project is hosted here. A Debian package is also sitting in NEW.

I've successfully upgraded my primary web/mail/misc host from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny. There were a few minor problems, but on the whole the upgrade was as painless as I've come to expect. In the past I'd edited my Exim4 configuration to add quite a few ACL checks, for example rejecting mails based upon spoofed/bogus HELO identifiers, and rejecting messages that didn't contain "Subject" or "Date" headers. The Debian Exim4 configuration may be split into multiple files (which is how I prefer it on the whole). The idea that you just add new files into the existing hierarchy and they'll magically appear in the correct location when a real configuration file is generated. On the whole this works well, but sometimes editing files in-place is required, and it was these local edits that caused me pain. Fixing things up was mostly not a challenge, primarily it was a matter of removing ACLs until exim4 started without errors - all my spam checking is handled ahead of exim4 these days, except for the last-ditch spam filtering with a combination of procmail-fu and the crm114 classifier package. Taking a hint from Bubulle's weblog I decided to nuke my CRM114 spam database to avoid any possible version-mismatch issues so now I'm having to classify a lot of "unsure" messages. Happily my memory of doing this last time round is that the initial training of spam/ham takes a day or so to complete. Anyway now I can start looking to advantage of the things new to Lenny. But probably not until I'm sure things have calmed down and upgraded correctly.

steve@skx:~$ uptime
 05:00:31 up 260 days, 14:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.95, 0.51, 0.31
steve@skx:~$ cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 \n \l

ObFilm: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

So, I'm considering a backup system that has as its goal to let you backup all your data from third party websites, easily. The idea I have for its UI is you enter in the urls for all the sites you use, or feed it a bookmark file. By examining the URLs, it determines if it knows how to export data from each site, and prompts for any necessary login info. The result would be a list of sites, and their backup status. I think it's important that you be able to enter websites that the system doesn't know how to handle yet; backup of such sites will show as failed, which is accurate. It seems to almost be appropriate to have a web interface, although command-line setup and cron should also be supported. For the actual data collection, there would be a plugin system. Some plugins could handle fairly generic things, like any site with an RSS feed. Other plugins would have site-specific logic, or would run third-party programs that already exist for specific sites. There are some subtle issues: Just because a plugin manages to suck an RSS feed or FOAF file off a site does not mean all the relevant info for that site is being backed up. More than one plugin might be able to back up parts of a site using different methods. Some methods will be much too expensive to run often. As far as storing the backup, dumping it to a directory as files in whatever formats are provided might seem cheap, but then you can check it into git, or let your regular backup system (which you have, right?) handle it.

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Thoughts, comments, prior art, cute program idea names (my idea is "?unsilo"), or am I wasting my time thinking about this?

Thanks to Thomas Vander Stichele I've found out that when ripping an audio CD you get a different file depending on the CD drive you use because they don't all start reading at the same position and that for most drives this is a constant offset. So if you know what offset your drive has, you can compare rips done with a different drive. I was under the impression that this offset was always a multiple of the sector size, because audio CDs do not have a reliable way to detect the position. But it seems this offset can in the middle of a sector too. It looks like they agreed on some standard to compare the drive offsets. You can find a list of drives here and here. Cdparanoia has an option you can use to correct for that offset. But I started wondering where this error comes from. There is no real reason why all CD drives shouldn't be able to return the same thing. There is very little real info about it out there, and I basically get the impression that someone just decided to use something as base value. It isn't really a problem, since this is about very small time. To fully understand this, I think it's important to understand the basic layout of an audio CD. A sector (frame) of a CD contains 2352 bytes (588 samples) main data and 96 byte of sub-channel data. You have 75 such sectors per second, giving you a total of 44100 samples per second. A sector is made up of 98 sub-frames. Each such sub-frame has 24 bytes (6 samples) of main data, 4 bytes of C1 error correction and 4 bytes of C2 error correction, and 1 "byte" of sub-channel data. The first 2 sub-frames are used to mark the beginning of the sector. It contains a special pattern at the location of the sub-channel data. The first sub-frame contains S0 and the second S1. So you are left with 96 byte of sub-channel data. The highest bit of the sub-channel byte is used for the P sub-channel, bit 6 for the Q sub-channel, and so on until the W sub-channel. So the sub-channel has 96 bits (12 byte) per sector and each bit is in a different sub-frame. If you go look at the offsets, you'll notice there are a lot of drives that have an offset that's a multiple of 6 samples, but there are also a lot that aren't a multiple of 6. In the P and Q sub-channels you can see at what place you're reading. The P channel is a "pause" flag. At least 2 seconds before the track starts the P flag is turned on and the second sector of the track it's turned off again. All bits of P sub-channel should be the same for the whole sector, it can only change after an S0/S1. In the Q channel you can have different information depending on what is in the first byte. The most useful one is "mode 1", which contain things like the track number, index in the track, and time indication for both the current track and the whole disc, and a CRC. Mode 1 should be in at least 9 out of 10 sectors. So you known perfectly at which location you are. There is just 1 small problem, the sub-channels do not have any error correction, but does have a CRC. And there are lots of sectors with the information in it. So I wondered if the drives just didn't look at S0/S1 and that the sub channel data was shifted too. So I changed cdparanoia to log the sub-channel data and dumped it. I've tried this with a total of 6 drives, and also look at what the drive offset is. This are the drives I've used and the offsets they have:

Drive	offset
SONY DVD RW DRU-700A VY03	+12
PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W4012A 1.00	+98
PLEXTOR CD-R PX-R412C 1.06	+355
TSSTcorp CD/DVDW TS-L532A TI5a1	+116
HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR-H30N 1.00i	+6
ASUS CD-S520/A 1.7L	+1858

Some notes:

• They all start exactly at the sector boundary, sub-channel data is not shifted. So they all perfectly know where a sector starts.
• Except for the ASUS, they all start at the correct sector. The ASUS starts 2 sectors too fast, which is probably why it has that 1858 samples offset, which is more than 3 sectors.
• Both plextors add 588 to the offset when reading the main data + the sub-channel data. So they start reading 1 sector earlier if you request the sub-channel data.
• The PLEXTOR CD-R PX-R412C sometimes also has an offset of +354

I can perfectly understand that it might be off by 1 or more sector, like the ASUS. I could also understand that it might be off by 1 or more sub-frames, but then I wouldn't expect to get proper values for the sub-channel data. Having an offset not be a multiple of the sub-frame makes no sense to me. So I can only come to the conclusion that this are all firmware issues.

As a past member of the listmaster team, this is a goal I have to support. I did some work myself a few years ago to clean out at least the most offensive images from the archive. And I can tell you there were a number of really gross ones. This was mostly manual work, replacing the spams by placeholder messages. Since then the listmaster team has implemented an excellent toolset for nominating messages as spam, reviewing the nominations and removing confirmed spam from the archive. My current contribution is twofold: Plug-in that allows reporting new list spam from KMail It's not actually a plug-in, but just uses the filter functionality of KMail. I've documented two alternative filters developed for KMail 1.9.9 (from KDE 3.5). Possibly they can also be (adapted to be) used with KMail from KDE 4, but that has not been tested. There are plug-ins available for several Mail User Agents (MUAs), with a few still to be developed. Spam cleaning campaign for the debian-boot list A few weeks ago I sent out a request for help to clean "our" archive. The response has been great. The work is [tracked on a Wiki page[(http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SpamClean) and has already resulted in the removal of 676 spams. By the end of this week I expect that number to be doubled. If you'd like to start a similar project for your own favorite list, I'd suggest you start by reading through the thread linked above.

---

Update: I was wrong, the number was almost tripled: from 676 to 1801!

Ever since I bought this laptop I was quite content with it running Debian GNU/Linux (Lenny) and, except the sleep functionality not working (bug reported, but I have no answer for any new approaches) I have no other major issues.


Actually, the problems are partially solved since I am in a "pick your favourite bug" situation:

• with the 2.6.26 kernel from Debian the information about the power source is incorrect (kernel bug which goes away for me right since 2.6.27)
  
• while with a newer (>=2.6.27) pristine kernel, power information is accurate, but the entire bluetooth stack (init.d scripts and apps) needs a restart after a hibernate/resume cycle to work again; I added my info in the corresponding upstream bug and I hope it gets fixed

Still, I am really curious, since the Debian Kernel Team policy is to accept only patches accepted upstream, theorecally that would mean newer upstream kernels should work wrt that bluettoth issue, assuming this isn't a regression (it doesn't look like one from my experience).

So what is present in Debian kernels that isn't in the pristine ones that makes BT work afer resume? If you know the answer, please add it to the bug report.


On the Debian side of the kernel, which are the chances that newer Lenny kernels will include the power fixes necessary for MSI laptops to report power related info correctly? I know, I know, I should probably report a bug, but I want to know first if there will be a lenny-n-half release, otherwise it doesn't make sense.

In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi and 2 000 monks and activists are being detained, as the miltary junta in the country presses new, ridiculous charges against Suu Kyi a few days before the end of her house arrest. Suu Kyi, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and proponent of democracy, is leader of the opposition and the greatest threat to the junta s grasp on power. Given the inhumane conditions imposed upon the Burmese, and the ruthless slaughter of those who do not play by the military s rules, it is not hard to imagine that she would win any fair election, as soon as she would get a chance to run. However, if the junta are successful in pushing charges Suu Kyi is accused of breaching the house arrest after an American man sneaked into her house uninvitedly she could be locked up until after the elections in 2010, effectively disarming the threat she poses to the military regime. She is threatened to be kept in the notorious Insein Prison without medical care. As she is suffering from serious illness, this puts her life at risk. I do not usually campaign for political topics, but I ve been to Myanmar and this issue touches me deeply. The people in Myanmar need our support. Even though the 2007 Burmese anti-government protests seriously weakened the military and brought hope to the lives of millions that have been oppressed for years, the events quickly vanished from the media and allowed the junta to regain control. We must not let that happen again. It is of utmost importance to show our support and not look away. One way of doing so is by increasing visibility. If you care, please write to your newspapers, publish on your blog, and do everything else you can to raise awareness. Another way to help the Burmese people is through signing the avaaz.org petition to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Best to do all of the above! Unfortunately, avaaz.org force-subscribes everyone who signs a petition to their newsletter, which may well not be what you want. However, please do not let it stop you from signing the petition. You can later unsubscribe from the (infrequent) newsletter. I have informed the staff members of this concern. If you would like to voice your opinion too, write to info t avaaz dot org and encourage them to make the newsletter subscription optional. But make sure to also sign the petition, please.

Some might dread the feature of read notifications supported by certain MUAs; some call it an invasion of privacy ; and yet, it can also be useful in certain situations: When a message is read or seen in a MUA supporting this extension, the programme emits a notification back to the sender saying something along the lines of your message was read on . This is good to know, especially in times when you cannot wait for the failed-delivery-notification that follows four to five days of unsuccessful (but furious) attempts of some delivery agent, assuming it doesn t get trashed as spam. Such a read notification is logically a reply to the original message, isn t it? The RFC 680 proposed in April 1975 defines the header References as a way to point to other correspondence which this message references . This header, along with In-Reply-To (defined in the same RFC), is commonly used in every-day mail traffic to refer to previously exchanged messages, and enables mail readers to thread separate messages together into coherent conversations (it takes a human to remove the coherence, the technical aspect is infallible). Cut. Microsoft was also founded in April 1975, and it took them 20 years to barely manage to squeeze through the Internet door without the proverbial foot in it. They published a browser and several e-mail programmes, and it always appeared as if they tiredlessly tried to be different from the rest, attempting to form a clique of users, a Microsoft league in which to increase their revenue through network effects. Sounds bad, is bad, but yet again, they managed, through unimaginable feats of entrepreneurial genius and ruthless behaviour. Cut. In 1982, STD11 declared the aforementioned In-Reply-To and References headers as standards. At that time, Microsoft software didn t even know what a computer network was. Cut. Does it come as a surprise that read notifications sent by Microsoft e-mail programmes, such as Microsoft Outlook do not make use of either of these standard headers to tag read notifications they send? Instead, Microsoft pushes Thread-Topic and Thread-Index, which are undocumented and thus probably only work in a Microsoft-only context. How am I supposed to assume anything else than Microsoft actively trying to oppose standards. Anyone who boycotts standards is hindering progress and should be left behind. It s good to see that the Internet society seems to follow that trend more and more. Update: I found a way to extract the data to recreate the In-Reply-To with procmail. I don t see a way to do the same for the References header. Also, I ve only verified that this works for message disposition notifications from Outlook 2003, although I expect it to work for other, similarly crippled MUAs too.

Yesterday was my first appearance as a sardine in Zurich s public transport vehicles, as part of a campaign by the Swiss group for sustainable mobility, umverkehR, which I support: We handed out flyers and answered questions, and the general reaction was very positive. The fact that we got covered in Switzerland s most popular newspaper, 20 Minuten will add greatly to the reconnaisance factor, so that in the months to come, us sardines will be immediately recognised, hopefully provoking thought and chat over the roots of the campaign. Most of us know the sardine as a dead fish perched into a can with many others in a way to minimise space. Human-sized, walking sardines are a great way to increase awareness of the issue of over-crowded public transport. It was fun to see even the Really Serious Newspaper Readers unable to suppress a smile. Talking to friends about the campaign, I ve often been met with expressions of how absurd such a campaign is in Switzerland, possibly the country with the best public transport system world-wide. I agree, but that doesn t mean that we should not keep working on further improving it. If you ve ever been stuck in a commuter train during rush-hour, standing around in stifling heat and jealously eyed those that managed to grab a seat before you, you ll probably agree that even in Switzerland, we could be doing it better. These days, with the financial crisis weighing heavy on everyone s budgets, and with environmental concerns on the rise, we are witnessing a never-before level of readiness of the public to make sustainable choices. Confronting those people with stuffed trains doesn t reconfirm those decision. Instead, it will make those people crave their air-conditioned cars and possibly switch back to polluting the air with exhaust and noise, because it surely is more comfortable to sit in your own cool car than it is to be perched in public transport like a sardine. Thus, umverkehR s message goes mainly to the politicians: prioritise public transport in your future mobility plans, keep the prices affordable, and help get people off the road in the interest of our environment. You can see more pictures in the gallery and a short film on Youtube. We have a separate sardine blog, a Facebook account and there s even a chance for you to win travel coupons: all you have to do is submit an original photo of anything to do with over-crowded public transport by e-mail or MMS to sardine t umverkehr.ch by October 2009. You can browse all submissions on Flickr. I hope that we can spread the idea as far as New Zealand and the countries between. There are always chances in any crisis. NP: Porcupine Tree: Stupid Dream

In close to 11 years of living in Europe, I've accomplished plenty beyond working in the high-tech sector: I've also been fairly active in Immigration Policy, especially on aspects that affect migrant labor. Because of this, I keep on getting more and more requests to produce statements or to appear on panels to discuss issues pertaining to migrant labor and to immigrants' integration. The hot topic of last week was Swedish language for immigrants, the crux of the issue being that even though Swedish has an official language status in Finland, in practice, it is pretty much impossibly for immigrants to register their kids at the Swedish language school, to claim public services in Swedish or, even more so, to request labor training in the Swedish language at the Employment Office. The weekly newspaper Helsinki Times, in collaboration with the media think tank Magma, recently conduced a survey of the immigrant population, to find out how much they know about Swedish culture in Finland and about the Swedish language. It was in this context that the Helsinki Times and the national television's Swedish programming (FST) asked for an interview with yours truly, because I have recently visited the Ministry of Employment and Economics with a concrete proposal to facilitate the availability of labor training in the Swedish language. This FST webcast, starting at 16:03 minutes into the show, and the above Helsinki Times article provide more details about the context and about my proposal to the Ministry.

You might have noticed that during last week the Mexican Debian mirror, nisamox.fciencias.unam.mx (a.k.a. ftp.mx.debian.org, a.k.a. debian.unam.mx), went offline. The motherboard died on us, and Facultad de Ciencias was kind enough to give us a brand new one. So, excuse us for the blackout, but we are back Meaner and badder than ever before! Now, Sergio (nisamox's main admin) prefered to rebuild the whole mirror, as there was a shadow of doubt regarding the data integrity. So, rsync was pulling as fast as he could for the whole weekend (leading to some people scratching their heads regarding the 404 for the missing files; sorry, we should have left Apache shut down until the mirror was complete!). After three days of sustaining a 10-20Mbps download from the main mirrors, all 364GB of Debian are finally installed and as you can clearly see we are back to normality, with small, regular mirror pulses and a nice sustained 5-10Mbps (with some up to 40Mbps peaks We have seen up to 100Mbps peaks in the past, and I doubt with the current network infrastructure we won't top that). You can see we have currently plenty of disk space still to fill up. Among our plans is to host the most popular ISOs, which are a common request, and... What else? Well, ask us and we shall do so (quite probably). So, if you switched away from ftp.mx.debian.org due to our downtime, readjust your mirror settings. Nisamox is back!

Attachment	Size
Nisamox Ethernet statistics for the last week	23.38 KB
Nisamox disk space statistics for the last week	24.29 KB