Many people in the western world are completely unaware that in the Moldavian Republic there is an ongoing protest against the current Communist Party which is at power after the parliamentary elections held on Sunday. The protestants accuse the Communists of election fraud and there are numerous reports of dead people being recorded as voters, people which, by religion, chose not to vote, and other several people which couldn't have voted.

Tuesday the protests took a violent turn, apparently "aided" by some instigators which were reported to be seen as recording the protesters, taking notes and, generally, not fitting the picture. During the day the national television broadcasted absolutely no information on the events, and aired documentaries, cartoons and no news on any of the protests. To me, this looked very much alike what the Romanian Television aired during the Romanian Revolution in December '89 when during the fights in the streets of Bucharest the Television aired no images from the centre of Bucharest.

But, back to Moldavia, at the end of the day, sadly, the Parliament and Presidency buildings were devastated, making it easy for the Communist leaders to produce some disinformation propaganda based on real footage.

Yet again, sadly, but it seems under the protection of some of the aforementioned instigators, the flags of the EU and Romania were waved at the highest levels of the Parliament building during the time the protesters allegedly took over that building (there were several reports that the Police forces actually simply let them in, without actually needing/being forced to do that; also the passivity of the policemen seen in the footage from Romanian televisons was obvious).

As many Moldavian students live and study in Romania, some of them wanted to go home and take part at the protests happening in Chi in u. To their surprise, many of them were denied the right to enter their home country. Many, if not all, Romanian journalists were also denied access in the country accusing alternatively technical issues, lack of proper papers (although only the passport or the ID card was officially required), lack of safety, or simply refusing without reason.


Today, the Moldavian president Voronin, accused Romania as being behind the manifestations in Chi in u, Moldova's capital and said it will declare as a persona non grata the Ambasador of Romania in Moldova, and thus forcing him to leave Moldova within 24 hours. He went even further and said that visas will be required from now on for Romanian nationals. As soon as this was announced, it was one of the most invoked reasons by the Moldavian customs as a rejection reason, although, according to Moldavian Embassy officials in Romania, no rules or procedure were known for the release of visas for Romanian nationals.

Also, during Wenesday, Moldavian crossing points were opened and closed alternatively but incosistently accros the entire border for Moldavian nationals. Romanian nationals were denied in most cases (although some Romanian truck drivers were reported as allowed to cross). At some point during the day the Moldavian officials from the customs told the Moldavian students awating at the border that they are offered access on the condition they go direclty home with the buses provided by the Moldavian customs and were warned that going to Chi in u wasn't a smart choice for them. Some of the information from students which managed to enter their home country suggested that is advisable to not enter the country since they were going to be denied of the right to leave the country later, when they were to return to Romania to their studies (after Easter).

What's sadder is that the Moldavian voting system is built in such a way that the vote counting, in the end is done by Government officials behind closed doors, inside a Ministry. OTOH, the international official observed the things which happend in public, but did not see any of the dead voter lists (since they were not present when those votes were casted), and declared the vote as mostly legal and without major or significant incidents.


According to the media, before the elections, the Communists were credited with 35-37% of the votes in an independent poll, while in the exit poll conducted by the Communists themselves they were credited with 42-45% of the votes. In the end the last official partial results credited them with approximately 51% of the votes.

About Vladimir Voronin, it is a known fact that he has double citizenship, Moldavian and Russian and is a reserve general within the Russian Army and currently has a pretty nice pension from the Russian state.


All I can say is that, although the Moldavians' desire to have a real democracy is a legal and reasonable request, the western world chose, due to the international circumstances, to look the other way around and not to incommodate Russia in any way. Moreover, to accuse Romania to have unionist desires an act upon those desires is planly stupid since now Romania is part of the EU and Moldova uniting with Romania is simply impossible now, since Moldavia's economy would sunk even more the fragile and regressing Romanian economy and Romania would instantly fail the EU requirements which would mean disaster for us.

The workshop I went to recently and the ICT Champions in general ( Website Under Development - release early, anyone?) seem to be funded by public and charity money. As I mentioned, the worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies products, so why are they promoting private products instead of being neutral and open? That s bad for Britain, bad for the competing products that are co-produced by the Voluntary and Community Sector and bad for the VCS workers because it trains them in single-tool methods instead of transferable skills. Let the private sector pay for their own adverts! Why can t we stop making this mistake? Which brings me to the other problem with that ICT advice: well-meaning common-sector businesses like ours can t update it autonomously, for two reasons:

1. All the texts I saw were under various Non-Commercial and No Derivative licences which make them hazardous or unusable to IT support businesses.
2. Particularly on Free and Open Source Software, the advice is at best misleading and unhelpful. This is very frustrating: based on our private work and success in explaining things, I m sure we could do better, but for various reasons, no-one is paying for us to publish that. Instead, someone s paying to publish statements like There s no such thing as open source written by someone from an association that includes Microsoft and Oracle.

Again, why is public and charity money paying for the private sector s marketing? Why is it published under blocking copyright terms, scattering broken glass across the path just built? Where can we get funding to publish our explanations?

Jacob has lately been telling us gate gamma kassen so sick (Great Grandma Klassen is so sick), after his visit to the hospital, and it s true. Today started normal enough, but by 2:45 I got an email from my mom, saying that grandma had taken yet another turn for the worse; her pulse was racing, her temperature feverish, and her breathing shallow and difficult. The last grandchild that was going to be there made it, and got the last flicker of recognition from grandma. I wrapped some things up at work. Then I made the short drive from work to the nursing home, and got there just after 4. I went in to her room there, and it was full of family. Two of her children were singing her favorite hymns. I can never forget my uncle s deep bass voice as he stood at her bedside, holding her arm, while my aunt patted her head, both of them singing. Grandma s only remaining sibling, her younger brother Melvin, sat on the other side of the bed, looking on. Grandma s white table and chairs, which were in grandma and grandpa s house as long as I can remember, and followed grandma through all of the four other places she lived in the last years of her life, were in her room at the nursing home too. It always felt like home to be with grandma and those familiar things that she always took with her. Despite what was happening, I was glad she was back at home. My uncle motioned me over to her bedside, and I took her hand for a few minutes. It felt cold and weak; for the first time, she didn t grab my hand at all. A nurse came in to check oxygen saturation, but the machine wasn t able to get a reading due to poor circulation to her hand. She wasn t able to get a heart rate either because the heart was racing so fast. She discussed briefly whether the family wanted them to continue giving her oxygen, and they decided that they would, for her comfort. My uncle and aunt kept singing. I blew my nose and dabbed at my eyes, and there were hugs all around. And just a few minutes later, grandma peacefully stopped breathing, maybe 20 minutes after I had arrived. They went to get the nurse, who came back to listen to grandma s heart again, though we knew what she would find. She took the stethoscope off, and she almost lost her composure, but managed to say you can turn the oxygen off now. Several people gave grandma a last hug. After a few minutes with just the family, they told the nurses to go ahead and call the funeral home. That set off a lot of activity making arrangements for the next few days, funeral plans, and the like. I stepped back into grandma s room a few times, while the family was in the sitting area right outside it discussing. I looked around at the family photos on the wall, the old table and chairs, the recliner. Now, these are the things that were grandma s. It didn t feel like home anymore. Terah and Jacob were stuck at home Terah s car was at the mechanic for repair today. I called to give her the news. She wanted to come to be with the family, but I didn t really want to leave. She tried calling some friends to see if they could give her a lift to the mechanic, but not one of them was available. I talked to her again and suggested she just call the mechanic. She wasn t even halfway through describing the situation when he interrupted with, We ll have it at your place right away! Well, I don t expect you to have to do that, or you could certainly wait until you close. Nope, this isn t your average community, we ll bring it right over. You should be there. Grandma has enjoyed a simple life and had requested a simple death: no extraordinary measures at the end of life, no embalming either. So, by law, the burial must happen within 24 hours of death, and will be tomorrow. After all the arrangements, people realized nobody had supper yet. We went to the quickest available option pizza and ate there. It was paid for out of grandma s remaining money the last meal of so many that she provided for her family over the years. It was a happy meal. As I drove home, NPR news was on the radio. There were the same stories we hear all the time: the economy, the mideast, the president. Normally I m interested, but today I shut it off. Today is different. Tomorrow, for the second time in four years, I will help carry a grandparent s casket a few days before Easter. I ll end tonight with this photo. It was taken soon after Jacob was born. Grandma came to the hospital and held him. That smile sums her up perfectly.

A quick update before the big one about the 2009 Google Summer of Code. I believe we had a great recruitment drive this year and we have a very good set of proposals to work with. We d like to thank everyone involved for their help. We re now ranking out student applications. I promised elsewhere that I ll send out our shortlist of projects once Google sends us our preliminary slot allocation today but I misread the thread on the -mentors list and that count will only happen on Thursday, so we ll have to wait a bit more. That shortlist would only include projects, but not individual students. The idea is to give a heads up to everyone before committing to a group of projects and students. It is very important to inform the community as it increases visibility of the students work, giving them more help and support (and also avoids duplicating existing not yet publicized work!). As far as mentors go, we should have all of our approximately 14 planned projects covered, except for 2. I m posting them here in case you could mentor or help find mentors for those projects. (The wiki pages are not really up to date, so please come on IRC and ask clarifications, see below)

• Qt4 Package Manager:

Finish Petr Rockai s Adept 3.0 and bring a Qt4 Package Manager to Debian, with a different interface paradigm than Aptitude-gtk.
Petr said he would provide help with the existing codebase but can t mentor. Sune Vuorela from Debian KDE is ready to help with Qt4 related issues.

• EC2/Eucalyptus:

Build Debian tools to create Debian images for Amazon EC2 and the free Eucalyptus implementation. Packaging of the Eucalyptus hosting framework is also possible.
For this project, we already have on board to help: Charles Plessy from Debian Med, Eric Hammond, developer of the existing vmbuilder Ubuntu tool for EC2 and Chris Grzegorczyk and Rich Wolski, from the Eucalyptus team. Plenty of people to get help from. Mentoring is a great experience! See this for what it entails. If we still can t find a mentor by the end of the week, I ll blast an announcement over at debian-devel@l.d.o along with the project shortlist. In the meantime, don t forget to idle on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org.

I'm currently waiting for my ADSL to be setup and so I've borrowed my mum's "three" 3G mobile broadband USB dongle. The device is a "ZTE MF622" and getting this working in Linux apparently used to be a bit of a nightmare. However, with Debian Lenny and 2.6.26-1-amd64 it is trivial: you plug it in, it appears as a USB mass storage device; wait a little bit and it disappears and comes back as some USB serial devices. You can then chat to /dev/ttyUSB0 (or whatever the first ttyUSB device belonging to the dongle is). There's a working wvdial configuration at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-665332.html, reproduced here for convenience:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATZ
Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = 1
Modem Type = Analog Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Username = user
Dial Command = ATDT
Password = pass
Baud = 460800

IF you don't want to use wvdial there are bare ppp scripts at http://hillj.co.uk/2008/01/31/how-to-get-online-with-three-mobile-uk-and-linux-ubuntu/, although I haven't tested these. Whilst researching this I stumbled across several examples of more extreme ways of getting the initial switchover to work, including http://blog.ufsoft.org/zte-mf622-usb-modem-under-linux#extended which includes a udev snippet that forcefully calls rmmod and modprobe. This will totally fail if you are using usb-storage or usb-serial for anything else, which is probably not the case for the majority of people trying to get this to work at the time they are trying, but there are several examples out there of people complaining that their USB has failed since trying these instructions. We are often accused of having a problem of missing documentation in the free software world. I'm wondering if this is one example of where we have bad, damaging documentation. How can we deal with that? Incidentally, for those whose devices won't automatically switch over to the serial device, there's a program usb-modeswitch (currently in sid) that can do the job for you. There are apparently hacks in the usb-storage Linux kernel module that special-case the switchover for some Huawei devices. I couldn't find anything in there for the ZTE device.

A few hours ago, a new version of kernel-package was uploaded to experimental. This is a major change,and I would appreciate it if folks took it out for a spin, kicked the tires, and provide feedback about where this version is lacking. This is only part of the way along in this development cycle. I would like to add a debug-info separation, either in a different directory than / in the image packages, or a separate package by itself. I would also like to create an overlay directory for /usr/share/kernel-package/, so people can inject code or override the defaults for kernel-package easily. I am also willing to make any changes to standardize the handling of hook scripts for kernel packages in Debian.

As far as I am aware (and I am unanimous in this), ZOMG is the only released software that can scrobble tracks to both libre.fm and last.fm near-simultaneously.

I'm still waiting some clarificatons by HDF team about their HDF5 roadmap with SONAMEs and libraries name. It seems they partially learned to manage libtool properly to follow C API changes, but still some oddities are present, such as using the same names for MPI and serial flavors. I will probably have to again diverge from upstream names, which is generally something I don't like, as in the case of GDAL. A summary document about HDF5 plans is due in a brief also.
When finished with HDF updates, I will concentrate on a couple of new beasts which still are lacking in DebianGis and are of so much interest, that are Ossim and the CNES Orfeo Toolbox. In the meantime I would hope that debian-science team will define a squeeze-related policy for MPI.

As always, I'm still worried of the low level of activities in the DebianGis team, which is a constant since years. Unfortunately, this is a situation I see quite common also in many other teams, but I still don't see a right way to improve the status of the team to avoid an almost one-man show. Also I would like to see again Qgis in main, but I'm still waiting for feed-backs by past/current contributors to my last qgis-dev list and off-lists polls.

This morning started with a call from my mom. She was calling to let us know that my grandmother had apparently taken a turn for the worse, and we didn t know how much time was left. Terah, Jacob, and I got dressed and went to the hospital to visit. Grandma had been in a partial coma that left her able to hear, nod, and hold hands, but unable to speak. Apparently she came out of it overnight, and was talking and even singing with my mom and aunt some. She seemed happy, loved to hear the old German prayers she grew up with. She said some memorable things I ll have to write about later too. By the time we got there, she wasn t that active anymore, and was about like she was yesterday. She could see us, and give our hands a squeeze, maybe nod occasionally. She drifted asleep often. One time when I saw she was awake with her eyes open, I lifted up Jacob to where she could see him. Immediately her face brightened, and I saw the biggest smile on her face that I d seen in days! She smiled and waved to him, and with a small bit of coaxing, he waved back. Then she wiggled her foot, and when Jacob noticed, he wiggled his foot back at her. He s 92 years younger than her, and they still managed to communicate just fine. Grandma held my hand for awhile this morning; she loves to have a hand or two to hold. My cousin showed up for a visit, and I was going to get up to let her sit down, and when grandma felt my hand leaving, she grabbed on tighter. I went around to the other side of the bed and held the other hand. In the last couple of days, grandma s hearing has become much sharper than before, and I m pretty sure her memory has too. When it was time for us to leave and go to church, I was holding her hand, looking into her eyes, saying goodbye, and how much I loved her. I got a hand squeeze, and saw a few tears at her eyes the first I can remember seeing that. As I pulled my hand away to leave, she once again grabbed tighter and was still looking at me. I think she thought this was the last time she d see me, and didn t want the moment to pass too quickly. But that also guaranteed that I d be back in the afternoon. It was Palm Sunday in church today, and as every year, the Palm Sunday celebration ends with Bill singing I walked today where Jesus walked while Dale carries in a heavy cross. Right when Bill is singing I climbed the hill on Calvary, where on the cross He died! , Dale is climbing the steps to the stage and laying the cross there. Hardly a dry eye in the room at that. For lunch, my parents were still hosting their monthly college student get-together/home cooking event which we usually attend too. After that, I dropped off Terah and Jacob at home, and went back to the hospital. By the time I had left, grandma had 27 visitors just today. When I arrived, my great uncle (her brother) and aunt were there, along with her pastor and a deacon from her church, plus my mom and my aunt. More people came and went throughout the afternoon, and I enjoyed visiting and hearing stories about the family and grandma all afternoon. She was sometimes awake and able to look at people, and sometimes deeply asleep. I heard her say God bless you to several people. It was awhile before I had a chance to go be with her, and when I did, she was asleep, so I sat beside her bed and held her hand for quite awhile, maybe an hour, while visiting with family in the room. At one point, a nurse came in to give her some more morphine by IV. I got up to get our of her way, but the nurse said, Don t think of it; I can work around you, and what you re doing is more important than what I m doing anyway. Some of her old friends from church came by, and prayed with her in German, and recited the words to some German hymns and poems, which I think she really enjoyed. Her eyes were closed through most of it, but when they got to the end of each item, they opened, saying thank you, I believe. Eventually things calmed down, and it was time for me to head home. Grandma was awake by then, and I looked at her and said goodbye, and that I was glad I got to see her again. We gave each other a final hand squeeze, and then she let go of my hand this time. I m glad I came back for sure. They say sometimes that people that are dying feel like they need permission to die, before they will let themselves go. I wondered if grandma was feeling that way today. But then I hear that my uncle, who is driving in from 8 hours away through wintry weather, called and ask that she be given this message: Tell mom that I m coming, but if Jesus gets there first, she should go with him. That might not work on everybody, but for her, it s the best way I could think of to give her permission.

New York City is home to fantastic set of libraries, including the the mothership of libraries, the NYPL. My favorite library is one that is much smaller, located in the north of Manhattan on the campus of Columbia University: East Asian Starr. Quiet and compact, there are tall ceilings, dark wood, stained class windows, and reading nooks. When I enter, it feels like I step back in time (if I ignore the laptops, at least). When I was an undergraduate there, it was my library of choice and I logged many hours there and have yet to find a library I so love. I also was fond of the place because of their discreet open door policy. When I was a student there, over a decade back, they were supposed to ask for you ID but they never did. When I returned back to NYC in 2007, I was thrilled to find this practice of ethical inattentiveness was still followed by the student works behind the desk. I always wanted to find out more about what sustained this practice but I never dared or was too lazy to do so. So I was pretty saddened when I popped in the library on Friday to discover a new security system that requires you to scan your ID to get in. There were large signs also indicating such, clearly seething with some passive aggressive anger expressing disbelief that this library had managed to evade security for over decade. So while it is a real shame that this gem is no longer a place that one anyone can enter at will, it is nice to know that it took so long for someone to notice.

Done. I'm right here now sitting on my couch and trying to recover my legs after that first marathon ever. As planned, I met Ralf Treinen and No l K the at the start of the Paris Marathon. As No l was targetting 3h30m while Ralf and I were targetting 4h, we left him go with the faster runners. As No l doesn't blog that much, I think I can say it now: he managed to run in 3h28m, which is awesome. He is incredibly happy with that (we unfortunately didn't manage to meet again after the race as the crowd was too huge and the cellphones were of course miserably failing). Ralf and I ran together the first 12 kilometers. Then we split because he had to stop for a few seconds. Up to the 21st kilometer, I kept the pace for 4h and I was even running a little bit faster. However, this advance vanished slowly from km 25, up to km 35 where the virtual runner that was running 4h passed me..:-). Ralf also passed me around km 38 which is indeed the moment where I was blowing up, running slower and slower. The last 3 kilometers were a nightmare but, still, I managed to finish and my GPS watch tells me I ran for 4h10m. The official time is 4h12m56s, because of a huge "runner jam" at Bastille where we had to wait for 3 minutes before being able to enter the Faubourg Saint-Antoine street. Running through Paris is really magic, particularly with the nice sun we had ( not *too* hot, though) and I am really proud and happy to have my first marathon finished *without walking*. Yay.

I ve written twice recently about my grandmother s failing health. Yesterday, she was taken to the hospital due to severe pain. After many hours of tests, I believe her current diagnosis are: pneumonia, congestive heart failure, diabetes, gangrene in the gallbladder, and nonketotic hyperosmolar coma. She is able to hear and to see, but can t eat, drink, or talk. She can communicate a bit in other ways though. She has made it well known over the years that she doesn t want heroic measures to be taken to try to save her life in a situation like this. At this point, her treatment is focusing on making her comfortable, and she probably has a few days to maybe a week or two of life left. I went to visit her today. I walked in to her room, and she was visibly worse off than she had been a week ago. I said Hi Grandma as I went to her bedside. She with effort turned to look at me and managed to say hi back. Apparently that was the first word she said all day. She was clearly in pain, sometimes grimacing from it. It was hard to see, but I am glad I got to be with her. She wanted to hold my hand, and I sat by her bed for quite awhile doing just that. Sometimes my mom would comment that we all love each other, and I d see grandma nod, or she d give my hand an extra squeeze. My brother and his wife showed up just as I had to leave. Grandma said hi to them too, and gave them a little wave. I said goodbye as I left, and she was able to look at me and understand what was happening. I don t know if that will be the last time I ll say goodbye or not. They seem to have found better ways to treat her pain by this evening, and she is resting comfortably by now. If her condition stays like this, she will probably be moved back to her nursing home room with hospice care on Monday. She s 94, and all of us knew that this moment would come someday. I think she is the most comfortable with the idea of her death of anyone, and utterly ready for it.

Richard Glover has written a polemic about fads on the net [1]. His points are essentially good, but he does over-reach them a bit (which is part of the polemic style) and he also seems a little unimaginative about the future of technology. He starts by suggesting that Twitter [2] is a fad. Twitter has grown in popularity very rapidly, and I believe that the company is not guaranteed to last forever (the business model could fail or a better implementation of the concept could take the users). But the basic premise of Twitter (SMS length messages being published on the net in a similar manner to blog posts) is something that has been proven to work well. So even though I have not felt inclined to use Twitter (either as a reader or a writer) I don t think that the class of service will ever go away. He also cites an example of watching TV news on a mobile phone. While I believe he is right about that not being a viable business, it s because TV news itself isn t a great thing. Before the Internet was commonly used the only ways of getting news of something that happened in the last few hours was via TV or radio, if you want pictures with that then TV was the only option. If you wanted quality news (in-depth coverage, insightful analysis, and a depth of detail) then you were probably out of luck, but the best option available to you was the the newspaper. Watching a TV news segment on a mobile phone (or on a PC connected to the net) is not effective. What I want is a newspaper that is updated as soon as events happen and which contains full color pictures and video. There are a number of web sites which provide this service, The Sydney Morning Herald (which employs Richard Glover) [3] is one example. I think that the current fad for mobile phone TV is like the fad for WAP [4]. Many years ago I worked for an ISP that installed a WAP server, one of my duties was to keep the WAP server running. Everyone who knew anything about technology knew that the project was going to fail, WAP phones were horribly expensive (you could expect to spend an extra 200 guilders or more to buy such a phone) and the features of WAP were not particularly exciting. Also requiring that everything be re-written for WAP was just insanity. The problem with the WAP fad was managers who knew nothing about technology making technical decisions. I m sure that the TV on mobile phone fad is driven by managers in TV companies that are greedy for more revenue opportunities and don t stop to think about the implications. I might watch a news show on free TV, but I m certainly not going to pay by the minute to watch it on my mobile phone. Instead I can just go to a web site such as the SMH and read news items, see pictures, and even watch the occasional video (most TV news doesn t really require any video - they just re-enact scenes or use stock footage to have something on screen). Finally he makes a sarcastic reference to chocolate fondue. That reminds me, someone gave me a fondue set years ago that I haven t used yet. I ll have to make a chocolate fondue! For those of you who live in Melbourne, the restaurant of the Melbourne Swiss Club [5] offers cheese fondue for the main course and chocolate fondue for dessert. Fondue is still with us!

• [1] http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/you-could-bring-back-the-hula-hoop-if-you-found-a-way-of-connecting-it-to-the-net-20090320-94bi.html?page=-1


• [2] http://twitter.com/


• [3] http://www.smh.com.au/


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol


• [5] http://www.swiss.org.au/page.php?ID=249

It's been a long long time since I last posted anything at all, so this is a post to warn of impending doom. I've switched from a static html website (well, it was statically generated when I edited source files I then ran a bash script that fired off a perl script several times...) to a fully dynamic, django 1.0 backed website - this might mean that I manage to update things more often! I've also taken the opportunity to convert the previous content in to ReST, so it's actually easier to edit too. There's still work to do - but it's now "good enough" to be used, and I'll split the code out in to better chunks later on. So, anyways - that's what I've done with my day - so I expect all the aggregators to now break on the new feeds...

It's been a long long time since I last posted anything at all, so this is a post to warn of impending doom. I've switched from a static html website (well, it was statically generated when I edited source files I then ran a bash script that fired off a perl script several times...) to a fully dynamic, django 1.0 backed website - this might mean that I manage to update things more often! I've also taken the opportunity to convert the previous content in to ReST, so it's actually easier to edit too. There's still work to do - but it's now "good enough" to be used, and I'll split the code out in to better chunks later on. So, anyways - that's what I've done with my day - so I expect all the aggregators to now break on the new feeds...

Following the ACCEPT on packages on NEW during my vacations and the ack from the release team, I've just uploaded all Xfce 4.6 packages to unstable. Packages for your architectures should arrive on your mirror along the weekend. the NEWS.Debian (which will be displayed if you use apt-listchanges (which is a good idea)) will warn you about some upgrade precautions to take. I'm reproducing it here:

xfce4 (4.6.0.1) unstable; urgency=low

Xfce 4.6 includes multiple changes which are not directly visible to the
user but might cause problems in rare cases.

Settings management have been moved from the old MCS Manager to the xfconf
system. User settings will be migrated automatically at first Xfce 4.6
startup using the /usr/lib/xfce4/xfconf-migration/xfconf-migration-4.6.pl
script contained in xfce4-utils. Once those settings have been migrated,
the automatic run will be disabled but the script will stay (for future
users).

Menus are now managed using a dedicated library, used by various Xfce
components (including xfdesktop4 and the menu panel plugin). This library
tries to support the freedesktop.org specifications, but is not totally
complete and thus lacks the support for some items, like .
This renders useless the menu editor previously shipped with Xfce 4.4.
Solutions for menu editing can be found at the following address:
http://wiki.xfce.org/howto/customize-menu

As the upgrade is pretty invasive, it is recommended to quit Xfce before
doing so, but it's not required and upgrades have been made from the
desktop environment without problems. In that case, be sure to quit Xfce
not long after the upgrade.

-- Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org> Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:19:53 +0200 The xfce4-goodies will be updated soon to match the new goodies present for Xfce 4.6, and the desktop task (the standard install when you choose desktop=xfce in the installer) will be updated too (there's an ongoing discussion on pkg-xfce mailing list to select which packages should be part of that install). Have a good upgrade!

Well, I'm not dead buddies. I was overbooked. Last weeks have been a bit busy for me. I've also been on holidays, so I gave up on computers stuff a bit. awesome Big news: awesome 3.2 has been released some weeks ago, and seems to be a success so far. We're working on the new 3.3 release, which will have some new sexy feature you'll love. More on that later. Debian I've uploaded a new awesome-extra package with third party modules such as shifty or wicked. startup-notification I just managed to be added in the startup-notification group at Freedesktop. I moved the CVS repository to git and merged my set of XCB patches.

I finally got this released. I'm very sorry for the long delay; life has been ridiculously busy lately. This release updates the list of valid sections, fixes a few annoying bugs (particularly in diversion handling and some problems with file 5.00 and analysis of source packages), and has some additional checks for correct package sections. Many thanks to Frank Lichtenheld and Raphael Geissert for their work on this release. I've also started the full archive run for lintian.debian.org, so it will finally be up-to-date again. Apologies to everyone for the out-of-date results there; I kept meaning to update it after the next release, and then kept finding another bug or not having a moment to do it. Lintian development will probably be slow for the next couple of months (unless my co-maintainers end up with more time to drive it forward), since I have a huge pile of work that I need to do, including deploying a virtualization environment and lots of upgrades to lenny. Things should start settling down again sometime around mid-June.