These are the winners from my yearly class contest : SERIOUS BABY lol ..sometimes Did I just Get Rejected From McDonalds? (Watch to the end) This is one of my all time favorites funny videos and it has a nice catchy tune and I will also post one of my ALL TIME favorites after I show it in class next week.

Ya so I finally got around to uploading a legacy 96.43.13 version that works with the latest kernels and ia32 libs.
Please hold off on the tomato throwing for a while please.

I just uploaded nvidia-graphics-drivers 180.44 that work with Debian's 2.6.29 thanks to package team member Len Sorensen. If anyone wants to be as amazing as Len you may join the packaging team too.

I also did some BTS cleaning in regards to bugs reported by people not using the debian packages (and even said so) but reassigned to us anyway.

I am also battling a bad cold. I always get sick on holidays.

Oh one more thing. Go Canucks!

Started updating our Debian Machines at Hosting Nation to Lenny. Smooth so far.

Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called Chinese food [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense. The CentOS Plus repository has a kernel with support for the XFS filesystem, Postfix with MySQL support, and some other useful things [2]. Mary Gardiner comments about the recent loss of a blog server with all content [3]. One interesting point is that when you start using a service that maintains your data you should consider how to make personal backups in case the server goes away or you decide to stop being a customer. Val Henson makes some interesting points about the reliability of Solid State Disks (SSD) [4]. Some people are planning to replace RAID arrays of disks with a single SSD with the idea that a SSD will be more reliable, this seems like a bad idea. Also with the risk of corruption it seems that we have a greater need for filesystems that store block checksums. Lior Kaplan describes how to have multiple Linux bonding devices [5], the comment provides some interesting detail too. programmableweb.com has a set of links to sites that have APIs which can be used to create mashups [6]. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time is to play with some of the web APIs that are out there. Gunnar Wolf has written some insightful comments about the situation in Israel and Palestine [7]. He used to be a Zionist and spent some time living in Israel so he knows more about the topic than most commentators. Charles Stross has written an informative post about Ubuntu on the EeePC [8]. What is noteworthy about this is not that he s summarised the issues well, but that he is a well known science-fiction writer and he was responding to a SFWA member. One of his short stories is on my free short stories page [9]. He also wrote Accelerando which is one of the best sci-fi novels I ve read (and it s also free) [10]. Don Marti has written about Rent Seeking and proprietary software [11]. It s an interesting article, nothing really new for anyone who has followed the news about the coal and nuclear industries. Erik writes about The Setting Sun and points out that Scott McNealy had tried to capitalise on the SCO lawsuit but Red Hat has ended up beating them in the market [12].

• [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jennifer_8_lee_looks_for_general_tso.html


• [2] http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CentOSPlus?action=show&redirect=Repositories%2FCentOSPlus


• [3] http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2009/January/3/backup-policies


• [4] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [5] http://liorkaplan.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/network-bonding-types-and-configurationin-linux/


• [6] http://www.programmableweb.com/


• [7] http://gwolf.org/blog/about-recent-events-and-possible-outcomes-israel-and-palestine


• [8] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/01/i_get_mail.html


• [9] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/


• [10] http://www.accelerando.org/


• [11] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/freedom/rent-seeking/


• [12] http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/setting_sun.html

1. Dishwasher, by Pete Jordan
2. Windfalls, by Jean Hegland
3. River of Gods, by Ian McDonald
4. Powers, by Le Guin
5. Real World Haskell, by O'Sullivan, Goerzen, Stewart
6. Matter, by Iain M. Banks
7. Ars Magica, by Tweet & Rein Hagen

Nice set of books. Pity I'm in the middle of all of them. Lately I have a hard time finishing many novels, I think because waiting for the plot to play out gets boring. Although River of Gods has mostly just confused me with too many viewpoint characters. And by this, where each box is a chapter, and that big box I'm just at the start of scares me: Dishwasher is fun light reading. If I'd thought to bring it to its owner, Jay, who misplaced it, I could have picked it up from where I left off months ago and read it on the plane. Double oops. Oh well, there's always my next doctor or dentist appointment. Powers is a probably great book by Le Guin. I hope there are many more to come, but the tendancy is to savor what's available. Also, I have it in dead tree edition, which I tend to save up for when I need them. Windfalls is such a dead tree book, hibernating in the yurt for me to get back to them some day. I may have to start it over, since it's pretty involved, and rather out of my usual comfort zone. Real World Haskell is coming along well, I hope. Matter hasn't pulled me in yet, oddly. Ars Magica I've been flipping through the PDF of idly.

---

Anyway, after all that, turning up a random story generator in 1 kilobyte of code couldn't help but feel like a relief.

I've uploaded the 177.80 drivers to experimental. Note that there is another legacy break with this release. e.g. my secondary FX5500 card is no longer supported so I'm stuck at the 173.xx branch at work. The NVIDIA packaging team will have a legacy version of 173.14.12 available shortly.

The 96xx legacy kernel modules have entered NEW today.

I just uploaded lenny modules for the current branch of NVIDIA drivers. Only 4 more source packages to go, plus patching 71.86.06 for xen and 2.6.25+.

My wife and I have almost settled in our new home now. We start moving the alpacas today. I finally have some time to address the issues with the NVIDIA packages in regards to Lenny. As 2.6.26 is now in unstable I can build kernel modules for the proper kernel target and get a xen patch for 71.86.06. 173.14.12 will go into experimental shortly.

Sure, that sounds fairly formal to send a report for holidays, doesn't it? Anyway, as I have a few (often Debian/FLOSS related) friends around the world who are reading my blog entries, this might interest them so that's indeed a report..:-)...and I have time for it, so... I'm currently going back from Cahors to Maurepas (home), on my way to Debconf. We spent 10 days in Cahors with Elizabeth and the girls, finally joined by Jean-Baptiste on Sunday. We had great time over there, enjoying the richness of Quercy:

• heat (I need that before MDQ winter)
• nice running spots: for once, I could run by starting from the bottom of hills, climbing *up* and finishing down. I ran a lot, sometimes on very hard tours such as 18km with 300m positive height difference. I also did a few "fast" runs ("fast" here would make a few Debian friends laugh a lot, isn't it Ralf, Dirk.....)
• medieval architecture in Gourdon, Martel, St-Cirq Lapopie, Cahors...
• peace of the Lot valley
• Cahors wine: strong and tasty, of course
• Rocamadour and Trappe d'Echourgnac cheese (I won't bring Rocamadour at Debconf as it wouldn't survive)
• rest, sleep
• McDonald's parking lot for network connectivity
• very little hacking

So, I'm now heading back home, assemble stuff and will take off for Debconf on Thursday 7th (Paris Orly to Madrid, then Buenos Aires via Air Europa: IIRC nobody from Debconf is in the same flight). "Assemble stuff" here also means collecting cheese for the now famous Debconf Cheese&Wine party. That one will be tricky to achieve as most of us are coming from quite far away and...there are only 6 French citizens who attend DC8..:-)). Anyway, I already know that my fellow Nicolas Fran ois (namely nominated as Assistance CheeseMaster recently) will bring some good stuff. I haven't decided yet what to bring. I might be influenced by my holidays, so cheeses from South-West France are highly probable. Cahors wine will be the choice (prepare yourself: that is strong stuff). At Debconf itself, we'll have a quite busy schedule. I intend to mostly work along with Felipe, Nicolas, Grisu and others on i18n.debian.net. I'll have to animate the i18n sessions for which I want to prepare some schedule instead of just "lat's gather and talk" which didn't work so well last year, IMHO. And I have that bloody keynote lecture which, BTW, could be rescheduled if I properly read debconf-discuss as, finally 9am for keynotes seems to be considered too early for the late birds at DC8...:-)... We'll see: I will certainly have something that's not very well cooked and prepared. Expect some improvisation: this year I didn't want to stress myself with a talk, slides and blahblah. Elizabeth will come back from Cahors on Saturday with the kids. She'll have a holiday week at her father's place whil ethe kids will....do their stuff at Maurepas (this is what happens when kids are grown up). We'll gather together again on Aug 18th and I go back to work on 19th. Crazy, I know but I have a very busy and full work schedule for the upcoming next 2 months. September will be a hard time to go through: Jean-Baptiste will start his "Licence Profesionnelle" in Automated and Embarked Systems. He'll do it in shared time: half-time at university for classes and half-time working in a company (which turns out to be Essilor, the world leader for progressive glasses....and the company which Elizabeth is working for). He'll stay at my sister-in-law place during the week (30km away from our place but closer from university and work). Sophie, our 18-year old daughter, will spend the year in Toulouse, to prepare the admission in a Social Workers school. She'll have her own apartment, in the very center of the city, 20 meters away from Place du Capitole. Annoying, isn't it ? :-) So, we'll mostly stay with our "little" Magali, our 16 y.o. who will be attending High School, on her way to Baccalaur at. Tell us about shrinking families.... Now time to work on some slides for the Debconf keynote. Damn.

So as I've said before, this week is crazy but I have managed to upload nvidia-graphics-drivers with a RC bug fix and new legacy upstream 96.43.07 that supports 2.6.26. 71.86.06 will be uploaded later today. As far as testing goes I think I'll need some hinting and maybe a freeze exception once the kernel for lenny is decided on so I can create the appropriate kernel modules. Man all those kernel modules is gonna be a a pain. At least I have Internet at my new house now.

This past weekend was tiresome and this week will be more of the same. See, I moved yesterday to our new house. We have much unpacking to do and sleep to catch up on. Add to that that we don't have cable or Internet yet, I have to pick up my car from the shop, go to work, clean the old house and keep feeding the alpacas that aren't moved yet. Oh and Debian will be freezing this week sometime and my NVIDIA team still has a lot of work to do. NMU's are appreciated. Sigh.

My home network connection. I've been waiting for my network connection for the past two weeks, and finally there was a notice of packet containing the ADSL router. Hopefully the ADSL router is functional, and I'll be on-line again. Until that happens, I'll be reading my e-mail on wifi in my local McDonalds. Consider this my VAC message.

Weee! Epiphany with webkit just crashed for me on webkit.org.

The 173.14.09 drivers have been uploaded. I still have an undiagnosed crash on my work machine but it is an unusual set up. Hope you have a good summer.

For those who care you can find NVIDIA 173.14.05 debs here I have a problem with X crashing at startup with a secondary non-nvidia card on my i386 box at work so I'm still trying to figure out that issue but for single card systems they should work fine.

update: It looks like 179.14.09 might fix my issue so hopefully I will make an upload soon. - sigh. no it didn't. I'll upload 173.14.09 this week though.

I starting trying Twitter. Gotta keep up with the kids these days ;) I'm using the twhirl client based on adobe AIR. I tried spaz but it seemed to push the limits of Linux alpha AIR a bit too much. Twhirl seems quite decent. My twitter URL is here for those who care.


In other news I'll try to get the latest release of the current NVIDIA drivers up tonight.

I've uploaded the amd64 version of the current drivers tonight. I'll test the i386 version tomorrow and upload if it works as well. I'd like to thank my team member, Len Sorensen who did a lot of work on this release.

I'm pleased to announce Lennart Sorensen has joined the Debian NVIDIA Maintainers packaging team.
His first focus might be with the linux-modules-nonfree-2.6 integration as well as the current support he already does. Thanks and welcome Len.