After two weeks of being operational, Stuff To Do has been a big success at work, because it lets people keep track of what they're doing with a minimum of hassle. Truth be told, I've never been that wild about "productivity" software, but I'm pretty happy with the system I've created. I really have attempted to make something that stays out of your way as much as possible. That has involved making some choices - for instance, instead of buttons to start or stop time tracking for a given task, Stuff To Do [aside: it would be much faster to write 'STD', but I think that might not be such a good idea in terms of marketing] uses some javascript to see if you've moused over (or blurred, or typed, or done anything, basically) to the window where it lives in the last 15 minutes. This will certainly reduce the accuracy a little bit, and if you get 'in the zone' and don't hit the browser for a while, it won't count your time, but all things considered, this is better than having to hit a stupid button every time you do anything, because you will invariably forget to hit the button, and leave it going overnight, and then have to go back and manually edit everything, and.... yuck. I also have some ideas about how to further improve the javascript in order to make it even easier to track whether you're active or not (with your consent, of course!). In any case, I've fixed up a number of small bugs, and added a few new features:

• You can now only drag tasks with their title so that you can cut and past text from the 'notes' section.
• The notes now use 'markdown' so that you can mark them up some.

Some other things I'm considering for the near future:

• Enable sending tasks via email with one or two clicks - this would make it so you could add a default email address (of a bug tracking system, for instance) and automatically submit the stuff you're working on.
• "Warp" a task to the top of the list of things to do via a link for each task. You can currently move a task around by clicking, holding, and them moving the mouse scroller, but that's kind of cumbersome.

In the process, I also happened upon Active Merchant, which is some cool code by the fine folks at jadedpixel.com, which was quite handy for integrating Paypal. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I found a few things that I wanted to do just slightly differently, and sent in a patch.

My Christmas day was primarily spent at home watching Red Dwarf. Apart from that I made new releases of xen-shell and xen-tools. I was suprised to recieve a sudden flurry of bug reports. No less than ten bugs reported by two users in one day! Still I fixed most of them and made a new release. It was nice to notice Isaac Clerencia writing about using xen-tools for automated testing. The idea has occurred to me before: Create a fresh Xen installation of Debian then run a test suite and trash the system afterwards. I even setup a test Yawns builder for a while. Are people finding interesting users for xen-tools? I’d love to have some use-cases, and more user-feedback is always appreciated. Feel free to get in touch or comment here. Personally I use a few Xen guests on my home LAN and I regularly create new Sarge images for building backported Xen packages. Only recently did I move my home cfengine setup onto a domU. In other news I recently received a copy of Programming Ruby from my Amazon wishlist, I’m learning a lot about Ruby and I think I’m in love. The only downside is the mental confusion I experience when I see “@variable” and “$variable” used. I am too wedded to Perl to stop thinking “array” and “string” respectively. I should find a toy project to write in Ruby to get used to it. Right now nothing occurs, but I’m sure it is just a matter of time.

eBox is growing a lot lately, and updating screenshots is always a cumbersome task, so, prompted by a workmate, I decided to do something to get automatic screenshots. The first step was to get an automatic way to install eBox from scratch to have something to get screenshots from. That was quite easy using the Xen facilities available in Debian. I only had to write a role for xen-create-image and now I can get an eBox up and running in a couple of minutes executing a simple “xen-create-image –role ebox –hostname ebox-screenshots”. Using eBox introspection capabilities and some Perl magic, it was quite easy to autogenerate a list of the URLs that we should take screenshots from. Once we had the URL list and a running eBox all we have to do was to have a browser logging in the eBox web interface and loop through the URLs taking screenshots. To achieve that I resorted to Ruby, Konqueror, KSnapshot and DCOP, and it took less than 40 lines of code to do it. The first problem was spawning Konqueror and KSnapshot instances and getting a DCOP reference for them, but that was easily done using Ruby’s fork, which is quiet convenient:

konqpid = Kernel.fork exec("konqueror --geometry 1024x768+0+0")
ksnappid = Kernel.fork exec("ksnapshot")
konqwin = KDE::DCOPRef.new("konqueror-# konqpid ","konqueror-mainwindow\#1")
ksnapshot = KDE::DCOPRef.new("ksnapshot-# ksnappid ","interface")
The second problem I faced was logging in the eBox interface, I had to enter the password and submit the form. Fortunately Konqueror’s DCOP interface offers a really nice “evalJS” function:

konqwin.openURL("https://# ip /ebox/")
konqhtml = KDE::DCOPRef.new("konqueror-# konqpid ","html-widget1")
konqhtml.evalJS("document.getElementById('credential_0').value = 'ebox'")
konqhtml.evalJS("document.login.submit()")

and we’re in! Now we only have to loop through the urls taking the screenshots. I had a little problem because ksnapshot expects you to click the left mouse button before taking the screenshot. Fortunately that could be easily fixed using xte from the xautomation package to simulate the click.

urls.each url
konqwin.openURL("https://# ip /ebox/# url ")
name = "# konqwin.caption.split(/-/)[1].strip.gsub(/ /,'_') "
ksnapshot.slotGrab
system("xte 'mousemove 100 100' 'mouseclick 1'")
ksnapshot.save("# outpath /# name .png")

The code I pasted lacks a bit of initialization and some sleeps I put there to synchronize the stuff, but basically that’s all. I just love Ruby, KDE and DCOP

Last months I’ve been busy with some projects at work, involving some Qt programming, dealing with Cisco JTAPI and other nuisances, which have prevented me from working in eBox. My work desktop is about a meter away from the now three full-time developer eBox team, so I’ve been closely following the development process and participating in some design meetings and at last, I’ve found some time to write nice stuff for it again. eBox lacked administration logging, that is, a log with every change made through the eBox administrative interface (quite useful to know when something was changed or who changed it), so I’ve added support for that in the eBox framework and have implemented the necessary stuff in two modules as an example. There is still a lot of work until every module reports every action to the module, but the core is already working:
As a nice side effect, now we can also show the changes that you are about to save or rollback:
FYI, a new eBox version (0.7.99, aka 0.8rc1) was released some days ago, you can give it a try. Check our downloads section. Obviously these changes won’t be included in 0.8, but in 0.9, which will also add a openvpn module, traffic shaping and other improvements.

My workmate Javier Uruen has just pointed me to Banned for George Bush T-shirt, a story about a guy that was banned from an airplane because he was wearing a “George W. Bush is world’s #1 terrorist” t-shirt. He argued it was his right to express his opinion, while the airline said the t-shirt was offensive and he wouldn’t be able to flight unless he took it off. I can’t see how that shirt can be offensive for anyone besides George W. Bush and I guess nobody would have prevented a person from flying because of an “I love George W. Bush” t-shirt, and that is offensive. Freedom of speech seems to be in danger. In brighter news, I’ve discovered that UC Berkeley freely offers video and audio for some lectures. I’ve been listening to some lectures from the Undergraduate Colloquium on Political Science and they rock. Allan Ross, the lecturer is awesome, I wish I would have had somebody like him in my university.

A few months ago I finished Play Money by Julian Dibbel and like his My Tiny Life before it, the writing style is simple yet sumptuous, or I guess just simply sumptuous. Like the travel writings that pre-figured anthropological writing, Dibbel takes us to a far-away exotic land (but only a click or two away) that are populated by a motley crew of wizard (or is lizard)? slayers, gold-diggers, money-makers, and virtual-world-builders. For many, these MMOGsare no strange-lands but are becoming weaved firmly and intimately into the fabric of everyday life, whether as entertainment, sociality, and or for a cadre of folks, as a source of income generation. I think the book has gotten enough coverage that I don’t need to rehearse its content in any detail but the basic story is that Julian embarks on a real world quest in the virtual land of quests to try to make enough money (to be specific make a little more than his monthly salary as a freelance writer) from trading and selling a slew of virtual objects and gold. In taking us along, he gives a compelling entry into the imaginative and morally complex world of these games. And better is that whether you know nothing about them or are a seasoned player, the book has much to offer. One of the reasons I respect Julian Dibbel is because he takes his sweeeet time to churn out a book-length manuscript. In a day and age when there is so much pressure to release quick and often, especially when writing about anything in the so-called virtual plane of existence, he waited nearly 8 years from the publication of his last book on gaming, My Tiny Life before publishing on a considerably higher-tech phenomenon. Following him on his most recent adventure, you learn that he threw himself into a variety of gaming environments persistently and consistently and did at least 3 years of research and writing (at one point in the book he confesses how excruciating writing for him, which is hard to believe as the words slip so nicely off the paper but whatever the extent of his writing angst is, he clearly spends a lot of care in crafting his sentences). And I am starting to think that if more people followed this ethic of long-term immersion, coupled with slow-brewed productive sparsity, we would get higher quality products (Yes, kinda like the Debian release cyclce). Like any good ethnographer, he gives an intimate portrait of life in these worlds of copious play where various types of real world economies have mushroomed apace with new technological developments. That is, he gives us a taste of what it is like, as he cleverly puts it to own unreality. Couched within tales of gaming gone real world economic, are hearty reflections on the place of play in social and economic life, the close resemblance and conceptual affinity between computers and games (and not just computer games, and here he does a fantastic job at explaining the Turing Test), self-doubts about writing in general and in particular about this topic, commodity fetishism, and the changing nature of capitalism in a world of ever-greater abstractions. All of this makes for an enjoyable read that if used in the classroom (which like A Tiny Life, I am sure will become standard for courses on Virtual Worlds) allows you to bring in some good supplemental material whether Edward Castranova’s Synthetic Worlds, Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s The Laws of Virtual Worlds and or older heavy-hitters like Max Weber and Karl Marx. The only topic I think I would have liked to seen included is that of capitalist finance, because there are, I think, some real affinities, phenomenologically and conceptually, between finance capitalism and gaming the virtual game. Otherwise some of my favorite sections were on hackers and the object of the computer, but of course, I am biased that way. So here I leave you with a tasty morsel of something that was sumptuous to ingest: It is this endlessly repeatable collusion of freedom and determinism-the warp and woof of fixed rules and free play, of running code and variable input that sets both games and computers apart, together from the larger universe of information technologies they inhabit…. But only games share the universal machine’s game’s thoroughgoing commitment to the principle of recursion: the chained repetition of simple operations, each building on both the input of the moment and the outcomes of preceding steps. And only games, therefore, come close to capturing that precise mi of unpredictability and inevitability that makes the computer such a powerful simulator of our lived experience of the world. p. 104

As you may know, the future of the US world is again at stake in two weeks. Elections for the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives will be held on November 7. Most general indicators are favorable to the Democrats (only 40% approve Bush administration, 46% vs. 34% think that Democrats would handle Iraq better than the GOP, 55% think US shouldn’t have invaded Iraq), and it seems they will likely get a majority in the House (latest polls show a 13-18 seats Democratic lead). Democratic Senate majority sounds far-fetched though. First of all, the members of the US Senate (which has 100 members, two per state, regardless of population) are elected by classes. The Senate is formed by three classes, so in this election only a third of the senators are challenged, which makes a turnover more difficult. Right now the Senate is composed by 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and 1 Independent (who usually caucuses with the Democrats). Only 15 out of the 33 contested seats are held by Republicans, so Democrats would have to gain 7 of those 15 to get a majority (as a tie is broken by the Senate President, who happens to be the Vicepresident of the US, Dick Cheney). There are four close races that should be taken into account (Tennessee, Missouri, Virginia and New Jersey). Democrats would need to win three out of these to achieve majority. The amazing fact is that according to the latest polls they can make it. I’m not really fond of Democrats either (IMHO they are as right-winged as usual European right-winged parties), but lots of Dem Senate candidates are taking solid anti-war positions, which is quite good. In addition, I would say that anything that can take some power out of Bush hands it’s good news for the world. I just hope the anti-GOP wave is big enough. So, please, fellow American reader, on November 7th, vote the GOP out of the Senate and the House

As you may know, the future of the US world is again at stake in two weeks. Elections for the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives will be held on November 7. Most general indicators are favorable to the Democrats (only 40% approve Bush administration, 46% vs. 34% think that Democrats would handle Iraq better than the GOP, 55% think US shouldn’t have invaded Iraq), and it seems they will likely get a majority in the House (latest polls show a 13-18 seats Democratic lead). Democratic Senate majority sounds far-fetched though. First of all, the members of the US Senate (which has 100 members, two per state, regardless of population) are elected by classes. The Senate is formed by three classes, so in this election only a third of the senators are challenged, which makes a turnover more difficult. Right now the Senate is composed by 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and 1 Independent (who usually caucuses with the Democrats). Only 15 out of the 33 contested seats are held by Republicans, so Democrats would have to gain 7 of those 15 to get a majority (as a tie is broken by the Senate President, who happens to be the Vicepresident of the US, Dick Cheney). There are four close races that should be taken into account (Tennessee, Missouri, Virginia and New Jersey). Democrats would need to win three out of these to achieve majority. The amazing fact is that according to the latest polls they can make it. I’m not really fond of Democrats either (IMHO they are as right-winged as usual European right-winged parties), but lots of Dem Senate candidates are taking solid anti-war positions, which is quite good. In addition, I would say that anything that can take some power out of Bush hands it’s good news for the world. I just hope the anti-GOP wave is big enough. So, please, fellow American reader, on November 7th, vote the GOP out of the Senate and the House

More than a thousand people took part in the anti-bullfighting demo that every year takes place in Zaragoza. (Spanish) For those who are not familiar with bullfighting, it’s basically a Spanish shameful tradition, where six bulls are released one at a time to a bullfighting arena. There the bulls are tortured to death, first they’re stabbed on the neck by horse-mounted lancers, then they got planted in their back several harpoon-pointed sticks, and after half an hour of torture and agony, the bullfighter definitely murders the bull with a sword. Does it sound disgusting, cruel and sadist? It definitely is, and I’ve skipped the worst details. (yeah, I’ve got sick just writing this) We gathered at a square near the bullfighting arena, and then we headed towards it shouting stuff like “torture is neither art nor culture” (as bullfighting defenders usually say that “bullfighting is a central part of Spanish culture”), “murderers”, “torturers”, “sadists”, “you’re cavemen, evolve!”, “if you wanna see blood, slit your wrist” or “you should be ashamed of how you are raising your children” (to people who brought little (5 or 6 years old) children to the bullfight arena). The demo lasted about two hours and was completely peaceful, which is a great thing IMHO, as it clearly shows which side despises violence and which one loves it. There have been several good news for the anti-bullfighting movement last years, like several Catalonian towns declaring bullfighting illegal, Barcelona declaring itself an anti-bullfighting city (although it doesn’t have the legislative power to really ban bullfighting), demos in lots of cities and increase in people attending them. If Bullfighting seems doomed, but we still will have to push for a few years to really bury it. Even if you are not Spanish you can still help abolish bullfighting by taking part in anti-bullfight demos in front of Spanish embassies (there were 17 of them this summer), boycotting travel agents that promote bullfighting, …

Thanks to David Nusinow, Thierry Reding, Kristian H gsberg and Michel D nzer to have made this possible. It’s really nice looking, but damn, this is soooooooooooooo slooooooooooow. I already tweaked my X configuration, so that GL applications would be fluid, and they are, but compiz is so much slower than all the rest of the GL applications that I really wonder what’s going on. Is it so much more difficult to display 3 windows than to display the full earth with plenty of textures ? As a bonus, for an unknown reason, it cuts the nautilus desktop window at a width of 1024 instead of 1280., which makes the right of the screen a warp zone… (For the record, I have a Radeon Mobility 9200 with the x.org drivers ; I should try with the proprietary ones) Update : The slowness might be related to this message:
libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x4b Update 2 : According to this comment from Michel D nzer, the above message is only cosmetic.
I solved my slowness problem ! I just needed to switch back to XAA instead of EXA as an acceleration method (Option “AccelMethod”). There still remains the geometry problem… even fullscreened windows are limited to a width of 1024, though the gnome panel is correctly at the right-most of the screen (I use a vertical panel on the right of the screen).
There is also a cosmetic problem when switching from “normal” use to GL use (like cube rotation, window moving with wobbly, etc.): the window contents are kind of blured, but there’s nothing we can do about that, except have the windows blured in the same way in the first place.
Ah, and scrolling in windows is more sluggish, now. Update 3 : After some tracing of compiz, and some reading of the source code, it appears that the width limit problem is indeed due, as suggested by Hez in the comments, to GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE being 1024 (you can display it with glxinfo -l grep GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE). I wonder if, as suggested by erich, there is really an environment variable to change that…

Tomorrow at 6:00 AM I’ll be already sitting in a train in my way to Reus, from where I’ll fly to Dublin to attend aKademy 2006 … and I still haven’t managed to write about my trip to London (Well, in fact, I wrote about my two first days at London some time ago, but I haven’t found time to complete it). I’ve been trying to get some spare time for KDE hacking for a long time but I have only managed to do a dozen commits in the last months. I expect I can get some KOffice work done in aKademy and have a chance to enjoy beer with some KDE fellows.

I am nearly done with the marathon move. After a small hold-up in Canadian customs (for no apparent reason except I got a border official who had incorporated the role, a full 110%), my stuff is here, unpacked, and in decent order. In between unpacking, I have been able to experience some of Edmonton–from the nightlife to its administrative face (signing up for health insurance and a Social Insurance Numbers, for example, both of which were easy as cake) and I have to say E-town gets a far far far worse rap than it deserves. Ok, the weather is nothing to swoon over, and it is already getting far colder than I am used to but bracketing that detail, it is a pretty neat city. Now I tend to like the mid-size cities (Minneapolis, Madison, Philadelphia, Portland are some of my favorites in the U.S) over the mega-gargantuan-city and Edmonton fits this bill with just under a million people. And perhaps it is also just that I am digging some Canada-wide features (affordable and immediate health care, licensed cafes, a saner pace of life, the pleasant and earnest character of many folks) but there are Edmonton-specific attributes that are pretty nice too. Before I get to them, it is worth noting that every time I have told people that I was going to Edmonton, they would either: 1) admit that they did not know exactly where it was and thus could offer no opinion whatsoever (and I was one of those folks until I looked on a map) or 2) blurted some negative reaction like: “do you really have to go there!” though most of those people had never been, but had a sense of its northernly location. Perhaps my favorite reaction came from a blackberry forum where we posted a question about good data plans in Edmonton/Canada. Most of the replies stuck to the topic, but one person decided to spew his unadulterated thoughts on Edmonton:

i feel sorry for u going from NYC to Edmonton “Edmonton sucks” you’ll be happy to go back to NY..
You go from a city that has life to a dead one.. from having good bb plans to sh*ty ones.. hope your getting paid good

Ok, admittedly, the data/cell phone plans are lackluster but I think this person either has had some terrible times in Edmonton (and holds an unhealthy grudge), has never lived in NYC or has a warped sense of what the good life in a city means. Sure NYC is an amazing place, and is my likely future home, so I am not going to trash it but, like any city, it has its shortcomings.. like unfordable housing But time will tell as to how I feel about Edmonton after the winter. Perhaps when it reaches freezing temperatures, it does turn a leaf, and become dead but then you hit the mountains, no? But for now I am digging the HUGE pine trees, rivers, and ample sun of E-town.

Hi there! My company is looking for people with Perl and Unix (preferably Debian) administration skills to continue working on eBox, a free software thingie we’re developing (check out the web to learn about it). Fluency in English is also required. Being an EU citizen would be great to avoid immigration hassles, although I guess we would be able to make it work otherwise. The job offer would be for one year, with high chances of extending it for more time if you’re willing to do so. You would have to come and live in Zaragoza, Spain. Zaragoza is a 600000 inhabitants city in northern Spain, between Madrid and Barcelona. We can help you find housing, or you can even share my flat with me if you dare (five minutes walk to our office), for a reasonable rent (below 15% of your wage for sure). You would be working with 12 young people (around 26 years old), all of us free software enthusiasts. We play in snow (yeah, we also have sunny summers), have nice decorations in our office, hang out together, … If you’re interested send me a CV to isaac@warp.es and feel free to ask for more information via e-mail. Best regards

Hi, everybody. The Battle for Wesnoth project needs to move their campaign servers to a new location, and the main problem we have is we don’t have such a location. The requeriments are the following:

• About 100Mb RAM
• Around 1Gb of disk space
• Shell account (only me and, if possible, another BfW member will use the account), the server runs as a non-privileged user, so it shouldn’t be a security risk at all
• g++ and libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl1.2-net-dev installed
• Fixed IP and some spare bandwitch, I’m not sure how much bandwidth does it use, it’s enough to clog my DSL, but that’s not a lot

If anyone can provide such a server, please contact me at isaac@warp.es or isaac at IRC (oftc or freenode) and The Battle for Wesnoth project will be eternally grateful to you. Update
Thank you for all the offers received, it’s been overwhelming to get that amount of hosting offers in such a small time frame. We have already moved the campaign servers to one of the locations offered (http://www.drazzib.com) and the multiplayer servers to another one (http://www.bawue.net).

I had tried to read Wilt already twice, it’s quite a short book, but somehow I had failed to get past the first pages both times. I failed to even open it when I took it to my holidays in the beach, but I’d to come back home earlier than my friends, so I had a boring three hour bus ride ahead, which was a great opportunity to finally read it. Wilt (Tom Sharpe, 1976) is a novel about an underachieving assistant lecturer (Henry Wilt), which grows increasingly demoralized by both his simpleminded wife (which he dreams to kill) and his frustrating experiences teaching literature to a bunch of uninterested construction apprentices in a South England community college. Everything gets messed up when Mrs. Wilt gets lured by Sally Pringsheim’s liberal ideas, and talks Henry into attending a party hosted by the Pringsheims, a bizarre hip couple. Henry ends up with an inflatable sex doll overinflated around his genitals, and Mrs. Wilt gets extremely infuriated. From this moment the story goes wild and I won’t spoil it

Well, it is actually the other way around, I’m really sick of “home”, longing to get out of here (both Zaragoza and Spain).
Tomorrow in the morning I’m taking a plane to visit London for a week, but I fear that’s only going to make things worse.
I will report when I’m back, and also release Battle for Wesnoth 1.2

Hundreds of elderly people living in Zaragoza, Spain, will find a Debian-based KDE desktop in their elderly centers. The Zaragoza City Hall has just deployed a thin-client solution using PXES, Debian and KDE in six elderly centers with more than ten computers each. The number of elderly centers will grow up to some dozens in the future. We have dealed with the installation details. It has been officially presented today and people have already started using the desktops, browsing the web with Konqueror and enjoying the last annular eclipse using KStars.

As it looks like there is some ccache hype lately in Planet Debian, I’ll add some of my own. I use pbuilder to build my packages and it was a real PITA when some big package like wesnoth or kdesomething failed to build and I’d to restart the build from scratch, so (after several months of procastination) I decided to add ccache powers to my pbuilder setup. In fact, it was quite easy, although a bit “dirty”.

1. Create a directory to store the ccache cache for your pbuilder, for example,
   /var/cache/pbuilder/ccache
2. Create a directory to put the needed pbuilder hooks, for example, ~/debian/pbuilder-hooks/
3. Add an A (run just before starting the build) hook to set up ccache, for example, A01ccache:
   
#!/bin/sh
echo "Setting up ccache"
apt-get install ccache
cd /usr/lib/ccache
for c in *
do
   ln -s /usr/bin/ccache /usr/sbin/$c
done
ln -s /var/cache/pbuilder/ccache /root/.ccache

   This is the dirty bit, as I can’t set $PATH from one of the hooks, I link the ccache stuff into /usr/sbin/ which precedes /usr/bin/ in $PATH, if somebody knows any other clean way (i.e., without modifying the chroot) to do this, please tell me.
4. I’ve two more hooks, to run interactive shells when the package finishes building (or fails building), note that you need to run the shell like this:
   
/bin/bash < /dev/tty > /dev/tty

5. Run pbuilder with the correct options, I’ve a script named wonderbuild to do this:
   
#!/bin/sh
pdebuild -- --bindmounts /var/cache/pbuilder/ccache --hookdir ~/debian/pbuilder-hooks/ $*


I expect this to be useful to somebody else, it works really great for me Any improvement would be welcome.

I’ve been in release frenzy mode lately. Yesterday, we managed to get eBox 0.7.1rc1 out! This (pre)release fixes tons of bugs, adds PDC support and features a installer based in Sarge Debian Installer + 2.6.12 kernel. And a few hours ago we have released Battle for Wesnoth 1.1.1, with lots of new features, graphics (see new castle) and enhancements. Are you one of the few who hasn’t tried Wesnoth yet?

After a bunch of trains, subways, planes, buses and taxis I’ve finally arrived at Oaxtepec (Mexico) to attend DebConf6, the annual Debian conference. Besides doing some Debian work, having some fun with long-time-no-seen friends and enjoying the swimming pool, there are several interesting talks I’m interested on:

• SELinux UML instances, by Manoj Srivastava
• The X Community - History and direction, by Keith Packard, who has been involved in X development since the 80s
• Experiences with large Custom Debian Distributions installations, by Knut Yrvin (Skolelinux)
• Scratchbox 2, cross-compiling in Debian, by Riku Voipio
• Debian and the $100 laptop, by Jim Gettys
• debian-installer internals
• several interesting BoFs about optimizing boot time, libapt-front, embedded Debian, …

Time for lunch here!