I would really wish that I could travel around the world and do evangelization about i18n just like Jordi, Daffyd and Michael have been able to do. Of course, this is a known difference between a development model where people are paid to work on development and a completely volunteer development model. However, I really hope that all the good things that will be done to better support Asian languages in Ubuntu will end up in Debian really soon. After all, much of the initial work has been done in Debian itself by the wonderful Japanese/Chinese/Korean developers, or by the "debian-in" project lead by Jaldhar H. Vyas for Indic languages support. Don't take me wrong: I don't have any griefs towards Ubuntu when it comes at i18n. This is an area where the collaboration is already quite good and I hope it will become better if we manage to converge towards common tools (just free up the bloody Rosetta, Mark!). This is one of the goals I personnally set for the i18n session in Extremadura. Our goals here are common: we want more and more pleaces in the world to be able to use the Best Operating System ever and we will paint it red. (another way to say this: "we want the world and we want it NOW") For this, we just have to cooperate.

Christine, as I am among the people you IM'ed when you learned about you MIT application being accepted, I must say that I'm not surprised at all by your success. The very few I have learned through the work we did together on shadow or on your gquilt package, or through your blog, is probably just what a top-ranked education organization is looking for. Be proud of yourself and of being what you are. You can be. Now I hope that MIT classes leave enough time for doing more and more good Debian work. Debian needs more people like you. Why is this said in public? Just because I want more people know that Christine rocks..:-) Et, au fait Christine, continue pratiquer ton fran ais. Il est de trop bonne qualit pour tre perdu !

Sad day for Free Software. The so-called VU/SACEM/BSA (for Vivendi-Universal/French Artists Societey/Bullshit Software Alliance) amendment to the DADVSI law presented by the French government has been voted. For details about DADVSI, see EUCD.info web site. This amendment says (bad English translation of course): "(Est) puni de trois ans d'emprisonnement et de 300.000 euros d'amende le fait de mettre sciemment la disposition du public ou de communiquer au public, sous quelque forme que ce soit, un logiciel manifestement destin la mise disposition du publ (une copie?) non autoris e d'oeuvres ou d'objets prot g s." "The fact of voluntarily make available to the public or communicate to the public, in any possible way, software obviously intended for making available to the public an unauthorized copy of protected work shal be punished by 3 years jail and 300.000 euros fine". (again sorry for the bad legalese English...). People interested may read this very complete analysis (in English) from the EUCD.info site. In short, as it has been written for instance by Sun France Head Security Officer, Gilles Gravier, this bans a vast majority of free software such as BitTorrent, Apache, FTP servers and the like. I think you get the point. It seems time for Debian to think about dropping French mirrors....and for French free software authors to emigrate (which I'll never do....I have too much attachment for this country anyway).

Wouter, you're my hero. It's been a while since I was trying to figure out why the only CPU frequency governor I had available for my laptop was "performance". You tiny script made me discover that each possible governor has its own module, dammit. And, of course, not all are loaded by default by the various gazillions of software that are supposed to control that stuff. So, my /etc/modules file now load the various cpufreq_* things and I'm happy and so is my laptop's battery. echo "Wouter 1" >>beers.txt

One year ago, I uploaded shadow 4.0.3-31 with "New maintainer" in the changelog. During this year, the shadow maitenance team has been built with Alexander Gattin, Christine Spang, Martin Quinson and last but definitely not least Tomasz Kloczko, the upstream author and Nicolas Fran ois, the best non DD ever. In one year, this wonderful team built 35 releases, closed 214 bugs (according to the changelog), cleaned out the BTS which had about 300 opened issues at that time. There are now 35 opened bugs, 24 being fixed in upstream's CVS, 3 tagged "wontfix" and 1 fixed in experimental. In short, there is no reported issue that hasn't received attention. It took us six months before being able to resynchronize the Debian version of login and passwd with upstream. After achieving it and after dozens of exchanges with upstream, the size of the diff.gz file went down from over 1.5MB to about 120kb in the next release. Upstream changelog is now full of patches and rewards to Debian. We used 26 cheese names for naming releases in a tradition established after a famous Cheese Party held at Debconf 5. Be prepared for the Debconf 6 Cheese Party! I see this work as a good example of revival work for an essential package and good collaboration with upstream. I probably have my part in this, trying to keep the communication, sometimes making decisions and always revive work on forgotten issues. But, definitely, I have to deserve a special mention to Nicolas. He's definitely the one who understand the whole code and when he didn't knew, he just learned. Without him, we would never have been able to achieve this. Please, just give him direct DAM approval if he ever applies as a NM...:-) Again, happy birthday to the new shadow....

I'm currently very puzzled by Teletubbies being part of a few Debian developers and contributors reference system. It seems to be a sarcastic way to make fun about people who try to keep social relations to a level that would be considered normal in real life, or to people who think that technical excellence is not the only need to build the best operating system ever. I personnally know nearly nothing about Teletubbies (nor Bisounours, for French DD's). This probably means something, but what? And Teletubbies being used as a reference by some probably means something for them as well, but what? Bonne nuit, les petits..:-)

Wichert mentioned that productivity killer on IRC. Enjoy.... this could be the first meme that needs a whole "maintenance team" to be completed (unless someone cheats and looks for the hidden code with the solutions...probably easy to find but I don't want to try)....and even if an Excel spreadsheet is not the geekiest meme ever.. After 15 minutes, I gave up with a score of 10 out of 270, even if many of these bands are 60's and 70's bands, which are those I'm supposed to have a better knowledge of. I know I'll continue later, dammit. echo "wiggy -1" >>beers.txt

We again had a great event and a great Debian booth at Solutions Linux 2006. Thanks to Julien Blache who coordinated the whole stuff and all the Debian people who animated the booth this year again. The Babelbox demo installed Debian 148 times in 3 days, with 64 desktop installs the first two days and a sprint of 84 base system installs the last day, in less than 8 hours. I have put my pictures online. Most comments are in French but you'll enjoy them anyway. And, for my D-W friends, sorry for this and that.

Today was a good day in Debian X land. X.Org released the "zeroth" release candidate for both the 6.9 (monolithic) and 7.0 (modular) versions of the X.Org tree. I downloaded the 6.9 tarball, imported it in to the XSF svn repo, and got to work on the patchlist. I'd already ported a number from 6.8, and tonight I managed to finish the rest. Except for a massive GNU/kFreeBSD patch, every single patch in the debian tree has been ported over to 6.9. This work took multiple weeks with multiple people for 6.8 using dbs. Using our new quilt-based patch system I blogged about in the past, this took me about half a week, with the bulk of the work over the past two nights.

Now I haven't actually been able to build 6.9rc0 yet, nor have I been able to build 6.8 for a few days. There's currently a bug in the linux-kernel-headers package that breaks the X.Org build, so the XSF has been working on polishing the -5 release. Eugene Konev has fixed things to we now build HTML docs for xspecs again, for those of you who hate the postscript versions. David Mart nez Moreno has been doing an enormous amount of cleanup, generally dealing with a lot of the bugs that have come in and taking care of the new translations that have been flooding in almost as fast as we can change the debconf templates :-) Christian Perrier has joined the team as translation coordinator, so as soon as he can get svn access the X packages should be well taken care of in his amazingly capable hands. Finally, I've included a new script for /etc/init.d supplied by Petter Reinholdtsen that will give Debian LiveCD-derivatives a standard way of generating an X server configuration on boot. Nothing too fancy, but we're tightening up the package a bit more and those fixes have already been merged in to the 6.9 branch.

So if people need updated drivers from Xorg's HEAD, keep an eye out for 6.9rc packages to hit experimental. As soon as I can build and test them, I'll put them there for people to play with. My goal is to get 6.9 in to unstable on the day it's released by upstream. We're (or at least, I'm) going to begin work on 7.0 as soon as 6.9 hits experimental as well, borrowing one more time from Ubuntu and attempting to stabilize that packaging alongside them, if they haven't already beaten us to it completely :-) So things are moving and we're going to try and keep up the momentum.

Some people have also been asking about xcompmgr/transset packages. It's still not packaged for Debian because it's either slow or crashy, depending on your driver, although fixes are in the works. I may have found someone to maintain it for Debian, and I'll try and keep people posted about it when I know more.

Note to self: don't forget to shoot a picture of the Debian twins at Debconf6. Note (bis) to self: buy 300 fake mustaches, distribute them before the group photo, except to Branden. Shoot picture here as well.

In the inspiration of guadec travel instructions, I took time to take the trip from Helsinki-Vantaa Airport to Debconf accommodation building in Otaniemi. Apart from camera running out of battery (twice), total lack of graphics skills, and initially uploading images as png's, the results seem acceptable.

Directions from airport, relatively easy

.
Finding the bus station, annoyingly enough, the bus from airport does not stop at the main bus terminal, but at railway station. The new kamppi terminal is still under construction, so it is not impossible that the route changes before debconf starts.. Sigh.


Walk to dorm from the final stop of bus 102/102T taking to otaniemi is short, but may be confusing, with many similar buildings around. There should be proper "Debconf 5 this way" signs by the time you get there.</br/>


Thanks for Christian Perrier, we also added Google satellite map link to our otaniemi page.

Otherwise, our Debconf5 site seems to have a confusing structure, but I don't have concrete ideas what to fix to make it easier to navigate. Still Work in progress..

Scott James Remnant announced him taking a sabbatical for personal reasons. As Scott was maintaining dpkg for about two years (first NMU in February 2004), this was leaving one of the most important packages in the distribution without maintainer. However, Scott took care asking a few people about taking the package maintenance over. Up to now, these people are Frank Lichtenheld, Guillem Jover, Brenda O'Dea and myself. I of course can't speak for others, but I'll try to make my involvment limited to what I was already working on with Scott: localization of the software. The key point is now organizing things and have some teamwork possible (and refrain my natural tendency to organize things and take the lead, which I wouldn't survive...). So, it's seems like a good opportunity for more people to jump in and come in the package maintenance mailing list. Let's hope that all this will organize itself well and will soon be a good example of collaborative maintenance in Debian.

Well, shame on me, this is again a meme I participated in, probably because Axel mentioned that this quizz gives more interesting results. It appears that I should be a Chemistry major, which I actually am (my career in computing began after a PhD in Materials Science and a the french equivalent of a Master in Chemistry).. I should also by graduated in Linguistics, what a surprise...:-) Also scored 75% for Theater which kind of a surprise as I'm sometimes a bit shy in public. Art and Dance scores are very low which is not a surprise at all as well. Quite an accurate quizz indeed.

You scored as Chemistry. You should be a Chemistry major! As if that isnt clear enough, you are deeply passionate about Chemistry, and every single chemical reaction and concept fascinates you. Pursue that! Chemistry 83% Linguistics 75% Theater 75% Engineering 58% English 58% Sociology 58% Biology 50% Journalism 50% Psychology 42% Philosophy 42% Mathematics 42% Anthropology 42% Art 33% Dance 17% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com

...Guido is Italian from head to toe (thanks Erinn). And, of course, I'm definitely French. Those who I've met with already know this. B r t and baguette, wine and cheese, and of course translate everything...as well as giving lessons to everybody. Another interesting way to use the meme is choosing the answers that one definitely would never choose, to discover which European you are definitely *not*. It then appear that I'm definitely not Spanish. Too bad for my many Spanish friends in this project..:-)

This: ...is my newly born son Jean-Baptiste.... ...back in 1988. So, yes my son turns out 18 today, getting the right to vote, to say me "merde" as he wants and officially becoming a grown up adult...which he already his by several aspects. So, yes, I'm a proud dad. This, far more than my contribution to free software, makes me feel that I will at least leave one good thing on earth (actually, I will leave et least *three* good things on earth).

Yesterday evening, the Ministry of Culture has deciced to report the discussion of the DADVSI bill after the reopening of the French Parliament, on January 17th. The debates yesterday have been featuring different representatives from the majority (UMP party) coming to explain that que "global license" amendments, adopted yesterday, are severely critized by the "artists". Indeed, it turns out that the major artists feel themselves in danger with the disposals of the "global license" while artists will a less wider diffusion are mostly OK with it. Who would be surprised? :-) Debates around this will be very hot again on January and we can expect an active lobbying by the "official artists" and the major entertainment companies. About the parts of the bill which were highly criticized by the Free Software community, it seems that all concerns about the copy protection schemes are on their way for being removed. The debates clearly show that the Free Software community has been heard, even by several representatives who are in favor of several other parts of the text. In short, I'm now confident that this bill will in no way be able to lead to an illegal Videolan Client, for instance. The transcription of the debates shows that all representatives are very motivated in trying to limit the influence of the major software companies (Microsoft is explicitely mentioned several times). I'm in no way saying that we shouldn't stop being very careful and stop following what will happen. But, again, all things I have read from the debates shows me that the free software community is heard in France, even by our representatives and even by the current majority parties, which I don't share many things with. I consider this a victory for our community even if "we only won a battle and we now have to win the war".

Yesterday, the French government lost the first battle in its attempts to get the controversial DADVSI bill voted, which was pushed by most of the major entertainment companies and included a legalisation of copy protection schemes icluding measures to prevent software authors to circumvent them. As written, these measures would have possibly lead to software like VLC becoming illegal in France. The very strong mobilisation of the Free Software community and all communities involved in making the access to culture through the Internet easier has won its first battle. Thanks to a few Parliament members among who I'll cite M. Christian Paul (socialist party) or Mme Christine Boutin (UMP, the party of the French President and Prime minister....and representative of my neighbourhood in Yvelines...and certainly someone I do not share most of the moral values with...but anyway, I wrote to her), two very important "amendments" have been accepted with several members of the current right-wing majority voting along with the members of the socialist and communist parties. These amendments completely go against the will of the Culture Minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabre and all media say today this was like sending a huge torpedo in the project..:-) They propose to legalise a "global licence" which, being optional in ISP contracts, would allow users of the Internet to legally exchange cultural data over the Internet. As a side effect, this means that all attemps to enforce copy protection schemes (and virtually forbid Free Software authors to publish their sources) are to dropped to the waste bin. This is a huge victory but certainly not the final victory. The project is completely changed but the Minister and the Government can still amend it and propose something else after being lobbied again by the majors. And, as usual, they can even use our very funny 49/3 constitution article which allows a government to engage its responsibility on a given text and then forbidding any further discussion or change. The probability for this is very unlikely because they would risk a lot doing so...but with UMP one can never tell. They've done worse in the past... Again, hats off to all people who raised a strong mobilisation against this and hats off to some of our political representatives. Yes, politics is not EVIL when its done the Right Way.

The Web site of the French Parliament features the full transcription of the debates about the DADVSI bill. For those of you who can read French, I suggest you have a look at it. I suggest you look at the speech by M. Christian Paul who gives a very good argumentation about why this text is EVIL. In the text, "M. le Ministre", is Renaud Donnedieu de Vabre, the Ministry for Culture and Communication of the government headed by Dominique de Villepin (hey, we should tell these guys that the French revolution was over 200 years ago!).

I am half Supergirl and half Wonder Woman. Actually it depends on what I answer to "Do you ever wear a pushup bra?". If I happen to say something else than the leftest "no", then I'm Wonder Woman...:-)

Today is the day where the very controversial DADVSI bill will be examined by the French Parliament. DADVSI stands for "Droit d'Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Soci t de l'Information" which can be roughly translated to "Author Rights and Related Rights in the Information Society". This very controversial bill includes some very ambiguous parts about software "that could be used to illegally exchange data over the Internet". The text is so vague that it can even interpreted as possibly allowing to forbig software authors to publish their sources....which explains why the French Free Software community reacted so strongly. This text is promoted by the major entertainment companies (Vivendi Universal and the like...). Some even said to representatives of the Free Software communities: "we will foirbid you to publish your sources". I'm feeling they're failing, though. The very active lobbying promoted by the EUCD.INFO initiative has already reached one goal: the bill will not be examined confidentially. For instance, I'm currently watching the LCI TV channel, one of the major news channels among satellite/cable/Internet channels in France and this problem is now in their major headlines. You're screwed, pals. Bottom line note: in France, laws are proposed by the government and must be examined, then voted, by the Parliament. The Parliament may "amend" a law (ie propose changes) which sometimes means completely changing it. We now have a great hope that this will happen as many of our representatives ("d put s"), including some from the current majority (right wing) and most of the left wing representatives, have expressed very strong reserves. Additionnal side note: at this moment, there are no less than 200 amendments proposed to this bill...:-)