I previously wrote about my visits to Turkey to develop our export market in the Middle-East and how I ended up representing the whole Estonian business world in bilateral negotiations with Turkey. I'm going there again for two weeks, this time accompanied by a whole business delegation headed by Estonian prime minister Andrus Ansip. Asides from various official events organized by our Turkish hosts to present Turkey to their Estonian guests, the crux of the visit is a conference hosted by DEIK and the Estonian embassy, on Tuesday, March 18th. The goal of this conference is to present Estonia's extremely advanced use of ICT technology in E-Business and E-Governance. Speakers from several private and public sector organizations will explain how they benefited from Estonia's hyper-connected lifestyle and, most of all, how this has made every Estonian's life more pleasant, because it offers a convenient way of performing a broad range of online transactions not just with businesses, but also with governmental organizations. Yours truly will speak about the advantages Estonia offers to investors and technology freaks alike, from the perspective of an industry insider who, given the opportunity of choosing his first pick for a liberal high-tech nation, dropped the Nokiaesque lands of Suomi to go Eesti. The morning of conference will end with a business lunch where interested Turks can network with their Estonian counterparts and create lucrative bilateral opportunities. Space in the TOBB Plaza auditorium is limited so those interested in attending should promptly contact DEIK to get their name added to the guest list. Turks interested in learning more about Estonia in their own language should visit estonya.net.

Continuing from where we left off… The lower bound for me becoming a DD was 8th Feb ‘98 when I applied; for comparison, the upper bound as best I can make out was 23rd Feb, when I would have received this mail through the debian-private list:

Resent-Date: 23 Feb 1998 18:18:57 -0000
From: Martin Schulze 
To: Debian Private 
Subject: New accepted maintainers
Hi folks,
I wish you a pleasant beginning of the week.  Here are the first good
news of the week (probably).
This is the weekly progress report about new-maintainers.  These people
have been accepted as new maintainer for Debian GNU/Linux within the
last week.
[...]
Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
    Anthony is going to package the personal proxy from
    distributed.net - we don't have the source... He may adopt the
    transproxy package, too.
Regards,
        Joey

I never did adopt transproxy – apparently Adam Heath started fixing bugs in it a few days later anyway, and it was later taken over by Bernd Eckenfels (ifconfig upstream!) who’s maintained it ever since. Obviously I did do other things instead, which brings us back to where we left off…

---

• Crypto in main: It’s getting hard to remember the days when strong crypto software was classed as munitions and even getting a web browser to do SSL properly was a legal challenge; but for a long while that’s how it was, and as a result we had to keep all our security tools hosted separately to our main, US-based archive. The laws for that changed in early 2000, introducing a new exemption to the prohibition for software whose source code was available royalty-free (I think they called it “public source”). Unfortunately there were still drawbacks: it wouldn’t apply to some stuff in non-free, it wasn’t clear how far you had to go with the source code (is libssl’s source enough, or do you need the source for the apps that use ssl too?), and the biggest problem was you had to notify the export bureau and the NSA for everything you wanted to distribute. And all of that’s couched in the sort of confusing language you’d expect to find in, well, export regulations. So we ended up getting nowhere on merging crypto into the main archive for a long while because we couldn’t be confident of what we actually needed to do. We’d more or less already missed the opportunity to do the merge for the potato (2.2) release because it was frozen more or less exactly when the new regulations came out, and according to my mail archives Ben Collins (DPL at the time) got a team organised to review the legal issues by mid-May 2001. By July 2001, though, we still weren’t really getting anywhere; the lawyer we were talking to was looking at the ENC exception (which was for closed source stuff, and requires an active review by the BXA), instead of the TSU exception (which just requires notification). While it wasn’t terrible legal advice – following the ENC exception had a lower risk of misunderstandings on our part leading to problems later – it wasn’t useful in achieving our aims, ie, getting crypto stuff into main with a minimal level of ongoing effort, as well as a minimal level of risk. So moving onto August, we’d moved on from the lawyer we’d been using for this and other issues, to talking to a lawyer who specialised in export issues (and whose time was being covered by HP). That actually got us somewhere, with the end results being a matter of public record – we got the advice we wanted by November, we got a new incoming system so we could make sure we didn’t publish anything we hadn’t advised the NSA and BXA about, and most of all, we got cryptographic software in main for woody’s release. ssh at standard priority, apt by default checking archive signatures before downloading code to run as root, iceweasel coping with https:// urls out of the box all suddenly became possible, rather than artificially blocked due to pointless legal constraints. Yay! The way we notified BXA/NSA was somewhat interesting – we ended up notifying once for each package, when it passed through NEW: which is easy to automate, and limits the amount of software we block from review by other developers as best we can. OTOH, it also means a lot of notifications: the initial notification was a huge box of paper that got faxed off (there should be pictures somewhere on the net, but I don’t know where), and the vague hope that the ongoing reporting would not only comply with the regs, but manage to be something of a denial-of-service by compliance. As it turns out it apparently got noticed, with the following mail arriving in September 2005:

  From: Encryption 
  Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 12:51:02 -0400
  Subject: Addition to Debian Source Code updates
  Dear Mr. Collins,
  Your diligent reporting of updates to the Debian source code to the Bureau
  of Industry and Security has been an excellent example of perspicacity.
  However, you no longer need to do so per the following update to the EAR:
  [...]
  

  (The mails have always been sent with Ben's name attached) That mail was followed by another suggesting a phone conversation; unfortunately nobody seemed to notice the mail, at least until a year later (to the day!) when Joerg pointed out he was getting bounces form the BXA email address we'd been using... (Since then, based on the above mail, we've been recording notifications, but not passing them on; I sent a reply to the mails above indicating that, but didn't receive a response. There's been about 5000 notifications since then)
• Security and the architecture explosion: with crypto-in-main out of the way, along with lots of RC bug squashing, woody was looking good to come out in April or May, but unfortunately that all fell apart because of a lack of automation for handling security updates. Taking a step back, woody managed to introduce five new architectures compared to the previous release -- HP's pets, hppa and ia64; the IBM mainfram arch, s390, and the SGI/embedded mips and mipsel chips. That came just short of doubling our supported architectures (which had been i386, m68k, alpha, arm, sparc and powerpc), and was working really impressively well: testing was watching that they kept in sync, and the buildd network was keeping them all up to date with the latest source uploads, and the toolchain maintainers were making sure new kernels and compilers didn't cause massive breakages. It was great fun to be a part of, and I'm not sure how much is just blurry memories, but from here, it sure feels like it was a golden age on that score... Anyway, all the extra architectures freaked the security team out, given they were already having to worry about ssh'ing to half a dozen machines and manually do builds, and fix them when they broke, and to deal with that there'd been plans afoot for "rbuilder" to get rolled out, which never actually happened. All of which means it escalated from being the security team's problem, to a problem for everyone, particularly the release manager... The result of which meant knuckling down and coming up with a new security build infrastructure, which involved doing a dak install for the security archive, then building on the changes just rolled out for crypto-in-main to allow for packages to be autobuilt before actually being included in the archive, then updating official buildds for all the various architectures to target stable-security and testing-security and prioritise them and upload to the right place. But as stressful and last minute as that was, at least it worked, and woody made it out the door on July 20th 2002 -- and it's a good thing it worked, given woody ended up getting security support until June 30th 2006 -- the usual year after it's successor is released -- for four years support. (The same rule applied to sarge has resulted in two years and ten months' security support; eighteen month release cycles in general should result in two years and six months of support) Since then, with security managed by dak, there's been a few more bits I've been involved in. The most interesting of which (to my mind) was splitting the security upload queue from being completely secret and restricted to folks who are allowed to access updates prior to public announcement, into separate secret and non-secret queues. That was December 2005, and since then we've gone from having Joey Schulze basically being the sole person doing security updates to two separate teams, with ten new members. It's not without it's problems -- particularly for packages that get (mis)classified as NEW, or that get lost on their way for inclusion in the next stable point update, but it's nevertheless lightyears from where we were in April 2002, or even November 2005.
• Playing other people for suckers: with woody released, the whole "redo to release process" thing was essentially done -- it had been implemented, it had worked all the way to getting a release out, and in a fair few respects had improved things. Instead of the eight months of hand-approved uploads for the potato freeze, things had gone it automatically, albeit with gradually stricter constraints, right up until April; and even when the security problems delayed things, the manual updates only lasted a bit under three months. So at that point I was pretty happy, and looking forward to making things work a bit better and basically passing the buck to someone else. The first bit of buck passing that worked exceptionally well was jumping on Colin Watson, who'd been offering some debbugs patches on IRC, and after a delightfully brief discussion with some of the other debbugs folks, got getting him added to the group and able to make changes directly on the site. His advogato post the next day was:

  Yesterday I was invited onto the group that administers the Debian bug tracking system. I can't decide whether to be intimidated or excited. There's a great deal to do: my first couple of major projects look set to be integrating some of the existing QA interfaces to release-critical bug tracking, and developing a tool to help us edit spam out of bug histories.

  There's a lot to be said for grabbing people at the point where they're still intimidated by what they're joining; sure there's a definite risk that they'll break something you'll have to clean up, but that's pretty easy to deal with, and well worth all the extra excitement and energy that comes with a little bit of nerves. I did a talk on debbugs a few years later, at the 2005 DebConf, at which point we managed to entice Pascal Hakim and Don Armstrong into signing up, if I'm remembering right. At the same time Colin rolled out his implementation of version tracking support for debbugs (which I'd specced up a while ago, and helped design, but cannily avoided actually coding). Shortly after, Pasc put together bug subscriptions, and these days Don's pretty much the primary maintainer of debbugs. How cool is that? Passing on release managership was a bit less fortuitous though; it's a big job, and it's not something that you can offer "patches" for, generally. So after a bit of cogitating on just how to do it, I went with an open recruitment call in March 2003, and then a bunch of practical assignments to get the volunteers used to what RM work actually entailed and to see whether they actually like it. The recruitment call was mostly focussed on all the negatives, half to avoid people volunteering to be RM for the power (to decide which release policy wins, to tell maintainers what to do, to drop packages, or to just decide what name/number the next release gets) instead of wanting to actually do the work to get the next release out and keep developers happy; and the other half was the theory that if you make a job look hard, technical, but not terribly risky, it starts looking interesting to the right kind of people. The assignments generally were two parters -- first to introduce some stuff about release management that they mightn't be familiar with, and the second a bunch of problems that needed resolving that'd use those skills. The first set was RC bug fixing, followed by working out why packages aren't getting into testing, followed by dealing with packages with mutual dependencies and removing packages. At some point that evolved into the testing scripts accepting "hints" from the release team as to what packages to try in combination, or which packages to force out of testing. That turned out pretty successful, with Steve Langasek, Colin Watson and Joey Hess becoming official release assistants in August, and Colin and Steve replacing me as RM in mid-2004. It was also pretty satisfying to see Andi Barth do some more release assistant recruiting in 2005 following much the same model, and indeed using much of my mail verbatim. You can't really ask for better than that, I figure.

Geez, this was meant to be briefer...

On this page I've seen this nice way of preventing email addresses harvesting (I have noscripts installed):



When javascript is enabled/permited, it looks like this:


The code is really simple and could be easily automatically applied to pages (the code obfuscates even more, but that is irrelevant - see the original source for the code):

<script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
<!--
var prefix = 'ma' + 'il' + 'to';
var path = 'hr' + 'ef' + '=';
var addy35780 = 'g.martinez' + '@';
addy35780 = addy35780 + 'pcbsd' + '.' + 'es';
document.write( '<a ' + path + '\'' + prefix + ':' + addy35780 + '\'>' );
document.write( addy35780 );
document.write( '<\/a>' );
//-->\n </script><script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
<!--
document.write( '<span style=\'display: none;\'>' );
//-->
</script>This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
<script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
<!--
document.write( '</' );
document.write( 'span>' );
//-->
</script>

BTW, the PC-BSD site looks really nice, unlike Debian's.

Since Switzerland s three main cell phone providers (Swisscom, Sunrise, and Orange) are apparently happy to remain stagnant, here are two business opportunities, in case you re fidgety and looking to get rich. The second actually applies to all of Europe, or even the world.

1. provide a true EDGE flat rate. The three providers all have unlimited data options, but cap their offers at 1.5-2.5 Gb/month, after which you end up paying horrendous amounts for each additional Megabyte. The marketing people are, of course, aware of this unlimited lie, while the casual customer does not have to be since s/he won t generate this amount of traffic.
2. peer with local providers and come up with a plan that allows me to roam about and use my phone from anywhere in Europe (or the world) for the exact same fees as always. I realise this will be quite difficult because it involves a large number of peering agreements, but think of the potential: I d switch immediately, I d even forego any remaining term I still have on my contract, and I am sure I am not the only one.

Once you hit the black numbers, please hand over a small percentage of your stakes for my ingenious ideas. NP: Gazpacho: Night Update: Gunnar replied with a peek into the situation in Mexiko. Yes, I am spoiled.

I am trying to contact the Swiss Apple Store to inquire about one of their products. I was happy to find a free phone number on their web site, so I reached for the cellphone to dial but could not get a connection. It turns out that they don t accept calls from a cellphone because that costs a fair amount more than from a land line. I ve spent another 20 seconds or so looking for another way to get in touch with them, but apparently they don t care about me or other cellphone users. I ll take my business elsewhere then. NP: Guns n Roses: Use Your Illusion I

So today is the third anniversary of my first upload of the ISC DHCP v3 package to Debian. It all started back in the days of the linux.conf.au 2005 organising committee. Bob Edwards, who ran the ANU Department of Computer Science computer labs (which ran on Debian at the time), was constantly complaining about bugs like #286011, once he'd found out I was a Debian developer. So I figured I'd try and do something about it, so I think I emailed the maintainers, who had been fairly inactive (the last upload before mine was in July the year before), and asked if they'd like me to NMU the package. I think Matt Zimmerman emailed me back and told me to knock myself out, and add myself as an uploader while I was at it, and well, the rest is history... I've had fun fixing bugs, trying to clean things up, deal with a pretty archaic upstream build system and get the package up to current Debian standards compliance. One of the highlights was being able to finally get rid of Debian Installer's dependence on the v2 DHCP client package, so we could finally jettison the v2 packages for Lenny (which reminds me, I still have to figure out how to handle the transition from Etch with respect to that). I've been working hard to try and get as many of the patches in Debian's DHCP packages incorporated upstream. Unfortunately, they have a totally unpredictable release cycle, and they have feature releases and bug fix releases. The feature releases are very few and far between, and they won't introduce new features into a bugfix release. Speaking of patches, my personal philosophy is that distribution packages shouldn't differ radically in behaviour or functionality from their upstream source, so I've resisted incorporating some of the more deviant patches from Ubuntu, instead forwarding them directly upstream. There's still a bit of work to be done with the package. The ISC released version 3.1.0 a while ago, and that's the version I'm trying to standardise on for Lenny. It's got new support for a domain-search option, which means people can stop abusing the domain-name option to set a domain search list in their clients. The domain-search option is also honoured by Mac OS X (Leopard), and I dare say Windows Vista probably supports it as well, but I haven't checked. Unfortunately the client-side support for the domain-search option is a bit flaky in 3.1.0, so I'm hoping the ISC will release 3.1.1 real soon now, as I believe most of the flakiness issues are addressed in it. Of course, for Lenny to do the right thing consistently with this new option, #460609 and #465158 need to be resolved also. The last thing I'm trying to sort out for Lenny is the reasonably in-demand LDAP patch. It's been floating around out-of-tree for longer than I've been maintaining the package. Jos L. Redrejo Rodr guez has been kind enough to clean up the patch for me, so that rather than bastardising the standard DHCP package to build a dhcp3-server package that has LDAP support, it basically builds DHCP twice, once with the patch and once without, and the dhcp3-server-ldap package just diverts /usr/sbin/dhcpd3 out of the way and plonks in the LDAP-enabled binary in its place. I hope to upload a new revision of the package that builds this new binary package within the next week (hopefully this weekend). After that's done, and hopefully 3.1.1 has been released, and Lenny is out of the way, I'm going to focus on transitioning away from a versioned set of DHCP packages. The whole "3" in everything was to allow the v2 and v3 packages to coexist. I've sought advice from the release team about this, and they said not to bother, but it feels really gross to have the version 4 package (4.0.0 has been released by the ISC for a while now as well) be still called dhcp3, and to install into /etc/dhcp3 and other such versioned directories. The final thing I want to look into is collaborative maintenance. I've been wanting to do this for a while, but I wanted to get the package into a revision control system (shock horror, it's not currently) and I've been baulking at how to do it the "right" way. I'm pretty sold on using Git for the revision control system, I just haven't figured out the right approach yet. Martin Krafft's articles about it have been interesting, but feel a bit overly advanced, and don't quite suit my situation. I've been hesitant to start using Git, then discover I've done it all wrong, and have to start again. I need to just bite the bullet. My upstream also doesn't use Git, and doesn't make their revision control system publicly available, so I just get the tarballs when they're released. Speaking of upstream, I made the discovery last year that they're just down the road from me in Redwood City, so I've been trying to improve relations by getting the main folks who work on DHCP at ISC to pop up to Google for lunch every now and then, which so far has happened twice, and been good a opportunity to have a chat. In fact, they're keen for Debian to join the DHCP Forum (Debian is already a member of the BIND Forum) and I think they've started talking to the Debian folks responsible for our BIND Forum membership about extending that to cover the DHCP Forum as well. So that's about it. I think after three years of being the sole uploader, I'll formally put myself in as the maintainer and Eloy as an uploader until I get around to implementing collaborative maintenance.

I just saw The Cure, supported by 65daysofstatic, to which we arrived late. But the organisers had a reason why they started early. True to the concept of a Cure concert, the band played three hours, and two minutes more. And boy was it good. It felt like they were having the time of their lives on stage. Flawless. If you have a chance, see them.

With my new VoIP infrastructure in place, I d like to get rid of the softphones and replace them with hardware. An obvious solution, given how I might need to replace my cellphone sometime soon, would be to check out the Nokia E65, which can do VoIP over wireless. I ve previously dismissed the Nokia E-series phones for good reasons, but Nokia had time to improve them, and I know a few people who like the E65. Waiting for the OpenMoko Freerunner is nother option. If you know of other VoIP+Wifi GSM cellphones you can advocate, please let me know. On the other hand, I might just want to get a separate VoIP phone, ideally wireless, to use at home exclusively. The problem is that there seem to be none. I checked out at least two dozens, and they all fall short for one of the following reasons:

• they are Skype-optimised, or don t even support proper VoIP. I see no need to support this.
• they combine VoIP with regular analog telephony, which I don t need. I d rather pay less.
• they are made by big players, who charge more for their brand than the product is worth.
• they come bundled with some VoIP service out there, which smells like lock-in or extra charges.

Thus, I am reaching out to the lazyweb. Does anyone know of a wireless (short-range) phone that can do VoIP at a reasonable price, either based on Wifi, or using an ethernet-connected base station (DECT). I d appreciate a note. NP: Age Pryor: City Chorus

Yesterday, my phone had a temporary fit, yet I had a bunch of important calls left to make. Since I have an account with a VoIP provider and a Swiss number associated with it, I decided to use it as a fallback. That worked. The next thing I found out was that a meeting had been cancelled, and since I was in a VoIP-related mindset anyway, I did what I ve been meaning to do for years: check out Asterisk. An excellent article by Stefan Wintermeyer in the 01/2008 issue of the German Linux Magazin helped me understand the basics of the Asterisk configuration paradigms in a single read. With 40 minutes left, I installed the Debian Asterisk packages on a test machine and by the time of my next meeting, I had the server register with two VoIP providers (one of them being the university) and routed outgoing calls accordingly: calls to university numbers went there, all others would be routed via Insphone. I also hooked up three softphones and routed incoming calls to them. I shall post my configuration once I spent a little more time with it, configured e.g. voice mail and a simple voice- or DMTF-activated menu system to distinguish work from private calls, and cleaned it up. If you care before then, ask. Asterisk is said to have a steep learning curve. Thanks to the article and the excellent work by the Debian maintainers, I climbed that curve to the point where I can make and receive phone calls in about an hour. Thanks! NP: Age Pryor: Shanks Pony

Thanks to the colleagues at credativ for this nice romper suit. No Tags

After a failed attempt to fix Penny s car speakers taking apart the interior of a Ford is way harder than it should be, and of course we came out of the quest with the obligatory screw which wouldn t fit anywhere I bought a pair of portable speakers. The Logitech PureFi Anywhere convinced in terms of sound quality, and we greatly enjoyed them on our roadtrip. Having bought them in New Zealand, the speakers of course came with a type I power plug, while most of Europe uses a type-C-compatible plug. The design is modular, allowing for the actual plug to be swapped, so I bought it anyway: Back home, I contacted Logitech and asked them how to get the adapter swapped. Their response? It is not possible to obtain the modular plug separate from the speakers. Logitech uses a modular approach to optimise their product lines and ultimately, their profit, but they don t deem it necessary to leverage the power from this approach to serve their clients. Guess who won t be buying Logitech products again! If you are considering their stuff, please think twice. If anyone knows of a way to get at such an adapter, or has one to trade, or can help otherwise, please get in touch with me. Thanks! NP: The Pineapple Thief: 137

Hi, i am Pia Zobel and I watched the sun rising today for the first time. I was born 8:29 CET, 51cm in size and 3050g in weight. Mum is well, though it was a C-section. No Tags

At Melbourne Tullamarine airport today, I was asked to present the credit card used to book my flights as a security measure to be able to fly Bangkok-Zurich. I did not need the card for the Melbourne-Bangkok leg. Unfortunately, I left the card at home for various reasons. In the end, they just issued both boarding passes anyway. I was not allowed to take the throw-away wooden chopsticks that came with my Pad Thai lunch through the security checkpoint. For dinner on the airplane to Bangkok, we were given plastic knives and metal forks. For dinner on the second trip, we got metal knives. At Bangkok airport, I had to pass a security checkpoint changing planes. They confiscated the plastic water bottle which was given to me on the flight from Melbourne (the bottle said Thai airlines on the label). The lady in front of me was using one of those telescopic walking sticks, she apparently had a bad leg. They didn t even bother asking about the stick, which she ran through the x-ray. Terrorists don t have bad legs, nor know how to pretend. How long are we going to put up with this bullshit? NP: The Flower Kings: Stardust We Are

Following the first phase, the second and final phase of the Penny and Martin adventure ended last Friday at Wellington airport. I am now 11 500 metres high on my way from Bangkok to Zurich, looking back at seven days on the New Zealand South Island, another in Wellington, and a night in Melbourne. Here s the summary of the 2200km we travelled, with selected photos inline. Penny has more pictures in her Flickr album.

• Thursday: ferry from Wellington to Picton and on to Amberley, where we stayed with Penny s sister Janey.
• Friday: via Christchurch to Lake Tekapo for a lovely swim in turquoise water, before we set up the tent at Lake Pukaki with Mount Cook in the distance. Camping with a car isn t all bad.
• Saturday: via Wanaka en route to Haast Pass with a stopover at the Gates of Haast for some rock hopping and full body immersion in the icy water (yes, Penny went in all the way, too). From Haast, we took the beautiful road to Jackson Bay and back, before heading into Cascade Valley for another night of camping, this time with millions of sandflies forcing us to dress appropriately. NB: please, no new offers for fashion modeling contracts, I am already fully booked. Penny might appreciate them though, especially if she gets to wear white socks.
• Sunday: fled the valley as if running for life (think final scene of Hitchcock s Birds) to prevent further sandfly attacks and headed north to the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, where we got soaked in heavy rain. Reached Greymouth in time for the tour of the local Monteith brewery and spent the night recovering from the camping in the Charles Court Motel. Monteith s Munich-style Golden lager beer is actually quite reminiscent of Munich-style lager! I also got to take three girls to the men s toilet to see the world s coolest urinal.
• Monday: the bad weather followed us up the west coast to Punakaiki but didn t deter us from taking a short hike to the pancake rocks, nor from visiting the seal colony at Cape Foulwind later in the day. I found out how much Penny loves Nikau trees. From there, headed west for Lewis Pass and passed up on camping due to the heavy rainfall. Instead, we booked into the Maruia Springs Resort Hotel and indulged in hot springs recreation and camping-stove-cooked pasta in the room.
• Tuesday: the weather in Kaikoura, which we reached around noon the next day, wasn t any better, which foiled our diving plans, so we continued on to Picton and decided to cut our road trip short by one day to give us more time tying up loose ends in Wellington.
• Wednesday: got up early to rent diving equipment for two dives at Karaka point, where we inspected (and swam through) an old ship s wreck. We also collected around 20 scallops, which we brought to Penny s parents and enjoyed them cooked in ginger and garlic for a late lunch. The ferry took us back to Wellington that night, where I got to see Eagle vs. Shark, a Kiwi movie starring Jemaine Clement from the Flight of the Conchords and music composed by local bands, foremost of which The Phoenix Foundation. I have to side with Penny: it s an enjoyable flick but probably not worth watching multiple times.
• Thursday: following breakfast at the Olive cafe, we went on shopping sprees (I found a store selling Icebreaker gear at 50% ), chilled in the afternoon, fetched excellent Sushi at the Wasabi Sushi Train, and finally saw The Phoenix Foundation play a free concert at Frank Kitts Park.

My New Zealand beer top-ten, in reverse order: Monteith s Original, Monteith s Black, Mac s Great White, Monteith s Golden, Monteith s Celtic, Monteith s Pilsener, Emerson s Pilsener, Mac s Hop Rocker, Emerson s 1812 India Pale Ale, and (drum-roll): Mac s Sassy Red. Yum! The Emerson beers get no links because the brewery website uses Flash. Thanks, Penny, for a fabulous two weeks! NP: The Flower Kings: Back in the World of Adventures

On my way home from New Zealand, I spent a (Friday) night in Melbourne. Peter, Donna, Andrew, and Mark, all of whom I knew from LCA 2008, came out and helped me get away from the after-work-craze that filled centre city. Thanks to them, I found (and refound) a couple of places worth noting:

• The staff of Joe Taylor, a cute bar at the corner of Victoria and Errol Streets, prepare a delicious cocktail they call Don Quixote : vodka, lime, basil, sugar, and ginger beer. They also have Mountain Goat on tap; their hightail beer instantly became my new Aussie favourite.
• The Hot Poppy right next door has all-day breakfast, including a fantastic housemade Bircher M esli. Both Joel, who joined me for brunch, and I enjoyed it, so you don t have to rely on just my judgement.
• The outdoor bar my brother and I found on our previous visit to Melbourne, fenced off from a small lane with crates and boxes to sit on, is called Section Eight Container Bar. It s on Tattersals Lane, which is off Lt. Bourke Street between Swanston and Russell. It took me three tries to find it again, but it was worth it. They also serve Mountain Goat beers! Issue 5 of the Melbourne Pixel magazine has a review of it in the right pane.
• The Somerset Gordon Place hotel at 19 Lt. Bourke Street is a splendid location within walking distance from the centre. It s a four star hotel, but you can get sweet last minute deals there via booking.com, it seems.
• Federation Square and Wharf next to Flinders Station are always worth a visit.

NP: The Phoenix Foundation: Happy Ending Update: Joel points out that the Australia on Collins shopping centre on 260 Collins street has free wireless

In Montreal, I discovered the joy of visiting Osteopaths. An Osteopath managed to cure Leif's colic and let us sleep, and unlike a chiropractor, a treatment from Martine at Santenergie on the plateau of Montreal (shameless plug) would actually stay in effect for more than 20 minutes (Sometimes for weeks at a time).

Coming to the US, however, means learning a whole new variety of Osteo. Osteopathy was written into law early on, and has grown up as a full alternative to medical doctors - including the ability to prescribe medication. In practice what happens is that Osteopaths wind up in family practice as just another variant of MDs. The amount of "Osteopath" training that they've had compared to an MD turns out not to be that big anyway.

All hope isn't actually lost, though. There are two groups in the US, the American Academy of Osteopathy (Members recognised by the letters FAAO after their names), an the American Osteopathic Assocation (, AOA). Physicians can be fellowshipped into one or the other of these groups and they have different philosophies.

So there are three types of Osteopaths here:

1) Regular doctors (For all that it matters for the patients coming in)

2) Regular doctors who will practice some forms of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, but may not perform all techniques, and whom are more likely to be involved in "Integrative medicine" - helping find overall wholistic solutions to problems that might include manipulation, but might include other naturopathic solutions.

3) Osteopaths who specialise in manipulative medicine.

The downside to #3 is that these are people who've taken full medical degrees, and then had to further it with what an Osteopath would take at home. They're expensive, often don't accept any form of medical insurance, and are generally part of private practices.

With some back troubles I've been having recently, I managed to find a doctor in the #2 category who explained to me how this all works (followed by us figuring out that there's more to it than he can fix. But that's another story for later). He very kindly wrote it out for me on a napkin, so I'm copying it here before I blow my nose it in by accident. =)

Martin's adventure makes me long for some scuba diving, which I haven't done for a couple of years now. Damn you, busy life!

The first phase of the Penny and Martin adventure has come to an end: after a few days of Wellington, we are now sitting on the ferry to Picton, beginning our week-long road trip of the South Island. We spent the first three days getting our PADI Open Water diving certification. After the obligatory pool session, in which we practiced certain basic skills, such as taking off and replacing the mask underwater and breathing from the partner s (buddy s) backup regulator, we were ready for the open water. Four dives at Kau Bay later, during which we played with sea horses^W ponies, captured and ate scallops (well, the others captured them ), and were chased by vicious jellyfish, we can now go diving whenever and wherever we want, down to 18 metres and intend to do so a few times during the coming week. Later on Tuesday, I accepted the invitation by the folks at the New Zealand Sea Adventures dive shop, Mike and Seamus, and joined them for another dive in the evening, with conditions even worse than the previous four descents. Together with my buddy Jess, a volcano researcher from London, I experienced close to zero visibility at about 12 metres of depth rain and strong winds made the water really murky. I can easily understand how one might get disoriented and uneasy in the pitch black, but with Jess keeping an excellent bearing, it was all hunky dory for me, tagging on to her side and swimming along. Later that night, accompanied by two popping ears, Penny and I joined two of her close friends, Lisa and Chris, for an evening of games, and was introduced to the card game 500 , which is rather similar to the Bavarian game Schafkopf . It thus didn t take me long to get a grasp and win! Wednesday was Waitangi day, the anniversary of the equinomial treaty, and Wellington celebrated it with the One Love festival. Our plans for the day eating breakfast in the tree, frolic at the festival, and chill on the beach started to fall apart when we found aforementioned tree to be trimmed beyond recognition (at least in terms of function). A whining, hung-over Chris in the backseat and a traffic jam then made us skip the festival in favour of breakfast at the Recovery Room (great name!), and general absence of summery temperatures caused us to settle in Penny s back yard for beers and the last rays of sun instead. A Thai dinner later, we slept. (This post is dedicated to Daren, lover of and then reports.)

I would like to suggest to my readers to ask airplane crews for explanations of their rules. If we can get a larger number of people to inquire about the reasons behind the do s and dont s on airplanes, maybe the airline companies will adopt the practice. In the context of a previous post on the lack of explanation of the motivations behind airline rules, I was utterly impressed when the steward on the Air New Zealand flight from Melbourne to Wellington asked me to turn off my music player so that I would hear when they asked us to evacuate the plane or similar. While I doubt that I would continue to listen to The Flower Kings in an exceptional event, his explanation actually got me to turn off the player, which I had previously never done (rebel me!). I know it s a bit ridiculous, but I was previously so set on the idea of small devices like a music player interfering with the airplane instruments that I failed to see this obvious bit of logic. The steward thus gets my best steward award. When you fly, ask the crew about the reasons for the rules they impose on you, the passengers! NP: The Flower Kings: Unfold the Future

I am 10 000 metres above sea level, on my way from Melbourne to Wellington. I am looking back at a very enjoyable week of conferencing, with LCA 2008 ending yesterday, followed by today s Open Day. The purpose of this final day is to invite the general public to learn about open-source. Individual projects present their work at booths and field questions by bypassers. Jacinta Richardson and the other organisers and helpers of the Open Day have done an amazing job. The place was buzzing and the selection of projects broad and interesting, even to me. Two talks and a series of lightning talks, as well as catered food for everyone rounded it off. I will try to have this event in mind as we organise a similar event in Buenos Aires after the forthcoming DebConf8 in Argentina. I had a splendid time at the conference and probably can t thank Donna Benjamin and her army of mignons enough for organising it. Compared to the other open-source conferences I previously attended, this one was the most professional. Good job, everyone!!! Here are the highlights:

• I opened the Debian mini-conf with the state of the project address.
• My second presentation on that day was on my packaging workflow (slides), including a live demonstration, which was received well even though I should have prepared it.
• At the keysigning, I (again) used my Transnational Republic identity card and reported on it in another post. I was pleased by the level of attention this got, and how many people approached me during the week to discuss the issue.
• I really enjoyed the talk by Adaora Oniya on communication challenges in Tuesday s LinuxChix mini-conf. Among other interesting points, she listed traits that are typical to males and females and stated how none is 100% on either side. Glancing over the adjectives, I started to wonder about my feminine nature.
• Later that afternoon, a bunch of us sat down to find similarities in packaging workflows of the Debian and Fedora projects.
• Bruce Schneier s keynote titled Reconceptualising Security didn t teach me anything new, but that was to be expected since I am a regular reader of his Cryptogram newsletter. He s a good speaker, but I think his talk would have benefitted from a few, simple slides to illustrate some of his points.
• A few of us met on Wednesday morning for a few games of the Asian board game Go. Paul Wayper and I played two non-competitive games, in which we talked about each others moves and strategies. I think I learnt quite a bit during that session.
• Jeff Waugh s mini-conf talk titled Disintermediating Distributions as well as Stormy Peters keynote Would you do it again for free? , as well as a few other sets of slides, taught me that I really need to work on my own presentation style and get rid of bullet points once and for all.
• The Penguin dinner, traditionally a catered event for conference attendees, took place at the Melbourne Night Market this year. Everyone got food tickets and went off to the dozens of stalls to get food and drinks. This was an excellent idea to deal with 600 people.
• I was very glad to have attended Jason White s presentation on braille and text-to-speech interfaces on Thursday.
• My presentation on [netconf](http://netconf.alioth.debian.org] was well attended and the audience had plenty of good questions. I was able to answer most of them with reference to the design of the netconf core, which is a good omen. The idea of on-demand dialing went into my notes. I screwed up once when I went off on a tangent while answering a question about firewalling and then forgot the original question, but my listeners showed mercy.
• Luke Kanies presentation of Puppet convinced me to allocate more time to this system administration tool. He did a very good job fielding questions and managing time, but he should try to slow down a bit.

Apart from the busy programme, I particularly enjoyed the hallway track , which is usually the reason why I attend these events. I really ought to practice remembering names and faces a bit better. I am not paying enough tribute to this week with this report, but I shall conclude it regardless. Unless something very unexpected comes up, I will attend next year s LCA in Tasmania. NP: Porcupine Tree: Futile