Dear Bastian let's fix your blog post.

Philipp thinks, the fact that rng is not using the information in /usr/share/bug renders rng unfit for release and upgraded the corresponding bugreport from wishlist to serious. Moreover: since I dared to downgrade the report back to wishlist he decided to remove rng from testing and block it until the bug is fixed.

s/Philipp/the Release Team/g. And yes, we believe that reportbug-ng goes against the Maintainers wishes, and doesn't help users that don't know how to report a bug (and which are rng audience unless I'm mistaken).

I don t want to heat the debate about this bug again, but Philipp s decision seems arbitrary for me and I wonder if the same standard is applied to every other Debian package.

It's not, it was discussed in the Release Team and was not Philipp on his own alone. And yes, the same standards of quality is wanted for every package in Debian.

I mean, rng has no release critical defects.

That's you claiming that, there have been really constructive remarks in both bug that we upgraded, and that I think explain wisely why the current reportbug-ng behaviour doesn't makes it a suitable reportbug tool right now. I think for example that Sam's and Michael Biebl contributions in both bugs are good explanations of what is wrong and why.

It just does not use the aforementioned scripts as additional information in bugreports does this really render the software unfit for release ?

Yes it does. Again, people that use rng are I think, less experienced users, who need guidance through the bug reporting process. The kind of users that often send annoying bug reports. Instead of lowering the annoyance factor, you aggravate it. In the end, rng makes the frustration higher, and totally fails to meet its primary goals: making bug reporting nicer, simpler, and more efficient for the Reporter and the Maintainer. While it's probably nicer for the reporter, you totally fail on the other part of the contract. And if you don't care about the Maintainer, then well, reportbug-ng is just a spam machine to them, and your careless attitude toward them is unfit for release for sure.

Philipp thinks, the fact that rng is not using the information in /usr/share/bug renders rng “unfit for release” and upgraded the corresponding bugreport from wishlist to serious. Moreover: since I dared to downgrade the report back to wishlist he decided to remove rng from testing and block it until the bug is fixed. I don’t want to heat the debate about this bug again, but Philipp’s decision seems arbitrary for me and I wonder if the same standard is applied to every other Debian package. I mean, rng has no release critical defects. It just does not use the aforementioned scripts as additional information in bugreports — does this really render the software “unfit for release”? For example: In Etch we shipped a famous email client with a known bug which lead reproducibly to loss of emails on IMAP accounts, just because removing the program, or one of it’s components was not possible in the remaining time.

Sarah and I did the 50km route of Tour de Cure today. Many thanks to those who sponsored us. It was looking a bit dubious for me making the $150 minimum for a while. Sarah raised $170. We couldn't have asked for better weather, really. It was clear, not too hot, a light breeze. The 50km route was very doable. All of the hills involved were rolling, so it wasn't too much of a slog. This was the first major bit of exercise that Sarah's done since her heart surgery, just over 5 months ago now. She held up well, but was totally exhausted afterwards. Some of the uphills were a bit tough on her. I'm totally out of shape as well, and was expecting it to be much harder as a result, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how doable the ride was. That said, we both had a decent nap this afternoon after a dip in the pool. Apparently the 75km route had some gruelling hills in it, so I think we'll stick to the 50km one if we do it again next year.

Sound Juicer "Harder Now With Higher Speed" 2.23.0 has finally been released.. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Hot new features!

• Port to GIO (Michael Terry)
• Update URL handling for New GIO World Order (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix display problems with the cluebar (Pekka Vuorela)
• Add audio preview when overwriting (Luca Cavalli)
• Use GtkVolmeButton instead of BaconVolume (MT)
• Fix crash when no profile is selected (Matthew Martin)
• Add []
• to the special character list (MM)
• Make the year and disc entries a11y (Patrick Wade)
• Fix error handling in CD playback (Tim-Philipp M ller)
• Require intltool 0.40

I really need some heavy testing on the GIO rewrite, so please try and extract tracks to as many different targets as possible. Although I expect confirmation that using an unmounted remote location currently fails, it should be possible to use this to write to Samba, OBEX-FTP, and so on.

Yesterday I got a note from the Debconf organizers about my place in the sponsorship queue (15 of 58). The drawback, however: there is no money to be given out, yet. At least that's what I heared on IRC. The mail sounds a tad different. Considering that I applied for 2300 USD (~1300 EUR) there is no way that I pay this alone, being a job-less full-time student spending the other time with volunteer work. It would be nice to meet up all the other people driving Debian (apart from those I already met at FOSDEM), but considering that I wouldn't even see much of Argentina, well: no. Flights aren't getting cheaper, too. Back then when I searched (February I guess) Lufthansa return flights were offered for 1000 EUR flying non-stop from Frankfurt. I don't might paying a few hundred dollars on this myself, but how are other non-company-sponsored individuals dealing with this notice? (Comments are enabled, but need OpenID. Comments mailed in will be converted if allowed to do so.)

Now that I use Git at various places, I wanted a tool to send commit diffs. And, I couldn’t find one. There is the contrib/hooks/post-receive-email script, which does a lot of smart stuff to interpret the stdin of the post-receive hook, but which can’t send out diffs, nor produce nice subjects by default. Since, to be honest, post-receive-email scares me a bit, and I dreaded the idea of carrying a modified copy around everywhere I needed commit diffs, I went on and created a simple script to send out diffs. The initial idea was stolen from Philipp Kern (kudos!): abuse git-format-patch to produce the emails, and send those. The first hurdle was that the post-receive hook can receive packed updates, whereas you get notified that a branch changed from rev. N to rev. N+4. I really wanted to keep things simple, so I didn’t want to find out a list of all the revisions between those two, and invoke git-format-patch for each of those. And I didn’t want to generate temporary files, either (just git-format-patch —stdout). Then, while doing the dishes, inspiration came, and I saw I could easily let git-format-patch generate a stream of emails, and use formail(1) to split them. Anyway, this story is becoming larger than the script itself. You can fetch it with:

  % git clone http://chistera.yi.org/~adeodato/tmp/other/git-post-receive-diff.git

After a bit of using, and polishing it a bit more, I think I’ll submit it for contrib/ in git.

During LCA2008, Ed Borland of Melbourne-based Triple R FM Byte Into It show took me aside for an interview and asked some good questions about Debian and my work on cross-distro collaboration. The interview was recorded and is now available as Ogg Vorbis file from the 14 May 2008 issue of Byte Into It. Unfortunately, you cannot download it with wget, but browsers and players should work. I am looking forward to any feedback. Thanks to Ed and Phil Wales for their time and help. NP: Mono: You Are There

I am affiliated with a project whose origin is the northern parts of Canada, although whose members span the globe called What Sort of People Should There Be?. The idea behind this nifty and catchy title is to get a bunch of researchers in various fields, from disability studies to philosophy and everything that comes in between to start asking a series of questions about the role of human enhancement today and eugenics in the past, all within the context of thinking about the experience and politics of disability. I am super excited about the project because it spans the past and present to confront what it means to be human, how we value variation, how we seek to support or erase difference, and lastly something close to my academic heart, the role of technology in facilitating and dampening the politics of possibility and hope when it comes to disability. The project has recently launched an multi-author blog and I will be posting there from time to time. If you are interested in this topic, do come by for a visit. I am sure you won’t be disappointed. My most recent post is here and it covers an interesting article in the New York Times on Mad Pride, which oddly enough is in the Fashion & Style section.

A little off-topic exercise conducted in the "eye of the storm", when Ilenia and Helen were still in the hospital: A post on Seth Robert's blog brings up the idea that many Chinese restaurants were opened as a way to go into business without competing with native male workers. The post made the rounds of several other online journals. That was the push I needed to get up and go collect a few statistics of my own, regarding an idea I've been kicking around for a while. My theory is that the number of restaurants of a given type, divided by the number of immigrants from that country might be an interesting way of guaging the popularity of the cuisine in question. In order to simplify things just a bit, I actually used data from Italy, for the following reasons:

• Most immigration to Italy is pretty recent, so it's not necessary to account for the length of time different immigrant groups have been present, and the effects that may have had on the diffusion of a given cuisine.
• Immigration statistics were readily available: http://demo.istat.it/str2006/index.html
• Italian the language almost completely corresponds to Italy the country (outside of a chunk of Switzerland, San Marino, and the Vatican), something that makes things that much easier.
• I speak Italian, so it was easy to find out all the information I needed

Unfortunately, finding out the number of restaurants of various types is far from an exact measurement, and since this is a quick fun project, I just went for Yahoo search (they deserve credit for keeping their search API open when Google's was closed) results on terms like "Ristorante Turco" (Turkish), "Ristorante Messicano" (Mexican), and so on. This was the most expedient means of gathering information quickly, but this approach does present a number of obvious problems, listed here in the hope that someone without diapers to change and a business to run might come up with some good answers:

• Some hits likely come from people talking about a restaurant that happens to be in a country, like "ristorante americano". "Nel tipico ristorante americano, ...." or in other words, "In a typical American restaurant", rather than an American-style restaurant in Italy, which is what we were looking for in the first place. This is probably also true of countries close to Italy, where people go on vacation and thus have occasion to write about their experiences in a "ristorante tedesco" (German), rather than going to eat in a German restaurant in Italy. Perhaps the search query could be improved in an attempt to eliminate this sort of false positive.
• Some restaurants probably are not known as, nor brand themselves with a country name, but instead utilize titles like "Middle Eastern", "Arab", "South American", "African", or others that do not correspond with any one country in particular. It would be possible to group countries together with other adjectives, and get statistics for these clusters as well.
• Measuring hits is measuring what people are talking about, rather than simply restaurants that exist, so if restaurants from a certain country are more talked about than others, that would muddy the statistics a bit. However, it seems reasonable that people would mostly talk about restaurants in proportion to their popularity, and I don't see a particular reason why there would be more talk of Vietnamese restaurants, say, than Thai restaurants, compared to the actual numbers.

That said, for a quick project, this approach seemed to work out ok, and the results appear credible. Obviously, the results also reflect people discussing certain cuisines, rather than an actual number of restaurants, but since it does reflect interest, we'll use the number in any case. Since the number of restaurants/interest in a type of restaurant was clearly not correlated directly with the number of immigrants, other factors must come into play. For instance, "ristorante giapponese" turns up 125,000 hits, but the stats say only 6873 Japanese nationals live in Italy. As above, hits don't mean actual restaurants, but clearly Japanese cuisine is not being popularized through immigration. Here's my guess: these statistics show, to some degree, what people in the host country actually like to eat. Food that tastes good means more restaurants. Things that aren't that popular mean few restaurants, even if there are many immigrants. To pick on one country, there are many Philippino immigrants in Italy, but very few search hits - and anecdotally, I've never seen a Philippino restaurant in Italy either, whereas even smaller towns like Padova have Chinese, Mexican (well, it's called that, even if it's a shadow of the real thing), Japanese, various Arab and middle eastern restaurants, and even a few less common things like Eritrean. And I know that many native and foreign restaurants employ Philippino cooks. Below is the chart I whipped up showing the number of Yahoo hits per immigrant. The Italian names shouldn't be too hard to figure out. A few tricky ones: Giordano-Jordanian, Giamaicano-Jamaican, Spagnolo-Spanish. If you're interested in numbers or source code, contact me.

I bought an HCL MiLeap X for Shruti (who is in the tenth standard) and the IMSc purchased an eeePC for "general use". Now that I have both machines in front of me, it seems like a good time to review them.

SimilaritiesLet's be clear that we are not comparing "jamun" to "aam" (or apples to oranges, if you prefer); these machines have quite a few similarities. Both are aimed at young students who are starting to use the computer for "real work" for the first time. Both the machines run GNU/Linux, and have similar dimensions and features --- even the prices are close. However, we are here to "raise the differences and not bury them"!

Physical appearanceThe eeePC is marginally lighter and more compact. The MiLeap appears to be more rugged though I didn't dare drop either machine to check!The eeePC has a rectangular touchpad which appears to have only one button but in fact this button has a left and right! The MiLeap has two regular buttons and a circular(!) touchpad.The MiLeap is bulkier but has a nice handle to lift it by. The eeePC can be carried like a book and has a matt finish.Both were proclaimed "cute" by Shruti and Sudeshna; I depend on their opinions in such matters!

Hardware featuresThe eeePC scores over the MiLeap X in terms of hardware features. The former has a web camera, a VGA out and one additional USB port. At the same time, the remaining features of both devices are likely to be adequate for most users --- 900 MHz low power processor, graphics adapter, wireless, ethernet, smart card reader. The eeePC has 4GB storage to the 2GB on the MiLeap, but the larger base software install on the eeePC means that the user has about the same amount of working area on both machines.The extra hardware features on the eeePC do give value for the 10% extra that one pays for the eeePC; the latter costs Rs. 17K to the MiLeap's Rs. 15.5K.

SoftwareThis is where the difference between the two is most striking. The MiLeap comes with a pre-installed "classmate" version of EduBuntu. The net result is that this looks and feels like a regular GNU/Linux system configured with software appropriate for educational use.The eeePC on the other hand has a completely icon-driven interface where even getting a terminal is not easy (Ctrl+Alt+T). However, this is just the icing on top of a regular icewm cake. The applications that actually run are just the regular ones --- not customised to fit in with the point-and-click interface.The eeePC terminal has really small fonts and is a regular xterm so that fonts are not as easy to fix as they are for the Gnome terminal used by EduBuntu on the MiLeap. Overall, EduBuntu applications which are based on Gnome are more consistent with the interface than the mix and match between KDE, Gnome and icewm that has been attempted by Xandros; the latter has a lot of promise but needs more work!It was easier to install software on the MiLeap since the EduBuntu repository is significantly larger than Xandros' repository as used by eeePC. In particular, on the MiLeap we installed nethack-qt since that is Shruti's favourite game and openvpn which is needed for us to connect to IMSc from outside the LAN.The installation of the MiLeap is that of Intel's ClassmatePC on which it is based. The entire installation is on a squashfs filesystem image. The base system is used via unionfs at run time on both machines. This makes for easy "reset to default".Suspend-to-ram does not work on the MiLeap; it should be fixed by installing the Linux 2.6.25 kernel.

PhilosophyI have long believed that un-prejudiced minds (like children) will take more readily to GNU/Linux than the hordes of "experienced" (mostly adult) computer users who have well-formed opinions about "user-friendly" software and how particular applications should behave.The "standard" GNU/Linux interface actually encourages exploration and the "tune-it", "tinker" and "fix-it" approach to learning about computing. It is not a sealed box with a "do-not-tamper" sticker. (This tinkering attitude is further enhanced by the approach taken by the designers of the Sugar interface for the XO Laptop.)Since both the systems are based on GNU/Linux (and Debian derivatives no less!), I am nothing short of thrilled at how far things have come. However, will the interface of the eeePC actually encourage exploration? Perhaps the EduBuntu interface of the MiLeap will prove too daunting for a novice. (Shruti does not classify as one since she used GNU/Linux "forever".) Only time will tell ...As Larry Wall has famously said: "There's more than one way to do it!" These devices certainly prove the truth of that assertion within the GNU/Linux world.Devices like these could push GNU/Linux into mainstream usage much more effectively than the "battle for the desktop". Hence, it is perhaps not surprising the both MicroSoft and Apple are trying hard to get into the game. However, it is only GNU/Linux that can comfortably provide a plethora of applications in less than 2GB! Until small solid state disks become significantly cheaper, those guys will have to wait.

A common rant against Launchpad is that it s closed: the code is proprietary, and Canonical doesn t give raw access to the data they collect via the interface. Anyway, other people have taken up this issue, and it s not the point of this post to do so. I ve heard two argument why Launchpad is closed: first, it s a test bed for a product, which Canonical hopes to market to commercial entities to manage their own release cycles. And second: it s purposely cross-project and tries to integrate and link between them. Thus, lots of instances of Launchpad would defeat the point. I ll address these points in turn, starting from the back: While I won t deny a pre-trend towards (back to) mainframe-like computing, with Google, Amazon, and others providing rent-a-computer-cycle services. In addition, environmental concerns cast clouds over the 400W heating appliance under your desk, which happens to run your word processor and browser when it doesn t lose track of its countless spare cycles. Yet, I maintain that centralised services, such as Launchpad are a thing of the past. If you ask me, Launchpad got it wrong, even though it s light years further than its predecessors. It features pleasant graphics and obviously has had lots of smart thinking and experience shoved into it, but it s still centralised. It might be a business case, but it s not what the world needs. We ve seen massive growth of decentralised approaches to classic services, from file sharing to version control, from number crunching to simple web browsing, and yet, there s Launchpad, single point of entry (and failure) to the world of data surrounding Free software (at least if you follow their vision). What we need is something as slick as Launchpad, and thousands of instances thereof, which all peer with each other, automatically. The information would automatically be mirrored wherever it s referenced, so the entire cloud would be highly-available and failure-proof. Obviously, this wouldn t render itself well to the (traditional) software business model Canonical seems to strive for, so they re unlikely to go down this route. But we could. It would be a non-competitor. Update: thanks for the copious feedback I ve received. Among them was a comment by [Elliot Murphy]](http://launchpad.net/~statik), who speaks of us and thus leads me to believe that he s part of the Launchpad team:

We re definitely listening, and we still have lots more improvements we want to make. Our goal is collaboration, not centralization: thats why we build bazaar, are working busily on doing two-way integration with other bug tracker systems, and are building the best API we can. Our goal in the team is to make it trivially easy for you to get all the data that you put into launchpad back out through the API, data portability is very important. There is no big evil business model, but it would be socially irresponsible if we did not work toward making launchpad self-sustaining. It has been a long road, but the launchpad team is steadily working toward a distributed model, one step at a time.

While it s definitely nice to hear that data portability is a concern to them, I don t see Debian using Launchpad without the ability to run it on our own servers. I m definitely curious to hear more about the distributed model the team is pursuing. I certainly don t have a problem with self-sustainability, but in the Free software world, I do wonder what that is supposed to achieve. Release early, release often, anyone? Update: Philip Newborough took up the issue and has received a number of noteworthy replies. It made me very happy that he sees my post as a rant about Launchpad which is not lambasting Canonical for their proprietary Launchpad software; I wasn t aiming for any lambasting. NP: Nine Inch Nails: Further Down the Spiral

In the last week, Nicholas Negroponte gave this unfortunate interview decrying "open source fundamentalism" and hinting the possibility of a warmer relationship with Microsoft. Predictably, this has elicited an ongoing response by OLPC News and on the OLPC development mailing lists. Just a few days before Negroponte's statements hit the press, I gave a talk at Penguicon called Laptop Liberation where I talked about why I thought that OLPC's use of a free software operating system and embrace of free software principles was essential for the initiative's success and its own goals of education reform and empowerment. I've been saying similar things for some time. My main point boiled down to something that, appropriately enough, Nicholas Negroponte was fond of saying back when the project was still called the $100 laptop: an extremely cheap laptop is not a matter of if, but of when and how. This technology will define the terms on which students communicate, collaborate, create, and learn. These terms are dictated by those with the ability to change the software -- by those with access to computers, the source necessary to make changes, and the freedom to share and collaborate. Constructionism -- OLPC's educational philosophy -- is about putting powerful tools and control over those tools into the hands of learners. It is about learning through exploration and creation -- about shaping one's own educational environment. Constructionist principles bear no small similarity to free software principles. Indeed, OLPC's stated commitment to free software did not happen by accident. OLPC convincingly argued that a free system was essential for creating a learning environment that could be used, tweaked, reinvented, and reapplied by its young users. Through these processes, the XO becomes a force for learning about computation and an environment through which children and their communities can use technology on their terms and in ways that are appropriate and self-directed. We know that laptop recipients will benefit from being able to fix, improve, and translate the software on their laptops into their own languages and contexts. Much more importantly, however, are all of the uses for the laptops that OLPC has not -- and can not -- think up. OLPC is a powerful tool for learning, but ultimate power is only in the hands of those that can freely use, change, and collaborate in defining the terms of their learning environments. In its commitment to software freedom, OLPC chose not to be arrogant by assuming that it knows how its users will use their laptops. Flexible environments designed for constructionist learning and a free software platform protect against this arrogance. Constructionism and free software, implemented and taught in a classroom, offer a profound potential for exploration, creation, and learning. If you don't like something, change it. If something doesn't work right, fix it. Free software and constructionism put learners in charge of their educational environment in the most explicit and important way possible. They create a culture of empowerment. Creation, collaboration, and critical engagement becomes the norm. OLPC does not get to choose if educational technology happens. If we work hard at it though we might get to influence the "how" and the "who." Proprietary software vendors like Microsoft want the "who" to be them. With free software, users can be in power. What's at stake is nothing less than autonomy. We can help foster a world where technology is under the control of its users, and where learning is under the terms of its students -- a world where every laptop owner has freedom through control over the technology they use to communicate, collaborate, create, and learn. This, to me, is the promise of OLPC and its mission. It is the reason I've been involved and in support of the project since nearly day one. It is the reason I left Canonical and Ubuntu to come back to school at MIT to be closer to the then nascent unincorporated project. It is the reason that OLPC's embrace of constructionist philosophy is so deeply important to its mission and the reason that its mission needs to continue to be executed with free and open source software. It is why OLPC needs to be uncompromising about software freedom. As an adviser and sometimes contractor to OLPC, OLPC does not need to listen to me. But I hope, for all our sake, that they do.

Update: Richard Stallman and the FSF have published another essay on the same topic focused more on pure free software (i.e., less education specific) objections.

The Bandwidth of Code:

Hell is Other People's Code is, perhaps, another way of saying that code is a terrible way to communicate with other human beings. Foreign code inspires a mixture of apprehension, anger and anxiety precisely because the bandwidth capacity of written code is so horrifying small. Enormous amounts of context, nuance, philosophy, history -- in short, knowledge -- is lost forever each time we try to translate our ideas and desires into program code. And this tremendous loss of knowledge looks to be unavoidable.

Since even Knuth has given up on literate programming as a general solution to this kind of problem, let me throw another possibility out there: Version control. It's not perfect, but you can get into someone's head by reading their mistakes and false tries in their version control history. This is why rebasing is bad. But also why it appeals to so many developers, who have no desire to let you inside their head. Steve Yegge Steve is very quotable. From Xemacs is dead, Long live Xemacs:

XEmacs should drop out of the race At this point it's becoming painful to watch. GNU Emacs is getting all the superdelegates. That warmonger VIM is sitting back and laughing at us. But XEmacs just won't quit!

And has some deep insights into the mind of an emacs user. From the Pinocchio Problem:

Viewed from a radical, yet possibly defensible perspective, a reboot is a murder.

And some things that ring true (or at least provide another excuse for not learning haskell properly). Also from the Pinocchio Problem:

There's nothing wrong with static type systems. You just have to realize that when you use them, you're building hardware, not software.

Best of all they're in these enormous long blog-rants of chapter length that discuss a topic in depth, then go out the other side. Great fun, even if you disagree with him. sad end SFGate reports:

Reiser is guilty of first-degree murder, the jury has found. He killed Nina with premeditation and deliberation and now faces 25 years to life in prison. Pressed to elaborate, Du Bois said, "I'm sure he negatively impressed the jurors."

Hans also mostly negatively impressed me the one time I met him (and the one time I emailed him). And the whole business of hiring Russian programmers to slave away at a filesystem with your name on it has always struck me as shady and disenfranchising. But, after reading Rick's excellent summaries of every day of the trial, I still have no idea if Reiser killed his wife, and indeed no clue if she's dead at all, or instead back in Russia with the children.

Last night, my flatmate asked the question of whether it is possible to do anything in a selfless way, or whether everything one does can be traced back to one s own interests. I am not fit for these kinds of philosophical arguments anymore, so we pursued another topic instead. Today I am sitting on a Swiss flight and am being bombarded by commercials on the stationary television screens they use for safety instructions and the onboard entertainment. Swisscom purchased advertising space, and there they proudly let us know, in German, English, and French that 1 million kids in Switzerland jump for joy as Swisscom brings free Internet access to their schools. Simply so. (sic). When I read this, I first though: why the heck are Swiss schools still in need of Internet connections? Why do we tolerate an economy or situation in which the Internet isn t ubiquitous yet? And then, my mind suddenly made the connection to last night s discussion on selflessness: even though Swisscom is trying to communicate that they re being selflessly good by providing access to the school s, they obviously aren t, or they wouldn t be using the factoid for advertising. The curious aspect is that I wouldn t normally have absorbed their message or linked it to last night s discussion. The reason that I did is because of the gross errors in their English translation. The German einfach so , which I think they translated wrongly, suggests that they did something without any particular reason. I am not a native English speaker, but simply so doesn t exist, and it (thus) doesn t have that meaning. Dear Swisscom, and all other companies who think that English is hip, or who actually want to reach out beyond the borders of four-language-Switzerland: consider employing someone who can speak the language to help with your marketing. Even if you want to let the world think that what you do is without commerical interests. NP: The Flower Kings: Unfold the Future Update: initially, I criticised Swisscom for using jumping for joy , which makes no sense to me. Apparently, however, it s an idiom. I should have checked, especially since I am criticising the use of a language non-native to me. Thanks to the various people who wrote in for kindly pointing out my mistake.

I am very excited to announce that Jonathan Roes has successfully applied to the Google Summer of Code 2008 and will be working on netconf over this summer. With his help, I am confident that netconf 1.0 in Debian lenny is no longer a dream. Jonathan is a soon-to-be computer science graduate from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and his application was (by far) the most convincing of the ten I received. He has several years of programming and Linux experience and it s quite obvious that he has understood the philosophy of netconf. I am looking forward to working with Jonathan! NP: Underworld: Second Toughest of the Infants

We escorted Sarge to its last home. 3.1r8 is done, thanks to all the people who made it possible. A big thanks goes to James Troup, our ftpmaster of the day doing all the grunt work of getting a new point release out of the door. To bring in a more personal feeling of who makes this all possible, here is a list of people contributing uploads to 3.1r8 (mostly people from our fabulous Security Team):

• Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta
• dann frazier
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway
• Florian Weimer
• Gregory Colpart
• Julien Cristau (who is glad that he finally got rid of xfree86)
• Luk Claes
• Martin Pitt
• Michael Koch
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Patrick Schoenfeld
• Roland Mas
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Steffen Joeris
• Thijs Kinkhorst

I would also like to thank dann frazier, Luk Claes, Martin Zobel-Helas and Neil McGovern for helping with the preparation of the point release.

Now, could someone please make Livejournal stop leaking posts you can't read? There is a German proverb "Was ich nicht wei , macht mich nicht hei ." (roughly translated to "what I don't know doesn't make me curious"). kthxbye

Now, could someone please make Livejournal stop leaking posts you can't read? There is a German proverb "Was ich nicht wei , macht mich nicht hei ." (roughly translated to "what I don't know doesn't make me curious"). kthxbye

NPR has been doing an interesting series this week. They've sent out a reporter who is going all across Pennsylvania interviewing people at local food markets. He found a fish shop in Pittsburgh, a market in Lancaster, and some shops in Philadelphia. He sought out Democratic voters to ask them about their thoughts on Clinton vs. Obama.

A lot of the Pennsylvania voters were for Clinton. When asked why, most of them said that they liked Bill Clinton and his policies. A few said they liked how Hillary handled the Lewinsky affair. To me, none of that has anything to do with whether Clinton or Obama would be better for the country.

Then there was the person this morning who was criticizing Obama for not offering specifics. She said she is Jewish, and so Israel is important to her, and Obama hasn't said anything about helping along the peace process. So I went to barackobama.com, clicked Enter the Site, went to Issues, Foreign Policy, then Israel. Then I clicked on the full fact sheet, which was a full 2 pages on Israel, including far more detail than the voter said she wanted.

I often wonder about these people that say Obama doesn't have specifics. Just because each speech doesn't read off a whole lot of information doesn't mean that he doesn't have it -- it's all there on the website. I'm sure people that don't have Internet access could call the Obama campaign and get information, too. It seems Obama ought to do a better job of mentioning this fact at every possible opportunity.

Then I hear a lot of Clinton supporters saying that since Clinton has won states like Ohio in the primaries, she'd do better there in the general election. I think that is a totally facetious argument. Just because Clinton did better with Democrats doesn't mean that she'd do better in the general election. We can generally assume that the Democratic voters will vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever it is. The question is how many independents and Republicans a person can win over.