A while ago I decided to migrate my existing blogspot blog to an own domain and webspace again. My reasoning was mostly, that blogspot lacked some features, which I'd like to have in my blog.
Additionally, my requirements have changed a bit since I originally moved to blogspot and, last but not least, Blogspot was a compromise anyway.

In my article "Last time I've used network-manager" I made a claim for which I've been criticized by some people, including Stefano, our current (and just re-elected) DPL. I said that a certain pattern, which showed up in a certain thread, were a prototype for discussions in the Debian surroundings.

Actually I have to commit, that this was a very generalizing statement, making my own point against the discussion point back directly at myself.
Because as Stefano said correctly there has been some progress in the Debian discussion cult.
Indeed, there are examples of threads, were discussions followed another scheme.
But to my own advocacy I have to say that such changes are like little plants (in the botanical sense). They take their time to grow and as long as they are so very new, they are very vulnerable to all small interruptions. Regardless of how tiny those interruptions may seem.

I've been following Debian discussions for 6 or 7 years. That scheme I was describing was that which had the most visibility of all Debian discussions. Almost every discussion which were important for a broader audience followed that scheme. It has a reason that Debian is famous for flamewars.
In a way its quiet similar to the network-manager perception, some people have. Negative impressions manifest themselves. Especially if they have years of time.
Positive impressions does not have a chance to manifest themselves as long as the progress is not visible enough to survive small interruptions.

I hope that I didn't cause to much damage with my comment, which got cited (context-less) on other sites. Hopefully the Debian discussion cult will improve further to a point where there is no difference between the examples of very good, constructive discussions we already have in some parts of the project and the project-wide decision-making-discussions which affect a broad audience and often led to flamewars.

One would expect, that one of the most used script languages of the world would be ableto do proper comparisons of numbers, even big numbers, right?Well, PHP is not such a language, at least not on 32bit systems.Given a script like this:

<?

$t1 = "1244431010010381771";

$t2 = "1244431010010381772";

if ($t1 == $t2)

print "equal\n";

?>

A current PHP version will output:

schoenfeld@homer ~ % php5 test.php
equal

It will do the right thing on 64bit systems (not claiming that the numbers are equal).Interesting enough: An equal-type-equality check (see my article from a few years ago) will not tell that the two numbers are equal.

I once moved to blogspot with my blog, because I was to lazy to handle all the hard stuff about blogging (finding, setting up and maintaing a blog software) myself. It was a compromise, back then, because blogspot was missing features I'd like to have from a blog software.
Recently the compromise was slowly going to not satisfy me enough anymore and so I planned and executed a migration plan to an own domain and powered by Movable Type.

Because I was always blogging about more technical and Open Source-community related things as well as private stuff, politics and anything else, which I was interested about, and because these subject areas are not really related to each other, I decided to split the blog into two.

So in the future you will find this blog split into two places:

• just:imho tech - A blog about technical stuff and everything which is somewhat related to it. That will be the place where all blog posts, which I'd usually let appear on Planet Debian, will go. It will be written in English, as usual.
• just:imho - Personal stuff, comments about politics, columns, fun stuff which is not bound to technical topics, and all the rest will go here. The main language of this blog is German. It is the successor of the entries on this blog, which haven't been syndicated on Planet Debian.

I've tried to migrate everything to this sites, which has been on blogspot, including comments. So if you happen to find your comments there: Do not wonder.

The blogspot blog will stay around, eventually forever, eventually only for a certain time, to let search engine visitors still find stuff. But this is the last entry I'll publish here.

So update your bookmarks and stay tuned :)

Late last month our six year anniversary of moving to the US quietly came and went. This also makes it six years with Google. I think if you had have told me at the start of 2005, that I'd be ending the year off by starting a six year (and counting) stint in Silicon Valley, I wouldn't have believed you. Six years is comfortably the longest I've spent in any one place since I moved out of home (the four years living at the Central Park Apartments was the longest I've spent in any one home, also). Six years is also far and away the longest time I've stayed with one employer. I wonder what life will be like in another six years' time?

Perhaps the immortal bard was making a more noble and deep reference to the stages of ones life but I feel no compunction lifting the line for my purpose.

Cocolo Overview I recently wrote about buying a fridge for storing chocolate [1]. Jason Lewis (the co-founder of Organic Trader [2]) read that post and sent me some free samples of Cocolo chocolate [3] (Cocolo is an Organic Trader product that is made in Switzerland). It s interesting to note that Cocolo seem very focussed on a net presence [3], their URL is printed on the back of the packet in an equal size font to the main label on the front (although the front label is in upper case). The main web page has a prominent link to their Twitter page which appears to be updated a couple of times a month. Cocolo makes only organic fair-trade chocolate. Every pack lists the percentage of ingredients that are Fairtrade (presumably milk and some other ingredients are sourced locally in Switzerland and Fairtrade doesn t apply to them). Their chocolate packages have the URL www.fairtrade.com.au printed on them and their web site links to an international Fairtrade organisation. The packages also list the organic and Fairtrade certification details and state that they are GMO free. The final geek data on the package is advise to store the chocolate at a temperature between 16C and 18C (I have now set my fridge thermostat to 17C). The above picture shows the front of a pack of Dark Orange chocolate and the back of a pack of Milk chocolate. Reviews One thing that is different about Cocolo is that they use only unrefined evaporated organic cane sugar juice to sweeten their chocolate. This gives it a hint of molasses in the flavor. Children who like white sugar with brown coloring might not appreciate this, but I think that the use of natural cane sugar juice will be appreciated by most people who appreciate products with complex and subtle flavors. The Milk chocolate contains a minimum of 32% cocoa solids, this compares to the EU standard of a minimum of 25% for milk chocolate and the UK standard of a minimum of 20% for Family Milk Chocolate . The EU standard for dark chocolate specifies a minimum of 35% cocoa solids, so it seems that Cocolo milk chocolate is almost as strong as dark chocolate. If you are used to eating dark and bittersweet chocolate then the Cocolo milk chocolate is obviously not that strong, but it is also significantly more concentrated than most milk chocolate that is on the market. The high chocolate content combined with the evaporated cane sugar extract gives a much stronger flavor than any of the milk chocolates that I have eaten in recent times. The Dark Mint Crisp chocolate has a minimum of 61% cocoa mass. The mint crisp is in very small pieces that give a good texture to the chocolate with a faint crunch when you bite it. It has a good balance of mint and chocolate flavors. The Dark Orange chocolate contains 58% cocoa solids and has a subtle orange flavor. The white chocolate tastes quite different from most white chocolate. While most white chocolate is marketed to children the Cocolo white chocolate will probably appeal more to adults than children. This is one of the few white chocolates that I ve wanted to eat since the age of about 14. They also have many other flavors, most common types of chocolate (such as with almonds or hazelnuts) are available. I highly recommend Cocolo products!

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/28/chocolate-fridge/
• [2] http://organictrader.com.au/
• [3] http://cocolo.com.au/

There is an interesting interview with Richard Wilkinson on ted.com about the damage to society that is caused by excessive inequality [1]. The conclusion is interesting, it seems that one part of the solution is to send the message that excessive greed is anti-social. The demonstrations against the greedy 1% seem likely to do some good in this regard. He also has a TED talk about this in which he shows that even the rich don t benefit from great inequality [2]. If nothing else the links between great inequality and high rates of mental illness and murder should convince people that they don t want to live in such a society. Buying Cameras Some of the radio news reports have claimed that some of the people in OWS camps in Australia are somehow unworthy because they have smart-phones and digital cameras. They seem to believe that people have to demonstrate great poverty to have standing to complain. The problem here is that owning a mobile phone is essential to getting employment in many industries, so the vast majority of people who are old enough to work but not near retirement age just have to own a mobile phone. Once you have decided to use a phone if you are going to use it a lot (which you probably will if living in a tent in a public place) then being on a contract usually makes economic sense. As the cheapest contracts include a free Android phone that means almost everyone who is old enough to be allowed out alone at night and young enough to be willing to sleep rough for a cause will have such a phone. A related complaint is about people owning good cameras. One reason for this is the fact that the huge number of cameras deters the police from using excessive force that s a good justification for spending money on a good camera. But then a good camera doesn t cost much nowadays, the specs on $100 cameras are quite impressive and a camera that costs $400 new will have features that are useful for professional photographers and cameras are even cheaper on ebay. In Australia social security payments for a single person who is out of work are as much as $486.80 per fortnight [3]. Therefore someone who is living on social security could buy a great camera if they saved up two weeks of social security payments or buy a similar camera on ebay for one week s worth of payments. When at a protest the widespread use of cameras is essential for protection against police brutality. It s worth saving up for a camera. But really they are missing the point, OWS is about representing ~99% of the population. Even people on the average income are suffering because of the greed of the rich. Is Australia such a Great Place? There have been claims that Australia is such a great place that OWS protests are not needed, supposedly we have a very egalitarian society. The ABS data shows that the level of inequality as expressed by numbers isn t that great when restricted to just income if you restrict the analysis to the top 20% [4]. The mean gross household income per week is $340 for the lowest quintile and $2,380 for the highest quintile giving a ratio of 1:7.0. But when you look at total household net worth it s $27,400 vs $1,720,700 a ratio of 1:62.8! The ratio for the richest 1% would surely be a lot greater but a quick search of abs.gov.au didn t turn up any statistics on them. Also Richard Wilkinson s analysis puts Australia quite close to the US. If the people who are in the top 1% earned their money, paid taxes, and didn t pervert the political process then there wouldn t be any OWS protests. The corruption in the political process and rent seeking by corporations isn t as bad here as it is in the US, but it s bad enough that we need some serious changes. Emily Manuel wrote an interesting article for Tiger Beatdown about the need for an Occupy movement in Australia [5]. Her description of the political problems in Australia is quite clear. But I wasn t convinced by her analysis which suggested that Australia is different from the US in any significant way. Really Comparing Income To properly compare income it doesn t make sense to compare a ratio of money earned, or disposable income which is often misleading due to disagreements about what is considered disposable. It s really about which of the things that you want to do can be achieved on your income. One possible way of comparing it is based on Maslow s hierarchy of human needs. The poorest 20% of households in Australia have a gross income of $340 per week. The ABS shows that the average of private rental prices in the 8 capital cities (where most of the population lives) is $218 per week [6]. Obviously the poorest households can t afford an average rent unless you have lots of people packed in one house. No matter how you look at the numbers it s going to be difficult for low income people to pay for rent and food. That puts them on the bottom level of Maslow s higherarchy. It seems to me that the benefits of increased income diminish and it becomes more of a contest to be richer than other people. Owning an old car is a significant benefit over having no car. Owning a new car has some real benefits over an old car. Luxury cars usually have safety features before they are introduced to cheaper cars, but apart from that the benefit of owning a luxury car is small. Owning multiple Rolls-Royces doesn t seem to provide any real benefit, someone who would want to do that would probably be better served by hiring a good psychologist. Update: In a comment Brendan Scott cited The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen. That s a great point, and I ll have to read that book! I still maintain that owning two Rolls Royces is a symptom of psychological problems, people who can sort out such problems won t feel the need to try and prove that they have more money than others. Charles Stross has an interesting article about wealth disparity etc [7]. Being a sci-fi author he also explores what life might be like after Drexler boxes satisfy most of our current materiel needs. The Age has an informative article by Suzy Freeman-Greene contrasting the OWS protests in Melbourne which were broken up by police to the Catholic anti-abortion protests that have been going on for more than 20 years [8]. It seems that corporations aren t the only large organisations that are pwning democracy!

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2011/10/26/we-quite-suddenly-realized-that-what-we-were-looking-at-was-a-general-pattern-qa-with-richard-wilkinson/
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
• [3] http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/payments/newstart_rates.htm
• [4] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/4EABC33B47FEE100CA25773700169C75?opendocument
• [5] http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/25/why-do-we-need-an-occupy-australia/
• [6] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1301.0Chapter10052009-10
• [7] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/a-cultural-experiment.html
• [8] http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/some-occupy-to-protest-others-to-hamper-harangue-and-hurt-20111111-1nbn4.html

RInside 0.2.5 arrived on CRAN earlier today. RInside is a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package. The big news for this release is that Windows applications once again run! James Bates gets full credit for noticing why Windows binaries died on startup, and provided a short patch which we (after some further simplicifcation) added. So for the first time since the 0.2.0 release, Windows users can just change into the examples/standard directory and issue a simple make -f Makefile.win, and the twelve example binaries will actually work. Yay, and kudos to James. The other main addition is a new examples directory examples/wt containing the web-application of the density estimation demo I had blogged about last week. By combining the Wt toolkit with RInside, we get C++ "web" applications containing R which is pretty nifty. The example otherwise follows the earlier Qt-based example of a standard desktop application with RInside. One minor snafu I just noticed is that I was overzealous with the .Rbuildignore file. By excluding the wt and qtbinaries, I also excluded their source files with the same name (up to the .cpp or .h ending). If you desire to run the examples, just grab these examples files from the SVN repo at R-Forge. All changes since the last release are summarized below:

0.2.5   2011-12-07
   o    Applied (somewhat simplified) patch by James Bates which restores
        RInside to working on Windows -- with a big Thank You! to James for
        fixing a long-standing bug we inadvertendly introduced right after
        0.2.0 almost two years ago
   o    New example embedding R inside a Wt (aka Webtoolkit, pronounced 
        'witty') application, mirroring the previous Qt application
   o    Qt example qtdensity now uses the new svg() device in base R; removed
        test for cairoDevice package as well as fallback png code
   o    Very minor fix to qmake.pro file for Qt app correcting link order

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

According to Eric S. Raymond, one rule for Unix programming is the Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing. Since return codes are a form of information, I would like to add: when a program has carried out its task with no surprise, it should exit(0).Take xscreensaver-command -lock, for instance. That command is meant to make a running XScreenSaver to lock the screen. I have never seen it fail in doing so, however I sometimes get a non-zero code:

% xscreensaver -lock
xscreensaver-command: could not frobnicate window 4212
zsh: exit 1   xscreensaver-command -lock

Well, xscreensaver-command, I have the deep regret to announce you that despite of your surprising return code, you successfully succeeded to lock my screen. But that return code is wrong and annoying. Wrong, because as a user, I do not care if xscreensaver-command -lock failed to frobnicate some window he would have loved to as long as it does its job and locks my screen. To the user's point of view, locking the screen is binary: either it is done and it is a success or it is not done and that is a failure. And it is annoying, because it makes the return code meaningless and prevents you from using it to do things like:

% # Lock screen and suspend to RAM (only if locking was successful)
% xscreensaver -lock && sudo pm-suspend

With xscreensaver-command sometimes returning a non-zero code with no apparent reason, you end with a locked screen and your computer still running, and have to unlock it and try again. This looks like this meaningless dialogue:

• Scott to bridge.
• Kirk here. Scotty, could you restore impulse power?
• I'm sorry captain, I was not able to align the coaxial stabilizers, we just sustained too much damage here.
• How long would it take to get that power back?
• But you have it captain! Impulse power is working all right, it's just that
• Good job Scotty, do you think will hold long enough?
• Well, I'd say it should hold until our next scheduled revision if we take care, but captain, I could not align

So please, when you write a utility, design your return code for the user, not for you. If your utility has done the job, it should exit(0). What happened inside does may interest you as the developer but it does not matter to the user as long as the job is done, so it should not be reported to him, especially not with a misleading failure code.

Today, I've released GePeS 0.2.0. The only major difference is that it should reduce power consumption of your phone while it is running. Reducing CPU usage when application is not active was definitely on my roadmap, though email from "Publisher Support Specialist for Nokia" about this actually pushed me to investigate the issue. It turned out to be quite easy to disable sensors while application is not active and it did the trick. While doing this I also moved to using AlignedTimer to synchronize wakeups with other possible wakeups in the device. As usual, the application sources can be downloaded on GePeS page, binary will be soon available in Nokia store.

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Long time has passed since last entry in this blog. Moderation panel is full of spam comments. It s still unclear if I will ever will continue it. However, given what is happening in my country these days, I *must* write at least one entry, just to put a number there. 632305222316434 Everyone who disagrees with criminal behaviour of Russian president, government and all those rascals, must do that.

Prepare a location to run juju and install it:

mkdir ~/party
cd ~/party
sudo apt-get install juju

Initialize your juju environment. Be sure to add juju-origin: ppa to your environment, along with filling in your access-key and secret-key from your Amazon AWS account. Note that control-bucket and admin-secret should not be used by any other environment or juju won t be able to distinguish them. Other variables are good to set now too. I wanted my instances close to me, use I set region: us-west-1 . I also wanted a 64bit system, so using the AMI list, I chose default-series: oneiric , default-instance-type: m1.large and default-image-id: ami-7b772b3e

juju
$EDITOR ~/.juju/environments.yaml

Get my sbuild charm, and configure some types of builders. The salt should be something used only for this party; it is used to generate the random passwords for the builder accounts. The distro and releases can be set to whatever the mk-sbuild tool understands.

bzr co lp:~kees/charm/oneiric/sbuild/trunk sbuild-charm
cat >local.yaml <<EOM
builder-debian:
    salt: some-secret-phrase-for-this-party
    distro: debian
    releases: unstable
builder-ubuntu:
    salt: some-secret-phrase-for-this-party
    distro: ubuntu
    releases: precise,oneiric
EOM

Bootstrap juju and wait for ec2 instance to come up.

juju bootstrap

Before running the status, you can either accept the SSH key blindly, or use ec2-describe-instances to find the instance and public host name, and use my wait-for-ssh tool to inject the SSH host key into your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. This requires having set up the environment variables needed by ec2-describe-instances , though.

ec2-describe-instances --region REGION
./sbuild-charm/wait-for-ssh INSTANCE HOST REGION

Get status:

juju status

Deploy a builder:

juju deploy --config local.yaml --repository $PWD local:sbuild-charm builder-debian

Deploy more of the same type:

juju add-unit builder-debian
juju add-unit builder-debian
juju add-unit builder-debian

Now you have to wait for them to finish installing, which will take a while. Once they re at least partially up (the builder user has been created), you can print out the slips of paper to hand out to your party attendees:

./sbuild-charm/slips   mpage -1 > /tmp/slips.ps
ps2pdf /tmp/slips.ps /tmp/slips.pdf

They look like this:

Unit: builder-debian/3
Host: ec2-256-1-1-1.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
SSH key fingerprints:
  1024 3e:f7:66:53:a9:e8:96:c7:27:36:71:ce:2a:cf:65:31 (DSA)
  256 53:a9:e8:96:c7:20:6f:8f:4a:de:b2:a3:b7:6b:34:f7 (ECDSA)
  2048 3b:29:99:20:6f:8f:4a:de:b2:a3:b7:6b:34:bc:7a:e3 (RSA)
Username: builder
Password: 68b329da9893

To admin the machines, you can use juju itself, where N is the machine number from the juju status output:

juju ssh N

To add additional chroots to the entire builder service, add them to the config:

juju set builder-debian release=unstable,testing,stable
juju set builder-ubuntu release=precise,oneiric,lucid,natty

Notes about some of the terrible security hacks this charm does:

• enables password-based SSH access (and locks the default ubuntu account), so party attendees don t need anything but the ssh client itself to get to the builders.
• starts rngd -r /dev/urandom to create terrible but plentiful entropy for the sbuild GPG key generation.

Enjoy!

2011, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

This is a less useful writeup now than it would be six months ago when I was first going to do it, but oh well. Some people are still stuck running the Sun Java JDK for a while longer, and maybe it will be useful. Due to a variety of silly reasons too long to get into, the non-free Sun JDK comes with some encryption functionality disabled, particularly 256-bit AES. Those who want to use it have to download and install two replacement JAR files, which are not redistributable. While the Sun JDK is packaged for Debian in squeeze for those who have to use it (usually for legacy applications that haven't been ported to OpenJDK 7), the JCE policy files cannot be packaged. The hardest part of this is that, due to how the Sun JDK is packaged and where the files have to be installed, it's tricky to install them without having to redo that work each time the Sun JDK is upgraded or reinstalled. I wrote up instructions and packaging files for building packages that do the right thing, including across version upgrades of the Sun JDK. If you still have to use the Sun JDK, take a look. (And work on converting your software to work with OpenJDK 7 for the wheezy release!)

Inspired by a discussion in #wayland today, here are snippets from three people explaining why X declares its DPI as 96, and why a single 'DPI' sledgehammer isn't actually what basically anyone<super>*</super> wants. Please read them. Thanks. Adam Jackson:

I am clearly going to have to explain this one more time, forever. Let's see if I can't write it authoritatively once and simply answer with a URL from here out.

Matthew Garrett:

But what about the single monitor case? Let's go back to your Vaio. It's got a high DPI screen, so let's adjust to that. Now you're happy. Right up until you plug in an external monitor and now when you run any applications on the external display your fonts are twice the size they should be. WOOHOO GO TEAM of course that won't make us look like amateurs at all. So you need another heuristic to handle that, and of course "heuristic" is an ancient african word meaning "maybe bonghits will make this problem more tractable".

Federico Mena-Quintero:

People who know a bit of typography may know a few factoids:
- Printed books generally use fonts which can be from about 9 to about 12 points in size.
- A point is roughly 1/72 of an inch. For people in civilized countries, this translates to "I have no idea what the fuck a quarter pounder is".

*: Yes, I know you need to have actual point equivalence, and you've had all your displays and printer colour-calibrated for the past ten years too. You're doing all this in the GIMP or some other kind of design tool, so please yell at them to use the display size information that XRandR gives you right now, already, today.

Updating the bios on my X200 Tablet was surprisingly simple in Debian. Often, updating bios requires some sort of Windows or Dos boot disk and all kinds of machinations to make that happen. Lenovo provides an iso image to update the bios which alleviates some of these problems, but as the X series don't have built-in CDROM drives (and I don't have an ultrabay), All you have to do is download the iso, install syslinux aptitude install syslinux, and configure grub to start memdisk and boot off of the iso. You can do this by copying the iso to your boot partition (cp 7wuj43uc.iso /boot/;), copying memdisk to the boot partition (cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/;) and adding an entry to your grub.cfg like the following (putting it in /etc/grub.d/40_custom is probably the most reasonable):

menuentry "Thinkpad x200 BIOS Upgrade to 3.19"  
       insmod part_msdos
       insmod ext2
       set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
       linux16 /memdisk iso
       initrd16 /7wuj43uc.iso
 

Note that your configuration will be slightly different depending on whether you have a separate /boot partition (I do) or not. Then you just need to boot the laptop, select the bios upgrade option in grub, and tell the program that you really do want to upgrade the bios and that you really do have a full battery and the laptop plugged into an AC adapter. The major idea for this method came from ThinkWiki's entry.

Updating the bios on my X200 Tablet was surprisingly simple in Debian. Often, updating bios requires some sort of Windows or Dos boot disk and all kinds of machinations to make that happen. Lenovo provides an iso image to update the bios which alleviates some of these problems, but as the X series don't have built-in CDROM drives (and I don't have an ultrabay), All you have to do is download the iso, install syslinux aptitude install syslinux, and configure grub to start memdisk and boot off of the iso. You can do this by copying the iso to your boot partition (cp 7wuj43uc.iso /boot/;), copying memdisk to the boot partition (cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/;) and adding an entry to your grub.cfg like the following (putting it in /etc/grub.d/40_custom is probably the most reasonable):

menuentry "Thinkpad x200 BIOS Upgrade to 3.19"  
       insmod part_msdos
       insmod ext2
       set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
       linux16 /memdisk iso
       initrd16 /7wuj43uc.iso
 

Note that your configuration will be slightly different depending on whether you have a separate /boot partition (I do) or not. Then you just need to boot the laptop, select the bios upgrade option in grub, and tell the program that you really do want to upgrade the bios and that you really do have a full battery and the laptop plugged into an AC adapter. The major idea for this method came from ThinkWiki's entry.

This weekend, we held a combined Debian Bug Squashing Party and Ubuntu Local Jam in Portland, OR. A big thank you to PuppetLabs for hosting! Thanks to a brilliant insight from Kees Cook, we were able to give everyone access to their own pre-configured build environment as soon as they walked in the door by deploying schroot/sbuild instances in "the cloud" (in this case, Amazon EC2). Small blips with the mirrors notwithstanding, this worked out pretty well, and let people start to get their hands dirty as soon as they walked in the door instead of spending a lot of time up front doing the boring work of setting up a build environment. This was a big win for people who had never done a package build before, and I highly recommend it for future BSPs. You can read about the build environment setup in the Debian wiki, and details on setting up your own BSP cloud in Kees's blog. (And the cloud instances were running Ubuntu 11.10 guests, with Debian unstable chroots - a perfect pairing for our joint Debian/Ubuntu event!) So how did this curious foray into a combined Ubuntu/Debian event go? Not too shabby:

• Roughly 25 people participated in the event - a pretty good turnout considering the short notice we gave. Thanks to everyone who turned up!
• Multiarch patches were submitted for 14 library packages by 9 distinct contributors
• Four of these people submitted their first patch to Debian!
• Three more contributors worked on patches that were not submitted to Debian by the end of the event, but we will stalk them and see to it that their patches make it in ;)
• 8 Ubuntu Stable Release Updates were looked at for verification of fixes
• 7 of these fixes were successfully verified (one bug was not reproducible)
• 6 of those packages have already been moved to the -updates pocket, where all of Ubuntu's users can now benefit from them

When all was said and done, we didn't get a chance to tackle any wheezy release critical bugs like we'd hoped. That's ok, that leaves us something to do for our next event, which will be bigger and even better than this one. Maybe even big enough to rival one of those crazy, all-weekend BSPs that they have in Germany...

Mika and I will be traveling this winter in the Seattle area and in Japan. The current plan is to be in Seattle December 19 through 28 and then in Japan from December 28 through January 12. After that, we will fly back to Boston for the MIT Mystery Hunt where, as punishment for winning last year, our team is running this year's hunt. We will be in Tokyo for New Years and then traveling around Japan for much of the rest of the time. We hope to visit Hokkaido and Aomori and to travel there from Tokyo along Japan's Western coast through Kanazawa and Niigata. We're still figuring out where we will visit and what we will do in both places. If you are interested in meeting up for dinner or drinks in either place (or in organizing a talk or meeting), please get in touch and let's try to figure something out.

Uff. Two and a half days of hunting release critical bugs ended yesterday evening. It think it was quite a success. According to the statistics we closed 23 bugs with direct uploads, we created patches for 11, 9 bugs got solved by package removals, 6 will be closed by uploads via the delayed queue, 2 bugs were closed as unreproducible, and 9 other bugs where closed as well (e.g. already fixed in older version). On the other hand we opened 3 and upgraded 6 bugs to be release critical. So in the end, we solved about... 60 bugs! Wow, I'm really impressed! I'm also really pleased how well we integrated the newbs. As I already mentioned, when planing for this BSP started, we were a bit worried about the DD / non-dd ratio, but in the end everything worked out very well. All of those, who registered as interested users where able to fix some rc bugs, or help sort out some BTS hickups, e.g. bugs opened with package a but closed in package b. And as a special pleasure it seems, that the longest outstanding rc bug might be fixed soonish, too :) I'd also like to thank Pengutronix for hosting and sponsoring the BSP! The infrastructure worked very well: You arrived, plugged in your notebook, had a local mirror, IPv6 and fast enough connection to the outside. They also provided lots of snacks, cooked food and drinks (later they complained Debian people won't drink enough; apparently they calculated with way more drinks) and a general good atmosphere. PS: To the best of my knowledge, it was also the greenest bug squashing party ever, with most foods and all the electricity coming from certified ecological production. Cool, eh?