After a couple of months' hard work, I've posted the schedule for XTech 2007. And, though I say so myself, it looks good. You can read more about the schedule itself over on the XTech web site, but I thought it would be interesting to explain how we got there. The people bit  After the call for participation, we wound up with 200 proposals in the system. From there, the target was to get down to 5 tutorials and 68 presentations. Each proposal contains an abstract of at most 500 words. I enlisted a small army of reviewers (69 in all) to help, and assigned four or five reviewers to each abstract. 829 reviews were assigned in all. The reviewers work blind, so they don't get to see who the proposer is.
After the review, I read every score and proposal, and created a shortlist of the best scoring proposals plus those that had spuriously low scores given their quality. From this shortlist the hard graft of preparing a draft schedule started. We had already decided in advance on our usual format: four parallel tracks of browsers, core tech, applications and open data. I then filled in the schedule, aiming to create themes for days, or at least for the 2-session blocks. The draft schedule and details of those shortlisted but who missed the cut were circulated among the committee. After some iteration and feedback the final schedule emerged. Picking tutorials was a little different, as this is done by myself and the committee directly. The constraints on choice are more commercially-oriented. Experience has shown we need mainstream topics that people will be happy to pay for. Even so, each year we try to include one emerging topic. Last year, it was Rails. This year, it's OpenStreetMap.
Choices made, I then notified the speakers, awaited their confirmation, and reached the point where we could publish the schedule. The mechanics of it all A glib reading of the above would make it all sound quite simple. And this year I'm pleased to report that it was a lot simpler than previous years. We have been able to use Expectnation from beginning to end, which has streamlined a lot of the work.  Expectnation's my super startup that's taking up the time that XTech and fatherhood don't! I'm about to tell you why it's wonderful, so please forgive a little pride.
Gathering the proposals was easy once the CFP had been set up inside Expectnation. I set up three calls: one for presentations, one for tutorials, and a secret one that the public doesn't get to see. (We always need a secret one for people who have very good reasons why they didn't make the public deadlines.) The review phase Recruiting reviewers was done by Expectnation's request system. This lets me send a request to a large number of people simultaneously, and collect their responses via the web app. (Previously, this had involved email, spreadsheets and wasted time.) The chart you see to the right shows the breakdown of the response to this request. If a reviewer said 'yes', they added a note to say which types of proposal they would review, and signed up for an account in the system. I then passed through every paper assigning four or five appropriate reviewers. A quick search each time allowed me to look for the right reviewers, and ensure no one reviewer got overloaded with work. Once reviewers were assigned, I headed over to the Mailroom department. Expectnation has a large number of configurable mailing targets, one of which is "reviewers with work to do". I emailed each reviewer with details of how to get on with the reviewing. Every reviewer then logged into Expectnation, saw the proposals they needed to review, and used the interface to efficiently score the proposals. One big lesson here is that it needs to be very efficient if you want to get the best reviewers, who are often the busiest. Another wizzy graph enabled me to keep track of the reviews, and the mailroom let me send out a reminder to those reviewers who hadn't finished their work yet, when the time for the close of reviewing drew near. Picking the papers Expectnation lets me sort and filter proposals pretty flexibly, so I went through the papers for each track in turn, ordered by their review score. Anything scored 3 or higher (4 is best, 1 is worst) was almost certain to be shortlisted. I read all the reviews and the abstract, and moderated any score that was unusually low (for some reason, reviewers rarely overrate proposals!) The next step was to set up the empty grid, shown in the top half of the diagram to the right. Here I added the empty time slots to the rooms we had, and assigned putative tracks to each of the rooms (they can be swapped around later if needed.) After that, the scheduling can start, shown in the second half of the picture to the right. Each empty slot can be assigned a paper from the shortlist for the relevant topic. That way it's easy to "paint on" talks into each room and quickly get a sense for the overall flow of the conference. Once it was time to finalize matters, I mass-marked all the scheduled papers as accepted, which automatically sent a notification to the presenters, using the same request system as for reviewers. When a speaker confirms, their proposal status changes and they appear in the final public grid. From there, I am able to use the mailroom again to inform speakers of the information they need to know. Additionally, speakers can log into the system at any time to see when they've been scheduled to speak.
Gridding out the conference in Expectnation is probably the biggest timesaver of all. Previously this involved a lot of sketching on paper or a spreadsheet, and a lot of manual work notifying people, and then more work creating the timetable to go on the web site. Now, both the grid and a full web of abstracts and speaker details are generated automatically. What next? As you can probably tell, I'm rather excited about both XTech 2007 and also about the work we're doing with Expectnation. What's next for XTech is the process of publicising the conference among attendees, recruiting session moderators, and also the writing of papers by the presenters. As the conference draws nearer, the attendee-level interactive features of Expectnation will kick in, allowing personal scheduling and rating of sessions. What's next for Expectnation is that we're ramping up to our 1.0 launch. We're working with a handful of early adopter customers right now, and are always interested in new use cases. As we get nearer the end of the first tranche of engineering work, we're going to gear up the publicity effort and start explaining to the world why we're special. As usual, I'd love to hear questions, feedback and suggestions.

Big bump for stats of german debconf translations This is somewhat expected: most of the NMUs I'm doing today include german translations. It seems that the german l10n team had a great activity between October 2006 and January 2007, which is the period of time I'm fixing remaining bugs for right now. Today's uploads: localization-config, xmcd (switch to po-debconf and a lot of translations). And I finally couldn't resist and I posted a call for new translations for my geneweb pet package. 23 translations and already one more came (Tamil). On The Road to 100%, we're now missing Florian Weimer's debsecan.

Miriam, coroutines have the same problem as threads, futures and all the other interesting concepts out there: they are perceived as a magic bullet when they are merely one tool in the great toolbox. Whether a tool is appropriate depends on the job. Postgres, for example, handles each connection in a separate process, which adds a lot of complexity to their internal structures as all concurrent accesses need to be handled properly. However, SQL's transaction and isolation semantics make a single-threaded implementation almost as hard to implement, so the correct answer was to use threads. The biggest problem with threads is data consistency, and this is where almost all negative examples originate: some variable was not declared volatile, some lock not held long enough, some set of locks taken in the wrong order. A rule of thumb should be: if your threads need to interact, then you should not be using threads. If you have to compute something which will take longer, it is absolutely fine to start a new thread, but then you will have to protect the inter-thread communication appropriately. What is appropriate depends on the problem again; in most cases it will be message queues which allow the other thread to handly the request when it is in a safe state. Coroutines come in at a point where "you should not be using threads", by essentially allowing me to write a producer-consumer model as if it were threaded, and then letting the compiler build a nonthreaded version from that. In the C++ world, most algorithms can not be combined directly because they are written as a consumer/producer loop and cannot be suspended -- coroutines will make that possible.

The other night I was rocking out to a newly acquired swath of rock and techno from the 1970s and 1980s when Mako pinged me on IRC to chat about my recent blog post, the outcome of which the was his following blog entry. And indeed, I made the associations and links very quickly to gesture to the absurdity of how these example are collapsed and under the umbrella of IP law and as a move to argue for maximalist positions. He took the time to explain how certain folks, like Pat Choate in Hot Property used these very examples to argue for more not less protection. Does anyone know of a case of people using these types of examples to argue the opposite or differently as I think can also be done?? (that is aside from Mako’s wonderful post)

On January 13, I sent a mail to debian-private saying I'd be on a semi-vacation until around February 10 - And yes, for over a month I've basically not touched my packaging, and for around three months my general profile in Debian has been really low. I sent this message because the Institute I work at moved, and I got the task of taking care of everything related with electrons flows carrying information (namely, voice and data networks).
It's not that I'm really-really-back now - Work is still too absorbing, users still come too often to me expecting me to solve their problems. I can often try to do so on the data network, but I'm far from even having access to the voice equipment (I've done my hardest effort not to get such access, because that'd instantly turn me into the phone operator for life). However, for the first time in many weeks, today I had some quiet time, I catched up with some mailing lists, and... Well, I expect to work on my QA page.
Boy, team-maintainership rules! pkg-perl friends, thanks for saving me from the creepy bugs sometimes too often. I expect to pick up work I haven't even looked at since I committed to doing so with the pkg-ruby-extras team as well, specifically, getting mongrel in shape and into Debian, despite our deep differences with its author. This will make Rails roll smoother and faster in Debian. And of course, there is Debconf. After last year's burnout, I think I recovered - I'm not a core organizator anymore, but I'm back to work my way to Edimburgh ;-)
As for my local activities (Mexican Free Software conferences, meetings and people): Partly because so I decided and partly because so it happened, I've been off the hook with the local community since before Debconf 6. Before, because I was too busy to think about anything besides it, and after, because I was burnt out and somewhat bitter at several facts. I've been to few regional or local conferences, also because I knew that between last October and today I'd be too tied up at work. But last week we had both CONSOL and BarCamp Mexico. Somehow I managed to be at both (well, at CONSOL I was only enough time to do my two talks, for which I miraculously managed to get prepared, and BarCamp was during the weekend). Both were very positive for me, and I'm willing again to find some time to devote to promoting and developing Free Software in our country.
Oh! One more note: Thanks to Sergio Mendoza for pushing me and for co-discussing on the subject, we are getting small but tangible results pointing to a Debian-UNAM project. Not much to see yet, besides having received the domain authority, which for now just means a nicer name for Nisamox, Mexico's main (and only long-running) full Debian mirror.

A pirated movie carries little consequence, except for that the movie industry may lose some cash flow. A fake Rolex purchased on the bustling streets of NYC saves you a lot of money (and robs you of a warranty). But counterfeit drugs, the consequences and stakes are at a whole other, more serious, order of things.

Bastian, what about using sshfs (needs fuse)?

And thanks for the tip!

I just had some spam from "Kingpin Intelligence" about Sun's London Tech Days '07 A Worldwide Developer Conference 13th - 15th March 2007 - Central Hall, Westminster SW1. It seemed to include some filter-defeating random strings. Why are Sun using spam to promote their events? I've obsoleted the email address from LWCE2004 that it was using. Please use the enquiry form to contact me at work.

When More is Not Enough is not only clever parody but has such a nice fusion of content and form….

Congratulations are in order to my friend Nicolas Ritoux. He's upgraded Hysterie to use a CMS and CSS. Hysterie is a venerable online magazine here in Quebec, and Niko's converted the site (formerly hand-coded in HTML) to use SPIP, a clever little CMS which seems to be working nicely for him. I think the principal reason he chose it was that it was made in France, however. Anyways, I know he's been working hard on it, since he wanted the site to match pixel-perfect with the hand-coded, table-based, old style. I'm glad he's done; it looks really good. tags: niko spip hysterie cms css

FreeYourID.com I was pretty psyched to see on Scott Kveton's blog the story about the free OpenIDs from the .name registry. Apparently the FreeYourID.com site gives you a free 90-day trial of a .name registered domain, which you can use as an OpenID. I've been using my .name domain as my OpenID for quite some time. I think they're pretty cool. tags: .name opeinid freeyourid.com kveton free

Read receipts I've been having a lot of trouble with email lately. There's been such a flood of stock fraud spam that many of my outgoing emails get caught in other people's spam traps, or lost in the crowd of UCE. I've started requesting read receipts on email that I send to individuals (not mailing lists). It's a simple way for me to make sure that email is getting through to people. I actually like read receipts a lot; I hate writing "I have received your message" messages, and read receipts are a quick and easy alternative. There are some folks who don't like read receipts, and that's fine; they'll just have to put up with me asking through other channels if they got my email. tags: email read receipts spam e-mail tracking

While I use delicious, I find it somewhat of a chaotic mess, even if you can eventually find stuff thanks to le tagging. Because of the chaos, I have decided to compile a simple list of my favorite articles and books. Most of these are good for teaching and make a worthy second read. I have had to rely on memory to get most of the articles I have on the list there so there will be others coming soon. I am also more interested in getting the articles there than the books (and actually am putting books that I would use to teach with which is why there is not much up there now).

Yesterday, I sent out an email to the debian-events-eu mailinglist, to ask for more volunteers for the FOSDEM booth next weekend. The situation is a little less desperate now than it was yesterday, but I would still need about 5 extra people who would want to put in one our at the booth. Manning the booth at FOSDEM is not hard; you need to know a bit about Debian to be able to answer questions (which means that you don't even have to be a Debian Developer), and be sure to be at the booth for your designated hour. I fully expect you not to be there all alone, but you will have final responsibility for the stuff that's at the booth during your hour, and you are not to leave it, just in case everyone else does at some point, because of a rather interesting talk, or the keysigning, or some such. If there are interesting things which you definately don't want to miss, then just let me know the hours that would work for you; I'll consider them then when I put you on the schedule.

Vim's Feature of the Day #2: Context-Aware Completion for XML (in 5 minutes!!!) You're editing yet another Debian sub-policy. Of course the policy is written in Docbook XML and (should I even need to mention it?) of course you're using Vim. The Docbook v4.4 specification is huuuuge and you happen to know just a tiny teeny part of it. Hence you're dreaming of XML Spy or Emacs context-aware completion. Shame on you misbeliever!, Vim can do the same!! Here is how to set-up in 9 easy steps context aware completion for Docbook v4.4 with Vim7 in Debian/unstable:

# aptitude install docbook vim-scripts perlsgml
$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload/xml/ ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/xml/
$ cp -r /usr/share/sgml/docbook/dtd/xml/4.4/ /tmp/docbook-dtd/
$ cd /tmp/docbook-dtd/
$ SGML_CATALOG_FILES=/etc/sgml/catalog dtd2vim docbookx.dtd docbk44
$ mv docbookx.vim ~/.vim/autoload/xml/docbk44.vim
$ rm -rf /tmp/docbook-dtd/
$ echo "runtime ftplugin/xml.vim" >> ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/docbk.vim
$ echo "XMLns docbk44" >> ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/docbk.vim

Now just start Vim on an .xml file containing some Docbook markup and let the fun begin:

• in insert mode place the cursor just after a '<' character and type CTRL-x CTRL-o: Vim will present you a choice of opening tags which can be placed there respecting the content model
• in insert mode place the cursor before the '>' character of an opening tag and type CTRL-x CTRL-o: Vim will present you a choice of attributed which can belong to the current opening tag

Warnings: dtd2vim is a recent addition to vim-scripts, you will need >= 7.05. If you start editing a file which Vim is not yet able to recognized as a Docbook file (e.g. an empty file) don't panic, setf docbk is your friend. Enjoy! PS an even higher fun level while editing XML with Vim can be obtained using the "xml" ftplugin shipped by vim-scripts ...

Very early tomorrow I'll be flying to Oslo for my second week at the Telemark. The only fixed plan for the week is to do ski daytrips all over the Gausta area, and, maybe, attempt topping it if my skills with the Telemark skis are good enough. I don't think so, though. Unlike two years ago, the weather will be a bit less gentle, according to the forecast. It is expected there'll be snow and under -5 C next Tuesday at noon, when we'll be out in the forests. Eww! While I planned to hang around Oslo with Tollef while we waited for our bus to Rjukan, it seems this year we don't have that much time to kill. So, depending on how tight the return is, I hope we can at least have a beer next Saturday instead! Keep an eye on your e-mail.

Since there are few topics about academic etiquette than get me as excited as the norms of citations, I was quite fascinated by Joseph Reagle’s blog entry on the topic, a discussion that spanned a summary of Helen Nissenbaums’ work on the subject to his own wrangling with how he should recognize others who have independently reached similar conclusions as his own. Citations fascinate me because they are one of the few tangible inscriptions that reveal just how much of our work is indebted to others; it is stimergic (and if you don’t know what that is, read Joe’s entry as his moral wrangling over citations had to do with this term, his use of it and the discovery that someone else came up with it also). Despite the fact that all disciplines use them, we use them slightly distinctly. Lawyers use them in lawyerly-like ways: they cite the crap out of everything (it is kinda annoying but kinda helpful) and this makes total sense: they are covering their asses (lawyers know how to do this well), they are following the logic of their own practice as case law is quite citational, and well, law professors usually have one if not two research assistants, and this I am sure helps them in covering their citational bases. Another big difference in practices of citations is between a conventions that includes the name of the person you are citing in the body of the text and those that stuff all that data in a footnote. I can’t stand the later convention, not only because it is a pain in the neck to have to go back to the footnote JUST to see who the heck the author is citing but I think the credit should be right there, springing off the page so that the politics of collaborative recognition are, well, very evident (and I do understand that if you are citing a buttload of folks, that sometimes it is just better to do that in footnotes and sometimes with history they are citing way to may folks to really do it effectively in the body of the text). Joe raises some fundamentally thorny questions of who and how do we cite given that we may come up with an idea with the power of our own little brains, only to find out (gasp) that others, past and present and very unknown others, say something similar. On the whole, I tend to try to make clear, as Joe did in the example he provided, where I am totally taking the idea from someone to apply to another idea of mine and where I have an independently crafted idea and I am citing others so as to support my own position, which usually only strengthens my own argument. And what I find is that just because a cohort of folks may be working on similar topic (open souce, hackers), since we do so from our own perspectives and methods, most of the research will be original, though not as much as we tend to perform to our superiors. Also I sometimes find myself with an idea, which I consider as my own, but where I am so in need of a citation because it is an idea that seems at an intuitive level to be right on but it is hard to truly substantiate with the data I have (I am in that position right now and am desperate to find someone who says what I say and thus have a means to support what otherwise seems like a lofty idea…) And in fact, one thing that bothers me about citations is that we don’t seem to take seriously that the date of publication may not just tell us when something was published but help us gauge if something can become “dated.” What I mean is that when (and I guess if) I publish my book on hackers and Debian, it will not be a reflection not of some timeless aspects of hacking but firmly based out of the time period (roughly 10 years give or take 3 or 4) that I was either researching and writing about the topic. And while you can and should cite folks who wrote stuff in the past because that stuff still matters (a lot of what Steven Levy says for example still holds water) a lot changes. And yet I can’t stand how folks then cite someone as wrong when in fact all that went wrong is that time does what it does best: MOVE FORWARD and social phenomenon change along with the passing of new moons. This is not as likely to happen in the hard sciences but sure as heck happens with anything in the so-called human realm (which is why it bothers me that the social sciences and humanities model our citational and journal practices so similarly to the hard sciences, when it seems there are enough differences to warrant more differences than there are but that is a whole other topic). So now I try to note where my analysis diverges because the context so radically changed and really leave critique for those things I can safely and fairly disagree with on its own terms.
Finally, Nissenbaum’s article seems so interesting (I have not yet read it but now will) because it confronts how our practices of citations may or may not (or should) change in the face of a proliferation of access to work due to electronic media (she flags: wildcat publisher, grey literature, preprints). But I have found that, at least in anthropology journals, and especially in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, authors are mostly citing other anthropologists, as if a whole scholarship on a topic was non-existent, which seems more odd today when it has gotten easier to mine and find this stuff. They only cite “non-anthro others” when these folks are so standard, it would look horrible not to do so, but there is not a move to branch out, which I find a real shame and why I sometimes get really down on disciplinary journals (and why I am quite content to be joining an interdisciplinary department). And to be clear, I don’t fault individual authors, it seems that this is the unstated expectation and if that is what is going to get you in a journal, and that is what gets you tenure brownine-points, then you do as everyone else does. And that brings me to the final point which is the problem with standards in citational practices. So for example in the field of science studies, everyone must and usually does cite Bruno Latour. And as Chris Kelty reminded us, there is *very* good reason to. But I find what happens is that once a person is flagged and gets cited ad nauseum (which is mostly a decent but not full proof baramoter for judging good work), it become self-perpetuating reality/cycle because everyone else is doing it and it seems weird if you don’t (and I have sometimes seen some articles just awkwardly cite famous people in their discipline when it made little sense to do because, I think of this phenomenon). So all of a sudden, it becomes all Microsoft-Windows like: you cite, they cite, and it becomes “standard” who you cite and you can’t seem to escape the default. But alas, there is always an escape hatch, because one of the gems in academia is discovering that one theorist or book relate x to y and z topic that for some reason everyone else overlooked (because they were busy citing Latour,) to bathe some topic in a wholly new light and then a whole group of folks become unfashionable and the cycle begins, yet again…. The solution? If we only had a couple of research assistants like the lawyers, well maybe we could branch out a little and cover our bases a little..

Is your idea of an awesomely good time writing, over the course of 15 hours, a series of haikus? Are you an academic? Or do you write about things academic ? Well if you answered yes then do join this contest and I guess you should do it for the love of haiku writing and not the prize because, well 10 bucks from the Itunes store is not a huge pot of virtual gold, and anyway, I know a lot of readers of this blog are pretty anti Ipod/Itumes for DRM but many are also into haikus so… go for it. I am trying to get Seth Schoen to submit his now world famous haiku though it is a “little” long. Since I am mostly a right brain person (so that writing a haiku is excruciatingly painful), I will not submit my own haiku but at least I am wrapping up an article on a haiku (and yes it is Seth Schoen’s haiku).

Last month, Bel n and I managed to secure our trip to Tunisia on the very last moment. So, planning trips on the very last moment isn't nothing new around this place, but we made a big effort to take things to the limit. I can't remember why exactly, but on January 31 we were *so* close to fucking everything up before it started, when we packed our stuff just a pair of hours before having to leave to the train station. My luggage was prepared in a rush, so while I think I took everything I thought I'd need, I didn't really select my clothes too much. The idea was to have our suitcases mostly empty to bring back stuff from the markets: smoking cachimbas, lamps, leather stuff, etc. At that time I didn't know that would end up being a great strategy. Anyway, like 9 minutes before the train's departure we were stuck in Nuevo Centro without a taxi and at that point I really had lost hope about being on time. For some reason, there were no taxis in the area, when it's normally a place where there's tons of them. Suddenly one appeared, we rushed in and I asked the taxi driver to please fly to the station. Happily, we got an incredible green wave around the avenues, he drove us at like 80 Km/h and we even had to wait for a few minutes at the station. In Barcelona, we prepared our small New Year's Eve dinner with my cousin Laia and Marc, and while the plan was to go to sleep pretty early to be in good shape to go to the airport next morning, the bottles of wine and cava emptied quite fast, and around 4:30 we were quite drunk when we decided it was enough. When some annoying sound woke us up next morning, it was really late, so we again rushed out to the empty streets of Barcelona, sneaked into a regional train, without knowing it was the only way to get in time in El Prat airport, and after some initial confusion trying to find the travel's agency desk in the wrong terminal, we managed to check into our flight, being the very last to do so. With all the rush, I couldn't get some clothes from my suitcase transfered into my hand luggage, which I really wanted to do after my nice lost luggage experience during Debconf 5 in Helsinki. Anyway, chances are small that your luggage gets lost, right? But of course, Murphy is always vigilant, and this was a great opportunity to fuck me up. After a short but horrible (due to our really bad hangover) to Tunis/Carthage airport, we were in the long security/passport check. When Bel n picked up her bag and mine didn't appear, I tried to tell myself hey, it'll appear, no worries! . After 15 minutes, the stupid suitcase was nowhere to be found. Apparently, another two pieces of luggage had the same luck, which made us contact a group of four Uruguayans who were missing one of them. Nothing too terrible; it'll surely come on tomorrow's flight. After reclaiming our lost luggage, we went out to the parking where a bus was waiting for us, and on the way there, the six of us nearly fell into the first Tunisian scam, involving a dude selling jasmine flowers at 2 each. The bus took us down to Jasmine Hammamet, the most touristic place in Tunisia. Valencians might have an easy imagining the atrocity of the area by picturing what twice Marina d'Or plus Benidorm including Terra M tica would look like. Kilometres and kilometres of a disgusting Who can build the most horrible giant hotel right next to the beach contest. So it was pretty clear we had to spend as little time as possible in the area. We soon learned about how transport works in Tunisia. The cheapest is to use the public busses and the luagge collective taxis, we soon found out. Our first morning there, our guide Rejeb, working for Iberojet and Solplan touroperators, gave a talk where he advised us against travelling alone, specially around the South, while he offered organised trips around the country for every day of the week. Although we expected this danger! speech, we decided to book the two day trip to the South and Great South of the country, basically because it was the best way to see many places in a short time, even if it meant having limited time in each destination. We wandered around Jasmine Hammamet and discovered Carthage Land, sort of a Disneyland set in the age of Anibal and Carthage's empire, which was inside a newly built medina complex. This was a really bad place to practice the art of haggling, as the place was so desert, merchants really tried hard to get you buy something. Again, we were close to fucking up after our first negotiation, but we finally decided we weren't so interested. Lucky, we later found out the price was outrageous. Sadly, we spent way too much time in that tourist trap, and we found it was too late to go to the real Hammamet town to see a real medina and real stuff, so we had a long walk around the immense beach until sunset. On Wednesday, we did organise a bit with the Uruguayans and some others we had met: Mar a and Santi Kuchi Kuchy , Cristina and Pedro and an Argentinian family, and managed to hire a van driver to drive us all over the North. For quite a good price, we were taken to a few ruin sites in Carthago, now mostly a residential area, and it was really impressive. While the condition of many of the remainings is not optimal, it was exciting to see things which had been built by Phoenicians and Romans 2,000 years ago. I really enjoyed the remainings of the Antonine thermal baths of the city. It had been a huge building right next to the sea; one of the standing columns helps figuring out how big it had been. Right next to this site, the Presidential Palace dominated the whole gulf. Military places are treated zealously in Tunisia, and it is against the law to take pictures of any bit of it, not even a barbwire of the fence. The Palace had a great Tunisian flag waving over it, and many signs advised you against taking pictures in that direction. I couldn't resist.

The ruins of the Roman Antonine Baths After Carthage, we went to Sidi Bou Said, a small touristic town, which had the peculiarity and beauty of having all windows and doors painted in a beautiful light blue colour. Our last stop for the day was in Tunis, where we visited the most amazing medina of the whole week. Unlike the new medina in Jasmine Hammamet, this one was literally packed with people going up and down the maze of very narrow streets. Every few metres you'd come across a new, attractive smell coming from the few salons de th or spice, leather or perfume shops. Here we finally started developing our haggling skills, and managed to get a few items for reasonable amounts.

Streets of Sidi Bou Said Back at our hotel, everyone tried to get a quick dinner and go early to bed, as next morning we were taking a bus for our trip around the South. There was time to call yet another time to the Airport, to find out that one of the luggage pieces had been found. While there was no news about my suitcase, we shared a taxi to the airport to pick the found suitcase, and see if mine was actually there by any chance. Unluckily, it wasn't, so I wouldn't have any clothes for the desert visit. Some people in the group were kind enough to lend me some t-shirts and pants. For my underwear, I actually resorted to using some of Bel n's (no kidding, it was way too sexy :P), while mine dried up after some manual washing. The alarm clock went off at 5:15 or so, and soon after we were ready in the hall with our small bags. When the bus was ready to pick us up, the guide said we weren't allowed in, as we weren't on the list. WTF? We were nearly the first ones to book and pay for it! So he finally let us in, for a short while, until he realised there was no space for everyone, so he demanded that we got off. Of course, we didn't, and a long and very disgusting argument started between the guide, us and a few people who had seen us pay for our trip, and were trying to support us. To make a long story short, we ended up stepping down when I noticed the bus driver calling the police, and after Rejeb, our guide, told us the other bus would be waiting for us at the travel agency if we quickly took a taxi there. We of course knew that was a fantasy to get the bus moving, but dealing with the police at 6:30AM wasn't on my list of activities for the day, so we finally gave up to let the rest of the people get in time to their visits, as they were very tightly scheduled to make everything fit in two days. Nobody was waiting for us at the travel agency, but we were promised our money back, which did happen in the evening; our plans for Thursday and Friday were a bit broken though, and the rest of the morning was spent looking for alternatives. When we had managed to book a new trip in a different agency for Saturday, we took the bus to Nabeul, the capital of the province, well known for their medina specialised in pottery. In Nabeul, we lived a tourist trap which I found to be quite original. Not having walked 3 metres into the city walls, some young dude stops us and tells us that he knows us, as he works in the restaurant of our hotel . I totally didn't remember his face at all, but why not? So he quickly tells us Nabeul has good carpet workshops, and her sister is working in one which is regulated by the Government, and you can only visit two days a week. Coincidentally, Thursday is one of them! So he literally grabs us by the arm and takes us to one of the streets perpendicular to the main market street, and we enter a carpet shop. To the right, his sister probably being like 45 years older, is knitting a nice carpet on the loom. And a few seconds after, we're taken upstairs, where a Teletienda show starts before us. Without being asked if we want to buy a carpet, some other dude starts to unroll carpets and more carpets before us, talking in some very basic Spanish. While we're offered jasmine tea, which is really nice, Ali the brother quickly excuses himself and vanishes, leaving us with the salesman, which continues unrolling more and more before us, now helped by someone else. When 10 minutes later we convince them that we won't buy any carpet, he asks a donative for his young employee, who has unrolled and will now roll back a zillion carpets. Back in the hotel, we have dinner with a pair of Catalans from our flight, and when we tell us about the carpet place, they tell us they went over the same story like one hour before us! On Friday, we got some advice on other places to visit, and decided to go up to Cape Bon and visit Kerkuan, the only important remainings of a Punic city which, when conquered by the Romans, was destroyed to the grounds, but not rebuilt on top (they were busy with Carthage). Romans did an excellent job when destroying cities, and the result is a site which still lets you see perfectly how a small town (around 1,500) looked like 2,000 years ago.

Ruins of a Kerkuan neighbourhood, with their red bathrooms nearly intact To reach Kerkuan we had taken the bus up to Nabeul and then our first luagge to Kelibia, where we took a taxi (after no less than half an hour arguing in French with the taxi driver to settle on a rate for a ride to Kerkuan and then to the tip of the Cape in El Haouaria. Luagges are undoubtedly the best way to travel medium distances for very little money, while getting mixed with locals. During our ride up North, we chatted with a nursing student from Kelibia who was going back to her town for the weekend. She was really open, like most of the people we found in Tunisia, and we ended up exchanging our post addresses; we still need to send her a postcard from Val ncia soonish. This area wasn't so touristic, so the roads, while totally acceptable, weren't as good as the highway from Tunis to Sfax we were used to. We had seen some bits of the local driving skills , but the luagge driver performed some of the most extreme overtakings I've ever seen. These happened every three of four minutes, so after a while I was actually amused about what was going on. We would overtake two lorries on one go when there was absolutely no visibility; if things went too far, people would just slow down to let the overtaker get back into his lane on time, and those coming ahead would just use their headlamps to make them know it was just a bit too close. The taxi driver, annoyed at us, took us to Kerkuan but didn't wait for us; he immediately left, leaving us without any transportation in the middle of nowhere. After a visit at the site, we walked around 2.5 kilometres back to the main road, where we decided it was too late and risky to continue the journey up to El Haouaria, so we waited on the road gutter for a taxi. The first one which stopped was, to our surprise, the same bastard who left us one hour before, who stopped, laughing at us a little. Luckily some other taxi came by in the correct direction, and soon forgot about that man. After a taxi, luagge and bus ride, we were back in Hammamet, and the desert group had already got back from the two day trip. We were asked over and over what happened, what did we do, etc. People who hadn't talked to us before would come over and see; we were really surprised about the warm welcome we had. After dinner, we improvised a customes party, and many people managed to dress up in Tunisian/arabic fashions using bed sheets and so on. We had to wake up at 5AM next morning, but didn't go to bed until 2AM. Nothing could go wrong this time. We had our tickets, we had confirmed we would be going on Sunday the night before, so at 6:15, our new guide came in, and came straight towards me. He said something in German, and after I told him I spoke absolutely no German, he said huh, well you know the bus is full of Germans, and my indications will be in German? . Pretty incredible, but again a fuckup by the agency. My ticket said, clearly: Sahara safari. Bus + 4x4. (ALL). Turns out ALL meant Allemand, not everything included , although we had requested English pretty clearly. This was quite a minor problem though, after having no clothes for a whole week and having been left behind two days before. I think we were really lucky getting that German group, though. We were only 16 people on the minibus, making the stops a lot faster than the normal ones, where 55 persons need to get out and in of the bus. We had our own Routard guide for Tunisia, so we could read about the places we were about to visit before getting ther. Also, I surprisingly knew much of what our guide was talking about, just missing the details he talked about oil production in Tunisia compared to Spain's, among other topics . When the landscape was becoming drier and drier, Bel n and I spotted something dark far away ahead in the completely straight road. As it became bigger, I started thinking it might be the #1 place to visit for me in Tunisia: El Djem's impressive Roman amphitheatre. When we got off the bus, I was totally excited. Before me, the walls of an incredibly well preserved, huge Roman building; in fact, the best Roman ruins in the whole continent. El Djem's amphitheatre was the third biggest of the Roman empire with 35,000 seats, only surpased by Rome's and Capua's. It remained mostly intact until the 17th century, when some of its stones were used to build the city and some of the treasures taken to the Great Mosque of Kairouan, but when it took more damage was during two consequent wars, when the Turks didn't have many problems to blow part of the wall away using cannons to end up a siege of the city.

The Roman amphitheatre of El Djem The underground tunnels are intact, and it's difficult to not have flashes of Gladiator while walking under the arena's trapdoors. Sadly, there was little time to spend there, and we had to continue the journey after just 45 minutes. I would have spent half of the day there. From here, the landscape truly started to get drier and more desertic. The south of Tunisia is a giant olive field, until you reach the Great South, where it's dry enough that the only thing that grows in the land are rocks. Hours later we arrived in Matm ta, the very famous troglodyte village of small holes in the ground. Although I was curious about being there, watching how organised and massive tourism has destroyed these Berber's ways of life dissapointed me greatly. Our guide stopped the bus in one of the pits, which was decorated with white and light blue. In the first room, an old woman was grinding something in a small, stone mill. The dwellers of the few pits still used by their original inhabitants now make a living by letting people into their homes and getting dinar as a payment for taking photographs. What the woman was doing was just a bit of theatre, part of the show. After this first room, we got into the middle of the pit, which had a series of other passages to some rooms, some of which were simply open so we could get in and have a look. I felt a little bit like violating someone's privacy, and wondered how much the house had changed in the last years.

Inside a troglodyte underground house in Matm ta After our visit, we continued up the mountains of Matm ta, and after going by a giant "WELCOME TO MATMATA" sign drawn in white in the middle of a mountain, Hollywood style (!), we stopped for a brief photo-stop (sic). Indeed, the view was quite impressive, and is universally famous as one of the filming spots of Tatoonie scenes in Star Wars: A New Hope. Speaking of famous places, a few minutes later we stopped at the top of one of the hills, were we'd have lunch in the Hotel Sidi Driss, a place of pilgrimage for Star Wars fans, as it was the troglodyte pit which served as the Skywalker's home. The place is full of references to the film saga, and one of the open pits is full of set pieces stuck into the walls. We were served couscous, which wasn't bad, but was cooked and served in the most genuine fast-food fashion. Everyone there gets couscous to eat, apparently, and it's the same in many other touristic places in the area.

Matm ta's lunar landscape From here, our journey headed straight West, in the middle of the rocky desert, until after some time, you could start to see lines of palm tree branches planted here and there, a sign that rocks would soon disappear, being replaced by sand and dunes. As when we were approaching El Djem, at some point a huge, dark spot appeared on the horizon. Douz, probably named after some 12th French batallion which stayed there, is a small town in the very limit of the Sahara desert, built right next to a huge oasis, exclusively dedicated to palm tree plantations, making dates production a big source of income, along with, of course tourism. The travel agencies use Douz as the starting point for several-day trips into the desert, camel rides and stuff like this. Our guide offered us getting a camel and carriage ride in Tozeus for 20 dinar, but Bel n and I declined. He didn't seem to be too happy about it, and had no problem commenting this in German and Arab with the driver (Spanisch and Spanien were clear to me). We learned that the agency (or the guide) makes around 3 Dinar for everyone who contracts the camel rides, after speaking to one native young kid who worked in the camel place. While our German trip mates got dressed in berber fashion, we opted to walk into the desert and play around in the sand on our own. I discovered a few desert insects which were unlike anything I've seen anywhere, and their diminute trails were all over the dunes. Looking West, the view was astonishing, with only thousands of kilometres of yellow dunes ahead us.

The evening sun over the dunes After they came back, we were taken to our hotel, which was really impressive. After leaving our stuff in our room, we headed back to the desert, which was like 300 metres away, to see the sunset over the Great Dune . There's a street which literally serves as the frontier between the rocky ground and the sand desert. From there, you could see many lines of palm tree branches, which are planted by locals in a futile attempt to stop the inexorable advance of the desert. Women in Douz and other towns in the desert limit spend their days sweeping the entrances to their homes, as sand gets in really fast. A small village next to Douz even had to be abandoned and rebuilt in some other place, with the old one being finally devoured by the dunes. When it got dark, we still had some time to kill before dinner, and we discovered a hammam in our hotel. I got in, and saw there was a bored young man inside. He informed us about the prices, and after some short deliberation, we realised we'd spent half of the camel money in some Arab relaxation; while I got a really cool massage, Bel n enjoyed a Turkish bath. I spoke to the guy for a while, and he said not that many people used that hammam. He actually handed the list of services since 2002, which easily fitted in one piece of paper. People don't know what they are missing; he explained that most of the hotel's clients just showed no interest in the baths. I wonder how Fins or Norwegians would react, given their sauna culture. The dinner and breakfast in that hotel was absolutely awesome, and I actually ate too much to have an easy sleep. Next morning we had to be ready at 5:30. That's pushing my limits. The bus started crossing the Chott Jerid when it was still quite dark. The chotts are dry, salt lakes in the middle of the desert, which during some seasons do get some water, sometimes from the underground. The Chott Jerid is the biggest of the three chotts in the area, and the views are fantastic. It's like a giant, totally flat muddy sea which reflects light creating dangerous mirages of oasis-like dark patterns. Before the construction of the recent road that links Douz and Tozeur, crossing the chott was so risky that many people died in the attempt. We had the unique opportunity to see the sun rise over the salty horizon.

Sunrise at the Chott Jerid Again, on our way to Tozeur, we were offered a carriage ride for ten dinar, and again we declined. The guide then asked us if we had no money or what. So in Tozeur we basically wanted to walk around the oasis fields, and ended up talking most of the time with some old man who sold drums and desert roses. On a 4x4, we went up North to Chebika, a really cool town with a small oasis of thermal water, which I guess was around 40 C. The short walk to the wall where the oasis surfaced was packed with children who insistently begged for money or offered necklaces and other items. It was difficult to make them understand you didn't want anything. We then went up the mountain behind Chebika through a road which had its own piece of history. It seems that during WWII, Rommel suffered an Allied siege in Chebika, with a range of mountains behind their backs. The Allies gave him one month to surrender, and he took his time to answer. During that time, he ordered his engineers to design and build a road which would let them escape Chebika through the steep mountains, and they managed. When the ultimatum expired, the Allies apparently found out Chebika had been abandoned by the Germans, including tanks and most of their equipment. So, on the way up, a few kilometres away from the Algerian border, there was another typical visit to the biggest oasis waterfall in Tunisia, which was several metres high.

The oasis at Chebika Our Sahara trip would soon end, and after lunch we headed Northeast on our way to Hammamet. On our way back, we stopped in Kairouan, one of the key Islam pilgrimace spots, with the Great Mosque as the biggest attraction. Unluckily, as we arrived after lunch, we didn't had a chance to see it. Apparently it is really impressive. We haggled a bit for a pair of babouches and a small leather couch in the medina. We came back to our hotel around 7, and found most of the people around the hall. After the obligatory update on how it went, we went to bed as we were exhausted, and of course we had to get up really early to head to the airport. The airport was at that early time of the morning a total chaos, and while people stood in the checkin lines, I tried to find out what was going on with my still lost luggage. I went back to the lost luggage window, which would be closed for 5 more minutes. When they finally opened, they told me once again they had no clue about what was going on with my luggage. I finally understood they had no clue: my tracking number wasn't in their database. I asked them if I could have a look at the unreclaimed luggage storage room. They kindly opened a small door for me, and invited me to go inside and have a look. The view was gross: hundreds of lost bags all over the place. As I was in a bit of a hurry (I actually had to get back to Barcelona), I asked him where to find the bags of one week ago, and he nearly bursted into laugher. Okay, I had to look all over the place, scanning every piece of luggage in an attempt to spot mine. There were bags of absolutely every type in there. In one of the corridors, I sensed a disgusting smell, and figured out some poor guy may have food or something in one of their lost bags, which was rotting in that horrible room. So wrong: soon after I found myself nearly stepping on a puddle of shit, as if someone had literally dumped it right there. Oh my... luckily my search was nearly over and unsuccessful, and I got back to Barcelona with the hope of finding my bag in El Prat. After looking in their two storage rooms I realised I'd probably not see the luggage again, which is a real pain in the ass. A few hours of train later we were back in Val ncia, with a feeling of having spent 3 or 4 weeks in Tunisia, not just 8 days. Really a great place to visit, not only for their cultural treasures, both current and ancient, but for the openness of their people. I hope I'll be back at some point!

Seriously, RFC2445 is on crack. No wonder that few apps handle recurrence rules properly. Let me give you some examples straight from the RFC:

RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=2;BYMONTH=1; BYDAY=SU;BYHOUR=8,9;BYMINUTE=30

These are tons of events: at 8:30 and 9:30 every other year, every sunday in january. That's not precisely what I'd call a yearly frequency... I mean, we're talking about every sunday in januar. I'd more call that like... weekly. And yes, this is the official solution:

"every Sunday in January at 8:30 AM and 9:30 AM, every other year"

Note that you can not do 8:30 AM and 9:00 AM. You could do 8:00 AM, 8:30 AM, 9:00 AM and 9:30 AM (using BYMINUTE=0,30). Pure crack.

Everyday in January, for 3 years:

DTSTART;TZID=US-Eastern:19980101T090000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;UNTIL=20000131T090000Z; BYMONTH=1;BYDAY=SU,MO,TU,WE,TH,FR,SA or RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;UNTIL=20000131T090000Z;BYMONTH=1 Isn't that totally on crack? Using FREQ=YEARLY for everyday in january? Notice how the semantics of "BYMONTH" change? In the first case, it's creating multiple events (BYMONTH=1,2 would name january and february independently); in the second case it's used to filter out individual days. Let me explain that a bit more: FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=MO,WE means every Monday and Wednesday. See how the modifier makes about 104 recurrences out of a single year? FREQ=HOURLY;BYDAY=MO,WE means every hour, but only on Monday or Wednesday. In this case, the modifier reduces the hourly events by throwing out all that are on other weekdays, reducing the number of recurrences. Again, this is not my weird reading, but the RFC says:

BYxxx rule parts for a period of time which is the same or greater than the frequency generally reduce or limit the number of occurrences of the recurrence generated. [...] BYxxx rule parts for a period of time less than the frequency generally increase or expand the number of occurrences of the recurrence.

(Note that I didn't find any details on if they consider a week to be be "less" or "more" than a month, since there is no obvious subset relationship, but a week can overlap two months, and a month usually overlaps five weeks... So if I have FREQ=WEEKLY;BYMONTH=1;BYDAY=WE, is that Monday in every week overlapping January? Every week completely contained in January? If I'd want every Monday in January, I'd use FREQ=DAILY;BYMONTH=1;BYDAY=MO...) Intersecting or joining two RRULE specifications is usually impossible (try to write one rule that is 8:00 and 9:30 every day for convincing yourself that a join won't work, and try to intersect FREQ=DAILY;INTERVAL=3 and FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=2...) Anyway, I'm truly not suprised that my mobile and probably many other applications don't handle recurring events completely (that is when importing from iCal they often just lose the repetitions). My own implementation is doing okay. There are still a few missing features (BYSETPOS e.g. which can be used to say "the second to last tuesday or thursday each month"; should be trivial to add however, just picking the appropriate indexes out of a list), and some odd corner cases to dig in the specs and resolve (e.g. "every other week on friday, starting saturday march 3" - are we talking in business weeks, or intervals of 7 days here? When talking in weeks, is it friday in the week containing march 3, or following march 3, since that day itself is not a friday!) Some of these details probably vary heavily from iCalendar-supporting application to another... e.g. FREQ=DAILY;BYHOUR=8;UNTIL=20070215T000000Z does this include a recurrence on 2007/02/15 at 8:00 (which is past the UNTIL time, however the hour of the UNTIL field is not used in presence of BYHOUR). If you ever design a language for specifying recurrences, please:

• Allow interval repetitions or repetition patterns (e.g. Monday, Thursday) for any and multiple fields (iCalendar only has interval for one)
• Allow arbitray union and intersection
• Think of people not using Gregorian calendars, we have i18n/l10n...

Consider something like (intersect (repeat daily interval=3) (union (repeat weekly monday) (repeat monthly 1) ) ) (i.e. every 3 days, if they fall on the first of the month or on a monday) Also spend some time thinking about alignment: "Every monday in a week containing the 15th of a month." - months and weeks are not aligned; assuming a week being defined as Monday-Sunday, this can be any day between the 9th and 15th of the month (in fact you could specify this in iCalendar, but it's probably easy to come up with an example that is too difficult to represent in iCalendar RRULEs, albeit trivial to calculate.)

ONE bloody string left Now, the last and very only package remaining that prevents French to reach 100% for po-debconf is atokx2. Will I resist to the temptation of an NMU? That is very unlikely. I'll make one attempt in trying to urge the maintainer whoc already has two pending translations after he uploaded the package without waiting for the deadline mentioned by translators.