Jimmy Kaplowitz commented:

"The text "the board to confirm SPI's view of debian" goes to a 404 not found error page. If you are referring to this post: then I certainly had no idea what correspondence you were asking the secretary to report, and he may well not have known either if he wasn't up on the latest posts to debian-vote."

I'm not referring to that post. I sent a later message to board cc:general. I got bored waiting for it to appear, so I linked to where the next message will appear. I'm surprised it hasn't appeared yet. That's probably something to do with SPI's email-hostile server config, which I asked the board to address last month and they deferred.

"Please don't attribute a lack of response to a desire to avoid questions and add red tape when it can mostly be explained by a simple lack of understanding of the question. (Yes, if Neil had acted perfectly he would have replied to your mail asking what correspondence you meant, and if you had acted perfectly you would have included a link to the correspondence in the first place. Nobody's perfect.)"

I don't know what correspondence has been received, so how can I link it? I could link one example from me, I guess, but presumably there is more.

"I also can't find the correspondence to which you refer in any of my SPI list archives, private or not. If it was a direct mail to the secretary, then maybe Neil should have replied, but Neil is no more able to speak for the board in these matters than any other individual director. We'd need to pass a resolution if you wanted an official statement to end any confusion. Personally I think that SPI would act on a GR that overrode a DPL decision in keeping with the Debian Constitution, but as I just said, neither I nor any board member who spoke up on debian-vote can rightly express an opinion of the board on this matter in the absence of a resolution. Certainly a resolution would be reasonable."

I thought Neil is no more able to speak for the board than Joey or any other director. However, when I asked Joey to show proof that SPI only views the DPL, Neil posted. Neil's SPI secretary, so should know whether some proof exists, right? Now it seems a no-op resolution is needed to sort this out, as neither Joey or Neil agreed that SPI would follow non-DPL decisions. In a word: argh.

About a month ago Dell announced with great fan-fare that they were the first computer company that offered their customers the chance to be carbon neutral, by planting trees to offset the carbon dioxide generated in producing a years worth of electricity for the computer. Nice idea. They’re lucky that they specifically didn’t mention packaging, and saving the forests. I was down in Hamilton today for work, and a box from Dell arrived with two sticks of RAM for a new Dell server. We’re talking standard 1GB ECC sticks of ram. The packaging for these two unremarkable sticks of memory amounted to no less than seven boxes of increasing size (think japanese dolls), 8 peices of packaging foam, and one long strip of “air bubbles”. Two of the boxes contained absolutely nothing except for packaging foam, and were just used to pad out the medium size boxes, so that the boxes containing the actual ram didn’t bounce around. The two sticks could easily have fit in just one of the smaller boxes! The waste is unbelievable, see the picture below with your own eyes. With the number of trees that died to support this packaging effort, I sure hope that the $6 I pay to make my desktop carbon neutral plants a lot more trees than is strictly necessary!

The Radical Journal of Psychcology has just published a series on the Survivor’s Voice and a lot of news continues to develop on the Eli Lily/freedom of speech case

Curves are again with the "right" slope. Thanks to Neil Williams upload for dpkg-cross. Good news also for libapache-mod-backhand who has been uploaded today. We're now left with atokx, atokx2 and wmmoonclock. Today, I worked on remaining issues of various ways to "break" PO files in a few packages. This was affecting the import of material in i18n.debian.net which I intend to get as clean as possible. That will mean a small bunch of NMUs for these package as they currently require hacks in the sync scripts, which I don't like. Ah, and Rapha l Poir e got a very last medal in biathlon..:-)

In my previous post ( to this Debian section), I've mentioned we were preparing an event focused on direct contribution. Well, we've done it and it was very successful!. The event name we've choose was invol crate+, which means "involve yourself" and the plus sign meaning "more", since that was the main idea behind the event. We've worked for a couple of months, this includes live and online meetings, (even we all live in Lima sometimes it's quite difficult to match our spare time) and a lot of online work. We've just published the event report (currently in Spanish only, translation in progress). The main things I'd like to highlight is the fact that we got people doing real work and breaking the ice from "I want to do something, but I'm quite not confident to get on the teams" to people discussing work-related issues on our l10n-spanish list. I wanted to people directly learn and use the tools we do and also the infrastructure, so at some point I made the decision of make them directly work on our team's infra, this of course got some people inquiring if I was running a parallel project and complain about the quality, later I had to explain what was this rush of translations and that we were running this workshop and, yes, I knew the work was not going to be as we usually expect but they were quite new and we didn't have much time for have them learn all our policy, terms and all things one knows after being on the team for a while.
My girlfriend also involved herself and did some translation work and took pictures for me, cute. However, since I had an horrible issue with my main domain for email, and also because my time constraints, I didn't have much time to follow them up but I'm glad about what they did and that some of them are very encouraged and still working on the list. One of our goals was to get at least one people "hooked" on the direct contribution I'm glad to see we over-passed this goal. The report has the in-depth details, like number of participants, talks, also the problems we faced, as Diego describes (no, don't believe him, I wasn't acting as the contact/manager guy all the time, word). We had a dinner later with some of the people who still had energies or were hungry ;).
There is a pictures gallery at our website, also the talks slides, the videos are still on processing. We'll publish them once they are ready, like everything in Debian of course ;). Finally, I want to say that this was a great personal experience to transmit the things I've learnt and having people to feel that they also can do it, but even more: doing it!. Sometimes online chat or mailing lists are quite cold for transmitting this knowledge to newcomers. Usually they got scared after one tells them they have to read a lot, or they just got frustrated by their inability to understand the team work-flow at the very beginning. I'd like to thank our wonderful band, or squad (you named it, we can get it for you), who is responsible for making this happen. We are already working on the long-term (call strategic if you like it) plan for the up-comings invol crate+. We've already made a shot-term plan for this year and started to work on the next invol crate+, be ready.
Of course thanks to Peru Pacifico Institute where we hosted the event. We had a post-event meeting with them and directors are very happy with us and with the success, they are willing to work together again on the future. Also to our helpful sponsors, speakers, friends and relatives who support us.

There aren’t many features I grew fond of with CVS that I haven’t yet found a satisfactory solution for in Darcs. One of them was, until today, sending commit mails to mailing lists. There are a number of more or less ugly hacks floating around the net, but I never found them very satisfactory, so I wrote my own. Darcs-monitor will send email to a specified recipient about new changes added to a specific darcs repository. It can be run as an apply posthook (resulting in near-instantaneous “push” emails), or periodically from Cron, or occasionally by hand, whatever seems most convenient. You can get it by darcs at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/darcs/darcs-monitor/ (darcsweb available), or as a tarball at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/software/dist/. It depends on mtl and HaXml and is written in Haskell, naturally. It has been tested only with GHC 6.6 so far. For installation and usage instructions, refer to the README. Please note that this software is very new and thus can be buggy. As with any email-sending software, bugs can result in major annoyance; user caution is warranted.

I had the most wonderful dentist appointment this morning. bbollenbach was so excited over this dentist http://www.smilemontreal.com/ - but it seemed mostly because they use lasers to do any fillings or whatnot.

I started off by going to their website to get the phone number, and found a web form there. I filled in information asking for an appointment. I got an email back on a Sunday night from the dentist saying that someone would contact me during the week. They were nice enough to call during the evening (which was funny, since I'd given them my work number assuming they'd call during the day, but I was here anyway that day) and booking the appointment was easy.

I got an email saying that they'd booked the appointment and a link I could click to get an iCal appointment. This didn't work in the Google Apps for Your Domain setup, but might if I were using local mail.

A day before hand I got an email asking me to confirm that I would make the appointment by clicking a link.

The place is a little further away from M tro Vend me than I'd thought - it's beside the Westmount Public Library. I walked in to find a nice spacious waiting room. The office manager / receptionist was very friendly, and this continued through to dealing with the hygienist and the dentist himself. I usually *hate* hygienists - most of the ones I'd met before hand had been dentists from overseas whose accreditation's hadn't been accepted here. So understandably bitter and annoyed. My only other good hygienist had been at the clinic in Toronto, but that was also the dentist who tried to convince me that there were no risks with using mercury fillings, and that she was exposed to it much more anyway, so why was I so insistent on white fillings anyway? (Worth noting that my plan *covered* white fillings, so it wasn't an issue of price or anything.)

The dentist was also a really calming presence, and answered my questions with a smile. I need to go back, so I'll know more about what he's like then. But so far I suspect I've found a keeper.

... suck. The XML Schema "datetime" format can't be handled by Java's SimpleFormat (ok, that probably is more Javas fault, of not being able to handle hours:minutes in the timezone specification, anyway, this is mildy annoying). The XSLT2 parsers are very intolerant about the format of the time specification, too. They could have made more stuff optional such as the specification of seconds; an error here will make the whole XSLT fail with an exception. Some compact form of error handling would be nice... as would be a smart parser which can handle various formats. The XML Schema "duration" is even worse. First of all, it was completely forgotton when doing XSLT 2; there are no functions to format or disassemble it (except by regular expressions, which could also use a zero-width lookahead). Secondly, it's lacking common specifications such as "next week". While "next week" is computationally equivalent to "in 7 days", it can have different semantics in some contexts (especially when not being aligned): If I'm looking for the week February 9th 2007 is in, the result is February 5th two February 11th. If I'm looking at a 7 day interval containing this day, there are infinite possibilities (aligned on milliseconds and below...). So it does make sense to make a difference between 7 days and a week.

French is going the wrong direction as I already explained, but it's interesting to see that Czech continues to progress. This means that maintainers are quietly fixing translations for their packages, which is still good. Few activity today, mostly because of an hectic schedule, being away from home. I essentially completed the translation of atokx, broken by its maintainer, and dealt with several answers from maintainers after I proposed some NMUs. It seems that I'm now reaching packages which are really maintained..:-) Yesterday also saw the beginning of a big update for apt-listchanges. Translations are coming in in a rush and I hope that Pierre will like this. Some translators even volunteered to use the (still experimental, and for a while) Debian i18n server, hosted here, in Extremadura.

... is the working title of my diploma thesis. Tomorrow I'll hold the introductory presentation on my topic in the research seminar. This is to explain my project to other members of the working group, so they can give me feedback and suggestions. What I'll be doing:

• extend the existing IkeWiki semantic wiki with a simple calendaring function
• investigate use cases for calendaring in a wiki context
• eventually develop a simple query language, that allows non-tech-savy users to do common queries and rules; others will probably be given full SPARQL or some extension on top of it (for temporal calculations)

Where I am:

• I think I know where I'm heading
• I've started hacking on IkeWikis internals
• IkeWiki actually queries the database via SPARQL to retrieve relevant temporal information and displays them in a simple calendar view
• I have some months to go for finishing my thesis

Difficulties:

• Repeating events. Actually a very common thing. I havn't seen a calendaring software that could handle more than just the simplest tasks. Please name a calendaring software that can do "the last wednesday each month which is not a national holiday".
• Custom time types: working days, work time (8-18 on work days), holidays, ...
• Sub-events. Should actually be pretty easy in a semantic wiki, but defining the semantics right and making an okay UI can get tricky
• Non-gregorian calendars (I'll probably not handle this)
• Ambiguity in expressions. If you have a meeting scheduled for some day at 10:00, duration: 1 day, it probably doesn't end at 10:00 the following day, but at 18:00, end of the working day it started. If the meeting starts at 17:00, duration 1 day, it probably ends at 18:00 the next day...
• Various technical stuff, including:
• XSLT sucks for datetime handling. It can only process very few formats; XSLT 2.0 has format-dateTime, but it can't format a duration for all I know. Still IkeWiki is using XSLT a lot.
• SPARQL is a pain for negation handling; you can do "IF NOT EXISTS", but it's very ugly. But this is common in calendaring: "if there is not another event at the same time, the office hour is wednesday at 10am"
• Ajax. Ikewikis UI makes heavy use of Ajax, but that makes development and debugging much harder; often you won't see the actual error message (or have to dig in some messy logs), because it's all obscured somewhere in XMLRPC and JSON calls

Fortunately, we have a rather strong research group here in Munich. There are experts for query and transformation languages (e.g. Xcerpt, SPEX - Querying XML Streams), temporal calculations (Computational Treatment of Temporal Notions, CTTN) and time modeling Calendar and Temporal Type System CaTTS); and I'm also working closely together with the author of IkeWiki and Xcerpt. And of course they're all nice people to work with!

Daniel, here you go:

Asun osoitteessa $ADDRESS. En halua puhelinluetteloita, mutta ne oli ty nnetty postiluukustani. En halua heitt niit paperinker ysastiaan, koska se lis taloyhti n j tekuluja. Olkaa hyv ja tulkaa hakemaan luettelonne pois. Puhelinnumeroni on $PHONE.

Or, in English:

I live at address $ADDRESS. I do not want phone books. but they were pushed through my mail box. I do not want to throw them into paper recycling since that would increase the waste costs of my apartment building. Please come and get them. My phone number is $PHONE.

The e-mail address is info@fonecta.com (it's mailto: on their pages as well). No response to my e-mail yet. I'm not optimistic: companies who don't mind wasting natural resources usually don't care about non-customers, either. Remeber, phone users are not the customers of phone book companies, advertisers are.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 20 days of "blitz l10n NMU". No blog entry yesterday, sorry for those of you who like the "bubulle fights the dragon" adventures. I was travelling from Paris to Badajoz/Spain for the Free Software World Conference. Frans Pop, Wookey, Martin Michlmayr, Knut Yrvin and I will give a common talk about the results of the "Extremadura work sessions" funded by the regional government of Extremadura last year. My net connection will be jerky as we have a very good connection at the conference site, but nothing at the hotel (except a ridiculously expensive Telefonia wireless, which can't even be circumvented with IP-over-DNS). viewvc is to be uploaded by ender very soon. No news for dpkg-cross. A NMU is pretty likely now. I just uploaded a few more NMU's today as I got network again:

• ipsec-tools
• libpam-ldap
• php4-rrdtool
• freetds
• icedove will be taken care of by Alexander Sack and we will even rewrite the templates while we're at it

Wathching this video I was reminded that the image can quite often trump the power of the written word. Made by anthropologist Michael Wesh, I could not help but smile at his visual essay on the web, even though I am not all that rah-rah over Web 2.0 and the unbelievable proliferation of …. everything …. . But I immediately identified with most of the images and so there was something quite comforting in seeing a set of images that if nothing else, captures the everyday experiences of many folks hunched over their computers for hours everyday. I think it would have been good, however, to include at least a small splash of the dysptopic in this representation, because even for its biggest enthusiasts, I imagine there is always a set of frustrations and downsides, like for example, taking over 3 weeks to catch up with your blogroll (and mine is pretty modest) because of this extreme explosion of well … everything… and all the organzing tools like tagging and citation software while are really “cool” in that gadget-gizmo sense are just not enough to soften the downsides of a really heavy (information-over) load.

Right, back from Luxembourg and here's how the other two days went: I woke up pretty early on Friday. Damn sportsmen, seems they all jump out of bed at 6 am, to happily (and noisily) engage in their respective sports. Horrible. I've never heard so many people be in such a good mood at such an early hour.
Breakfast was great though! I spent the rest of the day at the LinuxDays site. It was situated in the ground floor of the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor and consisted of two rooms for talks and workshops and a tiny exhibition area with tables from Lilux, CAcert and a book shop. (Oooh, the temptation!!) It was also possible, to sit in the nearby cafe, which was right next to the exhibition area. Unfortunately LinuxDays.lu don't provide any kind of hacking centre (read: chair + table + power plugs), but the friendly people from CAcert offered me a seat at their booth/table so I could do some work. My talk went quite good. I didn't feel as comfortable giving it as I usually do, since it weren't my slides. But I still think it went quite well and there were some interesting questions afterwards. There aren't any recordings of the talk, but the slides can as usually be found in the talks section of my homepage. The third day started as the second one, but this time I stayed in bed and watched the Sendung mit der Maus instead of getting up at such an inappropriately early hour. I had actually planned to travel back to Hildesheim by train, but the very nice guys from quintessenz.at offered me a ride to Mannheim, which made my journey back home a lot more pleasant and also much more comfortable, since I could then take a direct train from Mannheim to Hildesheim. Concluding, I'd like to thank the organisers of LinuxDays.lu for the really good service! (I've never before been at a Linux Day where speakers were provided with such a lot of stuff. (Free hotel, travel reimbursement, free food AND a book from the book shop! Yay!) It's been really fun, speaking at this event and I can recommend it to anyone. LinuxDays.lu may not be the biggest or most popular Linux Day, but it's a really nice local event and very professionally organised! PS: So, where are the pictures I promised?
They are in a directory on my home machine, and this will remain the only place they're at until I've found a simple script to generate web galleries (such as album, galrey, jigl, shalbum ...) that manages to generate a gallery that doesn't use tables but CSS or I found the time to rewrite or produce an according template for any of these scripts. Grrr.

Welcome to this 7th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Loic Minier with #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) and #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Sune Vuorela with #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer)
• Josh Triplett with #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #408424 (apache2: "It works!")
• Florent Bayle with #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !)
• Christian Perrier with #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout)
• Frans Pop with #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Emmanuel Bouthenot, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette, Julien Louis and Jade Alglave. Full ranking Bugs

• #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible) (28 points)
• #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !) (21 points)
• #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #408424 (apache2: "It works!") (18 points)
• #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) (17 points)
• #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger) and #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout) (11 points)
• #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer) (10 points)
• #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing) (10 points)

Challengers

• Loic Minier (45 points with 2 bugs)
• Florent Bayle with (21 points with 1 bug)
• Sune Vuorela (28 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (18 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier and Josh Triplett (11 points with 1 bug)
• Frans Pop (10 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Challenger: Loic Minier
• Bug reporter: Tshepang Lekhonkhobe
• Voter: Emmanuel Bouthenot with two first bugs correct: #408524, #408989

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

It's the Fourth Safer Internet Day which is fine in itself, but it also seems to be an excuse for politicians and journalists to say stupid things about the internet. Example 1: Interior Minister John Reid suggests making sex offenders register all email addresses and internet nicknames - seems fine at first reading, but then you realise that anyone can have an infinite number of email addresses and nicknames and wonder how the hell the police will cope with a denial-of-service attack that enumerates each address and nickname in turn. a@mydomain, b@mydomain, ... z@mydomain, aa@mydomain, ab@... you get the idea? Example 2: BBC Five Live asks 'Should websites that promote anorexia be shut down?' which was also subject of an ITV news programme called 'thinternet' yesterday evening - There are practical problems shutting down any web site (censorship is often seen as damage and the internet can route around it) and if it's not on the web, it will be passed from person to person. It's shameful that Eating Disorders Awareness Week is getting hijacked by this futility. Can someone get these people to realise that banning and controlling things on the internet is about as easy as controlling radio waves? The radio laws are mostly unenforced against small offenders because they are mostly unenforceable without a huge police force. The solutions will come from addressing the problems (sex offences, eating disorders) not the symptoms (email addresses, web sites).

I’ve done this exercise a long time ago, but I think last time was before the first post with Wordpress. So here it is: my improbable (or not) best of search engines keywords for january (provided by webalizer). “ ” - !
“debian fundamentalism” - where ?
“asa dotzler troll” - did Blake Ross post here ?
“could have agree with you anymore” - all your opinion are belong to you
“do i need firefox if i have iceweasel” - firewhat ?
“your name in firefox 2″ - I know
“lifelike androids” - paranoid ones are better
“dumb ass” - still ?
“blitzer blog” - wrong address
“a lot of horse facts” - i don’t know what to say
“damage harddisk instantly” - drop your laptop from the 10th floor
“iceape vs iceweasel” - none of the above
“do you like the american accent” - no
“facts about the horse” - what is it with the horse ?
“feliz a o nuevo happy new year ” - Bonne ann e !
“free mozilla firefox” - as in beer ?
“icebrowser community edition” - nice one
“normal life” - what is it ?
“shake laptop crash hard drive” - shake it the other way
“trademark versus copyright”, “trademark vs copyright”, “trademark vs copyright vs gpl”, “trademark vs reserved”, “trademarked and copyrighted logo”, “registered trade mark vs copyright” - ask mozilla, they are knowledgeable
“what should stop working” - you
“what is a patent” - something I hate (I’ll tell you stories about that soonish)
“why does debian call firefox iceweasel”, “why does debian name firefox iceweasel”, “why iceweasel debian instead firefox” - because we can’t call/name it firefox
“will flashplayer work with iceweasel” - why not ?

Are psychiatry and big pharma joined at the hips ? And if yes is this a bad thing? In a recent speech, the new president of the APA sees the relationship as a little too cozy for comfort: “We have allowed ourselves to be corrupted in this marketplace with lucrative consulting to industry, speaker panels, boards of directors, and visits from industry representatives bearing gifts.” Some industry representatives and psychiatrists were not moved and responded with their assessment statement:

Unless another model is proposed and shown to be effective, we believe that the strong partnerships and collective contributions of academic, clinical, and industry-employed psychiatrists and neuroscience researchers can best maximize our potential to deliver the highest quality of psychiatric care to all who suffer from mental illness.

. It is nice to see the debate occuring within the field itself and I hope that it continues, especially with some hashing out of other models. And here is one of the most interesting ones in that it takes physical activity and cultural expectations quite seriously.

I’ve written twice before about Charles “Cully” Stimson, the Pentagon official who urged corporate clients to boycott law firms representing Guant namo detainees pro bono. The latest, via the legal tabloid abovethelaw.com, is that Cully has resigned over his remarks, a fitting end to the episode.