I have a number of upcoming talks at conferences in the next few weeks and months that I thought I'd mention in case people want to attend or meet up:

• Debian Quality Assurance, Free Software World Conference 3.0, 7-9 February 2007, Badajoz, Spain. I will briefly give a summary of QA activities in Debian and of the work accomplished at the Debian QA meeting in Extremadura in December 2006.
• Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices, FOSDEM, 24-25 February 2007, Brussels, Belgium. I will mainly talk about installing Debian on the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100, both very interesting devices.
• Compiler testing using Debian as a real-world testcase, Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo, 15-18 April 2007, San Jose, California. I will talk about the work I did testing GCC 4.2 and Osprey by compiling the entire Debian archive on Itanium (and other architectures).
• Release management in free software, Google, 19 April 2007, Mountain View, California. I will present some results from my research. I'll probably present good and bad practices found in large free software projects.
• I'll probably tour Norway in May to talk about my research on release management but details have not been finalized yet.

I will update my talks page as more details become available. I hope to see some of you at these conferences.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 12 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Nothing happened yesterday, which explains why I didn't post. Today, a few packages uploads in unstable should have improved the stats for French. However, this is also the day where dpkg-cross introduced 3 strings without prior notification to translators. A good occasion to test my "Please interact with translators" new script..:-) Czech has improved a lot as a consequence of numerous package uploads after my strong activity during the week-end. Thanks again to all these responsive maintainers. So, now we're hunting tha last remaining parts for French:

• postfix, on its way by LaMont Jones
• s390-dasd, a D-I component, already completed in D-I SVN and which will be uploaded by Frans along with all other D-I updates
• conserver, which has indeed been uploaded today by J rgen H gg
• libpam-rsa, which I'll sponsor in a few minutes
• dpkg-cross, as explained above

Another package will soon appear, out from NEW: emdebian-tools, uploaded by Neil Williams, who took care to request for translation updates in debian-i18n. Thanks, Neil.

(Almost all links in this text lead to German sources. Sorry, but this is a local topic and there aren't any English sources.) Unfortunately, Hildesheim is home to some rather prominent figures of the German neo-nazi scene. One of them has now registered for a protest march through Hildesheim on the 24 February 2007. The reason for this is, that an other neo-nazi event, that had been disguised as a "birthday party", but was in fact a propaganda event featuring talks by "contemporary witnesses" and "an evening of ballads" and was arranged by "National Forces of Hildesheim and the Association of German Women" had been prevented by the Hildesheim police. As a reaction to this, the aforementioned gentleman has now registered for a demonstration with the Hildesheim city council. (In Germany you need to register demonstrations.) Official head of the whole thing is this other gentleman, who has a history of trying to organise nazi demonstrations. He occasionally does so in Leipzig, where he tries to organise such demonstrations about twice a year. Their attendance is dropping though and they are usually met with about ten times as many counter demonstrators and thus have to be ended prematurely, exposing them as the unwanted and ridiculous farces they really are. However, the fact that people still try to register demonstrations such as this one is worrying. And the fact that this one is meant to be in the town I live in makes me pretty angry. Fortunately the demonstration is met with broad opposition. An alliance has been formed, consisting of the German adult education centre of Hildesheim (VHS), the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB), Verdi, our public services union, Attac, the Antifa, the refugee council of Lower Saxony and the political parties with the Hildesheim Greens as the most active part at the moment. It is good to see, that such neo-nazi endeavours are met with such a broad opposition, and that this opposition does not only originate from the "usual suspects", but from the centre of society. (The VHS for example is usually a non-political organisation, and seeing them engage in such an alliance and even hosting its meetings is pretty cool!) It's not sure yet, whether the demonstration will be approved. It probably will, but with a bunch of extra conditions. If it is approved, it is even more important to meet it with the resistance it deserves! So, if you are living near Hildesheim, watch this space for announcements of the planned counter measures.

Thankfully I don’t have to directly deal with the Wikipedia question till next fall when I am teaching a bunch of students but the debate is totally fascinating and the comments in this Inside Higher Ed article are quite provocative and thought-provoking (if not sometimes downright hialrious).

My Ubuntu-counterpart, Andreas Lloyd, has written a nice response to Lars Risan’s interesting discussion of tensions between Ubuntu and Debian and in it, he visits, with great detail (or as much as a blog post will allow), the limits of launchpad. It is exciting to see more anthropologists conducting in-depth research on F/OSS projects with a keen awareness of the ways technology mediate or make possible certain social relationships. . .

Hope this sticks in Thailand yet spreads to other nations struggling with exorbitant drug costs… Time will tell…

David Berlind: “With barely five days to go before long-anticipated January 30 launch of Vista is history, a familiar problem and the linchpin to adoption of any major operating system upgrade (Windows Vista qualifies) is crashing the party: backwards compatibility. Intuit, developer of one of the world’s most popular accounting applications used in small, medium and large businesses (Quickbooks), has notified its customers by email that Windows Vista is incompatible with some of the features of Quickbooks 2006.” Mary Jo Foley: “Is it Intuit’s fault that its older products don’t work on Vista? Or Microsoft’s fault for changing the operating system in a way that it breaks them?” George Ou: “As it turns out, it isn’t QuickBooks 2006 itself that has the problem with Vista but all the Intuit and third party add-on software that communicates with QuickBooks 2006 that’s the problem. More to the point, it’s the intercommunication between all those applications and the fact that they’re using forbidden techniques that have been banned since 2001 with Windows XP certification requirements that’s the issue. Intuit admitted to me that they declined to seek Windows XP certification for all these years and they’re just now making the necessary modifications for QuickBooks 2007. The reason this is relevant is because most software that is certified for Windows XP will automatically be compatible with Windows Vista.” David Berlind: “So, while Microsoft’s response doesn’t point the finger directly at Intuit as the culprit in this situation, it makes it clear that its certification programs programs that Intuit has apparently eschewed since 2001 are the centerpiece of its efforts to guarantee backwards compatibility.” Interesting discussion. Whose fault is it? It doesn’t really matter, as the end result is the same—Microsoft potentially loses customers (those who won’t upgrade to Vista because QuickBooks will break), and Intuit potentially loses customers (those who won’t upgrade to QuickBooks 2007 but rather will move to an on demand solution like NetSuite—customers tend to dislike forced upgrades). David Berlind’s observation is interesting though, namely that Microsoft has been using its certification programs to limit the scope of the backward compatibility problem to a well defined subset around which it can presumably do thorough compatibility testing. Note that Red Hat too only guarantees backward compatibility for a subset of its platform, and that the LSB doesn’t cover the entire Linux platform either, just the subset that’s import for application portability. What are the lessons here, from my point of view? First of all, and not surprisingly, backward compatibility matters, and it matters (or should matter) to both sides. Second, to achieve that backward compatibility, both sides have to work at it, and because a typical platform has so many moving parts, limiting the scope is key to understanding the “contract” between OS and application. Finally, some formal way of stating “I am following the contract”, such as a certification program, can make compatibility a lot easier to articulate to mutual customers. Related: On the importance of backward compatibility, More on the importance of backward compatibility

I was recently asked to help someone understand the OpenSource movement, and the effects it might have on companies such as Oracle or SAP. I talked a bit that these companies can benefit from being independant of big vendors like Microsoft, while still not having to do everything themselves. But also on how opensource alternatives to their products will threaten their business in the long run and force them to be more innovative and constantly improve their product. I then talked about the 'viral' aspects in OpenSource; not about that GPL licensing bullshit (just read the licenses of stuff you want to use, and don't use them if you don't like the license...; this virality is highly overrated due to Microsofts FUD), but a very different kind of virality: Let's say you are supposed to evaluate different CMS solutions. So you install one or another that sounds promising. Most likely you'll install an opensource database like MySQL or Postgresql. And when you've decided upon a solution, you are quite likely to go with this database, and say to yourself: "if MySQL doesn't scale up well enough for our needs, we can still but an Oracle license". This would be probably different if you had had installed Oracle in the first place. Say a demo or so. But the demo versions of the CMS you tried already made you comfortable in using MySQL; it's easy to install (most likely included with your system anyway), and it just works. But would you have tried a CMS in first place that actuall required you to setup Oracle? Anyway, this "social" virality brought me to another point: developers and administrators. When you see numbers on the market share of Microsoft, they're still huge. Some 95% of users are using Microsoft as their primary operation system (I'm discounting the fact that a huge share of DSL modems here is running Linux, so actually many people are Linux users, and I'm also discounting the use of www.google.com, which would make 99.9% of people Linux users...). But these are the average users. But they aren't on their own. The software choice of the "average user" is influenced by a couple of factors, including:

• if anything goes wrong, whom can I call for help?
• company (administrative, security) policies
• word of mouth and (software) recommendations

But if you look at the computer geeks around you, what are they using? A huge share of the people I know are using Linux. Not everyone is using Linux as their main desktop system, but many are. Others are using Linux just for their development stuff, some only on servers. It doesn't really matter, Linux is huge with the geeks. When I look at the sofware my mom has installed on her Windows system (which also dual-boots Linux, and interestingly is the primary choice for watching a movie - Windows doesn't playback sound with some videos...): half of it is opensource. There is OpenOffice.org, Gimp, Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape, LyX, Mplayer and a couple others. He favourite game? PySol. My dad already has switched to Linux as his main operating system. So why did they switch to so much opensource software? Because it's what I recommended them, and where I can help them. My mom needed a software to record something for her blog (yes, she's "podcasting" now) - of course I recommended her an opensource application, audacity. My mom is giving private lessons in math and physics; she's very successful at that. When one of her students got herself a laptop, she of course was given all kinds of (opensource!) software. For her highschool thesis she needed a vector graphics program - she ended up with inkscape. Now if my parents have some problem with Windows, who are they going to ask? I didn't manage to solve the video playback issues, my mom by herself switched to Linux for watching movies. It didn't work with Windows, I couldn't help her - she switched to something where she knews she'd get more support (and where the problem by chance didn't occur). Now let's have a look at the university. Our computer pool for the students is all Linux. There are a few windows systems for legacy purposes, I never found out if they are accessible to regular students; I only know they're supposed to exist. When doing some assignment, you're very often required to use some opensource software. For a thesis, you'll very likely be building upon some opensource system. The mathematics institute is still on solaris, but recently Gnome was installed there. Physics and electrical engineering also have mostly Linux systems, I've heard. For software development, it's pretty much a "develop on Linux, run anywhere", whereas Windows-only developers usually need to port their applications (or trust on Wine being able to run them good enough on Linux). So more and more people start developing on Linux, and get to love it's great development environment (after all, Linux was pretty much completely done by software developers...). And that is how Microsoft might already have lost the desktop war: developers, technical students and administrators (who usually also love their Linux boxes). They're only a small share of the userbase, but they're influential. In fact, other users rely on them being able to eventually fix their systems for them. But since these are using Windows much less already, they will be less capable of assisting others with Windows. They'll be putting Linux systems everywhere, and keep on encouraging them to make the switch. Of course it will still take some years, but you can expect more and more companies (and cities) to switch over, like the city of Munich. Windows support staff on the other hand might even become more expensive. I don't know of any numbers on the MCSE programme (Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert) - does anyone have numbers on "graduates" for that?

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 10 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Still 26 strings left to translate for French. But one more fully translated package (acidlab, thanks Javier FS) which explains the small increase. All remaining packages (postfix, ddclient, logtool, conserver, libpam-rsa) are under work by either me or their maintainers. Funnily, working on all this, I accidentally discovered that the mail queue on puccini.debian.org, which hosts packages.debian.org, was completely stucked. A prompt action by Joerg Jaspert unflushed it leading to funny results like the D-I teal receiving three notifications in a row for various versions of tasksel transiting to testing. Stats for Czech will maybe not improve as quickly as I imagined. The Czech team has been motivated deeply by my announce and they began reporting many new translations or translation updates. However, I can't really NMU packages because they have translation updates that are one day old..:-) The Portuguese team jumped into the game during this day (46.605%)

I received a very interesting email the other day from an individual who works for the state of Oregon seeking to forge ties with high tech companies abroad. They don't have a great deal of resources, but they do have some contacts, and are open to dealing with even relatively small organizations. I have to say that there is some really interesting stuff happening in Oregon in terms of open source lately (beyond Linus Torvalds living there), so if any European companies, or university professors are interested in going over to have a look, I'd be more than happy to pass the information along.

I got some email from Dan Brickley on Friday asking for some help getting the MediaWiki OpenID extension working. It looks like the FOAF wiki now allows you to login with OpenID. Cool beans on that! tags: wiki foaf mediawiki openid

Wikicalc Speaking of people whose names match the production "Dan Brick*", Dan Bricklin just releases WikiCalc 1.0. WikiCalc is an awesome piece of software that provides shared spreadsheets with a Wiki flavor. I'm interested in using it for some new projects, so I'm really glad Dan's worked so hard on it. Congratulations to him and to sponsor SocialText for such good work. tags: wiki wikicalc socialtext dan bricklin

Lucinda I'm excited to see that one of my favorite people in Montreal has set up a blog. Lucinda Catchlove is a Montreal writer, and also a good friend with a clear voice and an honest opinion. I'm looking forward to seeing what her blog will have to offer. tags: friends montreal lucinda catchlove

Google in Montreal It's probably not an overstatement to say that Montreal's digerati are a-twitter with gossip that Google will be opening a small office in Montreal (note: link in French). It's only space for a dozen or so people in downtown, but more tantalizing is the prospect that they're shopping for commercial real estate capable of handling 200-300 employees. The blogosph re (or is it the blogod me...? I get those confused all the time) here is pretty excited about the news, but a post by star podcaster Julien Smith has been more controversial. In Montreal... Needs... Brains... he says that he thinks the Montreal tech scene isn't as dynamic and interdependent as in other cities. He thinks the city needs a Google office as a shot-in-the-arm for developing our technology culture. I don't believe that this is the case. Montreal has a vibrant tech scene with a lot of cross-pollination. There are a lot of formal and informal venues for discussion in Montreal. We have the monthly Yulblog and Wiki Wednesday, last year's BarCampMontreal and the upcoming BarCampMontreal2, as well as RoCoCo. There's also the quarterly Montreal Creative Commons Salon. On the informal side, Seb Paquet's had a few group lunches with some of the most interesting people in town, and le Sans Fil gives us great hotspots like La ka and L'Utopik for serendipitous or on-purpose path-crossings. I guess my main point is that Montreal's got a great Scene, and I don't think it needs a big infusion of Googloids to make it better. Is there more that could be done? Sure. I think we need to get a Web Montag going to pull together the various sub-cultures forming. And we should probably be using SAT more -- it's a great space. But I think we're doing pretty good overall. Side notes: Hugh MacGuire has a quick list of Montreals doing stuff, and Robin Millette has some ideas about Montreal Action. tags: montreal technology scene google

On a Debian mailing list someone claimed that it was inconvenient to use ssh tunneling for sending and receiving email due to the issue of broken connections.

On my source-dump blog I have posted an entry with xinetd configuration for doing this in a reliable manner.

Ok, i386 users which have downloaded my packages here, I know you can't use thunar volume manager (thunar-volman) nor (u)mount devices from thunar, as it says that exo isn't built with hal support.

Hal support is indeed not enabled in i386 build (it is for ppc builds) on debian.corsac.net. I won't rebuild Xfce 4.4 for i386 with exo hal support enabled, as I don't really have currently enough power to do that more than once in a while.

But ema has begun to upload Xfce 4.4 package to experimental, so exo (with hal support enabled) is available on Debian Experimental packages.

If you want to test it, add experimental sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list:



Then update and install exo:



You can also pick other libs from there, which are more recent than ones on debian.corsac.net.

As always, be aware that those packages are in experimental shape, so it may damage your system, kill your cat and make your SO go away. Be prepared!

Anyway if you encounter bugs, don't hesitate to tell us on irc (precising from where your packages come from).

Happy testing.

Recently I complained about using dial-up in PR and I believe in response to my post, Joey Hess provided some great tips for making the dial-up experience a little more bearable. He, of course, was providing a set of solution to constraints, which is what the likes of Joey Hess do a lot of their waking (and according to a recent IRC conversation, even dreaming) hours. I as an academic am not involved so much in the business of finding real hard solutions but when I go to Puerto Rico, that is what I DO spend a lot of time doing. And I came up with 3 solutions this year, 2 of which I was particularly proud of (one of which may be useful to the blog readers), so I thought I would share them here: As I wrote about a few weeks ago, my mom has been plagued with a problem of choking on her saliva because she is not swallowing. It causes her and those around her a lot of angst. I tired many things but when I stopped trying and just started watching and observing to see when it seemed to be worse, I finally noticed that if she wore her dentures, the problem, while not totally resolved, was like 70-80% better. With her dentures, she would never choke on her spit and often times there would be not spit. I think the dentures changes the shape of her mouth so that she can swallow with less effort. I was pretty proud to notice this because it was the overwhelming problem of the season. Now, there is, of course, another problem. She loathes wearing those teeth and well, it has been a battle to convince her it helps (I think she sort of knows but does not want to admit it) but she is wearing them a lot more than she used to…. Maybe I will come up with a long-term solution to that problem later but I have failed in all of my attempts while still there which stretched from begging, to coy deception, to outright bribery. So in PR, we have an awesome mutt, who goes by one of three names, Isabela, Gordita (look at her tummy in the pictures to see why we call her chubster ) and Pucha. She is literally the joy of the house and she truly revels in this role. She is, in fact, like a hovercraft of love , in the sense that she will hover over you, as you are, for example, trying to get work done, and she will whimper, or lift her little paw, or more audaciously butt her head against your hand, until you assume the position and pet her, or preferably hug her. And she wants demands this sort of attention for as long as you can humanely sustain it. Ok this is not the problem part (though it can be a problem when trying to complete work and I usually just give up and give in to her or kick her out of the room). The problem was that the pucha would routinely despoil the same spot on the floor, usually every day, usually in dramatic response to leaving her in the house alone for more than 10 minutes. And I know this is willful because she is otherwise quite potty trained. She just likes to remind those who shower her with affection and love that she wants it to rain harder. The problem was that she was soaking and thus really rotting the wooden trimming (and poking around led me to discovering the third huge problem, termites, but more on that soon) and this had just had to stop. Giving her a light whallop in her chubby behind never helped (maybe she was too well padded?) and obedience school seemed like way too much effort and money. Eventually, I just threw her little bed right where she peed, and vualla, she stopped peeing there and thankfully she did not have the cojones to find another spot. I am not sure if this is long-term solution, but for now I am satisfied. Through the pucha, I found out that the wooden trimming in our house was ingested with termites. This caused a mini-heart attack, because well, termintes are a bitch to eradicate and they are a real problem in the tropics. I called the exterminators just to find out some information on termites and they assured me that once I ripped out the molding (which was my low-tech solution), I would not be putting the other wood in danger by accidentally flinging one of the little chubby white grubs over to another piece of wood and there is a lot of wood at home. Thankfully, since that is unlikely, with some help , I proceeded to tear most of the molding out only to disover a cornupia of bugs living there. It was so so so so so gross, really, gross that of course I am not replacing the trimming with wood but with some other bug-resistanant material. But that will have to wait till another trip.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 8 days of "blitz l10n NMU". No improvement today as the stats script obviously didn't run. As there is nearly no more packages for which I have to work on French (the remaining glitches are waiting for the maintainers...but I won't wait really long, guys), I focused on the second language in the rankings, namely Czech. The goal is now to improve their stats as well (and of course, this will improve many other translation teams stats while I fix all sleeping l10n bugs).

When I built my PVR a few years I bought a OneForAll URC-7562 6in1 remote control; with a surround sound amp, TV, NTL cable box, DVD and PVR the number of remotes around the place was getting a bit ridiculous. The main reason for choosing this remote was its ability to control the NTL box, which uses some odd IrDA based format apparently that even lirc has difficulty making sense of and learning remotes mostly ignore. It also had the ability to be upgraded remotely by phoning up a support line and they'd squirt some noise down the phone that the remote would understand. I had call to use this to enable my Scan DVD player when I first got the remote and it worked fine and I was quite impressed. However the remote also features another neat way to do upgrades. It has a 6 pin header in the battery compartment that is know as the JP1. This exposes the I2C bus that the configuration EEPROM lives on and there is a good amount of information out there about understanding the memory layout and adding support for new remotes etc. I'd been meaning to build the adapter to connect up since getting the remote but until recently hadn't really had a reason. However although my new TV is vaguely supported I'd really like to be able to remap the keys more sanely. So last weekend I discovered I had the appropriate bits lying around and built one. Unfortunately most of the software is for Windows; there's a Java app that will generate the appropriate data to feed to the remote, but the main communication tool is a Windows app. I found a couple of old Linux tools, but then I had a thought: it's just i2c. Why not tie it into the proper i2c subsystem? Turns out the i2c-parport driver makes this sort of thing easy; all you add is a single entry defining the appropriate parallel port lines to wiggle and it all magically works. So now I can talk to my remote using the eeprom driver talking to the i2c subsystem which talks to the remote over the parallel port adaptor I built. Which feels wonderfully sick. :) Now I need to actually have a closer look at getting all the buttons working for my new TV...

The follow up of my previous blog post: FLOSS in Brazil turns out to be a joke, was published today on Linux.com written by Bruce Byfield, with the name: Brazil's FOSS utopia image at risk.

Some of those who simple ignored my blog post are the ones calling and mailling me now. I don't like answer calls during the workhours, i prefer answer emails and i'm doing that a lot lately. I'm glad that Carlos Morimoto (Kurumin fame) mailed me open to discuss changes in their website and distribution to inform better their users what's free software into Kurumin distribution, where's the source code, what exacly isn't free software and the reasons. Let me inform you that Kurumin isn't maintained by a company as Bruce wrote, the only error in the article so far, IMHO.

What about the free software initiatives in your country? Do they really fit with what the gov't is spreading everywhere over the press? Do they really fit with what people write on their company website? Let the world know the truth, even if that hurts.

Update: I've just visited plurall.net website and some hours after the Linux.com article, that was translated and published in some Linux related brazilian websites. They managed to setup a svn repository and put the code there. The announce into their site states in Portuguese "Finally, after some technical problems we've published the Plurall source code at: http://svn.plurall.net/plurall_boot_server". Looking into the source now...

This addition to my Bad Technology page is plumbing. I hate plumbing. It is really inconvenient if it goes wrong, plumbers are pretty rare these days and most of my attempts to fix anything to do with plumbing end up wet and/or messy and/or damaging the house. I was just starting to understand the sealed system at the old house and then we moved to a house with an open vent system with loft tanks and inverted loops and draincocks and stuff. Humanity has invented the internet and other great stuff, but it seems we can't invent a heating system that is reliable, affordable, environmentally-friendly, understandable, hackable and doesn't fail messily. On what may have been the coldest day since we moved here, the heating stopped. Testing the controls, looking at the system design and working through a troubleshooting list suggested that the sensors were working and the boiler was working but the valve that sends hot water to the tank or heating was just clicking and sending nothing to the heating. I tried calling our usual plumber. Voicemail. So, I popped the cover off the valve. In addition to the wet/messy/damaging worry, that also involves electrics. Water and electicity - an ideal combination(!) There were some springs, a round bit and a worrying number of wires (live, for all I know). Also dust. A lot of dust. Thick lumps of dust. Grab the air gun, blow out the dust. Set the controls to try the heating. Still no joy. The round bit seemed to be twitching and making the ticking noise. Tapped it with the screwdriver handle. Nothing. Hit it. It moved. Pump starts, boiler starts, sound of heating pipes expanding as the hot water enters them again. I think that's my first successful fix to the plumbing in three months. Be cautious, but give it a go - I guess that's the same tactic that works for my successful computer hacks.