Hi! This is Comas, the conference management system we all know and love! Perhaps you remember me from /www.consol.org.mx/">/www.consol.org.mx/">CONSOL 2004 and 2005, Debconf 5 and 6, CICOL, Seminario Globalizaci n, Conocimiento y Desarrollo or other such great conferences! Well, it is a pleasure for me to announce I am moving.
That's right - My developers have felt too constrained by CVS to keep being merry and productive, and decided to move away from it and to Subversion. If you are tracking my development history, you should have noticed a new file in my base CVS directory, called DONT_USE_THIS_REPOSITORY_ANYMORE. I will reproduce it here following Gunnar's wishes, and hoping it is useful to you.

PLEASE DON'T USE THIS REPOSITORY ANYMORE! Just in the meantime, while we migrate our current installations to point to the correct server, while our users take note, and while the kind GBorg admins lock down this project: PLEASE DON'T USE THIS REPOSITORY. WE HAVE MOVED. The Comas project will no longer be hosted at GBorg - We are moving to Debian's Alioth.
Comas' webpage (although it is still ugly :) ) is still the same as always. The repository will no longer be handled through CVS - We switched to Subversion. Don't worry, the usage is basically the same. You can use anonymous access to get the Subversion tree. If you want to participate in the project, register at Alioth and ask us for commit access. You can also use the very nice SVN Web interface, which allows you to look at each of the files, view the changes, and even subscribe to the Comas RSS feeds! Development goes on. Stay tuned! Greetings, - Gunnar Wolf

Of course, as in any migration, there is still a lot of things to do. Mail the other contributors and interested people notifying them of the move. Migrate (and check the validity of) any tickets we have in the old site. Point all the places where there is Comas-related information to the new repository. Close the existing project page at GBorg. Sanely re-structure the repository in a more standard and functional way (and hope it does not break current installations ;-) ). Rework the documentation that has been neglected in the last months. Rework the bits of logic that never smelt very good but -as a dead rat- now positively stink. Fixe the things that will eventually stink as well... Anyway, I'm sure this will speed up my growth!
I am very excited on which way my dear authors will continue to push me - I know I'm quite a lousy program for many things, and I know there is a lot for me to learn until I am a military-grade conference management system - But my many parents have written me with deep love, and I understand they had to write hastily parts of my code. I understand their mistakes, but I hope they make them go away soon.

Martin: Strange... Here setting up a company is so much of a hassle that most people only register as Persona f sica con actividad empresarial instead - Physical person with enterprise activity. That means, you can print your invoices with "Madduck Consulting Inc." if you so wish, as long as under that, in tiny letters, you print your real name and fiscal data.

Several people's blogs have appeared recently in the planet with the different points of view on the different candidates and various rants regarding the DPL office - Well... This time I have not yet been able even to read the platforms of the different candidates (of course, I plan on doing it quite soon), but I follow the posts on the subject with interest. The most interesting post so far is Martin Michlmayr's - Of course, being an ex-DPL, there are important experiences he has that few people do.
A couple of days ago I was talking with one of the candidates with whom I have talked and worked in the past. My main gripe with the whole process is that, although as a project we need a leader, an easily identifiable single contact person who knows the teams, knows the people and can speak on the project's behalf, I have not seen much being done by the past DPLs towards the inside of the project. Of course, it's easy to bitch around when I sit in the comfortable silent majority most of the time - Currently I am devoting quite less time and effort to Debian than what I should, although it is true that setting up Debconf6 in Oaxtepec takes a _lot_ of time and that it will facilitate much more interaction between Debian people (which is good for the project) than me working more and better on my packages and on doing interesting team work.
Maybe something that would make me to vote for somebody, more than the most coherent and best written platforms, is for the candidate to admit the lack of importance of the role to most of the project - or to defend how to make it again a leadership position.
Following Martin's post, maybe we do need a Bruce-like leader who tells us what to do and drives the project. Or maybe not, maybe we could do better with reducing the importance of the post towards the inside and emphasizing it's mostly a confidence vote for somebody to speak on behalf of us all. And even this would be difficult, as a sad flame in debian-private some months ago reminds us that nobody can speak on behalf os the whole project because somebody might be offended by the viewpoint taken by the official?
I am no big believer in democracies. I do think that sticking to much to a democratic constitution (where democracies are very scarce in the Free Software world, where projects tend to have benevolent dictators grown by meritocracy instead of democratically elected) and allowing everybody to voice too much the same opinion in our regular flamewars has lead Debian to the communications swamp it is right now. We do have very effective small teams (quoting Andreas Schuldei' term for the phenomenon that seems to work best and appear naturally in our project), integration between teams is quite good... But having 1000+ people sitting in a big room and shouting at each other is plainly not fun. Maybe we should stop pretending that there is no cabal (forgod'ssake...) and admit that there is and it works, and we (the drones) implement Their decisions? Nah... That sounds it would only create more flamewars.
But seriously: Towards the inside, do we need a leader? Have we ever used it?

Today, Nadezhda and I went with jyr and Tigre to get some more details ready for Debconf 6 at Oaxtepec. Among lots of work, we met with Gnaro to talk about connectivity issues. A nice, productive day all in all - If you care to check, I uploaded today's (raw, no descriptions yet) pictures together with today's information at the bottom of my Oaxtepec gallery - Yes, it's a whole bunch of photos, and my connection is quite mediocre (512/128 ADSL line), but there it is :)
But the reason I am writing is that Nadezhda and I decided to drive back to Mexico down a smaller road that goes from Oaxtepec to Xochimilco, through Milpa Alta, in the high and rural area of Mexico's capital. We didn't know if this would end up being a good idea or a terrible one, as anything can happen in our rural roads. Being straight pragmatic, it was very good - We made a bit over 90 minutes end-to-end, and we saved around 130 pesos (10 euros) of toll roads. But the real win was to have some beautiful landscape session.
Sadly, we are at the beginning of the fire season (read: the hot season, where a spark often arises in the tall grass and forest fires break. All of the Cuautla and Oaxtepec region, as well as all the way up Tlayacapan and until Tlalnepantla had thick smoke which took some of the beauty off the beautiful small ridge that finishes at the Tepozteco - here are some simple samples. After that, we crossed an area of fields of nopales - yes, you will get to taste them... But in my case, I enjoyed seeing some nopales fresh cut (first link), some others with the leaves ready to be harvested (second)... And just the shape of the mountains. And then, although somewhat clouded, our beautiful volcanos. I don't know what Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl have that they make me drool. Every time we have clear skies in the city, I look for them. They are probably the greatest symbol of all of Central Mexico - And although today they look sadly a bit greyish, I still had the change to see the glaciars that were lost due to the global warming in the last 10 years. And after some time travelling with my dear volcanos on the right, we reached one of my favorite spots on this planet.
This little road is even better during May/June-October/November, during the rainy season, the way I had met it a very long time ago... The brownish colors are all green, as south of Mexico City towards Morelos, it is very fertile ground. Still, even after five hours of being home, I'm still wholly satisfied at the beauty I could half-look at while driving.

I'd love to joyfully join the hordes and post my ticket data here... As that would surely mean I don't have to worry about lots of stuff we are preparing right now ;-) Many people have blogged in planet.debian.org their travel details - This post is just to ask you: Please don't forget to update your personal information in our system, so we can work on the logistics on how to properly receive and arrange you.
Your arrival/departure data is available to other registered Debconf attendees - If you want to change that, just activate the Keep travel data privateoption in your personal data page.
This should be obvious by now, but anyway: This is just a public information announcement, not a proper blog posting. In fact, I will be retouching it and sending it to the proper mailing lists.

Yesterday, the right-wing PAN candidate for the presidency of Mexico, Felipe Calder n, made a declaration that shadows the current president, Vicente Fox (from his same political party) almost look like a genuine statesman. (some links, La Jornada, El Universal) - And that's no easy feat, given that Mr. Fox is -so far- the nation's most prolific president... When it comes to stupid sayings.
How come Calder n rose so quickly to become a statesman? Let me first go through a bit of history. Not much, promise. Well, I'll do my best.
Twelve years and one month ago, Mexicans woke up with the frightening news we had a violent guerrilla group in Chiapas, one of Mexico's richest states, but one with the highest percentages of poor people - and, not coincidentally, of indigenous population as well. This uprising was very soon known all over the world - And its leaders quickly learned how to ensure they would not be prosecuted and exterminated: Simultaneously with the fighting, they made as large a media coverage as they could, strongly supported in the Internet democratization of the information that had just begun. Thousands of people all over the world understood their ideas -at least what they said at that time- and spread the word. I had my first trip in Europe with my (now) wife in 1996, and we saw many grafittis stating Viva Chiapas, Viva EZLN... It was amazing.
EZLN was (is) specially hard for the government to kill. As they don't do military sabotages, terrorism or so on, it is very hard to justify military action. After 12 days of fighting, a truce was decreed. The truce was broken once, in the early years of the Zedillo government, but officially there is a cease-fire, observed by both sides. The Zapatistas have took the ideas and further promoted them, with action. My Chiapas-born friend Alex Ju rez often tells me about the tremendous cultural difference between the Zapatista territories and the paramilitary ones - In the Zapatista areas, you see indians reading books, working their land, organizing themselves in the Fair Government councils, and strongly opposing alcohol and drugs. Just the opposite from the other areas.
EZLN shifted their strategy some months ago, going beyond stating their wishes for a fair regime and waiting for the government to look at them. I still don't really understand where they are heading, but the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Rainforest turns them into a political movement, clearly separated from the existing regime. They do not seek to be elected, they oppose every party and candidate. They define themselves as an anticapitalist movement, located down and to the left - Lets see where this goes to.
Well, back on track... One of the president's most famous stupid quotes is that, during his campaign, he promised to solve the Chiapas conflict in fifteen minutes. Well, it's been either fifteen very long minutes, or he just hasn't had any time to devote to those dirty indians. Mexicans are very frustrated by the lack of importance this man gave to one of our country's longest and most desperate needs.
Of course, Felipe Calder n must do something in this regard. Fox's shadow is a big one, and this little man must try to escape from Fox's biggest mistakes. So he just came with a formula that I don't know why no statesman thought of before: Instead of negotiating, instead of working to solve a very difficult problem, he declared he will unilaterally declare peace with EZLN.
I wonder if this year's Nobel prize will go to such an abnegated, smart and selfless person. Man, we could take this same solution to Darfur, to Israel/Palestine, to Congo, to Chechnya... If rulers all over the world start declaring peace unilaterally, all of the world's problems will be solved! What comes next, he will declare (maybe as Salinas did) that we are a first world country? Poor people are only sad reflections in the sand but don't exist in his reality?
Please, Mexicans: The man is clearly schizoid. Are you happy with Foxilandia? It seems that alternate realities are part of the PAN's action program. If you are not satisfied with Fox's results (who is?), don't vote for this guy. We will all regret it.

Tolimar, liw: Just to give an extra bit of ease, I know Alvaro Lopez, one of the talk's proponents. I am to some extent an instigator for this talk - Alvaro is definitively a Free Software guy. I know him for several years already. He has been as careful as possible, and told me about his frustration when the whole Nexenta mess erupted. As far as I can say, the cooperation intentions are as serious as you can expect from such a beast as Sun is - I cannot judge more, and I won't say more in this regard. I just assure you that this talk will not be a presentation on why Solaris is better than Hurd or anything like that. I trust Alvaro (and, transitively, I should also trust Simon). I do hope we get something interesting out of this talk.
[update] Alvaro has answered. I'm linking it here as he is not syndicated in Planet Debian.

Wow, a semi-regular posting.

The Iron Giant

Small town america in the late 50s doesn't know what hit it. Science fiction is in it's hayday and the nation is on a hairpin trigger when a big robot falls from the sky and is discovered by a small boy. I had heard much about this movie and everyone I knew who saw it liked it. I have to tell you: the hype is well deserved. The story is compelling and heartening, good for children and adults alike, and the humor throughout is well done. Characters are voiced well. The story obviously revolves around the giant. Most of the story is centered around keeping the monstrosity hidden, which doesn't succeed for long. The government eventually figures it out and starts shooting, and then things really get interesting. The ending was just as fun to watch as the beginning, although I think they copped out on the very end, leaving it with a light note. It would have been really nice to see it end in a bitter-sweet tone. The Giant gets a 9. (imdb)

Brazil

One of the things I remember hearing about Brazil is that it was "Terry Gilliam's Directorial Masterpiece". It certainly is at that. In the 20th century somewhere, a clerical error causes a great movie plot. A futuristic society is thrown into disarray by a simple error in typing, starting with the death of an innocent man, and then the coverup of the century. The protaganist is in a dead-end job, but seems to be perfectly fine with it, until the girl of his dreams literally walks into his life. Gilliam and his cinematographer create a beautifully blocky and dull grey industrial wasteland set in stark contrast with the beautiful dreamland. The subplots don't obscure the main line which is compelling and kept me wanting more even though it clocks in at over 2 hours. The ending was unexpected and well done at the same time, and I couldn't see it done any other way. The directors cut is the only way to go with this one, and I haven't even seen the studio cut.
Brazil is berriffic, and scores a 12. (imdb)

As this blog has become one of the top sources of information on the Webloyalty scam, I’m reporting this news about Webloyalty and Marketworks, a third party eCommerce site that supports high volume eBay sellers. Marketworks is apparently throwing the switch to make a Webloyalty subscription the default for the thousands of eBay sellers that use its services:

Over the past two years our users have experienced tremendous success incorporating WebLoyalty in their checkout. For those of you unfamiliar with WebLoyalty, it’s a special rewards program offered by Marketworks that benefits merchants with cash and repeat shopping. Given the success our participating Sellers have experienced, effective June 21, 2006, WebLoyalty will be enabled as a default setting in all US-based users’ StoreFront/Checkout profiles. We’ve updated our Terms & Conditions to reflect this setting (effective June 21, 2006 for existing users). If at any time you wish to discontinue your participation, simply indicate your participation preference by clicking the appropriate radio button on the WebLoyalty settings of your StoreFront/Checkout profile. Note that at this time WebLoyalty is only available to US sellers and buyers. Learn more about WebLoyalty. The Marketworks Team

So now not only will there be millions of Webloyalty subscribers who aren’t even aware they are paying for this useless service, there will also be thousands of eBay sellers who aren’t even aware that they are signing their customers up for this useless service. I understand that a number of Marketworks sellers who actually know this is going on are upset, but the majority of users don’t read the forums where this is being discussed. (Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with Marketworks myself.) To be fair, I should mention that a Webloyalty executive (the “lead Consumer Affairs representative” — Mary O’Reilly) has apparently posted to my blog in defense of the company. The following comment appears about 1,000 comments down on my main Webloyalty entry, and is in response to this entry mentioning inflammatory comments posted by other Webloyalty employees calling Webloyalty customers ‘suckers’:

As lead Consumer Affairs representative for Reservation Rewards, I apologize on behalf of WLI Reservation Rewards for the inappropriate and offensive comments posted by the person identifyingthemselves as “WLI Customer Service Representative”. Our company does not condone or tolerate this type of unprofessional behavior and providing consumers with the highest level of customer service is of utmost importance to us. If we can confirm that the comments were actually posted by one of our customer service representatives, appropriate action will be taken with that employee. As a company, Reservation Rewards takes consumer comments very seriously. We have hundredsof thousands of satisfied customers and we consistently strive to provide our customers with first class membership programs and customer service. In the past, our approach has been to deal with consumer concerns on an individual basis rather than in a public forum. To fully address a consumer’s concerns we need some specific information (e.g. the consumer’s full name or email address) so that the consumer’s record can be accessed. Once the consumer’s record is accessed, we can identify exactly how, when and where the membership offer was accepted and also cancel the membership if that is what the consumer wants. However, it troubles us to see the concern that some consumers have expressed on this blog with regard to Reservation Rewards. At this time, wewant to make an open and sincere attempt in this public forum to clear up the misunderstandings that are generating the concerns. We thought the following Question & Answer type format might be the clearest way to share information and address the primary areas of concern expressed on this blog: 1. How Is The Reservation Offer Presented To Consumers? How Did I Get Signed Up For This? We try to make our offer as clear as possible so that consumers can make an educated decision on the offer. Over the years, we’ve incorporated a number of client and consumer suggestions to clarify the offer even further. Consumers are presented with the ReservationRewards offer when completing a transaction at one of our client’s websites. It’s not a check box that you have to unclick to reject the offer. Instead, the consumer is presented with a full offer page (separate from the client’s transaction page) and is required to take 3 actions to accept the offer and authorize the data pass of personal information. In addition to entering their email address twice, a consumer must also click on a ‘YES’ button to accept the offer. The offerpage includes all the Offer Details, clear mention of the monthly charges, a description of the membership benefits and instructions on how to redeem the Cash Back award. 2. How Does Reservation Rewards Get Consumer Credit Card Numbers? Please be assured that our clients aren’t passing credit card information to us without the consumer’s authorization. The security of your credit card information is of utmost importance to each of our clients. They would never provide a consumer’s credit card information without proper authorization. The security of your credit card number is also important to Reservation Rewards and we require consumers to provide us with authorization. In order to accept the Reservation Rewards membership, we requirethe consumer to provide us with their email address twice to make them pause and take the time to read and understand the offer. Immediately next to the boxes where a consumer is required to enter their email address is the statement: ‘By entering my email address as my electronic signature and clicking YES, I have read and agree to the Offer and Billing Details and authorize to securely transfer my name address and credit or debit card information to Reservation Rewards for billing and benefit processing.’ If a consumer just clicks on the ‘YES’ button without entering their email twice, the membership is not accepted. If a consumer does not want to accept the offer, there is a ‘No Thanks’ option right under the ‘YES’ button. 3. Reservation Rewards customer service said they sent me multiple emails about the membership before billing. What emails? I never got any. Once a consumer accepts the membership we make a significant effort to make the consumer aware of the membership and send multiple communications to the consumer before the first membership billing occurs. We use sophisticated monitoring tools to track the deliverability of these emails and our records show a very high delivery rate. We actuallyhave these records audited by a third party to ensure we are consistent in sending them to consumers.We also work with two outside companies to assist us in maximizing our high delivery rate. If an email bounces back as undeliverable, we send the consumer a letter via U.S. postal mail. However, we do understand in this day and age of spam, some of our email communications maybe filtered out and not read by some consumers. So, in addition to the email communications, each member is also presented with a membership acknowledgement page immediately upon acceptance of the membership. Our intent with this acknowledgement page is to make the consumer immediately aware theyaccepted the membership and to give them an opportunity to cancel it if that is what they want. We have hundreds of thousands of members that happily use the Reservation Rewards benefits and we don’t want people to be in the membership that they didn’t intend to join. 4. Why didn’t I get my Cash Back Award or access to membership benefits? I don’t believe there really is a Cash Back Award or Membership Benefits. We apologize if some consumers find it unclear how they can redeem their Cash Back Award or take advantage of the membership benefits. We have many members taking full advantage of the membership benefits and redemption of their Cash Back Awards. We encourage members to redeem their Cash Back Award and use the membership benefits by immediately presenting them with the membership acknowledgement page. In addition to instructions on how to redeem their Cash Back Award, the membership acknowledgement page also includes a password to log into the Reservation Rewards website. We also send each customer an email 13 days after accepting the membership that reminds them to redeem their Cash Back Award. We encourage you to go to www.reservationrewards.com to review the array of membership benefits. We think you’ll find that we partner with many top names in leisure, dining and theme parks to provide our members with significant discounts. At the lower left-hand corner of the home page you can review positive comments from Reservation Rewards members who regularly use the benefits. When a misunderstanding occurs, we’re more than willing to cancel the membership and provide a refund. Wecan assure you that our customer service representatives are all trained to respond to consumers in afriendly and accommodating manner. When you contact our customer service department to cancel a membership, you won’t be faced with a rep trying to convince you to keep the membership ’ our reps aren’t allowed to do that. The rep will just need some basic information from you such as your email address, full name and/or zip code to access your record and immediately accommodate your request. Once your membership is cancelled, you can be assured that we will not bill your credit card again. We value consumer comments whether positive or negative. They help us consider ways we can further improve the communication and value of the Reservation Rewards offer to consumers and they also gives us the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings. If anyone would like us to provide more specific information on the actual offer that was presented specifically to you, just send your full name and email address directly to consumeraffairs@webloyalty.com. We’ll be happy to assist you and address any further concerns you have. Sincerely,
Mary O’Reilly
Consumer Affairs
Reservation Rewards

I don’t know whether or not the above description is currently true, but it is certainly entirely inconsistent with my experience. I did not enter my email address once — or twice — to “confirm” my subscription. My server logs from that time period showed that no confirmation emails were ever sent by Webloyalty (regardless of whether they might be caught by a spam filter), and the customer service representative I spoke with did try to keep me to keep my membership (and moreover was exceedingly rude). Hopefully my experience with the company is no longer true, but based on the comments on my blog that’s not the case. Webloyalty seems to have found a novel and profitable solution to the opt-in vs. opt-out tradeoff — don’t give the customer any option at all!

David, you wrote about Class::DBI performance. Even without benchmarking you could have found out, that Class::DBI is quite slow. Fortunately there are some alternative object-relational mappers available in the perl universe. The best ones I found so far are Rose::DB::Object and DBIx::Class. I took a closer look at both and would like to share my experience. As this shows, RDBO is faster than DBIC in most of the case. The generated SQL doesn't differ too much and therefor it must be the perl side of things that makes the difference. Matt S Trout <dbix-class@trout.me.uk> says:

  However, RDBO achieves its perl speed by aggressive inlining of stuff
  etc. - for example the main object retrieval function in RDBO's manager
  class is >3000 lines in a single sub. DBIC values extensibility over a
  few extra sub calls, so methods are much more broken out and there are
  many more ways to hook into the DBIC execution process to extend.

Also its idea of resultsets is something I really love. Here's a small example to illustrate that:

  my $user_rs = $schema->resultset('User')->search(  registered => 1  );
  $user_rs    = $user_rs->search(
		    comment.title => 'Foo'  ,
		   
		  	join     =>   'article' => 'comment'  ,
			order_by => 'user.name',
		   ,
  );

  # no sql executed yet.
  # now you can use your resultset as an iterator or query a list of User
  # objects from it or ..

  while (my $user = $user_rs->next)  
	  ...
   

  # or

  my $count = $user_rs->count;

Using these resultset makes it extremely easy to built up queries piece by piece and to work together well with, for example, a templating system. You don't need to fetch all row-objects and give them to your template. You can just pass the iterator to the template library. There's a lot more to say about this two object-relational mappers (for example RDBO supports prefetching of multiple one-to-many at once, which DBIC doesn't), but maybe you just should take a look yourself. I personally prefer DBIx::Class for its vast extensibility.

I had long thought that Sexism was a thing of the past; that women would have the ability to do what they wanted, and would mostly not be discriminated against. And while I was not so naive to think that there was no discrimination at all, I was under the impression that any such discrimination would mostly be something the discriminator did not think of consciously. That things like people being rejected outright for a job because they were women, and, well, "women can't work as well as men", were stories of the past. At least if I did ever discriminate against women, it never was intentional. Little did I realize how far away from the truth that was. As some troll's recent mails show, there are actually people out there who do thinkn that the influx of Women into Debian should be stopped, and that Debian should be a men only club. Our coward is too afraid to post under his real name, instead relying on tor and throwaway yahoo accounts to mask his identity. So let's call him 'Anonymous coward'. Occasionally, this is the main reason why I don't like tor; full anonymity should not be allowed, one should be able to have people stand up for what they say, and face the consequences. Anyway, that's a different story, for another time. What puzzles me is how anyone would think that there could possibly be a correlation between orphaned packages and the existance of Debian-Women. Personally, I've been happy that there is a Debian-Women which strives to make our community more complete; the lack of women (or any considerable part of the world population, for that matter) is a serious disadvantage for any community that tries to do something for the "greater good". Personally, I'm disgusted and offended by the mails this moron is sending; and even though I realize that there probably still is some (unconscious) discrimination against women, I can hope to safely say that Debian is tolerant regarding people that represent a minority amongst its community members. Even Jonathan Walther, whom we kicked out for (amongst other reasons) trolling on the debian-women mailinglist, never (to the best of my knowledge) said anything which implied that he thought Debian-Women should be disbanded (although he, err, had a "different" idea of what they should be doing). I guess all this only means we don't live in a utopia, and that Debian is not free of the plagues that will hit any sufficiently large community. But that doesn't negate the fact that I'm still offended by this lunatic.

This May I spent four consecutive weeks abroad, visiting first Debconf6 (including the Debcamp that preceded it), and then Los Angeles afterwards. I won't write a detailed report of everything that happened; nobody likes to read pages after pages of descriptions of meals and such. Instead, I'll jot down a few memories of moments. It's still long, sorry about that. May 6, about 3 AM, at home. Waiting outside for a taxi. Pretty tired already: spent the night frantically weighing all my clothes to optimize my packing. It is warm enough to wait outside without a jacket. The night is calm and beautiful. Mankind is so much nicer when it sleeps. May 6, about 4 AM, the Helsinki airport. I bump into Tuukka and Tulitar, who are on the same plane. Kaol also joins us, but that I knew beforehand. I'm suddenly much less apprehensive about the long flight. May 6, Mexico City airport. We meet more Debian people. The first taxi driver we're assigned seems to be suspect somehow. The other taxi drivers rebel and our luggage is put into another car, with another driver. I have no idea what is actually going on, but that develops into a theme for the Mexican part of the trip. May 6, Oaxtepec. We're finally here, but it seems very difficult for us to get rooms. While we wait, we and some of the people who arrived earlier go to a restaurant. The Germans want to order the same thing for everyone, but fail to agree on what, so eventually we order all the steaks on the menu. The food is good, but the restaurant staff would probably have preferred to go home at closing time. We eventually get rooms and I collapse into bed. Debcamp week, Oaxtepec. We have network. We don't have network. We have network. We don't have network. We have network. We don't have network. We're frustrated all the time. I was supposed to do billable work (related to Debian, even), and can't. Should've prepared for this possiblity. I'm too dependent on a good Internet connection, need to figure out to reduce this dependency. To have something else to do, I start the Mugshots project: take a photo of everyone together with a paper with their name, or IRC nick, or anything else they want to say about themselves. Debconf, late one evening. Everyone is partying one way or another, drinking, dancing, discussing. Lots of people around already. Nice people. Still I withdraw into myself. I'm physically present, but not interacting. Never know what to say; exhausted by having to remember who everyone is. I'm introverted, and deal better with smaller gatherings. My life's ambition is to become a multi-millionaire recluse. Debconf, late another evening, Oaxtepec. Everyone else is getting drunk, and it affects me. I make the silly bet about Debian releasing on time: if we do, I'll get a Debian tattoo. Not to worry, I win either way. Debconf, some evening or another. I participate in a game of Mao. It is an unpleasant game, for me. I suspected this beforehand, but now I've verified it. It is best for everyone if I never play again, now that I know enough to at least try to reach my personal, alternative goals in the game, which make the game less fun for everyone else. (Better for me too, since I make fewer enemies.) Debconf, day after formal dinner. I learn that Jonathan (Ted) Walther is gone. Good riddance. I suprise myself with the amount of glee I feel when removing him from the Mugshots gallery. (That, incidentally, was something I decided all by myself. It's my gallery, after all.) Debconf. The sponsored food is quite acceptable, but eventually becomes boring and bland. Mass-kitchen food can't but help to be like that, I guess, unless it gets expensive. I don't want to see another chicken leg ever. Debconf, early in the week. Droidy (Leena) and Burger (Ville) arrive. Very nice. Helps massively with my withdrawnness to have real life friends around. I still go early to bed, though, instead of participating in the partying. Debconf, late in the week. I get Ville and Frans Pop to talk and Ville agrees to have look at the installation manual. He's an actual (former) professional tech writer, so hopefully will be able to improve it a lot. May 22, Oaxtepec. Last day. I spend all morning packing, checking out, and waiting for a taxi. Strangely relaxing. Debconf is finally over, and although I did enjoy parts of it, and don't regret coming, I'm not sad it's over. May 22, evening, Los Angeles. Julie and Kristian meet me at the airport. Hugging happens. Happiness happens. I get my first taste of LA traffic, which seems to mostly consist of people complaining about how slow it is while driving very fast. May 23, the Promenade, Los Angeles. A three block long walking street of shops, with three (count them: three) bookstores. The two I have time for even smelled nice. I am in hog heaven. Colossal credit card cringing. May 24, Getty Center. A very nice, very impressive place architecturally. The art is good too. As usual, the impressionists make the strongest impression on me, but there's lots of other good stuff, too. Not everything, though: Robert Adams's photographs leave me unimpressed, possibly I lack the cultural reference points necessary to appreciate them. He has many photos of shabby temporary shelter-like houses that in reality seem to be nice south-western US houses from the 60s and 70s. My intuition just screams that the houses and their inhabitants won't survive their first winter. But of course, they don't have a cold winter there. The rest of the exhibition (or what I have time to see) has way too many portraits for one session. Portraits get boring after the first dozen or so, I'm afraid, unless there's something extraordinary about them. They are several rooms rebuilt from 18th century French aristocratic houses. Very nice, very pretty, but I would not like to live that uncomfortably. I have a small epiphany about nudity in art in one of the rooms with statues. I've always known nudity could be portrayed erotically, such as having two lovers embrace passionately; or that it could be portrayed more or less abstractly, using the human body, or parts of it, just because it can be a very beautiful subject, just like a flower, but without giving it a greater significance. It's decoration, nothing more. There are two statues in the Getty collection that show me a third way. They are exquisitely sensual, evoking a sense of form and texture that make me think of human skin and flesh, a sense that if one were to touch the statue, it would feel like touching a live human. Yet none of this is erotic at all. I'm not sure I can explain this, one may have to experience it for oneself. Unfortunately, I was too overwhelmed to write down the names of the statues. May 23, Los Angeles. The food takes me by surprise. Julie has always told me that food in LA is good, much better than in Finland, but she hadn't prepared me for an all-out assault on my palate. Dine well in LA and die happy. (When I go back to Finland, I will have to learn again how to cook, dammit.) May 25, Los Angeles. Jesus reminds me via SMS about the Towel Day. I participate. My hosts think I'm a bit weird, but in a funny way. Many happy days in May, Los Angeles. I visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (exhibiting a weird Italian designer, some boring Klimt paintings, and a very nice general collection); the Natural history museum of LA (dinosaurs! real skeletons! big ones! T.Rex! for the first time in my life! they're huge!); the Museum of Jurassic Technology (weird); had dinner with some local Debian people, and visited the local Google office afterwards; the Hollywood Boulevard at night (funny, for a while). And other places I've forgotten already. LA is not small. I visit a political theater play that is brilliant. I also visit my first American BBQ, and have my first experience with the LA gay community at the same time. I'm later told that these two are separable. I enjoy them both a lot. I visit more bookstores. My hosts keep finding new ones they want to recommend to me. Parking would be a pain in LA, except that it means that people do actually walk a lot, since the nearest parking space is always three blocks away, or five levels up without an elevator. May 28, Los Angeles. I innocently mention that LA is such a nice place, with nice people and gorgeous food, that I wouldn't mind living there. Julie's brother hears this and immediately connects me with someone he knows whose company is looking for new people. During the next three days, we meet and talk and things seem favorable. Even if I decide not to go (it may be too huge a change for me now), it's nice to feel appreciated. June 1, Los Angeles. Leaving for home. Not a sad thing, but I'm definitely feeling wistful. I get hugged about fourteen thousand times. Parting is such sweet sorrow. I will definitely have to go back to LA, one day.

will be held in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd, 2006, [Update: Registration Required] [...] Of course, I can't find any way to get there for those [cont. with links]

My graphical skills are known to be poor but I still managed to use the gimp to create a hackergotchi for myself out of the ugly image from my student web page. The hackergotchi was quickly added to the Debian Planet, before I regret that move. I probably should raid my digital photos for a better picture, if a skilled hackergotchi maker is interested in making something more palatable I'd be happy to privately offer some other possible pictures for the conversion.

My last.fm status is "subscriber", though I never subscribed. Interesting. I thought maybe it was a test subscription of one month for my birthday or so (which was less then one month ago), but why didn't I get any mail to tell me of this test subscription then? Weird. So if anyone "secretly donated" this subscription to me, please, don't. But who would do so without telling me? I'm happy with their free service... So if you insist on wasting some money on me, consider my amazon wishlist instead (though I don't really care much about that stuff either...). Well, maybe the "ad" message was just delivered to the spam folder. After all, there is still a "subscribe" button on the last.fm page.

Simon, Kurt and I played pool this evening, it was lovely. The place is a bit slow, but the people there are confident business will pick up. Now that I don't get hit by a wall of smoke when I go, I think I'll become a regular.

They're open until three on a Wednesday night, anyway. I imagine it's probably the same other nights of the week.

The European Union wants to tax SMS and e-mail messages (see digitoday news in Finnish). Or at least the French MEP Alain Lamassoure has suggested that, it seems. The tax would be 1.5 cents per SMS, and 0.00001 (one hundred thousandth) cent per e-mail. Current prices in Finnish operators seem to be around 7-10 cents per SMS message. A 1.5 cent tax on top of that seems pretty high. Collecting it would be simple: all SMS messages go through operators. For e-mail, however, the thing is going to be a nightmare. Much e-mail goes not via operators, and there is no good way of tracking it. This could be fixed (from the tax collecting viewpoint) by requiring all e-mail servers to be registered for proper accounting (nevermind freedom and privacy). Update: This paragraph is rubbish, due to my inability to calculate simple things; I'll keep it here in the interest of historical accuracy (randomly changing already published log entries is impolite, to say the least). Anyone operating a busy mailing list will want to move it outside the EU. Even at such a low price, a list with a thousand subscribers and a hundred messages a day is going cause a tax burden of around four hundred euros a year. A company might be willing to pay that; a free software project would probably not.