Hey, I am back from vacation. I was back on Saturday but I didn't had the time to blog or do Debian work, so hello :-D.

After coming back from my vacation I went back to the softfloat rrdtool thingie I was working on before and I finaly managed to compile a statically linked softfloat uclibc rrdtool. Needless to say that I found that a pain and I ended up:

• avoiding the Makefile and made the linking manually because:
• for some unknown reason, the -static option didn't ended up in the final link call
• libfreetype and libart_lgpl always were added as .so files... - libtool is probably the usual susupect, but I suspect the upstream libraries themselves
• avoided (completely) using xmerge and used directly the source since:
• CFLAGS="-Wl,-static" did not do the right thing (it didn't do in raw source, either)
• I was about to make a static rrdtool, so I didn't needed gentoo's ebuilds at that point
  

If you are curious about the hideous details, just add a comment or email me and I'll send them or publish them.

So, in the end, I managed to produce a staticlly linked arm-softfloat-uclibc rrdtool which:

• did not work directly on the .rrd files generated by the debian packaged collectd since they were "generated on another achitecture"; well with debian's rrdtool, 'rrdtool dump' was not that slow, so it was acceptable to dump with debian's rrdtool and restore with the statically linked one
• generated graphs in about 1 minute (way slower than my amd64 machine, which does in 3s, but at least 100+ times faster than debian's arm rrdtool - remember, I tested the generation and it didn't finish the first graph not even after 50 minutes)

So that was fun. The total round trip for a round of graph generation was about 15 min which was more than cool and fast compared to the slow native variant, whohoo!

Now the downside, I am not through with it. If you look at the picture you'll notice that there is a "small-ish" problem: there are no scales, legends and no letters/glyphs of any kind, so the graphs are still quite useless, but better than nothing:


They should look something like this:




Notice any difference? :-/

Of course, I won't stop here!

I suspect the problems come from the cross compiled libfreetype and libart_lgpl, and I'll probably end up doing some native compiling after all, sigh!

After many months of few contributions, and lots of spam, I decided to shut down the Windows for Linux Users wiki, and transfer its contents to an article on my new personal web site: http://www.welton.it/articles/windows_for_linux_users.html I will still accept contributions, of course, but it's more efficient to simply apply them myself rather than sort through a lot of spam on a relatively static wiki. The content is based on my experiences with windows several years ago - I realized that I knew very little about using it productively, and so I attempted to share what I learned about turninig it into an environment I could be productive in. Since most people go from Windows to Linux, they're not likely to face those problems, but for those who do, some of the listed tips and tricks are useful. These days, I can happily report that I'm happily back to a windows-free life.

A couple of days ago the hardware that is used to host this blog was upgraded - doubling the amount of RAM in the machine. To do this the machine was halted, memtest86+ was run to ensure that the new RAM worked correctly, and then it was booted up again. During that process my ssh session was not stopped! I merely refrained from typing anything until the upgrade was complete. This is one feature I really like about Xen. It can save the memory image of a running domain to a file and then restart it later. TCP sessions remain open if timeouts have not elapsed. The command xm save can be used to save the state to a file and the command xm restore will restore it. In Debian the location of the save files is stored in the file /etc/default/xendomains with the variable name XENDOMAINS_SAVE and defaults to /var/lib/xen/save. A quick experiment with one test domain (running Debian/unstable in 128M of RAM and had just run apt-get dist-upgrade so the memory contents would not be all zeros) showed that gzip -9 would decrease the file to 35% of it’s size at a cost of just over 1 minute of CPU time on a Pentium-M 1.7GHz. But gzip -3 compresses it to 37% and only takes 9 seconds. 9 seconds of CPU time to save 80M of disk space seems a reasonable trade-off. In my particular case it saves CPU time as the encryption I use for my root filesystem takes more CPU time than gzip -3 so compressing the data saves time. But I don’t expect my case to be common. Now when Xen is used on a more modern machine with a faster CPU gzip -3 has the potential to save time as well as disk space. A machine with a CPU that is in aggregate 10x faster than my laptop (I think that means most 64bit multi-core CPUs) running with a single S-ATA disk (that will have a sustained contiguous read speed of 80MB/s and write speed that is less) will save time when saving multiple Xen DomU’s if it runs them in parallel and compresses them. Also gzip is not the fastest compression program. There may be other options that are better suited to the needs of Xen. I have filed a Debian bug 435406 requesting that compression be supported.

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A year ago I setup a xen hosting platform, because I was selfish and wanted a lot more resources than I could otherwise buy within my budget. At that time I managed to setup a system which gave 7 users 256Mb of memory, 10Gb of disk space and 3 IP addresses all for 11.50 a month, or 138 a year. On the first anniversary I've managed to increase those resources such that our users can now have:

• 40Gb of disk space (x4!)
• 512Mb of memory (x2!)

All for the same price. One user decided to buy two accounts upon the machine, so that he could have a combined 512mb+20Gb account, and as the resources have increased this year this is no longer required - so we have a space free for one more user. Last year several people asked for accounts and I had to reject them - I don't want to be a hosting company I just want to have enough users to fill a machine so that I can be selfish and get a higher spec for myself! So if anybody who asked last year is still looking for cheap hosting there will be one space at the given spec and price available from this coming Friday / Saturday. (Unfortunately I must insist upon a years payment in advance.) Uptime last year was good I can recall two reboots with minimal notice, which is reasonable enough I think. You'll get as much support as I can offer, my mobile number, and a clean install of any Debian derived distribution. (The xen-shell package was developed for this service last year, and allows you to reboot your machine remotely, manage reverse DNS, and connect to the serial console if you break your networking. You'll be able to use that over SSH.) Please comment if you're interested - If there are more people interested I guess I'll work though the list in order of comments until somebody commits to paying.. Questions welcome,. TODO: Update website, get great testimonials about my "service" ;) Update: Space gone.

I am subscribed to the Google news alerts for the keyword Debian, and usually this means that I am notified of every security upgrade at least three or four times (needlessly, since I'm subscribed to Debian's security announcements anyway...) But today, two headlines sparked my interest: One, Carla Schroeder wrote an introductory article into building Custom Linux kernels with Debian and Fedora (though why somebody would want to do this is beyond me...), showing how easy the process is (I may be biased, but I find Debian's way is easier. On the other hand, it within the -- rpm -- package framework instead of a custom command -- make-kpkg in Debian -- feels more consistent and logical. Without reading documentation you won't get anywhere on both systems, so it probably doesn't matter...) One down for Carla, however, for not doing enough basic research: “The new naming convention [linux-* instead of kernel-* packages] opens the door to using other kernels with Debian, which I don't know what those would be, but Debian is ready for them.” Or one down for us, the Debian project, for not making enough noise around the various non-Linux ports. Though that will come when GNU/kFreeBSD is released with lenny... Two, Debian derivative SimplyMEPIS, which switched to Ubuntu as a base operating system a year ago, is now returning to Debian GNU/Linux as its base system. The main reason seems to be long term stability and upgradeability - which is a key strength of Debian for many other users as well (me, for one.) The reason for switching to Ubuntu in the first place has been newer application versions and predictable upgrade schedules (and that Warren Woodford misunderstood how Ubuntu LTS was to be maintained, apparently) -- both issues are being addressed within Debian as we get better release management and faster integration of new application versions (the big pieces of software I use regularly are the Linux kernel, X.org, KDE and OpenOffice.org, all of which I find are integrated in unstable fast enough, and much faster than 2 years ago. That the testing migration sometimes takes time is not a problem since mixing etch, lenny and sid is usually possible without problems even in a production (desktop) environment.) So, if we take a step back from the day-to-day squabbling between developers working at cross purposes and look at the output we produce, I believe we're still doing some things right.

Russell Coker has recently started posting random tech-tips and recipes in his blog :

To improve things in this regard I plan to increase the number of posts I write with solutions to random technical problems that I encounter with the aim of providing a resource for google searches and to randomly inform people who read my blog.

This is nice to see on Planet Debian - although I hope we continue to see the personal entries. For anybody else who is considering posting things like this I would be delighted if you'd copy them to the Debian Administration website. There have been numerous times when I've been just about to write something on a topic, seen it posted elsewhere and figured I shouldn't do so:

• Because it would be duplication.
• Because it would look like plagiarism

(Notable examples off the top of my head: Introduction to OpenVZ, Introduction to GIT, several Xen pieces.) I don't get many submissions, which I'm getting resigned to, but it is easy and people really really are greatful for new posts. In other news linuxlinks.com are a bunch of spammers and will be reported as such. I utterly fail to care that they've added "my software" to their list; if I cared I'd join their site and agree to receive emails from them..

It seems like everything's coming up wiki these last few days. I guess it's just part of going to Wikimania -- wiki is in the air. For example, I'm glad to see that Wikispaces now supports OpenID for login. That's excellent news for the wiki world -- Wikispaces joins a growing number of wiki projects and wiki providers who support OpenID: WetPaint, Wikitravel, wikiHow, AboutUs, and many others. OpenID is really coming together as a global sign-on for wikis. This is good news, because it means we can start talking about distributed reputation systems for wikis, making for one big wiki family. I think it would be great if Wikipedia and Wikia were ready to come on board with OpenID sometime soon. It's unfortunate that OpenID deployment at Wikimedia is dependent on the single user login system, which is a huge effort that's taking longer than expected. Wikia is waiting to see what Wikimedia does. I tried out Wikispaces's OpenID support, and it seems pretty good. I got a spurious error when I logged in -- it responded to my automatically-provided nick, "Evan", with a message that made it sound like I'd just typed in that nickname. Other than that, it worked quite smoothly. Good job to Wikispaces, and real bonus for OpenID. tags: openid wiki wikispaces

After an exhausting trip home from OSCON (Portland to Frankfurt 10 hours, then by car to Innsbruck, 6 hours), I caught something nasty and am taking it easy. So I took a little bit of time to work on updating the Linux Incompatibility List to use DedaWiki, to which I also added a search function. Hopefully this will allow me to manage spam just a little bit better, as it is becoming a serious problem for that site, due to its popularity.

Well, I am impressed. Iceowl slipped through NEW in just a few hours. Many thanks to our ftp-masters … well done! Two screenshots Iceowl and its Icedove extension:

Thanks to Centauri Dreams for the pointer to the ESA DARWIN proposal now here (high-resolution version also here). DARWIN is a space mission to detect the presence of life on other planets by spectroscopy: looking for biomarkers such as the presence of Ozone, water and methane together on terrestrial-sized planets. These are groups of gases that collectively would imply the presence of life. Unfortunately it appears that DARWIN is slipping: its not currently hardware-funded, and has a planned launch-date of 2020, having slipped from 2012. This is when NASAs alternative Terrestrial Planet Finder and Space Interferometry Mission have been defunded indefinitely. At the same time, the French COROT mission has just announced its first month-long series light-curves. COROT hunts for Earth-sized planets: it's a small space telescope that stares at the same patch of sky for long periods, looking for changes in the amount of light from stars that indicate a planet passing in front of a star. It has been much more successful than expected, having already announced its first exoplanet detection in April. NASA is also launching a similar mission, Kepler, in 2008. So we face the prospect that any day now we may know of Earth-sized planets in a Habitable zone, and yet be over a decade from determining if they could contain life. So do we have any other tricks up our sleeves? Other possibilities include the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble. With a launch planned in 2013, it would be able to determine some atmospheric features found in COROT detections, but would be too expensive to do the planet-hunting Darwin could do. Perhaps this could be imroved with occulters such as UMBRAS (thanks to enzo). Other novel detection missions include the Voyager Interstellar Mission (via), reusing exisiting 'end-of-life' spacecraft as telescopes. And finally, could ground-based telescopes do it? tests have just started on a new 10M telescope in the Canaries that could help; in terms of larger scopes, colleagues of mine in NUI Galway have been collaborating on the design of Euro50,a proposed 50 M telescope. Together with new techniques such as spectral deconvolution (via via) may help. Tags astronomy, exoplanets

Because of the social networking and needing-to-be-registered of it all, I had to sign up for another website to keep track of one of my friends' goingses-onses. The sign-up process reminded me of a circus freakshow of the "Step on inside -- if you dare! And buy a bottle of our snake oil!" (insert knowing, taunting laugh) variety. Tell me how PUMPED you feel after reading the comments they added after I filled in the various fields:

Email address: Nicely put!
First name: So that's what they call you!
Last name: Classy last name, I have to admit!
Username: Creative!
I agree to the Terms of Service: ...I dare you to un-click that!
End of registration: To make sure you're as awesome as you claim, please visit your email's inbox for our verification email (I'm positive that more exclamation points were ejaculated all over my screen at this point but I closed the window too quickly to be sure.)
Activation confirmation emancipation proclamation: Wonderful, the hardest part is now over! Time to Enjoy! (With a capital E!!!!)
It might as well have been written by Dr. Bronner himself:

Email address: Godliness!
First name: If I'm not for me, who am I? Nobody!
Last name: Enlarge the positive!
Username: WE'RE ONE! ALL-ONE! EXCEPTIONS ETERNALLY? NONE! ABSOLUTE NONE!
I agree to the Terms of Service: Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute! or Wet Skin Well!
End of registration: Whatever unites mankind is better than whatever divides us!
Activation confirmation ALL-ONE! clean sensation: WELCOME TO SPACESHIP EARTH!!

Following my previous article, I had some interesting comments introducing me to git-filter-branch (which is a new function coming from cogito’s cg-admin-rewritehist). This command is really designed to rewrite the history and you can do much more changes… it enabled me to fix the dates/authors/committers/logs of all the commits that were created with git_load_dirs. It can also be used to add one or more “parent commits” to any commit. In parallel I discovered some problems with the git repository that I created: the tags were no more pointing to my master branch. This is because git rebase won’t convert them while rewriting history. This lead me to redo everything from scratch. This time I used git-filter-branch instead. The man page even gives an example of how to link two branches together as if one was the predecessor of the other. Here’s how you can do it: let’s bind together “old” and “new”… the resulting branch will be “new-rewritten”.

$ git rev-parse old
0975870bb1631379f2da798fa78736a4fe32960a
$ git checkout new
$ git-filter-branch --tag-name-filter=cat --parent-filter \
"sed -e 's/^$/-p 0975870bb1631379f2da798fa78736a4fe32960a/'" \
new-rewritten
[...]
Rewritten history saved to the new-rewritten branch

Short explanation: the only commit without a parent commit (thus matching the empty regex “^$”) is the root commit and this one is changed to have a parent (-p) which is the last commit of the branch “old”. At the end, you remove all the temporary branches, keep only what’s needed and repack everything to save space:

$ git branch -D old new
$ git prune
$ git repack -a -d

Hey folks, we released some minutes ago finally Debian-Edu/Skolelinux 3.0r0 ?Terra? which is based on Debian 4.0 with some modifications to work out-of-the box. Here are the releasenotes: Oslo - July 22., 2007 Skolelinux 3.0 is ready. This is an community release with comprehensive support from regional and national projects in Germany, Spain, France, Greece and Norway. The Skolelinux project is now a part of Debian under the name Debian-Edu. Several other projects have made additional functionality to Skolelinux tailored for national needs. Skolelinux now supports more than 50 countries. whats new in skolelinux 3.0: based on Debian 4.0 ?etch? and therefore compatible to LSB 3.1, using kernel 2.6.18 and KDE 3.5.5 Full support for networked Thin clients, ?LowFat (diskless) clients, Workstations and Laptops. With the ?LowFat clients users got full PC functionality with extremely low maintenance cost. The use of ?LowFat clients gives full support for sound, video, USB memory stick?s and DVDs without the need for a local installation. Skolelinux now got more than 80 applications selected for pedagogic uses, supporting more than 50 languages. Many new applications are introduced in addition to popular classic as GCompris, KDE-Edu, Iceweasel (unbranded version of Firefox) and ?OpenOffice.org. Installation is a breeze: Both the installation and source code for all software are now distributed on a single DVD now supporting three different processor platforms as i386, PowerPC and AMD64. This makes it more easy to choose hardware, and to study the recipes behind the software. Those interested can exercise their freedom to learn, participate and share knowledge more easily. Installation CDs are also available, but requires a working Internet connection for installation. about skolelinux Skolelinux is a complete tailored software solution for the needs of any educational institution or school. It is a ready computer system were the school does not need to piece together the components. Skolelinux is the result of the work of the Debian Edu project and Debian Edu is an official Debian subproject. It is installed in a great number of schools in Norway, Germany, France and other countries. Municipalities and Commercial Service Providers run Skolelinux across multiple schools, operated and maintained centrally. Service providers report that the ?lowfat clients? require half the maintenance cost of other desktop alternatives. The next milestone of Skolelinux development will be to merge the Debian-based ?LinEx distro into Debian Edu. Currently ?LinEx is used by more than 250,000 students and public employees in the region of Extremadura in Spain. in depth Lowfat clients is also known as Diskless workstations. They run applications locally on the client. All software comes from the server instead of locally from the client hard drive. Recommended minimum requirement for client machines is > 256 MB RAM and 800 MHz CPU. Skolelinux now got improved tools for system surveillance and maintenance. Roadmap for next merging of ?LinEx and Debian-Edu: * http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/LinEx2DebianEdu-Roadmap Please note that the documentation for the 3.0 Terra release is only available in English at the moment and contains some rough edges. We have considered releasing before the end of the summer holidays more important and we will fix those rough edges in the coming weeks, when we also expect more translations to show up. Those fixes will be included in the upcoming 3.0 r1 release.

It is not fresh news, but I haven't had time to comment about it before. Very soon after launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which was only made available worldwide in its original English version, you can read a free and non-academic version in Spanish. Spanish Hallows project, built up by a bunch of Harry Potter fans have made completely ridiculous efforts of J.K. Rowling and hers publishers (Bloomsbury Publishing) to try to delay versions in other languages. Perhaps this was not made with other intention than to avoid early publishing of copies sent to translators, which, as you know yet, happened anyway. Once again we see how is not only impossible, but stupid, to try to keep information in this new environment. I am pretty sure that most of books, movies and music publishers will disappear soon. But not because of piracy: they are not being able to adapt their corporate business model to the new environment. And I am sure that there are little start-ups out there working in this new model, and some of them will succeed. But nothing new here... it is how business world has worked for years now.

It’s interesting to see an eWeek article about outsourcing to Canada, apparently the US immigration laws are restrictive enough that US companies (such as Microsoft) are establishing offices there. It really makes sense, Canada seems like a much nicer place to live. It’s also interesting to see an eWeek blog post about reductions in outsourcing to India that claims that Indian salaries have increased so much that there are few benefits in outsourcing the work. I have previously blogged about my approval of outsourcing as a form of charity to developing countries which received this response in Spanish. An English translation of a section of that post is “Conclusion, outsourcing hurts and the damage to many individuals is permanent. In countries in the third world like the one where I live, the damage affects the majority of the population (80% of the population is very poor). It’s ridiculous that less than 10% of the Mexican population earn 8 to 10 thousand pesos per month which only allows them to survive and save a little to buy a car or a house“. I agree that the inequality in Mexico is a bad thing, but I think that outsourcing is more of a cure than a cause for such inequality. The competition for employees who are capable of doing such work will increase salaries for workers and create a middle-class. Also the net access which is needed for outsourced work will drive some political changes. When discussing these issues with Indians I never hear any complaints about outsourcing!

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The chinese-big5 is moderated since quite some time, because of to much unfilterable spam. Now the last remaining listmoderator asks for help as won’t be able to do listmoderation in near future. If you are able to read/write chinese-big5 and want to do listmoderation, please contact listmaster@lists.debian.org and/or write to 434837@bugs.debian.org. listmaster

Note: This article is part of my Testing stuff with QEMU series.

From the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port page:

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port that consists of GNU userland using the GNU C library on top of FreeBSD's kernel, coupled with the regular Debian package set.

Q: Why would anybody want to do that?
A: Why not? [1] So, after we have talked about that, let's start:

1. Install QEMU:
   apt-get install qemu
2. Download the latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD installer ISO image (either for i386 or amd64):
   wget http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/install-cd/kfreebsd-i386/20070313/debian-20070313-kfreebsd-i386-install.iso
3. Create a QEMU image which will hold the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (i386) installation:
   qemu-img create -f qcow2 qemu_kfreebsd_i386.img 5G
4. Boot directly from the ISO image and install Debian into the QEMU image:
   qemu -boot d -cdrom debian-20070313-kfreebsd-i386-install.iso -hda qemu_kfreebsd_i386.img
5. The FreeBSD installer will now start. For more detailed instructions see the Installing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD manual.
   First you can choose between an "Express" or "Custom" install (I used "Express").
6. Next you end up in the partitioning tool. Type "a" to use the entire (QEMU) disk for the installation (the disk is called "ad0", not "hda" as on Linux). Type "q" to quit the partitioning tool.
7. You are now asked which boot manager to use. For QEMU you should use "BootMgr", the default FreeBSD boot manager. If you install on real hardware you can also use GRUB; in that case choose "None" here (see the manual for more information), but note that the installer does not install or configure GRUB for you! You should do that beforehand!
8. Next up: The disklabel editor. Here you'll create a partition ("slice" in FreeBSD-speak) for the root filesystem and a swap partition.
   Press "c" to create a new slice (will be called "ad0s1"), enter "4GB", choose "FS" (filesystem), and enter "/" for the root filesystem. Per default the UFS2 file system will be used. To create the swap partition, press "c" again, enter "1023MB", and select "swap". The new slice is called "ad0s1b". Press "q" to quit.
9. Choose "minimal" when asked which distribution to install.
10. Installation media dialog: select "CD/DVD" and "acd0" (for QEMU's ATAPI/IDE CD-ROM drive).
11. The installation will now begin, and after a while you're asked to switch to console 3 using ALT-F3. Do it.
12. You'll have to answer a bunch of questions: geographic area + city you're in (for timezone), whether you want to participate in the Debian popularity contest, whether module-init-tools should load additional drivers (no, so press ENTER three times). The installation will soon be finished.

At the end you must select "No" as you're told to do, then reboot via "Exit Install". You can then shutdown QEMU.

1. Restart QEMU with the newly installed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD:
   qemu -hda qemu_kfreebsd_i386.img
   
2. Press enter at the FreeBSD boot manager prompt, then login as root (there's no password).
3. First things first: Set up a root password:
   passwd
4. Now let's fix networking, update the system and install a bunch of packages:
   nano /etc/network/interfaces
   Yes, there's no vi, not even a symlink to nano! Uncomment the two "ed0" lines ("ed0" is the equivalent to "eth0" on Linux, I guess).
   /etc/init.d/networking restart
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install vim xorg icewm xterm
5. You can fix your console keymap using the kbdcontrol package (just select your keymap from the menu):
   apt-get install kbdcontrol
6. Finally, let's fix X11 and start it. But first we create a new user, as we don't want to run X11 as root:
   adduser uwe
vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   The mouse device is "/dev/psm0", the protocol "PS/2", and the graphics driver should be "vesa":

  Section "InputDevice"
      Option "Device" "/dev/psm0"
      Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
  [...]
  Section "Device"
      Driver "vesa"
    

That's about it. Login as "uwe" (or whatever your username is) and start X11:
startx

Wasn't all that hard, eh? Now, if you've got some spare time, head over to the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD wiki page and help improving this port ;-) You should probably start with reading the PORTING guide. Both kfrebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 seem to be reasonably stable already (and more than 70% of the whole Debian archive builds fine on these architectures, see kfreebsd-i386_stats and kfreebsd-amd64_stats). I'll quite likely install kfreebsd-amd64 on one of my boxes soonish and start using it, maybe I'll even find some time to fix/patch/port some packages... [1] More elaborate answer(s) and reasons are available in the Debian wiki.

We've had a lot of great blog traffic about Vinismo. I thought I'd try to pull together a few of the better ones.

• vinismo! wiki wine compendium from Hugh McGuire.
• Vinismo Opens Its Doors to Wine Lovers Everywhere from the Creative Commons Weblog. Thanks, guys!
• Vinismo: Wiki + Wine from Zach Copley
• Vinismo from Wendy Copley.
• DemoCampMontreal3 report from Montreal Tech Watch
• DemoCampMontreal3 Report from Josh Nursing
• Vinismo Presentation at DemoCampMontreal3 on the SearchAnyway Blog. Probably one of my favourite pieces, although it makes Niko real mad since it cuts off just before he starts talking. Make mental note: don't say "Uh" so much.
• Bienvenue sur Vinismo, le guide des vins libre by Niko. Niko also bemoaned the difficulty of keeping our project under wraps in Mon lourd secret bient t d voil . What a drama queen.
• Vinismo : un wiki sur le vin by Olivier Niquet. He's suspicious that we are sponsored by J. Lohr, because there are so many J. Lohr wines on our front page.

All in all it's been pretty good. I hope we'll get some more, though! tags: blogs vinismo

DemoCampMontreal3 report So, it's been a couple of days and I should probably get around to posting my own DemoCampMontreal3 report.

• Niko and I started off with our own demo for Vinismo. It was a lot of fun: we talked about the reasons for starting the site, the technical, information architecture and graphics/UI design challenges, and what our future extensions are going to be. At the end of it, we took some questions, which was fun. The most interesting for me was from Roberto Rocha, whose TechnoCit is one of my favourite tech columns in Montreal. He asked, "Your typical contributor will be much older. What will you do to make your wiki more accessible to them?" It was a good question I don't have an answer to yet, but I want to think about it more.
• The second demo was by Heri Rakotomalala, who showed off his social-networking GTD tool, WorkCruncher. It's a TODO list with a twist: items that you don't get done age off the list. You have to re-commit to doing a task on an almost daily basis. I think it's a great and refreshing design; my TODO list gets depressing long and filled with unfinishable tasks, and I get too intimidated to work on ones that really matter. I think Heri might have to make some concessions to people's expectations for TODO lists -- maybe a way to automatically archive tasks, rather than deleting them entirely...?
• The third demo was by the gang from Defensio, who are providing an great anti-spam Web service similar to Akismet. They had a few examples of where they're different, but I'm not well-versed enough in comment spam issues to understand them. My guess is that since they're getting into the market after Akismet, though, they have the opportunity to make a smarter technology. Their one downside? They used slides -- which the rules of DemoCamp. They did demo the service, though.
• Fourth up was the indefatigable Simon Law. Simon's project? To turn back time. Talk about ambitious! His effort consisted of making a typical kitchen clock turn backwards. He disassembled the clock and explained how it worked to the audience. It was great, except for two things: the clock didn't work at the end of the demo (although he got it working by the end of DemoCamp), and he took a few minutes to draw a diagram of the clock; in my mind, that's just a low-tech PowerPoint slide.
• Fifth, and quite fascinating, was a tool that Jerome Paradis showed off. It was a Google-Maps mashup that filtered special emails for an informal private jet sharing network. Apparently, companies who charter private jets often have space in the jets, so they'll make that space available. People who need a last-minute charter jet can send email from their Blackberries and such, and if there's availability they get contacted by the charter companies. The interesting part? These people use a highly structured lingo ("O/W" = "one way"), and Jerome's tool scrapes these emails to make the data into a mapping app for his customers. Very interesting!

All in all, it was a good night -- probably made better by the Argentina Cabernet Sauvignon I had. There's a DemoCampMontreal4 scheduled for August 17th, but I won't be in town for it. Too bad for me! tags: democampmontreal3 defensio workcruncher simonlaw jeromeparadis vinismo

About the recent blogs on planet debian about debian maintainers, I guess I have a couple of comments also. About me: I am currently in "waiting for DAM" stage. I have been 10 months getting there and has now waiting for 6 weeks there. Looking at the DAM queue, people have been waiting in more than 6 months. What would make the process faster for me ? Getting processed by the DAM - and then the keyring maintainer is the obvious answer. A thing that would have made my 10 months at AM stage shorter would be if the "reward" for getting the AM stage done wouldn’t have been queueing in maybe to 6 months. It wasn’t like the most motivating factor for answering my AM. The fact that it took 10 months is mostly my own fault. So what am I trying to say here? Fix it it at the DAM stage (and maybe at the keyring stage also) and see people becoming DDs faster. Without lowering the barriers - except the barriers for the ability to stand in a queue. Debian Maintainers seems mostly like a ugly hackaround this. And I kind of find my self being in the target group for some of the use of Debian Maintainers. - and I am eagerly waiting getting processed in the DAM queue. And back to development Who wants to test & fix kdm on sparc ? (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=433801)

After having spent the last few weeks of my life travelling randomly around Europe; my interrail ticket has alas run out. Although this doesn't mean I stop travelling, it means I will be travelling certainly less frequently.
Despite a few hiccups, I think the experience of travelling around Europe again was fantastic, I would like to thank pixie for bearing with me for so long; and of course also all the people who offered us places to stay. It was very generous of you, and (once I've settled into an apartment here in Oslo) feel free to give me a shout if you need a place to stay whilst over here!
I am here until the 6th; after which I will be in Duesseldorf for a month working, and then hopefully moving back over to Oslo, after having sorted out at least a temporary job and a place to stay.
I shall finish with a few pictures of the trip!


Pub in Helsinki; with a few Debian people!


pixie in the process of killing 6 hours at an airport


At Rob's flat in Amsterdam


Me looking insane on the train to spain


Pixie looking insane on the train to spain

That's all folks!