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I smiled at "Things I thought" from Bagel Belly Blog more than I have for a while. Much truth there. The Bagel Belly is back on form. Sam Hocevar asks "Is there a task organiser that does not suck?" which I think is interesting - the program is not the organiser. The user is the organiser. The program can only help (or hinder!) not organise. Sometimes obvious is just plain wrong. I used to think it was obvious to answer my messages at the start of the day. I found I lost whole chunks of the day that way. For me, long reading is usually an evening activity, so I guess my mind associated it with going to sleep afterwards. I didn't notice that reading personal email is fine, when I reply to a high proportion of it and act on it. That starts my day with action and I continue being active through the day. Reading mailing lists and newsgroups isn't fine, as I read most of that and don't reply. I switched to reading only personal email in the morning and leaving lists and newsgroups until later in the day, unless there's something obviously interesting. It's made a big difference. Is there a need to rethink email? Bob Geldof rails against emails:

"Geldof said he dreaded seeing lots of e-mails in his inbox, as they imposed an agenda on him, and disrupted his own plans for the day."

This doesn't surprise me in general (is there a less likely email fan?) but does he have a point? Over time, I've moved to treating emails as letters, essays or at least office memos. It's easy to treat them as conversations, but they are not, in so many ways. You can say things in conversations that will haunt you if you ever write them down. In conversation, people accept that sometimes you'll make comments without proper review and reflection, but it's assumed that you have considered your emails, even though most people don't seem to. This is part of why I think the Debian private email "declassification" proposal is unethical if applied to past messages. People didn't expect to have such a wide audience. Similar musings from techdirt, the Register, the Inquirer and Business Week Maybe see also thread patterns from see shy jo which could help you skip though low priority email sooner, and Online forum usage and other addictions, from Steve Pavlina. I wondered if the problems were new to online. Forums can be a bit like newspapers, but while you get a whole day to read a newspaper and there's one hell of a lag on the letters page, you can get a forum update by clicking at any time (even though new editions may be smaller) and your talk-back appears instantly on most forums. - Then someone reminded me about "news junkies" who buy all the newspapers and watch or listen to rolling news. Maybe this isn't a new problem. How was it solved in the past?

The flight to Edinburgh went just fine. I believe it’s my first time flying 10 minutes ahead of schedule because everyone was already in the plane. I left on 12:35 CET, landed on 12:35 GMT, so no time lost :). After arriving I was dying for something to eat (which I took with me in my coat but it wasn’t really reachable in the plane). So I ate, got some money and took a taxi to the Heriot-Watt University campus. The university campus I got dropped off on the campus at the main reception. There I was able to store my luggage and I was kindly directed to the Mountbatten building, home of the school of MACS. There I met Fairouz Kamareddine and two of my direct colleagues: Manuel Maarek and Krzysztof Retel. Fairouz quickly arranged that I got registered as a HW(Heriot-Watt) student, got my MACS account, the accommodation, etc. With keys, luggage and instructions I took off to the Lord Thomson Hall to find my room. At 17:00 I was completely settled in already. I met my (all Chinese) four kitchmates (yes, it’s a strange word) and went back to the university refectory for dinner. My room is a quite small, at least, smaller than I am used to (about half the area), but it has a bathroom (with shower), gets cleaned weekly and all the heating is included… so I am not complaining. I must say that the people on campus are very nice. I can ask anyone if I need to know something and I always get help or a kind reply. There are really a lot of foreign students here (about 25%) who all share the same fate.

After large amounts of peer pressure from Rapha l Hertzog and other French Debian Developers, I finally created a new geek-fr category in this blog. The old geek category was renamed to geek-en for consistency, and both are now subcategories of a new geek category. I think that means you’ll get articles in both French and English if you just read geek. Same applies for the RSS feeds, so you may like to update your feed readers and aggregators (I already updated Planet Debian). The new geek-fr subcategory will contain articles in French, as you’d expect, and will probably be more related to French-specific events. I’ll post another announcement in French in a few minutes.

Since this weekend there's a new member in my little computer family :)
After serving as my bedside table for over three months (ever since I moved here) my regular PC is now finally reassembled, equipped with a new hard drive and DVD drive and back in action! It's got a new name, too: Undine. For the illiterate among you, a Undine is a water spirit and this particular one is called after the Undine in the story of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. (Full text from the Gutenberg Project, and a summary.)
It's not all set up yet. (Is a machine ever?) Aplayer and xmms still throw errors and it won't go into any kind of standby (sleep or hibernate). But nevertheless the increase in quality of my life has since been enormous. Until then I used my beloved 12" Thinkpad (Dropkick, got it's name from them and the way I treat it) for daily work, which was okay, but somewhat unhandy at times. Now I got 21" instead of 12", a lot more power, sound, and a decent (but filthy) keyboard again. Yay!
Downside: I had totally forgotten how *INCREDIBLY LOUD* that thing is. Maybe I'll go buy a set of these insulating mats. This high-pitched noise drives me insane!

Regarding my last post: I noticed there's an extra-i-that-bears-witness-to-my-favourite-editor in it but decided to leave it as a statement ;) Maybe I'll start a new trend?
The Skatalites concert was as great as expected but unfortunately very full. People where standing shoulder to shoulder all the way to the back wall. So all you could do was stand and listen, dancing was rather difficult or even impossible. :( Also, we left a bit earlier since those $%*# ing regular work hours have turned me into a total sissy when it comes to staying up late. This needs to be undone!!

In other news: My increasing enthusiasm for Leipzig experienced a first drop when I noticed this morning that somewhen in the last few days someone must have stolen the bungee cord from my bike. :(

I am disappointed and indignant about this!!!

(Especially since only my new springy one is gone, the old, f***ed-up one is still there. Haha!! You me too!)

Last but not least: I got my Christmas leave confirmed! I am off work from christmas until new-year. This means that I can go South over the holidays and be with my ifamily who totally rocks and I very much look forward to seeing again :) (Mom, should you read this: We are having fondue again this Christmas, arent we? Pleeaaase??)

At the end of an interesting piece on permissions, Joey Hess concludes:

I could give many more examples of subsystems in Debian that exist at different point in the spectrum between locked down unix permissions and a wiki. There seems to be a definite pull toward moving away from unix permissions, once ways can be found to do so that are secure or that allow bad changes to be reverted (and blame properly assigned). Cases of moving in the other direction are rare (one case of this is the further locking down of the Debian archive server and BTS server after the server compromise last year).

I think Joey’s focus on “unix permissions” is a bit misleading; you could make the same argument more generally by talking about permissive and restrictive regimes. Permissive systems have the obvious risk of vandalism in various forms, whether deliberate and malicious like adding false information to wikipedia, or well-intentioned contributions that are low quality due to simple ignorance or carelessness. On the other hand restrictive systems have the somewhat subtler risks that good contributions will be turned away because the restrictions are more effort than they’re worth, and that the time it takes to administer the restrictions start detracting from the time to actually do the work in the first place. So obviously there’s a tradeoff. But as well as that, there are ways of easing both risks: the risk of vandalism can be overcome if the stuff isn’t relied upon too heavily and can be changed relatively easily – so problems in unstable aren’t much of an issue since they can be fixed in a day, and don’t affect people running mission-critical systems because they should be using stable or testing or similar. Likewise, managing restrictions can be distributed too: the new-maintainer process is a good example of that, in that a range of people are involved in helping people pass through the qualification round, and in that sponsorship allows people who haven’t passed through the main lot of restrictions to get their contributions in by going through a different process. One interesting approach, to my mind, is worrying less about permissions and more about space – so that different people with different ideas on how to do things can do them independently. That’s part of the idea behind usertags and usercategories: rather than having people try to find an imperfect compromise, let them work on the same stuff in the way they actually prefer. That reduces the risk of carelessness, in that you stop having any reason to bother other people, and also reduces the problem of restrictions, in that if you don’t have permission to work in someone else’s area, you can just setup your own area and work there. Perhaps the worst problem is if the drawbacks feed on each other: a restrictive system turns away contributions, which causes prospective contributors to get frustrated and hence careless, which then reinforces the reasons that the restrictions were put their in the first place and diminishes the chance they’ll be reconsidered. That’s a hard cycle to break, but it’s not one where anyone really wins. I’ll leave the last word to Joey:

Anyway, the point of this is that, if you survey the parts of dealing with the project where Debian developers feel most helpless and unempowered, the parts that are over and over again the subject of heated discussions and complaints, you will find that those are the parts of the project where unix permissions still hold sway. […] The challenge, then is to find ways to open things up to everyone, without throwing security out the window. It has to be done a piece at time, and some of the pieces that are left are the ones most resistant to this change.

New article: Using Xen 3.0 on Debian Sarge [Fixed the broken link]. Nothing much else happening today. I woke up around 11AM and was just going back to bed when the postman came to deliver a lot of stuff from my wishlist Now the question is “Do I watch some DVDs, or go back to bed like I’d planned?” Two new books too - The Picture of Dorian Gray, the only film to give me nightmares as a child, and ‘Tales from the perilous realm‘ which will almost certainly have its cover copied into a tattoo at some point in the new year

In 1999 I went to LinuxTag as a Debian representative after the project has received an offer to staff a booth there. I took over the maintenance and organised the first Debian meeting in Germany. I also gave two talks during this event, one of them was even repeated on the second day. We've had a lot of fun and since this was the first meeting of Debian affiliated people in Germany, it was very interesting to connect faces to mail addresses and to learn more about the people behind a name. This LinuxTag was the last such event that took place at the University Kaiserslautern. Free projects such as KDE and Debian have been offered a booth in one building from which one could reach the lecture rooms, while company booths were located in the Mensa building with their own professional booths. It was a warm weekend and the Jolt people have supported us with cool and caffeined drinks. We had the opportunity to use a lecture room for sleeping with other project members. Klaus Knopper was supporting the network and supervised the security team, and hence, had the unfortunate job to move away all project members from their booths, out of the building or into the lecture room. I've heard, that he had a hard time, and still believes that Debian people don't need sleep. I guess we should have moved him into the lecture room for a sleep instead. This '99 LinuxTag was quite a real success. It took place at the rise of the dot com era and all people were happy about the event. There were about 7,000 visitors in total on both days. The city of Kaiserslautern has called the university several times since there were no free hotel rooms anymore. Former events happened more or less unnoticed by locals, but not anymore in 1999. After the show was over, we dismantled the booth, moved away our own equipment and left the place. However, I made the "mistake" to notice that the LinuxTag people, who have provided us such a great opportunity, still had work to do since they had to dismantle the booth system and clean the ground floor. My biggest "mistake" was that I didn't run away and have a nice evening but decided to help and ask other booth members who were still around to do the same. Having cleaned up the location quite fast was not the only result. Oliver Zendel, who was in charge of talking to the community and who offered Debian the booth, spoke to me afterwards and wondered whether I would be interested to join the team. Well, I knew how to organise stuff, can talk to people, know quite some people in the community, the LinuxTag people were a cool team, so why not. So for the event in 2000 I was in charge of the projects exhibition. In 2000 we also had to move out of the university of Kaiserslautern since 7,000 visitors were already too much for that small university and city. That's why we eventually moved to the Stuttgart fair. That was an interesting experience. It was also interesting to see how such an event can be organised by a team of friends and how the acceptance in the business world was. In Stuttgart we were able to use a small office (max. 15m ) for the entire team as working space. Two computers were installed which we were allowed to touch but not to install a real system on. Hence, Klaus brought Knoppix CDs. This was the first time that I learned about the Knoppix Live CD. Together with my notebook we've had three desks and could work. However, today I really wonder how this could have worked with so many people, but apparently it really did. Due to the need and my experience in both talking to the press and being the press I joined the LinuxTag press team and even held the final press conference, while my colleague held the opening press conference. So after all projects were happy, the show went fine and most of the office jobs were done, I prepared a press release together with others and maintained the final conference. This was also the first time LinuxTag has organised a business congress as a special extra program for business representatives. It was also the time I experienced the need for several supporters for various tasks. In that year, a dozen supporters were paid as "security" who also drove the shopping for us. Hence, I already acquired some people who supported us as volunteers. That was also the time when Benny joined the team. In 2000 the exhibition boomed and there were a lot of large dot com company booths, which was very nice because LinuxTag arose from a students association and became more and more professional, a platform for both companies and projects. It was organised just like a Free Software project and worked non-commercially. Despite several flame wars and disputes, which seem to be normal, it was organised by friends who believed of a higher goal. It was very nice and gave me a warm feeling when looking at what we have achieved. However, I had nothing to do with commercial interests, income, acquisition, invoices etc., so I may have missed a lot. This year, LinuxTag was planned to take place in one exhibition hall, but there were so many companies interested in running a booth that a second exhibition hall was later rented as well. That's why there were two adjacent halls instead of one large location. In 2001 we were using a different exhibition hall, a larger one due to the strong demand in 2000, but still at the Stuttgart fair. This time I was also in charge of the supporters and already dispatched jobs during the event. From time to time I also maintained the shuttle service to the airport to pick up speakers or take back speakers, which I've also done in 2000. This time we've had a larger office in which all of use fit and which was a nice working atmosphere. We were also able to provide more booth space to Free Software projects. In that year I've automatically taken over the office and communication with the outside world, collecting and distribution information. I don't think this was planned, but it just happened since I was able to do the job besides my other obligations. I also gave a talk about Debian, even though others in the team considered me insane for doing that as well. With a lot of help by the local user group, we were able to offer project members a cheap sleeping opportunity. The LUG acquired a gym hall during the night an cooked in the student's office "Hellblaues Nilpferd". After I've picked up Hans Reiser I went there for a snack with him before dumping him at the hotel. It was a nice atmosphere. One of the lead people for this effort, Hubert Kai er, was suddenly overtaken by death two weeks ago. In 2002 LinuxTag moved to Karlsruhe and thus to a new fair where everything had to start again from zero. We had to get acquainted with the local company and their representatives and learn how the new fairground works. The fairground was more interesting since there was a large open area between the conference site and the exhibition hall. Looking at past years, it was used by visitors. Thanks a lot to Jochen Topf from GUUG and members of the local user group KaLUG a lot of community events happened during LinuxTag. They maintained an Internet caf in the conference building and organised the legendary KaLUG party which has become a regular LinuxTag event. In addition to that I've also worked more and more and took over more areas where I noticed help was needed and that I could manage it. So it happened that I took over more work at and before LinuxTag which finally resulted in two months of work were I don't remember a day on which I've worked less than 8 hours for LinuxTag in 2005. In 2002 I worked on the coding marathon and delegated the tasks and support during LinuxTag to two other people, so it will run independent of me. Since I was the first of the team to arrive in Karlsruhe, I also built up the office and the storage. Due to the large distance I had to leave Oldenburg the day before I want to arrive in Karlsruhe, so that I was at the fairground at last at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning. Before the event a lot of issues had to be negotiated with various parties, which required quite a lot of work. Until 2004 the entire team was working in their spare time without getting paid for their LinuxTag work. The higher goal was the impulse and all of us had neglected one issue or another that wasn't important for LinuxTag. We've had some external service providers at least since 2002. The acquisition became a difficult task for students who liked to work until the morning and get up at lunch time, since many companies expect a partner that is available for them from 9 to 5. That's why Charter was eventually hired and this year ergomedia. For press work newthinking was hired. This year the social event was also organised by them. However, having two people from the board of directors being paid by the association for their LinuxTag work from April, and external service providers that were also paid, was something I considered problematic if not unfair, looking at how other people commit to LinuxTag and don't get a monetary compensation. Several people still worked a lot on LinuxTag in their spare time and had to live from something as well. It caused resentment in the team.

I've come back from foss.in in Bangalore, India which I attended as a representative of the Debian project. Foss.in is the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore. It has broadened out to cover all aspects of Free and Open Source Software and is the largest such event in South Asia. I'm told almost 3000 people attended this year. I arrived on the morning of Monday the 28th. The conference organizers put up myself and other speakers at the guesthouse of the Indian Institute of Science. The accomodations were spartan but comfortable. They got considerably less spartan by the next day which was when I figured how the hot water tap worked. I shared my room with Kartik Mistry of Gujarati l10n fame. The first day of the conference was on Tuesday the 29th. The conference was taking place for the first time in a new venue, in several large canvas tents in the grounds of the Bangalore Palace. There were some technical difficulties; when we arrived on site in the morning, there was a line of people atleast several hundred long, waiting to register. Undoubtedly, some of them must have given up and gone home, but the fact that so many people persevered is a testament to the high level of energy surrounding the event. The talks began late too but everyone I spoke to seemed to take it goodnaturedly. I had planned to give two talks. One my standard half-hour "What is Debian?" song and dance. If you went to Debian Day at Helsinki, you already know what that's about and a 90 minute workshop on "Creating Debian Packages." Both were scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Owing to the earlier delays, the first of these which was slated for 2:30pm didn't start until 4pm. The organizers actually asked me to roll both talks up into one supertalk which was not a problem for me. However, I made one fatal mistake. At lunch time I had noticed one of the food stalls was selling an inviting-smelling cheese pizza. Now, I've been to India enough times to know, "phirangis" simply don't eat dairy-based food in India unless they have some time to acclimatize to it first. I even said as much as I was eating the pizza. Somehow I rationalized that the cheese was pasteurized and well-cooked so the rule wouldn't apply to me but boy was I wrong. I first noticed signs of distress three-quarters of the way through "What is Debian?" I struggled valiantly to the end but then had to excuse myself to head off to the latrines and perform a hard reset of my gastro-intestinal tract. A couple of minutes of vomitting later, though a bit wobbly, I felt well enough to return and start talking about creating Debian packages. I didn't have slides for this one, I just used my laptop to show the innards of binary and source packages, all the various files in the debian directory, debhelper, debconf, and the lifecycle of package maintainence. Unfortunately wi-fi didn't seem to be stretching as far as my location so I couldn't show such nifty things as apt-get source and pbuilder but hopefully my descriptions of these things were impressive enough. There were lots of good questions from the sizable audience and I think we went over 90 minutes. Apart from some BOFs, I didn't really have any formal commitments for the rest of the conference so I spent it holding court at a table in the expo area. I was constantly busy demoing Debian, answering questions, and signing keys. I met Vaidhyanathan Mayilarangam who is a Debian developer, though inactive at the moment. He is going to start getting involved again soon. On Saturday the 3rd, I met the two currently active DDs, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan, and Ganesan Rajagopal. Throughout the days of the conference I also met many other figures on the Indian Free Software scene and made a lot of new contacts. That's it for now; in future blog entries I'll write about some of my impressions of the prospects and problems of Debian and Free Software in India. It remains for me to thank: Branden for authorizing funds for my plane ticket, Atul Chitnis and the other organizers and staff of foss.in, Mahesh Pai and Prasad Kadambi who assisted me in navigating Bangalore, and all the other friends of Debian, new and old, I met during my trip.

Yesterday, I told you about Aunt Viola, choir director at our church for many years, about 50 years ago. Today, I'd like to tell you what she did in church last week. In our community, the song Nun Ist Sie Erschienen is a traditional Christmas hymn. Even though our church services have been in English since the 60s, and the song isn't in any current hymnal, it's still sung around Christmas. (There is a photocopy of this song with each hymnal.) Some of us wish it were sung a little more often. Our church, like many Mennonite churches, has a sharing time during the service. People share what's going on in their lives -- joys or concerns, or whatever it may be. Last Sunday, the first day of advent, the hymn wasn't in the bulletin. The sermon that day was on surprises (very fitting). At the end of sharing time, one of the older people in our church got the mic and said something like "I feel like singing Nun Ist Sie Erschienen, so we're going to right now!" Aunt Viola had been in on this -- she had checked with the organist in advance. So it was all set. Aunt Viola sprung up and somehow got to the front of the sanctuary very quickly (she is in her 80s), ready to direct the congregation! And it was great. I like the song too. It was one of my grandfather's favorites (he played it wonderfully on harmonica) and we sang it (in English) at our wedding. After church, I asked Aunt Viola how long it had been since she had directed for a song. She didn't know -- "a very long time". But she said that if I ever wanted to request a song during sharing time, she'd be happy to direct again! I think I might have to one of these days.

For me this year's event was the most successful and wonderful LinuxTag I've eve been to. I've worked during LinuxTag as much as I could and did my best to make it the best event ever. If I commit myself to something, I try to work properly and generate proper results. This was the same for LinuxTag. As a result, this year I had many tasks to work on. First of all I managed the community and free projects so that they had an opportunity to present themselves to the broad audience during LinuxTag. This required months of communication with members of all attending projects and negotiating their needs. It also required to gather information about the various parts of LinuxTag that also affected projects. Since it is boring having to answer the same questions all the time I decided not doing that anymore and once started to maintain an FAQ that intends to contain all important information for exhibiting projects. Last year I've also added an location plan with information about shops and restaurants nearby and this year I contributed a map for getting to the AKK where the legendary KaLUG party was organised. Being responsible for the projects I was required to decide which project are suited to get a sponsored booth, its size and its location. This year we have had the opportunity to use the ground floor of the conference building in addition to the regular exhibition ground, so that we've could use about 700m in total for the projects exhibition. I've worked nearly two entire weekends to get the booths assigned properly and to have proper graphics. For the conference building I also created the "official" booth map, booth naming, booth signs and booth numbering. One weekend was planned, the other was an accident since we had to rearrange some booths. Exhibiting projects and other community and Free Software oriented projects also had the opportunity to use two workshop rooms for workshops, BoF sessions, meetings and talks. For these I maintained the schedule and negotiated with the speakers and projects, and also acquired moderators for both rooms for the entire time. The people who organised the Accessibility booth people managed to get green light for building a large booth and a so called forum, which is an open talk area, but without any support. Since they couldn't fill in all slots and you can't dismantle a forum in the middle of the show, I've taken over its maintenance and schedule and managed to complete it with interesting talks, setting up, looking for moderators and dismantling. One of these talks I've even held on my own. Fortunately, a DJ contacted us and was able to provide his PA, boxes, microphone and stuff. Without him, the forum would have been an utter disaster. To support the projects we had to build up the network in the main exhibition hall for them on our own. Otherwise it would have cost us several thousand euro, which we didn't have. So I had to draw plans containing the cables we had to lay, calculated the length and decide where to deposit switches and stuff. On the day before the show opened, several supporters went around with a large ladder laying the cable. In the conference building this was done by the KaLUG. I've also coached the supporters during LinuxTag, and was even present at a special short meeting for and with supporters in order to reflect the past day and talk about the next day. This year was the first time I really had the time to attend the meeting and thank our supporters. Before the show started I've also negotiated food arrangements with a restaurant and a colleague so that we had lunch during the show. I ate from it as well, but didn't manage to eat every day unfortunately. Most additional signs of A4 and A3 size that we used during LinuxTag in order to help visitors and officials to find their way were designed and printed by me. Many of them were the result of last year's aftermath. Most of them were fixed with adhesive tape by our supporters. The Coding Marathon was supervised by me as LinuxTag representative. It was organised by HP, intel and Red Hat and, of course, negotiated with the acquise team of LinuxTag. The Coding Marathon was a half day programming session for visitors. The resulting code is released under the GNU GPL and winners were awarded with prizes at the end of each day. This required me to attend several phone conferences, name one or two interested people from "LinuxTag" who would propose a task and head the marathon during one day. Last year already, when I took over this job, With p2 and Arne I've already found two competent people, and this year also added Alex Schmehl for a task I proposed. Naturally, it was not possible for me to moderate the Coding Marathon during LinuxTag due to other obligations. When I arrived at LinuxTag the week before it officially started my first job was to build up the office and prepare the rooms so that the entire "team" could work inside properly. The first office should be used by supporters for general requests and customers, with a desk for me as well. The next room was meant to host the speakers office and the other rooms were intended to be back offices or private rooms. In order to be able to work properly in the office I've also brought with my some of my network equipment and set up the office LAN, server and printer. I had already experienced cable problems last year, that prevented us to use 100MBit/s switches, so that antiquated 10MBit/s hubs had to be used. I've also supervised our daily shopping tours and collected demand for various items from others. The most important items were fluids since it was quite warm during LinuxTag and collapsing core members and supporters are no fun. Other food had to be fetched as well. A lot of other items had to be purchased as well, in order to run LinuxTag and be able to fix or improve various areas. One or two supporters were taking the car for the shopping tours. When I arrived in Karlsruhe the HP booth was already being built. The other, smaller booths followed on Monday. Hence, on Monday and Tuesday I also supervised the building of the booths. It's important that somebody is around for questions, both from booth builders and from officials of the fairground. One also has to check if the booths are built properly and that they don't cause a risk for the exhibition hall, neighbour booths, smoke detectors and stuff. Issues should be corrected as soon as possible so that they don't become problems later. As soon as I arrived I also took over our own storage area and maintained deliveries for booths that haven't built up yet. Several companies negotiated with me before the show so that I knew which deliveries to expect and could move them to their respective booths as soon as they were built up. This year the first X.Org developers conference took place right before LinuxTag as well. I negotiated with both the X.Org people and the fairground people so that this developers conference could really take place. Unfortunately the plans and acknowledgements were sent out quite late so we were in a hurry getting everything set up and organised. Since we experienced network problems this year, they had not network as well, so did we in the office. Two days without a network connection. Pure horror. On Thursday the legendary KaLUG party took place. The location had to be prepared for the party, for which several supporters went there before the party has started. It was planned that I attend the party, so I went there at about 1 a.m. For some reason I didn't manage to leave the fairground earlier, and on the way to the AKK some of my friends who were also supporters were on their way home, excusing themselves for leaving before I arrived. Eumh... When I arrived at the party I first checked the situation and saw loads of uncleaned pots and stuff. Since nobody was cleaning them, I jumped into the mobile kitchen and started cleaning before I even ate or drank anything. That was fun, though a bit unplanned. The social event on Friday was organised by Claudia from a service provider who got some support from me before the show and during the show. Several supporters helped her clean the area that was unused for several years. During the evening I only gave away free tickets for the supporters and moved inside afterwards, always looking around if everything was ok, negotiating with her, of course. Very well managed, I can only say. This year I gave three talks during LinuxTag. Usually I only give zero or one during such an event, due to my other obligations. However, this time I felt, that I should make a maximum use of LinuxTag, anticipating the future. Hence, it started with Debian Security held during this year's Debian day, followed by Howto LinuxTag on the following day and finally Debian Internals together with other Debian developers. After the last talk I had about two hours to calm down again and initiate the general dismantling. Fortunately I've already planned a lot before the event because after my final talk I was a bit exhausted and needed to calm down and get into LinuxTag organisation again. Dismantling is the most parallel work at LinuxTag because all booths are dismantled at once and many people are running around with arbitrary stuff. One really has to take care of ones own stuff or it gets lost faster than one can shout. During the evening the entire fairground was cleaned, from all conference rooms the audio and video technique was removed again, all bottles and glasses were moved back into the office, the movable walls collected and moved back to their owners, the Internet caf was dismantled and computers moved back into their respective boxes. Some exhibitors had to use extra storage space temporarily. The Community forum in the conference hall had to be dismantled and chairs stacked properly. The same goes for tables and chairs used by the projects booths in both, the exhibition hall and the conference building. The network for projects had to be removed again, cables and switches secured. All additional signs had to be removed again. Since we have used some durable signs that could be used for future events again these had to be removed carefully and secured again. We've also ordered a container for paper since a lot of paper had to be thrown away and throwing away large amounts of junk is expensive. This way we were able to get rid of paper stuff a bit cheaper, but had to take extra care so that only paper went into this container. Hence, we needed a supporter who stayed with the container until it was fetched again. When the internal LinuxTag party in the office was nearly over, I came back into the office with all other areas finished, ready to start dismantling the office - usually the colleagues don't let me because they want to party and don't have any obligations anymore. That sucks a lot. So, again the internal party went on nearly without notice by me, but I'm used to that. This year I had already taken this into account and organised some stuff for an after work party (contrary to the other while-others-work party) outside of the office with supporters, friends and some team members that were still sober. This night we went to bed after 5a.m. and hence had a chance to get a quick breakfast already (we didn't use it, though). It was when we thought "Yes, this was a hell of an event!" I usually went to bed at 1 to 3a.m. and got up again at 5 or 6a.m. so that I was able to work on the important stuff that I committed myself to, and so that I was able to chat with friends and supporters in the evening. That was something I really missed on past events. Last year I probably wouldn't have spoken to Alfie if he hadn't placed himself into my way as a brake block. Thanks Alfie! This year such a maneuver wasn't required. In order to be able to work on so many areas during LinuxTag I tried to optimise the workflow and the processing as much as I could. I also used several sheets and paper to write down stuff for later processing so that my brain was kept clear and I don't become insane (or more insane, for what it's worth). That worked quite well and all areas I worked in worked fine as well, since I had time to talk to people even during the day. Even after my talks I wasn't flooded by phone requests like last year. After the event I had to drive some 750km back, after having only little sleep. Getting to Karlsruhe is always the easy part. Driving back is exhausting because I'm usually quite exhausted and in need of a lot of sleep. I won't disclose how long it took me to reach Oldenburg but it was faster than last year.

So that I have something in my blog again, lets repeat what I wrote to debconf-list about the moved lists.debconf.org setup: As announced to the old debconf6-team list there is now a new layout of lists.debconf.org running. We are running mailman now with lurker as the web-archive thingie. That also got a few new lists in our setup, see below. Generally - all lists are subscriber-only, non-subscribers are moderated. debconf-announce: Important news about Debconf. This list is a MUST for everyone, organisator or participant. Postings are moderated, discussion happens at debconf-discuss@lists.debconf.org Moderator and only allowed posters are currently: Gunnar Wolf, Andreas Schuldei and me. debconf-discuss: General purpose discussion list for all participants and interested people. Moderator is currently Andreas Schuldei and me, any volunteers are welcome! debconf-team: The list for the organizer team to communicate about all kinds of dirty details and grand schemes. Moderator again Andreas and me, volunteers welcome. debconf-video: The list for taping and streaming the conference. Moderator is Holger Levsen and me, ask Holger if he accepts you as an additional one. debconf-website: The list for website development. Moderator is Neil McGovern and again me, ask Neil if he wants you. :) debconf6-speaker: For the speakers, wanna-speakers and bof-initializers, to sort out and exchange relevant infos and helpfull tips. Moderator is Andreas Schuldei, Alexander Schmehl and myself. debconf6-localteam: Specially designed for local matters on the Debian Day, this mailing list brings discussions for all the people involved locally on DebConf. In the webarchives, you also see the old Debconf5 Speakers list. Of course that one is closed, but the archives are there. Similar for the other lists, I imported the archives into all of them. If you want to volunteer to moderate a list: - Its not much work, usually lists are subscribers-only. You need to go and look regularly for posts that mailman put on hold, either because the list isnt in To or CC or because some other problems it might have. You will get a daily mail if there is something waiting on you and can then select “Approve, Discard, Reject” together with “Sender will be banned/accepted forever”. - If you want to volunteer ask the existing *other* moderator, not me.

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe:

• Get the XFT_JHD_BRANCH of CVS Emacs, see XftGnuEmacs on the Emacs wiki, and this page from Deling Ren.
• Get a further patch, from this mailing list post
• Get the emacs-snapshot-debian directory from this arch repository and use it as the debian directory inside the Emacs source tree

Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules :

  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes

After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts. There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this:

  Emacs*font: Monospace-8

You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment. OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.

Without the vast number of voluntary supporters past LinuxTag events wouldn't have been possible at all. On the financial side LinuxTag has always made only little profit after the event. Without these nearly 100 volunteers who have supported us directly during the event and during its preparation the show wouldn't have been possible. Without the help of so many supporters during the event, the entire show isn't possible. Hence, it is important to either generate more income and be able to pay for hostesses and callboys or manage a proper environment in which many supporters want to help. For this, accepting the importance of the supporters, acknowledging their work and supporting them with food, fluids, fun and other advantages is very important. To my regret, I have to admit that this has not always been the case inside the core team. I have argued in favour of the supporters several times, so hopefully not much of it has been noticed by them. Supporters have worked in several different areas. I'll try to list them below but I'm sure I already forgot half of them even though I have coached most supporters directly or indirectly. We have maintained the parking ground so we were able to ensure that the Festplatz in the middle of LinuxTag is not abused as a parking place during the event. This required us to maintain a gate with at least one gatekeeper from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. This was a lot of work, and it wasn't that interesting, but good for people who want to read or hack in the gatekeeper pavilion. We have manually built the projects network in the exhibition halls. In the conference building it was built by the KaLUG. All information signs and plans had to be drawn, printed, magnified and fixed at their respective locations. There are a lot of additional signs that we have maintained to help visitors find their way. I'm sure still a lot of signs were missing. I have used the opportunity to prepare most of them after the last event, so that we have less work for the new one. Our own office had to be set up, since we've used naked rooms with only some cupboards, tables and chairs inside. More furniture had to be arranged, the network had to be built up, the server had to be installed or configured, the printer had to be attached, the network configuration needed testing, the desks had to be set up. For some years now one to three volunteers have helped us in the office in order to support the core team and so that we are able to present visitors, exhibitors, the press etc. We've had an an additional human firewall who worked for two or three days usually and was able to support most people already without clogging the office room. The firewall (Arne) himself had the idea to become a firewall several years ago and I have to agree that it was a very good idea. However, with the exhibitor support maintained at a special booth at the entrance less work had to be done for the firewall this year. Several large and self-standing signs had to be prepared or repaired after the had been broken at the last event or their content has been obsoleted. Signs for the gate from above had to be printed and fixed at proper locations so that exhibitors find their way. We have built up the entire audio and video equipment on our own with a service provider from Bremen. Since this affected up to six rooms a lot of equipment and cables had to be moved, installed and dismantled after the show. For this we've helped J rg and Sven with several volunteers. The business congress had to be prepared as well. Stuff for the attendees had to be created and taken to the conference building. The entrance counter for it had to be maintained and staffed. Doors had to be secured. Deliveries had to be maintained in a storage area, since before LinuxTag a lot of stuff is delivered to LinuxTag without the target booth built up already. During setting up the booth, the booth builders also had to be supported and problems detected, discussed and corrected. During the entire time of our siege of the fairground we've had to maintain our own storage of fluids and food. Due to the high temperatures having around enough fluids was very important. In addition to this demands for several goods also required us to send somebody out for shopping each day. In order not to die of starvation during the event we have also organised a delicious lunch for all supporters and core team members. Kudos to Thomas we were able to order large pots of salad and cooked food for two years so that we didn't have to eat unhealthy food (such as fat pizza for six days) and everybody could decide on their own how much they want to eat. In the years before we've had rented a cook and even ordered Pizza. The food had to be fetched from the restaurant, arranged, together with table clothes, cutlery and stuff, and finally taken back at the evening. Cutlery had to be cleaned regularly as well. For the social event the location had to be cleaned and prepared. This year we've had the great opportunity to use the Nancy Caf which was unused for about 10 years, and hence required a lot of cleaning. As it turned out just before the show began, it required a lot more cleaning than expected. However, thanks to the competent and highly motivated supporters the location was cleaned in time. Kudos to Claudia, this year's social event was also one of the most successful. For the legendary KaLUG party the location had to be prepared as well and the food cooked. Looking at the pictures, the pavilions had to be built, tables and chairs arranged, cutlery and fluids organised. In the evening all the stuff had to be cleaned as well. This year KaLUG had organised a so called "Sp lmobil" that helped with doing the washing-up, but somebody had to work in it as well. The KaLUG has maintained the Internet caf in the conference building and has set up the network for the exhibiting projects in the conference building. For this they have acquired a lot of computers and network equipment that had to be built up and dismantled after the show. They have also acquired a number of movable walls for separating booths and providing poster space. During the show we have distributed fluids for the conference rooms and exchanged information posters and flyers with the daily schedules. When you're giving a talk, your throat often gets quite dry, hence, a cup of fresh water is a good cure, but requires the organisator to maintain water and cups. Since the conference program changed daily posters and handouts had to be exchanged during the evening. Project exhibitors were supported directly by us while company exhibitors were supported by a service provider. Additionally all speakers had to be supported as well. The conference rooms were also maintained by a moderator who supported the speaker, announced the talks and speakers, ran (!) around with a microphone, helped in case of technical problems and maintained the schedule. Even though it may look strange for an outsider there are a lot of costs that emerge when such an event is organised at a commercial fairground. LinuxTag has always had the problem of only little yield after all bills have been paid after the show but had to start preparing the event for the upcoming year. In the past years it was always a struggle to continue with only little financial substance trying to get the next event set up properly. LinuxTag has been unique in its configuration, looking at its history, its organisation structure, its size and its components. There are basically only three ways of creating income: commercial exhibition, business congress and sponsoring. All three have obviously been on the descending path for several years now, reducing a lot of flexibility for the organisation. This income has had to be used for all expenses. On the other side there are a lot of areas that just cost money, such as the conference building, exhibition hall, hotel, travel reimbursements, projects booths, advertising. In addition to that we've had two service providers that have taken over some tasks and needed to be paid as well. A very rough overview is in my Howto LinuxTag talk from this summer.

Steinar, your comments on the limited utility of Get/Set methods both struck a chord and touched a nerve with me. On the one hand, I completely agree that people need to spend more time writing methods that do something useful to an object rather than just exposing public methods. For example, how often have you seen something like this (in faintly python-inspired syntax):

 obj.count += 1
 [...]
 obj.count -= 1
 [...]
 if obj.count == 0:
 	obj.destroy

Instead of the far more descriptive (and well-encapsulated):

 obj.register_user()
 [...]
 obj.unregister_user()
 [...]
 obj.destroy_if_unused()

(or any one of a thousand other similar idioms). This is a contrived example, of course, and a real example would involve doing at least a dozen operations on an object's public attributes from another class (which results in class-associated logic being located in other classes in the system) instead of putting it in a method and calling that (thus keeping all of the logic with the data it's manipulating -- which is the point of OOP). Anyone who writes code like the first example above and calls it OOP is kidding themselves. Of course, you could make the code even more ridiculous with getter/setters:

 obj.setCount(obj.getCount()+1)
 [...]
 obj.setCount(obj.getCount()-1)
 [...]
 if obj.GetCount() == 0:
 	obj.destroy

Incidentally, if you ever see anyone turn the first example into the last example and say they're "improving encapsulation", please do the programming world a favour and kill them. kthx. On the other hand, Steinar, you say "I'm not denying that getters and setters for a few variables might make sense", which clouds the issue immensely. The idea of routing attribute access through a method is immensely useful. It even has it's own name -- the Uniform Access Principle. A few examples are in order (you might already have thought of these, Steinar, but who knows who reads my dribblings!):

• (Not taken from real life, but certainly plausible) An accounting system has an Invoice class, which contains line items. After an all-nighter binge-drinking Stupid, the original programmer wrote the Invoice class to store the total as a separate attribute. Then, after sobering up (and possibly some cluebat-inspired rehab) s/h/it decides to create the total by adding up the subtotals in the line items when someone wants the invoice total. Except, by now (it was a long rehab session), there's about 15,000 places which ask for inv.total, and finding them all and replacing them with inv.total() is Aegean-stables level pain.
• ("Based on a true story") A class that interfaces to some piece of physical hardware has an attribute whose value gets sent to the hardware. Either a hardware change or a "we didn't think of that" moment results in a requirement that the value of the attribute, as sent to the hardware, be within certain bounds. Just truncating to the required size isn't going to work. What you'd like to do is raise an exception (or log a call trace) when that attribute is set with and out-of-bounds value, so you can track who is setting the OOB and fix the problem at the source. But of course, since it's just an attribute, you can't do a bounds check and exception-throw, so it's call-wrapping-and-funky-logic time.
• (Taken from my last few days programming, but it happens often enough) A class hierarchy has a map of IDs and names stored in it (these are dynamic maps, but are set via config file so don't change over time or during program invocation). This is stored in an object attribute. Yay for object attributes. Then, somebody decides that a new class (in the same hierarchy) should be able to dynamically generate value maps in some circumstances (specifically, from a remote database). Since these maps can change in real-time, we can't just generate-and-cache.

In my real-life case, there were few enough places to change all of the calls to a method, and since it's all written in Python I could have played __getattr__ games to get back to a method if I'd had to, but it would have been messy. But imagine a system written in a language that doesn't (somehow) support the Uniform Access Principle, and which was widely deployed (possibly even used by programs outside of our direct control) so the users of the class couldn't be adapted easily. Nightmare. Now, the real solution to the problem is to only use languages which support the UAP (Python can be hacked to do it; Ruby is, IMHO, almost a case-study in How To Do It; and there are other good languages out there). But, in ass-backwards languages that can't transparently map attribute accesses to method calls, I'd rather deal with getX()/setX() everywhere than have to try and perform the necessary gymnastics to later support dynamic value generation from what-was-previously-an-attribute. If, on the other hand, your post was primarily targeted at said ass-backwards languages, or programmers who cargo-cult manual getter/setters everywhere, let me join you in your derision. <grin>

In several semi- or non-commercial associations work is done by volunteers who spend a lot of their spare time and energy for the goals of the association. This works fine as long as all people who are spending a lot of time on the goals are treated the same and work voluntarily. When some people decide that some people should get paid for their work, while others, who don't work significantly less, don't get paid for their work an uneasy situation is created. Why are some people treated better and get paid for their work while others don't get paid, but still work a lot on the same or similar issues? Why should those, who have to make money in other areas in order to live at all, continue to work voluntarily? I have always argued that in such constellations one must not have volunteers and paid workers do the same work. The only exceptions are volunteers who have stated that they want to do the same work, even though they don't get paid for it. Otherwise you'll create dissatisfaction of the volunteers, which in turn will most probably result in less volunteers, at least in the long term. Also volunteer work should be more interesting and relaxed than paid work, so that the volunteers have more freedoms and develop more fun doing the volunteer work they were asked to do. Paid work is fine for boring tasks that not enough volunteers are comfortable with, such as standing around asking visitors at an exhibition for their tickets, keeping people out of areas where they don't belong, working at a counter, folding and packing stuff etc. Looking at LinuxTag, we had such situations twice. First of all, two members of the board of directors have been on the payroll of the LinuxTag association for three or four months, while the others of the team have worked voluntarily. The same or at least a lot of similar work has been done by the same people before voluntarily. This has caused resentment by those who have worked for LinuxTag in their spare time, or even full-time for several months without getting a Penny for it. In addition to that there were two external service providers that have worked on some tasks (such as press coordination, social event and business acquisition) which didn't interfere with volunteer work. We've had those for years and especially for business acquisition it is important since they can maintain regular 9-to-5 business hours. These companies have worked very well, and we've had a great social event this year, after several years with extremely problematic social events. A second situation arose after it was clear that not enough hostesses were available and volunteers should work side by side with them. There is no problem as long as the volunteers want this. However, normally they don't. Many of them enjoy their freedom, not having to work for the entire time but having enough time to walk around and talk to people etc. Most volunteers feel very strange when they are asked to do the same job voluntarily while their neighbour is paid for it. In the Debian project I have always objected to paying some developers while not paying others. In my opinion, the best situation would be a company that employs a developer for regular company work but lets them work on Debian and Free Software issues for 30-60 % of their time. However, I have to admit that those, who work on Debian more or less for the entire day, and, hence, don't have enough time for their studies, jobs or work, will have to get some revenue or they will starve to death sooner or later. On the other hand, if they get paid for the work, they can't easily take a day off and enjoy their non-computer life. Err... I've heard that some people do...