I am nearly done with the marathon move. After a small hold-up in Canadian customs (for no apparent reason except I got a border official who had incorporated the role, a full 110%), my stuff is here, unpacked, and in decent order. In between unpacking, I have been able to experience some of Edmonton–from the nightlife to its administrative face (signing up for health insurance and a Social Insurance Numbers, for example, both of which were easy as cake) and I have to say E-town gets a far far far worse rap than it deserves. Ok, the weather is nothing to swoon over, and it is already getting far colder than I am used to but bracketing that detail, it is a pretty neat city. Now I tend to like the mid-size cities (Minneapolis, Madison, Philadelphia, Portland are some of my favorites in the U.S) over the mega-gargantuan-city and Edmonton fits this bill with just under a million people. And perhaps it is also just that I am digging some Canada-wide features (affordable and immediate health care, licensed cafes, a saner pace of life, the pleasant and earnest character of many folks) but there are Edmonton-specific attributes that are pretty nice too. Before I get to them, it is worth noting that every time I have told people that I was going to Edmonton, they would either: 1) admit that they did not know exactly where it was and thus could offer no opinion whatsoever (and I was one of those folks until I looked on a map) or 2) blurted some negative reaction like: “do you really have to go there!” though most of those people had never been, but had a sense of its northernly location. Perhaps my favorite reaction came from a blackberry forum where we posted a question about good data plans in Edmonton/Canada. Most of the replies stuck to the topic, but one person decided to spew his unadulterated thoughts on Edmonton:

i feel sorry for u going from NYC to Edmonton “Edmonton sucks” you’ll be happy to go back to NY..
You go from a city that has life to a dead one.. from having good bb plans to sh*ty ones.. hope your getting paid good

Ok, admittedly, the data/cell phone plans are lackluster but I think this person either has had some terrible times in Edmonton (and holds an unhealthy grudge), has never lived in NYC or has a warped sense of what the good life in a city means. Sure NYC is an amazing place, and is my likely future home, so I am not going to trash it but, like any city, it has its shortcomings.. like unfordable housing But time will tell as to how I feel about Edmonton after the winter. Perhaps when it reaches freezing temperatures, it does turn a leaf, and become dead but then you hit the mountains, no? But for now I am digging the HUGE pine trees, rivers, and ample sun of E-town.

Whew. Ichthux has released, and now I can breathe again! When I joined the Ichthux development team, they had produced their “proof of concept” release as yet-another-Knoppix-remaster. At that time, I encouraged them to move away from tacking their work on as a derivate of a derivative and instead become a CDD. I argued that as a CDD Ichthux would last, while as a Knoppix-remaster, it would just be another marginal custom livecd that went nowhere. They got the message. So you may well be surprised to hear our first release is based on Kubuntu, and not Debian.

So, what’s the story here? Have you defected?

Nope. It just happens that most of the team ended up being actively involved in Ubuntu development. Also, when we first started casting about for the best way to package a livecd/install disk, it seemed to us that Ubuntu already had a head start on this.

What about being a CDD? It looks to me like that idea has fallen by the wayside.

Nope again. We’re a joint team now, and though we’ve started out with Ubuntu, we’ll be pushing changes back into Debian. The goals of a CDD are well understood by the whole team: to best meet the needs of our users, we design the system to mesh well with the parent distributions, not forking and making a derivative, but working inside those distributions to improve them for our particular subgroup of users.

Hold on now, aren’t you contradicting yourself? A CDD’s development is all within Debian, but Ubuntu itself is a derivative, and what’s worse, Kubuntu is a derivative of a derivative! Aren’t you right back where you started?

Well, on the last count, you’d be wrong. Kubuntu is not a fork. And as for Ubuntu being a derivative, well, sure it is. But the Ubuntu/Debian relationship is different from other derivatives, and although there is friction, I’m enough of a crazy idealist to believe a joint Debian/Ubuntu CDD is quite doable, benefits both projects more, and serves our users better than if we were to split up and each go work on our own.

You would be forgiven for thinking that using Mongrel clusters to serve Rails applications was only a good idea if you have Apache 2.2 installed, as this is what most of the instructions on the web advise. However, there are good reasons for still running Apache 2.0, one of them being that it's the most up to date version packaged in Debian and Ubuntu Linux. So, without mod_proxy_balancer, what can you do? A simple solution is to use the randomizing feature in mod_apache's rewrite map feature. Say for instance you had 3 Mongrel servers, running on ports 4000 to 4002 on localhost. First create a file map.txt containing these numbers:

ports  4000 4001 4002 

Then ensure the following directives are present in your virtual host configuration:

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:4000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:4001/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:4002/
ProxyPreserveHost On
RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap  servers rnd:/path/to/your/map.txt
RewriteRule ^/(images stylesheets javascripts)/?(.*) $0 [L]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://localhost:$ servers:ports /$1 [P,L]

Of course, Apache config is complex and I advise you to test this properly — it's possible if you are not careful to leave your web server as an open proxy. Thanks to Matt Biddulph for pointing out this method to me. I've written it up as nobody else seemed to have done so thus far.

So K. called me a brat, and rightly so. Now I could go on about the bizarre dysfunctional ways A. and M. keep trying to drag me into their extramarital insanity, but that would be overuse of initials. I could tell you about Fatslaps and his plans to splatter Harry with onions, but Harry is whimpering just about the right amount. I'm talking about Harry, not Harry. I could do a Marxist literary criticism of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, but something disturbing happened to me, indirectly leading me to have a flashback. It was another century, though not more than a couple miles away. As with all progress , some things are better now, and some things are worse. Maybe that's just how I see it. It's stereotypically geriatric to reminisce about the past, accentuating the positive, but it's stereotypically me to only comment on the negative. So in the interest of stalling, here comes a m lange of the two. Value judgments are left as an exercise for the reader, assuming the prostitute/lover question isn't still getting top billing. Warren Zevon was still alive. Nouvelle Vague hadn't released any albums yet. I only knew one person who spoke Brazilian Portuguese. I hadn't seen Rent yet. I used to eat a lot more Colombian food. I refused to eat tomatoes. Actually, I ate quite a few things then that I don't now, and quite a few things now that I didn't then. I don't remember what I ate that night, but it wasn't Kraft dinner ; I'm sure of that. I know because I went to see a free concert as performed by the Barenaked Ladies. The concert was free because they were almost completely unknown. I was introduced to them a while before, by a dirty, dirty slut who squealed with delight because the lyrics featured words such as erection . It took me years of recovery to be able to appreciate that song. Years. If she hadn't, I would have found out about them through Minna Bromberg because she does a cover. One of the people I was with shouted out to Steven Page, calling him by the wrong name. If being a starstruck poseur weren't enough cause, I think the error would have made me implode from embarrassment. He took it on the chin. I know this Canadian who keeps telling the same tired old story that the Barenaked Ladies is the only Canadian band to ever become famous outside of Canada. He uses this dubious claim to segue into his bit about how The Tragically Hip is really popular in Canada, but unknown everywhere else. I tell him that I've heard of The Tragically Hip. He doesn't believe me. I try telling him that I've never heard of Moxy Fr vous or Rush, at which point he breaks down and admits that everyone has heard of Rush. Then we repeat the conversation a month later. So BNL did get all famous and mainstream and STUFF. That night, they urged everyone in the audience to promote them so they could GET PAID and sell out to The Man. I must confess not comprehending their earnestness and the gravity of the situation. I also never expected them to be played on Z100. Boycott ClearChannel. They're sellouts now, but they weren't then, and a good time was had by all. At the time, If I Had $1000000 might've been their most popular song. AS SUCH, the more rabid fans in the audience had brought boxes and boxes of macaroni & cheese, as well as a stuffed monkey or two. These items were flung at the stage, at appropriate times, frightening the band. I don't believe that anyone threw a green dress. Now, Canadians are funny people. They like to flap their heads and do medleys and covers and rap gratuitously in the middle of concerts. Well, Rush doesn't, but Moxy Fr vous and BNL do, and that's enough for me to make a sweeping generalization, because Rush can be disqualified purely on the mullet factor. You probably don't know this, but If I Had $1000000 is a song which gets a lot of variation and perhaps improv. For example, the owner of the remains will vary, and they'll vamp the introduction with the lyrics of some other song. You can hear it on the Rock Spectacle album, where they lead in with Grade 9. That night they did Prince's Raspberry Beret. We swooned. We swooned.

Faro points out that the map of Spain in my previous post is obsolete. A more uptodate version can be found here. From that link I also discovered that calling Extremadura a province is wrong. It is an "Autonomous Community" which consists of two provinces: Badajoz and Cáceres. The latter is where the place we were staying, Casar de Cáceres, is located.

While trying to introduce Linux at the SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College in Tema, Ghana, I encounted a very strange problem. Here are the results, I spare you the list of things I tried to find out:The BIOS on the Gateway PCs they use here, with the id bf86510A.15A.0066.P13, will freeze when it encounters a disk with a linux created partition table. It will do so before even deciding what to boot, so you can't boot from CD then. It does not matter if the orignal MBR is on it, or the one created by Window's fixmbr, or lilo -M, or install-mbr, or grub. Changing the partition table using Windows XP (diskpart in the recovery console) will make the BIOS boot nicely. This only happens with the hard model drive that came with the PCs, after replacing it with a different model any partition table is ok.The only way to keep working with the hard drive is to power the computer without the hard drive attached, wait until it is done detecting it (for example wait until the BIOS complais about the lack of harddrives), then plug it in while the computer is running. Of course, the hardware is not meant to be used this way, and it might destroy everything, so don't try this at home (unless you have to). For me it was the only way, since when I know boot from a CD (Windows Installation Disk, Knoppix, FAI-Installation CD, anything that does not rely on BIOS information regarding the hard disks), the hard drive can be used just fine...So how did I get Linux on it in the end? One can say I tricked the BIOS: I made the automatic Linux installation add another, unused and small partition at the end. After the installation is done and I can't boot regulary any more, I use the mentioned power trick to boot the Recovery Console of a Windows XP installation CD, to delete the unused partition with diskpart. This makes Windows write the table, and thus make the BIOS happy. Unfortunately, this kills grub, so I have to boot any Linux boot CD, chroot into my installed system and run grub-install...If anyone has encountered similar problems before and maybe found a nicer solution, which maybe could bring me back the "A" in "Fully Automatic Installation", or at least frees me from the need to make IDE hot-pluggable, I'd be grateful.

Last spring I was invited to join an academic guild on WoW, but since my computer runs on, with, and through pure freedom (and I was too lazy to run an emulator and my computer does not have the processing power for it anyway), I did not join. But reading Steven Levy’s recent piece Living a Virtual Life makes me wish I had a more powerful computer or had sacrified my morals… Because hundres of naked gnomes protesting, is well, just worth it.

Development Environment Conference(Japanese) was held in Akihabara, 8 Sep. The event was focused for that the famous geeks use what kind of tools, software configuration, or environment. Many people were using zsh, GNU screen, and vim or Emacs. In the event, I really surprised a man who use GNU screen with default prefix key!

So i have travelled to Slovakia again, for a weekend this time. I have been painting window frames. Since i have a new iPod (4G nano, black, yummy), i could also listen to music (Tristania, In Flames, Kamelot). The last time, it was somewhat of a patience exercise, but this time... I guess i got better at painting and maybe i have become more patient, too :). It was pretty enjoyable, more than i would have thought a work like that could be. And i am sure the music helps, too. (The next day) And to continue the last blog... There, i have concluded that hardship was important factor in becoming better: And apart from hardship... Problem is, hardship alone, if it stays the same, is not enough to make people change. It is the change from contentment to unhappiness, that drives people forward. Because in that change, one starts to change, and hardship together with dynamics helps a lot. Static, unchanging hardship will only do little to change a person. One can get used to it, like to anything else. Like to contentment. So an initial change can start a cascade. Like for me, breakup caused a domino effect. The change alone brought a lot of hardship with it, and i had to change to accomodate to it. And the change in me provoked more changes and so on. I have learned many new things, or, things i have learned before but went unnoticed took my notice. And in light of such things, i had to change again, because i knew i couldn't be happy any other way. A human being is as good as dead, when captured in a period of stagnation, in an unchanging moment that lasts. Only through change, through dynamics of life, we are alive. A man that does not change is a statue, a dead piece of matter, only useful as a memento. And that was what i have become, and now the statue is again starting to move, to breathe, to live. Because there is just no perfection that one could capture in a moment. No matter how perfect a moment, if frozen, the perfection decays, the little cracks are noticed. That is why trying to freeze time is futile, trying to preserve. One cannot enter the same stream twice. Life is a constant change, and this constant change is its only manifestation. Take the change away and you take the life away. The past is important. The past is what resulted into present, and present is what makes future. Every moment, in a succession of moments, is important. But without the moment before and the moment after, the moment does not mean anything. The moment is void, without predecessor and successor. We move in time, and the motion is what becomes important, not the points we moved through. They are only important in the relation to our trajectory, not in isolation. And so is the direction which we take, the vector of our motion, and the shifts in direction. There is no eternity, only the eternity of its own absence. Immortality and death are the same, the very same notion. Because every time we change, there is a little death and a little birth. And immortality is only possible in staticness. Immortality is a point in time, without motion. And without motion, there is no life to be. And same goes for relationships. Make a relationship immortal and you make it die. Relationship needs a possibility of death to live. Like humans, like every living being. Without death, there is no life. The transition from being into non-being is essential, because it is the precondition to change. As i have already described, every change is a death followed by rebirth, but the entity reborn is not the one that has died. And therefore, without the ability to die, there is no ability to change. And death, the conventional death, as we know it, is just a death without rebirth. Something dies, and there is nothing more to take its place. But... The death makes others change. And therefore, the one who dies definitively, is again reborn, as part of those others that have died, but haven't died, but are reborn. And the one definitely dead enters those new, reborn creatures, as a little fraction of them. And the cycle of life is closed, and the change can perpetuate itself. Every day, i die a thousand times. But there are deaths that are important and deaths that go unnoticed. And most of the important ones are only noticed in retrospect, by a being that resulted, after many hours, or days, or weeks or even longer. And many more deaths. We only exist through our succession, because only what is born from us remembers what we were. And the very moment we are born, we die again, and a new being remembers. The memory lives on, but the beings are already dead. And the memory changes as well, because memory itself does not mean anything, only the being possesing it can give it meaning. And every successive being that we become gives it a slightly different meaning. And so the delicate, complex dynamics of individual life are established. Not only the living being changes itself, but the memories of the previous beings change. There is certain gravity toward stagnation, because often the changes are only very slight, and the being remembers his predecessors that were fairly happy and tries to remain so. Because the bigger the change, the bigger risk. And therefore all beings are susceptible to stagnation, to the stasis cell of past success. Because past success is one's own enemy, even if it is something that is a precondition to one's own being. So we need to learn to live with our past success, but to not try to revive it. The effort to bring back past is a wasted, contraproductive effort. It seems so, it is almost natural, that if there was happiness in the past, restoring the same past will bring the same happiness. But there, that is not true, in the light of previous paragraphs. The trap is so obvious, that description is probably redundant, but let me do it once again anyway, maybe because i have fallen in it so many times already. Yes, the trap is in the stagnation, in absence of new things. Because even if one cannot restore the original condition no matter how much he tries, one can, and that is for sure, replicate it very closely. And that way lies a trap, a temporary (or even permanent) thermal death of stagnation. (Later that day, outside, on a nearby hill) And now, like before, there's nothing more to stand between me and myself. I sit in the grass, alone. My being alone complements me, in a way. There are waves in the grass, as air moves. Music is playing, apart from the few houses i can see downhill, my only connection with the rest of people. And this what belongs to me, this paper, this pen. This book by Italo Calvino that Enrico Zini has given me. If on a winter's night a traveller. But it is late summer. I can see vineyard in distance, on a slope different from mine. I call this slope mine because i am the one sitting there. And the time to collect the grapes is close. And here, next to me, an apple tree, with red apples on it. And a white butterfly in the distance, beating the air with its light, small wings. And i blow away a tiny spider who has lost its way on my trousers. I feel being part of all this around me, and still so foreign. And the butterfly appears again, but it may be a different one. The sun shines behind my back, alhtough i sit in shade of a tree. And neither the sun nor the tree are my enemies, or my friends. But still, i feel sympathy for both of them, one gives me light and warmth and the other shields me from too much of it. And the setting, the scenery soothes my senses, my mind, my feelings. Here, i am close to the loving mother of us, living beings, the nature. Here she is tender and forgiving and caresses my hair and it feels good. And these feelings, i would love to pass on, to other people, so they, too, could feel well. But i see that this is not quite possible. Although these lines will hopefully give something to someone, they probably can't carry what i feel. And i would bring someone with myself here, so they could feel it with me. But presence of other person would spoil it, it would be something else then. Maybe beautiful in a way, different from this one, maybe very pleasant. I love people, and when i see them happy, it fills me with gladness. (And in the evening, on a train...) And here i am, moving with speed, from one place to another. The speed, sound of loud music in my ears, the landscape drifting away. I could say i was happy, happy in the sense of change, everything changing around me, sun setting behind distant horizon, the train moving through the country. The semaphore lights. In the headphones, heavy guitar riffs competing with the roaring of the train. Cold air blowing in my face, flowing in my hair. And now in another train, sitting in a compartment with stranger, a girl, trying to guess who she could be, from her dress, from what she is reading, from cues. Who she could become. What she means to me, a passing stranger on the path of life. I have been reading the Calvino book till now, but i thought i could write down my thoughts before they perish, like they do. It is fairly silent now here, even while we are on a train. The engine and the outside are muffled, the window and the door are closed. We are in a strange kind of privacy with this girl, neither knowing anything about the other. I, writing this text here, she reading some sort of magazine. Looking up from what we do at occasions. The train is accelerating now, and the sounds are more intense. It is a bit shaky, too. My hearing is still lightly impaired from the loud music from the previous train. We arrived to a station. Short stop, then another long motion. Always toward Brno, toward my flat, toward the night and tomorrow. The girl is reading a horse races program. Here, i intrude her privacy and write that here. I hope she wouldn't mind. I don't have a name other than "the girl" for her, since all the words we exchanged was me asking whether i can sit down in the compartment and her answer. And i suppose i won't say anything and she won't, neither. Maybe a goodbye. And now, we share a sort of almost intimacy. Two lone people in a compartment, tired and waiting to arrive somewhere. An invisible bond between us, doesn't mean anything, just that element at random brought us there together, for a short moment. Chances are, we won't ever meet again. And still, she is almost falling asleep, with her feet up, like if i were a trustworthy friend of old. And i feel sympathy for that, i feel honoured by a trust given by a complete stranger. She seems comfortable, feeling safe. And it feels good to have that trust, it feels important. It nearly gives warm fuzzies. (To be continued, further...)

I've spent the last few days in Spain, representing Debian-IN at a meeting on Internationalization sponsored by the government of the province of Extremadura.
It has been very productive and informative. Debian should be proud of the attention we pay to internationalization (for the Indian languages at least we are ahead of any other distro and even Microsoft IMO.) If we keep up the effort we can truly deserve to be called the Universal OS.

Suck: Cleaners went into the office today, didn't have alarm code and left.

More suck: Alarm company didn't know how to page building security. Apparently hadn't realised that you can't leave a voicemail on a numeric pager. Decided to go into office myself because it's better to spend $17 on a cab than $250 on a false alarm from the police.

Kinda cool: When I brought the security guard up to do the inspection with me, he was like: "Dude? Is this Canonical and Ubuntu like the Linux Distribution?"

Amazing how that can make going into work on a Saturday significantly less suck. =)

The I18N meeting in Extremadura is almost over - tomorrow everyone is leaving to the airport at different times. So, enjoy the group photo of the meeting. And if you click the photo, that will bring you to a Frickr photoset that contains all the other good photos that I took at this meeting. Enjoy!

The i18n work session in Extremadura is in the last day now and photos and impressions are accumulating. In the mean time I am translating some packages to Latvian and I discovered that the only place I can find a comprehensive list of officially translated country name to Latvian is a translation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 2001.

Tenho aqui comigo um o in cio de um texto antigo, que comecei a escrever h uns dois anos atr s, sobre porque eu uso Debian. Nunca consegui finaliz -lo direito, mas achei que n o seria justo deix -lo aqui jogado em um diret rio empoeirado de meu HD (meu ~/txt tem muita coisa iniciada e n o finalizada). Um dia ainda vou termin -lo e acrescentar mais conte do, s preciso estar num dia inspirado para tirar todas as id ias da cabe a e coloc -las na forma de palavras. De qualquer forma, mesmo inacabado, espero que gostem. E lembrem-se : meu blog aceita coment rios

Por qu Debian ? Eu tamb m ou o esta pergunta quase diariamente. Para que eu n o tenha que respond -la novamente a toda vez que me perguntem, resolvi sentar e escrever uma resposta padr o para a mesma. Assim, toda vez que algu m me faz esta mesma pergunta novamente, eu simplesmente pe o para a pessoa ler este texto. Aspectos t cnicos Qualidade. Sim, qualidade. Erroneamente, a maioria das pessoas que n o utilizam Debian ou que n o o conhecem pensam que o grande motivo pelo qual o Debian se diferencia das outras distribui es GNU/Linux puramente pela exist ncia da ferramenta APT, a qual auxilia na resolu o autom tica de depend ncias, facilitando enormente o gerenciamento de softwares. Realmente, trata-se de uma ferramenta extremamente til. Por m, atualmente, diversas distribui es GNU/Linu baseadas em pacotes no formato RPM (Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, etc) utilizam por padr o ou suportam, mesmo que n o oficialmente, mecanismos de resolu o autom tica de depend ncias e gerenciamento de softwares similares ao APT. Algumas at mesmo utilizam um porte do pr prio APT, adaptado para funcionamento com pacotes no formato
RPM. O que diferencia o Debian das demais distribui es GNU/Linux a qualidade. O apt-get a parte vis vel qual o usu rio tem acesso e que parece fazer toda a m gica. Por m, por atr s dele, existe um componente fundamental, frequentemente esquecido pelos usu rios : a pol tica de empacotamento de softwares Debian. O projeto Debian possui um documento extenso e altamente detalhado, que descreve, em cada m nimo detalhe, ao que um pacote de software precisa estar atento para poder ser considerado um pacote oficial e fazer parte da distribui o. A pol tica de empacotamento de softwares o que faz com que o Debian seja altamente superior s outras distribui es. Ela bem definida, clara e aplicada rigorosamente. Ferramentas de apoio aos desenvolvedores auxiliam a refor ar a aplica o das regras ditadas pela pol tica e qualquer pacote de software que n o siga fielmente o que dita o Manual de Pol ticas Debian n o inclu do em uma vers o oficial da distribui o, n o importando o qu o importante seja o componente de software fornecido pelo pacote. Isso, somado s diversas equipes internas existentes dentro do projeto Debian, garante a qualidade da distribui o. Equipes de QA (Quality Assurance), de seguran a, de ger ncia de release, ger ncia de relatos de erros e diversas outras equipes garantem que um sistema operacional funcional e altamente integrado seja criado, em oposi o a mera corre o de problemas em pacotes de softwares isolados. Adicionalmente, cada software passa por um intenso processo de avalia o antes que possa ser aceito oficialmente e adicionado a distribui o. Al m dos in meros detalhes t cnicos, tamb m existe uma equipe de especialistas legais que analisam as licen as de distribui o dos softwares antes de aceit -los como parte da distribui o. O fato do Debian ser atualmente a distribui o GNU/Linux que suporta a maior quantidade de arquiteturas de hardware que o kernel Linux suporta tamb m adiciona qualidade distribui o, uma vez que, como parte do processo de porte das aplica es para uma arquitetura de hardware suportada pelo Debian, in meras falhas s o descobertas e corrigidas, o que contribui
para a qualidade final do software. Logicamente, some a isso tudo o fato do projeto Debian possuir o maior acervo de softwares livres empacotados e prontos para uso existente da atualidade, deixando para tr s todas as outras distribui es GNU/Linux, inclusive as distribui es comerciais. Atualmente, s o mais de 15.000 pacotes de softwares prontos para uso e facilmente instal veis. Aspectos estrat gicos (ou independ ncia tecn logica) Uma das grandes vantagens estrat gicas que se ganha ao utilizar Debian a independ ncia tecnol gica. L gico, a grande maioria das distribui es GNU/Linux atuais s o livres, mas nada garante que continuar o a ser livres por toda sua exist ncia. Claro, sempre existir o grupos de pessoas dispostos a iniciar uma nova distribui o com base em uma vers o livre existente de uma distribui o comercial caso algo aconte a com a empresa que a desenvolveu e que impossibilite a continuidade da distribui o. Mas criar uma comunidade e manter um projeto grande como o de uma distribui o GNU/Linux, com toda a infraestrutura j fornecida pelo projeto Debian, leva tempo, anos. E consome anos de trabalho de milhares de volunt rios. O projeto Debian j tem tudo isso funcionando e uma experi ncia de 13 anos nessa rea. Exemplos de problemas com o envolvimento de interesses privados de empresas no desenvolvimento de distribui es GNU/Linux n o s o somente te ricos e recentemente tivemos provas da exist ncia dos mesmos, com empresas privadas terminando a continuidade do acesso a atualiza es de seguran as para suas distribui es de uso livre e sem custo e, em
muitos casos, praticamente obrigando seus usu rios a migrarem para vers es comerciais de suas distribui es. O projeto Debian criou o Contrato Social Debian. O item n mero 1 desse contrato social diz que o Debian ir sempre permanecer composto de 100% software livre. De igual import ncia, o item n mero 4 desse mesmo documento diz que a prioridade do projeto Debian ser sempre seus usu rios e o software livre, o que, na pr tica, garante que interesses comerciais n o ser o colocados em primeiro plano e que os usu rios n o ser o for ados a migrarem para vers es comerciais da distribui o em momento algum. A Defini o Debian de Software Livre, mais um documento produzido pelo projeto Debian, possui grande import ncia na comunidade de software livre, tendo sido utilizado como base para a cria o do Defini o de C digo Aberto (Open Sorce), a qual individuais e empresas aderentes ao modelo de desenvolvimento aberto de software usam como base para cria o de licen as de softwares que os qualifiquem como software aberto (Open Source).

Ok, isso por enquanto. Um dia ainda termino e acrescento mais conte do. Quem quiser comentar e dar novas id ias, esteja a vontade, nos coment rios ou por e-mail.

We got back from Europe 36 hours ago, and I've spent most of the time sleeping. We'd had a pretty rough flight across the Atlantic -- although of the three of us the baby was the least grumpy. I'm a terrible jet-lag victim, though, and just a few hours of time change really messes with my wp:biorhythms. Yesterday was Amita June's first birthday, and although we were all tired we had a good time just the three of us. My parents, Maj's parents and our siblings all called, and we picked up a few presents that had been shipped here while we were gone. Amita got a trip to the toy store (net haul: 1 rubber ball, one Caillou book, one crapload of block toys) and a special breakfast. Sadly, she and her papa fell asleep together before she got her birthday dinner. We're having a birthday party at our house on Saturday, "from 3PM to bathtime". It should be a little more lively than our quiet day at home. tags: europe jetlag amitajune birthday

Malm I don't think I've posted anything in a little while, since before we went to wt:Malm . We had a really nice time while we were there. I had corresponded with Sean Finney, another Debian developer who lives in Malm , before we left for Europe, and he'd offered a meetup. We had a free day in wt:Copenhagen so I figured I'd take him up on the offer. Malm is only about 40 minutes from Copenhagen by train, so we were able to take a trip over quite easily. There's a beautiful bridge between wt:Zealand and wt:Scania which we crossed by train -- the water was beautiful. We managed to miss Sean at the train station -- I'd given some pretty tenuous instructions on how to meet us -- but we managed to get out and see the town a bit for ourselves. The old city has two squares -- the Stortorget or Big Square and Lille torg or Little Square -- right next to each other. The Lille torg is circled by restaurants and we had a decent lunch at a place called the Moose Bar -- Scandinavian staples like salmon with a Thai presentation. A good idea. Sean managed to catch us as we were walking around, so we had a nice coffee together at a caf on the main drag. He's been in Malm for more than a year, and is taking classes at nearby wt:Lund. We managed to exchange GPG key signature preliminaries (what Maj calls the "Debian butt-sniffing ceremony") and had a good time talking about the state of Debian and Free Software. We split up at the train station and Maj and I went off to explore the towns small castle. It has a number of museums, but it was late in the day on a Sunday, so we opted instead for a walk to the beach, looking out to the bridge and ultimately the skyline and wind turbines of Copenhagen. After a long walk circumnavigating Malm 's distinctive Twisted Tower, the tallest building in Sweden, we headed back to Copenhagen for a dinner at Tivoli Gardens (probably my favorite spot in Copenhagen). tags: copenhagen malm travel sean finney debian

Z rich We made a special stop on the way home to Montreal through wt:Zurich. We flew on Swiss Air, which has a hub in Zurich, and they gave us a free 24-hour layover in town. Fortunately for us, we got to spend some time with our good friends Mark Jaroski and Allegra Biava. They're friends of ours from SF who moved to Switzerland around the time Maj moved there, and they now live in wt:Lausanne. Both are extremely funny, intelligent and clued-in people. They were passing through Zurich on their way back to the US for a family visit there. I'm glad we got to see them, since I got to meet No ma, their 2-year-old daughter. No was born about 8 months after we last saw Mark and Allegra -- they weren't even telling people they were pregnant at the time. She's a barrel of laughs -- a real fun little person. She and Amita June got along great. We spent most of our time walking around central Zurich, seeing some of the sights and taking it easy. There's only so much tourism you can do with one toddler, and two toddlers raises the requirements considerably. I think the big downer for Zurich for me was how many people we didn't see. I'd hoped to connect with Alex Schroeder, founder of CommunityWiki, and also Martin Krafft, another fellow Debianista. Most disappointing, we missed Marco Prestipino, who's doing work at the University of Zurich in information transfer in online communities. tags: zurich mark allegra no ma

Today, as it was widely anticipated, the Superior Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) declared Felipe Calder n, of the currently right-wing governing PAN party, elected as president for the 2006-2012 period.
My regular readers will know that my political views are against his party's, and that I completely oppose him - Of course, being consequent, in June I started, together with some friends, FeCal.org.mx, a site destined to show the incongruencies and incoherences in the official version - and that evolved to a site I am quite fond of, having good and deep analysis of the political situation. Of course, it is time now to redesign and think forward for this site, now that FeCal is no longer a candidate - but lets leave it aside for now.
Today, we are mourning. We are not mourning an electoral loss - Wherever there is democracy, there are losers, and it might be right that we lost this time. Furthermore, in political systems such as ours, it is practically guaranteed that the majority of the citizens will lose (this means, it is terribly hard for any candidate to get over 50% of the votes - If Calder n wins with almost 35% of the votes, or if L pez Obrador wins by a similar amount, we will anyway have 65% of losers). But what we are mourning goes far beyond that: We lost faith in our electoral institutions, which we were so proud of a couple of years ago. They proved not to be serious, not to be adequate for a hard decision. Why am I saying this? Lets analyze a bit.
First of all, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE)'s main function is to organize the federal elections, and to make sure they are run with neutrality. Since the early months of the formal competition (as the campaigns themselves started way too early and we Mexicans are sick of the eternal electoral climate), the IFE has not acted in time to stop a dirty campaign, made not only by the PAN party but by the nation's President himself and by groups that, being privately owned, are said to be outside the reach of the IFE's regulatory spectrum. The IFE's general council should have been built with representants of all of the main political forces, but only PRI and PAN (which means, center-right and right wing) were represented.
Secondly, over the last six years, President Fox seems to have made constant efforts not only to prove us all he is a complete fool and inept as a statesman (examples abound, there is no rush to prove Vicente Fox just cannot be trusted to run a country), but that his fight for democracy was nothing but a race for personal power. He took every oportunity he could to promote his party - while the Mexican law requires him to remain neutral during the electoral period. There are many proven examples of irregularities and corruption inside his cabinet (most notably those carried out by Josefina V zquez Mota, who was in charge of all of the federal programs to fight poverty, and was the coordinator of Calderon's campaign) leading to inject resources into the campaign. Yes, this should have been stopped by IFE as soon as they were detected - But it was not. And, thank you Mr. Fox, by doing this you severely undermined the respect there should be for the Presidential figure.
Now, IFE's role ends shortly after the elections. After that, it is TEPJF's role to qualify the elections - To ratify they complied to the required equity, legality and certainty. Many of us had more trust in TEPJF than in IFE, mainly because of the series of personal and group connections that came up between IFE and the power groups. Most of us were quite vocal on the voto por voto, casilla por casilla front - Demanding from TEPJF to request to recount all of the votes. Having only 0.58% distance between the top candidates, with lots of statistical anomalities, with tons of reports of illegal tampering of the ballots, having a wide recount would surely make many among us believe and accept the results - Of course, the PAN repeated ad nauseam that the ballots had been counted and we should not go again over the same excercise, quoting all kinds of arguments that came from a too narrow interpretation of the law. And, in the end, too narrow was the response of TEPJF - Only 9% of the booths were reinspected, and not all of them were recounted. In fact, one week ago, they decided to discard over 300 appeals (this means, 300 requests for trial on a specific booth or on a whole district), without yet disclosing which appeals were they, on what basis were they discarded, what geographical areas did they impact, or anything. They nullified about 235,000 votes - And this number is quite scary, as it practically matches the official difference between the two lead candidates (244,000 votes before this partial recount, 233,000 after it). We can now state for certain that the difference between the candidates is smaller than the error margin.
Today, with a very important portion of the country in doubt on whether their decision was legal and correct, TEPJF ratified Felipe Calder n as the elected president. This would be good news. I would like to accept Felipe as my president - Sadly, I cannot, just because all of the TEPJF's principles were violated:

• Equity: The process didn't progress with equity. Illegal publicity was repeated over and over. Just as one example, the Presidency has had the equivalent of 24h a day of ads in the national electronic media for over six months - And IFE acknowledged it was used in a way that promoted the vote for their candidate. The final message was very subtly changed, many people were left unsatisfied, and... That was it.
  Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador was often protrayed as a puppet of Fidel Castro and Hugo Ch vez, and there are still people who believe he was setting to create a communist regime in Mexico. Of course, this was also a direct result of what is now known as the hatred campaign that the ruling party and an important group of industrials pushed. So, no, we had no equity.
• Legality: Most of this posting has dealt with the ilegalities of the process, they are really not in short supply. The sad and alarming thing is that it was the TEPJF itself which commited the last and most important illegal acts.
• Certainty: In a strongly contested electoral scenario, I perceive this to be the sole most important principle. How many votes were cast for each of the top candidates? We have repeatedly stated that the difference between them is below the statistical error margin for a process where a million people counted the votes. And after last week's results where nearly 240,000 votes were discarded, the difference is objectively and undoubtely smaller than the error margin. Even if no fraud was made, people make mistakes, and it is too na ve to assume not even one out of each 200 votes was incorrectly accounted. And even if no fraud was done, not allowing the society to ensure the results of the process really match the reality is by itself a fraud. We will now probably never know if Felipe Calder n cheated, the same as we still don't know who won in 1988 and by how much. Then, official records say that Carlos Salinas had over 50% of the votes, Cuauht moc C rdenas almost 30% and Manuel Clouthier close to 20% - But both C rdenas and Clouthier were sure they had won. And while C rdenas (founder of the PRD, which now supports L pez Obrador) called off the civic resistence to start creating a strong political movement for future, PAN's Clouthier did exactly what his party criticizes L pez Obrador for. In fact, our president Vicente Fox was the Agriculture Secretary in Clouthier's parallel government. Only that Clouthier had a misterious accident some months later and died - giving way to the dark period of PRI-PAN concertacesiones led by Diego Fern ndez de Ceballos.

So... In short, what comes now? We are exhausted by this long process. As too many people, I just cannot accept the imposition of yet another fraudulent president. I had the hopes that Mexico had changed in the last 18 years - But it has not. We are still in a strong presidentialist regime, and we still don't have hopes of getting a democratic government. If we do have a democraticly elected president, perfect, I will accept it. Of course, criticizing and keeping a close eye on his government, as I don't think the social and economic principles they push, but accepting. But there are too many signs of a fraud, there are too many stinky bits in the decision. The stinkiest of them all, the refusal of their opportunity to shut us up. Is it better to have millions of angry citizens closing important streets and giving Mexico a bad name by writing about our trip back to the stone age than to allow for a legal recount? Is it too much asking giving some certainty to our elections? Is there any doubt we will keep fighting this imposition?

We spent the extended weekend in New York City, visiting many friends. Particularly noteworthy was our dinner with my Cousin (Dr.) Matt at Gobo, “Food for the Five Senses.” (The website, by the way, is a fairly effective combination of Flash where helpful and HTML where Flash is unnecessary.) Gobo served quite possibly the best vegan food I’ve ever had. I might even say the best vegetarian food I’ve ever had. (Since I’m a vegetarian, I guess that might just make it the “best” food.) Our dinner included:

• scallion pancakes with homemade mango salsa
• crispy spinach & soy cheese wontons
• salt & pepper king oyster mushrooms
• natural seitan medallion in sizzling spicy citrus sauce
• spinach pistachio roll with jade mushrooms
• beet salad with toasted walnuts

Too bad Boston has nothing comparable. Every time I travel to New York I wonder why Boston can’t borrow at least some of the best ideas — for example, a functional mass transit system. Some other highlights — click on any image for a full-size version: Esther watching the traffic go by
Buildings
A Fountain
The view from my cousin’s rooftop

This blog should serve both as a reminder of the planned BSPs around the world the upcoming weekends and as a proposal for some tasks to tackle then. At this point there are two “real-life” BSPs planned for this weekend, 08th-10th September in Vienna (Austria) and Z rich (Switzerland) and another two BSPs planned for the weekend 15th-17th September in J lich (Germany) and San Cristoba (Venezula). If you would like to attend one of these parties, you can find additional links regarding these events here. First a few necessary words on coordination: #debian-bugs on irc.debian.org will be the main channel for overall coordination. Do not hesitate to ask there before tackling any task; there will certainly be people available that can advise against tackling problematic tasks or tasks already worked on, and give general advice. When working on specific bugs, please claim them or let a DD claim them for you. See also here for list of claims. Tasks that can not be expressed by a claim but are big enough to warrant a notice for others should be noted on http://wiki.debian.org/OngoingBSP or pages linked from there. There should be plenty of bugs for all levels of complexity, programming language or legal skills and time requirements. So if you never attended to a BSP before and want to help, now is the right time to start. The RC Bug Squashing HOWTO by Steve Langasek gives a good introduction and is probably a must-read for beginners. But don’t hesitate to ask questions in #debian-bugs, we will be eager to help you to do some work. Non-DDs can also easily contribute by creating patches and/or testing existing ones. Just send them to the related bug report, a DD can easily pick it up from there. See also the end of this mail for a list of useful links. Procedures:
During the BSPs we should use a 0-Day NMU policy again, that means uploads that fix RC bugs that are more than a week old can be uploaded directly. If you feel unsure about a patch and/or if the patch is rather invasive, please consider asking on #debian-bugs for review and/or giving the maintainer some time to react by uploading to the DELAYED queue. If you are unsure whether your package upload might break an ongoing transition, PLEASE speak up on #debian-release and ask for advice there. Help Etch forward:

• RC-Bugfixing. One way to help is fixing release critical bugs. Here you can find a list of RC bugs affecting Etch.
• Test the installer. d-i beta3 was just released recently and should be tested by many people to help the people working on it judge whether it is a worthy release candidate (they sure hope it is See the Debian Installer Website for more information on how to get it, known issues, etc.
• Test Sarge->Etch upgrades. This is particularly useful with “real” systems since you might notice problems that will never occur in more or less clean chroots (hint: there is no one saying you can’t use a copy of your real system
• Verify Release Goals. As one of our major release goals is pervasive IPv6 support, all network related applications should be able to work with both, IPv4 and IPv6. If you have the possibility to do so, please test IPv6 integration in all packages you use and report bugs to the BTS or even better, fix them.
• Translate. There are quite a few .pot files out there waiting for you. Debian’s l10n website is a good starting point. (If you’re new to l10n and/or new to l10n in Debian, try to find someone at your BSP or on IRC to guide you through the first steps. This helps avoid wasted effort and frustration.)
• Fix bugs in orphaned packages. In the list of packages maintained by the QA Group you can find all bugs in orphaned packages, free to be squashed by anyone.
• Fix bugs tagged “help”. This this list.
• Fix bugs in your own packages and in packages you often use. Also help on reproducing bugs, if there are unreproducible.

I personally will attend the BSP in J lich and hope to see many of you during that weekend there or on IRC. Community

Debian has always defined itself as "the universal operating system", which to me means that, given two options A and B, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, we will incorporate them both, because there are people for whom A is better, and people for whom B is better. This is one of Debian's greatest strengths, and this is what makes it the "universal" distribution. Now there has been discussion lately about whether Debian needs some sort of central authority to pull the project into a certain direction. The thing is, while everyone seems to agree that we lack direction, we cannot disagree more on which direction it would be if we had one. At present, we have a number of groups pulling in different directions:

The "release" group

Debian's primary goal is/should be to make stable releases. In the time between releases, people should run the release candidate and iron out bugs, so we can release faster; new features are to be added only right after a release.

The "usability" group

Debian does not have any use if we do not support every user. As the admin users can already help themselves, we should focus more on the average user and make the system more simple to use and administer. Integration is a must, as is closed-source firmware.

The "hacker" group

Debian's purpose is essentially to give us a distribution we can use for ourselves, where all the tools that exist are there.

The "freedom" group

Debian is supposed to be only free software so I don't accidentally come into a situation where I'm in breach of a license.

The "large installations" group

It should be as easy as possible to deploy Debian to a set of boxes and remotely administer them. It should be easy to install the software the users need and to customize it for our organization. Users are not supposed to administer machines, and non-free software and drivers need to be clearly marked and easily avoidable so as to not put us at legal risk.

The "supermarket" group

Debian is a repository of packages that makes our lives easier when we build either a system or a distribution, but we don't really care whether stuff is integrated already, because in order to feel comfortable with it, we need to redo it anyway.

The "small but beautiful" group

The system should be as modular as possible, allowing me to leave stuff out that I don't need. I don't mind installing stuff later on.

There are others, and I have represented each only with their most extreme positions. These groups are not usually disjunct, and in some places, some groups share goals. But, for example the "usability" group and the "small but beautiful" group will always disagree on what should be in a base installation. All of this is not new. What is new is that people are asking for a strong leader to strike down the unbelievers rather than discussing stuff on the mailing lists. This is generally a thing I wouldn't like to see happen in Debian, because anyone you pull into the discussion is either uninformed (so not qualified to answer) or already has an opinion (which will most likely conflict with either party's opinion). By forcing a decision, you essentially give one party the right to dismiss arguments with "we've already had this, it has been decided" and do not solve the problem at all, because the other party is still unhappy. You might want to argue that a committee evens things out a bit as more groups are represented there. That is true to a certain extent, however you'd have to have a way to determine who gets to be on the committee, and to do so in a manner that noone is left out (even if there are new groups forming all of the time) and without giving any group too much power. We might just include everybody, which brings us to status quo, except that everyone got a job title now and people might feel more inclined to decide things by majority vote (because that is what committees do after debating, right) instead of based on actual merit. Scott writes that implementing the same thing he just did in Ubuntu would have taken him ages to do in Debian because there are so many more people to coordinate in Debian. I have to disagree here, the number of people to coordinate is probably the same if not higher, except that the Ubuntu model seems to be that every core team member has commit access and is supposed to read up on the changelog when touching a package, making the coordination more implicit. I happily give out Ubuntu CDs, which do have non-free drivers, firmware and documentation, to users. Telling them that they cannot use that driver or have a manual because it's not free will not help anyone, and it is unlikely that they will be taken to court over it. This is all fine and dandy considering Ubuntu's target audience. However, Debian has a much larger target audience, including Ubuntu itself. If Debian were to interpret licenses less strict for some perceived benefit for the users (cdrecord springs to mind here), then all derivers, including Ubuntu, would have to carefully cross-check all of the licenses for possible violations. Thus, I oppose GFDL documentation in Debian main, because when we say "our priorities are our users and free software", that includes all of our users, not just end users. So, what I ask of you people reading this via Planet Debian is the following: Ask your "opponent" whether he'd be interested in finding a common solution that fits both use cases. Present it as a technical challenge. Accept that the outcome of such an endeavour might be that the other person is right. Accept that not everyone shares your views and/or priorities. It is hard to accept for me that a lot of people still think that svn is superior to git, or emacs is superior to vi. So if you have a different opinion on some matter, keep in mind that the other person may be looking at things from a different angle, where his choice is the only "logical" choice. Oh, and that goes for both of you. To conclude: Debian's strength is its lack of a clear direction. If we were to decide that the end users are what matters, we'd become another Ubuntu, which would be quite unnecessary because we already have one, and they are pretty good at being Ubuntu. If we decided only releases mattered, we'd probably release more often, but right after a release, unstable would be really broken (the elders might remember how it was before the "testing" distribution was introduced). In the same way, the release team takes care to include your pet project in the release if at all possible. Every package that is added delays the release because they have to wait for autobuilders and make sure that everything is internally consistent. So, they are already respecting your goals. Are you going to respect theirs, and join the release effort even if all your machines run unstable? So in my opinion it is a good thing that we did not decide on a direction, because there is no right one. We'd always leave some people behind if we had to make a choice. What needs to change is our attitude that software is to be used in one particular way, because the people actually using it would disagree. After all, free software is (also) about being able to do things your own way, and Debian as a whole should be supportive of that.