Or: my last blog entry in Drupal I'm migrating from Drupal to Serendipity, just because Drupal won't be released with Etch. I already blogged about this migration here and here. It's not because I don't like Drupal. I really like it. But as it won't be included in Etch, that's a real show stopper for Drupal and s9y is nice as well - and it even seems to have a better spam prevention than Drupal. So, when you've subscribed to my blog feeds, you'll need to resubscribe soon, because the domain will point to a different location and thus breaking the links. Maybe I'll keep the old blog under the subdomain "oldblog.windfluechter.net"...
If you want to take a first look, visit http://blog2.windfluechter.net/ (or while the DNS update is on its way). I apologize in advance in case of flooding planet.d.o!

In 2006, Edward A. Lee wrote The Problem With Threads (PDF), in which he observes that threads remove determinism and open the door to subtle yet deadly bugs. While the problems are maybe manageable on single core systems, threads on multicore systems are likely to magnify the problems out of control. According to Wikipedia, coroutines are “program components that generalize subroutines to allow multiple entry points and suspending and resuming of execution at certain locations”. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing more familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, iterators, infinite lists, and pipes. Coroutines are more generic than subroutines. The start of a coroutine is the first point of entry, and places within a coroutine following returns (yields) are subsequent points of entry. Coroutines are also a lot faster than processes or threads switch, since there is no OS kernel involvement for the operation. Even though coroutines are supported in some high-level languages, there doesn’t seem to be an standard implementation of them in C or C++. The first time I heard about coroutines were in Lua. Since then, I’ve been trying to find a good solution for using them in C. Simon Tatham proposes a way of implementing them with a combination of subroutines and macros, but I think that, even creative and clean, this is a dirty approach for real code. What about handling with errors in the code? I still have nightmares when I have some problem to debug in STL-based code. Cryptic, the least. Due to the limitations of standard C libraries, some authors have written their own libraries for coroutines:

• Libtask: a Coroutine Library for C and Unix. It uses the context functions if they are provided by the native C library; otherwise it provides its own implementations for ARM, PowerPC, Sparc, and x86.
• Portable Coroutine Library (PCL): Easily portable on almost every Unix system and on Windows. It can use either the ucontext.h functionalities ( getcontext()/makecontest()/swapcontext() ) or the standard longjmp()/setjmp().
• libCoroutine (a small, portable coroutine implementation): For FreeBSD, Linux, OS X PPC and x86, SunOS, Symbian and others.

Our despicable prime minister said "I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory".

That statement is wrong in many ways, firstly the US (with Australian help) has destabilised and destroyed Iraq already. Claiming that removing US troops at this stage will do any further harm is unproven (and except for the Kurdish area extremely unlikely). Trying to link a presidential candidate with a terrorist organisation is the worst type of dirty politics.

Texas Republican senator John Cornyn requested that the Australian government stay out of US politics. It sounds like a reasonable request. But I wonder whether John Cornyn got involved when the US ambassador spoke out against the leader of the Labor party at the last Australian Federal election...

Senator Obama suggested that if John Howard wants to criticise his policies in Iraq then he should first send another 20,000 Australian troops (there are currently 140,000 US troops compared to 1,400 Australians). According to the CIA World Fact Book Australia has a population of 20.3M while the US has a population of 298.4M. If the ratio of serving soldiers was to match the populations then Australia would have 9,500 troops in Iraq. If Australia was to be a full military partner of the US (but scaled down due to the smaller population) and therefore had troops in South Korea, Japan, and Germany then the number of Australian troops committed might be closer to the 20,000 number cited.

But this is no criticism of Senator Obama. For a number that was made up to demonstrate his point that Australia is not pulling it's weight in Iraq it's a quite reasonable estimate.

The US Democrat Senator Ron Wyden correctly described Howard's comment as "bizarre". This may become a catch-phrase for the Howard regime (as the Bush regime is described as a "miserable failure").

Johnny seems to think that it's in his best interests to send Australians to fight a war that has no benefit for Australia (or the US for that matter), but he doesn't have the guts to do it properly. Fortunately for him the Bush regime understands his position and allows him to send a token force to demonstrate support without the risk of any significant number of casualties or having to conscript soldiers.

This mutual meddling in elections is a demonstration of the way Bush and Howard conspire against the interests of the Australian and US citizens. Both countries need governments that look after the interests of their citizens at home and let the UN take a larger role in world issues.

In MIT-land, IAP is over, and classes have been running again for a week. This term I’m doing things such as learning Scheme in the intro CS class 6.001, “The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” — otherwise known as SICP. No DrScheme jokes. Ari, this means you. IAP was great fun — it’s kind of a like a mini-summer in between terms. I played in a LARP, participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt on the same team as Mako, and made a robot. But now it’s back to the grindstone. But I’m looking forward to this term more than I was last term. (Famous last words.)

News flash: gamers and Tron fans everywhere can rejoice; Armagetron Advanced will soon be up-to-date once more in Debian! The last time a new upstream version (0.2.7.0) was uploaded was almost two years ago now, and while the Debian package has languished in neglect, upstream has chugged on, fixing bugs and adding new awesomeness to the game. Just recently, the old maintainer orphaned the package, and since I use it anyway I’ve adopted it and given it some much-needed love. The new version is 0.2.8.2.1, what an, er, long version number. The new packages have been renamed from armagetron[-foo] to armagetronad[-foo] to reflect upstream’s name change. They include upstream improvements such as the addition of maps and improved graphics code, as well as packaging improvements like a new initscript for the server and rewritten, up-to-date manpages. While the new packages have been uploaded to experimental, they’re stuck in NEW due to the binary name changes. So, grab the x86 or x86-kfreebsd packages from here and test, test, test! (Yes, I run a kfreebsd machine. I wanted something eclectic for a non-essential, moderately old dual-core x86 box. Also, I’ll probably compile amd64 packages soon, but the amd64-machine I can use to build them on is currently in a half-installed state, which I need to fix before that. You can always build from source.) I’ve cleared with the security team that it won’t get in the way of anything and will probably be uploading to unstable as soon as there’s been some more testing to look for major problems. And since the newest version contains fixes for the security bugs affecting the old version, I’m going to snoop around and judge the [in]sanity level of porting back the security fixes for etch, since the new version will at most be unofficially backported to etch. Go, er, take a break in between fixing RC bugs. And test, test, test!

In my previous post ( to this Debian section), I've mentioned we were preparing an event focused on direct contribution. Well, we've done it and it was very successful!. The event name we've choose was invol crate+, which means "involve yourself" and the plus sign meaning "more", since that was the main idea behind the event. We've worked for a couple of months, this includes live and online meetings, (even we all live in Lima sometimes it's quite difficult to match our spare time) and a lot of online work. We've just published the event report (currently in Spanish only, translation in progress). The main things I'd like to highlight is the fact that we got people doing real work and breaking the ice from "I want to do something, but I'm quite not confident to get on the teams" to people discussing work-related issues on our l10n-spanish list. I wanted to people directly learn and use the tools we do and also the infrastructure, so at some point I made the decision of make them directly work on our team's infra, this of course got some people inquiring if I was running a parallel project and complain about the quality, later I had to explain what was this rush of translations and that we were running this workshop and, yes, I knew the work was not going to be as we usually expect but they were quite new and we didn't have much time for have them learn all our policy, terms and all things one knows after being on the team for a while.
My girlfriend also involved herself and did some translation work and took pictures for me, cute. However, since I had an horrible issue with my main domain for email, and also because my time constraints, I didn't have much time to follow them up but I'm glad about what they did and that some of them are very encouraged and still working on the list. One of our goals was to get at least one people "hooked" on the direct contribution I'm glad to see we over-passed this goal. The report has the in-depth details, like number of participants, talks, also the problems we faced, as Diego describes (no, don't believe him, I wasn't acting as the contact/manager guy all the time, word). We had a dinner later with some of the people who still had energies or were hungry ;).
There is a pictures gallery at our website, also the talks slides, the videos are still on processing. We'll publish them once they are ready, like everything in Debian of course ;). Finally, I want to say that this was a great personal experience to transmit the things I've learnt and having people to feel that they also can do it, but even more: doing it!. Sometimes online chat or mailing lists are quite cold for transmitting this knowledge to newcomers. Usually they got scared after one tells them they have to read a lot, or they just got frustrated by their inability to understand the team work-flow at the very beginning. I'd like to thank our wonderful band, or squad (you named it, we can get it for you), who is responsible for making this happen. We are already working on the long-term (call strategic if you like it) plan for the up-comings invol crate+. We've already made a shot-term plan for this year and started to work on the next invol crate+, be ready.
Of course thanks to Peru Pacifico Institute where we hosted the event. We had a post-event meeting with them and directors are very happy with us and with the success, they are willing to work together again on the future. Also to our helpful sponsors, speakers, friends and relatives who support us.

Wouter wrote an interesting post about names. I wonder how many people know me as Russell SELinux...

I went to the Astronomy Festival on Jan 27 organised by Galway Astronomy Club. Worth seeing; it attracted about 100 people (the Hotel conference room was full); successful for a town like Galway, so frequently covered in Cloud. Dr. Lucie Green save a good talk on Solar Physics, describing the different methods we now have of exploring the Suns behaviour, Flares, Sunspots, etc. and the different missions such as SOHO and the new STEREO mission to observe the Sun. Prof. Chris Dainty gave a clear presentation describing the state of the Art in Adaptive Optics, and work his group has been doing, both in Astronomy and pushing AO into other fields, such as opthalmology (treating the eye as the obstacle and observing the retina behind) and productising A.O. for 'non-professional' use. He hopes in the near future to be able to provide Adaptive Optics to Amateurs (price range around Eur 5000, status: not ready yet, the first units would be for 'University Dept' observatories, costing 20-30k, in the next year or two). Of particular interest were one by Prof. Dick Butler, head of the Chemistry dept. here in NUIG; it was on Organic Chemistry and meteorites. He is a long-time amateur astronomer but professional chemist; he was particularly interested in the organic chemistry of the Murchison meteorite. After pointing out the out the false alarm of ALH 84001, he gave a convincing presentation of the extra-terrestrial origin of complex organic compounds, including amino acids, etc. in the Murchison meteorite. In particular he disputed claims that the meteorite was contaminated, pointing to the Deuterium enrichment of the compounds within; as the C-D bond is stronger that C-H, Carbon-Hydrogen compounds are more likely to be broken up by extraterrestrial radiation that their deuterium variants, leading to deuterium enrichment over terrestrial equivalents. Later he gave a nice summary of conditions on Saturn's moon Titan, pointing to its rich supply of organic compounds, showing that when hit by meteorites, lakes of water would be possible for several hundred years at a time, as the impact craters cooled, and called Titan a utopia for organic chemistry exploration. This seems to make the idea of panspermia: life originating off-Earth more plausible. For a while now I've had a book (found in the Bargain bin somewhere) by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, From Grains to Bacteria, a collection of papers documenting their belief that they've discovered bacteria in free space via spectroscopy. I must admit my spectroscopy is not up to challenging them; time to dig deeper and fish it out. Dr. Aaron Golden gave a very interesting talk on Brown Dwarfs: Planets or Pulsars that he and his students have been doing. Basically it turns out that while Brown Dwarfs have long been seen as the 'runt' of the Stellar world, stars that didn't make it, some of them it seems are Pulsars. (He's invented the acronym SPUDs: Sporadically Pulsating Ultracool Dwarfs, for them; maybe it'll help people remember that Pulars were originally discovered by an Irishwoman, too). This was first seen by Andys Postgrads Greg Hallinan and Steve Bourke - (see the papers). Kinda interesting as Aaron studied under Dr. Andy Shearer in NUIG working on Pulsars, so knew a bit about them, and had seen behaviour like this before, with a bit of a clue what might be causing it. It was wierd going to this talk; Andy hired me to work in ICHEC, and we have an office in NUIG; Greg and Steve work down the hall, and indeed, I see them occasionally working on our computers; but didn't know what they'd been working on until now. So, it appears that these Brown Dwarfs (they've seen Pulsar behaviour in several) have Starspots (details here and here; some hot-off-the-press stuff: rumour has it he was checking the results of observations from the night before to ensure they didn't disprove what he was about to say). Aaron was pointing out the coherent maser behaviour was similar to that seen at Jupiter, leading to its strong radio emissions. I didn't get to talk to him about it in detail, but the idea of an Object with both sunspots and clouds sounds fairly exotic and interesting. Beyond that, the Festival was a good opportunity to see what Irish Amateur Astronomers have been doing, and meet some interesting people. Kudos to all those who organised it.

Ulrich Drepper has written a good web page about text relocation which is most often noticed as execmod failures reported when running SE Linux. When an AVC message reports a failure of execmod against a shared object it means that the object has text relocations (the shared object code writes to code that it executes to fix up addresses). This is due to being compiled without -fPIC or -fpic.

The command eu-findtextrel (from the elfutils package) when run with a parameter of the shared object in question will tell you which functions were compiled without -fpic or -fPIC.

The module in question must be recompiled with -fpic or -fPIC to generate the correct code.

Without SE Linux it's still a bug to compile a shared object without position independent code, so any shared object which can't run under SE Linux because of execmod will probably have problems in other situations anyway (maybe only on certain architectures).

I had the most wonderful dentist appointment this morning. bbollenbach was so excited over this dentist http://www.smilemontreal.com/ - but it seemed mostly because they use lasers to do any fillings or whatnot.

I started off by going to their website to get the phone number, and found a web form there. I filled in information asking for an appointment. I got an email back on a Sunday night from the dentist saying that someone would contact me during the week. They were nice enough to call during the evening (which was funny, since I'd given them my work number assuming they'd call during the day, but I was here anyway that day) and booking the appointment was easy.

I got an email saying that they'd booked the appointment and a link I could click to get an iCal appointment. This didn't work in the Google Apps for Your Domain setup, but might if I were using local mail.

A day before hand I got an email asking me to confirm that I would make the appointment by clicking a link.

The place is a little further away from M tro Vend me than I'd thought - it's beside the Westmount Public Library. I walked in to find a nice spacious waiting room. The office manager / receptionist was very friendly, and this continued through to dealing with the hygienist and the dentist himself. I usually *hate* hygienists - most of the ones I'd met before hand had been dentists from overseas whose accreditation's hadn't been accepted here. So understandably bitter and annoyed. My only other good hygienist had been at the clinic in Toronto, but that was also the dentist who tried to convince me that there were no risks with using mercury fillings, and that she was exposed to it much more anyway, so why was I so insistent on white fillings anyway? (Worth noting that my plan *covered* white fillings, so it wasn't an issue of price or anything.)

The dentist was also a really calming presence, and answered my questions with a smile. I need to go back, so I'll know more about what he's like then. But so far I suspect I've found a keeper.

So, it's the week before the fair. Last week, the main concerns were proper lighting and colourspace conversion, this week it is test-assembling the flyer stands. That's the cool thing about small companies: there's nobody telling you that certain things should be left to the appropriate department.

I had a full day yesterday. I'm not sure how this happened, but for some reason both Montreal Wiki Wednesday and Yulblog First Wednesdays fall on (ta-da!) the same day of each month. So we get a whole lot of Internet social-software craziness all in one intense burst during the day. Wiki Wednesday last night was a good time. We had it up at La bande passante, the informal meeting space that Robin Millette, Marco and roommates have up near Metro Cr mazie. It's a really nice space for a meeting of <20 people in an informal setting. They have lots of space, equipment for presentations, WiFi, a big table and comfy chairs. Hugh McGuire, Anne Goldenberg and Antoine Beaupr , Marc LaPorte, Seb Paquet and Robin Millette were all there (with various bande-passistes passing in and out as needed). I talked about experiences with RecentChangesCamp 2007, especially the "what we should have done" session at the end of the event. It really informs what we're going to do with RoCoCo in May of this year. In particular, we've made a commitment to try to get invitations and sponsorship requests out in February -- about 3 months before the event proper. We hope this is close enough to the event itself that people won't put it off or forget about it, but far enough away that people have time to make plans. Hugh talked about his new project Visible Politics. It's kind of a Wikipedia-meets-They Work for You. It's a wiki project for sharing objective information about the voting records, positions, and affiliations of Canadian federal politicians. It's still in its infancy, but I think the project can lend a really great hand to making public information about civic activities possible. On top of that, Robin demoed a really cool project for measuring activity on parts of a wiki site, Hot Off the Wiki. His demo versions use the BarCamp wiki, but I think the plan is to expand the tool to work for other wiki engines and sites. It's a good idea. I also demoed the MediaWiki OpenID extension, which I think was pretty interesting. I didn't say it at the time, but I mostly did the demo for Marc, who I think could benefit from one of the US$5000 Open Source OpenID bounty. I believe that TikiWiki meets the popularity requirements and the OpenIDEnabled.com libraries should make it easy to implement. Anyways, good Wiki Wednesday all around. I'm looking forward to the next one in March. tags: wiki wiki wednesday recentchangescamp rcc07 visible politics montreal openid tikiwiki

YULblog when I tell you to blog After WW, Hugh and I went down to the YULblog event at the Quincaillerie on rue Rachel. We actually stopped in and had a poutine at La Banquise really quickly, which definitely put me in a good mood. When we got to the bar around 8:30 -- in my mind, fashionably late -- the place was already jam-packed. There were easily over 50 bloggers there, and maybe closer to 75. My friend Nicolas Ritoux was already there, sitting down at a table eating papadum with a lot of nice folks. I got a chance to talk to Patrick Tanguay about his upcoming trip to San Francisco, and Niko and I chatted in French about how we never chat in French. I also managed to get a whole stack of Moo Cards from the likes of Hugh and Vanou. All in all a good time, although I left a little early to get some baby quality time in. I really love YULblog; it's a great event that makes me feel connected to the local community. tags: yulblog fevrier

Personal note Thanks for the blogroll link from the anonymous author of The Love Shack. My guess is that it's Alex Malinovich, but I'm not sure. Anyways, let me know who you are so I can add you to my roll. tags: rcc07 recentchangescamp the love shack alex malinovich

I’m back in Dublin, trying madly to lose the Californian mannerisms. Starting sentences with ‘So …’ is the most pernicious. It’s excellent to be back; there’s a great sense of camaraderie here, and people are easier to approach. It’s also good to have easy access to daylight — even though there’s less of it, I get to look out of a window. I had been intending to go straight from the airport to where I’m living temporarily, but I forgot its address so went to work instead. I’m so grateful to B and his wife for putting me up for the time being, but of course I’m now looking for somewhere in Dublin to live — preferably close to the Google office. So if anyone out there has a room to spare in Dublin for a non-smoker with simple needs, get in touch. I seem to have found the key to avoiding jet-lag. Stay up the night before you fly, so you sleep on the plane. When you wake up, your body clock will be so disoriented that it’s easy to persuade it to re-sync to wherever you are. It’s great to see colleagues again, but of course I’m now missing friends and colleagues from California. On the whole, however, Dublin is an upgrade. I’m even enjoying the rain. It gets so tedious in California, to know that the whole week will be 22-25°C, with no rain. Of course, the great benefit of Dublin is that it’s only an hour’s flight from Durham and the family. I’m seeing them on Friday!!

I’m the happy owner of a Linksys WRT54GL. OpenWRT is nice, but … well. Debian is just nicer. And I couldn’t resist the idea of running Debian on this little MIPS system. Since there’s clearly not enough space available on the Linksys, I decided to install etch in a chroot, that I would mount using NFS. Joey tried that already, the Debian wiki provides some information, but I use another technique. First, on another system (an i386, I debootstrap’ed a mipsel etch, using –foreign. This tells debootstrap not to run the second stage:
debootstrap –arch mipsel –foreign etch /space/debian-mipsel http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian Then, I modified /etc/exports to allow the router to mount that chroot:
/space/debian-mipsel 192.168.1.1(rw,sync,no_root_squash) I mounted it on the router:
ipkg install kmod-nfs
insmod sunrpc
insmod lockd
insmod nfs
mount -t nfs star:/space/debian-mipsel /debian -o nolock
mount -t proc /dev/null /debian/proc I set up some swap space on the NFS mount (mandatory, or debootstrap’s second stage will fail):
ipkg install losetup
ipkg install kmod-loop
ipkg install swap-utils
dd if=/dev/zero of=/debian/swapfile bs=1M count=100
losetup /dev/loop/0 /debian/swapfile
mkswap /dev/loop/0
swapon /dev/loop/0 I chrooted inside /debian, and ran debootstrap’s second stage:
chroot /debian /bin/bash
debootstrap/debootstrap –second-stage When you are done playing, you can disable the swap space and umount everything:
swapoff /dev/loop/0
losetup -d /dev/loop/0
umount /debian/proc
sleep 1 # or umount /debian will fail
umount /debian If you want to re-mount everything, all you need to do is:
insmod sunrpc
insmod lockd
insmod nfs
mount -t nfs star:/space/debian-mipsel /debian -o nolock
mount -t proc /dev/null /debian/proc
losetup /dev/loop/0 /debian/swapfile
swapon /dev/loop/0
chroot /debian /bin/bash That first stage/second stage split in debootstrap is really cool: it’s an easy way to run Debian anywhere, only requiring to be able to chroot at some point.

... is the working title of my diploma thesis. Tomorrow I'll hold the introductory presentation on my topic in the research seminar. This is to explain my project to other members of the working group, so they can give me feedback and suggestions. What I'll be doing:

• extend the existing IkeWiki semantic wiki with a simple calendaring function
• investigate use cases for calendaring in a wiki context
• eventually develop a simple query language, that allows non-tech-savy users to do common queries and rules; others will probably be given full SPARQL or some extension on top of it (for temporal calculations)

Where I am:

• I think I know where I'm heading
• I've started hacking on IkeWikis internals
• IkeWiki actually queries the database via SPARQL to retrieve relevant temporal information and displays them in a simple calendar view
• I have some months to go for finishing my thesis

Difficulties:

• Repeating events. Actually a very common thing. I havn't seen a calendaring software that could handle more than just the simplest tasks. Please name a calendaring software that can do "the last wednesday each month which is not a national holiday".
• Custom time types: working days, work time (8-18 on work days), holidays, ...
• Sub-events. Should actually be pretty easy in a semantic wiki, but defining the semantics right and making an okay UI can get tricky
• Non-gregorian calendars (I'll probably not handle this)
• Ambiguity in expressions. If you have a meeting scheduled for some day at 10:00, duration: 1 day, it probably doesn't end at 10:00 the following day, but at 18:00, end of the working day it started. If the meeting starts at 17:00, duration 1 day, it probably ends at 18:00 the next day...
• Various technical stuff, including:
• XSLT sucks for datetime handling. It can only process very few formats; XSLT 2.0 has format-dateTime, but it can't format a duration for all I know. Still IkeWiki is using XSLT a lot.
• SPARQL is a pain for negation handling; you can do "IF NOT EXISTS", but it's very ugly. But this is common in calendaring: "if there is not another event at the same time, the office hour is wednesday at 10am"
• Ajax. Ikewikis UI makes heavy use of Ajax, but that makes development and debugging much harder; often you won't see the actual error message (or have to dig in some messy logs), because it's all obscured somewhere in XMLRPC and JSON calls

Fortunately, we have a rather strong research group here in Munich. There are experts for query and transformation languages (e.g. Xcerpt, SPEX - Querying XML Streams), temporal calculations (Computational Treatment of Temporal Notions, CTTN) and time modeling Calendar and Temporal Type System CaTTS); and I'm also working closely together with the author of IkeWiki and Xcerpt. And of course they're all nice people to work with!

A few interesting interviews with speakers at the upcoming FOSDEM 2007 have been published. I especially recommend reading the interview with Ronald G. Minnich, the founder of the LinuxBIOS project. Here are the questions he was asked:

• What's your goal for your talk at FOSDEM?
• We saw the mention on the LinuxBIOS website about one million devices shipped with LinuxBIOS. Could you tell us more about these devices?
• What kind of support have you received from chipset and motherboard manufacturers so far?
• Could LinuxBIOS theoretically replace all BIOSes, of are there certain limitations to be taken into account?
• Could you tell us a bit more about the BIOS side of the OLPC laptop?
• What exactly is the difference between "easy" hardware to write a BIOS for, and the "tough" hardware?
• What are your thoughts on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)?

Answers here ;-)

In order to make a Debian Live image these are the steps you have to make (as root):

• aptitude install live-package
• make-live -d $ DIST -p $ PACKLIST -m $ MIRROR
• Enjoy!

Really, no lies! just make sure you replace $ DIST , $ PACKLIST and $ MIRROR .



DIST can be etch or sid. I didn't try sarge.
PACKLIST is one of the ones in /usr/share/make-live/lists/ or you can make your own and place it there.

By default, these are available:

ls /usr/share/make-live/lists/
gnome kde kde-extra-i18n minimal x11
gnome-core kde-core kde-full minimal-net x11-core
gnome-full kde-core-i18n kde-full-i18n standard xfce
gnustep kde-extra kde-i18n standard-i18n

MIRROR is easy and it can be a local mirror

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 20 days of "blitz l10n NMU". No blog entry yesterday, sorry for those of you who like the "bubulle fights the dragon" adventures. I was travelling from Paris to Badajoz/Spain for the Free Software World Conference. Frans Pop, Wookey, Martin Michlmayr, Knut Yrvin and I will give a common talk about the results of the "Extremadura work sessions" funded by the regional government of Extremadura last year. My net connection will be jerky as we have a very good connection at the conference site, but nothing at the hotel (except a ridiculously expensive Telefonia wireless, which can't even be circumvented with IP-over-DNS). viewvc is to be uploaded by ender very soon. No news for dpkg-cross. A NMU is pretty likely now. I just uploaded a few more NMU's today as I got network again:

• ipsec-tools
• libpam-ldap
• php4-rrdtool
• freetds
• icedove will be taken care of by Alexander Sack and we will even rewrite the templates while we're at it

I got in late last night, and I've been trying to get caught up on all the various aspects of my life. I spent some time on the plane writing up my RecentChangesCamp 2007 notes, which aren't yet done. But I hit the ground running today. All charged up from a weekend of wiki talk, I decided to exercise some DoOcracy and organize this month's Wiki Wednesday here in Montreal. It wasn't really that hard -- I just made sure that the great meeting space at La Bande-passante was available, then updated the Montreal Wiki Wednesday page and sent out a link to the RoCoCo discussion list for good measure. I'm pretty excited to start discussions about RoCoCo, the Montreal RecentChangesCamp coming up May 18-20. We're about 3 months out, and although Anne and Antoine have done a ton of prep work, we still have a lot to do to get ready. tags: wiki wednesday wiki recentchangescamp rcc07 montreal bande-passante rococo

Wiki Wednesday Portland Speaking of WW, I find it hard to believe that Portland, the so-called "Wiki City", doesn't have its own Wiki Wednesday event. I'm sure everyone there is burnt out right now, but it'd still be really useful. tags: portland wiki wiki wednesday

OpenID and CardSpace So, it seems like everybody and their dog is nattering about Bill Gates's announcement that Microsoft will be supporting the OpenID single sign-on solution in some future version of CardSpace. This is probably quite good for people who are using Microsoft desktop platforms, and obviously very good for those of us who already have OpenID deployed (like Wikitravel does). But I wonder if Windows Live ID users will be able to fully participate in the already growing world of OpenID-enabled sites. It would be cool if a Live Spaces URL, like http://evanprodromou.spaces.live.com/, it's possible someone smart is going to create a Live-ID-to-OpenID bridge, like idproxy is for Yahoo IDs. tags: openid microsoft live id cardspace idproxy bill gates live spaces