The controversy around voting computers has gained a lot of national attention in the past weeks, mostly thanks to the aptly named action group "We don't trust voting computers". Leading man Rop Gongrijp has made a clear (albeit late) case against these computers, up to the point where minister Nicola has ordered the ban of a specific type. Most interesting though is the decision of the action group to cancel their scheduled court case against the national government. Instead of radically continuing until their goal - a full paper trail - is reached, they decided that it would be better to not jeopardise smooth elections, less than three weeks from now. Afterall, good elections are what it's all about. A wise decision.

R.K. Mulholland, author of Something Positive, one of my favorite web comics, writes something that seems pretty relevant to Debian:

People assume most Debian developers are heavy-handed, pushy, intolerant bigots bent of dominating any other culture or idea and supplanting it with their own whims because, for the most part, the ones who speak up the most ARE heavy-handed, pushy, intolerant bigots bent on dominating any other culture or idea and supplanting it with their own whims. It sucks. It's horrible. And it's the what everyone of any faith, political idea, or lifestyle has to deal with. People always focus on the loud minority who ruins everything. And like any other group, the only way you can combat this is making your views and, in this case, your kindness and actual testimony louder than the hateful prattle of those hurting your beliefs.

Mulholland actually writes about Christians, but I took the liberty of substituting the words "Debian developers" instead. I wonder if I should reconsider my policy of shutting up and going away when people start quarreling or otherwise behaving badly inside Debian. Perhaps participating more actively in such a situation would be helpful, if only to make it clear that those most vocal do not always represent the majority. Mostly such participation should be to do constructive things: offering solutions to technical problems, pointing out good things others do. Sometimes it would have to be to help Debian make some of the very difficult decisions it needs to do. For example, what should the project do in the case of Sven Luther? This is a good example of a problem that Debian as a project is very ill equipped to handle. I'm not sure I will do anything about this, but now that it's two hours past midnight, I feel I should. When I wake up, I expect to regret this.

I was born on 19771102T2018+0200. Thus, it is now almost an hour into my 29th, that is, 035th, that is, 0×1Dth birthday. And what am I doing right now? Celebrating? No, actually I am writing a novel. This is the fourth time I participate in the interNational Novel Writing Month. The MissionImpossible is to write 50 000 words of fiction, a single story, in thirty days. That makes about 1667 words a day, roughly half a dozen pages of manuscript for each 24 hours of this month. I won last year, but whether I cheated or not only $DEITY can tell. I certainly can’t. This year, I want to finish with flying colors. Yesterday (the first day of the hellride) I learned a valuable lesson. If my writing slows to a crawl, then I am writing something I should not be writing. Rethinking the scene in question, to include some sort of jeopardy, usually helps. Not that my writing is anything close to stellar when it flows; but in NaNoWriMo it doesn’t matter. Quantity is the only thing that matters, quality is left as an exercise to the reader. Um. No. Quality is the worry of the National Novel Editing Month, in March. Last year I cat-vacuumed by writing blog posts about the Finnish judicial system. This time I wised up and made it a topic of my novel. It is a sf story, set in a future colony world populated by Finns. Who have refrigerated the Finnish system. Well, almost. They have changed it enough that I can call it fiction. Um. Also to be able to write about things that cannot be written. If it is fiction (in fact, not just in fiction), I am not breaking my oath to keep the deliberations secret. Because it’s fiction, I am not actually writing any court case I have sat in. Setting it in a different world allows me to create court cases that would not exist in the real world. Like trying someone for a murder they are alleged to have committed fifty years ago on another planet, with no physical evidence. Oh wait, almost sounds like the Lake Bodom murders. Damn. Oh right, I forgot. I didn’t sit in that panel of judges. Here is a bit of infodump I wrote two hours ago:

Some of the first-generation boardmen had told him stories about grand courthouses with metal detectors at the doors, a dozen courtrooms, the same number of judges and hundreds of boardmen. That was in Finland on Old Earth, of course. Not so here. The courthouse was really a modified small apartment building. There were no metal detectors; the technology was hellishly expensive and wasteful. There were no guns on the planet (except in the Old Earth Museum) and knives were not a problem. There were only eight thousand people, so one judge was quite enough, and twenty boardmen. Well, four judges, one at the Thing’s Court and three at the Apellate court. And occasionally a new graduate from the university doing their clerking to obtain their attorney status. The courthouse had two large courtrooms. The larger generally hosted criminal trials of the Thing’s Court; the smaller was used by the Apellate court when they wanted to hear evidence themselves. Which was not very often. Civil cases sometimes used both rooms at the same time; the wall separating them could be easily removed and put back. The old-timers did approve of the layout and furnishing of the big room. Apparently they did much resemble the Old Earth system. Riku went in, said hello to the janitor and used the ultra secret boardman access hatch to reach the back room. He was the first boardman there, so he took his time to check his appearance, took a crap and made coffee. Justice must not only be just, it must also look just and stay sharp.

Wish me luck in this insane journey, would you? (Notice how I cleverly avoided asking for conga rats for the birthday. Tee hee. Or something.)

So, the following package exists in Debian:

Package: update-manager
Version: 0.42.2ubuntu22-5

Now, what is this abomination? What does the "ubuntu" tell us? That this package was stolen from Ubuntu? That it has Ubuntu specific patches? Branding? Or that it simply is the same package that is in Ubuntu, and the maintainers saw no good reason to use a different version string in Debian? I prefer the last explanation, and believe this to be part of a greater trend. There have been a number of REJECTs because Debian simply does not have any releases codenamed "dapper" or "edgy", and people simply uploaded the package to the wrong upload queue. I believe the Ubuntu side also had a few uploads to "unstable" that their archive maintenance software could not process. Quite a number of packages are maintained by the same people in both distributions, and in most cases, it does not make sense to have packages differ at all. Even more disturbing, Ubuntu has been built for more architectures than they released edgy for, while some people in Debian are trying to reduce the number of architectures in the hope of getting towards a shorter release cycle, which Ubuntu has just admitted to be suboptimal for server installations by preparing an "LTS" release. So Debian and Ubuntu are becoming more and more alike. Now, is this a good thing, or would we all prefer that both keep a strong "profile"? And: if they are to grow together, where should we meet? I think most of us can agree on an installer with a big "expert" switch, and a lot of eye candy as long as you can deinstall it, but we'd also have to merge the respective communities, which is what I'd consider the more difficult part. Debian's NM process is quite different from the MOTU programme, and on both sides there will be "hardliners" (I consider myself one) who will push for their respective community's standards. Still to be filled remains the spot of the end user friendly distribution. I just got a call asking me to fix a printer setup, and, frankly, this stuff is *way* too complicated. Maybe a joint project, by members of the Debian and Ubuntu communities can tackle this?

Tonight whilst Googling for random numbers that call us up and don't make it through the Asterisk menus, I discovered Who Called Us, a user-driven site to identify the people behind the numbers, for callers that provide a number but no name. Very cool. One such number seems to be drawing a reasonable amount of ire. Generally speaking, we're not bothered by telemarketers, because of the menu Asterisk presents to all callers. It's just interesting to see the cases that continually call back.

I rebuilt all the packages in etch inside an i386 etch chroot on bi-Opteron systems with 2 Go of RAM. Here is some data about the build times for each package. They include the time needed to fetch the dependencies from a Debian mirror over NFS, so might have been overloaded during some builds, so it the build times might not be totally accurate, especially for the very short builds.
Two packages are excluded from the following stats because their didn’t complete their build: libmail-mboxparser-perl and camas. 17 packages took more than 1 hour to build. They are:

Package	Build time (seconds)
openoffice.org	21537
linux-2.6.16	17859
linux-2.6	14833
gcc-4.0	9142
gcj-4.1	9062
gcc-4.1	7111
gnat-4.1	6910
installation-guide	6337
gcc-3.4	6022
octaviz	5735
gcj-4.0	5300
k3d	5294
openscenegraph	4851
ghc6	4670
glibc	4504
vtk	3954
atlas3	3759

The full list is available. Most packages build very quickly:

Build time (s)	Number of packages	Total
30	5389	5389
30 - 59	2354	7743
60 - 119	1304	9047
120 - 499	873	9920
600 - 1799	92	10012
> 1800	40	10052

The total build time is 220.4 hours (that’s 9.2 days), the mean build time is 78.9s, the median build time is 27s.

We're going to have a little Bug Squashing Party in Helsinki, on the 11th and 12th of November. See the wiki page for more information. The location is still open: we have a tentative place, but it's not ideal, so we're looking for something better. If you can offer some place, please mail me, thanks. We will have the BSP in any case, so if you're interested in coming, start making your plans now.

Wouter Verhelst replies again:

"With all due respect, but I can't shake myself free of the feeling that you're being intentionally obnoxious here." "When I said "[...] these people never had to run a business", that wasn't intended to say that people who run a business "have" to do so, for lack of anything else. I mean, sure, there's choice, but that doesn't mean you can make this choice every day. Does the word "expression" mean anything to you?" "Additionally, the numbers I gave were meant to give people a general idea; while they're roughly accurate for my case, they certainly aren't completely correct in the general case, and were never meant to be." "Please stop putting whatever I say under the microscope like that, thank you very much."

I didn't need a microscope to spot the cracks in those numbers - our right-wing news media repeatedly points out that it's cheaper to do business in the US and casual web browsing finds figures. As I asked elsewhere, the general idea that net pay is less than the bill to the customer is widely known, so why use a detailed breakdown with higher figures to advocate US$6k? If the point is just "the 6k isn't net pay" then just write that. Personally, I think that point is mostly irrelevant, but the misleading breakdown looked like the sort of thing that dunc-tank should be publishing and isn't. As for "these people have never had to run a business" - yes, it's an expression, but it suggests a compulsion which doesn't exist - why use it? If the point is just "these people have never run a business" then just write that. It's shorter and more honest, although probably wrong: you don't need to have run a business to know that the bill to customer isn't the worker's net pay. I can think of many, many possible reasons for misdescribing something that some people choose to do as something they had to do, but I can't think of one I like. At worst, it's insulting to people who don't do their own business administration. "With all due respect" maybe I am being "intentionally obnoxious" about the breakdown and misleading phrasings: I want to discourage people who post comments without any obvious attempt to get their facts straight, or who exaggerate. Both of those take us away from discussing more basic points like: dunc-tank's execution has damaged debian; and dunc-tank is buying from neither an open market nor an openly regulated one.

The BarCamp Zurich 2006 is over. On the way there I thought about what I would do during time slots with no interesting talks. But when I tried to make up my personal schedule, I noticed that I rather would have the opposite problem: Too many interesting talks at the same time… Well, to many interesting talks at all, although I only went to tech talks and left out the biz talks. I first went to the Podcasting & Co. talk by Timo Hetzel, since I never heard or made a podcast, but was curious about podcasts in general. Besides statistics and rankings he spoke about where people listen to podcast (most listeners seem to do that during commuting), what people like in podcasts, why companies podcast, etc. And that a very big share of all podcast listeners use iTunes as podcast client and except juice (never heard of it before) all other podcast clients seem to be irrelevant. My conclusion: I haven’t missed anything not having listened to or made podcasts neither do I need to listen or make podcasts in the future. They’re irrelevant. To me. :-) Then I had to choose between the talks AJAX@localhost (PDF) by Harry Fuecks and Realtime Collaborative Text Editing and SubEthaEdit by the Coding Monkeys. I heard about realtime collaborative editing once know that it’s a challenging task for the developer. I also know what AJAX is (and that I would only use or recommend it for bells and whistles, but not for content in general), but “AJAX@localhost” sounded like writing normal applications using AJAX. It sounded interesting and evil at the same time. I had to go there! ;-) Others had similar expectations after reading the talk’s title, so I was quite surprised that it was about something completely different, namely about debugging AJAX on the localhost but under conditions usually only appearing if you’re running AJAX application not from localhost but from somewhere on the net: You may have different lags with every request, so some requests may reach the server before others, which may screw up the whole AJAX application, if the developers didn’t think about it and only tested it on localhost. (Hence the talk’s title…) My conlusion: I will use and recommend AJAX even more seldom, since there seem to be even more design misconceptions than I thought before. But I’ll once have a look at the Webtuesday meeting, he mentioned. For the third time-slot, I didn’t need long to decide where to go: I already knew a little bit about Microformats and I wanted to know more. Tag Trade also sounded interesting, but the second part of the talk’s title, Paid Learning sounded like business and so I had no scruples to cold-shoulder that talk. I probably didn’t learn anything really new in the microformats talk, but my knowledge about microformats is now more concrete, and after talking with Cédric Hüsler later during a break, I would even trust myself to start and define a new microformat. Then I went to the HG Caféteria together with Gürkan and two German guys. While waiting in the queue, we were talking about our jobs and our favourite Linux distributions. I got some rhubarb pie and a rum truffles, assuming that the Caféteria uses no alcohol in their products like all other SV restaurant I know. But this one seemed to have quite a lot of alcohol, since it felt like my breath was burning… Well, this resulted in my second SV feedback form submission… Next I went to Alex Schröder’s talk about multilingual websites, Oddmuse and the Emacs Wiki, although also the talk A-Life about simulating evolution sounded promising. Alex asked the listeners about their experiences with multilingual websites and showed what Oddmuse offers as partial solution to the general multilingualism problems. But regarding the comments from the auditorium, there probably won’t be a perfect solution until computers can translate perfectly… The next talk I visited was Gabor’s talk about his master thesis Organizing E-Mail which resulted in a soon to be released Mozilla Thunderbird extension called BuzzTrack. From the other concepts he showed, I found Microsoft’s SNARF (Social Network and Relationship Finder) and IBM’s Thread Arcs most interesting as well as the fact that there is no e-mail client seems to have a majority at all. Directly after Gabor I had my own talk about Understanding Shell Quoting, so I also couldn’t go to Adrian Heydecker’s talk about Learning with Hypertext and Search Engines. I had only about three and a half listeners of whom several to my surprise where here because they didn’t know what “shell quoting” is. I really didn’t expect that. But that seems to be one of the differences between a BarCamp and a Linux Conferences: People come here to see something new, something they haven’t heard about before. On Linux events most people come, because they already heard about some special topic and want to know more or learn something about it. On Linux event my shell talks usually were attracting many visitors while at a BarCamp, talks presenting an idea, a concept or a tool seem to much more interesting for the attendees. So for the next BarCamp I perhaps exhume my Website Meta Language talk which never seemed to hit the nerve of Linux event attendees, since it tried to “sell” a different concept of generating website than most were used to. At least one listener excepted the talk to be named “shell escaping”, but IMHO escaping is only one quoting technic and it’s not only used for quoting. But perhaps I should take the word “escaping” in the title though for the next time. Happily most of the listeners seem to have learned something new from the talk and Silvan Gebhardt was really happy about his new knowledge about ssh ~ escapes, although I mainly talked about how to quote them than how to use them. :-) During the last slot I visited the session about the upcoming BarCamp Alsace 2 and the yet to be planned BarCamp Rhine, a BarCamp to be held on a ship traveling from Basel in Switzerland down the Rhine, stopping in Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Rhein-Main-Area and perhaps even Cologne and Amsterdam. Contrary to my initial thoughts, the day was over very fast and I had no single boring minute during the BarCamp. Wow! After we’ve been kicked out of the building by ETH janitors, we joined again at the Bar N-68. On the way there I met Urban M ller who attended BarCamp Zurich, too. We talked quite a lot and it was very interesting to see behind the scenes of e.g. map.search.ch. Later I joined the French speaking table, talking with Gregoire Japiot from WineCamp France and Alex Schröder. Around 9pm I left the N-68 as one of the last BarCampers, tired but with new knowledge, new ideas, new acquaintances and a new hobby: BarCamping. What a luck that BarCamps aren’t that often, otherwise I couldn’t afford this new hobby. ;-) As a relaxing end I met with Alex Schröder and Christophe Ducamp on Sunday morning for brunch in the restaurant Gloria in the Industriequartier. When we were leaving the Gloria I noticed their book board with a lots of BookCrossing books and I took “The Da Vinci Code” with me, since I saw the movie and people were telling me that the book is much better. I’ll see…

It's a beautiful day here in wt:Los Altos Hills, wt:California, where my parents live. It's been unseasonably warm this week, ever since we hit the ground on Thursday, and we've been enjoying the warm weather to the fullest. Amita June is storing up vitamin D (a precious commodity in the Canadian north) for use during the rest of the autumn and winter. We had an early flight into wt:San Francisco from Montreal on Thursday. There's only one direct flight from Trudeau airport to SFO on Air Canada per day, and it takes off at 8:30AM. Maj is pretty convinced that we need to take direct flights with no stops while we have the baby; I'm mixed on the issue. I think a break every 2-3 hours makes it easier on all of us -- everybody gets some exercise and a little change of scenery. But Maj wisely points out that the takeoff and landing is the hardest part of flying with a little one, so direct flights minimize those. I dunno. Anyways, the 6 hour flight was uneventful, except for people coming up to us to comment on how good our baby is. The movie was "Click", which as I've mentioned before is the worst movie of 2006 bar none. It was pretty disappointing to see it come on -- I like watching movies on the plane. It was bright and sunny at SFO when we landed, and my mom met us at the baggage claim. We had a bit of a struggle getting out to the short-term parking -- for some reason the elevator queue at SFO is out of control; probably all the people loading and unloading luggage from the elevator. In any event, they now have elevator attendants and structured lines to make sure things go in an orderly, if slow, fashion. Back at the house, we had a late lunch of tuna salad and then Maj, Amita June and I did a big group nap. My mom had set up a toddler bed for AJ, and she's been sleeping in it since we got her. I think she's just turning the corner where having a little more space in the bed for herself is more important than nursing all night. Which I think is better for all three of us. Thursday night my dad came home from work in wt:Morgan Hill and we had take-out burritos with my parents, my sister-in-law Pam and Amita's two cousins Elena (3) and Tessa (10 months). The three girls got along like gang-busters; Elena seems to like being the older sister showing the younger girls what to do. tags: california travel los altos hills amitajune elena tessa

Jagi's Birthday Party Friday night we went up to the City for my brother Nate's annual Halloween party. Nate lives on a precipitous incline in North Beach, the Italian-Beatnik section in the northeast of San Francisco with steep hills, great caf s and a significant dearth of parking. We managed to get Amita June down to bed for the night, gave her grandparents far more instructions than were actually needed, and then sped off into the night. We were running late, but we stopped on the way to pick up Maj's brother Brian, who lives in Noe Valley. It was the first time we'd seen his new apartment and we probably took longer than necessary there, but we finally got off towards North Beach around 7:30PM. And... we drove and drove. Every street I drove down was packed, and I kept doing U-turns and trying alternate routes to get where we were going. Finally, on Van Ness Avenue at California Street, we got stuck in a gridlock that wouldn't move at all. Friday nights are pretty bad for traffic in San Francisco, but at this point we sat through 5 red-and-green light cycles without any motion whatsoever. Unable to turn, unable to go forward, unable to go back. When traffic finally started moving again, we saw what the problem was: the last dregs of the Critical Mass rally were just passing through. Critical Mass is a bike rally that happens on the last Friday of each month in San Francisco and elsewhere; hundreds of bike riders take over streets and block traffic. It's really fun if you're riding; it's infuriating if you're driving. We drove down further on Van Ness to go through the Broadway Tunnel into North Beach, but it was blocked by... Critical Mass! They'd turned about and come to block our way again. This time, I was able to do a U-turn and get over to Nate's house through side streets. We had a good time at the party itself. Nate and his roommates have been having a Halloween party for years, but increased size and complaints from landlord and neighbors have made them move the party to a nearby bar, Woody Zip's. With two stories, two bars and a dance floor, it was just about the right size for their event. Nate was dressed up as Buzz Lightyear from "Toy Story"; Brian had a huge fat suit and a sumo-wrestler outfit. Maj and I were millionaires, with tiaras and top-hats. We all looked pretty good. Woody Zip's even let the guys bring their own Jagermeister machine, affectionately known as "Jagi". They got the machine for one of their Halloween parties a few years ago, and they've made special costumes for it each year (this year: Spongebob Squarepants). We had a shot of Jager and toasted the machine's maturity, then moved on to karaoke and dancing. But only for a while; by 10PM we had to start heading home. We worried quite a bit about Amita June, but when we got back she was asleep in the arms of her Pappou in the TV room. The "parent curfew" is a little hard to deal with, but on the bright side it makes sure you can find babysitters so you can go out in the future. tags: halloween nate north beach party jagermeister san francisco

Baby Circus Last night we went to visit our friends Zach and Wendy in wt:El Cerrito, in the East Bay. Zach and Wendy have been our friends for... oh, more than 10 years now, I guess. They had a handsome little cowboy son two years ago, on the same weekend as my bachelor party in wt:Las Vegas (making it easy to remember his birthday... better than I remember that weekend, is for sure). They have a nice house just near the BART station, with lots of room... although about 2/3 of it is taken up with Wyatt's toys. Wendy is a Web developer for Nolo Press, the do-it-yourself law book publisher. Zach is a hard-working computer genius, one of my favorite people to work with, but he's hung up his spurs to be a full-time stay-at-home dad and go back to school. We had dinner at the Kensington Circus Pub, just up the hill from Wendy and Zach's house. It was a great place; an English-style pub with Fuller's ESB on tap, and a kids' play area underneath the dartboard. Amita June and Wyatt ran around playing while we had fish-and-chips and burgers. It's a great recipe for getting young parents to come to your restaurant; I wish more places would use it. We spent the rest of the night talking about wikis and web sites and all the opportunities there are available to share information in creative ways. We dragged home after Wyatt's bedtime, and Amita fell asleep in the car on the way back home. Greatest thing in the world! tags: zach wendy wyatt el cerrito kensington circus pub

I learn fire I had drinks with Hugh McGuire, founder of Librivox, at La ka on St. Laurent last Wednesday. It was a real good time -- Hugh has had similar experiences "leading" that public domain audiobook project that Maj and I have had with Wikitravel. Another project he's working on Collectik.net, an interesting tool for sorting and organizing podcast streams. I have to admit that I've been skipping the podcast wave -- much like I skipped blogging before it -- and I don't listen to a lot of podcasts. But Hugh got me interested, and now I'm looking around at it. I find there are a lot of interesting tools for podcast catching for Linux; even Rhythmbox, the Gnome music player, can handle podcasts. I'm finding it interesting to listen to them; DestinyLand and Chris DiBona's FLOSS TV are both interesting, as well as the CBC podcasts. I haven't figured out how to listen to Vu d'ici, though -- m-c doesn't seem to have an RSS feed with just the podcasts in it. Or am I missing something? tags: podcast destinyland flosstv vudici rhythmbox librivox collectik laika hugh macguire

Today I saw the movie God On My Side by Andrew Denton. It's an interesting movie about the televangelist industry in the US. I expected it to be about the shonky frauds who harm people, there was one scene in the start of a televangelist claiming to cure diabeties (a very dangerous claim that often results in serious injury to the victims of such frauds), but mostly it was about serious evangelists and not about the frauds.

What was scary was the level of advocacy of Armageddon. These people seemed very determined to have a great war between the US and Russia (haven't they realised that the USSR doesn't exist any more?). They advocated taking all possible measures to defend Israel (not ruling out the use of nuclear weapons) and didn't want any compromise with Palestine (no land for peace - after all peace gets in the way of Armageddon).

One insightful comment by an evangelist pointed out that many Christians have gone wrong in their advocacy in being based on what they are against rather than what they are for. It's a sad trend that most Christians are not able to express any positive things that they are for and only focus on things that they oppose. On most occasions when they say they are for something it is really a disguise for being against something else, EG supporting Family Values means oppressing homosexuals, preventing freedom of speech (bad language), and banning abortions (even for rape victims).

I am looking forward to the DVD release of this. I'm sure that the out-takes and some further footage post release will be interesting.

Above is the day 21 beard picture.

I don't often post about work, but it's always with some trepidation that I switch my main computers to the new distro.

While I moved from the Distro team to leading the Support team last October, I still retain my Ubuntu core-dev status, and keep current by looking at toolchain issues occasionally and hacking on our SCC ports, ia64 and hppa. This means that not only do I keep my programming sk1llz from getting rusty through disuse, but I also have reason to keep in touch with other members of the distro team who are both work colleagues and friends.

As one of the people who cares the most about glibc in Ubuntu, I try to make sure that I'm running it wherever possible and making sure that I'm likely to find at least the obvious bugs before others.

So last night I pointed my sources.list to feisty.

This morning there were already two updates: base-files, and debootstrap. linux-libc-dev (the kernel headers) will come along shortly after the new kernel doesn't FTBFS. At the beginning of next week, there will be binutils, libc*, and gcc-4.1. And after that, the merge.

This will be the fourth release in a row that I've ridden from the first files uploaded. At times it's been exciting (leaving for a management meeting in Spain with a non-working X or wireless, not to mention broken cell phone and airplane. All of which were solved by the time I got to Mallorca.)

Wouter Verhelst kindly replied to my comments on his calculation of Steve's net pay :

"The point wasn't getting a "correct" number; only Steve could produce those, if he wanted to. The point was proving that if you get 6000 for one month of work as a business, then those 6000 aren't what you can spend on your personal life. Whether the exact number is 2400 or 3400 is, thus, totally besides the point." "But, yeah, thanks for the clarification :-)"

I agree that 6000 gross works out as a lower net figure. So what? That's obvious to anyone who works and has noticed their gross pay isn't what they actually get to use, even if these "people have never had to run a business". (And I think running a business is a choice, not something anyone ever "had to" do.) If whether it's 2400 or 3400 net wasn't the point, why use inflated figures to advocate paying 6000 gross? My main point was: Dunc-Tank is not buying in a free market, so how can we tell what the fair rate is? Brian M. Carlson explained the lack of VAT:

"States in the US have either an income tax, a sales tax, or both. In the general case, non-profit corporations are exempt from taxation, as long as they have the proper paperwork. Also, certain essentials, such as necessary foods (cheese, but not soda) are exempt from sales tax where it exists." "Since Steve is almost certainly not a non-profit, he will have to pay income tax to both the state and federal governments; the rate depends on his annual income. He will have to pay FICA (social security) taxes, which are approximately 7% of the income. Any amount over $90,000 is not taxable under FICA."

Thanks for the explanation. I hope it'll help other non-US people. Of course, the actual payment rate is minor to me, compared to the problems of dunc-tank being designed as a market for lemons and being driven through by brinkmanship.

I'm finally doing some serious optimisation of ikiwiki tonight. It had been feeling a bit slow. So far with one optimisation (making it into a two-pass compiler) I've sped it up about 8x in some cases, though it's probably more like 2x-4x in the general case of rebuilding a wiki from scratch. Incremental builds are also sped up somewhat, though generally much less. Another optimisation changes backlinks calculation from O(N^3) to O(N^2) on the number of pages in the wiki. Of course N^2 still isn't very good, but this is still a serious improvement. Especially when you have thousands of pages. Rebuilding my personal wiki with these optimisations, it builds 9 times faster than before, now taking just 1 minute. Ikiwiki's own wiki rebuilds in 7 seconds instead of 34. Stunning!

Interestingly, Simon Richter write about rerunning maintainer scripts for changes in related packages just when I thought that it would really be nice to get SpamPD (a SMTP-proxy in Perl which scans mails for spam using the Mail::SpamAssassin Perl module) restarted when SpamAssassin gets updated. Or to get spamd (which is part of SpamAssassin) restarted when a plugin is updated, removed or installed. Of course the second one is easier since the plugin package “knows” that SpamAssassin is affected by the change and can thus reload/restart spamd.
One idea I had for this is to create a hierarchy to which an admin or maintainer could add scripts (effectively providing hooks), like this:
/var/lib/dpkg/hooks/<package>/(removal update install)/(pre post)/<hook-package>
Where <hook-package> would be the package installing the hook while <package> is the package for which the action is to be “monitored”.So that I as the SpamPD maintainer could make the spampd package install a script in
/var/lib/dpkg/hooks/spamassassin/update/post/spampd which would get called whenever spamassassin is updated, after the update, to be exact.
An alternative on per-package basis would of course be:
/var/lib/<package>/hooks/(pre post)inst/<hook-package> or /var/lib/spamassassin/hooks/postinst/spampd for the above example. I would be quite intested to hear what other devs think about this.

In Scotts Blog : Teardown,Scott had a small post about what Teardown in Ubuntu does (or did?). I like the idea that’s behind this “project”. Basically, it tries to avoid calling init scripts with “stop” when actually shutting down the system. This is feasable wherever the init script does nothing but sending the TERM signal to the associated daemon anyway. Or to put it the other way around: The only init scripts which should get called in rc[06].d (i.e. on halt or reboot) are those that do more than just TERMinating the daemon.
This is an interesting “new” approach which I personally would like to see implemented in Debian, too. The way this is supposed to get implemented in Ubuntu looks quite sane to me, too.

Telling gpg not to use the key in the card So, I created the subkeys for the OpenPGP card, and it works. Now I'd like to upload some Debian packages, but the uploads fail because my new subkeys aren't yet known to the Debian keyring. I tried to push my subkeys to keyring.debian.org, but uploading afterwards still was rejected. Maybe it takes some time for propagation, maybe there's some other procedure to follow, I don't know. I didn't manage to figure out what is the procedure for getting a new subkey in the Debian keyring. I wish to replace this paragraph with proper details if I'll ever find out. Now, failing to use the subkeys, I had to convince gpg to use my good old main key. The quick and dirty way was to make a backup of the keyring, delete the subkeys, sign and upload. Seconds after hours of searching terminated in the above crude hack, as it normally happens, someone (Holger in this case) suggested the correct way to do it: use --default-key and append an exclamation mark at the end of the key ID. This was in the gpg manpage, but nowhere near the documentation of --default-key:

Note that you can append an exclamation mark (!) to key IDs or fingerprints.
This flag tells GnuPG to use the specified primary or secondary key and not
to try and calculate which primary or secondary key to use.

So, now I'm happy:

$ gpg --sign  --default-key '797ebfab!'
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: [...]
$ gpg --sign
gpg: signatures created so far: xx
Please enter the PIN
[sigs done: xx]

With my Ubuntu hat, I strongly regret that no Ubuntu developer (to my knowledge) stepped forward to point out the inaccuracies in Chris Beard’s (Mozilla Vice President of Products) Q&A on Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu. Letting people bash Debian when Ubuntu gets so much stuff from Debian isn’t nice at all. With my Debian hat, I really like how Mike Hommey chose to discuss facts, with references, in his reply to Chris Beard’s post. When it is possible, going back to the facts is really the best thing to do to avoid the usual FUD. It’s not really a surprise that this intelligent behaviour came from the Debian side. I have been a very happy user of Epiphany since I made the switch from Firefox 3 months ago. I would recommend it to anyone still using Firefox who is tired of its slow startup times, and its lack of integration in the Gnome desktop.

It’s been over a year now since my last proper upload to Debian, and nine months since I announced my intent to put aside working on Debian for a while. With Matthew Garrett’s resignation from Debian, several people have compared it to my own “resignation” from Debian. It has got my thinking about whether I currently intend to ever end my “Sabbatical” and return as an active Debian Developer. I think that the end of my love-affair with Debian started at Debconf last year where several developers treated those of us who also worked on Ubuntu quite rudely. Someone was attacked for wearing an Ubuntu t-shirt at the conference, while someone else was applauded for wearing a “Fuck Ubuntu” t-shirt. That’s where I realised that maybe I didn’t have as much in common with these people as I thought I did. I still don’t understand why Debian singles Ubuntu out for this kind of treatment, we’re still the only derviative distribution that makes all of our patches to Debian available, yet Ubuntu is claimed to not do anything at all. Another example is that Ubuntu is being asked to change the Maintainer field of every package, something no other derivative is being asked to do or has ever been asked to do. Martin Krafft has had some interesting things to say about this strange relationship in the past. If that was the start of my falling out with Debian, I think that Debian considering removing documentation and firmware from the distribution, especially the documentation, was another point I started wondering whether I shared anything in common with the project anymore. Call me strange, but I think that one of the fundamental purposes of a Linux distribution is to be useful to its users. If nobody can use the distribution because it doesn’t support their hardware, and even if it did, all the documentation has been stripped out; I started to wonder what it’s aims are. It became increasingly apparent that the only users Debian was considering a priority were its own developer. And the third thing is simply a matter of Fun. Fun for me, at the moment at least, has been to build a system that fits together extremely nicely with each component doing the right thing. For Ubuntu this has meant being a driving force for it being Linux 2.6 only, with reliance on udev for hardware, etc. Upstart is just a continuation of these goals, getting a system which all “just works”, even if it means throwing out a few things people were previously fond of. All of these things would have been impossible to do in Debian itself. Getting upstart installable required changes to twelve different packages, including sysvinit itself; at a worst case, this would have required the agreement of twelve different maintainers in Debian. It’s often exhausting just persuading one of the reason for the change, persuading a dozen would have been a herculian effort. Perhaps Matthew is right, what Debian lacks is a single leadership. There’s nobody in Debian I could have gone to for approval over the changes I wanted to make, whose decision developers cannot overrule. Ubuntu has such people (the Technical Board and sabdfl), which gives the project an obvious direction instead of a couple of hundred people all pulling in different directions. In a way, I don’t feel that I’ve left Debian. I feel like I was happily going along, only to realise the mob had gone in a different direction and with no easy way of rejoining the group.