My book review of Emacs made it onto Slashdot today. It took a while to work through that book; all sorts of life events came up and it kept getting pushed farther out. Oddly enough, it was posted on /. on my dad’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad, and thanks for teaching me to stick with it when things get tough and to keep my promises to people.

I finally got my review of Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition from O’Reilly out the door last night. For those like myself who are coming into the Linux and Free/Open Source Software game later in life, books like this really help to backfill your knowledge/skill sets in a timely manner. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to move beyond the basic Gnome and KDE text editors into a more serious text editing tool that has both a GUI and console modes. That is, if you are considering Emacs. And no, this is not an invitation to an Emacs vs. vi flamefest. I use both. 8^)

For those of you wondering about why Ekiga is not in unstable yet, the problem seems to be some discussion about MPL in debian-legal of which nobody has informed any of ekiga/opal mantainers (Thanks again for your communication folks!). The main problem is point 3.2, which reads

3.2. Availability of Source Code.
Any Modification which You create or to which You contribute must be made available in Source Code form under the terms of this License either on the same media as an Executable version or via an accepted Electronic Distribution Mechanism to anyone to whom you made an Executable version available; and if made available via Electronic Distribution Mechanism, must remain available for at least twelve (12) months after the date it initially became available, or at least six (6) months after a subsequent version of that particular Modification has been made available to such recipients. You are responsible for ensuring that the Source Code version remains available even if the Electronic Distribution Mechanism is mantained by a third party.

Also, as a comment in annotated MPL 1.1 you can read:

This provision is intended to ensure availability of code, while minimizing the burden on each Contributor. You do not need to ship Source Code to your Modifications with each Executable, as long as you make it available on-line and tell the recipient where it is. It does not require that you return Modifications to mozilla.org or any other named organization. However, you may do so if you choose, and we hope that you wish to participate in the development community that mozilla.org is chartered to foster.

You don't have to ask a lawyer to see that Debian does yet comply with this. As Alioth is now an official Debian system, and as OPAL is being mantained using Alioth and svn.debian.ORG, every patch we can make to OPAL source will be kept not only for those required 6 months, but forever. And nobody can comply about a SCM system not being an accepted Electronic Distribution Mechanism. For those wondering why OPAL is not relicensed using GPL/LGPL, you can ask yourself by performing a quick Google search. Basically the problem is that there were many conributors in the past and that some parts of the code were written sponsored under the condition of the code be kept under MPL. So, please, stop being so integrist and GPL centric. There are other licenses that have problems (as GPL have) but are as DFSG compliant like GPL and BSD are. We have to keep main clean, but we have a lot of problems to solve and we don't need to make up any more.

Sarah's been helping someone at Google organise the Google Tour de Cure team, and so I've been roped in to ride. I don't know that I'm going to be able to raise a lot of money, as I don't really like asking people for money, and I don't know that many people here well enough to be soliciting donations anyway. I got this generic email to spam people with after registering:

Dear Friends and Family, I recently accepted the challenge of cycling in the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure fund-raising event. I am taking part in this event because I believe in and support the Association's mission: to prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes. You, too, can help by supporting my fund-raising efforts with a generous contribution. Your tax-deductible gift will make a difference to more than 20 million Americans who are affected by diabetes and another 40 million who are at risk for developing diabetes. It is faster and easier than ever to support this great cause - you can make your donation online by simply clicking the link at the bottom of this message. If you would prefer, you can also send your tax-deductible contribution to me at the address listed below. More information on the American Diabetes Association, its programs, and diabetes in general can be found at the Association's Web site, www.diabetes.org. To find out more information on our Tour de Cure, please visit http://tour.diabetes.org. Whatever you can give will help! I greatly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress. Sincerely, Andrew Pollock To donate online, click http://tour.diabetes.org/site/TR?pg=personal&fr_id=3323&px=2791919. If this link does not send you directly to my personal fund-raising page, please cut and paste the entire link, from beginning to end, into your Web browser and hit return. To send a donation: Make all checks payable to: American Diabetes Association
Mail to: Andrew Pollock
Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,
Mountain View, CA 94043-4933

A mother and her litter of five kittens (four boys and a girl) were dumped at the animal shelter that Sarah volunteers at, and they needed a temporary home for about 5 weeks until they're old enough to be weaned, de-sexed, and put up for adoption, so they have taken up temporary residence in the spare room. They're about three weeks old at the moment, and very uncoordinated. The mother is only about 8 months old herself, and very affectionate. It's interesting watching her reaction to her kittens mewing. It'll be fun watching them grow up. They're a bit too small to be playful yet, but they're starting to develop their own personalities. Sarah named them:

• Frodo (male with hairy toes)
• Byron (black male that reminds us of our old cat)
• Bella (female tortoise-shell, slightly longer hair)
• Shadow (male, slightly more greyish coat)
• Mojo (male tabby with a bit of an "M" on his forehead)

Via reddit (which kicks the crap out of slashdot and digg): What I've Learned From Failure.

The link above is a long, but fascinating piece. I've had to become a lot more interested in how to manage software projects since taking on Xorg maintainance, and the same lessons seem to scale up well to how Debian as a whole manages itself. This article talks about some of the major problems that I've seen myself deal with, and the experiences of this guy echo my own over the past year very strongly. Here's a few examples:

"Getting away from weak teams, another source of failure is the omnipresent threat of "chickens." A chicken is not necessarily a weak individual, but a sign of a weak management structure. A chicken is an individual who has significant authority over your project, but does not make a personal commitment to the success of the project. Significant authority includes the authority to impose constraints on the team."

I like this and I've noticed it in the XSF and in Debian as a whole. People are free to work on what they want how they want, and this tends to work out well for us. But we also have no structure in which people must actually commit to what they do. As such, there's no accountability. This frees Debian developers from the preassure of having to work on something they don't enjoy, but it also creates abandoned packages, ignored bugs, and frustrated release schedules. In the past I've described a need for a stick in addition to a carrot for Debian developers, and the sentiment here echoes that idea. I've spoken with Manoj about his conception of personal responsibility in Debian, and I think it may truly be the bedrock on which Debian needs to rest. I still don't have a good mechanism for this yet though.

"Another sign of a weak team is poor development hygiene. There are dozens of development practices that seem trivial to the inexperienced outsider or to the manager focusing on "big wins." Examples of development hygiene include source code versioning, maintenance of an accurate bug or issue database, significant use of automated testing, continuous integration, and specifications that are kept current (whether incredibly detailed or high-level overviews)."

This is a something I myself have had a problem with over the past year. Branden was extremely good about keeping the XSF svn repo and the BTS up to date and well managed. I've done just about the opposite over the past year, and it's bitten me a few times. This however, was a conscious decision on my part, knowing that I was so far behind upstream that it was going to be hard to effectively manage the BTS without a recent codebase deployed to our users. So I focused on packaging instead, and luckily that road is nearly finished. Also fortunately, everyone else in the XSF managed the BTS for me, most notably (in alphabetical order by last name) Julien Cristau, Michel D nzer, Eugene Konev, and David Martinez Moreno, and they've managed to keep it relatively tidy. I'm going to spend some serious effort over the coming months to clean out the BTS so it's more manageable both for users and developers again. Luckly our SVN repo is in good shape still, so for the most part we're doing pretty well here. Debian as a whole also seems to be doing better at this, with lots of public svn repos springing up on alioth.

"It's mandatory to fail early. You need to know you're in trouble right away. That's essential when taking over an existing project or starting something new. You have to find out how you're doing within weeks. Not quarters, not months. The longer you wait, the more inertia the failure will have."

We're getting better at this, and I've sort of made it my mantra for this release cycle. Get things in to experimental as fast as possible, and then when I've fixed the majority of the bugs that show up there, put it in unstable as fast as possible. It worked out well for all the releases I've done so far and I'm going to keep doing it. Michel is really pushing me to keep CVS (or git as of Real Soon Now) snapshots from upstream in experimental, and I really like this idea and plan to follow through with it for this reason. This also echoes some of aj's ideas about speeding up development pace. Hopefully he'll implement them whether or not he becomes DPL, because I think they're going to be important for Debian as a whole.

"Dates are sacred."

We learned this during the sarge release cycle.

"The net result is that I've tried to find the happy medium where I generate weekly management reports on projects. A management report is something that is used to actually make a decision. Everything else is garbage. I've learned that when I haven't had management reports for a project, failure has resulted."

This is an interesting idea. It sort of echoes how I try and provide status updates on my blog, as well as the "Bits from" emails, but perhaps something more like this would be useful. I may try and play with this idea in the near future.

There's a lot more in there, but this entry already got way too long. Hopefully there's some food for thought in there for everyone who's interested in how Debian is run. The Debian development model has carried us very far, but I can't shake the feeling that we need to make some critical changes for it to continue. This will require a certain degree of boldness, but in order to fix the problems with the project I think we just need to clench our teeth and go for it. With that, I'll leave you with one last line from the above: "And if you decide to make changes, have the courage to go 100% with your gut. I've failed more than once when I watered down my convictions in order to appease dissenters. The only thing worse than evangelizing change and failing is looking back and realized you might have succeeded if you'd held firm on your convictions."

So remember Jerry Taylor, the man from Tuttle, OK that threatened to call the FBI on a Linux vendor because an unrelated hosting company had misconfigured Apache?

Well, this story is just getting funnier and funnier.

First off is this story from the Tuttle Times. It basically repeats Taylor's view that the CentOS people were expected to help him with his problem, and that he was somehow entitled to their help. But there are some funny tidbits in the story:

"Phone calls from across the country started coming in to the newspaper and city offices, and e-mails from Switzerland, Australia, Wales and England were received. Many of the web sites discussing the exchange are in foreign languages." I hate to break it to you, but Australia, Wales, and England all speak English.

(Ok, so they did switch from talking about email to web, but it still sounds funny.)

"In their search to find out more, web surfers discovered that the Tuttle Times online forums were hacked, and theorized that it was in retribution for the e-mails. Those forums, however, were corrupted several months ago, and the newspaper s now former web hosts did not repair it after numerous requests. New forums should be available at the Times site in the coming weeks." I'm so glad to know that your forums were merely corrupted for months and not hacked. Sounds like the IT problems in this town extend well past the city building.

Taylor said: "[CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he s got on his hands." Grumble.

Quoting Tuttle Mayor Paxton (trying to say what was more important than this): "We have issues with sewer. People here want better park facilities. They want a library." I think this has just validated every stereotype people have about Oklahoma.

Tuttle is more than 7 times larger than my hometown in Kansas, and yet my hometown has had a library for years.

Jerry Taylor also reported having 500 e-mails and numerous phone messages when he arrived to work Monday.

There's a new blurb on the Wikipedia page about Tuttle about all this. And in their talk page about the now-deleted article on Jerry Taylor, one person wrote: "Mr. Taylor's actions have coined a new term of art "Tuttled", in reference to the invocation of criminal consequences by one who is ignorant of the true situation. Since this is now a part of the English vernacular the story behind the term should be explained to give it an historical context. It is no longer about the action of a single person and an attempt to publicly vilify him, it is about a world-wide common experience of dealing with a Kafka-esque minor government official who, through ignorance, creates problems far beyond their normal sphere of influence. The page should be returned to the public."

The Register has two new stories about it. The first reports that Taylor has been interviewed by all sorts of media and says that he did the right thing. The second, Linux conquered, Tuttle man takes on London is a story about the grandson of the namesake of Tuttle, OK -- who happens to be the current US ambassador to the UK. This person is refusing to pay the regular London car fees. The mayor of London said: "It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge like everybody else and not skive out of it like some chiseling little crook."

And finally, there's some incredibly funny photoshop work on this one over at fark.com (you have to scroll down a ways). Also, this comment:

"A small-town American politician wants a British newspaper to turn off the Internet.

Say that to yourself a few times. Please."

A couple of days ago, I mentioned the Register article about the Tuttle, OK city manager that threatened to call the FBI on a Linux developer because his webhost misconfigured their server.

Now The Register has a great followup. Apprently people all over are justifiably upset at the city manager.

There are also some great reader comments over at The Register.

Also, that city manager has removed his e-mail address from tuttle-ok.gov. But fortunately, we all remember that it's citymgr@cityoftuttle.org.

I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over "renegade" Linux maker. Quite hilarious.

Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city's webpage wasn't working right. He got the default "test page" for the Apache webserver on CentOS.

Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy -- he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.

Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"

The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):

If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.

Your choice.

Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.

He's probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn't giving his employees the "feeling that we're 'working together'" (see that link).

Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?

Earlier this week my Amstrad E3 2.6 patch was accepted into the linux-omap-2.6 tree. This is pretty cool; I'm a big believer in pushing changes to upstream where possible and thus it's great when they take them. I'd thought that once this base patch was in it would be a simple matter of cleaning up my patches for the LCD, USB, keymap and NAND support, ready for submission. I have all of these working fine on my 2.6.15 tree, so it should have been easy, right? Of course not. I've spent most of the week (well, the bits I wasn't working or doing late night router upgrades) trying to solve the ohci: Unlink after no-IRQ? Controller is probably using the wrong IRQ. problem. No, I know it's not the wrong IRQ. It works fine with 2.4 and 2.6.15. Gah. What's worse is Google only showed up people having the same issue; a number apparently x86 with ACPI being suggested as the culprit, but there were a few that were also with the OMAP5910 (the E3's processor). The most recent from Ladis but he's already turned up on #emailer to ask me how I'd got it working in 2.6.15. Anyway, I think I've finally solved it (the 5910 needs the local bus clock enabled for USB according to the datasheet and this wasn't being done), though I'm waiting to see if my solution works for anyone else before deciding it's a success. Assuming it does I can actually start to look at getting the other bits ready too; I think the LCD stuff has changed a bit and I dread to think what the MTD guys are going to say about my attempts at a driver.

I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over "renegade" Linux maker. Quite hilarious.

Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city's webpage wasn't working right. He got the default "test page" for the Apache webserver on CentOS.

Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy -- he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.

Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"

The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):

If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.

Your choice.

Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.

He's probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn't giving his employees the "feeling that we're 'working together'" (see that link).

Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?

Last night, glib 2.8 and pango 1.12 entered testing, as a first step on the GNOME 2.14 quest. The bad news is that the fixed evolution & friends were not ready to go in as well, so now many etch users will be wondering why their evolution doesn't start up, or doesn't show any mail. Until we manage to get a fixed evolution in testing, and it looks like it won't be trivial to get this done in the immediate future, Erich's recipe comes handy again:

My personal hero of the day is Gustavo Franco, for this email to debian-devel. He writes how to get your Gnome/Pango/Glib applications that don't work since yesterday's upgrade like evolution (#358071) working again:

$ G_SLICE=always-malloc evolution

And you should be able to read your email again.

Just FYI, and in case you missed it. :)

I’m taking Rojo for a spin, mostly because of recent upgrades that add some interesting features, including a “sort by relevance” function that lives alongside the usual “sort by date”—a “personalized digg”, as some have called it. One thing I like about Rojo is that it’s a River of News style aggregator, which means all feeds get combined into a single stream that’s very easy to scan for interesting items, rather than serving as just another way of filling my inbox with stuff I won’t have time to read anyway (the “aggregator as an extention to the email client” model). With River of News style aggregators, it’s no big deal if you miss something, kinda like it’s no big deal if you don’t read every last article in the newspaper every morning. Trouble is, how do you make sure you read the most important stuff first, so in the event you don’t get through everything, the likelihood you miss something is small? “Sort by relevance” would appear to solve this problem nicely. Rojo appears to calculate “relevance” by analyzing a few things: What I read (i.e., what I click on), what I tag (either by giving it “mojo” or by tagging it in the Web 2.0 sense of the word), and what my contacts read and tag. That seems like a reasonable enough algorithm. Problem is: 1. most of the things I read Rojo doesn’t know anything about (they’re in my browser clickstream); 2. I already have about a year’s worth of tags accumulated at del.icio.us, and I have no intention of moving those tags anywhere else (ironically enough, because del.icio.us gives me the ability to do just that); and 3. I already have more social networks and contact silos than I know what to do with, and I certainly don’t want another one. So, Rojo’s new features are less interesting than they appear at first glance. Guess I’m going to have to continue doing without, either until I decide to dump all my stuff in one place (ahem) or until small pieces loosely joined evolves a bit further. Update: On second look, it looks like relevance is actually calculated by the total number of reads and tags rather than by the number of reads or tags by me or my contacts. Not sure how that can be called personalized, but I guess those are the words of others, not Rojo’s.

Today is an special day.

One year ago we (yes, you and me), started a beautiful path together. A long path with wisdoms and mistakes. I learned about Debian and you about correcting me, but both learned to wait each other.

Dear Pyro, for not to many years together, with this wonderful relation ApplicationManager-Applicant, I say you: Happy Anniversary!



PD: don't get angry, I'm just joking (c:

DIY Canadian farm-style, or “what I did this weekend.” First, you pack about ten people into the back of a pickup truck… …and walk through the fields… …to empty the buckets on the trees, spiles having been drilled previously. Back home, you cook in the ancient, homemade sap cooker (which was once an oil drum, long ago). Sometimes, you need to feed the fire. Make sure to keep adding sap when the level gets low, or when the pans threaten to boil over (overzealous fire feeders!). If you’re bored, you could always go exploring and fall through the ice on the half-frozen flooded field. Late afternoon is the best time to take advantage of the fact that boiling liquid kills bacteria, by sampling straight from the pans–with the same spoon. By now the sap’s thick enough to actually taste good. The day’s cooking is done when the sap’s about 60% sugar. (Damn, I don’t have a picture of the sugar-measuring gizmo.) The sap pans are unloaded… …into pots, to be brought inside and finished on the stove to 66% sugar. A more controlled environment, to prevent accidental burning/overcooking/sludgification. Which would be a Bad Thing. A fun weekend. It’s something I do just about every year (the farm belongs to my grandparents), but this year I managed to drag a couple friends along to slave have fun.

My name is Jurij and I’m a Pine user. I’ve been using it forever and got remarkably used to it. If previously there was no good reason to switch to anything else, lately two things where bugging me a bit: lack of PGP/MIME support, and lack of Mail-Followup-To handling. If the latter problem is not such a big deal, the former was seriously annoying me sometimes, because even if you save the PGP/MIME message in a file, checking the signature is sowewhat non-trivial. So, on Saturday I’ve decided that time has come to switch to mutt. Again. And failed. Again. It’s just so different that using it is painful, in spite of all the flexibility and configurability. So instead I’ve spent the better part of Sunday writing a PGP/MIME signature checker, which can be used from within Pine. The resulting script pgpmime.py just reads a PGP/MIME message from standard input and checks the signature (more features are planned in the future). From Pine one can just pipe the raw PGP/MIME signed message to it using the (pipe) command.

I'm looking for a calendaring application with the following features:

1. Must have a (limited) command line interface. I want to be able to view my appointments of the day in plain text format, so that I can put that in my .profile; it'd be nice if it allows me to view my appointments on any random date, but that isn't required. Moreover, when someone sends me a meeting invitation, I want to be able to pipe the ical file into something which puts it in my calendar, with optionally also sending an email to the person who sent me the invitation that I'm accepting it (optionally, as in, it must have the feature, and it should allow me to decide whether to send the mail on a case-by-case basis, not as in it would be nice if the feature existed.)
   More command line features are nice, but not necessary.
2. Must have the ability to export ical files to a text file on my local hard disk; must not require me to set up a server with some weird login scheme and ditto protocol so that I can please put my webcalendar somewhere—and no, I won't sign up for one of those "free" webcalendar services. I'll put it online myself, thank you very much.
   This requirement rules out evolution, unless I missed some plugin somewhere (I don't think so).
3. Must have basic calendaring functionality. I.e., I should somehow be able to get an overview of my appointments of any given day, to get a weekly, monthly or yearly overview, to print out things, etc.
4. Must not require ages to start up. This, definately, rules out evolution. When I have a phone call, I want to be able to see within a few seconds whether I'm available at any given time.
5. The ability to synchronize my calendar with my cellphone somehow would be nice, but isn't absolutely required. I'm willing to jump through a number of hoops here. Note that gnokii supports my cellphone.

Suggestions are welcome.

The Latin American Infest finally ended yesterday. In Caracas, it was a week of hard work with people of the Science and Technology Department and the IT Office (government offices) but the event in Caracas ended succesfully. It was a world-class event featuring renowned keynote speakers who spoke about Web Development using Frameworks (featuring TurboGears, Rails and Catalyst) and software development paradigms migration from privative platforms to GNU/Linux (Gambas and Mono). Other talks included basic security in Debian GNU/Linux and a speak about electronic signature security by an officer of the Venezuelan Government CA. We had a speak about Clusters, hosted by a female member of the Venezuelan Free Software Community and Debian User, and a speak about Free Software in the Venezuelan Education, by a 16-year-old Venezuelan GNU/Linux user and a willing Debian Maintainer. Of course, the Installation Festival took place in the Knowledge Square, in the Auditorium Building Lobby, with the extraordinary support of the Venezuelan Free Software Users Community. Debian GNU/Linux Sarge netinst and CD1 was distributed (several hundreds) as well as Knoppix and Ubuntu Hoary. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (maintainer) and me wore Debian T-Shirts on Saturday, and he made a great speech about the Project, named “Debian is inexorable“. We had demonstrations of Linux on a Mac Mini, using XGl and presenting several applications, as well as Debian running Enlightenment on an old Presario 1246 laptop. I would like to thank all the speakers and the attendees for making of FLISOL Caracas a great event. More information about FLISOL Caracas is in my blog and the homepage (spanish). Pics are here.