We now have a second GNU/kFreeBSD build daemon building the kfreebsd-amd64 architecture. It has been kindly offered and is hosted in UK by The Positive Internet Company Ltd. It adds redundancy to our buildd network, which is important given that the other kfreebsd-amd64 build daemon machine is on a simple ADSL line, and so less reliable than a machine in a datacenter. For those who want to know more, here is the current status of the GNU/kFreeBSD buildd network:

• callisto.debian.net (kfreebsd-amd64)
  2 x Opteron 1.4GHZ, 1GB RAM
  Hosted by The Positive Internet Company
• shockley.aurel32.net (kfreebsd-amd64)
  Sempron 2600+, 1GB RAM
  Hosted by Aurelien Jarno (ADSL)
• hagrid.debian.net (kfreebsd-i386)
  PIII 800 MHz, 512MB RAM
  Hosted by ETH Z rich
• maxwell.aurel32.net (kfreebsd-i386)
  Sempron 2600+, 1GB RAM
  Hosted by Aurelien Jarno (ADSL)

My goal is to eventually get rid of all build daemons that I am hosting at home on my ADSL line, though that is less critical now.

Further to problems with
gettext and split po files, glib_gettextize turns out not to be usable with more than one po/ directory. I've just converted gpe-expenses to multiple POT files (for the same reasons as gpe-cash) and I'm due to make the upstream release and upload later. glib_gettextize needs to be replaced by gettextize but this is not problem free. gettextize is noisy and keeps tampering with my build, putting in things like config.rpath and forcing -I m4 additions when that is already included elsewhere. So ./autogen.sh now supports gettextize but stops it running twice. I'm storing the gettextize support files in CVS just to allow the post-gettextize environment to be retained without needing to deal with the aftermath of gettextize --force.
Also, one tweak is needed to the Makevars file in the new directory - change the subdir po location to po-lib or whatever you use.
The changes will show up in gpe-expenses CVS later.

In a comment on my blog post titled Childhood, Don Marti refers to an earlier blog post he wrote which refers to a New York Magazine article about the effects of praising children. The article does in some depth to describe scientific research into the issue of praising children for being “smart” vs praising them for working hard - with the conclusion being that it’s significantly better to praise them for working hard! One quote from that article that I find very significant is “Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents pride in their children s achievements: It s so strong that ‘when they praise their kids, it s not that far from praising themselves’“. This matches my theory about people who subject their children to TV documentaries about gifted children. The conclusions regarding children seem quite clear and the article provides direct advice to parents and teachers as to how to avoid the problems. One issue I am wondering about after reading the NYM article is whether being exposed to smarter children hurts a child’s learning ability. The fact that there is no correlation between high self-esteem and learning ability has been proven, but the reports do not indicate whether there might be a correlation between a decreases in self-esteem and a decrease in learning ability. I recall pointing out to one the few good teachers at high-school that having some of the most capable and some of the least capable students in the same class was inefficient and led to excessive boredom for the more capable students and excessive difficulty in keeping up for the less capable students. I was told that “streaming” was considered bad because it was bad for the less capable students to know their status. I was also refused access to my results of the Westpac Maths contest for the same reason - which seems particularly strange, I was in the training program for the International Mathematical Olympiad so I doubt that releasing my score from one maths contest would change anyone’s opinion of my ability. I am also wondering about how this effects adults (apart from their education history). Should we try to praise work colleagues for their effort instead of being smart? Are adults discouraged from trying hard at their work when they see others succeeding with little apparent effort? One data point for this seems to be kernel coders in the Linux community. Everyone sees super-star Linux kernel coders on stage (on a pedestal) at conferences and it’s easy to believe that such people are significantly more intelligent than others (the well-known programmers are indeed very smart - but they also work a lot harder than most people believe) and that being so smart is a necessary pre-condition for submitting Linux kernel patches. I have met many people who appear to have the ability to be good at any type of coding but seem intimidated by kernel coding it for these reasons. Statements such as “I’ve been doing Linux coding for 10 years but I’m not a kernel coder” are often heard at Linux conferences. Also people who’s skills are respected are often regarded as kernel coders without any real reason. The Linux kernel is a large C program with limited options for a debugger, if you are good at C coding you should do OK! I know that I am trivialising the issues related to kernel coding, there are some tasks such as reverse-engineering device-drivers and debugging some of the tricky race conditions that require special skills - but no-one is born with such skills! I would not suggest that someone try a significant kernel coding task on their first attempt - as with all areas of programming it’s best to start with the easy things first. The web site kernelnewbies.org is a good source of information for people who are getting into kernel coding. I wonder whether a change in the attitudes towards such things could encourage more people to write free software, and more of the current programmers to attempt new challenges (such as kernel coding).

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I am subscribed to the Google news alerts for the keyword Debian, and usually this means that I am notified of every security upgrade at least three or four times (needlessly, since I'm subscribed to Debian's security announcements anyway...) But today, two headlines sparked my interest: One, Carla Schroeder wrote an introductory article into building Custom Linux kernels with Debian and Fedora (though why somebody would want to do this is beyond me...), showing how easy the process is (I may be biased, but I find Debian's way is easier. On the other hand, it within the -- rpm -- package framework instead of a custom command -- make-kpkg in Debian -- feels more consistent and logical. Without reading documentation you won't get anywhere on both systems, so it probably doesn't matter...) One down for Carla, however, for not doing enough basic research: “The new naming convention [linux-* instead of kernel-* packages] opens the door to using other kernels with Debian, which I don't know what those would be, but Debian is ready for them.” Or one down for us, the Debian project, for not making enough noise around the various non-Linux ports. Though that will come when GNU/kFreeBSD is released with lenny... Two, Debian derivative SimplyMEPIS, which switched to Ubuntu as a base operating system a year ago, is now returning to Debian GNU/Linux as its base system. The main reason seems to be long term stability and upgradeability - which is a key strength of Debian for many other users as well (me, for one.) The reason for switching to Ubuntu in the first place has been newer application versions and predictable upgrade schedules (and that Warren Woodford misunderstood how Ubuntu LTS was to be maintained, apparently) -- both issues are being addressed within Debian as we get better release management and faster integration of new application versions (the big pieces of software I use regularly are the Linux kernel, X.org, KDE and OpenOffice.org, all of which I find are integrated in unstable fast enough, and much faster than 2 years ago. That the testing migration sometimes takes time is not a problem since mixing etch, lenny and sid is usually possible without problems even in a production (desktop) environment.) So, if we take a step back from the day-to-day squabbling between developers working at cross purposes and look at the output we produce, I believe we're still doing some things right.

A response to a post I wrote about things to do for the environment suggested that there would be a health risk to lowering the temperature of a home hot-water system to save power. I have just been reading about so-called tankless hot-water systems. The concept is that instead of keeping a tank of water hot (which means that you lose some energy due to the insulation not being perfect) you heat water when you need it. The down-side to this is that you need a moderate amount of power to heat water as rapidly as it’s used. The GoTankless.com products use between 11KW and 27KW of electricity. The early implementations of this idea used gas - the occasional carbon-monoxide problem with gas appliances makes me inclined to avoid them so it’s good that there’s an electric option. One of the benefits of the tankless system is that it runs the water at a lower temperature than a regular hot water system. For a tank storing hot water you have to run it at a temperature that kills bacteria (or at least dramatically inhibits their growth) - which means greater than 50C, but for on-demand water it’s safer to have it run at something close to the desired temperature (probably not much above 40C) and not use the cold tap. Lower temperature water avoids the risk of scalding for children and the elderly and if the “hot tap” is running at a good temperature for a shower then you can just turn it on, wait 30 seconds for the pipes to warm up, and jump in! Incidentally it really sucks the way most showers have the taps under or behind the flow of water, so if the water becomes too hot before you get in then you end up getting minor burns in the process of turning on the cold tap. I still think that solar hot water is the way to go. It apparently combines something like a tankless system on water that comes out of a tank heated by the sun. So during winter it operates like a tankless system but in summer you get more hot water than you can use. This web site about Solar hot water systems indicates that they have a similar technology to “boost” solar hot water, so if the Sun doesn’t make the water hot enough then it can use electric or gas systems to further heat the water. It’s also interesting to note that they offer Heat Pump hot-water systems, it’s a pity that they apparently don’t support combining this with solar heating. Another interesting feature is what they call the Water Guardian that pumps cold water from the pipes back into the water tank and avoids wasting the water that you might otherwise run down the sink while waiting for it to get hot.

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Hmh... It's hard to get to a decision on this aspect, although I'm mostly sure I'll vote for a "yes". I have read most posts on this subject on debian-vote and on the planet, and I'm still not too much at ease... Anyway, one of the most relevants so far is Joerg's - And not because he is so involved with the NM process, but because he drives me to what I think is a very important point few people have addressed:
For long, we have been saying that you don't have to be a programmer to help Debian - But so far, we have been unable to deliver except for this funny French guy. And although the current proposal still focuses on getting a step closer to DDness, and for many people this seems like geared at reducing the frustration when going over the NM process, my impression is that this will help us implement something similar for other areas.
Some people have complained about implementing decisions per policy instead of doing so gradually. Thing is, I feel, this kind of proposals have been reiterated over the years - and they have always dropped into the silence because some actions need to be taken by the people who are less willing to. Maybe the only way to break the inertia is to take a step by a GR vote. Maybe parts of it will have to be undone or re-done differently if we end up with the wrong results - but we will have broken the status-quo. Maybe, who knows, this will serve as an experiment - and after another long series of long flame threads we will end up in 2010 in the same position are we currently at - but it won't be because of inaction.

Over the past few months I have been asymptotically approaching being able to make a good cappuccino or latte. (I'm way better than the glassy-eyed morons who are usually behind an espresso machine but nowhere near "good barista".) However, over the last few weeks I have noticed that sometimes I was not able to steam the milk properly. I get very little foam then when I bang out the biggest of the bubbles, it’s virtually flat. I had thought that I was just having a bad run, but then a colleague mentioned it too. It turns out that only some of the bottles have this characteristic, and we haven't determined, from analysis of the codes on the bottle tops, what determines this. Each was full-fat milk from the same dairy. If anyone who reads this knows the answer, please mention it in a comment.

I finally managed to learn CTest enough to be able to add some test cases to add some automatic testing to Gammu. Well there is not much to test until we have some fake driver for phones which can be used to feed custom data, but at least some parsers can receive testing. First thing I try to focus on is vCard parsing. I know this is currently tricky and I'm trying to collect as many problematic vCards as possible. For now I have collected some from issues in bug tracker and my emails when people reported some problems. So if you have some vCard which Gammu parses wrongly, please send then to me. For now 3 of 5 vCard tests fail, but I hope to resolve those problems until release will happen :-).

Chris Samuel blogs about a plan to censor porn from the Internet in Australia. According to the ZDNet article the Fundamentalist Christian party Family First wants a national porn filter to protect children. However there is strong evidence to suggest that the incidence of rape decreases as the availability of pornography increases. Access to porn prevents rapes! The question is whether protecting people (mostly women and children) from rape is more important than protecting the strange and unusual (by the standards of modern Australian society) religious beliefs of a minority of people who oppose porn. The current research on porn vs rape is based on comparing different regions of the US with different levels of Internet access. It would be more accurate if a scientific test could be performed in a controlled environment. The US has the largest number of prisoners of any country and the largest proportion of the population in prison of any first-world country and rape is common in prison. It would be easy to grant access to porn to one cell block of a prison and deny access to another and then record the incidence of reported rape (currently in the US porn is restricted in prisons and masturbation in prison is a crime). The results of such research could be used to devise government policy with the aim of protecting people from rape. Of course that would require compassion - something that’s extremely uncommon in politicians particularly the ones that claim to be Christian. Some people are requesting the creation of Christian Porn - so Porn and Christianity don’t have to be opposed. The same site has an interesting page Masturbation: God’s Great Gift to Us. Now if all those rapists could be encouraged to watch Christian Porn and take advantage of God’s Great Gift then the world would be a better place.

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Being in any reasonably large free software project one tends to be confronted with endless little annoyances, frustrations and letdowns. Often it happens that these little things keep growing in our perception the longer they last and the more they trouble us. In these times it is good to be reminded that the actual thing we invest so much time and energy in is not those little issues that often annoy us so much, but the overlying ideal of free software which is still a great thing, even in view of all the little frustrations that we have to deal with when working on it. Yesterday I had one of these little experiences that just remind you, just how good a thing free software is:

• At Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:38:49 I filed a whishlist bug against a software I recently started using.
• At Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:04:35 the bug had been passed on to the software's upstream and I got an email from the upstream author telling me that the feature I wanted was already in the current development version of the software, where I could download the tar.bz2 and how to contact him on jabber.
• At about half to ten I downloaded the code, rolled it into a package and tried it, but couldn't get the new feature to work, so I wrote another email.
• An half hour later I got an answer telling me what I'd done wrong. I fixed my mistake, tested the new feature and found that it did right what I wanted. However, there was one more option I thought would be useful so I contacted the author via jabber.
• In the following 2.5 hours he implemented the additional option that I had asked for, renamed a button I found a bit unintuitive and fixed two bugs I discovered in the process of testing the new feature, sending me new code versions to test after every change.
• I am now using the software with the new feature I asked for and with all the options I wanted from a homemade package but expect the proper Debian package to show up in the archive any day.
• The whole process took three days.

... and this is exactly why free software (and the people in it) is so great. Because if there is something you'd think would be useful, all you have to do is ask and maybe lend a little help in testing and you got it. And this is why it's worth to put up with all the little annoyances, frustrations and letdowns that working with humans brings with it. Even if they sometimes seem to be overwhelming. PS: I know that there are also enough examples where things didn't go as smooth as this one. But this just makes it more worth and important to highlight and appreciate these examples where everything just worked out perfectly and not just take them as granted. So, inbetween posting rants and fuming at all the things that tick you off, how about if you think of a nice FLOSS experience you had and share it with the rest of the world?

Thanks to Centauri Dreams for the pointer to the ESA DARWIN proposal now here (high-resolution version also here). DARWIN is a space mission to detect the presence of life on other planets by spectroscopy: looking for biomarkers such as the presence of Ozone, water and methane together on terrestrial-sized planets. These are groups of gases that collectively would imply the presence of life. Unfortunately it appears that DARWIN is slipping: its not currently hardware-funded, and has a planned launch-date of 2020, having slipped from 2012. This is when NASAs alternative Terrestrial Planet Finder and Space Interferometry Mission have been defunded indefinitely. At the same time, the French COROT mission has just announced its first month-long series light-curves. COROT hunts for Earth-sized planets: it's a small space telescope that stares at the same patch of sky for long periods, looking for changes in the amount of light from stars that indicate a planet passing in front of a star. It has been much more successful than expected, having already announced its first exoplanet detection in April. NASA is also launching a similar mission, Kepler, in 2008. So we face the prospect that any day now we may know of Earth-sized planets in a Habitable zone, and yet be over a decade from determining if they could contain life. So do we have any other tricks up our sleeves? Other possibilities include the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble. With a launch planned in 2013, it would be able to determine some atmospheric features found in COROT detections, but would be too expensive to do the planet-hunting Darwin could do. Perhaps this could be imroved with occulters such as UMBRAS (thanks to enzo). Other novel detection missions include the Voyager Interstellar Mission (via), reusing exisiting 'end-of-life' spacecraft as telescopes. And finally, could ground-based telescopes do it? tests have just started on a new 10M telescope in the Canaries that could help; in terms of larger scopes, colleagues of mine in NUI Galway have been collaborating on the design of Euro50,a proposed 50 M telescope. Together with new techniques such as spectral deconvolution (via via) may help. Tags astronomy, exoplanets

Because of the social networking and needing-to-be-registered of it all, I had to sign up for another website to keep track of one of my friends' goingses-onses. The sign-up process reminded me of a circus freakshow of the "Step on inside -- if you dare! And buy a bottle of our snake oil!" (insert knowing, taunting laugh) variety. Tell me how PUMPED you feel after reading the comments they added after I filled in the various fields:

Email address: Nicely put!
First name: So that's what they call you!
Last name: Classy last name, I have to admit!
Username: Creative!
I agree to the Terms of Service: ...I dare you to un-click that!
End of registration: To make sure you're as awesome as you claim, please visit your email's inbox for our verification email (I'm positive that more exclamation points were ejaculated all over my screen at this point but I closed the window too quickly to be sure.)
Activation confirmation emancipation proclamation: Wonderful, the hardest part is now over! Time to Enjoy! (With a capital E!!!!)
It might as well have been written by Dr. Bronner himself:

Email address: Godliness!
First name: If I'm not for me, who am I? Nobody!
Last name: Enlarge the positive!
Username: WE'RE ONE! ALL-ONE! EXCEPTIONS ETERNALLY? NONE! ABSOLUTE NONE!
I agree to the Terms of Service: Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute! or Wet Skin Well!
End of registration: Whatever unites mankind is better than whatever divides us!
Activation confirmation ALL-ONE! clean sensation: WELCOME TO SPACESHIP EARTH!!

I really enjoyed OSCon. This was the first conference I've been to in years where I've felt a bit sad that it's over. I met a lot of interesting people, enjoyed most of the talks I attended (and especially this morning's keynotes), and also enjoyed Portland. I recommend OSCon. Last year, I went to Usenix ATC. Compared to Usenix, OSCon had more talks that were relevant to things I'm interested in, more people that I met with similar interests, more people that I knew online and met in person, and a more broad program. The one criticism I would level at OSCon is that it has a disproportionately high number of web-related talks.

On to other items...

Portland

Probably the friendliest "big city" I've ever seen. Everyone from cab drivers to bus drivers seems to go out of their way to be helpful and friendly. Somewhat different from, say, Chicago or Los Angeles.

The climate is very nice and the transit system is excellent as well. While it doesn't move as fast as below-ground systems, since it has to work within traffic, one nice thing for visitors is that you actually get to see the city and see potential places to stop. Last year, we went from Boston to Cambridge on the T, but you don't see much except a whole lot of concrete along the way.

The Japanese Gardens are wonderful and deserve a visit.

Compared to Indianapolis, where we lived for awhile, Portland has some nicer parks, and a better transit system. I think that Indianapolis had a nicer walking path. Portland had a lot of friendly people, including many that worked for TriMet. MAX was very nice, with frequent departures. The TriMet system had scattered electronic signs about the MAX lines, streetcar stops, and even some bus stops I think. These listed how many minutes until the next departure in each direction, and were very helpful. Stations were announced audibly and on signs on-board. There was helpful information at stops and platforms.

Indianapolis has a really quite awful transit system, which consists of, let's see, regular buses and small buses. These run infrequently, are known for not being on-time, and a former co-worker had trouble with them just not showing up at times. They also all seemed to run between downtown and the outskirts. So if you wanted to go from one area towards the outskirts to another area there, you'd have to go towards downtown and back out.

Because of all this, I never rode IndyGo, and wouldn't ever encourage visitors to. TriMet was very different, and if I lived in Portland, I'd want to live close to MAX.

Hotel

The DoubleTree Lloyd Center is a nice, friendly hotel. Everyone here has noticed that the elevators inexplicably stop on the 2nd floor every time they go down, but other than that, we have had no real problems (other than some water dripping onto the desk when we first were here, but maintenance fixed that). It's annoying that they charge for in-room Internet access, but that is unfortunately typical for hotels of this class.

The room is also a bit small, but has worked out OK. The hotel is very close to a MAX stop, and fairly close to the Lloyd Center mall, which is convenient. The staff is very friendly and helpful as well, especially the concierge staff, which are great and helping visitors find their way around the city and the transit system.

They give you cookies on check-in, but Terah was disappointed that they didn't offer any without nuts.

Restaurants

I had opportunities to eat with various people from OSCon, some Portland area people, and of course, Terah and Jacob.

Portland has some good restaurants, and a few more iffy ones...

The Multnomah Grill in our hotel was one of the iffy ones. I had the ribs, which were not at all good. The prices were about in line with other Portland restaurants, which is too bad because the food wasn't. Because of all that, I just couldn't bring myself to try the other restaurant in the hotel, Eduardo's Mexican/American Cantina.

I had heard about Jake's Famous Crawfish from a passenger on the train. It was also listed on the OSCon wiki restaurants page. It's a historic century-old restaurant, with excellent seafood. I had parmesean-crusted Alaskan Halibut, which was very good.

I also went to the Newport Seafood Grill, which is within walking distance of the hotel, just on the other side of the Lloyd Center mall. It was also good; I had a tuna dish served rare, with a sauce that complimented it well.

Blossoming Lotus Cafe is a vegan cafe in the Pearl District. I hadn't ever been to one of those before. It was OK, but not all that great.

Across the street was Sweet Masterpiece, a chocolate and coffee house. Excellent chocolate made in-house, all sorts of desserts, and good coffee.

Rock Bottom in downtown has some surprisingly good food options. I was there with a group of local and OSCon Haskellers, and it was a little bit hard to follow conversation all the time due to the background noise, but that's to be expected in this sort of place. I'm not into beer, but those that were enjoyed their selection, I think.

I also went to a couple of chains: Quizno's and Ben and Jerry's. Both were about what you'd expect from those chains. Good ice cream of course at Ben & Jerry's.

OSCon provided breakfast and lunch free to paid attendees. Breakfast consisted of a selection of various fruits, slightly stale pastries, and bagels. On the tutorial days, lunch was pre-made boxed lunch. For what it was, it was OK. On Wednesday and Thursday, lunch was served hot in buffet lines. They had chicken both days, which looked identical. I had tried it Wednesday so knew not to bother Thursday. Wednesday they also had salmon with cranberries, which was good. Their salads, breads, etc. were OK.

Oregon Convention Center

This is where OSCon was held. A very nice, but incredibly huge, building. They say it covers the equivalent of 13 square city blocks, and if you look on a map, you can see that it is indeed quite large. There was a lot of walking to get to everything, even though OSCon took up only one part of this huge place. Restrooms in particular were not in very convenient locations to just about anything. But it was a nice place and I wouldn't mind being there again next year.

It is not fresh news, but I haven't had time to comment about it before. Very soon after launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which was only made available worldwide in its original English version, you can read a free and non-academic version in Spanish. Spanish Hallows project, built up by a bunch of Harry Potter fans have made completely ridiculous efforts of J.K. Rowling and hers publishers (Bloomsbury Publishing) to try to delay versions in other languages. Perhaps this was not made with other intention than to avoid early publishing of copies sent to translators, which, as you know yet, happened anyway. Once again we see how is not only impossible, but stupid, to try to keep information in this new environment. I am pretty sure that most of books, movies and music publishers will disappear soon. But not because of piracy: they are not being able to adapt their corporate business model to the new environment. And I am sure that there are little start-ups out there working in this new model, and some of them will succeed. But nothing new here... it is how business world has worked for years now.

So, let’s join the postings about the currently running Debian maintainers GR. The short text of this post is I am against the proposal as it is right now and think it does more harm than good and so I did vote for Further Discussion. See below for a bit more about my reasoning, or just skip if you are already bored. :) The current proposal does look like a “yay, we have an idea thats not really thought through. And we do not want to get it into the currently existing procedures, that would involve more work and discussions. And anyway, everyone is ranting about the current procedures anyway, so lets take that bad mood against it to get this done”. (And yes, this is a bit exaggerated, so don’t take it personal, please). As you may have noticed I wrote that I am against the current proposal when it first was on vote. I was mostly on vacation back then and didnt want to read the whole thread, so I stayed mostly quiet. I am not against the DM concept itself. I am against it being seperate to the existing NM procedure. For me a proper solution has to be integrated with the existing procedures, not seperated. The main reasons why some support this proposal seem to be

1. Slow NM process.
2. Someone doesn’t want to go through NM
3. Someone doesn’t want to be in the Debian community

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Slow NM process I am part of this, and not a small one. And yes, I feel (very) bad about it, but already think about ways this can be changed, after I got the current backlog done. Anyway, for this DM thing my backlog isn’t the main reason that people feel NM is slow. It seems to be the general “I have to wait for an application manager and then answer to a lot of questions and between that wait and wait and wait”.

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True. People have to wait at some points, and those waiting periods can be frustrating. We should do our best to eliminate those waiting places. The other point is that of the lot of questions. Yes, we have a really big set of questions in the templates, that cover a whole lot of the possibly areas a future Developer can work in. And most of those questions got added after a large set of existing Developers showed that they completly do not know something. That way the templates are constantly growing and still intend to give the future Developers the possibility to learn about things in Debian they might never have heard about. And there is the thought that, if you read about a topic and had to answer to it in the past, you will at least remember that there is something if you encounter it in the future. But - there is also the fact that an AM is NOT forced to use the templates for their process. AMs are, and have always been, free to do the process on their own. There are some questions every AM has to ask, but thats a minority. If you look at the templates you will spot the needed ones easily. Other than those every AM can freely do whatever he wants to do with his applicant (as long as the applicant agrees to do that stuff and its legal :) ). The AM only has to keep the following in mind: Both, FrontDesk and DAM, usually do not work together with the applicant. They might have heard the applicants name at some point, in some bugreport or some packages Maintainer: field. But they usually did not interact with them. Which means that the AM has to make sure that FD and DAM are able to build up their opinion of the applicant just by reading the mailbox of the AM->NM communication. Which usually means: read between 20 - 70 mails of a communication someone else had before you decide if someone should or should not enter Debian. (Leaving alone checking packages.qa, lintian, bug lists and a bit of google).

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Someone doesn’t want to go through NM Erm. Well. Then use sponsors for your packages. Or is it because you think NM is too hard? NM isn’t that hard, everyone that can read and write english texts (even if the english is bad) and use google is able to pass NM. (For the bad english - if you fear joining NM because of that: Well. If I go and reread my own report from back when I joined - ugh. I hate my english. And I know native people still hate my english texts, its named en_GANNEFF for a reason. :) It is not necessary for your English to be perfect; you only have to be able to make yourself understood. If an AM doesn’t understand what you wrote they can simply ask for clarification). DM also doesn’t help for people that don’t want to pass NM. They have to pass the advocate, the ID check and the same minimum set of of questions NMs have (as written a bit above). So you already have a large part of NM for the future DMs.

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Someone doesn’t want to be in the Debian community Then they shouldn’t be able to upload on their own. They can use sponsors. After all the only thing you must do as a DD is to read debian-devel-announce. And thats something a DM also must do, or you can’t seriously consider to package anything. And then DD only adds rights for you, like taking part in votes and so expressing your opinion and getting things changed in Debian that you may not like.

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How to integrate a concept of DM then? First - by starting in the right area - getting it into the NM system by talking to all those involved. There is FrontDesk, DAM and also the NM-Committee, the latter should be the right point for a proposal and discussion. What I can imagine that would work and do something good is a system integrated into NM that gives future Developers upload privileges after they passed a few steps with their AM. That way they can upload early in the process, which can then be part of the T&S set, and the following steps in their NM process “just” slowly add more rights to the NM until its the set of rights every DD has. Seen from the current layout of the process it would be somewhere after the ID check and the first set of P&P, ie. at the time the AM sends the second P&P part. After that point the AM could recommend to those maintaining the DM list that the applicant should be added to it, together with a list of packages where the applicant is allowed to upload them. The maintainers of that DM list could be FrontDesk + DAM + maybe someone else, but thats something to discuss. And list of packages - while one could take the current limits the GR wants to set or simply a plain list, that can be amended during the time someone is a DM. Now, one can add a turnoff for people that do not want to pass through the rest of the process at this place. Im not sure its such a good idea, but thats something one can discuss. But if so it should be attached to some rules like - must read our debian-devel-announce list, is included in regular pings of activity similar to the wat ping.

Since about two days I’m proud owner of a Lenovo X61s notebook. It will become my main and new developer box for grml, featuring all that nifty stuff like 64bit support, hardware virtualization and so on… I managed to use all the important features with a very current version of grml. I’m using kernel 2.6.22-grml on a setup with LVM, cryptsetup-luks,… everything works fine so far (including Suspend-To-RAM - even in grml live-mode when booting from USB pen - thanks for the excellent hibernate package, madduck!). As you won’t find useful and approriate information about Linux on the X61s yet (either pretty incomplete or wrong) I decided to put all relevant information on a webpage in the grml-wiki:

• Lenovo Thinkpad X61s @ grml-wiki

Short version: the X61s rocks. I’ll provide information to thinkwiki as soon I checked out all the details…

In a discussion with Bdale, he suggested that DM is seen as forking NM. And some people do not like forks. They are not opposed to DM in principle but do not want it outside of the current NM team. Obviously DM tries to respond to cases that NM is not prepared to handle. Furthermore, the DM discussion has been active for quite some time and the various members of the NM team (Frontdesk, DAM) have not participated much in the public discussion. Only when it comes to a vote do we hear some more (negative) opinions. I don’t see that as a sign of willingness to integrate DM or something similar in the current NM structure. So people who are requesting DM to be integrated in NM, please take it up with the frontdesk/DAM… and don’t oppose the principle just because of organizational matters. Internal organization always change and adapt themselves to the situation. Joey is right when he compares this to the introduction of the sponsorship process. I was one of the main actor in that process. I introduced the concept without the consent of the NM team (James Troup, Martin “Joey” Schulze) at that time. It was a fork, a new way to proceed and it became mainstream with the creation of the current NM process. It’s the natural way of doing things in a free software project. That said, I’m not opposed to improving our NM process. It really needs to be reworked in a “Membership Process” and be open to various kinds of contributors. That’s why I created a dedicated wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/ReformedMembershipProcess Let’s see if we’re ready to really fix that! I hope to have comments from all the people who look to be so eager to fix the NM process.

We've had a lot of great blog traffic about Vinismo. I thought I'd try to pull together a few of the better ones.

• vinismo! wiki wine compendium from Hugh McGuire.
• Vinismo Opens Its Doors to Wine Lovers Everywhere from the Creative Commons Weblog. Thanks, guys!
• Vinismo: Wiki + Wine from Zach Copley
• Vinismo from Wendy Copley.
• DemoCampMontreal3 report from Montreal Tech Watch
• DemoCampMontreal3 Report from Josh Nursing
• Vinismo Presentation at DemoCampMontreal3 on the SearchAnyway Blog. Probably one of my favourite pieces, although it makes Niko real mad since it cuts off just before he starts talking. Make mental note: don't say "Uh" so much.
• Bienvenue sur Vinismo, le guide des vins libre by Niko. Niko also bemoaned the difficulty of keeping our project under wraps in Mon lourd secret bient t d voil . What a drama queen.
• Vinismo : un wiki sur le vin by Olivier Niquet. He's suspicious that we are sponsored by J. Lohr, because there are so many J. Lohr wines on our front page.

All in all it's been pretty good. I hope we'll get some more, though! tags: blogs vinismo

DemoCampMontreal3 report So, it's been a couple of days and I should probably get around to posting my own DemoCampMontreal3 report.

• Niko and I started off with our own demo for Vinismo. It was a lot of fun: we talked about the reasons for starting the site, the technical, information architecture and graphics/UI design challenges, and what our future extensions are going to be. At the end of it, we took some questions, which was fun. The most interesting for me was from Roberto Rocha, whose TechnoCit is one of my favourite tech columns in Montreal. He asked, "Your typical contributor will be much older. What will you do to make your wiki more accessible to them?" It was a good question I don't have an answer to yet, but I want to think about it more.
• The second demo was by Heri Rakotomalala, who showed off his social-networking GTD tool, WorkCruncher. It's a TODO list with a twist: items that you don't get done age off the list. You have to re-commit to doing a task on an almost daily basis. I think it's a great and refreshing design; my TODO list gets depressing long and filled with unfinishable tasks, and I get too intimidated to work on ones that really matter. I think Heri might have to make some concessions to people's expectations for TODO lists -- maybe a way to automatically archive tasks, rather than deleting them entirely...?
• The third demo was by the gang from Defensio, who are providing an great anti-spam Web service similar to Akismet. They had a few examples of where they're different, but I'm not well-versed enough in comment spam issues to understand them. My guess is that since they're getting into the market after Akismet, though, they have the opportunity to make a smarter technology. Their one downside? They used slides -- which the rules of DemoCamp. They did demo the service, though.
• Fourth up was the indefatigable Simon Law. Simon's project? To turn back time. Talk about ambitious! His effort consisted of making a typical kitchen clock turn backwards. He disassembled the clock and explained how it worked to the audience. It was great, except for two things: the clock didn't work at the end of the demo (although he got it working by the end of DemoCamp), and he took a few minutes to draw a diagram of the clock; in my mind, that's just a low-tech PowerPoint slide.
• Fifth, and quite fascinating, was a tool that Jerome Paradis showed off. It was a Google-Maps mashup that filtered special emails for an informal private jet sharing network. Apparently, companies who charter private jets often have space in the jets, so they'll make that space available. People who need a last-minute charter jet can send email from their Blackberries and such, and if there's availability they get contacted by the charter companies. The interesting part? These people use a highly structured lingo ("O/W" = "one way"), and Jerome's tool scrapes these emails to make the data into a mapping app for his customers. Very interesting!

All in all, it was a good night -- probably made better by the Argentina Cabernet Sauvignon I had. There's a DemoCampMontreal4 scheduled for August 17th, but I won't be in town for it. Too bad for me! tags: democampmontreal3 defensio workcruncher simonlaw jeromeparadis vinismo

Here’s a guide to supporting Xen servers for people who are not Linux experts. If your job means that you have root access to a Xen server that someone else installed for the purpose of fixing problems when they are not available then this will help you solve some common problems. Xen is a virtualization system that is primarily used for running Linux virtual machines under a Linux host. It is mostly used as a Paravirtualization system in that the virtual machine knows that it is running in a virtual environment - this allows some performance benefits. The host environment is known as Dom0 and root in that domain has the ability to control the other domains (which are known as DomU domains). If you perform an orderly shutdown of the Dom0 (via the shutdown or reboot commands or notification from the UPS of an impending power failure) then when the machine is booted again the DomU’s will be automatically restarted (if the on_reboot setting has the value restart - a common configuration). If you run the command shutdown in a DomU then the domain will be destroyed, and the command reboot will restart the DomU with the same settings - if you want to change the settings for a DomU you need to shut it down and create a new instance. The main sys-admin command related to Xen is xm. Here are the main xm options that are useful in support:

1. xm list provides a list of running domains. For each domain it gives the name of the domain, the ID number, the memory allocated to it, the number of virtual CPUs allocated to it, the state, and the amount of CPU time used in execution. The ID numbers are allocated sequentially, if you reboot a DomU by running the command “reboot” inside it then it will get a new ID number when it re-starts. Many xm operations that may take the name of a domain will also take a Domain ID number. Generally you never use an ID number and ignore it - the only relevant thing about an ID is whether it is 0.

Here is a sample of the output of xm list:
# xm list
Name        ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State  Time(s)
Domain-0    0    1236    4 r---–  14116.3
wind        13    2999    3 -b----  60114.1
wind-f7    52      519    1 -b----  3329.9 You can see from this output that the domain named wind has 2999M of RAM, 3 virtual CPUs (out of 4 physical CPUs in the machine) and has 60,114 seconds of CPU time used (that is 114 minutes of CPU use - the equivalent of almost two hours for a single CPU). Here are the values you might see in the state field (from the man page xm(1)):

• r - running
  The domain is currently running on a CPU - note that Dom0 will always appear to be running because you are running the xm utility!
  
• b - blocked
  The domain is blocked, and not running or runnable. This can be caused because the domain is waiting on IO (a traditional wait state) or has gone to sleep because there was nothing else for it to do.


• p - paused
  The domain has been paused, usually occurring through the administrator running xm pause. When in a paused state the domain will still consume allocated resources like memory, but will not be eligible for scheduling by the Xen hypervisor.


• c - crashed
  The domain has crashed, which is always a violent ending. Usu ally this state can only occur if the domain has been config ured not to restart on crash. See xmdomain.cfg for more info.


• d - dying
  The domain is in process of dying, but hasn t completely shut down or crashed.

If you see domains that are running which normally aren’t busy then make a note of this. If you see domains that are paused, crashed, or dying then contact the sys-admin. Also know which domains are expected to be running so that if a domain is missing then you will recognise it as a problem!

xm top is similar to the top command in Unix but displays Xen data, by default it displays the same information as xm list but also includes the amount of data read and written from network devices and disks. If your terminal is less than about 145 columns wide the lines will wrap and it will be confusing - stretch the width of your xterm before running it.

If you have multiple network interfaces then you can see the transfer counts for each of them separately by pressing the N key. If you have multiple network interfaces in DomU’s then this can help diagnose some network problems (although you may find that tcpdump is more useful). If you have multiple disk devices in a DomU then you can see their transfer counts separately by pressing the B key. One problem that can be partially diagnosed through this is excessively poor performance. If a DomU is running extremely slowly then it may be impossible to login to diagnose and/or fix the problem (it could take tens of minutes to login), in that case seeing where the disk access is going from outside the DomU can shed some light on the problem. VBD  768 [ 3: 0]
VBD  832 [ 3:40]
VBD 5632 [16: 0]
VBD 5696 [16:40] Above is the identification of the virtual devices /dev/hda and /dev/hdb in a DomU. The numbers inside the brackets are the device node numbers in hexadecimal, so 16:40 means the device 22,64 as a pair of decimal numbers (22*256+64=5696). # ls -l /dev/hd?
brw-r---– 1 root disk  3,  0 Jul 23 17:24 /dev/hda
brw-r---– 1 root disk  3, 64 Jul 23 17:24 /dev/hdb
brw-r---– 1 root disk 22,  0 Jul 23 17:24 /dev/hdc
brw-r---– 1 root disk 22, 64 Jul 23 17:24 /dev/hdd Above is the result of a ls -l on the devices in question from inside the DomU. When I set up a Xen DomU I generally use /dev/hda for the root filesystem and /dev/hdb for swap. So if the machine is performing poorly and /dev/hdb ([3:40]) is being accessed excessively then it indicates that the machine has some memory hungry programs running and is paging heavily.

xm list –long [domain] gives detailed information on all domains, or it can be run with the name of a domain such as xm list –long wind to give the detailed information on only one domain. Generally this is something that you will log to a disk file before restarting domains, in the short-term there is little use for this.

xm console <domain> gives you the console of a domain. If a domain is not working correctly and it is impossible to login via ssh (either due to a network problem or a problem with ssh) then you can access the console (equivalent to a serial-port login on physical hardware) to diagnose the problem. Often the kernel will log messages to the console, such messages will be stored by the Xen system until they are read. If you suspect that there may be many such messages then use script(1) to log the output to disk, if you are unsure then use script to make sure that you don’t miss any data. Even if you don’t understand it the sys-admin probably will!

If the system is half-working then you can login as root to investigate problems. You can escape from the console by pressing CTRL-].

xm dmesg gives Xen logging data comparable to the dmesg command in Linux. If you ever have to reboot the machine (run reboot from Dom0) due to a problem with Xen then you MUST save the output of xm dmesg to a file for later review by the sys-admin.

xm destroy <domain> will kill a specified domain. It’s a last resort for stopping a domain that is not working correctly - it is greatly preferrable to login to the domain via ssh or xm console and give an orderly shutdown.

xm create [-c] <domain> creates a new domain. The configuration for the domain will be taken from a file of the same name in the current directory or in the /etc/xen directory - if /etc/xen is not the current directory when you run xm create then make sure that there is no file-name conflict. You can use this command after destroying a domain or to start a domain that was not previously run.

If you want to change a configuration option of a domain (such as the amount of RAM used) then the usual procedure is to edit the configuration file, run halt or shutdown from within the domain, and then create the domain again with xm create. Note that the -c option is used to attach to the console after starting the domain (you usually want to do this).
I will probably update this post when I get some feedback. I may write more posts of a similar nature if there are requests.

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