I wonder am I the only one who feels that Gnome default thumbnail size is way too small? See the bug report for the background, motivation and a comparison screenshot 
P.S. The fix is simple dconf write /org/gnome/nautilus/icon-view/thumbnail-size 128; rm -r ~/.thumbnails/* and then close and restart your nautilus file browser. 
The meeting was as long as the kernel changelog, the decision was as difficult as a Debian release, but in the end Le Camp has won in the voting 5 to 4. It was lucky that one member of the 10 man committee was not present or we could have had a tie, just like there was one in the first round of voting.
Well, congratulations to the poor sods of the Swiss team, who will now have to fulfil what they promised and also all the small things that everyone always forgets that also need to be done for every Debconf!
I think that I will try again for 2015, but before that we will try to get a few people from Latvian community to go to Debconf13 to get the Debconf and Debian experience and exposure.
Meanwhile, it looks like I will be skipping this years Debconf12 it is very far away for me and as I could not find a reasonable business rationale for me being there, it would be a far and expensive vacation for me. I don t think there is enough benefit from me being there to ask for any Debian funds for this either, especially hearing how tight money is this year. So if you re going, make sure to take a camera and take a bunch of pictures, so we at home can see it too
Over recent months, I have been pondering the relevance of my Free Software involvement a lot:
More than anything, it constantly feels more and more like several important distributions and projects are moving in directions that break with the old ways far too radically, by breaking software usability rules such as "least surprise", "works out of the box", and "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" either to try new approaches to addressing existing needs or simply for change's sake.
Another aspect lies in my usual motivation for packaging or adopting software: because I need it and nobody else bothered doing it. Further reflection made me ponder what, correspondingly, are my usual reasons for dropping software: because what exists already works and because everybody and their grand-mother already invented a million of ways to handle the same issue.
Which brings us to today's news.
What prompted me to hand the dictionary packages I maintained over to someone else was a combination of "no longer need it" and "it already works fine as it is."
For instance, the Estonian dictionaries haven't seen any upstream release since the initial one in 2003. While I still use Estonian daily in my online communications, the last 9 years have mostly been spent making minor changes to the dependencies and maintainer scripts, just to keep the package compliant with current Debian packaging policies and with ongoing improvements to the dictionary-common maintainer tools. This is not the sort of work that requires any knowledge of the Estonian language, so I felt that having dictionary-common developers handle those technical transitions in a clean and across-the-board way for as many dictionary packages as possible would be more productive than me trying to keep track of those changes by myself.
A similar case applies to the Latvian dictionaries. While there have been occasional upstream releases, some of which required patching the source code, maintaining the package has mostly been about tracking Debian policy changes and dictionary-common functional changes. Additionally, my interest for learning Latvian has dramatically dropped over the years, so I no longer saw any point in remaining involved in maintaining the package.
Ditto for the Russian dictionaries: occasional upstream releases, occasional patches, regular packaging upgrades to keep up with the Debian policy and with dictionary-common functionality, but no longer much of anything than a passive interest in practicing my Russian.
One of the developers behind dictionary-common, Agustin Martin Domingo, frequently helped me make sense of the changes I needed to track in the past, so he gladly accepted taking over the technical maintenance of all 3 packages. The Estonian dictionaries, while extremely skim in the breadth of vocabulary they cover, remain useful, but are essentially deprecated, as the upstream author is working on a spell checking engine similar to what Voikko does for Finnish, which is why maintaining them will be a rather easy task for Agustin. Meanwhile, Aigars Mahinovs passively remains on board for the Latvian dictionaries, while the Russian dictionaries have been adopted by Mikhail Gusarov, in both cases with Agustin assisting on technical matters.
Basically, I feel that passing the maintenance over to people whose motivation remains high is a better way to guarantee those packages' future than leaving them in my unmotivated hands and I'm glad that I found someone to keep on packaging them.
PS: happy Valentine's day to everyone!
I never got the craze for the zombie this and zombie that. I saw the premise as thinner than vampire storyline which in my book only had a good day with Buffy franchise. But then I got Kindle and run out of stuff to read and decided to pick up something less lively and more shambling. And you know what I found there are a few great books hiding behind the zombie label.
I read them in the worng order, so to help you guys out, here is the way I would recommend to check out if the zombie genre is interesting to you:
Start with World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
. It is written as a historical book documenting the memories of people that have survived the world wide zombie apocalipse is a series of escalating short stories. This is a perfect bathroom or bus reading. Each story focuses on how people react (or fail to react) to a radical change in their environment. Zombies are a tool to expose the human condition for this book.
The next you could read (or you could even skip this if it get a bit boring for you) is The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
this is a problem solving book, it basically takes a problem ( ZOMBIES! ) a goal ( I want to survive! ) and describes the logical steps needed to reach the goal in the context of the problem. It is very educational on the issue of problem solving, especially with unusual problems. But it can get boring for people if so, don t give up, but just skip this book for now and move on the the best of them all
The third is a trilogy, two books are already published, the third is coming soon first books is Feed (Newsflesh, Book 1)
and the second is Deadline (Newsflesh, Book 2)
. This is a rare gem of modern literature. Basically this is a book set in the world long time after a zombie outbreak (with a good reason why and how it happened) where people have already lived a few decades with the problema and the kids are very used to it. So the book is written from a perspective of a young woman and her brother, who were born after Rising and are now into one of the most dangerous profession journalism. Early on they become the first bloggers to be picked to follow a presidential election campagn (book was written before Obama campaign really took off) and it only get wilder from there.
I really liked these books. So much so, that I will now explore the other zombie fiction books to see if there possibly is something good there as well. Any recommendations?
http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20111110.144615.333c5288.en.html
Date: 2011-11-10 16:46 +200 
Here is one more photo from Debconf11 that has been missed in all the excitement t-shirts from all Debconfs so far: from Debconf3 up to Debconf11. I was a bit late in stitching it together, so it appeared in the middle of the photo stream and people missed it.
P.S. I also took a bit of time to add some labels to the photos so the people that were not there would know what is happening in the image.
P.P.S. Talking to few key people (housing, venue, catering, networking) to prepare Latvia bid for Debconf13 is in full swing now.
Another year, another Debconf and now it is passed. Pictures are processes and all are now uploaded. We are still missing 25 names in the Debconf 11 group photo. With 265 people and 86 Mpix it is the highest resolution image we have had so far (Spain image had a bit more pixels, but a lot of them were outside the actual photo) and the largest number of people (Edinburgh photo had 248 people). The video team produced hundreds of gigabytes of footage, we had very interesting talks and debates and sometimes the AdHoc meeting room on the side was overcrowded with people in BoFs that were not on the initial schedule. It has been a very special kind of conference. As it always is. 
.
Short links: http://is.gd/dc11group http://is.gd/dc11names
Short version arrival was quite easy, the arrival wiki page is now up-to-date and my photos are uploaded every day to this Flickr set.
I had a small problem departing from CDG to Zagreb after scanning my suit twice and complaining that it had too many electronic devices, they had me remove my Nexus S, Nokia N950 and Kindle 3 from the suit pockets and then scanned that all lot again. After that another security guy asked me to open my suitcase and started squishing my Ligo cheese and declaring in a grave voice that it was too soft to be legal . As I kept calm and explained the DebConf cheese party to him, he looked around, put the cheese back in the bag and said ok, ok, off you go . So I still have that softness for the party.
I heard an even better anecdote from our next years hosts when they were travelling trough Germany, a border official asked a typical so, what are you here for? question. They answered that they were in transit for an IT conference and gave him the invitation letter. He read the letter, nodded and then said: DebConf, huh? So, who was the author of the Linux kernel? and when after the initial shock they gave the right answer, they were immediately waved trough. Now that s what I call good border security.
I met up with the guys in the Zagreb airport caf , which was immediately after exiting the secure zone. We waited for dkg to arrive and get his baggage. The passport check too a couple of minutes, but the baggage claim looked to be taking almost a half an hour.
After that was sorted out, we took out some local money in one of the 5 ATMs around and went to the bus. We were waived to just put our bags into the bus luggage space and get on, the driver went around to sell us tickets just before we drove off. It was one of the most comfortable and well air-conditioned buses I have been on in a long time. We were in the Zagreb bus station in less than half an hour.
Then a funny part started an old man came up to dkg and immediately asked Are you going to Banja Luka? , and when he said yes, the man started dragging us along to the bus station saying that there is a bus to there that will leave in a couple minutes, but we were in luck, so we should follow him right to the bus. Driven by curiosity, we went on. The man dragged us to the far side of the bus terminal bus stops where there was a minibus with Bosnian number plates, but no official designation as a passenger transit bus and no other passengers. They asked a reasonable 120 kuna for the trip, but they looked very shady to me, so we refused. I think that if we agreed and we were lucky enough that they actually did get us to Banja Luka, the price would have risen along the way, for example using the highway tolls as an excuse.
After getting cursed at by the old man and being demanded to buy him a beer for his efforts, we went upstairs to the real bus station where we were told that there were two buses to Banja Luka: one at 15:00 and another at 16:30, but that those two buses arrive in Banja Luka almost at the same time, so we got us tickets for the latter bus and went to a local bar to get some food and drinks. I somehow managed to get sausages in deepfried bread that for some reason cost almost triple of a hamburger and fries that others got, but it sure helped to pass the time and after all those 9 was not a bad price for a good meal.
We were a bit surprised by the bus drivers asking us to pay 1 (or 8 kuna) for bags to be put into bus bag storage, especially as we for several minutes could not quite understand what they want of us as neither of them spoke either English, Russian or German.
I don t remember when was the last time I crossed a real (i.e. non-Shengen) border in a bus, so getting out of the bus and walking one-by-one to the border official was a new experience. On the other border of two bus drivers collected the passports an then brought them back later, so that was less painful. And by then we were in Bosnia! And of the things that greeted us was a billboard for the casino in Banja Luka Hotel Bosna.
By the time we got to Banja Luka, dkg had already made friends with an official from Croatian ministry of regional development that sat behind us on the bus and knew English very well (after living in Canada for some time). The bus station in Banja Luka looked almost abandoned like the bus stopped in the field with only a few taxi drivers and a bunch of buildings some distance away showing that this was indeed part of civilization.
The taxi drivers would take you to the venue for 8-10 KM 5 or 50-100 kuna (if their meter is broken and you look to be really ignorant of the exchange rates). If you walk on a bit, there is a bus station with an ATM taking Visa cards and a bit further on a bus stop that will take you to the centre of the city for 1.5 KM. The train station looked fully abandoned when we went there, only a news kiosk was working there. The bus driver reacted well to the name Hotel Bosna and wave toward it when we passed by it.
It is hard to miss, especially the blinking Casino sign or the white pillars with black letters Hotel Bosna on top. You just get off at the bus station Central and walk back a couple hundred meters. Then see all you Debian friends drinking in the cool bar and walk around the corner to the main entrance of the hotel to check in.
The rooms are looking really great this is the best DebConf location that I have been to (I was not in Argentina). Soft beds with linens changed daily, nice air conditioning, towels (changed daily, if used), good shower, It is lacking in the speed and power of its free WiFi and in some place there is a clear impression that the hotel was built as a top of the line hotel a couple decades ago, but somehow has fallen into a disrepair since. Or it is simply used much more than expected.
So far I would say that the DebCamp is running full steam two hacklabs have desks, chairs, power and network connection, one of them even has sufficient air conditioning. The network works great for me so far, at least in the venue. The hotel wireless is barely usable to read a blog post, preferably without photos.
The food is being served well and on time. So far for lunch and dinner you walk up to the reception and get a food ticket based on your room number and go to the M level for the food (the M level is between the ground floor, labelled as PR , and first floor) where for breakfast and dinner there is a buffet, but for lunch you sit at a table and they bring you food. Vegetarians should clearly say vegetarian while pointing at themselves to get the special vegetarian option. So far food has been very good, except that that they often run out of popular items, such as fries, in the buffet. You can also ask for beer and other extra drinks with your food, but know that they cost extra up to 2.5KM for a beer, for example.
Before arriving to DebConf11, I arranged my flights so that I had a day and a night in Paris as I have not been there before. So after checking out of my work apartment in Tampere, going to work there with all the things from that apartment, then flying back to Riga, going to a midnight screening of the last Potter movie and finally getting back home around 2am, I quickly checked that I have everything needed for the conference and went off to sleep only to wake up at 8am again, pack everything (into a single carry-on bag, after a year of experience travelling by air weekly and watching Up in the Air twice) and be off to the plain to Paris.
The CDG airport is quite huge, even compared to something like JFK it feels bigger and more concrete. And yet so dark and lacking interesting features that the only photo I got from it was this
I then used the B line train to get to my hotel(9.1 ), drop my stuff there and another metro ticket (1.7 ) to go to Arc de Triomphe (M tro Charles de Gaulle-Etoile), went up there and walked the length of the Champs-Elys es right up to the Louvre. Then I walked to the river, crossed it to a small island to see the Notre Dame and then went back following the other bank of the river Seine seing both some more normal non-touristy streets of central Paris and also some other magnificent buildings, like Les Invalides and ending up at the Eifel tower. It was a rather easy walk that was only spoiled by some rain in the end so I did not get to take some night photos of the Eiffel tower as I wanted.
But the experience still was breathtaking. The scale of the buildings was impressive. The pervasive gold-gilded decorations do expand on the splendour and the same time the full access to all the previously-royal places brings them down to people. The city looks well built and the planning mostly makes sense, especially if you are on foot. Car drivers might have a different opinion about it considering the maze of roads and traffic circles and underpasses I saw in central Paris.
It is often said that Riga is a mini-Paris. Mostly, that is said in Riga. But walking the back streets of Paris I can see where that comes from the architecture, the street design, the small cafes and some cobblestone roads and some historical buildings with a few modern building thrown into the mix, and a tower too. Visually Riga does look like Paris a lot, but for the feeling, I still think that Riga feels more like Berlin with its mix of eastern and western Europe.
I had one incident when some girl in front of Louvre started to ask me to sign something, gesturing to show that she was mute, it looked like a donation racket, but I did not get to find it out in detail as a swift security guard appeared and started running for the girl, who immediately took off running along with several friends. I guess the guards know them very well.
On a more positive note, in one of many confetterie shops I noticed the macaron sweets that my friend advertised loudly some time ago, so I decided to buy and try some. They cost 7 for a box of 6. The taste was very, very sweet. Basically it tastes like froffed up and then frozen sugar made into cookie form with a cream layer between two cookies.
So basically it is like an Oreo cookie, but much, much, much more tender, airy and sweet. The two of the 6 cookies were partly crushed while I tenderly carried them for 5 minutes in their box while searching for a place to sit down and eat them.
After that I also had a proper dinner in a restaurant that was not too near the touristy paths, but still it was a bit lacking. The starter was quite nice I mean it is hard to screw up cutting off a piece of foie gras (basically a piece of liver paste with a layer of extra geese fat), but the main dish was disappointing I ordered a medium rare steak. First of all it came with a side of fries, that in itself was an insult to Paris, baked potatoes would have fit much better with this dish. And despite the main part of the steak being very nicely done to medium rare, the cut was done badly and the edges of the steak had sinew that was too chewy to eat or even cut normally.
Other interesting things I liked about Paris:
* Statues some made of stone, some of iron, some covered in gold, everywhere and made with great quality
* Bicycle rentals, I mostly saw the locals using them
* Segway tourists
* And countless classic postcard shots of very recognizable architecture
The Eiffel tower was immensely impressive. It towers over everything around, especially because there simply is nothing high enough around it. It would not have been so impressive in the middle of New York, for example. The age and openness of the construction makes you really feel the massiveness of this marvel of functional architecture.
But in the end Paris also looks like a great city to just kick back and relax in
P.S. I am amazed that when I put a link to a Flickr image (such as http://www.flickr.com/photos/aigarius/5950187165/in/set-72157627230456160 in a separate paragraph in my WordPress article text, something along the way translates them into proper linked images with a reasonable size. Progress is amazing.
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
All this started when my wife
Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for
my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early
March or something (I don't yet have all the details).
Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again
into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday
wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many
languages as possible.
Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up
the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work
with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some
in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking
dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday.
Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with
many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible,
poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting
things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in
the Perrier's genes!
And they were doing all this without me noticing.
As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly
turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be
possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost
Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift.
Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of
Christian" album?
But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that
features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book?
But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil,
then Joey doing on the following pages?
And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often
bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards
(one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro
representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all
around the world. All this in a wonderful album.
I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and
emotion was really really intense.
Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what
you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the
investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into
this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they
really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual
family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated
and some were indeed much much much appreciated.
Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the
result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you
were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that
includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!).
Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin
Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto,
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina
Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution
received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall,
Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil
McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema
Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl,
Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and
Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux'
Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in
September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu),
Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and
God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi,
Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets
bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach,
Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE
Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx
cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs
(finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak
Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition"
Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza,
Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam
D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes
the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor"
Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer"
Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli
Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i ,
Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n
Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans
Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is
as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier,
Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by
nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky"
Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su,
Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous
for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe
Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero,
Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi
Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent,
Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam
Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be
REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello.
Let's say it gain:
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
All this started when my wife
Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for
my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early
March or something (I don't yet have all the details).
Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again
into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday
wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many
languages as possible.
Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up
the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work
with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some
in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking
dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday.
Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with
many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible,
poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting
things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in
the Perrier's genes!
And they were doing all this without me noticing.
As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly
turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be
possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost
Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift.
Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of
Christian" album?
But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that
features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book?
But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil,
then Joey doing on the following pages?
And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often
bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards
(one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro
representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all
around the world. All this in a wonderful album.
I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and
emotion was really really intense.
Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what
you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the
investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into
this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they
really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual
family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated
and some were indeed much much much appreciated.
Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the
result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you
were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that
includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!).
Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin
Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto,
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina
Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution
received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall,
Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil
McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema
Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl,
Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and
Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux'
Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in
September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu),
Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and
God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi,
Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets
bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach,
Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE
Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx
cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs
(finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak
Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition"
Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza,
Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam
D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes
the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor"
Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer"
Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli
Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i ,
Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n
Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans
Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is
as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier,
Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by
nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky"
Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su,
Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous
for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe
Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero,
Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi
Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent,
Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam
Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be
REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello.
Let's say it gain:
Guys, we have a problem. The name of that problem is NVidia and their Optimus technology. The idea of that tech is quite neat take a laptop, put two video cards in it, use the powerful card when you need 3D power, use the weak card when you need to conserve battery. The problem is that any laptop with this technology is currently an expensive paperweight on Linux (or rather it was so until a couple weeks ago, see below). And NVidia has no plans for fixing that.
Let me explain the technicalities.
In all modern laptops (such as the new and sexy Dell XPS 15z and many, many others) NVidia Optimus is implemented as follows there is an NVidia card and an Intel card, all display outputs are connected to the Intel card, when the user wants more 3D power, the NVidia card is powered on and it renders an image into a framebuffer in the video memory of the Intel card which is the responsible for actually outputing that framebuffer to a display.
Currently in Linux if you are using NVidia drivers the Intel card is left uninitialised, your session starts up fine on the NVidia card, it outputs the resulting picture onto the video memory of the Intel card, but the Intel card is not configured in any way and so it does not do anything further with this picture and the display stays black.
The alternative is to use Intel video card driver and then the NVidia card stays there in your laptop as dead weight. It does not even power down (out of the box) so you have all the power consumption and none of the functionality. There is some support from NVidia to using that card for CUDA computing purposes in such situation, but nothing else.
After years of neglect and statements from NVidia that Optimus support in Linux is impossible and thus not even planned, one individual stepped up and made it work. Yes, the solution is hacky, yes it is a hassle to set up and make it work, but this is the first glimmer of hope for actually working Optimus on Linux. Over the last couple years the share of laptops with Optimus has greatly increased almost all laptops that have NVidia video cards have Optimus now. This Bumblebee project is currently our only real hope on making Linux work on these laptops.
This project needs our support in a multitude of ways: This year Debconf is a bit off the beaten track, so there is a bit of anxiety in the participants flights to Banja Luka are quite expensive (I d guess we have packed the relevant dates pretty full already) and other options are going via Zagreb or Ljubljana, but there people do not yet have all the info on how they will be able to get from, for example, Zagreb airport to the Debconf venue in Banja Luka, if their plane lands at 22:30 and get back if the departure time is 06:30. There is hope that the organising team will provide the info on how to use the local buses and arrange a Debconf bus for people arriving late and departing early, but that has not been 100% confirmed yet.
In light of all this, I really dug deep into all possible options and found an option that is far more fun and relaxing for me and almost the same price. So I will be travelling to Paris on the morning of July 16th, then staying overnight there (never been in Paris before!), then take a late morning flight to Zagreb where I ll be around noon (plenty of time to get to Banja Luka) and then on the final day of the conference I can got to Zagreb at any time, stay there overnight (never been to Zagreb too!) and around noon next day fly back home via Budapest (just a 2 hour break there). This way I will get to see two more cities, save me a lot of stress and also not bother the organizers too much.
P.S. I must say thank you Accenture for paying for my plane tickets.
It looks like I am going to Debconf11! Vacation time is booked, registration is in, only some final approvals inside Accenture are pending to pay my flights. I must say after working in Finland for the whole winter, I need to get out and get to friendly (and relatively chatty) Debian people more than ever.
Warning, this post is COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL, do not spread outside of authorized corporate internal communication channels.
Today Nokia will announce that in order to increase investor confidence and foster brand loyalty all Nokia Symbian phones in the world will receive two free Nokia-themed games.
The first game will be Angry Nokias Nokias have discovered that other phones are taking their market share away and now they are very, very angry! Fling cool and shiny Nokia phone and destroy the competition. Complete all free 30 levels and be first to collect all golden Ovi s by gathering MeeGo and Windows Phone 7 logos in the levels!
The other game that is sure to be an instant hit among true Nokia fans will be the Nokia Ninja you are a humble user and sales people are throwing phones at you all kinds of phones. But beware most of those phones are not Nokias! Use your finger to slice trough the competition, rake up combos and achievements! But be careful you do not want to slice trough a Nokia phone! Only trough instant brand recognition you can rake up truly great scores in this game.
Nokia connecting people.
(P.S. Check the date)
Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and
can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of
candidates in each year's DPL elections.
| Year | Count | Names |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 | 4 | Joseph Carter, Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Richard Braakman |
| 2000 | 4 | Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Joel Klecker, Matthew Vernon |
| 2001 | 4 | Branden Robinson, Anand Kumria, Ben Collins, Bdale Garbee |
| 2002 | 3 | Branden Robinson, Rapha l Hertzog, Bdale Garbee |
| 2003 | 4 | Moshe Zadka, Bdale Garbee, Branden Robinson, Martin Michlmayr |
| 2004 | 3 | Martin Michlmayr, Gergely Nagy, Branden Robinson |
| 2005 | 6 | Matthew Garrett, Andreas Schuldei, Angus Lees, Anthony Towns, Jonathan Walther, Branden Robinson |
| 2006 | 7 | Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ari Pollak, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Towns, Andreas Schuldei, Jonathan (Ted) Walther, Bill Allombert |
| 2007 | 8 | Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Steve McIntyre, Rapha l Hertzog, Anthony Towns, Simon Richter |
| 2008 | 3 | Marc Brockschmidt, Rapha l Hertzog, Steve McIntyre |
| 2009 | 2 | Stefano Zacchiroli, Steve McIntyre |
| 2010 | 4 | Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy, Margarita Manterola |
| 2011 | 1 | Stefano Zacchiroli (no vote yet) |
Quick post. In light of recent Nokia+Microsoft-MeeGo news, I have gone to learn more about Android in a hurry. And here is the first result MorzeSMS.
Basically it is a tiny app that will play a morze code when you receive an SMS message. The morze code is the phone number of the sender in cut number morze form (to be shorter). The idea is that first of all morze is a cool sound and second is that each sender gets a unique sound that you can learn to identify over time so that you know who sent you a message as soon as you hear the beep.
This is very early beta there is no UI, no configuration. You can download it here. Leave bug reports in the comments of this blog post. It does not disable the stock SMS-received sound.
This is just a quick note that I broke down and replaced my ageing iPhone 3G with a brand new unlocked Google Nexus S. I got it in my hands last Saturday and by the end of the first day it did 90% of what I used my iPhone for and by the end of day two it did 100% of what I used my phone for before this and did it better than the iPhone. I will give it a week and then write up a bigger thing on all the good and bad things I notices from my migration from iPhone to Nexus S.
If you want to know something specific about Nexus S, Android 2.3, its interaction with Debian/Ubuntu, this is the time to ask.
Next.