A very late start into the season, with a nice ending. We had about zero snow until after christmas, and not just down in the valley, but also at 2000m in the mountains. My first run was therefore very late, on January 1st, followed by two short excursions (8:45 - 11:20) due to too many people on January 5th and 6th. After that we had more than enough snow which allowed me to go to Diedamskopf most of the time (basically only natural snow there, which makes better slopes). I went there almost exclusively until they closed on Easter sunday after heavy snowfall in Holy week, and had 5 more days therafter In Dam&uumlls and Warth/Schr cken. Last run was on April 19. Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13	2013/14	2014/15
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25	23	30	24
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10	4	29	9
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14	19	1	13
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1	0	0	2
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588	203562	274706	224909
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m	13885m	12848m	13278
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516	468	597	530

What does not show up here is the number of times I walked (with and without snowshoes) up the mountain and used the lift down and obviously also tobogganing.

Given that snow is yet a little bit sparse for snowboarding and the weather could be improved on I have made myself a late christmas present: It is a rather sporty rodel (Torggler TS 120 Tourenrodel Spezial 2014/15, 9kg weight, with fast (non stainless) "racing rails" and 22 angle of the runners) but not a competition model. I wish I had bought this years ago. It is a lot more comfortable than a classic sled ("Davoser Schlitten"), since one is sitting in instead of on top of the sled somehow like in a hammock. Being able to steer without putting a foot into the snow has the nice side effect that the snow stays on the ground instead of ending up in my face. Obviously it is also faster which is a huge improvement even for recreational riding, since it makes the difference between riding the sledge or pulling it on flattish stretches. Strongly recommended. FWIW I ordered this via rodelfuehrer.de (they started with a guidebook of luge tracks, which translates to "Rodelf hrer"), where I would happily order again.

With today's removals of gnutls26 and libgcrypt11 from jessie the respective transitions have been finished. Thanks to everybody who help accomplishing this, package maintainers and the release team, with a special thanks to Emilio. It started from a bad position: Since 2011 we had co-installable gnutls26 and gnutls28 in Debian with separate (and conflicting) development packages. Simply providing libgnutls-dev from gnutls28 was not possible because there are some incompatibilities and because we had license problems. So we ended up gradually switching packages over by sourceful uploads.
Looking back, this worked both well and badly: On one hand it played nicely with testing migration. It did not break a lot of important packages at a single time or block packages from migration to testing. On the other hand over a 100 sourceful uploads are a lot, and the transition took a long time.

The GnuTLS28 transition is making progress, more than 60% done: Thanks to a national holiday combined with rainy weather this should look even better soon:
ametzler@argenau:~$ w3m -dump https://ftp-master.debian.org/deferred.html grep changes wc -l
26
ametzler@argenau:~$ w3m -dump https://ftp-master.debian.org/deferred.html grep Metzler wc -l
18


The GnuTLS 3x transition is slowly starting. If you are maintaing a package (build-)depending on libgnutls-dev please test/consider building against libgnutls28-dev. TIA

Little snow, but above-average season. The macro weather situation was very stable this year, very high snowfall in Austria's south (eastern tyrol and carinthia), and long periods of warm and sunny weather with little precipitation on the northern side of the alps (i.e. us). This had me going snowboarding a lot, but almost exclusively in Dam ls since it is characterized by a) grassy terrain (no stones) and b) huge numbers of snow cannons. I started early (December 7) with another 6 days on piste in December. If there had been more snow the season would have been a long one, too. - Season's end depends on the timimg of easter (because of the holidays) which would have been late. However I again stopped rather early, last day was March 30. In addition to the days listed below I had an early season's opening at the glacier in Pitztal. I attended the pureboarding in November (21st to 23rd). Looking back at the season I am not quite satisfied with my progress, I just have not managed to implement and practise the technique I should have learned there. It is next to impossible when the slopes are full, and when they aren't one likes to give it a run. ;-) Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13	2013/14
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25	23	30
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10	4	29
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14	19	1
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1	0	0
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588	203562	274706
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m	13885m	12848m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516	468	597

As GMP has been relicensed to LGPLv3+/GPLv2+ build exim against GnuTLS v3.

I needed to switch servers from vserver to Xen and therefore ended up with a new IP address. As a consequence I am losing downhill.at.eu.org as mail domain. because it seems to be impossible nowadays to change eu.org MX records. You can reach me on bebt.de nowadays.

Exim 4.82rc1 is available in experimental. See NewStuff in upstream GIT for a list of newly added features.

Dear web, Do you know a human contact for the eu.org free domain name service? The mailing-list is dead (subscription is possible, but no mails are sent out) and the webpage does not provide contact points. (I already tried the role-addresses.) I would welcome hints per mail to ametzler at downhill dot eu dot org. Backstory: I would like to change where my eu.org MX record points to. As far as I can tell the web forms only support full domain delegation, while I only need to change a single eu.org hosted MX record. Thanks in advance

All in a below average season. Although we had lots of snow in December, my first day on-piste was December 22nd. Riding in snowstorm or thick fog is just not my kind of thing. The christmas holiday season was absurdely warm, getting rid of most of the snow again. I managed 7 snow-days from December 22nd to January 1st, but this was more sport than fun. Really sunny days were rare in the whole winter. Due to minor injury and minor illness I had to take long breaks from snowboarding (just two snow days in the periode from January 8th to February 15th!). Early easter cut the season short. This year I ended up in skiline.cc's top-100 list for both most meters of altitude in a single day and the whole season which shows that other people had a short season, too. On the plus side, we had enough and good snow. This is also evident from the balance sheet below, I almost always went to Diedamskopf where there is almost no artificial snow. Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25	23
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10	4
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14	19
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1	0
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588	203562
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m	13885m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516	468

Ski-lifts are closing tomorrow, but I have the perfect thing to look at for the next 8 months:

My receiver (Topfield SRP 2410) has the nasty habit of rescaling to fill the display, ignoring the aspect ratio. So I am reencoding, adding padding (black bars) and top and bottom. In this context avconv has offered some less cryptic errors. The one that cost me most time was this one:

[libx264 @ 0x8f29ca0] constant rate-factor is incompatible with
2pass.
[...]
Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect
parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

libx264 interprets a missing bit-rate specification as a request for constant rate-factor encoding. Which does not work with multi pass. Setting a bitrate (avconv syntax -b:v 1200k) fixes the problem.

As I was upgrading harddisks I thought about giving windows 8 a spin. and got what I deserved. ;-) I had expected Grub to be wiped, however I was a little bit surprised that the existing Windows (Vista) installation (which was automatically integrated in Windows 8 bootloader) did not boot anymore. Vista's automatic system repair failed, manual intervention on the system console (bootrec) seems to have shredded the system (The partition table is messed up.) No data was lost, as I have simply switched back to the old hd again. I will need to re-do the harddisk upgrade, though.

I have recently read ECB/2011/14 (GUIDELINE OF THE EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK of 20 September 2011 on monetary policy instruments and procedures of the Eurosystem) and have stumbled upon the following gem.

An institution may access the Eurosystem's standing facilities and open market operations based on standard tenders only through the NCB of the Member State in which it is incorporated. If an institution has establishments (its head office or branches) in more than one Member State, each establishment has access to these operations through the NCB of the Member State in which it is established, notwithstanding the fact that the bids of an institution may only be submitted by one establishment (either the head office or a designated branch) in each Member State.

At first glance this fine, it is easily readable. (All abbreviations are explained at the start of document.) However a more attentive examination corrects this impression. Compare the two highlighted versions below:

An institution may access the Eurosystem's standing facilities and open market operations based on standard tenders only through the NCB of the Member State in which it is incorporated. If an institution has establishments (its head office or branches) in more than one Member State, each establishment has access to these operations through the NCB of the Member State in which it is established [...].

An institution may access the Eurosystem's standing facilities and open market operations based on standard tenders only through the NCB of the Member State in which it is incorporated. If an institution has establishments (its head office or branches) in more than one Member State, each establishment has access to these operations through the NCB of the Member State in which it is established [ ].

Perfect contradiction. Either only the "own" NCB works or any NCB where we have a establishments. Ex falsum quodlibet and Bob's your uncle. ;-)

Panasonic's G1, G2 and G3 micro four-thirds cameras are missing a dedicated orientation sensor. With a lens featuring image stabilisation the camera makes use of its sensor. Otherwise (e.g. with the Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7) the Exif image orientation tags are not correct for portrait format images. Here is how to write correct tags (compatible with the camera's preview function) with exiv2: Camera rotated anti-clockwise (shutter button on top):
exiv2 -k -M"set Exif.Image.Orientation 8" -M"set Exif.Panasonic.Rotation 8" -M"set Exif.Thumbnail.Orientation 8" P1020800.JPG Camera rotated clockwise (shutter button at bottom):
exiv2 -k -M"set Exif.Image.Orientation 6" -M"set Exif.Panasonic.Rotation 6" -M"set Exif.Thumbnail.Orientation 6" P1020800.JPG

I have just uploaded exim 4.80 rc4 to experimental. As the GnuTLS code has been overhauled testing would be appreciated.

Finally a year with real snow again. Winter started rather late this year, I was still hiking at above 2000m end of November with zero snow there. First day of snowboarding was December 21st. Starting from there we never had too little snow. At home we topped out at 175cm, and had more than 125cm for a long time. Start of February was very cold, I had to skip a good day of good weather as I got a tiny bit of frostburn on my nose. (1200m of descent was a little to much at below -20 C.) A very warm end of March/start of April neverless quickly killed the snow here down at the bottom of the valley. There is still lots of snow in the mountains, although the ski-lifts have closed April 15th. Judging from the number of snowboarding days the season was a bad one. It started late and ended early (31st of March). In spring I simply need good weather to have fun. - Cloudy nights are too warm, the slope does not freeze properly, which is perfect only for breaking one's leg. Nevertheless if I could choose between a repetition of 2010/11 or 2011/2012, I would always go for the latter. :-) On a sidenote, my local hill has switched from www.hoehenmeter.com to www.skiline.cc to provide statistical information. Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516

GnuTLS 3.0.x is finally available in unstable (and squeeze). Please consider upgrading. (Development package: libgnutls28-dev)

exim 4.77 rc4 is available for testing in experimental. This release contains an incompatible change. Exim no longer performs string expansion on the second string of the match_* expansion conditions: "match_address", "match_domain", "match_ip" and "match_local_part". Named lists can still be used. See explanation and rationale on exim-announce mailing list.