Unfortunately Debian cannot sponsor my trip to Banja Luka this year and it s too expensive to pay it from my own budget. Thus I just cancelled my attendance for the conference. I m very sad, since my first DebConf last year in NY was a lot of fun and I was really looking forward to see you guys again this year. I wish you a lot of fun anyways. Have a productive and fun conference!

Weee! After the excellent experience last year in New York, I couldn t resist See you all in Banja Luka!

A few months ago dropbox was a Debian packge in non-free. Recently I noticed that there are several new versions available and tried to notifiy the maintainer and ask him to update the package. But unfortunately it looks like the package is not available any more (Here s why). However getting Dropbox is quite easy if you know what to do. The obvious choice would be to go to dropbox.com and download either the source package and compile it yourself or try to install the precompiled Ubuntu packages. The first option is not really an option for most users and the second one does currently not work on Debian/Sid (aka unstable). However, there is an easy solution: on the download page search for the CLI script (currently it is named dropbox.py) Download that and run it with python dropbox.py start -i. That will download the propritary binaries into ~/.dropbox-dist. Now go into that folder and start dropboxd. There you go, you have a fully working systray app for dropbox. Depending on your desktop environment you might want to put dropboxd in your autostart . So you don t have to start the daemon every time you login. And that s it. It is not really ideal, since a Debian package would be much better for updates, security, yada yada, but it s still better than nothing.

The last weeks I spend quite a lot of time hacking on a Python library for the AR.Drone. The AR.Drone is a nice toy for nerds. You connect to it via WIFI and soon you ll realize that it has 4 ports open. Reading the specs you ll find, that on one port it listens for AT-Commands with which you can remote control the drone, on the other two ports it waits for an incoming package which will trigger the drone to send the navdata (speed, angles, battery status, etc) and the video stream. Heck, you can even telnet into the drone Unfortunately it comes without a proper software to control the drone, only an iPhone app (w/o iPhone of course). But given the documentation, it should be easy to write your own. While getting the beast to fly was relatively easy, decoding the almost -jpg-video-stream was not. Almost-jpg, since the images the drone sends are more or less jpg with a small difference which makes it impossible to decode them using standard multi-media libraries. Anyways, the format is documented and implementing a decoder was not that hard. The tricky part was to get the framerates from unacceptable 0.5 FPS to 12-22 FPS the whole decoder is written in Python. I m cheating a bit by using psyco, but the code in arvideo.py is heavily optimized to minimize calculations and to please psyco. In the code is also a small demo app which uses Pygame to display the video stream and allows to control the AR.Drone with the keyboard. It should be ready-to-use as soon as you are connected to the drone via WIFI. The git repository is here, the license is MIT. Suggestions and patches are welcome. Here is a video of the drone flying through the office.

After todays or yesterdays daily package update (Sid) several kernel modules, namely thinkpad_acpi, snd-hda-intel and probably others are not loaded automatically anymore. So my Thinkpad T500 had no support for audio and several power management functions anymore. Once I found out that the missing kernel modules where the problem, the fix was easy: just add the corresponding module names to /etc/modules to enforce loading of the modules. But I wonder what caused the sudden change? Why are the modules not loaded automatically anymore? I usually update my Sid packages every morning so some package update from yesterday or today might have caused this. Looking at the packages which where updated, I found nothing suspicious. Has anyone an idea at which package I should look? Update: Looks like the problem was related to the recent update of base-files to version 6.2 which introduced the new /run directory in combination with udev. Downgrading base-files to version 6.1 (via snapshot.debian.org) fixed the problem.

Once again, there will be another round of the Summer School Advanced Scientific Programming in Python . This year in St. Andrews, UK. Quoting from the official announcement:

Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have evolved, only few scientists actually use them. As a result, instead of doing their research, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel. In this course we will present a selection of advanced programming techniques, incorporating theoretical lectures and practical exercises tailored to the needs of a programming scientist. New skills will be tested in a real programming project: we will team up to develop an entertaining scientific computer game. We use the Python programming language for the entire course. Python works as a simple programming language for beginners, but more importantly, it also works great in scientific simulations and data analysis. We show how clean language design, ease of extensibility, and the great wealth of open source libraries for scientific computing and data visualization are driving Python to become a standard tool for the programming scientist. This school is targeted at PhD students and Post-docs from all areas of science. Competence in Python or in another language such as Java, C/C++, MATLAB, or Mathematica is absolutely required. Basic knowledge of Python is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with Python should work through the proposed introductory
materials before the course.

You can apply on-line at http://python.g-node.org Applications must be submitted before May 29, 2011. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 19, 2011. No fee is charged but participants should take care of travel, living, and accommodation expenses. Candidates will be selected on the basis of their profile. Places are limited: acceptance rate in past editions was around 30%. Prerequisites: You are supposed to know the basics of Python to participate in the lectures. Please consult the website for a list of introductory material. If your re a scientist and interested in Python, I cannot recommend this summer school highly enough. The Summer School is always fun, the faculty members are very nice and always willing to help and answer questions. The balance between lectures and exercises is in my opinion very good, and you ll learn a lot about Python during the week. The highlight of every Python School is always the Pac Man tournament, where groups of students will implement their own Pac Man agent (in Python) and compete against the other agents in a tournament till the bitter end! The students of the previous editions were usually very happy during and after the School. Speaking of happiness, since no fee is charged for the Summer School, you ll have more money left over to invest into the excellent Scottish pubs!

Tonight Squeeze was released! Along with the release came a redesign of our website and planet. Nice! I m particularly happy that we ll see lots of fresh software and updates in unstable again, now that it is not frozen anymore. Thanks to all contributors. Keep up the good work!

Dear Lazyweb, Today I bought me a Canon IXUS 130 and was quite disappointed to see that it couldn t properly connect to my Debian/Sid machine via USB. Apparenty the camera is not recognized as a USB Mass Storage Device but utilizes PTP. I upgraded to libgphoto2 (2.4.10.1-3) from experimental and added a proper udev rule with vendor- and product-id but it did not help. Is there anything more I can try? Update: Accessing the camera actually works, even with ligbphoto2 (2.4.6) from unstable. I can access the camera with gphoto2 and download pictures (but not with KDE s filemanager). My problem was that I had rhythmbox running and the camera was automatically mounted by it as a media device. When KDE s filemanager or gphoto2 tried to access the camera I got an error like: ( Could not lock the device ): Camera is already in use., which is probably also a bug. Closing rhythmbox solved the issue and I was able to download images with gphoto2.

As requested by our beloved leader, here s my report on this year s Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Summit. The summit took place in Google s HQ in Mountain View, California and was what they call an unconference . In the beginning of the unconference the attendees had 10 minutes to write down proposals for a session and put them on a huge white board. After that, every attendee voted for the sessions in which he was interested by putting a small sticker on the proposal. This way we could evaluate the interest on a specific topic and schedule the sessions to the differently sized rooms according to their interest. Neat trick! The the rest of the summit was basically like a conference: we had 11 tracks filled with 5-6 sessions per day, which ran from 10:00 to 17:30. Google provided shuttle buses from our wonderful hotel to the googleplex in the morning and back to the hotel in the evening. The hotel was very nice, it was equipped a swimming pool and a hot tub (both outside), which was extensively used in the morning and of course during the night. Speaking of the night, Google sponsored Thai food in the first night and ye olde Pizza and Beer in the second. Some of the attendees brought their keyboard, guitar, bass and electric clarinet, and where playing some sweet ass Jazz and Pop (on special request ). The sessions itself where not quite what I expected. I expected some proper talks about specific topics, but it was more like and open discussion round where everyone was invited to participate. For some topics it worked pretty well, for others not. It was still totally worth coming, since you meet a lot of like minded people and there is plenty stuff to talk about. Of course I was very exited to see the googleplex. And the rumors are true: the googleplex seems to be a very nice place to work. They provide free breakfast, lunch and dinner for their employees. They have micro kitchens everywhere where you can grab free snacks and beverages. There are lot s of toys lying around, they have bicycles everywhere on the campus which you can just grab to move from one building to another. There is a dinosaur on the yard, a spaceship over the stairwell and lots of other things (testing on the toilet, anyone?), and we have probably only seen a small fraction, since we were not allowed to leave the restricted areas for the unconference. Despite the horrible yet lag (leaving Germany on Friday morning and leaving San Francisco on Sunday night), I m glad I was able to attend to the summit and can only recommend aspiring mentors and students to participate to the next summer of code!

Python-popcon is a small Python library which allows to query Debian s popcon database. The usage is very trivial:
>>> import popcon >>> popcon.package('python-popcon')
'python-popcon': 2 >>> popcon.package('icedove', 'iceweasel')
'icedove': 12140, 'iceweasel': 45666 >>> popcon.package('foobarbaz')

You can call the package method with an arbitrary number of package names and it will return a dictionary with package name : popcon value mappings for all packages found. If a package is not found in the popcon database it will not be in the resulting dictionary or if it was the only package in the method call, the method will return an empty dictionary. The popcon value is the number of installations according to Debian s Popularity Contest service. There is also a second method which gives some more information
>>> popcon.package_raw('icedove', 'iceweasel')
'icedove': [8065, 2195, 1879, 1], iceweasel : [27857, 10681, 7120, 8]
It returns a list of [vote, old, recent, no-files] for the given package. How does it work? Upon a query, popcon downloads http://popcon.debian.org/all-popcon-results.txt.gz, extracts and parses the file and returns the desired information. Since downloading and extraction this file is expensive, it saves the file and tries to re-use it is not older than 7 days. So while the first call of one of the above methods can take a few seconds, the result will appear almost instantaneously for the next week until the cache file expired. That s it, no rocket science but a convenient way to get popcon information from within python. The package python-popcon is available in Debian/Sid for a few days.

Can someone explain me the purpose of (KDE s) konsole s ability to split?
You can split horizontally or(!) vertically but the resulting terminals are just mirroring the activity of the first one. What is the usecase for that? Yakuake does splitting right. You can split several times horizontally and vertically and the resulting terminals are independent. You can also switch the focus of the terminals easily via keystrokes which makes yakuake an invaluable tool when working on the terminal under KDE. So what s the point of konsole s variant of splitting?

Hello fellow developers, The summer is over but I m happy to announce that this year s Summer of Code at Debian has been better than ever! This is indeed the 4th time we had the privilege of participating in the Google Summer of Code and each year has been a little different. This year, 8 of our 10 students succeeded in our (very strict!) final evaluations, but we have reasons to believe that they will translate into more long-term developers than ever, all thank to you. The highlight this year has been getting almost all of our students at DebConf10. Thanks again this year to generous Travel Grants from the Google Open Source Team, we managed to fly in 7 of our students (up from 3!). You certainly saw them, presenting during DebianDay, hacking on the grass of Columbia, hacking^Wcheering our Debian Project Leader throwing the inaugural pitch of a professional baseball game or hacking^Wsun-tanning on the tr s kitsch Coney Island beach. Before I give the keyboard to our Students, I d like to tell you that it will be the pleasure and honor of Obey Arthur Liu (yours truly, as Administrator) and Bastian Venthur (as Mentor) to represent Debian at the Summer of Code 2010 Mentors Summit on 23-24 October 2010, at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Like last year, we expect many other DDs to be present under other hats. We will be having 2 days of unconference on GSoC and free software related topics. We all look forward to reporting from California on Planet and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o! All of our students had a wonderful experience, even if they couldn t come to DebConf, that is best shared in their own voice, so without further ado, our successful projects: Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt apt-get install MultiArch does mostly work now as most code is already merged in squeeze, but if not complain about us at deity@l.d.o! Still, a lot left on the todo list not only in APT so let us all add MultiArch again to the Release Goals and work hard on squeezing it into wheezy. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Hello, I m David Wendt, and I went to Debconf10 to learn more about the development side of Debian. Having used it since the 9th grade, I ve been intimately familiar with many of Debian s internals. However, I wanted to see the developers and other Debian users. At DebConf, I was able to see a variety of talks from Debian and Ubuntu developers. I also got to meet with my mentor as well as the maintainer of Debbugs. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont Config::Model is now capable of manipulating files using shorter and easier to write models. Thanks to that, packagers may start experiment with creating upgrade models. Further work is needed to support more complicated config files Dominique Dumont is working on DEP-5 parser, I ll shortly start working on a cupsd config file parser.
The best thing about DebConf10 is that every person I talked with knew what I was doing. I had a mission to get some feedback on my project. Everybody liked the idea of making upgrades less cumbersome. On the other side, it was my first visit to United States, so I decided to go on a daytrip on my own (instead of staying inside the building, despite heat warnings). I had a chance to visit many interesting places like Ground Zero, the UN headquarters, Grand Central Terminal, Times square and Rockefeller Center that was a great experience. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault Debconf10 was great! Among other people working on the installer, I met Aur lien Jarno from the Debian/kFreeBSD team and we worked together on a cross-platform busybox package. Besides, the talks were very interesting and I ve filled my TODO-list for the year.
For instance I learned about the Jigsaw project of OpenJDK, and how Debian would be the ideal platform to experiment with it. More generally, some people think Debian could push Java 7 forward and I d like to see this happen. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert I must say that it was great time for me in NY, I ve met and talked and coded with people from ftp-master team like Torsten Werner who helped me to push the project a bit further and with some other people who were looking forward to release of the tool which I hope they will use quite soon. Everybody interested, everybody excited, really cool place and time. And I can t forget the Coney Island beach and stuff, lot of fun, lot of sun;) Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Currently, development branches support full features searching, viewing extended package s informations, performing cache and packages operations. Code and GUI still require a lot of work which will be continued. Informations about further progress could be found on aptitude mailing list and repository rss channel. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin For me, DebConf 10 started at the airport, where Sylvestre Ledru (whom I didn t know of before) was wearing a GSoC 2007 t-shirt, that is, given the circumstances, almost equivalent to say I m a hacker, I m going to DebConf 10 .
I ve spent my time at the conference attending various talks, hacking, meeting DDs and other hackers (amongst others, my co-mentor Per Andersson, Paul Wise, Julien Cristau, Christian Perrier, Cyril Brulebois, Martin Michlmayr, Colin Watson and Otavio Salvadores who I have to thank for his patience while dealing with my questions), chatting, cross-signing keys, rushing to finish eating before 7pm, getting sunburnt, sightseeing (thanks, Arthur, for the lightning-fast tour of Manhattan!), and so on. Debian Developers and community, we count on you. See you next year! (cross-posted to debian-devel-announce@l.d.o and soc-coordination@l.a.d.o)

17 years I guess the puberty is almost a thing of the past and you re getting all grown up and stuff. You certainly changed for the better in the last years. Ok, a few rough edges here and there but overall a quite impressive development. You re already forking regularly and even your offspring is quite handsome. No wonders with those genes if you ask me. Thanks to Ian for starting probably the best Linux distribution out there. I hope you are proud of what you ve started (I certainly was when I met you two years ago) and someone is killing a few beers with you right now. Also big thanks to all the Debian Developers, Maintainers and contributors for making Debian what it is today. Keep up the good work!

DebConf was really an awesome conference. I m happy that I have finally met so many of the fellow Debian people I only knew from the mailing lists or planet. There where lot s of interesting talks, the hacklabs where always busy, and the overall atmosphere was very good. Now that I m back in Berlin, I m already missing it I m by the way also missing my luggage which is apparently still at the JFK airport. This was my first DebConf, but definitively not my last. I encourage people who never made it to DebConf: Get your butt up and register for the next conference! You don t know what you re missing. If money is an issue: there is a sponsoring which you can apply for and chances are good that you ll get at least partially sponsored. Big thanks to all the volunteers who helped to organize and run this conference and to SPI for sponsoring my trip, food and accommodation! I m looking forward seeing some of you again in three weeks at Steve s place in Cambridge for a nice BBQ and the rest of you next year in Bosnia and Herzegovina!

Second day in the big city and after the obligatory pancakes, scrambled eggs and bacon breakfast, I spend almost the entire day in the hacklab fixing the documentation for the debbugs SOAP interface. Thanks to Don I think I finally have the get_status part at an accurate state. Accordingly I was very busy making changes in python-debianbts which uses the SOAP interface to query the BTS. Some Bugreport attributes disappeared, others got their data type fixed, Unittests where added and docstrings updated. Finally I uploaded the new version to unstable. Between that mess I met a lot of nice people, and heard a talk whose slides consisted almost entirely of lolcat images which was of course awesome! I definitively have to try that in one of my next scientific talks. Hopefully tomorrow I ll find some time to actually prepare my talk.

Dear lazyweb or someone who is already in NY, do I have to bring my own bed linen and towels or are they provided by Furnald? I couldn t find the information on the website. I guess I have to bring that stuff since it is not really a hotel, right?

Awesome! Thanks to all the sponsors and all the people helping to organize this year s DebConf for making it happen! See you soon in New York City!

Today I received a mail from the DebConf Travel Sponsorship Team and they informed me that I may get partially (or fully) sponsored. Ok that s a bit vague for now, but that also means that I may come to Debconf 10 yeah! I also applied for this Debconf Newbies thingy, as this will be the first DebConf for me, but unfortunately there where too many applicants and not enough money and they had to decline my request.

This is freakin awesome! It is now possible to checkout from- and commit to git repositories on github with SVN. This just made my day. This could also mean that this SVN support may later be added into official git (like the CVS emulation), allowing the early movers to use git also on the repository side while staying backwards compatible with the rest who is still using SVN on the client side. Currently it s more the other way round, the wherever SVN is used, git users have to resort to git-svn.

Dear Lazyweb, does anyone know how to run gnome applets in KDE? I m talking about byzanz which is a software to record your desktop in an animated gif, ogg or Flash format. It provides a command line and a gnome applet, which apparently only works under Gnome. Is there a workaround to make gnome applets run under KDE as well?