"Debian developer Eric Dorland confirmed to internetnews.com that Debian will re-name Firefox and that the re-naming process could be completed as soon as next week." (in Firefox Not Really Free? [Sean Michael Kerner], tip to /Jonas) Another hat-tip to /Jonas for this thought-provoking suggestion: are MozCorp deliberately trying to mimic X-Oz's role in the XFree86 farce?

With all the GR fever going on right now, I thought I would join the fray. I've upgraded to a paid LJ account so I could post a poll. So I've picked what I think are the best suggestions for Firefox's new name from my previous blog entry. Please pick your favorite:



Vote early, vote often!

Note: I reserve the right to pass the results through my Diebold voting machine to "correct" the outcome if necessary.

If everyone thought that accepting bogus obligations just to be allowed to name something by it&aposs name, take a look at Eric Dorland&aposs blog or directly into the new problems.

My vote for this: Call it firesomething or mffbrowser or some other free name once and forall. With some luck somebody will then also write a nice patch to have a common Debian ca-certificate handling. (I&aposm sick of having to do anything twice, especially if it includes writing mozilla extensions adding a ca-certificate every time a user loads its config as I&aposm ignorant in all this stuff to know any better way). Having things as similar as possible in different environments is a nice goal, but having working solutions and the right to implement working solutions is much more important...

Phoenix, that was a cool name. Damn you PhoenixBIOS. Firebird was good, and who needs another database anyway? Mozilla Firefox is a cute name, with a cute logo. A logo we can't use. Oh wait, we can't use the name either?

So the Mozilla Corporation has asked us to stop using the name "Firefox" in our version of Firefox, unless we use the fox on a globe logo. We can't use the logo because its copyright license is not free. Even if somehow we could do this, they want to vet every patch we apply before we release a package called Firefox containing it.

This puts us in a very difficult position. If there is no traction on the Mozilla side and Debian stands firm on the freeness of non-program files, I don't really see anyway around having to rename Firefox. So what should this new name be? Preferably something clever, nice sounding and not trademarked. I'd like it to be something other distributions can use if they're so inclined. And while Iceweasel is cute, and I enjoy the parody, I'm not sure it has enough sex appeal. Suggestions welcome.

New mozilla-firefox packages to fix JavaScript regressions (#385452 and #385248) that caused 1.0.4-2sarge10 to crash when using Google Maps.

Please test these packages so they can swiftly be added to the security archive.

So I installed Ubuntu for the very first time a couple of days ago. I was doing for the niece of a coworker, who is 11 years old and French speaking. So I burned a copy of Dapper and booted it up on the old HP computer I was installing onto. The whole Live CD/Install CD approach is a good one, I hope the debian-installer team can adopt a similar approach post-etch.

I was a bit unhappy that there were no LVM options in the partition tool, but since the target user is more of a neophyte I suppose this makes sense. For that perspective the installer is a success, it asked very few questions and in the end presented me with a very nice, working system. I did the install in French and did notice a few buttons that still seemed to be in English and also that after rebooting the boot messages were still in English. I guess that shouldn't be surprising considering that I've never seen a init script that was translated. This should be possible with gettext right? I wonder why I've never heard anyone clamoring for this.

So the final result is nice and surprising responsive on this old machine. It had all the software an average computer user needs: web browser, email, office suite. The interface is pleasingly integrated. None of this is enough to sway me away from Debian, but it does seem like a nicer distro for a non-technically savvy user.

I've been hiccuping all morning. Someone please kill me or suggest a cure.

I'm a little behind having seen my last film on Monday, but here we go:

• Arthouse Ultraman ( ): Four episodes of the latest incarnation of Ultraman (think Superman meets Power Rangers), directed by guest directors, including two by Takashi Miike. It's pretty childish show, but these episodes kept me pretty entertained. I doubt the show would in general though.
• The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai ( ): This movie was basically a soft-core porn flick. When it wasn't being that, it was just being completely strange and random.
• The iDol & Sukeban Boy ( ): Some shortish films that weren't that entertaining. Sukeban Boy was mostly an excuse for toplessness. The iDol was only interesting in that it was written and directed by a westerner.
• Train Man ( ): A nerd who finds true love by asking for advice on message boards, apparently inspired by true events. It was a nice story, but the crowd was relating to it a little too much.
• Synesthesia ( ): An interesting concept of people with a condition where there senses are blended, eg you can see sounds, or hear colors. The ending drags too much and is completely confusing and incomprehensible.
• The Five Venoms: Pretty standard Kung-Fu movie plot, but fun action, with those classic animal styles that are silly but somehow still cool. I'll try to find the sequel.
• The Great Yokai War ( ): A child's movie by Takashi Miike, what could be better? This was definitely a kids movie, but it had enough sophisticated humor to keep me interested. Fun movie.
• Executive Koala ( ): A very strange movie with a man-sized koala as an executive, with a world mostly inhabited by humans but with the occasional giant animal person. Bizarre twists and turns of psychology and homicidal koala behavior. A weird one, but somehow compelling.
• Re-Cycle: Had the fortunate chance to see this with the lovely ndusart. An amazing, visually stunning movie by the Pang Brothers. A writer gets sucked into a strange world of her own creation. It's a bit of horror, drama and suspense rolled into one. Highly recommended.

So I've spent the last 8 days at Fantasia, neglecting friends, family, my health and Debian work. Probably a good time to look back at what I've seen so the memories don't melt away has they have other years.

• The Descent: A British horror flick, about 6 female spelunkers. I was sold right there. It had a very satisfying amount of suspense, and overall was a lot of fun. The monsters do lose some of their scariness once you start to see them unfortunately.
• Seven Swords: A fairly standard group of amazing warriors fight an evil army. It was pretty average, drags a bit. The villain "Fire Wind" was entertaining.
• Tokyo Zombie ( ): A Japanese zombie spoof starring Tadanobu Asano sporting an afro. It had some pretty good laughs, but the last half kind of drags.
• A Bittersweet Life: A Korean gangster revenge flick. Pretty standard sort of story but well executed. Very enjoyable.
• Death Trance: Stars Steven Seagal's son. Enough said. Avoid at all costs.
• My Scary Girl: A Korean romantic comedy about a 30 year old virgin getting together with a cute killer. Some good laughs, the ending is a bit disapointing.
• Citizen Dog: An excellent Thai film reminiscent of Am lie. They showed a reel of the director's Thai TV commercials before the film which were good fun as well.
• A Chinese Tall Story: An extremely random Chinese big budget movie. Not very entertaining and somewhat puzzling (Why did the Buddha have crystal earmuffs?).
• Funky Forest: the First Contact ( : the First Contact): This was a totally messed up movie, full of short vignettes, by a someone who clearly liked Naked Lunch. I enjoyed it, but that probably means I have severe mental problems.
• Lost In Wu Song: A very pleasant low budget Chinese movie about a starry-eyed dreamer trying to make a movie about Wu Song. Interesting blend of the difficulties of getting the movie made with reveries about Wu Song.
• Murder, Take One: A cop movie crossed with reality TV, Korean style. Couldn't really capture my interest.
• The Art of Fighting: Another Korean one, this time about a kid training to get back at school bullies, mostly by fighting dirty. It was fun, the old tough guy character being pretty cool.
• Ils (Them): A French horror movie about a couple in Romania and there house being invaded by a gang of... well I won't ruin it. Really had me on the edge of my seat, once it gets going the suspense doesn't let up. Apparently inspired by true events.
• Strange Circus ( ): This one was packed with people. The story is a little difficult to explain, but basically it's about a mother and daughter who suffer sexual and physical abuse, and both lose there minds over it. Very disturbing imagery and fairly graphic sex scenes. A bit hard to follow in the beginning and lots of twists and turns throughout but comes together nicely in the end I thought. Probably my favorite of the festival so far.
• God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand ( ): I actually missed this one because I didn't pay enough attention to what time it was playing. Although I did see the first ten minutes of it when I went to see Tokyo Zombie because of a tape screw up. I don't think I missed much.

So only 8 movies left to see. So far it's been pretty good.

Last night I went to Sakura Gardens to celebrate the end of our class. The food was good, I don't think they do the best sushi, but the other food is excellent. I also successfully avoided any karaoke singing.

Also, Fantasia 2006 is starting next week. So I'll soon be spending way to much time sitting in a movie theater. Summer in Montr al is great.

After my despondant post the other day, Alexander Sack came through again with patches for the Bookmark regression. Please test them! If I don't get any negative feedback I'm sending this on to the security team. Positive feedback is also encouraged, just so I know that people care :)

With mozilla.org stopping official security support for the 1.0.x branch a mere 6 months after the release of 1.5 is really starting to cause pain. I can understand wanting to move on to the new thing, but ending it so quickly really makes it hard for distributions with long support cycles. Alexander Sack worked very hard backporting most of the fixes into sarge. Unfortunately, it looks like one of the patches breaks submenus in Bookmarks menu.

So what do we do? Announce discontinuation of security support? Give up and ship 1.5 as other distros have done? Many users might welcome the latter, but the the ones who count on the stability of stable might not be so pleased.

Users of sarge, please try these new mozilla-firefox packages, that contains backports of the security fixes from Firefox 1.5.0.4 (with some small exceptions). There are a rather large amount of fixes in there, so please try it and report any breakage.

I'm terrible at the whole blogging thing, I've been back for two weeks and haven't found the time to summarize my time at DebConf. I had an excellent time. I met a lot of great people and even found a squash partner for the next DebConf. It was really quite unforgettable, so thanks to everyone involved.

Hanging out with sfllaw there, I was exposed to a lot more Ubuntu-esque things that I really had before. Some people there were quite unhappy about Ubuntu. To me, it's just not really that interesting, one because I don't see it as being substantially better or different from Debian and two because it looser stand on freedom. But hey, this is free software, people seem to like it, and I'm glad to see something related to Debian getting money and attention, rather than say RedHat or SUSE. I think a lot of developers would be happier with Ubuntu if it was just easier to ignore.

Then there was that dinner, and the events surrounding it. While I and many others won't miss Ted, I don't think he was treated at all fairly. Being thrown out in the middle of conference when seemly he did nothing wrong there was not very civil. If people could not stand to be around him, they did not have to be around him. He could have just as easily been removed from the project after the conference was over.

Enough griping though. If I came away with anything from the conference, it was a renewed vigor to work on Debian. Now if only my schedule would permit it.

So Johannes (Johannes Berg perhaps?) gets a beverage, even though I figured it some hours before after wading through obscure mailing list posts. So for the record (aka Google), to enable the fn-key on last generation PowerBooks, you need to enable CONFIG_USB_HIDINPUT_POWERBOOK in your kernel. It's not enabled by default, but there's already a bug about it, so hopefully it will be fixed next release.

So a lot has been going on here at DebConf 6. Yesterday we spent a sun soaked day at Xochicalco. It was hot out, but not unbearable, and it was really interesting. Makes me want to see Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, even though I'll bet it will be crap. We also had a delicious late lunch at a local buffet. I think the key to their deliciousness was serving actual Mexican food, rather than the quasi-Western fare at the hotel. We also had the foreign liquor BoF, which had excellent representation from various countries. I want to go to Puerto Rico for Christmas. The night before sfllaw had the genius idea to get some tuna and feed the kittens running around the hotel complex. They fought tooth and claw for every scrap of the tuna, then proceeded to wrestle and play for our amusement. They were still afraid of us, but not so badly, and it was completely adorable. Pictures are up on sfllaw's Flickr stream. Before a small group of us had dinner at a small Argentinian steak house. It was fantastic, and put me a meat coma for the rest of the night. Earlier in the day I attended an interesting talk by Don Amstrong about the GPLv3. He helped clarify some questions I had on the optional components of the license and how to combine them. Very interesting, and it's nice that Debian is represented on committees helping draft the next draft. Tuesday I attended a couple of very interesting talks by Manoj relating to SELinux. He basically confirmed my suspicion that SELinux is really hard, but nonetheless worthwhile. I'll have to pick up O'Reilly's SELinux book and learn more. It looks likely it will be in the base install in some form or another for etch. Monday night's highlight was a discussion between madduck, sfllaw and I. We talked mostly about why people feel unhappy about Ubuntu and maybe some ways of fixing it. Hopefully this DebConf will help bring the two camps together more than before. I've also been killed in Assassins, after only killing my first victim. I also thank the gods that I brought my old Orinocco wireless card, because the Broadcom drivers for my PowerBook isn't happy with the wireless here. I could of sworn that thing was working at some point. The flaky Internet connectivity is frustrating, but I can tell the volunteers are fighting a hard battle against some tough limitations, so thanks for the hard work! PS: If anyone knows a good way to get the Fn-key with Page Up/Down working on a Aluminum PowerBook, a beverage of your choice is yours.

So I'm halfway through my 2nd full day here at DebConf 6. The trip over was fairly uneventful. Dorval Airport charges a fairly ridiculous amount for WiFi. Cost me $10 to surf for an hour. Such a ripoff. Meet Jimmy in Newark. A bit of a mad rush from the Mexico City airport to the bus station to catch the last bus to Oaxtepec. Mexico city is big (says Captain Obvious). Arrived at the resort after midnight, and was greeted by a nice gift bag and many developers, including one of my roomies for the week, sfllaw. There are wild cats everywhere on the resort! They're adorable, but a little heartbreaking. There's waterpark here too, need to try to find time for that. The swimming pool closes at 6pm, just around the time I'm most keen for a swim. Yesterday, the conference officially began. sfllaw, I and few others (including important spanish speakers), went into town for breakfast. I had a chorizo echilada, very nice and not sick yet. The talk level was fairly light, and sfllaw went to town again to get some beer, limes and water from town. The deposits on the beer bottles were almost the same as the price of the beer! sfllaw theorized that it was to discourage destroying the bottles. The day caught up with me in the evening and I fell asleep and almost missed dinner. Luckily we made it just in time. The conference food has been fairly good, and I can't argue with the price. The net connection seemed to have problems in the evening, I was feeling a mite anti-social and the previous 24 hours had caught up with me, so I totally crashed around 11. Today was some interesting talks, the most interesting being the Ubuntu Annual Report by Mark Shuttleworth. During the QA, a lot of the same objections seemed to be raised (LaunchPad non-freeness, passing back to Debian. The same soft answers were forthcoming. I mostly have no problem with Ubuntu, and think sometimes we're a bit whiny about them. This is free software, we can't compel anyone to do exactly what we want, nor do they owe us. I'm happy to get what help I do from them.

I just uploaded firefox 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.3-0bpo1 to backports.org this morning, because it fixed an important security related bug (see #364810). And boom... a few hours later, bug #365960 was filed. Of course, the backport is affected too. So, think twice before upgrading the firefox backport, I'm sure Eric Dorland and/or Mike Hommey (who are doing a great job maintaining a monster like firefox) are going to fix this in unstable soon. Update: 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.3-2 was uploaded to unstable, and the backport is already updated.

It's nearly 3am and I'm waiting for firefox 1.5.0.3 to finish building so I can upload it. This is what my life has come to. The strange thing is I like it.