This Clevo laptop is a new machine and like a lot of new machines, not all of its hardware has drivers in the current stable release of debian. Happily, there is a driver for its rtl8723ae wireless networking device in the later 3.8 Linux kernel versions. So it s just a case of installing the package called kernel-package and following the instructions in it, to make a new linux-image package with the latest drivers in it. One small thing which tripped me up is that you usually need to write make-kpkg rootcmd fakeroot initrd kernel-image now. I forgot the initrd option at first.

This is basically a link-post to the Debian Project Leader election email discussions on GMANE s blog-style interface to debian-vote. After only 3 days of the 21, there s already a pageful, so if I don t start collecting links now, I ll probably miss some. Right or wrong, I ve grouped these into three topics: The Job

1. Why do you think you are a good candidate for DPL (10 Mar 2013)
2. How do you plan to represent Debian externally? (10 Mar 2013)
3. about a DPL board (12 Mar 2013)
4. DPL term duration (12 Mar 2013)
5. Work balance and traveling (12 Mar 2013)
6. trying to do awesome and risking to fail (11 Mar 2013)
7. To Lucas: how do you plan to push your ideas (12 Mar 2013)
8. All candidates quotes for the press if you win (13 Mar 2013)

Money

1. using debian funds for Debian s hardware infrastru (12 Mar 2013)
2. Usage of Debian s Money (12 Mar 2013)
3. Debian s relationship with money and the economy (12 Mar 2013)

Project Management

1. getting new people to Debian (10 Mar 2013)
2. Free Software challenges and Debian role (11 Mar 2013)
3. Development and technical issues and challenges (10 Mar 2013)
4. Are there problematic infrastructure or processes in Debian? (12 Mar 2013)
5. to Moray: encourage teams to take interns (11 Mar 2013)

So, what do you think are the key points or differences? Leave me a comment, or get involved in the discussions. Campaigning ends and voting begins 30/31 March.

The constitution of the debian operating system project says things like consistent with the consensus of the opinions of the Developers at various points but doesn t say how strong a consensus or how the project will test for consensus. I think those were mistakes, breaking a couple of the conditions for consensus. Wikipedia s understanding of consensus is even worse. Wikipedia seems to treat consensus as a synonym for unanimity. Its testing methods allow an infinite loop to form where the casual observer can t differentiate between a controversial proposal and consensus. I think those were mistakes. These famous-but-imperfect implementations frequently lead to misdirected rants which seem to misunderstand consensus as requiring perpetual bikeshedding. Apache s implementation is rather better and it may surprise you to learn that our co-op is mostly run by consensus. There are two key differences which I feel makes consensus work for us: we ve set limits beforehand on some decisions where we need to act fast where not making a decision would usually be the same as making a bad decision and our methods of testing for consensus are better. We test for consensus with secret-at-vote-time-but-published-after straw polls, or using Crowd Wise by email. I summarise Crowd Wise as follows: gather all ideas plus option 0 (do nothing) if possible, carry out a de Borda (preference) voting round 1, merge/amend/consolidate ideas, voting round 2 if needed. It does still work better if participants put their ego aside a little and co-operate, but it does put limits on non-co-operators. Anyway, as described in Xana/ xana2/ bamamba/ Why Russ is wrong, debian isn t exactly using consensus much at the moment, anyway. Should we try to fix its bugs? Do you know other projects where consensus is working?

My trusty Asus seems to have succumbed to graphic fault. I got an OS-free Zoostorm as its replacement, to avoid paying the MS tax. Zoostorm is one brand that Clevo laptops are sold under. It was actually a Clevo 7872-9040/A built Jan 13. I installed Debian 6 on it. The download button was easy to spot on the front page, but I actually used mini.iso so I could use a smaller usb stick. The first larger stick I tried was a dud and I m not sure where other sticks went in the move. The base installation went fine and most things went well, but the wireless networking and sound required an upgrade, but more on that next tech post.

Interesting stuff is happening again and I m doing a bit of travelling where I m not driving much, so I can write some blog posts. If this train stops bouncing quite so much! I think most readers are interested in technology and collaborative work, so it makes sense to alternate those two themes most of the time. So that s what I ll aim for, probably a few posts each week for the next few weeks. Let me know in the comments or our co-op s contract form if there s anything in particular you d like us to cover, else I ll start with my recent experiences installing Debian 6 on a new laptop and the fun of running a business at tax return time.

With immediate effect, our co-op is now at: 384 Lynn Road, Setchey, Norfolk PE33 0PD Please send any official post there instead of Somerset or London, because the forwarding is slow and I expect it to miss a few items. Our telephone numbers and email addresses remain the same, of course. It s still best to use the contact form on our website.

Contrary to http://blog.einval.com/2012/11/13, I ve just been and voted (four times, or 2 2 one for me, one as a proxy) for a police and crime commissioner. I agree with much of what Steve writes and more besides. It s a very bad election. But I voted for three main reasons: Firstly, parties I don t like will get their core vote out anyway. If we don t turn put, the election becomes more about party structures, less the popular wish. Secondly, democracy is imperfect, but it s the best we ve got. I ve interacted with two appointed police authorities and they re rubbish and they re untouchable/unaccountable. Thirdly, I expect policing to be a hot topic here if the government do actually try to build the incinerator that 65,000 people/90+% voted against. Best try to get a non-gov commissioner now, I think. So that s why I ve voted and encouraged other members of our co-op to vote.

Sometimes I felt at home at Cooperatives United, like at the wonderful fringe dinner at Eighth Day last Thursday night. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed by the flood, like at the cooperative party workshop on Friday morning. The workshop addressed the key questions: why do we want cooperative politicians, what could they do and what are the needs and challenges facing them? Personally, I felt the first is obvious and the answer is all the second. It s both frustrating (few ask why other movements want to influence politicians) and reassuring (no taboo topics) that the first question is asked. There were many fascinating answers to the other two questions from around the world. As so often with workshops, few hard conclusions were reached, but I think some interesting conversations were started there, which we might hear again in the future. What would I call the top challenge? Persuading open and transparent co-op members to join the party. I ve written about my difficulty with joining political parties in the past, as some forms of collective responsibility are against my beliefs and I m not sure that joining a small party will help anyone much, but I think I ll take another look at the cooperative party, all the same. The picture above is of the Welney washes, some miles south-west of Lynn. It s a stunning wetland environment, and it surprises me every time the train crosses the floods, as it did on the way to Manchester. And yes, I ve shoehorned a picture I liked into this article!

I sometimes ask other co-ops and social enterprises to publish things as web pages, PDFs, ODFs or basically any standard format instead of Microsoft Word Doc files. Doc files have the practical problem that they look different even in different versions of Microsoft Word, but also, Microsoft is not a co-operative (a private-sector firm oft accused of bring a monopolist, in fact!), whereas PDF, ODF and so on are more co-operatively developed, so I feel that we should support the better alternatives. The usual first move is to PDFs. I don t like them as much as web pages (it s a file to download and open in an app or plugin, rather than something I can just read without interrupting my flow), but the process is basically the same. Just upload a PDF where you would have uploaded a Doc. Occasionally, I get a reply saying that PDF is no better than Word because Adobe are also a private-sector supplier and therefore not much different from Microsoft (not as big, though?), while doc files are an ISO standard too. I m careful to suggest using ISO PDFs rather than Adobe PDFs. Although PDF started with Adobe, it was given to an independent ISO process (currently co-chaired by someone from Microsoft, which amuses me) and so software to read it has been developed by a wide range of people, including our co-op in a small part. You can find some non-Adobe software for reading PDFs at http://pdfreaders.org there is also alternative PDF creation software, such as that built-in to libreoffice, but I don t know of a good similar listing for them. Microsoft have only given part of Doc (called Docx) to the ISO process and there is a limited range of other readers for it, which suffer the same different on every version problem as Word as far as I ve seen. There s also the added complication that Microsoft Office reportedly won t comply with the Strict standard before Office 2013 More widely, Microsoft are so un-cooperative that they don t seem to want to share a marketplace with anyone else and have been hauled in front of regulators numerous times for monopoly offences. They seem to be on their way there again. So Adobe is not great (does its best to continue marketing and extending PDF as if it had sole control), but Microsoft is much worse. ISO ODF and web pages are other possibilities. The ODF standards are mainly developed by the democratic non-profit Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, while web standards are mainly developed by an unincorporated trade consortium, the W3C. While they are not themselves co-operatives, co-operatives can be members of both of those. So, whatever the problem, please prefer to publish web pages, PDF or ODF files, rather than Microsoft Word Doc files.

So when I arrived on Thursday (ten minutes early despite a cancelled train, thanks to help from the cooperative fellow traveller mentioned last post), I was in time to go to a workshop on media cooperatives led by @theBoyler. It wasn t what I expected. It seemed to concentrate on the opportunity presented by the current awful state of news media companies in many countries and the technology-driven changes to their businesses. For example, WordPress is a viable way to start online first, then move into print later. There are already news co-ops in places where there would be no local news media. The challenge well be how to overcome what I d call spoiling or scorched earth tactics from departing media companies. Some local news media owners are looking for a way out. One obvious one is to turn a local title into a minor variation on a regional-or-worse service or publication, maybe by selling it to a bigger media business. That loses some audience but many will put up with it, so it avoids creating an obvious gap in the market for more truly local reporting. Much else was covered and the audience suggested tons of examples. I m not sure we reached many firm conclusions, but there seem quite a few examples to learn from (Morning Star, taz, ) and Dave Boyle s work is continuing

I m on my way back from Cooperatives United. I haven t quite posted as much as I planned (just a few microblogs/tweets) because the event was so much bigger and busier than I expected! So I m writing this on my (6 hour) journey home. We ve attended Congress before and it was nothing like that. I was expecting something maybe 50% larger than last time and this seemed more like 300%. I wonder if Cooperatives UK have some numbers Maybe it reflects the growing strength of the cooperative economy that they reported in the summer just gone. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised on the journey from Norfolk. I made a brief informal travellers co-op with an actor from Micawber Theatre company (tickets on sale now for shows in Ipswich and London) to overcome the challenge of East Midlands Trains. Unprompted by me, he blamed the shocking service on the big train businesses being unaccountable to passengers. Maybe that s it. Cooperatives are accountable and people are ready for more responsible post-capitalist businesses. That s why coops are doing well now and Cooperatives United was such a lively event. I ll write more tomorrow. Now if you ll excuse me, we ve got to get off and change carriages because East Midlands Trains couldn t be bothered to tell us the train divides at Nottingham until long after we boarded!

Credit Unions are financial co-operatives where a community s savings are used to fund other community borrowing and both savers and borrowers can become members. Thursday 18 October 2012 is International Credit Union Day, as well as being in the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives. This year s theme is Members Matter Most which was suggested from Ireland. In the UK, there will be events including one at Westminster with speeches from Damian Hind MP, Chair of All Party Parliamentary Group on Credit Unions and Simon Hughes MP, its Vice Chair. I m a member of my local credit union. I can pay in at my bank or any PayPoint and withdraw by bank transfer. If you re fed up with the fat cat plc bankers, there s no better time to Move Your Money in general and Find Your Credit Union (international visitors, start at WOCCU) in particular, is there?

So you ve got lots of shiny spam-detection software (not eyetests or similar rubbish) installed but are still getting some spam on your email and your website? Why aren t your spam detectors and preventative measures effective at dealing with it? Basically, the spam detectors are pretty effective, but it s a problem of scale. The underlying problem is that there s so much spam now something like 73% of email is spam just now (I suspect the web is worse). I expect much of the rest is legitimate robots too, like newsletters, automated billing, or notifications about social network activity. So, we want to trap the spam, while letting humans and good robots through. We can t use physical ability tests because there are both human spammers who are paid to spam trickier sites manually, and people like me who fail things like Google s human test because we use technology to overcome our physical limitations: there are now robots that are better than me at voice recognition or passing eyetests! We try to design websites so that the return on investment for spammers is too low (don t give untrusted users outgoing links automatically, basically). Even so, when we re using some popular software like WordPress, our site settings don t give them a return, but most stupid automatic spammers don t bother to check and still have a go. After that, the main things we re trying are rules of thumb to trap spammers (which is usually enough to filter out 90% or so) and to group sites together in informal co-operative spam-fighting networks like blogspam.net, so that once a spammer is spotted, they should get blocked on lots of sites (which blocks a bit over half of the remaining 10%). Sadly, the rest gets shown to humans for decision. Real comments are so few and far between now that we really don t want to risk turning real people away and killing discussions. We used to go after spammers who got shown to humans, but there are now too many spammers and too many service providers who won t kick spammers off their services: the spammers pay them and we don t: all we could do was waste their money in support, so they stopped offering any support to non-customers. Is that a flaw in the co-operative nature of the Internet? Can we overcome it? Wish I knew

Thank you to the co-operative group Cambridge and East Anglia area for electing me as their member delegate to the national half-yearly meeting and annual general meeting. Please tell me what you d like me to do (such as comment here or there s a private contact form on my website), else I ll do what seems best at the time. Thanks also to our co-op for allowing me the time to do this and for helping with the process. Co-ops do different.

Here s a summary of what happened at this conference. Opening address. Keynote from Nick Hurd MP, @minforcivsoc. Lot less money around. Called canals and rivers trust the biggest social enterprise. Blames lack of large social enterprises on culture, leadership and access to capital. First Big Society Capital investments announced tomorrow. Questions (and responses) about what had changed in commissioning (determination?), something about accountability in health I think but I didn t hear (more public scrutiny), other models besides worker-led (gov is agnostic, but that s just the type of mutuals so far), and capital renewal (gov is challenging the banks with Big Society Bank). This is going to get a bit long, so click through to our site to read what the other the speakers had to say and what that block of flats in the picture has to do with it Still here? Good! Harriet Hounsell from John Lewis Partnership was next. What s the Right level of profit? Structure of the partnership. The registry seems like the member services function and a bit more. Partner suggestions make a real difference. Beliefs have been tested. Recession hit us. Vivian Woodall, the co-operative phone, back to how it started. He knew people working for NGOs with high international phone bills. Bulk buy. Solid steady growth. Paid all tax. Living our cooperative values. Employee council and profit-shared. Adoption of new brand. Questions to both on redundancies (debate openly, try to redeploy, ultimately division of responsibilities: managers manage staff levels, not members), and being rejected as too small to help other social enterprises (ask why? Try local level instead of head office?), plus praise for John Lewis. Then there was coffee, workshops, lunch, workshops and coffee. I don t think I should report all of that, so a quick comment on the venue at Anglia Ruskin Uni Cambridge: is the Lord Ashcroft it s named after the same one who said it was legal to attack Iraq? Anyway Based on the workshops, I don t think our co-op will do SROI accounting any time soon (needs too much people time) and I m little the wiser on leadership. Some people are intrigued by collective management and cooperative working, though. The closing keynote was Wayne Hemingway, formerly of Red or Dead and now of Hemingway Design. He gave a quick history of himself and of those two enterprises and a bit of an entertaining ramble around. He seemed very much from the business end and how to use business to benefit society, but I ve not really looked at his companies before. I probably should do, as they ve a regeneration project in Lynn (pictured: before Wayne). Then it was the closing address, the thanks (yes, thanks to the workers and sponsors) and then time to head for the exit. It s a shame that some people who made good points during the keynotes (coop party!) left quickly instead of staying to chat.

Well this isn t Edinburgh. This is London calling. More from kohacon later. Today I was at OKFN s bibliohack . There were several interesting projects there and it was a good opportunity to get back into coding, metadata and APIs after thinking about conference practicalities for too long. BibSoup and its biblioserver software was my chosen hack. I didn t really make the most of it because I had to workaround broken wifi drivers that I hadn t noticed before, and I had to fix a broken java install that I did know about. BibSoup is mostly python and I think web.py, but it uses elasticsearch which is java. Oh and it s python 2.7 with virtualenv which is, erm, entertaining to get working on debian 6.0, as far as I can tell: I installed python2.7 from testing, backport python-virtualenv and I don t think anything broke. The approach to a hackfest was very different to kohacon s. Whereas people at kohacon hackfest were gathered around tables, moving to the talks table(s) when there was a talk they wanted, bibliohack started off classroom-style and didn t gather into workgroups until after coffee. The so-called non-coders were shunted off elsewhere after the welcome to do I-don t-know-what (maybe Library Co-op will write about it) and weren t seen again until the day s end. There were some nudging comments about being able to hack late into the night, which I m not sure is healthy if you ve done a full day. I left feeling a bit unsettled and disconnected from reality, although I got what I wanted from it playing with some new tech that we can maybe do good things with: thanks OKFN!

Probably by the time you read this, I ll be on the road to kohacon12. It s been a fun week or so with the final arrangements on top of our other planned work and some unexpected work too, but I think we ve done enough and it will all come together. (There are still a few places left if you d like to register, but not lots.) The most nerve-wracking bit has been the sponsorship. Kohacons are free to attend and funded entirely by sponsors, which is great in so many ways. It s a bit scary for the host organisation(s), but I think the community has helped so much that it ll break even. We won t know for sure until the final reckoning in a month or so. One unneeded worry was Paypal freezing our account for a couple of weeks and sending us contradictory and absurd demands for information. Why isn t there an easier way to get money out of the USA (and Australia and NZ, actually) that isn t either slow (cheques) or expensive (wire)? Once again, I m left feeling that banks are being a big problem for business. The best bit has been the spirit of the volunteers. Our co-op couldn t have done this without them. Some of them have gone a really long way to help metaphorically, bailing us out while Paypal was chewing up our time, and sometimes physically, flying around the world I ll be raising a glass to all of them, whether they re in Edinburgh or not. So, next update should be from Edinburgh!

Stop using CAPTCHAs. It s time to switch to DLT: Design, Limit and Trapdoor.

[a certain website] has the evil bad wrong Google reCaptcha on the edit page to stop disabled users, so screw it. Google s reCaptcha seems to be spreading again, obstructing more people when accessing more websites. Is there a reason for that? The re in reCaptcha stands for replace with real anti-spam, please!

I wrote the above about two years ago and it s not getting any better. I ve written similar things over the last ten years, as have many others, and I ve always sought to avoid using physical ability tests as a way to cut down spammers. Why do people keep reaching for the reCaptcha non-captcha or things that use similar bad eyetests like Mollom? So most online messages may be spam, but those physical ability tests do nothing to test for spam. They re trying to detect computer submissions (the TCHA in CAPTCHA is meant to be Telling Computers and Humans Apart), but that s really bad when the computer is helping someone with a disability to access the internet. People from the home of the CAPTCHA describe access for sight and hearing-impaired users as an important open problem for the project (Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum and John Langford. Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically. In Communications of the ACM). Until that problem is closed, CAPTCHAs should be considered defective and removed whenever possible. What webmasters should do instead is DLT:

1. Design it well: Set up sites so the spammers cannot get a quick win in the first place. Configure permissions and things like that so people have to do some work before they are trusted to post links. This is similar to the basic theory behind my Open Activism paper Fighting in the Shadows. This is much easier to do if the system is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), too.
2. Limit the damage: include rate limits to stop one person causing you lots of work: even with computer-assistance, few people need to post 10 forum messages every minute. Join up in co-operative anti-spam networks like blogspam.net so if they hurt you, others can see them coming. Again, it s easier to hook into a network if you re using FOSS.
3. Trapdoor: keep a way for people to contact you if they are really blocked by your design decisions and limitation and keep a way to exempt them from the limits if needed. Make it welcoming because disabled users are tired of reporting barriers to webmasters who don t care and will never fix the web. A good multi-step eyetest-free contact form is a basic way to do this.

Have you tried this? Have your experiences been as good as our co-op s? Are there sites you don t think it would work for? A comments form is on the original of this article, as ever.

Voting is open in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2012 So now I need to figure out who to vote for. This year I didn t take part in the discussions (all my spare time was bought, basically). The platforms are linked from the Debian Project Leader Elections 2012 page above and the key discussions were:

• Questions to all candidates
  • discouraging discussion styles any cure? I think this is vital. I like Gergely s answer best, but there s not much between his and Wouter s. I m not sure about Stefano s.
  • More votes in Debian? Any idea for improvement? Another vital issue to me, as democracy is a point of principle for me and our co-op. Wouter s answer sucked and there s not much to choose between the others.
  • Finding sponsors for Debian
  • Raising money for Debian I didn t feel that any candidate distinguished themselves on this or the previous question. No financial revolution looks likely.
  • About debian-companies Wouter s answer is pretty much identical to my view so I m disappointed he won t interfere if elected.
  • how informed should a DPL be? I ve a slight preference for Gergely s answer, but all are good again.
  • Debian s trademarks and logos, and their terms of use. Sadly, I suspect this is most likely to divide three good candidates for me (reads) or not. Basically the same positions, with Gergely expressing interest in delegating it to Stefano to finish what s been started.
  • Question to all candidates: In eight years Seems only Stefano has a vision?
• Questions to some candidates
  • Gergely and Wouter: on the need of becoming a DPL It seems they mainly want the freedom and a few style changes, but I feel Wouter makes a bit of a pig s ear of this discussion, seemingly insulting Stefano at one point and even defending the broken Mail-Followup-To because it would help him use reply-all for everything.
  • Gergely and Wouter: the level of independence from other distributions It seems that both want to decide first but share more if we reach the same decision as others.
  • Wouter and Gergely: software monopoly vs diversity both seem pro-choice, as long as it s maintainable.
• Questions to one candidate
  • Stefano Zacchiroli: What would you do different no big changes.
  • DPL practicing
  • Gergely Nagy: enough packaging manpower? This becomes about reforming the mentor/sponsor system, which I feel is needed.
  • Gergely Nagy: how will you search for talent and passion has more good ideas on similar themes.
  • Gergely Nagy: Disappearing? No, won t happen, based on experience.

Thanks to everyone who asked these great questions. So, what do you think?

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (384.14 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dpkg and multiarch The month started with a decision of the technical committee which allowed me to proceed with an upload of a multiarch dpkg even if Guillem had not yet finished his review (and related changes). Given this decision, Guillem made the experimental upload himself. I announced the availability of this test version and invited people to test it. This lead to new discussions on debian-devel. We learned in those discussions that Guillem changed his mind about the possibility of sharing (identical) files between multiple Multi-Arch: same packages, and that he dropped that feature. But if this point of the multiarch design had been reverted, it would mean that we had to update again all library packages which had already been updated for multi-arch. The discussions mostly stalled at this point with a final note of Guillem explaining that there was a tension between convenience and doing the right things every time that we discuss far-reaching changes. After a few weeks (and a helpful summary from Russ Allbery), Guillem said that he remained unconvinced but that he put back the feature. He also announced that he s close to having completed the work and that he would push the remaining parts of the multiarch branch to master this week (with the 1.16.2 upload planned next week). That s it for the summary. Obviously I participated in the discussions but I didn t do much besides this I have a mandate to upload a multiarch dpkg to sid but I did not want to make use of it while those discussions remained pretty unconclusive. Also Guillem made it pretty clear that the multiarch implementation was buggy , not right and not finished and that he had reworked code fixing at least some of the issues since he never shared that work in progress, I also had no way to help even just by reviewing what he s doing. We also got a few multiarch bug reports, but I couldn t care to get them fixed since Guillem clearly held a lock on the codebase having done many private changes it s not quite like this that I expect to collaborate on a free software project but life is full of surprises! I ll be relieved once this story is over. In the mean time, I have added one new thing on my TODO list since I made a proposal to handle bin-nmu changelogs and it s something that could also fix #440094. Misc dpkg stuff After a discussion with Guillem, we agreed that copyright notices should only appear in the sources and not in manual pages or --version output, both of which are translated and cause useless work to translators when updated. Guillem already had some code to do it for --version strings, and I took care of the changes for the manual pages. I merged some minor documentation updates, fixed a bug with a missing manpage. Later I discovered that some recent changes lead to the loss of all the translated manual pages. I suggested an improvement to dh_installman to fix this (and even prepared a patch). In the end, Guillem opted for another way of installing translated manual pages. Triggered by a discussion on debian-devel, I added a new entry to my TODO list: implementing dpkg-maintscript-helper rm_conffile_if_owner to deal with the case where a conffile is taken over by another package which might (or might not) be installed. Misc packaging At the start of the month, I packaged quilt 0.51. The number of Debian specific patches is slowly getting down. With version 0.51, we dropped 5 patches and introduced a new one. Later in the month I submitted 4 supplementary patches upstream which have been accepted for version 0.60. This new version (just released, I will package it soon) is an important milestone since it s the first version without any C code (Debian had this for a long time but we were carrying an intrusive patch for this). Upstream developer Jean Delvare worked on this and based his work on our patch, but he went further to make it much more efficient. Besides quilt, I also uploaded dh-linktree 0.2 (minor doc update), sql-ledger 2.8.36 (new upstream version), logidee-tools 1.2.12 (minor fixes) and publican 2.8-2 (to fix release critical bug #660795). Debian Consultants The Debian Project Leader is working on federating Debian Companies. As the owner of Freexian SARL, I was highly interested in it since Freexian contributes to Debian, offers support for Debian and has a strategic interest in Debian . There s only one problem, you need to have at least 2 Debian developers on staff but I have no employees (it s me only). I tried to argue that I have already worked with multiple Debian developers (as contractors) when projects were too big for me alone (or when I did not have enough time). Alas this argument was not accepted. Instead, and since our fearless leader is never afraid to propose compromises, he suggested me (and MJ Ray who argued something similar than me) to try to bring life to the Debian Consultants list which (in his mind) would be more appropriate for one-man companies like mine. I accepted to help animate the list, and on his side, he s going to promote both the Debian Companies and the Debian Consultants lists. In any case, the list has seen some traffic lately and you re encouraged to join if you re a freelancer offering services around Debian. The most promising thing is that James Bromberger offered to implement a real database of consultants instead of the current static page. Book update We made quite some progress this month. There s only one chapter left to translate. I thus decided to start with proofreading. I made a call for volunteers and I submitted one (different) chapter to 5 proofreaders. The liberation campaign made a nice leap forwards thanks to good coverage on barrapunto.com. We have reached 80% while we were only at 72% at the start of the month (thanks to the 113 new supporters!). There s thus less than 5000 EUR to raise before the book gets published under a free license. Looking at the progression in the past months, this is unlikely to be completed on time for the release of the book in April. It would be nice though so please share the news around you. Speaking of the book s release, I m slowly preparing it. Translating docbook files is not enough, I must be able to generate HTML, ePub and PDF versions of the book. I m using Publican for most formats, but for the PDF version Publican is moving away of fop and the replacement (webkit-based) is far from being satisfactory to generate a book ready for print. So I plan to use dblatex and get Publican to support dblatex as a backend. I have hired Beno t Guillon, the upstream author of dblatex, to fix some annoying bugs and to improve it to suit my needs for the book (some results are already in the upstream CVS repository). I m also working with a professional book designer to get a nice design. I have also started to look for a Python Django developer to build the website that I will use to commercialize the book. The website will have a larger goal than just this though ( helping to fund free software developers ) but in free software it s always good to start with your own case. Hopefully everything will be ready in April. I m working hard to meet that deadline (you might have noticed that my blog has been relatively quiet in the last month ). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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