Next Saturday a group of more than 20 women that work with Free Software in Argentina and Uruguay will gather to speak at a Free Software event in Buenos Aires, called Software Libre, Pasi n de Mujeres. It's your typical Free Software event, with talks related to the philosophy of Free Software and the Free Culture in general, and also technical talks related to using and developing Free Software. With one important difference: all the speakers will be women. This might sound shocking to some people and normal stuff to some others, but the reaction created by the call for talks of this event was definitely not something I expected. Women from all over the country (and many also from other Latin American countries) have contacted us, to tell us about what they do in their daily lives with Free Software and how they would like to share their work with others. The event is open for both men and women to attend, however, of the more than a 100 people that have already pre-registered, more than half are women. A ratio that is more than amazing when you have been to a Free Software event before. I think that the fact that all the speakers are women is really encouraging for many women to attend, who otherwise wouldn't. Debian will be sponsoring the event, by paying the bus tickets of the speakers that come from the whole country, which is a great help in making this event a big success. I really expect the event to be a fantastic opportunity for the women in our country to finally show all the great work they are doing... I'm very excited about it :) PS: Somehow, I screwed up Planet Debian, filling it with old posts. I'm sorry! :-\

After reading Christian's post about the new ISO 639-3, I thought about the "what is the country in the world which as the highest number of languages listed in ISO 639-3" question, and thought, "It must be India or China", and sure enough they both have a high language count (428 and 236 respectively). However, after clicking around a while, I found out that Nigeria has 510 languages. I thought I had found the highest one for quite a while, until I got to Indonesia, which has 742 languages, and I thought "it's not fair, that's much more than just a country, it's a huge group of islands". Not having learned my lesson, I was quite astonished when I finally found out that the country with the highest number of languages is Papua New Guinea, a neighboring group of islands (although not so big as Indonesia), with 830 languages! In Europe, the coutry with the highest number is Turkey (36), followed by Italy (33) and France (32). It looks like Europe has gone a long way after that stupid Babel incident :). In America, I thought Argentina would be quite up in the list, since we do have a lot of native groups, but it turns out we only have 27 languages and we are on the 9th place. The country with the most languages is Mexico (298), then USA (238), then Brazil (235). And, after all that clicking around the site, I found a very interesting map, that has one red dot per language in the primary location of each living language. It's quite amazing to see the big red New Guinea island. I wonder what happened there that led to the creation of that many languages.

Finally, after more than a year of preparation, and six months of very very hard work, DebConf8 has come and gone. Even if I'm not yet completely recovered from all that stress, I'm good enough to feel really happy about how things turned out. DebConf8 was a great success. We had great talks, many opportunities for developing interesting ideas, a lot of social interaction, an awesome video team that allowed more than 200 people from all around the world to be part of the conference even if they weren't in Argentina, and in general almost everyone had a very good time. It was really nice to have so many people from Debian over here, and it was specially nice to see them working and enjoying themselves so much. This was all possible thanks to our sponsors, thanks to the many hours spent during the previous months both by the DebConf orga-team (the usual suspects) and specially by the local team, which includes Tincho, Dami n, Romanella, Maxy, Sebas, Zero, Mendieta, Dererk, Melisa, Angasule, Lisandro, Nueces, and also thanks to the all help of the volunteers that came to work with us during DebCamp and DebConf, which include Tom s, Tinchito, M nica, Lucas, Germ n, Diego, Fefu, Nicol s, Mart n, Marcos, Hern n, Alejandro, Mat as, Rodrigo, Alberto and Joaqu n, and finally, DebConf wouldn't have been the great event it was without all the people that managed to travel thousands of kilometers to get here. To all of them, thanks, for making DebConf8 such a great conference Now, at last, DebConf8 is over (although there is some stuff that we still need to do before we can really forget all about it), and life goes on. Today, I did my first NMU after a long time. I'm particularly glad to have time for fixing bugs again, but I won't lie, I'm also extremely satisfied with how DebConf8 turned out. See you in Extremadura!

Caution: Latin American rant ahead. With my Latin American Spanish keyboard (xkb code "la") I can type in:

• English: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
• Spanish, Galician, Basque, Quechua:
• Catalan/Valencian and Occitan: l l
• French:
• Italian:
• Dutch:
• German:
• Swedish:
• Danish and Norwegian:
• Icelandic:
• Finnish: (apparently, the untypable are only used in loan words)

But not in:

• Portuguese: I can't type or (no dead_tilde)
• Guaran : I can't type g (no dead_tilde).

It turns out that for some people it's more important to have 3 (yes THREE) asciitilde (~) in the Latin American Spanish keyboard, than to allow people to write in the language spoken by 51% of South American people, or the second official language in Paraguay (spoken by 94% of the population). The same thing happens with the Traditional Spanish keyboard (code "es"), which was initially thought only for Spain, but is now widely sold all over Latin America. It includes 2 asciitilde, but no dead_tilde. I think this is outrageous and I'm very very pissed about this. As can be seen in the posts I've made to the bugs in Debian and in FreeDesktop. However, it looks like we Latin Americans are overwhelmed by the amount of Spanish people in Free Software (particularly in Debian) who don't care that Brazil is the biggest economy in the region nor that other native american languages can't be written without a dead_tilde. For the record, there are some other European languages, that can't be written with the Latin American keyboard, such as:

• Polish: I can't type , only
• Czech: I can't type , only
• Romanian: I can't type , only

But in this case, it makes much more sense to not be able to write those than not being able to write Portuguese or Guaran , and it's not like there are 3 macrons and no dead_macrons, there are no macrons at all (same for all others).

Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have a correct timezone. Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict the future:

# From Paul Eggert (2007-12-22):
# For dates after mid-2008, the following rules are my guesses and
# are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all.
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=1  0:00    1:00    S

Well, back in December 2007, October 2008 might have seemed like a long time in the future, and they assumed that sometime in the middle the correct date would be announced... But, predictably (knowing Argentina's current government), no DST has yet been announced. However, Paul Eggert's guesses had propagated to almost all UNIX distributions, so that at 0:00 Sunday Oct 5th, all our computers were suddenly one hour ahead of time. Affected systems: Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS. Devices: ipod, maemo, Nokia N95. Websites: Clarin (a major newspaper - still broken 36 hours later), Gmail. And probably many others that I don't know of. I even read that Windows was affected, although I don't know how that might be possible, since as far as I know they don't use tzdata. Anyway, not satisfied with how they mistakenly predicted the future before, a few weeks ago (not enough time in advance to fix almost any systems, only sid had this release), they added this change:

# From Alexander Krivenyshev (2008-09-05):
# As per message from Carlos Alberto Fonseca Arauz (Nicaragua),
# Argentina will start DST on Sunday October 19, 2008.
#
# http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_argentina03.html
# http://www.impulsobaires.com.ar/nota.php?id=57832 (in spanish)
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=15 0:00    1:00    S

So, they decided to take the word of a guy from Nicaragua (no bad feelings against Nicaragua, but I think that this kind of stuff should be informed by people from the affected country), and from a couple of articles that say that "According to some sources, we might have to change our clocks on the third Sunday of October". Would you change tzdata sources with such information? I definitely wouldn't. Anyway, Aurelien Jarno has already uploaded fixed packages, with no assumption regarding when the DST will happen, which is the sensible thing to do in a case like this. Thanks Aurel!

This post is about Barbara Liskov, for the Ada Lovelace Day. Barbara Liskov is the first woman in the United States of America that obtained a Ph.D. from a Computer Science department, in 1968. However, this isn't by any chance her greatest achievement. She's the creator of the CLU programming language, a language created in the mid-70s, that we would find crufty and ugly nowadays, but that with its strong emphasis in abstraction, the use of clusters (basically equivalent to what we call classes today) and iterators, was to become the rock foundation of Object Oriented Programming. Apart from that, she worked in the design of a timesharing operating system, called Venus; designed another programming language, called Argus, that was oriented to distributed applications, and also set the foundations for much of what is currently done as distributed computing. Aged 70, she's currently still working at MIT, as the leader of the Programming Methodology Group, researching ways to tolerate byzantine faults. For all this work, she received the John von Neumann medal in 2004, and the Alan Turing award in 2008. All in all, what I find the most inspiring of all her life, is the fact that she was able to pursue her career, working on a new way of creating programs, while she was also a wife and a mother; and that today, aging 70, she's still researching, leading a group, and working towards making computing better.

Whew! Is it karma or what? What makes me get involved in two horribly complex, two-week-long conferences, year after year? Of course, both (DebConf and EDUSOL) are great fun to be part of, and both have greatly influenced both my skills and interests. Anyway, this is the fifth year we hold EDUSOL. Tomorrow we will bring the two weeks of activities to an end, hold the last two videoconferences, and finally declare it a done deal. I must anticipate the facts and call it a success, as it clearly will be recognized as such. One of the most visible although we insist, not the core activities of the Encounter are the videoconferences. They are certainly among the most complex. And the videoconferences' value is greatly enhanced because, even if they are naturally a synchronous activity (it takes place at a given point in time), they live on after they are held: I do my best effort to publish them as soon as possible (less than one day off), and they are posted to their node, from where comments can continue. This was the reason, i.e., why we decided to move at the last minute tomorrow's conference: Due to a misunderstanding, Beatriz Busaniche (a good friend of ours and a very reknown Argentinian Free Software promotor, from Via Libre) thought her talk would be held today, and we had programmed her for tomorrow. No worries - We held it today, and it is already online for whoever wants to take part :-) So, I don't want to hold this any longer (I will link to the two conferences that I'm still missing from this same entry). Here is the list of (and links to) videoconferences we have held.

Tuesday 2009-11-17

• Debian-Women, by Margarita Manterola (Buenos Aires, Argentina) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• Personal networks, by Isidro Maya Jariego (Sevilla, Spain) (.ogg file, IRC log)

Wednesday 2009-11-18

• Social networks, by Sof a Liberman Shklonikoff (Mexico City, Mexico) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• Open Social Education, by Dolors Reig Hern ndez (Barcelona, Spain) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)

Thursday 2009-11-19

• Politics 2.0, by Txopi, Bilbao, Basque Country (ODP presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• OpenSocial, by Rodrigo Gallardo (Portland, USA) (.ogg file, IRC log)
• Informatic analfabetization, or why does privative software work towards analfabetization? (.ogg file, IRC log)

Friday 2009-11-20

• Education and cognition from Free Software, by Offray Luna (Bogot , Colombia)< (PDF material, .ogg file, IRC log)/li>
• EDUSOL's state / EDUSOL projects, by the EDUSOL organizer team (which attempts to be distributed ;-) )

As two last notes: Regarding the IRC interaction photos I recently talked about, we did a very kewl thing: Take over 2000 consecutive photos and put them together on a stack. Flip them one at a time. What do you get? But of course A very fun to view and interesting interaction video! We have to hand-update it and it is a bit old right now, but nevertheless, it is very interesting as it is. Finally... I must publicly say I can be quite an asshole. And yes, I know I talked this over privately with the affected people and they hold no grudge against me... But still - yesterday we had an IRC talk about NING Latin American Moodlers, by Luc a Osuna (Venezuela) and Maryel Mendiola (Mexico). One of the points they raised was they were working towards (and promoting) a Moodle certification. And... Yes, I recognize I cannot hear the mention of the certification word without jumping and saying certifications are overrated. Well, but being tired, and not being really thoughtful... I should have known where to stop, where it was enough of a point made. I ended up making Maryel and Luc a feel attacked during their own presentation, and that should have never happened. A public and heartfelt apology to them :-(

This is the fifth year we hold an EDUSOL, and we are closing in on it. EDUSOL is an online encounter whose topics are Education and Free Software Actually, this year we are widening our scope, and we will include Free Culture as well as a base area. Now, besides those three general areas, each year we have had a base topic around which we invite the speakers to talk about (although it is a lax requirement). This year, the base topic is social networks No, not in the Twitter/Facebook/blah sense, but as a wider phenomenon, studying interaction between people, the forming of communities. And for our particular areas, the forming of knowledge-based communities. Anyway I agreed with the organizers to provide the English translation of the participation invitation. I will skip the call for papers, as we are basically at the proposal deadline (October 17), but if you have anything you want to propose, please tell us so! Leaving that aside... Please excuse the quality of my translation, it is late and I'm tired. We will work on it :) Videoconference reception EDUSOL spans several participation categories. The closest category to a traditional, face to face conference. Each year, we invite a group of speakers to talk about a topic related to our main discoursive line. Among the speakers that have confirmed so far, we have:

• Sof a Liberman Shklonikoff, Mexico. Social networks.
• Dolors Reig. Barcelona, Spain. Open social education.
• Marko Txopitea. Bilbao, Spain. Politics 2.0
• Carolina Flores. Costa Rica. Building methodologies for infoinclusion
• Luis Rodrigo Gallardo Cruz. United States. OpenSocial.
• Margarita Manterola. Argentina. Debian-Women

We invite you to be active participants in the videoconference cycle. You can invite your social or user group to be part of the Encounter. There are three ways to do it:

1. Using the videoconference facilities in your University network
2. Connecting from a personal computer with broadband access, by using Ekiga or any other H.323 client
3. Following the .ogg stream and participating back via IRC

In any case (specially in the first two, which require more coordination), please contact us. For further information, visit http://edusol.info/es/e2009/convocatorias/videoconfrencias November 6: Free Education and Free Culture day We invite social and user groups to host talks regarding Free Education and Free Culture. This is not a call to promote Free Software, as there are many other spaces devoted to it. We should start with the idea that freedom resides in us, not in the software. Some of the topics our community recommends are:

• Common goods
• Free culture: Success stories
• Be legal: Sharing digital media
• Free culture at school
• Collaboration and collectivity
• Freeing your computer

Further details at http://edusol.info/es/e2009/convocatorias/dialternativo We need some help in this area to generate contents with slides, making it easier for proposed scripts for the talks. If you want to collaborate, please write to our academic support list, http://lists.edusol.info/listinfo.cgi/soporte-academico-edusol.info Want to collaborate? Further questions or comments?

• Questions to contacto@edusol.info
• identi.ca group: http://identi.ca/group/edusol
• Academic support group (EDUSOL Encounter and Free Culture day): http://lists.edusol.info/listinfo.cgi/soporte-academico-edusol.info
• And of course, the EDUSOL Community Planet: http://edusol.info/planeta/

We are holding on-line meetings for this group of topics on Thursday 22:00 GMT-5, in the #edusol channel in OFTC (irc.debian.org); you can enter the IRC channel using the Web client at http://irc.bine.org.mx or http://edusol.info/irc About EDUSOL EDUSOL started as a proposal seeking to provide a space so that people interested in education could discuss and analize the good and bad points about Free Culture and Free Software, with no geographic restrictions. Year after year, freedom-loving educators of all Latin America and Spain gather for our annual party. EDUSOL's core language is Spanish, although participation in English is allowed and encouraged (although understanding Spanish will be a strong aid). We invite you to participate and contribute in this collective effort using and commenting on our blogs, or adding your personal blog to our planet: http://edusol.info/es/node/add/blog
http://edusol.info/es/node/add/feedapi-node You can follow us by identi.ca or RSS: http://identi.ca/group/edusol
http://edusol.info/rss.xml

Copy of http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/04/msg00421.html. Hi folks, We have been pretty busy these past few weeks with the whole Google Summer of Code 2009 student application process.
I can say that we have this year a very good set of proposals and I d like to thank all the students and mentors for this. I am going to present to you our shortlist of projects that we would like to be funded and believe we can reasonably manage to get funded. As always, remember that the number of slots is not final yet at this point so we can t promise anything. The first preliminary slot count given today was *10* (same as last year) and we hope to get *2* more (as we did last year). This shortlist is alphabetically ordered because we don t want to reveal the current internal rankings. I am inviting you to debate what you think is cool, what is useful, what is important to Debian, maybe give us pointers to resources or people that could be helpful for the projects. We will try to alter our current rankings to reflect the zeitgeist in Debian, while taking into account the personal information that we have about each student involved. The deadline for any modification is on the 15th, so get everything in by the 14th. The final selected projects will be announced by Google April 20th, ~12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. We ll have another announcement then. Three proposals need or may need a mentor, I indicated it. For more information about the projects or mentoring and how to talk to us directly, scroll down past the list. Debian s Shortlist : - Aptitude Package Management History Tracking
- Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling
- Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back
- Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings
- Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD
- KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager
- Large Scientific Dataset Package Management
- MIPS N32 ABI Port
- MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation
- On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration
- Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives
- Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite And the details: Aptitude Package Management History Tracking Student: Cristian Mauricio Porras Duarte, Mentor: Daniel Burrows Aptitude currently does not track actions that the user has performed beyond a single session of the program. One of the most frequent requests from users is to find out when they made a change to a package, or why a package was changed; we want to store this information and expose it in the UI in convenient locations. As a side effect, this might also provide some ability to revert past changes. Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling Student: Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Mentor: Marc Brockschmidt This proposal aims at providing debug binary packages for the packages in the Debian archive in an automatic manner, moving them away from the official Debian archive to an special one. This has the benefits of providing thousands of debug packages without any work needed from the developers, for all the architectures, without bloating
the archive. Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back Student: Diego Escalante Urrelo, Mentor: Margarita Manterola The Amancay project aims to be a new read/write web frontend to Debian s BTS; allowing DDs and contributors to easily interact with bugs via an intuitive yet powerful interface, enabling new workflows and creating new contribution opportunities like triaging while upholding reporting quality. Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings Student: Jonathan Yu, Mentor: (probably) Dominique Dumont see below This project proposes a common library for parsing and manipulating Debian Control files, including control, copyright and changelog. Main ideas include validating and parsing of these files, with both Strict and Quirks modes for the parser. The second idea is a new frontend for Debconf using Qt4 (for which Perl bindings will be written). Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD Student: Luca Favatella, Mentor: Aurelien Jarno GNU/kFreeBSD is currently using a hacked version of the FreeBSD installer combined with crosshurd as its own installer. While this works more or less correctly for standard installations (read: the exact same installation as in the documentation), it does not allow any changes in the installation process except the hard disk partitioning. This project is about porting debian-installer on GNU/kFreeBSD, and to a bigger extent, make debian-installer less Linux dependant. KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager Student: Mateusz Marek, Mentor: NEEDS MENTOR, see below. Finish Adept 3.0, a fully integrated package manager for Qt4/KDE4. Adept is currently the only viable path to a Debian native package manager on KDE that would support modern features such as tags, indexed search or good conflict resolving. With Aptitude-gtk still in development and only available for GTK+ and (K)PackageKit having fundamental problems, Debian needs this project to stay in control of its package management on KDE after much neglect in the recent years. Large Scientific Dataset Package Management Student: Roy Flemming Hvaara, Mentor: Charles Plessy Large public datasets, like databases for bioinformatics are typically too big and too volatile to fit the traditional source/binary packaging scheme of Debian. There are some programs that are distributed in Debian, like blast and emboss, that can index specialised databases, but Debian lacks a tool to install or update the datasets they need and keep their indexing in sync. MIPS N32 ABI Port Student: Sha Liu, Mentor: Anthony Fok This project first focuses on creating a new MIPS N32 ABI port for Debian. Different from O32 and N64, N32 is an address model which has most 64-bit capabilities but using 32-bit data structures to save space and process time. A second focus will be given on making such a mipsn32el arch fully optimized for the Loongson 2F CPU which gains more and more popularity in subnotebooks/netbooks in many countries. MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation Student: Per Andersson, Mentor: Wookey Many embedded devices have MTD onboard flash as persistent storage like the Kurobox Pro NAS, the Neo Freerunner, the Sheeva Plug or the OLPC. With MTD flash being so popular and with increases in capacity, support for MTD partition/installation would make Debian even more interesting to a wide range of of devices, making it one step closer to being universal. On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration Student: David Wendt Jr, Mentor: (probably) Steffen Moeller see below In many academic fields, as well as commercial industries, people use clusters to distribute tasks among multiple machines. Many times this is done by packaging a whole operating system disk image, uploading it onto the cluster, and having the cluster run it in a VM. This project intends to make it easier for Debian to distribute prepared disk images templates like they distribute CD images now, for the users to recreate or customise these templates with Debian packages and for administrators to host such clusters with Debian. Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives Student: Stephan Peijnik, Mentor: Michael Vogt The project would involve taking the distribution-(Ubuntu-)specific update-manager code, analyzing it, and creating a package with just its core functionality, decoupling the distribution-specific parts and thus making the core code extensible by distribution-specific add-ons. This in turn would remove the need of porting update-manager to Debian with every upstream release. An additional optional goal would be replacing the synaptics-backend with a python-apt based one. Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite Student: Philipp Kern, Mentor: Luk Claes Rewrite the software that currently runs the Debian autobuilding infrastructure in a way that makes it more maintainable and robust. It will use Python as its programming language and PostgreSQL for the database backend. By harmonizing buildds, many build failures can be prevented and wasteful workload on buildd volunteers can be reduced. On mentoring:

• KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager:

Petr Rockai, the original developer of Adept has offered help to anyone willing to adopt Adept. Sune Vuorela has offered help for any Qt4 and KDE related issues. *We really need a mentor here*. The student is quite competent but Google dictates that we provide a mentor to handle student management.

• Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings:

Dominique Dumont, although not DD, has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been confirmed yet. Sune Vuorela has offered to help co-mentor for the Qt4-Debconf and Qt4-Perl bindings part.

• On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration:

Steffen Moeller has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been formally confirmed yet. Charles Plessy of the Debian Med team will provide help for use cases related issues. Eric Hammond, developer of the original vmbuilder image creation tool and maintainer of a set of Debian and Ubuntu images will provide help for Amazon EC2 and image creation issues. Chris Grzegorczyk from the Eucalyptus team will provide help for Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus/Debian integration issues. Contacting us: Considering the tight schedule, most stuff happens live on IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org You can also consult our wiki page for some additional information:
<http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009> We have a mailing-list at:
<http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination> Keep this discussion on debian-devel@lists.debian.org while cc-ing soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org. This thread is for debian-devel primarily.

So, I should be at DebCamp, but I'm back home after driving 800km in one day.  
Why?   I still don't know.

The main reason for this post is the irrational and unilateral response I got 
from the DebConf Orga Team, with no right to replica of any kind, and with 
the violence and humiliation we were treated with. I've helped to make 
3 DebConf's possible, and have been involved in many ways for the past years 
in Debian, so this shocked me deeply.

The short story is that there was an extra bed in the room I was staying in, the 
person who was suppose to be in that bed is a close friend of mine, so I asked 
if someone else could use it while they weren't, since that meant I could take 
the necessary equipment that I managed to get for DebConf, and also introduce 
to Debian someone who is very active and well known in our local community 
(and also part of the umbrella foundation used for local finance issues). 
I was excited about getting there, like every year. Just to make this extra 
clear, this person had already booked the full week of DebConf, just not 
DebCamp, as he previously thought he couldn't attend. When he found out he 
could, he was thrilled to be able to go and help setup. So, I made the mistake 
of not notifying the Orga team about the switch. I did this because it truly 
was harmless action, where a bed which would otherwise be wasted would get 
used, and, I did not notify the Orga team because they've been very 
aggressive, inflexible and unhelpful throughout the planning of the 
conference. This doesn't justify it, just explains why someone who generally 
is helpful decides to take the wrong path to solve something.

Up to here, nothing very exciting. What made this special, is that when one 
of the organizers, Margarita Manterola, found out about the switch, instead 
of coming to talk to me, even though she's known me for *years*, she went 
and informed the hotel that somebody had committed a crime, and checked in 
under a different name, as if me or the person that came with me where 
some random stranger. All I can say is, WTF?

Let me stress this, the email that was sent out[1] twisted the facts, to the 
extent that some of them are a lie, like the problem arrived at check-in, 
when it actually happened while we where napping a few hours after we had 
arrived, and any effort made by the Orga team with the hotel where wasted, 
as it was one of them who had originally created the problem.

Instead of solving this among us as a group, and, again, "solve" is a 
bureaucratic thing, because no one was being harmed, Marga decided to 
actually *harm* me personally, the person who I had brought, and DebConf 
as a group. What got solved?  Nothing. I left, along with someone who 
would of otherwise been helping out build DebConf, while the Orga team 
demanded a ridiculous fee for me to stay in the hotel.
Rules are rules, I understand, but I also understand everybody listens to 
downloaded music, people in Germany install[2] nmap, and a very long list 
of rules that we tend not to follow because they're unreasonable or 
unnecessarily complicated.
Is this really what DebConf is turning into?

All I can say is I'm very sad and shocked that the people I've worked with 
for so many years decided to condemn me over such a meaningless issue, and 
especially that the local team, Martin Ferrari, Damian Viano, Maximiliano 
Curia and Margarita Manterola would do such thing to "one of there own", 
and that the international Orga team would mindlessly follow through with it.

I apologized to the hotel, I do want to apologize to the innocent people who 
had to deal with this, and, even though my intentions where good and unselfish, 
I regret what happened.

Despite all of this, I'm still deeply committed to Debian, have worked during 
the year and deserve to relax and enjoy it, so I will be there for DebConf 
as a regular attendee.

See you there!

[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20080802.231856.66c7d3fd.en.html
[2] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1629259&from=rss