Just under a week after XDS was announced, we've already got 38 (out of 40!) attendees registered. 40 is our current cap, and we need to change it soon if we're going to break that number, so please, ensure you're registered if you're planning to come. If there's too many people, registering now won't bump other people off, it'll just mean that we know we can increase the size a bit. :)

Our accommodation is in 'single sets': a study with adjoining bedroom (single bed), and en suite (so, your own shower and toilet). For the moment, registration is everyone who's signed up on the attendees page, and hasn't told us that they're not staying in the college. Please do not contact Clare College and book the rooms yourself: we have a big group booking.

Wireless will be available in the main conference room, as well as in the bedrooms, and a common area.

So: if you're thinking of coming, register!

Update: We're now at 38 people, not 25. Two spots left.

X.Org 7.5 will be releasing fairly soon -- within the month. Check the updated schedule for more details.

Received in an SMS from a friend: 'I just walked past a bloke with pasty white skin and a ponytail wearing a t-shirt that said 'I do it with Ubuntu'.'

I don't use Emacs myself, and I don't recall a single Emacs user complaining about accidentally triggering Ctrl-Alt-Backspace on their way to M-C-E-A-S paste-output-of-doctor-into-irc. Most of the grumbling came from actual users (i.e. people who don't know what an X server is, let alone how to configure it, let alone to email xorg-devel@ about it), rather than people who are perfectly capable of changing the default[0].

Regardless, Peter came up with a perfectly sane plan which makes it very easy indeed to optimise for clients with stuck grabs (being that termination requires you to be processing input events in the first place, in which case you're likely doing reasonably well anyway).

[0]: Yes, the text is woeful. Sorry.

Dom: Yeah, we used PayPal to accept payments for accommodation for the 2008 X Developers' Summit, but a combination of staggering US bank incompetence and PayPal being, well, PayPal, means that we lost about $US4500 we'll almost certainly never see again. The whole thing was a nightmare. After that, I switched to Google Checkout and didn't have a single problem, aside from it wanting to give me the whole interface in Finnish for a while and not offering a choice.

This is a public service announcement: depth and bpp are different.

Depth refers to the number of significant bits (usually colour-significant, i.e. R + G + B bits for RGB modes) per pixel. bpp, i.e. bits per pixel, refers to the number of bits used altogether for pixel storage. Ignoring alpha, the usual configuration of your framebuffer will be depth 24 (8 bits each for R, G and B), but 32bpp: 8 unused bits at the top. 24bpp and depth 24 means that there are no unused bits, and that four pixels will occupy 96 bits (12 bytes), and not 128 bits (16 bytes), as there would be in 32bpp. (Thankfully, no-one actually uses 24bpp in the real world.) That is all.

In a nice coincedence with the release of Lenny (cheers!!1), the low-quality versions of the videos from the Debian DevRoom at FOSDEM 2009 are available now!

Better quality versions will be encoded and uploaded by Ben over the next days. I'd also like to collect the slides from the talks there, so if you had a talk there, please send them to Wouter and/or me, and Wouter, please send me the slides you collected on the presetation computer ;-)

Basically I'm very happy with our results, excpet for two things: sadly the computer running dvswitch wasn't powerful enough to do picture in picture (and due to time constraints we weren't able to switch to a more powerful one), so we'll have to plan this better next year. And second, I have no real clue how useful our streaming efforts are, I believe the recordings are useful, but in both cases feedback from people who find them useful is appreciated! Covering FOSDEM is certainly a lot of fun, but it's also a lot of work and leaves not much room for seeing other parts of the conference. So a short reply (I'll post this to d-d-a with reply-to set to -project) will be very much appreciated! :)

Big thanks go to Womble2, edrz, xerrako, Q_, danielsan, DaCa, tokkee, luca, Yoe, Ganneff, franklin, huhn, luk, CarlFK, daven and some more volunteers I cannot remember right now! Also not to be forgotten the FOSDEM crew & volunteers for an awesome event and the people from CCC Hamburg who came by car and took a lot of audio/video/computer equipment for us (and left 90min later than planned! Thanks again!)! And also Debian (via the DPL) for some 120 Euros to rent equiqment and for buying batteries and the always needed duct-tape!

I’ve been away from the blogging keyboard for a few more days than I expected. For some reason, my Wordpress doesn’t work in lynx so I couldn’t post from the mobile phone when I had chance. I was at:-

• Shaping the Future of Social Enterprise last Thursday
• Bristol Knowledge Unconference last Friday
• Kewstoke Council this Monday
• Tour of Britain stage finish in Burnham-on-Sea this Tuesday - I then rode back which was pretty exhausting with my current poor legs and the terrible road surfaces
• North Somerset Cycling Forum yesterday

I’ll write up the remaining events over the next few days and they should appear linked from below this article - please leave me a comment if you want to influence the order I write them. First I need to attend to some business matters, though. Other recent random things: upgrading my kernel (to enable an rt2500 wireless card instead of the nasty bcm4301 I was using) seems to have fixed an X/GNUstep copy-paste problem I was having; why does http://identi.ca say “OpenID authentication failed: Not in requested trust domain” to my OpenID?

Some interesting events that I’ve heard about recently, with a bit of a focus on software, cooperatives and the South-West:-

• Bristol Knowledge Unconference: Friday 5th September 2008 *
• Tour of Britain, Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, Tuesday 9th September - other UK locations 7-14 September, itv4 7pm highlights daily *
• NoseRub DevCamp, Cologne, 13.-14. September 2008
• BathCamp, Bath, Somerset, 13-14th September
• Bristol Anarchist Bookfair, St Werburgh’s Centre, Bristol, 13-14th September
• Software Freedom Day, Global, 20 September 2008
• Scripting Enabled, London, 19th and 20th September
• Listening to the Social Entrepreneur, London Docklands, 9 Oct 2008 *
• LinuxWorld, London Olympia, 23-25 Oct 2008 *
• enterprise week, UK, part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, 17-23 November
• Cooperatives-SW/RISE Trade Fair, Bristol, 1st December *

I’m pretty sure I’ll go to the *d ones - which others do you think I should go to? Will you be at any of these? Any comments to make on/to any of them? Any more to add to the list?

Unfortunately, Matthew is correct, and it seems that Ryan Farmer is the idiot that signed a few of us up to about 200 mailing lists this morning. Not only do I trust Matthew's analysis (and was watching him go through the various steps on IRC as it happened), but then there were two other bits.

Ryan refused to approve two of my comments I made on his latest blog entry (more than happy to screenshot this). He claimed he too had been spammed, and had to abandon his email address of a few years. Even if you ignore the length of the text blanked out in the title bar not even remotely matching the length of his personal email address, there were only 131 messages in the inbox, of which 127 were unread, and no others but spam visible. He claimed they were archived; I offered to publicly apologise if he'd do a quick screencast showing him logging into that account and showing some messages from the archive to prove the point. Unfortunately he didn't bother approving these comments. (Incidentally, if you had to 'abandon' an email address due to an avalance of newsletters, et al, which took an hour or two to fully unsubscribe from, would you still bother blacking out the address everywhere?)

As per his standard 'insult everyone with random images from the internet and YouTube videos, then wildly claim conspiracies against him' policy, he went on to claim Matthew was conspiring against him, but given the choice between Matthew conspiring and severely irritating a few of his friends in the process, and some scorned 16-year old continuing his track record of acting like an irrational, immature idiot, I know which one I'd pick.

It takes some skill to be banned from all the Ubuntu IRC channels and the Ubuntu forums both, but I guess this morning showed that was completely justified. Apologies to everyone waiting on the announcement of sponsorship for XDS, as well as hotels, but unfortunately some people just can't conceive of having better things to do than acting like chavs. Hopefully IzanbardPrince/TheAlmightyCthulu/etc goes back to impersonating Kevin Carmony, flaming the bejesus out of companies using BIOSes which trip Linux bugs, and other, equally productive, uses of his time.

Make of them what you will.

daniels@psyence:~/x/xorg/xserver% wc -l **/*.[ch] tail -1
  730420 total
daniels@psyence:~/x/xorg/xserver% git diff -p xorg-server-0_99_1.. diffstat tail -1
 2747 files changed, 178062 insertions(+), 628051 deletions(-)
daniels@psyence:~/x/xorg/xserver% echo $((628051-178062))
449989

I agree pretty much with what ajax said, but Alberto's post struck me as pretty weird. Given that git's internal format has been unbelievably stable (indeed, far more stable than bzr: a few times, I've just given up trying to get code because doing so would require me to compile a new bzr -- barrier to entry like what), I don't see what's stopping anyone from developing alternate git clients that are all Windows-friendly (or OS X-friendly, or Eclipse-friendly, or whatever).

A quick FAQ: the reason all DSA keys have been removed from fd.o and we aren't accepting any new ones is that they are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks if they have ever been used (not just generated) on a system with a predictable RNG: see Steinar's summary of the maths. We're going with precedent of debian.org rejecting DSA keys, and a general desire to be safe rather than sorry. RSA keys are the default in OpenSSH anyway, so I'm not really sure why you'd want to generate DSA.

If you're attending the excellent FOSDEM (which you should), you should make sure you get down to my talk on input. We're now at the stage where we understand not only the problems, but their causes and fixes, and the code which led us there, and I think by early 2009[0] we should be in really good shape. Finally.

I felt a bit bad posting a blog entry just about myself, but then I thought hey, at least I'm not putting a picture of myself in here.
[0]: Peter has a thesis to write, I have work to do and another move to make, et al.

The X Developers' Conference 2008 will be held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California from April 16th-18th, 2008. If you're interested in coming, please sign up at the wiki; we're also interested in having people talk if they want to. More details as they come to hand, but start booking your flights now.

After my shameless beg, a number of people emailed me (thanks -- sorry about the lack of comments) to tell me that I should really be using awesome, and I am. (Other popular suggestions were wmii and dwm.) I'm well happy with it so far, so thanks!

Dear lazyweb,
I want to try out a window manager like Ion, but I don't want to actually use Ion due to the fact the author's an irritating nutcase who I'd rather not encourage any further, and its utterly daft license. What's a man to do?

Following on from AMD's announcement at XDS 2007, Intel have just released documentation on their graphics hardware, without NDA, available to the public. There's also a mirror at X.Org. Cheers, Intel!

A special birthday shoutout to Ross Burtonini, who's 31 today.

daniels: lightroom makes me so unbelievably content
daniels: if i were a doe-eyed schoolgirl
daniels: and you were showing me this in the back of your car
daniels: i'd let you take me, there and then

I knew showing Daniel Adobe Lightroom was a bad idea... It is a truly majestic application though, with that killer combination of a very clean interface and incredibly well thought-out features.