Debian 6.0 squeeze will be the first GNU/Linux distribution release ever to offer comprehensive support for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based neuroimaging research. It comes with up-to-date software for structural image analysis (e.g. ants), diffusion imaging and tractography (e.g. mrtrix), stimulus delivery (e.g. psychopy), MRI sequence development (e.g. odin), as well as a number of versatile data processing and analysis suites (e.g. nipype). Moreover, this release will have built-in support for all major neuroimaging data formats.
Please see the Debian Science and Debian Med task pages for a comprehensive list of included software and the NeuroDebian webpage for further information.
NeuroDebian at the Society for Neuroscience meeting 2010
The NeuroDebian team will run a Debian booth at the Society for Neuroscience meeting (SfN2010) that will take place November 13-17 in San Diego, USA. The annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience is one of the largest neuroscience conferences in the world, with over 30,000 attendees. Researchers, clinicians, and leading experts discuss the latest findings about the brain, nervous system, and related disorders.
If you are a Debian enthusiast (developer, contributor, evangelist) and reside near San Diego (or have time and funds for travel/lounge), or already planing to attend SfN 2010, please help us to make the Debian booth at SfN shine. Please contact the NeuroDebian team at team@neuro.debian.net
If you are going to SfN2010, come talk to us at booth #3815.
Michael Hanke and Yaroslav Halchenko
I have always liked learning and understanding history. Since I discovered him, for a couple of years already I always try to catch Javier Garciadiego's program Conversaciones sobre historia, Saturday 9AM in the Horizonte 108 radio station (can be listened to online). This program started by going over the events just before the beginning of the 1910 revolution in Mexico - and along slightly over five years, one hour per week and following different threads, the program has reached the end of the Cristiada, in the early 1930s. Garciadiego has a very nice, followable, amenable way of telling history, and I have recommended his program to many friends. This last June, I spent some days in Guatemala City, for DrupalCamp Centroam rica. I stayed with my good Colombian friend, Dilson, and at his house he had framed a poster of the History of the Civilizations. Of course, I got my nose close to it, guessing as many faces as possible in the lot. And he showed me his last Christmas present: Two books, each of them with 6 CDs. One is Historia de las Civilizaciones, the second one is Historia de las independencias. They are made by Colombia's very well known and well regarded historian Diana Uribe. I copied the CDs in order to listen to them later And wow, was I impressed! Diana Uribe makes a great narrative about topics that to some people would seem boring and dry. As I said, I have always found passion in understanding the human processes that have shaped civilization and brought us all the way to where we stand now. Well, Diana Uribe manages to bring more "normal" people to this passion. While looking for information on her to share in this blog post, I found so many places offering download of her disks, with apparently young people talking about how she has got them all so excited and interested in history... That's, I think, the best "thank you" any academician can get: having non-specialists say how her work has opened up the passion of one of the world's least sexy professions to them. And yes there are so many "thank you" and "I want" commentaries, so much of what I would call "fan mail", that it took me a bit to find an online library carrying both works. And yes, at ~US$50 each, I do intend to buy them. Now, why am I writing this today? Well, yes, because I finished listening to the series today, but besides During this year, most of Latin American countries conmemorate their 200 years of existence. Most of the independentist struggles in the continent started in 1809-1810. And today is the "partying" day in Mexico Says the legend that in the night between September 15 and 16, 1810, a priest who is always painted as old and charismatic called on his small town urging the people to rise and fight for independence, and as a result of that, only 11 years later Mexico was a fully independent country, spanning from Costa Rica to California, and... well, a nice and very idealized myth. A century later, in 1910, after a very long stability and growth period (attained mostly through repression, the same abstract thing named as "the people" rose against the dictator Porfirio D az, who had been Mexico's president for 30 years. The revolution deeply changed the social face of the country, but politically... After ~15 years of fighting, the result was that a 30 year long dictatorship was replaced by a 70 year long one... And our political system still has not evolved beyond that model. Now, comparing what has not improved nor even stayed the same but went backwards... A century ago, the festivities of the hundred years of independence were a time for showing pride, for showing to the guests from more "civilized" countries how ours was by then a modern, thriving country worth believing in, worth investing in: Besides the important, majestic and well built monuments that were erected and still stand today (i.e. the Column of the Independence or Hemiciclo a Ju rez, many institutions that would socially shape the next century even after D az's death, even after he had been declared not the role model we wanted after all were born: The National University (nowadays the most important university in Latin America), the National School for Professors, the Railroad Technical School and many others (see Javier Aranda's note for some more details)... The celebration was well-thought and planned. Of course, it didn't go into some darker corners, the country was as uneven and unfair as it can be for the poorer indigenous population (which back then was a majority), and what not. But this year? Well, we are expecting an impressive show tonight (which I won't see, even though I'd like to, as I no longer have a TV and even if I had wanted to go downtown for the celebration, different government branches are insisting we should just sit and watch it by TV at home as it can be too crowded... so not even that was well thought out Of course not every Mexican can go to the same square and see the same de-facto president do the ritual, but some more redundancy could be thought, spreading acts through all of the city instead of concentrating the festivities all along Reforma. But anyway Leaving aside our current de-facto ruler's inabilities to do anything worthy, which are already well known and documented... I took this opportunity to listen to a great work, and am most happy to do it, and to be able to share it with you. |
Valpara so, Chile
I love it when people understand that a happy hacker working at midnight is better than an unhappy hacker working on a set in stone schedule. Kudos to Igalia for that.
Your code should explain and defend itself
My written expression teacher says Your text should be good enough to explain and defend itself . This applies to code too. I confirmed this at the expense of Xan s patience.
It s a common situation: when the maintainer reviews your patch you are not around to explain it, or present the rationale you put into the change. The solution? well, simple, your patch and commit log should explain by themselves.
Don t just post a patch and do this.
Review it yourself.
I saw, after realising how much ping-pong Xan and I had to play to get a patch in, that my patches lacked a harder review by myself before being posted. You have to be your first reviewer.
Be a severe judge of your patch, ask yourself if you would accept such a patch, if you would like a commit message like that, if that variable name is really good, if someone could quickly grasp what s it all about, etc. Get into the flippy flops of the maintainer, don t assume everything is obvious to everyone.
A special report on America's economy: Time to rebalance I've been thinking about that for a while too, especially after the dollar's recent weakness, although it has been strengthening some, lately, apparently due to the state of Greece's finances... I think that the computing industry is, in general, well poised to take advantage of that. For instance, what could be easier to export than computing power or "Software as a Service"? All it takes is a few minutes for someone in Europe to sign up to a US-based service with a credit card. For instance, compare Linode's prices and good service with most of their European competitors (gandi.net for instance, who are good people, and you have to love that they put "no bullshit" right on their front page). Not that they don't have good service in Europe, but it's very difficult to compete on price with the dollar being significantly cheaper. With the dollar where it is right now, gandi is almost, but not quite, competitive with Linode. If you don't include taxes. If the dollar weakens again, though, things could easily tilt far in Linode's favor. Besides a weak dollar, I think it will be important for companies in a position to do so in the US to focus on "the rest of the world". The US is a big, populous country where it's very easy to forget about far-off lands. Compare my home town of Eugene, Oregon to where I live in Padova. Google Maps says that it takes 7+ hours to drive to Vancouver, Canada (which, to tell the truth, isn't all that foreign in that they speak English with an accent much closer to mine than say, Alabama or Maine). Going south, Google says it's 15+ hours just to San Diego, although I think that's optimistic myself, given traffic in California. From Padova, I can be in France in 5 hours, according to Google, 3 hours to Switzerland, 4 to Innsbruck, in Austria, less than 3 hours to the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana, and around 3 hours to Croatia, too. And if you wanted to throw in another country, the Republic of San Marino is also less than 3 hours away, according to Google's driving time estimates. You could probably live your entire life in a place like Eugene and never really deal much with foreigners, whereas here, nearby borders are both a historic and an ever-present fact. The outcome of this is that, to some degree, people in the US have traditionally focused their businesses "inwards" until they got to a certain size. Which is, of course, a natural thing to do when you have such a big, homogenous market to deal with before you even start thinking about foreign languages, different laws, exchange rates and all the hassle those things entail. However, if exchange rates hold steady or favor the US further, and internal spending remains weaker, it appears as if it may be sensible for companies to invest some time and energy to attract clients in "the rest of the world". "Cloud" (anyone got a better term? this one's awfully vague, but I want to encompass both "computing power" like Linode or Amazon's EC2, as well as "software as a service") companies likely will have a much easier time of things: for many services, it's easy to just keep running things in the US for a while, and worry about having physical or legal infrastructure abroad later. Your service might not be quite as snappy as it may be with a local server, but it'll do, if it performs a useful function. Compare that with a more traditional business where you might have to do something like open a factory abroad, or at the very least figure out the details of how to ship physical products abroad and sell them, and do so in a way that you're somewhat insured against the large array of things that could go wrong between sending your products on their merry way, and someone buying them in Oslo, Lisbon or Prague. Since this barrier to entry is lower, it makes more sense to climb over it earlier on. As an example, Linode recently did a deal to provide VPS services from a London data center, to make their service more attractive to European customers. However, they still don't appear have marketing materials translated into various languages, and presumably they don't have support staff capable of speaking languages like Chinese, German or Russian either (well, at least not in an official capacity). This isn't to pick on them; they may have considered those things and found them too much of an expense/distraction/hassle for the time being - they certainly know their business better than I do - and that they simply are content to make do with English. Other businesses, however, may decide that a local touch is important to attracting clients. What do you need to look at to make your service more attractive to people in other countries? In no particular order:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer
And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:Next.