Review: Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel

Publisher:	Apress
Copyright:	2009
ISBN:	1-4302-1948-3
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	601

Coders at Work is a collection of edited interviews by Peter Seibel (probably best known previously for his book Practical Common Lisp) of an eclectic and excellent collection of fifteen programmers. It opens with an interview with Jamie Zawinski (one of the original Netscape developers) and closes with Donald Knuth. In between, the interview subjects range in programmer generations from Fran Allen (who started at IBM in 1957) and Bernie Cosell (one of the original ARPANET developers) to Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal founder and original developer). Techniques and preferences also range widely, including two people involved in JavaScript development and standardization (Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford), a functional programming language designer and developer (Simon Peyton Jones), language designers and standardizers such as Guy Steele, and people like Dan Ingalls who have a different experimental approach to programming than the normal application development focus. All of the interviewees are asked roughly the same basic questions, but each discussion goes in different directions. Seibel does an excellent job letting the interview subjects shape the discussion. Two things immediately stood out for me about this book. First, it's huge, and that's not padding. There are just over 600 pages of content here, much of it fascinating. The discussions Seibel has are broad-ranging, covering topics from the best way to learn programming to history and anecdotes of the field. There's some discussion of technique, but primarily at the level of basic approaches and mindset. One typical question is how each programmer organizes their approach to reading code that isn't familiar with them. Each interviewee is also asked for book recommendations, for their debugging techniques, for their opinions on proving code correct, and how they design code. The participants are so different in their backgrounds and approaches that these conversations go in fifteen different directions. This is one of the most compelling and engrossing non-fiction books I've read. Second, the selection of interview subjects, while full of well-known names in the field, is not the usual suspects. While I'm interested in the opinions of people like Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum, I've already heard quite a lot about how they think about programming. That's material that Coders at Work doesn't need to cover, and it doesn't. Many of the interview subjects here are people I'd heard of only vaguely or not at all prior to this book, often because they work in an area of programming that I'm not yet personally familiar with. Those who I had heard of, such as L. Peter Deutsch, I often knew in only one context (Ghostscript in that case) and was unfamiliar with the rest of their work. This gives the book a great exploratory feel and a lot of originality. There is so much good material here that it's hard to give a capsule review. This is a book I'm highly likely to re-read, taking more detailed notes. There's entertaining snarking from Jamie Zawinski and Brendan Eich, fascinating history of the field (including in gender balance) from Fran Allen, and an intriguing interview with Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang), who seems to have a far different attitude towards languages and libraries than the other interviewees. Every interview is full of gems, bits of insight that I now want to research or play with. A couple of examples come to mind, just to provide a feel of the sort of insights I took out of the book. In the interview with Joshua Bloch, who does a lot of work on library APIs, he mentions that empathy is one of the most important skills for designing an API. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the programmer who's going to use the API and understand how it will feel to them. This came up in the context of a discussion about different types of programmers, and how programmers can be good at different things; the one who can do low-level deep optimization may not have that sense of empathy. Another example: Bernie Cosell talked about how he did debugging, and how he got a reputation for being a fantastic debugger who was able to fix just about anything. He confessed that he often reached a portion of the code that he didn't understand, that seemed too complex and tricky for what it was attempting to accomplish, and rather than trace through it and try to understand it, he just rewrote it. And after rewriting, the bug was often gone. It wasn't really debugging, but at the same time it's close to the more recent concept of refactoring. Several of the interview subjects commented on a subjective feeling of complexity and how when it gets too high that's a warning sign that code may need to be rethought and rewritten. A third example: I was fascinated by the number of interviewees who said that they used printf, assert, and eyeballs to debug rather than using any more advanced debugging tools. The former Lisp developers would often bemoan the primitiveness of tools like gdb, but many of them found that print statements and thinking hard about the code were usually all that's needed. (There was also a lot of discussion about test suites and test-driven development.) The general consensus was that concurrency problems were the hardest to debug; they made up a disproportional number of the responses to Seibel's question about the hardest bug the programmer ever had to track down. I could go on giving similar examples at great length, but apart from the specific bits of wisdom, the strongest impact this book made on me was emotional. Coders at Work is full of people who love programming and love software, and that enthusiasm, both in general and for specific tools and ideas, comes through very clearly. I found it inspiring. I realized while reading this book, and I suspect I'm not alone among programmers in this, that I largely stopped learning how to program a few years back and have been reusing skills that I already have. Reading Coders at Work gave me a strong push towards finding ways to start learning, experimenting, and trying new techniques again. It also filled me with enthusiasm for the process of programming, which immediately helped my productivity on my own coding projects. This is obviously a book whose primary target audience is practicing programmers, and while it doesn't go too far into language theory, I was relying on remembered terms and structure from my master's degree for a few of the interviews. I think it's approachable for anyone who has a working background in programming and a few languages or a CS degree, but it might be a stretch for someone new to the field. But even someone without any programming knowledge at all would get a lot out of the anecdotes and snapshots of the history of software development. Coders at Work is also full of jumping-off points for some additional research on Google or additional reading in other recommended books. I only have one complaint, which I have to mention in passing: for such a large book full of interesting ideas and book recommendations, the index is wholly inadequate. I tried looking up five or six things in it, including the source of some of the book recommendations that are collected in an appendix, and I struck out every time. It's very hard to find something again in 600 pages, and more attention paid to the index would have been greatly appreciated. But, despite that, for people within the target audience, I cannot recommend this book too highly. Not only was it full of useful information, at the level of programming above the code details that's often the hardest to talk about, but it's consistently entertaining and emotionally invigorating and inspiring. It made the rounds of tech blogs when it was first released, to nearly universal approval, and I can only echo that. If you're a practicing programmer, I don't think you'll regret spending a few weeks reading and thinking about this book. Rating: 10 out of 10

As I mentioned, I headed to Pittsburgh last week to give some talks at CMU and find out something about what they're doing there. Despite the dire weather that had closed the airport the day before, I had no trouble getting into town and was soon safely in a hotel room with a heater that seemed oddly enthusiastic about blasting cold air at me for ten seconds every fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, it seems that life wasn't as easy for everyone - ten minutes after I arrived, I got a phone call telling me that the city had asked CMU to cancel classes the next day.

This turned out to be much less of a problem than I'd expected - whether because of their enthusiasm to learn about ACPI or because they simply hadn't noticed the alert telling them about the cancellation, a decent body of students turned up the next morning. After a brief chat with Mark Stehlik, the assistant dean for undergraduate education, I headed off to the lecture hall. The fact that I can now just plug my laptop into a VGA cable and have my desktop automatically extend itself continues to amaze me, as does OpenOffice's seemingly unerring ability to get confused about which screen should have my content and which should be showing me the next slide. Nevertheless, facts were imparted and knowledge dropped on those assembled. I'm even reasonably sure that the contents were factually accurate, which is a shame because the most attractive part of teaching always struck me as being able to lie to students who will then happily regurgitate whatever you tell them because in case it turns up on the exam. Perhaps this is why I'm safer out of academia.

Lunch offered an opportunity to visit the Red Hat sponsored lab, which was pleasingly located somewhere other than a basement. The guy on the right of the picture is Greg Kesden, the director of undergraduate laboratories in CS there - it was wonderful to get an opportunity to see the machines getting used, and students seemed genuinely appreciative of the facility.

After lunch I spent a while talking to Satya about the Internet Suspend and Resume project. This is an impressive combination of virtualisation and migration, using a Fedora-based live image to bring up an OS on arbitrary hardware before downloading a machine image and launching it. The majority of the data is pulled in on demand, meaning that initial performance can be slow but ensuring that data is only downloaded if it's needed. When the user is finished, the delta between the original image and the new one can be pushed back to the server while remaining cached on the local machine in case the image is used again.

It's an interesting approach, combining the flexibility of thin clients with the advantages of having actually useful computing power at the local end. There's a few functional awkwardnesses, such as some VMs being unhappy if images are migrated between machines with different CPU features, and it obviously benefits from having significant bandwidth. But the idea of being able to combine the convenience of a floating session with the knowledge that you can still keep copies of your data on you is an attractive one, and I'd love a future where I can move my session between my laptop and a desktop.

After that there was some time to talk to Bill Scherlis and Philip Lehman about the software engineering courses that CMU run. Part of the minor in software engineering includes a course requirement to make a meaningful contribution to an existing software project, from design through to submission and upstream acceptance. I had the opportunity to talk to a couple of the students about this and the differences they found between working with the Mozilla and Chrome communities, which I'll try to write up at some point.

Finally I gave a presentation on Fedora and some of the issues that we face in providing a useful OS when patents and recalcitrant hardware vendors do their best to thwart us. Despite the ice outside and the significantly-below-freezing temperatures, enough people turned up that sorties had to be sent out to find extra chairs. It was great to see how interested people were in learning about what we do, although it's probably the case that the free pizza did help encourage people.

After that it was an early trip back to the airport, where I found that my plane was delayed and the only "restaurant" still open was McDonalds. Even so, I left with the feeling that it had been an interesting and educational visit. Many thanks to David Eckhardt, who runs the OS course I presented to and who looked after me all day - thanks too to Joshua Wise who picked me up when David was running late due to the ground being covered with blocks of ice.

Thought I might post this here as well.

Package: wnpp
Severity: normal

Greetings,

I am placing this Request for Help as I can no longer do the majority of
the work on the NVIDIA packages. Although some people have offered time
and work over recent years, there really needs to be another Developer
or Maintainer that can take on a lot of work. Also I feel an injection
of fresh spirit would be helpful in some of the areas requiring an
overhaul. I am not stepping away, however. I just wish to reduce my role
in a way that is more comfortable and beneficial to the team and
project.

Randall Donald

Knowing full well that it will cause many of my readers to tut and roll their eyes at me I derive slight pleasure from confessing that I have now eaten at McDonalds on 6 continents. To make it worse I only did so in Asia and Australia so I could say I had.

It does lead me into a slightly more valid ramble. I'm not particularly bothered about eating on my own. I like food (even if I'm picky about what I like), but I prefer it with company. This means I'm not particularly great about being organised to cook complicated things when I'm on my own; largely the whole thing just turns into dealing with hunger. It also mean I'm bad at finding nice places to eat out while travelling. Which, when you're travelling for a month to some interesting places, is a bit of a bugger. I've got a bit better at actually going to nice places, and trying not to bolt my food into me so I can get out ASAP but instead enjoy it. A book helps. Also places that aren't quite as busy (which if you have no agenda is nicely achieved by letting your body clock desync from the world around you). Unfortunately I didn't really do so until after Hong Kong. Guess I'll just have to go back at some point...

(More on my travels at some point, maybe. I've started the tortuous journey home now.)

The current 190.53 nvidia-graphics-drivers were uploaded to NEW and the latest 173xx legacy branch is now in unstable. Now back to your regularly scheduled Friday

On the train to my parents' house for Christmas I finished up a wild run through the book Coders at Work. The book isn't even mine, but I'd been borrowing it very often, sometimes to the chagrin of its owner, because I could barely put it down. The book is a collection of interviews with 15 great programmers of our time, starting with Jamie Zawinsky and ending with Donald Knuth. It's written in an interview style each interview starts with a brief introduction to the person being interviewed, summarizing what the person is known for and what he or she has accomplished and a few of the highlights of the interview, and then a transcript of the interview follows, with the author/editor, Peter Siebel, will saying something or asking a question, and the interviewee responding. I was skeptical about this format at first because I feel like it can be an easy way out of good editing and make the reader have to do the work of the editor, but on finishing I think that Siebel uses the format to his advantage in this case. For one, the speech format allows the reader to really form a picture of how the person being interviewed speaks and would act in a conversation. Jamie is somewhat bitter and pretty informal. Brad Fitzpatrick is flippant and energetic, his speech littered with profanity and colloquialisms. Others seem more stately and verbose Joe Armstrong's responses can go on for a page or more. In this way, not only do readers learn something about what these greats have learned about programming, but we also feel a bit more like we've met or know them, and can connect to them more as people. I always have this problem where I want to read computer books, but often computer books seem inextricably tied to the computer, so there's this dynamic of reading a bit and then wanting to get on a machine and try something out, write some code, play around especially with books focused on a specific language. Coders at Work retains some of this computer-book dynamic in that I constantly encountered things that I want to investigate or play around with more: Erlang, OCaml, various papers and essays, Knuth's literate programs, and books such as Higher Order Perl and others. Siebel makes a point to ask each person what her short-list of books and papers programmers should read are, so this book is a great source of pointers to other reading material. Unlike a more specific book, however, keeping a list in a notebook was enough to settle the mind to read away-from-a-computer for chapters at a time. It's obvious that despite the interview format, Siebel has done some serious editing. None of the prose is boring to read, and I can't imagine that the text is a straight transcript of how the interviews went. He also has arranged the interviews in an order such that different interviews play off each other. In Branden Eich's interview, for example, he disparages the book Design Patterns:

I never bought the Gamma book. Some people at Netscape did, some of Jamie Zawinski's and my nemeses from another acquisition, they waved it around like the Bible and they were kind of insufferable because they weren't the best programmers.

In the next chapter, Joshua Bloch names it as a book he thinks programmers should read:

Another one, which I have slightly mixed feelings about but I still think everyone should read, is Design Patterns. It gives us a common vocabulary. There are a lot of good ideas in there.

Similar plays, such as Ken Thompson and Fran Allen disagreeing on the badness of C, happen in later chapters, tieing together the different chapters and illustrating how even really good programmers disagree on the Right Thing all the time. Clearly the craft of programming is no settled thing. Besides the general structure of the book being well thought-out, the material is generally thought-provoking and interesting. One thing that stood out to me was Joshua Bloch describing what he called the "empathy gene", which is what a programmer has to have if he's going to be able to design good APIs and programming languages he has to be able to put himself in the shoes of the person who will be using the language or API. This is one thing that differentiates how different programmers can be good at different things. Another thing that stood out to me is that many of those interviewed stated that they don't use much in the way of modern tools and IDEs Joshua Bloch and Simon Peyton-Jones both touch on this, just to name a couple examples, even though some say that they think using these tools would make them more productive, especially when it comes to refactoring. This is a testament to the power of inertia sometimes there is just no chance to be unproductive now in order to be more productive later. Or perhaps just a sign that a programmable text-editor can stand on the same level as a heavier tool in terms of productivity in the right hands. I could go on with examples, but the conclusion here is that I thoroughly enjoyed Coders at Work, and I think it is a book that is well-worth the time spent reading the entire thing.

Dan Gilbert gave an insightful TED talk about our mistaken expectations of happiness [1]. Don Marti has an insightful post about net neutrality and public property [2]. When net access requires access to public property then it should be sold in a neutral manner. Rachel Pike gave an interesting TED talk about the scientific research behind a climate headline [3]. The people who claim to be skeptical of the science should watch this. Mark Peters wrote an interesting article A Happy Writer Is a Lousy Writer about the correlation between emotional state and work quality [4]. Apparently watching a film about cancer will make people more careful and focussed on details. CERIAS has an interesting short article about Firefox security as well as some philosophy on why web browser security generally sucks [5]. Cory Doctorow writes in the Guardian about Peter Mandelson s new stupidity in trying to legislate against file sharing [6]. This is going to seriously damage the economy of every country that implements it. Charles Stross has been blogging a series of non-fiction essays about space colonisation, in The Myth of the Starship he describes how most ideas of space travel are bad and how the word ship is always going to be unsuitable [7]. Brent T. White is an associate professor of law at the University of Arizona who has written an interesting paper about mortgages [8]. He says that anyone who is underwater (IE owing more than the value of their house) should walk away. The credit damage from abandoning a bad mortgage apparently isn t that bad, and there is the possibility of negotiating with the bank to reduce the value of the loan to match the value of the house. Mako is working on a project to allow prisoners to blog [9]. It s basically a snail-mail to web gateway as the prisonsers are not allowed Internet access. PracticalEthicsnews.com has an article about the special status that homeopathy is given [10]. It also notes that homeopathic medicines include arsenic and mercury. Such quackery should be outlawed, a life sentence for homeopathy would be appropriate IMHO. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting essay about why he is not selling one of his books in audio form (he s giving it away) [11]. He concludes by noting that he wants no license agreement except don t violate copyright law . The fact that he can t get anyone to sell an audio book under such terms is a good demonstration of how broken the marketplace is. Thulasiraj Ravilla gave an inspiring TED talk about the Aravind Eye Care System a program to bring the efficiency of McDonalds to eye surgery [12]. Hopefully that program can spawn similar programs for other branches of medicine and spread to more countries. In many ways they are providing better service (both in quality and speed) than people in first-world countries who pay a lot of money can expect to receive. Scott Kim gave an interesting TED talk about his work designing puzzles [13]. He is also a big fan of social networking, unfortunately (for people like me who don t like social networking) his web site ShuffleBrain.com relies on Facebook. Gordon Brown (UK Prime Minister) gave an inspiring TED talk about global ethic vs the national interest [14], with a particular focus on the global effort required to tackle the climate change problem. Now if only we could get Kevin Rudd to listen to that. Brough has written an interesting analysis of the AT&T network problems that are blamed on the iPhone [15]. His essential claim is that the problem is due to overly large buffers which don t cause TCP implementations to throttle the throughput. This seems similar to my observations of the Three network in Australia where ping times of 8 seconds or more will periodically occur. One particularly nasty corner case with this is when using a local DNS server I can have a DNS packet storm where basic requests time out while BIND uses a significant portion of available bandwidth (including ICMP messages from receiving ports that BIND has closed). To alleviate this I am now using the Google public DNS service [16] (the Three DNS servers never worked properly).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html
• [2] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/freedom/property-rights/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_pike_the_science_behind_a_climate_headline.html
• [4] http://www.good.is/post/a-happy-writer-is-a-lousy-writer/
• [5] http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/firefox_vulnerabilities_souvenirs_of_windows_95/
• [6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/digital-economy-file-sharing-mandelson
• [7] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth_of_the_starship.html
• [8] http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2009/10/30/its-ok-to-walk-away-a-law-professor-argues/
• [9] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091201-00
• [10] http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2009/12/diluted-evidence-is-there-anything-special-with-homeopathy.html
• [11] http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6709919.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/thulasiraj_ravilla_how_low_cost_eye_care_can_be_world_class.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_kim_takes_apart_the_art_of_puzzles.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/gordon_brown_on_global_ethic_vs_national_interest.html
• [15] http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/10/is-att-wireless-data-congestion-selfinflicted.html
• [16] http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

These are the winners from my yearly class contest : SERIOUS BABY lol ..sometimes Did I just Get Rejected From McDonalds? (Watch to the end) This is one of my all time favorites funny videos and it has a nice catchy tune and I will also post one of my ALL TIME favorites after I show it in class next week.

These are the winners from my yearly class contest : SERIOUS BABY lol ..sometimes Did I just Get Rejected From McDonalds? (Watch to the end) This is one of my all time favorites funny videos and it has a nice catchy tune and I will also post one of my ALL TIME favorites after I show it in class next week.

Ya so I finally got around to uploading a legacy 96.43.13 version that works with the latest kernels and ia32 libs.
Please hold off on the tomato throwing for a while please.

I just uploaded nvidia-graphics-drivers 180.44 that work with Debian's 2.6.29 thanks to package team member Len Sorensen. If anyone wants to be as amazing as Len you may join the packaging team too.

I also did some BTS cleaning in regards to bugs reported by people not using the debian packages (and even said so) but reassigned to us anyway.

I am also battling a bad cold. I always get sick on holidays.

Oh one more thing. Go Canucks!

Started updating our Debian Machines at Hosting Nation to Lenny. Smooth so far.

Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called Chinese food [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense. The CentOS Plus repository has a kernel with support for the XFS filesystem, Postfix with MySQL support, and some other useful things [2]. Mary Gardiner comments about the recent loss of a blog server with all content [3]. One interesting point is that when you start using a service that maintains your data you should consider how to make personal backups in case the server goes away or you decide to stop being a customer. Val Henson makes some interesting points about the reliability of Solid State Disks (SSD) [4]. Some people are planning to replace RAID arrays of disks with a single SSD with the idea that a SSD will be more reliable, this seems like a bad idea. Also with the risk of corruption it seems that we have a greater need for filesystems that store block checksums. Lior Kaplan describes how to have multiple Linux bonding devices [5], the comment provides some interesting detail too. programmableweb.com has a set of links to sites that have APIs which can be used to create mashups [6]. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time is to play with some of the web APIs that are out there. Gunnar Wolf has written some insightful comments about the situation in Israel and Palestine [7]. He used to be a Zionist and spent some time living in Israel so he knows more about the topic than most commentators. Charles Stross has written an informative post about Ubuntu on the EeePC [8]. What is noteworthy about this is not that he s summarised the issues well, but that he is a well known science-fiction writer and he was responding to a SFWA member. One of his short stories is on my free short stories page [9]. He also wrote Accelerando which is one of the best sci-fi novels I ve read (and it s also free) [10]. Don Marti has written about Rent Seeking and proprietary software [11]. It s an interesting article, nothing really new for anyone who has followed the news about the coal and nuclear industries. Erik writes about The Setting Sun and points out that Scott McNealy had tried to capitalise on the SCO lawsuit but Red Hat has ended up beating them in the market [12].

• [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jennifer_8_lee_looks_for_general_tso.html


• [2] http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CentOSPlus?action=show&redirect=Repositories%2FCentOSPlus


• [3] http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2009/January/3/backup-policies


• [4] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [5] http://liorkaplan.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/network-bonding-types-and-configurationin-linux/


• [6] http://www.programmableweb.com/


• [7] http://gwolf.org/blog/about-recent-events-and-possible-outcomes-israel-and-palestine


• [8] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/01/i_get_mail.html


• [9] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/


• [10] http://www.accelerando.org/


• [11] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/freedom/rent-seeking/


• [12] http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/setting_sun.html

1. Dishwasher, by Pete Jordan
2. Windfalls, by Jean Hegland
3. River of Gods, by Ian McDonald
4. Powers, by Le Guin
5. Real World Haskell, by O'Sullivan, Goerzen, Stewart
6. Matter, by Iain M. Banks
7. Ars Magica, by Tweet & Rein Hagen

Nice set of books. Pity I'm in the middle of all of them. Lately I have a hard time finishing many novels, I think because waiting for the plot to play out gets boring. Although River of Gods has mostly just confused me with too many viewpoint characters. And by this, where each box is a chapter, and that big box I'm just at the start of scares me: Dishwasher is fun light reading. If I'd thought to bring it to its owner, Jay, who misplaced it, I could have picked it up from where I left off months ago and read it on the plane. Double oops. Oh well, there's always my next doctor or dentist appointment. Powers is a probably great book by Le Guin. I hope there are many more to come, but the tendancy is to savor what's available. Also, I have it in dead tree edition, which I tend to save up for when I need them. Windfalls is such a dead tree book, hibernating in the yurt for me to get back to them some day. I may have to start it over, since it's pretty involved, and rather out of my usual comfort zone. Real World Haskell is coming along well, I hope. Matter hasn't pulled me in yet, oddly. Ars Magica I've been flipping through the PDF of idly.

---

Anyway, after all that, turning up a random story generator in 1 kilobyte of code couldn't help but feel like a relief.

I've uploaded the 177.80 drivers to experimental. Note that there is another legacy break with this release. e.g. my secondary FX5500 card is no longer supported so I'm stuck at the 173.xx branch at work. The NVIDIA packaging team will have a legacy version of 173.14.12 available shortly.

The 96xx legacy kernel modules have entered NEW today.

I just uploaded lenny modules for the current branch of NVIDIA drivers. Only 4 more source packages to go, plus patching 71.86.06 for xen and 2.6.25+.

My wife and I have almost settled in our new home now. We start moving the alpacas today. I finally have some time to address the issues with the NVIDIA packages in regards to Lenny. As 2.6.26 is now in unstable I can build kernel modules for the proper kernel target and get a xen patch for 71.86.06. 173.14.12 will go into experimental shortly.

Sure, that sounds fairly formal to send a report for holidays, doesn't it? Anyway, as I have a few (often Debian/FLOSS related) friends around the world who are reading my blog entries, this might interest them so that's indeed a report..:-)...and I have time for it, so... I'm currently going back from Cahors to Maurepas (home), on my way to Debconf. We spent 10 days in Cahors with Elizabeth and the girls, finally joined by Jean-Baptiste on Sunday. We had great time over there, enjoying the richness of Quercy:

• heat (I need that before MDQ winter)
• nice running spots: for once, I could run by starting from the bottom of hills, climbing *up* and finishing down. I ran a lot, sometimes on very hard tours such as 18km with 300m positive height difference. I also did a few "fast" runs ("fast" here would make a few Debian friends laugh a lot, isn't it Ralf, Dirk.....)
• medieval architecture in Gourdon, Martel, St-Cirq Lapopie, Cahors...
• peace of the Lot valley
• Cahors wine: strong and tasty, of course
• Rocamadour and Trappe d'Echourgnac cheese (I won't bring Rocamadour at Debconf as it wouldn't survive)
• rest, sleep
• McDonald's parking lot for network connectivity
• very little hacking

So, I'm now heading back home, assemble stuff and will take off for Debconf on Thursday 7th (Paris Orly to Madrid, then Buenos Aires via Air Europa: IIRC nobody from Debconf is in the same flight). "Assemble stuff" here also means collecting cheese for the now famous Debconf Cheese&Wine party. That one will be tricky to achieve as most of us are coming from quite far away and...there are only 6 French citizens who attend DC8..:-)). Anyway, I already know that my fellow Nicolas Fran ois (namely nominated as Assistance CheeseMaster recently) will bring some good stuff. I haven't decided yet what to bring. I might be influenced by my holidays, so cheeses from South-West France are highly probable. Cahors wine will be the choice (prepare yourself: that is strong stuff). At Debconf itself, we'll have a quite busy schedule. I intend to mostly work along with Felipe, Nicolas, Grisu and others on i18n.debian.net. I'll have to animate the i18n sessions for which I want to prepare some schedule instead of just "lat's gather and talk" which didn't work so well last year, IMHO. And I have that bloody keynote lecture which, BTW, could be rescheduled if I properly read debconf-discuss as, finally 9am for keynotes seems to be considered too early for the late birds at DC8...:-)... We'll see: I will certainly have something that's not very well cooked and prepared. Expect some improvisation: this year I didn't want to stress myself with a talk, slides and blahblah. Elizabeth will come back from Cahors on Saturday with the kids. She'll have a holiday week at her father's place whil ethe kids will....do their stuff at Maurepas (this is what happens when kids are grown up). We'll gather together again on Aug 18th and I go back to work on 19th. Crazy, I know but I have a very busy and full work schedule for the upcoming next 2 months. September will be a hard time to go through: Jean-Baptiste will start his "Licence Profesionnelle" in Automated and Embarked Systems. He'll do it in shared time: half-time at university for classes and half-time working in a company (which turns out to be Essilor, the world leader for progressive glasses....and the company which Elizabeth is working for). He'll stay at my sister-in-law place during the week (30km away from our place but closer from university and work). Sophie, our 18-year old daughter, will spend the year in Toulouse, to prepare the admission in a Social Workers school. She'll have her own apartment, in the very center of the city, 20 meters away from Place du Capitole. Annoying, isn't it ? :-) So, we'll mostly stay with our "little" Magali, our 16 y.o. who will be attending High School, on her way to Baccalaur at. Tell us about shrinking families.... Now time to work on some slides for the Debconf keynote. Damn.

So as I've said before, this week is crazy but I have managed to upload nvidia-graphics-drivers with a RC bug fix and new legacy upstream 96.43.07 that supports 2.6.26. 71.86.06 will be uploaded later today. As far as testing goes I think I'll need some hinting and maybe a freeze exception once the kernel for lenny is decided on so I can create the appropriate kernel modules. Man all those kernel modules is gonna be a a pain. At least I have Internet at my new house now.