I decided to move the old 1-RU Pentium III server (the thing providing all the storage for my MythTV box via ATAoE) from under the bed in the spare room to the linen cupboard. It had a brief stop in the wardrobe in the spare room, but it didn't really help with the noise. Sarah was a concerned about the heat in the linen cupboard, as this is where the patch panel is, so caesar is already in here, along with an Ethernet switch, an ADSL modem, a wireless access point, and the Vonage ATA. There's a lot of DC plug packs generating heat, so it was a reasonable concern. I figured in this day and age, someone must make some sort of USB temperature sensor, and after some searching around, I discovered the DLP-TEMP-G, which seemed to be about the right price, doing what I wanted. I'm going to say the web page was a bit ambiguous, but it was probably just late at night, because I read the bottom as having the option to buy it from Mouser, or via PayPal directly with DLP Design. So I went down the latter path, because I generally prefer to deal directly with the manufacturer. Turns out what I was actually ordering was just a "Test Application", so that email I'd received the day after I placed my order for two units was all I was going to get. I figured this out after a week or so of wondering when it was going to arrive. They were really good about it, and refunded me my $40, even though I'd received said software, and I placed a new order with Mouser for what I really wanted. Now this time, I just didn't read things thoroughly enough, although I'll still say that things were a little ambiguously worded. The page I've linked to above does say "DLP-TEMP-G and 1 DS18B20 sensor $25.00", but when reading datasheet, it goes on about three sensors, and coming with one that isn't soldered on so that you can optionally run a cable between it and the board. I somehow interpreted this as meaning there were two sensors on the board, and one loose. Not the case. The board supports having up to three DS18B20 sensors attached to it, however you please. It comes with one unattached. In hindsight, why would you want two temperature sensors directly on the board? So the moral of this story is I just can't read. Anyway, I got home from Santa Monica last night, and the goods had finally turned up, so I had a play. The DS18B20 just looks like a transistor. I initially ignored it, and just shoved the USB board in caesar, and it happily recognised it

usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 8
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
ftdi_sio 1-1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Detected FT232BM
usb 1-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new driver ftdi_sio
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: v1.4.3:USB FTDI Serial Converters Driver

I then fooled around with minicom, and discovered that the little transistor thing I'd been ignoring was indeed the temperature sensor, as I got a reading of zero back (when using this program I found on the 'net). So I went to bed, and this morning did a bit of messing around with the sensor, and with a bit of creative bending, I've got it sitting in the S1 holes without requiring any soldering. It tells me the linen cupboard is about 44 degrees Celsius. Warm, but I don't think it's in any immediate danger of bursting into flames. Wouldn't surprise me if some of the gear in there isn't too keen about the temperature though. At least we won't have to worry about mold. Next step is to convince cacti to graph it, and nagios to monitor it, and we're in business. Here's a little Python program I knocked up to grab the temperature. pyserial is nice. Read on, Macduff!

The answer to my previous question is "to be". That happened thanks to a bunch of people, in no particular order:

• Jens Sidel, for committing and suggesting early activation and advices about switching to PO format
• Christian Perrier, for being a really nice guy and for being the person that made me click and start contributing to Debian
• Kobayashi Noritada, for magic po4a related commands
  
• Frans Pop, for actually activating the thing and for advices
• Andrei Popescu, for the multiple patches sent and the late hours sacrificed on the Romanian localization altar
  
• Stan Ioan Eugen, for the work done on the translation done for 1.119, multiple comments and comments done at really late hours last night
• Dan Damian, for being the first person to translate the Release Notes in Romanian, at my suggestion
• Ru e Zeno, for comments and suggestions
• Denis Barbier and Martin Quinson for creating po4a
• Nicolas Fran ois (aka nekral) for maintaining po4a
• Javier Fern ndez-Sanguino Pe a, for making calls to translations and sacrificing the Spanish translation while working on the English text to bringing it in shape
  
• anyone that I forgot or don't know about and had a role in making this possible
• silent reviewers on the debian-l10n-romanian list - I wish you started speaking instead of unsubscribing

Updates:

• David Roundy, for creating darcs with its nice darcs send feature which allowed parallel work
  

I just submitted my talk proposal for YAPC::EU, which will be held in Vienna in late August. The topic? Integrating Perl in a wider distribution: The Debian pkg-perl group.
I took part in YAPC::NA (Yet Another Perl Conference - North America) in 2001, in Montreal, and YAPC::EU (you guessed right: Europe) in 2002, in Munich. While in Munich, I met Debian's Erich, Weasel and the late Jens. It is a very nice conference with all kinds of Perl-heads, apt for different experience levels. the talk I am proposing will be about what do we work for in Debian, how can we get a better synergy from our upstream group and (oh, this point is quite itchy - specially in strongly opinioned communities such as Ruby's! Perl people are quite nice to play with, however, but still...) what do we (as Debian maintainers) request from them in order for life to be smoother.
Of course, I only submitted the talk. The CFP has just been launched, and so far, mine is the fourth talk offered - It can still be rejected (as it is not really related to Perl development, the heart of YAPC), but I guess it will be deemed interesting by the Perl monks reviewing them.
In any case, hope to see you in Vienna as well!

Jens Gecius has just dropped out of the Debian new maintainer process, citing time constraints. That means he's no longer maintaining his packages, and I have agreed to adopt them. Which is a nice turn: I'm happy to maintain them, and I'm very happy that someone did the initial packaging while I only had to review it (I sponsored the uploads up until now). I'm now the proud maintainer of the dvtitler, kinoplus and timfx source packages, all three being collections of plugins for Kino (a digital video editor small and functional enough for my needs), containing effects, filters, transitions and so on. I'm not viscerally attached to them, though, so if anyone wants them more than I do, just ask. Now if the udev, sysfs and ieee1394 drivers authors could sit around a table and fix things so that the appropriate raw1394/video1394/dv1394 device nodes appear in /dev when I plug in my DV camcorder, that would be even nicer. I'm currently having to reboot to Linux 2.4 to grab the video out of it and send it back.

Jens wants me to sponsor timfx 0.2.2-1, which fixes an FTBFS bug. Unfortunately, it also removes the automatic updating of the config. sub,guess files. Since it's an useful feature, I told him to un-remove that, then I'll upload 0.2.2-2.

I have the impression that OpenOffice is still busy with cleaning up the code inherited (and e.g. porting to GTK2 and such things). Given the screenshots posted in the much respected Office UI blog by Jensen Harris, I think OpenOffice will run into trouble when Microsoft actually releases their new Office. Microsoft seems to have a really neat and productive UI there - there is only one thing really wrong with it: it's completely different than anything else people are used to (and people have learned to use). While there will obviously be migration issues, companies will probably delay switching to the new office to save licensing costs and such things, marketing people will be all crazy about the new features in there. You might remember the research with the aggressive title "PowerPoint makes you stupid"... actually this will become even more true with the new Office, I fear. It comes with default styles for common diagrams used in presentations, like a flow sequence or a circle sequence. While these aren't particularly smart things, they'll be presented even more prominently (because the gfx is so great), and the actual contents will probably be pushed back even further... Anyway, these new styles look really hip, so people will be eager to use them. And use them. And use them again. And use them really big (eventually forgetting about the contents behind them)... and OpenOffice can't keep up with that so far. Maybe OpenOffice needs a huge scale UI contest. Maybe with some abstraction scheme to be able to run different UIs on the same engine. OpenOffice in particular should try to become a technology leader, and not just try to copy Microsoft as much as possible... the UI changes in Impress are said to be pretty similar to what people expected when they think PowerPoint. There are good reasons to stick with the established UI standards (even when that might mean 'cloning' the UI) since that keeps migration costs low. But I think it's a pity OpenOffice can't show many large technological improvements to put more pressure on Microsoft. Ah, and yes, I guess many people at OOo are well aware of that, and like so many projects (commercial ones probably even more than FLOSS) they're just short on development resources...

Today my boss asked me for a method to clearly umount and afterwards eject a CDROM media on the event of trying to eject the tray using the drive button. I googled around a bit and found auto-eject-cdrom, in the public domain, and originally written by Jens Axboe, from SuSe, and Peter Willis, in 2001 and 2005 respectively. The problem with this little application is that it was unable to eject both my boss drive and mine. It did umount the filesystem but did not eject the tray. So I dig into the code and found that it used plain, old cdrom events, handled by the cdrom kernel module. The event was, in fact, defined in <linux/cdrom.h> as:
#define CDROMEJECT 0×5309 /* Ejects the cdrom media */ I found out that using system (”eject”); as my quick and dirty solution after the umount was working ok, but I was losing performance because eject is used for ejecting floppy disks, tapes and several other media. In fact, eject can figure out which media is he working with so he selects the proper method of ejecting, but I was bitten by the curiosity. So I implemented both the cdrom commands and the SCSI commands for ejecting the tray, in two functions, copypasted from the eject.c, previously apt-get source‘ed and I’m putting this interesting piece of code to the public domain (most likely it should go with a GPL license, since I used GPL’ed code on it) here: auto-eject-cdrom v0.3. A relevant and important piece of code goes now:

        /* Here I use two different methods for ejecting the CDROM. This is for fun only,
           since I could use system(\"eject\"); but this is the dirty hack. Here I use the only
           two CDROM-related eject functions from the eject.c file of the eject program
           by Jeff Tranter (tranter@pobox.com) - Note by Jose Parrella  */

Installing is just a matter of compiling and copying to /usr/local/sbin and running it as auto-eject-cdrom &. I hope it’s useful for those of you who can not afford to use one of the keys of your keyboard to assign the eject command to it. Enjoy!

Today my boss asked me for a method to clearly umount and afterwards eject a CDROM media on the event of trying to eject the tray using the drive button. I googled around a bit and found auto-eject-cdrom, in the public domain, and originally written by Jens Axboe, from SuSe, and Peter Willis, in 2001 and 2005 respectively. The problem with this little application is that it was unable to eject both my boss drive and mine. It did umount the filesystem but did not eject the tray. So I dig into the code and found that it used plain, old cdrom events, handled by the cdrom kernel module. The event was, in fact, defined in <linux/cdrom.h> as:
#define CDROMEJECT 0×5309 /* Ejects the cdrom media */ I found out that using system (”eject”); as my quick and dirty solution after the umount was working ok, but I was losing performance because eject is used for ejecting floppy disks, tapes and several other media. In fact, eject can figure out which media is he working with so he selects the proper method of ejecting, but I was bitten by the curiosity. So I implemented both the cdrom commands and the SCSI commands for ejecting the tray, in two functions, copypasted from the eject.c, previously apt-get source‘ed and I’m putting this interesting piece of code to the public domain (most likely it should go with a GPL license, since I used GPL’ed code on it) here: auto-eject-cdrom v0.3. A relevant and important piece of code goes now:

        /* Here I use two different methods for ejecting the CDROM. This is for fun only,
           since I could use system(\"eject\"); but this is the dirty hack. Here I use the only
           two CDROM-related eject functions from the eject.c file of the eject program
           by Jeff Tranter (tranter@pobox.com) - Note by Jose Parrella  */

Installing is just a matter of compiling and copying to /usr/local/sbin and running it as auto-eject-cdrom &. I hope it’s useful for those of you who can not afford to use one of the keys of your keyboard to assign the eject command to it. Enjoy!

Heute war die Impro-Theater-Gruppe der Uni, Schmitz’ Katze, im Jubez zu sehen. Diese leider nicht sehr h ufigen Auftritte lasse ich mir - soweit m glich - nicht entgehen. Trozdem wird es einem dank der Improvisation nicht langweilig. So wurde man heute mit Reagenzglaskindern, Lagefeuergeschichten und Horror-B gelbrettern begl ckt.Nach einer kurzen Aufw rmzeit anfangs zeigte die Truppe vor der Pause Bestleistung. Bew hrt haben sich dabei die traditionellen Spiele. Nach der Pause wurde lange und am St ck “Fishing in the Stream of Conciousness” gespielt, und sollte wohl einen k sterlischen Touch bekommen. Das war schade, denn es zog sich bisweilen ein wenig und wirkliche Lacher waren etwas d nner geseht. Um so beeindruckender war Jens’ Auftritt als posenreicher Jesus beim Abendmal. Auch sonst - als komplettes Italienisches Landhaus mit K hlschrank und BH - war er heute in bester Verfassung. Daher geht mein “Bester Improvisat r des Abends” an Jens.F r die Freunde des Theatersports, der kompetitiven Variante des Improtheaters: Am 10. Dezember kommt die T binger Theatersportgruppe Harlekin ins Jubez: Diese professionelle(?) Truppe spielt in einer andren Liga, hier sind die Sponanlieder chartreif und jede Szene erneut orginell (zumindest habe ich sie so in Erinnerung).

Tim Pritlove Jens (argh, need some sleep!) from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has asked for more english blog posts about 22C3, the upcoming hacker conference in Berlin. So here you go. Reminder:

The 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3) is a four-day conference on technology, society and utopia. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics including (but not limited to) information technology, IT-security, internet, cryptography and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society.

The congress (sub-titled "Private Investigations") will be held from December 27th to 30th, 2005, in Berlin, Germany. Some noteworthy bits and pieces:

• If I don't get hit by a bus, I'll be there.
• They have an (English) event blog which should keep you up to date.
• The 22C3 public wiki launched today.
• There are very nice 22C3 wallpapers available now (thanks to Antenne).
• The CongressRadio team will be podcasting during the congress.
• There is a 22C3 Planet (actually there are two).

This is gonna be one of the highlights of this year, I'm really looking forward to the congress.

Debian again hat a booth at the "Systems" fair in Munich. This is mostly a B2B fair, and the focus is on "ready to use" products. So there are few new product announcements happening here, and not this big audience as of IFA or CeBIT. Still it is an important fair for the medium and small sized businesses. Noone expects a PSP to be introduced there... I staffed the booth on tuesday morning, and I intended to staff it on Friday morning, too (but was unable to do so). We were rather few people this year; also the organizational contribution of Jens (who died this summer) was missed a lot. Thanks to Michael Banck for organizing most things, and to all the other contributors such as Michael Ablassmeier and Simon Richter. See Michael Bancks blog posting for a complete list. Thanks also to e.g. the wikipedia staff, who managed to staff our booth for a few minutes while I went to the entrance to give Simon a free pass. Tuesday morning was rather quiet, few people coming by, most of which are either already happy Debian users or at least know of it. Few donations, albeit the few LinuxTag DVDs left were gone (for a donation of at least 2 Euro) by noon. While I remember people asking all the time about the pretty posters with Ayo's artwork last year, and we had a bigger stock of them this time, noone asked while I was there. So on overall, I don't think it paid off for the project. :-( A couple of people had technical questions which I was usually able to give the relevant pointers for solving them. The recurring question "when is sarge going to be released" was obviously not an issue any more; one guy asked when etch was going to be released and I was able to quickly pull out the announcement by the release team with the end-of-2006 schedule. I was rather disappointed with the few people coming by, but probably tuesday morning was a rather unrepresentative time. The only two "important" conversations I had there was with someone from a PHP magazine who are interested in including a Sarge+PHP5+MySQL5 CD with an upcoming issue (I can't do that, I hope they'll find someone else to prepare the CD for them!) and with the people from LiMux (the upcoming linux switch of the city of munich) which sounded (to me) much like the current delay of the project is mostly due to management issues than due to Debian/GNU/Linux lacking some features. They couldn't really tell me what the Debian project could do to support LiMux. Debian being used for LiMux is something I'm really looking forward to, and I would have loved to see a demo of it at the Systems, but apparently the project isn't that far yet. :-( I didn't see much of the Systems otherwise - I had to hurry back to the university when I left the booth, so I didn't visit any other booth. The last few times it wasn't too interesting for me anyway, since none of the products (except the OSS projects) is targeted at my audience obviously. And I'm not the type to walk around to collect as many free CDs and ball pens as possible. I remember that last year you could have your face "imprinted" in a block of transparent resin with small bubbles or so; no idea if that was free or at a low charge, though. You used to get popcorn and such stuff at a couple of booths etc. - and a lot more of such stuff back in DotCom times - but it never interested me too much. And last year I think a conference hotel had the booth opposite of us and gave away free beer... anyway, I didn't even check if the LiMux booth maybe had one of these nice munich-penguin pins... I had considered to walk around and ask for sponsorship at a coupld of places for some projects I'm invovled in, but I don't think I'm good at that anyway... So my feelings are rather mixed. I really hope we'll have more people for the booth next year, because I'll not be available then: I'll hopefully be in finishing my diploma thesis by then.

Systems 2005 Another year, another Systems. This year, however, sadly the first time without Jens, so organization was harder than usual. C&L again provided an Open Source area where we had a booth along with GNOME, KDE, the several BSDs, PostgreSQL and some smaller Open Source projects. As we were not able to build up the booth on Sunday already, there was only a pretty bad location left on Monday, facing towards the wall. Roland Stigge provided a huge 1,5 by 1,5 metre Debian swirl banner, which we mounted in the vicinity of the (too small for that) booth. Michael Ablassmeier brought a Shuttle PC and a TFT display so we could show visitors around the Debian desktop and point them towards further information on the internet. Credativ again kindly shipped posters and flyers. We sold the former and distributed the latter to passing visitors. Unfortunately, Credativ did not receive any LinuxTag DVDs this year, and we were unable to obtain some from other people (apparently they are spared for LinuxWorldExpo in Frankfurt next month, though most visitors there should know Debian already I guess), so we only had about 30 DVDs, which were left from the pack I took back from LinuxTag myself. We sold those for 2 EUR, and later distributed some shiny new Breezy CDs the GNOME booth acquired on Thursday and had some Sarge CDs pressed at a nearby CD production booth which we sold for 2 EUR as well. After some initial doubts on whether we would be able to properly man the booth, it turned out that the local Debian community was enough to guarantee presence except for Friday morning. Michael Ablassmeier, Erich Schubert, Simon Richter, Roland Stigge and Rene Engelhard manned the booth besides me. So we were in the fortunate position that we had two people at the booth most of the time while shuffling around personnel, while most other booths were operated by the same one or two people throughout the week. This year, almost all people I asked (I usually offered a flyer and asked "Do you know Debian already?" to all passing visitors, unless they quickly tried to run through our territory) knew about Debian at least somewhat, and surprisingly many people said they had Debian installed and were happy with it. Thanks to the Sarge release and the almost-official amd64 archive (the respective lack of which were by far the most prominent questions last year), we had almost no recurring questions to answer; probably the most frequent question was about Ubuntu and our relationship with it, but those were pretty scarce and I expected much more of that. Likewise, only very few people were unhappy about Debian (far outweighed by the happy bunch), and most of that seemed to be due to specific technical issues rather than any general reservations about the Debian development or community processes. Most of the remaining questions were pretty specific, e.g. people having issues installing Debian on their hardware or trying to do some exotic stuff. To summarize, it was a nice having a booth again and getting in touch with visitors and users. I did not see much else of Systems this year due to being busy with university as well, but I do not think it would have been worth it anyway. Murray Cumming and Joerg Kress (who were managing the GNOME booth) helped me dismantle the booth and carry back the hardware and leftovers on Friday evening and we decided to have dinner together at a nice pub in Munich.