I haven t blogged for a while, because I ve been doing so many things that I scarcely had time nor will for it. Among all those things, and during the weekends of the last few months, we have been teaching kids (8-12 y.o.) about computers, Free Software and technology. Those kids are great, very intelligent, very motivated, and very funny to be with. I miss them a bit after the program has ended. In any case, I ve been given the chance to teach some more kids during summer weekdays, and I m really looking forward to it. The downside of this is that I won t have any summer holidays and, thus, I finally won t be able to attend DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, which was something I was also looking forward too. But, even though that s something I d really love to do, one cannot be in two places at the time, so this year I finally won t be able to attend DebConf either. Have lots of fun! I ll miss you! In case you want to know more about all of this (sorry, links are in Spanish):

• La Servilleta de Paco Prieto [feb 26 2011]: J venes descubriendo talento: tecnolog a, ciencia, emprender y matem ticas
• La Servilleta de Paco Prieto [jun 21 2011]: Estudiantes que quieren m s ca a !!!

Oh, and to show you what I m exchanging you for (nothing personal): I wouldn t like to end this post without thanking all the kids from both Campus TIC and Yo Programo for being so cool, and also to welcome the kids from Fantastic Park, in case any of them -or their parents- are reading. Oh, and all of you who attend DebConf this year, have a lot of fun!

Gnash 0.8.8 was released on the 23rd of August, a bit more than two weeks after the freeze. There are very important features in this new release that made 0.8.8 by far a better option than buggy 0.8.7 for Squeeze:

• 100% of all YouTube videos should work now. If you have problems, delete all YouTube cookies and refresh.
• Gnash can switch at runtime between the Cairo, OpenGL, and AGG renderers.
• It can also switch media handlers at runtime, between FFmpeg and GStreamer.
• Gnash can now decode video quickly on hardware compatible with the VAAPI library (a few NVidia, ATI, and Intel graphics processors). Debian packages by default do not have this feature activated until FFmpeg in Debian supports VAAPI, so that will be in Wheezy.
• It compiles faster due to reduced internal dependencies.
• It has Scriptable Plugin support so Javascript in the browser can work with ActionScript in Gnash.
• There is an improved input device handling when using a raw framebuffer.
• Lots of bugs fixed.

Today, the Release Team has unblocked 0.8.8-2, which has already reached Testing, so I m proud to announce that Squeeze will be released with latest Gnash. Thanks guys!

Today is March 24th, that means Ada Lovelace Day, and it is being pushed as an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. The aim of Ada Lovelace Day is to focus on building female role models not just for girls and young women but also for those of us in tech who would like to feel that we are not alone in our endeavours. There are some very good examples of women that have been important in the development of science and technology, starting with Ada Lovelace herself (the first developer of an algorithm intended to be processed by a machine), Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language), Adele Goldstine (who wrote the complete technical description for the first digital computer, ENIAC), as well as the six women who did most of the programming of if (Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman), or women scientists, or women inventors, etc. Well, I m not going to write about any of those, even when any of them would surely deserve that and more for sure. I m going to write about a woman who has definitely been very inspiring and supportive for me when I was starting to get in touch with Free Software and Debian, and who is probably the most important single reason I decided to go for it. It is definitely hard to write about someone you admire when she happens to be one of your best friends, and in fact I m pretty sure that most of the people reading this article already know her, so there s no great mistery. I m talking about Amaya Rodrigo, the first european female Debian Developer (AFAIK) and co-founder of the Debian Women project, and also member of Hispalinux Board in the golden days. The first time I met her she was giving a talk in Madrid about a project that was starting then, Debian Women, and it was very inspiring for me. Inspiring enough for me to join the project. Afterwards I ve learnt more about her, how she overcame many dificulties, like starting to work with computers quite late, among others. The real merit of a pioneer is not really to be the best techie out there, but to overcome the difficulties and doing it the best you can, when no one else has done it before. I m not going to write her biography here, it s not really the purpose of this blog entry, and you probably can ask herself directly. This blog entry is, as I said at the beginning, to highlight women in technology that I consider inspiring and relevant. You know, I admire you, Amaya

It seems that I m not blogging as often as I was some months ago. The main reason is microblogging, which is somehow quicker, even though briefer. It is also less informative, I guess, because 140 characters is a very limited length. Probably because of that, a friend of mine asked me to write a proper blog entry about this, and I think that he s probably right. openFrameworks is an open source toolkit, released under the MIT license, written in C++ and designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation. According to its authors, it was developed for folks using computers for creative, artistic expression, and who would like low level access to the data inside of media in order manipulate, analyze or explore. I attended a short course in openFrameworks some months ago, and decided that if I wanted to experiment with it, I should somehow structure the building process of the library a bit, remove the dependency on FMOD, which is not DFSG-free, even though that might require remove the whole audio subsystem, make it buildable without Code::Blocks, and hopefully build some more-or-less proper packages. I ve also added some pkg-config files, so that it becomes easier to build projects based in openFrameworks (as easy as g++ source.cpp -o test $(pkg-config openframeworks openframeworks-addons cflags libs) ). Even though the packages are still not as good as they should, they re absolutely usable right now. I ve uploaded them, as well as their dependencies, to my Ubuntu PPA (although I m using those packages in my Debian), in case that someone is interested. I ve also uploaded a couple of tiny examples (the second one downloaded from here) of openFrameworks.

Zaz ( Zaz ain t Z*** ) is nice action puzzle game, similar to Zuma, in which you have to get rid of all the balls that roll around the screen through some given paths by rearranging their order in the chain. The balls explode and dissapear when three or more of the same color get in contact. The whole game is controlled through the mouse device.
Through the game some special balls appear, with a tiny symbol over them, that makes your life easier by doing thinks like make all the balls step back a bit, making them move more slowly, stopping them for a while or giving you a ray to help you point your device and get and drop the balls where you want. You lose a life when the balls reach their destination hole, so be quick! The game currently has 10 different levels, but will probably have more in the future, and needs a 3D accelerator for decent gameplay. Zaz has just entered Debian repositories. If you like arcade puzzles, you should definitely give it a try. If you use Ubuntu Jaunty, you can also find it in my PPA. The original game included CC-by-sa-nc 3.0 music from Nine Inch Nails, which had to be removed for the game to go into Debian Main. The game has already been translated to Polish and Spanish, probably other translations will follow in the future, but it is not really text-based at all, so that shouldn t really be a problem for anyone.

Structure Synth is an application for creating 3D structures from a set of user specified rules. It is an attempt to make a 3D version of Context Free (a free -GPL ed- program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar). The cool thing about Structure Synth is that it has a simple language for writing recursive scripts that can generate complex structures (kinda Processing, but in 3D), and you can feed the result into Sunflow (a rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis, already available in Debian) to generate Escher-like cool images. The program is waiting in the NEW queue, but you can temporarily download my packages (for Debian SID amd64) if you want. Even though I ve tried hard to be the one to blog about this, my friend Javier Candeira has won the competition and has been able to write about this earlier than me Spanish readers might want to have a look at JoSeKBlog, where he describes how to combine Structure Synth and Sunflow, and where I first read about the existence of the program.

Recently, a new version of Gnash was uploaded to Debian by Miriam Ruiz. The most important thing in the changelog from my point of view is the following:

• Using KDE4 instead of KDE3

So I kind of had to test how the KDE 4 thingies works.
Youtube: The videos being watched right now -animation works, but I can t actually watch the movies.
Random flash advertisements plays nicely. Unfortunately. I was happy to avoid those. Conclusion: Some things works, but mostly the annoying things.

Easy: Install this, and add this bookmarklet to your favourites.

Giving up on a position within a free software project when you know you re no longer managing to do an effective job is a wonderfully liberating experience. Now that I have started to talk with Miriam Ruiz about handing over the Debian Jr. project, I can stop worrying about the leadership task and just have fun with it. I can always count on Miriam for recommendations for games in Debian my kids may enjoy, as she has a passion for finding good games to package for Debian, and in particular, games for children. Over the past few weeks we ve had some fun with her picks. At the same time, I always have Debian Jr. in mind. How can we ensure kids can have the most fun with this? How do we equip their guides to help them? What we ve done with each new piece of software is to find a quiet time when one or more of the children can start playing with it on their own while we watch, offering such guidance as they need, but for the most part just letting them loose with it. Each wrinkle of the brow, each impetuous thump of the mouse, every illuminated grin and exclamation of delight is noted. We try to see what frustrates or pleases our kids and discuss it both with them and the Debian maintainers and upstream developers. This is an excercise we ve managed to pull off without being overly intrusive and the results have been well worth the effort. Using a few of Miriam s picks we tried this week, we were able to draw their play into the free software development process. Here s a brief summary of those sessions: Platinum Arts Sandbox puts into children s hands the ability to role play in a 3D world and edit that world using simplified controls. The expressions on the faces of our kids as they played were priceless: both the ups and the downs. I wanted to capture this on video and share it. After having established a rapport with upstream, we took a 20 minute clip of one of our play sessions and gave a copy to them to use to help further their work. Here is the edited result. They were very pleased to have that kind of feedback and found the video valuable for determining where the software still needed improvement and to notice which aspects particularly pleased the children. I happen to know that Hex-a-hop is one of Miriam s personal favourites. We have a household full of puzzle-lovers so this puzzle game was an instant hit. While on irc on #debian-jr with Miriam we relayed in real-time some of the reactions as they played this and a handful of her other picks. This gave her some confirmation of areas she knew needed work as well as inspiration for upcoming releases of these packages. During this play session, which also included StegaVorto, kartofel, Anagramarama, Funny Boat and Vodovod, my youngest girl, age 7, plunked down on the couch next to me as her 10-year-old sister played. Then she started to notice I was typing what people in the livingroom were saying and doing on irc. She took a mild affront to me copying her own words and actions, so I decided it would be better to let her participate so she would feel included. At this point, I started playing secretary for her, typing what she dictated to me while she read the responses from the display. Later, I just handed her the keyboard so she could type and read the responses on her own. She was still at it long past bedtime and it was with some reluctance that she finally gave up the keyboard. We all had a lot of fun and look forward to doing this again. We are particularly careful with privacy, taking care to share pictures, videos, and other personal details only so far as we believe it does not put our children at risk. Also, we need to ensure we observe in a way that is welcome and doesn t interfere with their enjoyment. But with a little bit of prudence and a practiced eye and ear for what increases or diminishes enjoyment of the software, we can involve our children directly in the free software development process. I commend to anyone who has the privilege to share free software with children to use this method to communicate with maintainers and developers, increasing your own enjoyment of the software in the process and that of children and their guides everywhere.

Patio Maravillas is a self-managed government-independent social center in Madrid, placed in a squatted building that long ago belonged to school. The place currently belongs to a Real Estate company, Grupo 2 Reunidos. According to the law, the place has to be used for providing services to the community, which hasn t happened for 10 years. Nobody knows what plans they do have for the building, but there are suspicions that it might be related to property speculation. Nothing new on the horizon. The police are throwing them out of the building tomorrow morning, incidentally coinciding with the opening of the Foro Social Mundial (World Social Forum), for which Patio Maravillas was going to be one of the hosting buildings. Madrid isn t really known for supporting social movements in general, and has a conservative government, so feel free to think that the coincidence is not random. Patio Maravillas has been giving courses and workshops to the community since July 2007, and is very well considered and supported by different organizations. Supposedly whatever happens tomorrow will be without violence, but knowing how the Spanish Police behaves in this situations that is not very likely. The event will be streamed and probably recorded, and information will be twittered, so hopefully nothing serious will happen. I really hope the best for them. I d love to be able to be there with them, but as it is really not possible for me, I m giving them all my support from here. Good luck! Keep up the good work!

Instant messaging through web interfaces is not really the most comfortable thing to use. While their ubiquity is nice, and they can be used from whatever computer you want without having to install anything, for my own computer I prefer a real desktop application. Pidgin (formerly called gaim) is a multi-platform instant messaging client that supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols, so different services can be used from the same application. Being a user of many different messaging systems, I kinda use Pidgin as an abstraction layer from the services I use. Yesterday I discovered pidgin-facebookchat, a Facebook chat plugin for Pidgin and libpurple messengers, that is able to connects to the new Facebook Chat IM service without the need for an API key. It works quite well, all things considered.

Some weeks ago I bought myself an e-book reader, Sony Reader PRS 505. It is a really cool gadget, and as I usually read a lot of stuff in my computer, it is somehow an investment in my eyes. I decided on this one because the support for Linux is quite well, through the unofficial Free Software project Calibre. Calibre is primarily an e-book cataloging program: it manages your e-book collection for you, and it is designed around the concept of the logical book (i.e. a single entry in the database that may correspond to ebooks in several formats). It also upports conversion from a dozen different ebook formats to LRF and EPUB. A graphical interface to the conversion software can be accessed easily by just clicking the Convert E-books button. A lot of input formats are supported: MOBI, LIT, PRC, EPUB, ODT, HTML, CBR, CBZ, RTF, TXT, PDF and LRS. After some weeks of work, Martin Pitt and I have finished the packages for Debian and Ubuntu, which are right now waiting in the Debian NEW Queue. You can temporarily get them from here, compiled for Debian SID AMD64, but of course you can build them for your platform, or wait until they enter Debian.

The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
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:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

I have been positively surprised to find out that some people are taking seriously the fact that some people are being put off from actively participating in Debian s discussions because doing so would lead to offensive behaviour and personal attacks, and to try to find a solution to the fact that a very vocal minority is dominating the silent majority. Of course, some people are happy with the statu quo and strongly opposes to changing anything in that direction, not very surprisingly. The part about I m really starting to think that this Project could do a lot better without some people is crystal clear and needs no comments. I m not really sure that the current social environment can be fixed just with technical measures. Another proposal talks about some mailing lists extracted from the official ones but with the offending comments filtered out. I must confess that I find this idea very interesting and that I might think about rejoining such a list. Of course, technical details on how to properly and effectively implement any of this methods, or even a mixed one, can be very tricky.

Well, everybody has been very vocal about it, so I will be too: I don t like current voting ballot, I won t defend that, but I do like Manoj as Debian s secretary and I don t think he deserves all the attacks he has been subject to. Short and clear.

From How to win online debates, by Adam Graham:

• Learn how to ridicule the beliefs of others: When you debate online, you can be quite contemptible in your choice of verbiage. Don t just respond to your opponents, ridicule them. If you merely respond, they can just fire back a response, but the ridicule will strengthen your argument and there s not really a good way to respond to being ridiculed.
• Repeat yourself: Keep going over the same ground over and over again. The most talented online debaters say the exact same thing repeatedly in a slightly different way. In doing so, they force their opponents to become equally repetitive, which can help you in winning the debate.
• Quote whole articles of more than a thousand words in their entirety. While in an offline debate, you couldn t stand up and read fifty pages of material, nothing stops you from doing so online. Thus, if you re not very good at forming logical arguments, all you have to do is quote others good arguments and thus you can bolster your weakness and outmatch your opponent.
• Remember that if your opponent quits debating you, you win. What will pay off most in repetitiveness, a snotty attitude, and writing posts that are so long that your opponent cannot respond to them unless he quits his jobs and dedicates his entire life to addressing your rants. If he says he s leaving because you re rude or repetitive, you ve really won because it shows how much you dominated the debate.

You won t really influence the direction of what people think on a given issue. The prize is the satisfaction that you won the debate. You beat that guy. You showed him who was right! Congratz! As the author of the article says, quoting the film War Games: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Games are probably the kind of software that needs more patching and maintenance. In some cases we even have to effectively act as upstreams ourselves. Currently every distro is doing that on their own, and we end up making n times similar patches to provide the same functionality (put files in the proper places, endianess and word size stuff, building with newer versions of gcc or free toolchains, etc). It makes a lot of sense to share among us all that stuff. Some of us, developers of different Linux distributions and BSD operative systems have started working together to reduce duplicated work, creating a distribution-agnostic mailing list in freedesktop servers as a first step. Debian Project News talks about this too. You can read more about our goals here. Wish us luck in this new quest, and join us if you’re interested too

Gnash 0.8.4 will be finally included in Lenny. There have been many improvements since 0.8.4, and it looks as though even more will be included in next release. Gnash current release cycle is 3 months, so next upstream release is planned for January 2009.

I hadn’t noticed until today when Jordi Guti rrez Hermoso pointed it out to me: We already have AGPL’ed stuff in Debian, and not only in sid but it will also be shipped in Lenny. We have discussed that license in debian-legal during August and September this year, and in November its usage in client code has also being clarified when the FSF updated their FAQ to address that question, but we never reached a definitive conclussion. I also filed a bug against FTP Master asking them to clarify the situation of AGPL licensed stuff in Debian, which still remains unanswered. In any case, debian-legal is just a mailing list for discussion, and does not have the capacity to take any final decisions (that’s FTP Master’s task) but it would have been nice if someone had pointed it out there.