I discovered Coccinella this afternoon. It is a Jabber client coded in Tcl/Tk that I found in the list of clients supporting Jingle in the Wikipedia. The main advantage about Coccinella is that it has a built-in whiteboard that allows a better collaboration with other people. The whiteboard is a shared desktop which supports text, drawings, images, and multimedia in a number of formats, such as MP3 and video. It runs in two main modes, a peer-to-peer configuration and a mode compatible with the Jabber Instant Messaging system. A flexible plugin architecture may be used to support additional formats. For being able to package it, I also had to package some of its dependencies: TkTreeCtrl (a widget for Tcl/Tk), TkPNG (to add PNG support to Tcl/Tk) and the Tcl interface to the iax(2) client library. I still have to finish them properly, with man pages, icons, desktop files an the such, but for the moment I don’t have time for that, so if anyone wants to try the program, all the packages are available (compiled for amd64 for sid, but the package source is available too, so you can easily rebuild it for your system).

I spent much of this week in Alicante. It was wonderful to have a few days away from the beginnings of Winter in Cambridge - Alicante's in South West Spain, right on the Mediterranean. It's a lovely city, although it was very quiet due to the time of year. I was invited down to Alicante by organisers of the Congr s de Programari Lliure, Comunitat Valenciana, to present a talk about Debian. That I did, and as always my slides and photos are available in case people are interested. I wasn't too sure about what level to aim the talk, so I deliberately went for a general introduction to Debian. That seems to have been the correct level - nobody threw anything at me, and nobody was visibly falling asleep. *grin* It's also the first time I've ever given a talk with official translators, which is a weird experience! The main topic for the conference was the new release of Lliurex, Valencia's own GNU/Linux distribution targeted primarily at use in schools. The conference was massive; I was told there were about 1500 attendees in all, most of whom were teachers who wanted to come and learn more about Free Software. There was a good spread of talks and workshops, covering topics from development through to deployment in the classroom. The level of enthusiasm for Free Software here was immense - lots of people were keen to learn more about it and get involved. I was told that out of the 15 regions/states of Spain, 11 of them have now started their own distributions to use in schools! Extremadura were the first region to experiment with Free Software like this, and their success with LinEx was a clear inspiration to their neighbours elsewhere in Spain. As well as the obvious cost advantages of moving from proprietary to Free Software, the local governments also love the freedom to use and modify their software however they like - including the ability to provide their own translations. I met up with a lot of cool people at the conference too. The local education minister (Alejandro Font de Mora) was keen to talk with all the speakers and very enthusiastic about the future of Free Software in his schools. As is increasingly common at FS events around the world, there were of course quite a few Debian people around too. Luciano and Miriam were also giving talks, and I bumped into Rene and Miguel and a whole bunch of others whose names I'm too crap to remember - sorry! I also spoke a lot with Kurt Gramlich, the mega-enthusiastic Skolelinux developer who was also happy to push Debian to everybody he spoke to *grin*. Jon "Maddog" Hall had some excellent ideas that I'm sure we'll all hear more about soon, and his talk was excellent. He did a very good job of explaining how Free Software makes such a difference, including how it helps people to make money. He also explained that due to travel he had missed Halloween at home and he wanted to share the experience of scary masks with the people at the conference: I had a great time in Alicante, and I'm very grateful for the invitation to go there. I wish that the UK was as far as advanced as Spain in the use of Free Software in education - they've done a huge amount of good work in this area and I'm glad we can help them.

“I can understand, accept and respect that there are people with different sexual trends, but that they feel proud to be gay? That they go out on parades and demonstrations?” , Said the Queen of Spain to Pilar Urbano, the author of a biography about her (”La Reina muy de cerca“). “If these people want to live together, dress up for a wedding and to marry, they might have right to do so or not, according to their country’s laws: but they shouldn’t call that marriage, because it’s not. There are many possible names: social contract, union contract.“, she added. “Puedo comprender, aceptar y respetar que haya personas con otra tendencia sexual, pero que se sientan orgullosos por ser gays? Que se suban a una carroza y salgan en manifestaciones?“, dijo la Reina de Espa a a Pilar Urbano, autora de una biograf a sobre ella (”La Reina muy de cerca“). “Si esas personas quieren vivir juntas, vestirse de novios y casarse, pueden estar en su derecho, o no, seg n las leyes de su pa s: pero que a eso no le llamen matrimonio, porque no lo es. Hay muchos nombres posibles: contrato social, contrato de uni n.“, a adi . She has also spoken against abortion and euthanasia and in favor of forcing all the children to learn religion (catholic) at school. The Royal Family is supposed not to have a public political opinion, as they should theoretically represent every Spanish person. Fortunately many of us don’t believe in blue blood, kings, queens and all that stuff, so she definitely doesn’t represent us God shave the Queen!

L ve is a 2D game development framework based in Lua and OpenGL, created to be a user-friendly engine in which simple (or complicated) games could be made without having extensive knowledge of system or graphics functions and without having to dedicate time towards developing the same engine features time and time again.After some weeks in the NEW queue, we finally have L ve in Debian.In this time frame, L ve 0.5.0 has been released. I’ll try to have the latest version packaged and uploaded as soon as possible. In any case, it’s so cool to finally have love in Debian! You can now apt-get install love in your system Lior Kaplan spoiled the surprise some weeks ago, btw

While I don’t really have a strong opinion on the suggestions in Ganneff’s announcement in d-d-a, as I haven’t had time to think deeply about the consequences that they would have, but which I foresee to be very important (they could have strong implications in the Debian Project), and making use of my freedom of speech, I must say that I agree with Joey and Julien. I don’t like how the whole proposal has been done, and I also fear the accumulation of power that slowly seems to be going along in Debian. I believe that spread power usually is much better and healthier than the opposite, and if it’s true that decisions are being increasingly taken in cabals, we’re going in the wrong direction. About Julien’s post on people being too coward to say what they think, a long time ago I posted about NM process saying that “If you want to finish university, you should take care about getting on with the teachers. The result are submissive citizens that won t face authority even if they know they re right, in order to avoid problems“, and “What should be taken care about is that the NM process don t filter side (lateral) thinking, creativeness, confrontation with authority or the will to make a better world. I wouldn t like an NM process that promoted the same submissive values that the educational system does“. I hope this is all a misunderstanding and things aren’t changing for worse. In any case I’m not afraid of sharing my thoughts on the matter.

Data ordered by entry data is not a data file, and thus not protected by the law regarding personal data files, because it’s hard to do searches in them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s the argument that the highest court in Spain (Tribunal Supremo) has used to prevent the Catholic Church from losing believers. Many children are automatically baptisted by their parents when they’re just babies, without having any decision in that, and thus they names are written down in the Church files^Wlists of baptisted people. That’s the numbers they will use later when asking for privileges for the Catholic Church, and that’s why it’s so important for them that all of us are counted as catholics, whether we are or not believers. Fewer than half of Spanish youth consider themselves Catholic, so it’s important for them to keep appearances to keep their power intact. In Spain thousands of non believers are demanding that the Church cancel their baptism records, in order to annul any official connection with Catholicism. And church leaders in turn have gone to the courts to try to stop parishioners deserting. The Tribunal Supremo seems to be taking a political side with their decision trying to vulnerate non-believers rights to artificially promote the Catholic Church. Apostasy is the formal religious disaffiliation or abandonment or renunciation of one’s religion. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, considers the recanting of a person’s religion a human right legally protected by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “The Committee observes that the freedom to ‘have or to adopt’ a religion or belief necessarily entails the freedom to choose a religion or belief, including the right to replace ones current religion or belief with another or to adopt atheistic views […] Article 18.2 bars coercion that would impair the right to have or adopt a religion or belief, including the use of threat of physical force or penal sanctions to compel believers or non-believers to adhere to their religious beliefs and congregations, to recant their religion or belief or to convert.”. Anyway, many religious groups and even some states punish apostates. For Catholics, the word “apostasy” signifies the desertion of faith, which had been one of the three unpardonable sins in the early years of the Church. AEPD, the national agency for data protection, is pondering now whether to appeal against the sentence. I hope they do. There are other legitimate subjects that could appeal against it, too. No one should be forced to belong to a Church they don’t believe in.

(long post, you've been warned) With his his 'Omelette Post' about FOSS.IN/2008 Call for Participation, Atul Chitnis, the FOSS.IN team 'leader' indeed sent an strong sign. For those who aren't aware of it, FOSS.IN is the longstanding major FLOSS event in India and, still (just like our beloved Debconf) only run by volunteers. Last year, along with Sam Hocevar, I had the chance to attend the event and share the groove of that big, huge, conference, with over 2,000 participants. Some other Debian fellows also made it in the past (Jaldhar, Bdale...). During the Debian Project Day as well as regular conference days, we had the great opportunity to meet with the people who currently participate in Debian (and Ubuntu) in South Asia, as well as first meeting some major contributors from other projects. For me, and, I think, of all people I met up there, this was a great *and productive* event. Maybe not productive at the moment it happened, but productive in terms of mutual awareness, knowledge and friendship. All people who attended such conferences (should I say "Debconf" or "FOSDEM"?) know what I'm talking about. The conference was still quite focused on "real" FLOSS contribution more than evangelizing or politics. And I think it succeeded in it quite well. This year, I already planned to not attend...mostly because such event, with the associated long travel time, is something I can't really fit in my real life right now. Also, because it conflicts with a planned Extremadura work session, indeed. Still, I would indeed not have attended it. Atul's post makes it clear: the even will only be about coding. The point is to put focus on people who code and we do 'real' code. Bug fixing is not coding. Translation effort is not coding. Work on support for complex languages is not coding. Actually, what FOSS.IN/2008 organizers are trying to do is a kind of big Debcamp. I'm afraid it won't work this way. From what I have seen in years of participation to Debian, things just don't come up this way. People don't sit down and code because they're invited to. And, still, are only "people who code" the only people that matter in a project? Debian is sometimes seen as one of the biggest FLOSS projects all around (probably shared with the Linux kernel). How many people in Debian just "sit down and code"? What about those people who maintain our web site, our archive, setup our infrastructure, our new maintainer queue, our communication channels? What about those dozens of people who nicely maintain packages and keep the link with upstream developers, or fix bugs.... Those people do not seem welcomed at FOSS.IN/2008. "Not only bug fixing" is said in this announcement. This, I don't get it. At all. Why would "bug fixing" be second class work? Why would it be more noble to "code" new stuff? Maybe Atul did not mean to say this. He wants to have Indian contributors in FLOSS to be more visible....but I don't share this. Indian contributors in Debian *are* visible. Giridhar Appaji Nag is visible, "my" translator crew is visible, Kartik Mistry is visible (he once was too visible, even, by maintaining a little bit too many packages...). Bug fixing is the most noble task I see in FLOSS development. This is what we need the most. I recently blogged about how I feel APT to be 'poorly' maintained (once again, that was not targeted to current APT maintainers). What I would respect deeply is to see a bunch of Indian contributors stand up and take this task over. Atul, that would certainly not be "outsourcing code/package maintenance" and, no, these are not things one can get involved with instantly. Really, I don't buy this vision and that saddens me. That saddens me mostly because I know the folks there. I know the FOSS.IN organizers and I have deep respect for them. I just think they're missing the target and are too ambitious: one cannot change an event so drastically by just saying it has to change..:-) And, really, I'm even more sad to see localization work be called a low-hanging fruit from a country where there are 22 official languages. Or take words such as "talk is cheap, show me the code" as $ DEITY 's Holy Word just because it was once said by Linus Torvalds (who said many stupid things). Code is just one part of FLOSS development. Certainly one of the important parts but still one part. What would have happened to FLOSS if only "coders" had been working on it all over those years? It would be something used by about 10,000 people all around the world, that's all. We should not make an opposition between those who code and those who don't. By the way, do *I* code? When I'm sitting at 07:00AM on a Saturday morning, hacking on Samba packages and try to have Samba 3.2.4 built with the set of patches we have on Debian....do I code? I'm not *producing* code....the code was produced by those wonderful Samba Team folks. Does Karolin Seeger code when she's releasing samba with such a precise and constant schedule as she's doing since early 2008? Or Ana Guerrero when she (not alone!) compiles dozens of KDE packages and organizes and bumps the maintenance of KDE in Debian for the best of our users. Or Miriam Ruiz when she picks up each and every possible free game and tries to get it in Debian, talks with upstream developers, help them to fiw their code to suit the severe requirements of the Debian policy? Or Clytie Siddall when she translates about every major FLOSS in Vietnamese (nor URL here, sorry)? All these folks are part of the FLOSS game. You want Indians to be part of FLOSS game? Then allow the potential Karolin, Ana, Miriam or Clytie to be part of Indian FLOSS game and don't try to make FOSS.in the place where you seek the future Indian Linus Torvalds and only him her. Talk is cheap, show me the contribution.

A research conducted by Noel A. Card at the Universities of North Carolina and Kansas, that appears in the September / October issue of journal Child Development, challenges the popular misconception that indirect aggression is a female form of aggression. The meta-analysis is based on 148 studies of aggression in children and adolescents in schools, involving on the whole about 74,000 children and adolescents. Direct aggression is what we might call physical aggression, and indirect aggression includes covert behaviour designed to damage another individual’s social standing in his or her peer group. Based on the analysis, the researchers suggest that children who carry out one form of aggression may be inclined to carry out the other form. This is seen more in boys than in girls. The popular myth that girls are more likely to be socially aggressive has been proven wrong by this analysis, even though it has persisted among teachers, parents, and even among researchers, probably because of social expectations and recent movies and books portraying girls as mean and socially aggressive. They also found ties between both forms of aggression and adjustment problems. Direct aggression is related to problems like delinquency and ADHD-type symptoms, poor relationships with peers, and low prosocial behaviour such as helping and sharing, while indirect aggression is related to problems like depression and low self-esteem, as well as higher prosocial behaviour (perhaps because a child must use prosocial skills to encourage peers to exclude or gossip about others).

A couple of years ago Debian had to change the name of Firefox to Iceweasel because Mozilla Corp. was using their trademark to impose conditions on the software that were not restricted by the license. Now the problem is brought again to life for Ubuntu, with Mozilla forcing them to show an EULA before letting users start Firefox. Jeff Licquia explains the situation quite well, in any case. At first glance, having to add an EULA seems a small price to pay, but underneath the obvious there might be something really serious happening. Software licenses seems to be just one of the possible ways of restricting users’ freedom. We’ve already seen some companies trying to use different methods to restrict it: via software patents, tivoization, etc. It seems we might want to add the usage of trademarks to the list. According to the Free Software Definition, there are four types of freedom that users need to have to consider a program as Free Software:

• To run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)
• To study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1)
• To redistribute copies (freedom 2)
• To improve the program, and release your improvements (freedom 3)

In any case, nowhere is said that those freedoms must be given just to end users. Distributions and such must also have these freedoms, including the freedom to modify the program and adapt it to their needs, and their users’ needs. While it makes sense that you cannot call a program Firefox just because it includes 10 lines from its source code, it also doesn’t seem tolerable to try to use trademark to prevent you from adapting the program to your needs and keep calling it free. Is it valid that an organization or company tries to restrict that freedom for you by using their trademark rights? Should a clause preventing that be added to GPL4? In any case, the final reason for the discussion seems to be much ado about nothing, as the EULA does not, and cannot, add any restriction to the usage of the program. First freedom (to run the program, for any purpose), remember?

Here's one more post for my own little "advertising section", where I introduce gender-related projects that I think are a good idea but deserve some more publicity. So, last time we had geekspeakr.com, this time I'd like to introduce to you the Eleonore Digital Project. In a nutshell they are organising a project where groups of students all over Europe work together in creating an educational 3D computer game that deals with the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Each team is assigned an episode or a certain aspect of Eleonore's life and they will research this, draft a concept and finally create their respective part or episode of the game. Doing this they will only work with free software, namely Debian as the Operating System, OOo, Blender etc. A longer (and better) description of what they want to do and the motivation behind all of this can be found in their project description or on the Eleonore Project site itself. In my opinion the project seems to be a really good idea and I wish them the best of luck! What I like most about it is that it is not exclusively for girls, so that it does not create a kind of "artificial biotope" for girls to work in. Instead it aims to rise the girls ratio by means of a project topic that (so I assume) mostly appeals to girls. And I am especially happy that when looking for a topic that appeals to girls they came up with something better than fan homepages, foto love stories, and what else you find in "girls IT projects" these days. I am pretty sure that reading and researching on the life of one of the most influential women in European history is going to do them much more good that creating princess-themes webpages! I am also quite happy that they picked Debian as their operating system. I think Debian being used in a school project is a nice example that it is in fact not as "user-unfriendly" as it is often claimed to be! I've also introduced the project to the Debian Women Project and Miriam had the very good idea to also forward it to the Debian Games Team, so I hope we'll get some good cooperation here.

Some time ago, when I packaged treeline, I wanted to make the package configure the environment so that .trl files would be automatically open with the program. That meant that the package had to configure the MIME types in the desktop to handle that, and assign the new MIME type the selected program. I tried a dozen of things at the time, based on a lot of howto’s that I found, without any success, so I decided to forget about it. This week I started packaging a new program: L ve, a 2D game development framework based in Lua and OpenGL. Many of the games developed for this platform are distributed as a zip file with the extension .love, so I decided I wanted to try again the MIME stuff. After many unsuccessful tries, I found a package that gave me some hints on how to do it: chemical-mime-data. After having a look at it, I was able to prepare a proof of concept that did what I wanted. It is supposed to work, at least, in GNOME, KDE and ROX. In case someone else is interested, here is the code:

• mime-example_0.1-1.dsc
• mime-example_0.1-1.diff.gz
• mime-example_0.1.orig.tar.gz

We’ve finally been able to make the latest version of Frets on Fire work properly and be playable, without the high CPU consumption levels that we were getting, among other annoying bugs. I’ve already uploaded the latest version of the package (1.2.512.dfsg-3) to Debian SID, I hope in time for getting into Lenny before the freeze. Lots of thanks to deavid (David Mart nez Mart ) for the patches, it wouldn’t have been possible without your help!

Katherine Lawrence and Marianne Schreiber, two women at Hewlett-Packard, used the term Glass Ceiling to to refer to invisible barriers that impede the career advancement of females. While on the surface there seems to be a clear path of promotion, in fact women seem to hit a point where there is no way to progress beyond. Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schellhardt used the term again afterwards in the March 24, 1986 edition of the Wall Street Journal, which is considered by many people the starting point of the usage of that term. Even though the term Glass Ceiling was originally specifically applied to discrimination against women, its meaning has expanded to describe similar situations of other collectives. I was wondering whether there might be a Glass Ceiling in Debian too. I know some of you will be tempted to answer “no way!” or “yeah! of course!” without even thinking about it. Please don’t. Keep in mind that a Glass Ceiling situation is referred to as a “ceiling” as there is a limitation blocking upward advancement, and “glass” (transparent) because the limitation is not immediately apparent and is normally an unwritten and unofficial policy. Give a serious and deep thought about it before commenting. It’s quite likely that if you are too sure about what the answer might be, one way or the other, that you might be wrong. I just wanted to make us think a bit about it.

I normally don’t play computer games, never been a big fan. Once in a while, though, I will try one, normally when some irc channel I’m in becomes a fan of it. This afternoon Miriam introduced us to Krank. And now I’m hooked (though I’m not sure for how long, as the title hints). There are basically four kinds of objects: two you can move, and two you can’t. The objective is to move the movable ones onto the static ones, in a way that makes the static ones disappear (according to the rules here). I must say, I enjoy levels with links and anchors very, very much. Ah, and Miriam made packages available. (The code is Python and is public domain; the images are mostly free-for-non-commercial, hence the “-nonfree” suffix.)

Russ Nelson announces that the newer version of Gnash has been released. I’ve already created newer packages for it, but I cannot upload them to Debian yet, as they’re blocked for the poppler, c-ares and ffmpeg transitions. I hope to have them uploaded soon. In any case, I’ve put them here, if someone wants to try them. As the backends for the rendering, widgets and media must be decided on compile time, there’s not much to do if you want to use the most uncommon ones. The most stable and conservative option is agg and GStreamer, but I’ve also added the possibility of using OpenGL, which would be better for hardware-accelerated machines. Versions for both GTK and KDE widget systems are compiled. In a week or so they will probably be in Debian, in time for Lenny. Improvements since 0.8.2 release are:

• Native fullscreen support (from AS) implemented.
• Long command-line options properly supported.
• View detailed movie information from GTK gui.
• Added an option in Preferences to initially display a movie as a blank (”Click here to start”) screen.
• Added “dump” GUI to dump a movie to disk.
• Improved Cairo rendering performance.
• Fix support for OpenOffice Impress SWF exporter (malformed..)

Ira Pramanick talks in her weblog about a mentorship program targeted towards middle and high school girls to foster in them a positive attitude towards computing. The program is called MAGIC, which stands for More Active Girls In Computing, and tries to address the issue of the low number of girls entering the computing and high tech world. As they say, it is a serious issue caused not by then lack of talent, but due to a bunch of discouraging factors that exist in our culture and society. Right now, women represent only about 28% of the technology workforce. I don’t know if a mentorship program dedicated to these girls would be enough to increase the number of women participating in the technology workforce, but it will probably help to improve the situation. It would be nice to import the project model into Spanish speaking countries if it’s successful. The Mentor Qualification Process is quite strange anyway. It might be that we europeans have cultural differences, but I find some of the questions there quite disturbing, like “Are you willing to be finger-printed and screened?”. I don’t exactly know what they might want such a sensitive data for.

Just to not confuse readers from Planet Debian, the mentioned baby is not Miriam Ruiz. Sorry. :)

baby is leaving
flying over the big sea
heading for some place I wish her good luck
and that she will come back soon
to my open arms

P.S.: Tiny bits changed after some nagging from baby. ;)

How could I express how happy I am? It’s raining cats and dogs here, but it’s such a lovely day! Congratz to the other new Debian Developers

I am very happy that 19 contributors who were waiting for their accounts, sometimes for a very long time, became Debian Developers today. This is great news for them, and for the project as a whole. Many thanks to all people involved for making this possible, including Joerg Jaspert, Steve McIntyre and James Troup. And congratulations to (using their account names) kibi, plessy, gregoa, goneri, tincho, akumar, filipe, miriam and the others I haven’t had the chance to work with yet. It also seems that the various pending issues (updating keys that expired, etc.) have been resolved, which is great news for several of our current DDs. But this doesn’t solve the DAM problem on a permanent basis. Something interesting about today’s events is that the account manager asked the system administrators to create the accounts, which is a nice way to offload part of the process. But the keyring maintainance is still a SPOF. A tool has been developed to allow multiple people to collaboratively edit the same keyring (and it’s used to maintain the Debian Maintainers keyring), but I’ve heard that some people weren’t satisfied with it, unfortunately. Let’s hope that this is solved soon, so the next ones to go through NM won’t have to wait that long!

After the unfortunate show that Microsoft and ISO provided us recently, ISO’s response is a FAQ note about ISO/IEC 29500 (OOXML, that’s it) in which they threaten Microsoft with the most severe of penalties if they’re tricking on as. Funny. In that statement, they try to answer all the issues that initially were concerns but that now has turned into proven facts about the OOXML standard and it’s approval, and to try to recover some of their lost credibility. It’s sad to be commenting on this, words don’t come easy, as if to say. Microsoft has already proven who’s the one in charge here, who owns the committees, who takes the decisions and in which terms, and nothing happens. It’s gonna take more than to publish a FAQ note saying how well you did it and to threaten Microsoft to behave or else. No one seriously believe you at the moment, you know? A funny thing is that ISO dismisses any responsibility about standardization, and relies on the market taking the decisions for them. Microsoft has said many times that they consider something positive and healthy to have multiple standards for the same, and let the market decide. Now ISO declares to think along the same lines: “After a period of co-existence, it is basically the market that decides which survives”. We don’t really need an organization for standardization for that, do we? We already have the market for that. Will ISO apply the same policy for every standard from now on? Like, say, having a couple of competing standards at least for every need, and let the market decide? ISO tries to recover from their credibility loss with this note (“the standards development process is credible, works well and is delivering the standards needed, and widely implemented, by the market“), without much success at least in what I’m concerned. If they keep trying to convince with press notes instead of with real acts, no one is gonna believe them ever again.