The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Jonathan Wiltshire (jmw)
• Michael Hanke (mih)
• Sebastian Reichel (sre)
• Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (sgevatter)
• K re Thor Olsen (kaare)
• Didier Raboud (odyx)
• Benjamin Drung (bdrung)

Congratulations!

The following developers have returned as Debian Developers after having retired at some time in the past:

• Matt Zimmerman (mdz)
• Jerome Marant (jerome)
• Scott James Remnant (keybuk)

Welcome back!

Merkaartor 0.16.0 was uploaded to Debian/unstable several days ago and should be available on all architectures now. As usual please help testing the new version - upstream and me will try to fix all bugs as fast as possible. Below follows the long list of new features, for the full list of changes see the CHANGELOG.

• Ramer-Douglas-Peucker simplification of ways (in Roads menu)
• support for JOSM remote protocol on port 8111
• support for "standard" (as in http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Tile_Map_Service_Specification) TMS
• Preliminary support for OpenStreetBugs (Refs #983)
• POC of a Gosmore map adapter
• Allow to delete features from the context menu of the Features dock
• Accept mlon/mlat URLs as emitted by mkgmap logging
• Walking Papers backgound plugin + load WP scans as geotagged images
• Import from OSC (osmChange format)
• Feature-Force Delete action (deletes the feature without entry in the undo nor upload list)
• Export to OSC (osmChange format)
• CSV POI import
• OSGB36 to the default list of projections
• Add SHP feature attributes as not uploadable OSM Feature tags
• Allow to save geotagged images
• show geotagged photos on the map (disable via 'view-Show Photos on map')
• Templates xsd (by Jonathan Bennett) (closes #2809; closes #2707)
• allow to re-order relation members (closes #2759)
• add a projection editor
• allow google maps links in goto and download dialogs
• Allow to tile (and cache) arbitrary WMS'es (only EPSG:4326 and google projection supported)
• Export to OSC (osmChange format)
• CSV POI import
• OSGB36 to the default list of projections
• Add SHP feature attributes as not uploadable OSM Feature tags
• Allow to save geotagged images
• show geotagged photos on the map (disable via 'view-Show Photos on map')
• Templates xsd (by Jonathan Bennett) (closes #2809; closes #2707)
• allow to re-order relation members (closes #2759)
• add a projection editor
• allow google maps links in goto and download dialogs
• Allow to tile (and cache) arbitrary WMS'es (only EPSG:4326 and google projection supported)
• support for WMS-C servers (see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Merkaartor/Documentation#WMS-C_Servers) (closes #2598)
• add the possibility to show a lat/lon grid
• Allow to zoom on the location of a GeoTIFF image
• Brazilian Portuguese translation (by Marcio Moraes)

Just an update about sgeps, because it seems to have made a small stir (which is more than I expected).

• Yes, I know about emacs foo.gpg. Admittedly I found out while I was developing sgeps, but I kept on my track anyway. The real reason was that I was having fun, but I could also mention that sgeps doesn't store data unencrypted on disk, not even temporarily. I'm not sure about vim foo.gpg. (Update: Joey Hess telle me it does the right thing.) Anyway, I don't want to fire up an editor (or switch to an already opened one) just to get a password.
• I had also found out about pwman too. My script started as pwman.pl but it was renamed later. I like the simplicity of sgeps better, especially the lack of any UI besides the CLI, but pwman is probably good in its own way, but it doesn't fit my usage pattern.
• It seems the Gentoo people don't share my qualms about making very small packages, and apparently sgeps is now packaged for Gentoo Linux.
• Mehdi Dogguy already contributed suggestions (including better error handling) and even a patch implementing sgeps --delete. Thanks to him!
• An anonymous commenter suggests that sgeps should be able to store notes as well as passwords. That wasn't a requirement I initially had, but I won't reject the patch if it comes He also argues that it should be able to push the password into the X11 paste buffer. Again, why not, if it doesn't break anything.

I've been accumulating passwords recently. More than I could remember all in one go. I even got worried that I'd locked myself out of one of my own servers recently. So I decided to play it safe and store the passwords somewhere. However, plain text files, even on an encrypted disk, aren't the most secure plan, so I tried to go shopping for a tool that would store passwords in encrypted files and wouldn't be too inconvenient to use. I found a few (pwsafe, keysafe, keepassx, yapet and so on), but they all seem to be either graphical or using their own encryption scheme and (presumably) storage format. Being rather nervous about long-term data accessibility, I thus decided to roll my own script, that would be as simple as possible while doing just the required amount of work. I call the result sgeps, for simple GnuPG-encrypted password store . Note the initial s: I didn't invent any wheel.

• Data model: a list of key/value pairs (each being a string);
• Storage: serialisation using Perl's built-in Storable module;
• Encryption: the serialised data is GnuPG-encrypted;
• Hopefully secure: no password stored in plaintext files at any time.

The code comments should give an idea of the capabilities of sgeps:

  # Usage: sgeps --create                     to create the store
  #        sgeps --add <key>                  to add a key/value to the store
  #        sgeps --list                       to list existing keys
  #        sgeps --add --overwrite <key>      to replace a key/value

I trust both GnuPG and Perl to stay around for quite some time, so hopefully I can forget even the passwords I use very rarely and still be able to recover them later. Even in the event of a hard drive dying, since the encrypted store can now be backed up and burnt on DVDs. I just need to be careful about my GnuPG key. Interested people can grab sgeps from its Bazaar branch with bzr branch http://bzr.debian.org/users/lolando/sgeps/trunk/ or browse it on the web interface. I don't plan to make a Debian package for a hundred lines of Perl code, but if anyone is interested, feel free to include it in an existing package (moreutils maybe?).

This poem is only in German language, but I hope you can forgive me to run it in my English language feed nevertheless. I send you the best season greetings, have a nice time, use it well, relax and think about it. :)

Weihnachtsgedicht 2009

Vor ungef hr zweitausend Jahren
glaubt man, wurde ein Mann geboren
glaubt man, dass es Gottes Sohn gewesen ist
glaubt man, der uns alle erl sen sollte

Irgendwann sp ter
dachte man, das w re ein Grund, daran zu denken
dachte man, es w re ein Grund, in sich zu kehren
dachte man, es w re eine besinnliche Zeit

Heute jedoch
stresst man, um nur ja Geschenke f r alle zu finden
stresst man, weil jeder berall mit einem feiern will
stresst man, um sich besonders g tig zu zeigen

Ich w nsche mir, dass
wir helfen, uns zur ck zu erinnern
wir helfen, uns zur ck zu besinnen
wir helfen, wieder ruhiger zu werden

Ich w nsche euch ein erl stes, besinnliches,
g tiges und ruhiges Weihnachtsfest!

So, next Saturday Luciana and I are moving back from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte after about 6 months here. It was an interesting ride. We didn t really have a good time finding a good place to live at - Rio is very expensive and it looks like demand is so high anywhere close to Luciana s work place that the only reasonable solution was to live very far away, and even there we didn t really have much success, although for other reasons I may talk about later. Belo is how the foreign people who live there usually refer to Belo Horizonte. I think that is probably because it s a bit too hard for them to say Horizonte =D (if it helps you, you could use the Mineirish Belzonte ). I have borrowed this svg file kindly licensed in the FDL by Raphael Lorenzeto de Abreu, and generated a simple png image that you can see in this post with Belo Horizonte, and some other cities we often talk about at Collabora =): A straight line between Recife and Belo Horizonte has about 1640km. There are 340km between BH and Rio, and 973km between BH and Florian polis. A bit about Belo Horizonte, for those friends of mine to whom I always have a hard time explaining where it s located, and what kind of city it is: Belo Hozizonte is a nice, beautiful city, with a quite big metropolitan area. About 6 million people live in greater Belo Horizonte. It is considered one of the three most influential cities in Brazil, along with S o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It s surrounded by mountains, which are considered one of the defining geographical features of the Minas Gerais state, of which it is the capital. Here s a picture that is available under the public domain in Wikipedia: Speaking of Minas Gerais, it is, according to Wikipedia, the fourth in size among the 26 States of Brazil, being just a bit bigger than mainland-France. Minas Gerais is one of the main earth transports hubs of the country (having the largest number of federal roads), and is famous for its tasty food, the beauty of its people, its cheeses, the calm, introspective nature of its people, its interesting way of speaking portuguese, and its alcoholic beverages. Now, going away from Rio to Belo Horizonte has a single big disadvantage associated with it: we don t get to have the Sea a few minutes away, anymore. Our solution to that is, of course, going to one of the numerous bars (the legend goes around that BH has the largest absolute number of bars of all cities in the world), and drinking instead of swimming! Quem n o tem mar, vai pro bar!

This post describes how to play with the UK postcode database that recently turned up on WikiLeaks using GeoDjango. You will need the following pieces of free software:

1. PostgreSQL (MySQL does not provide sufficient geospacial features) I will be using Postgres 8.4.1; please adjust your paths for your version and/or distributor.
2. PostGIS spacial database extensions I will be using version 1.4.0.
3. Django I will be using version 1.1. This version includes the GeoDjango framework.
4. GEOS geometry engine I will be using version 3.0.0 from the libgeos-c1 package in Debian unstable.

You will also need a copy of the leaked postcode data. Usage of this data is almost certainly a copyright violation.

It has become a hidden tradition for me to watch Superbowl every year, despite disappointment in the game and coverage quality in the years before. It started as before: pre-game show, pre-pre-game show, coin toss show and kick-off show It is clear that the show is planned by and for advertisers and not for the viewers. That is a shame and a disgrace - the viewer must be the master of the TV programming and NOT the advertisers. In soccer the program starts, you see the captains exchange a handshake, you see the referee throw a coin and 10-15 seconds later the game is going full steam. Why do you need 3 ad breaks and 2 songs before the game is beyond me - get to the game! The camera work and NBC commentary is MUCH better than last year - stable shots with good close-ups and explanations that actually make sense even to people that are not American football experts. Oh and they actually use units - saying they won x out of y games this season and not they are x in y this season , mostly at least. The game had more fun than usual in the beginning, but the legal things slow it up again - it is weird that a guy got over the line but was called beck because of the knee touching and then a penalty for a false start ? Too much rules and regulations. Soon you ll have a team of lawyers on the sidelines and lawyer drafts will be more important than player drafts. And then again holding and chopping - isn t that what the blockers are supposed to do? Is that some kind of sissy sport? Maybe not. 100 yard interception return run I am speechless. Now that was a great, great play. That episode alone made watchig this thing worth it. Not the best sport thing I ve seen, but the best American football moment for sure. I like the basis of the game, it is a good game, but there is way too much fluff on it. That game needs to be cut down - less rules, less breaks, less interruption, less advertisements, less time to think and relax for the players. 10 seconds of play and 5 minutes of players chatting is not a sport, even curling has more action. The whole Superbowl should be over in 1 hour real time. If the TV transmission starts at 17:00, it should be done before 18:00. There is no content there to justify anything longer than that. Why is there a limited number of challenges? Do the referees make only a limited number of mistakes per game? No. Illogical. And when I though it was done and sealed, Arizona does a great drive and get a great touchdown. One more drive like that and the game could go either way. Now that is a good game. But again penalties spoil the whole game Fitsgerald gets a touchdown, another great play to turn the game around, but only because of the holding penalty giving Arizona safety score. Not deserving in my opinion. And the Steelers drive back AMAZING game! Now this is actually close to the best sports game that I have ever seen. I sure was not expecting that. And Arizona tries to drive back again. I was sleepy when I started to watch this, no sleep now. That was a great game. Despite all the commercialization, it is still a great game and it is very watchable if you download it from the Internet or watch it with TiVo and can skip the adds and the slow parts.

Not being from Oakland, Meth has a relatively small impact on my life. Until I get a cold, at which point I get to curse the lack of effective drugs. What's surprising is how phenylephrine does have a noticable effect. What's even more surprising is that it has this effect about thirty seconds after I've swallowed the capsules, indicating fairly strongly that it hasn't actually hit my bloodstream in any sensible way at that point (though I've had astonishing difficulty in finding figures on how long the plastic capsules take to dissolve in the stomach). So, even though I know it's got no measurable effect beyond that of a placebo, the placebo effect still works. Damn you, psychology.

This morning after getting up I stumbled over exciting news: Google designed it's own browser called Chrome. As a marketing-gag they published a small comic about this new browser where presenting all exciting features. While clicking through this comic I noticed something strange: Google seems to think that Europe is still in the middle of WW2, like many Americans do... (Hint: Have a look at the german borders)

So a few folks left some interesting comments in response to my link to the article on the rise of the alpha-girl based on the research of Harvard psychologist, Dan Kindlon. My response to both Joe and Karl is that it is worthy to lower the barriers to entry not because girls will change the cultural ecology of geekdom in positive ways (though they may) or because geekdom is inherently “omg totally awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” but for a much more mundane reason: it may allow girls to follow interests and eventually discover a passion. I think it is a great idea if more women were involved in geekdom and open source development not because it is inherently great but because I am sure there a lot of women out there who would enjoy it (and by extension, I am sure a lot who would not). By highlighting this article I am not advocating some forced hacker-female-labor-migration-policy but pointing to the fact that social conditions outside of geekdom play a role in ensuring more participation among women. But let me explain a few things before I argue my position a little further. First a little clarification, especially now that I have read the article. By alpha the author does not mean dominant, aggressive, and totally jerky, which is what might immediately come to mind when you read/hear alpha (especially if one knows any alpha-geeks or alpha-lawyers for that matter, who are much worse, imho). And I certainly don’t want any more alpha-anything (alpha-women, alpha-dogs, alpha-cats, alpha-hamsters ) given our world is already chock-full of alpha-jerks. By using the term, the author basically means confidence, which apparently is on the rise among girls, leaving them much more likely to be go-getters, undaunted by explicit and implicit barriers and obstacles and thus more likely then ever to enter arenas that have been thought of as traditionally male or in fact totally dominated by males. If this trend is indeed in place, I think it is great and I hope that this eventually translates into more girls/women populating traditionally male areas whether it is neurology, movie directing, hacking, or surfing. What I appreciate about the article is that his research can help us question the idea that women are naturally averse to competition due to their estrogenic hormones while boys, brimming with testosterone, just love it and exude it. I never identified with that conventional well-worn script, in part because I guess I am fairly confident and somewhat competitive. Being in academia for the last 10 years, I have witnessed a lot of really confident women that have helped inspire me and keep me going, especially when times got rough. What is fascinating about the article (and by extension probably his book) is that gender parity and equity and changes in the psychological makeup of women have not changed overnight but have taken a much longer time to settle in place. We are only now bearing the fruits of structural and educational changes first instituted decades ago and that tackled some serious forms of discrimination. As a result, we are seeing girls and women donning a deeper confidence that may help them participate with more success in the arenas they want to whether it be sports or in the workplaces (though there are certainly still major barriers and issues, which are addressed in the article). So why would someone want to participate in the world of free software and hacking in particular? My first answer is there may be any number of reasons why anyone, female or male or transgender or whatever, may want to do so for the love of technology, to feel an intense belonging to a community who share your passions and who work together to create something with a lot of value, to enjoy the challenge of learning, to spread freedom to every corner of the earth, etc… It is not that geekdom is inherently fun and exciting but that it will be interesting to some slice of the population men or women (or other) and what is the harm in lowering the barriers to entry, especially if it brings enjoyment and frankly a lot of economic security too? There are a number of girls/women who already find it worthwhile and I am sure many more who would. And the point is not to create some policy to make sure that we shuttle women into hackerdom but as a society we should equip them with the necessary psychological tools so that if they think this is worthwhile, and discover that they love it, etc, they will dare to venture in there and more importantly, stay if they want to. In terms of Karls point that a lot of people are professional geeks in part because they d have trouble being anything else; like being gay, it s not a choice, I think that is far too narrow of an assessment, not to mention an outdated caricature of geeks. While there is certainly a class of socially awkward geeks (if that is what you mean??), I would say they are in the minority though they may certainly stand out precisely because they are the odd ducks and because the stereotype is so entrenched. Many geeks I have met, while they may pretty darn focused on geekdom, also have full and rich lives/personalities that cannot be easily collapsed into one immutable personality type. Yes they may be obsessed with tech but aren’t doctors, academics, musicians, lawyers sort of fanatical too? I spend like my whole week working on academic stuff (part of necessity, part out of love). And at least hacking has way better conferences and economic perks, which may help explain why people stay Finally, I think you assume a little to strongly that we do what we do because we have a pre-formed existing desired to do so. While I think this is the case for many things (and I knew the minute I learned about anthropology, I wanted to be one, which was odd but it proved to be correct), I think desire is also formed as much through experience and hence the importance of exposure to different worlds and experiences. I know that there are many things I could have never imagined I would have loved–karoake and sailing are two things that come to mind—until I tried them about both took some degree of courage. In the later case, it took a lot of guts to move onto some ship at the age of 18 instead of going to college and I am so glad I did. This is an instance where confidence and an initial curiosity led to discovering a love and passion I never knew I had. So if desire can be formed and not just expressed, I think it is key to make sure people have all sorts of opportunities to cultivate the passions they never knew they had.

It’s incredible how one troll can split a channel up. It’s incredible how the sexist shit can be spread all over the place. It’s incredible, not wait, not incredible, it’s sad, sadder and sadder, to see what Debian has become. The Debian social life has become a center for dramas of all kinds, since sexist traumas, transgenders issues, people with too much free time, real good technical people leaving, freaking big farts in Debian thinking on leaving the project, elitist dolls clubs, small wannabes who think they can treat other people unrespectful. Debian itself is now its own slow killer. There has always been old people, new people, people leaving and people entering, but when you see other projects just as good as we were, some of us remain because of the social side of Debian. But is it really worthwhile? Perhaps not anymore. And because of the non-sense shit from the debian-women mailing list thread, here are a few random greps on my old logs:

Jun 11 07:19:29 <directhex work> timgoh0, for the same reason a woman in skimpy lingerie is sexier than a women in the nude, lesbians are sexier to watch than a threesome. it’s the *potential* being presented. the thinly veiled chance for the imagination to run wild Sep 13 00:23:27 <tech> women are mostly useless Sep 12 23:28:10 <tech> nvz: just stay away from women, it’s easier Mar 04 20:12:32 <nvz> women like to be refluffled Jan 13 12:50:07 <toresbe> rcox: Some idiot got out on the debian-women mailing list and said #debian-offtopic was “sexist”.

Of course we are sexists, just like we are men and women unfriendly, we laugh about nationalities, we like fluffling, make fun of others and we like to be nipple smited. Love it or get the fuck out of there. We’re an unofficial community now. Who would want to be official after all?

I am very saddened by the state of the IT industry. It seems like nearly everyone who works in or around IT is, to put it bluntly, a cowboy. There appears to be very little desire for actually helping people; instead all I see is a very large number of people circling around looking for the next person they can make a quick buck off. In short, most of the IT industry is composed of people who are little better than shysters and conmen. As a case in point, I recently had contact with someone who is trying to get an online store running. They've been trying, unsuccessfully so far, for several months. They've been screwed over by basically every IT-related person they've had contact with so far. Now, after all of their suffering, they've finally gotten in contact with me. Most of their money is gone, and they're deeply behind schedule. So I'm left trying to pull a miracle job in little time and with little money. Yes, I could shoo them away, because they're asking for more than they can afford, but there's a little spark of helpfulness left in me, and I'll try to get them going as best they can with what they've got. If they'd found someone competent right at the beginning, they'd have been fine. They started with sufficient cash and time to produce a good end result. But chancing upon someone decent doesn't have good odds in IT; it's a bit like winning the lottery. This story isn't unique in my personal experience, by any stretch. There seems to be a near-endless procession of non-technical people who come out of their encounters with the IT industry battered and bruised, whether it be on the web, in their business infrastructure, or their personal computing needs. While it's easy to blame the customer for not managing themselves and their computing properly, I don't think it's fair to lay the blame on them -- to me, that's like blaming the patient for dying on the operating table, when the responsibility must lie, prima facie, with the surgeon. It's the surgeon, after all, who is the (presumably) trained and experienced professional in the relationship, and it is his responsibility, primarily, to ensure that everything goes smoothly[1]. Depressingly, I don't see much of a way around this problem. The few IT people who did care could try and group together, build some sort of a rating or "membership implies quality" system, educate the consumer, and try and drive the cowboys out, but guilds and trade associations are frowned upon these days, smacking (as they do) of restraint of trade and collusion. Government regulation never seems to produce anywhere near the desired result, while hoping that the consumer will either rise up and demand quality, or will gain sufficient knowledge to be able to pick a cowboy is a complete non-starter, for the same reason as teaching everyone basic surgical techniques isn't going to improve the quality of hospitals.

---

There's an ad that used to be on Australian TV for a certain bank, where a guy is at a party and he's asked by another of the partygoers what he does for a living. As he replies, "I work in banking", the entire party goes silent and stares at him in horror. It's only when he says, "It's OK, I'm with $BANK_BEING_ADVERTISED" that everyone looks happy again and continues on with their party. Although I've never had that particular experience, I'm almost getting to the point where I'm not happy telling people what I do for a living. This is because in any non-trivial collection of people, there's almost certainly going to be at least one person who has had such a poor experience with the IT industry that they're either going to take it out on me, ask me interminable questions about computers, or will just hate me on principle. It's unfortunate that brothels don't have pianos any more; if I were to say "I play piano in a whorehouse" I'm pretty sure the response would be "lawyer or sysadmin?". As Edsger Dijkstra said back in 2001, "The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed." Are you?

---

1. That isn't to say that the patient (or client) has no responsibility in ensuring a positive outcome -- if you go bungee jumping the day after open heart surgery, or never send your web developer any content, you're very unlikely to have a positive outcome. However, it seems to me as though the only customer consultation done by most IT "professionals" on taking on a project is a Homeresque "I only have two questions. 'How much?' and 'give it to me'".

The german parliament has passed a law for retention of all communication data for a period of at least 6 months lately - despite all protests from various groups, organizations and experts.
Only the opposition (the Greens and the FDP/Liberals) voted against the law (and some single persons of the other parties). Some, who voted for the law, said later that they consider the law being against the constitution (Grundgesetz) and that the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) will bring the law (or parts of it) to fall.

When you wonder what this is all about, you may want to read the article "Personal Data Is Now on the Record in Germany" by Rose-Anne Clermont.

There will be a complaint of unconstitutionality (Verfassungsklage) against that law. It's going to be the biggest complaint so far with about 20.000 petitioners. The protests are still going on.

Anyway, data rentention is happing all the time whenever you communicate, but it's a new change that every communication data has to be recorded for at least 6 months. Prior to the new law, data retention was only allowed for billing purposes. Now it's the default and not only Police and Courts are allowed to access the collected data, but organizations like RIAA or MPAA are aiming at getting access as well.
Basically there is no communication privacy anymore.

Given the other "security laws" lately, like the new biometric passport, the Passenger Name Records (PNR), it's really threatening our privacy and democracy. And yet it's still unproven that this will cause less terror.

One says the eyes are the mirror of the soul. I made this experience back in easter for the first time. I was over at my brother's place for easter celebration when I got up in the morning, went into the bath and looked into the mirror for morning toilet. I washed my face like always with cold water to refresh myself, and when I removed my hands... I was sure I was looking into a female face. It quite a lot bewildered me; it was the first time this happened. And I wasn't even properly shaved...
An experience like this is something special I guess, and it happened more and more often in the meantime. I guess this is one more proof that what I feel is the right thing. ... even though still some others seem to be immensly ammused by it. When I went to the ceilidh at the debconf in EDI I received some pretty nasty responses to my outfit, which I didn't expect within a project about Freedom and Openness. Though, I give the people the doubt of not knowing what they have done. It's too much in human nature to joke about things they don't understand, not knowingly insulting others. I'd like to dedicate this fine tune from Garbage to them: Bleed Like Me. If you listen closely to the lyrics you might be able to find out why... There has also been a genderfuck night in the club next to the night venue which on the other hand was pretty nice. It was attended by quite some people from Debian, some expectedly, some to my happy surprise. Thank you again guys, for making this evening to something special. I hope you keep it in as nice remembrance as me. My former SO drew a while ago a pretty nice picture about me. I didn't ask for it, or did hint it, which makes me even more happier about it. Thank you Babsi, really. :) I switched my hackergotchi on Planet Debian to it just in case. Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. I stumbled upon it in the Venus Envy comic I got notified about earlier this year, you might want to check its contribution, but beware, it might as disturb you as it does to me. I'm thankful that Erin dis survive it, because she gives so much strength with her comic to me and possibly also others...

Explaination for non German Readers: Today the german parliament passed an act, which orders all communication-connection data (caller-ids, times, email-communication, other internet-transactions) have to be stored for 6 months.

More info on vorratsdatenspeicherung.de

grml-live ist ein Framework, mit dessen Hilfe man mit nur 1 Kommando eine auf grml/Debian basierende Linux Live-CD bauen kann. grml-live baut auf FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) auf und nutzt dessen klassenbasiertes Konzept: In diesem Beispiel habe ich gerade ein gro es grml-ISO gebaut. Dabei habe ich einfach nur den Debian-Mirror in /etc/grml/grml-live.conf auf meinen lokalen Mirror gedreht (um Traffic und Zeit zu sparen) und dann folgendes Kommando aufgerufen:

# grml-live -t /grml/grml-live -c GRMLBASE,GRML_FULL,LATEX_CLEANUP,I386 -s sid

Ca. 50 Minuten sp ter habe ich im Ordner grml_isos unter /grml/grml-live/ (-t …) ein fertiges grml-ISO. Dieses wurde auf Basis der Klassen (-c …) GRMLBASE (da steckt alles essenzielle drin), GRML_FULL (Software-Auswahl wie auf der offiziellen gro en grml), LATEX_CLEANUP (ein paar sehr gro e LaTeX-Verzeichnisse aufr umen) und I386 (x86-spezifische Pakete wie z.B. der Kernel) gebaut. Als Debian-Suite (-s) wurde sid (unstable) ausgew hlt. Und das war es auch schon. Ein kleinere grml-Version auf Basis von Debian/stable gef llig? Kein Problem, machen wir es doch einfach mal im Shared-Memory (superschnell und mit genug RAM und den Mountoptionen rw,suid,dev auch kein Problem): Ein ‘grml-live -t /dev/shm -c GRMLBASE,I386 -s etch’ und keine 5(!) Minuten sp ter hab ich dann mein 135MB kleines grml: Mit grml-live kann man sich somit seine pers nlich angepasste Linux Live-CD erstellen, ohne sich erst mit Remastering im Detail besch ftigen zu m ssen. Auch muss man dabei nicht zwingend Debian/unstable nehmen, sondern kann auch Debian/stable als Basis ausw hlen. Durch das Erstellen einer neuen Klasse oder das Anpassen einer existierenden kann man auch spezielle Software-W nsche ganz einfach erf llen. Wird damit das offizielle grml-ISO etwa obsolet? Nein, auf keinen Fall. grml-live soll dem grml-Team als Buildsystem dienen (automatisierte Snapshots auf regelm iger Basis z.B. sind schon in Planung) und die langweilige Arbeit abnehmen, damit wir uns auf die wirklich wichtigen Sachen konzentrieren k nnen: Testen, Bugfixing, Implementieren von neuen Features, Arbeit am Kernel, Qualit tssicherung, Dokumentation,… grml-live hat den Anspruch, auf jedem Debian-basierten System zu funktionieren und wer Interesse daran gefunden hat, kann sich das Debian-Pakete aus dem grml-Repository holen. Den Quellcode gibt es nat rlich auf unserer Mercurial-Webseite. Wer jetzt noch Fragen hat oder mehr Details zu grml-live erfahren m chte, der m ge einfach auf die grml-live-Homepage schauen. Falls dort eine Frage noch nicht beantwortet sein sollte, jemand Feature-Requests, Bugreports oder Patches hat: meine Inbox freut sich ber Post!