Search Results: "thep"

9 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 28 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Chris Lamb filled a bug on python-setuptools with a patch to make the generated requires.txt files reproducible. The patch has been forwarded upstream. Chris also understood why the she-bang in some Python scripts kept being undeterministic: setuptools as called by dh-python could skip re-installing the scripts if the build had been too fast (under one second). #804339 offers a patch fixing the issue by passing --force to setup.py install. #804141 reported on gettext asks for support of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in gettextize. Santiago Vila pointed out that it doesn't felt appropriate as gettextize is supposed to be an interactive tool. The problem reported seems to be in avahi build system instead. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: celestia, dsdo, fonts-taml-tscu, fte, hkgerman, ifrench-gut, ispell-czech, maven-assembly-plugin, maven-project-info-reports-plugin, python-avro, ruby-compass, signond, thepeg, wagon2, xjdic. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Chris Lamb closed a wrongly reopened bug against haskell-devscripts that was actually a problem in haddock. reproducible.debian.net FreeBSD tests are now run for three branches: master, stable/10, release/10.2.0. (h01ger) diffoscope development Support has been added for Free Pascal unit files (.ppc). (Paul Gevers) The homepage is now available using HTTPS, thanks to Let's Encrypt!. Work has been done to be able to publish diffoscope on the Python Package Index (also known as PyPI): the tlsh module is now optional, compatibility with python-magic has been added, and the fallback code to handle RPM has been fixed. Documentation update Reiner Herrmann, Paul Gevers, Niko Tyni, opi, and Dhole offered various fixes and wording improvements to the reproducible-builds.org. A mailing-list is now available to receive change notifications. NixOS, Guix, and Baserock are featured as projects working on reproducible builds. Package reviews 70 reviews have been removed, 74 added and 17 updated this week. Chris Lamb opened 22 new fail to build from source bugs. New issues this week: randomness_in_ocaml_provides, randomness_in_qdoc_page_id, randomness_in_python_setuptools_requires_txt, gettext_creates_ChangeLog_files_and_entries_with_current_date. Misc. h01ger and Chris Lamb presented Beyond reproducible builds at the MiniDebConf in Cambridge on November 8th. They gave an overview of where we stand and the changes in user tools, infrastructure, and development practices that we might want to see happening. Feedback on these thoughts are welcome. Slides are already available, and the video should be online soon. At the same event, a meeting happened with some members of the release team to discuss the best strategy regarding releases and reproducibility. Minutes have been posted on the Debian reproducible-builds mailing-list.

29 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 9 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Norbert Preining uploaded texinfo/6.0.0.dfsg.1-2 which makes texinfo indices reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb. Lunar submitted recently rebased patches to make the file order of files inside .deb stable. akira filled #789843 to make tex4ht stop printing timestamps in its HTML output by default. Dhole wrote a patch for xutils-dev to prevent timestamps when creating gzip compresed files. Reiner Herrmann sent a follow-up patch for wheel to use UTC as timezone when outputing timestamps. Mattia Rizzolo started a discussion regarding the failure to build from source of subversion when -Wdate-time is added to CPPFLAGS which happens when asking dpkg-buildflags to use the reproducible profile. SWIG errors out because it doesn't recognize the aforementioned flag. Trying to get the .buildinfo specification to more definitive state, Lunar started a discussion on storing the checksums of the binary package used in dpkg status database. akira discovered while proposing a fix for simgrid that CMake internal command to create tarballs would record a timestamp in the gzip header. A way to prevent it is to use the GZIP environment variable to ask gzip not to store timestamps, but this will soon become unsupported. It's up for discussion if the best place to fix the problem would be to fix it for all CMake users at once. Infrastructure-related work Andreas Henriksson did a delayed NMU upload of pbuilder which adds minimal support for build profiles and includes several fixes from Mattia Rizzolo affecting reproducibility tests. Neils Thykier uploaded lintian which both raises the severity of package-contains-timestamped-gzip and avoids false positives for this tag (thanks to Tomasz Buchert). Petter Reinholdtsen filled #789761 suggesting that how-can-i-help should prompt its users about fixing reproducibility issues. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: autorun4linuxcd, libwildmagic, lifelines, plexus-i18n, texlive-base, texlive-extra, texlive-lang. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Untested uploaded as they are not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: debbindiff development debbindiff/23 includes a few bugfixes by Helmut Grohne that result in a significant speedup (especially on larger files). It used to exhibit the quadratic time string concatenation antipattern. Version 24 was released on June 23rd in a hurry to fix an undefined variable introduced in the previous version. (Reiner Herrmann) debbindiff now has a test suite! It is written using the PyTest framework (thanks Isis Lovecruft for the suggestion). The current focus has been on the comparators, and we are now at 93% of code coverage for these modules. Several problems were identified and fixed in the process: paths appearing in output of javap, readelf, objdump, zipinfo, unsqusahfs; useless MD5 checksum and last modified date in javap output; bad handling of charsets in PO files; the destination path for gzip compressed files not ending in .gz; only metadata of cpio archives were actually compared. stat output was further trimmed to make directory comparison more useful. Having the test suite enabled a refactoring of how comparators were written, switching from a forest of differences to a single tree. This helped removing dust from the oldest parts of the code. Together with some other small changes, version 25 was released on June 27th. A follow up release was made the next day to fix a hole in the test suite and the resulting unidentified leftover from the comparator refactoring. (Lunar) Documentation update Ximin Luo improved code examples for some proposed environment variables for reference timestamps. Dhole added an example on how to fix timestamps C pre-processor macros by adding a way to set the build date externally. akira documented her fix for tex4ht timestamps. Package reviews 94 obsolete reviews have been removed, 330 added and 153 updated this week. Hats off for Chris West (Faux) who investigated many fail to build from source issues and reported the relevant bugs. Slight improvements were made to the scripts for editing the review database, edit-notes and clean-notes. (Mattia Rizzolo) Meetings A meeting was held on June 23rd. Minutes are available. The next meeting will happen on Tuesday 2015-07-07 at 17:00 UTC. Misc. The Linux Foundation announced that it was funding the work of Lunar and h01ger on reproducible builds in Debian and other distributions. This was further relayed in a Bits from Debian blog post.

9 May 2015

Daniel Silverstone: Kimchi Trial 1 - Part 1

I have spent today making my first ever batch of Kimchi. I have been documenting it in photos as I go, but thought I'd write up what I did so that if anyone else fancies having a go too, we can compare results. For a start, this recipe is nowhere near "traditional" because I don't have access to certain ingredients such as glutinous rice flour. I'm sure if I searched in many of the asian supermarkets around the city centre I could find it, but I'm lazy so I didn't even try. I am not writing this up as a traditional recipe because I'm kinda making it up as I go along, with hints from various sources including the great and wonderful Maangchi whose YouTube channel I follow. Observant readers or followers of Maangchi will recognise the recipe as being close to her Easy Kimchi recipe, however since I'm useless, it won't be exact. If this batch turns out okay then I'll write it up as a proper recipe for you to follow. I started off with three Chinese Leaf cabbages which seemed to be about 1.5kg or so once I'd stripped the less nice outer leaves, cored and chopped them. Chopped up cabbage I then soaked and drained the cabbage in cold water... Soaking cabbage ...before sprinkling a total of one third of a cup of salt over the cabbage and mixing it to distribute the salt. Salted Cabbage Then I returned to the cabbage every 30 minutes to re-mix it a total of three times. After the cabbage had been salted for perhaps 1h45m or so, I rinsed it out. Maangchi recommends washing the cabbage three times so that's what I did before setting it out to drain in a colander. Drained salted cabbage 1h45m later Maangchi then calls for the creation of a porridge made from sweet rice flour which it turns out is very glutinous. Since I lack the ability to get that flour easily I substituted cornflour which I hope will be okay and then continued as before. One cup of water, one third of a cup of cornflour was heated until it started to bubble and then one sixth of a cup of sugar was added. Stirred throughout, once it went translucent I turned the heat off and proceeded. Porridge thingy One half of a red onion, a good thumb (once peeled) of ginger, half a bulb of garlic and one third of a cup of fish sauce went into a mini-zizzer. I then diagonal-chopped about five spring onions, and one leek, before cutting a fair sized carrot into inch long pieces before halving and then thinly slicing it. Maangchi calls for julienned carrots but I am not that patient. Veggybits Into the cooled porridge I put two thirds of a cup of korean hot pepper flakes (I have the coarse, but a mix of coarse and fine would possibly be better), the zizzed onion/garlic/ginger/fish mix and the vegetables... All in the pan ...before mixing that thoroughly with a spatula. Mixed vegetables Next came the messy bit (I put latex gloves on, and thoroughly washed my gloved hands for this). Into my largest mixing bowl I put a handful of the drained cabbage into the bowl and a handful of the pepper mix. Thoroughly mixing this before adding another handful of cabbage and pepper mix I repeated until all the cabbage and hot pepper mixed vegetables are well combined. I really got your arms into it, squishing it around, separating the leek somewhat, etc. Bowl of kimchi As a final task, I scooped the kimchi into a clicklok type box, pressing it down firmly to try and remove all the air bubbles, before sealing it in for a jolly good fermenting effort. I will have to remove a little tonight for our dinner (beef strips marinated in onion, ginger and garlic, with kimchi on rice) but the rest will then sit to ferment for a bit. Expect a part-2 with the report from tonight's dinner and a part-3 with the results after fermentation. Box of kimchi
As an aside, I got my hot pepper flakes from Sous Chef who, it turns out, also stock glutinous rice flour -- I may have to get some more from them in the future. (#notsponsored)

26 March 2015

Zlatan Todori : Random bits

Gogs I installed today Gogs and configured it with mysql (yes, yes, I know - use postgres you punk!). I will not post details of how I did it because:
  • It still has "weird" coding as pointed already by others
  • It doesn't have fork and pull request ability yet
And there was end of journey. When they code in fork/PR , I will close my eyes on other coding stuff and try it again because Gitlab is not close to my heart and installing their binary takes ~850MB of space which means a lot of ruby code that could go wrong way. It would be really awesome to have in archive something to apt install and have github-like place. It would be great if Debian infrastructure would have the possibility to have that.

Diaspora* Although I am thrilled about it finally reaching Debian archive, it still isn't ready. Not even closely. I couldn't even finish installation of it and it's not suitable for main archive as it takes files from github repo of diaspora. Maybe poking around Bitnami folks about how they did it.

The power of Free software Text Secure is was an mobile app that I thought it could take on Viber or WhatsUp. Besides all its goodies it had chance to send encrypted SMS to other TS users. Not anymore. Fortunate, there is a fork called SMSSecure which still has that ability.

Trolls So there is this Allwinner company that does crap after crap. Their latest will reach wider audience and I hope it gets resolved in a matter how they would react if some big proprietary company was stealing their code. It seems Allwinner is a pseudo for Alllooser. Whoa, that was fun!

A year old experiment So I had a bet with a friend that I will run for a year Debian Unstable mixed with some packages from experimental and do some random testings on packages of interest to them. Also I promised to update aggressively so it was to be twice a day. This was my only machine so the bet was really good as it by theory could break very often. Well on behalf of Debian community, I can say that Debian hasn't had a single big breakage. Yay! The good side: on average I had ~3000 packages installed (they were in range from 2500-3500). I had for example xmonad, e17, gnome, cinnamon, xfce, systemd from experimental, kernels from experimental, nginx, apache, a lot of heavy packages, mixed packages from pip, npm, gems etc. So that makes it even more incredible that it stayed stable. There is no bigger kudos to people working on Debian, then when some sadist tries countless of ways to break it and Debian is just keeps running. I mean, I was doing my $PAID_WORK on this machine! The bad side: there were small breakages. It's seems that polkit and systemd-side of gnome were going through a lot of changes because sometimes system would ask password for every action (logout, suspend, poweroff, connect to network etc), audio would work and would not work, would often by itself just mute sound on every play or it would take it to 100% (which would blow my head when I had earplugs), bluetooth is almost de facto not working in gnome (my bluetooth mice worked without single problem in lenny, squeeze, in wheezy it maybe had once or twice a problem, but in this year long test it's almost useless). System would also have random hangs from time to time. The test: in the beginning my radeon card was too new and it was not supported by FLOSS driver so I ended up using fglrx which caused me a lot of annoyance (no brightness control, flickering of screen) but once FLOSS driver got support I was on it, and it performed more fluid (no glitches while moving windows). So as my friends knew that I have radeon and they want to play games on their machines (I play my Steam games on FLOSS driver) they set me the task to try fglrx driver every now end then. End result - there is no stable fglrx driver for almost a year, it breaks graphical interface so I didn't even log into DE with it for at least 8 months if not more. On the good side my expeditions in flgrx where quick - install it, boot into disaster, remove it, boot into freedom. Downside seems to be that removing fglrx driver, leaves a lot of its own crap on system (I may be mistaking but it seems I am not). Debian with love Well, that's all for today. I think so. You can never be sure.

Zlatan Todori : Random bits

Gogs I installed today Gogs and configured it with mysql (yes, yes, I know - use postgres you punk!). I will not post details of how I did it because:
  • It still has "weird" coding as pointed already by others
  • It doesn't have fork and pull request ability yet
And there was end of journey. When they code in fork/PR , I will close my eyes on other coding stuff and try it again because Gitlab is not close to my heart and installing their binary takes ~850MB of space which means a lot of ruby code that could go wrong way. It would be really awesome to have in archive something to apt install and have github-like place. It would be great if Debian infrastructure would have the possibility to have that.

Diaspora* Although I am thrilled about it finally reaching Debian archive, it still isn't ready. Not even closely. I couldn't even finish installation of it and it's not suitable for main archive as it takes files from github repo of diaspora. Maybe poking around Bitnami folks about how they did it.

The power of Free software Text Secure is was an mobile app that I thought it could take on Viber or WhatsUp. Besides all its goodies it had chance to send encrypted SMS to other TS users. Not anymore. Fortunate, there is a fork called SMSSecure which still has that ability.

Trolls So there is this Allwinner company that does crap after crap. Their latest will reach wider audience and I hope it gets resolved in a matter how they would react if some big proprietary company was stealing their code. It seems Allwinner is a pseudo for Alllooser. Whoa, that was fun!

A year old experiment So I had a bet with a friend that I will run for a year Debian Unstable mixed with some packages from experimental and do some random testings on packages of interest to them. Also I promised to update aggressively so it was to be twice a day. This was my only machine so the bet was really good as it by theory could break very often. Well on behalf of Debian community, I can say that Debian hasn't had a single big breakage. Yay! The good side: on average I had ~3000 packages installed (they were in range from 2500-3500). I had for example xmonad, e17, gnome, cinnamon, xfce, systemd from experimental, kernels from experimental, nginx, apache, a lot of heavy packages, mixed packages from pip, npm, gems etc. So that makes it even more incredible that it stayed stable. There is no bigger kudos to people working on Debian, then when some sadist tries countless of ways to break it and Debian is just keeps running. I mean, I was doing my $PAID_WORK on this machine! The bad side: there were small breakages. It's seems that polkit and systemd-side of gnome were going through a lot of changes because sometimes system would ask password for every action (logout, suspend, poweroff, connect to network etc), audio would work and would not work, would often by itself just mute sound on every play or it would take it to 100% (which would blow my head when I had earplugs), bluetooth is almost de facto not working in gnome (my bluetooth mice worked without single problem in lenny, squeeze, in wheezy it maybe had once or twice a problem, but in this year long test it's almost useless). System would also have random hangs from time to time. The test: in the beginning my radeon card was too new and it was not supported by FLOSS driver so I ended up using fglrx which caused me a lot of annoyance (no brightness control, flickering of screen) but once FLOSS driver got support I was on it, and it performed more fluid (no glitches while moving windows). So as my friends knew that I have radeon and they want to play games on their machines (I play my Steam games on FLOSS driver) they set me the task to try fglrx driver every now end then. End result - there is no stable fglrx driver for almost a year, it breaks graphical interface so I didn't even log into DE with it for at least 8 months if not more. On the good side my expeditions in flgrx where quick - install it, boot into disaster, remove it, boot into freedom. Downside seems to be that removing fglrx driver, leaves a lot of its own crap on system (I may be mistaking but it seems I am not). Debian with love Well, that's all for today. I think so. You can never be sure.

24 January 2015

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Link Pack #05

Lever Rukhin Photographs Los Angeles From His Car
Lever Rukhin shoots the sketchiest parts of Los Angeles from his car, taking a really unique perspective that helps you perceive what LA looks like, if you were in a car An experience that is apparently common to all LA people. People drive too much in the US :-). It s a very interesting interview that goes well with his full site: Lev Rukhin. What I love about this, besides the whole premise, is that Lev went the extra mile and actually hacked his car to make the images he wanted:
Phoblographer: It looks like many of these images have artificial lighting in them. What s your gear setup, and how do you introduce so much light into the scene from your car? Lever: About 9 months ago, I affixed a Mola beauty dish onto the roof rack of my 75 Volvo and juice it with a profoto bi-tube. This takes a bit of practice, as making a turn changes the light completely, which I always try to keep balanced. The Canon 5D3 with a 24mm f1.4 is set up on a tripod. The strobe has allowed me to capture more detail as well as creating a somewhat surreal feel to the sets.
Lev Rukhin Lev Rukhin http://www.levrukhin.com/
The Invisible Woman: A conversation with Bj rk
Bj rk is that Icelandic singer we all hear about but never really pay much attention to because her music is too smart for our simple ears. In this interview she goes over how her latest album is a very personal work, and unexpectedly (?) ends talking about how problematic it s been to be a female auteur in her generation. I have seen the same problem she denounces about people assuming that the male members of a team did all the work while the women just sticked to making coffee and sandwiches. I ve worked with exceptional women that don t get enough credit, but I ve also worked with potentially exceptional women who don t give themselves enough credit. It s a very interesting read, specially since it comes from someone who couldn t be higher in the art food chain. Bj rk is god-damn Bj rk. Only thing that bugs me is that Pitchfork decided to hold back most of the interview for publishing next month. I ll try to go back and read it in full, but I wonder if the technique works for them or if perhaps they are missing the opportunity for a bigger impact. But I digress.
Pitchfork: The world has a difficult time with the female auteur. B: I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this I m not dissing him this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second. If whatever I m saying to you now helps women, I m up for saying it. For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. [Matmos ] Drew [Daniel] is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don t even listen to him. It really is strange.
In Defense of the Selfie Stick
Miguel proposes a different take on the consequences of the selfies stick:
When you ask someone to take a picture of you, technically, they are the photographer, and they own the copyright of your picture. ( ) All of a sudden, your backpacking adventure in Europe requires you to pack a stack of legal contracts. Now your exchange goes from Can you take a picture of us? to Can you take a picture of us, making sure that the church is on the top right corner, and also, I am going to need you to sign this paper .
I don t know what s with the selfie stick hate. Let people have fun, it doesn t hurt. If anything, it prevents them from asking you to take their photo, and if we already established you are the kind of people not a big fan of strangers, all the better, right? Why Top Tech CEOs Want Employees With Liberal Arts Degrees
Here s a small extra. When I decided to pursue a humanities/art formal training, I got many naysayers telling me that I was screwing up not specializing even more as a formal (titled) engineer. I argued then, and now, that if I was gonna pay for training, I might as well pay for training outside my comfort zone. The result resonates perfectly with this article. Of course, it s not like the thing is settled, but I can back the various quotes in there. Working with purely technical/engineering types can be an echo chamber, and having trained myself in the humanities and arts I have become incredibly much more sensitive to the human factor of things. I used to think I was already good at this (because we hacker types have lots of confidence), but studying humanities like human communication, social conflict and development, film language, etc; it all has made me a much more capable hacker of things. There s also a nice argument to be made about joining the arts when you are already highly skilled on technical matters. Like Robert Rodr guez s teacher (mentioned in his diary/book Rebel Without a Cause, which I also have to review soon) used to say (generous paraphrasing here): the world is of those who can be their own creative and their own technician.
Both Yi and Sheer recognize that the scientific method is valuable, with its emphasis on logic and reason, especially when dealing with data or engineering problems. But they believe this approach can sometimes be limiting. When I collaborate with people who have a strictly technical background, says Yi, the perspective I find most lacking is an understanding of what motivates people and how to balance multiple factors that are at work outside the realm of technology.
Interesting food for thought, specially if you know an engineer that ditches the arts as of little value for personal growth in their careers/life.
Read more Link Pack, you ll love it

24 September 2014

Laura Arjona: 10 short steps to contribute translations to free software for Android

This small guide assumes that you know how to create a public repository with git (or other version control system). Maybe some projects use other VCS, Subversion or whatever; the process would be similar although the commands will be different of course. If you don t want to use any VCS, you can just download the corresponding file, translate it, and send it by email or to the BTS of the project, but the commands required are very easy and you ll see soon that using git (or any VCS) is quite comfortable and less scary than what it seems. So, you were going to recommend a nice app that you use or found in F-Droid to your friend, but she does not understand English. Why not translating the app for her? And for everybody? It s a job that can be done in 15 minutes or so (Android apps have very short strings, few menus, and so). Let s go! 1.- Search the app in the F-Droid website You can do it going to the URL: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=wordofappname Example: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=pomodoro Then, open the details of the app, and learn where s the source code. 2.- Clone the source code If you have an account in that forge, fork/clone the project into your account, and then, clone your fork/clone in local. If you haven t got an account in that forge, clone the project in local. git clone URLofTheProjectOrYourClone 3.- In local, create a new branch, and checkout to it. cd nameofrepo git checkout -b Spanish 4.- Then, copy the /res/values folder into res/values-XX folder (where XX is your language code) cp ./res/values /res/values-es -R 5.- Translate Edit the strings.xml file that is in the res/values-XX folder, and change the English strings to your language (respect the XML format). 6.- Translate other files, or delete them If there are more files in that folder (e.g. arrays.xml ), review them to know if they have translatable strings. If yes, translate them. If not, delete the files. 7.- Commit When you are finished, commit your changes: git add res/values-es/* git commit -a (Message can be Spanish translation or so) 8.- Push your changes to your public repo If you didn t create a public clone of the repo in your forge, create a public repo and push your local stuff into there. git push --all 9.- Request a merge to the original repo (Using the web interface of the forge, if it is the same for the original repo and your clone, or sending an email or creating an issue and providing the URL of your repo). For example, open a new issue in the project s BTS Title: Spanish translation available for merging Body: Hi everybody. Thanks for your work in "nameofapp". I have completed a Spanish translation, it's available for review/merge in the Spanish branch of my repo: https://urlofyourclone Best regards 10.- Congratulations! Translations are new features, and having a new feature in your app for free is a great thing, so probably the app developer(s) will merge your translation soon. Share your joy with your friends, so they begin to use the app you translated, and maybe become translators too! Comments? You can comment on this post in this pump.io thread.
Filed under: Tools, Writings (translations) Tagged: Android, Contributing to libre software, English, Free Software, libre software, translations

26 March 2014

Clint Adams: Belinda Carlisle (@belindaofficial) retweeted one of your Tweets!

Now that ZOMG has support for Opus, I find myself wondering how one does the equivalent of vorbisgain, preferably without floating-point.

30 January 2014

Russell Coker: The Movie Experience

Phandroid has one of many articles about a man being detained for wearing Google Glass in a cinema [1]. The article states as a fact that it s probably not smart to bring a recording device into a movie theater which is totally bogus. I ve visited a government office where recording devices were prohibited, they provided a locker for me to store everything that could be used for electronic storage outside their main security zone, that s what you do when you ban recording devices. Any place that doesn t have such facilities really isn t banning recording. The Gadgeteer has the original story with more detail with an update showing that the Department of Homeland Security were responsible for detaining the victim [2]. There are lots of issues here with DHS continuing to do nothing good and more bad things than most people suspect and with the music and film industry organisations attacking innocent people. But one thing that seems to be ignored is that movies are a recreational activity, so it s an experience that they are selling not just a movie. Any organisation that wants to make money out of movies really should be trying to make movies fun. The movie experience has always involved queuing, paying a lot of money for tickets ($20 per seat seems common), buying expensive drinks/snacks, and having to waste time on anti-piracy adverts. Now they are adding the risk of assault, false-arrest, and harassment under color of law to the down-sides of watching a movie. Downloading a movie via Bittorrent takes between 20 minutes and a few hours (depending on size and internet connectivity). Sometimes it can be quicker to download a movie than to drive to a cinema and if you are organising a group to watch a movie it will definitely be easier to download it. When you watch a movie at home you can pause it for a toilet break and consume alcoholic drinks while watching (I miss the Dutch cinemas where an intermission and a bar were standard features). It s just a better experience to download a movie via Bittorrent. I ve previously written about the way that downloading movies is better than buying a DVD [3], now they are making the cinema a worse experience too. I sometimes wonder if groups like the MPAA are actually trying to make money from movies or whether they just want to oppress their audiences for fun or psychological research. I could imagine someone like the young Phillip Zimbardo working for the MPAA and doing experiments to determine how badly movie industry employees can treat their customers before the customers revolt. Anyone who watches a Jack Ryan movie (or any movie with a Marty-Stu/Gary-Stu character) obviously doesn t even want to experience the stress of an unhappy ending to a movie. It seems obvious that such people won t want the stress of potentially being assaulted in the cinema. In terms of economics it seems a bad idea to do anything about recording in the cinema. When I was 11 I was offered the opportunity to watch a movie that had been recorded by a video camera in the US before it was released in Australia, I wasn t interested because watching a low quality recording wouldn t be fun. It seems to me that if The Pirate Bay (the main site for Bittorrent downloads of movies) [4] was filled with awful camera recordings of movies then it would discourage people from using it. A quick search shows some camera recordings on The Pirate Bay, it seems that if you want to download a movie of reasonable quality then you have to read the Wikipedia page about Pirated Movie Release Types [5] to make sure that you get a good quality download. But if you buy a DVD in a store or visit a cinema then you are assured of image and sound quality. If the movie industry were smarter they would start uploading camera recordings of movies described as Blue-Ray rips to mess with Bittorrent users and put newbies off downloading movies.
Related posts:
  1. Censorship, Piracy, and Movie Ideas Flame has written a satirical post about the different methods...
  2. the next feature for a spy movie I have noticed that motion sensors on burglar alarms don t...
  3. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i First Experience I have just got a new Xperia X10i for my...

9 December 2013

John Goerzen: Delicious Holiday Recipes

I ve come up with some new favorites this season. The boys and Laura were around for all three, and I am happy to report there were many kitchen smiles over these! From-Scratch Hot Chocolate There s something about hot chocolate made from scratch, with chocolate melted into milk, instead of a powder stirred in. It takes quite a bit more time, and probably has more calories, but it is quite delicious. The key to a delicious result where milk is concerned is to take things slow and keep stirring. You don t want the chocolate to scorch at the bottom of the pan. Heating up the milk before the chocolate should help things mix in more easily as well. The basis for this recipe was here, and it called for 2 cups milk and 2 cups half-and-half. I trust my heavy whipping cream was fine! <grin> There are also some other variations on that site. This nearly made my little cast iron kettle overflow, so next time I made a 3/4 recipe. Hot Spiced Cider We put up a Christmas tree yesterday, so I thought hot spiced cider would be perfect for the occasion. I went searching for recipes, and many of them called for cloves (which have to be sifted out later or put in a spice bag). I wasn t going to have time to delay two boys from setting up a Christmas tree long enough for that, so I found this basic recipe to work well. However, I, as usual, made some modifications ;-) Mmmmm . yum . Turkey or Chicken Noodle Soup The annual what to do with all that leftover turkey quest strikes again. I like chicken noodle soup, so why not a turkey noodle soup done the same way? Here s what I used, roughly, in my large 6-quart cast iron cooking pot (aka Dutch oven ): Start with the broth, onion, basil, oregano, pepper, and bay leaf. Heat up the mixture and add the vegetables. Bring it to boiling, then add the uncooked noodles. Return to boiling, then reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 8 minutes. Add the turkey or chicken and diced tomatoes, and simmer until hot enough to serve. The nice thing about soups is that they freeze well and make great winter leftovers. This recipe makes quite a lot of soup; you may wish to halve it. This recipe was adapted from one in a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook.

6 February 2013

Biella Coleman: Edward Tufte was a phreak

It has been so very long since I have left a trace here. I guess moving to two new countries (Canada and Quebec), starting a new job, working on Anonymous, and finishing my first book was a bit much. I miss this space, not so much because what I write here is any good. But it a handy way for me to keep track of time and what I do and even think. My life feels like a blur at times and hopefully here I can see its rhythms and changes a little more clearly if I occasionally jot things down here. So I thought it would nice to start with something that I found surprising: famed information designer, Edward Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale was a phone phreak (and there is a stellar new book on the topic by former phreak Phil Lapsley. He spoke about his technological exploration during a sad event, a memorial service in NYC which I attended for the hacker and activist Aaron Swartz. I had my wonderful RA transcribe the speech, so here it is [we may not have the right spelling for some of the individuals so please let us know of any mistakes]:
Edward Tufte s Speech From Aaron Swartz s Memorial
Speech starts 41:00 [video cuts out in beginning]
We would then meet over the years for a long talk every now and then, and my responsibility was to provide him with a reading list, a reading list for life and then about two years ago Quinn had Aaron come to Connecticut and he told me about the four and a half million downloads of scholarly articles and my first question is, Why isn t MIT celebrating this? .
[Video cuts out again]
Obviously helpful in my career there, he then became president of the Mellon foundation, he then retired from the Mellon foundation, but he was asked by the Mellon foundation to handle the problem of JSTOR and Aaron. So I wrote Bill Bullen(sp?) an email about it, I said first that Aaron was a treasure and then I told a personal story about how I had done some illegal hacking and been caught at it and what happened. In 1962, my housemate and I invented the first blue box, that s a device that allows for free, undetectable, unbillable long distance telephone calls. And we got this up and played around with it and the end of our research came when we concluded what was the longest long distance call ever made, which was from Palo Alto to New York time-of-day via Hawaii, well during our experimentation, AT&T, on the second day it turned out, had tapped our phone and uh but it wasn t until about 6 months later when I got a call from the gentleman, AJ Dodge, senior security person at AT&T and I said, I know what you re calling about. and so we met and he said You what you are doing is a crime that would , you know all that. But I knew it wasn t serious because he actually cared about the kind of engineering stuff and complained that the tone signals we were generating were not the standard because they record them and play them back in the network to see what numbers they we were that you were trying to reach, but they couldn t break though the noise of our signal. The upshot of it was that uh oh and he asked why we went off the air after about 3 months, because this was to make long distance telephone calls for free and I said this was because we regarded it as an engineering problem and we made the longest long distance call and so that was it. So the deal was, as I explained in my email to Bill Bullen, that we wouldn t try to sell this and we were told, I was told that crime significance would pay a great deal for this, we wouldn t do any more of it and that we would turn our equipment over to AT&T, and so they got a complete vacuum tube isolator kit for making long distance phone calls. But I was grateful for AJ Dodge and I must say, AT&T that they decided not to wreck my life. And so I told Bill Bullen that he had a great opportunity here, to not wreck somebody s life, course he thankfully did the right thing.
Aaron s unique quality was that he was marvelously and vigorously different. There is a scarcity of that. Perhaps we can be all a little more different too.
Thank you very much.

18 January 2013

Petter Reinholdtsen: How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type

Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to install to get support for a given MIME type. Thanks to specifications done by Ubuntu and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian. Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification: 
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import apt
def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
    cache = apt.Cache()
    cache.open(None)
    thepkgs = []
    for pkg in cache:
        version = pkg.candidate
        if version is None:
            version = pkg.installed
        if version is None:
            continue
        record = version.record
        if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
            continue
        mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
        for t in mime_types:
            t = t.rstrip().strip()
            if t == mimetype:
                thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
    return thepkgs
mimetype = "audio/ogg"
if 1 < len(sys.argv):
    mimetype = sys.argv[1]
print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
    print "  %s" %pkg
It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type: 
% ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype 
Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
  gecko-mediaplayer
% ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
  browser-plugin-gnash
%
In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is anyone working on adding it? Update 2013-01-18 14:20: The Debian BTS request for icweasel support for this feature is #484010 from 2008 (and #698426 from today). Lack of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.

21 October 2012

Jonas Smedegaard: How I (don't) use Facebook images

Dear Facebook friend, I like you and I am happy that you take/tag/share photos of me, just not on Facebook! I have a Facebook account but don't hang out there. Please share your photos in public, not (only) inside Facebook. And please consider allowing Free reuse of your photos, by licensing them with a Free license like CC-BY-SA or CC0.

Here & Now My suggestion for now is to use Flickr, and license all images as "Attribution, share alike".

The Perfect Way Ideally you would publish the photos on some server that you control, like the Freedombox, but those are unfortunately not yet easy to find or use.

Why not Facebook? Facebook is a closed system: all activities happen at one central place. Maybe you don't care who is spying on the photo gallery that you share. That's fine - but please respect those of your friends who do care, by putting a copy of your photos somewhere with less thirdparty control. Regards, Jonas

28 August 2012

Theppitak Karoonboonyanan: Pango-HarfBuzz Merge and The Effects on Thai Module

One major change in GNOME 3.6 is Pango s shaper engines replacement with HarfBuzz. Only language engines (for word break analysis, for example) are retained. So, I m checking how this affects Thai/Lao rendering and what to do next. Over all, Behdad has put a good effort to make it right. Most Uniscribe behaviors have been achieved for compatibility. He even cares enough to cover some widespread Thai fonts in which the language tag 'latn' is used instead of 'thai', as seen in Mozilla #719366. Unfortunately, this font set has been declared as standard fonts in official documents. The workaround seems inevitable. Supported Fonts In my experiments with some existing Thai OpenType fonts, the new Pango still renders well without regression. Loma font from fonts-tlwg (glyph positioning with GPOS, rearrangement with GSUB): Loma on new Pango Arundina Sans font from Fonts-SIPA-Arundina (positioning by substitution, only GSUB, no GPOS): Arundina Sans on new Pango But for legacy fonts without OpenType features, it renders badly: Non-OpenType on new Pango In addition, according to Behdad, PUA glyphs in legacy fonts are not supported yet. This means there will be regression on fonts designed for Windows XP or below. But modern fonts designed for Windows 7 should be fine. Changes on Bugs The engine replacement from scratch certainly affects existing bugs. Some become obsolete, some still remain. Here are the summary for Thai/Lao engine, as resolved upstream: Closed bugs: Questionable bugs: Remaining bugs:

26 January 2012

MJ Ray: Phones, Privacy and Co-ops

And now a slightly longer than usual rant: The problem with the o2 network disclosing mobile browsers phone numbers that I repeated 2 days ago (and it appeared on our co-op website) snowballed yesterday to the point that it was on the short bulletins from ITN, BBC, IRN and probably many more. And then o2 fixed it. Good! The reply claims that it s only since 10th January which is rather at odds with other claims that it has been happening since at least March 2010 in some situations. I started buying from o2 in December. I was using Three, but their network where I stay in Norfolk isn t reliable and you can t just buy a device in a shop for The Phone Co-op. The dongle from o2 is a recent Huawei USB device that just worked in debian and was fairly easy for me to get working in Ubuntu. There s space in it for a memory card, so maybe I could boot from it but that s an idea for later. The o2 deal is OK but not great, and the included wifi is nowhere near as good as it looked: when it says it includes BT Openzone that doesn t include any of the BT Openzone-H hotspots that are much more common. You re only allowed to register one device for wifi, so no using your phone, tablet and laptop at different times! I can t believe it s legal to advertise that as unlimited wifi , but o2 is still a better offer than access to BT Openzone-H hotspots at 39/month (yes, that s the price for wifi-only ). Ultimately, I think the problem is that there s a rubbish choice of mobile (wifi or 3G) internet access providers in the UK. It s a completely and utterly failed market, so you need to use Virtual Private Networks and similar tricks to protect yourself from the dysfunctional networks. My VPN meant my mobile number was safe: how about yours? As luck would have it, I had already proposed a resolution about protecting customer privacy to The Phone Co-op (affiliate link) for our AGM on Saturday 4 February (if you re a member, let me know). We were trying to find a compromise wording and I don t think this little o2 scandal has hurt my proposal at all! At least the phone co-op s mobile service is based on Orange s network, which wasn t affected. How does your network perform? There s an Internet Service Provider evilness test which might tell you.

24 January 2012

C.J. Adams-Collier: SOPA response from Representative Rick Larsen, WA 2nd District

Below is an email I received from Representative Rick Larsen s office. I don t recall ever having identifying myself as PVT Adams-Collier in any communications with his office, though I could have done so at some point. Maybe. I also don t recall contacting his office directly concerning SOPA. I blogged a few things and mentioned him on facebook a couple of times, though. It is good to know that I don t always have to go directly to my representative to have my voice heard. For those playing along at home, I think the best course of action would be for producers to perform searches for their work on peer-to-peer file sharing search engines such as http://thepiratebay.org/ and http://scrapetorrent.com/. If producers find that their work is being distributed in a way which is contrary to their wishes, I advise the producer or their agent to contact the individuals operating seeds with high share ratio in order to ensure that they perform AAA before accepting new peers into the swarm. Those seed operators who refuse to negotiate reasonable AAA terms should be issued C&D orders, and legal action should be taken, should they fail to comply with the request. [edit 2012-01-24T05:27:44] It would probably be wise to impose a minimum fee of $5 for seed operators per content package they distribute. This will encourage them to pass this fee on to their subscribers in a legal and responsible manner. I recommend that it be distributed in the same fair and concise way in which the tickets are distributed for toll violations on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Ask me how I know. This will provide content producers a valuable distribution channel which is closely in touch with the consumers of the producers media. I believe that if the producer puts forth effort in good faith to develop and maintain relationships with key distribution points, we will see a situation where both content producers and consumers get what they want. The authorization phase of the AAA system could charge a Payment Card Industry or bitcoin account a reasonable fee. My employer produces content delivery appliances which would serve quite well the role of AAA gateway. For an example of this use case in action (sans account billing), I recommend contacting seeding participants of the Debian CD/DVD swarms. I will proxy such requests if there is interest. An alternative might be a tool developed for the online gaming community with a strange name: http://www.evenbalance.com/
Dear Pvt. Adams-Collier: Thank you for contacting me about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). I wanted to update you on my views on this important issue. I am opposed to SOPA and PIPA in their current forms. I believe that these bills create unacceptable threats to free speech and free access to the internet. I have heard from many of you in Northwest Washington who are deeply concerned about the potential impacts of SOPA and PIPA. Online piracy is a serious problem that costs U.S. businesses billions of dollars. Government agencies must be empowered to stop and prosecute intellectual property thieves. But in doing so we cannot undermine freedom of speech or jeopardize the free flow of information on the internet. I will work with my colleagues to see that any final anti-online piracy legislation protects the internet and does not encroach on free speech rights. Please be assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind should I have the opportunity to vote on any legislation that would impact online piracy and internet freedom on the House floor. Again, thank you for contacting me. I encourage you to contact me in the future about this or any other issue of importance to you. Sincerely, Rick Larsen
United States Representative
Washington State, 2nd District
[edit 2012-01-24T05:28:09] Sincerely, C.J. Adams-Collier
San Juan County Democratic Central Committee (*whew*) PCO
San Juan County, Washington State, Orcas 3 District

2 October 2011

Theppitak Karoonboonyanan: Myanmar Visit

Quite a belated English blog (after the Thai version), due to busy personal life lately. I had visited Yangon during 4-11 Sep. to give some talks and tutorials on Debian packaging and mirroring. And I've shared some information with community. The visit was initiated by Ngwe Tun and the Myanmar L10N team. I found later that a Facebook event had been created for this. Localization The first day was a comparison between Myanmar and Thai supports in GNU/Linux, in which I briefed the status on Thai side, and Thura Hlaing on Myanmar side. It was nice that we had the Myanmar Computer Federation (MCF) director presiding the meeting til the end. That means GNU/Linux support has been awared at executive level. According to Thura, Burmese has gained support in GNU/Linux quite well. On the rendering side, all the reordering for the logical order is normally done with pure GSUB in the fonts, without special processing on the rendering engine. This is suboptimal in principle, but it's the most effective way, as Windows redering engine itself does not yet support Myanmar, either. For input method, Myanmar XKB map has been available in xkb-data for a long time, but to serve users' familarity with visual order typing, some reordering input methods have been developed, based on keymagic and ibus. But all are not context-sensitive like what's done for Thai in other frameworks. Fortunately, with the surrounding text API recently added to ibus, this has become possible. One unusual requirement for Myanmar script editing is the caret movements. It needs to move syllable-wise, not character-wise nor cluster-wise. So, I suggested them to have a look on UAX #29 to see how it should be amended. Myanmar locales are already done, both for GNU C library and CLDR. And even a GNOME applet for Myanmar lunar calendar is also available. This latter thing is what Thai can learn from. Burmese word segmentation is not supported in general. But R&D works have been done for this in its NLP lab. A serious issue left to solve is the existing abuses of Unicode. In Myanmar, there exist at least 14 variations of font hacks, abusing some free slots in Unicode charts as pre-composed clusters for information interchange (not for font internals), making plain text interchange impossible without the proper font for rendering. For program translation, the new Myanmar L10N team is trying to request for a mass submission to the current GNOME team. And for Debian, Thura Hlaing and Ngwe Tun has already started the translation process with Christian's help. Along my stay, I could see the team actively discussing on the IT glossary, trying to settle down the translated terms. This looked very fun. Debian Then, the next three days were a workshop on Debian packaging, where I have presented the basics of Debian package building, uploading, quality-controlling, modifying, creating and delivering. This aimed toward the development of a local distribution based on Debian. Each day in the afternoon was the time for setting up a Debian mirror, not only for convenient local distro developement, but also for general users. This is important because internet penetration is still low in Myanmar. The main media for software distribution is CD/DVD, which means only stable version of Debian can be spread, which is not good for desktop users. Having a mirror should improve the situation somehow. It should make dist-upgrading to testing/unstable easier. And it should make CD snapshotting using local distributions easier, too. For this, I also presented another quick slide on Debian mirroring & caching. In the last day, I was introduced to the staffs of Myanmar NLP Lab and their projects, which include Myanmar OCR (based on tesseract), information retrieval, machine translation, and other lingustic resources like dictionary, lexicon and text corpus. Furthermore, I was also offerred technical helps on developing a Lao/Esaan Tham font for a Lao and North Eastern Thailand variation of Tham script, which is Mon-based and is closely related to Myanmar script. (See some sample transliterations if you are curious how it looks like. It was part of my hacking during DebConf11 travelling.) Currently, its OpenType support is quite sufficient, but it still renders poorly on Mac OSX. To cope with this, I was given a Mac Mini as a present from Myanmar for its development, as well as some explanations on AAT features from a Myanmar font developer. And I am very grateful for that.

15 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

16 February 2011

Stefano Zacchiroli: in the news - Debian and the FreedomBox

Fellow geeks who have attended FOSDEM this year probably remember Eben Moglen's announcement about the creation of a foundation to support the development of FreedomBox-es. The FreedomBox foundation and its goals have been featured in a New York Times article appeared yesterday, together with a nice Debian mention which points to our wiki. Debian is also prominently present on the (ikiwiki-powered) website of the foundation. Yet another reason why I'm proud of being part of Debian.
(thanks to Faidon for the heads up)

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