DebConf 13 report (by Andreas Tille) General impression I'm beginning my DebConf report in an unofficial "Scenic Hacklab" right at the edge of the lake in Yverdon. This is the right place to memorise the last days. When I started from this place cycling to Le Camp 12 days ago I was full of great expectations and what should I say - the reality has even beaten these. Once it comes about comparing DebConfs even if it is an unfair comparison due all the differences my secret long term favourite was Helsinki very closely followed by Argentina and also very closely followed by all the other great DebConfs I joined (and I joined all in Europe). Would Le Camp be able to beat it? The short answer is: Yes, it is now my favourite DebConf while I think I do not suffer from the last-Debconf-was-the-best-DebConf-syndrome (and I realised there are others thinking the same). As you might probably know I'm a bit addicted to swimming. While Helsinki had admittedly the better conditions I was at least able to fix the distance issue using my bicycle. (Hey, those Le Camp photographers did a great job in hiding the fact that you can not actually touch the lake right from the meadow of Le Camp.) Being able to have my bicycle at DebConf scored some extra points. However, the really great view of the lake, the inspiring "Scenic Hacklab" which was my favourite place has bumped DebConf13 at first place in my personal ranking. So it comes quite natural to say: "Kudos to the great organisation team!" They did a Swiss-like precise work and perfectly succeeded in hiding any problems (I assume there were some as always) from the attendees so everything went smooth, nice and shiny for the attendees. The local team was even precise in setting up great weather conditions for DebConf. While saying thanks to the local team I would like to also explicitly thank Luca Capello who has quite some share that this DebConf was possible at all (while I have to decrease my DebConf score one point because he was not really there - Luca to bad that you were not able to come full time!) Also thanks to Gunnar and Gannef who helped remotely (another score down because I were missing them this year as well). Even if it was my favourite DebConf I was not able to work down my todo list fully (which was not only uploading one package per day which I at least statistically fullfilled). But that's probably a general feature of todo lists anyway. One item was definitely done: Doing my daily swimming BoF. I actually was able to do the other parts of the triathlon which was skipped by Christian and have done in summary about 150km cycling with 3500m elevation and estimated 7-8km swimming (0m elevation ;-)). Considering the great view at sunrise over the lake I was not hating my "Senile bed escape" disease too much (I was every day waking up at sunset) - it was simply a great experience. I will never forget seeing water drips glimmering like gold inside the morning sun while seeing the Alps panorama in the distant. I hope I was able to help all interested swimmers with the DebConf Beach Map which was just a by-product of my activities in DebCamp. Speaking about OSM: I was astonished that the area was way less covered than I expected. Thanks to several DebConf attendees the situation became better and the map does not only show random trees in the wild but also the tracks leading to these. (Remark: It was no DebConf attendee who is responsible for plastering the map with single trees.) While I had my mapping focus basically close to the edge of the lake I was also able to even map my very own street. :-) I clearly remember one specific mapping tour when I was invited by the DPL: He convinced me to join him on a bicycle tour and since I was afraid to get fired I joined him instead to keep on hacking. Also Sorina was brave enough to join us on the tour and she did quite well. (Sorina, do you remember the agreement about your work on the installer? ;-)) Lucas described the tour as: going uphill on only asphalted roads. Sorina and me were witnessing the mighty DPL powers when we left the wood around Le Camp to reach the described road: The asphalt was just put onto the road - no doubt that it was done on the immediate demand of mighty DPL. :-) DebCamp time was flying like nose dive and a lot of known (and unknown) faces arrived at Le Camp. What I really liked a lot this year was that several really young children has pulled down the average age of DebConf attendees. I clearly remember all the discussion one year ago what to do about children. As always the issue was solved in a typical Debian way: Just do it and bring your children - they had obviously a great time as well. I think the youngest child was 2 months and the oldest "child" above 20. ;-) Actually Baptiste Perrier did great in making the C&W party a success and had obviously a nice time. (I wished my son would have been able to come as well but he needs to write his bachelor s thesis in physics. :-() It was nice to see the kids using all playing facilities and communicating with geeks. Also I would like to point out that even the very young attendees had their share at the success of DebConf: Just think of the three "bell ringing assistants" who helped me ringing the bells for lunch and dinner. I've got this cool job from Didier in the beginning of DebCamp. I must say having some real bells ringing is by far nicer than just the "lunch / dinner starts in 10 minutes" from IRC bot. The only thing I did not understand was that people did not considered ringing the bells at 8:00 for breakfast as a good idea. Regarding the food in general I would also like to send kudos to the kitchen: It was tasty, freshly prepared, regional food with a good change rate. I really liked this. Extra points for having the chance to sit outside when eating. Talks But lets have a look into the conference programme. I'd really recommend watching the videos of the talks Bits from the DPL (video) and Debian Cosmology (video). I considered both talks as entertaining and interesting. I also really hope that the effort Enrico Zini started in Debian Contributors (video) will be successful. I had some talks and BoFs myself starting with Why running a Blend (video) and I admit that (as usual) the number of attendees was quite low even if I think there is some proof (see below) that it is interesting for way more people who should consider working more "blendish" in their team. Do you know how to recruit one developer per year and relax the man power problem in your team? Feel free to watch the video. We have confirmation that ten DDs of our team have considered to join Debian only because Debian Med exists. Admittedly biology and medicine are really leaf topics inside the Debian universe. So if even this topic that has a very tiny share of the Debian users is able to attract this level of attention - how many more people could we win for multimedia, games, GIS and others? So if you feel you are quite overworked with your packaging and you have no time this is most probably wrong. The amount of time is basically a matter of priorities you set for your tasks. Try to put some higher priority onto using the just existing Blends tools I explained in my talk to attract more users and developers to your team and by doing so spread the workload over more people. It works, the prove was given in my main talk. So before you start working on a specific package you should wonder who else could have an even stronger interest to get this work done and provide him with some additional motivation and help to get the common goal done. The interesting thing is that my BoF about How to attract new developers for your team (video) - which was a simple report about some by-product of the Blends work - made it into the main talk room and got way more attention. For me this is the proof that the Blends concept itself is probably badly perceived as something like "a few outsiders are doing damn specific stuff which is not really interesting for anybody else" instead of what is really is: Smoothing the way from specific upstream applications to the end user via Debian. Once you see the video of this BoF you can observe how my friend Asheesh Laroia became more and more excited about the Blends concept and admitted what I said above: We should have more Blends for different fields. Funnily enough Asheesh asked me in his excitement to talk more about Blends. This would have been a really good suggestion ten years ago. At DebConf 3 in Oslo I had my very first talk about Blends (at this time under the name "Debian Internal Projects"). I continuously kept on talking about this (MiniDebConf Peking 2005, DebConf 5, Helsinki (video), DebConf 7, Edinburgh (video), DebConf 8, Mar del Plata (video), DebConf 9, C ceres (video), MiniDebConf Berlin 2010 (video in German), MiniDebConf Paris 2010 (not video recorded), DebConf 11, Banja Luka (video) ... and these are only (Mini)DebConfs my talks page is full of this topic) and every new year I try different ways to communicate the idea to my fellow Debianistas. I'm wondering how I could invent a title + abstract avoiding the term Blends, put "Git", "release" and "systemd versus upstart" in and being able to inform about Blends reasonably by not becoming to off topic with the abstract. I also registered the Debian Science round table. I admit we were lacking some input from remote via IRC which used to be quite helpful in the past. The attendees agreed upon the handling of citations in debian/upstream files which was invented by Debian Med team to create even stronger bounds to our upstream developers by giving their work extra reward and providing users with even better documentation (see my summary in Wiki). As usual I suggested to create some Debian Science offsprings like "Debian Astronomy", "Debian Electronics", "Debian Mathematics", "Debian Physics" etc. who could perfectly leave the Debian Science umbrella to get a more fine grained structure and a more focused team to enhance the contact to our users. Unfortunately there is nobody who volunteers to take over the lead for such Blends. I have given a short summary about this BoF on the Debian Science mailing list. In the Debian Med meeting I have given some status report. No other long term team members were attending DebConf and so I gave some kind of introduction for newcomers and interested people. I touched also the DebiChem topic which maintains some packages that are used by biologists frequently and so we have a good connection to this team. Finally I had registered three BoFs in Blends I'm actually not (or not yet) active part of. My motivation was to turn the ideas I have explained in my main talk into specific application inside these teams and helping them to implement the Blends framework. In the first BoF about Debian GIS I have shown the usual team metrics graphs to demonstrate, that the one packaging team Pkg-OSM is in danger to become MIA. There are only three persons doing actual uploads. Two of them were at DebConf but did not joined the BoF because they do not consider their contribution to Pkg-OSM as a major part of their general Debian work. I will contact the main contributor David Paleino about his opinion to move the packages step by step into maintenance of Debian GIS packaging team to try to overcome the split of two teams that are sharing a good amount of interest. At least if I might become an Uploader for one of the packages currently maintained by Pkg-OSM I will move this to pkg-grass-devel (which is the name of the packaging team of Debian GIS for historical reasons). The attendees of the BoF have considered this plan as sensible. Moreover I talked about my experiences with OSGeo Live - an Ubuntu derivative that tries to provide a full tool chain to work on GIS and OSM problems ... basically the same goal as Debian GIS has just provided by the OSGeo project. I'm lurking on OSGeo mailing list when I asked explicitly I've got the answer that they are working together with Debian GIS and are using common repository (which is IMHO the optimal way of cooperation). However, it seems that several protagonists of OSGeo Live are underestimating the resources provided by Debian. For instance there was a question about Java packaging issues but people were not aware about the existence of the debian-java mailing list. I was able to give an example how the Debian Med team managed to strengthen its ties to BioLinux that is also an Ubuntu derivative for biologists. At our first Debian Med sprint in 2011 we invited developers from BioLinux and reached a state where they are using the very same VCS on Alioth where we are maintaining our packages. At DebConf I was able to upload two packages where BioLinux developers did certain changes for enhancing the user experience. My "work" was just bumping the version number in changelog and so we did profit from the work of the BioLinux developers as well as they are profiting from our work. I plan to dive a bit more into Debian GIS and try to strengthen the connection to OSGeo Live a bit. The next BoF was the Debian Multimedia meeting. It was nice that the current leader of Ubuntu Studio Kaj Ailomaa joined the meeting. When I was explaining my ideas about cooperation with derivatives I repeated my detailed explanation about the relation with BioLinux. It seems every topic you could cover inside Debian has its related derivative. So to me it seems to be quite natural to work together with the developers of the derivative to join forces. I actually consider a Blend a derivative done the right way = inside Debian. The final work for the derivers that might be left for them is doing some shiny customising of backgrounds or something like this - but all the hard work could and should be done in common with the relevant Debian team. My dream is to raise such relevant teams inside Debian ... the Blends. Finally the last BoF of this series was the Debian Games meeting. As always I presented the team metrics graphs and the Debian Games team members who attended the BoF were quite interested. So it seems to be some unknown fact that team metrics are done for several teams in side Debian and so I repeat the link to it for those who are not yet aware of it. As a result of the BoF Debian Games team members agreed to put some more effort into maintaining their Blends tasks. Moreover Miriam Ruiz wants to put some effort into reviving Debian Jr. Regarding Debian Jr. there was an interesting talk about DouDouLinux - in case you might want to watch the video I'd recommend skipping the first 30min and rather watch the nice live demo. There was also an ad hoc BoF about Debian Jr scheduled to bring together all people interested into this cute project and Per Anderson volunteered to take over the lead. I have given a summary about this specific BoF at the Debian Jr list. For some other talks that I'd regard as remarkable for some reasons: I'd regard the talk "Debian-LAN" by Andreas Mundt as some hidden pearl because it did not got a lot of attention but after having seen the video I was quite impressed - specifically because it is also relevant for the Blends topic. Memories I also liked "Paths into Debian" by Moray Allan (and I was only able to enjoy the latter talks thanks to the great work of the video team!) because it also scratched the same topic I was concerned about in my mentoring talk. Related to this was in my opinion also "Women in Debian 2013" were we tried to find out reasons for the lack of woman compared to other projects and how to overcome this issue. Besides the talks I will probably never forget two specific moments that make DebConf so special. One of these moments is recorded on an image that clearly needs no words - just see Geert hovering over the grass. Another strong moment in my personal record was in the DebConf Newbies BoF "First time at DebConf" that unfortunately was not recorded but at least for this statement it would have been very great if we would have some reference better than personal memory. Aarsh Shah a GSoC student from India suddenly raised up and said: "Four months ago I was not even aware that Free Software exists. Now I'm here with so many people who are totally equal. If I will tell my mother at home that I was standing in the same queue where the Debian Project Leader was queuing up for food she will never believe me." He was totally excited about things we are regarding as normal. IMHO we should memorise moments like this that might be part of the key to success in cultures, where Debian is widely unknown and very rarely in use. Amongst these not scheduled great moments the scheduled day trip was also a great thing. I had a really hard time to decide what tour I might join but ended up in the "long distance walking (or should I say running) group". Inspired by the "running Bubulle" who was flashing between the walking groups we went uphill with 5.4km/h which was a nice exercise. Our destination the large cliff was an exciting landscape and I guess we all enjoyed the dinner organised by the "Trout cabal". ;-) So I had a hard time to leave Le Camp and tried hard to make sure my memories will remain as long as possible. Keeping some signs attached to my bicycle, conserving the "Scenic Hacklab" sign for my private "scenic hacklab @ home" was one part. I also have cut some branches of the Buxus sempervirens in Le Camp and have put them in my garden at home (where I create some hedgerow from places where I spent some great time). These will probably build a great part of the hedgerow ... Thanks for reading this longish report. Looking forward to see you all in Germany 2015 (or earlier) Andreas.

"I think that we need to be better at accepting mistakes. It's OK to not know everything, it's OK to not be perfect right from the start, but it's better to be vocal about things you don't know, things you are unsure, than to just hide it under the carpet and hope nobody will notice."
Lucas Nussbaum, Bits from the DPL "This is my definition for a team: waking up in the morning and realizing that somebody else has solved your problem from yesterday."
Andreas Tille, How to attract new developers for your team

While working on English subtitles for DC13 talks, you can stumble upon some real gems. The subtitling work is progressing nicely: four talks have now subtitles available (you can find them here), thanks to the work of Daniel, Gunnar and myself (as well as the reviews from Justin, Andreas and Michael!). In the meanwhile we created an alioth group and a related repository for the sub team, and there are several subtitles in progress! How can you help?

• you can claim a talk and create the English subtitles for it (more info here)
• you can translate in your language the subtitles already available
• if you are hearing impaired, please send us some feedback: we are trying to create subtitles that are also useful for people with hearing problems, but we've not much experience in the field :)

Review: River of Stars, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Publisher:	Roc
Copyright:	April 2013
ISBN:	0-451-46497-4
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	639

In Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay applied his style of slightly fantastic alternate history to Tang Dynasty China and wrote possibly the best book of his career. In River of Stars, he takes the unusual step of revisiting one of his historical worlds, something I don't think he's done explicitly apart from the Sarantime Mosaic duology. River of Stars is set in the same land of Kitai, Kay's alternate China, four centuries later. It's a stand-alone novel, not a sequel, but the effects of the events of the earlier book are deeply felt on the structure of society. Under Heaven was one of my favorite books of all time, so you can imagine how eagerly I've been awaiting this book ever since it was announced. It starts, once again, in the distant regions of Kitai, this time with a boy. Ren Daiyan is the second son of a minor clerk in a backwater town with a very atypical dream for someone of his social rank: to win back the lost provinces of Kitai from the Xiaolu and restore the glory of the empire as the center of the world. One sees little hope for this dream in a world where no one with any choice in the matter would let their sons join the discredited and suspected army. And, as River of Stars opens, it's become much less likely since the town's only teacher has closed his school and left. As with Under Heaven, the unfolding of Daiyan's life is full of surprises, all of which should be enjoyed in the flow of the story. Here, I think the cover flap even gives away too much information, despite only mentioning events at the start of the book, since the incident that it recounts has much more impact without being spoiled. I recommend avoiding any plot summary and just reading, and therefore will avoid giving any more details. River of Stars, in another echo of its predecessor novel, has a second, female protagonist. Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar on the edges of imperial court life, a man who has quietly but persistently refused to educate her differently than he would have educated a son. This matters in the time of this novel. Kitai has turned more conservative, turned away from the roles of women in public life seen (in their limited ways) in Under Heaven, and has pressed women into new roles of formal modesty. Shan has been set up for a difficult life. But she's also brilliant, careful, and canny, making use of opportunties, and manages to make several extraordinary friends within the power structures of the court. It's impossible not to compare this novel to Under Heaven, but that's an unfair standard to which to hold any novel. So I will say up front that, at least for me, River of Stars does not capture quite the same magic. Shen Tai was a brilliant protagonist, and his unwanted journey into the circles of power was the perfect palette on which to mix personal integrity with sweeping politics. It used history as a backdrop for a novel that was always grounded in Shen Tai's modest ambitions and quiet integrity. Neither Daiyan nor Shen are that character, nor is River of Stars that book. This novel is far more political from the start, concerned directly with issues of governance, court intrigue, and military maneuvers. Even with Shen to ground the story, the personal is the political and the events of history have been moved to center stage. I've seen Kay approach a history both ways, and I prefer when he uses history as backdrop rather than focus. I find it easier to identify and celebrate with the protagonists when their journies are less caught up in grand events. When, as here, the personal becomes the political, it creates a darker tone. The stakes are higher, and there is little separable individual triumph to blunt the tragic moments. That said, Kay remains at the height of his form. Once again, this novel contains some of the best conversations I have ever read. I'm not sure what Kay is doing that other novelists aren't. It may be that he is discarding some realism in favor of presenting the purified essence of sharp and dangerous exchanges (more on that in a bit). But there are several conversations here that read like the distilled essence of a high-stakes, insightful exchange between fearsomely intelligent adversaries: steeped in strategy, carefully managed for effect, and full of thrilling rhetorical tightropes. There are also moments that literally sent shivers up my spine: moments when the story changes, and lives change, in ways that I was not expecting at all. The story is beautifully stage-managed, imbuing every moment with a feeling of a broader resonance. I do have to warn, as with all Kay but particularly recent writing, that this is done openly and explicitly via an omniscient and very obvious narrative voice. Kay writes in the style of high fantasy in which the narrator is nearly a character in the story, one who foreshadows events and shares observations directly with the reader. Some people dislike that style inherently, and if so, Kay may not be for you. I love it when it's done well, and I don't think anyone does it better than Kay. I feel like I'm in the hands of a master storyteller who is carefully crafting the story to preserve surprise and suspense and who knows exactly where he wants the story to go. That's fitting, since one of the major themes of this book is stories and legends, and how they are shaped by events but then come to shape events in turn. River of Stars is partly about the construction of stories in the way that Under Heaven was partly about poetry. Some of the characters try to control the setting and subject matter, some use stories as a way to focus their personal motivation, and some use them to define their lives. But stories also shape politics because they can define popular reaction and the limits of the possible. This theme is subtle through much of the book, but the more I thought about it the more I noticed it woven through the story. Unfortunately, and very unusually for one of Kay's novels, the journey was intense but the destination was mildly unsatisfying. I don't want to give away any detail of the plot, so this is necessarily vague, but while I intellectually appreciate the themes that I think Kay was exploring, I think River of Stars lacks the powerful catharsis that I normally get from his novels. This for me returns to the focus on the politics over the personal (which is in some ways another of the themes of the novel). The catharsis in a novel for me begins and ends with the characters, and these characters didn't have quite enough independence from the broader sweep of events. Another theme of the novel is the degree to which every character is operating within tight constraints. This also showed up in Under Heaven, but Under Heaven was full of characters who subverted and manipulated those constraints. In River of Stars, they are more often suffocating. Shen is my favorite character, and I think the strongest character in the novel, because she manages to work around the most constraints and has the most personal story. But the roles into which she's forced remain smothering and push her out of the center of the action. Her life is full of lovely details (I particularly liked her domestic situation, which shows a family model that I think was far more common in reality than it has been in fiction and one that I would like to see portrayed far more often), but she simply doesn't have realistic room, within the society portrayed here, to maneuver to the catharsis I was looking for. One other, minor note: as in Tigana, but more blatantly, unusual sexual desires make an appearance linked with the closest thing this story has to a villain. (In this case, femdom BDSM, although shown so glancingly that I suspect some readers will not pick up on what's being described.) It was neither unrealistic nor out of character, but there is a moment of nastiness that caught me by surprise and bothered me. I hope eventually to see alternative sexuality show up in a Kay novel without the negative linkages. It's not quite characterization by stereotype (I think Kay was going for a deeper point about the constrained roles available to women), but it's close enough to not work for me. I'm spending a lot of words on what didn't quite work for me, but that's because it's complex to explain, not because this is a bad story. Rather the opposite: it's an excellent novel that I didn't enjoy quite as much as its predecessor for reasons that are very individual to me. It's quite likely that those with different narrative preferences or different tolerances for certain emotional tones in novels will have a far different reaction. The quality of the writing is quite high, provided that you don't mind Kay's intrusive narrator, and several moments in this novel made me catch my breath in wonder. If you like Kay, read this; it's very much worth your time. If you're new to Kay, I would start with Under Heaven, which is near the top of my list of novels to recommend to anyone. Then read this, since seeing how the world develops and how the events of the previous novel change and shape subsequent politics is fascinating. It's not quite at the same level, but it's very much worth reading on its own terms. Rating: 9 out of 10

To recap: given the absence of other credible alternatives I had two options:

• Re-hack mutt to give me a sidebar that will show only folders containing new messages.
• Look at writing a "simple mail client". Haha. Ha. Hah.

I think there is room for a new console client, because mutt is showing its age and does feel like it should have a real extension language - be it guile, lisp, javascript(!), Lua, or something else. So I distilled what I thought I wanted into three sections:

• mode-ful. There would be a "folder-browsing mode", a "message-browsing mode" and a "read-a-single-message" mode.
• There would be scripting. Real scripting. I chose Lua.
• You give it ~/Maildir as the configuration. Nothing else. If the damn computer cannot find your mailboxes something is wrong.

So how did I do? I wrote a ncurses-based client which has Lua backed into it. You can fully explore the sidebar-mode - which lets you select multiple folders. From there you can view the messages in a list. What you can't do is anything "real":

• Update a messages flags. new -> read, etc.
• GPG-validation.
• MIME-handling.
• Attachment viewing.

For a two-day hack it is remarkably robust, and allowing scripting shows awesomeness. Consider this:

--
-- show all folders in the Maildir-list.
--
function all()
   -- ensure that the sidebar displays all folders
   sidebar_mode = "all";
   -- we're going to be in "maildir browsing mode"
   cmail_mode = "sidebar";
   reset_sidebar();
   refresh_screen();
end
--
-- Test code, show that the pattern-searching works.
--
-- To use this press ":" to enter the prompt, then enter "livejournal".
--
-- OR press "l" when in the sidebar-mode.
--
function livejournal()
   sidebar_pattern = "/.livejournal.2";
   sidebar_mode = "pattern";
   reset_sidebar();
   refresh_screen();
end
--
-- There is a different table for each mode.
--
keymap =  
keymap['sidebar'] =  
keymap['index']   =  
keymap['message'] =  
--
-- In the sidebar-mode "b" toggles the sidebar <-> index.
--
-- ":" invokes the evaluator.
-- "q" quits the browser and goes to the index-mode.
-- "Q" quits the program entirely.
--
keymap['sidebar'][':'] = "prompt-eval"
keymap['sidebar']['b'] = "toggle"
keymap['sidebar']['q'] = "toggle"
keymap['sidebar']['Q'] = "exit"
-- show all/unread/livejournal folders
keymap['sidebar']['a'] = "all"
keymap['sidebar']['u'] = "unread"
keymap['sidebar']['l'] = "livejournal"

Neat, huh? See the cmail.lua file on github for more details. My decision hasn't really progressed any further, though I can see that if this client were complete I'd love to use it. Its just that the remaining parts are the fiddly ones. I guess I'll re-hack mutt, and keep this on the back-burner. The code is ropey in places, but should you wish to view:

• https://github.com/skx/cmail

And damn C is kicking my ass.

Also this year the Debian project was present at Chemnitzer Linuxtage, this time right next the debianforum.de booth. The booth folks arriving on friday organized a flashmob at Expitas after booth setup. Unfortunatly our second planned flashmob at the mensa was boycotted by much more students, so we ended up in the Turm-Brauhaus, which is a great location with good drinks but the service was very harshly. On the next two days at the booth we chatted and discussed with visitors and other exhibitors a wide variety of questions, including 'When will be (the next Debian version) released?' and 'Are there installation disks available?'. The answers was as always 'When we are ready and we will have reached the quality-level we defined', 'No we don't have installation medias, as they are always outdated. Do you have an USB-dongle with you?'. Merchandising was requested by visitors as always, but we just had some leftovers of fosdem, brought by Axel. The demonstration was as usual a small box running Babelbox and xpenguins which worked out the last years too. This year there were three lectures held by Debian related people, about Debian GIS, Aptitude - known but even unknown and SSH and unreliable network connections. The organisation team did a really great job. The social event at saturday night was very exciting and we left it early in the morning. The whole event was indeed fun and a pleasure to find new friends and meet old ones of the Free Software community. Many thanks to Florian Baumann, Jan Dittberner, Andreas Tille, Christian Hoffmann, Axel Beckert, Markus Rekkenbeil, Daniel Schier, Jonas Genannt, Jan H rsch and kurio for taking care and running the booth, which worked out this year extreme smoothly from my point of view. Likewise as the last years a special thanks to TMT GmbH & Co. KG, which kindly donated additional boothtickets, the equipment, its transportation and accommodation for almost half of the booth staff.

This is the report about my work at Debian Med sprint ten days ago in Sch nberger Strand. If you are interested in Sprints in general you might be interested in work item 2. below.

1. Wrote draft article for Indian health care magazin. If you might like to proofread the article I'd be very happy (it is not yet to late for changes.) There is also a PDF version.
2. I have given a short talk proving the importance of sprints. The slides are basically graphs and I try to prove that sprints are a really good idea. The background knowledge is that the Debian Med team is doing sprints since 2011 and looking at all graphs you can see that this has a really positive effect. Thanks to Debian and its sponsors for supporting this kind of sprints.
3. Packaging
   • Worked with T. Travis on flexbar and uploaded the package to new queue
   • Worked with Ch. Gille on strap-base and uploaded the package to new queue
   • Discussed strategy how to strip glam2 source from meme upstream with T. Booth. Meme upstream agreed to keep the original license of Glam2 and backport the changes from Meme source archive
   • Discussed igv packaging issues with O. Sallou who updated the package and documented some issues about its dependency goby
   • Worked together with I. Maintz on cellprofiler
   • Worked together with I. Maintz on a couple of R packages which are mostly predependencies but also one Debian Med primary target (r-cran-boolnet) was uploaded to new
4. Discussing / chatting
   • Some chat with Ch. Steigies (Debian Games, Debian m68k, Debian Science)
   • Discussion with M. Banck about DebiChem
5. Little bit of MoM mentoring
6. Maintain Debian Med tasks files about newly commited packages of other sprint participants
7. General infrastucture issues
   • Issues with machine-readable files importer into UDD
   • Try to revive PET data in UDD
   • Work on installation of future blends.debian.net host (install needed packages, create UDD clone)

Thanks to all participants of the sprint and specifically to Steffen M ller who took over the work of organising. It was fun to meet you all and I'm even looking right now forward to the next sprint hopefully beeing able to continue the graphing of positive results of sprints in our team metrics.
We had some nice food, not so nice weather and from my perspective the only drawback was that at home there would have been perfect conditions for skiing ... but finally there are preferences. ;-)
See you at next sprint!

At FOSDEM I was talking even two times about Debian Med. The talk in the morning was attached to the FOSS for scientists track and was only a short overview about the use scientists can make from Debian Med. As usual the slides are available from my web page.
The main talk was in the evening in the Cross Distro Devroom and it was even video recorded.
It was fun to be at FOSDEM for the first time and meet a lot of Debian people and discuss new ideas with them.

This are the new years bits from Debian Med team. We try to make the wishes for a healthy new year becoming true with Free Software. :-)
Debian Med Bug Squashing Advent Calendar 2012 As last year the Debian Med team did some advent calendar bug squashing. The summary states 15 bugs from Debian Med scope which is less than last year but Debian Med team members also did some general bug squashing to help the Wheezy release. Finally this makes a lot of sense also for Debian Med if we can speed up the release. When counting the additional 12 RC bugs fixed in the advent calendar effort we again managed to fix more than one bug per day. Please keep on squashing RC bugs for Wheezy!
Mentoring of Month Last year Andreas Tille started the Mentoring of Month effort to lower the entrance barrier for newcomers. There was no student for every month and not each package was uploaded at end of month but expecting such a high number of newcomers would be unrealistic anyway. So I'd like to draw some positive conclusion that we now have some newcomers friendly invited to the project and some packages uploaded or at least prepared which would not be there without the MoM project. Finally all MoM students liked the project and we will continue it in the future and would like to recommend other teams to do something similar.
Planed Debian Med sprint in Kiel The next Debian Med sprint for real life meeting of Debian Med developers and users will happen in Kiel 23rd/24th of February. All interested people are invited to join to continue the success of the past two sprints. We are currently in the planing phase but there are just some hot topics which are workflows, licensing (specifically bug #694908), cooperation with Ubuntu and BioLinux and other things.
Metapackages targeting at Wheezy Currently Debian Med metapackages version 1.13.2 are in unstable and once the unblock request is accepted by Debian release team this version will target at Wheezy. This means your very last chance to influence the metapackage content regarding some missing dependencies is defacto over now. Please closely observe our web sentinel in case you are interested in the work of Debian Med and tell us if packages are missing from our focus.

Kind regards and see you at Debian Med sprint
Andreas.

Jacob (and Oliver too, somewhat) has taken quite the interest in Christmas music this year. Perhaps it s singing in the choir at school, or perhaps it s just him getting older, but in any case, Christmas music fascinates him. And no song more than Jingle Bells. I have recordings of it by several artists in different styles, and he has his favorites and often wants to hear them again and again. The other night at supper, he said, Dad, can you sing Jingle Bells in German? Kind of a random question. I normally try to keep books and devices of all sorts away from the table, but my son had just asked me to sing. In German. I don t believe that had ever happened before, so I wasn t going to say no! I got my tablet, pulled up Google, and found some German lyrics. Not exactly a translation, but it fit the tune, so that s what counts. So I started singing, and when I got to the chorus, and sang Oh, Glockenklang, Glockenklang both boys bust up laughing. They thought Glockenklang was a hilarious word, and loved to hear it. Oliver requests I sing Glockenklang every so often now. He has this eager anticipation when he does it, as if he knows I m going to be hilarious so much so that he almost starts laughing before I even say a word. Then yesterday at breakfast, Jacob requested more German songs. I finally got a couple of hymn books (one of which, Gesangbuch mit Noten, really is a German songbook). I sang some songs in German for the boys, while they enjoyed their blueberry crepes. Sadly Stille Nacht and O du fr hliche did not prove as hilarious as Glockenklang, but they got impatient as I looked through the idnex between each song, saying Dad, just sing more German! Don t look at those pages! So I guess it was a hit. I m not sure where this sudden fascination with German music came from, but it appears to be leaving me hungry. While driving around, Oliver requested I sing Glockenklang in the car. I said yes, despite not remembering even one German word to that song except for, well, Glockenklang. So I just filled in with some random German words I do know. Fortunately, they didn t seem to have memorized the rest of it either. The other day, we went to the annual Christmas concert at the local high school. It was perfect for the boys various styles of music, an interesting old auditorium, nobody was going to care if they weren t perfectly quiet, and the price was right, too. The band played first, and both boys sat there, paying great attention, soaking it all in. They loved the cymbal crashes and Jacob seemed to dream of playing the chimes and bells. At one point, I whispered to Jacob that I could feel the timpani on the wood floor in the auditorium, and he tried it, and made his Hmm, I just learned something interesting! reaction. As is tradition, the concert concluded with singing the Hallelujah Chorus and anyone in the audience that wants to sing is invited on stage to join the choir. I remember being in high school for that concert, and after practicing it in school, the great fun of being joined by many powerful voices from the community all around me on the risers. So this time, while my parents stayed with the boys, I was one of the many that went up to join the choir. It was no less thrilling all these years later. Ending with Forever and ever, Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Hallelujah! , and feeling it, right then, put a huge smile on my face.

# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc. # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package. # FIRST AUTHOR <email>, YEAR. # #, fuzzy msgid "" msgstr "" "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n" "POT-Creation-Date: 2012-10-12 11:14+0300\n" "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n" "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <email>\n" "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <ll>\n" "Language: \n" "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n" #. type: Title # #, no-wrap msgid "Status hos doktoren" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" "**Jonas Smedegaard** [dr.jones at pobox.com " "](mailto:friends%40jones.dk?Subject=Status%20hos%20doktoren&In-Reply-To=1.5.4.32.19971011010004.0067de34%40kaospilot.dk) " "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "_Sat Oct 11 15:22:00 CEST 1997_" msgstr "" #. type: Bullet: ' * ' #: msgid "Previous message: [Spamming? ](000001.html)" msgstr "" #. type: Bullet: ' * ' #: msgid "" "**Messages sorted by:** ? date (date.html#2) ? thread (thread.html#2) " "? subject (subject.html#2) ? author (author.html#2)" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " Hej Patrik (og alle Jer andre )!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " >_Vad sker med dig det var ett stycke tid diden?\n" " _>_Vad skedde der med ditt arbejde pa cafeet og pa skolen?\n" " _\n" " Lang historie!\n" " (den kommer nu )\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg tror snart jeg har laert (the hard way) hvor dyr jeg egentligt er i " "drift.\n" " Jeg har nu i 3 maneder "ligget med r ven *under* vandskorpen" " " konomisk: minus 15.000,- pa kontoen. Det vender forhabentligvis indenfor " "den naeste maned - ellers pa jeg tage et regulaert lan, hvis jeg fortsat " "skal have firma som fuldtidsbeskaeftigelse.\n" " Det betyder, at jeg for tiden arbejder fra ca. 9 morgen til 0:30 nat syv " "dage om ugen (med enkelte eftermiddage eller aftener fri). Der er faktisk " "opgaver at lave, som ogsa gi'r penge i kassen - men det har der ikke vaeret " "for nogle maneder siden, og nar der var, har jeg taget mig for billigt " "betalt (men du kender mig jo!). Jeg er begyndt mere at involvere min " "storebror, nar jeg udarbejder tilbud, til at hjaelpe mig med en mere reel " "prissaetning.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " Her er lidt(?) om, hvad jeg beskaeftiger mig med for tiden:\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Homebase ***\n" " Jeg far forbindelse fra mit kontor og ned til Mejlgade om en lille uge - " "rent teoretisk ihvertfald - derefter skal jeg ha' elektronikken til at " "fungere \n" " Jeg administrerer deres servere og netvaerk, og er "Boss" for Morten " "P. fra Frontl berne, som er blevet hyret til at vedligeholde alle " "arbejdspladserne pa skolen.\n" " Jeg har *intet* at g re med content pa webserveren. Efter i foraret at " "have haft DogSystem (et par nystartede edb-folk) til at udarbejde noget " "smart (som vist aldrig blev rigtigt til noget) har Uffe nu faet samlet nogle " "studerende (vist primaert fra hold 3), som skal hitte pa noget \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Her er et uddrag af en mail til Rasmus fra hold 3:\n" " >>_Du ma gerne f lge lidt med i arbejdet og sende mig en kommentar " "eller\n" " _>>_gode rad, hvis du f ler for det.\n" " _>_\n" " _>_Jeg har et ambivalent forhold til Jeres arbejde:\n" " _>_ - Jeg f ler for det, Ja. Meget!\n" " _>_ - I sidder og laver mit arbejde \n" " _>_ - Meningen med mit arbejde er ar g re mig selv arbejdsl s - sa det " "er\n" " _>_*godt*, at I laver det \n" " _>_ - I laver det maske bedre, maske darligere end jeg ville ha' gjort " "det -\n" " _>_men helt sikkert anderledes!\n" " _>_ - Min force (og min kaephest!) er grundstrukturer mere end visuel " "(og\n" " _>_anden) indpakning. Det er svaert at kommentere og komme med gode rad, " "nar de\n" " _>_er omkring grundstruktur. Det kraever naesten, at man sidder ved " "roret \n" " _>_ - Hvis ikke jeg kommer med mine kommentarer nu, skal jeg enten holde " "mund\n" " _>_med det (og det er svaert) eller de vil udvikles til bagklogskab og\n" " _>_bedrevidenhed \n" " _>_ - Jeg har egentligt for travlt til at beskaeftige mig med det: Jeg " "har hele\n" " _>_tiden haft "travlt". At jeg har "for travlt" er et udtryk for, at " "jeg er\n" " _>_blevet klar over, at for at leve et liv som selvstaendigt " "erhvervsdrivende\n" " _>_er det ikke nok at arbejde hardt - man skal ogsa ta' penge for " "det Jeg\n" " _>_har derfor ikke for travlt, hvis der er penge i lortet (men det er " "sjaeldent\n" " _>_tilfaeldet i Mejlgade - til gengaeld er der sa meget andet " "dernede!).\n" " _\n" " *** Brugerflade-design ***\n" " Jeg har faet et job ved Frontl berne: VPAE (Virtual Project Assistance " "Environment).\n" " De er med i et faelles-nordisk projekt om at lave en "virtuel " "projektvugge" - altsa et forum pa Internet med en raekke vaerkt jer til " "projektudvikling og administration af gamle projekter.\n" " Konkret arbejder jeg i diss uger pa design af brugergraenseflade " "(dialogbokse osv.) og n dvendige datastrukturer til et system til " "udarbejdelse af en projektbeskrivelse.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg arbejder taet sammen med Morten P., og det er utroligt spaendende at " "arbejde med en konkret, mindre opgave med stor paedagogisk og funktionel " "vaerdi.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Praktikant ***\n" " En af mine venner fra gymnasietiden, Henrik, studerer informatik (det " "hedder vist noget lidt andet ) her i rhus, og meget tyder pa, at han " "snart kommer i praktik her hos mig i en maned.\n" " Han skal arbejde meget selvstaendigt. Jeg har brug for hans viden " "indenfor PR, han kan bruge mig som "pr veklud", og jeg kan stille medier " "(webserver o.l.) til hans radighed.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg har en ide om at vaere meget aben overfor brug af praktikanter - " "ikke bare som nem arbejdskraft (det er kraevende at saette i arbejde, og at " "give opgaver fra sig!), men mere fordi det giver mig en traening i " "formidling af min viden, og erfaringer mht. "s saetning" af mine metoder " "og ideer som tekniker - men det kraever maske lidt uddybning :\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Mit virke er grundliggende at bygge bro mellem teknikere og brugere " "indenfor IT. Det har 2 aspekter - at naerme teknikeren til brugeren, og at " "naermere brugeren til teknikken. Jeg arbejder med undervisning (arketyper, " "paedagogik og kommunikation), brugerfladedesign og almen radgivning for at " "hjaelpe brugeren pa vej. For at hjaelpe teknikeren tager jeg udgangspunkt i " "mig selv og mit arbejde med brugeren, og udvikler herigennem en raekke " "metoder og tankesaet, som jeg vil formidle - gennem praktikanter eller " "evt. decideret undervisning - til andre teknikere, som ikke i det daglige " "arbejder "i begge lejre", og derfor ikke ser de samme problematikker som " "mig.\n" " konomisk skulle "Projekt dr. Jones" gerne baeres igennem " "vha. konkrete projekter - virksomheder og enkeltpersoner, som har behov for " "min viden og mit arbejde, og som er villige til at betale merprisen for " "forskning fremfor traditionelle l sninger (NB! jeg bruger bevidst ikke ord " "som "udvikling" og "innovation" - for mit arbejde f rer til tider " "tilbage til udgangspunktet - det er ikke *altid* n dvendigt at opfinde den " "dybe tallerken igen!)\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Henrik vil ikke give mig de store erfaringer mht. formidling af min " "viden - jeg har for stor en pukkel af opgaver liggende til at kunne gabe " "over ham ogsa. Denne gang er det primaert hans felt - PR - jeg kan drage " "nytte af.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Undevisning ***\n" " Jeg har nu i en maned undeervist i edb som valgfag pa IDA " "(Idraetsdagh jskolen). Indtil nu har det vaeret 2 timer om ugen, elever i " "alderen 30-60 ar - men om fa uger bliver der yderligere 4 timer om ugen med " "elever pa 20-30 ar.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Afl nningen er symbolsk (nej, god l n regnet som underviser, jeg far " "samme l n som en uddannet laerer - men ikke sammenholdt med, hvor " ""dyrebar" min tid er som selvstaendig ), men sjaeldent har jeg oplevet " "sa tydeligt et ryk i min paedagogiske forstaelse og opmaerksomhed.\n" " Jeg bliver sandsynligvis ikke haengende ved IDA i mere end et 1/2-1 ar - " "det er simpelthen for tids- og ressourcekraevende - men h ster gode " "erfaringer salaenge (og bader mig i deres positive feedback :-)\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Brugerflade-programmering ***\n" " Samtidig (egentligt burde jeg forlaengst vaere faerdig, men opgaven greb " "om sig) arbejder jeg pa mit eget projekt: BOS (BrugerOpdateringsSystem).\n" " Det er et CGI-script (lille program pa en web-server), som muligg r " "redigering af indholdet pa websider uafhaengigt af sidens grafiske " "opsaetning, og - vaesentligst - UDEN AT SKRIVE EEN ENESTE KODE!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " 1. udgave af BOS betalte jeg en programm r 15.000,- for at udvikle. Jeg " "havde brug for det til en opgave for AC (Akademikernes Centralorganisation), " "som skulle bruge det til bl.a. pressemeddelelser og publicering af et " "manedsblad pa deres 200+ siders websider (som jeg ogsa har lavet!).\n" " Da AC i sensommeren kom med rettelser og udvidelser til deres website " "blev der brug for forbedringer af BOS, og jeg erfarede, at min programm r " "havde lavet meget u-fleksibel kode, som var umulig at bygge videre pa.\n" " 2. udgave af BOS er nu naesten faerdig. Jeg valgte at skrive det om fra " "grunden selv (med hjaelp fra en god ven, som studerer datalogi), og har " "efterhanden skrevet ca. 750 linjers kode i programmeringssproget Perl \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg havde ikke troet, at jeg nogensinde skulle kunne programmere. Det " "kraever disciplin og god forstaelse for grundliggende datastrukturer, som " "jeg hidtil troede n dvendiggjorde et mangearigt universitetsstudie " "(datalogi).\n" " Jeg vil ikke sla mig ned som programm r, men kan nu bruge det som ekstra " "fjer i min vifte af erfaringsomrader, i min rejse mod "At vaere det ledende " "radgivningsorgan i Danmark indenfor anvendt edb"!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Internet-Cafe ***\n" " Jeg har jo kontor i 2 lokaler hos NETLAB, en spillecafe (computerspil i " "netvaerk). Det tog ikke mange jeblikke at slutte deres og mit netvaerk " "sammen, sa alle spillecomputerne ogsa kunne komme pa Internet - desvaerre " "fungerede det ikke med store computerspil (lang teknisk forklaring ), kun " "med alm. ting som e-mail og at "surfe" pa nettet.\n" " Jeg far snart (indenfor fa uger) "aegte" adgang til Internet, via fast " "forbindelse d gnet rundt. Sa kan der spilles computerspil via Internet, og " "spillecafeen er reelt blevet en Internet-Cafe \n" " Den kommende Internetforbindelse er dog ikke saerligt kraftig (64kbit - " "2-4 x modemhastighed) til deling mellem 20 kraftige maskiner, og har lagt en " "f ler ind hos Telia: Om ikke de har lyst til at sponsorere stedet. Give os " "en kraftig forbindelse til Internet, og til gengaeld fa reklamevaerdien af " "en stabil og hurtig forbindelse Folk der bliver rigtigt bidt af det vil " "jo f r eller siden k be en maskine selv, og sa far de jo brug for en " "Internet-udbyder \n" " Min rolle bliver at administrere "hullet" (eller "hullerne" til " "Internet, og evt. ogsa at strukturere og administrere mail-adresser til " "bes gende pa cafeen.\n" " konomisk forestiller jeg mig en fast procentdel af indtaegterne i " "cafeen - eller evt. simpelthen en billigere husleje?!?. Det gaelder om at " "finde en prispolitik, som spiller sammen med den grundliggende holdning ved " "bade dr. Jones og NETLAB om et indbydende, seri st (uden at blive kedeligt!) " "milj fremfor "flest muligt forbi kasseapperatet".\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " -\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Det blev et laengere brev - og jeg tror faktisk, jeg vil genbruge det " "til ogsa at fortaelle familie og andre venner, hvorfor de har h rst sa lidt " "til mig pa det sidste \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Hej allesammen!\n" " Haber I nyder tilvaerelsen. Det g r jeg - men traenger ogsa snart til et " "lille pusterum - juleferie i Sydfrankrig, regner jeg med!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Ha' det bra!\n" " Jonas\n" " :_-)\n" " _\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "[More information about the Friends mailing list](http://mail.jones.dk/cgi- " "bin/mailman/listinfo/friends)" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "This text is part of my friends scriblings." msgstr ""

DPL August report, posted on d-d-a a while ago (yep, I forgot to blog it up to now!, sorry for the oldies).

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Dear project members, August has been a month with a good deal of vacations for many of us, including yours truly. Therefore the monthly report of DPL activities will be briefer than usual. Which is good, as it'll leave all my readers more time to do NMUs and fix RC bugs! Ongoing discussions

• Discussion about the new trademark policy has continued on -project. I've collected quite some feedback and summarized it in a request for change that I've passed on to SFLC. I'm waiting for a second draft from them, before reviving the thread.
• on the long-running issue of de-duplicating DebConf infrastructure wrt Debian's, I've been happy to support the proposal of moving DebConf's list to Debian's software and infrastructure. There seems to be interest and consensus, but the DebConf team could probably use a couple more helping hands to make it real
• starting from the practical need of dealing with minified JavaScript files, an interesting discussion sparkled on -devel. It quickly turned in both musing on the notion of archive-wide DFSG-freeness and some new devscript tooling by Andreas Tille. AFAIU some extra testing would be welcome

Assets

• The DFGS-free logo relicensing I've mentioned last month is now on its way. Following advice from SFLC, I've slightly patched the current trademark policy (mainly to clarify scope), just enough to decouple logo relicensing under LGPLv3/CC-BY-SA 3.0 from the finalization of a new trademark policy (see above). I've also verified that the license choice is fine with teams that regularly deal with the logos. Ball is now in SPI camp (as copyright holder). They should finalize the relicensing during the forthcoming board meeting, on September 13th.
• We heard back from the trademark office in Japan, who accepted our request to transfer it from local Debian contributors to SPI. That being mainly a bureaucratic acknowledgement, we'll now need to way for a while until they confirm the transfer has been finalized. My eternal thanks for help with this matter goes to Kenshi Muto.

Core teams

• Manoj Srivastava has stepped down as tech-ctte member. I hereby thank him for his long and valuable service in that capacity. The tech-ctte has now one vacant seat, and I've encouraged present tech-ctte members to propose to me a suitable candidate. In an attempt to promote diversity of views within the tech-ctte, they are now considering various ways to solicit candidatures. You'll hear from them about this soon, I suspect.
• In the meantime, monthly IRC meetings of the tech-ctte are continuing, as you might have noticed from tech-ctte decision reports posted on this list. As it seemed to be lingering, at the last meeting I've solicited progress on the Python maintenance issue.
• The auditors have noticed the unclear situation of the Policy Editor delegation, which seems to rely on a "base" delegation dating back to Antony Towns' office and various subsequent delegation "patches". After discussion with Russ Allbery I've then proceeded to a public "ping" to assess the interest of current editors in continuing their work in such capacity, and encourage new volunteers to apply as editors. Based on the feedback I've got, I'm now preparing a new Policy Editor delegation.

Legal and RC fun

• Solicited by Jonathan Nieder and Helge Kreutzmann, I've looked into #555168 and sought legal advice to answer various questions related to the non-copyrightability of locale data. Aaron Williamson of SFLC has been blazing fast in answering them (thanks!), and Jonathan and Helge has now all the needed information to help addressing that (RC) issue. Keep an eye on the bug log for more details.

Hardware

• I've approved buying 6 console servers to improve DSA ability to act on remote machines, without having to bother^Wrely on local admins when not strictly needed. ~550 USD well spent.

See? It's been quick(er)! Talk to you here next month, with a much lower count of Wheezy RC Bugs on the horizon, hopefully.
Cheers.

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PS the boring day-to-day activity log for August 2012 is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201208

In this report from LSM 2012 in Geneva I will report about

1. Medical imaging using Debian
2. Debian Med packaging workshop
3. Integration of VistA into Debian
4. Other interesting talks

Medical imaging using Debian There were about 10 attendees basically upstream developers of medical imaging software. The talk got some attention and the message to include even more medical imaging software into Debian was well percived. Thanks to Mathieu Malaterre there was some live demonstration which was way easier for him as a medical imaging expert than it would have been for me.
Debian Med packaging workshop Due to my advertising in the talk yesterday three students (two of them from one medical imaging project, one from an other project) attended the workshop. Thanks to Axel Beckert who helped me out surviving the challenge to walk on unexplored ground.

The idea of the workshop was to ask the attendees to name a package of their own and just package this. Because two of the attendees were upstream developers of CreaTools we decided to go on for packaging this. After circumeventing some pitfalls in the beginning it went rather smoothly and after about 2.5 hours we were able to commit some initial packaging to the Debian Med Git repository which comes quite close to a ready package (perhaps some split into a library and a development package needs to be done and for sure testing is needed).
Quoting Frederic Cervenansky, upstream of CreaTools

Thanks for your work. Your workshop was very interesting and didactic: a relevant discussion between Claire and me for the future of Creatools has emerged from the difficulties you encountered to package creatools. I will try, before the end of the month, to fully package creatools. And for sure, I will contact the debian-med mailing list.

Integration of VistA into Debian I had the good chance to directly address some issues of Claudio Zaugg the speaker in the talk Implementing open source Health Information Systems in Low- and Middle Income Countries a practical review directly before mine. It turned out that by using Debian packaged software might help simplifying the issues they had in supporting health care workers in Low- and Middle Income Countries.
My talk was partly repeating some basic ideas about Debian Med from the talk on Monday because the audience was completely different. Than I tried to explain in detail how we tried hard to establish good contacts to upstream developers and why this is essential to finalise the goal to include hospital information systems straight into Debian any by doing so open the doors of hospitals for large scale Debian installations.
There is also video recording of this talk. Other interesting talks OpenEMR, a multi-language free open source electronic health record for international use Just discussed the packaging of OpenEMR which is prepared for Debian Med as it can be seen on our tasks page. The contact to the creator of some inofficial package will be established to finalise this task.
OpenFovea : when open-source and biophysical research get married Just another target for Debian Med popped up in this talk to further enhance Debian Med in covering all issues of medical care on one hand and on the other hand helping upstream authors to distribute their code
more effectively.
Collaborative software development for nanoscale physics The talk would have fit very nicely into the Debian Science workshop at ESRF (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility) in Grenoble because it was about ETRF (European Theoretical Radiation Facility). At previous LSM events I had just talked with Yann and the work to include their software into Debian is on its way.
Free software and High Performance Computing This talk was not directly connected to my Debian work but I simply enjoyed to see how "two people" had a really entertaining talk about Top 500 computers. Vittoria, you made my last day at LSM.

I recently had the sort of weird experience of a recent blog post being on the top of Hacker News and there being a fair amount of interest in the details of my wacky living situation. I could write a detailed post explaining everything, but that'd be boring .. instead I'll tease the stalkers with more oblique references to it. So here's my notes for a caretaker who will be here while I'm away at DebConf.

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Please make yourself at home!

• The back bedroom bed is made
• That weird thing on a stand next to it that looks like a juice container with a wire coming out of it is a lamp. Plug it in to use it.
• Check battery voltage (press the green button on the Xantrex controller) and avoid using much power if it gets below 12.0 volts. (10.0 is absolute minimum)
• Orange inverter on stand in front bedroom has a switch to turn on, regular power cord on front porch.
• Plug in server computer in kitchen (under my portrait), wait 10 minutes, and you can get online with wireless. (Wireless network is "hollow", and is an ad-hoc network, with Cell id AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA. You may have to enter this information manually.) Slow is normal.
• Cook stove: Pull red handle behind stove to turn on gas. Light w/lighter. Turn off cook stove gas with red handle when not in use!
• Eat any staple foods in kitchen.
• Eat everything in fridge! (It won't keep; food lasts only half as long in it as you're used to.)
• Check once a day (especially on windy or stormy days) that the fridge is lit, by touching the black pipe sticking above it on the back. That's its chimney. It should be warm to the touch. Temperature can be adjusted in rear also. If fridge is blown out, follow instructions printed in back to re-light.
• Human drinking water is in large jugs in kitchen + red water cooler. Sorry it's so turbid right now, I'm using a neighbor's well.. but it's safe. I have not tested the water from the large cistern yet this year.
• Dishwashing water: Use water from any of these (non-potable) sources:
  • rain barrels
  • outdoor shower (on way to outhouse, not at parking area; that other one is fed from a spring that has dried up)
  • large pail on coffee table
• Please don't drink the distilled water; it's used in battery maintenance.
• Feed dog 3/4 of metal bowl each day (on porch, next to table)
• Cat: 1 dish full each day.
• Consider brushing the cat, with the folding saw, on the left-side porch steps, every other day. Hairballs..
• Chickens: 3/4 yoghurt container of feed per day (feeding station is across yard, down steps, on right; some feed is in container there)
• Eggs can be found in nest under bush in woods. Trail starts to left of shower, goes about 10 feet in. Eat eggs, or give to dog with food.
• Blueberries are currently available on the small hill near the greenhouse.
• Dog and chicken feed is in front bedroom.
• Keep solar powered fountian to the left of the sliding door full; it's used by the dog and chickens.
• Cat has large water pail in bathroom, good for about 2 weeks.
• Take animal water from rain barrels or from shower outside. (Can detach hose for easier access and watering.)
• Also water lemon and lime trees, in pots, if it's dry. (Feel free to eat lemons.)
• The house does best in hot weather if all windows are closed during the day, and opened during the night.
• If it gets too humid inside, drain water from trays of salt underneath the pantry shelves, and run the fan.

I just uploaded new metapackages featuring dependencies of several new packages prepared thanks to the great work of the Debian Med team. Here are the newcomers (and packages we lost):

med-bio:
+ ballview
+ bowtie2
+ cd-hit
+ clustalo
+ ffindex
+ gassst
+ grinder
+ hhsuite
+ profphd-utils
+ proftmb
+ profphd
+ profphd-utils
+ pynast
+ qiime
+ r-bioc-cummerbund
+ reprof
- seq-gen (turned out to be non-free)

med-bio-dev:
+ libchado-perl
+ libffindex0-dev
+ libtfbs-perl
+ libpal-java
+ librg-reprof-bundle-perl
+ librostlab-blast0-dev
+ librostlab-blast-doc
+ librostlab3-dev
+ librostlab-doc
+ libzerg0-dev
+ libzerg-perl

med-data:
- freediams (restructuring upstream, will be back with next release hopefully)

med-imaging:
+ imagevis3d
+ itksnap
+ odin
+ volview

med-imaging-dev:
+ python-pyxnat

med-practice:
+ clinica
- freediams (restructuring upstream, will be back with next release hopefully)

Seems the regular sprints of the Debian Med team have enhanced the team (regarding the number of people and the effectivity of the cooperation). Thanks to all people who joined our effort to make Debian the best free operating system for medical care and biological research.

As announced 3 weeks ago, the Debian project was present at Chemnitzer Linuxtage. Several talks and workshops where held by people related to the Debian project. At the booth we had talks and discussions with exhibitors and visitors, unfortunately I didn t had much time to visit more than small parts of two lectures. Unfortunately (for the visitors) we didn t had any merchandising on board, while we received several requests. On Sunday Axel surprised us with some leftovers from fosdem of debian.ch merch. At the booth we had a demo machine running Babelbox and xpenguins, which attracted visitors very well. We received also more than one Just thank you by satisfied users. :) Four different talks and one workshop were held by Debian people, but they were not specific to the Debian. The workshop was about OpenStreetMap, lectures was about commandline helpers, grep everything, quality analyzing and team management in opensource projects and Conkeror and other keyboard based webbrowsers. Many thanks to Jan Dittberner, Andreas Tille, Christian Hoffmann, Florian Baumann, Christoph Egger, Axel Beckert, Adam Schmalhofer, Markus Schnalke, Sebastian Harl and Patrick Matth i for running the booth, answering a wide range of questions or just chatting with visitors . A special thank to TMT GmbH & Co. KG for providing the complete equipment and sponsoring it s transportation. At the end we have to send a big thank to the organizing team of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage. It was fun and a pleasure to find new friends and meet old ones of the Free Software community. A small sidenote was anybody aware that OpenSuSE Package search is using screenshots.debian.net?

Hi,

in this bits:

1. Debian Med Bug Squashing Advent Calendar 2011
2. Anniversary of Debian Med
3. Second Debian Med sprint (Southport, 27th-29th January 2012)
4. Mentoring of Month (MoM)
5. DDs who came to Debian because of Debian Med
6. Future plans
7. General lessons learned
   

Debian Med Bug Squashing Advent Calendar 2011In December last year Thorsten Alteholz has started a nice QA initiative which might be interesting for other teams next Advent. The Debian Med team was able to fix about 70 bugs in this time. Thanks to Thorsten for this nice piece of motivation and thanks to everybody who took part in the bug squashing.

Anniversary of Debian MedOn Mon, 7 Jan 2002 the Debian Med project was first officially announced. I submitted a short blog posting about this and perhaps you might like to see a long sequence of talks about this topic.

Second Debian Med sprint (Southport, 27th-29th January 2012)In end of January 2012 the Debian Med team has met to the second sprint. As last year I would call this a very successfull event and I would recommend other teams to instanciate such meetings as well. Feel free to read my more verbose report.

Mentoring of Month (MoM)I have started this project for the following reasons:

• gather more manpower to the team
• strengthen connections to upstream (which might become MoM students)
• help shy people to become more verbose
• to learn myself about potential problems of people who do not feel fit for packaging tasks

I made a short summary how the first MoM project worked (see at bottom).

DDs who came to Debian because of Debian MedAfter realising that several members of the Debian Med team finally became DDs I made a little survey to find out about their reasons to become DD / DM. I came to the conclusion that a Blend could be a nice entry point for people to join Debian because newcomers can identify themselves with a known topic (the scope of the Blend - in this case medicine and bioinformatics) first and learn Debian rules in a team with common interest. This perfectly fits my expectation which I had from the beginning 10 years ago and I would be very happy if other Blends would follow this example to be nice, inviting and try to *actively* ask people for cooperation (see some simple rules which I learned in this process below). In the teammetrics GSOC project some graphs were created where you can see the level of contribution of these people (and other team members).

Future plansCurrently some heavy work regarding bringing bibliographic references about packages straight into package information is going on. This topic is specifically interesting in Biology because programs are frequently connected to some publication about the methods used inside the code. This topic is as well relevant to Debian Science and DebiChem. Thanks to the patient work done by Charles Plessy we now have about 70 packages featuring debian/upstream files featuring bibliographic references and there is ongoing work to move these data to UDD to enable further usage. We are in the process of final polishing the format and finishing scripts for the import. If people are interested to join this effort this would be the right moment to raise their hand.

General lessons learned

1. Do not let wait anybody who wants to do work.
2. Newcomers are frequently shy - try to invite them kindly and patiently.
3. Tell people verbosely about your project - it is astonishing how less people know and what wrong assumptions they make about your project.

Kind regards
Andreas.

Fresh from the oven, monthly report of what I've been working on as DPL during January 2012.

---

Dear Developers,
here is another monthly report of what happened in DPL-land, this time for January 2012. There's quite a bit to report about --- including an insane amount of legal-ish stuff --- so please bear with me. Or not. Legal stuff

• Webmaster heroes have decided to tackle the long standing issues of copyright and licensing of the Debian website. I've accepted to help them out in reaching consensus with license choice and I'm happy to report that we've managed to pick a DFSG-free license (BSD-ish) for future contributions. Webmasters will soon contact contributors to re-license old contributions (or get rid of them), so hopefully will have a DFSG-free website RSN. Many thanks go to David Pr vot for successfully tackling such a can of worms.
• I've sought a second legal advice on the constraints that trademarks (might) impose on the work-flow of a distro like Debian. Luckily, it is coherent with one I've sought in the past so I'm now in condition to wrap up the "trademark vs DFSG" thread on -project with the missing legal information. Hopefully, I'll find time to do that sometime next week.
• I've restarted discussions with the Debian France association so that they can become a Debian Trusted Organization (as per Constitution 9.3). Members of the board of the association seem to be interested and I'm positive it could happen fairly soon. The importance of this is that we could use a back-up association in Europe to hold Debian assets, to complement the services that FFIS are already offering us.
• Thanks to the contributions of Benjamin Mako Hill and SPI lawyers, I've now what I consider a final draft of a trademark policy for Debian trademarks. Before proposing it to you, I'm waiting for some feedback from another umbrella organization for Free Software projects, that is working on a trademark policy for all their associated projects. As many Free Software projects are seeking trademark protection these days, I see benefits in having uniform (and sane!) policies. I hope to be able to gather the feedback I still miss this week-end at FOSDEM, and let you know shortly after that. Once this is done, we'll also be able to (finally!) relicense all kinds of Debian logos under a DFSG-free license. On this front, I've also updated http://www.debian.org/trademark with the information needed to contact us about trademark usage; hopefully it'll reduce the burden of answering to such inquiries.
• With the help of Kenshi Muto, Fumitoshi Ukai, Ishikawa Mutsumi, Shuzo Hatta, and Yasuhiro Araki we've started the process to move the Debian trademark in Japan from individuals (who are present or past members of the Debian JP association) to SPI. That would help dealing with these matters, as well as ensure that important Debian assets are held by Debian Trusted Organizations.
• I remind you that we've an ongoing complaint with the current registrant of debian.eu, domain that we believe Debian should legitimately own. Lawyers at SPI has now formally contacted the current owner and hopefully we'll be able to solve the issue amicably in the next months.
• Some of the past legal advice I sought for PPA came handy in a discussion on the legal risks of running a service like mentors.debian.net, hopefully addressing part of the issues in turning that into mentors.debian.org
• Patent policy for the Debian archive is now ready as well and I also have a patch for the website ready to be merged. I'm just waiting for the final blessing from SPI (lawyers) to go ahead and publish it.

Most of the above wouldn't have been possible without the precious help of folks at SFLC working for SPI and Debian. Be sure to thank SFLC for what they're doing for us and many other Free Software projects. Coordination Nobody stepped up to coordinate the artwork collection for Wheezy I've mentioned last month, so I've tried to do a little bit of that myself. The -publicity team is now preparing the call for artwork and hopefully we'll send it out RSN. In case you want to help, there is still a lot of room for that; just show up on the debian-desktop mailing list. Sprints A Debian Med sprint has happened in January, and Andreas Tille has provided a nice and detailed report about it. Some more sprints are forthcoming this spring, how about yours? Money

• We got from SPI a prepaid and rechargeable credit card that we can use for expenses or other kind of guarantees. Many thanks to Michael Schulteiss, SPI treasurer, for his help with that. Using it, we've redeemed 10k$ of credits offered to us by Amazon, that (thanks to ongoing work by Lucas Nussbaum) we're going to use to make our QA rebuilds independent from the underlying computing infrastructure.
• Thanks to the help of Luca Capello, we advanced quite a bit on forming the Debian Event Box kit that should make it easier to set up Debian booth at FOSS events. We bought the machine for it (for about ~755 CHF) and the box to contain it will soon be on its way as well. If you're at FOSDEM, tend to the Debian booth to check it out (and possibly help out with the technical setup).
• We've got quite a bit of donations during the December holidays. I've took the chance to thank donors, discuss what we do with donations and the status of publishing periodic Debian budgets.
• Pinged by Yves-Alexis Perez, I've now properly documented the fact that DDs are welcome to apply for hardware sponsoring, in case the hardware can be used to help/improve their Debian work. As suggested by Yves-Alexis, you can also advocate other DDs for hw sponsoring.
• Given hardware invariably age and that we can afford it, I've prodded DSA to prepare a general hardware replacement plan for our machines. Planning will go on this week-end and FOSDEM (thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and Faidon Liambotis for their presence here) and I hope to have an approved machine replacement plan well before the end of the current DPL term (although I'm usually optimist...).

Important stuff going on Other important stuff has been going on in various area of the project in January. I'd like to point your attention to a couple of things:

• People active on debian-mentors have proposed an improved work-flow to deal with sponsoring/mentoring requests, based on the usage of a new pseudo package "sponsorship-requests". Thanks to Ansgar Burchardt, Jakub Wilk, Arno T ll, and Gregor Herrmann for working on this.
• Raphael Hertzog has kickstarted work on DEP-2, as a way to rationalize the flow of package-related information that (co-)maintainers get. Discussion about the idea are ongoing on the debian-qa mailing list.

Miscellanea

• Work has further progressed in reaching out to companies with an interest in giving support for, and contributing to Debian. Thanks to Alexander Wirt the technical work is now done and some sort of governance policy has been decided. Further step for me is to announce it properly hoping to reach out to as many interested companies as possible. I hope to finalize that in the next month. (If you're working for such a company and you happen to read this, feel free to reach out to me already.)
• I've completed an old todo item setting up and documenting titanpad.debian.net, service that has been requested for collaborative work during various kinds of online events. Help is welcome to help administering the service (see doc).
• SPI has clarified the role of project representatives and, as a consequence of that, I (as DPL) no longer receive SPI board discussions addressed to board@spi. That is good not only for the sanity of my inbox, but also because it puts all projects affiliated to SPI at the same level of communication within SPI. Thanks to Robert Brockway for his work on this.

In the unlikely case you've read thus far, thanks for your attention! Happy Debian hacking.

---

PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

Some years ago I came across a really peculiar newsgroup post. It was not about technicalities of any sort. It was about history. A beautifully written history of computers. From the Turing machine to the Free Software world, the original author managed to capture all the important events of the computer revolution with a great deal of humor. Re-posting it here, it is just brilliant. The Gospel of Tux (v1.0) In the beginning Turing created the Machine. And the Machine was crufty and bodacious, existing in theory only. And von Neumann looked upon the Machine, and saw that it was crufty. He divided the Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet the two were one Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom. And von Neumann spoke unto the Architecture, and blessed it, saying, Go forth and replicate, freely exchanging data and code, and bring forth all manner of devices unto the earth. And it was so, and it was cool. The Architecture prospered and was implemented in hardware and software. And it brought forth many Systems unto the earth. The first Systems were mighty giants; many great works of renown did they accomplish. Among them were Colossus, the codebreaker; ENIAC, the targeter; EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of froody creatures ending in AC, the experimenters; and SAGE, the defender of the sky and father of all networks. These were the mighty giants of old, the first children of Turing, and their works are written in the Books of the Ancients. This was the First Age, the age of Lore. Now the sons of Marketing looked upon the children of Turing, and saw that they were swift of mind and terse of name and had many great and baleful attributes. And they said unto themselves, Let us go now and make us Corporations, to bind the Systems to our own use that they may bring us great fortune. With sweet words did they lure their customers, and with many chains did they bind the Systems, to fashion them after their own image. And the sons of Marketing fashioned themselves Suits to wear, the better to lure their customers, and wrote grave and perilous Licenses, the better to bind the Systems. And the sons of Marketing thus became known as Suits, despising and being despised by the true Engineers, the children of von Neumann. And the Systems and their Corporations replicated and grew numerous upon the earth. In those days there were IBM and Digital, Burroughs and Honeywell, Unisys and Rand, and many others. And they each kept to their own System, hardware and software, and did not interchange, for their Licences forbade it. This was the Second Age, the age of Mainframes. Now it came to pass that the spirits of Turing and von Neumann looked upon the earth and were displeased. The Systems and their Corporations had grown large and bulky, and Suits ruled over true Engineers. And the Customers groaned and cried loudly unto heaven, saying, Oh that there would be created a System mighty in power, yet small in size, able to reach into the very home! And the Engineers groaned and cried likewise, saying, Oh, that a deliverer would arise to grant us freedom from these oppressing Suits and their grave and perilous Licences, and send us a System of our own, that we may hack therein! And the spirits of Turing and von Neumann heard the cries and were moved, and said unto each other, Let us go down and fabricate a Breakthrough, that these cries may be stilled. And that day the spirits of Turing and von Neumann spake unto Moore of Intel, granting him insight and wisdom to understand the future. And Moore was with chip, and he brought forth the chip and named it 4004. And Moore did bless the Chip, saying, Thou art a Breakthrough; with my own Corporation have I fabricated thee. Thou thou art yet as small as a dust mote, yet shall thou grow and replicate unto the size of a mountain, and conquer all before thee. This blessing I give unto thee: every eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until the end of the age. This is Moore s Law, which endures unto this day. And the birth of 4004 was the beginning of the Third Age, the age of Microchips. And as the Mainframes and their Systems and Corporations had flourished, so did the Microchips and their Systems and Corporations. And their lineage was on this wise: Moore begat Intel. Intel begat Mostech, Zilog and Atari. Mostech begat 6502, and Zilog begat Z80. Intel also begat 8800, who begat Altair; and 8086, mother of all PCs. 6502 begat Commodore, who begat PET and 64; and Apple, who begat 2. (Apple is the great Mystery, the Fruit that was devoured, yet bloomed again.) Atari begat 800 and 1200, masters of the game, who were destroyed by Sega and Nintendo. Xerox begat PARC. Commodore and PARC begat Amiga, creator of fine arts; Apple and PARC begat Lisa, who begat Macintosh, who begat iMac. Atari and PARC begat ST, the music maker, who died and was no more. Z80 begat Sinclair the dwarf, TRS-80 and CP/M, who begat many machines, but soon passed from this world. Altair, Apple and Commodore together begat Microsoft, the Great Darkness which is called Abomination, Destroyer of the Earth, the Gates of Hell. Now it came to pass in the Age of Microchips that IBM, the greatest of the Mainframe Corporations, looked upon the young Microchip Systems and was greatly vexed. And in their vexation and wrath they smote the earth and created the IBM PC. The PC was without sound and colour, crufty and bodacious in great measure, and its likeness was a tramp, yet the Customers were greatly moved and did purchase the PC in great numbers. And IBM sought about for an Operating System Provider, for in their haste they had not created one, nor had they forged a suitably grave and perilous License, saying, First we will build the market, then we will create a new System, one in our own image, and bound by our Licence. But they reasoned thus out of pride and not wisdom, not forseeing the wrath which was to come. And IBM came unto Microsoft, who licensed unto them QDOS, the child of CP/M and 8086. (8086 was the daughter of Intel, the child of Moore). And QDOS grew, and was named MS-DOS. And MS-DOS and the PC together waxed mighty, and conquered all markets, replicating and taking possession thereof, in accordance with Moore s Law. And Intel grew terrible and devoured all her children, such that no chip could stand before her. And Microsoft grew proud and devoured IBM, and this was a great marvel in the land. All these things are written in the Books of the Deeds of Microsoft. In the fullness of time MS-DOS begat Windows. And this is the lineage of Windows: CP/M begat QDOS. QDOS begat DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 begat DOS 2.0 by way of Unix. DOS 2.0 begat Windows 3.11 by way of PARC and Macintosh. IBM and Microsoft begat OS/2, who begat Windows NT and Warp, the lost OS of lore. Windows 3.11 begat Windows 95 after triumphing over Macintosh in a mighty Battle of Licences. Windows NT begat NT 4.0 by way of Windows 95. NT 4.0 begat NT 5.0, the OS also called Windows 2000, The Millenium Bug, Doomsday, Armageddon, The End Of All Things. Now it came to pass that Microsoft had waxed great and mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mighter than any of the Mainframe Corporations before it had it waxed. And Gates heart was hardened, and he swore unto his Customers and their Engineers the words of this curse: Children of von Neumann, hear me. IBM and the Mainframe Corporations bound thy forefathers with grave and perilous Licences, such that ye cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumann for deliverance. Now I say unto ye: I am greater than any Corporation before me. Will I loosen your Licences? Nay, I will bind thee with Licences twice as grave and ten times more perilous than my forefathers. I will engrave my Licence on thy heart and write my Serial Number upon thy frontal lobes. I will bind thee to the Windows Platform with cunning artifices and with devious schemes. I will bind thee to the Intel Chipset with crufty code and with gnarly APIs. I will capture and enslave thee as no generation has been enslaved before. And wherefore will ye cry then unto the spirits of Turing, and von Neumann, and Moore? They cannot hear ye. I am become a greater Power than they. Ye shall cry only unto me, and shall live by my mercy and my wrath. I am the Gates of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to the Blue Screen of Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly afraid; serve only me, and live. And the people were cowed in terror and gave homage to Microsoft, and endured the many grave and perilous trials which the Windows platform and its greatly bodacious Licence forced upon them. And once again did they cry to Turing and von Neumann and Moore for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task until the birth of Linux. These are the generations of Linux: SAGE begat ARPA, which begat TCP/IP, and Aloha, which begat Ethernet. Bell begat Multics, which begat C, which begat Unix. Unix and TCP/IP begat Internet, which begat the World Wide Web. Unix begat RMS, father of the great GNU, which begat the Libraries and Emacs, chief of the Utilities. In the days of the Web, Internet and Ethernet begat the Intranet LAN, which rose to renown among all Corporations and prepared the way for the Penguin. And Linus and the Web begat the Kernel through Unix. The Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities together are the Distribution, the one Penguin in many forms, forever and ever praised. Now in those days there was in the land of Helsinki a young scholar named Linus the Torvald. Linus was a devout man, a disciple of RMS and mighty in the spirit of Turing, von Neumann and Moore. One day as he was meditating on the Architecture, Linus fell into a trance and was granted a vision. And in the vision he saw a great Penguin, serene and well-favoured, sitting upon an ice floe eating fish. And at the sight of the Penguin Linus was deeply afraid, and he cried unto the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore for an interpretation of the dream. And in the dream the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore answered and spoke unto him, saying, Fear not, Linus, most beloved hacker. You are exceedingly cool and froody. The great Penguin which you see is an Operating System which you shall create and deploy unto the earth. The ice-floe is the earth and all the systems thereof, upon which the Penguin shall rest and rejoice at the completion of its task. And the fish on which the Penguin feeds are the crufty Licensed codebases which swim beneath all the earth s systems. The Penguin shall hunt and devour all that is crufty, gnarly and bodacious; all code which wriggles like spaghetti, or is infested with blighting creatures, or is bound by grave and perilous Licences shall it capture. And in capturing shall it replicate, and in replicating shall it document, and in documentation shall it bring freedom, serenity and most cool froodiness to the earth and all who code therein. Linus rose from meditation and created a tiny Operating System Kernel as the dream had foreshewn him; in the manner of RMS, he released the Kernel unto the World Wide Web for all to take and behold. And in the fulness of Internet Time the Kernel grew and replicated, becoming most cool and exceedingly froody, until at last it was recognised as indeed a great and mighty Penguin, whose name was Tux. And the followers of Linus took refuge in the Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities; they installed Distribution after Distribution, and made sacrifice unto the GNU and the Penguin, and gave thanks to the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore, for their deliverance from the hand of Microsoft. And this was the beginning of the Fourth Age, the age of Open Source. Now there is much more to be said about the exceeding strange and wonderful events of those days; how some Suits of Microsoft plotted war upon the Penguin, but were discovered on a Halloween Eve; how Gates fell among lawyers and was betrayed and crucified by his former friends, the apostles of Media; how the mercenary Knights of the Red Hat brought the gospel of the Penguin into the halls of the Corporations; and even of the dispute between the brethren of Gnome and KDE over a trollish Licence. But all these things are recorded elsewhere, in the Books of the Deeds of the Penguin and the Chronicles of the Fourth Age, and I suppose if they were all narrated they would fill a stack of DVDs as deep and perilous as a Usenet Newsgroup. Now may you code in the power of the Source; may the Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities be with you, throughout all Distributions, until the end of the Epoch. Amen.

Andreas Tille had a BOF about Debian Med at DebConf 11 in Banja Luka at 30.7.2011. The slides as well as a video record can be downloaded.
Andreas had given an overview about the current status of Debian Med. It can be stated that the project which is one out of several Debian Pure Blends had made good progress over its nine years of existence. While several applications which might be used in medical care in the wider sense (which also stretches to microbiological research) were added to Debian so that we have a count of close to 200 packages it was also stated that the existence of Debian Med itself has attracted new Developers to the Debian project. Saying this Free Software for medicine profits from the Debian distribution and Debian was able to gather new manpower because this software was included.
The following TODO items were raised in the BOF
Visibility:

• Logo
  
• more effective use of social media to attract more users
  
• Work together with Debian Publicity
  
• Release in stable PPA and announce this

Plans for the next Debian Release:

• Hospital information system VistA or at least GT.M (precondition for VistA)
  
• Additional practice management systems FreeMed & FreeMedForms
  
• Further Java packages like Jalview, Beast, Artemis (biology), mayam (medical imaging), dcm4chee (PACS server)
  
• radiation therapy planning Prism
  

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:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)