Search Results: "tille"

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

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

30 May 2011

John Goerzen: War and Peace

I doubt I have ever read a book that had as significant an impact on me, and my act of reading it had on others, as this one. Conversations like this were frequent: Someone, upon seeing me reading my Kindle, would ask what I am reading. War and Peace. Oh. . . uhm, wow. Yeah, it s great. I m reading it for fun. Uhm, OK then, see you later. . . It seems to be so revered, and also so loathed, that I had to read it. At 1400 pages, it took me 8 months to finish, though I read several other entire books in that time. I feel rather unequal to the task of expressing how this book impacted me, let alone a review of it. And nonetheless, I also feel I would be remiss if I let it go past saying nothing. I was struck by so many things as I read War and Peace. Some of them I won t mention here and hope to turn into their own blog posts. Of the others, I felt I gained some sense of how the nobility and serfs in Russia (and, to a certain extent, Europe) thought about life, their position, and how things ran. Being a modern Kansan, this thought process was not familiar to me, and though I head read about it in history texts before, felt far more informed having read it in Tolstoy s novel. Although much of the novel centers around Napoleon s invasion of Russia in 1812, the work as a whole spans nearly two decades of time. Tolstoy s characters aren t static; they change over time. Some, yes, die; others go through hardships and triumphs that change them to their core. It evoked a feeling of nostalgia in me at times for the younger, childlike Natasha who was so full of simple delight in life. But then, a thousand pages later, the older Pierre finally was able to find simple delight in life too. Sometimes I have missed on the simple joy of being, and Jacob or Oliver or Terah remind me of that. Today Oliver and I read a book together, one that we read often, and we discovered an illustration of a tiny worm we had never noticed before. And the worm had a red hat ( hat is one of Oliver s favorite words right now.) The happy laughter as he pointed at the tiny hat, saying hat over and over, reminds me that sometimes children know how to live better than adults. Jacob later asked me how my day was, and I told him how I read a book on my Kindle, where I sat, and how I even read it lying down on the couch for a bit. At that he too laughed. As with some other wonderful, engrossing books, I was sad to reach the end of this one. I felt as if I was leaving a conversation early; fictional characters, yes, but their story wasn t over. And really, that was part of Tolstoy s point: things don t happen in isolation, and stories don t have clearly-defined start and end points. The novel touched on politics, religion, philosophy, free will, and just about every topic imaginable. It is, really, unfair to call it a just a novel. Here are some random quotes from the book, which I highlighted:
his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them. How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? All will end in death, all! A pleasant humming and whistling of bullets were often heard. Looking into Napoleon s eyes Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain. If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man s highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole, said Pierre, and he pointed to the sky. Prince Andrew stood leaning on the railing of the raft listening to Pierre, and he gazed with his eyes fixed on the red reflection of the sun gleaming on the blue waters. There was perfect stillness. Pierre became silent. The raft had long since stopped and only the waves of the current beat softly against it below. Prince Andrew felt as if the sound of the waves kept up a refrain to Pierre s words, whispering: It is true, believe it. He sighed, and glanced with a radiant, childlike, tender look at Pierre s face, flushed and rapturous, but yet shy before his superior friend. In Natasha Prince Andrew was conscious of a strange world completely alien to him and brimful of joys unknown to him, a different world, that in the Otradnoe avenue and at the window that moonlight night had already begun to disconcert him. Now this world disconcerted him no longer and was no longer alien to him, but he himself having entered it found in it a new enjoyment. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards. But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country s inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. From the moment Pierre had witnessed those terrible murders committed by men who did not wish to commit them, it was as if the mainspring of his life, on which everything depended and which made everything appear alive, had suddenly been wrenched out and everything had collapsed into a heap of meaningless rubbish. Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, his faith in the right ordering of the universe, in humanity, in his own soul, and in God, had been destroyed. He had experienced this before, but never so strongly as now. When similar doubts had assailed him before, they had been the result of his own wrongdoing, and at the bottom of his heart he had felt that relief from his despair and from those doubts was to be found within himself. But now he felt that the universe had crumbled before his eyes and only meaningless ruins remained, and this not by any fault of his own. He felt that it was not in his power to regain faith in the meaning of life. When Princess Mary began to cry, he understood that she was crying at the thought that little Nicholas would be left without a father. With a great effort he tried to return to life and to see things from their point of view. Yes, to them it must seem sad! he thought. But how simple it is. The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Father feedeth them, he said to himself and wished to say to Princess Mary; but no, they will take it their own way, they won t understand! They can t understand that all those feelings they prize so all our feelings, all those ideas that seem so important to us, are unnecessary. We cannot understand one another, and he remained silent. Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source. These thoughts seemed to him comforting. People speak of misfortunes and sufferings, remarked Pierre, but if at this moment I were asked: Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through all this again? then for heaven s sake let me again have captivity and horseflesh! We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us. I say this to you, he added, turning to Natasha. During that twenty-year period an immense number of fields were left untilled, houses were burned, trade changed its direction, millions of men migrated, were impoverished, or were enriched, and millions of Christian men professing the law of love of their fellows slew one another. What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events? What force made men act so? These are the instinctive, plain, and most legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments and tradition of that period.

15 May 2011

Christian Perrier: 2011 week 19 Debian work

That was a damn busy week. It was mostly centered about attending SambaXP, the annual Samba user and developers conference, in G ttingen, Germany. The only free software conference I attend with expenses paid by my employer, Onera. This year was the 10th edition and, as last year, to the "who was there for the nth edition" game, I won by staying alone as they asked who attended all editions of the conference. :-) That was a great week, with time spent with people as interesting as Andrew Tridgell, Jeremy Allison, John Terpstra, Volker Lendecke, Kai Blin, to name a few. A good opportunity, again, to get input from our packaging work for that big piece of software, as well as getting visibility about the future of Samba. I also had a great, even if short talk, with the kind Karolin Seeger, the release manager of Samba for 3 years now. We talked about....children, as she's now a mother since last year (with a non negligible impact on her professionnal life, as often in Germany). Great meeting, too, with Brad Kuhn, from the Software Freedom Conservacy, who had a keynote about GPL licence enforcment activities. It becomes more and more sure that Samba3 and Samba4 will reconverge together after the Samba Team releases Samba 3.6. It brings plans for our packaging work: I think we'll stick with having samba 3.6 in wheezy while the brand new shiny Samba4 probably stays separate in some way. Our users (and /me first) clearly need stability in the file and print services first. Of course, I did some packaging work there: samba 3.6.0pre3 was uploaded to experimental, about 10 days after its official announcement. I also worked on the samba *binary* package bugs, triaging them as usual. We now have 51 bugs opened against the samba binary package: 18 unclassified, 11 moreinfo (several likely to be closed as unreproducible or user error), 1 wontfix, 8 with a pending patch and 13 forwarded upstream. I'm also thinking about a possible way to ask about SMB2 support in samba: it won't be activated by default in 3.6 (mostly because us, distros, requested for that and, by "us", I mean Debian, RHEL, SuSe and their derivatives, so quite a large consensus). Still, it would be good to put some light on SMB2 support and a debconf question about it could be a solution (not shown by default and defaulting to no SMB2). I also worked quite extensively on packages maintained by No l K the, Ralf Treinen and me, aka "the pkg-running team". I did setup a git repo for my new "garmin-ant-downloader" package, that allows downloading track files from Garmin Forerunner 405 GPS watches (guess what is the brand and model of mine!). My first packaging git repository! Thanks to Ralf for his advice and help in this. I triaged bugs in the other two packages we maintain: pytrainer (more bugs forwarded upstream) and garmin-forerunner-tools (which was later uploaded by Ralf). I also setup a team mailign list so, now, we're a real team...:-) Few activity on the l10n front: a few Smith reviews are in progress and I completed 1 or 2 French translations, and reviewed some others. Regular activity, then. The only specific stuff is that I'm now pushing harder for the French DDTP effort, doing many reviews and translations there. We try to reach 100% in the "popcon500" packages. Later, we'll try to head at reaching the hieghts reached by the Italian and German teams, who are, on this l10n activity, way ahead from us. Finally, during the SambaXP conference, and as usual (except last year because of too heavy work duties), I visited my German friends, living "close to" G ttingen, accomppanied by Luk Claes and his friend and colleague Ivo, who were also attending SambaXP. Great barbecue at Andreas and Kathrin Tille's place, facing the Wernigerode castle at sunset. And the best sp tzle ever at Meike and Alex Reichle's place in Hildesheim, with a french touch on the salad's dressing as well as great Chilean wine brought by Meike's coworker Wolfram. Always a great time to see these good friends even if that means driving a few hours (and being flashed....twice!...by german speed cameras on the way to and back Andreas place!) To complete the week, I ran a 34km/800m+ trail today in the Rambouillet forest, completing it in 3h31. I'll probably blog separately about running updates as it is now quite some time that I didn't. Guess what? I'll be sleeping well tonight...

25 April 2011

Obey Arthur Liu: Welcome to our 2011 Debian Google Summer of Code students!

I d like to extend a warm welcome to our new batch of students selected for the 2011 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should soon be posting on Debian Planet and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Further details will be posted in the coming days to our wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Automated Multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping aka autocrossbuild , by Gustavo Prado Alkmim, mentored by Wookey
Enable easy and automated setup of cross-platform automated build systems and bootstrapping for QA in the Multi-Arch era. This involves the creation of multi-stage bootstrap build sequencing tools and a reliable automated multi-arch cross-builder. APT/Dpkg Transaction Ordering for Safety and Performance aka aptordering , by Chris Baines, mentored by Michael Vogt
The ordering code in libapt is responsible for ordering the unpacking/configuration of debs so as to ensure dependencies are satisfied etc. Currently it organizes the ordering into big batches. This project further implements an ordering satisfying more constrains such as minimal amounts of dpkg invocations , minimal amount of broken packages at any point . DebDelta APT Native Integration aka debdelta , by Ishan Jayawardena, mentored by Michael Vogt
Improve user experience of APT and its front-ends by speeding up the upgrade process. This provides a better framework for unified handling of debdelta and future APT improvements such as parallelism. Support for stable and security ugprades as well as multiple APT related libraries is expected. Dpkg Declarative Diversions aka declarativediversions , by Sam Dunne, mentored by Steve Langasek
The dpkg-divert command should be replaced with a new control file with a declarative syntax which Dpkg will parse and process directly as part of the package unpack and removal phases, eliminating the problems resulting from non-atomic handling of diversions. Backend Tools and Infrastructure for DEX aka dextools , by Nathan Handler, mentored by Matt Zimmerman
EX is a new program designed to help improve Debian and its derivatives by merging in changes made downstream and encouraging discussions between the various projects. As this is a new project, most of the infrastructure does not exist (or is rather hackish and incomplete). This project will create the necessary backend tools and infrastructure so that all Debian derivatives can easily make use of the DEX project. Jigsaw Modularized Java in Debian aka jigsaw , by Guillaume Mazoyer, mentored by Tom Marble
The Java Development Kit (JDK) is a big monolithic software tool: many of its features are only useful in limited areas (GUI toolkits are useless for a web server). This project will bring the Jigsaw modular JDK to Debian, helping performance (start-up, size, etc) but also the dependency resolution (to match Debian packaging). Some work exists upstream does not fit with Debian. This project will package the current development version of Jigsaw, update Debian Java Policy, and create the necessary packaging tools for software depending on it. Python Multi-Build for Python Extensions Packaging aka pythonmultibuild , by Mesutcan Kurt, mentored by Piotr O arowski
This project creates a tool to build Python extensions for all Python versions supported by Debian at the time. The project should detect the upstream build system and testing frameworks and use them. It will be interfaced with CDBS and the dh sequencer, replacing their Python snippets. Debian Teams Activity Metrics aka teammetrics , by Sukhbir Singh, mentored by Andreas Tille
This project will gauge the performance of teams in Debian by measuring metrics such as: postings on relevant mailing lists, package upload records from the Ultimate Debian Database and commit statistics from project repositories The information gathered will help in evaluating team performance by measuring how people in a team are working together. An interface to access this information easily will also be developed. Compute Clusters Integration for Debian Development and Building aka computeclusters , by Rudy Godoy, mentored by Steffen M ller
The project s main goal is to enable developers to easily use compute clusters (Eucalyptus, OpenStack ) as environments for arch-specific development by providing a set of tools they can use to setup and run an extended platform for their development, testing and building tasks. Good luck to everyone!

21 April 2011

Raphaël Hertzog: People behind Debian: Meike Reichle, member of Debian Women

Meike Reichle is a Debian developer since 2008 but has been involved for longer than that, in particular in Debian Women. She s a great speaker and shared her experience in a Debconf talk. She s also part of the Debian publicity team and managed the live coverage of the last release on identi.ca. Enough introduction, learn more about her by reading the interview. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Meike. Who are you? My name is Meike Reichle, I am a studied information scientist and work as a project manager at Pengutronix, an embedded Linux company probably best known for their ARM kernel work. I live in Germany, more exactly in Lower Saxony, but I was originally born and raised in Swabia. Although I moved here ten years ago I still have a rather strong Swabian cultural identity. (Among other things I pride myself on having introduced a number of fellow DDs to the true promise that are real hand-made Sp tzle ;-) ) I am married to Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, we ll have our third wedding anniversary this summer. Apart from Debian most of my spare time is used for all kinds of crafts and DIY activities. Making things with my hands always gives me a great sense of accomplishment. My Free software history is summed up pretty quickly. Like most women of my age I wasn t introduced to computers until well into my teens. I didn t have a computer of my own until I started studying at the university in 2001. From there on things developed rather quickly: Working on the University s Unix terminals got me hooked on *nixes, so I got me one of those Linuxes everyone talked about. I tried a couple of different distributions, ended up with Debian around 2004, started contributing in 2005, and finally became a full DD what a nice coincidence! exactly this day (Apr 18th) three years ago. You re part of Debian Women. How is the project going? I have the feeling that the number of women involved in Debian has not significantly increased. The amount of women active within Debian is a tricky thing to judge. Here s a quick example why: When the DPL was elected in 2004 there were 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, 4 of them were female. Shortly after, during DebConf4, debian-women was founded. When the current DPL was reelected last month, there were again 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, but this time 13 of them were women. You can look at these numbers and say The number of female DDs has more than tripled, what a success! Or you can pull out your calculator and it will tell you that in terms of ratio this puts us from a measly 0.4% to an only slightly less measly 1.4% ratio of female DDs. This still is pardon my language a bloody shame, but sadly also pretty close to the average ratio of women in Free Software. So, while I do think that the debian-women project did already have a significant impact on the Debian project as a whole, I don t think it has achieved its goals yet. Not for a long time. There s still a lot to be done but unfortunately the debian-women project has somewhat run out of steam at the moment. The seven years of its existence divide quite equally into the first half, which was very active and saw great results, and the second half, which was very slow and much more passive. In my impression debian-women is currently undergoing a rather bumpy generational change. On the one hand a lot of the original members, including myself, have reduced their involvement. Speaking for myself this is caused by shift of interests as much as general weariness. On the other hand there are only very few women following up. This development is also reflected quite harshly in DD numbers: If I don t misjudge any first names (and I desperately hope I do!) for the last three years not a single woman has joined Debian as a developer! After the great start debian-women has had, this is a very painful thing to see! That said, things don t look all bad. There is a number of women maintaining packages without being DDs and there s also at least one woman currently in NM, so there s hope this standstill won t last very much longer. But still, the fact remains that debian-women is suffering from a rather serious recruitment problem and I hope that this interview might actually help to spur some new or not yet active members into action. The aim of debian-women is far from achieved and now that its initial members are receding its time for new members to step up and take initiative. What should Debian do to be more attractive to women ? I think the general atmosphere has improved, we re less tolerant with rude behaviour, the usual tone on mailing lists has improved. Yet it doesn t seem to be enough. If there was a female DD for every time I answered that question First of all, I agree, Debian as a community has improved tremendously! Our general tone is much more friendly and cooperative and there is now a much better awareness of the impression we give to outsiders and newcomers. Now on to the difficult part: The question what should be done to get more women into Free Software has been around almost as long as Free Software exists, and it has been answered very well by a lot of people: Twenty years ago Ellen Spertus wrote Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists? and most of it still holds true. Almost ten years ago Val Henson (now Aurora) wrote HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux and that also is still pretty accurate. In 2006 Floss Pols undertook extensive research to find out why there were so few women in Open Source and Free Software and how that could be changed. They also came up with a very good set of recommendations. All of these texts highlight different aspects of that question and all of them have very good points. I personally have, over the years, arrived at a rather sociological, not to say holistic point of view. In fact I answered the exact same question a few days ago, and the answer I gave then was this: After ~10 years of women in tech advocacy I d say the ultimate and final measure to get more women into Free Software is by finally achieving a truly equal society and at the same time dramatically improving child care support in almost any country. I ve come to the conclusion that what really holds women back in practice is not so much a lack of skill or interest but a simple lack of opportunity. For most of us Free Software is what we do in our spare time and that s something that women, even today, have considerably less of than men. Even in couples where both partners work full-time it is still mostly the woman who does the majority of the housework and child care duties. In most cultures men have a perceived right to their leisure time that does not to the same degree exist for women. That is one major reason, the other is instilled modesty, which has kind of become my personal arch-enemy by now. I ve talked to so many girls and women at all sorts of events about why they won t take up Computer Science studies or join a Free Software project and the answer I hear most often is that they do not consider themselves good enough in one or another aspect. Sometimes they will doubt their technical skills, sometimes their language skills, sometimes their stamina. Needless to say these girls and women were not any less qualified than the people already active in Free Software. So, yes, in the short and medium term making Debian a more welcoming and friendly place is the way to go. As many others pointed out already this will not only benefit prospective contributors but the community as a whole: those new to it as well as those who ve been in it for a long time. In the long term however what we need is empowerment! Women who are just as confident about their skills as men and are not discouraged by uncooperative environments. This is of course something that is culturally deep-rooted and can only happen in a very large time frame. So, for the moment the way to go in my view is accessibility: a cooperative atmosphere, a code of conduct, comprehensive documentation not only of technical aspects but also of structures and processes. The other thing we need to do is to have as many already active women as possible attend as many Linux/Debian/Free Software/Whatever events as possible. In my experience it happens quite often that other women see these women, feel very inspired by them, get to talk to them and then a few days later show up on some mailing list or IRC channel. From what I ve seen personal contact still beats any other kind of recruiting measures. You re a Debian developer but you re also married with a Debian developer (Alexander Reichle-Schmehl). Did you meet because of Debian? If not, who introduced Debian to the other one? :-) We did in fact meet because of Debian. More specifically during our booth shift at the Debian booth at LinuxTag 2005, where I did a talk on the debian-women project and Alex organised the DebianDay. After that our relationship developed pretty much along our Debian activities: After our initial meeting we talked a lot on #debian.de, when Alex went to DebConf5 and I didn t we noticed that we kind of missed each other. The first gift he ever gave me was a Debconf5 shirt and a box Finnish chocolates (I still have one of them today. :) ) Our first secret kiss was at ApacheCon 2005, where we were both staffing the Debian booth (kudos to abe for pretending not to notice). We then became an official couple at Berlinux 2005 where we were both staffing the Debian booth and giving talks on packaging and user motivation. Our first real relationship stress test was when we both joined the DebConf6 orga team. It was a stressful time, but we passed it with flying colours! About a year later we announced our engagement via planet.debian.org. Our wedding was a veritable MiniDebConf, one of the best gifts we got was a Debian cookbook including the favourite recipes of DDs from around the world. By now we ve both finished university and work full-time jobs, so we don t do as many talks and attend as many Debian events as we used to. Instead we now mainly focus on press and publicity work, which is quite practical to work on as a pair. It s actually rather funny that way, Alex and I get confused with each other quite often, since we have almost the same name, often pick up on each other s E-Mail conversations and are most often quoted by our function rather than by name. Because of we have kind of merged into this virtual Debian Press Person in the perception of many of our contacts. You also have another hat : Debian Press Officer. What is this about? What would you suggest to people who would like get involved in that domain? Debian press work is mainly about providing an official and coordinated point of contact to anyone wanting information from or about Debian. The press team answers all sorts of inquiries (the most popular one is is of course always the next release date) and makes sure all important events and developments within Debian receive the attention and recognition they deserve. Debian is a diverse project where every sort of contributor is free to voice his or her opinion in any way. We don t have NDAs or prescribed terminology. That s one of the things I love about Debian but also something that makes us difficult to handle for conventional media. They want official statements, in generally understandable terms, at appointed times. That s what the press team takes care of. Almost all of the press work is done in the publicity team, which coordinates using IRC, Mail and SVN. The publicity team also publishes the Debian Project News, which are very popular among our users and developers. Press work is also an area of work that offers lots of possibilities for non-technical contribution. http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity lists a number of possibilities for contribution and, like most Debian Teams, we d be more than grateful to get some more helping hands and happy to introduce interested newcomers to our work. What s the biggest problem of Debian? In my view: Overwork. Debian has thousands of contributors but still a lot of the main work rests on very few shoulders. We need more contributors, especially, but not only in the key teams. In order to get more people we need to do some marketing which is very hard for us, since we are very proud of our independence and have a strong focus on purely technical aspects rather than aiming for popularity. However, with the current amount of Open Source and Free Software projects to join we find ourselves not only in a contest on technical excellence but also a sort of popularity contest that is about perception rather than hard facts. This popularity contest is difficult for Debian and currently costs us quite a bunch of very capable people. Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? My answer to that is a non-technical one: I think Debian is currently very under-appreciated, we do a lot of great work and maybe even more importantly we do a lot of important work for Software Freedom, sometimes even at the cost of our above-mentioned popularity. I hope people will appreciate that more again in the future. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Over the years I have made a lot of friends within the Debian community, some have even become family. That makes it somewhat hard to single out individual people. I think what I admire most is continuous commitment. I am very impressed by those among us who have kept up a high level of commitment over many years and at the same time managed to bring that in line with a fulfilled personal/family life. That s something that I hope I ll also be able to achieve in the years to come.
Thank you to Meike for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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3 April 2011

Christian Perrier: [life] [running] Last week before Paris marathon

So, the last countdown to Paris marathon started today for me. One week left. Nearly last run before it, today, with a quiet 12.5km trail at marathon speed. The point was testing my legs one week after the Eco-Trail 55km run. I'm balanced. Things seem to be OK but running 42km two weeks after such a hard trail is really like jumping in unknown water. I feel a small pain in my right leg. Not something really worrying, just not perfect at all. The hard choice is the starting pace. I'll probably be as careful as possible, with something like 5'25"/km, which should end up in 3h48'. If things are OK at half-marathon distance (OK being "perfect"), then I'll try to speed up slightly to 5'20", trying to hit the 3h45' mark. This one is probably the very best I can do. If things aren't OK, then I'll probably slow down from km 15, or even before, and try to keep up with 5'40" and stay below 4h. Marathon start is 8h45 in Champs-Elys es. Eh, maybe Zack and Ralf will show up in Bastille neighbourhood, between km 23 and 24, as they did last year. I should be there between 10h50 and 11h05 (watch the red cap!). Now.....just rest, drink, eat pasta and sleep!

31 January 2011

Michael Banck: 31 Jan 2011

Debian Med Bioinformatics Sprint Last weekend, I was at the Debian Med Meeting in Travem nde near L beck, thanks to an invitation by Steffen M ller and Andreas Tille. It was a great opportunity to finally meet Steffen and some of the other bioinformatics people in Debian like Manuel Prinz face-to-face for the first time. Also, lots of upstream and related bioinformatics packagers from e.g. Biolinux were present as well, many of them from the UK. I discussed with and helped some people about Debian packaging. There is a big push to get Debian packages done and integrated in Debian and Ubuntu, but often enough people are not exactly sure what the requirements are and what needs to be done. Hopefully, the sprint was successful to clear things up and move forward. I also managed to finalize the initial Jmol packaging and uploaded it to Debian towards the end of the sprint. I plan to update the other bioinformatics related packages in debichem like pymol and openbabel as soon as squeeze is released. Overall, it was a great weekend, many thanks to NERC and Debian for making it possible, and to Steffen M ller for organizing it!

21 November 2010

Russell Coker: Ruxcon 2010

Yesterday and today I attended Ruxcon the leading technical security conference in Australia [1]. The first lecture I attended was Breaking Linux Security Protections by Andrew Griffiths. This included a good overview of many current issues with Linux security. One thing that was particularly noteworthy was his mention of SE Linux policy, he cited the policy for the FTP server as an example of policy that can be regarded as too lax but also noted the fact that to get SE Linux used the policies had to be more liberal than we might desire. There is probably scope for someone to give a good lecture about how we are forced to make uncomfortable choices between making security features stronger and making them more usable.The next lecture I attended was Breaking Virtualisation by Endrazine. It makes me wonder how long it will be before someone cracks one of the major cloud hosting services such as EC2 it s not an appealing thought.Billy Rios gave a really interesting lecture titled Will it Blend? about blended exploits. The idea is to try and find a few programs which do things that are slightly undesired (arguably not even bugs) but which when combined can result in totally cracking a system. One example was a way of tricking IE into loading a DLL from the desktop and a way of tricking Safari into saving arbitrary files to the desktop, combine them and you can push a DLL to a victim and make them load it. Learning about these things can really change the way you think about misbehaving programs!Ben Nagy gave an interesting lecture about Prospecting for Rootite . His systematic way of finding test cases that cover a large portion of the code of a large application such as MS-Word seems quite effective. Once you have test cases that cover a lot of code then you can use fuzzing to find flaws.Edward Farrell gave an informative lecture about RFID Security , I didn t really learn that much though, he confirmed my suspicions that RFID implementations generally suck.Mark Goudie gave a very informative lecture titled We ve been Hacked! What Went Wrong and Why . Mark works for Verizon and often with the US Secret Service in investigating security breaches. He presented a lot of information that I have not seen before and made some good arguments in support of companies being more proactive in protecting their systems from attack.Stephen Glass and Mark Robert gave a lecture titled Security in Public Safety Radio Systems which mainly focussed on digital radios used by the Australian police. It would be good if the police got people like them to test out new kit before ordering it in bulk, it seems that they will be using defective radios for a long time (it s not easy or cheap to replace them once they are deployed).Edward Farrell gave an interesting lecture titled Hooray for Reading: The Kindle & You about hacking the Kindle. Unfortunately they haven t worked out how to get GUI code going on a hacked Kindle yet so there are some limitations as to what can be done.I think that the most interesting lecture of the conference was This Job Makes you Paranoid by Alex Tilley of the Australian Federal Police. He gave some interesting anecdotes about real cases to illustrate his points and he advocated the police position really well. I ve attended several lectures by employees of law enforcement agencies, but none of them demonstrated anywhere near the understanding of their audience that Alex did.The last lecture I attended was Virtualisation Security State of the Union by David Jorn of Red Hat. He gave an interesting summary of some of the issues including mentioning how SE Linux is being used for confining KVM virtual machines.Ruxcon was a great conference and I definitely recommend attending it. I have to note that even though there are police attending and lecturing it s not entirely a white-hat affair. One thing that I hope they do next year is to get a bigger venue. The foyer was rather crowded and because it had a hard floor was really noisy between lectures. Space and carpet are two really important things when you have lots of people in one room!

15 November 2010

Alessio Treglia: Bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

This brief announcement was published in the debian-devel-announce mailing list and I repeat it here for your information.
 Hi! Since there has been a lot happening in the Debian Multimedia world during the Squeeze release, so we figured we should give you an update on that. Who are we? In the dark old ages, there were two teams involved in multimedia: the Debian Multimedia and Debian Multimedia Packages teams. Please note that neither of them is related to debian-multimedia.org (which is maintained by Christian Marillat, and is known to break current ffmpeg-based applications like mplayer and vlc in Debian Squeeze.). During late 2008, both teams were merged into one, the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team, to avoid effort fragmentation. Since then, there has been a lot of work done: Consumer Multimedia in Debian Consumer Multimedia is about playing and, well, consuming multimedia. Squeeze will feature: Squeeze will not feature: Producer Multimedia in Debian Producer multimedia is software for producing multimedia. Squeeze will
feature: End user applications: Platforms and technologies: Squeeze will not feature: Debian Multimedia Blend There is also an effort to start a Debian Multimedia Blend to give a better overview about what multimedia applications are available in Debian. There is a short list for a quick overview as well as a long package list separated in sections to give a more detailed overview (including translations, screenshots, popularity of package etc). You are invited to help improving the tasks either directly in SVN or by sending patches to Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> or debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org (see below). Note that not all of the packages listed in the tasks pages are maintained by the Debian Multimedia team, since they are aimed at producing useful package sets instead of showing only our own packages. For those who want to squash some bugs in multimedia packages there is also the bugs page generated by the Blends tools, or our team bug page. Other activity The team has seen a lot of growth since the merger. Of the current 52 members of the Alioth team, 20 were added during 2009 and 18 in 2010, many of whom are involved in upstream development as well as the debian packaging. The number of packages has also grown, with 112 of the current 205 git repositories in our team area having its first commit during 2010. Where to reach us The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org, should you have any questions. We have also decided to repurpose the old debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org address for user and more general discussion. We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Interested developers/packagers can also join us at the first address. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC.

Regards,

Alessio Treglia on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

11 October 2010

John Goerzen: Pump Organs and Music

Two years ago, I wrote about Elvera Voth and the power of love. Back then I wrote about her memories of seeing of service workers, who would be away from their home for 7 years at a time. Elvera remembered a gathering of people at the train station to see them off, and how they sang some German hymns at the occasion. Elvera s done a lot since, including starting an arts in prison program. And today, she hosted a hymn sing at the pump organ in the Friesen House parlor. img_4305.jpg The Friesen House is nearly 100 years old, and was on my parents property before it got moved to the Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum. We were among maybe 20 people that showed up for the event. We walked in a few minutes early and Elvera was sitting at the organ already, along with a few other early arrivals. Many of the people there were over 70, and the moment we walked in, she said, Oh good! Another generation! And, of course, asked about us, where we live, who we are related to, etc. The announcement in our church bulletin said to bring a copy of Gesangbuch mit Noten if you have one. That was a common hymn book in Mennonite churches in Kansas (songbook with notes and yes, there was one without notes that had only words.) I pulled out my copy, and just opened it up. I saw my grandma s beautiful handwriting saying it belonged to Mr. and Mrs. R. A. Klassen . This I brought along, but was perhaps the only one. Elvera recognized it and was pleased to hear where it came from. We had a great time, and it turned out to feel like the kind of afternoon people around here used to have: time with friends and family visiting and maybe singing on occasion. After some introduction and some stories, we got to the singing and started with hymn #1 in the 1969 (English) Mennonite Hymnal. That song had German words below as well, which we sang: Grosser Gott, wir loben dich! (Holy God, We Praise Thy Name) Elvera played the organ while we all sang. And then we turned to #556, O Have You Not Heard. We read through the German lyrics (to help those that don t speak German):
Ich weiss einen Strom, dessen herrliche Flut
fliesst wunderbar stille durchs Land,
doch strahlet und gl nzt er wie feurige Glut,
wem ist dieses W sser bekannt? O Seele, ich bitte dich: Komm!
Und such diesen herrlichen Strom!
Sein Wasser fliesst frei und m chtiglich,
o glaub s, es fliesset f r dich!
Elvera translated this herself, a much more powerful translation than we usually get in English. And then we sang, this time a cappella. Elvera told the story about the train station to this group, and then, of course, we sang O Power of Love, one of the songs sung on that occasion. For that, she asked us to stand up and form a circle around the organ, and again we sang mostly a cappella. Singing that song with Elvera left few dry eyes in the room for sure. Someone brought up Nun Ist Sie Erschienen, and so of course we sang that. It wasn t in any hymnal, but I suspect we were the only ones there that didn t have it completely memorized. Elvera told us the story of the museum s pump organ; it had been in her family, and she had paid to have it restored and eventually donated it to the museum. It had been used every evening at twilight for singing and devotions in the family. She also told us that the singing at the Newton train station the same one our family uses a few times a year was what inspired her to a career of choral music. In the end, we probably spent more time visiting than singing, but that was just fine. Next the group went over to the Preparatory School, an old schoolhouse also on the museum grounds. There we had a traditional Faspa, an afternoon meal with coffee, Zwieback and jam, cheese, and various cookies. We all visited for awhile longer and then went on our way. It was a wonderful afternoon, and I hope to have a chance to do that sort of thing again.

15 July 2010

Enrico Zini: On python, frameworks and TOOWTDI

On python, frameworks and TOOWTDI The Python world is ridden with frameworks, microframeworks, metaframeworks and their likes. They are often very clever things, but more often than not they are a tool of despair. A very peculiar thing about Python web frameworkish things is that there are so many of them. There's cherrypy (in its various API redesigns), fapws, gunicorn, bottle and flask, paste, werkzeug and flup, tornado, pylons, turbogears 1 and 2, django, repoze who, what and whatnot, all the myriad of rendering engines and buffet as a metathing on top of them, diesel, twisted, and I apologise if I don't spend my day listing and hyperlinking them all, I hope I made my point. Frameworks are supposed to standardise some aspects of programming; the nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from, and they all suck, so I'll make my own. But wasn't Python supposed to be the world of TIOOWTDI? Ok, everbody knows it isn't. Just in the standard library there are 2 implementations of pickle and 2 urllibs. But people like the TIOOWTDI idea. I believe the reason people like the TIOOWTDI idea is because it creates a framework. It standardises some aspects of programming, and defines building blocks that guarantee that people doing similar jobs will be using similar sets of components. Let's take for example the datetime module in the standard library. It is an embarassing example of a badly designed module, so embarassing that the standard library documentation continuously fails to document its fundamental design flaws and common work-arounds hoping that noone notices them, but as a consequence each poor soul starting to use it for nontrivial things has to google for hours in despair to rediscover in how many ways it's broken. But still, datetime works as a structure to hold those values that make a date, time, or full UTC timestamp. For that job it's become the standard, and as such it's an important component of the Python TIOOWTDI framework: one can use it to exchange datetimes among different libraries: for example ORMs are using it instead of rolling their own, which makes database programming so much easier when date/time is involved. Even if the implementation is far from perfect, once we apply TIOOWTDI to dates and timestamps, python code from different authors can exchange dates without worries. This is much better than having 3 different superior datetime libraries and having to convert date objects from one to another when passing values from a web form to an ORM. There is an often overlooked Python framework. The Pyton framework. It's called TIOOWTDI. All the micro-mini-midi-maxi-meta-frameworks that people scatter around, are, or should be, just experiments, proofs of concept, competing ideas waiting to be distilled in The Only One Way, bringing the Python experience one step forward. What is unfortunate is that this last distillation thing happens so rarely that people get used to the idea of having to use proof of concept code to get things done. Update: this post apparently wasn't very clear, so here is some clarification:

10 May 2010

Stefano Zacchiroli: UDD - consolidating bazaar metadata for QA and data mining

Eclectic paper on the Ultimate Debian Database A few months ago, I've co-authored with Lucas a paper on UDD, which has just been presented at this year IEEE's Mining Software Repository conference, continuing my recent tradition of eclectic papers. The paper is titled The Ultimate Debian Database: Consolidating Bazaar Metadata for Quality Assurance and Data Mining and is available for download from my publications page. For Debian people already familiar with UDD there is probably not much to learn from it, as the main target of the paper is the community of scientists doing data mining on software repositories. For them, UDD offers a valuable entry point to Debian "facts", as data sources reflected in the database are easily joinable together and to some extent already validated by other UDD users (e.g. QA people). Nevertheless the first two sections of the paper are probably of more broad interest. There we have given our point of view on the so called Debian Data Hell: why it exists, how it's related to the nature of Debian and similar distros, etc. I've already noted in the past how that is also related to the culture of freedom that in Debian we value not only in our software, but also in our infrastructure and procedures. We should just get rid of a bit of inertia, and total world domination will then be just around the corner :-) I'm happy to conclude quoting the acknowledgments section of the paper: Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all UDD contributors, and in particular: Christian von Essen and Marc Brockschmidt (student and co-mentor in the Google Summer of Code which witnessed the first UDD implementation), Olivier Berger for his support and FLOSSmole contacts, Andreas Tille who contributed several gatherers, the Debian community at large, the "German cabal" and Debian System Administrators for their UDD hosting and support.

11 April 2010

Christian Perrier: [life] Paris marathon 2010~bubulle-1 ACCEPTED

Upload accepted by organisers. Upload time has been 3h49'29" (my watch says 27", eh!). That was a good one, really (actually, I can compare to only 3 as it was my fourth marathon after Paris and Cologne 2009, plus the unofficial Rambouillet Forest marathon I ran alone 6 weeks after Paris 2009). For marathoners around, here are the chronometric data. Please note that GPS watches tend to overestimate the distance, mostly because of the jerky way one runs in mass events, as well as geometric considerations related to the imprecision of GPS (imprecision may be lateral and thus the line recorded by the watch is often less straight than the real one). For instance, according to my watch, Paris marathon was 42.63km long, so an overestimate by nearly 500meters. As a consequence, the recorded speed of 5'23"/km should be corrected to 5'25". So, times below should be increased by 2 seconds. As a conclusion, even though I can improve the pace and avoid going too fast in the first 25km, I'm very happy as I avoided nearly collapsing as I did last year (with sometimes over 7'00/km and a few walks). Going back home was OK and I had no cramps and I still haven't any. This is also what one gets when preparing well. My only regret is that I didn't run over 30km since, indeed, Cologne Marathon! That made the difference in the last 12 kilometers, obviously. Having spent the winter on many half-marathons (either alone, or a few officials) clearly improved my "performance" up to 25km. For the next marathon (a marathoner always thinks about the next one), I need to have 1 or 2 long trainings a few weeks before. Now, I have to find out which one will be the next one... and I wish good luck to my friend No l K the, who is preparing the Mainz marathon for May 9th as well as Dirk who's certainly preparing another one. Guys, rendez-vous is of course for Debconf10 in NYC. We won't run a marathon for sur, but how about an half one? :-)

9 April 2010

Christian Perrier: [life] Once you run a marathon...

...you want to run many. Everybody told me so. Which is why I was warned when I ran my first one year ago in Paris, I knew I would run other. So, on Sunday will be my fourth one and my second Paris Marathon. So, after 4h10mins in Paris (april 2009), 4h12 in Rambouillet Forest (all alone in full autonomy mode) and 4h00'49" in Cologne, my target this time is 3h50. Weather is announced to be perfect, my physical condition is AFAIK good, the motivation is very high....my only fear is that I registred in the "4h target" group (because, back in November, I wasn't expecting the results I got in February/March in half-marathons). As many people overestimate their target, I expect to be passing hundreds of runners during the first 5 kilometers, which is not the best way to start....but, hey, Paris streets are wide enough (except Place de la Bastille, my nightmare....I hope organizers solved the jam problem there). Of course, I kinda hope seeing fellow Paris DD's waving giant Debian swirls, including our wanabee-DPL.....but let's stop dreaming. And running in a sunny day all across Paris and along river Seine, will be great again even without Zack. I'll also be missing Ralf and No l who ran it last year: Ralf is unfortunately suffering from knee problems and No l is preparing for Mainz marathon (target: 3h??). Anyway, more news on Sunday afternoon....and let's enjoy a full rest tomorrow!

7 March 2010

Christian Perrier: [life] 1h41'29"

W00t. Again below 1h45 and beating my best time by more than 2 minutes. Paris half-marathon was great. Freaking cold (-3 C with a strong North-East wind) but great weather with the sun in a blue sky. I didn't see Ralf (and, Ralf, sorry but I was finally wearing an orange suite..:-)) nor Debian swirls....but, apparently, that wasn't missing for having a great race. Elisabeth cam along with me to Paris and I managed to see her (and she manage to spot me) twice: once in Bastille at km 10 and later on at Charenton at km 14 The interesting challenge now is what to set as goal for the marathon. Of course, I have to run below 4h (which I missed by 49 seconds in Cologne) but I apparently can do better. I think I'll be reasonable and set 3h50 and we'll see.

8 November 2009

David Paleino: Finally a DD!

Finally, it happened! I became a Debian Developer! I wish to thank everybody involved in this process: from those who helped me in my initial packaging efforts, to who actually created the account. Many thanks to the pkg-perl team for accepting newbies and helping them: props to Damyan Ivanov, Gregor Herrmann, Gunnar Wolf! Thanks to Debian-Med and Debian CLI: they always believed in me, and I had a great time in these teams. A special thanks goes to Andreas Tille, who advocated my NM candidature. Thanks to my two AMs, Bart Martens and Bernd Zeimetz. Even if my NM was long, difficult and not so flawless, it all went good, at the end Smile. A special thanks to Enrico Zini: he was the first DD signing my GPG key, thus allowing me to have more "rights" (being a DM), and experience some more responsibility than I previously had. Thanks to his "Become a DD. NOW!" right after checking my ID in Palermo -- Enrico, it finally happened! Thanks to Christoph Berg, Ron Lee, and Stephen Gran, which handled the final steps of the overall process. And now, dapal is here to break the world. Be warned! Smile

3 September 2009

Pablo Lorenzzoni: EeePC: Surviving liquid spills - phase II

About four months ago I described how my EeePC survived the spilling of orange juice over its keyboard. No! I never spilled anything on it again, if that s what you re thinking But I noticed that some keys (those that got more juice on) began to malfunction. At the beginning I paid no attention to it, hoping that it would just go away, but, eventually, they just stop working And those are not just unimportant keys I am talking about arrows and the forward-slash (/) keys in the lower right corner of the keyboard!!! How could I survive without those keys, without a quick access to my bash history and vim search? Well, I began googling around and found some good advice. Everything that made sense regarding how to cleanup my keyboard I compiled and, when I was enough confident it would work, I just follow the procedure I ve devised. This is what I did:
  1. After turning it off and removing the battery, I removed the keyboard. Check the instructions I linked in my previous article for some pictures on how to do it.
  2. I poured 500 mL of distilled water in a clean plastic box (I bought 1L for BRL 20 at a local pharmacy), added enough dish detergent to make some foam (I was careful to select a non-biodegradable one) and drowned the whole keyboard in the solution.
  3. For the next 30 minutes I pressed and released the affected keys over and over again. My intention was to dissolve anything that might have remained from the orange juice.
  4. I left it soaking in the solution for the next 12 hours.
  5. The next day I got the keyboard out of the solution and used current tap water to remove any detergent still left in it. This might have took about 10 minutes.
  6. Our tap water is really clean, but its hard, and I would not like to remove any juice from the keyboard just to add some minerals that might have the same effect, so after I was certain all the detergent was removed, I left the keyboard in the remaining of the distilled water for another 12 hour soak.
  7. After that I just removed the keyboard from the soak, dried it a little bit using a paper towel and left it to air-dry (away from the sun). I don t remember how long it took, but I believe not more than 4 hours Those were hot days Anyway, I was really sure it was dry.
When I plugged it back, surprise! All keys are working again! Of course, that was just what worked for me Best advice still is: Keep liquids away your EeePC!

5 April 2009

Christian Perrier: 42,195

Done. I'm right here now sitting on my couch and trying to recover my legs after that first marathon ever. As planned, I met Ralf Treinen and No l K the at the start of the Paris Marathon. As No l was targetting 3h30m while Ralf and I were targetting 4h, we left him go with the faster runners. As No l doesn't blog that much, I think I can say it now: he managed to run in 3h28m, which is awesome. He is incredibly happy with that (we unfortunately didn't manage to meet again after the race as the crowd was too huge and the cellphones were of course miserably failing). Ralf and I ran together the first 12 kilometers. Then we split because he had to stop for a few seconds. Up to the 21st kilometer, I kept the pace for 4h and I was even running a little bit faster. However, this advance vanished slowly from km 25, up to km 35 where the virtual runner that was running 4h passed me..:-). Ralf also passed me around km 38 which is indeed the moment where I was blowing up, running slower and slower. The last 3 kilometers were a nightmare but, still, I managed to finish and my GPS watch tells me I ran for 4h10m. The official time is 4h12m56s, because of a huge "runner jam" at Bastille where we had to wait for 3 minutes before being able to enter the Faubourg Saint-Antoine street. Running through Paris is really magic, particularly with the nice sun we had ( not *too* hot, though) and I am really proud and happy to have my first marathon finished *without walking*. Yay.

26 January 2009

Y Giridhar Appaji Nag: Wagah-Attari and Hussainiwala

Pakistan flag and Emblem of India Fellow countrymen, happy Republic day to you all.

Any trip to Punjab is incomplete without atleast one visit to the daily tamasha at the Wagah-Attari border. This is probably one of the few places on earth where you would see the Pakistan flag right next to the Emblem of India.

I arrived at the place a couple of hours before the vening flag down ceremony but was too late to be able to get a comfortable seat in the crowd of a few thousands; the place was already packed. Luckily, a BSF ranger (who incidentally was not allowing the crowds in any more) looked at my tripod and camera, thought I was a journalist and led me to the VIP section which is as close to the gates as one can get.

For a very long time preceding the ceremony, there is nationalist music blaring on the tannoys, crowds screaming in unison: LA ilAha ill-Allah on the Pakistani side and vandE mAtaram, bhArat mAtA ki jai on the Indian side. On either side of the border gates, kids run up and down the road with their respective national flags while young men climb onto the top-most walls and wave flags high in the air. One gentleman was commenting that while women on 'our' side are allowed to dance and sit anywhere, 'they' don't allow that, "see how the men and the women there are grouped separately".

Thousands of spectators Waving the Pakistan flag Waving the Indian flag Women dancing

The half hour of the retreat ceremony is full of action with the Indian BSF rangers in their red turbans and khakhis, and the Pakistani rangers in black salwaar-kameez marching heavily down the road, glaring into each others eyes, competing on who can kick higher into the air and possibly also on who has the best kept moustache. The rangers on either side of the gates know that they are entertaining their home crowd and spare no effort to do their best.

Indian BSF rangers marching Indian BSF rangers at-ease
Indian ranger marching towards the gate Indian BSF ranger Indian BSF ranger
Border gate, Pakistan crowd and rangers India and Pakistan flags Crowds going back home

The retreat ceremony is so popular that it is difficult to allow in all the people that come in to watch. So a clone of the ceremony has been setup at the Hussainiwala border. However, Hussainiwala is popular not because of the flag retreat, much less because the 1971 war memorial still has a lot of marks of artillery firing, but because of Bhagat Singh's memorial. The memorial moves one to tears.

Hussainiwala: Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh and Raj Guru Hussainiwala bridge: Sympathetically detonated in the 1971 war

Few more pictures from the Hussainiwala memorials:

Hussainiwala: Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh and Raj Guru Hussainiwala: Bhagat Singh memorial Hussainiwala bridge piers and war memorial Artillery fire on Hussainiwala bridge piers Artillery fire on Hussainiwala bridge piers

13 December 2008

Tiago Bortoletto Vaz: BrDesktop is back


well, at least its website :) Since we got Trac 0.11 into Lenny, our great green theme has been broken. So this weekend I decided to spend some time migrating the old stuff to a Genshi template and adapting it for Trac 0.11. Fortunately it worked. Credits go to Skittlish Trac theme, the one BrDesktop s comes from. BrDesktop is a Debian Pure Blend* intended to give Brazilian desktop users an easier way of joining the Debian community.

* thanks very much to Andreas Tille for insisting on changing the former (and inadequate) Custom Debian Distribution term. Most important, thanks to Holger Levsen for being strongly opposed to the Andreas DISh suggestion! :) Posted in english

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