So, Thailand Mini-DebCamp 2010 in Khon Kaen has already ended. It's another memorable event I've joined, and especially for this one, been in the organizing team. We owed many people for its success. I'd like to thank our guest DDs for their talks, many of which are improvised. Special thanks to Paul Wise and Yakiharu Yabuki for preparing the talks on Debian Social Contract and Debian packaging in one night, so our audiences can prepare themselves for the Bug Squashing Party in the next 3 consecutive days. Thanks Paul Wise, Andrew Lee, Yakiharu Yabuki, Daiki Ueno, Christian Perrier and our local participants for their efforts in tackling more than 50 bugs during the BSP, 30 of which have been closed and 14 with proposed patches. Thanks Christian Perrier for several talks in the last two days. We also had Andrew Lee's talk on Debian EzGo project, along with talks from our local distro developers (Linux SIS, Linux TLE) on what are being worked on and what can be pushed into Debian. And Neutron Soutmun had presented some future plan on the RahuNAS, a captive portal software based on Debian. A special agenda had been arranged to improve Debian mirroring in Thailand. Chatchai Jantaraprim, the ftp.th.debian.org maintainer, had shared us the backgrounds and motivations behind the official mirror setup for Thailand. Andrew Lee, the ftp.tw.debian.org maintainer, had introduced us to the Debian mirroring infrastructure, and encouraged the local mirror Debian mirror maintainers to do it Debian way. We had exchanged experiences and problems found among the current mirror sites, which can be much useful for their improvements, as well as cooperation in the future. Christian Perrier had also introduced us to the Debian translation workflow and how to coordinate translation via mailing list. This can be useful in the future for Thai if we can form a team, rather than a single-handed translation as present. Christian's talk on Debian contribution paths, along with their fresh hands-on experience in the BSP, had indeed motivated many local people to join Debian. I've been told by some people that they wanted to actually join Debian after this event, after just having a wish to do so for a long time. And Christian's yet another talk on key signing, with live demonstration, was really helpful for Thai audiences, as few of us were familiar with the concept and practice. Yes, taking care of PGP key does require special cares! Night chats and parties were also cool. We enjoyed the drinks (especially, Debian wine!), snacks, and chats together, and exchanged many stories. For me personally, it made me feel Debian as a live community, with people living in it. For the record, we even had a real bug squashing party, as fried bugs are among well-known Esaan dishes. And we had immediately got new voluntary vegetarians because of it! Hee hee.. Hello Christian, I witnessed it. ;-) And thumbs up to Yabuki for his bravery! Yes, it's a wonderful event for me indeed. Thanks Khon Kaen University (Kitt Tientanopajai et. al.) for hosting it. Thanks NECTEC Information and Mobile Applications Program and Science Park KKU for the financial support. Thanks NECTEC people for taking care of foreign participants in traveling between Bangkok and Khon Kaen. And thanks all participants for their contributions to make this event a great one! Picture credits: Supphachoke Suntiwichaya, DebConf Gallery

I'm now on my way back from The first miniDebCamp and miniDebconf that happened from March 13th to March 19th in Khon Kaen, Thailand. This even was organized locally by a team of very motivated Thai Debian enthusiasts and contributors, such as Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (*the* Thai DD), Neutron Soutmun, Kitt Tientanopajai, and all those whose name I'm not remembering as of now (I hope they won't mind). The even had kinda the structure of DebConfs, with a few days of "Debcamp" to begin. See the full schedule. We were hosted in Khon Kaen University (KKU), one one the most famous universities in Thailand, a small "town in town" in a city with a few hundred thousand inhabitants (dunno exactly). Lodging was done in a hotel located inside the university. Interestingly, the hotel was also hosting youg students participating to "Summer Camps" (apparently training systems to get good school results) gving to all this a very young atmosphere. The hacking lab and talks location was a 30-seat room in the university library, and meals were brought in there very efficiently, with the very specific way that Thai people have to transport each and every kind of meal (in small plastic bags closed by rubber). I arrived only in the 3rd day because I had commitments at home that made it impossible to me to come for the first day. During these days, people have been very busy hacking and participating to the Bug Squashing Party. During that BSP, about 50 bugs have been touched, without about 15 or so closed. Other non Thai attendees were Andrew Lee from TW, Paul Wise from AU, Daiki Ueno and Yukiharu Yabuki from JP. Organizers were expecting some attendees from neighbouring countries such as Laos, Vietnam or Cambodia. Unfortunately, none of them could come, including Anousak Soupavanh, leader of Lao free software localization efforts, who I was very impatient to meet. Transport difficulties, or visa problems, do not make things easy in that part of the world. On Wednesday we had a "DayTrip" as it is common for such event. We went abotu 50 km away from Khon Kaen, to visit a nice place, close to a dam lake, and climbed a hill surrounded by a big temple and a giant Buddha statue. Then we had a wonderful lunch in a fish restaurant in the very specific Thai way to share stuff: everything is on the table and you pick your food here and there, at you rconvenience. Of course, local advice before trying apparently innocent food is always worth it because the fire might be hidden anywhere (for instance in that soja plate which I tried and that set my mouth as a burning hell for 20 minutes). The journey ended by a visit of a great temple in Khon Kaen and, very noticeably by a dinner in a very popular barbecue restaurant in "all you can eat" style for...100Bath (so, about 2.5 euros). Maybe only vegetarian people had more trouble enjoying the meal as it was mostly made of various meat (and sea food). The talk days were very intense, at least in my opinion. Probably because I ended up giving four talks, some of them completely improvised (about IP-over-DNS, which I was using at the hotel and about which many wanted to learn a little bit more, and GPG keysigning processes). It turned out that the GPG talk was well received and, discussing with Paul later on, we agreed that such a talk, mostly meant to explain the DOs and DON'Ts For good GPG keys signing, could be a good idea even for Debconfs. There were also a few talks about local initiatives and efforts to develop (and not only promote) free software. We have no recordings of these talks as we were infortunately missing some video recording installation (maybe next time, Thep) just like the miniConf that was happening in Panama at about the same time was having. Due to local regulation on the university network, we had some limitations with Internet access (some firewalling that for instance was preventing SIP to work properly, which made a video-conference with a japanese user group fail, unfurtunately). The event ended in a round table discussion about ideas to organize something bigger in the future. The local community in Thailand has apparently the energy, maybe ressources and local support to be able to organize a slightly bigger event as first try (somethign like an Asian DebConf or something similar, targeting mostly Asian contributors and about 50-100 people. Thailand seems to be a good target to host such event, with many things being relatively inexpensive (and not only beer!). And they even think about possibly hosting a Debconf at some time in the future (actually, Martin Krafft should also be credited for bringing this idea). That isn't as crazy as it seems and, provided that potential organizers start involving themselves in the current Debconfs, everything seems to be possible. After all, if we look back to 2005, only one person (hello, Safir) was seriously thinking that Debconf could really happen in Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? After this week (followed by 2.5 days of sightseeing in Bangkok for me, plus a small meeting today with local Thai Linux corporate users and IT company owners), I feel like the mood in Asia about Debian development is high and full of potential. The miniconf last year in Taiwan was already a good success, by establishing a good connection between people.....we need to keep that alive and, hopefully, there will be other miniconfs in this part of the world. And, well, if I can be there, I'll be there.

Next Saturday a group of more than 20 women that work with Free Software in Argentina and Uruguay will gather to speak at a Free Software event in Buenos Aires, called Software Libre, Pasi n de Mujeres. It's your typical Free Software event, with talks related to the philosophy of Free Software and the Free Culture in general, and also technical talks related to using and developing Free Software. With one important difference: all the speakers will be women. This might sound shocking to some people and normal stuff to some others, but the reaction created by the call for talks of this event was definitely not something I expected. Women from all over the country (and many also from other Latin American countries) have contacted us, to tell us about what they do in their daily lives with Free Software and how they would like to share their work with others. The event is open for both men and women to attend, however, of the more than a 100 people that have already pre-registered, more than half are women. A ratio that is more than amazing when you have been to a Free Software event before. I think that the fact that all the speakers are women is really encouraging for many women to attend, who otherwise wouldn't. Debian will be sponsoring the event, by paying the bus tickets of the speakers that come from the whole country, which is a great help in making this event a big success. I really expect the event to be a fantastic opportunity for the women in our country to finally show all the great work they are doing... I'm very excited about it :) PS: Somehow, I screwed up Planet Debian, filling it with old posts. I'm sorry! :-\

Whew! Is it karma or what? What makes me get involved in two horribly complex, two-week-long conferences, year after year? Of course, both (DebConf and EDUSOL) are great fun to be part of, and both have greatly influenced both my skills and interests. Anyway, this is the fifth year we hold EDUSOL. Tomorrow we will bring the two weeks of activities to an end, hold the last two videoconferences, and finally declare it a done deal. I must anticipate the facts and call it a success, as it clearly will be recognized as such. One of the most visible although we insist, not the core activities of the Encounter are the videoconferences. They are certainly among the most complex. And the videoconferences' value is greatly enhanced because, even if they are naturally a synchronous activity (it takes place at a given point in time), they live on after they are held: I do my best effort to publish them as soon as possible (less than one day off), and they are posted to their node, from where comments can continue. This was the reason, i.e., why we decided to move at the last minute tomorrow's conference: Due to a misunderstanding, Beatriz Busaniche (a good friend of ours and a very reknown Argentinian Free Software promotor, from Via Libre) thought her talk would be held today, and we had programmed her for tomorrow. No worries - We held it today, and it is already online for whoever wants to take part :-) So, I don't want to hold this any longer (I will link to the two conferences that I'm still missing from this same entry). Here is the list of (and links to) videoconferences we have held.

Tuesday 2009-11-17

• Debian-Women, by Margarita Manterola (Buenos Aires, Argentina) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• Personal networks, by Isidro Maya Jariego (Sevilla, Spain) (.ogg file, IRC log)

Wednesday 2009-11-18

• Social networks, by Sof a Liberman Shklonikoff (Mexico City, Mexico) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• Open Social Education, by Dolors Reig Hern ndez (Barcelona, Spain) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)

Thursday 2009-11-19

• Politics 2.0, by Txopi, Bilbao, Basque Country (ODP presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• OpenSocial, by Rodrigo Gallardo (Portland, USA) (.ogg file, IRC log)
• Informatic analfabetization, or why does privative software work towards analfabetization? (.ogg file, IRC log)

Friday 2009-11-20

• Education and cognition from Free Software, by Offray Luna (Bogot , Colombia)< (PDF material, .ogg file, IRC log)/li>
• EDUSOL's state / EDUSOL projects, by the EDUSOL organizer team (which attempts to be distributed ;-) )

As two last notes: Regarding the IRC interaction photos I recently talked about, we did a very kewl thing: Take over 2000 consecutive photos and put them together on a stack. Flip them one at a time. What do you get? But of course A very fun to view and interesting interaction video! We have to hand-update it and it is a bit old right now, but nevertheless, it is very interesting as it is. Finally... I must publicly say I can be quite an asshole. And yes, I know I talked this over privately with the affected people and they hold no grudge against me... But still - yesterday we had an IRC talk about NING Latin American Moodlers, by Luc a Osuna (Venezuela) and Maryel Mendiola (Mexico). One of the points they raised was they were working towards (and promoting) a Moodle certification. And... Yes, I recognize I cannot hear the mention of the certification word without jumping and saying certifications are overrated. Well, but being tired, and not being really thoughtful... I should have known where to stop, where it was enough of a point made. I ended up making Maryel and Luc a feel attacked during their own presentation, and that should have never happened. A public and heartfelt apology to them :-(

37 years since I first heard Peter Gabriel's voice (Genesis' Nursey Crime, one of the first LP I ever bought) and about 34 since I first saw him on stage in what turned out to be Genesis' last show in France (St-Etienne, my home city, may 1975). Since then, I tried to keep up with PG's appearances here and there and he has always been my favourite artist. So, if any of this blog's readers happen to be in Latin America and enjoy PG's music, just try to go there:

• March 20 Lima, Peru / Esplanada Del Monumental
• March 22 Buenos Aires, Argentina / Estadio Velez Sarsfield
• March 24 Santiago, Chile / Arena Santiago
• March 27 Mexico City / Distrito Federal
• March 29 Guadalajara, Mexico / Jalisco
• March 31 Monterrey, Mexico / Nuevo Leon

Gunnar, I fully agree with your post.
Ghandi said that poverty is the most extreme form of violence.
I took this picture in Buenos Aires:



Hunger is a crime

When Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, he probably didn t expect the rise of the cellphones we ve been seeing over the last 20 years. At first, there were C-net phone too huge to carry, but mobile still, as they communicated wireless. Then, devices became smaller, networks faster and ubiquitous, and today, the number of cellphones sold worldwide has exceeded the population. Much like everything else, it used to be better back then . When phone calls were still ridiculously expensive, people were able to enjoy their peace and life progressed slow for everyone to think enough, not do or say without engaging their brains. Then, when the first cellphones stuffed people s pockets, they did their job pretty much from the start: you could make phone calls. Some genius discovered SMS as a splendid tool to rip off customers, so phones grew pager abilities, but other than that, they just worked; I remember my first phone, which didn t break in years. Obviously, if you re a phone manufacturer, you don t like that, because once you sell a phone that works, the customer won t come back to give more monies in ten years. Clever as you are, you devised two schemes to ensure your cash flow: make phones more brittle and crap, so that they break within a year, at most two; and drag ever younger people into the debt trap. For the truly stupid, sites and services offer ring tones and games and what not, and the lesser challenged you keep close by the continuous addition of new features that noone needs. So these days, almost every phone can play music files, which is mighty convenient to spice up your work commute with some tunes, but our youngsters are overburdened by that, it seems. I almost soiled myself laughing at a group of five Italians at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, who were sitting around waiting for a bus, every one of them ear plugged and grooving to the beats (you know how dorky it looks when people silently sing along rap songs?). That s not the funny part. The funny part is that every minute, one of them would say something, which would cause the others to unplug one ear, and form their lips to bleat what (making sure to add just a little bit extra of the tone of general disinterest, which is cool ). This elicited one of two responses: either the original speaker would say oh, nothing and everyone nodded, or he d repeat his wisdom, causing everyone to laugh and nod before in both cases they replugged and returned to luff themselves. I wonder how they made it to the airport themselves, and why they travel as a group. Worse than that, however, is that cellphone manufacturers remembered that their phones had speakers (for fancy ringtones) and consequently added the ability to blast tunes through them. As a result, groups of kiddies walk around or sit in trains, with one (or more) of those cellphones blaring into the environment. Apart from being generally inconsiderate, what I don t understand is how they put up with the sound quality. It s mostly hip-hop music you know that genre that makes some homies out there install 5000 watt subwoofers into their cars so make sure the windows rattle with the base but these phones have a frequency spectrum comparable in width to that of your grandfather s, way further up the scale (meaning they just don t do base). Playing hip-hop through those is like putting a flute concerto on a subwoofer, just worse, because high-pitch tones are harder to filter by those who don t want to hear them. And yet, I see it all over the place, kiddies listening to music through cellphone speakers. Is it because silence would kill them? NP: 65daysofstatic: The Fall of Math

Sorry, ever since Debconf I've been busy, ill and otherwise distracted. I'm still catching up... Stuff that's happened: Dude, you're married! For the second year running, I had to leave Debconf a day early to attend a wedding party. My good friend Matthew married Oxana last Monday. I've just put my photos of the happy event online today. After a successful Debconf where I managed to evade the normal plague, it hit hard on the Tuesday morning and I've been struggling with it ever since. Just about over it now, but I've been feeling crap for over a week. On the way to Buenos Aires to catch my flight back to England, I received a text message telling me the sad news that my uncle, John Bolton had passed away. This means that the eldest two of my mum's three brothers have died this year, in the space of just a few months, and it's been a very hard time for the family. The funeral happened earlier this week, so I was away and mostly off-line for a couple of days travelling there and back. I'm trying to get back up to speed on a whole host of different things at the moment; if you're waiting on a response from me about Debian-related stuff, please feel free to prod me via email or IRC.

As I start this blog post, I'm on the train between Amersfoort and Osnabr ck, on my way to Kiel, where there'll be a meeting of the m68k porters, kindly organized by m68k kernel maintainer Christian Steigies. I took the 8:40 train in Mechelen this morning, and if all goes well, I'll be arriving in Kiel at 17:22 tonight. Some train trip... but I certainly prefer that to any flight. Anyway. The days of Debconf were very nice. Debconf is a lot of things to me. Travel. Hacking. Mao, evolving into a drinking game. Beer. Attending talks. Giving talks. Meeting people. Face-to-face non-flaming. Gesturing for an extra knife at luunch. Hangover. Whiskey. Talking to the person next to you—over IRC. Getting killed before knowing what the rules of the assassins game are. Filing bugreports in person. Pictures. Kilts. Streaming video. Not being sick, hopefully. Name badges. Flying. Sleeping. Yes, sleeping. Most of all, though, this year, Debconf was just great. Thanks. You know who you are. After debconf, I flew to Buenos Aires, where I slept for one night in a Youth Hostel somewhere downtown. They were affordable, but the bed wasn't great—the mattress sorely needed replacement. Since I had a day in BA, and since there were apparently not enough people on the schedule, I'd agreed to hold a talk, and came up with the idea of a 'debian secrets' talk—about Debian-specific commands, such as dpkg-divert and update-alternatives etc—so that people could learn how to use their Debian system more efficiently. As I was sitting in Andreas' talk, who was right before me on the schedule, suddenly Dag walked up to me and said hi. This was unexpected; Dag is a fellow Belgian, who's involved with the CentOS project, and who maintains a positively huge RPM repository at his site—if you maintain an RPM-based system somewhere, you'll probably know about that site. So while I recognized him, I immediately wondered what he was doing there. Turned out he was invited to hold a talk at the Free Software event to which Debianday was attached (and which would not start for another day or two), and that when he saw my name on the schedule, he decided to attend. Fun. He learned a thing or two from my talk, and was talking later about writing some tools for RPM-based systems that would perform the same or similar functionality implemented by some of the Debian tools I talked about. Great. We had a picture together (in front of the DebConf banner—hah) that I still should upload, and then went out for lunch together with some other CentOS guys. The talk itself seems to have been well-received, and I'm glad about that; I only gave it because there was a need for more talks, not because I felt confident I was very knowledgeable about that subject. In fact, I did have to ask on the debconf-discuss mailinglist for some input (which I received) so that I could make sure the talk would actually be useful to people. That helped a lot, I guess. After that, we played some mao in the lobby of the DebianDay venue. While doing so, I overheard Dag talking about CentOS, advocating it to some of the people there, which I must say felt pretty weird on a Debian event. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course. Except that Dag was supposed to be writing his talk slides. How did that work out, Dag? ;-) Eventually, I got in a cab to the EZE airport, and flew home. That wasn't fully without issue, but I did get there. And now, I've been, eh, overloaded. Still have to follow up on a question a customer asked me, but I've barely been home or at the office, just enough to sleep really. Should do something about that, I guess... Two days ago, I also managed to forget my camera somewhere. For 12 hours, I was worried, even though I had a pretty good idea of where it was; but since I'm getting quite good at taking pictures now, and since I really like doing so as well, I really didn't want to lose my camera. Fortunately, when I called this morning to the place where I thought I'd lost it, they told me it'd been found, and where to get it. In other words, it's safe, it's taken care of, Philip went to get it, and I just need to arrange to get it when I get back. Which is a relief. Let's not be so stupid anymore in the future... Finishing up now, a day later, and I'm at Christian's office, playing with his and my coldfire board. As it happens, it appears that Freescale has brought out a new BSP for these boards, so that's nice. Let's see whether we can get those to boot again...

I'm back (for several days now) from Argentina and DebConf 8 to Portland. Too long a journey and too short a trip, as always. It was great to see everybody again as well as to meet a number of new folks from the local community. Here's hoping that DebConf 8 inspires more involvement in Debian from Argentina! It was my first time to this wonderful South American country, which made it even more melancholy to have to leave after such a short time and to be making this trip without Patty. Random observations about Argentina, for posterity:

• The 6-hour bus ride from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata looks an awful lot like Iowa. Except for the occasional palm tree and the fact that it's 20 C in winter.
• Well, ok... Iowa also tends not to have quite so many cows. Or country grills (parrillas) right next to pastures...
• All the towns along the route are named after generals or colonels?
• All the police on the highway wear OSHA green vests.
• Following the German with the voluminous guidebook is an effective way to acquire generous portions of bife de chorizo.
• People from Bah a Blanca seem to have a somewhat more paranoid opinion of what constitutes a "dangerous neighborhood" than I do. :)
• "Buenos Aires" appears, I'm sad to say, to be a marketing lie. There was nothing bueno about the aire on the autopista on the ride to the airport. But the air in Mar del Plata was quite nice, and the people were the best!

As always it was a pleasure to take part in another annual DebConf, an event which is such a positive force for rejuvenating the Debian community. And BTW, Biella, NYC is not the only US city entertaining a bid for DebConf 10.

Some interesting two days have just passed. I took the airplane from Mar del Plata to Buenos Aires on the 17th, slept one night in a hostel on a mattress that felt like stone, and went to the 'Circulo del Officieles de la Mar' (or some such, I don't know spanish) where I had to give a talk. The oral feedback I've gotten so far indicates that people did appreciate it, which is good. I had originally planned to do some sightseeing in Buenos Aires after my talk, but me being tired and not immediately finding anyone else to go with me changed those plans. Instead, I just stayed at the C.O.M., where we played some Mao. Amongst other things. About an hour before I left the place, Holger Levsen gave me a tripod, with the request to take it with me to Belgium, and keep it until FOSDEM. As that would also give me the use of an tripod, and being the photography hobbyist that I am, I was too happy to oblige. There was just one problem: the suitcase that contained my luggage already had a bulge from here to tokio, so adding it was a no-no. No problem, I thought. I'll just keep it in my carry-on luggage. There's some space left there, and I certainly didn't have 5kg of carry-on luggage yet. Problem solved. The 'security' in EZE is a joke; the security officer doesn't even look at the screen while X-raying my luggage. Well done. So I fly from EZE to MAD on the first, 11-and-a-half-hour leg of my flight. Madrid Barajas is a crazy airport, with its own private metro. Somewhere between gates R-something (where IB6844 from EZE arrived) and J40 (where the flight to BRU will depart from), we need to go through a security checkpoint. Strange, since I hadn't had to do that on my way in from BRU to EZE; but of course you have no choice, so I comply. As I've gotten used to by now, what with the mess of cabling in my laptop bag and the other metal objects there, I get a baggage check. The security officer who goes through my very messy bag asks me to open the bag containing the tripod, so he can see it. He then promptly decides that it is a "sharp" object, and that it is "not acceptible". Here the fun begins. Of course, trying to argue with a security guard isn't the best idea if you want to be allowed on any flight, ever, so I don't even try that. I ask him 'can I check that in, instead?' and he tells me how to go back, to the exit, and to the departures hall where I can have that little tripod get checked in. So I go there. The lady at the check-in desk tells me that she cannot check the tripod in, because the flight has already been closed and I'm too late. I tell her I'm from a connecting flight, and that I can't help that. She says she knows. So I ask her what my other options are. She tells me I could try to get on the next flight to Brussels, which is at 20:00 (rather than the 16:20 flight that I was booked on). I consider that an acceptable compromise, so ask her how to get that done, and she refers me to the ticket sales desk, some 10 meters to my left. Unfortunately, the 20:00 flight turns out to be completely booked, and there are no other flights on the same day. The best alternative he can give me is a flight to Amsterdam at 19:20, which would cost 'a little more'. I ask him 'how much more'. He starts looking up things in his computer, and after a few minutes tells me that he cannot refund my ticket for the 16:20 flight and that a flight to amsterdam would cost me 429. At this point I get somewhat angry, and tell him that this is not acceptable. He refers me to the customer service desk right across. The lady at the customer service desk is friendly, but firm: she cannot help me. Either I leave the tripod behind, or I pay whatever the ticket service asks me—she takes my word that it is 429, because she cannot check it, and cannot change it, either. I get more agitated, and ask to see the supervisor. She points me to a lady a little across who can 'call' the supervisor. At this point it is 15:55 As I reach that lady, apparently someone else had just asked for the same thing, and starts arguing with a guy in black uniform, who appears to be the supervisor, about the fact that he's got more than 30kg of luggage which he isn't allowed to take along with him. Dude, not a single airline will let you do that, no matter how much you argue. I let them argue for about 10 minutes, all the while nervously looking at my watch, but then I interrupt with 'please, I don't have much time left before my flight leaves'. That gets his attention. In our two-minute conversation, the guy in black backs up everything the other three people have told me, adding that '429 is reasonable; your luggage is already on the flight, and it will cost Iberia a lot of money to delay the flight and get it off'. I curse. He also seems surprised at the notion that I'm not allowed to take a tripod in my carry-on luggage. Hmm. Figuring I have nothing to loose, I curse one more time, and make a run for it. When I reach the security checkpoint, I ask to be allowed to skip the queue in front of it, on the grounds that I have only 15 minutes left before my flight leaves. Mind you, this is not the same security checkpoint as the one where I was rejected about an hour earlier; this is the security checkpoint between the departures hall and the secure area, whereas the other security checkpoint was one between two different terminals. I am granted my request, and quickly throw everything in the X-ray boxes. They need to go through my bag again. I help them, showing where everything conspicuous is, and opening my flute box so they know what's in there. He looks at everything, and signals that I can move on. Hang on, I think. This can't be right. 'Okay,' I ask? 'Yes,' he says. I run for the nearest info desk, show them my boarding pass, and tell them 'please, my flight leaves in 10 minutes, can you tell me where to go?' They are quick and efficient. Gate J40. I make a run for it again, and just make it in time. Of course, I could forget about my plans of finding a power outlet, plugging in my cell phone and calling my parents, but that's not a big deal—there's a train station at Brussels Airport. So what have we learned? Security on airports is random, arbitrary, non-standardized, and utterly stupid. Items that pose no danger at all—plastic bottles containing more than 100ml of water, small quantities of yoghurt that are over 100grammes but not over 100ml, tripods—are not allowed, while on the other hand I've occasionally gotten through security carrying knives and tools that are clearly forbidden by the rules. We've also learned that the rules very much depend on the particular person checking you. If you're refused for an item that is not a knife or a gun or something else similarly problematic, it may help to just find a different security checkpoint and try again. It's not as if they make any sense, anyway.

Me and Ail arrived at Buenos Aires on saturday. A member of the local team was waiting for people at Ezeiza, and we gave away our 2130 bus reservations in order to take a combi to Mar del Plata with Clint, four fellow german debianites and some venezuelans. The trip was quite long, around six hours IIRC. We arrived in the early morning, and slept past noon. I have no words to describe my particular experience with this year’s conference, but I do agree with our DPL: this has been the best DebConf I’ve ever attended. In general, the Annual Debian Conference is one of the most attractive events for me, since it provides us with the opportunity to share and define a little bit of the future of the universal operating system. I use, develop for and work with this operating system, so there’s the importance of this conference for me. That said, DebConf is a unique event. Some people that I know back in Venezuela are used to a different, more academic style of event, which features a tight schedule and no specific provision of group networking. They are not used to an event like DebConf, and when they attend it they feel they’ve lost their time in an event they don’t understand. And they ask for a participation certificate :) In that respect, besides the very interesting talks and events in the conference, DebConf offers an excellent opportunity for group development and general networking. On the other hand, both the local team and the venue have striked me in many good ways. I’m aware of LatAm limitations for some of the particularities of DebConf such as connectivity, provision for special food needs, special usage of the venue and general receptivity for a bunch of 24/7 geeks. The local team has made a huge effort putting this together in such a special and organized way. I don’t think the Venezuelan DC8 Bid would have made this much success in the same timeframe. Congratulations, Argentina! We will leave Mar del Plata on saturday (at 2200) and then we will spend some more days in Buenos Aires, particularly to attend Debian Day, where I’ll be giving a talk in spanish. Therefore, we’ll be writing a little more (in spanish) about Argentina later, since we loved our time in this country.

DebCamp8, shakiness, planes, python-debian Well, not unexpected news, but since I've been rather quite lately it is worth reminding that I'm now at DebConf8, enjoying the DebCamp. I've arrived today after a quite long trip made of unexpected extra plane stops in Madrid (thanks Iberia for not declaring it and letting me ponder about how can it possibly take 16 hours from Barcelona to Buenos Aires, now I know the reason ...) and shaky bus hours. First tiny teeny achievement of DebCamp (among a handful of beers already) is an upload of python-debian 0.1.11, implementing among other things support for parsed dependencies and a major overhaul changelog parsing (thanks to James Westby). Unfortunately we are going to miss Lenny with this release, but after all it is a package mostly meant for Debian Developers, so it is probably not a big deal.

Sure, that sounds fairly formal to send a report for holidays, doesn't it? Anyway, as I have a few (often Debian/FLOSS related) friends around the world who are reading my blog entries, this might interest them so that's indeed a report..:-)...and I have time for it, so... I'm currently going back from Cahors to Maurepas (home), on my way to Debconf. We spent 10 days in Cahors with Elizabeth and the girls, finally joined by Jean-Baptiste on Sunday. We had great time over there, enjoying the richness of Quercy:

• heat (I need that before MDQ winter)
• nice running spots: for once, I could run by starting from the bottom of hills, climbing *up* and finishing down. I ran a lot, sometimes on very hard tours such as 18km with 300m positive height difference. I also did a few "fast" runs ("fast" here would make a few Debian friends laugh a lot, isn't it Ralf, Dirk.....)
• medieval architecture in Gourdon, Martel, St-Cirq Lapopie, Cahors...
• peace of the Lot valley
• Cahors wine: strong and tasty, of course
• Rocamadour and Trappe d'Echourgnac cheese (I won't bring Rocamadour at Debconf as it wouldn't survive)
• rest, sleep
• McDonald's parking lot for network connectivity
• very little hacking

So, I'm now heading back home, assemble stuff and will take off for Debconf on Thursday 7th (Paris Orly to Madrid, then Buenos Aires via Air Europa: IIRC nobody from Debconf is in the same flight). "Assemble stuff" here also means collecting cheese for the now famous Debconf Cheese&Wine party. That one will be tricky to achieve as most of us are coming from quite far away and...there are only 6 French citizens who attend DC8..:-)). Anyway, I already know that my fellow Nicolas Fran ois (namely nominated as Assistance CheeseMaster recently) will bring some good stuff. I haven't decided yet what to bring. I might be influenced by my holidays, so cheeses from South-West France are highly probable. Cahors wine will be the choice (prepare yourself: that is strong stuff). At Debconf itself, we'll have a quite busy schedule. I intend to mostly work along with Felipe, Nicolas, Grisu and others on i18n.debian.net. I'll have to animate the i18n sessions for which I want to prepare some schedule instead of just "lat's gather and talk" which didn't work so well last year, IMHO. And I have that bloody keynote lecture which, BTW, could be rescheduled if I properly read debconf-discuss as, finally 9am for keynotes seems to be considered too early for the late birds at DC8...:-)... We'll see: I will certainly have something that's not very well cooked and prepared. Expect some improvisation: this year I didn't want to stress myself with a talk, slides and blahblah. Elizabeth will come back from Cahors on Saturday with the kids. She'll have a holiday week at her father's place whil ethe kids will....do their stuff at Maurepas (this is what happens when kids are grown up). We'll gather together again on Aug 18th and I go back to work on 19th. Crazy, I know but I have a very busy and full work schedule for the upcoming next 2 months. September will be a hard time to go through: Jean-Baptiste will start his "Licence Profesionnelle" in Automated and Embarked Systems. He'll do it in shared time: half-time at university for classes and half-time working in a company (which turns out to be Essilor, the world leader for progressive glasses....and the company which Elizabeth is working for). He'll stay at my sister-in-law place during the week (30km away from our place but closer from university and work). Sophie, our 18-year old daughter, will spend the year in Toulouse, to prepare the admission in a Social Workers school. She'll have her own apartment, in the very center of the city, 20 meters away from Place du Capitole. Annoying, isn't it ? :-) So, we'll mostly stay with our "little" Magali, our 16 y.o. who will be attending High School, on her way to Baccalaur at. Tell us about shrinking families.... Now time to work on some slides for the Debconf keynote. Damn.

After a night at Tinchos place, then driving and walking around Buenos Aires a day and finally taking a 5hours bus trip, Mark, Stephen and I arrived in Mar del Plata early this morning, at around 05:30AM. Brr, early. We could checkin to the Hotel at 06:30. During checkin we discovered that Stephen and my birthday are, in absolute numbers, 6 years, 6 months and 6 days apart, ie. 666. And we are managing the evil, I mean, the network for DebConf. HA. HAHA. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ignoring that - stuff looks pretty nice over here. Most machines are working, most services we (as in admins, not video team) care about are setup or will be ready within the next 2 days, the Hotel stuff is doing the last preparations, it all looks great. There hasn’t been a DebConf that was that prepared, ever. We currently have a local smtp server accessible for everyone here (no direct outgoing smtp, we firewall that), a local OFTC IRC Server (Freenode IRCd is in setup), soon a full (pushed) mirror, preparing an upload queue for ftp-master, a schedule announce bot is also ready to run, most of the building has good wireless covering (and the rest is scheduled to get better soon). And lots of other nice things that are surely there and I just forgot to mention but which we will mention in some wiki page in time for you. (Oh, and make sure to listen to what DHCP tells your machine, all the various services get send to you :) ). Comments: 0

Finally got my shit together and got a flight to Argentina for DebConf! Perth -> Sydney -> Auckland -> Buenos Aires -> Mar del Plata. That is quite a bit of flying and a long bus trip ending quite early on the 4th. It will definitely be worth it if DebConf7 was anything to go on. Hopefully by DebConf I can get my hands on an OpenMoko FreeRunner to do some Debian porting work during DebCamp and possibly mapping out the streets of Mar del Plata for OpenStreetMap. Of course I need to work on completing analysis of the results of the Debian user and new contributor surveys and figure out what to say about synfig if I get the chance to do a lightning talk about it. /me now officially excited

This year, DebianDay will take place in Buenos Aires, on Monday August 18th, the day after DebConf ends. We are still in need of talks for DebianDay, so, if you are coming to DebConf and you’ll be staying a few more days in Argentina after the conference, you are invited to give a talk on whatever you want as long as it’s Debian related. Some suggestions for talk subjects for DebianDay:

• Debian in Latin America
• Internationalization in Debian
• How to help Debian
• Debian Live
• Making a Debian derivative distribution
• Packaging for Debian
• … And anything else you feel might be interesting to people who are not DDs, but are interested in Debian.

We are planning on having two tracks, one for newbies and one for advanced talks; talks in Spanish are welcome, but don’t worry if you don’t speak the language, for talks in English, we will probably have a translator. To submit a talk, just log in to your DebConf account and click in the “New event/Paper” link.

This will be my first DebConf ever and I'm excited. I just booked my flights together with nomeata:

2008-08-03: Frankfurt (10:20) -> Buenos Aires (19:05) [LH510]
2008-08-03/04: Buenos Aires (21:30) -> Mar del Plata (3:20) [Bus]
2008-08-17: Mar del Plata (12:00) -> Buenos Aires (18:00) [Bus]
2008-08-18: Buenos Aires (20:55) -> Frankfurt (15:00) [LH511]

Okay, I will again miss DebConf. This time it is not because of time, but because of money. The flight to Buenos Aires is far too expensive to go there just for DebConf and I didn't manage to plan some more travelling around South America... Hopefully it will get better next year, at least DebConf will be much closer :-). PS: Just after deadline for confirmation and my decision for not going there, I got an email that my sponsorship for travel was approved. Unfortunately too late to change my decision.

Yes, me too. I actually booked a while ago, but never got around to blogging about it. Oh well. In case you care, my flights:

 BRUSSELS        IB 3207 L  02AUG 0755  LHPX2MBE            23AUG 2PC OK
 MADRID BARAJAS                   ARRIVAL TIME: 1010
 TERMINAL:4
 MADRID BARAJAS  IB 6845 L  02AUG 1225  LHPX2MBE            23AUG 2PC OK
 TERMINAL:4S
 BUENOS AIRES EZ                  ARRIVAL TIME: 1940
 BUENOS AIRES EZ IB 6844 N  18AUG 2145  NPRO21BE      09AUG 23AUG 2PC OK
 MADRID BARAJAS                   ARRIVAL TIME: 1430
 TERMINAL:4S
 MADRID BARAJAS  IB 3214 N  19AUG 1620  NPRO21BE      09AUG 23AUG 2PC OK
 TERMINAL:4
 BRUSSELS                         ARRIVAL TIME: 1835

Now most people will be taking the bus from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata, where Debconf8 will be. However after looking at a map of Argentina, and remembering what happened when I flew to Australia with the flute choir back in 2001, when we had to do a bus ride after landing, I decided against doing the bus thing this time around. So:

 BUENOS AIRES AE AR 1626 V  03AUG 2000  VVD                       15K OK
 MAR DEL PLATA                    ARRIVAL TIME: 2055
 MAR DEL PLATA   AR 1627 V  17AUG 2120  VVD                       15K OK
 BUENOS AIRES AE                  ARRIVAL TIME: 2215

Which means I'll have a night in Buenos Aires in both cases, to rest and to avoid having to do the bus trip. And perhaps to see the city, too. All that's left now is not to forget about the passport thing. I'm sure I'll manage.