Notice: There were several requests for me to more elaborate on my path to Debian and impact on life so here it is. It's going to be a bit long so anyone who isn't interested in my personal Debian journey should skip it. :) In 2007. I enrolled into Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (at first at Department of Industrial Management and later transfered to Department of Mechatronics - this was possible because first 3 semesters are same for both departments). By the end of same year I was finishing my tasks (consisting primarily of calculations, some small graphical designs and write-ups) when famous virus, called by users "RECYCLER", sent my Windows XP machine into oblivion. Not only it took control over machine and just spawned so many processes that system would crash itself, it actually deleted all from hard-disk before it killed the system entirely. I raged - my month old work, full of precise calculations and a lot of design details, was just gone. I started cursing which was always continued with weeping: "Why isn't there an OS that can whithstand all of viruses, even if it looks like old DOS!". At that time, my roommate was my cousin who had used Kubuntu in past and currently was having SUSE dual-booted on his laptop. He called me over, started talking about this thing called Linux and how it's different but de facto has no viruses. Well, show me this Linux and my thought was, it's probably so ancient and not used that it probably looks like from pre Windows 3.1 era, but when SUSE booted up it had so much more beautiful UI look (it was KDE, and compared to XP it looked like the most professional OS ever). So I was thrilled, installed openSUSE, found some rough edges (I knew immediately that my work with professional CAD systems will not be possible on Linux machines) but overall I was bought. After that he even talked to me about distros. Wait, WTF distros?! So, he showed me distrowatch.com. I was amazed. There is not only a better OS then Windows - there where dozens, hundreds of them. After some poking around I installed Debian KDE - and it felt great, working better then openSUSE but now I was as most newbies, on fire to try more distros. So I was going around with Fedora, Mandriva, CentOS, Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS and in beginning of 2008 I stumbled upon Debian docs which where talking about GNU and GNU Manifesto. To be clear, I was always as a high-school kid very much attached to idea of freedom but started loosing faith by faculty time (Internet was still not taking too much of time here, youth still spent most of the day outside). So the GNU Manifesto was really a big thing for me and Debian is a social bastion of freedom. Debian (now with GNOME2) was being installed on my machine. As all that hackerdom in Debian was around I started trying to dig up some code. I never ever read a book on coding (until this day I still didn't start and finish one) so after a few days I decided to code tetris in C++ with thought that I will finish it in two days at most (the feeling that you are powerful and very bright person) - I ended it after one month in much pain. So instead I learned about keeping Debian system going on, and exploring some new packages. I got thrilled over radiotray, slimvolley (even held a tournament in my dorm room), started helping on #debian, was very active in conversation with others about Debian and even installed it on few laptops (I became de facto technical support for users of those laptops :D ). Then came 2010 which with negative flow that came in second half of 2009, started to crush me badly. I was promised to go to Norway, getting my studies on robotics and professor lied (that same professor is still on faculty even after he was caught in big corruption scandal over buying robots - he bought 15 years old robots from UK, although he got money from Norway to buy new ones). My relationship came to hard end and had big emotional impact on me. I fell a year on faculty. My father stopped financing me and stopped talking to me. My depression came back. Alcohol took over me. I was drunk every day just not to feel anything. Then came the end of 2010, I somehow got to the information that DebConf will be in Banja Luka. WHAT?! DebConf in city where I live. I got into #debconf and in December 2010/January 2011 I became part of the famous "local local organizers". I was still getting hammered by alcohol but at least I was getting out of depression. IIRC I met Holger and Moray in May, had a great day (a drop of rakia that was too much for all of us) and by their way of behaving there was something strange. Beatiful but strange. Both were sending unique energy of liberty although I am not sure they were aware of it. Later, during DebConf I felt that energy from almost all Debian people, which I can't explain. I don't feel it today - not because it's not there, it's because I think I integrated so much into Debian community that it's now a natural feeling which people here, that are close to me are saying that they feel it when I talk about Debian. DebConf time in Banja Luka was awesome - firstly I met Phil Hands and Andrew McMillan which were a crazy team, local local team was working hard (I even threw up during the work in Banski Dvor because of all heat and probably not much of sleep due to excitement), met also crazy Mexican Gunnar (aren't all Mexicans crazy?), played Mao (never again, thank you), was hanging around smart but crazy people (love all) from which I must notice Nattie (a bastion of positive energy), Christian Perrier (which had coordinated our Serbian translation effort), Steve Langasek (which asked me to find physiotherapist for his co-worker Mathias Klose, IIRC), Zach (not at all important guy at that time), Luca Capello (who gifted me a swirl on my birthday) and so many others that this would be a post for itself just naming them. During DebConf it was also a bit of hard time - my grandfather died on 6th July and I couldn't attend the funeral so I was still having that sadness in my heart, and Darjan Prtic, a local team member that came from Vienna, committed suicide on my birthday (23 July). But DebConf as conference was great, but more importantly the Debian community felt like a family and Meike Reichle told me that it was. The night it finished, me and Vedran Novakovic cried. A lot. Even days after, I was getting up in the morning having the feeling I need something to do for DebConf. After a long time I felt alive. By the end of year, I adopted package from Clint Adams and Moray became my sponsor. In last quarter of 2011 and beginning of 2012, I (as part of LUG) held talks about Linux, had Linux installation in Computer Center for the first time ever, and installed Debian on more machines. Now fast forwarding with some details - I was also on DebConf13 in Switzerland, met some great new friends such as Tincho and Santiago (and many many more), Santiago was also my roommate in Portland on the previous DebConf. In Switzerland I had really great and awesome time. Year 2014 - I was also at DebConf14, maintain a bit more packages and have applied for DD, met some new friends among which I must put out Apollon Oikonomopoulos and Costas Drogos which friendship is already deep for such a short time and I already know that they are life-long friends. Also thanks to Steve Langasek, because without his help I wouldn't be in Portland with my family and he also gave me Arduino. :) 2015. - I am currently at my village residence, have a 5 years of working experince as developer due to Debian and still a lot to go, learn and do but my love towards Debian community is by magnitude bigger then when I thought I love it at most. I am also going through my personal evolution and people from Debian showed me to fight for what you care, so I plan to do so. I can't write all and name all the people that I met, and believe me when I say that I remember most and all of you impacted my life for which I am eternally grateful. Debian, and it's community effect literally saved my life, spring new energy into me and changed me for better. Debian social impact is far bigger then technical, and when you know that Debian is a bastion of technical excellence - you can maybe picture the greatness of Debian. Some of greatest minds are in Debian but most important isn't the sheer amount of knowledge but the enormous empathy. I just hope I can in future show to more people what Debian is and to find all lost souls as me to give them the hope, to show them that we can make world a better place and that everyone is capable to live and do what they love. P.S. I am still hoping and waiting to see Bdale writing a book about Debian's history to this day - in which I think many of us would admire the work done by project members, laugh about many situations and have fun reading a book about project that was having nothing to do but fail and yet it stands stronger then ever with roots deep into our minds.

in a random disorder:

As I write this, DebConf12 has actually been over for more than a week. Usually during DebConf, I'm a more proficient blogger than during other times of the year, since I'm not doing as much work that I have to remain quiet about at that time, which simply means I have more to blog about. Unfortunately, however, this year the server on which this blog runs managed to become unavailable on the second day of DebCamp, an issue that I could only fix once I was back in Belgium, which meant I haven't been able to blog as much as I would've wanted to. Anyway, all I can say is that both DebConf and DebCamp have been a huge success for me again, this year. I'd started the second rewrite of ipcfg a few weeks before DebCamp, and spent most of DebCamp whipping the basic framework into shape. It's nowhere near ready yet, but I'm confident it'll get further this time than it did before. During DebConf, I was also responsible for doing the group photo. I'd done that (together with Andrew McMillan) during DebConf8 before (if you look closely, you'll see me pressing the remote which actually triggers that picture), and I still like that picture. This time around, we didn't have a beach nearby (at least not as nearby as during DebConf8), so we had to do things slightly differently. Rather than doing one large picture, I took several pictures and used Hugin to stitch them together. Unfortunately however, some things did go wrong with the group photo. For starters, the weather wasn't very helpful, in that I noticed it was about to rain. As such, the main bunch of pictures were taken slightly before the announced time of 14:30, which meant that some people had missed it. To make matters worse, I had rushed to the group and handed the camera to someone else, so that I could gimp myself onto the picture too; but that meant that some people who were arriving as these pictures were being taken thought they were on the picture, when they really weren't. I've fixed most of these by just gimping them into the picture as well, but I might've missed some of them. If you're one of them, talk to me! Preferably now. If you're not one of them (or even if you are), hold off on doing things like printing it in large format or some such. I'll re-upload improved versions onto the same location once they're ready.

I met Francesca in Debconf 11 in Banja Luka. If I recall correctly, it s Enrico Zini who introduced me to her, because she was the madamezou (her IRC nickname) who started to get involved in the publicity team. Since then and despite having a bachelor thesis to complete she got way more involved and even gained official responsibilities in the project. Before starting with the interview, I wanted to mention that Francesca is drafting a diversity statement for Debian I was expecting the discussions to go nowhere but she listened to all objections and managed to improve the text and build a consensus around it. Thank you for this and keep up the good work, Francesca! Rapha l: Who are you? Francesca: My name is Francesca, I m 30 and I studied Social Sciences. Currently I live in Italy but I m planning to go abroad (not a lot of jobs here for geeky social scientists). Apart for Debian and FLOSS world in general, I have unrestrained passions for chocolate; zombie movies; sci-fi; zombie books; knitting sewing crafting and DIY in general; zombie videogames; bicycles; pulling apart objects to look inside them; splatter B movies, David Foster Wallace s books, playing trumpet, and did I already mentioned zombies? Days are too short for all this stuff, but I try to do my best. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Francesca: Some years ago I was stuck in bed for literally some months, due to a grave series of migraine attacks. I wasn t able to do anything: no social life, no books or television. So, I decided to turn on the laptop and do something constructive with it: I was already a Debian user and it seemed quite logical to me to try to give back to the community. I am not a coder and I ve not studied Computer Science, so my first step was to join an Italian Debian on-line community (Debianizzati) and help with tutorials, users support, wiki management. In a couple of months I learnt many things: helping other users with their problems forces you to do lots of research! My first contributions to the Debian project were mostly translations of the main website. Translators are the perfect typos spotters: they work so precisely on the text to be translated that they finish to do a great QA job. This is how I ve started to contribute to the Debian website: with very simple things, fixing typos or wrong links or misplaced wml tags. I still remember my first commit to the website: the idea was to undercase some tags, but it ended up that I misplaced some of them and in addition I fixed them only in the English page and not on the translations as well. When after a couple of minutes, K re Thor Olsen a long time contributor of the team and now webmaster reverted my commit, I felt so stupid and full of shame. But, to my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error: Gerfried Fuchs, one of the guru of the team, replies me in a really helpful and polite way explaining what I did wrong and how to do things correctly. I think this episode was a turning point in my Debian life: there s this idea that Debian Developers are just a bunch of arrogant assholes and maybe it was true in the past, but for my experience they are not. Well, at least the ones I met and work with .

To my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error.

Since then, I joined the WWW team and helped them apply the shiny new design provided by Kalle S derman. A lot of work was done during the week immediately before the release of the new website. Oh that was a week! We worked night and day to have the new design ready for February 6th, and it was fantastic when we finally published it, simultaneously with the release of Squeeze. At the same time, I started to contribute more actively to the Debian Publicity team, not only translating news but also writing them. It can sound scary for a non native English speaker to write something from scratch in English, but you have to keep in mind that your text will be reviewed by native speakers before being published. And we have some fantastic reviewers in the English localisation team: particularly Justin B Rye, who is tireless in his effort and more recently Moray Allan. I think I m particularly lucky to work with all these people: there s a special mood in both Publicity and WWW team, which makes you feel happy to do things and at the same time pushes you to do more just because it s fun to work with them sharing jokes, ideas, rants, patches and hugs. Rapha l: I believe that you have been trough the new member process very quickly. You re now a Non-Uploading Debian Developer. How was the experience and what does this mean to you? Francesca: Becoming a Debian Developer was not so obvious for me, because I didn t need to be a DD for the work I do in Debian. For instance, I don t maintain packages, so I had no reasons to want to become a DD in order to have uploading rights. For a while I didn t really feel the necessity of being a DD. Luckily, some people started to pester me about it, asking me to apply for the NM process. I remember Martin Zobel-Helas doing this for an entire week every single day, and Gerfried Fuchs doing it as well. Suddenly, I realized that people I worked with felt that I deserved the DD status and that I simply had thought I didn t. As a non coder and a woman, there probably was a bit of impostor syndrome involved. Having people encouraging me, gave me more confidence and the desire to finally become a DD. And so I did. The process for non uploading DD is identical to the one to become an uploading DD, with one exception: in the second part of the process (named Tasks and Skills) instead of questions about how to create and maintain packages, there are questions about the non packaging work you usually do in Debian. The general resolution which created the possibility to become a non uploading DD gave us a chance to recognize the great effort of Debian contributors who work in various area (translations, documentation, artworks, etc.) that were not always considered as important as packaging efforts. And this is great because if you are a regular contributor, if you love Debian and you are committed to the project, there are no reasons to not be an official member of it. With regards to this, I like the metaphor used by Meike Reichle in her recent talk about the Debian Women Project (video recording here):

a Debian Developer status is a lot like a citizenship in a country that you re living in. If you live in a country and you don t have citizenship, you can find a job, buy a house, have a family [...] but if this country at any point in time decides to go into a direction that you don t like, there s nothing you can do about it. You are not in the position to make any change or to make any effect on that country: you just live there, but there s no way that you can excercise influence on the people who run this country.

Rapha l: You recently joined the Debian Press Team. What does it involve and how are you managing this new responsibility? Francesca: The Press Team is basically the armed wing of the Publicity Team: it handles announcements that need to be kept private until the release, moderate the debian-announce and debian-news mailing list and maintain contacts with press people from outside the project. The real job, so, is done within the Publicity Team. The most important part of our work is to write announcements and the newsletter: while the newsletter is published bi-weekly, the announcements need to be write in a shorter timeframe. Localization is really important in spreading Debian word, so we work closely with translators: both announcements and DPN are usually translated in four or five different languages. The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, we need to take quick decisions and often do last-minute changes. Personally, I like it: I work better under pressure. But I know that is sometimes difficult for contributors to accept that we can t debate endlessly on details, we have just to go on and do our best in a given timeframe.

The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, [ ]. Personally, I like it.

Raphael: You re one of the main editor behind the Debian Project News. What s the role and scope of this newsletter? Francesca: Debian Project News is our beloved newsletter, direct successor of the Debian Weekly News founded by Joey Hess in 1999 and later kept alive by Martin Schulze. In 2007, Debian Weekly News was discontinued but in 2008 the project was revived by Alexander Reichle Schmehl. The idea behind DPN is to provide our users an overview of what is happening inside and outside the project. As the core team of editors is formed by three people, the main problem is to be able to collect enough news from various sources: in this sense we are always glad when someone points us to interesting blogposts, mails and articles. DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian: propose news, write paragraphs and review the draft before the publication are quite easy tasks but very useful. English native speakers can do a proofread (as no one of the main editors is a native speaker) while others can always translate DPN in their native language. People who want to help us can take a look at our wiki page.

DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian.

Just yesterday I realized that since January we don t miss or delay an issue: so I d like to thank the fantastic team of editors, reviewers and translators who made it possible. The team is now working on another way of spreading Debian s message: a long-time project is finally becoming real. Stay tuned, surprise arriving! Raphael: You re trying to organize IRC training sessions but that doesn t seem to take off in Debian, while it s quite common in the Ubuntu community. How do you explain that? Francesca: I m not sure about it: both Debian users and contributors seemed to appreciate this initiative in the past. I was quite surprised by the amount of Debian members present during the various sessions and by the amount of interesting questions asked by the users. So the only reason I can think about is that I need to put more enthusiasm in convincing the teams to do it: they need more encouragement (or to be pestered more!). I, for myself, think that IRC training sessions are a great way to promote our work, to share our best practice, to talk about our project to a wider audience. And I ll sure try to organize more of them. Help, suggestions, ideas are really welcome! Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Francesca: There is a project I d like to give more love, but I always end up without the time to do it: the debian-community.org project. Back in 2007, Holger Levsen founded it with the aim of reducing the gap between Debian contributors and Debian users, giving all an opportunity to contribute, share ideas and more. The project was discontinued and I d really like to revive it: in these years various things have changed, but I think that the core idea of having a node to connect existing local communities is still good and doable. In Debian we don t have the wide and well articulated local infrastructure present in other distributions (Ubuntu, particularly, but also Fedora): even if I don t like too centralized structures, I think that a better connection between the project and local groups of users and on-line communities would be a step forward for the project. Being part of the Events Team, I m aware of how much we need to improve our communication with local groups. An example is the events organization: sometimes, Publicity and Events teams even don t know about regional Debian related events (like booth at conferences, workshops, talks, install parties, etc) and this is a shame because we could offer a lot of help in organizing and promoting local events. What we lack is better communication. And debian-community.org project could give us exactly this. Could be a cluster of local groups, a platform for events organization and even a useful resource for newbies who want to find a local group near them. I started some effort in this sense, sending a proposal about it, working on a census of Debian local groups. Any help is appreciated! I m really curious to see how many Debian communities (from all around the world and the web) are out there, and I d love to have members from these communities better connected with the Debian Project. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Probably the bikeshedding feticism of almost all of us. It s the other side of the coin of Debian s commitment to technical excellence and our perfectionism, but sometimes it leads just to endless discussions about details, and it is a blocker for various initiatives. In Debian, you have to be really patient and in a way stubborn to push some changes. This is frustrating sometimes. On the other hand, I really appreciate how people take some times to think to each proposals, give some feedback and discuss about it: the process could be annoying, indeed, but the result is often an improvement of the initial proposal. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Most of my teammates are simply brilliant and adorable and hard-working. But I have to admit that I particularly admire David Pr vot: beside being a webmaster he does a lot of things, from French translations to DPN editing. All his contributions have a great quality and he s able to push you always further in doing things and doing them better. He is a good example of how I d like to be as contributor: smart, tireless, friendly.

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Thank you to Francesca for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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Back in 2005 I saw that a new open standard was being developed for calendaring, and I thought it would be a great idea to implement it. Nothing too complicated - just a really simple implementation... And thus was born the "Really Simple CalDAV Store". A few years later, when I got about 90% of the way through implementing the base CalDAV specification, I realised that "Really Simple" and "Calendar" don't actually happen in the universe we inhabit, so after much deliberation the project got renamed to "DAViCal". Now, in 2012, DAViCal is one of the leading CalDAV servers available, and I spend quite a lot of my time helping people who want to use it. Earlier in the year I was looking at the web server logs and noticed that in a four week period (i.e. as far as my logs go back) there had been several thousand unique sources of hits on the URL that DAViCal uses internally to find out what the latest version is when you browse to the '/setup.php' page. This got me wondering how many DAViCal installations there are out there, and how big they might be, and so forth but since DAViCal is free open source software, there isn't a simple way to answer those questions. I thought that it must be time to run a survey of DAViCal users everywhere to try and find out what the scale of the penetration is. How big (and how small) are the installations running DAViCal? What... Well: lets save the questions for the actual place where you can put answers :-) So click here and take the survey right now... you know you want to :-)

Calypso CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution Ever since I bought my first Palm Pilot in 1997, I ve relied upon a pocket-able device to carry a copy of my calendar and contacts, and for that same database to be present on my laptop. I went through a long list of Palm-compatible devices, including both the Palm Treo and Palm Centro telephones. I even wrote a number of my own Palm applications. Years ago, it was pretty obvious that I d have to find a new phone, but I was stuck looking for something that could provide the same hot-sync functionality. SyncML on the Series 40 I bought a Series 40 Nokia phone in Shanghai that promised SyncML support. Given that I had seen numerous SyncML implementations for Linux, it seemed like I should be able to get something to work. SyncML on the Series 40 is a disaster the phone couldn t actually store all of my contacts, and it couldn t hold half of the data fields I used. So, that phone landed in the box and back to the Centro I went. SyncML on the N900 Nokia kindly sent me an N900 at some point, so I gave SyncML another try. Given that the N900 runs evolution-data-server, and that I ve had evolution-data-server running on my laptop, it seemed like I should be in business. Well, almost. It took several days of hacking to fix bugs in the evolution SyncML back end, then another several days fussing with opensync. I ended up abandoning direct synchronization as unworkable opensync would sit in an infinite loop, or worse, trash my database completely. I finally found syncml-ds-tool , which is a debugging tool that comes with opensync. This tool simply synchronizes a set of disk files, one per contact or calendar entry, with the phone. That worked for well over a year. And then, a few months ago, Bluetooth on the laptop stopped connecting with the phone s SyncML server. I d get ECONNREFUSED every time I tried to use it. So much for the N900. DUN still worked, mostly, although it too would get ECONNREFUSED at times, but retrying seemed to make it work. However, While the N900 SyncML solution worked, I discovered another thing I wanted contacts and calendar entries stored in individual files and revision controlled with git. This makes it reasonable to delete stale calendar entries and know that they re never really gone, just left behind in an older version of the calendar. And, if you mess up, you can recover by poking at the database with git directly. I switched back to the venerable Palm Centro; it turns out that calendar and contacts are more important to me than being able to surf the web on my phone. Alas, my Centro went swimming in August and has passed on to the great electronics recycling house in the sky. I pulled the SIM out and switched back to the N900. I got my contacts imported on the N900 by copying files over the net work; not a long-term strategy, but at least I had phone numbers again. There was no hope for my calendar. I started looking for a solution in earnest. How about Android? At this point in my story, I m sure you re asking why I didn t just use one of the numerous Android phones that came through my hands. The answer is simple my calendar and contacts are probably some of my most personal data, and I m not willing to store them outside of my direct control, for reasons similar to those which are driving the development of the FreedomBox. When Android first came out, it could only talk to Google services, which didn t meet my hard requirement for personal data storage. One of my co-workers had his Google account suspended for violating the terms-of-service; he asked what he had done, but they wouldn t say. He asked if he could get his data back, and they said no . They invited him to create a new account, but it would not ever get any of the old data. A few days later, he got a nice apologetic email letting him know that they d made a mistake and that he hadn t, in fact, violated any of the terms-of-service, and that his old account was restored with all of his data intact. Wasn t that nice of Google? WebOS? I got a WebOS phone over the summer and discovered that while it had multiple contact/calendar back ends, none of them used standard protocols and so you only had the choice between multiple corporate data centers, which isn t actually a choice at all. Furthermore, the WebOS phone refused route PAN packets over the phone network, even though I have a data plan which allows this. It s not that it couldn t support it, it s that it refused. A couple of weeks after the WebOS phone arrived, HP canceled all of their WebOS hardware products, which made me less interested in trying to solve this problem. Android recovers About the same time the WebOS phone arrived, I discovered that Google had published enough information about the calendar/contacts internals for Marten Gajda to write CalDAV-Sync and CardDAV-Sync. And then, Andrew McMillan wrote aCal, which is a complete replacement for the built-in calendar and contacts applications and supports CalDAV and CardDAV. With two different standards-compliant solutions available, it seemed like it might be time to try Android again. I d love for CardDAV-Sync and CalDAV-Sync to become free software like aCal is. Andrew makes money from aCal by offering it for sale via the Android Market, while still publishing the sources for those who want to build their own copy. CalDAV/CardDAV on Linux I think the most widely known CalDAV server for Linux is probably DAViCal, a huge pile of PHP and SQL sitting on top of Apache. I m sure it s suitable for running on a server and being accessed over the internet, but I m not interested in that, nor am I interested in having my laptop run Apache and PostgreSQL. I found a tiny little CalDAV server, Radicale, which seemed like a lot better fit. It s written in Python and uses the usual Python HTTP server infrastructure, which provides SSL and authentication support along with some fairly convenient APIs for parsing and generating HTML. Before long, I discovered that Radicale was actually too simple for my needs. It stores the whole calendar in a single file, re-parsing it whenever a request is made, so a calendar with just hundreds of entries caused the server to slow down enough that evolution would time-out when talking to it. Also, Radicale doesn t actually parse the calendar entries completely, it has some ad-hoc code that finds various pieces of data, but without dealing with the whole syntax. I started hacking at Radicale to see how far I could get. I changed the storage code to store one event per file, then added hooks to use git for change management. Then, I found a full vcalendar/vcard parsing library in python, vobject, which I used to replace the ad-hoc parsing code. Finally, I added support for VCARD entries as well, allowing the system to store both calendar and contact information. Introducing Calypso, a CardDAV/CalDAV server With this much divergence from the original project, I ve figured I d best rename things to avoid confusion, so I decided to call it calypso , after a brief trip through the dictionary looking for names starting with ca . Calypso works with evolution, iceowl and the Android CalDAV/CardDAV plugins. It does not yet work with aCal; for some reason aCal cannot find any calendars on the server. Calypso also supports importing calendar changes from the command line, allowing you to integrate support into a text-based email application like notmuch or mutt. Calypso is available via git from git://keithp.com/git/calypso and is distributed under the GPL (v3 or later). I still consider it a work derived from Radicale, and so the code retains all of the Radicale copyrights along with my own. Using Calypso Initial setup Calypso runs as a regular user, all data are stored in ~/.config/calypso. To initialize calypso:

$ mkdir ~/.config/calypso ~/.config/calypso/calendars
$ cat > ~/.config/calypso/config << EOF
[server]
ssl=true
certificate=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/ssl/server.crt
key=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/ssl/server.key
[acl]
;type=htpasswd
type=fake
filename=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/passwd

Running calypso Then run calypso:

$ python ./calypso.py

No, I haven t figured out how to install it Creating new calendars To add a new database:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/calypso/calendars/private/my_calendar
$ cd ~/.config/calypso/calendars/private/my_calendar
$ git init
$ git commit --allow-empty -m'initialize new calendar'

The new calendar should now be visible as https://localhost:5233/private/my_calendar You can add files to the directory at any time; calypso will check the directory mtime at each operation and update its internal state from that on disk automatically when the directory changes. Importing files Given a set of files with VCALENDAR or VCARD entries, you can import them with:

$ calypso --import private/my_calendar <filenames...>

This will update any changed entries and add any new ones. ToDo list for calypso

1. Document the config file contents.
2. Make it installable
3. Figure out what aCal wants
4. Support calendar creation

More Android info

• Synker. This provides a desktop widget which starts the sync process running on a list of accounts. This makes it easy to manually synchronize with the laptop when you are connected
• Contact Editor. This lets you fully edit contacts synchronized over CardDAV. The built-in contact editor doesn t let you change anything other than the name for some reason.

I m running cyanogenmod on my Nexus S as that provides PAN support. With PAN, I can create a network link between laptop and phone which doesn t depend on any local WiFi infrastructure and which gives both phone and laptop static IP addresses, allowing me to configure the sync URLs statically on the phone. I d use mDNS, but Android doesn t bother to support that.

The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world.If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now.The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world. If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now. DAViCal at CeBIT 2011 CeBIT in Hannover is said to be the largest trade fair in the world, attracting over 300,000 visitors during it's five days. Late last year a DAViCal user in Germany suggested that I apply for a free booth for DAViCal in the Linux New Media Open Source Project Lounge . When DAViCal was accepted, I realised I needed some funding to help me travel around the world to attend, so I applied for a grant from InternetNZ who were kind enough to agree to cover part of my travel costs, and I was on my way. Germany in March is cold, especially for me coming from Summer! My travel allowed for a couple of days in Germany before CeBIT because that was when I could get the cheapest flights, and I wanted to have a little time to recover from the journey. Everyone had warned me to pack my winter woollies, and they were definitely needed! I stayed with a friend in Hamburg for two days and on the the second day we walked through the frozen park, past the frozen lake and over the frozen streams to see the Attraktor Hackerspace in Hamburg Nord where the CCC also hold their meetings a very impressive hackerspace in a repurposed bank (including the vault :-) with several separated areas for talks, meetings and workplaces. The day before CeBIT I travelled to Hannover to take a look at my booth space, fetch exhibitor passes for myself and volunteers and generally prepare to do battle with the crowds. The following day the fair started and it was up at 6:30 to get ready and catch the 7:38 train out to the fairgrounds. Although the fair opens at 9:00 there was always something to do between eight o'clock or so when I arrived at my booth and when the attendees started wandering past.
I was fortunate to have two volunteers for my booth who were there all week, as well as a couple more who turned up on the first two days. Not only did this mean that I got to spend a few hours during the week actually wandering the fairgrounds, but that I had some knowledgeable native german speakers for the occasional visitor who could not speak English. DAViCal has been translated into a dozen languages, and there had been some extra work put in to update the German translation before CeBIT also. As well as showing DAViCal, I was also able to demonstrate a new project at the fair which was aCal - a CalDAV Calendar Client for Android which I had released into the market just a few days beforehand for a token sum (it is licensed GPL v3 or later and the source code is available on gitorious.org). Having the smartphone devices available was great for giving live demonstrations, and I used the timetable for events at the Open Source Forum across the aisle from the Open Source Lounge to populate a calendar that we shared among a variety of devices. The first day was really the calm before the storm, and we saw lots of people asking what we were about, and had some good conversations with people wanting to know more, or telling us they used the software and were very happy with it.
CeBIT closes the gates at 18:00 with the visitor supply drying up pretty quickly around then and the secret lives of the exhibitors are revealed with people starting to relax and joke, and beer or wine starting to come out and some booth parties kicking off... if you have the stamina! I didn't, so it was off back to the train, to Hildesheim, to dinner and to bed. That first day blurred into the next, and the next and by Friday I was starting to lose my voice with all the talking I had been doing. I was visited by a chap from Posnan University who are a DAViCal user and he invited me down to the Polish stand to tell me about what they do there, and he agreed that they would love to help get the Polish translation improved. Another DAViCal user turned up with some bavarian wheat beer and a special beer glass for it by way of thanks. In some spare moments I fixed a bug in aCal's handling of character sets and uploaded a new version, so that we could use umlauts in events. Many people came past to talk to us, some of whom want to help with them project or have ideas for interesting things to do with DAViCal, some were already users of DAViCal and some went away thinking that they would be in the future. The last day of CeBIT is a little different: it's a Saturday and the doors are opened to the public and the minimum age is lowered to allow children to attend the event. I had been warned that this day is a madhouse, and it did indeed seem to be so for many booths. For DAViCal it was probably quieter than the day before, I think perhaps because calendar server software is inherently less sexy than many of the other things on display. We still had plenty of great discussions with interested people nonetheless and to be honest I was fairly happy to be spared the further exhaustion that had been threatened. Sunday was spent recuperating: discovering that Hildesheim has a great little restaurant that does traditional german pancakes for breakfast and then wandering around the small city soaking in the sunshine that I'd seen through the windows outside all week. On Monday I caught the train to M nchengladbach to meet with an organisation that might provide support for DAViCal in Germany, but who hadn't been able to come to the fair to see me due to illness. I was encouraged to spend the night in Aachen a beautiful little city , which I did, arriving around sunset and I spent a couple more days before flying home being intensely antisocial to recover from the furious week beforehand. Is CeBIT worth it? CeBIT seemed to me to be quite a different business model, or perhaps on a different scale. I've seen trade fairs in New Zealand for other purposes, but not to showcase software and services in quite this way. To give an idea of it's scale, consider that I had a tiny booth in a hall that was probably four times the size of the TSB Arena, and CeBIT included around 20 such buildings , packed with exhibitors, with free buses to get around the campus, acres of multi-storey parking buildings, two train stations, and so on. The scale of the event is incredible. As a result of this scale, CeBIT boasts impressive visitor numbers, and while a visitor will usually attend with a specific area of interest in relation to their business they will also wander the fair to see other areas of more personal interest, or just to see what is around. Open Source is a specific area of interest to a significant percentage of business in Germany, and Deutsche Messe, the fair operators, recognise the value of having an open source area as a draw for visitors, with the primary open source area placed in Hall 2, directly off the main north entrance. Within the open source area, the Open Source Project Lounge , where DAViCal was located, is a series of booths sponsored by Linux New Media AG. Projects in the Open Source Lounge are selected by a jury of Linux New Media, Deutsche Messe and several community advisors, so as such there is a range of interesting projects on show and the draw of any given project has a flow-on effect to the others. As an example, at one point while briefly minding the adjacent stand for the OpenEmbedded project I was unable to help an inquiring visitor, but I was able to talk about DAViCal with him until the exhibitor returned to answer his question. His interest in DAViCal was definitely increased in this process, and I'm sure that many people came into our area of the lounge attracted by a specific exhibitor and moving on to see some of the others. Outside of this association with open source, however, CeBIT offers something which general free software events cannot: an association with mainstream software and services. This presentation of Open Source alongside IBM, SAP, HP, Oracle, Software AG, Apple, Microsoft and so forth makes inclusion at this event particularly valuable. Free software solutions can have good brand recognition within the open ecosystem itself and yet be practically unheard of outside it. Most traditional methods of communication with suppliers don't work well with Open Source projects: a request for proposal will sail silently by, unless noted by a related commercial entity. In general there is no sales department, and marketing is frequently a desultory hit or miss affair. The fair is different. The fair is about talking with people. While there is still plenty of collateral marketing with brochures, signs, presentations and giveaway knick-knacks those things are just there to bring people into range: the real action happens when you engage a person in conversation, and at that point a humble free software project can be on an equal footing with a larger booth staffed with eager young salesmen. Of course there are a number of places where free software can get a booth. Linuxtag is a German example where there are many booths for free software projects, linux.conf.au also offers booths to free software projects during it's more outreach Open Day and software freedom day events happen all around the world where booths are available, but the audience arriving at these events are all largely pre-sold on openness and free software. So in presenting this broad blend of people, in a way in which free software projects can present on a roughly equal footing with their commercial brethren, CeBIT is an opportunity not to be missed. The numbers speak for themselves, too: traffic to the DAViCal websites has increased by about 50% around CeBIT with 25% coming from Germany, but significant increases also from France, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and Poland. Traffic to the DAViCal wiki has doubled over the last 12 months in a steady increase to around 200,000 page views each month. This sudden increase to around 10000/day in March, with some days during CeBIT peaking at over 20000/day The Future I won't be returning to CeBIT to represent DAViCal in Hannover next year as the sponsored booth is pretty much a one-time thing and the costs involved in purchasing a booth for attendance at the fair are significant (around NZD$15000 for a small 3m x 2m stall). It's possible that I will return next year in a different capacity, as one of the larger stand organisers has confidentially indicated he will invite me to attend as part of an Open Source Apps area that he is considering running on his stand, somewhat along the lines of the Open Source Lounge . Time will tell, I guess, but if invited I think I would definitely go for that. I will definitely be suggesting to a few specific free software projects that they should apply for the Linux New Media opportunity when it comes around again. Koha is one project that immediately springs to mind, but of course there are many, many worthy free software projects and this opportunity seems to be little-understood outside of Germany. If I do convince a project to apply, and they are successful, I will also try and give them some assistance and background knowledge to understand the fair, and how best they can take advantage of the opportunity it offers. Some basic tips would be:

• Book accommodation early, a small apartment or B&B is good. CeBIT accommodation prices are exceptionally high 3 or more times normal rates. There are companies that specialise in renting apartments for the week of CeBIT which are more reasonably priced.
• The fair is in Hannover , except that really it is some distance to the southeast. Exhibitors tickets provide free transport within greater Hannover for the whole week, so you don't actually need to be that close. Options like Hildesheim, a city of some 120k people south of Hannover (where I stayed), are also good although they add a small transport cost.
• Have a pop-up banner for your project.
• Develop a slideshow which tells people about your project and which can just be left running on a larger screen.
• Have a flyer you can hand out to interested people.
• Get at least one committed person to assist on the stand for the whole week.
• Get some more volunteers to assist on the stand for one day each.
• Pace yourself: get to bed early and try not to overdo the partying it's a long week!
• If you want to take a look around the fair don't wait until Friday or Saturday do it on Thursday or earlier.

and finally... I would like to express my appreciation to InternetNZ for the grant to partially cover my travel costs to Hannover, making my attendance at this outstanding event much more achievable. My thanks also to Britta Wulfling who supported all of the projects in the Open Source Lounge. My friends Alexander & Meike in Hildesheim who supplied somewhere for me to recuperate, and accompanied me to the fair every day to run the Debian booth. Thanks also, of course, to the German Linux Magazine for selecting DAViCal for a free booth, and to Benny who pointed the opportunity out, encouraged me to apply, and came along and helped out for the whole week.

It s general election time again in New Zealand this year, with the added twist of an additional referendum on whether to keep MMP as our electoral system. If you re not interested in New Zealand politics, then you should definitely skip the rest of this post. I ve never understood why some people consider their voting choices a matter of national security, so when via Andrew McMillan, I saw a good rationale for why you should share your opinion I found my excuse to write this post. Party Vote
I ll be voting for National. I m philosophically much closer to National than Labour, particularly on economic and personal responsibility issues, but even if I wasn t the thought of having Phil Goff as Prime Minister would be enough to put me off voting Labour. His early career seems strong, but lately it s been one misstep and half-truth after another, the remainder of the Labour caucus and their likely support partners don t offer much reassurance either. If I was left-leaning and the mess that Labour is in wasn t enough to push me over to National this year then I d vote Greens and hope they saw the light and decided to partner with National. Electorate Vote
I live in Dublin, but you stay registered in the last electorate where you resided, which for me is Tamaki. I have no idea who the candidates there are, so I ll just be voting for the National candidate for the reasons above. MMP Referendum
I have no real objections to MMP and I think it s done a good job of increasing representation in our parliament. I like that parties can bring in some star players without them having to spend time in an electorate. I don t like the tendency towards unstable coalitions that our past MMP results have sometimes provided. Of the alternatives, STV is the only one that I think should be seriously considered, FPP and it s close cousin SM don t give the proportionality of MMP and PV just seems like a simplified version of STV with limited other benefit. If you re going to do preferential voting, you might as well do it properly and use STV. So, I ll vote for a change to STV, not because I m convinced that MMP is wrong, but because I think it doesn t hurt for the country to spend a bit more time and energy confirming that we have the right electoral system. If the referendum succeeds and we get another referendum between MMP and something other than STV in 2014, I ll vote to keep MMP. If we have a vote between MMP and STV in 2014 I m not yet sure how I d vote. STV is arguably an excellent system, but I worry that it s too complex for most voters to understand. PS. Just found this handy list of 10 positive reasons to vote for National, if you re still undecided and need a further nudge. Kiwiblog: 10 positive reasons to vote National

Could you not trust this man?Max and Fraser are very interested in this year's election. I guess political awareness starts at the first election after you turn 10, or so. They're both very curious about how mum and dad are voting, and while their mother will not tell (though we all have our suspicions :-) I don't see any reason not to discuss my political leanings with them.I've been what is commonly termed a 'floating' voter for most of my voting life. I imagine the politicians themselves might term people like me 'floaters', with an eye to the scatalogical implications. After all, their livelihoods are on the line!So, after reading this blog post I thought I might as well also share my personal voting plans with the world.

My son is being encouraged to lie. It's a fairly regular occurrence around here, and I'm sure you've seen it yourself. It's that checkbox on the website you're visiting where you say "Yes, I am over X years of age".

One of the things I liked about Gnome 2 was the ability to run a background 'slideshow' defined in an XML file with a list of background files to give me a change of scenery from time to time. Switching to XFCE4 I can't seem to find a simple way to do that, but the ingredients are all there:

• I can set the background image to a list
• There's a handy-dandy xfdesktop command-line utility I can call to switch desktops

What's missing from the Desktop Settings is a setting for "switching background ever N minutes", which is kind of odd to not have, given the list thing being there - without my script it's only going to change every couple of weeks when I log in, or something. Not nearly often enough for me! There's lots of stuff on the internet saying "Just run xfdesktop --reload in a cron job", but this does not work for me, since cron is running with a different environment, and so xfdesktop doesn't know where the X server is and doesn't have the necessary XAUTHORITY and DISPLAY settings. If it was just DISPLAY that was needed it would be easy enough to set that in the crontab and be done with it - after all it doesn't change very often. XAUTHORITY is harder, since on Debian systems (and presumably others too) it has a random component in the name of a directory which lives in a directory without read permissions. I solved it with this script, which steals those values from the environmnt of xfce4-panel, which will be running already:

#!/bin/sh
#
PANELPID=" /usr/bin/pgrep -U $ LOGNAME  xfce4-panel "
stealEnvironment()  
  tr '\000' '\012' < /proc/$PANELPID/environ   grep -a "^$1="   cut -f2- -d=
 
export DISPLAY=" stealEnvironment DISPLAY "
export XAUTHORITY=" stealEnvironment XAUTHORITY "
/usr/bin/xfdesktop --reload

So now I have my background image switching among my favourite photos again, and my Desktop is effectively back as it was a week ago.

Some time ago someone reported issues accessing cpan.catalyst.net.nz a little peculiar and puzzling at the time, but we put it down to some weird DNS cache issues and moved on. Turns out the problem is a DNS one, though not what we were thinking at the time:

$ host -t aaaa mail.catalyst.net.nz
mail.catalyst.net.nz has IPv6 address 2404:130:0:10::40:0
2404:130:0:10::40:0 == 2404:0130:0000:0010:0000:0000:0040:0000
$ echo $((0x24)).$((0x04)).$((0x01)).$((0x30))
36.4.1.48

So somewhere, some crappy device is getting a bunch of bytes back when it asks DNS for the address of something, and then it's taking the first four of them and calling that the IP address. Kudos to David Clarke for spotting the actual problem.

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

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

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

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

Ok, so finally it is official! We just had the DebConf 12 decision meeting. We saw two great proposals, from the cities of Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Managua, Nicaragua. If you are curious on the decision process: We held it over two IRC channels The moderated #debconf-team channel, where only the five members of the decision committee (Marga Manterola, Andrew McMillan, Jeremiah Foster, Holger Levsen, Moray Allan) and two members from each of the bids (Marco T lio Gontijo e Silva and Rafael Cunha de Almeida from Brazil; Leonardo G mez and Eduardo Rosales from Nicaragua) had voices, and the open #dc12-discuss channel where we had an open discussion. Of course, you can get the full conversation logs in those links. I have to thank and congratulate the Brazilian team as they did a great work... The decision was very tight. It was so tight, in fact, that towards the end of the winning all of the committee members were too shy to state the results - so I kidnapped the process by announcing the winner ;-) (I hope that does not cast a shadow of illegitimacy over it) And, very much worth noting, both teams were also very professional: In previous years, we have seen such decisions degenerate into personal attacks and very ugly situations. That has always been painful and unfortunate. And although the Brazilians will not be able to go celebrate tonight, the decision was received with civility, knowing it was a decision among equals, and a decision well carried out. Well, that's it I am very much looking forward for that peculiar two weeks when the whole Debian family meets, this year to be held in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I am very eager towards meeting in 2012 in Managua, Nicaragua! Yay!

I've been very quiet on here for a few months, and the reason is (of course) because I've been doing other things. No surprise there, I guess! What I've been doing, first of all, is writing aCal, an Android CalDAV client with a lot of help from Chris Noldus. It's probably fair to say that Chris did most of the heavy lifting while I learned Java, did most of the UI & graphic design, and the low-level CalDAV synchronisation and geeky calendaring code. This is now available in the Android market for NZD$2.00 to help us fund further development and in a few days (or a couple of weeks) I'll get the source code up somewhere public (probably Gitorious) and it will be licensed GPLv3... When I get a moment - although refer to title :-) Of course on top of that I'd already committed to a second year of handling the sponsorship job for Linux.Conf.AU, so a fair amount of January was taken up with preparing for, and attending LCA in Brisbane where I took a lot of photos. LCA was, as always, a blast, and all credit to the fantastic team over in Brisbane who really came together when it seemed it was all going to fall apart after the flooding. This seems to be six long months of disasters around this part of the world, although until Tuesday I guess we thought we'd escaped the worst of it in New Zealand. After LCA I snuck home for a few days before flying off in the other direction, to UC Berkeley, for CalConnect XX where I managed to get in some great testing of the new Android CalDAV client, some excellent standards discussions, more photos and (even) a few days sightseeing. I've been home for a week from that now - just barely long enough to hug the kids, really - and today I am in the air once more, off to CeBIT in Hannover where I have been lucky to be sponsored a free booth in the Open Source Lounge by Linux New Media AG. My original travel sponsor slipped through the cracks, but I was fortunate that InternetNZ agreed to help fund me instead. If you're coming to CeBIT please do stop by the Morphoss table in the Open Source Lounge (Hall 2, F40) for a chat about DAViCal and Android - and anything else you want to talk about! I'll be there all week :-) And if I have some quiet time in that week (yeah, right!) I'll be trying to push out a new DAViCal release, which is overdue really, since the last one was two months ago.

DAViCal 0.9.9.4 is now available, along with AWL 0.46. This is a recommended upgrade with a focus on stability and reliability. Release notes are on the wiki at http://wiki.davical.org/w/Release_Notes/0.9.9.4. Most of the changes are subtle: fixes to small bugs or adjustments to correctness in respect to standards. In particular there were some errors in handling of various requests for addressbook data, and the support for WebDAV synchronisation is updated to draft -04 of the specification. One notable addition is the new '/feed.php/username/calendar/' URL which will provide an Atom feed of the events added to a calendar. This is pretty experimental at present, but any problems with it won't affect the rest of DAViCal so I felt it safe to include in a stable release series. I've also created a DAViCal Announce mailing list which in the future will be the primary place that notifications like this are sent to, so those of you who are subscribed here but really only want to see announcements should subscribe to that list. In a few weeks time (well, when I remember, I guess :-) I want to move the DAViCal General mailing list to a lists.davical.org mailing list. As of today I've moved the DAViCal developers mailing list there already (pretty easy since it did not involve moving servers) but the old address for that one will continue to work indefinitely. Also, as of yesterday, the sourceforge.net project name for DAViCal finally got changed, so DAViCal is now at http://sourceforge.net/projects/davical - yay! At the end of January I will be presenting about Calendaring and Free Software at Linux.Conf.AU 2011 in Brisbane - I hope you've all got your tickets already, because there isn't much time left now :-)

During my recent trip to Massachusetts for CalConnect XIX I passed back via New York, surfing a few nights on the couch at the Washington Cube Garden¹. This was just enough time for my new Davis VantagePro2 to arrive by UPS ground (phew!) causing me much consternation, as the box was about twice as wide as I expected it to be. On opening it I discovered that the reason for the size was the physical dimensions of the rain gauge, leading me to realise that I had actually bought exactly what I wanted: a high quality weather station. Also leading me to wonder how the hell I was going to get it halfway around the world with me the next day. Unfortunately that extra wide carrying case was in no way going to fit inside my suitcase. Fortunately it came with a handle. And those wonderful people at Air New Zealand gave me a Koru Gold upgrade for a 50th birthday present, so it was time to put it to the test... Travelling on the subway out to JFK was it's own little adventure, but I made it out to terminal 5 and wandered around a bit before concluding I needed to be in terminal 7. Once I was in the right place I found the fancy people's check in counter and the nice lady there was only too happy for me to carry it to New Zealand, though she did aver that perhaps the security scanners would be dubious. Not a hitch there though: I guess they're used to letting everything through that's not specifically denied, so weather stations are fine because nobody would be silly enough to even think of doing that... Being Koru Gold really helped at this point though, because it enabled me to queue jump use the priority boarding line when getting onto the plane, and every airline in the US seems to have gone all-out for this "checked baggage costs more" approach, so the planes all fly with empty baggage holds and totally overstuffed overhead lockers. If this progresses I shouldn't wonder that the planes will get so top-heavy they roll over, but through the miracles of priority boarding I was able to commandeer all the locker space I needed before anyone else had even made it past row 40. I confess that I was a little worried that it wouldn't be quite such plain sailing getting through LAX. I mean we all know what reputation this delightful little exit port has. In the event it was totally anitclimactic. If it has a handle on it, and it's about the same size and shape as a largish carryon then it's fine. There have been no recorded stabbings with wind vanes anyway - at least on aeroplanes - so clearly they are perfectly safe. Finally back in my country of birth, thinking I was home free, I breathed a sigh of relief transferred my bags and nipped off to the Koru lounge for a much needed shower and change of clothes after I snuck the station through another scanner. By now the handle had broken, so it was looking decidedly more 'box' like and less 'carryon' like, and when I eventually rolled up at the gate with my boarding pass the attendant made a valiant attempt to relieve me of it, but she was too slow and I danced around her and swanned up the gangway to take my seat. I was slow, this time, having missed the first boarding call, and all overhead lockers were crammed full. There was no seat in front of me to put the weather station under. Fortunately a nearby cupboard proved fit for purpose and it was secreted there and we were underway. At this point the guy two seats over said "didn't I see that weather station in New York?". Of course being bright yellow does make it a little conspicuous I guess, and I'm not renowned for my own inconspicuousness myself. So that's how I got my new weather station home, and you can see right away that doing things the easy way would never even occur to me. Possibly this is why I run Linux: there just isn't enough challenge when you run a different operating system. On Windows someone has always written a program for your new weather station, and a Mac user wouldn't be seen dead with it because it's black and beige and comes in a bright yellow box! So now I had to find some code to write. I looked around and very rapidly discovered that some software called vproweather was available, which would happily talk to my weather station and download the data from it, write web pages, stuff it into a MySQL database and so forth. All, obviously, far too easy, so I thought aha! I could convert that to PostgreSQL, and then I would be happy and relax with the thought of a job well done. So I downloaded the code in question an impressive several hundred kb of C code, cranked open a text editor and started to crawl through it and see where I could add the magic pixie dust to make it work with PostgreSQL. But it was not to be. My eyes glazed over or scales fell from them or something, and I realised that this particular edifice was beyond my help. Back to square one. I downloaded the Vantage Serial Protocol docs from the Davis Instruments website did some quick googling and decided I should write a module to talk this protocol. And I should write it in Perl (it was a Thursday, and Perl always seems more sensible on a Thursday, and not because of Douglas Adams, either). I beavered away into the night. Rain threatened, so I raced outside and installed the new weather station on the roof in the hopes that it's magnificent rain collector would collect. I raced back inside and was able to count the first (and so far, only) tip of the bucket. And so I now release upon the world Davis::VantagePro my first perl module. Well, the first one I care to share with the world, anyway. I have stressed it with very little testing, lumbered it with no planning or design whatsoever and so I feel it only fair that I should cast it upon the world with very little thought for it's survival or existential goals.

¹ I seem to recall one night we came up with some fantastic names for Micah & Biella's Washington Square apartment, but I couldn't remember any of the good ones and had to slap a new one on there. I should also mention my stay at the Acetarium in Boston, which was a fabulous few days, but it would pad this blog post needlessly, and I've already done that.

Finally, six months after releasing 0.9.9, and about three months after when I would have preferred to have released it, I've released version 0.9.9.2 of DAViCal. In fact most of the changes were included in 0.9.9.1 which was more quietly released last week to a select audience of keen testers. They found a few bugs, and these are resolved and so 0.9.9.2 is the release I hope people will be able to find useful for some time into the future. In a couple of weeks, once it's been in Debian Sid for a respectable time, I hope to ask for a freeze exception so that we can include this version into Debian Squeeze when it is released. Given that I missed the cut by a hair or two for Lenny so there is no DAViCal currently in a Debian release I think I can be hopeful on this count. Certainly this fixes a few issues with 0.9.9 which will cause annoyance if they haunt me for the next few years :-) As well as the rafts of bug fixes and such, the exciting new feature added in 0.9.9.2 is the first support for CardDAV. At this point you need to create the addressbook collection yourself, and there is no import facility, but at least you might be able to use DAViCal to store your contacts. Enjoy!