Keith and I have been plugging away for the last couple weeks turning on and testing the various bits of TeleMetrum, and I can now very happily report that we have all the hardware working! Amazingly, we got almost everything right in the hardware design. Only two things need to be changed. We need to be able to control the chip select line on the the SPI non-volatile memory chip, which means we need one more GPIO line to it from the processor. To free up a line, we gave up the ability to put the accelerometer in to self test mode. Two trace cuts and two jumpers to the current board implement this change. The last thing we got working just this evening was the ability to sense the presence of an ejection charge igniter. We need another resistor in each of the two sense circuits to form a voltage divider so that we don't overload the ADC input. Not sure how we missed that in our many design reviews! Oh well. To ensure robust ignition of the electric matches we prefer to use for ejection charges, we charge a 1000uF cap to a voltage higher than our ADC inputs can handle. Fixing this problem on the current boards requires changing the values of two resistors, then tacking extra resistor to one end of each of the existing ones and then wiring the other ends of the new resistors to ground. Since the resistors in question are all 0402 surface mount parts, this is a royal pain... but with my finest dental-pick soldering iron tip, and working under the inspection microscope, it is indeed possible. Alternatively, if the ability to sense igniter continuity isn't important, just leaving off R14 and R15 at least prevents the 3.3V processor from going whacko due to having 5V applied to two ADC inputs! I'm really impressed at how well these first two boards reflow soldered in the electric skillet in my basement came out. Getting the right amount of solder paste on the board is something I'm likely to get better at with practice, but so far we've only had a few (very obvious during inspection) shorts to clean up, and a couple poorly soldered pins. All in all, I couldn't be happier with how this has gone... and I'm really looking forward to flying one of these boards sometime soon as an auxiliarly payload to gather some initial flight data!

After a long hiatus for various reasons, I finally had the chance to try my hand at loading a TeleMetrum board today! Sadly, I wasn't able to completely load any boards, because I somehow ended up with the wrong Digi-Key part numbers for 4 capacitors, one of which is a critical value. I placed an order for the missing parts and a few other bits we'll need eventually, hopefully they'll be here in a couple days and I can try to load a board with all the parts. Instead, what I did today was a a partial load of a board with the goal of testing the various power supplies. Seemed like a good idea, since I've had my share of odd problems with power supplies in the past. This also gave me a chance to try out my solder paste stencil, get some experience hand-placing the tiny 0402 passive parts, and an excuse to see if I could hit the solder reflow temperature profile adequately with my electric cooking skillet and IR non-contact thermometer. The good news is that it all worked right the first time! We're successfully charging a LiPo battery from USB power, and successfully making 3.3 volts for the electronics from that. The resistor divider designed to allow the LiPo battery voltage to be sampled by the CPU's analog to digital converter is also working fine. A few observations are in order, however. Getting the right amount of solder paste down on the board requires some finesse with the spreading blade and the stencil. I think the paste was a bit heavy around the CC1111 footprint, as I ended up with some bridged pads. Since I didn't load the actual CPU part, it could just be that not having something real there to wick up some solder meant there was enough to form the bridges. Don't know. The amount of solder on the ground pad in the middle of the chip looks good, though! The 0603 sized LED in the power supply circuit was the only part that didn't self-align correctly. I may have had it a bit too far to one side. The pads on the part have notches in the end, and it looks like one side of each is more or less centered, so I think surface tension did the best it could with what I gave it to work with. The LED soldered ok, isn't shorting to anything else, and clearly works fine... but I'd be happier if it were aligned better. Found and fixed a solder bridge between two pins on the surface-mount USB connector before first application of power. Could be further data that the paste layer was a bit too thick. On the other hand, I had to wiggle the connector around a bit to get it aligned correctly, so I may have smudged the paste into a bridge while doing that. I also note that there's some visible flux left on the surface of the solder, particularly on big paste areas like the feet of the USB connector. I suspect this means I didn't dwell long enough at either or both of the preheat or ultimate reflow temperatures. Since all the parts clearly soldered adequately to function, I'm still pretty happy... but since the rockets we fly experience violent accelerations during boost, this is something I'll play with on future reflows. All in all, a great way to spend an afternoon, and a big step forward for the TeleMetrum project!

People keep asking me about the beard thing... Here's my take on what happened and why. Just before I left for LCA 2009, my wife offered to send along one of the limited edition prints of her award-winning waterfall photograph. She knew from prior years that the LCA organizers often host an auction or raffle to raise money for some worthy charity at the conference banquet. Since the photo was taken at Milford Sound on the way to last year's LCA in Melbourne, there was a connection between the photo and LCA. We had no idea what this year's charity might be, nor did we anticipate that her photo would become the centerpiece of the evening's fund-raising activities. The charity selected this year was an organization that is trying to save the Tasmanian Devil from extinction. Professor Hamish McCallum, the chief scientist with the program, gave a talk after dinner and before the auction began. The native population is suffering from a fatal facial tumor disease that results in horrible lesions, and is likely to kill off all the Devils within a decade or three. My family and I all have a strong love of nature, and Karen and I had the pleasure of touring Tasmania after LCA 2003 in Perth, so this seemed like a great charity to raise money for with her photo. As often happens at LCA, the auction and related fund-raising activities got complicated. This year, the photo alone was bid up to $2500 (which was very cool!), before people started offering things for higher bids. For years, going maybe as far back as Perth, I've been cajoled about shaving my beard if the bidding hit some level, and have always said no. This year, someone offered $5000 if I would shave my beard, and again I said no. Much later, after more cajoling and many counter offers, when the bids and various matching offers had us approaching $20,000 in total donation to the charity, I relented and announced that if we hit a total of $25,000 going to the charity I would consent to a shave. The resulting frenzy, including the suggestion that if it went high enough Linus should do the shaving, and the formation of a bidding consortium that kept raising more money and bidding against itself, was completely unexpected! Others have tried to capture details of the insanity, but the bottom line is that by the end of the evening, the total had blown way past anything we could have imagined, and by the end of the conference the total going to the charity was on the order of $40,000! Why did I agree to let Linus shave my beard? To be honest, I'm not entirely certain. I only had one beer that evening, so I can't blame intoxication. The fact that it would yield a worthy charity something over 10 times what my wife's photo alone had drawn as a maximum bid seemed significant to me. In hindsight, I also think I was at least a little bit curious to see what my face looked like after having a beard since sometime around September of 1982! In any case, I made the offer, insane amounts of money were raised, and on the last day of the conference, over the lunch hour, Linus took trimmers in hand and removed my beard in front of an audience. The reactions have been completely overwhelming. A local TV station and a local newspaper in Hobart were both there and ran stories. The ripple of mentions in the blogosphere was and is just astounding. There's even a silly Shaving Bdale game created overnight by the "Mad Scientists" at Secret Lab! And from all over the globe, people I do and don't know have been sending emails and finding me on IRC to plead with me to grow my beard again! Right after the shave, my good friend Keith Packard said "Bdale, grow it back!". Before I left Hobart, my wife emailed saying she and the kids hoped I wasn't waiting until I got home to start. Joey Hess blogged a hairy tale about how I'd scarred the minds of young Debian developers. The leader of Debian-RS sent word by email that the group all hoped I would re-grow my beard. And on and on and on... I'm really not used to being the center of so much attention! Being suddenly without beard felt weird in lots of silly little ways. I was hyper-sensitive to drafts. The feel of cold beverages hitting my upper lip was downright strange. And I kept wanting to scratch what wasn't there! After making faces at myself in the mirror for a while, I decided I really wasn't happy, and do prefer being bearded. So I haven't shaved since Saturday morning in Hobart, and am pretty scruffy looking. My wife said today that I'm "already starting to look like Bdale again". At the current growth rate, I have high hopes of having at least some facial dignity back by the time I speak at FOSDEM. And no, I won't be shaving my beard off again any time soon...

My talk about how I combine open source and rockets at LCA 2009 that included my first public presentation of the TeleMetrum design was well received, and I was invited to repeat it during Open Day on Saturday. Now that I'm home again, I need to get some parts loaded on a board so we can start testing!

It s the last day of the most awesome linux.conf.au 2009 conference in Hobart, Tasmania. I ve just witnessed the a room full of 500 people sit with baited breath as Linus wielded a set of clippers to shave Bdale Garbee s beard, followed by Bdale (with a razor with 3 more blades than last time he shaved, a tiny bowl of water and a hand-mirror) trying to make it look neater. The LCA twitter feed was up on the projector, and someone rightly observed this whole event was actually pretty weird. There are already pictures on flickr too. However, well done to Bdale for being such a good sport, but it looks like his wife Karen will accompany him next year to make sure he doesn t agree to anything else like this, and supervise the waxing of Rusty s chest :) What s this all in aid of? After the incredible auction for this beautiful picture from Karen, and generous donations at the Penguin Dinner on Wednesday night, the conference has now raised between AU$ 35k and 40k towards the Save the Tasmanian Devil appeal. Around AU$ 1.3k of the nonsensical winning consortium s AU $10.6k bid came from the Collabora folks who were at the dinner, and AU$ 1.2k from Collabora and Collabora Multimedia directly. We were all set to place a winning AU$ 3k bid but then Matthew and Daniel came up with the Bdale shaving scheme, and then things really picked up. I m glad we took part - the lead scientist from the project was really grateful, and I hope the money can make a real difference to their great work. On more mundane matters, I also gave my talk this morning, and my slides (Telepathy slides v2.0 thanks to Marco) are online. I also made a few demos of new awesome stuff you can do with Telepathy (most of the patches are already merged upstream or well on the way):

• Geolocation support (XEP-0080) support in the XMPP backend and Empathy, using GeoClue to find your location and the libchamplain Clutter & Open Streetmap widget to display where your contacts are. Thanks to Pierre-Luc, Alban and Daf for their work here - more details on Pierre-Luc s blog.
• Support for launching file transfers over link-local XMPP from Nautilus using the Empathy plugin for nautilus-sendto. This is already merged upstream but needs a patch to work with trunk Empathy. Thanks to Marco, Jonny and Guillaume for their work on this.
• Alban also made a neat hack to Rhythmbox which allows exporting your DAAP music server to one of your contants over a Telepathy Stream Tube. Thanks also to recent work from Marco, these tubes now go over XMPP s SOCKS5 Bytestreams, giving much better throughput than the earlier in-band implementation, network permitting. The next step is unleashing the full might of our libnice NAT traversal library, signalling tubes with Jingle, and therefore making connections work peer to peer in up to 95% of the cases. However, this won t affect the APIs, stuff will just go faster! Isn t Telepathy wonderful?
• Olivier stepped up to show off the demo from his talk about Farsight, which shows his branch using the new telepathy-farsight library to allow recording Telepathy video calls directly into the PiTiVi video editor. His network was screwed up so it didn t work, but I did see it work in his talk yesterday! Awesome stuff, hopefully Edward and friends can pick it up and merge it in before too long.
• Unfortunately we ran out of time for Will to show off Guillaume s recent work on Telepathy-enabled Abiword on the desktop (rather than just Sugar s Write activity), but I expect he ll blog about it soon!

On that note, these were just the five that I picked to try and fit into my talk. There are a load more demos in the pipeline from the other guys in Collabora of doing stuff with Telepathy, so keep a close look on Planet Collabora for the next cool thing.

Yesterday, I closed Debian bug #211765 regarding material under the GLX Public License violating the DFSG. That's two less open bugs tagged lenny-ignore!

I just mailed the schedule for the FOSDEM '09 Debian Devroom to the -events-eu mailinglist. Also note that Bdale Garbee will be doing a Debian keynote talk on saturday morning.

I just moved my blog from blosxom to ikiwiki. Slowly, but surely, my web-related infrastructure for gag.com and related sites is all moving to ikiwiki+git... I shoved in a rewrite rule to map the old top-level URL to the new one, and ensured that my rss feed will only contain new posts. However, all the "permanent" article paths changed. Oh well. I'm much happier now!

With all the parts, the raw boards, and the solder paste stencil for the TeleMetrum board now in hand, you'd think we'd be about ready to load and reflow a board. Not quite! The 0402 passives are going to require lots of magnification for me to place accurately. And the solder paste has a finite working life. That leads me to want to prepare all the parts in advance so that there's minimal fumbling around during the "pick and place" phase of the operation. So, I've been transferring the passive parts from the cut auto-load tapes they came in to plastic prescription medicine bottles I've been collecting for the purpose. Miraculously, these happen to be a near-perfect size for the sticky labels provided by Digi-Key with each part! My next step will be to label the bins on the Mini Muffin Pans I bought to stage the parts for placement. Then I'll load the bins with parts, and hopefully that'll make picking and placing with tweezers and inspection microscope go reasonably quickly. Hopefully tomorrow!

In June of 2005, I finished reading "The Professor and the Madman" by Simon Winchester, which is an intriguing story of two significant contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED. I first heard this book mentioned in an interview on the Charlie Rose show, and it sounded interesting, so I bought a paperback copy, and it was indeed an interesting read. I wrote these thoughts down then, but neglected to post them until now. That was likely in part because others beat me to the punch. In particular, I think I remember listening to a presentation by Nat Friedman on the topic at around that time. In any case, I stumbled today over the text I wrote back then, and thought the words were still worth sharing. The most interesting thing I learned in reading this book wasn't actually about the principal characters, but instead involves a speech given by Richard Chenevix Trench to the Philological Society, entitled "On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries." This is the talk that eventually led to the creation of the OED, and the intriguing bit to me is an idea Trench proposed that was new at the time, but absolutely fundamental to the Open Source & Linux world today. Trench well understood that an undertaking of such magnitude as compilation of an exhaustive dictionary of the English language, detailing the history and lifetime of each word illustrated with many example of usage from existing literature, could never be accomplished by one individual. Instead, he proposed explicitly involving a large group of unpaid volunteer contributors. Winchester claims that while this may sound obvious today, that this idea had never been put forward before for such an undertaking. Absolutely brilliant. As an up-close observer of the evolution of the community approach to software development and maintenance, I couldn't help but draw connections. We are today engaged in an equally grand effort that may well have an enduring impact, that fundamentally would not be possible to accomplish without the contributions of an astoundingly diverse array of unpaid volunteer contributors...

In June of 2006, I finished reading Tim Russert's book "Big Russ & Me". It's not the sort of thing I usually read, but I did find it it generally interesting and at times even thought provoking. I wrote these thoughts down then, but never got around to posting them until now. Russert used a particularly striking phrase when he described what he learned from his long association with Daniel Patrick Moynihan... "to respect true intelligence, ask good questions, and disagree agreeably." I don't think I've ever heard the words "disagree agreeably" put together like that, but I instantly knew what he meant. It seems to me that the world would be a more pleasant and productive place all around if more of us would commit to disagreeing agreeably, instead of tending towards assuming the worst, over-reacting, and flaming each other when working through contentious issues.

Two policy issues have been brewing in debian and I ve been mostly quiet about them because I ve been busy with TTLLP work. One is the Lenny release GR which I m still trying to make sense of. I mean: yikes! I ve been reading debian-legal and -vote for years and this ballot confuses me. I think I ll vote 5324671 but I m really not sure what that means. The other big issue is that Manoj has resigned as secretary. I think this is a good thing, if for no other reason than he s been secretary for 7 years and I feel it s not healthy for one person to hold that post too long in a thousand-strong group. I ve disagreed with Manoj about some tasks, but I didn t see any point in making this difficult job even less fun, so I stopped criticising him a while ago. Since then, my comments on the secretary s work have usually been limited to small review comments on ballots (which are then apparently ignored anyway, but at least I offer help). I m apprehensive about who will replace Manoj. In the short term, Bdale Garbee acts as secretary, but surely Bdale is busy enough already? Given his increased vote-taking activity, Neil McGovern seems a likely choice, but the work left undone after his term as SPI secretary may count against him. More generally, I think there s a problem with Debian s secretary, so anyone who would be a good secretary would probably refuse to do it as currently defined. There s an email about bundled votes and the secretary by Steve Langasek which touches on this major problem:

the secretary is the *only* line of defense against gaming of the GR process by a small group of developers who propose an uncontroversial but orthogonal amendment that will always win over the alternatives, in the process preventing the will of the project from being formally enacted

In other words, in Debian, the secretary is both secretary (usually an appointed or consensual post in most organisations, in my experience) and chairman (usually an elected post) - both doing the hard administrative leg-work and actually ruling on contentious issues, rather than just giving an opinion to the chairman. Manoj commented that he would be happy if the constitution was changed, to clarify the issue, or to explicitly add another entity to handle intepretations . Is it time to split the secretary s role?

I wrote last month about my failed first attempt to achieve a "level 3" high power rocketry certification. Last week, I learned that one of the commercial altimeters I flew for control of the ejection sequence has a firmware bug, which can cause premature ejection of the main parachute on flights above 10k feet! So it may in fact be the case that everything I did was perfect and I was simply the victim of a bug in software... how ironic! Yesterday, on my second certification attempt, I was successful! The rocket I flew this time was based on a Polecat Aerospace ten inch Goblin kit. I incorporated several modifications in my build, including additional fiberglass and carbon fiber reinforcement, and a payload bay in the nose cone. Once again, my wife Karen graced me with a parachute sewn from the Team Vatsaas design, this time a slightly larger one in burgundy and black rip-stop nylon. She incorporated several design tweaks based on her experiences sewing the first one which we'll try to write up at some point, that allowed her to sew this one in less time. The motor selected was again an Aerotech M1297W reload. The launch went perfectly, and the ascent was impressive. At apogee, the nose cone separated as planned and the drogue parachute deployed. Unfortunately, when the backup charge fired two seconds later, the main parachute also deployed. That wasn't intended... the main was supposed to deploy much lower, at 1300 feet. Luckily, the winds were light enough that the rocket touched down only about a mile downrange from the launch rail, well within the waiver distance, and was easily recovered without damage. There are three things I'll consider changing before flying this rocket again. First, the chute size calculator used to design the main parachute seems way off. The actual descent rate was around 32 feet per second, while our goal was 20. Other than that, the parachute performed admirably! Second, the premature deployment of the main at apogee could be cured by replacing the paper taped over that parachute bay with another piston capping the bay and held in with a pair of shear pins. Finally, the hard touch down snapped some of the nylon wire ties holding the batteries in place in the avionics bay. While no damage was done, and reducing the descent rate might prevent it happening again, improving the battery mounting would be an easy upgrade. For more information, see my project page for this rocket. James Russell took some pictures at the launch, including a great one of the rocket under boost just leaving the launch rail. And Jeff Lane captured video of the ascent and descent. It was a great flight and a great day, and represents a major milestone in our hobby rocket activities!

As some of you know, the first weekend in October was a big deal for me, because it was NCR's Oktoberfest launch event. My son and I spent the weekend camped out on the prairie with Keith Packard and many of our other friends. Keith successfully went from nothing to a "level 2" high power certification, which was pretty cool. I wasn't quite so lucky. On Saturday morning, I flew my custom-designed rocket YikStik for a "level 3" certification attempt. The name comes from the word my wife uses to describe lipstick. The rocket was built from a mixture of custom and Giant Leap parts, including 98mm Dyna Wind airframe, a 98-75mm tail cone retainer, and a Pinnacle nose cone. All the centering rings were cut on my 3-axis CNC milling machine, and the fins were custom 7-layer composite layups using plywood, carbon fiber, fiberglass, and epoxy... all vacuum bagged using a kitchen food saver appliance. Painted red, gold, and black, with a custom 8 foot main parachute sewn by my wife Karen from the Team Vatsaas design in red and black rip-stop nylon. The motor selected was an Aerotech M1297W reload. This is a 75mm diameter motor 66.5cm in length with 2722 grams of propellant yielding 5417 Newton-seconds of total impulse. It was also on sale earlier this year for cert attempts. My simulations said YikStik should have flown to about 14,800 feet above ground level at the NCR north site on this motor. The launch went perfectly, and the rocket was stunningly beautiful under boost. It disappeared into some high clouds, but we continued to have strong signals from the two tracking transmitters installed in the payload bay behind the nose cone. About the anticipated time after launch, we saw a rocket descending under chute in the distance, and headed in that direction. A few minutes later, we abruptly lost both tracking signals, and that's when things took a turn for the weird. In hindsight, I think we suffered an apogee deployment of the main chute, and the rocket we saw descending was someone else's. YikStik was designed to deploy a streamer at apogee, then descend fairly quickly to about 1500 feet above ground where a second set of ejection charges would fire to separate the nose cone on a 3 foot drogue parachute that would pull a deployment bag containing the main chute out of the airframe and then pull the bag off the chute. The nose cone, payload bay with the tracking transmitters, and deployment bag would then descend under the drogue chute and the remainder of the rocket would descend under the big chute. In the world of deployment bags, this is called a 'free bag' configuration. With deployment at 1500 feet, the two bits should have landed within sight of each other. But that didn't happen. It wasn't until late Sunday afternoon, after we had to leave to get Keith to the airport, that some friends finally located the nose cone assembly about 3.5 miles down range from the launch site, over a couple rises and past an area of rough terrain. By then it was cold, windy, and rainy, and so I really appreciated the effort they put in locating the nose, and wasn't too surprised that they didn't immediately see the rest. Since the bulk of the rocket under the main should have had a slightly higher descent rate than the nose cone, I expected to find the rest of the rocket somewhere near a line between the launch rail and where the nose cone was discovered. So last Wednesday I spent about 5.5 hours walking around the area searching... but no luck. Since then, several other people have been out looking for my rocket, including two friends who flew over the area today in a light plane looking down into all the washes. Still nothing. I posted some signs in the area with a photo of the rocket and my contact info, I hope someone calls eventually. In the meantime, the bulk of YikStik remains missing, and of course I did not achieve a successful level 3 certification. Lessons learned for next time are that tethering the deployment bag to the main chute instead of flying in a "free bag" configuration might have been a better choice, and it's kind of silly having two tracking transmitters in one of the two pieces of your rocket and none in the other... Ray LaPanse took some stunning photos of the launch. He will likely post better versions with color correction and so forth at some point, but in the meantime, I've put a few up on my Garbee Rockets web site. She sure was a beauty!

Participiants: Martin F Krafft <madduck@madduck.net> (vcs-pkg.org), Florian Maier <contact@marsmenschen.com> (LiMux), Cesar Gomez <cesar.gomez@gmail.com> (Linex), Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> (Debian Edu), Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org>, Mark Shuttleworth <marks@debian.org> (Ubuntu), Bdale Garbee (Debian)
Full event details

It took me 34 hours elapsed time to get from a hotel in downtown San Francisco to the Hotel Dora in Mar del Plata, a few hours longer than planned. But despite being tired, it seems like a good place, my first meal here was quite pleasant, and I've already had some great conversations with people I didn't know would be here. Hard to ask for much more! I'm glad someone reminded me that I have two sessions scheduled in the first two days, an SPI BOF and then a keynote on Monday morning. But first, some much-needed sleep!

Quite some time back, I wrote about my disappointment that Ampad had ceased manufacturing their Quad Ruled Steno Books, which I use to make notes to myself on just about everything. Several of my friends in Europe responded that similar pads in A5 size were commonly available in retail stores, and I quite happily bought a few on a trip to Germany. Then, one of my colleagues at work had some nice notebooks made up for a customer event with grid paper and suitable logos on the cover that I grabbed a few of and have used quite happily. Sometime in the intervening years, Ampad started producing these pads again, but with a different product number, 42036. I stumbled over some at a local office supply store and bought a big pile... others have noticed too, and sent me email about it, which is why I'm taking the time to write this... Yes, I'm much happier now!

I've been using git for a while, like it a lot, and finally decided it's time to move all my Debian packaging work over from CVS. After a frustrating few hours trying, I gave up on trying to use git-cvsimport. It generates mangled repositories even for simple packages like sudo. The git-import-dsc tool in the git-buildpackage package works fine as far it goes, but I'd really like to preserve my history. So, after some consultation on IRC, I took a look at parsecvs. It didn't quite work out of the box, either, but looks promising, and the author showed an immediate interest in the problems I'm having and offered to help. So, perhaps I'll be able to use it before long... In the meantime, a while back I offered to help Gudjon I. Gudjonsson restructure the sdcc packages so that a DFSG compliant version can return to main with a full version under a different package name going in non-free. This is all necessary because some of the assemblers provided in the package have a non-commercial use clause in the license, and there are also license issues with the HTML documentation. I care about this because sdcc is a build dependency for gnuradio, which I maintain for Debian (it uses the 8051 toolchain to build downloadable code for the USRP, etc). While waiting for parsecvs to get some love and attention, I sat down this evening to restructure sdcc and move it to git. I'm pretty happy with my progress so far, though there's a bit left to do before uploads happen. Gudjon and I decided to use the collab-maint facilities on alioth.debian.org for collaboration, which took me a little head-scratching to figure out, but looks like a perfect fit for our needs. I updated the wiki page about Git on Alioth with a few of my learnings as I went through the process. Using git branching to handle non-DFSG-compliant upstream sources is pretty obvious, the notes in the git-buildpackage documentation helped. Using pristine-tar to capture the deltas required to regenerate orig.tar.gz files from the git repo is amazingly cool. It's hard to believe how much friendlier the world seems when you don't have to drag a bunch of tarballs around with you to do useful work! And git-buildpackage has suitable options to make using it pretty automatic. Great stuff! It's likely to be a few days before I can get back to this, finish up, and upload the results of this restructuring work. In the meantime, I'm writing this entry largely to offer my compliments to everyone involved in making git-buildpackage, alioth, and collab-maint work so well. Special thanks to Joey Hess, whose pristine-tar package is another in a long line of absolutely brilliant tools that contribute to making my life easier! I'm going to end up using it a lot.

On Sunday, the day before LCA 2008 officially started, Kelly and Rusty asked us first-timers to blog about events, specifically about what we liked and disliked. So far, this conference has been really enjoyable and busy, and I have not found the time to write about its content. The talk I just heard leaves me without an excuse, so there: I have recently had a very interesting and enlightening discussion with a blind Debian developer. When I saw on the conference schedule that Jason White would talk about using Linux with speech and Braille output interfaces, I passed up my opportunity to hear Andrew Tridgell talk about clustered Samba and attended his lecture instead. Jason covered a great number of aspects: from the history of the Braille system, and current, Free implementations thereof, via speech output, to strategies of integrating these techniques into existing programmes which are generally not designed with visually-impaired users in mind. He has a collection of references on his webpage, to which I shall refer for the technical content. His presentation left me very excited and impressed. Excited to see him giving a presentation with such enthusiasm and energy, and impressed because his talk (without notes or slides) was by far better than the job of the average presenter with access to notes and slides to display. Jason conveyed a lot of information in a very well-structured, capitivating report. I think he left most of the audience speechless (figuratively speaking; there were good questions). I feel uneasy with thanking Jason explicitly, or even writing this blog post. If you bear with me for a minute, then let me bridge to women involvement in open-source software. My position on this topic is quite clear: I make no distinctions where they are not obvious, and simultaneously I think it s awesome that more and more women are joining the predominantly male crowd (and their influence undeniably makes the community a more comfortable place). Every now and then, I would like to comment on that, such as I think it s awesome that you are working on this, being a woman (an oversimplified example). What I am trying to say is given how few women are involved with OSS, I appreciate all the more what you are doing. This is non-judgemental, I don t say this because I am trying to highlight someone s gender or sex. It s a communication issue, and I am learning, but I d also rather not limit what I say by making absolutely sure never to offend anyone. But when I utter such a comment, it might still greatly annoy someone or yield vicious returns. This is not always the case in fact, less than it used to be but I ve encountered it here and there, which made me more careful. So when I write about Jason s presentation and how great it was, I want to highlight how it s a greater achievement for him than it would be for me, because he is blind and I am not. I don t mean to single him out or put him on the spot. I am simply impressed, very impressed. And being who I am, I d like to say so. Thanks, Jason. Update: David Schmitt makes an interesting point:

The important question is now, why are we blind people doing great presentations more impressing than people with working eyes doing a great presentation? My personal answer isn t so great: because I didn t expect it. No wonder people get offended if you tell em to their face that I m impressed with his achievements, because I wouldn t have expected it.

I don t agree, or at least I fail to see it. I was impressed, I did not expect it (which isn t to say that I came in to Jason s talk expecting it to be any less than a good talk, I had no expectation! Please think for a second if this isn t immediately clear!) is that offensive? I didn t know Jason, had no way to know whether his presentations are great or less so, but then he pretty much blew me away. The presentation was better than what I am used to (from anyone), and the achievement is all the more greater because it seems to me that he has had to put much more effort into it, purely for accessibility reasons. I guess I should know better, but I still, after all these years, have a problem seeing through the end of it, understanding it. Kant to the rescue, my intentions are good (I claim), but this goes both ways regardless: in any communication, one ought to try hard never to offend. At the same time, one ought to try hard not to be offended until one can be reasonably sure that offence was intended. When I brought this up in Adaora Oniya s miniconf talk on communication challenges, Bdale Garbee recalled the policy in use when he was involved in protocol design work groups: send politely, receive with an open mind. I don t remember his exact words, but I think I got the gist. Update: I just talked to Jason and got his feedback on the issue. It boils down to a quote I ll transcribe: I want my work to be judged by its merit and not by who I am. It only leaves me wondering about the situation at hand: I was impressed by his very well-structured and presented talk and by the fact that he did such a good job given his visual impairment. In any case, I ll close the issue. Jason told me he d happily engage in further discussion and I stated that he is not offended. There is another lesson I learnt: the next time I blog about someone else in such a way, I should really get his/her clearance before publishing! Just to be sure