DebConf5 This tshirt is 15 years old and from DebConf5. It still looks quite nice! DebConf5 was my 3rd DebConf and took place in Helsinki, or rather Espoo, in Finland. This was one of my most favorite DebConfs (though I basically loved them all) and I'm not really sure why, I guess it's because of the kind of community at the event. We stayed in some future dorms of the universtity, which were to be first used by some European athletics chamopionship and which we could use even before that, guests zero. Being in Finland there were of course saunas in the dorms, which we frequently used and greatly enjoyed. Still, one day we had to go on a trip to another sauna in the forest, because of course you cannot visit Finland and only see one sauna. Or at least, you should not. Another aspect which increased community bonding was that we had to authenticate using 802.10 (IIRC, please correct me) which was an authentication standard mostly used for wireless but which also works for wired ethernet, except that not many had used it on Linux before. Thus quite some related bugs were fixed in the first days of DebCamp... Then my powerpc ibook also decided to go bad, so I had to remove 30 screws to get the harddrive out and 30 screws back in, to not have 30 screws laying around for a week. Then I put the harddrive into a spare (x86) laptop and only used my /home partition and was very happy this worked nicely. And then, for travelling back, I had to unscrew and screw 30 times again. (I think my first attempt took 1.5h and the fourth only 45min or so Back home then I bought a laptop where one could remove the harddrive using one screw. Oh, and then I was foolish during the DebConf5 preparations and said, that I could imagine setting up a team and doing video recordings, as previous DebConfs mostly didn't have recordings and the one that had, didn't have releases of them... And so we did videos. And as we were mostly inexperienced we did them the hard way: during the day we recorded on tape and then when the talks were done, we used a postprocessing tool called 'cinelerra' and edited them. And because Eric Evans was on the team and because Eric worked every night almost all night, all nights, we managed to actually release them all when DebConf5 was over. I very well remember many many (23 or 42) Debian people cleaning the dorms thoroughly (as they were brand new..) and Eric just sitting somewhere, exhausted and watching the cleaners. And everybody was happy Eric was idling there, cause we knew why. In the aftermath of DebConf5 Ben Hutchings then wrote videolink (removed from sid in 2013) which we used to create video DVDs of our recordings based on a simple html file with links to the actual videos. There were many more memorable events. The boat ride was great. A pirate flag appeared. One night people played guitar until very late (or rather early) close to the dorms, so at about 3 AM someone complained about it, not in person, but on the debian-devel mailinglist. And those drunk people playing guitar, replied immediatly on the mailinglist. And then someone from the guitar group gave a talk, at 9 AM, and the video is online... (It's a very slowwwwwww talk.) If you haven't been to or close to the polar circles it's almost impossible to anticipate how life is in summer there. It get's a bit darker after midnight or rather after 1 AM and then at 3 AM it get's light again, so it's reaaaaaaally easy to miss the night once and it's absolutly not hard to miss the night for several nights in a row. And then I shared a room with 3 people who all snore quite loud... There was more. I was lucky to witness the first (or second?) cheese and whine party which at that time took place in a dorm room with, dunno 10 people and maybe 15 kinds of cheese. And, of course, I met many wonderful people there, to mention a few I'll say Jesus, I mean mooch or data, Amaya and p2. And thanks to some bad luck which turned well, I also had my first time ever Sushi in Helsinki. And and and. DebConfs are soooooooo good! I'll stop here as I originally planned to only write a paragraph or two about each and there are quite some to be written! Oh, and as we all learned, there are probably no mosquitos in Helsinki, just in Espoo. And you can swim naked through a lake and catch a taxi on the other site, with no clothes and no money, no big deal. (And you might not believe it, but that wasn't me. I cannot swim that well.)

Playing with popcon data Check out http://people.debian.org/~enrico/popsuggest.php. You can upload there the popcon results of your system and have them compared with all the other submissions. It will show the results grouped by the most relevant tags found in your system, and you can filter the results based on various package types that map to debtags expressions. Credits also go to Eric Evans, for the continuous very useful and supportive discussions during all the development. As I said, there is so much really cool stuff to be written, just within reach. Some random notes taken during the development:

• The popcon dataset is on gluck in /org/popcon.debian.org/popcon-mail/popcon-entries
• Local popcon scan results are in /var/log/popularity-contest
• I now generate and publish aggregate frequency information
• Here are two links about TFIDF
• Here is some more literature about computing similarities; the Jaccard Index seems to be made exactly for Debtags tag sets.
• Xapian has python bindings documented in /usr/share/doc/python-xapian/bindings.html and the full C++ API documentation is also useful