YNAB On the advice of many friends, I tried to use You Need A Budget. I gave it a seriously long, proper evaluation: over a year. But I just couldn't get it to work for me. I don't want to try and explain why. To be honest, those same friends who advocated for it fairly strongly, also gave me a pretty hard time for giving up on it! Despite it not clicking for me, there are a few concepts from YNAB that I quite like:

• "give every dollar a job". Or: Budget your entire income.
• The jam-jar budgeting approach of carrying budget "pots" over from month to month, so you can budget a small amount towards a large thing over a long period.

GNUCash Jimmy Kaplowitz suggested back in 2012 that I should take a look at GNUCash. It took me a few more years before I did. The eventual trigger point for me was organising an event where I paid for a load of things on behalf of others and needed to track who had paid me back. It excelled for that. I've continued to use GNUCash to manage my personal money that is, my "play money" and anything I've accumulated but I haven't committed to it for my family finances. Practically speaking that would lock my wife out of them, which wouldn't be fair. But also because GNUCash's shortcomings (and despite its strengths, it certainly has some) mean that I don't expect I will be using it into the indefinite future, even for my personal stuff. The most significant drawback, in my opinion, is GNUCash's support for scripting. Sometimes, there's a laborious but easily-mechanisable (in theory) task I need to perform that would be ideal to script. GNUCash has built-in scripting support using Guile the GNU lisp/scheme dialect but this is limited to Reports only, I don't think it can be used for a task such as "match a series of transactions using one or more filters or regular expressions, and apply a transformation to them, such as change the account to which they are posted", etc. It also has a C library and auto-generated bindings for other languages. This has a horrible API, which is carried over into the language bindings. Documentation for the whole lot is basically non-existent too. Plain-text accounting For that reason I set out to find some better tools. There's a lot of interest and activity in plain-text accounting (PTA), including tools such as beancount, ledger or the Haskell re-implementation hledger. In a future post I'll write about PTA and hledger.

Big release notes since 1.0: We ve got a new list dput-ng-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org feel free to subscribe!

1.3:
  * Avoid failing on upload if a pre/post upload hook is missing from the
    Filesystem.
  * Fix "dcut raises FtpUploadException" by correctly initializing the uploader
    classes from dcut (Closes: #696467)
1.2:
  * Add bash completions for dput-ng (Closes: #695412).
  * Add in a script to set the default profile depending on the building
    distro (Ubuntu support)
  * Fix a bug where meta-class info won't be loaded if the config file has the
    same name.
  * Add an Ubuntu upload target.
  * Added .udeb detection to the check debs hook.
  * Catch the correct exception falling out of bin/dcut
  * Fix the dput manpages to use --uid rather then the old --dm flag.
  * Fix the CLI flag registration by setting required=True
    in cancel and upload.
  * Move make_delayed_upload above the logging call for sanity's sake.
  * Fix "connects to the host even with -s" (Closes: #695347)

Thanks to everone who s contributed!

     7  Bernhard R. Link
     4  Ansgar Burchardt
     3  Luca Falavigna
     2  Michael Gilbert
     2  Salvatore Bonaccorso
     1  Benjamin Drung
     1  Gergely Nagy
     1  Jakub Wilk
     1  Jimmy Kaplowitz
     1  Luke Faraone
     1  Sandro Tosi

This has been your every-once-in-a-while dput-ng update. We re looking for more code contributions (to make sure everyone s happy), doc updates (etc) or ideas.

The SPI election results have been declared. Jimmy Kaplowitz, Clint Adams and Robert Brockway were elected to the SPI board. There were 75 voters, which is 16% turnout, up from the 13% in the last contested election, in 2009. The next meeting is this evening at 20:30 UTC (21:30 UK) in #spi on irc.spi-inc.org and there are a couple of resolutions, inviting the Drizzle database and Arch Linux distribution projects to associate, so that SPI can collect and process funds for them. Please, pop in and see how the new board members perform.

Right now I am sitting in the train to the airport for going to DebCamp/DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. During DebCamp amongst other things I am going to work on finishing up the last bits on getting daily/weekly Debian Live autobuilds back for wheezy. This spring Jimmy Kaplowitz offered to help with the task of overseeing the debian-live autobuilder and to coordinate necessary bits with cdimage.debian.org. Having them on cdimage.d.o became recently possible as Steve McIntyre offered to make a VM available for us (live-build requires root privileges, and naturally, you would not want to let that run on the host system itself, that is why in the past it was not possible to build them on cdimage.d.o). The remaining issues are, and this is why the autobuilds are not yet back since spring, that live-build still needs two things: a couple of tweeks for wheezy, and the autobuild stuff need to be properly integrated into live-build itself. That will happen as an additional binary package live-build-cron with a bunch of debconf questions, so that everyone and his dog can setup a debian-live autobuild server on his own machine. The initial upload (which will not yet work, do not bother to try) was uploaded to experimental this week and cleared the new queue, now looking forward to get this all finished up and resulting in a live-build uploaded to unstable by the end of the week. In the second week, Jimmy arrives, I will be introducing him to live-build and the various little things to watch for and hopefully manage to persuade him to take over the autobuilds maintenance. Having all images that are based on packages solely from the stable/testing/unstable archives moved to cdimage.d.o is freeing up ressources on live.debian.net which did the job in the past since etch. Ben Armstrong volunteered to help with overseeing the live.d.n instance of live-build-cron that will build more then once per day images for si, with the only difference that they will not use live-* from the archive but the latest snapshots from our git snapshots repository. This will be a big help for the development as eventually we will be autotesting these images for various things. Last but not least, thanks to both Jimmy and Ben for all your kindness, patience and help with this during the last couple of months. We have interesting times ahead.

Asheesh posted When "free software" got a new name, which mentions about the transition period where the Free Software movement started its quest towards being understood by non-geeks, and when people started finding terms better suited for general (and specifically, business-minded) audiences. We are talking about facts that reached concretion 12 years ago, when the term Open Source was coined and divulgated. That is already far in the past to try and change it Still, during DebConf I was talking with several friends about it. In my opinion, there was never really the need to choose such an ambiguous name In English, the word Liberty unambiguously refers to free as in freedom, with no conceptual links to gratuity. Liberty is also a concept held dear by the values of the USA society (which is the birthplace of our ideological movement, so it's specially important). Jimmy Kaplowitz pointed out a reason: Liberty is an incomplete word. You could translate what Asheesh's post mentions, Freed Software Liberated Software, but libertydoes not exist as an adjective by itself, only when used as contrasting with an earlier more restricted situation. We can say some piece of software was liberated if it was born unfree, but what about things that were libre since the beginning? So, yes, as beautiful as Liberty is, and as advantageous as such a concept would have been for us... Liberty seems to be too imperfect to be able to represent our movement.

Even though I am late with this post, it is nice to say that I am writing here from this year s DebConf10, in NYC. Today (well, yesterday) was the day of the Cheese and Wine party and I think that it was cool, at least for the moments that I were there. This post, though, isn t technical in any sense. I only talks shortly about my impressions of the community, as this is my first DebConf ever (despite the fact that I have been using Debian since the late nineties). I was very pleased to have met Bdale Garbee. I saw him the other day arriving with Keith Packard, but I just didn t want to disturb them at that point. We only talked for, say, 2 minutes, and his was one of the nicest receptions that I had here. And there were some other people that were equally easy to approach, nice to talk with and, to my surprise, knew my name after some brief moments (yes, this does make a difference, especially when you are in a strange country, when you don t know anybody with whom you have worked for some years). Being involved in the organization stuff, one would think that Jimmy Kaplowitz would be so busy, but he was so kind. I had longer conversations with T ssia Cam es, Tiago Vaz (as always) and some other people that I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person. In particular, Daniel Baumann (who apparently is now crazy about our FISL and wants to drink all Guaran that he can get ), Chris Lamb and Ot vio Salvador and his mom. Those people are so cool and it is nice to discuss some legal issues among different continents in the lounge of their building at late night. Too bad that I am allocated to the other building. I am forgetting many other people (hey, it is 2 am here in NYC), but I would feel guilty if I had not mentioned at least three people more: Martin Michlmayr, Phil Hands, and Reinhard Tartler (who is uploading lame to the debian repository, as the patents regarding it are expiring or expired already). Thanks! P.S.: I just created an account on flickr that I hope to populate with some photos that I took here. And even with a nice squirrel.

This moment has finally arrived! Last Saturday (27-th) on #debconf-team decision was made, DebConf11 is coming to Bosnia and Herzegovina! Our team and myself were working on this whole candidature for last ~9 months, and even though we put incredibly amounts on energy, hard work, enthusiasm and everything else that goes along with it, suspense and uncertainty were there until the very last minute! One of our local team members (trip0d s) wife almost gave a birth to their child during the decision process that lasted full 4 hours As a remainder we were competing with Ecuador and Germany to win this bid, whole process was excruciating and very emotionally distressful in every possible aspect for every team member; at one point Germany took a slight lead ahead of Bosnian team, while in the end by points Bosnia was in slight lead by 0.25 points, and this is exactly what touched me the most about this whole bid/decision/process. This is not a great advantage or anything for that matter, but what happened is that in decision process Debian debconf team and its developers picked Bosnia and Herzegovina as a place where they want to have DebConf11! Our main competitors from M nchen, Germany showed a real fair play and at the end even yielded to our side; really to both of you, Michael Banck (azeem) and Andreas Barth (aba) it was a pleasure and honor to compete with you guys! See you in NYC for proper handshake and possibly a hug? Also I d like to thank Jimmy Kaplowitz (Hydroxide), Moray Allan (moray) who had chairs and who did absolutely incredible job I guess I ll just have to thank the whole debconf orga team for all their amazing work ( can t name names individually because I ll definitely forget someone!) This bid really reunited whole Bosnia and Herzegovina, this whole process also united all of Balkans and whole of Ex Yugoslavia, which makes me especially happy since today (March 1st) we are celebrating the day we officially separated from Yugoslavia. Now this just one small step forward, since the real work is ahead of us and we re starting it all as soon as tomorrow since there s really a lot that needs to be done. Again thank you all, we ll give our best for this to be a DebConf you ll remember (as a great one of course!), in the meantime see you in New York City! Adnan Hodzic aka AbsintheSyringe team leader on behalf of whole debconf11-team. DebConf11 Banja Luka wiki Debconf11 decision log (#debconf-team log)

Registration is now open for DebConf10. The dates of the conference are August 1-7, 2010, with arrivals at our group lodging permitted as of 3 PM on July 31 and departures required by 11 AM on August 8. The conference is preceded by DebCamp from July 25-31 including the arrival day. To receive announcements regarding DebConf and DebCamp, please subscribe to the debconf-announce mailing list. In order to avoid spamming Planet Debian with a long post detailing registration procedure, travel sponsorship, DebCamp info, and cost of attendance, please instead see the DebConf10 website s registration page to answer all your questions. As always, feel free to contact the DebConf team via email or IRC for answers not provided by the website. DebConf10 is going to be great. We re looking forward to seeing you in New York in August! the DebConf team

The DebConf10 team just sent out a press release announcing the dates and venue for DebConf10 in New York City. Most of the readers of this blog already saw it through some other list, so I ll just put the dates here and provide the full text plus other relevant info via links.

• Dates: July 25-31, 2010 will be DebCamp and August 1-7, 2010 will be DebConf.
• Press release text
• First press coverage in response to our announcement
• Main conference website
• Visa info
• Email address for visa help(read the visa info page before emailing)
• Yes, thanks to Valessio Brito we already have I m going to DebConf10 buttons.

We hope to see many of you there!

Hello, The DebConf10 local team would like to announce availability of visa information at http://debconf10.debconf.org/visas.xhtml Full information is contained at that page, provided by our lawyer; however some important points are indicated below. - The United States depends on its tens of millions of visitors annually for its economy to function. Getting approved for a visa is not a rare exception, and it is even easier given our generous free help from an immigration lawyer. - If you are from a Visa Waiver Program country (see visa page), fill out the ESTA web form to apply for your travel authorization now. You don t need any information about the conference itself or your means of travel. - If you will need to apply for a visa, check the visa information page for information on what to do. Carefully check the wait times for your country s embassy. For most countries there is no *immediate* urgency, but plan to get an appointment well in advance of May 2010. - Make sure you will have a passport that will expire in February 2011 or later (6 months after the latest possible DebConf date). If not, apply for a new passport. Special note to Venezuelans: Since the wait time for a visa appointment in Caracas is so long, we have been paying special attention to its visa application process. We have reports that the dates for visa appointments are moving quickly, getting later and later. If you are are applying for a visa in Caracas, you need to make an appointment immediately. You just need to make an appointment now, supporting materials can be assembled later. Also consider applying for a visa in a different US embassy such as the Quito, Ecuador one with a significantly shorter wait time. Consult with our lawyer for advice on the advantages and disadvantages of doing this. The local team hopes that everyone interested can meet us in New York City and have a great DebConf10 experience! Feel free to email us (publicly archived list) or ask in #debconf-team or #debconf-nyc on OFTC with your questions or ideas. - The DebConf10 Local Team

Just received this comment from Jimmy Kaplowitz over in the US: “yuck, your country continues to turn into Big Brother: BBC News: Giant database plan ‘Orwellian’” Hell, yeah. That’s a reason why my support for the party is so weak at the moment. I’ve been working and writing against this since ST@ND and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which we were told was essential for crime-fighting, but actually helps gov.uk spy on parents making school place applications. Currently, I’m telling people Gov.UK Consults on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO. If anyone has any doubt that the database state will be abused, look at some examples of Labour’s “terrorists” (at least, they had supposedly anti-terror measures used against them) since 2001:-

1. Wolfie, an 82-year-old peace-campaigning heckler at a Labour conference
2. Indymedia
3. a Frenchman in Suffolk who downloaded the Anarchists’ Cookbook
4. an Algerian pilot
5. the country of Iceland

and that’s ignoring gov.uk’s frequent data leaks. Noodles replied: “There’s a quote somewhere that goes along the lines of “If the Tory policy is looking sane compared to what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong” that’s been applied to the Labour fascist state stuff.” Our terrorism measures are a joke, with loopholes that gov.uk can drive a truck through. They should be repealed and clearly-limited ones enacted, shouldn’t they?

The monthly IRC board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place later today, as announced by SPI’s secretary last week. While the announcement is back on time (yay!), the agenda isn’t (aww!). I’d be quite interested to learn how SPI is going to try to reduce the risk to its reserves, given the current slow decline of its primary bank which is not one of the first US banks getting bailed out. I think the best way for not-for-profits to avoid risking donations at the moment is to avoid having them in their bank accounts, in line with the Better Business Bureau standard that

“the charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the size of the past year’s expenses or three times the size of the current year’s budget, whichever is higher.”

Back in June 2005, SPI’s board of the time (Ian Jackson, John Goerzen, Jimmy Kaplowitz, David Graham, Bruce Perens, Benj. Mako Hill, Branden Robinson) decided to “remain noncompliant” with that standard and I fear that chicken could be coming home to roost now. I hope we don’t lose anything, but AIUI we’ve got nearly $150,000 in play. Update: Unlike its UK analogue, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation covers corporation accounts up to $250,000, so SPI is only risking temporary unavailability, not yet a risk of loss. Thanks to bd_ for pointing me to that.

Jimmy Kaplowitz writes:

“Software in the Public Interest, Inc., will hold a public board of directors meeting on Wednesday, August 20, 2008, 19:00 UTC. [...] SPI meetings are held on the OFTC IRC network, irc.oftc.net, in #spi. [...] Agenda“

A couple of weeks ago, I asked why people do and don t join SPI? The answers I got can be grouped into a few headings:-

Don’t know about SPI

“I admit that I was unaware of SPI. However seeing its age, a few familiar names on the board and also on the project list it looks like a solid organisation.”

“I too am unfamiliar with your organization”

“I guess I would be yet aother person who was not aware of this group.”

“Lack of awareness of SPI is probably the biggest hurdle. I too, was unaware of SPI. I am aware of the Linux Foundation and the FSF and others, but how does SPI differentiate itself and its goals from those organizations?”

Don’t know about joining

“The membership page on the SPI website is buried at the bottom of a secondary menu. One has to really go looking for it. And this definitely gives the impression that adding members is not a very high priority.”

“I ve been looking a while for how to join, is not the first time, I did before and never found it until now”

Don’t see why to join

“Even as an open source software advocate, I have not joined SPI because my particular interest and focus is on Plone. The Plone Foundation handles largely the same functions that SPI does for smaller, independent groups.”

“Why, what’s in it for me? The betterment of mankind or bragging rights when a corporations steals all of my work and gets rich off of it.”

“If you are someone who is very interested FOSS (free and open source software) rights and licenses, you are probably more inclined to become a part of the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or the OSI (Open Source Initiative).”

I’d welcome any thoughts you have on how we should overcome these barriers, either in the comments here, or on IRC #spi - I think I should be there a bit before or after the meeting. I’ll try to summarise the best over the next Wednesday or two.

Regular readers may remember that I stood in the board election of Software in the Public Interest, the main democratic free software corporation, a few weeks ago. Well, the result is posted with David Graham and Jimmy Kaplowitz are re-elected. Well done and good luck to both. Thanks to the other board members for running the election and restarting the voting machine as necessary. The postponed July meeting might happen in irc.oftc.net #spi today (Wednesday) at 1900UTC, but I expect they’ll announce it in the usual place before it happens. Naturally, I’m disappointed that more news, members’ panels and the annual report weren’t attractive enough to get more votes, and that old untruths were being reposted to some forums, but I can’t get too upset about this year’s result because both elected candidates had fine manifestos. I’m glad that Jimmy Kaplowitz’s platform includes posting more news and look forward to seeing that. Slightly worrying are the low turnout (down for the third year) and that over 80% of those few voters were from debian (my estimate). I’ve my suspicions why, but I’d love any non-voters to leave me a comment telling me why you think it is. The apology: the summary of responses to my questions about SPI membership will appear next week because I made a mistake on one site, set the closing date a week late and I don’t see any way to edit surveys after they’ve opened. Oops. Sorry. (Now, if that site was running free software, I’d see if I could fix the user interface to allow previews.) (Aside: I was going to include a bar chart of the voting, like last year, but Wordpress’s stupid post editor strips style attributes from li tags. I’ll go looking for that with a hack-axe Real Soon Now, before it causes me serious trouble.)

Jimmy Kaplowitz commented:

"The text "the board to confirm SPI's view of debian" goes to a 404 not found error page. If you are referring to this post: then I certainly had no idea what correspondence you were asking the secretary to report, and he may well not have known either if he wasn't up on the latest posts to debian-vote."

I'm not referring to that post. I sent a later message to board cc:general. I got bored waiting for it to appear, so I linked to where the next message will appear. I'm surprised it hasn't appeared yet. That's probably something to do with SPI's email-hostile server config, which I asked the board to address last month and they deferred.

"Please don't attribute a lack of response to a desire to avoid questions and add red tape when it can mostly be explained by a simple lack of understanding of the question. (Yes, if Neil had acted perfectly he would have replied to your mail asking what correspondence you meant, and if you had acted perfectly you would have included a link to the correspondence in the first place. Nobody's perfect.)"

I don't know what correspondence has been received, so how can I link it? I could link one example from me, I guess, but presumably there is more.

"I also can't find the correspondence to which you refer in any of my SPI list archives, private or not. If it was a direct mail to the secretary, then maybe Neil should have replied, but Neil is no more able to speak for the board in these matters than any other individual director. We'd need to pass a resolution if you wanted an official statement to end any confusion. Personally I think that SPI would act on a GR that overrode a DPL decision in keeping with the Debian Constitution, but as I just said, neither I nor any board member who spoke up on debian-vote can rightly express an opinion of the board on this matter in the absence of a resolution. Certainly a resolution would be reasonable."

I thought Neil is no more able to speak for the board than Joey or any other director. However, when I asked Joey to show proof that SPI only views the DPL, Neil posted. Neil's SPI secretary, so should know whether some proof exists, right? Now it seems a no-op resolution is needed to sort this out, as neither Joey or Neil agreed that SPI would follow non-DPL decisions. In a word: argh.

I wrote SPI gives away opensource.org and opensource.net and Bruce Byfield wrote SPI to transfer domain names to OSI - I think it's interesting to see how differently we view the disagreement. One possible reason for the difference is that the email discussion around this resolution happened on private lists. I saw the December meeting notice a couple of days before the meeting, sent the board a request that they fix member communications and then started a discussion about giving away the opensource domains with:

"SPI still holds the opensource domains because SPI is a membership controlled organisation and OSI was a self-perpetuating board; and OSI had not done enough to balance their bad licence proliferation work. Why isn't that mentioned in the proposal? Why does 2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1 not mention 2005-07-26.bp.1? Is it good to keep reposting rejected proposals until they pass? Why is the SPI board being asked again to surrender the domains while OSI is unreformed?"

The reason I started the discussion on spi-private was Josh Berkus writing

"If you think it's important that we should drag it onto spi-private, though, I suppose we should."

which rather suggested a private list was the appropriate venue. As Neil wrote:

"Some discussion has occured on the spi-private mailing list as to how the opensource.org resolution has been handled by the board."

That's putting it mildly. I wrote about the lack of public discussion (as mentioned in my previous report):

"I still don't see how some board members reconcile their votes to give away community assets with their promises. How the devil does board expect members to oversee it when board hides its operations from our view?"

There is a report on the discussion at the next meeting, which will hopefully put the reasons on the public record at last. Unsurprisingly, the first January 2007 meeting agenda omitted my member communications request, but board member Jimmy Kaplowitz accepted my reminder.

For various reasons, Software in the Public Interest (SPI) owned the domains opensource.org and opensource.net, which have been managed by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for most of their life. This supported various SPI goals and also gave a possibility of community control of opensource.org/net just in case it was ever needed. OSI does not offer much opportunity for community control, as it is a self-appointing board. (Regular readers may remember that the principles of democratic member control, autonomy and concern for community are important to me.) I was watching as the SPI board voted in favour of giving away the opensource domains, proposal 2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1 on the agenda. The vote happened without any discussion in the meeting. From memory (I guess logs will appear on the SPI site eventually):- David Graham ("SPI must also be involved in the promotion of and education about open source") proposed and voted for this action that stops SPI being involved in this promotion and education about open source; Michael Schultheiss ("I look forward to SPI's future expansion") (amended and?) voted for this action that reduces SPI; Neil McGovern ("achieve a greater degree of involvement [...] from the community in general") voted for this action that lessens SPI's involvement; Jimmy Kaplowitz ("It is important that it continue holding in trust the money and other legal assets belonging to its member projects [...] fulfill some more of its stated corporate purposes, involving education of the general public about free software and about computers in general") voted for this action that drops these assets and reduces involvement in education of the general public; Bdale Garbee ("would like to close this issue one way or another, once and for all") seemed willing to vote for anything which prevented further discussion - of course, only surrendering the domains could close it once and for all, as this is a one-way trapdoor topic - but had apologised for absence from the meeting; Martin "Joey" Schulze had apologised for absence from the meeting; Josh Berkus (nothing obviously relevant in his platform) abstained - consistent but disappointing; I think Branden Robinson was missing. Ian Jackson ("SPI's role is to provide a stable legal entity which can hold assets") voted against this action so that SPI would keep holding these assets. Bravo! Sources: The quotes above are the board's own promises in their election platforms, as listed on the SPI site in 2003 2006 apart from Bdale Garbee's platform which wasn't at the link given in 2004 so that quote is from the minutes of the previous meeting If some board members are willing to give away assets for no good reason, that strikes at one of SPI's core methods: holding assets for the community. What can we trust about this board? Their platforms are full of fine sentiments, but how do their actions reflect their platforms? This may be a mostly-dormant issue until the next election. If you want any of SPI's assets, just ask. If your request is rejected (as SPI rejected the opensource domain give-away before), just keep asking new sets of voters until they agree.