The Debian Project includes many people, groups and teams with different goals, priorities and ways of doing things. Diversity is a good thing, and the results of the continuous interaction, cooperation and competition among different points of view and components make up a successful developing framework both in Debian and in other Free / Libre / Open Source Software communities. The cost of this evolutionary paradigm is that sometimes there are subprojects that might have been extremely successful and useful that are surpassed by newer approaches, or that have to compete with alternative approaches that were not there before, and which might pursue different goals or have a different way of doing things that their developers find preferable in terms of modularity, scalability, stability, maintenance, aesthetics or any other reason. Whenever this happens, the emotional impact on the person or group of people that are behind the established component (or process, or organizational structure), that is being questioned and put under test by the newer approach can be important, particularly when they have invested a lot of time and effort and a considerable amount of emotional energy doing a great job for many years. Something they should be thanked for. This might be particularly hard when -for whatever reason- the communication between both teams is not too fluent or constant, and sometimes the author or authors of the solution that was considered mainstream until then might feel left out and their territory stolen. As generally development teams and technical people in the Free / Libre / Open Source world are more focused on results than on relationships, projects are generally not too good at managing this (emotional, relational) situations, even though they (we) are gradually learning and improving. What has happened with the Debian Live Project is indeed a hurtful situation, even though it s probably an unavoidable one. The Debian Live Project has done a great job for many years and it is sad to see it dying abruptly. A new competing approach is on its way with a different set of priorities and different way of doing things, and all that can be done at the moment is to thank Daniel for all his work, as well as everyone who has made the Debian Live Project successful for so many years, also thank the people who are investing their time and effort in developing something that might be even better. Lets wait and see. Source of the image: Conflict Modes and Managerial Styles by Ed Batista

Now that the tsunami that followed my recent blog post has passed, I can read through all the nice comments and blogs of other people. I didn t expect that just writing up some links to posts on LKML, plus adding my personal opinion on what has happened and about my interpretation concerning Debian could gather so much attention. Anyway, let us look at the blog posts written in the aftermath. In particular do I want to answer to two blogs: Lars Wirzenius blog and Mart n Ferrari s blog, both of which are excellent examples of insults. I also want to mention that although the previous two are bad examples, there are fortunately also those who are able to resist primitive insults, in particular Gunnar Wolf (direct link to the blog does not work), and Miriam Ruiz blog, which contradict my blog and propose a different view, without pulling the knife. Lars Wirzenius Let us start with Lars (ah sorry, I have to call him Wirzenius here, strange custom has suddenly popped up in Debian!):

I think Preining mis-characterises what happens on the Linux kernel mailing list, and in Debian, in free software development in general, and what Sarah Sharp has said and done. I continue to think he is wrong about everything on this topic.

I am very surprised that Lars^WWirzenius is in possession of a crystal ball that allows him to see and evaluate my attitude towards all these items, considering that I have presented links to posts on the LKML, and yes, my interpretation of the matter. Mind that the whole text amounts to about 130 lines on my screen, while my personal opinion was stated in two paragraphs of total 9 lines plus some interspersed comments. And in these maybe 20 lines I didn t make general statements about open source, kernel development etc etc. Lars, I know you have closed your blog for comments so I couldn t ask you but please, can you send me one of your crystal balls if you have more of them? At least he has managed to keep a bit of proper writing and disagreed with my statement on Debian (whether there is fun or not in Debian). He is of course free to do that, but please, don t rob me the right to state that I think Debian has changed. All this dispute centers around people not being capable to distinguish two things: One, being against the Code of Conduct due to the inclusion of administrative actions without clear definitions, and Two, being pro offensive behavior and and insults. Now, dear Lars^WWirzenius, please listen: I never advocated abusive behavior or insults, nor do I defend it. (Did you hear that!) I simply opposed the Code of Conduct as ruling instrument. And what kind of emails I got due to my opposition was far outside the Code of Conduct you are so strongly defending. So please, stay at the facts, and stop insulting me. Thanks. Mart n Ferrari Concerning Mart n I don t have much to say but please, stop spreading lies. You stated:

Once again, he s complaining about how the fun from Debian has been lost because making sexist jokes, or treating other people like shit is not allowed any more.

Could you please come up with a reference to this? Or are you just interpreting? I am very disappointed about this level of discussion between Debian Developers. You not even cared to answer my comment on your blog. Should I say something clear here you should be happy that this has not been written on a Debian mailing list, otherwise I hope the Code of Conduct hammer would hit you.

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So yes, it seems that at least these two blogs underline exactly what my opinion is: Communication culture in Debian has changed to be more company-like. Probably due to the ever increasing amount of developers that are paid for their work on Debian (Ubuntu), the pressure to follow US company codes has taken a firm grip, so firm that even stating my diverging opinion is already enough to get branded. Good Future!

The definition of thick-skinned in different dictionaries ranges from not easily offended to largely unaffected by the needs and feelings of other people; insensitive , going through able to ignore personal criticism , ability to withstand criticism and show no signs of any criticism you may receive getting to you , an insensitive nature or impervious to criticism . It essentially describes an emotionally detached attitude regarding one s social environment, the capacity or ignoring or minimizing the effects of others criticism and the priorization of the protection of one s current state over the capacity of empathizing and taking into account what others may say that don t conform to one s current way of thinking. It is essentially setting up barriers against whatever others may do that might provoke any kind of crisis or change in you. There are a few underlying assumptions in the use of this term as a something good to have, when it comes to interactions with your own community: In the first place, it assumes that your own community is essentially hostile to you, and you will have to be constantly in guard against them. It assumes that it is better to set up barriers against the influence of others within your own comunity, because in fact your own peers are out there essentially to hurt you. Or, at least, they do not care a damn about you. In second place, it assumes that changes are wrong, that personal evolution is wrong, and that the more insensitive you are to your peer s opinions, the best, because they really have nothing to contribute to help you grow as a person. I m smart; you re dumb. I m big; you re little. I m right; you re wrong; And there s nothing you can do about it. (from the film Matilda). Matilda s dad is in fact the first reference that comes to my mind when we re talking about really thick skin. When the main recommendation when the level of aggressiveness within a community is that someone has to make their skin thicker, they are assuming that a bullying environment will help the results. This is nothing new. It s the same theoretical base that you can see in hazing and in other activities involving harassment, abuse or humiliation in college, when initiating a person into some groups. It s supposed to build character, to make someone closer to the alpha male stereotype and, in essence, make us better men (yes, I am using the word men on purpose, because insensitiveness is not usually seen as a positive trait in females). The assumption is that a community with a hard environment and individuals prepared for the war is more effective than a more civilized one. Luckily, that s not the point of view of most members of the Debian Community, and many other Free/Open Source projects. The Code of Conduct is very explicit when it says that a community in which people feel threatened is not a healthy community , and that is good. The Debian Project welcomes and encourages participation by everyone (Diversity Statement), including those with a thin skin, and I m happy about that. There are still a lot of things to improve, of course, but I have the feeling that -despite the occasional complains that having to be respectful to others take the fun away- we re moving in the right direction. The best tip I can give you on thickening your skin = don t. That is, don t thicken your skin. Having a thin skin means you re letting the world in, you re letting what s out there affect what s in you. It means you re connected. You re open. You re considerate and you ll consider it whatever it might be. Having a thin skin may be dangerous, sure, because you might take in so much that you pop, like that blueberry girl from Willy Wonka. But life is dangerous. A thick skin protects you from everything, but it also protects you from everything from the gentle touches of life, from the subtle emotions of others, the deep connections, the meaningful interactions. (Top Ten Tips on how to Thicken your Skin).

I approached the SuperTuxKart community fearing some backslash due to last week s discussion about their release 0.9, to find instead a nice, friendly and welcoming community. I have already had some very nice talks with them since then, and they have patiently explained to me the sequence of events that led to the situation that I mentioned and that, for the sake of fairness, I consider that I have to share here too. You can read the log of the first conversation I had with them (the log has been edited and cleared up for clarity and readability). I seriously recommend reading it, it s a honest friendly conversation, and it s first hand. For those who don t already know the game:

All this story seems to start with the complain of a 6 yo girl, close relative of one of the developers and STK user, who explained that she always felt that Mario Kart was better because there was a princess in it. I m not particularly happy with princesses as role models for girls, but one thing I have always said is that we have to listen to kids and take their opinions into accounts, and I know that if I had such a request from one of the kids closer to me, I probably would have fulfilled it too. In any case, Free Software projects based on volunteer work are essentially a do-ocracy and it is assumed that whoever does the work, gets to decide about it.

So that is how Princess Sara was added to the game. While developing it, I was assured that they took extra care that her proportions were somehow realistic, and not as distorted as we re used to see in Barbie or many Disney films. Sara is inspired on an OpenGameArt s wizard and is not supposed to be a weak damsel in distress, but in fact a powerful character in the world s universe.

Sara is not the only female character playable. There are a few others: Suzanne (a monkey, Blender s mascot), Xue (XFCE s mouse) and Amanda (a panda, the mascot of windows maker). Sara happens to be the only human character playable, male or female. While it has been argued that by adding that character, a player might have the impression that the rest of the characters would be male by default, I have been told that the intention is exactly the opposite,and that the fact that the only human playable character in the game is female should make it more attractive to girls. To some, at least. Here are some images of Sara:

So the fact is that they have invested a lot of time in developing Sara s model. I m not an artist myself, so I don t know first hand how much time and effort it takes to make such a model, but in any case it seems that quite a lot. When they designed the beach track Gran Paradiso, they wanted to add people to the beach. That track is, in fact, inspired on a real existing place: Princess Juliana Airport. Time was over and they wanted to publish a version with what they already had, so they used Sara s model in a bikini on the beach, with the intention of adding more people, male and female, later. The overall view of the beach would be:

This is how that track shows when the players are driving in it:

Now, about the poster of version 0.9, it is supposed to be inspired in the previous poster of version 0.8.1, only this time inspired in Carnival (which is, in fact, a celebration in which sexualization of both genders is a core part). I know that there are accusations of cultural apropriation, but I couldn t know, as my white privilege probably shields me from seeing that. Up to now, no one has said anything about that, only Gunnar explaining his point of view as a non-native mexican: While the poster does not strike as the most cautious possible, I do not see it as culturally offensive. It does not attempt to set a scene portraiting what were the cultures really like; the portrait it paints is similar to so many fantasy recreations . In my opinion, even when the model is done in good taste, with no superbig breasts and no unrealistic waist, it s still depicting a girl without much clothes as the main element of the scene, with an attire, a posture and an attitude that clearly resembles carnival and, thus, inevitably conveys a message of sexualization. Even though I can t deny that it s a cute poster, it s one I wouldn t be happy to see for example in a school, if someone wanted to promote the game there. The author of the poster, anyway, tells me that he had a totally different intention when doing it, and he wanted to depict a powerful princess, in the center of SuperTuxKart s universe, celebrating the new engine.

About the panties showing every now and then, I ve been told that it s something so hard to see that in fact you would really have to open the model itself to view them. I m not saying that I like them though, I think it would have been better if Sara would have had short pants under the skirt, if she was going to drive the snowmobile with a dress, but I m not sure if that s something important enough to condemn the game. The original girl mentioned at the beginning of this post seems to have found the animation funny, started laughing, and said that Sara is very silly, and that was all. It s probably something more silly than naughty, I guess. Even though, as I said, it s something I don t like too much. I don t have to agree with STK developers in everything. I guess.

There s one thing I would like to highlight about my conversations with the developers of SuperTuxKart, though. I like them. They seem to be as concerned about the wellbeing of kids as I am, they have their own ethic norms of what s acceptable and what s not, and they want to do something to be proud of. Sometimes, many of these conflicts arise from a lack of trust. When I first saw the screenshots with the girl in bikini and the panties showing, I was honestly concerned about the direction the project was taking. After having talked with the developers, I am more calmed about it, because they seem to have their heart in the right place, they care, they are motivated and they work hard. I don t know if a princess would be my first choice for a main female character, but at least their intention seems to be to give some girls a sensible role model in the game with who they can identify.

It has been recently discussed in Debian-Women and Debian-Games mailing lists, but for all of you who don t read those mailing lists and might have kids or use free games with kids in the classroom, or stuff like that, I thought it might be good to talk about it here. SuperTuxKart is a free 3D kart racing game, similar to Mario Kart, with a focus on having fun over realism. The characters in the game are the mascots of free and open source projects, except for Nolok, who does not represent a particular open source project, but was created by the SuperTux Game Team as the enemy of Tux. On April 21, 2015, version 0.9 (not yet in Debian) was released which used the Antarctica graphics engine (a derivative of Irrlicht) and enabled better graphics appearance and features such as dynamic lighting, ambient occlusion, depth of field, and global illumination. Along with this new engine comes a poster with a sexualized white woman is wearing an outfit that can be depicted as a mix of Native american clothes from different nation and a halo of feathers, as well as many models of her in a bikini swim suit, all along the game, even in the hall of the airport. They say an image is worth more than a thousand words, don t they?

In the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be felled with an ax, the natives cut it down by yelling at it. (Can t lay my hands on the article, but I swear I read it.) Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree just at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works. Ah, those poor nave innocents. Such quaintly charming habits of the jungle. Screaming at trees, indeed. How primitive. Too bad thay don t have the advantages of modern technology and the scientific mind. Me? I yell at my wife. And yell at the telephone and the lawn mower. And yell at the TV and the newspaper and my children. I ve been known to shake my fist and yell at the sky at times. Man next door yells at his car a lot. And this summer I heard him yell at a stepladder for most of an afternoon. We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling. Don t know what good it does. Machines and things just sit there. Even kicking doesn t always help. As for people, well, the Solomon Islanders may have a point. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts . by Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten)

A teacher in New York was teaching her class about bullying and gave them the following exercise to perform. She had the children take a piece of paper and told them to crumple it up, stamp on it and really mess it up but do not rip it. Then she had them unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty is was. She then told them to tell it they re sorry. Now even though they said they were sorry and tried to fix the paper, she pointed out all the scars they left behind. And that those scars will never go away no matter how hard they tried to fix it. That is what happens when a child bullies another child, they may say they re sorry but the scars are there forever. The looks on the faces of the children in the classroom told her the message hit home. ( Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/awesome-bullying-lesson-from-a-new-york-teacher )

Even though the Wikipedia defines gamer as someone who partakes in interactive gaming, such as (predominantly) video games or board games , this doesn t really gets close to that term means socially at the moment. Going back to Wikipedia, we find that the video game subculture is a form of new media subculture that has been influenced by video games , so it might be quite accurate to define gamers as members of that subculture. You will find that most of the uses of the term gamer in the social networks and in the blogosphere refer to that. Please notice that, even though it is quite likely that most of the gamers play video games, the other way round does not need to be true and, in fact, it isn t. Not everyone who plays video games belongs to the video game subculture, shares their point of view, their values and aesthetics, or even know about it. Kind of like what happens with the word hacker . Not everyone who hacks around with a computer belongs to the hacker subculture. Mostly everyone who has access to the technology plays video games now. From babies and kids to grandparents. And people play them in every possible technological system around, not only on video game consoles or personal computers, but alse on mobile phones, tablets, web browsers. And many of those people who use different kind of technologies to play video games are not gamers. Not in the sense of belonging to the video game subculture. It is important to acknowledge that: that the video game subculture does not have the monopoly over video games or the video game developing industry anymore. As you can imagine, all this rand doesn t come from nowhere. During the last months, we have been witnessing a fight between some conservative core members of the video game subculture and people who want to bring some fresh air into the sociocultural elements of that subculture. Namely, that women shouldn t be discriminated inside it. As every time that a women raises her voice to complain about anything in the Internet, they have been subjected to insults, attacks, rape and death threats, etc. I m talking about something called #GamerGate, and even though I m not going to get into it, I will provide some URLs in case someone might be interested. Please acknowledge that not all the points of view might be represented in this list (in fact, they are not, as I won t be promoting in my blog things that I severely disagree with), so search the web for more information if you want to get that.

• Gamergate: A Scandal Erupts in the Video-Game Community
• What death threats have to do with video games
• Why #Gamergaters Piss Me The F*** Off
• Actress Felicia Day Opens Up About GamerGate Fears, Has Her Private Details Exposed Minutes Later
• Felicia Day speaks candidly about #GamerGate, immediately gets attacked
• VGS- #GamerGate: Threats of Mass Shooting and Rape for Journalistic Integrity- Interview with Brianna Wu + Jennifer Allaway
• Gamergate can t stop being about harassment
• Brianna Wu and the human cost of Gamergate: every woman I know in the industry is scared
• Rape and death threats are terrorizing female gamers. Why haven t men in tech spoken out?
• Why GamerGate Can t Continue
• The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read
• Gamergate s anti-woman agenda made clear: Actor Felicia Day threatened for speaking up
• Gloria Steinem: Gamergate is making the web especially hostile and dangerous
• #GamerGate Has Finally Made My Head Explode
• Gamergate Should Stop Lying to Journalists and Itself
• #GamerGate: the misogynist movement blighting the video games industry
• #Gamergate is really about terrorism: Why Bill Maher should be vilifying the gaming community, too
• Women Are Being Driven Offline : Feminist Anita Sarkeesian Terrorized for Critique of Video Games
• The Hashtags and Death Threats Behind #GamerGate, Gaming s Latest Controversy
• Anita Sarkeesian on GamerGate: We Have a Problem and We re Going to Fix This
• Tropes vs Women in Video Games by Anita Sarkeesian
• Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency XOXO Festival (2014)
• Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows
• What Is #GamerGate and Why Are Women Being Threatened About Video Games?
• Gamergate: Female gamers and developers threatened with rape, murder as online row rages
• Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in GamerGate Campaign
• Gamergate: when outsiders become the oppressors
• The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It s Gamergate
• On GamerGate: A letter from the editor
• Pew Research about Online Harassment
• Pew Poll: People Believe Online Gaming is the Least Welcoming Space for Women
• Pew: Gaming Is Least Welcoming Online Space For Women
• A Narrative of #GamerGate and Examination of Claims of Collusion with 4chan
• The End of Gamers
• Nobody Wins the GamerGate Civil War
• A GamerGate recognition guide
• Visual timeline of the #GamerGate events

I ve never been a gamer myself, meaning part of the subculture I mentioned. At some point I was probably closer tho the core values they had then than I am now. In any case, video games have already consolidated themselves as an important part of current culture, entertainment, education and socialization, and are definitely here to stay. That will probably mean that the percentage of gamers (members of the video game subculture) will become smaller. as the number of non-gamer video game players keeps raising.

I have just uploaded a newer version of L ve to Debian, 0.9.0. As usual, this version breaks compatibility with the API of previous versions. Literally: L VE 0.9.0 breaks compatibility with nearly every 0.8.0 game . It s a hard to fix situation from a package maintainer s point of view, at least until they agree on a stable API, hopefully in a 1.0 version sometime. L ve has been in Debian official repositories since 2008. As major changes, we can see that it s using SDL2 and LuaJIT now. Depending on where the bottlenecks were in some of the demos and games, the performance might have improved a lot. The improvements have been a lot, and the structure of the API is more consistent and clean. Congratulations to everyone that has made it possible. On the bitter part, well, most of the previous games and demos will most likely not work any more without some changes in the code. As we don t have any reverse dependencies in the archive (yet), this won t cause any severe problems. But, of course, Debian is not an isolated island, and people might need to execute some old code without being able to migrate it. I have prepared some packages for older versions of L ve that might make the situation more bearable for some, until code is migrated to the new API. These versions can be co-installed with the latest version in the archive (0.9.0). I m not sure if it will be needed, but if it was, I might consider putting previous 0.8 version in the official repositories. I would prefer not to do it, though, as that would make me the de facto maintainer of the upstream code, as L ve community is moving forwards with newer versions.

DebConf 13 report (by Andreas Tille) General impression I'm beginning my DebConf report in an unofficial "Scenic Hacklab" right at the edge of the lake in Yverdon. This is the right place to memorise the last days. When I started from this place cycling to Le Camp 12 days ago I was full of great expectations and what should I say - the reality has even beaten these. Once it comes about comparing DebConfs even if it is an unfair comparison due all the differences my secret long term favourite was Helsinki very closely followed by Argentina and also very closely followed by all the other great DebConfs I joined (and I joined all in Europe). Would Le Camp be able to beat it? The short answer is: Yes, it is now my favourite DebConf while I think I do not suffer from the last-Debconf-was-the-best-DebConf-syndrome (and I realised there are others thinking the same). As you might probably know I'm a bit addicted to swimming. While Helsinki had admittedly the better conditions I was at least able to fix the distance issue using my bicycle. (Hey, those Le Camp photographers did a great job in hiding the fact that you can not actually touch the lake right from the meadow of Le Camp.) Being able to have my bicycle at DebConf scored some extra points. However, the really great view of the lake, the inspiring "Scenic Hacklab" which was my favourite place has bumped DebConf13 at first place in my personal ranking. So it comes quite natural to say: "Kudos to the great organisation team!" They did a Swiss-like precise work and perfectly succeeded in hiding any problems (I assume there were some as always) from the attendees so everything went smooth, nice and shiny for the attendees. The local team was even precise in setting up great weather conditions for DebConf. While saying thanks to the local team I would like to also explicitly thank Luca Capello who has quite some share that this DebConf was possible at all (while I have to decrease my DebConf score one point because he was not really there - Luca to bad that you were not able to come full time!) Also thanks to Gunnar and Gannef who helped remotely (another score down because I were missing them this year as well). Even if it was my favourite DebConf I was not able to work down my todo list fully (which was not only uploading one package per day which I at least statistically fullfilled). But that's probably a general feature of todo lists anyway. One item was definitely done: Doing my daily swimming BoF. I actually was able to do the other parts of the triathlon which was skipped by Christian and have done in summary about 150km cycling with 3500m elevation and estimated 7-8km swimming (0m elevation ;-)). Considering the great view at sunrise over the lake I was not hating my "Senile bed escape" disease too much (I was every day waking up at sunset) - it was simply a great experience. I will never forget seeing water drips glimmering like gold inside the morning sun while seeing the Alps panorama in the distant. I hope I was able to help all interested swimmers with the DebConf Beach Map which was just a by-product of my activities in DebCamp. Speaking about OSM: I was astonished that the area was way less covered than I expected. Thanks to several DebConf attendees the situation became better and the map does not only show random trees in the wild but also the tracks leading to these. (Remark: It was no DebConf attendee who is responsible for plastering the map with single trees.) While I had my mapping focus basically close to the edge of the lake I was also able to even map my very own street. :-) I clearly remember one specific mapping tour when I was invited by the DPL: He convinced me to join him on a bicycle tour and since I was afraid to get fired I joined him instead to keep on hacking. Also Sorina was brave enough to join us on the tour and she did quite well. (Sorina, do you remember the agreement about your work on the installer? ;-)) Lucas described the tour as: going uphill on only asphalted roads. Sorina and me were witnessing the mighty DPL powers when we left the wood around Le Camp to reach the described road: The asphalt was just put onto the road - no doubt that it was done on the immediate demand of mighty DPL. :-) DebCamp time was flying like nose dive and a lot of known (and unknown) faces arrived at Le Camp. What I really liked a lot this year was that several really young children has pulled down the average age of DebConf attendees. I clearly remember all the discussion one year ago what to do about children. As always the issue was solved in a typical Debian way: Just do it and bring your children - they had obviously a great time as well. I think the youngest child was 2 months and the oldest "child" above 20. ;-) Actually Baptiste Perrier did great in making the C&W party a success and had obviously a nice time. (I wished my son would have been able to come as well but he needs to write his bachelor s thesis in physics. :-() It was nice to see the kids using all playing facilities and communicating with geeks. Also I would like to point out that even the very young attendees had their share at the success of DebConf: Just think of the three "bell ringing assistants" who helped me ringing the bells for lunch and dinner. I've got this cool job from Didier in the beginning of DebCamp. I must say having some real bells ringing is by far nicer than just the "lunch / dinner starts in 10 minutes" from IRC bot. The only thing I did not understand was that people did not considered ringing the bells at 8:00 for breakfast as a good idea. Regarding the food in general I would also like to send kudos to the kitchen: It was tasty, freshly prepared, regional food with a good change rate. I really liked this. Extra points for having the chance to sit outside when eating. Talks But lets have a look into the conference programme. I'd really recommend watching the videos of the talks Bits from the DPL (video) and Debian Cosmology (video). I considered both talks as entertaining and interesting. I also really hope that the effort Enrico Zini started in Debian Contributors (video) will be successful. I had some talks and BoFs myself starting with Why running a Blend (video) and I admit that (as usual) the number of attendees was quite low even if I think there is some proof (see below) that it is interesting for way more people who should consider working more "blendish" in their team. Do you know how to recruit one developer per year and relax the man power problem in your team? Feel free to watch the video. We have confirmation that ten DDs of our team have considered to join Debian only because Debian Med exists. Admittedly biology and medicine are really leaf topics inside the Debian universe. So if even this topic that has a very tiny share of the Debian users is able to attract this level of attention - how many more people could we win for multimedia, games, GIS and others? So if you feel you are quite overworked with your packaging and you have no time this is most probably wrong. The amount of time is basically a matter of priorities you set for your tasks. Try to put some higher priority onto using the just existing Blends tools I explained in my talk to attract more users and developers to your team and by doing so spread the workload over more people. It works, the prove was given in my main talk. So before you start working on a specific package you should wonder who else could have an even stronger interest to get this work done and provide him with some additional motivation and help to get the common goal done. The interesting thing is that my BoF about How to attract new developers for your team (video) - which was a simple report about some by-product of the Blends work - made it into the main talk room and got way more attention. For me this is the proof that the Blends concept itself is probably badly perceived as something like "a few outsiders are doing damn specific stuff which is not really interesting for anybody else" instead of what is really is: Smoothing the way from specific upstream applications to the end user via Debian. Once you see the video of this BoF you can observe how my friend Asheesh Laroia became more and more excited about the Blends concept and admitted what I said above: We should have more Blends for different fields. Funnily enough Asheesh asked me in his excitement to talk more about Blends. This would have been a really good suggestion ten years ago. At DebConf 3 in Oslo I had my very first talk about Blends (at this time under the name "Debian Internal Projects"). I continuously kept on talking about this (MiniDebConf Peking 2005, DebConf 5, Helsinki (video), DebConf 7, Edinburgh (video), DebConf 8, Mar del Plata (video), DebConf 9, C ceres (video), MiniDebConf Berlin 2010 (video in German), MiniDebConf Paris 2010 (not video recorded), DebConf 11, Banja Luka (video) ... and these are only (Mini)DebConfs my talks page is full of this topic) and every new year I try different ways to communicate the idea to my fellow Debianistas. I'm wondering how I could invent a title + abstract avoiding the term Blends, put "Git", "release" and "systemd versus upstart" in and being able to inform about Blends reasonably by not becoming to off topic with the abstract. I also registered the Debian Science round table. I admit we were lacking some input from remote via IRC which used to be quite helpful in the past. The attendees agreed upon the handling of citations in debian/upstream files which was invented by Debian Med team to create even stronger bounds to our upstream developers by giving their work extra reward and providing users with even better documentation (see my summary in Wiki). As usual I suggested to create some Debian Science offsprings like "Debian Astronomy", "Debian Electronics", "Debian Mathematics", "Debian Physics" etc. who could perfectly leave the Debian Science umbrella to get a more fine grained structure and a more focused team to enhance the contact to our users. Unfortunately there is nobody who volunteers to take over the lead for such Blends. I have given a short summary about this BoF on the Debian Science mailing list. In the Debian Med meeting I have given some status report. No other long term team members were attending DebConf and so I gave some kind of introduction for newcomers and interested people. I touched also the DebiChem topic which maintains some packages that are used by biologists frequently and so we have a good connection to this team. Finally I had registered three BoFs in Blends I'm actually not (or not yet) active part of. My motivation was to turn the ideas I have explained in my main talk into specific application inside these teams and helping them to implement the Blends framework. In the first BoF about Debian GIS I have shown the usual team metrics graphs to demonstrate, that the one packaging team Pkg-OSM is in danger to become MIA. There are only three persons doing actual uploads. Two of them were at DebConf but did not joined the BoF because they do not consider their contribution to Pkg-OSM as a major part of their general Debian work. I will contact the main contributor David Paleino about his opinion to move the packages step by step into maintenance of Debian GIS packaging team to try to overcome the split of two teams that are sharing a good amount of interest. At least if I might become an Uploader for one of the packages currently maintained by Pkg-OSM I will move this to pkg-grass-devel (which is the name of the packaging team of Debian GIS for historical reasons). The attendees of the BoF have considered this plan as sensible. Moreover I talked about my experiences with OSGeo Live - an Ubuntu derivative that tries to provide a full tool chain to work on GIS and OSM problems ... basically the same goal as Debian GIS has just provided by the OSGeo project. I'm lurking on OSGeo mailing list when I asked explicitly I've got the answer that they are working together with Debian GIS and are using common repository (which is IMHO the optimal way of cooperation). However, it seems that several protagonists of OSGeo Live are underestimating the resources provided by Debian. For instance there was a question about Java packaging issues but people were not aware about the existence of the debian-java mailing list. I was able to give an example how the Debian Med team managed to strengthen its ties to BioLinux that is also an Ubuntu derivative for biologists. At our first Debian Med sprint in 2011 we invited developers from BioLinux and reached a state where they are using the very same VCS on Alioth where we are maintaining our packages. At DebConf I was able to upload two packages where BioLinux developers did certain changes for enhancing the user experience. My "work" was just bumping the version number in changelog and so we did profit from the work of the BioLinux developers as well as they are profiting from our work. I plan to dive a bit more into Debian GIS and try to strengthen the connection to OSGeo Live a bit. The next BoF was the Debian Multimedia meeting. It was nice that the current leader of Ubuntu Studio Kaj Ailomaa joined the meeting. When I was explaining my ideas about cooperation with derivatives I repeated my detailed explanation about the relation with BioLinux. It seems every topic you could cover inside Debian has its related derivative. So to me it seems to be quite natural to work together with the developers of the derivative to join forces. I actually consider a Blend a derivative done the right way = inside Debian. The final work for the derivers that might be left for them is doing some shiny customising of backgrounds or something like this - but all the hard work could and should be done in common with the relevant Debian team. My dream is to raise such relevant teams inside Debian ... the Blends. Finally the last BoF of this series was the Debian Games meeting. As always I presented the team metrics graphs and the Debian Games team members who attended the BoF were quite interested. So it seems to be some unknown fact that team metrics are done for several teams in side Debian and so I repeat the link to it for those who are not yet aware of it. As a result of the BoF Debian Games team members agreed to put some more effort into maintaining their Blends tasks. Moreover Miriam Ruiz wants to put some effort into reviving Debian Jr. Regarding Debian Jr. there was an interesting talk about DouDouLinux - in case you might want to watch the video I'd recommend skipping the first 30min and rather watch the nice live demo. There was also an ad hoc BoF about Debian Jr scheduled to bring together all people interested into this cute project and Per Anderson volunteered to take over the lead. I have given a summary about this specific BoF at the Debian Jr list. For some other talks that I'd regard as remarkable for some reasons: I'd regard the talk "Debian-LAN" by Andreas Mundt as some hidden pearl because it did not got a lot of attention but after having seen the video I was quite impressed - specifically because it is also relevant for the Blends topic. Memories I also liked "Paths into Debian" by Moray Allan (and I was only able to enjoy the latter talks thanks to the great work of the video team!) because it also scratched the same topic I was concerned about in my mentoring talk. Related to this was in my opinion also "Women in Debian 2013" were we tried to find out reasons for the lack of woman compared to other projects and how to overcome this issue. Besides the talks I will probably never forget two specific moments that make DebConf so special. One of these moments is recorded on an image that clearly needs no words - just see Geert hovering over the grass. Another strong moment in my personal record was in the DebConf Newbies BoF "First time at DebConf" that unfortunately was not recorded but at least for this statement it would have been very great if we would have some reference better than personal memory. Aarsh Shah a GSoC student from India suddenly raised up and said: "Four months ago I was not even aware that Free Software exists. Now I'm here with so many people who are totally equal. If I will tell my mother at home that I was standing in the same queue where the Debian Project Leader was queuing up for food she will never believe me." He was totally excited about things we are regarding as normal. IMHO we should memorise moments like this that might be part of the key to success in cultures, where Debian is widely unknown and very rarely in use. Amongst these not scheduled great moments the scheduled day trip was also a great thing. I had a really hard time to decide what tour I might join but ended up in the "long distance walking (or should I say running) group". Inspired by the "running Bubulle" who was flashing between the walking groups we went uphill with 5.4km/h which was a nice exercise. Our destination the large cliff was an exciting landscape and I guess we all enjoyed the dinner organised by the "Trout cabal". ;-) So I had a hard time to leave Le Camp and tried hard to make sure my memories will remain as long as possible. Keeping some signs attached to my bicycle, conserving the "Scenic Hacklab" sign for my private "scenic hacklab @ home" was one part. I also have cut some branches of the Buxus sempervirens in Le Camp and have put them in my garden at home (where I create some hedgerow from places where I spent some great time). These will probably build a great part of the hedgerow ... Thanks for reading this longish report. Looking forward to see you all in Germany 2015 (or earlier) Andreas.

The first time I found this cute game, was around 2009, but for a bunch of reasons I haven t been able to get it into the archive until now. Pink Pony is a cute game in which you have to control a pink pony who s main goal is to last in the game more time than the other ponies. You might remember the game Tron, or the film, in which there were light cycles who left a trace behind, with which the other cycles crashed. Well, this is the similar game concept, only with cute ponies instead of light cycles. You can see a video of the game in action, if you want to get a feeling of how it is. Thomas Weber (Ginko), has published a newer version of the game (1.3.1) a couple of days ago, and that is the one that has entered Debian repositories (sid) today. Thanks, Ginko, for this lovely game! Even though the game might not seem too appealing for some of the adult users of Debian or Ubuntu, maybe some of their kids will like it as much as I do. The game is quite quick, though, so very young kids might have trouble controlling the pony. I would suspect it might be all right for kids above 9 years old, but I haven t been able to test my hypothesis, so if you find out, please tell me

I discovered pySioGame for the first time in the first half of 2012, and even though it was still in a beta state, I liked it a lot. pySioGame is essentially a set of educational activities and games for kids. pySioGame was initially developed by its author -Ireneusz Imiolek- for his son, but he soon decided to make it Free Software. And I m glad that he did, because it s a very cute application. Even though -in it s author s own words- it s hard to put age range on this kind of games, it is primarily targeted to children from as young as 3 years old, up to about 10 years old. The activities included, many of which are grid based, cover topics like maths, reading, writing, painting, and memory activities, among others. I was finally able to upload pySioGame to Debian during the DebConf, and it has very recently hit the archive. I m convinced that pySioGame is soon going to be one of the references among the free programs for small kids, among titles such as GCompris, ChildsPlay, PySyCache, or Bouncy. Or, even though it s not in the archives, Omnitux. Finally, to whet your appetite, here is the link to a video, and there go some screenshots:

Scratch has finally reached Debian repositories. Scratch is a programming learning environment created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab designed to be accessible by young learners (over 8 years old). Scratch makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art through a visual interface based on blocks. Thus, beginners can get results without having to learn to write syntactically correct code first. It is powerful enough to have even been adopted as an entry-level computer language in computer science programs at different universities. Scratch makes use of pieces of code embedded in different blocks that are shaped like puzzle pieces. That way, programming consists on putting different blocks together, which gives immediate visual feedback to the programmer about the correctness of the syntax: If the pieces fit together, then the expression is valid. Scratch programming system is so nice and easy that has been the inspiration of other systems such as MIT App Inventor or Google Blocky.

Scratch animations consist of sprites that are animated by dragging the corresponent blocks into the Scripts area of the Scratch interface. Multiple sprites can be created and interact with one another. Each of the sprites can have different looks (called costumes in Scratch). You can use built-in sprites, load them from files, or draw your own using a drawing tool integrated in the environment. Scratch itself is coded in Squeak, a Smalltalk implementation derived from Smalltalk-80. The Scratch 1.4 source went GPLv2 on March, but there were some incompatibilites with the Squeak Virtual Machine currently in Wheezy that had to be resolved first. Luckily we were able to solve them, with the help of the Scratch and the Squeak guys, so I m happy to say that Scrach is finally available from Debian repositories. Note: If any Scratch derivatives (such as BYOB or Panther) also need to be ported to the current version of Squeak, they should have a look at the comments in the Scratch ITP, and especially to the script uploaded by Bert Freudenberg, that replaces 90 indexed primitive declarations (removed in later versions of Squeak VM) with their named counterpart. Note 2: This wouldn t have been possible without all the great work and effort made by Amos Blanton and many others. Lots of thanks!

You might remember the action puzzle game Zaz. Well, we now have a new puzzle game from the same author (Remigiusz mal1ce Dybka), called Phlipple. The goal of the game is to reduce a 3D shape to a single square in each level, removing squares by flipping edges around, like you would do in a cardboard box. The Free/Open source version of the game, including 50 levels, is now available in Debian, in case that you want to give it a chance. You can watch the promo video in Youtube if you want to have a better idea of what the game looks like. I hope that you like it, I do Here are some screenshots of the game:

Periodic Calendar, a GPL ed GUI application, coded in Java that helps keeping track of women menstrual cycles and predict fertility periods, has just entered Debian. This information can be used as supportive either for conception or contraception planning. This program (pcalendar in Debian) is by far more complete than mencal (a simple menstruation calendar that can be run in the console) or cycle (a windowed calendar that can calculate stuff based on the length of the cycle or on statistics of previous periods), and provides support for BBT and sympto-thermal methods, which have the highest reliability in fertility periods prediction. User can thus choose any subset of the features to be used or even fall to the generic calendar method (which if used alone is very unreliable). Keep in mind, though, that -as the authors of the program insist on- Periodic Calendar is NOT an equal substitute to the fertility planning consultants or doctors, and methods used are not 100% effective. It s a useful program, anyway. I ve also translated the program into Spanish, made some cute icons and added MIME support so that data files can be easily open from the desktop.

On the 26th of June I wrote that I wouldn t be able to travel anywhere this summer (including DebConf 11), because I was going to be teaching lots of things related to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to a bunch of kids. That was a bit more than two months ago. On the 27th of June we started the first edition of Fantastic Park with a lot of enthusiasm, and hoping that the kids participating could get in touch to the ICT world while having fun. After all, it was summer holidays. The results have not only more than fulfilled our expectations but, from what their parents tell, we have also been able to overcome what the children were expecting. It was somehow encouraging to know that the kids were telling their parents to get up half an hour earlier (heh, sorry for them, but that s what being a parent is about, isn t it?), to be able to start as soon as they could, and also to make them wait until the last minute for going back home. These four editions have involved more than two months of work (280 hours), and 82 kids have taken part on it (57 boys and 25 girls). There have also been visits to different companies that work on the field of ICT (32 in total), and there was an important number of other people collaborating (thanks to all of them). Finally, the last edition of the Park has ended yesterday. Along these weeks, the kids have been able to get acquainted with a lot of different things, such as robotics (using Lego WeDo), digital photography and photo edition (using Pinta), Free Software, satellites, GPS or learning to code with Scratch. It has been very intensive and I m almost exhausted, but I m also quite sad that it s over. Hopefully some of these children might have developed an interest in this field, and who knows what might come out of it. If somebody is interested in the daily activities at the Park, we have been writing a blog with daily entries (in Spanish, sorry). We have also published quite a lot of photos of the activities. Of course, needless is to say that I m really happy to have taken part on it, and that the kids participating were simply great. I ll miss them.

I haven t blogged for a while, because I ve been doing so many things that I scarcely had time nor will for it. Among all those things, and during the weekends of the last few months, we have been teaching kids (8-12 y.o.) about computers, Free Software and technology. Those kids are great, very intelligent, very motivated, and very funny to be with. I miss them a bit after the program has ended. In any case, I ve been given the chance to teach some more kids during summer weekdays, and I m really looking forward to it. The downside of this is that I won t have any summer holidays and, thus, I finally won t be able to attend DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, which was something I was also looking forward too. But, even though that s something I d really love to do, one cannot be in two places at the time, so this year I finally won t be able to attend DebConf either. Have lots of fun! I ll miss you! In case you want to know more about all of this (sorry, links are in Spanish):

• La Servilleta de Paco Prieto [feb 26 2011]: J venes descubriendo talento: tecnolog a, ciencia, emprender y matem ticas
• La Servilleta de Paco Prieto [jun 21 2011]: Estudiantes que quieren m s ca a !!!

Oh, and to show you what I m exchanging you for (nothing personal): I wouldn t like to end this post without thanking all the kids from both Campus TIC and Yo Programo for being so cool, and also to welcome the kids from Fantastic Park, in case any of them -or their parents- are reading. Oh, and all of you who attend DebConf this year, have a lot of fun!

Gnash 0.8.8 was released on the 23rd of August, a bit more than two weeks after the freeze. There are very important features in this new release that made 0.8.8 by far a better option than buggy 0.8.7 for Squeeze:

• 100% of all YouTube videos should work now. If you have problems, delete all YouTube cookies and refresh.
• Gnash can switch at runtime between the Cairo, OpenGL, and AGG renderers.
• It can also switch media handlers at runtime, between FFmpeg and GStreamer.
• Gnash can now decode video quickly on hardware compatible with the VAAPI library (a few NVidia, ATI, and Intel graphics processors). Debian packages by default do not have this feature activated until FFmpeg in Debian supports VAAPI, so that will be in Wheezy.
• It compiles faster due to reduced internal dependencies.
• It has Scriptable Plugin support so Javascript in the browser can work with ActionScript in Gnash.
• There is an improved input device handling when using a raw framebuffer.
• Lots of bugs fixed.

Today, the Release Team has unblocked 0.8.8-2, which has already reached Testing, so I m proud to announce that Squeeze will be released with latest Gnash. Thanks guys!

Today is March 24th, that means Ada Lovelace Day, and it is being pushed as an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. The aim of Ada Lovelace Day is to focus on building female role models not just for girls and young women but also for those of us in tech who would like to feel that we are not alone in our endeavours. There are some very good examples of women that have been important in the development of science and technology, starting with Ada Lovelace herself (the first developer of an algorithm intended to be processed by a machine), Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language), Adele Goldstine (who wrote the complete technical description for the first digital computer, ENIAC), as well as the six women who did most of the programming of if (Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman), or women scientists, or women inventors, etc. Well, I m not going to write about any of those, even when any of them would surely deserve that and more for sure. I m going to write about a woman who has definitely been very inspiring and supportive for me when I was starting to get in touch with Free Software and Debian, and who is probably the most important single reason I decided to go for it. It is definitely hard to write about someone you admire when she happens to be one of your best friends, and in fact I m pretty sure that most of the people reading this article already know her, so there s no great mistery. I m talking about Amaya Rodrigo, the first european female Debian Developer (AFAIK) and co-founder of the Debian Women project, and also member of Hispalinux Board in the golden days. The first time I met her she was giving a talk in Madrid about a project that was starting then, Debian Women, and it was very inspiring for me. Inspiring enough for me to join the project. Afterwards I ve learnt more about her, how she overcame many dificulties, like starting to work with computers quite late, among others. The real merit of a pioneer is not really to be the best techie out there, but to overcome the difficulties and doing it the best you can, when no one else has done it before. I m not going to write her biography here, it s not really the purpose of this blog entry, and you probably can ask herself directly. This blog entry is, as I said at the beginning, to highlight women in technology that I consider inspiring and relevant. You know, I admire you, Amaya

It seems that I m not blogging as often as I was some months ago. The main reason is microblogging, which is somehow quicker, even though briefer. It is also less informative, I guess, because 140 characters is a very limited length. Probably because of that, a friend of mine asked me to write a proper blog entry about this, and I think that he s probably right. openFrameworks is an open source toolkit, released under the MIT license, written in C++ and designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation. According to its authors, it was developed for folks using computers for creative, artistic expression, and who would like low level access to the data inside of media in order manipulate, analyze or explore. I attended a short course in openFrameworks some months ago, and decided that if I wanted to experiment with it, I should somehow structure the building process of the library a bit, remove the dependency on FMOD, which is not DFSG-free, even though that might require remove the whole audio subsystem, make it buildable without Code::Blocks, and hopefully build some more-or-less proper packages. I ve also added some pkg-config files, so that it becomes easier to build projects based in openFrameworks (as easy as g++ source.cpp -o test $(pkg-config openframeworks openframeworks-addons cflags libs) ). Even though the packages are still not as good as they should, they re absolutely usable right now. I ve uploaded them, as well as their dependencies, to my Ubuntu PPA (although I m using those packages in my Debian), in case that someone is interested. I ve also uploaded a couple of tiny examples (the second one downloaded from here) of openFrameworks.