I have just sent a mail to the Debian/Ruby Extras mailing list stating that I will also give up most of my Ruby packaging efforts and reduce my involvement in the team. I am following Lucas Nussbaum in his decision. Although our reasons are slightly different, I subscribe most of what he says in his blog post. Besides that, I haven t done much Ruby programming in the past years, making me lose the motivation for the huge load of packages I am responsible for and thus subconsciously perceive that as a burden, as I feel guilty not having/making time to work on them. So, what does this mean? I will handover (co)maintainership of over 50 libraries. Many of which have dead upstream, unfortunately. Also will I be looking for someone to take over the administrative tasks of heading the team such as mailing list moderation and Alioth repository access. I will keep maintaining some programs that I still use, such as Camping, and am approachable for (mentor) uploads. Meanwhile I will continue my work on my PhD thesis, which is progressing well and should lead to my defence (hopefully) somewhere around September this year. That said, I will try to keep tinkering with Ruby and other F/OSS projects. Oh, and also to get more motivated and some inspiration

A few months ago I realised it has been 10 years already since Spacelabs ¹ was founded. Today we will celebrate that with a reunion and probably reminisce about past projects, events and experiences. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to accompany this with a post. The past Spacelabs was founded to create something that sits in between research and consumer appliances. Since we are associated to the Electro-Optical Communication group these things often had to do with bandwidth. For example, showing the ease of use of plastic optical fiber or participate in GPRS/UMTS trials. However, due to the loose structure of Spacelabs, we ventured into many other projects of our own such a information system-enabled fridge with a barcode reader, a dynamic DNS system, etc. At some point we got our own Internet connection with an accompanying subnet. It has been fun and rewarding to learn how to setup and run a mini ISP. Spacelabs doesn t have any formal structure: when you are on the mailing list, you are a member. There are no regular meetings, no hierarchy, no obligations. So in some ways, we are a group that is much like a free/open source software community. I think that this approach has provided us the drive to work both on projects during our free time as well as our own ideas. I feel that Spacelabs has contributed so much to my life. It might not be the typical study association, but it was a big supplement to my studies, it was fun and it was completely ours. Not only did it teach me many, many technical things from networks to program languages to software design but it also gave me experiences on other levels, such as very attuned group work and responsibilities for key systems. The future Soon, everyone connected to Spacelabs will have finished their Master s or PhD (in my case) and nobody will be left to continue the project. Although this is a bit sad, I think we can be proud of what we have accomplished, learnt and experienced. I will miss our location high in the Potentiaal/E-hoog building overlooking Eindhoven, and our being together as a group. We are however not gone yet, there is still a lot to plan and to work on if we want to rescue the huge amount of servers and services that we have accumulated over the years if we were to leave

¹ Yes, the website is very much from the past.

I am all set for my trip to Iceland! (Well, except for the actual packing of stuff.) The purpose of the trip is a work visit and holiday combined. In the first week (maybe extended to 9 days), I will be working at the Reykjavik University on some process algebra things and possible present my past work. During my time there I can stay at the appartment of Arnar, whom I ve met when he was attending our university for his Master s. Thanks for providing me with accomodation and congrats with obtaining your Master s degree! When my days at the RU are over, I will explore, tour, hike around the island with him and some of his friends. Very much looking forward to that! Some travel information for Sunday June 7 (travelling with Iceland Air):

09:45	Leaving by foot/bus/train to the airport
14:00	Departure from Schiphol with flight FI503 (UTC+0200)
15:00	Arrive at Keflavik Airport (UTC+0000)

I will be returning on Sunday June 28:

16:30	Departure from Keflavik Airport with flight FI504 (UTC+0000)
21:30	Arrive at Schiphol (UTC+0200)

I will attempt to keep you all updated via this journal and/or the usual microblogging sources: Twitter / Jaiku / Luonica.

More than a year ago I tried out Jaiku and it worked quite well despite some of its glitches. Although the number of journal posts plummeted, I ve been able to keep up the microblogging. I ve noticed in the past year that others preferred Twitter and/or identi.ca, but I didn t want to join all these networks and duplicate my microblogs and all the hassle that came with it. This week I ve registered myself on ping.fm, so I can post to more services (my Twitter, my Jaiku) simultaneously. Meanwhile Christian had set up a local (test) Laconica service, which available as of yesterday as Luonica on http://ica.luon.net/ (for all Luon users). Obviously, I have also added Luonica to my publish list.

I have attended FOSDEM again this year. Most of all, it was nice to see everyone again, especially the Collabora crew. Besides having fun while hanging out with them again, I must say FOSDEM was quite a motivation boost too! I feel motivated again to work on Ruby packaging. The whole RubyGem mess and other less-specific Ruby-related messes keep draining my motivation. This feels very conflicting, since I like the language very much. The upcoming transition to Ruby 1.9.1 will be quite a challenge and I hope that we can finally work out a nice, actual Ruby policy for Squeeze. A few days ago I have also joined the pkg-gstreamer team, mainly to work on Elisa packaging. Elisa is a nice-looking media center application that I am using on my HTPC(Home Theater PC). Debian s experimental suite now contains an up-to-date version of Elisa, try it out if you want. Elisa 0.5.27 So, why is Elisa not in unstable yet. Well, Elisa has a plugin system which also features auto-updates. While this is very nice on platforms such as Windows, it is not really nice for Debian. I have been working to get this updating disabled by default. Once I am sure (hopefully by the time 0.5.28 gets released) that it is in order, I wil upload it to unstable. Meanwhile I am planning to work on some Elisa plugins to add some features that I feel are missing. First of all I need webradio a la Rhythmbox in there. Then something to watch TV: a MythTV frontend-plugin, via UPnp, or whatever works. Finally it might be nice to have to have a plugin to setup video-conferencing using Telepathy. I m quite sure some of these things are lying around somewhere, more about that later.

The long-awaited, big and stable Debian GNU/Linux Lenny 5.0 has been released! Great job everyone and congratulations! In this release the Debian/Ruby Extra team has an ever greater presence. We were able to increase the number of mainted libraries and applications to over 95 packages. Also quite a lot of issues were resolved and I am proud that we obtained this quality level. For Squeeze we plan to deal with the transition to Ruby 1.9 and with possible multiple interpreter-support (still Ruby 1.8, JRuby?). We might also deal with the gems, who knows? :) P.S. Indeed, did I just started posting without explaining why I was away for over 7 months?

I am in the process of packing my stuff for my holidays. Tomorrow, I will fly to Istanbul to attend GUADEC 2008. Because GUADEC does not start before the 7th, it will give me some time to roam around Istanbul itself and do some sightseeing, probably with some of the Collabora guys. I’m flying on July 3 at 12:00 (+0200) from Schiphol with KLM (flight KL 1615) and arrive at Istanbul Atat rk International Airport at 16:20 (+0300). I’ll return on July 13 at 17:15 (+0300), again with KLM (flight KL 1616), and land on Schiphol at 19:55 (+0200). In Istanbul I will be staying in the Saint Sophia Hotel in Sultanahmet. I’m looking forward to it, although it doesn’t feel like holidays to me yet. I should have an Internet connection over there, and probably Jaiku via cell phone will work fine too. So I will keep you up-to-date. It is also clear that I will be skipping DebConf this year. This is unfortunate, because I wanted to work with the Debian/Ruby team to advance some of our goals. However, I’m happy to catch at least one free software conference.

Not 28 links, but 28 years. :) I know, I know… I haven’t written for a long time. I promise to pick it up soon. See Jaiku for more recent ramblings of mine. By the way, congrats Steve!

Last weekend I have decided to just try some of this micro-blogging and lifestreaming stuff. I have always been quite conscious about my own (online) presence and that of others due to long term Jabber usage. The presence-awareness helps me to somehow stay more connected to people on a kind of general level than previously was possible. By the way, this is just because I like to, not because it is a forced, mandatory thing. Concerning micro-blogging. This is a perfect solution for me! I don’t have to think of a title and just can share a thought for whoever is interested whenever. Anyway, I ended up subscribing to Jaiku. It has a richer feature set than Twitter and it seems more things are “done right” to me. I especially like the comments and channels. I have added a Jaiku Stream Badge to my webpage so I am also trackable there. Let’s see if I can keep it up. :-)

Yesterday after dinner we spontaneously ended up having a XO play night. I liked the interface and the things it could do, the complete difference with a normal notebook, the creeping into a child’s mind a bit. It was funny to notice that being older and experienced, things that probably are intuitive to children, are not/no longer intuitive to me anymore. This fact alone shows how “being used to” and experience are a large part of things one consider intuitive. I notice this also when people are trying to use GNOME when they are used to Windows: they find this difficult, but of course most of them are already “hard wired” to Windows. The reverse holds for me: due to not using Windows often at all, I keep losing the aptitude for it and it seems to be a hard system to use from my perspective. Fortunately for us all, “getting used to” is the specialty of the brain.

The latest MacBook equipped with a Core2 Duo and the Santa Rosa platform, dubbed MacBook3,1, is now partially supported by pommed, thanks to Paul van Tilburg who sent me the data I needed yesterday. It is available in the pommed SVN, but read on. As with the last MacBook Pro refresh, I do not have support for the LCD backlight yet. It may or may not be supported by the ACPI video driver; if someone has access to a new MacBook and can test that and report back, that’d help. Note that you’ll also need to patch your kernel, because Apple changed the keyboard and trackpad in this refresh. The new device is called Geyser IV-HF, and according to the Info.plist from the OS X kext, it’s compatible with the previous Geyser III and Geyser IV devices - you’re lucky. USB IDs for the new devices are 0×0229 for the ANSI version, 0×022a for the ISO version and 0×022b for the JIS version. This refresh also brought a new iSight, USB ID 0×8300. The Apple IR receiver hasn’t changed (USB ID 0×8242).

From Debian I downloaded, installed and toyed around with Liquidsoap. It took me a few moments to understand the language, but once I did, I got very enthusiastic about it. I always wanted something more than just streaming a set for my friends now and then and this tool allows me to created a quite contrived webradio setup. More about that later… To Debian unstable I finally uploaded Camping, a small Ruby web framework for MCV type applications. It is in NEW now. I’ve been writing (or at least started writing) quite a few apps based on Camping the past few months. Primarily because it is fun, but also because I like its flexibility and strength very much (see also some examples). Once Camping is in Debian, I’d like to put more Camping apps out in the open.

I have ordered my new MacBook today. The model silently got an update yesterday and that was what I was waiting for. While my “old” PowerBook (4 years old) is still working fine, it has a broken hinge and unexplainable display-startup problems. Combined with the fact that it always connected to all my peripheral devices, external drives and a second screen, it is less then ideal to just pick it up and go. (Although we have XRandr 1.2 now, the whole desktop environment is not integrated with these features yet). Moreover, because I somehow ended up in a 5 year cycle of needing a computer system update and something portable at the same time, I always bought a heavy laptop. This time, I want to break this cycle, and buy a light, portable laptop and maybe later some workstation. And why Apple or a MacBook… well, I have good experiences with it, well-designed and thought-through, and if you look for portable laptops, 1000 , with a 12-14” screen, quality hardware and good specs, the MacBook is on of the few options that is left, actually.

Two years after writing about what I found out when I was looking why my HDDs kept breaking down, I started to receive emails about this post. It seems that it was mentioned in an Ubuntu bug report and this morning I noticed that exactly this bug report was mentioned on Slashdot, so I can consider my post to be slashdotted (indirectly). For the past week, I’m counting 15,000 hits and it is still rising fast. It’s a good thing that I use a static HTML journal, so that my journal-hosting-pentium-233MHz can handle this. It’s also a good thing that the issue finally gets some attention.

Again some writing about writing, since it has been over a month again. Somehow I think of lots of things to write but end up not writing them. Maybe I should attempt to write smaller things. I will try this.

I propose that we get rid of names and titles, especially journal post titles. There are these annoying moments when you clearly know what you want to write but you can’t think of a fitting title, so you just don’t write it down and it is forgotten. It’s the inverse of the writer’s block, I think. It is similar to having a clear idea about a piece of code, a line of code, a function or a program in your mind, but you just can’t think of any suitable variable, function or program name. Designation by “brain-concept” would be far more preferable. Maybe that’s something to think about for the future. This concludes my excuse for not writing much the past few months. Now that I at least have a title for this post, I might as well abuse it. Here are some things that I have been busy with the past few weeks:

• Creating a poster for the SIREN (Scientific ICT Research Netherlands) 2007 event showing what my PhD project is all about. When it is finished I’ll link it from my university page.
• Reading up on and toying with concepts related to my PhD project.
• Continuing work on my paper based on my master’s thesis.
• Assisting and tutoring students that are involved in two teaching related activities.
• Working on LaTeX packages for typesetting process algebra and drawing graphs, transition systems in particular. I know that for the latter there are already some alternatives available, but I found the interfaces to be either overly complicated or too general.
• Hacking on Camping/Photos. The first release should be ready soon. :)
• Toying with the new Xorg 7.3 release and the related ATI driver updates with dynamic on-the-fly output (re)configuring.

I had some posts planned, but didn’t get around to it. I’m off to Lisbon for CONCUR 2007 now. I’m flying with TAP (flight TP661) at 18:05. I’ll be back next Saturday (September 8)!

Two weeks ago I started my new job at the Formal Methods research group of the Department of Mathematics of Computer Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. So, what have I been up to until now? Well, as you can imagine it takes some time to settle down. I got a room with two other PhD students. I have installed my new (and fast!) computer with Debian Sid and am very happy about it. I have created my academic website using Webgen (like I do with all my sites), attempting to have it look the same as the main university site. I think I have succeeded. Next to the settling down I have been meeting all the people of our group and reading a lot of papers in my future area of research. What will I be doing the next few weeks then? For the moment I’ll continue to do a lot of reading. My research is in the area of the automata theory and the process algebra and ways to combine them. Besides reading up on that I will be continuing upon my master project and try to get the result published. Also, my first conference has been planned! Yay! From September 2 till September 8 I will be in Lisbon to attend the CONCUR 2007 conference and also have a look around town, of course.

Just graduated… and now what? Well, I had the opportunity to choose among several options: a PhD position at the TU/e, a PhD position at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, or pursue a job at Google. After much consideration, I have chosen the first option. I found it to be impossible to decide based on the research assignment or the people I would work with, so I looked at more personal and practical reasons which led me to my current decision. I will start my job on August 1, 2007 and hope to finish the PhD in 2011. My research will involve working on project MoCaP, Models of Computation: Automata and Process, in which we try to achieve a better integration of the concurrency theory with the classical theory of automata. The thought behind the project is to make undergraduate computer scientists more aware of concurrency theory.

Arnaud and I finally managed to release Ruby D-Bus “Almost live from DebConf 7” 0.2.0. The release was planned for DebConf 7. However, I didn’t manage to get it ready in between all the talks, meetings, and other social stuff. Ruby D-Bus is an implementation of the D-Bus protocol in pure Ruby. After starting the development in February, it soon became apparent that several other projects were out there with about the same goal, such as Pure Ruby DBUS and R-Bus. Our approach is to have an API that is close to the old Ruby D-Bus bindings. While the other, similar projects seem to have a slightly different goal, we still invite them to come to some sort of merging so that no duplicate effort is put into three or four separate projects with almost the same result. The 0.2.0 release is our first real public release. We have a large subset of the features working and documented. The main focus of this release was to improve the API documentation and the tutorial. The 0.2.0 release is a release for exploratory purposes. We invite everyone interested to have a look at the API and inner works and provide us with feedback and/or patches. This means that the API can still change a bit over time based on feedback and tweaks performed by ourselves. So don’t built a big application on it just yet if you’re not willing to make some changes later on. For more information, see our project (Trac) page.