My late biological maternal grandmother ("Nana"), remarried late in her life to a long-time friend named Bryce. I was probably an early teenager. He was a nice guy, and I kept in loose contact with him after my Nana passed away. After my Nana passed away, he moved out of the retirement home he'd been living in with my Nana, and in with one of his sons. Sometime before I moved back to Australia, in ailing physical health, he moved from his son's place into Masonic Care's aged-care hostel in Sandgate. He turned 90 last year. Mentally, he's doing pretty good. Physically, he's very wobbly on his legs. He's had a few falls, which was the main catalyst for moving from his son's place to the aged-care hostel. Other than that, he's in pretty good physical health though. I remember the first time I visited him in the hostel. After I left, I wept uncontrollably. Here was a man who was literally just waiting out the rest of his life in a small cupboard of a room. I was appalled at how small the room was, and the fact that he was just sitting around waiting to die really upset me. I've visited him a few times since I've been back. I've taken him over to my parent's place when I've taken Zoe to visit them, just so he gets out. I should say that I'm sure his own family do spend some time with him, so it's not like he's spending all his time rotting in this place, but probably still a fair chunk of it. Growing old sucks. Yesterday, when the weather forecast for today was looking like it was going to be pretty wet and miserable, I decided I'd use the day to take Zoe to Underwater World (which I've since learned has rebranded it self as "Sea Life: Mooloolaba". I had the presence of mind to call up Bryce yesterday to see if he'd like to join us today. We had to pass in his general direction to get up there, so it wasn't particularly out of my way. He informed me that he was now in a wheelchair, which I thought was fine for this excursion. So this morning, after we got ourselves going, we stopped at Sandgate to pick up Bryce, and made it to Underwater World by about 10am. I was a bit leery of the drive, because from home, it was another 30 minutes on top of the drive to Wet and Wild, and 15 minutes on top of the drive to Sea World, so I wasn't sure how Zoe would take that length car trip. It turned out that she took it pretty well. She started getting a bit restless in the last 30 minutes, but it was manageable. I was a little apprehensive about how wrangling Zoe and looking after a frail 90 year old in a wheelchair was going to work out. It turned out it worked out just fine. I could leave Bryce wherever he was, if I had to chase after Zoe, and Zoe quite liked helping push the wheelchair around. Towards the end of the day, when she got tired, I could just pop her in Bryce's lap, and push the pair of them around. It was a really good outing. I have only vague memories of visiting the place in my childhood, and it's become significantly better since then. Zoe really enjoyed going through the glass tunnels under the main ocean exhibit. We did several laps of that. We were fortunate enough to catch the sting ray feeding almost immediately upon arrival, and we also saw the seal show and made the otter feeding. The place was more focused on salt water aquatic life, hence the name, but there was also some freshwater exhibits. I never thought that much of the Monterey Aquarium, much preferring the California Academy of Science's aquariums, especially in terms of drive time accessibility. If you ignore the freshwater/salt water diversity, I think Sea Life is even better than the California Academy of Sciences. We left at about 2pm, and after a lot of hunting around, tracked down the photo they took when we entered, and then drove home closer to 3pm. To my surprise, Zoe didn't fall asleep immediately, but she did fall asleep on the way back to Bryce's place. She woke up to say goodbye to him, and then we drove home, stopping off in the Valley to check my post office box along the way, and arrived back home about 15 minutes before Sarah arrived to pick her up. It ended up being a very full day. Bryce really enjoyed himself, and I felt really happy that I was able to relatively easily brighten up his day. I've resolved to try another such outing again, I just need to figure out what to do. I thought I'd try for a 10km run, but it started to rain at the 4km mark. I was also not feeling particularly confident about lasting the distance, so I decided to just turn it into a 5km run instead.

Aaron on Software wrote an interesting series of blog posts about psychology and personal development collectively Titled Raw Nerve , here s a link to part 2 [1]. The best sections IMHO are 2, 3, and 7. The Atlantic has an insightful article by Thomas E. Ricks about the failures in leadership in the US military that made the problems in Afghanistan and Iraq a lot worse than they needed to be [2] Kent Larson gave an interesting TED talk about how to fit more people in cities [3]. He covers issues of power use, transport, space use, and sharing. I particularly liked the apartments that transform and the design for autonomous vehicles that make eye contact with pedestrians. Andrew McAfee gave an interesting TED talk titled Are Droids Taking Our Jobs [4]. I don t think he adequately supported his conclusion that computers and robots are making things better for everyone (he also presented evidence that things are getting worse for many people), but it was an interesting talk anyway. I Psychopath is an interesting documentary about Sam Vaknin who is the world s most famous narcissist [5]. The entire documentary is available from Youtube and it s really worth watching. The movie Toy Story has been recreated in live action by a couple of teenagers [6]. That s a huge amount of work. Rory Stewart gave an interesting TED talk about how to rebuild democracy [7]. I think that his arguments against using the consequences to argue for democracy and freedom (he suggests not using the torture doesn t work and women s equality doubles the workforce arguments) are weak, but he made interesting points all through his talk. Ernesto Sirolli gave an interesting TED talk about aid work and development work which had a theme of Want to help someone? Shut up and listen! [8]. That made me think of Mary Gardiner s much quoted line from the comments section of her Wikimania talk which was also shut up and listen . Waterloo Labs has some really good engineering Youtube videos [9]. The real life Mario Kart game has just gone viral but there are lots of other good things like the iPhone controlled car and eye controlled Mario Brothers. Robin Chase of Zipcar gave an interesting TED talk about various car sharing systems (Zipcar among others), congestion taxes, the environmental damage that s caused by cars, mesh networks, and other things [10]. She has a vision of a future where most cars are shared and act as nodes in a giant mesh network. Madeleine Albright gave an interesting TED talk about being a female diplomat [11]. She s an amazing speaker. Ron Englash gave an interesting TED talk about the traditional African use of fractals [12]. Among the many interesting anecdotes concerning his research in Africa he was initiated as a priest after explaining Georg Cantor s set theories. Racialicious has an insightful article about the low expectations that members of marginalised groups have of members of the privileged groups [13]. Rick Falkvinge has a radical proposal for reforming copyrights with a declared value system [14]. I don t think that this will ever get legislative support, but if it did I think it would work well for books and songs. I think that some thought should be given to how this would work for Blogs and other sources of periodical content. Obviously filing for every blog post would be an unreasonable burden. Maybe aggregating a year of posts into one copyright assignment block would work. Scott Fraser gave an interesting TED talk about the problem with eyewitness testimony [15]. He gave a real-world example of what had to be done to get an innocent man acquitted, it s quite amazing. Sarah Kendzior wrote an interesting article for al Jazeera about the common practice in American universities to pay Adjunct Professors wages that are below the poverty line [16]. That s just crazy, when students pay record tuition fees there s more than enough money to pay academics decent wages, where does all the money go to anyway?

• [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/bxtvl2f
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/8nz8zjr
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/cpu7ahx
• [5] http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/i-psychopath/
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/aejpwkr
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_stewart_how_to_rebuild_democracy.html
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/cbv7lvc
• [9] http://www.youtube.com/user/WaterlooLabs
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/robin_chase_on_zipcar_and_her_next_big_idea.html
• [11] http://tinyurl.com/48dfthu
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals.html
• [13] http://www.racialicious.com/2012/12/10/privilege-and-low-expectations/
• [14] http://falkvinge.net/2012/12/10/declared-value-system/
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/d8v9zax
• [16] http://tinyurl.com/8bdmn3p

A few months after starting the NM process, I have just been accepted as a Debian Developer. My account name is simply: julien I have been a Debian user for about 10 years now, and have begun contributing to Debian in 2005. I have then been accepted as a Debian Maintainer in 2007. This post is mainly to thank:

• all my sponsors: Christoph Haas (haas) , Lo c Minier (lool), Free Ekanayaka (freee), Maximiliano Curia (maxy) and Micah Anderson (micah),
• my advocate: Matthijs M hlman (matthijs)
• my AM (who actually make it happen in a really short time frame, thanks a lot to him): Xavier Oswald (xoswald)
• all people who helped me during the process, to name a few: Christoph Berg (myon), Enrio Zini (enrico), Peter Palfrader (weasel)

Also thanks to all people who have already sent their congratulations, it makes me very proud!

The Debian Python Modules Team is discussing which DVCS to switch to from SVN. Ondrej Certik asked how to generate a list of commiters to the team s repository, so I looked at it and got this:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-modules$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
865 piotr
609 morph
598 kov
532 bzed
388 pox
302 arnau
253 certik
216 shlomme
212 malex
175 hertzog
140 nslater
130 kobold
123 nijel
121 kitterma
106 bernat
99 kibi
87 varun
83 stratus
81 nobse
81 netzwurm
78 azatoth
76 mca
73 dottedmag
70 jluebbe
68 zack
68 cgalisteo
61 speijnik
61 odd_bloke
60 rganesan
55 kumanna
52 werner
50 haas
48 mejo
45 ucko
43 pabs
42 stew
42 luciano
41 mithrandi
40 wardi
36 gudjon
35 jandd
34 smcv
34 brettp
32 jenner
31 davidvilla
31 aurel32
30 rousseau
30 mtaylor
28 thomasbl
26 lool
25 gaspa
25 ffm
24 adn
22 jmalonzo
21 santiago
21 appaji
18 goedson
17 toadstool
17 sto
17 awen
16 mlizaur
16 akumar
15 nacho
14 smr
14 hanska
13 tviehmann
13 norsetto
13 mbaldessari
12 stone
12 sharky
11 rainct
11 fabrizio
10 lash
9 rodrigogc
9 pcc
9 miriam
9 madduck
9 ftlerror
8 pere
8 crschmidt
7 ncommander
7 myon
7 abuss
6 jwilk
6 bdrung
6 atehwa
5 kcoyner
5 catlee
5 andyp
4 vt
4 ross
4 osrevolution
4 lamby
4 baby
3 sez
3 joss
3 geole
2 rustybear
2 edmonds
2 astraw
2 ana
1 twerner
1 tincho
1 pochu
1 danderson
As it s likely that the Python Applications Packaging Team will switch too to the same DVCS at the same time, here are the numbers for its repo:

emilio@saturno:~/deb/python-apps$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
401 nijel
288 piotr
235 gothicx
159 pochu
76 nslater
69 kumanna
68 rainct
66 gilir
63 certik
52 vdanjean
52 bzed
46 dottedmag
41 stani
39 varun
37 kitterma
36 morph
35 odd_bloke
29 pcc
29 gudjon
28 appaji
25 thomasbl
24 arnau
20 sc
20 andyp
18 jalet
15 gerardo
14 eike
14 ana
13 dfiloni
11 tklauser
10 ryanakca
10 nxvl
10 akumar
8 sez
8 baby
6 catlee
4 osrevolution
4 cody-somerville
2 mithrandi
2 cjsmo
1 nenolod
1 ffm
Here I m the 4th most committer And while I was on it, I thought I could do the same for the GNOME and GStreamer teams:
emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gnome$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
5357 lool
2701 joss
1633 slomo
1164 kov
825 seb128
622 jordi
621 jdassen
574 manphiz
335 sjoerd
298 mlang
296 netsnipe
291 grm
255 ross
236 ari
203 pochu
198 ondrej
190 he
180 kilian
176 alanbach
170 ftlerror
148 nobse
112 marco
87 jak
84 samm
78 rfrancoise
75 oysteigi
73 jsogo
65 svena
65 otavio
55 duck
54 jcurbo
53 zorglub
53 rtp
49 wasabi
49 giskard
42 tagoh
42 kartikm
40 gpastore
34 brad
32 robtaylor
31 xaiki
30 stratus
30 daf
26 johannes
24 sander-m
21 kk
19 bubulle
16 arnau
15 dodji
12 mbanck
11 ruoso
11 fpeters
11 dedu
11 christine
10 cpm
7 ember
7 drew
7 debotux
6 tico
6 emil
6 bradsmith
5 robster
5 carlosliu
4 rotty
4 diegoe
3 biebl
2 thibaut
2 ejad
1 naoliv
1 huats
1 gilir

emilio@saturno:~/deb/pkg-gstreamer$ svn log egrep "^r[0-9]+ cut -f2 -d sed s/-guest// sort uniq -c sort -n -r
891 lool
840 slomo
99 pnormand
69 sjoerd
27 seb128
21 manphiz
8 he
7 aquette
4 elmarco
1 fabian
Conclusions:
- Why do I have the full python-modules and pkg-gstreamer trees, if I have just one commit to DPMT, and don t even have commit access to the GStreamer team?
- If you don t want to seem like you have done less commits than you have actually done, don t change your alioth name when you become a DD (hint: pox-guest and piotr in python-modules are the same person)
- If the switch to a new VCS was based on a vote where you have one vote per commit, the top 3 commiters in pkg-gnome could win the vote if they chosed the same! For python-apps it s the 4 top commiters, and the 7 ones for python-modules. pkg-gstreamer is a bit special

Congratulations to Yves-Alexis Perez (Corsac), Nicolas Fran ois (Nekral) and Sune Vuorela (Pusling) too \o/ Finally, some accounts (~30 ?) were created and i’m in. Thanks to all people involved in Debian and Kubuntu. In particular (no order) my co-maintainers, sponsors, helpers and application manager:
* Pierre habouzit (Madcoder)
* Mark Purcell (msp)
* Ana Beatriz Guerrero (Ana)
* Enrico Zini (enrico)
* Gustavo Franco (stratus)
* Lo c Minier (lool)
* Jonathan Riddell (riddell)
* Sarah Hobbs (hobbsee)
* and many many others But I don’t forget other people who missed this train: Cyril Brulebois (kibi). Next time, it’s your turn ! (i hope soon).

This strip is dedicated to lool.

My lack of posts lately left Planet readers without yet another yay, GNOME 2.20 released post. I'm sure nobody missed it. However, I can report what's going on in Debian regarding its packaging. The executive summary is: the GNOME team rocks, and having much of GNOME 2.20 available in sid on the very same day it was officially announced was possible thanks to the incredible work done by lool, Np237, slomo and other restless team members, who spent the summer tracking GNOME 2.19 releases and packaging them in experimental. To get a better view on what's left to do, you can use the 2.20 status page, which you'll see shows lots of green at this point. Some of the outstanding blockers are gtksourceview and the new epiphany-webkit binary stuck in NEW, which block gedit and epiphany, and of course, the initial mess that the buildds need to sort out to get the dependencies installed. The rest of red bits will continue trickling in unstable in the next few days. Beware of the new behaviour in control-center, which will by default use the DPI value provided by X. Some X drivers are still buggy and can provide bad values, which will cause bad font displays. If you're hit by this, you can force a DPI value in control-center, which should fix the issue. Also, you can read the relevant thread in our mailing list. Enjoy 2.20! Update: yeah, ftpmasters rock too, and epiphany hit incoming just a few hours after posting this entry. Yay ephy-webkit!

The short answer is no, but as our status page easily reflects, there has been lots of work going on during the last two weeks, once etch's release unblocked the way to upload new versions to unstable. This post intends to resume the trend of updating on the status of GNOME in Debian, after we ended up deciding we'd ship etch with 2.14 for a number of reasons, most notably some complications with the GTK 2.10 transition at that time. You'll be able to find other related news items in Debian GNOME team's website. What has the Debian GNOME team up to during the last 6 months? Our first priority was to focus on unstable's GNOME 2.14 packages again, in an attempt to fix any outstanding remaining bugs from our packaging, and get them in the best shape possible to deliver a polished GNOME desktop for etch. I think the result is really good, and Debian's default GNOME desktop is both very usable and attractive. In parallel, the preparations for a complete set of GNOME 2.16 packages continued in our Subversion repository and kept appearing, little by little, in experimental. The most visible consequence of our 2.16 efforts translated into nobse's backport of 2.16 for etch, which can be found in the corresponding repository. And then, with etch deep frozen and nearly ready to be released, GNOME 2.18 was released, and of course the GNOME team didn't wait too much to start working on it. Our current status is looking good: the Developer Platform is already available in unstable, although buildd's are fighting the builds on various architectures. When the dust settles (GTK 2.10's landing has generated quite a big cloud; we have a list of packages that still haven't completed the GTK+ 2.10 transition), we'll be able to prepare and upload the more complex Desktop components like the panel, nautilus, evolution or control-center. Unstable users should probably be seeing daily progress on this front, so keep an eye on your package managers! Although Debian 4.0 released with an old version of GNOME, vast amounts of time and work have been invested to release it with the necessary backported fixes and enhancements. The newer GNOME versions have been available in Debian official ftp archives in very reasonable timeframes; this has only been possible thanks to the restless efforts of the (fortunately) growing Debian GNOME team members: giskard, feedback, HE, lool, np237, slomo, shaka, sjoerd, xaiki and not forgetting our incredible bug triager, svena. Thanks! On the behind the scenes department, it's a pleasure to report that Lo c Minier and Jordi Mallach very recently joined the GNOME Foundation's board of advisors in representation of the Debian Project, replacing Matthew Garrett, who has been representing us for the last few years until he left the project. Thanks, Matthew!

It has long been that I'm the sole maintainer.lool has been active lately, which is a very nice change.My time is mostly used up by apt-listbugs maintenance these days.