If I think back to fond memories of being with my dad during my childhood, there s one thing that always comes back first. It s those late summer evenings outside. Dad often had outdoor projects going on of some sort. I d go out there hanging around, maybe chatting, maybe playing with cats, or maybe doing something of my own. Dad often had an old AM radio sitting around and would be listening to a baseball game while working. As it got darker, lights would come on, and the bugs would start flying near them. Sometimes dad would be working just inside the barn, and the bugs would start flying in there, while some light poured out the big front door. There s something about that scratchy AM signal, the evening slowly getting darker, the slow pace of the baseball game, and just being around dad and a peripheral part of whatever he was doing that stirs a wonderfully fond recollection in me. I don t remember the specifics of any one of those times, nor do I really remember how often it happened, but it does stick with me. We ve had a routine in our house, starting early enough that neither of our boys know anything different, where right before bed, I read a book and sing a song to each of them individually. Last November, I was looking for some books to challenge Jacob a little more than what we had been reading. I found The Complete Winnie the Pooh used for $4 on Amazon. This contains the original A. A. Milne stories, not the Disney series. It had a few line drawings, but there were many pages without any. It s 352 pages and written in a rather dated form of British English. So for all these reasons, I wasn t sure if Jacob would like it. But it was $4 so I bought it. And Jacob was hooked. Each evening, we start bedtime with looking at the map of the 100-acre forest, just inside the cover. He gets to pick out 4 things for me to describe, and then we turn to our story. We usually read somewhere between 2 and 5 pages at bedtime, depending on how well he got ready without wasting time. And then we sing. A. A. Milne has his Pooh character make up songs throughout the book. They are printed with words only, no tune, so I make up a tune for them as we go. Jacob has taken to requesting these songs for his bedtime song as well. Jacob always gets to choose his bedtime story, and sometimes he chooses a different one but about 75% of the time, it s been Pooh. A few weeks ago, he started noticing that we were almost to the end. He got very concerned, asking what we d do next. I suggested a different book, which he didn t like. Then I pointed out that we could restart the Pooh stories from the beginning, which was exciting for him. Last night, we finished the book. The very last story was an interesting one, suggesting Christopher Robin growing up and no longer having imaginary adventures with the animals, but making Pooh promise to always be there for him. I don t think Jacob caught onto that meaning, though. When we finished it, we had this conversation: Jacob: Dad, is that the end? Me: Yes. Jacob, getting a big smile: Yay! So can we start back at the beginning tomorrow? Me: Sure! Jacob then gave a clap, shouted Yay! again, and was a very happy boy. Sometimes I wonder what our boys will remember in 25 years of their fun times with me. I don t know if Jacob will remember all the days reading about the animals in the 100-acre wood when he was 4, or maybe he ll remember watching train and combine videos, or playing radio hide-and-seek, or maybe something entirely different. But I have no doubt that I will remember sitting on the couch in his room, holding him on my lap, and reading a 350-page book to a loving 4-year-old. As Pooh aptly put it, Sometimes, the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.

Sometimes there s nothing quite so heartwarming as hearing a 4-year-old that doesn t think anybody is listening. When Jacob is all alone in his room, sometimes he will sing. Maybe it s a song he knows, or fragments of a song he knows. Or maybe it s something he just made up on the fly. It might be about trains, cats, letters, or who knows what. Maybe it will crack him up and he ll keep singing and then laugh. Or maybe it will stop in 30 seconds and he ll go on to something else. Brief and out of tune though it may be, it is still one of the most beautiful sounds I know and I love to hear it. Jacob loves to have other people sing, too. Sometimes I will make up songs while we drive: We are driving, we are driving, we are driving down the road; we are driving down the old country road and we re making some dust, yes a lot of dust Or Jacob likes me to sing the songs in the Winnie the Pooh book he has (the original, pre-Disney version, which has the words for the songs but not a tune, so I make up a little bit different one each time). Very occasionally he will sing with me, but if he does, he doesn t want anybody to comment about it. I sing with the Kansas Mennonite Men s Chorus. We re a group of about 300 singers (all men, though not all Kansan and not all Mennonite) that sing for charity. We ve raised over $600,000 for charity so far. I still remember the first time I went to a KMMC practice 3 years ago. It was my first year singing, and the first practice of the season. We started singing the first song, and wow what a powerful moment. Even at its imperfect first practice state, hearing 300 people sing quietly is a powerful sound and when they get to the top of their lungs, it s indescribable. No CD can ever quite do that justice. Jacob and Oliver come to KMMC concerts sometimes, but this year they took a special interest. Oliver pointed to, hm, perhaps 300 men and said dad for each one. (He was quite far away and probably couldn t pick me out specifically.) Jacob, for the first time, sat quietly engrossed in the concert until we got to Dry Bones (a song involving surprise and lots of homemade instruments) which made him laugh out loud. Then he would hide under his seat from the applause. Last week, KMMC went on tour. This was my first choir tour, and Terah came along while the boys spent time with grandparents in Kansas. We sang in Bloomington, IL, and then in Goshen, IN at the fairly new Sauder Concert Hall. That hall is a few years old, and has been reviewed as once of the best concert halls in the world acoustically. It seats 1100 people and was perfect for this. The 85 or so singers from KMMC that went on tour joined the Indiana and Ohio Men s Choruses to make a combined group of about 200 singers. And what an experience that was. I learned later this was the first event to completely pack Sauder Concert Hall. We ended the concert singing the Mennonite Anthem a souped-up version of the doxology. (You can see a video of a different group singing it to get an idea of what it was). This is often joked about as being part of Mennonite DNA. You can gather a random group of Mennonites and ask to hear 606 (its number in, well, an old hymnbook that we don t use anymore) and you can probably get a fairly well-sounding rendition, from memory, a cappella, complete with 4-part harmony, at the drop of the hat. Mennonite youth have been known to sing it in train stations, airports, soccer stadiums, and with kazoos. At Goshen, we had 200 men on stage, plus a brass band, plus 1100 people in the audience facing us. They were, of course, invited to sing along. (That s one of the rules of 606: you can t exclude anybody because even if you tried, they d still sing, because how can you resist?) So I was up there on stage, singing a song I love, and hearing the 1100 people in the audience sing it to me. I could glance out over the front rows and saw the smiles on so many faces as they sang, and what a moving moment that was. The excitement and thrill of it all hit me so much that I could barely finish the song. The numbers aren t all in yet, but I m guessing that we raised over $15,000 for charity last weekend (the choir members paid their own expenses in advance, so 100% of the money raised goes to international relief efforts.) A 4-year-old singing alone in his room is really heartwarming. I have to say that 1300 people singing a song that touches each one of them is a pretty close second.

Jacob really enjoys his pajamas. By this point, he can mostly get himself ready for bed. He still wants help brushing his teeth but that s about it. His favorite pajamas are his rocket ship pajamas , which also cover his feet and have a white pad underneath the feet. That s his favorite part. They have rockets all over them, and he sometimes will run out of a room and inform me with delight, I m all rocket ships! Oliver has really started to form up words. We can pick out words like lettuce, truck, book, look, and dad John . He also has a way of saying there it is , most particularly when looking at trains. Jacob still loves trains. In church, he will take his markers, connect them end to end, and have a marker train that will keep him entertained for quite a long while. He will slide it back and forth on the pew, and eventually it will slide in a tunnel (behind my back). This actually started with hymnbook trains get a few books in a row, and it s a train. Anything can be a train to Jacob. Driving down the road, we might see what he calls tree trains, which are just trees in a row. Last Sunday, the Kansas Mennonite Men s Chorus had its first concert of the season. I sing with this group, which has nearly 300 men in it. It s a lot of fun to be a part of that group, and the music is wonderful. Jacob and Oliver were there on Sunday, and both started to take more of an interest in the music that before. Jacob particularly loved the song Dry Bones, which had a number of odd percussion instruments in it. He was laughing at spots, and wanted to hear me sing it for the next several days. He even wanted Terah to read the program from the concert to him before his nap one day. Oliver enjoyed it too, and kept saying dad John (his word for me) whenever there was a soloist. I didn t sing a solo, but apparently to 1-year-old eyes, 300 guys all dressed alike all look like dad. Jacob and I recently have been reading Winnie the Pooh stories at his bedtime. Not the Disney books, but the original A. A. Milne stories. We read a few pages every night, and have made it to page 214 by now. Jacob loves it. And he s becoming increasingly interested in reading things. Sometimes we ve been unsure if he s reading something or just had it memorized. Last night, I got out the book, and we were on a page he had never seen or heard before. He pointed to a word, and said, It says Roo there! And indeed it did. Then he added, It says said Roo. . Yep. And then he read me the whole sentence:

I love jumping, said Roo.

I believe that s the first time I ve been certain Jacob has read me an entire sentence without having memorized any of it beforehand. And he won t be old enough to start Kindergarten for another year and a half. We then read the story, and when I came to the sentence Jacob had read to me, he interrupted, saying, No, dad, I will read that one! And he did.

Sam Varghese has written an article that is very skeptical of the educational value of the OLPC project [1].Are Laptops Any Good for Schools?Sam cites an article in the New York Times by Winnie Hu about schools removing laptop programs due to a lack of success [2]. Winnie s article gives an example of a school shutting a program because of getting new teachers who lacked computer skills and some examples of schools which had issues with the repair cost. The solution to that would be computers that are more robust and easier to use by all accounts the OLPC systems are solidly constructed and easy to use!It is claimed that using laptops doesn t increase test scores. Using only test scores to compare educational methods is a way to lose, probably any school which does nothing other than try to increase test scores is worth avoiding. One example from Winnie s article is a report by Mr. Warschauer of students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online . What value can you place on having students develop books for poor children in other countries and debate Supreme Court cases? If this sort of program became popular then it would lead to the countries which do it becoming better places to live in future decades!Mr. Warschauer also claims that If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful . I would go further than that, I think that providing the educational environment that involves international charity work and analysis of important court cases would lead to students having the skills to become good engineers, designers, and artists who work for people like George Lucas and Steve Jobs. No matter what you might do the vast majority of children will not grow up to be like George Lucas and Steve Jobs, there is a very limited number of positions for such people. But those people employ a huge number of creative people who do interesting and enjoyable work for good pay.I don t think that Winnie s article supports criticism of the OLPC project. I don t think that Winnie s article even contains sufficient evidence to match the headline.Playing GamesSam also cites an article about the misuse of school computers for playing games [3]. Of course there are ways of limiting access to games based on time etc. For a Linux system you could have a root cron job that runs chmod on /usr/games at various times, and preventing users from easily running programs that they install isn t difficult.Not that games are all bad, the flash-based games on www.physicsgames.net do teach kids some things about physics although I admit that much of that could be learned by playing with balls, skate-boards, etc.The Problem with the OLPC ProjectI think that the policy change to make OLPC systems only available to disadvantaged children was a mistake. The give one get one program was a great idea, maybe not the most effective way of getting funding but good for getting developers. While the new Sugar on a Stick project to put the OLPC GUI on a bootable USB device [4] it doesn t compare well to having dedicated hardware IMHO.Minimal Use of ComputersI have previously written about the weight of school bags and how laptops can alleviate the risk of health problems related to carrying heavy text books [5]. Since that time ebook readers and tablets have become incredibly cheap. Ebook readers are really light and the recent tablets are also very light (particularly the smaller ones). It seems to me that every school should at least be moving towards every student having an ebook reader and to use ebooks for all books that are part of the curriculum.At the moment there are a bunch of tablets on sale for about $150, that includes tablets that can access the Internet via Wifi or via 3G and a cheap 3G plan costs less than $150 per annum. If tablets were used for some of the computer tasks related to schools then a lot of the difficulty of repairing hardware would be removed. Tablets don t offer as many options for messing up the software configuration and if the hardware breaks it s easy to transfer the data onto a new tablet from the cloud with a maximum cost of $150 to replace the hardware.Also a cloud-based computing model could permit students to access all the same data from school and home while using desktop computers at both locations.Current SuccessNatalie Craig wrote an interesting article for The Age about The Lab a drop-in computer center for kids on the Autism Spectrum run by Dale Linegar and Stefan Schutt [6]. The fact that kids who have communication difficulties can find it easier to communicate electronically should be fairly obvious to everyone in the free software community, but the creation of an organisation to support such kids is noteworthy I think that such centers should be funded by the government and run in every city.Salman Khan gave an interesting TED talk about his project the Khan Academy [7] which is an online video-based teaching system that evolved from some Youtube videos he produced to tutor his cousins. Salman pointed out that his cousins said that they would rather watch his videos than have him teach them in person, it seems that they liked being able to pause and rewind the talk as well as avoiding the pressure of human interaction. The Khan Academy has videos in Adobe flash format, but conveniently they have download links so those of us who don t have the Flash plugin can still view the content [8].One of the interesting things about the Khan Academy is that in school use the videos are being assigned to kids as homework and the class time is used for teaching children to do worked examples what has traditionally been homework.So it seems that there are real examples of special-needs kids and average kids benefiting from different types of electronic learning.ConclusionI think that almost everything about the education system is broken. I also think that in many ways the education system has reached a local maximum, so there is no small way of improving things, and adding computers without making any of the significant changes needed to fix the big problems probably can t do a lot of good. In spite of this computers can provide some real benefits and I expect that those benefits can be better than the benefits of other potential ways of spending the money (IE it s worth the opportunity cost). I also have no doubt that almost anything can give a negative result if done badly enough, so I don t interpret examples of computer use failing in a school as anything other than evidence of a failing school.While the Khan Academy has some results that seem very positive I think that s only the first step of what needs to be done. It also seems to be based around users who have good Internet access which often isn t the case in places where the OLPC is being deployed. This implies that we need to get systems like the Khan Academy designed to operate in a disconnected manner, maybe with a remote server that s not connected to the Internet. This should be possible if funding is available.Sam suggested that there needs to be a scientific study of the effectiveness of the OLPC. I think that every project which involves significant amounts of public funding should be researched to ensure that it s an effective use of resources. 400,000 laptops is going to cost something more than $40,000,000 so it seems reasonable to devote a few person-years of research to determine how effective they are and which of the possible ways of using an OLPC will give the best results.I am confident that a good study of the effectiveness of the OLPC would demonstrate that it provides real educational benefits when correctly incorporated into an educational program. I also expect that such a study would show some significant differences in the effectiveness of various ways of using them. But we shouldn t be relying on confidence, we need some test results.

• [1] http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/44673-lca-2011-is-the-olpc-about-technology-or-education
• [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html
• [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/business/11digi.html?adxnnl=1
• [4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/24/school-bag-weight/
• [6] http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/autistic-kids-learn-to-fly-in-cyberspace-20110219-1b0fj.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
• [8] http://www.khanacademy.org/

Today I started to package from nearly all packages which I maintain within debian the new upstream versions, as squeeze is finally released Have fun with powertop 2.0beta (1.97) and the new lmms versions, to name only a few!

After everybody though that Midnight Commander is dead and the next release of it will be released together with hurd, it is very cool to announce that a new team of developers are active again. We've taken over officially the development in December and now, after two months of work a new version of mc is available: 4.6.2. This is mostly a bugfix release addressing several very nasty bugs which are also present in the debian package. Here the notes what has changed in this release:

• MC Core
  • Changed HQ url to point to new website www.midnight-commander.org (Closes: #137, #138)
  • Added a micro helper library in order to go slowly avay from glib (Closes: #157)
  • Use static strings as section entries in ~/.mc/history WARNING!: This will break old files (Closes: #50)
  • Fixed a repaint issue when clicking on the "View" Button instead of using F3 (Closes: #35)
  • Removed obsolete autoconf macros (Closes: #133)
  • Fix escaping for command line completion (Closes: #147)
  • prevent mc from segfaulting when getting invalid timestamps on files (Closes: #96)
  • Fixed a keybord issue when running mc via a putty console (Closes: #203)
  • setted pty fd to closeonexec (on subshell) (Closes: #174)
  • Fixed file renames, when copying/moving is performed into deleted directories. (Closes: #181)
  • Add an option to show executables first in the panels (Closes: #173)
  • Fixed concatdirand_file if there is a parameter = NULL (Closes: #180)
  • Allow out-of-tree builds (Closes: #224, #208)
• Editor
  • Syntax highlighting for:
    • debian files (debian/changelog, debian/control, debian/copyright, ..) (Closes: #142)
    • updated sh syntax highlighting (Closes: #143)
    • updated pascal syntax highlighting (Closes: #65)
    • differentiate between c and cpp files for highlighting (Closes: #16)
    • updated python highlighting to support python 2.6 (Closes: #216)
  • Removed some unneeded variables (Closes: #168, #151)
  • Do use a ro test if a file exists (Closes: #206)
  • Fixes some missbehaviour in regex matching (Closes: #207, #211 )
    • start at front of line and not on cursor position
    • . shouldn't match a newline
• VFS
  • Fix some bashisms in some extfs scripts (Closes: #146)
  • Fixed various problems with symlinks and files with chars which needs escaping over fish (Closes: #10, #87, #149, #53)
  • Added 7zip extfs descriptor (Closes: #92)
  • Switched from o3totxt to odf2txt as o3totxt is outdated (Closes: #218)
• Locale
  • Updated german translation (Closes: #167)
  • New Belarussian translation (Closes: #170)
  • Updated russian translation (Closes: #159)

As you see.. quite a long list of fixes Have fun and check the new release out right here!

This morning after getting up I stumbled over exciting news: Google designed it's own browser called Chrome. As a marketing-gag they published a small comic about this new browser where presenting all exciting features. While clicking through this comic I noticed something strange: Google seems to think that Europe is still in the middle of WW2, like many Americans do... (Hint: Have a look at the german borders)

I have just observed demonstration units of the V-Smile system [1]. They have “educational games” aimed at ages 3-5, 4-7, and some similar ranges. The first thing I noticed was that children who were able to correctly play the games were a lot older than the designated ages. For example 10yo children were playing the Scooby-Doo addition game (supposedly teaching children to add single-digit numbers) and apparently finding the non-addition part of the game challenging (I tried it myself and found catching flying hamburgers while dodging birds to be challenging enough that it was difficult to find numbers). For children who were in the suggested age-range (and a suitable age for learning the basic lessons contained in the games) the only ones who actually managed to achieve the goals were the ones who were heavily directed by their father. So my observation is that the games will either be used by children who are too old for the basic lessons or be entirely directed by parents (I didn’t observe any mother giving the amount of assistance necessary for a 5yo to complete the games but assume that it happens sometimes). I doubt that there are many children who have the coordination needed for a platform game who have not yet learned to recognise printed letters (as supposedly taught in the Winnie the Pooh game). The Thomas the Tank Engine spelling game had a UI that was strange to say the least (using a joystick not to indicate which direction to go but instead to move a cursor between possible tracks) and I doubt that it does any good at teaching letter recognition. There was also a game that involved using a stylus for tracing the outline of a letter, as I had great difficulty in doing this (due to the poor interface and the low resolution of the touch-pad) it seems very unlikely that a young child who is just learning to write letters would gain anything from it. Strangely there was a game that involved using the touch-pad to indicate matching colors. Recognising matching colors is even easier than recognising letters and I don’t think that a child who can’t recognise the colors would be able to manage the touch-pad. The V-Smile system seems to primarily consist of a console designed for connection to a TV but also has hand-held units that take the same cartridges. The same company produces “laptops” which sell for $50 and have a very low resolution screen and only the most basic functionality (and presumably other useless games). Sometimes the old-fashioned methods are best. It seems that crayons are among the best tools for teaching letter recognition and writing. But if there is a desire to use a computer for teaching, then a regular PC or laptop should do. Letter recognition can be taught by reading the text menus needed to launch games. The variety of computer poker games can be used for recognising matching colors and numbers as can the Mahjong series of games. Counting can be taught through the patience games, and the GIMP can be used for teaching computer graphics and general control of the mouse and the GUI. NB I’m not advocating that all education be done on a computer, merely noting the fact that it can be done better with free software on an open platform than on the proprietary systems which are supposedly designed for education. Finally with a PC children can take it apart! I believe that an important part of learning comes from disassembling and re-building toys. While it’s obvious that a PC is not going to compare with a Lego set, I think it’s good for children (and adults) to know that a computer is not a magic box, it’s a machine that they can understand (to a limited extent) and which is comprised of a number of parts that they could also understand if they wanted to learn the details. This idea is advocated by Gever Tulley advocates such disassembly of household items in his TED talk “5 dangerous things you should let your kids do” [2]. Gever runs The Tinkering School [3] which teaches young children how to make and break things. Finally I just checked some auction sites and noticed that I can get reasonably new second-hand laptops for less than $300. A laptop for $250 running Linux should not be much more expensive than a proprietary laptop that starts at $50 once you include the price of all the extra games. For an older laptop (P3) the price is as low as $100 on an auction with an hour to go. Then of course for really cheap laptops you would buy from a company that is getting new machines for their staff. It’s not uncommon for companies to sell old laptops to employees for $50 each. At a recent LUG meeting I gave away a Thinkpad with a 233MHz Pentium-MMX CPU, 96M of RAM, and a 800*600 color display - by most objective criteria such a machine would be much more capable than one of those kids computers (either V-Smile or a competitor). Of course the OLPC [4] is the ideal solution to such problems. It’s a pity that they are not generally available. I have previously written about the planned design for future OLPC machines [5] which makes it a desirable machine for my own personal use.

• [1] http://www.vsmile.co.uk/


• [2] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html


• [3] http://www.tinkeringschool.com/blog/2005/about/


• [4] http://www.laptop.org/


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/21/the-new-olpc/

Share This

As I wrote in my mail to debian-devel@l.d.o I would like to ask for help for porting mc to link dynamically against libsmclient so that I can enable the native smb support again. I've disabled this support with the last upload to unstable. Please see the informations below for the reasons: Here some background informations: mc still uses a very old samba lib to make the native smb support possible. This lib was included in 1996 and wasn't updated until now. Since the layout of the configuration file has changed and new features was added, this old lib had very much problems parsing this file. Furthermore I fear that there are untracked and unfixed security issues within this lib which were discovered from 1996 until now. My plans are to link mc dynamically against the libsmbclient0, but since there are several other big tasks to work on, I don't know exactly if I've enough time to work on this big issue. If someone is interested in working on a fix for this or for any other issue listed here please contact me, so we can coordinate. Thanks in advance

Cowdancer is activly developed in debian, that's very nice. it's really a cool tool to build packages for unstable but also for backporting efforts. I'm using it on a daily basis to build debian etch packages of lustre. However three days ago cowdancer stopped working with my etch chroot after an upgrade of my unstable system:

dpkg-source: info: building lustre in lustre_1.6.5~rc3-1.dsc
dpkg-genchanges -S >../lustre_1.6.5~rc3-1_source.changes
dpkg-genchanges: including full source code in upload
dpkg-buildpackage: source only upload (original source is included)
chroot: cannot run command  cowdancer-ilistcreate': No such file or directory
W: cowdancer-ilistcreate failed to run within chroot, falling back to old method
 -> Running in no-targz mode
I: using fakeroot in build.
Current time: Sat May 17 12:18:30 CEST 2008
pbuilder-time-stamp: 1211019510
 -> copying local configuration
 -> mounting /proc filesystem
 -> mounting /dev/pts filesystem
 -> policy-rc.d already exists
Obtaining the cached apt archive contents
Installing the build-deps
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
Can't open perl script "/usr/bin/dpkg-architecture": Cannot allocate memory
 -> Attempting to satisfy build-dependencies
 -> Creating pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy package
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
cowdancer: .ilist size unexpected
sh: /tmp/satisfydepends-aptitude/pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy/DEBIAN/control: Cannot allocate memory
E: pbuilder-satisfydepends failed.
Copying back the cached apt archive contents
 -> unmounting dev/pts filesystem
 -> unmounting proc filesystem
 -> Copying COW directory
 -> Invoking pbuilder
 -> Cleaning COW directory
Command /bin/sh -c pdebuild "--pbuilder" "cowbuilder" "--" "--basepath" "/var/cache/pbuilder/etch.cow" failed

After some research I found that a change of cowdancer (something related to .ilist) is responible for this issue. After that I asked on #debian-devel if someone else had this problem and were told that removing an re-creating the chroot will help. But that results in the same error msg. After that I decided to wrote a bugreport against cowdancer, since this is in my eyes a major defect in this software to do not support the latest stable release. I filled this report as RC Bug and got very fast a answer:

severity 481344 wishlist
retitle 481344  provide cowdancer etch backport
[ ... ]

I think this is the wrong way to fix a problem in unstable with a backport of a software. Providing a fallback for older debian releases would be the better way. Is anybody else having this problems?

Patrick Winnertz writes about the demotivating effect of unreasonable delays on joining the Debian project [1]. While I agree that things need to be improved in terms of getting people in the project in a timely manner (the suggestion of providing assistants seems good), I don’t think that anyone has a good reason for being demotivated because of this. I first applied to join Debian in late 1998 or some time in 1999. At the time part of the process of joining was to receive a phone call. At the time I was living in a hotel and they refused to call me on such a line. I could have easily camped out in the hallway of a hotel (the cheap London hotels often had a pay-phone in the hall and no phones in the rooms) and pretended that it was my own phone with an unlisted number. Unless they refused to allow people with unlisted numbers to join (which seems unlikely) then I could have joined then. So it seems that at the time I could only join Debian if I was prepared to lie about my ownership of a phone line. I wasn’t overly bothered by this - there has never been a shortage of free software projects that need contributions of code. By late 2000 the rules had changed and I joined without needing a phone call. In the mean time I had forked the Bonnie storage benchmark program to form my own project Bonnie++ [2], created Postal - mail server benchmark suite [3] and worked on many other things as well. I have sympathy for the people who apply to become Debian Developers and who have to wait a long time, I’ve been in the same situation myself. But there are plenty of things that you can do in the mean time. Some of the things that you can do are upstream development work, filing bug reports, submiting patches that fix bugs, and writing documentation (all forms including blog posts). Also when projects aren’t yet in Debian it often happens that someone creates unofficial packages, the person who does this doesn’t need to be a DD. Producing back-ported packages for new versions of programs that are in a stable release can also be done by people who are not DDs. Unofficial and back-ported packages provide less benefit for the project as a whole but considerable benefit for the people who want to use them. There is a lot of work that can be done to fulfill clause 4 of the Debian Social Contract [4] (Our priorities are our users and free software) which doesn’t require being a Debian developer. It seems to me that if you have the right approach to this and maintain the perspective that Debian is one part of the free software community (and not necessarily the biggest or most significant) then a delay in your application to become a DD won’t be particularly demotivating.

• [1] http://www.der-winnie.de/posts/Demotivaton_of_new_prospective_Developers/


• [2] http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/


• [3] http://www.coker.com.au/postal/


• [4] http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Share This

I'm writing this blog entry as a reaction of Lucas Nussbaums one. More or less one year ago I also was a New Maintainer who completed the process after 3 months (Started in February and ended in May). My Intention was to become as fast as possible a Developer and I was very motivated. (I helped Lucas with filling the build twice in a row bugs in this time). The FD approves me quite fast... (I'll guess I was only waiting for two weeks?) but the next to steps (Approval of DAM and creation of the account) took very long. After waiting for 3 months I was quite demotivated and doing only necessary things in order to update my packages... it was very frustrating. But now I'm finally a DD, since 6 months. For those who doesn't want to calculate: I was waiting for DAM about 4 months. When I saw that I was again highly motivated and started again to work on Debian a bit more, because I thought that the account creation can't took long...this was an error: I was approved by DAM in the middle of October... and got my account in Dezember... again waiting for a simple action. I can really understand New Maintainer who are directly MIA after being a DD. Waiting a half year for account creation is much too long. In my eyes there is only one possible solution for this issue: Since DAM and the Account Manager have also many other tasks which consumes there time, I would suggest to give them assistants...every manager needs at least one assistant ;-). This would speed up the process and people who are doing actually a great job doesn't get frustrated by waiting, but can actively work on Debian. I hope that the new DPL will find a solution for this really big issue during his time.

Some weeks ago I post about a spam contest where I participate. This contest is now running for several weeks. (It will be finished after 5 weeks). The aim is to get as most as possible spam to the emailadress . (My is winnie@qsc218.credativ.com). Atm I'm the second... I've ~140 spam mails and only 1 virus in my mailbox Noel, who is on the first has ~150 spam mails and ~10 viruses in his mailbox :-S The winner of this contest will get a free t-shirt (with a cool text on it). Yeah... it would rock if you can distribute this emailadress a bit more, so that I recieves more spam Thanks!!

I thought the spanish region of Extremadura had 4 million inhabitants and 200000 computers running GNU/Linex, a custom Debian distribution.

I was wrong. It's 1 million inhabitants and ca. 100000 computers running Linex - which is a much better ratio :-)

The exact number is not really known, because about 2000 computers (or so, details...!) don't provide data back for some unknown reasons. Probably a configuration detail.

Details are sooo important, and I love that. But at the same time, details are irrelevant (100000 or 102000...), I love that too.

Personally, I think the Debian Edu developer gathering the last 3.5 days here in Extremadura was very productive and fun. It was so productive, there were so many fun, interesting and insightful discusssions, that currently I can only think of one detail, I want to mention here, which really isn't a detail, but something bigger. I'm very very happy about the work which was put into bug 311188 here, mostly by Winnie. #311188 is just a meta bug, the juice is in the details, all the bugs which are blocking this bug.

And as you are probably interesting in this detail, why we care so much about this bug, let me explain: the blocking bugs of that bug will prevent upgrades from Lenny to Lenny+1 from working without problems for Debian Edu installations. That's why we care - it's only a detail, but an important one.

And now I'll run to get a last drink from the hotel bar, instead of correcting details in this post. Thank you, Cesar y Jose, for arranging this great meeting and everybody else, who makes Debian a fun thing to work on details and the great picture!

Today is the first day where we are really here and could work. After some initial troubles with the network setup here, we've managed that everybody was able to get internet access. There are some goal we would like to archieve during this worksession, these goals are:

• remove blocker bugs of our long standing issue #311188
  • bind9 patch
  • dhcp3 patch
  • slapd patch
  • switch syslog daemon to use rsyslog
• improve our dokumentation
• general hacking on ltsp
• further work on cdd-dev

After the first day the bind9 patch is completed and the dhcp3 is almost ready. Hopefully are the other days here in this nice town also so productive! I'll add some photos of this meeting after it is over to my gallery.

Yesterday I made the switch from kde3 to kde4. But before I dumped all installed packages into a file ( if I have to restore) and backuped my configuration files for kde. After some fiddeling with kde4 and the dependencies I had a full kde4 installed. My problem was that:

apt-get -t experimental install kde4

won't resolve all dependencies... So my apt-get line was quite long. (After I was finished, I thought that maybe pinning would be a better idea). In general kde4 is usable, but there are some quite annoying things:

• konqueror can't show websites via ssl with a ssl name which doesn't match the servername (the https:// protocoll will die)
• It is not possible for me to choose another delimiter than the default one for the shortcuts in konqueror. (I'm used to have as delimter only a blank, but the default is a colon.)
• Sometimes konqueror (very rare!!) can't contact klauner anymore.. a restart of konqueror fixes this issue.
• Sometimes plasma crashes and restarts directly afterwards, but I'm not able to reproduce this atm.

But of course there are quite many improvements, I'll list here only those which I consider very useful

• kopete is now able to show the away messages of people using ICQ6 (I wasn't able to read them before)
• konqueror renders some websites now better than before
• The new menu structure is quite cool
• And of course: the plasmoids...it's quite sad that most plasmoids are in playground atm (calc, weather). It would be cool if it would be possible to package them as extragear-playground or something similiar.

Some things which are definitly missing in kde4 (which have to be ported to qt4) are kpowersave and knetworkmanager. Furthermore kontact and amarok, but there is work in progress.

I've created a small contest together with several other guys. We'll try to get as much as possible spams on a emailadress. The people with the most spam and viruses on his emailaccount will win. I think a good starting point is to publish here, we'll see. Some other things which could end in having success are:

• write the emailadress into the footer of each emailadress as spamtrap.
• subscribe to several websites
• write some guestbook entries with this emailadress

If you have other ideas how to get as much as possible spam to this address please write a Comment to this post to the Discussion page. Thanks in advance The emailadress which should recieves as much as possible spam is: winnie@qsc218.credativ.com.

Today I was very nerved by searching for patches for mc. Every distribution has other patches for the same thing, The best point to show this are the utf8/slang patches. There are many different approaches which have different qualtity. Furthermore are in every distribution fixes which are missing in other ones. And I was really pissed by that :S In order to find a solution I contacted several other maintainers of mc (opensuse, mandriva, mandrake, fedora, ubuntu) and get a reply from several of them. Maybe we'll start to use one repository to start to unify our patches. My goal with this is to get better patches into debian (and into the other distributions), sharing patches between distributions and unifying them to submit them to upstream. Maybe this will help to get patches from distributions faster into the upstreams CVS. We'll see what will happen. I'm looking forward to the result of this initiative

After nearly 2 days I'll put some fotos of the CLT08 online. It's a quite cool event which many nice people and I'm pleased to meet them (again). In some minutes is the start of the social event, I'll hope it will be as good as the last year, which many very cool drinks Have fun to view the fotos! (Sorry for some not so good pictures

Yeah.. finally we're preparing everything in order to leave for the CLT08. Two days on the debian booth in Chemnitz, some very cool talks about various topics, of course party and meeting some people there. See you there!