AM reports, MIA check, LinuxTag

Over the last few days, I read several AM reports and checked whether they were complete. Quite a large number of people are waiting for James now and I hope he'll process some soon as he promised recently. I also finally mailed some of the people who responded to the MIA check which was performed from March to May 2003. When the MIA check was done, some mails bounced, some people wanted to be retired and some were active. Some were not very active but said that they would become more active again. I now checked the status of all of them and mailed them an update; as it turns out, most of them haven't contributed anything recently.

On Wednesday evening, I also went to Karlsruhe for LinuxTag. I wasn't sure whether I should go at all since I'm travelling so much these days, but in the end I decided to go for two days. LinuxTag is a really good event and has always been fun in the last few years.

On upstream authors

I finally fixed a /tmp handling bug in one of my packages tonight after the upstream author didn't act on the bug report for a few weeks. After talking to Matt Zimmerman about security work a few weeks ago, I decided to look at my packages in detail and found a potential problem. Matt confirmed that it allows an DoS. Nothing terribly serious, but still an important bug that has to be fixed. So I forwarded it upstream, in the hope that upstream would fix it. However, from past experience, my expectation were low. Basically, most of the time I receive a bug report, I have to come up with a patch myself which I then forward upstream. I have no problem contributing to upstream, but after a few years it is getting quite tiresome that I have to fix most bugs myself and that there is almost no upstream development. This entry is not supposed to be a rant, though. Instead, I'd like to thank all the active upstream authors out there, and there are some truly incredible people! A while ago I packaged a new tool and the author is fantastic. Every time I think of a new feature or a user requests something, I mention it to the upstream author who usually mails me a few days later saying that a new upstream release is out. He is really incredible and it's so much fun working with him. In fact, I feel guilty sometimes because I have to do so little work myself, but on the other hand I do make important contributions (I wrote man pages which were integrated upstream, I worked on good integration of the tool with debian-installer, and obviously good integration with Debian itself, etc).

Cranes concert

I went to London today to see a Cranes concert. I first saw the Cranes in 1992 in Innsbruck during The Cure's Wish Tour, and I saw them again in 2001 when I lived in London. I wish they were more successful because they'd certainly deserve it. Some of their music is online in case people are interested.

Greece, Spain, Brazil

I have been way too busy to keep this up to date, but let's try to summarize the most important events of the last weeks. Most of it is about travel, and I'm sure people will be envious… but I should mention that this travel is for work and not purely for holidays; while most people see the fun side of travel, they often don't realize that it's a lot of work attending conferences, and it takes quite a bit of energy since lots of people want to talk to you, etc. This does not mean that I don't enjoy it; it is usually great fun, but also very exhausting.

Anyway, at the end of April, I spent a few days in Greece for a conference. First, six international speakers (well known Free Software and Open Source people) gave a talk in Athens, and the following day we were sent to different cities all over Greece. Georg Greve (FSF Europe) and I went to Thessaloniki. The following day, I returned to Athens for a few hours and managed to go to the Acropolis with Konstantinos Margaritis and Kurt Gramlich. I had never been to Greece before, so it was good to get a first impression, but it wasn't long enough to see much.

Then I actually stayed at home for a few weeks, I had to present my research at a department internal PhD conference. My supervisor seemed happy with my presentation so that's good. At the end of May, I went to Majorca to talk about quality assurance at a conference organized by the LUG there. The BULMA folks have a really strong LUG, and I had lot's of fun there. Celso Gonzalez was so kind to show me around Palma, and he also took me to the beach for a few hours. I really enjoyed this trip.

Unfortunately, everything was a bit hectic after this trip… I returned on Sunday evening, and had to leave again the following day. On Monday, I went to Edinburgh (meeting Steve Kemp, Henning Makholm and broonie in the evening) to attend an academic conference about data mining on Tuesday. On Tuesday, I had to fly to London to get my flight to Brazil… I managed, though, and met some Debian people at the Sao Paulo airport where we were waiting for our flight to Porto Alegre. DebConf4 and FISL were fun; I guess I don't have to say much since other people did, but I really had a good time there.

On my way back, I made a stop-over in Rio de Janeiro. I did some sightseeing on the first day and went to the beach on the second day… Copacabana is really great and definitely one of the best beaches I've ever been to. Unfortunately, while I went swimming (the water was surprisingly warm), my trousers with my wallet (bank card, money) and my glasses were stolen. Fortunately, I had a credit card at the hotel, but getting back to the UK without being able to see properly and with few people speaking my language was quite… challenging. However, I managed, and I have new glasses already thanks to Vision Express (suggested by mjg59) so I'm back to work. It's a shame that such a nice time ended with such a stupid incident, but I guess it's my own fault for being so careless even though lots of people told me that Rio is a dangerous place. Maybe I should really look into those eye surgeries seriously; in the 7 or so years I had glasses, I never fully got used to them (they are not a major problem, but I'd still like to get rid of them).

So I'm back in Cambridge now, catching up on e-mail and research, and actually staying here for two weeks before I'm off to conferences again (LinuxTag, USENIX and possibly Spain).

Cranes, Herbert Xu

I received the new Cranes album Particles & Waves per post today. It's really fantastic. I first saw the Cranes at a Cure concert in 1992 and I've been a fan since. It's the only band where I bought every CD plus some other stuff like singles. There are some audio samples available and the new CD can be bought at their shop. They're also touring Europe soon, and I intend to go to their concert in London.

Herbert Xu resigned from Debian today which is really sad. Most people are probably not even aware just what an amazing guy Herbert is. I've always been impressed by his energy and vigor to get every single bug on the kernel and his packages in general resolved. Herbert joined Debian long before I did, and when I thought of what defined Debian then he always came to my mind. It will surely take a while to get used to a Debian without him. :-( Fortunately, he'll keep hacking on free software.

DPL

Oops!… I Did It again.

Thanks!

Norway, MIPS, MIPS, MIPS, MIPS, d-i hacking

My raid on Norway last weekend was very successful. I left the country with a Netwinder and an SGI Indy. Seriously though, those machines are for testing debian-installer. When I came home on Sunday evening, I performed a test installation on the Netwinder, and Vince Sanders and I fixed some issues. As far as I know, I've done the first installation with debian-installer on a Netwinder. Norway itself was pretty nice. On Saturday night, we had an opening party for the office of the SLX Debian Labs. The food was excellent, and the office is quite nice as well.

Since then, I gave given the Netwinder to Vince because he can make better use of it. Instead, I borrowed a DECstation from mjg59 because the mipsel port needs more work (incidentally, the DECstation has memory in it which I gave to mjg59 a year or two ago). I also purchases a Cobalt RaQ2, and plan to add support for it to debian-installer. I've four MIPS machines in my room now, along with some other machines. I really need to move to a bigger room next year.

On Friday, some Debian people went out to food, and yesterday some of us went to Dan's place to hack on some stuff. I spent most of Sunday playing with my new Cobalt machine, and started porting debian-installer.

QA meet, Amaya, Skolelinux party

Last Saturday, Colin Watson, Daniel Silverstone, Vince Sanders and got together for a Debian hacking session. I used the time to work on some QA scripts. First, I adapted some scripts to use Andreas Barth's new LDAP interface for the Bug Tracking System. I also adapted another script and resurrected the weekly WNPP postings. Second, I improved some scripts and worked on some items I had on my TODO list for about two years. Later this week, I moved qa.debian.org from klecker to merkel. merkel has or will have a full BTS, FTP and ftp-master mirror, has more disk and memory than klecker, and is not restricted (which means people can access the MIA database again).

The weekend before, Amaya was in Cambridge, and I showed her around the city. In the evening, we went to a Debian meeting, and we introduced her to Mao (a card game). It was great fun. Photos are available in my photo gallery. I finally took the time to actually write some content for my homepage, and added a photo gallery.

This evening I'm flying to Oslo in order to attend the Skolelinux party which takes place tomorrow.

mips autobuilding and old packages

Yesterday night, I started autobuilding the archive on mips. I sorted the sources files by age and started with the packages uploaded longest ago. I mainly have two aims: First, like others, I want to autobuild the archive in order to see whether packages still build. Second, from a QA perspective, I'm mostly interested in packages which have not been updated for a while, and I thought autobuilding them would give me a good excuse to look at them in more detail. Over night, about 650 packages were built, and I reported about 10 build failures (mostly out-of-date config.guess files from 2001 which no longer work on mips).

The more interesting part, however, is the sheer number of crappy packages. I know there is a high number of badly maintained packages in Debian, but I was (again) surprised to see how many. There were easily 10-15 packages which said "initial upload", i.e. their last upload was their first upload. First uploaded in 2002, and no single upload since then. Incidentally, in most cases it seems upstream is inactive too (And no, this is not a good reason for not uploading new versions of the package since Debian Policy changes all the time). I really wonder if we had to have those packages in the archive in the first place, and I'll investigate to find out if some of them can be removed. (Fortunately, some have never been part of a stable release, and its still time to get them removed before sarge becomes the next stable release.)

Also, I (again) realized that it is very hard to automate certain QA functions because the right information is not easily available. However, I finally got annoyed enough about the current state to actually do something about it. I will therefore implement a system which will record important data in a way that allows us to automate more QA activities like finding out-of-date or badly maintained packages. More on this on -qa soon.

elmos, random stuff, and even more random DNA

Last Thursday, James Troup was in town, so he, Daniel Silverstone and I first had dinner in King's. Later, Colin Watson joined us and took us to the Carlton where various geeks meet every Thursday. We had a good time, and it was good to see James again. I hadn't seen him in months. Anyway, after leaving the pub and coming back to the city, we stood on the place in front where I live for a while and talked. It was Thursday evening and there were lot's of weird people on the street (I mean really weird people, not just a bunch of geeks talking random stuff).

Hmm, I had a deadline on Monday for a paper so I basically spent the weekend on that. Other than that, nothing really significant happened. I mostly got distracted by a rebellious cytosine nucleotide, but finally found some time to catch up on e-mail and stuff. Ah, I also finally managed to go to the University Library for the first time. Kinda late considering the term is just about to be over, although that really doesn't matter since I'm a PhD student.

King's chapel, pub

I've been in Cambridge for two months now, but actually never went to the King's chapel yet. Today, a friend of mine gave a concert there, so that was a good opportunity to go there. The chapel is absolutely gorgeous! It was a sunny day, so the windows looked really pretty. The concert was pretty good as well. In the evening, some random Debian people went to a pub, the County Arms.

DPL platform

My platform for the DPL campaign is available now.

Firenze, London, Cambridge… back home

Hmmm, it's good to be back home. Even though I enjoyed the travelling and conferencing, it was quite exhausting; yesterday, I attended the workshop in Florence and gave a talk about Debian. Since some people in the audience didn't speak English well, we decided to translate the talk. However, it was not done simultaneously, but sequentially: I said a paragraph, and then this paragraph was translated. I though this situation wasn't ideal because it broke the flow and must have been quite boring for those understanding both languages. However, the audience seemed to like the talk and various people asked me questions afterwards. In the evening, Andrea Glorioso (sama), some of his friends and me went out to have dinner.

In the morning (err, practically still during the night… I got up at 5.30), I went to the airport to get my flight to Gatwick. I met someone who is interested in starting a Debian based project, and while the meeting was interesting I'm not in a position to say much about it. Afterwards, I went to the company James Bromberger is working for because they are in the process of moving to Debian. They are interested in a 64 bit PowerPC of Debian, and we talked a while about this. I then went to the train station, noticed that King's Cross looks different, almost missed the train because the queue for tickets was quite long, but fortunately the train was late so I successfully boarded the train to Cambridge. And so I'm back. I caught up on e-mail, but there are a million of things to do, both for Debian and for university.

Meetings, uncle

Spent the whole day in meetings, nothing exciting. In other news, I became an uncle yesterday. I think it's not fair that others can make me feel old. ;)

Bologna, Firenze, fichissimo, MIU-FT

Enrico Zini showed me around Bologna yesterday, with Luca De Vitis joining us. Luca and I talked about various Debian issues for a while, continuing an e-mail exchange which has been going on between us since the last NM flamewar a while ago. Enrico told me all kind of things about Bologna and Italian's history; he really knows many things, and I think he'd be an excellent teacher. Bologna seemed pretty nice. We met some more Debian people at the university and then went to Florence (without Luca who was busy/tired).

After arriving in Florence, I checked into my hotel and then we went out to dinner. Christian Surchi had picked an excellent restaurant, and the food was really good. I ate too much, and I really don't want to know how many kilos I gained during the last days. The food wasn't what I'd see as "typical Italian", but I guess that's just because of my limited vision of Italian food as pizza, lasagna and spaghetti (especially pizza). It was typical food for Florence, and it was really yummy. We had some excellent conversations, and I really enjoyed myself. Knowing that this will start a flamewar, I have to officially say that the Italian people are more fun than the Spaniards! Just joking, I love all of you. But I hope this will cause some rivalry leading to the Spanish people inviting me again to convince me they are better, then the Italian people inviting me again, etc, etc. ;-) In any case, after learning important Spanish phrases (like "casate conmigo"), I now speak perfect Italian; well, maybe not, but at least they taught me the word fichissimo. After the dinner, we went around Florence for a while so Enrico would sober up again. It is a really beautiful city. So many old buildings… I have to do some sightseeing during the day as well.

Today, I met with the people of Media Innovation Unit of Firenze Tecnologia and we discussed some proposals involving Debian.

Bologna, Florence, summing up FOSDEM

Hmm, 3.5 hours sleep, I'm not impressed. So I'm in Italy now. I took a plane to Bologna and Enrico Zini kindly picked me up at the airport, gave me Internet connectivity and nice Italian food (aren't mums wonderful?). Now we're off to do some sightseeing, and later we'll go to Florence where about 10 Debian people are going out for dinner tonight.

Recap of FOSDEM: met the usual suspects (weasel still sucks, even if not as much as Jordi), got to know some new people, like Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Thomas Hood and Andreas Barth. On Saturday I spent most of the morning and afternoon chasing people to get their money for the buffet and to give them their tickets; next time, I really have to delegate this; it's amazing how much time it takes to get the stuff from 40 people. Due to this, I also missed all talks and couldn't speak to many people. In the evening, we went to the buffet which was really nice; we ate too much food, especially dessert. At some point, I felt really tired, thinking it must be 11pm or even 2am, and it turned out to be just 9pm… ouch. Some of us decided to go home (especially weasel and me, i.e. the Internet addicts), but then it took us 2 hours to actually do so… the joys of having a large group with conflicting interests sharing cars. We got home eventually (home = mind.be, the Debian hotel in Belgium), but shortly after powering up all of our laptops the power went out. The power would not have been a problem because we all have laptops, but it also meant that we did not have Internet. So we were actually forced to go to bed (at about 1.30, I think).

Scheduling talks at 10am is bad, mmkay? Agreeing to give a talk at 10.30 is even worse, though. In any case, we managed to turn up at about 10.35, I recycled my Debian ftp archive talk from LinuxTag from a few years ago; nothing exciting, but I hope it was useful to some people. I spent the rest of the day talking to various people, like Keith Packard. As I mentioned before, I enjoyed it a lot, even if it's quite exhausting. Most people left in the afternoon (no more weasel, yeah!), and the rest wanted to go to dinner… unfortunately, Karsten Merker twisted his ankle, so that took a while to sort out. We eventually managed to have dinner, though, and Karsten's foot seemed fairly okay. I stayed at mind.be again, and got up way too early… OK, let's see what kind of old buildings/churches Bologna has to offer. Apparently it has one of the oldest universities.

exhausted

FOSDEM is over and it was lots of fun, but also quite exhausting; being leader@debian doesn't help since there's constantly something to do or someone to talk to. I'm not complaining, though, since I like what I'm doing. I just wish I didn't have to get up in less than 4 hours to catch my flight to Italy. Anyway, more later.

Really tired, OSWC is over, FOSDEM

God^WEris, I'm really, really tired. All the conferencing is taking its toll. Yesterday night, we went to the official conference dinner, and it was just really excellent. They first served us drinks and various things on plates like salami, cheese and some sea food. And after an hour, when we were half full, we finally sat down to properly start the dinner. There were 4 glasses and 6 pieces of cutlery — I felt quite overwhelmed. ;) The food was absolutely great; the only strange thing was something which can probably best described as garlic milk; quite a strange taste. We arrived back in the hotel at 2am, and the panel discussion about the future of open source (the vision from the gurus) in which I participated started at 9am; ouch. The session was quite good, I think. Bdale Garbee (HP), Danese Cooper (Sun), Miguel de Icaza (Novell) and myself each talked for about 10 minutes and then we answered questions from the audience. The group was fairly full, and I estimate there were about 300 people. I really enjoyed the session as I kind of like public talking. Afterwards, some people asked me for a photo or autograph, and I was interviewed. Everything was a bit hectic since I had to leave for the airport at 1.35 and I still had to say goodbye to everyone. I really enjoyed my stay in Spain; it was good to meet all the people there! I hope I'll be back soon. Hasta luego!

Unfortunately, I had to leave Spain and the Open Source World Conference to fly to Brussels for FOSDEM. Some of the Skolelinux people were on the same flight, and we made our way from the airport to the city (no more being picked up from the airport and getting transported there again, like in Spain :/). I headed to the pub in which the FOSDEM people met, and eventually various people turned up. I got to see weasel (the puppet master), Ben Affleck^W^WMichi Banck and others. After leaving the pub, we went to Mind.be where we are staying (thanks to Peter and p2). It's a shame that this building is (apparently) going to be torn down — I wonder where we are going to sleep next year. In any case, I was able to catch up with email in the last few hours and now I really have to go to bed; I know I won't get enough sleep since Tim O'Reilly's talk starts at 10.30 and it's after 3am already; I just hope weasel is not going to snore too loudly (like he did at DebConf in Oslo).

Málaga, Leni, j, Jordi, Jaffa cakes for breakfast!

I'm in Málaga now at the Open Source World Conference. I was surprised about the number of people coming to the conference. The main room was full in the morning. I arrived yesterday evening, was picked up at the airport and brought to the hotel where I met the Debian crowd which was just about to into town. I put my stuff in my room and off we went to a restaurant where we had excellent sea food. I met Leni and various other Debian users and developers. I also discovered how "j" is really pronounced in Spanish — names like Javier and Jesús sound much different to how I'd say them (either in English or German).

In the morning, after getting up way too early for my taste, we had really nice breakfast. I had the usual stuff and then some cheese cake, and they actually had Jaffa Cakes, too. That certainly made my day! Jaffa Cakes at breakfast, now that's an incentive to get up really early tomorrow (hmm, thinking about it, maybe even that is not good enough an incentive). As I said, the conference is much larger than expected. I finally got wireless working on my laptop for the first time, which was really nice. And then came the shock of my life — I met Jordi Mallach, the most annoying person on the whole planet. He is worse than your worst nightmare, a real pajillero, believe me (or, rather, don't — for those not aware of our "personal war": I really like him, and we talk on IRC almost every day; and he's my "Orkut brother". Of course, I wouldn't admit to any of this, so you didn't read this).

We have a meeting about Debian based distributions and how to cooperate more closely in the future, and Petter Reinholdtsen of Skolelinux is currently talking. Oh, just finished. Hmm, it's a shame Amaya isn't here.

Hysterical raisins

I posted a message to debian-vote.