La Salle Debain

Unfortunately I was not able to attend debconf this year but thanks to the awesome video team the all the talks are available for your viewing pleasure.

In order to recreate an authentic Portland experience, I took my laptop into the shower along with a vegan donut and had my children stand outside yelling excerpts from salon.com in whiny Canadianesque accents. Here are some notes I took as I watched the talks.

Welcome Talk

• Why is everyone on stage wearing shorts? Is this a thing now?
• Langasek is pronounced with a 'sh' I did not know that.
• Kees is pronounced 'case' I also did not know that.
• Steve missed a good opportunity for a "Who moved my cheese?" joke. (Hey its not any more obscure than the "white Chevy Nova" joke.)
• A well-deserved award to Russ Allbery from some of the UK people for being the voice of reason on the mailing lists. See Vincent Sanders blog for details.
  

Debian in the Dark Ages of Free software - Stefan Zacchiroli

• More shorts. I am starting to feel overdressed.
• Stefan reminisces about how he got involved in Free Software and his philosophy of the same. A good introduction for anyone wondering what
  makes a Debian hacker tick.
• We should be concerned about software freedom in the new "cloud" environments. Debian can play an important role in this by making it really simple for
  users to set up their own cloud environments. My take: the focus should
  be on free standards and protocols. The power that Google, Facebook etc.
  have is drastically reduced if it is easy to jump ship.

Weapons of the Geek - Gabriella Coleman

• pro: no shorts con: womens slacks
• Intriguing anthropological investigation into Anonymous and how it/they relate to Free Software.
• Coc acknowledged then ignored. Why do we need it again?
• "Anonymous has cabals ... [that] make the cabals within Debian look like childs play."

bugs.debian.org -- Database Ho! - Don Armstrong

• I would settle for a lungi at this point but noooo shorts again. (plaid to boot.)
• The return of my yearly guilt about undertaking to Don to add RSS support to debbugs way back at debconf 10 and not following up on it. Damn it, I am going to get this done now.
• Sadly, the initial part of the stream is missing and it begans right in the middle of Don saying something interesting.


• "I have to admit my primary motivation for giving a talk was to try to force myself into actually doing the work I'm talking about."
• Stats porn. The BTS is growing at a phenomenal rate. bugs opened 142/day. But only 95/day closed.

Grub Ancient and Modern - Colin and Watson

• pro: no shorts con: kilt
• I was interested in this talk because one of these days I want to get GRUB 2 running on Debian Minix but a lot went over my head so I'll have to do some
  more research first.

One year of fedmsg in Debian - Nicolas Dandrimont

• trouser status: undetermined
• Problem: There are many different services providing information in Debian but they do not interop very well.
• fedmsg is a unified message bus originally developed by Fedora who were facing a similar problem.


• It has now been implemented in Debian.

Coming of Age: My Life with Debian - Christine Spang

• trouser sta- oh the hell with this.
• Another talk which is more biographical than technical. Again, useful to help understand the motivations of hackers.
• What interests me is that for younger generations it was open source which was a novel idea whereas for those of who grew up in the 8-bit era, having
  to hack on a computer was expected (whether you wanted to or not and it was
  proprietary software you couldn't share which was considered new and strange.

Status report of the Debian Printing Team - Didier Raboud

• Ou est les pantalons? Je ne sais pas. (Apologies to Mme Terzini.)
• Kudos to Didier for taking up this augean task mostly on his own. Despite the long-promised "paperless" office I need to be able to print and I was
  pleasantly surprised that my new xerox all-in-one worked under Debian with
  very little hassle.
• Brother sucks. Don't buy their printers. Ditto for Epson and Samsung.
• Buy HP instead.

Debian recently instituted a code of conduct which makes the astute observation that "a community in which people feel threatened is not a healthy community". So imagine my shock when I read Russell Cokers blog via Debian Planet, where commenting on a link from the intellectual powerhouse known as salon.com he said "The next logical step is to treat conservatism as a mental health problem."

Being a conservative myself I immediately lost all my self-esteem and Dovecots SSL cert handling stopped working. What if I attend debconf and Coker uses his white privilege to sic Mental Health Services on me? I'm scared, so very scared and I don't know if I can continue not working on Debian Minix any longer.

I demand that the Debian project, nay the world, should be OUTRAGED—I'm talking spelling naughty words in hexadecimal levels of outrage— and force this maniac to shut up before any more innocent flowers are brutalized by his "opinions."

Each year the 7DRL competion gives me an opportunity to abandon developing a roguelike game part way through. This year I am going to strive mightily to actually complete a playable game though owing to family commitments I have already gotten off to a rocky start which does not bode well.

But enough negativity...

So this year 7DRL coincides with the first ever Procedural Death Jam. This is a similar type of thing except the genre is Procedural Death Labyrinth. Procedural Death Labyrinths are a subset of Roguelikes (or is it the other way round?) If you have taken advantage of the wonderful offer Valve has given to Debian developers, you can find a number of examples of Procedural Death Labyrinths on Steam.

The most important part of any software development project is of course choosing a cool name. My game is called "The Girl Who Played With The Dragons Nest" (Can you guess what I've been reading?) It is written in C++ with the Curses toolkit. It will of course be open source.

I intend to blog my progress here if you care to follow along.

Wishing everyone a happy Gujarati New Year (Vikram Samvat 2070 called Vishvavasu.)

You'll get your Diwali present tomorrow :-)

Sometimes it's easy to forget that Debian's unstable branch is...unstable. Unfortunately today I have to remind you of that unpleasant fact. Dovecot 2.1.7-6 which I just uploaded has removed some features present in -5.

• TCP Wrappers support.
• Hurd compatability support.
• Triggers

The reason for this is that I am trying to get dovecot in shape for Wheezy. Unfortunately, as I have been severely pressed for time these past few months, the process did not take place in quite as orderly a fashion as I had hoped. My -5 packages were deemed by the release managers to have too drastic changes for this stage of the pre-Wheezy freeze and this is an attempt to make things more acceptable to them. Hopefully this version will pass into testing without incident and as soon as it does, I will prepare -7 which will put these features back. So if you need any of them, you are advised to skip -6 and stay at -5 until that happens.

If you are following testing there is another possible problem you might encounter. When -1 of this version was uploaded, certain extra conf files were accidently omitted from the package. This is also true of -2 which is currently in testing. It was fixed in -3 but that version (or -4 or -5) never made it into testing so -6 is potentially the first time you might be dealing with the conf file fix. If you have manually made changes to files in /etc/dovecot/conf.d make sure you have backups because they may get overriden (as dpkg will be unaware at that point that they are conffiles.) This is a one time only packaging error and will not be a problem going forward but I apologize in advance for any inconvenience caused.

And this is a good time to ask anyone interested in Dovecot on Debian (and Ubuntu etc.) to volunteer to help maintain it. It is getting more and more popular at a time when I can give it less and less attention. It is vital that an important package like this needs is team-maintained and it kind of is but so far other people who have expressed an interest in joining the team have been similarly strapped for time so we still need more recruits. All the code is publically accessible at git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/dovecot.git and I would be happy to sponsor any non-DD/DMs who need it.

Wishing everyone reading this a happy Gujarati New Year (Vikram Samvat 2069, called Krodhin,)

Diwali was a bit of a squib this year thanks to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy but we survived relatively unscathed so I pray that in the upcoming year Lakshmi Ma will give a portion of my good fortune to those who are still suffering.

Normally around this time of year I would post a picture of one of my children in their Halloween costumes but alas this All-Hallows Eve, Hurricane Sandy has put an end to such frivolity. For, from out of this hell-born wind comes the tale of a creature so horrifying that even puissant warlocks of dark power cower in their Batman pajamas at the sound of his doom-laden moans rending the night as he wanders pitiously through the blackened streets searching for his forbidden love. I speak of the one known only as...

THE MAN WHO WENT FOUR DAYS WITHOUT INTERNET

With all the recent talk about running on Planet Debian I am proud to announce that I did a 10K run today. It took me just about an hour—a pace which for Bubulle, Noel etc. is approximately equivalent to standing still—but I managed to finish without collapsing in a puddle of sweat and shame, so I consider it an achievement.

The writings been on the wall for a while but now it's official. I will not be able to attend DebConf this year. Or YAPC::NA either. I am still holding out hope of being able to go to Disneyland however.