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Christian, that's too easy!

Give us a harder riddle? :-)

21:17 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

Keep libel laws out of science

The "Sense about Science" group have written about a ridiculous lawsuit currently happening in the UK. The British Chiropractic Association has sued Simon Singh for libel, based on an article he wrote in the Guardian newspaper in 2008. There is a campaign to express support for Simon and call for an urgent review of English law of libel, and I have signed the petition myself. The right place for scientific debate is out in the open, not shut down by cowards who refuse to show evidence for their claims and instead pay for lawsuits.

16:05 :: # :: /misc :: 0 comments

age++

On Thursday it was my birthday, and I fulfilled a promise I made to myself many years ago. I've always been a car nut, and when I was about 6 years old and had posters of Lamborghinis on my bedroom walls I promised myself that by the time I reached 35 I would have one. That would be long enough in the future that it might happen, but I'd still be young enough to still be able to appreciate it. Well, as it got to the beginning of this year I realised I was running out of time and my bank balance didn't quite look large enough to buy a Lamborghini. So, I cheated a little and I hired one for the day on Thursday.

More pictures here.

I had one car booked a few weeks ago, but unfortunately the company involved had to let me down as the car developed problems a couple of days before I was due to have it and needed to go away for repairs. I'm not going to complain too much about them, as it wasn't their fault and they did their level best to make things right: offering a different car, a refund or a later replacement hire. But dammit! I wanted the Lamborghini and I wanted it on my birthday! I quickly rang around on Wednesday to find somebody else, and thankfully the folks at Signature Car Hire were very helpful, sorting out a car with just a few hours' notice. Yay!

When they guys turned up on Thursday morning to deliver the car to my office, I couldn't stop myself grinning like the 6-year old boy whose promise I was keeping. Here was a gorgeous car, and it was mine for the day!!! I planned a route for the day to take in some nice driving roads and, importantly, some tunnels. I've watched Top Gear on the TV and I read Autocar every week, and they had both said that taking a fast sports car through a tunnel with the roof down was a good thing to do. I now know that's an understatement!

As a whole, the car was awesome: the acceleration, the handling, the brakes were all wonderful. But, as I found out on that day, the noise from the engine was just astonishing. I went through several tunnels that day, heading down past Baldock to Hatfield and back, and at full throttle I could not help but laugh out loud at the music coming from the 5-litre V10 orchestra just inches behind me. It's an experience I'm never going to forget. grin.

I also gave short rides to quite a few of the people at work; oddly I had lots of friends that day... :-)

I'd also planned other things for the day. I bought myself a new camera in advance to make sure I got some nice photos of the day. Then at the end of the day I went out to the pub with a huge group of friends and I was forced to drink lots of beer. It was horrible, horrible I tell you.

12:26 :: # :: /misc :: 2 comments

New additions on Planet Debian

I've just added feeds for the students working with Debian in the Summer of Code this year. Hopefully they'll soon be dazzling us all with their work... :-)

23:47 :: # :: /debian/SoC2009 :: 0 comments

NAS 1.9.2 in unstable

Just uploaded this at the weekend, and it was a really nice one to do too. Every single one of the Debian patches that I used to make to the source for NAS has now been accepted upstream, so our diff is now just the Debian packaging metadata. W00t!

23:45 :: # :: /debian/packages :: 1 comment

New key

I've followed the advice of Daniel and generated myself a new PGP key. I've moved from an old 1024-bit DSA key (88C7C1F7) to a new 4096-bit RSA key. I've signed the new key with the old one so there is a trust path already, and I've uploaded it to the keyservers today. I'm expecting some DD signatures on it shortly after a trip to the pub tonight. Once the new key is accepted I'll start phasing out the old one, of course. New key details:

pub   4096R/3442684E 2009-05-09
      Key fingerprint = CEBB 5230 1D61 7E91 0390  FE16 5879 7957 3442 684E
uid                  Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>
uid                  Steve McIntyre <stevem@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
uid                  Steve McIntyre <93sam@debian.org>
sub   4096R/E2C26E29 2009-05-09

00:55 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

Whoops, I did it again

So, it looks like Debian developers want me to be the DPL again for another year. The fools! cackle. :-)

Thanks to people for voting for me and Luk this year, and also thanks to Zack and the secretaries for their efforts in the election this year too.

I'll post something more formal shortly, but right now I'm still working on the latest set of point release CDs/DVDs and tidying up my place after a big party last night. TTFN!

00:52 :: # :: /debian/dpl :: 3 comments

Post-release

It took us a couple of weeks to organise, but we had a small Lenny release party in Cambridge last weekend. We had the usual crowd of Cambridge folks, plus Noodles and codehelp. Jason Clifford from UKFSN even threw some cash our way to help cover the costs - Thanks Jason! :-) We started at the Regal pub in town, then headed back to my place and drank until late.

Quite a number of the revellers also bought some of our shiny new Lenny release T-shirts! If you'd like one, look at the details here and mail me!

Update: Fixed the URL to the T-shirt photo. Doh!

10:41 :: # :: /debian/releases :: 0 comments

You are not alone

Shockingly, I seem to have found a woman crazy enough to like me! This delusion looks like it might be long-term; let's see how it goes... :-)

03:29 :: # :: /misc :: 1 comment

I did a bad bad thing

OK, so after a lot of dithering I finally decided that I wanted to stand again for re-election in the DPL election this year. That's despite the fact that it's not good for my health and I don't have enough time to start with... Why am I doing it?

• I believe I've done a good job in the last year, and lots of other people seem to agree. However, I did not find the time for all the work I hoped to do and I think it's worth carrying on.
• I've been pestered to stand again by a lot of my friends in the project.
• I wasn't going to let Zack stand unopposed! *grin*

To make the job easier this year if elected, I'm standing with Luk Claes as an assistant. He and I are good friends, and we share ideas and values on a lot of points. My experience from the last year as DPL tells me that the job is a big one, and sharing the load with a willing victim^Wvolunteer should help with that.

03:24 :: # :: /debian/dpl :: 0 comments

Release++

Thanks to everyone involved. Just finished my pieces of the release process, generating 502 CD/DVD/BD images. And technically it's still February 14th, somewhere... :-)

I should go and get some (more!) sleep, but I want to see us completely finished before I do.

Update: (15th Feb) People have been asking about the BD images. We decided a while back that we wouldn't ship full-size BD ISO images, simply due to the sizes of those images. For the same reason, we didn't generate them for all architectures, just concentrating on i386, amd64 and source. If you're looking for the BD images, you can download/make them via jigdo.

Update #2: (16th Feb) Yes, it's possible that we could make a multi-arch BD image containing all of i386, amd64 and source, similar to the multi-arch DVD. Last time I built that, it would just about fit on a dual-layer disc. That would be a really expensive disc to burn, but let me know by email and I can make the image for you if you really want it.

22:25 :: # :: /debian/releases :: 3 comments

3rd Free Software Congress in Valencia

I spent much of this week in Alicante. It was wonderful to have a few days away from the beginnings of Winter in Cambridge - Alicante's in South West Spain, right on the Mediterranean. It's a lovely city, although it was very quiet due to the time of year.

I was invited down to Alicante by organisers of the Congrés de Programari Lliure, Comunitat Valenciana, to present a talk about Debian. That I did, and as always my slides and photos are available in case people are interested. I wasn't too sure about what level to aim the talk, so I deliberately went for a general introduction to Debian. That seems to have been the correct level - nobody threw anything at me, and nobody was visibly falling asleep. *grin* It's also the first time I've ever given a talk with official translators, which is a weird experience! The main topic for the conference was the new release of Lliurex, Valencia's own GNU/Linux distribution targeted primarily at use in schools.

The conference was massive; I was told there were about 1500 attendees in all, most of whom were teachers who wanted to come and learn more about Free Software. There was a good spread of talks and workshops, covering topics from development through to deployment in the classroom. The level of enthusiasm for Free Software here was immense - lots of people were keen to learn more about it and get involved. I was told that out of the 15 regions/states of Spain, 11 of them have now started their own distributions to use in schools! Extremadura were the first region to experiment with Free Software like this, and their success with LinEx was a clear inspiration to their neighbours elsewhere in Spain. As well as the obvious cost advantages of moving from proprietary to Free Software, the local governments also love the freedom to use and modify their software however they like - including the ability to provide their own translations.

I met up with a lot of cool people at the conference too. The local education minister (Alejandro Font de Mora) was keen to talk with all the speakers and very enthusiastic about the future of Free Software in his schools. As is increasingly common at FS events around the world, there were of course quite a few Debian people around too. Luciano and Miriam were also giving talks, and I bumped into Rene and Miguel and a whole bunch of others whose names I'm too crap to remember - sorry! I also spoke a lot with Kurt Gramlich, the mega-enthusiastic Skolelinux developer who was also happy to push Debian to everybody he spoke to *grin*. Jon "Maddog" Hall had some excellent ideas that I'm sure we'll all hear more about soon, and his talk was excellent. He did a very good job of explaining how Free Software makes such a difference, including how it helps people to make money. He also explained that due to travel he had missed Halloween at home and he wanted to share the experience of scary masks with the people at the conference:

I had a great time in Alicante, and I'm very grateful for the invitation to go there. I wish that the UK was as far as advanced as Spain in the use of Free Software in education - they've done a huge amount of good work in this area and I'm glad we can help them.

02:12 :: # :: /debian/talks :: 0 comments

Still ill... :-(

I posted a couple of weeks back to say that I'd got the Debconf plague again this year. Unfortunately, it looks like I picked up something worse than just the normal cold/'flu. I've been on penicillin for a week to try and clear up a throat infection, but it's not gone yet. Time for blood tests to see if I've got anything worse. I've been too ill to go to work several times in the last couple of weeks, feeling totally exhausted and feverish. Here's hoping that things start clearing up soon...

Again, if I've not responded to you about Debian stuff lately then please pester/remind me as necessary and I'll try to get back to you.

00:55 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 2 comments

Been a bit quiet lately

Sorry, ever since Debconf I've been busy, ill and otherwise distracted. I'm still catching up... Stuff that's happened:

Dude, you're married! For the second year running, I had to leave Debconf a day early to attend a wedding party. My good friend Matthew married Oxana last Monday. I've just put my photos of the happy event online today.

After a successful Debconf where I managed to evade the normal plague, it hit hard on the Tuesday morning and I've been struggling with it ever since. Just about over it now, but I've been feeling crap for over a week.

On the way to Buenos Aires to catch my flight back to England, I received a text message telling me the sad news that my uncle, John Bolton had passed away. This means that the eldest two of my mum's three brothers have died this year, in the space of just a few months, and it's been a very hard time for the family. The funeral happened earlier this week, so I was away and mostly off-line for a couple of days travelling there and back.

I'm trying to get back up to speed on a whole host of different things at the moment; if you're waiting on a response from me about Debian-related stuff, please feel free to prod me via email or IRC.

23:50 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

Past halfway through Debconf already... :-(

I've had an outstandingly good time, as expected. Much kudos to the local team here in Argentina for organising the conference so well, and it's great to see that the efforts of the video team are making it possible for lots of people to attend the talks virtually as well. Good work, folks!

My highlights so far:

• Getting all the right people together in one room for a really productive session discussing "tdebs", a new way of organising the translations in our packages. In less than an hour, we went from a mix of opinions and suggestions (all with problems) to a good consensus about what we're going to do and what work needs to be done. In Debian we work very effectively online normally, but this kind of design discussion could easily have taken a month or more via email. Sometimes face-to-face meetings just work better! (See the wiki for the session notes.)
• The 15th Birthday Party last night. I got to formally accept our "epic fail" award from Luciano Bello after his recent trip to Las Vegas to tell the Defcon and Blackhat folks about our recent OpenSSL problems. Then I was coerced into dancing for the delight of the crowd. Apparently some git even caught that on video. Oh, the shame...
• Beeeeeeeeef! I joined a group of people at the "Palacio del Bife" restaurant in the centre of town on Monday night, and we ate a lot of beef. I had a massive T-bone steak which was awesome - large and very very nicely cooked. I'll have to go again. *grin*

Unfortunately, the end of the week is quickly approaching. I'll have to head back to England all too soon.

15:52 :: # :: /debian/dc8 :: 0 comments

At Debconf 8!

It took us a very long time to get here, but we're here. Yay! Mar Del Plata is beautiful, and the hotel is right next to the beach. When I've woken up properly I'll try and get some slides made up for my talk tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!

20:50 :: # :: /debian/dc8 :: 2 comments

The Model M is not dead!

It seems that the good folks at Unicomp are still making proper buckling-spring keyboards, now even with a USB connector. Phew! I was worried that I'd be forced to move away from my nice clicky Model M at some point soon, as PCs are slowly losing PS/2 ports.

20:02 :: # :: /misc :: 2 comments

Final Sarge CDs done and released

Forgot to mention, but some people seem to have spotted anyway. The last (ever!) official set of Sarge CDs and DVDs is available. I'd strongly advise against most people using them, as Etch is a much better bet and Lenny isn't too far away. But for those people that might want them, you can find them in the "archive" area: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/3.1_r8/

19:48 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 0 comments

Yay!

It seems I've been elected to be DPL for the next year, starting this coming Thursday (18th April) according to Manoj. Thanks to the people that voted for me, and also to the other two candidates - better luck next time to Marc and Raphael. And (of course) thanks to Sam as well for his excellent efforts over the last year.

I hope to do a good job for you all this year, and I have a few plans on what I'm going to do. More concrete details once I'm actually officially in charge... :-)

20:51 :: # :: /debian/dpl :: 6 comments

Going to Debconf 8!

Looking forwards to seeing folks there, or on the flight over from Madrid... Now all I need to do is finish finding sponsors to pay for the conference itself!

22:16 :: # :: /debian/dc8 :: 0 comments