Mon, 05 Dec 2011
Bug Squashing Party in Hildesheim is over
Alexander has already announced the final results of this weekend's BSP, but I'd like to add my personal thanks. So, kudos to all attendees, for helping to make the BSP such a success and also to my employer for the generous budget and my colleagues, especially Wolfram to whose initiative we owe this BSP, for helping out before, during and after the party.
All in all it's been an event well worth repeating!
Posted at: 11:40 in /english/debian
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Fri, 18 Nov 2011
Reminder: BSP in Hildesheim, Germany, 2-4 Dec 2011
We still have some free spaces in the Hildesheim BSP, which is scheduled in two weeks. (Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th of December). If you need any additional information or want to come by please check the wiki page.
Posted at: 11:38 in /english/debian
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Mon, 24 Oct 2011
BSP in Hildesheim, Germany, 2-4 Dec 2011
My generous employer has kindly offered to host the first Bug Squashing Party of the now commencing Wheezy Release BSP Marathon. Yay!
We'll meet during the first weekend in December (Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th) in Hildesheim, Germany. There's a wiki page listing all important information. Please also use this page to sign up if you want to join us.
Posted at: 14:44 in /english/debian
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Fri, 29 Jul 2011
Slides of my talks
I attached the slides of my talks to penta but they don't seem to show up so here are a couple links:
Posted at: 11:18 in /english/debian/events
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Thu, 05 May 2011
Finally finished my registration for DC11
Let's see ...
- Got the application for leave filed and accepted at work
- Registered my talks
- Booked the trip
- Got a working plan for (my day at) DebCamp
- Wrote my abstracts
... I guess I am going to DebConf :D
Posted at: 10:59 in /english/debian/events
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Thu, 28 Apr 2011
What it's like to do Debian Press Work
A few days ago I did an interview for the People Behind Debian series that, among other things, covered my Debian press work and asked what it's like to do that kind of work for Debian. Here's a little addendum:
Sometimes Debian Press Work is great: All these people do all this amazing stuff and it's a pure pleasure to talk about it. Our last release was such an experience for example. I was clamped to my laptop for almost 20 hours straight and I had a great time! There was this great common feeling of community, achievement and pride in our work and I was proud and happy to be a part of it.
And then there are times like the last few days, where Alex and I went
South for 4.5 precious and long-awaited days of vacation and ended up
spending the first two of them working on an obituary for a dear and
much valued member of our community and once this was done spent the
remaining days of our holidays nervously watching the net and drafting and
re-drafting press announcements because some <bleep> thought
it might be oh-so-hilarous to send out faked cease and desist
orders to a Debian user, ostensibly as a funny
prank but along the
way causing a huge amount of completely unsubstantiated FUD that we'll
probably spend weeks clearing up.
Somewhere in between these events is what Debian press work is like.
Posted at: 17:54 in /english/debian
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Sun, 06 Feb 2011
Squeeze Release Live Dent Finished
That's it! Squeeze is released and the website's new design is in place. What a great day! In addition to the usual announcements on the website and mailing lists we decided to also do a live coverage of the whole process using identi.ca this time!
Alex and me have been doing a live coverage of Debian's release process for almost 19 hours straight and, although we're dead beat now, I think it was well worth it! People seemed to enjoy being included in the process and many expressed their admiration for Debian's well-coordinated and purposeful proceedings.
Congratulations to all involved: the FTP team, the release team, the CD team, the www team and the publicity team! Great work everyone!
Posted at: 03:05 in /english/debian
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Sat, 05 Feb 2011
Squeeze Release Live Dent
The Debian Press Team will provide a live coverage of today's squeeze release (Yaaay!) via identi.ca. Follow us at http://identi.ca/debian.
Posted at: 09:21 in /english/debian
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Sat, 21 Mar 2009
Chemnitz Linux Days 2009
This is my fourth CLT report and they surely are becoming repetitive! But every good event deserves a good report, so here goes:
Contrary to previous years we already arrived on Friday this year. Since we were also not up for another stint with the gym (Aaah the sissifying effects of marriage!) we booked a room with a nice little guesthouse about 15 bus-minutes from the venue.
The conference was great as ever:
- Speakers, booth personel and visitors were taken very good care of, there was nothing left to be desired
- Organisation was exicellent, no (noticable) technical difficulties, no scheduling problems, a helpful staff member literally every 5 meters
- A broad variety of very well-chosen talks from total beginner's to very sophisticated topics
- Several accompanying social events including the 2nd Night of Free Films
- A broad variety of exhibitors from small to large projects, both commercial and non commercial. CLT manages very well to be a community event that feels fun and almost like a family meeting but at the same time instills a sense of seriousness and respectability
I usually visit the CLT mostly for networking but I also managed to see a few talks. I moderated the session on High Performance and got to see three very nice talks on GPU programing, cluster computing and parallel programming.
This year also featured the first talk
on (the lack of) women in Free Software. Unusually enough this one was
even given by a man. I was quite curious about that talk, which was (how
fitting!) scheduled in direct succession to my own. I am kind of torn on
that topic myself. On one hand women in Free Software is a topic that is
very important to me and deserves any attention it can get. On the other
hand instead of talking about how evenly capable women are in Free Software
I'd rather just demonstrate it, for instance by giving a good Free Software
related talk. And instead of talking about how there should be more women
in Free Software I'd rather just be one and try to encourage others with my
example. The usual quota of female speakers at linux events is somewhere
between 2-4% and I just don't like the idea of having a conference with
n men talking about Free Software and 1 woman talking about
women. I've had these settings before and it just doesn't sit well with me.
Because of this I was quite please to find the topic being tackled by a man
this time.
The talk itself, in my impression, left a few open issues though. It was
rather brief and focussed mainly on stating the usual numbers, asserting
that the Women in FLOSS movement wasn't about affirmative action or
discriminating men and explaining how women feel discriminated by sexist
behaviour and advertising and how objection to such things should not be
mistaken as prudery. It's general advice on how to improve the quota of
women in FLOSS mostly boiled down to the linuxchix slogan "Be Polite. Be
Helpful.". What I missed most was practical advice to projects wishing
to attract more female contributors, such as mentoring programs or
low-threshold entry points. Also I felt that the talk lacked a real
motivation beyond "gender balance is a Good Thing". However, I was glad the
topic finally found its way into the CLT as well and I had a couple of very
interesting discussions afterwards.
Concerning my own talk I was rather satisfied as well. Attendance was - as usually in Chemnitz - very good, according to the organisers I got around 200 people. Since I designed the talk as a collaborative project and its feedback was predominantly good I'll continue developing it with the feedback I got and submit it again to other events. I think the topic is very worthwile and there's still a lot in it. Some people asked for a more collaborative way of contributing their thoughts and ideas so I'll just create a wiki to collect the new ideas. I'll of course announce it here as soon as it's in place. The slides and audio recording (both German) are as usually available from the talks page at CLT or my own talks section.
Posted at: 23:14 in /english/debian/events
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Wed, 18 Mar 2009
Release consequences, as seen at CLT'09
Hey Martin, I think you better get that new edition finished real quick!
Translation:
- Book: The Debian System, incl. official Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 sarge on DVD
- Sign: Help yourself! A gift from: Open Source Press
Picture taken at Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2009.
Posted at: 16:34 in /english/debian
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Mon, 18 Aug 2008
Happy belated birthday Debian!
On August 16th 2008 the Debian Project, joy and burden of my geek life, has turned 15 years of age. Congratulations! There have been celebrations all around the world, and we've also had a little party at our home, complete with nice unhealthy food, red wine and chocolate and strawberries for dessert.
For a GNU/Linux distribution 15 years is quite a lot. We're almost the only distribution of such old age (Hi Slackware!) and there've been many, many others that didn't make it half as long. That said I am quite proud of this little project of ours and hope for many happy returns!
Artwork by Andre L.R.Ferreira, source: debianart.org (whose lack of thumbnails is still immensely annoying)
Posted at: 16:05 in /english/debian
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Mon, 23 Jun 2008
Open Source Census Part 2
Finally, here's the looong overdue second post on the Open Source Census. Very shortly after my initial post on my experiences with the Open Source Census I got an e-mail from one of their engineers adressing the points I had made in my post. So here are a few additions to my first post:
- You don't have to use the giant JRE including implementation, there's also a much leaner Ruby implementation of the scanning tool. Tolimar tested it and found it to be functional but also pretty time consuming.
- Load-wise the scanner comes with a --throttle option that makes it pause every n scanned files, so that your system isn't knocked out completely.
- Different from what I said there is a --help parameter, but the JRE has to come up first, so it takes some time until it outputs anything.
Tolimar was also contacted by the developer, he explained to him how to exclude individual directories using the Ruby version (not sure if it's also possible in the Java version) and how reports can be submitted anonymously. So, the privacy protection issues can also be taken care of.
I was very impressed by the quick and thorough reaction to both Tolimar's and my own post and hope this post will be of some help to the project and get them some more submissions.
One last note: Meike is indeed a female name. So no, he won't post a response, but she will ;)
Posted at: 01:26 in /english/debian
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Thu, 24 Apr 2008
Open Source Census - kinda fishy
I recently read about the Open Source Census and thought it would be a nice thing to also put my vote in and make sure my operating system of choice was properly represented (currently it doesn't seem to be). After creating an account there, downloading a 45M tgz including among other things a complete java runtime environment, starting the scan tool that takes neither a -h nor a --help parameter and watching it hog 70% CPU for over 20 minutes I lost patience and killed the script.
Somehow this whole thing is not exactly inspiring confidence and I start getting an idea why there are currently (Thu Apr 24 12:47:57 CEST 2008) only 53 Debian users who submitted their data. Although it's a pity Debian is (and will probably continue to be) so underrepresented there, I can't say I blame anyone for not taking part.
Posted at: 18:00 in /english/debian
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Fri, 18 Apr 2008
Thank you!
Yay! A big fat thank you to:
PS: Independently from recent events my account and also the other 18 where not created by Jörg, but on James' initiative. Just to put things straight.
Posted at: 15:32 in /english/debian
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Sun, 13 Apr 2008
What a sh***y week!
- Last weekend didn't exist due to deadline on Tuesday.
- Yet another night shift on Monday due to deadline on Tuesday.
- After meeting the deadline on Tuesday came home to find the house in scaffholding and a note from the owner: "We're going to do the whole facade, new insulation, colour etc. The construction works are estimated to take about eight weeks. We kindly take the liberty to point out that §554 BGB forces you to tolerate this. This modernisation is accompanied by a raise in rent of 22 Euros per Month
- Thursday: Dentist appointment. Got my first filling ever. Personal Waterloo and also not an experience I whish to repeat. Still hurts a bit.
- Saturday: It becomes clear that the DPL elections are going to happen without me, although I had hoped otherwise. Well, at least this is a problem shared.
- Sunday: My favourite candidate didn't win. Meh.
And now, off to clean the flat and hope for better luck next week.
*sigh*
Posted at: 13:09 in /english/debian
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Mon, 31 Mar 2008
Yay, I'm through
Since yesterday I am through with my NM procedure. Looking back I get to the same conclusion as probably most NMs have: not overly hard, but time-consuming and glad to have it over with. Anyway, so far so good, just waiting for DAM approval and my account now. There are still a couple of people in front of me but I hope for another processing before the elections close. (I guess it would at least be good for the turnout.)
For now, many thanks to my Application Manager Andreas Barth who has been very responsive and always answered my mails quickly and thoroughly, and also to Martin Zobel-Helas for advocating me.
Posted at: 08:19 in /english/debian
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Sun, 02 Mar 2008
Chemnitz Linux Days 2008
Seems as if the Chemnitz Linux Days somehow turned out to be the only Linux event I still attend regularly. These days I miss out on most of them, simply because of a total lack of spare time, however, I somehow always make the CLT ... no matter how big the hassle may be! They're just worth it :)
My talk went well, even though I actually got a bit pressed on time this year and had to cut the Q&A part. The (German) slides for my talk are as usually on my talks page.
Posted at: 11:14 in /english/debian/events
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Sat, 26 Jan 2008
Look Ma I'm on Podcast!
I recently had my first podcast experience, when I was approached by Mario Heide of the German podcast pofacs.de ("Podcast für alternative Computer Systeme") who asked me for an interview. To be true, I first had to read up a bit on podcasts, but after a little research I was very happy to accept his invitation. We did the interview via Sykpe, which wasn't exactly optimal sound-wise but still very nice. We talked mostly about Debian, primarily from a first time user point of view.
The (German) interview is online now and will, as I just heard, also be included on the next LinuxUser magazine CD. If you do understand German also have a look at the other podcasts there and thanks again to Mario for giving me the opportunity to brag a bit about Debian.
Posted at: 01:00 in /english/debian
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Thu, 02 Aug 2007
Some more positive things and Dear launchpad.net Part 2
More happy people: following up on my last post on nice free software experiences Chris Ball has responded by posting one of his. Are there any more?
Also talking about free software nuisances I remembered my recent grudge with launchpad.net. At that time I was contacted by someone from Canonical shortly after that first post. He said he'd pass my comment on, but in the next days nothing happened so I turned to other things and only occasionally checked back on the site. A few days ago I've again checked back and guess what, the objectionable title has been replaced, both for people using launchpad and for those who don't. The page's title for peple who do not actually use launchpad now reads "X does not use launchpad" and "X in launchpad" for those who do. Much better! Well done launchpad.net!
Posted at: 10:52 in /english/debian
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Sun, 29 Jul 2007
A little comfort
Being in any reasonably large free software project one tends to be confronted with endless little annoyances, frustrations and letdowns. Often it happens that these little things keep growing in our perception the longer they last and the more they trouble us.
In these times it is good to be reminded that the actual thing we invest so much time and energy in is not those little issues that often annoy us so much, but the overlying ideal of free software which is still a great thing, even in view of all the little frustrations that we have to deal with when working on it.
Yesterday I had one of these little experiences that just remind you, just how good a thing free software is:
- At Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:38:49 I filed a whishlist bug against a software I recently started using.
- At Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:04:35 the bug had been passed on to the software's upstream and I got an email from the upstream author telling me that the feature I wanted was already in the current development version of the software, where I could download the tar.bz2 and how to contact him on jabber.
- At about half to ten I downloaded the code, rolled it into a package and tried it, but couldn't get the new feature to work, so I wrote another email.
- An half hour later I got an answer telling me what I'd done wrong. I fixed my mistake, tested the new feature and found that it did right what I wanted. However, there was one more option I thought would be useful so I contacted the author via jabber.
- In the following 2.5 hours he implemented the additional option that I had asked for, renamed a button I found a bit unintuitive and fixed two bugs I discovered in the process of testing the new feature, sending me new code versions to test after every change.
- I am now using the software with the new feature I asked for and with all the options I wanted from a homemade package but expect the proper Debian package to show up in the archive any day.
- The whole process took three days.
... and this is exactly why free software (and the people in it) is so great. Because if there is something you'd think would be useful, all you have to do is ask and maybe lend a little help in testing and you got it. And this is why it's worth to put up with all the little annoyances, frustrations and letdowns that working with humans brings with it. Even if they sometimes seem to be overwhelming.
PS: I know that there are also enough examples where things didn't go as smooth as this one. But this just makes it more worth and important to highlight and appreciate these examples where everything just worked out perfectly and not just take them as granted.
So, inbetween posting rants and fuming at all the things that tick you off, how about if you think of a nice FLOSS experience you had and share it with the rest of the world?
Posted at: 14:34 in /english/debian
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