FOSDEM schedule

There had to be a few minor updates to the schedule after the mail I sent last week, so that's now been done. We're "only" three days after the deadline...

I hate it when people miss my request to tell them when they can and cannot talk. Next year, I think I'll shout three times or so.

Anyway, if you want to see the final schedule, please read my most recent mail to -events-eu. Yes, I still need to followup on my last week's mail, too, but hey—I'm busy for now. Soon, I promise.

Movie: The prince and me, plus sequel

First of all: no, I'm not a huge fan of the genre. In fact, when I don't feel too good, I tend to avoid them, since they can depress me at times. But once in a while, a romantic comedy doesn't hurt, and I do kindof like them at times. Early last week, I picked up a DVD of the first movie at a low-price DVD shop nearby, and watched it.

The prince and me isn't my favourite movie in the genre; the plot surely is interesting, but I can't shake the feeling that things work out too easily in the end. Compare with Notting Hill, for example, where the two protagonists need to go through (I believe) three cycles of relationship/no relationship before the end of the movie; this, in my opinion, makes for far more interesting cinema.

But, all in all, it certainly was an interesting watch. I might think the plot could've used some improvement; but that doesn't mean it's bad. The entire visual aura of the movie is great; they went through quite some effort to make it look well. For instance, in a number of scenes it's obvious that they made the clothing of the characters blend in with the background; and yet they still managed to create diversity in those colors during scenes, by making the clothing differ just that tiny bit, and different parts of the background as well; the entire scene would be built up of one painting-like shot after another, yet all of them slightly different. Impressive.

And then I haven't even mentioned the casting, which was magnificent. Anyway.

Since I kindof liked the movie, and since the sequel DVD wasn't expensive, either, I got that DVD as well.

Boy. I've never quite seen a movie's sequel be so completely and utterly out of touch with its original. What horror.

Except for the male protagonist, not a single actor of the original cast returned for the sequel. They had good reason, so it seems.

The plot is utterly stupid. It revolves around an ancient law that made it somehow illegal for the couple to get married. Hello? Do you really think a king wouldn't have the influence to convince parliament to get rid of that law? Of course not, but then you wouldn't have a plot anymore. Now if the rest of the movie would make up for this silliness, then it wouldn't be so bad. Except it doesn't. This movie is bad in... let me count the ways.

1. The plot error, as explained above. Also, the plot was quite incoherent, for the most part.
2. The casting is terrible. The original King Haraald, father of the male protagonist, managed to create a believable king, with that somewhat eccentric and strange flair that most European royals seem to have these days. The queen had a bit of an iciness over her, warming up to an interesting character once she started to like Paige. Even the minor roles were so well played. In the sequel, none of this returned. The queen was just tight; an empty shell. The new Paige had a problem with overacting in some of the scenes. In fact, that was a common issue; I don't think I've ever quite seen this much overacting in one movie. Also, King Haraald didn't even remotely look like the original; not physically, and not in his acting.
3. Speaking of the King, and given the plot of the original movie, he shouldn't even have returned for the sequel; he abdicated because he was terribly ill; he should've been dead, for crying out loud!
4. The CGI was horrible. In the original movie, there were a few scenes where I'll bet CGI was used; not because it showed, but because I don't think it were possible to create that scene otherwise. In the sequel, you could tell when CGI was used due to the utter lack of natural feeling. Ever heard of a randomizer? It's what you use to avoid having a full room of butterflies all shake their wings at the exact same speed. Shudder.
5. The "painting" feeling and attention to detail of the original movie was nowhere to be found. In fact, at some point they show a castle which supposedly is in Denmark somewhere, but it shows the Czech flag, instead. Ugh.
6. Some of the gags were funny, but not as intended; because they were so silly. I've seen 3-year-olds make better jokes.

... I guess I could go on forever, but then there isn't much point in boring my audience. The short version: the original "The prince and me" is an interesting watch, but please forget about the horrible sequel...

... I guess there's a reason why they put it directly on DVD and skipped the theatres.

DebPants

In Edinburgh, a Debian Tartan was created. Many people ordered kilts in that tartan; but, knowing I'd never use a kilt anyway, I didn't feel like spending too much money on that. Instead, I ordered 5 yards of the raw material, and asked my mother to make pants out of them.

They're not ready yet, but I had an initial fitting today, and it seems a perfect fit. Now I want one of these to go with it

Quickstep on 2.6

wouter@quickstep:~$ uname -a
Linux quickstep 2.6.24-1-mac #1 Fri Feb 1 00:14:53 CET 2008 m68k GNU/Linux

Ph34r my experimental buildd, which will be back... soon.

Unfortunately, doing 'apt-get upgrade' from etch-m68k (the last release to support 2.2, which quickstep was still running) to unstable takes a while. Other than that... yeah!

The update to 2.6.24 had some issues; e.g., the key map wasn't set correctly; also, 2.2 and 2.6 have different ideas about what the system clock is, so it insisted on doing an fsck at boot time initially, which with 18G hard disks takes quite a while on a 25Mhz processor.

Quickstep was one of the last machines that I had which was still running 2.2; unfortunately it took a long time for 2.6 on m68k to become a viable option. Apparently, the issues that existed for Centris 650 (of which quickstep is one) had been fixed a while ago already; I just hadn't noticed. Oops.

My final 2.2-running machine now is barok, my IIci. But that machine isn't very fast anyway, so its lack of 2.6 doesn't really hurt all that much. Having said that, Finn Thain told me he'd be working on IIci support soon, so that issue should be dealt with as well. Whee!

ID papers

Bruce Schneier blogs about an issue that, in the context of the current vote craze in the US, seems to be pretty popular: the question of whether or not the US governments should give a drivers' license to illegal immigrants. Bruce argues in favour of giving a drivers' license to illegal immigrants, since requesting that the administration which issues drivers' licenses also check whether or not people are illegal immigrants is going to cost the government a lot of money (both from the extra amount of resources that needs to be spent on doing this job, and the lawsuits to make up for the errors).

The fun bit is, I think that they are creating a problem where there is none. By not creating an official, designated, identification system, the US government is forcing people to look for alternatives, effectively giving a drivers' license a double function; that of an ID card, and that of a drivers' license. This can't be a good idea.

Often the major argument against issuing ID cards is that it reduces people's privacy. I think this is wrong, for a very simple reason:

The US already has an ID card. It's called a drivers' license.

No, really. For all practical matters, that little piece of paper is an ID card. Better get done with it and issue a real ID card, then.

ID cards, followup

I should've known that posting something about ID cards would spark a number of reactions. In fact, I did—which is one of the reasons why I posted that; nothing like a bit of discussion every once in a while.

Brian M. Carlson writes:

The difference between the US and Belgium, for example, is that Belgium has comprehensive privacy legislation.

Well, yes. Obviously, ID cards require some privacy legislation in order to prevent abuse of said cards. In Belgium, only the police is allowed to require me to show them my ID card; everyone else can ask, but I can tell them to go screw themselves. Of course they can then also refuse to provide me with a given service, but I may be able to sufficiently prove my ID with other means. The point is, whether or not a designated ID card exists does not impact the need for privacy legislation; if you want to protect your privacy, you need such legislation anyway, ID or no ID. The fact that you don't have an ID card does not mean in any way that people can't ask you to prove your ID; and the existence of an ID card does not mean that all of a sudden all other ways for me to prove my ID are null and void.

"Anonymous" writes:

You seem to take as a given that we need an official government-issued ID card, and from there you draw the fairly reasonable conclusion that if we need one it ought to exist separately from a driver's license. I agree that your assumption leads to your conclusion, but I disagree with your assumption.

Well, no, I do not assume that we need an official government-issued ID card. I know we do. That's not to say we need government-issued ID in all cases where we need to provide proof of ID; but when we do, there should be a way that does not overload some document into something which it was never intended to be.

"bignose" writes:

You miss the main complaint of a national ID card system: that it would be *mandatory* for a person who wishes to operate in the country. That's the important part that is not true for a driver's license: not having a driver's license does not make the person an unperson.

It is not necessary for me to have an ID card to "operate" in Belgium. There are a few things where the ID card is indeed required; e.g., the last time I personally had to use my ID card was during the last elections. If I would have had an encounter with the police in that time, they could have asked for it, too; but that didn't happen. Also, when doing my tax declaration online, I used the electronic keys on the ID card, so that I could only update my tax declaration—and not, say, my neighbour's. But that's only doable when you have an electronic ID card system, which is not necessarily a good idea (in contrast to plain old paper ID cards, I do have privacy concerns with electronic versions—details on request)

Of course, the fact that I can "operate" in Belgium without the use of an ID card does not mean it is legal for me to walk around without one; but that is not entirely the same thing.

There were some more comments to my previous blog post, but I don't disagree with those.

FOSDEM keysigning party: list created

This morning, right before leaving for work and somewhat in a hurry, I created the list of keys for the FOSDEM '08 GPG key signing party. You'll find it at the keysigning website.

Unfortunately, I fucked up a bit in that I forgot to check my mailbox. Apparently the key server was down for most of tuesday, and I didn't notice. Some people tried to send their keys, but couldn't. Also, the mail wasn't double-checked carefully enough.

Grmbl. Next time, I'll try not to forget to do such things when I actually planned them—in the evening.

Anyway; if your key has been received in time by the keyserver, you should have received an email this morning, and you should be in the list that I linked to, above. If you weren't then all is not lost; if you really want to participate, print out key fingerprint slips, and bring them to the party. This is not as efficient, and some people may choose not to accept such fingerprint slips, but at least you'll be able to get some signatures. If you didn't make it because the key server was down last night, I apologise (but then again, waiting for the last moment to participate isn't very smart...).

Please also note that we only have two hours, and the list contains 202 people. As such, it may be the case that we won't be able to finish the entire key signing party; it may be the case that we'll have to cut it short. In any case, you will be able to sign a significant amount of keys, and a significant amount of people will be able to sign yours, so that should be good enough -- and you can do the rest next year, or so...

my FOSDEM TODO list

In less than two days, and I still have loads to do

• Clean the office. The floor is pretty dirty right now, no place to lay down guests.
• Pack my bags. I host guests at the office, which requires me to sleep there, too.
• Figure out a solution for the booth (I did get some volunteers, but did not follow up on that yet).
• Write two sets of slides: one for my talk about the Belgian eID card in Debian, one for the key signing party, which I'm also organizing
• Clean out my SD cards, so that I can actually take pictures. This involves some sorting out of what needs to be kept and what not, etc.

Most of this has to be done this evening. And all this while feeling horrible; I think I'm sick again. If I didn't have to give this perl training, I'd have stayed at home today.

Here's for hoping I'll feel better during the weekend. And that I'll get everything done by tonight.

FOSDEM 2008: Day one

Day one of FOSDEM 2008 has now ended, and almost everything seems to have gone fine from my end. Note, "fine" is not "perfect"; there were some issues.

• Unfortunately, Lars fell ill, and couldn't make it. Shame; I was actually looking forward to meeting him again. Fortunately, Frans Pop offered to hold a replacement talk, and that talk went well, given the low amount of time he had to prepare it.
• The Debian developer's room is now really too small. Last year, we were having issues with the room being too full to accomodate new attendees, but this was very much dependent on the actual talk going on; the room couldn't accomodate the audience for all the most popular talks, but in general there were no issues. In contrast, this year around I haven't yet seen the room not being too small.
• The security staff sucks. Again, they kicked us out of the DevRoom before the agreed-upon time of 19:00. I'll need to remember that for next year, and not try to assign talks until the very last moment; perhaps stop by 18:45 or so...
• The idea to let my hair grow to prove to Nattie that it's ugly that way seems to have failed to meet its purpose. Darn. This is the last time I'll come up with such a lousy excuse for allowing my hair to grow.
• I've been slacking with things, and not following up on stuff people sent me mails about. As a result, I needed to fix some things at the last minute while the event was already underway. Silly me. Most things worked out nicely, however; and the booth—I think I shouldn't bother to make up a schedule anymore next year.

Nothing spectacularly problematic; and as for the last item, that can be easily fixed by introducing fresh blood in organizing the Debian side of FOSDEM next year. Not that I want to stop being involved, but at least not being the only one responsible might be sensible.

Other than that, no real issues, really. Well, except for one; I was so backlogged with everything that I had to postpone finishing my slides 'till the very last moment—half an hour ago. Ugh.

But, well. Great FOSDEM!

Talk done

I held a talk this morning about the Belgian electronic ID card in Debian (and derivates, like Ubuntu). Things were a bit tight there for a moment, because I overslept; but eventually, we did make it in time.

The talk didn't go perfect. Because I overslept, I didn't have enough time to test; because I didn't test enough, I found out that the smartcard didn't work on the demo machine. Darn; it's pretty silly to hold a talk about how easy it is to use the electronic ID card on Debian, only to find out that I, myself, am unable to use it. Grmbl.

Anyway, the talk worked out okay. Despite the early hour, a decent amount of people showed up—including Fabian Arrotin, who held a talk about a similar topic in the CentOS room last year.

Now for breakfast. Really.

FOSDEM, day two

This is no doubt one of the best FOSDEMs, ever. At least to me it was, and I've been to every FOSDEM, and to the second day of the original OSDEM as well. Great weather, great people, great talks, and great fun. What more can one want? Where I had to nag about a few things yesterday, today I can only feel exhausted, but happy.

Some loose ends:

1. Apparently someone forgot a camera in the Debian Developer's room; this is a Kodak EasyShare ZD710. If you're quick, you may be able to still get it at the info desk; otherwise, contact either me or "Chipzz" on the Freenode network (perhaps in the #fosdem channel). If you're still in Belgium, we may arrange for you to pick it up, otherwise we'll have to send it to you.
2. Thijs said it after the last talk in the Debian devroom, but let me repeat it here: if you have comments about the Debian presence at FOSDEM (and I mean about any subject, really), just let me know. This was a great FOSDEM already, but there's always room for improvement. Oh, and yes, we need a bigger devroom, and the FOSDEM people know this, and they can't really help us but they'll do what they can. Unfortunately "too many people" is a general problem at FOSDEM.

See you next year!

Beid screencast

My FOSDEM talk didn't go entirely as planned. I tried to run a demo of the beid packages, but unfortunately they decided to play up again. This isn't the first time; they sometimes have this. It has something to do with OpenSC or OpenCT, I believe, but it's hard to figure out what, exactly. When I got back at the office with the machine that failed to work properly, and tried again, it did work. Heisenbugs suck. Pun intended.

Anyway, since things work now, I prepared a screencast showing off what I wanted to show during the talk; it takes about 8 minutes. I was going to edit the talk to hide the spammer who was DoS'ing my mailserver just as I was trying to send an email out, and perhaps to hide away the long waits at times; but I didn't find an easy way to do so, and I got tired looking. If you're interested, have a look.

Also, the screencast doesn't include any sound. This is because I couldn't find any piece of equipment on which istanbul would produce correct imagery (it appears to be buggy on powerpc), where the hardware was fast enough to capture and encode both a video at 1024x768 resolution and sound from the sound card (ruling out "anything", the machine on which I tried to do the presentation at FOSDEM), and on which the microphone would actually work (ruling out the amd64 box that was standing nearby). Since I could at least create a correct movie on the last machine, I just forgot about the sound. Instead, I tried to make the screencast show what was going on, by pointing at important tidbits with my mouse pointer.

Which kindof worked, but was not ideal. Oh well.