Arrived

Yesterday was... intense.

I got up yesterday at 4 AM CEST, and have arrived in Mar del Plata around 3 AM local time, which is about 28 hours later. Luckily those are not 28 days. Oh well.

In between those two hours, I did little else than travelling. The longest pause was in Madrid, where I had a 2 hour pause... just to give you an idea.

Anyway, the trip wasn't as bad as back when I went to Australia; then, it took 36 hours on the way in to get to my final destination, and I was a total wreck when I did arrive.

I did have to miss breakfast this morning, though, since I needed sleep more than food. But I've arrived now, for two weeks of great DebConf goodness!

Rijksregister access through Belgian electronic ID card

On the mijndossier website, it is possible to view your own file in the belgian 'rijksregister' (state register), provided you have an electronic ID card and a computer set up to use it. I should note that the website uses a certificate that iceweasel on Debian, in its default configuration and after installing and configuring the necessary packages for using the electronic ID card, still warns about the certificate being 'not safe'. I should check what's going on there. But that is not what this post is about.

What it is about, however, is the fact that this website contains a "death" chapter.

Now, by definition, this "death" chapter can never be filled in, since one can only access their own data. And I can hardly do that if I'm death, can I?

Oh well, not that I care or anything.

Locales

Sami, it's really not that bad.

There are, as you say, many variables to modify the behaviour of several programs. What you seem to have missed, though, is that there are really only four types of variables:

LANGUAGE

This is a GNU-specific extension which allows you to set fallbacks on different languages than "C" (which is locale-speak for "disable translation completely"). It somewhat overrides LC_ALL, but then at the same time it doesn't. Pretty strange thing, this variable. See "info gettext" and search for LANGUAGE if you want the ugly details.

LC_ALL

This variable exists to (temporarily) override any locale-related variable; for instance, when you want to file a bugreport in grep and you want to make sure you don't get any output that might be unintelligible for the developer, you could run LC_ALL=C grep --broken-parameter to temporarily disable locales. Using LC_ALL completely and utterly overrides anything else, so you probably don't want to set it in the general case.

LC_NUMERIC, LC_PAPER, LC_MESSAGES,...

These variable are meant to be used to divert from the defaults. For instance, as in your case, a user may want to have messages in en_US but have dates and papersizes etc be as is common in fi_FI. In that case, you'd set the default to fi_FI but set LC_MESSAGES (which specifies the language in which messages are set) to en_US. Or you might be a Dutch-speaking Belgian guy living in the US. You'd set the default to nl_BE.utf-8; but since A4 paper isn't easy to come by where you live, you'd set LC_PAPER to en_US.

LANG

This variable is used for "the default". If you haven't specified LC_ALL, nor the other relevant LC_* variable, then the value of LANG is used for whatever you're trying to do.

So what you really want to do is to set LANG to be fi_FI.utf-8, but have LC_MESSAGES be either en_US or, perhaps, C. This should give you english messages, but finnish conventions for date and number formats.

Do note, though, that this is only the theory. It may be the case that some software is broken and doesn't look at the correct LC_* variable. If that happens to be true for some software you've seen, just file a bug...

Re: Government

One of the things of getting too much mail is that you will get swamped in it, sometimes to the level of not even managing to figure out there's been replies on your blog for the past several weeks. Oops.

Apparently quite a number of people answered to my blog post about the belgian government issues, and I only found out right before leaving for Argentina. They're now all accepted from moderation, but that doesn't mean I can't follow up on them anymore.

Most of them just agree with what I have to say, or posit another opinion (which is fine), but some clearly show a misunderstanding of what I was trying to say. So, since I don't want to appear as one posting gibberish, allow me to clarify:

"I could say that some other things about the past debâcle also puzzle me, such as the insistence of some people to get an unconditional split of BHV, thereby destroying all chances of even remotely reaching a compromise."

You are saying that you would accept giving in to the demands of the Francophones that the Flemish give up territory. (Think about it, what century are they from? In what other country does one community demand the enlargement of its territory as an exchange for fixing a situation which the constitutional court has ruled to be illegal?)

Thanks for asking, but no, I'm not saying that. Let's be clear about this: there's a huge difference between a position that says "we need to split BHV, period" on the one hand, and "we need to give territory to the francophone community" on the other. It should be perfectly possible to, say, have the flemish community come up with some benefit to the francophone community in some respect somewhere that does not include "giving territory to the south of france"; but apparently the "negotiators" think not. To quote just one example: at some point Reinders (MR) suggested that a federal election circle be created to replace BHV, so that francophone politicians could still be elected in flanders, but also the other way around. This proposal was however killed by flemish politicians before the press as "not even negotiable" without even having discussed it. This, and other similar examples, I do not understand.

After all, the fact that the constitutional court has ruled the current situation to be illegal does not change anything about the fact that this is still a request from the Flemish part of the country, and not from the Francophones; anyone telling you anything else is simply lying. There's nothing wrong with wanting something and being declared correct in court, of course; but there is something wrong with wanting that unconditionally. Unless you won a war, that is. And then still.

Of course, not caring about much of the definitions of many political parties and not being a politician in any way, I ticked off someone who just happens to be a member of one of the parties I don't even like in the first place. Amedee, in case it matters: I didn't call CD&V a "Catholic" party to imply anything, but simply because I'm blissfully ignorant of the difference between Catholic and Christian. And happily so, too, given the CD&V's current behaviour. Oh, and the SP.A is not my favourite party; it's just that they seemed to be the more sensible of the lot during the last elections' campaigns. What's really my favourite party isn't something I'll tell you (or anyone), though.

Re: Akademy

Kris blogs about akademy being in Sint-Katelijne-Waver—which, since I moved to Mechelen, is my backyard, really—and wonders why nobody in the Belgian FLOSS community talked about it.

It's not that I didn't know; Sune Vuorela, one of our Debian KDE developers, mentioned it to me a few months ago. He knew about our office in Mechelen, since he slept there at some FOSDEM a few years back. Of course, my first reaction was "oh, you'll pay me a visit then, right?", though I quickly realized "hang on, won't I be in Argentina then?"

Turns out that's was the case. So I didn't bother blogging; perhaps I should have.

Thing is, I've always felt like the Belgian FLOSS community is somewhat disjunct. It shouldn't be; we have a bunch of healthy and working community communication things, we have timely dinner meetings and drink meetings; and we even have a big important international developers meeting in the heart of our country. Even with that, I feel that more could be done. For example, I would probably like more unorganized social gatherings (say, more "lets-have-a-beer-now" type of meetings), and other things.

Is this just me? I dunno.

There is a cabal

Seriously.

Mail "migration"

I never thought I'd have to use my 'cluebat' section in my blog for myself, but apparently I do.

Since I moved out, a while back, mail to wouter@grep.be (and w@uter.be) was still being delivered on my Thecus N2100 that serves as server and internet gateway at my parents' place. This made sense when I set it up, because I don't usually read mail anywhere but home.

Since I now don't live with my parents anymore, however, I don't usually read mail anywhere near that server anymore. So, I'd been preparing to move the mail endpoint from goa (the Thecus) to samba (which has been my primary MX for quite a while, and which also has sufficient disk space to do so). Yesterday I made the switch, but forgot the important thing of checking up on whether the mail was actually arriving.

I'll spare the details, but suffice to say that I did make an error, and that over the last 12 hours, not a single mail that was sent by a server not known to me could send email to any of the grep.be or uter.be domains, amongst others. It wasn't blackholed (only 5xx'ed), but that's bad enough; I've now probably been kicked off every mailinglist in the universe. Go me!

Anyhow; if you sent me an email and you expect me to read it, you may want to send it back.

Off trying to resubscribe myself to some mailinglists now...

Scattergraphs

Debcamp is nice. Talking to people in person rather than having to do IRC to get anything done is a breeze, really.

One thing I haven't been particularly happy about is the fact that there aren't any good statistics on what the build capacity of an architecture is; i.e., you don't know you're low on build capacity until you suddenly start backlogging and it's too late. So, since Jörg Jaspert, Mark Hymers, and Steve Gran were there, I asked them whether it'd be possible to add some data to the projectb database about installing a binary. One additional column with a default now() option later, and we now have interesting data that I can make statistics of. Of course, since that column was only added four days ago, during one of which the link to ftp-master.debian.org was down (meaning, no uploads), there's not much data there yet; but I can start making some graphs now.

Of course, the hard part is trying to figure out how to present the data in a manner that one can actually get useful conclusions from, which is harder than it seems. Anyhow, I'm trying. For now, on my public space on merkel, you can find a (mostly empty) per-architecture scattergraph relating the size of a binary package against the time between the dinstall of a source package and that of its binary for that particular architecture. If the time between a binary upload and a source upload is "often" more than a day for small packages, then it's obvious that the architecture in question is having problems keeping up.

It's not very useful (yet), but the graphs will be updated on a daily basis, so that hopefully one or two months from now, they will contain useful data. Note that the scales are fixed to go from 0.1 day to 1000 days, and from 1k packages to 512M packages, so as to make sure one can actually compare graphs.

I'm also trying to come up with a useful line-based graph, so that it is possible to compare architectures over time against eachother. This will probably involve something with averages and standard deviations or some such, I guess. Not sure yet.

Wikipedia is useless

...at least sometimes it is. Take this gem, for example:

In probability theory and statistics, the probit function is the inverse cumulative distribution function (CDF), or quantile function associated with the standard normal distribution. It has applications in exploratory statistical graphics and specialized regression modeling of binary response variables.

A well-trained statistician will be perfectly able to understand the above, and perhaps fix any errors in it. However, anyone who isn't a highly trained statistician will not; and a trained statistician probably doesn't even need wikipedia to know the above.

I did get some basic statistics during my last studies, and have an understanding of some of the basic terms and concepts of statistics. Yet the above makes no sense to me, at all.

As an example, consider the familiar fact that the N(0,1) distribution places 95% of probability between -1.96 and 1.96, and is symmetric around zero. It follows that

... Or something. Suuuure.

(posted belatedly because my server was down yesterday)

Headache

Drinking games are fun.

Hangovers are not.

That is all.

Nouveau

No, I've not moved south. Nouveau is the name of an X.org driver for nVidia cards, that does more than the only other free driver, 'nv'. The main difference being that the former currently breaks more often (which is why it's in Debian Experimental, and not on the road to stable), and that it also supports external video.

Someone blogged a while back about it over on Planet Debian, and while I made a mental note of trying it out at some point, that hadn't immediately happened.

It has now, though. I'm happy to report that I won't need to borrow someone else's laptop for my DebianDay talk. Whee.

Nouveau developers: if I ever meet you in person, I owe you a beer—just as much as I owe beers to those people who wrote a driver for the Broadcom 43xx wireless drivers. Thanks!

Nouveau, followup

I blogged yesterday about trying out nouveau semi-successfully on my laptop. The driver is very new and not ready yet, so I did expect bugs when trying it out; and I was not let down. Or perhaps I was, depending on your point of view.

Anyway, mostly it's been a pleasant experience. Originally, using the nouveau driver would cause a full system lockup when shutting down the X server; but after I followed the suggestion by someone over on #nouveau on freenode that I try offb rather than nvidiafb, that problem was fixed. There's some weirdness going on still (such as the default font being thicker and larger, and the fact that moving windows to a second screen doesn't seem to work properly), but other than that, it seems to work.

I'll be using nouveau for a while now, and hopefully reporting any bugs I find. This should be good.

Panther on Debian/m68k.

Some crazy fellow tried to run Mac OS X Panther (that's 10.3 if I'm not mistaken) on a Centris 650 (a 25Mhz m68k). Procedure: run PearPC on an athlon or another insanely fast box to install OS X in an image that PearPC can boot from. Then copy the image to the Centris, run PearPC on that box, and, uh... wait a week for the stuff to boot.

Cute.

Picture retouching

Last month, the dutch-languaged C'T featured an article about retouching pictures with The Gimp, amongst others. Great timing, of course, since everyone goes on holiday during summer, right? Right.

It's amazing what you can do with The Gimp and a bit of basic knowledge. Take this picture, for example, which I took at this year's FOSDEM:

I kindof like it, but the colors are a bit blend. Too much of a red tint over everything. So, what we need to do, is change the curve:

Pardon my, eh, Dutch.

The trick is to remember that there are only so many colors which can be represented in a (JPEG) photo. The histogram on the background represents that; and by modifying the curve that is above the picture, you can effectively change the colorspace that is available for any peaks. If there's a lot of the darker blue in the picture, but less so in the lighter regions of the blue (as in this case), you just give the picture more space in the blue regions so that the blue that actually exists in the picture can be better represented. We do this by lowering the curve right before the peak, and by raising it afterwards, as the above screenshot shows. After doing so for red, green, and blue, this is the result:

Looks much better, right? Way more contrast, and the colors look much more natural. And that only took me like 10 seconds to do.

Do watch out, though -- it's easy to overshoot, resulting in an ugly picture; and you wouldn't necessarily want that. Also, if your camera has a RAW mode, you're going to be able to do a lot more of this kind of retouching with that than you would be using JPEG files. Then again, my camera has RAW too, but I don't use it most of the time...

Ganneff, you suck.

• You don't want me to post pictures of you, yet you post a movie of me dancing. So there.
• You post a movie of me dancing in a format my PowerPC-based laptop can't read.

Please, pretty please, with sugar on top, convert it to Ogg Theora.

Thanks,

The Management.

Knife

Yesterday, I was rummaging in my backpack, to make space for a few things I wanted to put in there and that I wanted to take along with me on the daytrip. As I was doing so, I found I'd forgotten to remove a knife from it before leaving for Argentina. Not just any knife, mind you:

Yet with this monster in my backpack, I managed to pass security in Brussels International Airport with no issues. At all. Luckily I didn't have to go through security a second time on a different airport, or I might have been in serious trouble.

By their own rules, however, they failed. Utterly.

Hardware test

So something Bdale came up with this morning at breakfast (and during his talk too, apparently, which I didn't attend) was this idea of a "hardware compatibility test"): a bootable image that hardware vendors could run to see whether their hardware would run Debian. Apparently all the other vendors have it, too, and the lack of it may be one of the main reasons why Debian isn't currently supported by a whole lot of hardware vendors yet.

Such a test wouldn't have to do all that much; just boot the machine (if it can) with the kernel that would be used for the installer and the system that is eventually installed; then run through a check of the available hardware, and finally come up with some kind of score that tells the vendor whether their hardware is supported at all, or if not, what they could do to improve the score.

It seemed to me (and to Mark Hymers, who was seated to my left) that this is something that could be done fairly easily with a slightly modified version of debian-installer. It would be okay if there was a different version for every Debian release we do; and I tend to think it's not even going to be a problem if the first time we don't make the release, but release such a test slighty after the release of Debian.

Having such a test would certainly give hardware vendors an incentive to improve their Debian support, especially if it's a simple thing that they can have some summer student do over all their hardware who'd then store the results in a database of sorts. Or so.

Additionally, if we do this right, we could diversify between 'a wireless driver that will probably work if you load ndiswrapper or something similar' (which would get a score that tells them 'yes, it will run Debian', but no perfect score) and 'a wireless driver that works with free drivers and no additional firmware required' (which would get a perfect score if there's nothing more). By doing this, we would put Debian's collective driving force behind a move to better and more Linux-friendly hardware, which can only be a good thing. Bdale seems to thing this could be an industry-changing thing, and I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work.

Except for one: I'm not sure I'll have the time to work on this myself; and even if I would be sure of that, it's not going to be something that I can do all by myself -- other people would have to run the test on their hardware and communicate the results.

So here's a request: is anyone else interested in this kind of thing? It doesn't sound like something too complicated; and given my business, it surely is something I have a personal interest in, so I will try to make time for it. But I can't do it alone...

The (almost) €429 tripod

Some interesting two days have just passed. I took the airplane from Mar del Plata to Buenos Aires on the 17th, slept one night in a hostel on a mattress that felt like stone, and went to the 'Circulo del Officieles de la Mar' (or some such, I don't know spanish) where I had to give a talk. The oral feedback I've gotten so far indicates that people did appreciate it, which is good.

I had originally planned to do some sightseeing in Buenos Aires after my talk, but me being tired and not immediately finding anyone else to go with me changed those plans. Instead, I just stayed at the C.O.M., where we played some Mao. Amongst other things.

About an hour before I left the place, Holger Levsen gave me a tripod, with the request to take it with me to Belgium, and keep it until FOSDEM. As that would also give me the use of an tripod, and being the photography hobbyist that I am, I was too happy to oblige. There was just one problem: the suitcase that contained my luggage already had a bulge from here to tokio, so adding it was a no-no.

No problem, I thought. I'll just keep it in my carry-on luggage. There's some space left there, and I certainly didn't have 5kg of carry-on luggage yet. Problem solved. The 'security' in EZE is a joke; the security officer doesn't even look at the screen while X-raying my luggage. Well done.

So I fly from EZE to MAD on the first, 11-and-a-half-hour leg of my flight. Madrid Barajas is a crazy airport, with its own private metro. Somewhere between gates R-something (where IB6844 from EZE arrived) and J40 (where the flight to BRU will depart from), we need to go through a security checkpoint. Strange, since I hadn't had to do that on my way in from BRU to EZE; but of course you have no choice, so I comply.

As I've gotten used to by now, what with the mess of cabling in my laptop bag and the other metal objects there, I get a baggage check. The security officer who goes through my very messy bag asks me to open the bag containing the tripod, so he can see it. He then promptly decides that it is a "sharp" object, and that it is "not acceptible". Here the fun begins.

Of course, trying to argue with a security guard isn't the best idea if you want to be allowed on any flight, ever, so I don't even try that. I ask him 'can I check that in, instead?' and he tells me how to go back, to the exit, and to the departures hall where I can have that little tripod get checked in. So I go there. The lady at the check-in desk tells me that she cannot check the tripod in, because the flight has already been closed and I'm too late. I tell her I'm from a connecting flight, and that I can't help that. She says she knows. So I ask her what my other options are. She tells me I could try to get on the next flight to Brussels, which is at 20:00 (rather than the 16:20 flight that I was booked on). I consider that an acceptable compromise, so ask her how to get that done, and she refers me to the ticket sales desk, some 10 meters to my left.

Unfortunately, the 20:00 flight turns out to be completely booked, and there are no other flights on the same day. The best alternative he can give me is a flight to Amsterdam at 19:20, which would cost 'a little more'. I ask him 'how much more'. He starts looking up things in his computer, and after a few minutes tells me that he cannot refund my ticket for the 16:20 flight and that a flight to amsterdam would cost me €429. At this point I get somewhat angry, and tell him that this is not acceptable. He refers me to the customer service desk right across.

The lady at the customer service desk is friendly, but firm: she cannot help me. Either I leave the tripod behind, or I pay whatever the ticket service asks me—she takes my word that it is €429, because she cannot check it, and cannot change it, either. I get more agitated, and ask to see the supervisor. She points me to a lady a little across who can 'call' the supervisor. At this point it is 15:55

As I reach that lady, apparently someone else had just asked for the same thing, and starts arguing with a guy in black uniform, who appears to be the supervisor, about the fact that he's got more than 30kg of luggage which he isn't allowed to take along with him. Dude, not a single airline will let you do that, no matter how much you argue. I let them argue for about 10 minutes, all the while nervously looking at my watch, but then I interrupt with 'please, I don't have much time left before my flight leaves'. That gets his attention. In our two-minute conversation, the guy in black backs up everything the other three people have told me, adding that '429 is reasonable; your luggage is already on the flight, and it will cost Iberia a lot of money to delay the flight and get it off'. I curse. He also seems surprised at the notion that I'm not allowed to take a tripod in my carry-on luggage.

Hmm.

Figuring I have nothing to loose, I curse one more time, and make a run for it. When I reach the security checkpoint, I ask to be allowed to skip the queue in front of it, on the grounds that I have only 15 minutes left before my flight leaves. Mind you, this is not the same security checkpoint as the one where I was rejected about an hour earlier; this is the security checkpoint between the departures hall and the secure area, whereas the other security checkpoint was one between two different terminals. I am granted my request, and quickly throw everything in the X-ray boxes. They need to go through my bag again. I help them, showing where everything conspicuous is, and opening my flute box so they know what's in there. He looks at everything, and signals that I can move on.

Hang on, I think. This can't be right.

'Okay,' I ask?

'Yes,' he says.

I run for the nearest info desk, show them my boarding pass, and tell them 'please, my flight leaves in 10 minutes, can you tell me where to go?' They are quick and efficient. Gate J40. I make a run for it again, and just make it in time. Of course, I could forget about my plans of finding a power outlet, plugging in my cell phone and calling my parents, but that's not a big deal—there's a train station at Brussels Airport.

So what have we learned? Security on airports is random, arbitrary, non-standardized, and utterly stupid. Items that pose no danger at all—plastic bottles containing more than 100ml of water, small quantities of yoghurt that are over 100grammes but not over 100ml, tripods—are not allowed, while on the other hand I've occasionally gotten through security carrying knives and tools that are clearly forbidden by the rules.

We've also learned that the rules very much depend on the particular person checking you. If you're refused for an item that is not a knife or a gun or something else similarly problematic, it may help to just find a different security checkpoint and try again. It's not as if they make any sense, anyway.

Hardware test: followup

I have gotten quite some response to my blog post about the hardware test proposal thingy from Bdale.

It would seem I haven't been entirely clear

Someone referred me to a page by Kenshi Muto that parses 'lspci' output into a hardware compatibility list. This doesn't help. It ignores x.org stuff (which is important, too) and the page itself clearly says that it cannot guarantee whether a piece of hardware will actually work.

For clarity: when I said 'Apparently all the other vendors have it, too', I really meant 'Apparently all the other GNU/Linux vendors have it, too'. People have suggested some cooperation between kernel/xorg upstream, other vendors, and perhaps something like freedesktop.org; and while that may be a good idea in and of itself, in the end Debian will have to provide something which it will call 'official' and which will tell a vendor whether or not Debian is supported on their hardware. This thing may not be fully automated or polished; it may need interactivity; but it must be something which will give a result that a product manager may want to lose some sleep over if it's not good enough.

Holger also suggested we try implementing this with Debian Live, rather than debian-installer. This may be a good suggestion; a debian-live image will have a full Debian system available rather than the somewhat limited d-i environment, so writing a test should be easier. Also, I don't even want to think how testing X.org drivers would work out from within d-i.

So what's left is a way to figure out how to do such a live system. I'll be posting some suggestion to the debian-devel mailinglist 'soon'.

Solving sudoku puzzles in package dependency relations

Daniel, you are evil. But yeah, it does look to be quite some fun.

Why apt sucks

From a buildd log:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  apache2-threaded-dev: Depends: apache2.2-common (= 2.2.9-7) but it is not going to be installed
                        Depends: libaprutil1-dev but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

Investigating with my set of perl scripts yields:

wouter@country:~/code/perl$ ./check-dep-waits
apache2-threaded-dev
dep-wait libmysqlclient15off (>> 5.0.51a)

Note the complete lack of any reference to mysql in the apt output. Also, in case you thought any of the above is bogus: apache2-threaded-dev depends on apache2.2-common which depends on libaprutil1 which depends on libmysqlclient15off. So there.

I've long been hoping for someone to finally fix #325786, but that never happened. Now that I wrote that perl script that I linked to above, I don't think I still need it -- particularly because my script works on my laptop, too, rather than only on m68k machines. Which is good.

Debconf8, and the m68k meeting in Kiel

As I start this blog post, I'm on the train between Amersfoort and Osnabrück, on my way to Kiel, where there'll be a meeting of the m68k porters, kindly organized by m68k kernel maintainer Christian Steigies. I took the 8:40 train in Mechelen this morning, and if all goes well, I'll be arriving in Kiel at 17:22 tonight. Some train trip... but I certainly prefer that to any flight.

Anyway. The days of Debconf were very nice. Debconf is a lot of things to me. Travel. Hacking. Mao, evolving into a drinking game. Beer. Attending talks. Giving talks. Meeting people. Face-to-face non-flaming. Gesturing for an extra knife at luunch. Hangover. Whiskey. Talking to the person next to you—over IRC. Getting killed before knowing what the rules of the assassins game are. Filing bugreports in person. Pictures. Kilts. Streaming video. Not being sick, hopefully. Name badges. Flying. Sleeping. Yes, sleeping.

Most of all, though, this year, Debconf was just great. Thanks. You know who you are.

After debconf, I flew to Buenos Aires, where I slept for one night in a Youth Hostel somewhere downtown. They were affordable, but the bed wasn't great—the mattress sorely needed replacement. Since I had a day in BA, and since there were apparently not enough people on the schedule, I'd agreed to hold a talk, and came up with the idea of a 'debian secrets' talk—about Debian-specific commands, such as dpkg-divert and update-alternatives etc—so that people could learn how to use their Debian system more efficiently.

As I was sitting in Andreas' talk, who was right before me on the schedule, suddenly Dag walked up to me and said hi. This was unexpected; Dag is a fellow Belgian, who's involved with the CentOS project, and who maintains a positively huge RPM repository at his site—if you maintain an RPM-based system somewhere, you'll probably know about that site. So while I recognized him, I immediately wondered what he was doing there.

Turned out he was invited to hold a talk at the Free Software event to which Debianday was attached (and which would not start for another day or two), and that when he saw my name on the schedule, he decided to attend. Fun. He learned a thing or two from my talk, and was talking later about writing some tools for RPM-based systems that would perform the same or similar functionality implemented by some of the Debian tools I talked about. Great. We had a picture together (in front of the DebConf banner—hah) that I still should upload, and then went out for lunch together with some other CentOS guys.

The talk itself seems to have been well-received, and I'm glad about that; I only gave it because there was a need for more talks, not because I felt confident I was very knowledgeable about that subject. In fact, I did have to ask on the debconf-discuss mailinglist for some input (which I received) so that I could make sure the talk would actually be useful to people. That helped a lot, I guess.

After that, we played some mao in the lobby of the DebianDay venue. While doing so, I overheard Dag talking about CentOS, advocating it to some of the people there, which I must say felt pretty weird on a Debian event. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course. Except that Dag was supposed to be writing his talk slides. How did that work out, Dag?

Eventually, I got in a cab to the EZE airport, and flew home. That wasn't fully without issue, but I did get there.

And now, I've been, eh, overloaded. Still have to follow up on a question a customer asked me, but I've barely been home or at the office, just enough to sleep really. Should do something about that, I guess...

Two days ago, I also managed to forget my camera somewhere. For 12 hours, I was worried, even though I had a pretty good idea of where it was; but since I'm getting quite good at taking pictures now, and since I really like doing so as well, I really didn't want to lose my camera. Fortunately, when I called this morning to the place where I thought I'd lost it, they told me it'd been found, and where to get it. In other words, it's safe, it's taken care of, Philip went to get it, and I just need to arrange to get it when I get back. Which is a relief.

Let's not be so stupid anymore in the future...

Finishing up now, a day later, and I'm at Christian's office, playing with his and my coldfire board. As it happens, it appears that Freescale has brought out a new BSP for these boards, so that's nice. Let's see whether we can get those to boot again...