I'm not much of a reader anymore these days (I used to be when I was a young teenager), but I still do tend to like reading something every once in a while. When I do, I generally prefer books that can be read front to cover in one go—because that allows me to immerse myself into the book so much more.

John Scalzi's book is... interesting. It talks about a bunch of junior officers on a starship of the "Dub U" (short for "Universal Union"), which flies off into the galaxy to Do Things. This invariably involves away missions, and on these away missions invariably people die. The title is pretty much a dead giveaway; but in case you didn't guess, it's mainly the junior officers who die.

What I particularly liked about this book is that after the story pretty much wraps up, Scalzi doesn't actually let it end there. First there's a bit of a tie-in that has the book end up talking about itself; after that, there are three epilogues in which the author considers what this story would do to some of its smaller characters.

All in all, a good read, and something I would not hesitate to recommend.

I've taken over "maintaining" DVswitch from Ben Hutchings a few years ago, since Ben realized he didn't have the time anymore to work on it well.

After a number of years, I have to admit that I haven't done a very good job. Not becase I didn't want to work on it, but mainly because I don't have enough time to fix DVswitch against the numerous moving targets that it uses; the APIs of libav and of liblivemedia are fluent enough that just making sure everything remains compilable and in working order is quite a job.

DVswitch is used by many people; DebConf, FOSDEM, and the CCC are just a few examples, but I know of at least three more.

Most of these (apart from DebConf and FOSDEM) maintain local patches which I've been wanting to merge into the upstream version of dvswitch. However, my time is limited, and over the past few years I've not been able to get dvswitch into a state where I confidently felt I could upload it into Debian unstable for a release. One step we took in order to get that closer was to remove the liblivemedia dependency (which implied removing the support for RTSP sources). Unfortunately, the resulting situation wasn't good enough yet, since libav had changed API enough that current versions of DVswitch compiled against current versions of libav will segfault if you try to do anything useful.

I must admit to myself that I don't have the time and/or skill set to maintain DVswitch on an acceptable level all by myself. So, this is a call for help:

If you're using DVswitch for your conference and want to continue doing so, please talk to us. The first things we'll need to do:

• Massage the code back into working order (when compiled against current libav)
• Fix my buildbot instance so that my grand plan of having nightly build/test runs against libav master actually works.
• Merge patches from the suse and CCC people that look nice
• Properly release dvswitch 0.9 (or maybe 1.0?)
• Party!

See you there?

It's taken a while to get here, but the code of conduct that I set out to produce about a year ago now has been voted on. The result which has been released earlier this week is that the code of conduct has been accepted, but that future updates would require another GR.

Although not my personal preference, it's pretty much what I expected. I still think allowing the DPL to update the code of conduct in the future would be preferable over having to go through another GR (after all, if the DPL does something silly, we have ways of reverting that decision); but regardless, the fact that the code of conduct is accepted is, in my opinion, a major step forward for Debian.

Thanks to everyone who voted!