Bubulle's weblog

I have been a Debian user since about 5 years.
I currently have a home network consisting of 3 i386 boxes (2 servers, 1 desktop)
and used the desktop for the installation test. Because I got confused the first
few times and was not satisfied with the result, I did the installation 3 times.

More clues next days.

Last week, they released three different versions: 3.2.12 for the 3.2 branch, 3.3.5 for the 3.3 branch and 3.4.0rc1 as preparation for the upcoming 3.4.0.

Actually, I should say "Magic Karolin released" as Karolin Seeger is doing such a tremendous work managing Samba releases. In nearly 18 months of such work, she won the deep respect of the whole Samba community for this work.

So, last days, I worked to package all this stuff and now you can pick up whatever Samba you want:

• If you like being on the bleeding edge and help debugging upstream work, you can use the 3.4.0~rc1 packages from experimental.
• If you are using unstable, you'll get the last 3.3 version we will probably distribute: 3.3.5. Next package in unstable is very likely to be 3.4.0 when it's released
• If you're using testing, you'll get 3.3.4. No change, yet, here.
• If you're using lenny, you have four options (three only if not using i386):
  • Stay with the standard sources.list entries and you'll have 2:3.2.5-4lenny2
  • Use "stable-proposed-updates" and have 2:3.2.5-4lenny4 a little bit before it enters the next point release (due out soon). That version fixes 3 important bugs, particularly a memory leak and winbind crashes as well as allowing Windows 2000 SP4 workstations to join Samba domains
  • Use "official" backports from backports.org. You'll then get 3.3.4 packages (and 3.3.5 as soon as that one enters testing)
  • On i386 only, use our unofficial backports that provide the latest upstream release for the same branches, namely 3.2.12. For this, you need to add "deb http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org/packages lenny-backports/" to your sources.list
• And, finally, even if you are still using etch (also on i386 only), you can use a more recent version of samba than the good old 3.0.24 that's in etch. I just packaged 3.2.12 which is distributed in our "unofficial" backports repository: "deb http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org/packages etch-backports/"

That makes a lot of samba, isn't it? And it's not even finished... :-)

More about phallus symbol in Bhutan: http://www.keystobhutan.com/bhutan/bhutan_art_phallus.php

Apparently, I'm in a bhutanese mood this afternoon. After all, It's already 3 years since I went there and I still desperately want to go back. Hopefully, they'll launch another major version of DzongkhaLinux...:-)

After my last blog entry, one of my readers pointed me to this wonderful piece of swiss precision to help in haircutting: la pinaillette Baggenstoss. Hope you can read some (Swiss-)French to appreciate.....and thanks to Feth for the pointer.

If you spot it when it is already a giant thread, then anyway it already turned into a flamewar. So you can definitely ignore it. Nothing will come out of it.

Of course, this is less easy when the thread is not giant...yet. In such case you may be helped by the thread having a cryptic "Subject:" line and a message body which you don't understand.

From what I can spot that thread is cutting hair in pieces about licenses or copyright. My current stance on this is: let those who like haircutting discuss about this and see what comes out of this (my bet: nothing).

I probably saved me more than one full day of work on Debian doing this. Yay.

In short, the French Constitutional Court has censored the so-called Hadopi law by declaring the most significant parts of it to be against the French Constitution and, even better, going against the 1789 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Fun.

Update: Kai Wasserbach pointed me to http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/140226 that gives a german explanation about the French court ruling.

Samba 3.4.0pre2 was uploaded to experimental. Besides begin the new upstream version, it includes a split of the samba-common package to "samba-common-bin" and "samba-common". The latter will be common to Samba4 and Samba3 packages while the former will be different for both flavours.

The goal of this is allowing both flavours of samba to coexist on the same machine.

Thanks to jelmer Vernooij for this work, which we talked about at SambaXP.

Samba 3.4.0 release candidate versions will come out soon. It is definitely sure that 3.4 will be in squeeze at some moment.

I also uploaded a new package for lenny (2:3.2.5-4lenny4) with a backported upstream fix that fixes a problem preventing Windows 2000 SP4 workstations to join Samba domains. You can epect it in the next lenny point release, which is due out soon.

Quite good game, though not as good as last year's final (Toulouse-Clermont won by Stade Toulousain).

We personnally had no real preferences as our support in rugby generally go to Toulouse, which had been beaten in semi-finals by Clermont.

Perpignan won 22-13 against the infortunate Stade Clermontois, who lost its thirdt final in a row. We were fairly sad for Clermont but the catalan game was really much better, particularly in forward lines.

As usual, the finals were a great feast for rugby, in the usual spirit of that sport. And the spectacle, in Stade de France, was not only on the field but also around the field, with a stadium turning out yellow (and red on one side, and blue on another).

That will conclude that season for rugby....and we're already looking forward to next season where, of course, the Stade Toulousain will revive from its ashes and win both Top 14 and H Cup (there has now been enough of these for the British Isles, now...let's stop this).

I first considered not really reaction to Joey's post, mostly because he has very true points...and particularly when he has about the same reaction than mine about a recent post in ou mailing lists.

So, I will stick to react to one part of Joey's post...the one I consider really inaccurate.

"everyone uses the software in English anyway"

Really, Joey, really, that's completely untrue.

Of course, I do live in a country that very well known (or at least that has the reputation) for being deeply ignorant in English language. But, really....*all* computers I see around me, both in my personal life *and in my professionnal life* are nearly completely localized.

It's probably now well know that I spend most of my professionnal time....providing desktop systems (or managing the people who provide them) to users in ONERA, "the French Aerospace Lab". That means about 2000 users in a scientific environment where the use of English is much more developed than the average environment. Most of these users speak a fairly decent English and are perfectly able to understand that language in some way.

About 80% of these systems are Windows-based and 20% are Linux-based. Probably more than 95% of them are localized in French. Even on Windows systems, we mostly integrate free software. And for *each* of them, the most important feature we need, besides software being free, is it to be localized in French.

I bet our friends from Extremadura can say the same. The success of Linux-based free systems there also happened because the software is available in Spanish. And, of course, there are tons of similar stories and counter-examples (München, Bhutan, Venezuela, etc.).

So, really, please don't spread out that idea. Oh, yes, geeks *do* use their software in English (and, even here, I need to be convinced if I remember well what I saw at conferences in Germany or Spain, for instance). And, yes, it's very well widespread among geeks that using software in English is "better" or "easier". Which I indeed always fight and will fight until I die..:-).

We certainly agree that these l10n needs put a high load on development and sometimes slow it down. and, for sure, we sometimes need to make a balance and I really thank you for giving me the credit to try doing that balance.

Anyway, all this (including your rant) had to be said and it's interesting to have that small discussion (I just should not start writing down a blog entry at 23:00...:-))

See you soon, hopefully, Joey !

From now, Bolivia's "short" name is "Bolivia, Plurinational state of".

Don't take me wrong. I'm fine with such changes in official country names...when it comes at the official long name of the country. Most long names have some kind of political meaning. For Bolivia, the change is meant to reflect the consideration of the current government of the country for all "minorities" of Bolivia. That's for sure definitely any country's decision.

But, for ${DEITY}'s sake, why change the *short* name? For everybody, Bolivia is "Bolivia" and Venezuela is "Venezuela" and not some funky long and politically correct (or incorrect) name!

So, once again, the iso-codes package maintainers will use a new "common name" for another country so that lists of countries that display in various places do not show ridiculously long names for some countries while others have the name...everybody uses.

Remember "Taiwan" back in 2004?

Reaching birthdays between 45 and 50 gives one nice gift: presbytia.

In a few months, my arms were getting longer and longer while I was reading, to the extent that it became difficult to read, and even hack on the laptop during evenings.

As a consequence, I won a visit to an ophtalmologist and then got a prescription for glasses. Luckily for me, my wife (and my son, indeed) works for the Essilor International company, world leader of corrective glasses, and particularly makers of the quite famous "Varilux" progressive glasses.

So, I could get their top product, Varilux Physio glasses with Cryzal Forte anti-reflection treatments. Getting used to these nice pieces of glass technology is quite tricky but the result is...amazing, even for my far vision (which I thought was perfect until now).

So, expect some pics soon...or, alternatively just come at Debconf9...:-)

Since my first marathon, I had a full week rest, then gradually began running again, first starting with 10 to 15 kilometers runs and then slowly reclimbing up distances to reach 23km 3 weeks after the marathon and 26km on May 3rd.

Both these were done at a 5:35 to 5:40 mins/km pace, which seems to be the pace I can keep for a long time at this moment.

On later weeks, I diminished efforts slightly, cutting off on distances, to concentrate on speed, so running distances between 7 and 12km, with a faster pace (between 5:15 and 5:30). That culminate in a very sharp 6km at 5:06 on a week day, after work (and that loop includes a very steep slope).

The target for this "preparation" was indeed May 19th. I was on holidays all week long and that seemed to be a great occasion to try out something I wanted to do for quite a long time: run a marathon....alone.

I completed it, moreover with a very great loop in Rambouillet forest, running the 42.2 kilometers in 4h22. Not that a great time (6:12/km), compared to the 4h10 of the Paris Marathon, but fairly interesting as that was done by running lonely...and also by running in woods, partly on very muddy paths. What's even more interesting is that I ended up nearly without cramps and had only to walk on the steepest slope....at km41 (about 20% slope for 200 meters). Note that I made a stop around km25 in order to eat dry fruits as, contrary to official marathons, in lonely marathons, you need to have your own food and beverage with you. So, well, the full time is around 4h30.

Even more interesting: I was not tired at all the day after and, accordinng to my wife, much more "alive" than after Paris marathon..:). That probably explains why I could run again only 4 days after (a small but fast 6km) as well as today, 5 days after, for a 14km loop at 5:25/km despite the heat (my very best time on such a distance).

So, Debconf runners, bring on your shoes in Cáceres. I'll be there and ready..:-)

Recent package uploads:

• Last "stable" upstream branch: 3.3.4. 3.3.4-2 is in unstable, quietly ageing before entering testing. 3.3.4-1 is in testing. In short, we have the latest upstream in squeeze
• Next upstream version: 3.4.0~pre1 is in experimental. That includes many packaging changes as upstream is now providing samba3 and samba4 altogether, which lead to source tree reorganization. Good news: there are no more "FHS" patches and upstream included needed changes for the file layout to finally be able to cope with the FHS entirely.
• We maintain many backports:
  • 3.3.4 was just uploaded to lenny-backports on backports.org. Maybe soon to come a 3.3.4 upload for etch-backports
  • unofficial backports on http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org: here we will maintain "the latest upstream version of the same upstream branch than what we have in Debian stable suites". That seems complicated to say and an example says it better: lenny has 3.2.5, so this repository has upstream 3.2.11 with the same packaging than 3.2.5. We made an exception for etch: instead of backporting the latest 3.0 upstream (etch has 3.0.24, upstream has 3.0.34), we backported the latest 3.2: we consider that nobody is now seriously considering to run 3.0, except those people who are very happy with the official packages in etch.
  • All these backports will be useful when tracking down bugs and ask our users if they reproduce them with the latest upstream versions, as samba setups are often very tricky to reproduce in our own environments.

Also, Luk Claes joined the maintenance team and helped setting up the unofficial repository for backports.

The bug count is going up again these days as I don't spend much time triaging the bugs and some are very tricky to reproduce. As usual, help would be welcomed. I'm fairly sure that several of these are user errors but I often lack time to prove this enough for closing the bug. We should go to to 50-60 bugs or so.

Bug #520000 was reported as of March 16th 2009. We are now close again to our "10,000 bugs in 2 months" pace.

So, bug #540000 should be reported during Debconf 9, as it seems...

Oh, sure, I got warned in some way by NEWS.Debian entries, but I didn'tfigure out that it was URGENT that I change my *.css files.

What was happening is, in short, that all non whitelisted mail was just...reduced to a blank line. And I didn't figure out immediately because I have several whitelist entries, so I was still receiving *some* mails.

So, it is not only "stop working"....it is doing much harm. If you're a CRM114 user and haven't upgraded to 20090423-1, you've been warned.

I'm currently considering what to do and if a bug report is warranted (RC, of course). Oh, for sure, there *is* a warning through NEWS.Debian but is breaking existing behaviour so badly really something that we want in Debian? Losing legitimate mail is the worse thing a program can do, isn't it?

Any other DD or Debian contributors wanting to join in? I know that Dirk Eddelbuettel will probably not (btw, nice run at Boston, Dirk)....but others certainly can...and should ! October 4th, 2009 is still far enough for you guys to plan this..:-)

        Option          "TapButton1"            "1"
        Option          "TapButton2"            "2"
        Option          "TapButton3"            "3"

...and good luck exploring the joy of X.org updates (I am currently back in time fighting again with a jerky and unreliable Suspend-to-RAM which sometimes freezes my display...or just exits the KDE session...or sometimes just works....).

Still, I voted (112 or 11-, which makes no real differences). That goes with my personal feeling about right to vote, which I always used in my life as I consider it to be one of the most important rights we have, overall.

No intent to put shame on Wouter, of course. The right to not vote is also very important and he even doesn't have it in his country.

Congratulations to Steve and many thanks to Zack for running. That DPL election was a quiet one (too quiet?) but maybe Debian has reached its maturity by being close to 16 now? :-)

Despite a strong domination during the entire game, Toulouse could not qualify against the Welsh team.

As Guy Novès told, the Toulouse players now have to learn how to fall down in their opponents side without being seen, as the Welsh players seem to be very good at. Yes, that game was definitely stolen by Mr. Chris White who was reffing it and never saw the various obvious faults done by that Welsh team that was nearly never in position to score a try.

Having been a ref in another sport previously, I generally avoid criticizing reffing, particularly in rugby where referees are very respected and most often very wise. But I'm afraid that Mr. Chris White (ENG) is a strong exception to this.

Should I also mention a denied try by Stade Toulousain where a so-called forward pass by Dusautoir was done....by a welsh foot? Or the voluntary offside playing by Mr. Williams when Dusautoir was stopped 10 meters aways from the try line?

Sad. Really sad. The worst team won.

Simultaneously, X.org packages were updated so possible problems may have ben triggerred by it more than KDE, though.

At first glance, this new KDE is nice and has great improvements but generally speaking painfully slow..:-)

So, I began deactivating again all visual effects so that my poor old Dell X1 survives the upgrade.

I was also greatly annoyed by losing the "Terminal sessions" which I was very actively using with Konsole. No more "Terminal Sessions" menu in my task bar to connect to various hosts over the network. Bleh. I have to redo everything with Konsole's "profiles".

Also sucking a lot is the default setting for fonts in Konsole (antialiased fonts). It makes scrolling painfully slooooooow. I just deactivated this and it's much much much better.

I also lost my old mail notification utility (Korn). It is still working but having it running leaves a kio_mbox process eating all my CPU. Actually, korn is still something from KDE3, so I might expect it to be rebuilt for KDE4, hopefully. I never found anything as good as it in the gazillion of mail notification utilities we have. Maybe my dear Lazyweb will help.

I'm still left with weird keyboard behaviour which is hard to identify. Apparently the delay before key repetition starts when one leaves a finger on a key has changed in some way and despite my attempts to restore this in the adequate KDE thing, it doesn't change that much. I suspect some weird interaction with X.org stuff. Such "minor" details are very annoying as they interfere with year of (bad) typing habits.

In general, as a very old KDE user (I adopted it back in 2001 or so because of Kbabel), I'm somewhat happy with that upgrade but it will take time to be used to all the new concepts (ah, these "Plasmoids" thing...) and also restore the overall speed of my machine...:-)

I'm right here now sitting on my couch and trying to recover my legs after that first marathon ever.

As planned, I met Ralf Treinen and Noèl Köthe at the start of the Paris Marathon. As Noèl was targetting 3h30m while Ralf and I were targetting 4h, we left him go with the faster runners. As Noèl doesn't blog that much, I think I can say it now: he managed to run in 3h28m, which is awesome. He is incredibly happy with that (we unfortunately didn't manage to meet again after the race as the crowd was too huge and the cellphones were of course miserably failing).

Ralf and I ran together the first 12 kilometers. Then we split because he had to stop for a few seconds. Up to the 21st kilometer, I kept the pace for 4h and I was even running a little bit faster.

However, this advance vanished slowly from km 25, up to km 35 where the virtual runner that was running 4h passed me..:-). Ralf also passed me around km 38 which is indeed the moment where I was blowing up, running slower and slower. The last 3 kilometers were a nightmare but, still, I managed to finish and my GPS watch tells me I ran for 4h10m. The official time is 4h12m56s, because of a huge "runner jam" at Bastille where we had to wait for 3 minutes before being able to enter the Faubourg Saint-Antoine street.

Running through Paris is really magic, particularly with the nice sun we had ( not *too* hot, though) and I am really proud and happy to have my first marathon finished *without walking*.

Yay.

So, I'll apparently be able to enter the modern world and adapt my pace more easily than earlier (with my mechanical podometer and the stopwatch function of my cell phone).

And that thing has even a Debian package, maintained by...Ralf and Noèl..:-) ...though I have no idea whether it works with a Forerunner 405 as the original author apparently owns a 305. We'll see. If you somehow happen to see blog posts of mine with the GPS track of the Paris Marathon, I made it work (or I cheated and used a Windows machine...).

So, I finally switched entirely my laptop to GRUB 2 (remainings of a failed attempt to do so were lying in my boot menu for months, with a "Chainload to GUB2" entry that wasn't working). This, combined with the use of Grub2 Debian themes, bringed a nice blue-ish boot menu to my good old Latitude X1. Useless, but nice.

I'm also now using a 2.6.28 kernel from sid instead of an old 2.6.25 from pre-lenny release. I actually always forgot switching, being lazy to do a complete reboot (I'm mostly using suspend to disk and nearly never reboot my laptop entirely).

Inspired by the Ubuntu 8.04 version installed on my son's brand new Dell netbook, I also reinvested some time into usplash, to get an optional (and useless) graphical splash boot. That was less straightforward as, apparently, console-tools which was still sitting on my machine is in some way "hanging" the boot process with usplash.

That needs more investigation but that was the final argument to drop console-tools and use kbd. Something I already did in the past...but forgot that I switched back in order to test some weird bugs in console-data.

So, now, I have a machine that has a nice and friendly graphical boot process. I wonder if I should bring the discussion about adopting this as default for squeeze. I'm not sure that I can really handle the obvious flamewar that will follow...:-)

Finally, in order to be able to say that the week-end is also productive, I prepared an update for samba in lenny and also managed to run enough to be able to say that I'm in good preparation for the Paris Marathon in 2 weeks...

What I couldn't do was writing the minutes of the Debian Installer team meeting we had last Monday...sorry.

Why don't they put 3 days in week-ends?

PS: ah, I also installed Drupal on my home server in a desperate attempt to turn my old home server from the 90's into a shiny CMS-managed server from 21st century. I "just" have to migrate the content now....which will certainly raise the question of *updating* the content as well...

Bug #510000 was reported as of Dec 28th 2008. So, it took us 2.5 months for 10,000 bugs. This is still slower than our rate of 10,000 bugs/2 months but more than the pace we had for 500000-510000.

Of course, in the meantime, we released lenny on Feb 14th and, therefore, the development started again and, with development, new bugs come in.

To illustrate this, one will notice that bug #515000 was reported on Feb 12th. So, it took 46 days for the first 5,000 bugs and then only 32 for the remainder 5,000. In short, we're probably back to our pace of 10,000 bugs in two months.

In case someone cares, the first bug reported after the release of Lenny is #515247, reported by Robin Kluth against the gvfs package. It followed the release of lenny by 25 minutes and 14 seconds. That bug isn't fixed yet but is already reported upstream.

The first update of samba packages that's aimed for lenny has also been accepted for the next point release of Lenny, through stabe-proposed-updates. This is version 2:3.2.5-4lenny1. It fixes two important bugs discovered after the release of lenny that potentially affect many users and were fixed upstream in post-3.2.5 releases

In the constant tracking of a very active upstream, I also uploaded packages for 3.3.2 in unstable. That was quite a straightforward process, of course helped by Steve Langasek, who is a constant active support in the maintenance of samba packages. I really like the team we're having now, with Steve being very picky and motivated by quality and /me doing most of the nasty repetitive work to try saving his time for more important tasks..:-)

The next plan is updating packages on backports.org. Having 3.3.1 packages in testing now allows us to upload them in lenny-backports which should be good for lenny users who want to track upstream.

Finally, my proposal for a talk about "Packaging Samba for Debian and derivatives" has been accepted at Samba XP, the annual conference of Samba developers and users in Göttingen, Germany. For the first time, I'll be a speaker at this conference which I attend yearly since...it exists. My "german pilgrimage" of the year in Northern/Central Germany...

Ah, and I'm still preparing for the Paris Marathon, in 3 weeks now, which I will run with Ralf Treinen and Noèl Köthe. I feel in good shape for this as, this week-end, while I promised myself to "not run for too long", I just ran 19km and felt this was a quite "short" run. Still not in the performances of Dirk who mentions that 1h36 for a semi is "good for someone who didn't train that much during winter"...but I think I'll never reach that level of performance. I should have started running long distance 20 years ago for this, I'm afraid.

So, dear readers, sorry but you'll have to see old entries which never made it to my blog. Apologies.....old rants are not very useful, but I decided to leave them..:-)

I also registered my first proposed event: the now traditional cheese and wine party. Being in Spain with no regulations on food import for the traditional cheese providers in the Debconf crowd, I promise that this cheese party will be E.V.I.L.

And Debconf 9 will be a great success, of course.

See you in Cáceres!

The list given on Wikipedia is a completelt hilarious time waster, indeed.

My favourite one is probably the mention then some parts of British Columbia (Canada) are in UTC-7, namely Most of Peace River Regional District except Fort Ware, Pink Mountain as well as Regional District of East Kootenay and finally (take a breath!) Regional District of Central Kootenay east of the Kootenay River and parts east of Kootenay Lake that are south of and including Riondel (Creston doesn't observe DST), and Columbia-Shuswap Regional District east of the Selkirk Mountains.

Canada timezones are really a gem, where one learns that Northwest Territories (one of the largest states) follows UTC-7 except a town named Tungsten and.....a tungten mine.

Some other gems in that page are the places that leave in the future at UTC+13 and UTC+14, in Tonga and Kiribati.

A other one? Arizona is also funny with the entire state being UTF-7, but the Navajo nation not observing DST, but the Hopi reservation (that's an enclave of the Navajo nation) observing it. That gives an interesting nightmare when travelling over there in summer.

And finally, living in Florida probably requires a very high intelligence to understand what time it can be when "east of the Apalachicola River, plus the portions of Franklin County and Gulf County south of the Intracoastal Waterway, west of the Apalachicola River" uses UTC-5 while "west of the Apalachicola River, except for the portions of Franklin County and Gulf County south of the Intracoastal Waterway" use UTC-6.

There are other such hilarious thingies on that page. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

Nice, isn't it?

Nope. This isn't free in 2nd class but charged for 6.5euros for one hour or 13euros for "unlimited" access.

I really hate those pesky outrageously expensive connections in communication systems, at least here in EU.

However, the very same is free of charge for "Comfort 1", ie first class. And this depends on which onboard AP you connect your laptop on. So the trick is finally to go to the bar, which is located between 1st and 2nd class...and hook your laptop on the &st class AP....which you can determine by checking the portal page.

And here you go: free Internet (but bad seats and noise). But, still, that allows getting the mail and sending it before going back to your seat. I think that maybe those lucky people who are seated in 2nd class in the bar car can still hook themselves on the right side of life..:-)

PS: after some tests, my conclusion is that this just sucks.... The connection was way too slow: I could ssh into my home server (which generally establishes various SSH tunnels for my mail traffic), but nothing never came through the tunnels.

Since then, I tried to keep up with PG's appearances here and there and he has always been my favourite artist.

So, if any of this blog's readers happen to be in Latin America and enjoy PG's music, just try to go there:

• March 20 Lima, Peru / Esplanada Del Monumental
• March 22 Buenos Aires, Argentina / Estadio Velez Sarsfield
• March 24 Santiago, Chile / Arena Santiago
• March 27 Mexico City / Distrito Federal
• March 29 Guadalajara, Mexico / Jalisco
• March 31 Monterrey, Mexico / Nuevo Leon

My, by far, favourite skipper in the greatest race around the world (alone on a 60-feet boat without assistance), the Vendée Globe, arrived last night.

I mean Samantha Davies, 34 y.o. female british skipper, who finished 3rd (or 4th, depending on Marc Guillemot's arrival time), who illuminated these weeks with her videos and messages always full of positive attitude and happiness....which is certainly harder to do when surfing in the southern latitudes over 20 knots and thousands of miles away from any land.

I recommend those of you who never went on the VG web site to just navigate around the videos and spot those sent by Sam, to understand.

She made it with a 9-year old boat (that completes its third VG), keeping up with performance while preserving the boat (probably the one in the best condition after arrival). and all Vendée Globe fans will always remember her constant smile.

All this explains why I have even more admiration for Sam's performance than I have for Michel Desjoyaux (the winner) or Armel Le Cléac'h (2nd), both among the world's top skippers (along with Loïck Peyron, imho).

The race is not over, far from this. Eight skippers still have to arrive. Three of them (Marc Guillemot, Brian Thompson and Dee Caffari) will arrive on Monday or so, while Arnaud Boissières and Steve White wtill need one or two weeks and Rich Wilson, Raphaël Dinelli and Norbert Sedlacek still are in the southern Atlantic ocean.

And kudos also have to go to the 21 skippers who couldn't complete the race, certainly the most difficult Vendée Globe ever.

I wish I would live close to Sables d'Olonne to have a chance to see a VG arrival some day. Great race, great adventure. Sad that it happes only every 4 years..:-)

Whatever happens, I like the way these last two weeks were handled. The clear communication from the release team made it clear to everybody what the deadlines were.

That helped a lot in cooking up good Release Notes and the great Release Annoucencement, as well as their translations. Of course, one can regret that all had to happen in the very last weeks (the RN could have been prepared earlier but nobody was in that mood except certainly Martin Borgert who is trying to shake up the tree for months...).

Again, great work, everybody and I wish the best to the folks who will burn their week-end up to polish the last bits of that release.

Because of the very recent point release for Etch, I had more packages to update on my etch server than I had on my sid laptop.

Probably the first time in years that this happens. It apparently means that developers have, this time, been very careful avoiding uploads to unstable during the deep freeze.

As everybody now probably knows, D-I RC2 for lenny was released on January 31st, which now allows releasing Lenny.

While the last work for Lenny is going on, I noticed that, during this week, one of our "new" translators completed the first two parts of Debian Installer translations...which is the key for a language to be "activated" (with translations flowing to packages).

So, this morning I activated Kazakh in Debian Installer, which means that we will be painting a significant part of the world in red (dear readers, were'nt you missing "my" neat maps?).

Of course, this is way too late for lenny, but given the high activity of that team now, I don't doubt that Kazakh will be part of Squeeze D-I.

So, the count is now 64 and I really have to move my a** to shake those 16 translators and teams that are listed in "work in progress". Most of them are indeed silent, unresponsive, or just sleeping..:-)

I really should update mine, too, as it is:

• too small
• 12 years old
• including that ugly hair "hook" which doesn't even look like a Debian swirl

Or maybe Wouter's art (by far the most up to date when it comes at ripples and stuff)?

So, while visiting my mom and sister in the region of St-Etienne last week, I wanted to keep my sports pace to a sufficient level as we're now 3 months ahead from this marathon I've been crazy enough to apply for.

That went good: 3 days after my first run over 30km, my brother in law convinced me to enjoy the big snow fall in Le Bessat, the ski station of my young years, 30 minutes away from the city of St-Etienne.

That was the second time ever I'm doing croos-country skiing in skating technique. But, being supposedly used to skiing in general (20 years of ski are supposed to help), we went on the longest and hardest track: 16km and over 200m positive slope....which I completed in less than 2 hours, so a lot more than the same distance by running. Cross-country skiing in skating technique is awfully hard, particularly when you have no technique at all..:-))

To complete this, I went running for about 12 km on New Year, 3 hours after partying for New Year's Eve. Interesting way to eliminate the weight surplus..:-)

And, finally, today, I went out for a 19km run in the frozen country around my place (-8 degrees) for a wonderful discovery of woods covered with ice and the climbing of the highest "mountain" in the Paris area (280m height, still !) and a great view of the neighbourhood in white, under the sun. These are the joys of running in winter, really.

As bug #500000 was reported as of Sep 24th 2008, this marks a considerable slowdown of our bug reporting rate: between bugs 400000 and 500000, it always took us nearly exactly two months to have 10000 bugs reported. Here, we needed more than 3 months! This is a 50% drop in the bug reporting speed. I think we can conclude this is a very good illustration of the considerable drop in the development of Debian, while everybody is awaiting for the release of Lenny.

You still have a few days to correct your bet for bug 600000 date.

Ah, and the very same day, the result for the very controversial vote about firmwares has been published. Even though it is very hard to interprete, I think that the very very low rating of option 1 (worded as "Reaffirm the Social Contract" but indeed meaning "let's be Free Software Zealots and nitpick every single bit of firmwares so that we can be sure to never release Lenny") clearly shows that Debian developers still have their feet in reality.

So, now let's release the bloody thing...and prove the world we still exist...