Over the last couple years, I have begun teaching. At first just a reading group or seminar with a handful of attendees. Last term I helped teach two large lecture classes.

I know that, compared to some of my colleagues, I spend an enormous amount of time assessing and evaluating students' assignments. I try very hard to give detailed, substantive, feedback on each piece of student work. At the end of the day, however -- at my school at least -- there's always a grade.

For someone who went well out of his way to go to a college with no grades, there's a tragic irony to the whole situation: I think grades mean little and are often worth much less. Today I am forced to to inflict them on people who, almost universally, do not.

31 Jul 2010 3:57pm GMT

According to Murphy's law, the fsck check that happens once every n boots always happens at the worst time. By default, using CTRL-C to abort it causes fsck to exit with an error, and the filesystem to be remounted read-only. It's easy to change that in /etc/e2fsck.conf:

[options]
allow_cancellation = true

31 Jul 2010 3:53pm GMT

After I finished an re-read my epic post describing my first day and a half at Debconf10 I suddenly realised that if I continue to describe the rest of 13 days here in such style and verbosity this would become a book, a boring one at that, so I decided to limit myself to 2 posts for Debcamp and then a post a day for the Debconf.

But about the first half of the Debcamp week there are things that are as usual and there are things that are not.

Let's start with the usual bits: more people arriving every day, evening parties are getting more and more fun and wild (or so people say) and the Internet and power at the hacklabs magically becomes more and more reliable day by day, the cabling mess grows organically trying to spread out evenly and not overload any individual socket, extension cords with non-local plugs appear and spread the load some more, people stress out, volunteer, crash out and repeat. All in all nothing can stop the freight train of few hundred Debian developers determined to have fun. With out own DFSG-free definition of fun. (But this year we appear to be running very close to the edge on volunteers - if we run out of those, there will be a train-wreck, so please volunteer!)

Now off to the unusual stuff.

The City is … well … it is cool and very, very impressive. It is not terribly different to me at least - I am used to such structure of the city: grid based layout of the downtown city (with some parks) and then branching out to separate, but different across-the-river districts and then sprawling out to slightly chaotic suburbs. Riga is very much like New York in the design. The difference is that New York is 10-20 times larger: the areas are 10 times larger, the buildings are 3-4 times higher on average, the streets are 2-3 times wider and yet have more traffic and there are far, far more shops, shows and restaurants. Also there is the subway. It is a great thing in that it hides the size of the city - take a bus downtown once, to find out what I mean - it takes ages to drive the distance that takes 20 minutes on the subway. I like this city, I am getting a feeling, that I could live here without much problem for me. So far I've only had this feeling in Riga and Berlin.

On the other hand this is USA. I've so far only encountered one bad thing about it, but it is a pretty big one - food. Basically all food that I've tried so far in the USA has been crap. It was tasty - salt, sugars and fat took care on my brain thinking it's food, but underneath that it was pretty crap: there was no texture, no content, no soul. The John Jay cafeteria where we are eating lunch and dinner is better than the most other options, because it is an all-you-can-eat buffet where you can choose your poison and it was also the place where I had the best piece of food in USA so far - a slice of pepperoni pizza, that had a bit of taste behind the fat. Also, surprisingly, the fast food options (McDonalds, Burger King, …) are better than the equivalents in Europe, far better. In fact the fast food is cheap and in some cases tastes better than 'regular' food, so there is no wonder why people might prefer it in some situations. So it is easy to see how people just accept shoving bland fast food or bland all-you-can-eat food into their mouths and not think much about it and thus become fat and put undue stress on their health. I expect the average weight of Debian developers to increase by 5 kg by the end of the conference. If you want to prove me wrong, running with bubulle would help you a lot with that.

Events downtown. New York is a huge city with a lot of events going on every day, so everyone should be able to find something of interest for them. For me it was the free tickets for tapeings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I got into both of those and for me The Colbert Report was by far the better experience. For one you can not get into Daily Show without a ticket (some tickets show up on the web site on the morning of the shoot around 11am), while 18 people from the stand-by list at Colbert Report got in. At The Daily Show you stand in a live line with ticket holders in one line and stand-by line separate. If you have tickets and arrive around 3pm you should be fine - any later than that and you risk to be standing outside even with a ticket. You find that out around 4.30pm when they hand out physical tickets - you have one, you get in. If not you might rush over to Colbert Report where a more humane system is used - a staffer takes down your name and email on a numbered list and then you can walk around until 5.30pm then they let the ticket holders in and after that call the names of stand-by people that get in. The Colbert Report studio is brighter, more colourful and closer to the action, also it is very rare that cameras block the view from the audience (which is common on The Daily Show). It might have also been my luck when I got on the most boring The Daily Show episode I can remember, ever. The best joke was a woman asking John is she could get a ticket for her friend in August. The warm-up act and crowd control at The Colbert Report was also way better: Colbert staff was hyper, security was ever-present, warm-up was funnier and very engaging (he grilled me for several minutes and I replied making the audience laugh very hard explaining that Latvia was like India of Eastern Europe in regards to IT exports) and Colbert himself was very gracious talking to us out-of-character before the show for a good 10 minutes.

Location, location, location. The talk rooms and event rooms and hacklabs are spread out across multiple buildings and there is a lot of other activities going on in those buildings besides Debconf, so moving between place might be confusing for the first day or two. Also the rooms are quite dark - that might cause a noise problem for me and the video team as we'll have to up the sensitivity settings on our gear. The video team is working on fixing that by throwing a bit more light on to the speakers. Elevators are wicked fast, but can also be confusing, because the ground floor is on a different number for different buildings - it can be G, 1 or even 4. Usually on campus there is a star next to the level with the exit.

The dorms. I am in the Carman building and it looks like its interior has not been updated since it was built - large ceramic bricks with very visible gaps (for the interior walls), raise-to-open windows, huge aircon fans that take up the whole bottom of the window, plumbing from the 60ies (at least). The security is weird - on one hand you have to give your room card to the guard when entering the building, but on the other hand the room cleaning crew can simply forget to close your door after they are done. Like this Thursday I returned to the dorm just before lunch only to find the door of my room open. No one was around and nothing was missing, but it's still worrying.

In any case I am steadily uploading photos from Debconf 10 to my Flickr page and new stuff should show up every day.

31 Jul 2010 3:30pm GMT

Don't get me wrong. We didn't freeze the development yet but we are freezing our developers! The air condition at the Columbia University in New York City is quite cold. Bring some warm clothes if you going to attend the DebConf that will start soon.

31 Jul 2010 12:55pm GMT

The hacklab is so cold I'm going to lose some of my toes to frostbite.

Today I spent most of my time trying to track down the DHCP problem. Phil Kern suggested it might be due to the output of Columbias DHCP server which certainly sounds plausible but without tools such as strace I'm rather at a loss as to how to figure out what exactly is going on. If anyone would like to look at the source to the Minix DNS caching thingy which is where the hang actually occurs, I would appreciate it.

Other than that I also ported iconv, gettext, and grep.

31 Jul 2010 6:53am GMT

nycsubway-heart, originally uploaded by the biella.

So an email went out to Debconf-announce with all this and MORE information but it is worth highlighting the talks/events as they are great. We look forward to having you in New York City!

**********************************************************************************************************

exciting schedule highlights
----------

Have a look at the DebConf10 schedule,
there are a lot of really interesting things planned, both during Debian Day and DebConf
itself. We have a great line-up of speakers, and other events that are
sure to make this DebConf one to remember! A couple notable events that we wanted to highlight:

Be sure to come to the DebConf Welcoming Plenary in the evening of Debian Day. This opening plenary will be the first thing that kicks
off DebConf and will be brief, important, and fun. General information
about DebConf, important logistical bits, and prizes(!) will be
had. Also, this gives you a chance to ask some questions before we get
started. Be there at 7:30pm in Davis Auditorium on August 1st!

The much anticipated Cheese and Wine party will be happening in the
evening on the 2nd. This will be your chance to see what mixture of
fermented, cultured and alcoholic things your stomach can handle!

Also exciting to mention is Eben Moglen who will be speaking on the
3rd during DebConf at 9:30am about Freedom and Privacy in the Cloud
and how we (yes us!) here at DebConf, can be the silver lining. If you
don't already know Eben Moglen
he is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and founding Director of the Software Freedom Law
Center. Since 1993 he has served pro bono publico as General
Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. Moglen was part of Philip
Zimmermann's defense team when Zimmermann was being investigated over
the export of PGP. As counsel to the FSF, Moglen was charged with
enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL) and later became
heavily involved with drafting version 3 of the GPL.

Also in the evening of the 3rd at 7:30pm we will be treated to not
only a screening of the brilliant and beautiful and (award winning!)
film "Sita Sings the Blues" in
Pupin 301, but also a Q&A afterwards with the acclaimed animator Nina
Paley! She will describe how the process of making this film caused
her to question the wisdom of copyright monopolies in the arts. The
film is under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, and her
distribution mechanism is unique as Paley consciously adopted the
methods of the free software movement to distribute the film. The
discussion with the artist after the screening will explain in depth
how and why, and discuss what Paley and QuestionCopyright.org are
doing next to encourage more artists to try the Free route.

After the film, at 9:00PM the Columbia University Astronomy
Department will host a guided stargazing event, which includes use
of several different optical telescopes on their roof. There will be
astronomers on hand to answer any questions about the stars,
telescopes, or any other topics of scientific interest.

There are many talks that are going to be exciting at Debian Day, even
for Debian Developers! One track will be showcasing general Free
Software themes and issues, and many of these talks will be really
interesting to Debian Developers, so be sure to check out the schedule and come

On Debian Day we are excited to have the Honorable Gale Brewer speak at 4pm. She is part of the New York City Council and was the
former Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government, current
Chair on Committee on Governmental Operations and will discuss the
ways that government can foster freedom in technology. Its both
exciting and a privilege to have her speak at DebConf!

day trip
---

This year, the day trip is going to be a blast, a crazy adventure at
the bizarre and fun Coney Island! Explore the historic RussianBrighton Beach! Ride the Cyclone rollercoaster, 82-years old this
year! Swim in the ocean! See the circus sideshow! Eat delicious food
or if unlucky, not so good food. Or do none of the above and just hang
out with your friends outside and have a good time.

At the end of the day we are going to go to a unique cultural event:
the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball game where we will have the chance to
watch our beloved DPL humiliate himself as he throws out the first
pitch, in his Debian kilt!

Don't like baseball, or sports? Don't worry, neither do we, but the point really isn't the baseball game,
the point is hanging out with all your closest Debian friends and
having a good laugh as Zack tries really hard not to trip, also a good
chance to experience some local culture and to relax after a hard day at the beach.

free things in the city
--------

There are an amazing number of free events happening in New York City during the summer! If you are looking for something to do, we've
compiled a list of various events from a number of different locations
for you to easily view in one spot.

30 Jul 2010 6:50pm GMT

This is how we roll at DebConf 10.

That chair protects our router

30 Jul 2010 5:16pm GMT

As I did since 2007, I will be attending Debconf again this year. I have been quite busy recently, and am lagging behind in some of my Debian work, so I plan to use Debconf to get stuff done, not just socialize and attend talks.

Here is my TODO list, basically by order of "willingness to do the work". It's probably too much for 9 days, so don't hesitate to talk to me if you want to help with some items.

• Switch the ruby1.9.1 package to a prerelease of Ruby 1.9.2. That package providing the development branch of the interpreter. That will be done while keeping the existing package name, as Ruby 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 are (supposed to be) compatible. It might be a bit confusing for users to have a ruby1.9.1 package that installs Ruby 1.9.2, but then we can just blame the upstream developers for using the same numbering space for "ruby compatibility level" and "ruby version". Bonus: will fix 2 FTBFS on {kfreebsd-,}i386.
• Update the ruby1.8 package. There's a few patches pending (including the "ruby is slow because of pthread" one). ruby1.8 1.8.7.299-2 uploaded, sync to Ubuntu requested.
• Run an archive-wide test using instest again. instest is a piuparts re-implementation that is targetted at making it easy to file bugs about installation and removal failures. It's nothing big, really, but already allowed to file 78 RC bugs a few months ago.
• Run an archive rebuild. I did one last week-end mainly to provide food for RCBC, but there are some failures that haven't been filed because they required more investigation. I also need to check back with various people about some custom rebuilds (newer GCC, etc). And I'll probably also do a rebuild of Ubuntu maverick.
• Do a ddpo-by-mail run. Last one was a longgg time ago. I have a few open requests about ddpo-by-mail that I'd like to address before spamming people again (for example, it shouldn't report about merged bugs).
• Ultimate Debian Database work: merge the upload-history importer into UDD itself to drop the dependency on a script on merkel. Also address #540132 (strange info in the upload-history table). Make sure the changes to carnivore are compatible with the carnivore importer.
• Investigate how we could improve Ruby packaging with something like ruby-support. One of the requirements is to provide an easier way to support several Ruby versions.
• Do some work on feed2imap. It got a few valid feature requests recently that I'd like to address in a 1.1 release.
• Debian/Ubuntu work: add info about bugs with patches to the PTS now that this info is available in UDD thanks to Brian Murray's work on the Launchpad side, and other pending work items from the Debian/Ubuntu BOF at UDS
• Work on Bapase and the handling of poorly maintained and low-quality packages, resurrecting an old thread on debian-qa@
• Do some packaging work: systemtap 1.3, tcsh, websec (long overdue!), and the usual pkg-ruby-extras shores. I also would like to take a look at the atlas FTBFS as I'm affected through hpcc.
• Update developers-reference. I'm totally in lazy mode about that since the maintenance was transferred to debian-policy@, but I will try to address bugs with valid patches.

30 Jul 2010 2:01pm GMT

The unofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

Of these 254 bugs, the following tags are set:

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 150 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released.

However, with the view of the Release Managers, 238 need to be dealt with for the release to happen.

Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

30 Jul 2010 11:17am GMT

Dear lazyweb or someone who is already in NY,

do I have to bring my own bed linen and towels or are they provided by Furnald? I couldn't find the information on the website. I guess I have to bring that stuff since it is not really a hotel, right?

30 Jul 2010 9:36am GMT

GUADEC is going really well this year, great to catch up with folks. A big thank you to everyone who came along to my tips and tricks talk yesterday. I hope that everyone discovered something new; I certainly did whilst preparing it. As suggested i'll try and get this content all collated up into a wiki page. Watch this space.

30 Jul 2010 8:57am GMT

Actually I was at the venue on Tuesday for a little while but my name wasn't in the system either because I has given my name in Unicode or, more likely, I had forgotten to check the "reconfirm" box on the registration form. For some reason Columbia U's DHCP server makes Minix lock up on boot. Also I left my laptops AC adapter at home. Some kind souls lent me their European adapters but they didn't work. (I have a set of international converters. Also unfortunately at home.) So after about three hours, my battery ran out and I had to leave.

So we will pretend that never happened and instead call today day 1. (Wednesday I had some unexpected family stuff to attend to so that doesn't count either.)

Today I first concentrated on tracking down why the boot process was hanging. The culprit seems to be nonamed a daemon Minix runs to do DNS resolution/caching etc. I'm consulting with the Minix devs to see what can be done about this. I added the cool MOTD banner you see above (made by Osmo). And I ported some more GNU software to match the versions in Squeeze. Tomorrow, the biggies-gcc and perl, and seeing if I can get a dpkg binary that doesn't segfault.

30 Jul 2010 4:43am GMT

30 Jul 2010 4:43am GMT

On each last Friday of July the annual System Administrator Appreciation Day is taking place.

Matt Simmons organized a SysAdmin Day Meetup to celebrate this event in New York. If you're in New York on 30th of July consider registering yourself (it's free and takes just a few seconds).

If you are participant of the Debian Conference in New York and are already hacking at the DebCamp you might want to join our group of Debian people who plan to show up, currently consisting of Paul Wise, Lars Wirzenius, Thomas Lange and myself. If you plan to join please ping me so we can show up at the SysAdmin Day Meetup together.

30 Jul 2010 12:09am GMT

Here at DebConf10 the schedule is starting to get really packed of events, which is great! About a half of those events are BoFs (in the IETF sense), i.e. discussion sessions among people interested in specific topics. (Other conferences use "BoF" to refer to impromptu, non-scheduled, and spontaneous events, while at DebConf we have traditionally submitted, reviewed, and scheduled BoFs in advance.)

As most DebConf regulars, I've attended quite some BoFs in the past and I share with others the impression that the quality and usefulness for the project of BoFs varies substantially from BoF to BoF. That's why I'd like to share a BoF recipe, which comes from possibly the best organized BoF I've ever attended. As it happens with all good recipes (and with free software), I've took the liberty of customizing it a bit.

DebConf BoF HOWTO

have a coordinator

A good BoF should have a coordinator, which is usually (but not necessarily) the person who proposed the BoF in the first place. The role of the coordinator encompasses at least 2 tasks: preparing the BoF in advance (read below) and moderating the discussion to ensure everybody get a chance to participate.

prepare in advance

A good BoF is more than just getting together, vaguely knowing the BoF topic, and ... discuss. Mind you, it might work very well that way too, but the chances of having a successful BoF are much higher if attendees arrive prepared.

That is quite simple to achieve. It just takes the BoF coordinator to prepare some working questions and/or detailed discussion topics, and advertise them as such. That way potential participants can make up their minds, recall experiences that they want to share, note down comments they want to bring into the discussion, etc. In my experience, the BoF time will then be used in a much more productive, exciting, and ultimately fun way.

Most BoFs can also benefit from a few introductory slides on the BoF topic, to ensure all participants start from a common ground. The last slide could contain a brief recap of the working questions, so that the audience have them handy.

don't be exclusive

Debian is not a company and Debian contributors are not employees, therefore we cannot expect all relevant people to attend a specific BoF, just if they had to. As usual, the risk of cutting off community members who cannot attend should be mitigated as much as possible. To that end, minutes are just great; after the BoF, minutes should be posted where appropriate, and possibly uploaded to Penta as event attachments.

... but taking minutes is just boring and not everyone is good at that (for instance, yours truly used to suck at taking minutes, even if I'm trying to get better ...). If you have a trusted participant which is good at taking minutes, great, go for it!

If you don't, use collaboration. During past DebConfs as well as at UDS this year, I've been shown a nice way of doing that. It takes a dedicated projector in the BoF room showing some real-time, collaborative editing facility (e.g. gobby). With such a setup, people usually just start taking minutes collaboratively, although explicitly inviting the audience to do that is a very good idea.

Ideally, the room should have two projectors, one for supporting slides, another for collaborative minutes taking. In case there is only one, as it is usually the case for DebConf, it's probably better to use it for minutes and switch to them as soon as supporting slides are over.

gobby.debian.net for BoF minutes at DebConf10

For DebConf10, the DebConf team has setup a gobby (infinote) server at gobby.debian.net. Just do the following in order to be ready for collaborative minutes taking:

    # apt-get install gobby-0.5
    $ gobby-0.5 -c gobby.debian.net

(Note: you shouldn't use the non versioned gobby package as it uses a different protocol and doesn't support undo, which is quite risky; see Debian bug #590753 for more background.)

As the naming convention for DebConf10 minutes, using document names that start with dc10- sounds sensible.

comments welcome!

So, what do you think of the above suggestions? Do you have further best practices to share on BoF organization at DebConf? Leave a comment or mail me. In the end it would be nice to author a proper "DebConf BoF HOWTO" document for further reference.

Thanks to Gregor for his feedback on early versions of this post.

29 Jul 2010 11:48pm GMT

A new release of RcppArmadillo is now on CRAN. RcppArmadillo makes it easy to write highly efficient and highly readable C++ code for linear algebra (based on Armadillo) in R extensions (using Rcpp for the interface).

This release upgrades the included Armadillo version to 0.9.52 (see here for Conrad's high-level changes). We had to make two minor tweaks. In the fastLm() help page example we switched from inv() to pinv()</tt)> The short NEWS file extract follows:

0.2.4   2010-07-27

    o   Upgraded to Armadillo 0.9.52 'Monkey Wrench'

    o   src/fastLm.cpp: Switch from inv() to pinv() as inv() now tests for
        singular matrices and warns and returns an empty matrix which stops
        the example fastLm() implementation on the manual page -- and while
        this is generally reasonably it makes sense here to continue which
        the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse allows us to do this

More information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

29 Jul 2010 11:42pm GMT