Spent the first half of the day working on a web inteface to configure ikiwiki. The next version of ikiwiki will have that and some other neat setup features that make it really easy to set up a wiki.
Then up to Abingdon for VA highlands. I was actually reminded of Edinburgh, but not by the kilts and celtic music; instead by the post-rain damp and little alleys.
Drove Anna's golf cart around the swamp. Suprisingly capable in mud and creek ford and general rough going. (PS, if my next car has internal combusion, please shoot me.)
Another night on battery power @yurt.
Now playing: Cicadas and The Who, loudly.
I've been fearing August for months. That miserable hot streak in early June pumped it up to absolute dread. Not being able to escape to winter in Argentina didn't help.
Now it's August and we're going to have a whole week of weather like today's: In the upper 70's (aka mid 20's), breezy, beautiful puffy clouds.
I'm still dreading the second half of the month though. ;-)
Well, close as I'll get this year.
Making the most of it, thanks to the video team.
A few notes/reactions from the talks I attended today from the very, very back of the room. (AKA the skivvies and/or backyard track.)
(titular story by Connie Willis)
DPL talk
FYI, I raised my hand when Sledge asked for a show of hands. :`-(
MANCOOSI
(Is aptitude's dependency resolver deterministic?)
wiki
I doubt that trying to get the whole wiki licensed under a specific license is a good use of time. Since the wiki is not a package that we ship, but is instead a ad-hoc collection of many documents, and many conversations, I also don't see the point of a single consistent license, or any reason to be bothered by content whose license is not specified.
Be very wary of anything that makes contributing to the wiki require jumping through more legal hoops than it takes to contribute to lists.debian.org or bugs.debian.org. Chilling effects can work both ways.
method diffusion in free software projects
Most interesting talk today. Was hoping for some results, but not disappointed. (Yak shaving!)
user and NM surveys
Looked like most DDs in the audience hadn't heard of the survey?
SPI
Nice numbers and more big projects than I'd thought.
Avoided being locked in room, so still not a SPI member. ;-)
More notes and reactions from DebConf video.
debbugs
Hadn't realised how handy bts select is!
My CVE-XXX-XXXX tags are a fairly large percentage of the 3000+ unique
user tags. 2461 to be exact. :-) It would be nice to be able to view a list
of all users of usertags, and their tags, in the BTS web interface.
Yay! Don implemented the summary idea already.
(And I implemented bts summary during his talk.)
Local partial debbugs mirror: Crazy idea, but better than bts cache. :-)
(And if it provides an incentive for a current and proper debbugs deb to
be maintained, that's a win.)
vcs-pkg
I won't bother once again repeating my responses to tired arguments like "git's archive format will change!" Been there, done that, been ignored; stopped maintaining any non-native packages; your loss.
Topgit looks generally handy, and it was neat to have its author on irc during the talk.
video team
Hundreds of remote watchers -- impressive..
Looking forward to the remote controlled telepresence robots at debconf 10!
(Also to a lack of tango loop music.)
bugs in large packages
Bug summaries are not yet shown in the "extra information" in the bug index page.
Today I figured out why the awesome window manager's tags are so eh, awesome.
I'm attending debconf via irc and web stream, and have that on tag 9. Which I mostly think of a a desktop, since I generally view one tag at a time, and flip between them like desktops.
But often I want to browse the web, or do something else too, without losing the video and irc offscreen. So from tag 9, I can press mod+ctrl+3 to display tags 9+3 at the same time. And after I've done this, can mod+left/right to go up and down between tags, and tag 9 stays selected and visible. Awesome automatically lays everything out.
Only thing I don't like is that if I use mod+N to switch to a specific tag, it will drop tag 9.
Missed the morning talks.. looking forward to replays being available..
rails
Projects not bothering to release tarballs, and just publishing a git repo (hopefully with some tags!) will only become more common, I think, and it's interesting to see this is already very common with ruby gems.
Faking up an orig tarball is still a reasonable workaround now, but will probably look very retro in 5 years.
Re Debian vs Rails communities, I wonder if there's a generation gap in here somewhere..
rest
(will update throughout the day)
I'm going to cut down on debian-related stuff further. At least until next DebConf, I plan to reduce my involvement in the project to a minimum.
So, I'm unsubscribing from all (52!) lists now, except debian-devel-announce. Feel free to mail me privatly if you want to ask about anything. I'll still see bug reports.
This "beach trip" was unusual, as its ocracode shows:
OBX1.1 P5/6/4 L6 S12+b----c---- U10(mountains,freshwater,etc) T0 f0 b0 Rd Bb----m----n---- F+ SC----s--g0 H----f0i0.5 V+++s--m0 E-r--
Here are 4 generations of Hess's on a visit to the Bluff Mountain Preserve, which is not normally open to the public and has what is supposed to be the only fen in the southern Appalachians.
Also, I no longer have a car after that trip. I am, however, looking at various electric bicycles. As someone who hates being posessed by posessions, I'm happy that losing my car doesn't really bother me.
Oh, and Leo has kitty-laryngitis.
Yesterday was a grim and dismal day. Highlights were stunting the growth of lots of grass, clover, and weeds, and watching the evacuation of New Orleans on streaming TV. (While remembering tuning in to an AM station late at night as Katrina was headed that way, and wondering why things seemed so calm and there was so little traffic.) Lowlights were existential blah.
Today, trucking adventure to get out to Anna's, then hauled cinderblocks up the hill to the yurt, built a fire pit and we dined on lamb kabobs and her delicious garlic fried green beans.
Have you noticed that 90% of the 30-day fscks on laptop boot happen when it's on battery power? Even if it's only on battery power 50% of the time. One of these days I need to fix it so that ctrl-c makes it cleanly abort, rather than mount the disk read-only and fail to boot.
Also, Amazon prime is super dangerous. I tried their free trial and bought a large amount more books and stuff online than I usually would. Their usual free shipping requires bundling things up over time, and delays the instant gratification by shipping slowly. That tends to discourage impulse buys very nicely. Which is a weird decision for a company to make.