apparently I'm a dinosaur

Biella, I am from there and I do agree. If I was still living there I would try to form a team and make a bid. Simon even made noises about organizing a bid at DebConfs past. I wish he would :)

But a DebConf in New York would be almost as good.

So first the bad news is that I'm not coming to DebConf this year. There are a few reasons for this. It's fairly far and expensive. I thought the lineup of talks was pretty similar to the last two years. And perhaps most fundamentally, I don't want to go somewhere cold (well, cool) in the summertime. I think this may be a Canadian thing, but I love summer time and I don't want to squander any of my warm days. So have a good time folks, I'll miss you and I'm certainly going to make the effort to be there next year. And lets hope DebConf 10 is in Montréal :)

I will however be heading to OLS for the first time. Which is ironic because I used to live 2 hours from Ottawa and never went. Now I live several more hours away and now I've decided to go. Irony is fun.

I'm also thinking of attending HOPE here in New York. I'm not really sure what to expect. The talks seem really eclectic, which is cool, but makes it hard to figure out what to go to. Suggestions welcome!

Joey Hess writes that he may not attend DebConf this year because he canceled his talk and he believes this doesn't entitle him to sponsorship. I must beg to differ. Joey's contributions to Debian are numerous and ongoing, and his knowledge and general levelheadedness about Debian are legendary. I realize that in the post Dunc Tank era people are leery of creating the perception of rewarding someone monetarily, but with no disrespect intended just having him there to contribute and ask questions of would be more valuable than some of the talks (certainly more than the BoF I'm giving :P).

I have no idea if Joey's interpretation of the situation is correct, but if it is and his sponsorship will be cut I'd implore the DebConf sponsorship folks to reconsider.

I upgraded my mailserver, etc box to etch. It was fairly painless, a few tweaks to do here and there. I'm looking forward to newer version of things like Spamassassin. I'm also booked for my trip to Edinburgh, I'm really looking forward to that, since I've never been there and it's where my mother was born (well not Edinburgh, but Scotland).

I was looking forward to going to the New York etch release party, but I had to come out to Mountain View earlier this week. Luckily I think I will get to attend a BAD meeting this week. Being part of Debian sure is cool these days.

I'm terrible at the whole blogging thing, I've been back for two weeks and haven't found the time to summarize my time at DebConf. I had an excellent time. I met a lot of great people and even found a squash partner for the next DebConf. It was really quite unforgettable, so thanks to everyone involved.

Hanging out with sfllaw there, I was exposed to a lot more Ubuntu-esque things that I really had before. Some people there were quite unhappy about Ubuntu. To me, it's just not really that interesting, one because I don't see it as being substantially better or different from Debian and two because it looser stand on freedom. But hey, this is free software, people seem to like it, and I'm glad to see something related to Debian getting money and attention, rather than say RedHat or SUSE. I think a lot of developers would be happier with Ubuntu if it was just easier to ignore.

Then there was that dinner, and the events surrounding it. While I and many others won't miss Ted, I don't think he was treated at all fairly. Being thrown out in the middle of conference when seemly he did nothing wrong there was not very civil. If people could not stand to be around him, they did not have to be around him. He could have just as easily been removed from the project after the conference was over.

Enough griping though. If I came away with anything from the conference, it was a renewed vigor to work on Debian. Now if only my schedule would permit it.

So Johannes (Johannes Berg perhaps?) gets a beverage, even though I figured it some hours before after wading through obscure mailing list posts. So for the record (aka Google), to enable the fn-key on last generation PowerBooks, you need to enable CONFIG_USB_HIDINPUT_POWERBOOK in your kernel. It's not enabled by default, but there's already a bug about it, so hopefully it will be fixed next release.

So a lot has been going on here at DebConf 6. Yesterday we spent a sun soaked day at Xochicalco. It was hot out, but not unbearable, and it was really interesting. Makes me want to see Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, even though I'll bet it will be crap. We also had a delicious late lunch at a local buffet. I think the key to their deliciousness was serving actual Mexican food, rather than the quasi-Western fare at the hotel. We also had the foreign liquor BoF, which had excellent representation from various countries. I want to go to Puerto Rico for Christmas.

The night before sfllaw had the genius idea to get some tuna and feed the kittens running around the hotel complex. They fought tooth and claw for every scrap of the tuna, then proceeded to wrestle and play for our amusement. They were still afraid of us, but not so badly, and it was completely adorable. Pictures are up on sfllaw's Flickr stream. Before a small group of us had dinner at a small Argentinian steak house. It was fantastic, and put me a meat coma for the rest of the night. Earlier in the day I attended an interesting talk by Don Amstrong about the GPLv3. He helped clarify some questions I had on the optional components of the license and how to combine them. Very interesting, and it's nice that Debian is represented on committees helping draft the next draft.

Tuesday I attended a couple of very interesting talks by Manoj relating to SELinux. He basically confirmed my suspicion that SELinux is really hard, but nonetheless worthwhile. I'll have to pick up O'Reilly's SELinux book and learn more. It looks likely it will be in the base install in some form or another for etch.

Monday night's highlight was a discussion between madduck, sfllaw and I. We talked mostly about why people feel unhappy about Ubuntu and maybe some ways of fixing it. Hopefully this DebConf will help bring the two camps together more than before.

I've also been killed in Assassins, after only killing my first victim. I also thank the gods that I brought my old Orinocco wireless card, because the Broadcom drivers for my PowerBook isn't happy with the wireless here. I could of sworn that thing was working at some point. The flaky Internet connectivity is frustrating, but I can tell the volunteers are fighting a hard battle against some tough limitations, so thanks for the hard work!

PS: If anyone knows a good way to get the Fn-key with Page Up/Down working on a Aluminum PowerBook, a beverage of your choice is yours.

So I'm halfway through my 2nd full day here at DebConf 6. The trip over was fairly uneventful. Dorval Airport charges a fairly ridiculous amount for WiFi. Cost me $10 to surf for an hour. Such a ripoff. Meet Jimmy in Newark. A bit of a mad rush from the Mexico City airport to the bus station to catch the last bus to Oaxtepec. Mexico city is big (says Captain Obvious). Arrived at the resort after midnight, and was greeted by a nice gift bag and many developers, including one of my roomies for the week, sfllaw. There are wild cats everywhere on the resort! They're adorable, but a little heartbreaking. There's waterpark here too, need to try to find time for that. The swimming pool closes at 6pm, just around the time I'm most keen for a swim.

Yesterday, the conference officially began. sfllaw, I and few others (including important spanish speakers), went into town for breakfast. I had a chorizo echilada, very nice and not sick yet. The talk level was fairly light, and sfllaw went to town again to get some beer, limes and water from town. The deposits on the beer bottles were almost the same as the price of the beer! sfllaw theorized that it was to discourage destroying the bottles. The day caught up with me in the evening and I fell asleep and almost missed dinner. Luckily we made it just in time. The conference food has been fairly good, and I can't argue with the price. The net connection seemed to have problems in the evening, I was feeling a mite anti-social and the previous 24 hours had caught up with me, so I totally crashed around 11.

Today was some interesting talks, the most interesting being the Ubuntu Annual Report by Mark Shuttleworth. During the QA, a lot of the same objections seemed to be raised (LaunchPad non-freeness, passing back to Debian. The same soft answers were forthcoming. I mostly have no problem with Ubuntu, and think sometimes we're a bit whiny about them. This is free software, we can't compel anyone to do exactly what we want, nor do they owe us. I'm happy to get what help I do from them.

So I'm all booked up for DebConf. I felt very put out about missing all the sauna fun last year, so I made sure not to miss this time around. I wonder if there are sauna's in Mexico, or are they rather redundant.

So to all my Canadians friends, especially mricon, who have to stay here while I'm in Mexico for a week: So long suckers!