We had in total fourteen participants. The number of release-critical bugreports touched and processed is not clear, but over 100 bugreports were looked at and either got comments added for clearification, maintainer pinged, unblock requests filed or already filed ones noted down, or NMUed. Given that we are in freeze since a while now and many easy bugreports already squashed by those who aim for a daily fix, I consider this impressive.
There is also the point that we managed to get some people involved that didn't consider themself techy enough to be of help. On the contrary, they were a great help on checking these bugreports with analyzing the discussions in some lengthy bugreports and upstream bug trackers, or trying to reproduce some issues. I can just hope that the weekend left an impression deep enough to keep them in the boat.
All in all, I'm quite pleased of the outcome, especially in the light of severalotherevents catching the interest of potential participants which were going on at the same weekend. Thanks to all the people that stumbled by, and I am looking forward to maybe having another BSP at some point, but then I hope to not clash with so many other events. Thanks!
Sometimes one stumbles upon artists by accident and immediately falls in love with them. A link to a video from Lindsey Stirling was dropped in a chat I was paying attention to at that time, and it immediately touched me. She's got style, and she's got great videos.
Speaking of videos, here they are:
Electric Daisy Violin: This was the song that was dropped. And it touched me, especially her dressing style. Maybe her legs will also catch your attention like they did to me. :)
Crystallize: The subtitle Dubstep Violin of this video is what describes her style best. Great play.
This poem was triggered by a discussion with a special person—not special in the sense I address in the poem though.
My life's hating me
But it is not a one-way:
I'm hating my life
Hate being special
I know I can help others
But what about me?
All quite supportive
Respect for my openness
And encouraging
Though, no step further
No clue how to handle me
Afraid to ask me
Hooking up with me?
Suddenly embarrassing
Just scolding words left
Want to be normal
Maybe I'll lie to myself
Though that won't work out
I am what I am
And sometimes it just pains me:
Hate being special
I'm hating my life
But it is not a one-way:
My life's hating me
Please refrain from asking whether I feel fine, I am in good mood. :) But I haven't written anything in a way too long time, I noticed how little actually during selecting poems for the International Poetry Night during debconf. So I picked up the idea and caressed it until I came up with the above piece about with which I am quite happy. Think about it, and ... try to enjoy.
Wheezy is coming closer to the release, there though are still way too many release critical bugreports outstanding for it. Squeeze has already been released, but it has collected even more release critical bugreports than wheezy since. To be able to reduce these amounts I will be at the Linuxhotel in Essen at the weekend from 23rd to 25th of November, and it would be a great pleasure if I could convince you to join me in this effort.
As readers of my blog might assume, my main aim will be those RC bugs affecting squeeze and I would be happy if some people interested to work on those could join me, I plan to give a quick quick explanation about the version tracking of the BTS and why we should care about stable too, but the event will definitely not be limited to squeeze RC bugs. Also, it will be a good chance to improve your key stats for the web of trust in case your GnuPG key hasn't got enough signatures yet or you want to transition to a stronger one.
Please read the Community page of the Linuxhotel for what they offer for accommodation in case you want to use their lodging. Personally I'll go for the two-bed room with breakfast option, but you are of course free to bring your own sleeping bag and mat if you want to cut short on the expenses.
In case of any questions, feel free to ask me right ahead. It would be great if we could help both our stable release and the next stable release during the weekend, and if you could join in! Please add yourself to the wiki page about the BSP.
First things first: The issue with the feedback form is fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I'm not sure if you followed the schedule of this year's debconf closely, but there was an International Poetry Night happening. Given that Mermaids still is quite important for me, but also, that I like to write poetry every now and then, I had the idea spinning around in my head to present Mermaids there. The simple thought of that made me extremely nervous.
Things happened as they liked to happen: the video streaming setup for debconf still was giving me a bit of headaches, and suddenly it was too late to print out the poem because I didn't even had CUPS installed on my new laptop. Also, having reread it recently I noticed that it wasn't flowing too well, so I was uncertain whether it would be possible to properly perform it.
I attended nevertheless. It was rather cosy in El Panal, but still a fair amount of people there. And to my surprise, quite a lot of Debian people were presenting poetry. Some in Spanish, some in English, but also one in Japanese, one in German and even one Esperanto. I had the feeling that I really should present something too. I still was extremely nervous, but during the day I had opened some of my poems in the browser, so I started to write down The Girl and the Boy, and when Fito called me to the microphone, I think most people were able to tell how nervous I was about it.
But it went well. It even went so well that I felt the need to perform another poem. I chose that's what friends are for, quickly scribbling it down in bad light. The choice was easy, given that it is one that means a lot to me and that an haiku already got presented. It was really a nice experience to not only write these poems and publishing them on deviantART and in my blog, but also to present them to a live audience.
Then there was a break. Actually I thought it was over already, but they started a second round. And I somehow liked the way it worked out, so I started to dig for something else to present. I settled for Strange—and Jonathan insisted on translating it into Spanish and present that version, too. His version wasn't in Haiku style, but I think it still was a very nice idea. It seem to have been received well, but given that I don't speak Spanish I can only hope he was able to catch the feelings that I did put into this short piece. I am confident he did well. :)
As final piece I settled for another short piece, this time it was in German, Wahre Liebe. I think I was able to transport the feelings of it with adding pauses in certain spots, although I fear most people didn't get it because it was ... well, in German.
Again, a fair amount of the people who presented poetry were from Debian, actually more than half of it I think. And I am wondering: When will the CfP for next year's debconf open so we can try to establish this event as regular debconf event? And who knows, maybe I'll find the courage then to perform Mermaids.
It's almost seven years now since I wrote/published Mermaids. It was an important step in my life, confessing publicly what I've found out about myself, how I feel and identify myself. It definitely has been a certain turning point in my life.
A year later, there was the Debconf6 in Mexico, which was just as important. I was wearing a skirt for the first time, and that for the whole duration of the two weeks. It was an enormous feeling of freedom, and I knew I was feeling at home. That was also the time I shaved off my beard.
And since? Well, I sort of limited myself to these two weeks every year. Debconf is my haven, Debconf is my home. Here I allow myself to be myself. Debian is my family. And like in every family, there are people who won't understand, but that doesn't matter. I feel comfortable to express myself in this crowd in the way I feel.
Being abroad seems to help with the confidence, and it seems like it also shines through. I haven't had lots of strange looks. To the contrary, when I went with a skirt to a homosexual acceptance event at home in Vienna, there was a group of gays who were pointing and laughing. Quite an interesting experience, one would assume that people who are wanting more acceptance would be more acceptable and tolerant themselves...
But, I don't think I will ever take the step toward actually turning my body into a female one. It was an important step for me to find out about my inner self, and it actually managed to make me accept my male body; even though I can totally relate to people not being able to understand this—both people not in the situation and people being in the situation and needing the physical adjustment to be able to be happy again. But this is what and how I am: Contents may vary from packaging.
This though has an inherited problem: as I am not (usually) heading for a female appearance (besides my skirt during Debconf), people keep addressing me with a male pronoun, even, or rather especially when using my nick Rhonda. This is something that I consider a fair bit disturbing, especially when it comes from people that I consider to address with the term friends. One would assume that people who you share a fair bit of private life with would be the ones who can understand and relate better than others. But that's where we are, and I also can understand the troubles: I'm not giving them much visual help for fixing their thoughts.
I found the confidence in my body, and like most of you know, I have a son I dearly love (and miss like hell these two weeks), so I know how to use the tools it comes with, frankly spoken. But I won't go the road to adjust my body to be a female one instead, just to convince people that I really am the female person that I identify as. It might be hard for you to understand that, it might be hard for you to accept it—it is also hard for me, to fight for the acceptance that I thought are an inherent part of the term friendship.
I have deepest respect for the people who feel the requirement and have the strength to adjust their body to their mind. It though just isn't the road for me. I already have enough uncertainties in my life to cope with, and I don't need another one to deal with, related to that I might not be able to accept my body after the transition than I am able to accept it now. It's just not important enough for me to find my place. My place is here, my home is Debconf.
This is the third summary of my squeeze RC bug squashing. If you take a look at the bug graph you will notice that the blue line went up a bit over a two week's period. I would like to claim that confirming the samhain RC bug 618728 did cost me the time (I actually gave it the time to finish), but the real reason was that I was looking at other stuff. I came back with a vengeance though, so here is the list of the bugs squashed for squeeze since the last report:
This is the second entry in my series about squeeze release critical bug squashing. In response to my last blog post it was asked whether this is proper release critical bug squashing. Indeed there haven't been any patches or upload involved in this, only BTS handling, but this doesn't mean that these bugs weren't considered to be affecting squeeze. You can see this effort currently as weeding out the "wrong" bugs so that the list gets more useful and actually be able to ask maintainers to address the real issues.
You can at least see in this graph that the blue line is going down constantly since the year change instead of rising up like before. And I hope I will be able to keep it below the green line for a while still. Also thanks to the release-team and ftpmasters that it was possible to keep the massbugs about waf binary blob not being preferred source for modification out of affecting squeeze and ignore it for the current stable release—the required changes for those would rather be a fair bit intrusive for a stable update.
I am glad that I managed to keep it up and even have a nice margin in case I can't put any effort into it some day but still have more bugs squashed than days there are in the year so far. Currently I am at 60 bugs in 39 days. This gives a warm feeling. :)
The following announce is lazily copied from Paul Wise's announce. There is only one thing I like to add: the screenshots that are submitted and collected on screenshots.debian.net are visible on the packages websites (both Debian and Ubuntu) and are also used by the software-center package, so they help people to get a first impression of the package they might want to install.
Have you ever wondered how to start getting involved in Debian/Ubuntu? Do you enjoy discovering new games and playing them? You might want to come to the games screenshot party! We hope that the party will be a fun, easy, low-commitment way to get involved.
The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing a half-day screenshotsparty on the weekend of 25th-26th February for creating screenshots for all the games that are available in Debian/Ubuntu.
If you are interested in attending, please add your availability to the poll linked from the announcement so that we can get some idea of attendance and when is a good time for the people who are interested.
Look forward to lots of game playing, screenshots and merry time, hope to see you all there!
As sort of new year's resolution I started picking up the habit to work on release critical bugreports for squeeze again. The number is way to high to be healthy, but at least it is (still) below the amount of release critical bugreports for unstable.
It will be an uneven fight because it seems that there are quite some people working on weeding out release critical bugreports in unstable, but those who are interested in weeding out releasing critical bugreports in stable seems to be limited, even though it is one of our supported releases and thus should receive quite some attention, at least by the corresponding package maintainers themself.
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