Tim Retout's www presence

Lessons

Some things I have learnt this week at DebConf:

• The cost of living in the UK is much higher than in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• I feel much better about life when I am being a fun and exciting person, compared to boring and cynical.
• My laptop is not well-suited to travelling - poor battery life, and poor wifi. However, I have mastered the art of taking only hand luggage.

I have quietly resolved to spend more time doing things that I enjoy, that maximise the use of my skills, and which help other people; and spend less time on the opposite.

So far, I have tidied up various outstanding commitments that were weighing on my mind, and offered mdbtools for adoption. I started doing some RC bug NMUs again, because on a good day they hit all three of my criteria. Some ideas are already forming in my mind of other things to do, so I shall never be short of tasks.

Posted: 30 Jul 2011 14:14 | Tags: debian

DebConf 11

It feels good to be at DebConf again, this time in Banja Luka. This is my fifth consecutive DebConf.

Getting here was fairly painful; a flight from Split was delayed, so I had to get a later bus than planned from Zagreb. Still, I met a bunch of DebConf attendees getting the same bus, so at least there was conversation.

Packaging-wise, I have been working on adding KiokuDB (and associated backends) into Debian. I wrote a patch for libossp-uuid-perl yesterday to fix a bug with its Data::UUID compatibility; this probably means I'll drop the Data::UUID ITP. Having looked at the code, I don't see how it can be easily fixed for multi-user systems.

The Perl team's forthcoming move to git has come as a pleasant surprise; I've been trying out the new workflow.

Earlier in the week I went running with bubulle et. al. - I must have missed the bit in the email where the very steep hill was mentioned. And the rain. So I had to slow down and turn around, and probably didn't quite do 15km in the end. :)

Beer is half the price of Coca-Cola here. Awesome.

So generally, I've been decompressing, and introspecting. The cafes are good for philosophical discussions; preferably when it's not raining. More later.

Posted: 28 Jul 2011 18:21 | Tags: debian

No comments

I have turned off comments on my blog - there was too much spam, and I'm not planning to invest the time to fix that properly.

On the one hand, this is a shame - it removes an opportunity for other people to respond to what I might write.

On the other hand, the idea that this was any kind of two-way conversation was always a badly-maintained illusion. I didn't have any kind of notifications set up to tell me when comments arrived; so I rarely read them, and almost never replied. I don't want to build a commercial enterprise or a "community".

So for the moment, if you want to get in touch, email me. If you want to respond publically, write your own damn blog post. :)

Posted: 22 Jul 2011 17:02 | Tags: free speech

The Prisoner

I have recently finished watching The Prisoner (1967). All the surrealism is messing with my head.

In other news, I updated GNU Enscript.

Oh, and I filed an ITP for the real Data::UUID, and promptly found a symlink attack which I suspect I failed to disclose responsibly. Hmm.

I could write a lot more, but the short version is: I need a holiday.

Posted: 13 Jul 2011 00:25 | Tags: prisoner