Santiago

On Monday, Gunnar Wolf had to go to the airport and I went with him because I wanted to go to Santiago anyway. I wanted to do some sightseeing there and I had also previously mailed Sebastian Silva who was looking for someone to sign his GPG key. I said I could meet him once I'm in Santiago and Sebastian kindly offered to let me stay at his place. On Monday afternoon, I went to Cerro Santa Lucia which is a hill right in the middle of the city with nice gardens. In the evening, I met Sebastian and we went out for dinner.

On Tuesday, I spent a few hours reading e-mail and answering some interview questions a German computer magazine had sent to me. It's really funny… when I write in English, I sometimes look up words in German; but when I write in German, I typically look up words in English because I cannot immediately think of the German words… Anyway, in the afternoon, I finally managed to leave the house and go to Cerro San Cristóbal. I enjoyed the view of the city (with the Andes in the background). I later went to the zoo where they had zebras, giraffes (jirafas!) and even kangaroos. Afterwards, I went to Pablo Neruda's house La Chascona which again was pretty impressive. I wish I would have had time to visit his third house on Isla Negra.

In the evening, I went out to dinner with Tim, someone I had met at the conference and who was interested in my research. We went to a Peruvian place because Sebastian told me that Peruvian food is really good and I wasn't disappointed (even though I'm still not sure what I had was typically Peruvian). The most striking thing was not the food, though. When we arrived at the restaurant, there was a big parking spot saying "taxi". Someone was standing on the street, waving us towards that parking spot. I was like "err, are you sure we can park there?", but Tim reassured me that it's alright. Sure enough, when we came back, the person was still waiting besides our car. We gave him some money and went away. The really striking thing is how cheap some labour is in Chile. There are people everywhere basically doing nothing the whole day. Every little shop has a guard, most apartment blocks have someone downstairs at the reception, etc. Once, we went to have a BBQ after the conference and our bus driver waited the whole evening as if this was the most normal thing in the world… in Europe, you couldn't afford that but it's really common in South America. I always felt guilty when I saw this because I want people to have good, creative and rewarding jobs but it's important to understand the social structures they have… if they didn't have jobs like that, they wouldn't have jobs at all and would be much worse off. Still, it felt very strange to me.

On Wednesday, I briefly met Sebastian after he returned from an exam at the university and then I had to go to the airport. I wish I could have stayed longer. I really liked the country and the people and hope I can return some time in the future. At least I bought some Chilean/castellano Hip-Hop and funk CDs which I'm listening to now. Given how much time I've spent in Spanish speaking countries this year, I'm also seriously wondering whether it would make sense to learn (at least some basic) Spanish…

Valparaíso, Viña del Mar and Concon

On Sunday, Gunnar Wolf and I were taken on a sightseeing trip around Valparaíso and Viña del Mar (gallery). The two cities are right at the coast of the pacific ocean and since there are many hills you get nice views all around the city. First we went to Pablo Neruda's house La Sebastiana. Pablo Neruda was a Chilean writer and poet who won the Nobel prize. He's also known for his unusual and interesting houses (of which he has three in Chile). The tour through the house was really a great experience. Neruda liked many things I'm interested in, such as stained glass and stone mosaics, and seeing his house made me really jealous. Afterwards, we went to the harbour for some food and later we went to a cliff overlooking the pacific.

After we were done with Valparaíso, we went to Concon to climb up the sand dunes. I also saw what I think was my first scorpion. You were able to rent sand boards to go down the hill and I foolishly decided that I had to try this. Actually, it turned out that it wasn't too hard; the major problem is that sand accumulates on the board and so it gets too heavy to move. Going down the sand dune was really fun but unfortunately going up again was bloody exhausting.

Afterwards, we went back to the coast and sat on a rock for a while. The sun was beginning to go down and since a ship was just arriving, we decided to go back to Valparaíso (where the port is located). We couldn't actually go to the ship but the harbour at sunset was a really nice view. In summary, a nice trip; I wish I could stay here…

Quinto Encuentro Linux

The last three days I attended and gave talks at Quinto Encuentro Linux in Valparaíso, Chile. The conference was hosted at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María which has a nice campus with a wonderful view over the bay. The conference is over now and I have to say that it was a great event. In fact, it was one of the best conferences I've been to this year. All talks except for Peter H Salus's and mine were in Spanish so I don't know how well they went, but my impression of the whole event is really good. They expected 400 visitors but close to 700 turned up, and the whole organization was fantastic. They had lots of people who were constantly there for the speakers and it was clear that someone would be there if you needed anything. To some degree, it was like in the military because they were really serious about their schedule, just with the major difference that they were very friendly. Before I arrived, they sent me a detailed schedule for every day, like this:

Thursday 21
07:30 Breakfast.
08:00 Pick up from Hotel by organizers.
08:15 Arrival to UTFSM.
13:05 Go to F-106.
13:10 Get to lunch to El Caleuche.
14:20 Return from El Caleuche.
14:30 Arrival to UTFSM.
…

The amazing thing is that they managed to stick to their schedule fairly closely. The other funny thing was that the visitors treated me like a real celebrity. Normally at conferences, maybe one or two people ask me for an autograph or picture, but at this conference literally several dozens of people wanted their picture taken with me. I was happy to do it, but I have to say that it felt pretty surreal. Anyway, I had a really great time there and I'm thankful to the organizers for their great effort.

Hard drives, another chapter done

I'm really starting to think that hardware has artificial intelligence. It just knows what the best (= worst, from my point of view) moment is to break. On Saturday, I woke up and noticed that the hard drive in my laptop had decided to die - without giving any warning whatsoever. This was pretty annoying given that I had a paper due on Monday. Fortunately, I had a spare disk and I didn't even lose any data in this incident, just one day. While restoring my data, I also noticed again that I really need to re-organize my home directory.

Anyway, even though this hard drive crash changed my plans quite a bit, I managed to write another chapter for my first year report and actually finish it on time. That should give me plenty of time tomorrow to finish up various things and get ready for my trip to Chile.

On the roof of King's Chapel

I just returned from a tour to the roof of King's Chapel. What an amazing experience! The view from there over Cambridge is really awesome and the architecture of the roof itself is pretty impressive too. Unfortunately, the battery of my camera went flat as we went up so I don't have any good pictures. Someone promised to send me his pictures though.

Another week (or two)

I've been incredibly busy over the last few days. When I first started writing this entry it was Sunday and now it's Sunday again… anyway, I put some pictures up from Sunday two weeks ago when I was still in Italy. In the morning, the whole group of us went to Fiesole which is located on the hills next to Florence. There is a nice roman site and on these hills you have a beautiful view of some landscape of Tuscany. Unfortunately, I had to leave early to get back to Bologna for my flight to the UK. Back home, I mostly focused on my research. I had a meeting with my supervisor last Tuesday which went pretty well. Since then, I've been working on defining my exact research questions and I've also been studying more research methodology.

When I went to the library to get some books for my research, I also picked up a book about photography and a book by Henry Plotkin. I've had a digital camera for quite a while now and take simple snapshots but I'd like to improve my skills and hope this photography book is a good start to get some basics. Plotkin's book is about evolutionary psychology. I wanted to read some of his books since I attended his lecture at University College London (UCL) in 2001 but never found the time. I've also (again) fast-forwarded through Kill Bill vol 1 and 2 a bit… more importantly, over the last week I've worked on my New Maintainer backlog and have read over 30 applications and made sure they're complete.

Biology and Anthropology lectures

I've been interested in biology and anthropology for quite a while (in particular evolution) and for some reason this interest has grown much stronger over the last weeks. Sometimes I wonder whether I should have studied biology instead of psychology, but on the other hand I'm pretty happy I studied psychology because it has influenced the perspective with which I view the world in an interesting way. At the same time, there are many areas in biology I'm interested in and of which I only have a very basic understanding.

While I have a fairly good grasp of evolution, I really lack basic fundamentals of biology. I have therefore decided to take biology and anthropology lectures. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to attend practicals but as a member of the university I can go to any lectures I want to. Matthew (who studied genetics) came over yesterday (with robster) and gave me some advice and I later printed the course information and read through it. I very much felt like a freshman again, going through the lecture list and creating a timetable. I've now decided to attend Biology of Cells, Physiology of Organisms, Animal Biology and possibly Evolution and Behaviour (although the latter might be too introductory).

Testing reverse build dependencies

Over the last three or four weeks, I have been building the whole archive on a mipsel machine. The autobuild run with about 5400 packages has now been completed (many packages weren't actually built because a new version has entered the archive in the meantime and so the version I tried to build was no longer available but that's not a problem since the new version will be built by the Debian autobuilders anyway).

In the beginning, I was surprised about how few mips specific problems I found. It's probably not surprising given that I filed most of those bugs last time I built the archive but it's still good to see that they did actually get fixed. On the other hand, I found many generic failures for which other people (building on i386 or sparc) have submitted bugs a long time ago. Simple autobuild bugs left open for 90 days are unfortunately not uncommon. Towards the end, I found several mips specific bugs (outdated config.guess) and filed nine RC bugs. My list of packages was sorted by the date of the last upload but some packages were so old that they didn't have a date in the database; this put them at the end rather than the beginning of my sorted list. I also found two GOT errors for which Thiemo Seufer promptly offered a patch and a superb explanation. I can only echo Jordi's thanks to Thiemo — it's really a pleasure to work with him on the MIPS port.

In any case, in this entry I don't want to talk about MIPS failures but about something more general: packages breaking other packages (build) depending on them. It seems that quite a high number of new uploads have changes which break other people's packages. In just a few days, I found several failures because of this: docbook-dsssl switched from jade to openjade, thereby breaking im-sdk which explicitly needs jade, broken ALSA headers which break packages needing those headers, ocaml changing something in a new upstream release which broke regexp-pp, and a lesstif security update which causes other packages to fail to build. First of all, let me say that I'm not listing these cases to blame people. I think the maintainers did a pretty good job. Two of those bugs got fixed within hours and one maintainer sent some mail showing that he's investigating the case.

However, these cases are a good example to point out two things. First, regularly and systematically autobuilding the whole archive is very important to assurance that packages build with current toolchain and libraries. Second, people who have packages on which other packages (build) depend should really test their uploads by compiling these packages. When I filed the bug on lesstif, Sam Hocevar fixed it within hours and apologized for not testing any Motif 1 applications. Apparently, he tested his upload with some Motif 2 applications. I've always had a good opinion of Sam and it's good to see that he actually tested his new package by compiling some packages which build-depend on it. However, I honestly wonder how many maintainers do that. Seeing all the breakage which often occurs, I guess it's a minority.

I don't know if the Developers Reference mentions something like this already but if not it would be a good addition to tell maintainers to test their new uploads by building packages which build-depend on them. Obviously, you cannot test every dependent package, otherwise we'd never get new versions of libc or GCC uploaded. However, maintainers should be encouraged to take a sample of representative packages and see whether they still work with the changes they have made.