Nardol

Great to hear about “etch and a half”. I’ve just upgraded all my systems and everything went smooth. I dumped my home-compiled Ruby in favor of Debian’s version now, since it fixes the annoying security bug. Thanks for the good work people!

Here is a story people are bugging me to tell here: Since 2003, every year in fisl’s last day we, Debian Brasil, hold a “party” to celebrate Debian’s anniversary (I know it’s on August, but it’s probably the only opportunity we’ll have to gather all the gang together so we do it in advance anyway). It’s always something that draws everybody’s attention in the conference… I wonder if the pieces of cake we distribute have anything to do with it…

Anyway, this anecdote happened during fisl9.0’s party. I was there, helping by distributing cake and blowing our whistles when Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall got there to check what’s going on. I met Jon around 2001, in OpenBeach, an event that happens in Florianópolis every year (and that Jon likes to attend)... he’s the most pleasant guy, with lots of stories to tell. Since this years’ fisl was so intense, I barely had time to talk to him… in fact, that was the first time we saw each other this year. We hug each other and were asking how’s each other life’s going and so, when Jon got his camera out of his pocket and asked some guy in the crowd to get our picture. I did the same. We exchanged some compliments and he left saying that he still had to work in his talk.

Jon is quite a character. In fisl, every time he wanders around his picture is taken over one hundred times (I actually saw some father taking pictures of him holding his child like he were running for Senate or something, one time). So he left with some people around him and I think he’d not seen what happened next. I turn towards Debian’s booth, to resume the cake delivery when some guy in the crowd asked me to take a picture with him. And then another one… and another. I believe my picture was taken another two or three times before I got to the booth. I can’t believe! I was about to tell people “Hey! I am nobody! Stop taking pictures with me…” What were they thinking? I imagine something like “I don’t know who this guy is, but if Maddog took a picture with him, he must be some one!” was crossing their minds.

When the party was over I went back to the Organization Committee room and told this story… LTSP’s Jim McQuillan (another good friend) told me I was “Important by Association”, and everybody just kept laughing at me because of that. I haven’t got the time to tell Jon about it… I hope he’s reading.

I think I am going to check what pictures people are uploading about fisl, to see if I can find myself on any ;-)

They’ve came down with a participant number for fisl9.0: 7417. That’s it… over SEVEN THOUSAND! I was told it’s still an estimate, since they haven’t merged the databases yet (anyway, that’s the official number so far). This fisl is huge! One more picture of the crowd, just for the record:

Now everything is fine. TVSL went online with no problems (once the network was fixed) and remained broadcasting the event the whole day long. All was so fine that one can think it’s even boring! I spent half the day attending our company booth and the other half trying to help the organizing committee. While walking around, two linux-driven home-made robots called my attention. The first one serves water to the guy in front of it:

The other one just walks around:

On the Debian side of the “trench”, I met João Eriberto Mota Filho, Debian Developer wannabe who asked me to sign his key. I’ve seem he before, since he’s a frequent speaker at fisl and welcome him as a future developer. Meanwhile I was “reminded” by faw that I still owe him my signature… since DebConf4!! I signed so many keys in the KSP we held then, that one or two might have been missed… I intend to fix that RSN ;-)

We are at T-48h of fisl9.0, and everything starts to take form. I spent the whole afternoon getting our icecast infrastructure online. We’ve got 6 servers, all with different bandwidth and not all with the same architecture… The debian boxes were prevalent (4 of them – 1 amd64 and 3 i386), all of them etch. We’ll be able to follow the statistics at tvstats website (not all the servers are enlisted yet).

In this process I found an evil bug in debian’s icecast package, I will have to debug to understand it better: when relaying from a master server (which is our set-up), if the source stops feeding the master, the relay segfaults. The strace shows it just segfaults while pooling… I got no explanation for it and I’ll have to dissect it if I want to build a proper bug report. In the meantime, I installed the sarge-backports version, and it worked… so, the bug report will have to wait until after fisl :-)

I took some pictures to show how’s everything being put together. Take a look:

And some of the infrastructure crew:

See you all there!