Paul's Journal

I have just sent a mail to the Debian/Ruby Extras mailing list stating that I will also give up most of my Ruby packaging efforts and reduce my involvement in the team. I am following Lucas Nussbaum in his decision. Although our reasons are slightly different, I subscribe most of what he says in his blog post. Besides that, I haven’t done much Ruby programming in the past years, making me lose the motivation for the huge load of packages I am responsible for and thus subconsciously perceive that as a burden, as I feel guilty not having/making time to work on them.

So, what does this mean? I will handover (co)maintainership of over 50 libraries. Many of which have dead upstream, unfortunately. Also will I be looking for someone to take over the administrative tasks of heading the team such as mailing list moderation and Alioth repository access. I will keep maintaining some programs that I still use, such as Camping, and am approachable for (mentor) uploads.

Meanwhile I will continue my work on my PhD thesis, which is progressing well and should lead to my defence (hopefully) somewhere around September this year. That said, I will try to keep tinkering with Ruby and other F/OSS projects. Oh, and also to get more motivated and some inspiration…

A few months ago I realised it has been 10 years already since Spacelabs ¹ was founded. Today we will celebrate that with a reunion and probably reminisce about past projects, events and experiences. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to accompany this with a post.

The past

Spacelabs was founded to create something that sits in between research and consumer appliances. Since we are associated to the Electro-Optical Communication group these things often had to do with bandwidth. For example, showing the ease of use of plastic optical fiber or participate in GPRS/UMTS trials. However, due to the loose structure of Spacelabs, we ventured into many other projects of our own such a information system-enabled fridge with a barcode reader, a dynamic DNS system, etc. At some point we got our own Internet connection with an accompanying subnet. It has been fun and rewarding to learn how to setup and run a mini ISP.

Spacelabs doesn’t have any formal structure: when you are on the mailing list, you are a member. There are no regular meetings, no hierarchy, no obligations. So in some ways, we are a group that is much like a free/open source software community. I think that this approach has provided us the drive to work both on projects during our free time as well as our own ideas.

I feel that Spacelabs has contributed so much to my life. It might not be the typical study association, but it was a big supplement to my studies, it was fun and it was completely ours. Not only did it teach me many, many technical things—from networks to program languages to software design—but it also gave me experiences on other levels, such as very attuned group work and responsibilities for key systems.

The future

Soon, everyone connected to Spacelabs will have finished their Master’s or PhD (in my case) and nobody will be left to continue the project. Although this is a bit sad, I think we can be proud of what we have accomplished, learnt and experienced. I will miss our location high in the “Potentiaal/E-hoog” building overlooking Eindhoven, and our being together as a group. We are however not gone yet, there is still a lot to plan and to work on if we want to rescue the huge amount of servers and services that we have accumulated over the years if we were to leave…

¹ Yes, the website is very much from the past.

What is this? A real journal post after all this time? Yes, apparently! Some of you have noticed (and mentioned) that I stopped posting halfway my trip to Iceland. I got so backlogged on the pictures already that I had no time and motivation to continue posting. I might write some summary post about the trip later. This journal did not really die during my time in Iceland, it has been quite dead since April 2008. I think there are three reasons for this:

1. A lack of motivation to really sit and write something (but how long does it take, really?)
2. Me joining the microblog “hype”. This was apparently already over two years ago.
3. Moving to another house and discarding my old laptop in the process. This made my journal/blog software unaccessible.

I have restored the software on my current laptop now. We’ll see how it goes. ;)

I’ve been here for over 2 weeks now and I feel like I’ve gotten used to the place. I am a bit behind with the journal posts but on the other hand always quite up-to-date with the pictures. The following describes event from Thursday June 6 until Tuesday June 16.

Sunsets

Sunsets are different everywhere. On Thursday we took a trip to the tip of the isle on which Reykjavík is located to a separate town called Seltjarnarnes. Since we were there around sunset, I took some (quite colourful) pictures.

2009-06-11: Sunset near Seltjarnarnes

Later in the week, when Arnar left for a workshop in Dublin, I took the bicycle out for a ride. It was nice to get some exercise again, Reykjavík being considerably hilly. When I arrived at the university around midnight, I noticed that Willard was just arriving. We had some tea, met other people that were hanging around and viewed the sun set from the roof of the building.

2009-06-14: Bike trip to the RU and back

Master and Bachelor Graduation

Reykjavík University, being a rather small university (there is also the University of Iceland here), does the graduation ceremony in one go. So, I went with some friends of Arnar to attend his graduation on Saturday. Well, this was quite different from the one I had. This ceremony is for 420 (!) candidates at once, while mine was more personal. However, they make a big event out of this which speeches and musical intermezzos while mine was rather bare in that respect.

From 2009-06-13: Graduation Ceremony

After the ceremony there was a reception for all students followed by a party at Arnar’s. This party ended with hanging around in the kitchen for two hours, talking and laughing. This formula is the so-called “kitchen party” which seems to be an Icelandic thing.

Work

I ended my work here in Iceland on Tuesday with a lunch and meeting with Anna and Luca. We discussed our previous work and a way to supplement the results to be able to make it into a journal paper. The discussion was productive and we decided on a plan, so I’ll start with this somewhere in July when I return from my holidays!

So, I have been here in Reykjavík for a while, working, exploring, eating, sleeping. I must say, some things are totally different from everything I am used to (especially the surroundings, nature) and other things are very familiar (if not to NL, then to Scotland).

Work

I have been working at the Reykjavík University, a private university coexisting next to the University of Iceland. It is located across the street of a big mall which turns out to be very convenient for lunch and instant-need purposes. The Computer Science school has a “theory day” on the 19th and I will giving a talk which I am preparing now.

Leisure

Although I have been here for just a few things, I have engaged in many activities already. First of all there was the very nice hike to the waterfall Glymur. It has shown me a glimpse of the adventure and nature that Iceland can offer.

2009-06-09: Hiking to Glymur

2009-06-10: Stroll through Reykjavík

Besides that, the infinitely long days seems to induce a very relaxed, free view on planning. Having dinner at 23:15, going for a hike at 20:00, visiting the cinema at 22:30. This makes every work day still feel like a holiday.

I am all set for my trip to Iceland! (Well, except for the actual packing of stuff.) The purpose of the trip is a work visit and holiday combined. In the first week (maybe extended to 9 days), I will be working at the Reykjavik University on some process algebra things and possible present my past work. During my time there I can stay at the appartment of Arnar, whom I’ve met when he was attending our university for his Master’s. Thanks for providing me with accomodation and congrats with obtaining your Master’s degree! When my days at the RU are over, I will explore, tour, hike around the island with him and some of his friends. Very much looking forward to that!

Some travel information for Sunday June 7 (travelling with Iceland Air):

I will be returning on Sunday June 28:

I will attempt to keep you all updated via this journal and/or the usual microblogging sources: Twitter / Jaiku / Luonica.

More than a year ago I tried out Jaiku and it worked quite well despite some of its glitches. Although the number of journal posts plummeted, I’ve been able to keep up the microblogging. I’ve noticed in the past year that others preferred Twitter and/or identi.ca, but I didn’t want to join all these networks and duplicate my microblogs and all the hassle that came with it. This week I’ve registered myself on ping.fm, so I can post to more services (my Twitter, my Jaiku) simultaneously. Meanwhile Christian had set up a local (test) Laconica service, which available as of yesterday as Luonica on http://ica.luon.net/ (for all Luon users). Obviously, I have also added Luonica to my publish list.

I have attended FOSDEM again this year. Most of all, it was nice to see everyone again, especially the Collabora crew. Besides having fun while hanging out with them again, I must say FOSDEM was quite a motivation boost too!

I feel motivated again to work on Ruby packaging. The whole RubyGem mess and other less-specific Ruby-related messes keep draining my motivation. This feels very conflicting, since I like the language very much. The upcoming transition to Ruby 1.9.1 will be quite a challenge and I hope that we can finally work out a nice, actual Ruby policy for Squeeze.

A few days ago I have also joined the pkg-gstreamer team, mainly to work on Elisa packaging. Elisa is a nice-looking media center application that I am using on my HTPC. Debian’s experimental suite now contains an up-to-date version of Elisa, try it out if you want.

Elisa 0.5.27

So, why is Elisa not in unstable yet. Well, Elisa has a plugin system which also features auto-updates. While this is very nice on platforms such as Windows, it is not really nice for Debian. I have been working to get this updating disabled by default. Once I am sure (hopefully by the time 0.5.28 gets released) that it is in order, I wil upload it to unstable.

Meanwhile I am planning to work on some Elisa plugins to add some features that I feel are missing. First of all I need webradio a la Rhythmbox in there. Then something to watch TV: a MythTV frontend-plugin, via UPnp, or whatever works. Finally it might be nice to have to have a plugin to setup video-conferencing using Telepathy. I’m quite sure some of these things are lying around somewhere, more about that later.

The long-awaited, big and stable Debian GNU/Linux “Lenny” 5.0 has been released! Great job everyone and congratulations!

In this release the Debian/Ruby Extra team has an ever greater presence. We were able to increase the number of mainted libraries and applications to over 95 packages. Also quite a lot of issues were resolved and I am proud that we obtained this quality level.

For Squeeze we plan to deal with the transition to Ruby 1.9 and with possible multiple interpreter-support (still Ruby 1.8, JRuby?). We might also deal with the gems, who knows? :)

P.S. Indeed, did I just started posting without explaining why I was away for over 7 months?

I safely arrived in Istanbul yesterday. The trip went well, only it took some effort to get into the country. There was a huge queue at the passport checkpoint which was advancing very slowly. Then, when I finally was at the desk, the guy told me to get a visa first. Right, this is not Shengen, there is all this complicated stuff. So, I got in line for a visa. At the visa desk, the lady told me I could only pay in cash, in particular Euros and US dollars, nothing else. For the Netherlands, the Visa is € 10, which I left at home on purpose. So, I was directed to the ATM, where I got Turkish Lires, hoping they would suffice too, and they did. Back in the queue for the passport checkpoint, got through quickly. Next, the baggage. Because everyone is stuck at the passport checkpoint so long, almost nobody removes their baggage from the band. So, when 6 flights are assigned to that band your baggage will be dropped on, it will take a looong time. Also, it seems sometimes suitcases “drop off” in the corners of the band and moved to “some location”. When Amsterdam dropped of the board, I was worried, but I found my suitcase at “the location”. Finally we boarded the shuttle to the hotel and arrived there over 2,5 hour later. We had a nice walk and very good dinner (not for Sjoerd though). Just to prove I’m really here (info):

Now, on to some sight-seeing!