Finally got my shit together and got a flight to Argentina for DebConf!

Perth -> Sydney -> Auckland -> Buenos Aires -> Mar del Plata.

That is quite a bit of flying and a long bus trip ending quite early on the 4th. It will definitely be worth it if DebConf7 was anything to go on.

Hopefully by DebConf I can get my hands on an OpenMoko FreeRunner to do some Debian porting work during DebCamp and possibly mapping out the streets of Mar del Plata for OpenStreetMap. Of course I need to work on completing analysis of the results of the Debian user and new contributor surveys and figure out what to say about synfig if I get the chance to do a lightning talk about it.

/me now officially excited

As a Debian developer I have on occasion felt a bit out of touch with doing things with Debian and out of touch with other users. I mentioned to some folks at DebConf7 that I felt I focused too much on working on Debian and not actually connected to what the benefit of working on Debian is.

Partially as a result of those feelings and partially because I thought it would be an interesting thing to do, I started to prepare a couple of simple surveys early this year. The first one went out earlier last month and I posted the second one a few days ago after far too much procrastination and running the wording by a few people - thanks to Micah for the drug boats question

So, if you are a Debian user or are a new contributor (or DM/NM/AM or new DD), I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. Please respond to the survey addresses rather than my personal ones.

So far I have 15 or so responses to the new contributor survey, but ideally I would have many more, so please send something in if you are getting involved in Debian development or helping others get involved.

I've had about 24 responses to the user survey so far. Many of you will have heard about Debian success stories like Extremadura, Bhutan, HP, Skolelinux, Sanger and other high-profile Debian users. I'm hoping to hear about as many different uses of Debian as possible, so please keep the responses coming in.

The primary audience for these surveys is the Debian development community. The results will go to the debian-devel-announce and debian-private, I also hope to have a discussion or two about them at DebConf8 in Argentina. There is no time-frame for closing the survey or releasing the results, like the Debian distribution, I release when ready

PS: Please install the popularity-contest package on your machines if possible and subscribe to the packages.qa.debian.org pages for packages that you particularly care about.

PPS: Please feel free to ask me questions in your responses and I will attempt to reply as time allows.

On the way home from Thailand, I saw Linux booting and X starting up on the in-seat screens on our Malaysia Airlines flight.

Also got a funny cartoon for my birthday called "The adventures of debianman".

So, back to geekery after too many months away. While we were in Thailand, I met Theppitak Karoonboonyanan and his friend Neutron Soutmun and a couple of others from the Thai Linux community. Thep is in the NM process for Debian, he maintains Thai support packages in Debian and Neutron is a Debian user. Neutron writes firmware for GPS receivers (IIRC) and other GIS stuff, I'm hoping he will get involved in the debian-gis subproject. I think I convinced Neutron to at least think about applying to NM :D. We talked about a lot of things, mainly about Thai localisation and the challenges involved. He mentioned that the language barrier is a big problem for Thai people, so their main focus has been firstly infrastructure (text rendering, layout and wrapping, fonts, input methods, locale, etc) and now translation (and the associated, laborious localisation efforts). He told me a bit about the writing system and how it is related to other systems in the area. Thep also mentioned the possibility of debconf9 being in Thailand, I recon it would be bloody awesome to have debconf in Asia. At least one other Debian Developer is interested in this, madduck is the initial instigator. I hope we both make it to debconf in the UK this year. I also visited the open source lab at NECTEC (the Thai National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), which is government funded. There, they develop LinuxTLE (an Ubuntu based desktop distro), LinuxSIS (a simple internet server for schools and businesses) and do lots of translation and advocacy work within NECTEC and with businesses and other organisations within Thailand. One thing about LinuxPLE which I noted was that during the post-install GUI configuration step, there is an option to setup the system to use fonts from a mounted Windows partition. IIRC, they explained that they found this was important because of a reliance on Microsoft fonts in Thailand. While I was there, I went to a couple of other labs and saw a demo of a cool Thai OCR and car registration plate recognition system, English to Thai machine translation (text) and direct English speech to Thai speech conversion. They were also working on some medical imaging and speech recognition stuff that I didn't get to see. I also met the founder of linux.thai.net, whose company develops this online map for Bangkok..

Also posted some photos from our trip through Thailand.

[RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos]

So, I've been on the ship for a week or so now, learning knots and nautical stuff, cooking, cleaning, making inventories and otherwise preparing for the voyage. So far, we're just sitting in the harbour in Cairns, learning and working until the 24th. It feels weird to be away from the Internet for so long and the communities with whom my main contact has been Internet based; Debian, Perth/Indymedia & Cat@lyst. Kinda like being shipwrecked on an island, cut off from the outside world; no access to communication networks or ability to move around. However, the ship has an SSB (single sideband) radio (as well as VHF), I'm hoping that will satisfy my communications addiction. I've been learning about the SSB radio; if anyone knows of any information about, or free software (gratis and/or libre, preferably Windows based as there is only Windows - and a Mac and a Knoppix CD on board) that can access WEFAX (weatherfax) or the Internet via SSB, please email me about it.

argh! damn German keYboards have the Y and the Z in the wrong places!!!

Escaping for 3 months to sail the high seas in SE Asia! flickr photostream is: pabulous_katastrophic_adventures. Please email me if you wanna meet up in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia or Thailand for GPG signings/whatever.

I feel a bit sad leaving Debian just before the etch release (and just before I become a developer) and leaving synfig (GPLed 2D vector animation studio) just when more people are needed to help out.

Hopefully I'll be able to get some work done on hhm/chmdeco/chmspec while I'm away, I especially look forward to figuring out some of the stuff that Matthew's ITSF spec got wrong and bits that are unknown, especially the weird things with CHW files.

I just found out someone made a test installer with Khmer support:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2006/03/msg00510.html

At the moment it uses Khmer OS, but the final version will use Khmer OS System.

I just noticed that KDE 3.5 has been packaged for Debian and uploaded to experimental! Looking at the translation packages, I see kde-i18n-km!!!!! YAY! Hopefully they will reach etch before long and be candidates for inclusion in the next stable release! I think I should make a Khmer localisation task soon, since there are 3 Khmer related packages in Debian (OO, KDE and the KhmerOS fonts).

Also, does anyone know if there is a KhmerOS chatroom or IRC channel somewhere? If not, can I suggest irc.freenode.org?

Hmmm, lessee:

• freed helpdeco (no-commercial-use -> GPL)
• debian packaged helpdeco and a font
• kept up with nsis/scons fun
• bunch of indymedia/etc sysadmin work
• htmlarea/burmese bits n bobs

w00t found me a sponsor for nsis