Marc's blog

I fear that though we seem to be in the announcement season for those who care about announcements, I haven't seen an announcement about the publishing date for "Advanced sexual positions - how to achieve them without laughing". Seems like we'll need to wait longer for that.

Oh, I really like this new FTWCA acronym, BTW.

If anyone asks you what the difference is between Christmas and Chanukah, you will know what and how to answer!

1. Christmas is one day, same day every year, December 25. Jews also love December 25th. It's another paid day off work. We go to movies and out for Chinese food and Israeli dancing. Chanukah is 8 days. It starts the evening of the 24th of Kislev, whenever that falls. No one is ever sure.
Jews never know until a non-Jewish friend asks when Chanukah starts, forcing us to consult a calendar so we don't look like idiots. We all have the same calendar, provided free with a donation from the World Jewish Congress, the kosher butcher, or the local Sinai Memorial Chapel(especially in Florida) or other Jewish funeral home.

2. Christmas is a major holiday. Chanukah is a minor holiday with the same theme as most Jewish holidays. They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat

3. Christians get wonderful presents such as jewelry, perfume, stereos... Jews get practical presents such as underwear, socks, or the collected works of the Rambam, which looks impressive on the bookshelf.

4. There is only one way to spell Christmas. No one can decide how to spell Chanukah, Chanukkah, Chanukka, Channukah, Hanukah, Hannukah, etc.

5. Christmas is a time of great pressure for husbands and boyfriends. Their partners expect special gifts. Jewish men are relieved of that burden. No one expects a diamond ring on Chanukah.

6. Christmas brings enormous electric bills. Candles are used for Chanukah. Not only are we spared enormous electric bills, but we get to feel good about not contributing to the energy crisis.

7. Christmas carols are beautiful...Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful.... Chanukah songs are about dreidels made from clay or having a party and dancing the hora. Of course, we are secretly pleased that many of the beautiful carols are composed and written by our tribal brethren.

And don't Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond sing them beautifully?

8. A home preparing for Christmas smells wonderful. The sweet smell of cookies and cakes baking. Happy people are gathered around in festive moods. A home preparing for Chanukah smells of oil, potatoes, and onions. The home, as always, is full of loud people all talking at once.

9. Women have fun baking Christmas cookies. Jewish women burn their eyes and cut their hands grating potatoes and onions for latkas on Chanukah. Another reminder of our suffering through the ages.

10. Parents deliver to their children during Christmas. Jewish parents have no qualms about withholding a gift on any of the eight nights.

11. The players in the Christmas story have easy to pronounce names such as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The players in the Chanukah story are Antiochus Judah Maccabee, and Matta whatever. No one can spell it or pronounce it. On the plus side, we can tell our friends anything and they believe we are wonderfully versed in our history.

12. Many Christians believe in the virgin birth. Jews think, "Joseph,you shmuck, snap out of it. Your woman is pregnant, you didn't sleep with her, and now you want to blame G-d. Here's the number of my shrink".

13. In recent years, Christmas has become more and more commercialized. The same holds true for Chanukah, even though it is a minor holiday. It makes sense. How could we market a major holiday such as Yom Kippur? .....

Forget about celebrating. Think observing. Come to synagogue, starve yourself for 27 hours, become one with your dehydrated soul, beat your chest, confess your sins, a guaranteed good time for you and your family.
Tickets a mere $200 per person.

[Stolen from $unknown]

Planet Debian and my s9y seem to like the idea of presenting the oooold article on http://gonzo.dicp.de/~he/blog/archives/18-New-New-Maintainer-Documentation.html as new. It's not. Thanks for offering help, but this whole thing is already done. The New NM docs are now in the normal webwml cvs module.

As it looks like blogging is now the preferred way of sharing your thoughts, I guess I'll have to answer in my own blog to the problems starting with Thomas Hood post about withdrawing from the NM process.

Some people have replied to this and I think I should present my position, as I'm the most active of the unresponsive NM Front Desk, yaddayaddayadda.

Until Thomas blogged, I did not know that he considered the missing report as an issue.

To clear up the situation: Thomas completed all stages of the AM checks after he was reassigned to Alexander (formorer) this spring.
When Alex wanted to prepare the reported, he noted that some mails from the conversation between Madkiss (the old AM) and Thomas were missing. No problem, FD to the rescue, I still had those mails in my archive. After these initial problems, Alex' daytime job needed a lot of attention, so he didn't write the application report. I kicked him on a regular basis to do so, but it needs time and is not really very interesting, so it got delayed.

OK, that delay is not a good thing, but Alex told me that he planned to do the report on Saturday. Yes, this delay is quite annoying if you worked so hard and always had to wait for your AM to check your stuff and blabla. Now, the problem I have is that in this case, it's simply not true. Madkiss was assigned as AM to Thomas for 18 months - of these 18 months, 15 were spent waiting on a reply from Thomas to the usual NM questions.

Thomas, I can understand if you don't like the templates and think that they're boring, useless and whatever. But don't blame other people for time you have lost.

In the last few weeks I started to reduce my workload a bit by giving away packages to other Maintainers. I'm only partially successful, I still have 35 packages with my name on them (down from 42 (!)), but it looks like I'll drop the next 10 or 15 in the next few weeks.
To compensate the fact that I have more free time, Martin Zobel was nice enough to let me take over the maintenance of the experimental mips and s390 buildds for a few weeks...

Anyway, to the new meme (google for "$NAME needs" and present the results):

• Marc Needs You!
  
• Marc needs to get a clue. [...] Marc needs to get a life.
  
• Marc needs to visit your web site and check out your nude beach shots.
  
• Marc needs to pay this balance
  
• Marc needs our help now more than ever.
  

I'm not sure about the third one, but the rest sounds true.

I'm on my way back from the QA meeting and have used the time on the train to work on a few older mails in my mailbox - if you're still waiting for an answer, you should probably mail me again, because almost everything that was still on my radar vanished in the last hour.

Meeting a lot of the people I'm communicating with on a daily basis in person was a lot of fun. The discussions we had were quite nice and made me look on a few things differently. Videos and Slides should be available for all of them in the next few days.

Frank and I were quite productive today and filed a bunch of RC bugs on packages that haven't been updated in a long time. Mohammed Adnène Trojette (adn) will hopefully do as he said today and continue this work in the next days.
I also plan to do something like this for packages that weren't updated by their maintainer in a long time: Due to a lot of BSPs, we have packages that have no RC-Bug at the moment, but were NMUed a lot in the past and should probably get a new maintainer. I'm not too sure how to check for those packages, my current plan is to get the archives for debian-devel-changes@l.d.o, filter out all NMUs (by checking for a -X.Y debian revision) and then sort the packages using the date of the last maintainer upload. If you have a better idea or know an easier way - mail me!

Another thing I want to do (or delegate to someone else, which would probably be better, as I don't have enough free time to do it properly) is to compile a list of smaller packages with a lot of important bugs. Though we concentrate on the bugs we deem release-critical, a lot of important bugs are quite annoying for our users and should be fixed to make Debian more useable. An important bug in a small package often is a problem for most of its users, while bigger packages provide so many functions that only a fraction of all users notice those important bugs.

Oh, and I still need someone to proofread my rewrite of the New Maintainer documentation. It's simple WML, so you can use your favourite editor to check it, without needing to actually build it. I really don't want to commit those texts before someone fixed my english, but I don't want to wait ages to do it...

As a few others, I'm in Darmstadt and take part in a mini Debian conference focussed on QA issues.
I also had a talk, about QA and the New Maintainer process. It led to a quite productive discussion, which will be available on video in a few days.

As I mentioned in my blog, I'm working on a rewrite of the New Maintainer docs. A part of this is already done and only some bits are still missing, so please check out the .wml files in http://people.debian.org/~he/ and send me feedback. I really need a native speaker to fix my en_DE.

You scored as atheism. You are... an atheist, though you probably already knew this. Also, you probably have several people praying daily for your soul. Instead of simply being "nonreligious," atheists strongly believe in the lack of existence of a higher being, or God. atheism 96% Satanism 92% agnosticism 67% Buddhism 54% Paganism 46% Judaism 42% Islam 38% Christianity 21% Hinduism 4% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

[I'm slightly concerned by the fact that people are supposed to pray for me]

In the last months, I had to use trains on a regular basis and got into the habit to use 3/4 of the travel time for some Debian work (most AM things can be done offline, for example).

Well, this entry is about the other 1/4. I spend it watching people. Commuters, people on the way to the airport, the "normally, I use my car, but ..." type and lots of others. I'm still amazed how dumb most of these persons are. Chit-Chatting about totally
boring nonsense - not funny nonsense, just words coming out of their mouthes to keep the brain occupied and avoid thinking. I never understood this form of conversation, but my research got me to the hypothesis that it can only be done after a lobotomy was performed.