Gunnar Wolf

I found the following news item; if you can read Spanish, you will most probably prefer the original version in the Proceso magazine's site. The subject? The federal police (PGR) and army arrest 17 artisans for «making money out of» Spiderman.

The following translation is mine. Done past midnight, and being quite tired, and translated so this news item can reach a broader audience. All errors are mine (except those carried out by the security forces, that is).

June 13, 2013

Cuernavaca, Morelos. Policement from the General Republic Attorney (Procuraduría General de la República, PGR) and the Army entered and searched the "3 de mayo" neighbourhood, in the municipality of Emiliano Zapata, detaining 17 ceramist artisans that sold candies, dolls and piñatas shaped like Spiderman.

This search was done on the evening of last Wednesday, around 16:00. Federal ministerial policement and army soldiers closed a street with several informal stores and detained workers taht were selling this Marvel Comics character, following said company's denounce.

As a result for this operation, 17 artisants were detained, although the same day five of them were freed. The policemen also seized 12 bags of candies, piñatas, ceramics and wooden figures of the superhero.

PGR closed down 11 stores where ceramics with this same figure was being sold, accusing the detainees of plagiarizing Spiderman's image, protected under the copyright law.

The 12 that remained under detention were put at the Federal Justice's disposal, which prompted that this Thursday, around 10AM, hundreds of sellers of "3 de mayo" went out to PGR's building to demand their friends' freedom, who are facing a bail of up to 200,000 pesos (~USD$18,000).

Outraged because –they said– they were treated as if they were part of a drug ring, hundreds of artisans closed intermitently Avenida Cuauhnáhuac, where the PGR representation in Morelos state is located.

The artisans' pressure helped for the amount of the bail to be lowered from MX$200,000 to MX$16,000, and so they were set free.

Francisco Fernández Flores, president of the Ceramists Association, criticized the operation because, he said, it was as strong as if they were "drug dealers".

The artisans explained that they don't even make the Spiderman figures, they are made by the interns of the Centro Estatal de Reinserción Social de Atlacholoaya (prision), located in the Xochitepec municipality, who offered them to the ceramists so they could be sold.

"The Atlacholoaya inmates do them, we buy them to support them, and turns out we are the delinquents now", said Miriam Monroy, sister of one of the detainees.

This information was contradicted by Jesús Valencia Valencia, responsible for Morelos' state prision system, who assured that in said prision no ceramics are done.

Fernández Flores insisted though that from within the prision they are being offered piñatas, candies and "piggy banks" with Spiderman's shape.

José Luis Pozo, vicepresident of the Ceramists Union, said that to avoid more such federal operations for copyright breaches, they have committed not to produce or commercialize Marvel superhero figures, and any other characters the authority demands.

"We do commit to, from now on, those products singled out to us will not be commercialized", he said.

Pozo said that the PGR operation caused losses not just to the detained producers and salesmen, but to over 200 ceramists that had to close their stores in solidarity with their friends.

Acording to the artisans, the products were a success until the PGR came, seized the products and detained the salesmen.

And yes, the copyright insanity does not stop. Spiderman is by today a clear part of popular culture. Marvel brilliantly succeeded in creating such a popular icon that everybody recognizes, that everybody identifies with — And that everybody should be able to recreate.

We are not talking about brand protection. Marvel does not, and will never, commercialize piñatas, ceramics or wooden toys. And even if they were plastic-cast — While Spiderman is still under the protection of copyright, as the Berne Convention defines it (and of course, as the much stricter Mexican laws agree), that does not mean that any and every product resembling a Spiderman should be protected. Many ceramists and piñata makers will create unique pieces of art — Ok, handicraft. But reading the copyright law more strictly, Spiderman is more treated as a trademark than as a copyright. And it is a trademark that should be declared as having passed on to the public domain.

Excuse me for the rush and lack of organization... But this kind of things don't always allow for proper planning. So, please bear with my chaos ;-)

What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Yet another secretely negotiated international agreement that, among many chapters, aims at pushing a free-market based economy, as defined by a very select few — Most important to me, and to many of my readers: It includes important chapters on intellectual property and online rights.

Hundreds of thousands of us along the world took part in different ways on the (online and "meat-space") demonstrations against the SOPA/PIPA laws back in February 2012. We knew back then that a similar project would attempt to bite us back: Well, here it is. Only this time, it's not only covering copyright, patents, trademark, reverse engineering, etc. — TPP is basically a large-scale free trade agreement on steroids. The issue that we care about now is just one of its aspects. Thus, it's way less probable we can get a full stop for TPP as we got for SOPA. But we have to get it on the minds of as many people as possible!

Learn more with this infography distributed by the EFF.

Which countries?

The countries currently part of TPP are Chile, Peru, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam — And, of course, the USA.

Mexico, Canada and Japan are in the process of joining the partnership. A group of Mexican senators are travelling to Lima to take part of this round.

What are we doing about it?

As much as possible!

I tried to tune in with Peru's much more organized call — The next round of negotiations will be in Lima, Peru, between May 14 and 24. Their activities are wildly more organized than ours: They are planning a weekend-long Camping for Internet freedom, with 28 hours worth of activities.

As for us, our activities will be far more limited, but I still hope to have an interesting session:

This Friday, we will have Aula Magna, Facultad de Ingeniería, UNAM, México DF, from 10AM and until 3PM. We do not have a clear speakers program, as the organization was quite rushed. I have invited several people who I know will be interesting to hear, and I expect a good part of the discussion to be a round table. I expect we will:

1. Introduce people working on different corners of this topic
2. Explain in some more detail what TPP is about
3. Come up with actions we can take to influence Mexico's joining of TPP
4. And this will be at Facultad de Ingeniería. Another explicit goal of this session will be, of course, to bring the topic closer to the students!

We want you!

So... I am posting this message also as a plead for help. Do you think you can participate here? Were you among the local organizers for the anti-SOPA movement? Do you have some insight on TPP you can share? Do you have some gear to film+encode the talks? (as they will surely be interesting!) Or, is the topic just interesting for you? Well, please come and join us!

Some more informative links

• What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)?
• #yaraTPP, #internetesnuestra
• ¿Qué hay de malo con el #TPP?

Video explicativo: "Will TPP turn Internet service providers into copyright cops?"

• La DMCA (norma de derechos de autor de USA) es aún peor de lo que piensas. Informate de cómo la DMCA convierte en ilegal el acceso a contenido a personas con discapacidades

BE THERE!

So, again: Friday, 2012-05-03, 10:00-15:00

[Update] So, 2012-05-03 came and went. And thankfully, Alfredo was there to record most of the talk! So, you can download the video:

Gunnar Wolf, Salvador Alcántar: ¿Qué es TPP? ¿Por qué me debe preoucpar? ¿Qué podemos hacer?

Hey, Mexican hackers!

If anybody is interested in holding a small Free Software-related meeting (say, with up to 10-15 people) in the South of Mexico City, please tell me — We have adapted a nice room at our house where we want to invite people to come and do activities — Courses, meetings, whatever. It is not very big (~5×5 meters), but it has all of the needed amenities (some chairs, a projector, coffee-related amenities, and is very conveniently located). We are not charging for hosting your activities (but will of course want to schedule it beforehand with you).

So, if you have something to teach, or some project to hack on, and want a nice place to do it in, please drop us a line/call.

(hmh, yes, this is one of the posts that should probably be in Spanish — But this blog has a long-standing policy for English content ;-)

So we are at the beginning of this year's Debian Project Leader elections. And yes, after Stefano's long and (IMO) very successful DPL term, I feel as my voting machinery is somewhat stuck; it will not be so easy to get it back up to speed. Anyway, I have glanced over the three platforms, but only actually read 1.5 from the three DPL platforms. I know that whoever succeeds, I will be quite happy with the results.

This year there are three runners for the post. I have worked in several teams with two of them, and would love to know better the third. In the same order as presented in the vote:

Gergely Nagy

I have not yet worked with Gergely, but enjoy reading him. The closest I have been to working with him was sketching a packaging tutorial during DebConf11, in Bosnia. Sadly, I was quite busy, and he picked up the complete workload — And correspondingly, got the credits. I can say that Gergely has a very important quality, the ability to put in seductively easy words the most complex processes. So, yes, being the Debian Leader post a public-facing one, I am certain he has one of the important qualities.

Moray Allan

We have worked together organizing DebConf for many years, first loosely as orga-team members, and starting two years ago (and together with Holger Levsen) as formal delegates. I think our team is quite well balanced, and Moray plays an important role. Holger and I are sometimes anxious to take measures, measures that IMO would have proven disastrous more than once. Moray is often the voice of reason. Given that another one of the DPL's roles is to mediate in social conflicts and keep Debian working smoothly (or something close to it ;-) ), that is also a very important trait of a DPL, and I'm also sure Moray would shine as a good leader.

Lucas Nussbaum

I have long been part of the pkg-ruby-extras team (although I am way less active than what I used to, where Lucas often dazzles us with his intense streaks of activity. Among this group of three, I see Lucas firstly as the most technically oriented, the biggest implementer. Also, as the proactive bug-finder and team-herder. And yes, Lucas is maybe the most enthusiastic about the (always) important Making Debian Sexy point. So, if elected, I'm sure this facet will also make him shine

So, it's not that I'm trying to bribe our next DPL with sweet nice words about how interesting a person or how good a friend he is, but am trying to look at the election process as something different. It seems for me that we are going to choose which Debian do we want to pursue for this starting period.

Now, for our soon-to-be-ex-DPL Stefano: As many will surely tell you (or already have): You rock. I truly enjoyed your DPL term, and there is much we should adopt and learn from your personality and leadership.

And, although it has waned over the past few years, many people tend to publish their (stated?) vote during the campaigning period. I (think I) have never done so, and this time I will surely not do so. Choosing a DPL involves personal feelings, sympathies, and many non-objective things. And although I know nobody will feel hurt if I don't put them in the first place, I prefer not to expose such issues. I can only assure you that this year, "None of the above" will sink to the bottom of my ballot.

Daniel tells his story building a wooly mammoth, and throws some ideas on how this could be implemented easily with free software. But if I read his post correctly, Daniel still misses the precise ways to do it.

Our friends Octavio and Claudia (twitted hereby) have given some Blender courses here at our classroom at home (Guys! Come again! We miss you!), and host the Spanish-speaking g-blender community. At one of their courses, they showed how to model an object/character, and in order to color/texture its parts, you can unwrap it — This process yields a flattened image with the surfaces that build your object, that you can then color. Well, you can also use it as a base pattern to cut and sew your plush!

It is not meant to be used for this (although it works), so it won't give you the extra tabs to be sewn in place, and the joints might not be at the most comfortable places. But it is base you can work from.

I was invited as a panelist for the Laboratorio «Repensar el derecho de autor y el derecho de copia en la era digital:
diálogo sobre artes, regulaciones y disponibilidad de la cultura» at the beautiful Foro del Dinosaurio in the Museo del Chopo, located very centrally in Mexico City. The list of speakers is quite interesting, and makes me very interested and happy to be there.

The laboratory will be next week, Wednesday through Friday. I am scheduled to be part of the 17:00 table, Knowledge availability and regulation in Internet, coordinated by Pedro Mendizábal (Creative Commons Perú), and together with Juan Voutsás (Biblotecologic Research Institute, UNAM), Armida Aponte (Creative Commons México). The other topics that will be covered are:

• Rights, technologies and commons
• The culture and its industries in the digital age: What are the interests at stake?
• Intelectual, cultural and scientific works: Open access or availability?
• New business models around copyright-protected works
• nowledge availability and regulation in Internet
• Visual arts and copyright in the digital media
• Open governments and citizenship: Information, data and intelectual works

Sadly, it does not seem they have planned for remote people to follow along. I will ask and update here if there is any way for people outside Mexico City to tune in — For people able to attend, it's free entrance (and certificates will be given to people pre-registered, if you are interested, call 5535-2288 ext. 123)

For further details on the participants, go to the laboratory's web page.

Update: The talks will be streamed! http://www.chopo.unam.mx/chopoenvivo.html, via UStream.

What, haven't you heard about the WikiLovesMonuments photo contest around cultural heritage? Copying from its web page,

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest around cultural heritage monuments in September. Starting from the Netherlands in 2010 and organized on a European level in 2011, we go global in 2012!

I heard about this initiative in Iván Martínez's Wikimedia talk at COSIT 2012, held last week in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz (I intend to write a bit more regarding COSIT later on). I loved the idea, and intend to participate — Not because I take great pictures (I don't, and I usually take them using my aging phone, which gives decent results but nothing beyond that), but because I love to move by bike in the city, and it's one of the best ways to roll in front of some of them. But more on me later… Back to the topic!

WikiLovesMonuments aims to improve on Wikimedia's (the organization behind Wikipedia and several other Free Culture reference projects) coverage of important landmarks all over the world. To do so, they are offering a trip to attend WikiMania 2013 in Hong Kong to the first place winner, and other "photography-related" prizes to the other winners.

So, back to me: My motivation to enter the contest is to help Wikimedia. I know my shots won't be top-notch (although they will be the best I can do). I enjoy biking in my city, and often go not too far from many of the listed monuments. I am amazed at the number of monuments still pending in my area (of course, it's not by mistake this is called "La ciudad de los palacios", The city of the palaces) — Surely some of the readers of this post will have (or will find easy to take) some photos to add. Of course, I'll try to focus on the missing monuments, but if you are a good photographer, you might want to submit a better version for a monument that's already there.

So, some pointers, from what's closest to what's farthest from me:

• List of monuments in Mexico city
• Map with the list of monuments (Centered in Mexico City; other places in Mexico and other countries in the contest are a click away)
• Links to the monuments listing by state in Mexico
• GoogleMaps-based map with the monuments for Mexico City pin-pointed (similar maps are found at the other list of monuments pages)
• Android user? Android application pin-pointing you the nearest monuments

At least for Mexico, the listings are taken from the National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH)'s Public registry of archaeological zones and monuments. So, I cannot wait to start my biking session today to get some good end-of-summer evening sun and get some pictures taken! :-D

Happy 19th birthday, Debian!

The Debian project is 19 years old now. Following Francesca's invitation (and Raphaël's lead, and using Leandro's image, collaboratively as it always happens here), I will tell a bit of my memories: How I got to Debian.

I am a Debian user since ~2000, and a Debian Developer since April 2003. But, just as Raphaël's, my history must go somewhat further back in time.

In 1992, I got my first 1200bps modem, and almost immediately became an avid BBS user (what's that? Javier Matuk talks [in Spanish] about BBSes in his newspaper column back in 1994). By mid 1993 I started operating my own BBS, CatarSYS. One of the key points that defined CatarSYS is that my focus was large-scale communication. I started connecting to several BBS networks, allowing messages to be relayed to distant people, mainly in the USA and Spain, and getting some feeds that could be seen as the poor man's Usenet.

At some point during the year I kept CatarSYS going, I got connected through a strange set of gateways to pure gold: A UUCP feed! This means, during some months, I operated the first (free, hobbyist) service that offered its users a free Internet mail address in Mexico. Yes, it was completely different to what we are used to today. I tried to connect to my provider at least three times a week, but this meant less than one week turnover time for messages sent to people anywhere in the world! But, back to Debian: Via this UUCP feed, I also got some real Usenet newsgroups — Including several on the comp.os category. I remember reading about Linux back then, and learning some commands, but didn't really get hooked into it.

I was in Israel from July 1994 to June 1995, doing completely non-computer-related tasks. Came back in 1995, and due to my father being an academic, got dialup internet access at home. WOW, *real* Internet!

It didn't take me long to start downloading Linux information and floppy images. One failed after another. But before the end of the year, I found in a bookshop a book (that included a CD-ROM) called "Build your own web server with Linux". WOW again — Remember this was still 1995! I bought it, and shortly afterwards, I had a Slackware system (Linux kernel 1.0.9) running. That meant many sleepless nights full of joy and frustration (as getting hardware to work was cloe to impossible).

By 1996, I got (within one week) my two first real jobs: A systems administrator at a small ISP and a highschool teacher. At the ISP, I got a spare computer to play with Linux, as –of course– the Big Server was running with Windows NT 3.51. Poor little machine... By then I was already a part of the Mexican Linux User Group. This group had just printed a batch of Linux CDs — RedHat 4.0. This was the first release that really made me happy and allowed me to do good work. Together with a friend I took to work with us, Juan Pablo Romero, we installed over a weekend a full replacement for our buggy NT machine, in much cheaper hardware. Of course, Linux was nowhere near corporate-recognition, and our project remained a project, not touching the Windows machine.

Anyway... Several years passed, and I was happy with my RedHat choice. I won't mention the milestones and job changes, as it would get boring and leave the point completely aside. By the year 2000, I was quite more involved with the LUG, as well as with the computer security group in DGSCA-UNAM. I became also an OpenBSD user, and had got so hooked up in free software that I felt the need to collaborate: To be a little part of one of those Big Projects that had given me so much. But which one?

I have never been much of a programmer — Yes, I can solve my everyday needs and have fun with it, and sometimes a bit beyond that. I enjoy programming. But all of my projects have begun little… and stayed little. I wanted to join OpenBSD, as it was a community I really believed in, but given my skillset (and given a flame-prone, aggressive developer community), I lost motivation to do so.

By 2000, I had also lost faith in RedHat. I don't have the exact dates, so I might be some months off — But after RedHat's IPO, I felt a sharp change. Version 7.0 was really demotivating — It tried to offer a polished desktop experience, but was really buggy, unstable, and full of bad decisions. In Mexico, Pepe Neif had taken up the job of making a derivative distribution of RedHat (called LinuxPPP), pressing hundreds of CDs and making a teaching program I was part of several times. Talking with Pepe (who continued to release based on RedHat 6), he told me he was interested in switching over to become a Debian-based distribution, but the job of migrating his installed base made the project stall — LinuxPPP reached only version 6.4.

But I installed Debian in early 2000, and loved it. I started getting familiar with its social philosophy and foundation documents at the same time I started migrating my servers from RedHat to Debian — This must have been by Spring 2000, as I installed Potato while it was frozen but not yet stable.

By January 2002 I applied for NM. My process took a long time, as my AM got MIA when he had already approved me (but before sending the AM report), so basically I had to go through AM twice — And by April 16, 2003, I got accepted as a DD. Contrary to what is acceptable today, I requested the full process to be done before starting to maintain any packages, as I didn't want to bother people with package sponsorship requests, so my whole process was done evaluating packages I would eventually upload.

Since becoming a DD, my main involvement in the project has been in packaging groups (I was a pkg-perl founder and member for many years, and am currently working in the pkg-ruby-extras group). But, as I said, my main strength is not programming — So my main involvement in Debian has been more social than technical: I have been a DebConf organizer since 2005, a very interesting, stressing, rewarding and (for some months) time-demanding role, and since 2009 I am part of the keyring maintainence team, which is much easier workload, although carries important ramifications.

So, after 19 years of Debian, and after nine years of me being part of it, Debian is clearly my strongest link to the Free Software community, a project I have grown to love and whose way of being I share and enjoy studying and explaining. And it is a technically excellent product, and a great place to start and keep learning both about how every aspect and layer of an operating system works, and how human-to-human interaction works in such a diverse, almost impossible environment happens.

Congratulations, Debian!

This is one of the days where reading my everyday newspaper was worth more than just getting bitter at the news. I found this text in La Jornada, my usual newspaper. I liked it very much, and decided to translate it for a wider audience. Of course, if you can read Spanish, do yourself a favor and go to the original. It is not that the text is so easy to translate. And, after all, I'm not a native English writer.

I'm trying to do a literal translation, even when disagreeing with the author.

Ten theses in favor of free download of cultural goods on the Internet

Enrique G. Gallegos — Poet and philosopher. Currently a researcher in Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-C

1. Historical legacy. Criticists who promote the persecution of piracy and free downloads of cultural works from the Internet argue that the patrimonial rights have been wronged; they start off suposing that a cultural work is formed from a historical void, as if there was a "nothing" to begin with, and then a "something" appeared. Nothing more fallacious: All cultural products has its precedents, and thanks to these it generates part of its best forces.
2. Opening towards the future. Human beings are projected into the future. As the main philosophies of the 20th century have explored, one of the singular characteristics of mankind is the ability to think and imagine the future. Products of culture are the best ways to think and project society, politics, love, hope, needs, failures… A song, a poem, an essay, can trigger imaginary worlds with a transformative potential. To deny this to humanity with "patrimonial damage" as an argument is to mutilate man's temporal nature.
3. Recognition of the present. Cultural works generate moments of reflection, criticism and pleasure; they can trigger actions demanding commitment, solidarity and strong indignation against injustice. If every cultural work is adscribed in some way to a historic tradition, and if cultural products anre necessary to imagine other possible worlds and open our future, it's not less true that they also allow us to recognize our present by making us more sensitive to others' ideas, sensations and emotions. Without culture, there is no present nor others' presence.
4. Divulgation of the cultural heritage. If culture is "heritage of mankind", it should be also spread by any possible way. But not just spread, but actively sought for the biggest number of people to be able to effectively have access to it. In a potentially interconnected world, Internet is the most adequate world for it (despite its limitations). Therefore, penalizing free downloads means avoiding spreading it and restricting access to those groups who don't have enough economic resources.
5. Preserving cultural heritage. If we agree that cultural works are heritage of mankind, we need to take every action needed to preserve them. But preserving culture does not only mean keeping the products in museums, galleries or never-polluted drawers; it rather means to keep them in the collective memory and in the flow of constant interpretations and appropiations. Said in other words, the genuine way to preserve culture is to allow universal access to cultural goods. That's why, holding that free copies and downloads of books, music, videos, etc. over the Internet are harmful, is an incompatible argument with the obligation to preserve cultural heritage.
6. They are not goods. Cultural works are material and spiritual manifestations of mankind, concretions of its historicity; they are, also, expressions of emotions, ideas and projections of other lives and other worlds. That's why they cannot be equated to goods or inserted in patrimonialist logic. The market might want to cheat by giving a certain price to a painting by Orozco or auctioning a Baudelaire manuscript, but it will never be able to aprehend their true meaning as cultural works. And it's not that culture is not faluable, but taht its estimation criteria do not follow the rules of market, but those of the imponderable and unlimited.
7. Price disproportion. Assuming we accept the possibility that intermediaries charge for the services they perform, the value of a book, record or movie should never exceed the daily wage of a worker or employee. But this ellection would only be one more option within the effective possibility that people opt to download or freely copy the cultural work. The final decision as to which media to go to should be a sovereign resolution of the culture-interested person.
8. The principle of the most benefit. Even when copies and free downloads over Internet could generate a patrimonial "wrong" to third parties, the cultural benefit obtained by it will always be greater in as much that it carries out intensely the principle to foster, spread and access the cultural heritage of mankind. To think otherwise is to privilege the few over the many.
9. The real evil is elsewhere. Murder, women- and children-trade, poverty and misery are the real evils that ache mankind. According to the United Nations, in 2010 there were 468 thousand murders in the world; the estimation is that 3500 million people live in poverty; in their 2009 inform, the UN found over 2400 victims of "people trade", kidnapped as sex slaves; in some regions in Africa, close to 30% of children suffer acute malnutrition and six people (between children and adults) die every day from hunger. That's why pretending that free download of cultural works is an evil is clearly a tricky and deceptive speech
10. Against the intermediary-salesman. Culture does not need intermedieries that reduce cultural works to goods. Culture is too important to leavie it in the hands of salespeople that simplistly equate cultural goods with cakes. An intermediary of this kind will never understand the difference between a work of art and a disposable razor blade. What the world needs is more support from the government from every country to artists, creators and poets, as well as ensuring the conditions for the absolute mobility freedom for cultural works.

One week. One long week. One beautiful week. One of the two major weeks of the year has passed since my previous post. Surely, we are in the middle of the two Major Weeks of the year, in the yearly schedule I have upheld for almost(!) ten years: DebConf+DebCamp.

Yesterday, DebConf officially started. For the first time ever, we had a DebConf track targetted at the local (for a wide definition of local: All of the Central American countries) communities, which I chaired.

We had the following talk lineup during this track:

• Empaquetando software para Debian (Gunnar Wolf)
• Introduction to Debian translation workflow and processes (Christian Perrier)
• OpenPGP discussion and skillshare (Daniel Kahn Gillmor)
• Empaquetando colaborativamente con git y collab-maint (Ulises Vitulli)
• Uso del sistema de manejo de errores de Debian (Hector Colina)
• Building free software communities (Leandro Gómez)

I believe it was a great success, and I hope the talks are useful in the future. They will be put online soon thanks to the tireless work of our work team.

Today we sadly lost the presence of our DPL due to very happy circumstances he will surely announce himself. But DebConf will continue nevertheless - And proof of that is our anual, great, fun and inviting Cheese and Wine Party!

After a series of organizational hiccups I hope nobody notices (oops, was I supposed not to say this?), today we had a beautiful, fun and most successful cheese and wine party, as we have had year after year since 2005.

As many other people, we did our humble contribution for this party to be the success it deserves.

There is lots of great cheeses, great wines, and much other great stuff we have to thank to each of the individuals who made this C&W party the success it was. Yes, it might be among the least-academic parts of our conference, but at the same time, it's one of its most cherished -and successful- traditions. And above all else, we have to thank our Great Leader^W^WCheeseMaster (who we still need to convince to play by our Great Leader's mandates - And no, I don't mean Zack here!)

Hugs and thanks to my good and dear friend Christian Perrier for giving form to one of DebConf's social traditions that makes it so unique, so different from every other academic or communitary conference I have ever been part of.

We still have most of the week to go. And if you are not in Managua (and are not coming soon), you can follow our activities following our video streams.

Remember, debian/rules, now more than ever! And even given the (perpetual) heat in Managua: Wheezy is frozen, whee!

[ all photos here taken by regina ]

Yesterday night, Regina and me arrived to Nicaragua. Ready to greet us, we found quite a good number of good friends. We had a nice pizza+beer dinner at Diana's house, and some of the foreigners among us were distributed among the houses of several locals.

This morning, we woke up –together with Víctor, Moray and Gaudenz– in Norman's brother's beautiful house. We had breakfast with the family, were picked up to go to the hotel that will have the ho(n|rr)or to host us all for the following two weeks, and walked to the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) campus.

Contrary to our usual practices... It seems everything is working fine! I mean, I'm sure we will stumble with some unforseen details and what not... But coming on the very first day to the university, to find that food is all sorted out, that we have food tickets (and they are all printed!), that network works (and it's by a fiber connection that was laid out expressly for us), that we have all the hardware I was worried about, that people are arriving and getting accepted at the hotel. I mean, things work!

So, I'm quite optimistic this DebCamp will have everything ready to be a success — And the DebConf following it as well, of course!

If you have not yet arrived - See you soon!

During the February 2012 presentation of our book, "Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento". Left to right: Max de Mendizábal, Irene Soria, Carlos Cruz, Gunnar Wolf, Alejandro Miranda

During the February 2012 presentation of our book, "Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento". Left to right: Max de Mendizábal, Irene Soria, Carlos Cruz, Gunnar Wolf, Alejandro Miranda

As stated in the 2012-04-30 edition of the Debian Project News, this weekend I will be meeting Holger Levsen (who has been there for over a week now) in Managua, Nicaragua, as part of the Debian Tour 2012, a set of talks meant to raise awareness and interest on Debian between the Nicaraguan (+Central American) user groups, university students, companies and government.

Not all of the planned activities are present in the Debian Tour webpage. I know I will be giving my talk on Debian in the Free Software projects' universe, this Saturday at Universidad Centro Americana (UCA). Besides this, we will be meeting on Monday with the UCA staff to discuss some DebConf-specific issues. Sunday? Well, I hope^Wfully trust we will have interesting activities as well :)

I have just bought our plane tickets to Managua, so I can finally say this:

Yes, many of you will ask what happened, I was bragging everywhere I wanted to go by land, driving from Mexico City to Managua. I'd love to, and I'm sure it's completely doable... But we have family issues to attend on July 21, in Argentina. So we will have a beautiful flight schedule (and carbon footprint) for this July:

June 30

Mexico→San Salvador→Managua, 17:35-20:30. Yes, this means I will not be in Mexico to cast my vote on July 1st. Well, I had already accepted this would happen... And the price difference was quite sensible.

July 15

Managua→San José→Mexico, 16:25-22:20

July 16

Mexico→Santiago→Buenos Aires (AEP), 20:30-09:55

July 23

Buenos Aires (EZE)→Lima→Mexico, 08:35-19:00

Several people have asked me on the best airline options for this trip. In our case, to Managua, it was with TACA, US$518 total. You can get tickets for ~US$30 less, but the flight goes through Panama instead of San Salvador, for an extra 1000Km – And instead of ~3hr it makes slightly over 6. Yes, on our way back we will be routed a bit South to San José, but it's not as bad, and it's for a very short layover.

For Argentina? Well, we have always found LAN to be the cheapest and most convenient. This time, TACA/Avianca was a very close second, which lost due to almost doubling the flight+layover time

Why aren't we taking a Mexico→Managua→Buenos Aires flight instead? Because it's ~US$150 more expensive per person. Not *that* much, but still some money. And by returning to Mexico and having a night at home, we will save us the hassle of carrying Winter clothes to Nicaragua and Summer clothes to Argentina.

Oh, and if you are planning on dropping by home while we are away and robbing all of our stuff: There's not that much to take from there, and we have already arranged for somebody to be there while we are away. But thanks for thinking about us, anyway!

[update] And what about DebConf12 registration? When is the system opening for us all to register? Soon, dear friends, we are talking about some related issues, and you will have your registrationi open soon.