Generalizations are fun, they always are because they tend to offend people and offended people by stupid shit is usually lots of fun.

Here Debian, as a whole, fails; it sucks. Here Debian blows ass, the entire project is whack.

My good friend Chris Lee sent me this:

If you can't see the above iframe, go here.

Debian, full of fail. Wasn't this generalization fun?

Let the non-sense bullshit horses be released.

So Debian-NYC, mainly the DebConf10 local team, organized a workshop for people interested on Debian packaging. The nice people of drop.io offered their handy location in Brooklyn.

So this is the first attempt to bring new comers to Debian aiming DebConf10 next summer. Micah and dkg are the ones leading the workshop so far.

Pictures!

Peter, I have a single word for you: Moose.

During DebConf9 I had the opportunity to work together with Señor Micah to try to bring Passenger back to shape and get it back to the NEW queue on Debian. We spent way too much time dealing with the build  for the pkg-ruby-extras build model than to the actual fixing and updating. At the end we came up with a very well updated and DFSG-compatible (in contrast to the one that Brightbox provides, which isn't bad either to be honest) package for the 2.2.4 version.

Our current main interest was trying to get the package into Debian by cleaning up the licensing issues on some of the included files and try to come up with improvements in the near future (such as using Passenger directly from Nginx, instead of the Apache-only module). The future is bright and it'll bring sunshine to all of us.

Given that the package is still on the queue and there's a hell lot of other packages to be processed, you can grab the package here and if it fulfills your expectations, make sure you offer me and/or Micah a beer next time you see us around.

After a random series of hazardous events, I'm finally at DebConf 9 in Cáceres, Spain. I'll post more updates later, right now I'm trying to put my sh*t together and find my way through around here for the next couple of weeks. Interested people can always follow my microblogging feed too.

Love, D.

I have a couple of accounts in Twitter (namely @debian and @planetalinux) that are starting to bring a lot of followers (well, at least some of them). And given that I consider these accounts to be Twitter-polite enough, I like to follow the followers back too; however, this task sometimes gets really hard and it's tiring to go through the followers pages and follow those that I don't follow yet over and over.

So, I spent a few minutes and came up with this simple Ruby script that uses John Nunemaker's awesome Twitter gem.

#!/opt/local/bin/ruby

require "rubygems"
require "twitter"

httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new(
	ARGV[0] || 'yehyeh',
	ARGV[1] || 'kissm3'
)

base = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)

i = 0
(base.follower_ids - base.friend_ids).each do |id|
  i += 1
  begin
    base.friendship_create id
  rescue Twitter::General => e
    puts "#{e.class}: #{e.message}"
  end
end
puts "#{i} new friendships."

i = 0
(base.friend_ids - base.follower_ids).each do |id|
  i += 1
  base.friendship_destroy id
end
puts "#{i} destroyed friendships."

puts "#{base.friend_ids.size} friends now."
puts "#{base.follower_ids.size} followers now."

What this little code does is exactly that, it will start following the followers you don't follow yet, and it will stop following the people that don't follow you back, right? Got it? It's basically synchronizing your friends with your followers. As said, this is particularly helpful when you are maintaining a community account and want to keep up befriending your kind followers Handling the exception Twitter::General on line 18 is only done because the twitter gem raises it even when you are trying to befriend an account to which you have already requested friendship (like pending requests to protected updates accounts) or those of suspended accounts (spammers).

Thanks to Jamie, who used to have the name registered and now handed it over, Twitter Debian's Twitter username is now @debian (go follow Jamie now!). If you were already following @debianproject, nothing will change.

Having @debian on Twitter is actually kind of awesome!

I've added support for Debian Maintainers to post tweets to Debian Twitter (both on Identi.ca and Twitter). Feel free to use it.

If you happen to be in the NYC area this Friday May 8th, come over to our get-together to have a few beers/club sodas at Pacific Standard in Park Slope, Brooklyn (at 8 pm, map here). We will also be holding a PGP/GPG key signing par-tay at 9 pm, so make sure you bring your government-issued ID and your printed keys. More information about it, here.

Or… for those who care about Twitter and Debian

We've setup a Twitter account for the project to use on Twitter. Go follow it, go now!

twitter.com/debianproject

Now, the interesting part about this is that any Debian developer with a GPG key on the Debian keyring can tweet to it. You basically only have to do something like this:

$ echo "Squeeze is scheduled for Winter 2014" | gpg --clearsign | lwp-request -m POST http://twitter.debian.net/post

…or, what it's the same, just send a clearsigned POST data to http://twitter.debian.net/post. If the data is signed by a Debian developer, it'll go through and post it. The Debian uid is appended on the tweet, as found on Debian's LDAP DB, so if joetheplumber@d.o is the one posting, it'll be posted with "(via joetheplumber)" on it.

If you are more interested about this, you can go to twitter.debian.net where you will find deeper information and details about this service.

I encourage you, Debian user and advocate, to start following the @debianproject account; and I encourage you, Debian developer, to communicate with our users and advocates by using and posting to this service.

More news to follow soon.

UPDATE: Support for Identi.ca has been added and now both Twitter and Identi.ca accounts are updated at once and sync'ed.