Last week tragedy struck, and I saw the very best of the Debian community at work. I heard first hand testimony about how helpless so many people felt at being physically unable to help their friend. I heard about how they couldn’t bear to leave and had to be ushered away to make space for…
Team Roles and Tuckman’s Model, for Debian teams
When I first moved from being a technical consultant to a manager of other consultants, I took a 5-day course Managing Technical Teams – a bootstrap for managing people within organisations, but with a particular focus on technical people. We do have some particular quirks, after all… Two elements of that course keep coming to…
Continuing adventures of the mystery cable
My 4×2 has been in action again, trying to find the remainder of the mystery sometimes-4mm/sometimes-2.5mm/sometimes-1.5mm cable. It finally appeared in the tiniest gap possible between back wall and joist. As we had suspected by tracing everything else, the junction is an unfused union of all three cable types with a 230V 32A circuit breaker…
Mischief managed
I’m finally paying up a certain amount of household technical debt, including investigating some exciting mystery cabling and insulating the space it inhabits. This has meant pulling down large chunks of ceiling (eventually, most or all of it for the insulation) on a cable hunt. Turns out the best tool for this part of the…
Census stupidity, 2021 edition
Dear Office for National Statistics, Next time you sit down to design the UK census question flow, please ensure it does not go like this: 1. What is the date of birth for G [our young daughter]? Answer: late 2020 2. This date of birth makes G four months old. Is this correct? Answer: yes…
RCBW 21.9
A recent upload of electrum suffers from the serious bug #981374. On the face of it this is just a missing package dependency: can you help with testing and preparing an updated package to fix this? You don’t need to be a Debian Developer to get stuck into this one!
RCBW 21.1
Does software-properties-common really depend on gnupg, as described in #970124, or could it be python3-software-properties? Should it be Depends, or Recommends? And do you accept the challenge of finding out and preparing a patch (and even an upload) to fix the bug?
WordPress in a subdirectory
For many years now I’ve had WordPress installed as a subdirectory to my site but appearing to at the domain level, i.e. /wordpress/index.php is transparently presented as the homepage. This is done by setting the “WordPress Address” and “Site Address” settings and then mapping requests which do not match an existing file or directory through…
neuraldak
We are proud to announce that dak, the Debian Archive Kit, has been replaced by a neural network for processing package uploads and other archive maintenance. All FTP masters and assistants have been re-deployed to concentrate on managing neuraldak. neuraldak is an advanced machine learning algorithm which has been taught about appropriate uploads, can write to maintainers about…