Raúl Benencia rul@identi.ca

Last year we started to push more of Debian news and information away the single news source of the DPN into other media services. Debian has been more active than ever on our many IRC channels, free software based social networks, and unofficial Twitter and Facebook feeds. Today we have decided to announce the next stage in keeping Debian at the forefront of media by sub-contracting publicity and press to an outside marketing agency.

The marketing agency (name will be disclosed soon) has provided an AI system (running entirely with free software) which will be fed with all the content of Debian mailing lists and sources.debian.net to understand the character of the Debian community and then better customize future articles, interviews, and event news.

However, some bits of personal information are also needed. Please install the "publicity" package and you'll be presented a form to fill in your data: name, surname, phone, snail mail address, place of birth, names of family members, employers or employees. Each person providing their data to the agency will receive coupon for a 20% discount in the download (purchase) of next Debian release (valid only for downloads from the official site www.debian.org).

We kindly ask every Debian community member to sign up in, at least, one of theses services: Twitter, Whatsapp, Slack or Facebook (IRC, mailing lists, and free software based RTC are allegedly not so 'cool'). Users need not be concerned with losing the features that the IRC bots provide (so long KGB!) as they will be replaced by Tay-like AI systems. The most visible change will be that MeetBot will no longer log the meetings anymore, but we have bribed an NSA employee so they pass the relevant messages to us.

"If this 'centralization, outsourcing and pay-and-forget' approach goes well with publicity, I'm considering running for DPL in 2017 to extend this model to other areas of Debian" said Laura Arjona Reina, (now) former publicity delegate.

A new logo and mascot has been designed too, as a symbol of this new era embracing the standards of branding and corporate messaging. Please consider voting in favor of it, in the General Resolution that will be proposed soon:

dear ghc, when the type error exceeds 2 pages (like this 245 line one), how about just saying,
"You really goofed up around line N!"

Tomorrow Saturday I will be speaking about pump.io in http://procomuns.net , an event in Barcelona about commons collaborative economies.

It's a panel about decentralized technologies and different projects and proposals will be shown, and then Q&A.

Here are the slides I prepared about pump.io: https://cosas.larjona.net/pump.io

PDF: https://cosas.larjona.net/pump.io/pump.io.pdf

Zip with sources: https://cosas.larjona.net/pump.io/pump.io.zip

Thanks @Christopher Allan Webber and the @GNU MediaGoblin , @Alberto Moshpirit , @fsfe_news , @Sotitrox and @JanKusanagi for the images.

Special thanks to @Evan Prodromou for pump.io and for forwarding the invitation to the event.

During the weekend there are also lightning talks where I'll try to show also GNU MediaGoblin and GNU Social.

RIP Iceweasel, 13 Nov 2006 – 10 Mar 2016, Firefox is coming back to Debian!

I've spent rather too many hours today trying to get this code to fail to build with a type error.

intersectSupportedOS debian freeBSD

Here's the final type error in all its glory!

    Couldn't match type ‘'CannotCombineOS’ with ‘'CanCombineOS’
    Expected type: 'CanCombineOS
      Actual type: CannotCombineOS '['OSDebian] '['OSFreeBSD] '[]
    In the expression: intersectSupportedOS debian freeBSD

New blogpost: More involved in the !Debian Publicity Team https://larjona.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/more-involved-in-the-debian-publicity-team/

DebConf17 will be held in Montreal, Canada!

See you there!

APOD: 2015 April 1 - Suiting Up for the Moon

Image Link

How will cows survive on the Moon? One of the most vexing questions asked about space, scientists have spent decades debating this key issue. Finally, after extensive computer modeling and over a dozen midnight milkings, engineers have designed, built, and now tested the new Lunar Grazing Module (LGM), a multi-purpose celestial bovine containment system. By now, many of you will not be surprised to be wished a Happy April Fool's Day from APOD. To the best of our knowledge, there are no current plans to launch cows into space. For one reason, cows tend to be large animals that don't launch easily or cheaply. As friendly as cows may be, head-to-head comparisons show that robotic rovers are usually more effective as scientific explorers. The featured image is of a thought-provoking work of art named "Mooooonwalk" which really is on display at a popular science museum.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150401.html

FLOSS developers interview with Francesca Ciceri, Debian Developer and zombie fan.

1st teaser screenshot of my 7drl, Scroll

Having trouble with spending more time blogging about writing my 7drl than I am on coding it.

On the plus side, I am finding interesting stuff to blog about, and the game is coming along ok too..

Let's just say that RMS is an offscreen character in my 7drl..

Apologies for near total lack of available or response to anything this week. I'm really busy with the #7drl challenge.

o/

1/7th done already?! http://7drl.org/2015/03/07/scroll-day-1/ #7drl2015

For those who haven't watched Citizenfour yet and may not know, it's no longer available on archive.org.

#citizenfour #snowden #archive