Various, unrelated news:

Thanks to Marvin Stark my project syrep is now available in Debian. As you might know all the cool kids have written their own distributed revision control systems. This is my contribution on this topic. Although I started to work on it four years ago syrep is still unrivaled and unbeaten in its specific feature set. (Which is admittedly very different from the feature set of most other software in this area.)

Thanks to CJ van den Berg and Sjoerd Simons (and a few others from #pulseaudio) PulseAudio is now available in Debian, the auxiliary GUI tools like pavucontrol seem to be still missing. Nonetheless: it's now easier then ever to try PulseAudio:

sudo aptitude install pulseaudio \
    pulseaudio-module-hal \
    pulseaudio-esound-compat \
    pulseaudio-utils \
    libgstreamer-plugins-pulse0.10-0 \
    pulseaudio-module-gconf \
    pulseaudio-module-x11 \
    pulseaudio-module-zeroconf

For the next months I will focus on my Diplomarbeit (German equivalent of a master thesis). Due to this I passed maintainership of Avahi to Trent Lloyd and of PulseAudio to Pierre Ossman. I hope to resume maintainership of both projects in January.

My first non-trivial kernel patch has been merged into Linus' kernel, although the 2.6.19 merge window was already closed. I take this as birthday present from Linus.

If you have a laptop (such as the MSI S270) with Ricoh SD/MMC interface (not one of the new controllers which are SDHCI compatible, but the old ones where the SD/MMC is a virtual PCMCIA slot identifying itself as Bay1Controller), then please support me in writing a Linux driver for it and request the necessary documentation and datasheets from Ricoh. For more information on this issue see this posting on the s270-linux mailing list, and this followup.

That's all for now.