2009-05-24

Atom feeds per-topic

Just a quick note for those interested in subscribing only to my blog articles pertaining to a specific topic that the following Atom feeds are available:

2009-05-18

Invandringskonsult

In close to 11 years of living in Europe, I've accomplished plenty beyond working in the high-tech sector: I've also been fairly active in Immigration Policy, especially on aspects that affect migrant labor. Because of this, I keep on getting more and more requests to produce statements or to appear on panels to discuss issues pertaining to migrant labor and to immigrants' integration.

The hot topic of last week was Swedish language for immigrants, the crux of the issue being that even though Swedish has an official language status in Finland, in practice, it is pretty much impossibly for immigrants to register their kids at the Swedish language school, to claim public services in Swedish or, even more so, to request labor training in the Swedish language at the Employment Office.

The weekly newspaper Helsinki Times, in collaboration with the media think tank Magma, recently conduced a survey of the immigrant population, to find out how much they know about Swedish culture in Finland and about the Swedish language.

It was in this context that the Helsinki Times and the national television's Swedish programming (FST) asked for an interview with yours truly, because I have recently visited the Ministry of Employment and Economics with a concrete proposal to facilitate the availability of labor training in the Swedish language.

This FST webcast, starting at 16:03 minutes into the show, and the above Helsinki Times article provide more details about the context and about my proposal to the Ministry.

2009-05-05

Debian CUPS transition in progress

Since Lenny was the first Debian release to feature CUPS under its new package naming strategy, I started going through 'rdepends' results to see which packages in Squeeze still present dependencies for *cupsys* packages.

Much to my amazement, there's quite many.

If you are the maintainer of a package that still has those dependencies, please fix them ASAP. Alternately, if you're aware of any favorite package that does, please do not hesitate at filing a patch to help the maintainer update their debian/control.

Comes June 2009, transitional CUPS packages will be removed from our debian/control.