Before I start, I would like to point out #855549 . This is a normal/wishlist bug I have filed against apt, the command-line package manager. I sincerely believe having a history command to know what packages were installed, which were upgraded, which were purged should be easily accessible, easily understood and if the output looks pretty, so much the better. Of particular interest to me is having a list of new packages I have installed in last couple of years after jessie became the stable release. It probably would make for some interesting reading. I dunno how much efforts would be to code something like that, but if it works, it would be the greatest. Apt would have finally arrived. Not that it s a bad tool, it s just that it would then make for a heck of a useful tool. Coming back to the topic on hand, Now for the last couple of weeks we don t have water or rather pressure of water. Water crisis has been hitting Pune every year since 2014 with no end in sight. This has been reported in newspapers addendum but it seems it has been felling on deaf ears. The end result of it is that I have to bring buckets of water from around 50 odd metres. It s not a big thing, it s not like some women in some villages in Rajasthan who have to walk in between 200 metres to 5 odd kilometres to get potable water or Darfur, Western Sudan where women are often kidnapped and sold as sexual slaves when they get to fetch water. The situation in Darfur has been shown quite vividly in Darfur is Dying . It is possible that I may have mentioned about Darfur before. While unfortunately the game is in flash as a web resource, the most disturbing part is that the game is extremely depressing, there is a no-win scenario. So knowing and seeing both those scenarios, I can t complain about 50 metres. BUT .but when you extrapolate the same data over some more or less 3.3-3.4 million citizens, 3.1 million during 2011 census with a conservative 2.3-2.4 percent population growth rate according to scroll.in. Fortunately or unfortunately, Pune Municipal Corporation elections were held today. Fortunately or unfortunately, this time all the political parties bought majorly unknown faces in these elections. For e.g. I belong to ward 14 which is spread over quite a bit of area and has around 10k of registered voters. Now the unfortunate part of having new faces in elections, you don t know anything about them. Apart from the affidavits filed, the only thing I come to know is whether there are criminal cases filed against them and what they have shown as their wealth. While I am and should be thankful to ADR which actually is the force behind having the collated data made public. There is a lot of untold story about political push-back by all the major national and regional political parties even when this bit of news were to be made public. It took major part of a decade for such information to come into public domain. But for my purpose of getting clean air and water supply 24 7 to each household seems a very distant dream. I tried to connect with the corporators about a week before the contest and almost all of the lower party functionaries hid behind their political parties manifestos stating they would do the best without any viable plan. For those not knowing, India has been blessed with 6 odd national parties and about 36 odd regional parties and every election some 20-25 new parties try their luck every time. The problem is we, the public, don t trust them or their manifestos. First of all the political parties themselves engage in mud-slinging as to who s copying whom with the manifesto.Even if a political party wins the elections, there is no *real* pressure for them to follow their own manifesto. This has been going for many a year. OF course, we the citizens are to also blame as most citizens for one reason or other chose to remain aloof of the process. I scanned/leafed through all the manifestos and all of them have the vague-wording we will make Pune tanker-free without any implementation details. While I was unable to meet the soon-to-be-Corporators, I did manage to meet a few of the assistants but all the meetings were entirely fruitless. I asked why can t the city follow the Chennai model. Chennai, not so long ago was at the same place where Pune is, especially in relation to water. What happened next, in 2001 has been beautifully chronicled in Hindustan Times . What has not been shared in that story is that the idea was actually fielded by one of Chennai Mayor s assistants, an IAS Officer, I have forgotten her name, Thankfully, her advise/idea was taken to heart by the political establishment and they drove RWH. Saying why we can t do something similar in Pune, I heard all kinds of excuses. The worst and most used being Marathas can never unite which I think is pure bullshit. For people unfamiliar to the term, Marathas was a warrior clan in Shivaji s army. Shivaji, the king of Marathas were/are an expert tactician and master of guerilla warfare. It is due to the valor of Marathas, that we still have the Maratha Light Infantry a proud member of the Indian army. Why I said bullshit was the composition of people living in Maharashtra has changed over the decades. While at one time both the Brahmins and the Marathas had considerable political and population numbers, that has changed drastically. Maharashtra and more pointedly, Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur have become immigrant centres. Why just a decade back, Shiv Sena, an ultra right-wing political party used to play the Maratha card at each and every election and heckle people coming from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, this has been documented as the 2008 immigrants attacks and 9 years later we see Shiv Sena trying to field its candidates in Uttar Pradesh. So, obviously they cannot use the same tactics which they could at one point of time. One more reason I call it bullshit, is it s a very lame excuse. When the Prime Minister of the country calls for demonetization which affects 1.25 billion people, people die, people stand in queues and is largely peaceful, I do not see people resisting if they bring a good scheme. I almost forgot, as an added sweetener, the Chennai municipality said that if you do RWH and show photos and certificates of the job, you won t have to pay as much property tax as otherwise you would, that also boosted people s participation. And that is not the only solution, one more solution has been outlined in Aaj Bhi Khade hain talaab written by just-deceased Gandhian environmental activist Anupam Mishra. His Book can be downloaded for free at India Water Portal . Unfortunately, the said book doesn t have a good English translation till date. Interestingly, all of his content is licensed under public domain (CC-0) so people can continue to enjoy and learn from his life-work. Another lesson or understanding could be taken from Israel, the father of the modern micro-drip irrigation for crops. One of the things on my bucket lists is to visit Israel and if possible learn how they went from a water-deficient country to a water-surplus one. Which brings me to my second conundrum, most of the people believe that it s the Government s job to provide jobs to its people. India has been experiencing jobless growth for around a decade now, since the 2008 meltdown. While India was lucky to escape that, most of its trading partners weren t hence it slowed down International trade which slowed down creation of new enterprises etc. Laws such as the Bankruptcy law and the upcoming Goods and Services Tax . As everybody else, am a bit excited and a bit apprehensive about how the actual implementation will take place. Even International businesses has been found wanting. The latest example has been Uber and Ola. There have been protests against the two cab/taxi aggregators operating in India. For the millions of jobless students coming out of schools and Universities, there aren t simply enough jobs for them, nor are most (okay 50%) of them qualified for the jobs, these 50 percent are also untrainable, so what to do ? In reality, this is what keeps me awake at night. India is sitting on this ticking bomb-shell. It is really, a miracle that the youths have not rebelled yet. While all the conditions, proposals and counter-proposals have been shared before, I wanted/needed to highlight it. While the issue seems to be local, I would assert that they are all glocal in nature. The questions we are facing, I m sure both developing and to some extent even developed countries have probably been affected by it. I look forward to know what I can learn from them. Update 23/02/17 I had wanted to share about Debian s Voting system a bit, but that got derailed. Hence in order not to do, I ll just point towards 2015 platforms where 3 people vied for DPL post. I *think* I shared about DPL voting process earlier but if not, would do in detail in some future blog post.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Anupam Mishra, #Bankruptcy law, #Chennai model, #clean air, #clean water, #elections, #GST, #immigrant, #immigrants, #Maratha, #Maratha Light Infantry, #migration, #national parties, #Political party manifesto, #regional parties, #ride-sharing, #water availability, Rain Water Harvesting

I just noticed the new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment list ECMA-376 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term storage. Luckily such files will only be accepted based on pre-approval from the National Archive. Allowing OOXML files to be used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which lead to a question and an idea. Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such undefined behaviour? It would be useful for the National Archive (and anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined) to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of OOXML. I'm aware of the officeotron OOXML validator, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will report use of undefined behaviour. Are there other similar tools available? Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.

debian is in deep freeze for the upcoming stretch release. still, I haven't dived into fixing "general" release-critical bugs yet; so far I mostly kept to working on bugs in the debian perl group:

• #834912 src:libfile-tee-perl: "libfile-tee-perl: FTBFS randomly (Failed 1/2 test programs)"
  add patch from ntyni (pkg-perl)
• #845167 src:lemonldap-ng: "lemonldap-ng: FTBFS randomly (failing tests)"
  upload package prepared by xavier with disabled tests (pkg-perl)
• #849362 libstring-diff-perl: "libstring-diff-perl: FTBFS: test failures with new libyaml-perl"
  add patch from ntyni (pkg-perl)
• #851033 src:jabref: "jabref: FTBFS: Could not find org.postgresql:postgresql:9.4.1210."
  update maven.rules
• #851347 libjson-validator-perl: "libjson-validator-perl: uses deprecated Mojo::Util::slurp, makes libswagger2-perl FTBFS"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #852853 src:libwww-curl-perl: "libwww-curl-perl: FTBFS (Cannot find curl.h)"
  add patch for multiarch curl (pkg-perl)
• #852879 src:license-reconcile: "license-reconcile: FTBFS: dh_auto_test: perl Build test --verbose 1 returned exit code 255"
  update tests (pkg-perl)
• #852889 src:liblatex-driver-perl: "liblatex-driver-perl: FTBFS: Test failures"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #854859 lemonldap-ng-doc: "lemonldap-ng-doc: unhandled symlink to directory conversion: /usr/share/doc/lemonldap-ng-doc/pages/documentation/current"
  help with dpkg-maintscript-helper, upload on xavier's behalf (pkg-perl)

thanks to the release team for pro-actively unblocking the packages with fixes which were uploaded after the begin of the freeze!

The Python API for the Debian package manager APT is useful for writing practical system maintenance scripts, which are going beyond shell scripting capabilities. There are Python2 and Python3 libraries for that available as packages, as well as a documentation in the package python-apt-doc. If that s also installed, the documentation then could be found in /usr/share/doc/python-apt-doc/html/index.html, and there are also a couple of example scripts shipped into /usr/share/doc/python-apt-doc/examples. The libraries mainly consists of Python bindings for the libapt-inst and libapt-pkg C++ core libraries of the APT package manager, which makes it processing very fast. Debugging symbols are also available as packages (python ,3 -apt-dbg). The module apt_inst provides features like reading from binary packages, while apt_pkg resembles the functions of the package manager. There is also the apt abstraction layer which provides more convenient access to the library, like apt.cache.Cache() could be used to behave like apt-get:

from apt.cache import Cache
mycache = Cache()
mycache.update()                   # apt-get update
mycache.open()                     # re-open
mycache.upgrade(dist_upgrade=True) # apt-get dist-upgrade
mycache.commit()                   # apply

boil out selections As widely known, there is a feature of dpkg which helps to move a package inventory from one installation to another by just using a text file with a list of installed packages. A selections list containing all installed package could be easily generated with $ dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt. The resulting file then looks something similar like this:

$ cat selections.txt
0ad                                 install
0ad-data                            install
0ad-data-common                     install
a2ps                                install
abi-compliance-checker              install
abi-dumper                          install
abigail-tools                       install
accountsservice                     install
acl                                 install
acpi                                install

The counterpart for this operation (--set-selections) could be used to reinstall (add) the complete package inventory on another installation resp. computer (that needs superuser rights), like that s explained in the manpage dpkg(1). No problem so far. The problem is, if that list contains a package which couldn t be found in any of the package inventories which are set up in /etc/apt/sources.list(.d/) on the target system, dpkg stops the whole process:

# dpkg --set-selections < selections.txt
dpkg: warning: package not in database at line 524: google-chrome-beta
dpkg: warning: found unknown packages; this might mean the available database
is outdated, and needs to be updated through a frontend method

Thus, manually downloaded and installed wild packages from unofficial package sources are problematic for this approach, because the package installer simply doesn t know where to get them. Luckily, dpkg puts out the relevant package names, but instead of having them removed manually with an editor this little Python script for python3-apt automatically deletes any of these packages from a selections file:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import apt_pkg
apt_pkg.init()
cache = apt_pkg.Cache()
infile = open(sys.argv[1])
outfile_name = sys.argv[1] + '.boiled'
outfile = open(outfile_name, "w")
for line in infile:
    package = line.split()[0]
    if package in cache:
        outfile.write(line)
infile.close()
outfile.close()
sys.exit(0)

The script takes one argument which is the name of the selections file which has been generated by dpkg. The low level module apt_pkg first has to been initialized with apt_pkg.init(). Then apt_pkg.Cache() can be used to instantiate a cache object (here: cache). That object is iterable, thus it s easy to not perform something if a package from that list couldn t be found in the database, like not copying the corresponding line into the outfile (.boiled), while the others are copied. The result then looks something like this:

$ diff selections.txt selections.txt.boiled 
3780d3779
< python-timemachine   install
4438d4436
< wlan-supercracker    install

That script might be useful also for moving from one distribution resp. derivative to another (like from Ubuntu to Debian). For productive use, open() should be of course secured against FileNotFound and IOError-s to prevent program crashs on such events.

purge rc-s Like also widely known, deinstalled packages leave stuff like configuration files, maintainer scripts and logs on the computer, to save that if the package gets reinstalled at some point in the future. That happens if dpkg has been used with -r/--remove instead of -P/--purge, which also removes these files which are left otherwise. These packages are then marked as rc in the package archive, like:

$ dpkg -l   grep ^rc
rc  firebird2.5-common          2.5.6.27020.ds4-3   amd64   common files for firebird 2.5 servers and clients
rc  firebird2.5-server-common   2.5.6.27020.ds4-3   amd64   common files for firebird 2.5 servers
rc  firebird3.0-common          3.0.1.32609.ds4-8   all     common files for firebird 3.0 server, client and utilities
rc  imagemagick-common          8:6.9.6.2+dfsg-2    all     image manipulation programs -- infrastructure dummy package

It could be purged over them afterwards to completely remove them from the system. There are several shell coding snippets to be found on the net for completing this job automatically, like this one here:

dpkg -l   grep "^rc"   sed  e "s/^rc //"  e "s/ .*$//"   \
xargs dpkg  purge

The first thing which is needed to handle this by a Python script is the information that in apt_pkg, the package state rc per default is represented by the code 5:

>>> testpackage = cache['firebird2.5-common']
>>> testpackage.current_state
5

For changing things in the database apt_pkg.DepCache() could be docked onto an cache object to manipulate the installation state of a package within, like marking it to be removed resp. purged:

>>> mydepcache = apt_pkg.DepCache(mycache)
>>> mydepcache.mark_delete(testpackage, True) # True = purge
>>> mydepcache.marked_delete(testpackage)
True

That s basically all which is needed for an old package purging maintenance script in Python 3, another iterator as package filter and there you go:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import apt_pkg
from apt.progress.text import AcquireProgress
from apt.progress.base import InstallProgress
acquire = AcquireProgress()
install = InstallProgress()
apt_pkg.init()
cache = apt_pkg.Cache()
depcache = apt_pkg.DepCache(cache)
for paket in cache.packages:
    if paket.current_state == 5:
        depcache.mark_delete(paket, True)
depcache.commit(acquire, install)

The method DepCache.commit() applies the changes to the package archive at the end, and it needs apt_progress to perform. Of course this script needs superuser rights to run. It then returns something like this:

$ sudo ./rc-purge 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Fetched 0 B in 0s (0 B/s)
custom fork found
got pid: 17984
got pid: 0
got fd: 4
(Reading database ... 701434 files and directories currently installed.)
Purging configuration files for libmimic0:amd64 (1.0.4-2.3) ...
Purging configuration files for libadns1 (1.5.0~rc1-1) ...
Purging configuration files for libreoffice-sdbc-firebird (1:5.2.2~rc2-2) ...
Purging configuration files for vlc-nox (2.2.4-7) ...
Purging configuration files for librlog5v5 (1.4-4) ...
Purging configuration files for firebird3.0-common (3.0.1.32609.ds4-8) ...
Purging configuration files for imagemagick-common (8:6.9.6.2+dfsg-2) ...
Purging configuration files for firebird2.5-server-common (2.5.6.27020.ds4-3)

It s not yet production ready (like there s an infinite loop if dpkg returns error code 1 like from can t remove non empty folder ). But generally, ATTENTION: be very careful with typos and other mistakes if you want to use that code snippet, a false script performing changes on the package database might destroy the integrity of your system, and you don t want that to happen.

detect wild packages Like said above, installed Debian packages might be called wild if they have been downloaded from somewhere on the net and installed manually, like that is done from time to time on many systems. If you want to remove that whole class of packages again for any reason, the question would be how to detect them. A characteristic element is that there is no source connected to such a package, and that could be detected by Python scripting using again the bindings for the APT libraries. The package object doesn t have an associated method to query its source, because the origin is always connected to a specific package version, like some specific version might have come from security updates for example. The current version of a package can be queried with DepCache.get_candidate_ver() which returns a complex apt_pkg.Version object:

>>> import apt_pkg
>>> apt_pkg.init()
>>> mycache = apt_pkg.Cache()
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
>>> mydepcache = apt_pkg.DepCache(mycache)
>>> testpackage = mydepcache.get_candidate_ver(mycache['nano'])
>>> testpackage
<apt_pkg.Version object: Pkg:'nano' Ver:'2.7.4-1' Section:'editors'  Arch:'amd64' Size:484790 ISize:2092032 Hash:33578 ID:31706 Priority:2>

For version objects there is the method file_list available, which returns a list containing PackageFile() objects:

>>> testpackage.file_list
[(<apt_pkg.PackageFile object: filename:'/var/lib/apt/lists/httpredir.debian.org_debian_dists_testing_main_binary-amd64_Packages'  a=testing,c=main,v=,o=Debian,l=Debian arch='amd64' site='httpredir.debian.org' IndexType='Debian Package Index' Size=38943764 ID:0>, 669901L)]

These file objects contain the index files which are associated with a specific package source (a downloaded package index), which could be read out easily (using a for-loop because there could be multiple file objects):

>>> for files in testpackage.file_list:
...     print(files[0].filename)
/var/lib/apt/lists/httpredir.debian.org_debian_dists_testing_main_binary-amd64_Packages

That explains itself: the nano binary package on this amd64 computer comes from httpredir.debian.org/debian testing main. If a package is wild that means it was installed manually, so there is no associated index file to be found, but only /var/lib/dpkg/status (libcudnn5 is not in the official package archives but distributed by Nvidia as a .deb package):

>>> testpackage2 = mydepcache.get_candidate_ver(mycache['libcudnn5'])
>>> for files in testpackage2.file_list:
...     print(files[0].filename)
/var/lib/dpkg/status

The simple trick now is to find all packages which have only /var/lib/dpkg/status as associated system file (that doesn t refer to what packages contain), an not an index file representing a package source. There s a little pitfall: that s truth also for virtual packages. But virtual packages commonly don t have an associated version (python-apt docs: to check whether a package is virtual; that is, it has no versions and is provided at least once ), and that can be queried by Package.has_versions. A filter to find out any packages that aren t virtual packages, are solely associated to one system file, and that file is /var/lib/dpkg/status, then goes like this:

for package in cache.packages:
    if package.has_versions:
        version = mydepcache.get_candidate_ver(package)
        if len(version.file_list) == 1:
            if 'dpkg/status' in version.file_list[0][0].filename:
                print(package.name)

On my Debian testing system this puts out a quite interesting list. It lists all the wild packages like libcudnn5, but also packages which are recently not in testing because they have been temporarily removed by AUTORM due to release critical bugs. Then there s all the obsolete stuff which have been installed from the package archives once and then being forgotten like old kernel header packages ( obsolete packages in dselect). So this snippet brings up other stuff, too. Thus, this might be more experimental stuff so far, though.

After a few weeks of running Exodus on my moto g falcon, I've now done again the full wipe and moved on to LineageOS nightly from 20170213. Though that build is no longer online at the moment. It's running smooth so far for myself but there was an issue with the Google Play edition of the phone according to Reddit. Since I don't use gapps anyway I don't care. The only issue I see so far is that I can not reach the flash menu in the camera app. It's hidden behind a grey bar. Not nice but not a show stopper for me either.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday February 5 and Saturday February 11 2017: Upcoming events

• Holger proposed a hackathon with various possible dates -- please reply with your preferred dates!
• "Reproducible builds: Status update" CfP submitted for Debconf17 in Montreal.

Patches sent upstream

• pnmixer (Chris Lamb)
• cloud-sptheme (Chris Lamb)
• python-hypothesis (Chris Lamb)
• cython (Jelmer Vernoo )

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #854332 filed against cloud-sptheme.
• #854512 filed against ftpcopy.
• #854549 filed against python-hypothesis.

Daniel Shahaf:

• #854492 filed against xlsx2csv.
• #854541 filed against sogo.

"Z. Ren":

• #854293 filed against manpages-tr.
• #854294 filed against regina-rexx.
• #854362 filed against fonts-uralic.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 83 package reviews have been added, 8 have been updated and 32 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 5 issue types have been added:

• randomness_in_swf_files_generated_by_as3compile
• randomness_in_t3g_files_generated_tslmendian
• absolute_build_paths_in_dot_packlist_file_generated_by_perl_extutils_packlist
• formatdb_from_ncbi_blastplus_captures_build_time
• timestamp_and_build_path_captured_by_python_cheetah

1 issue type has been updated:

• build_id_differences_only

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, the following FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Chris Lamb (7)
• gregory bahde (1)

diffoscope development diffoscope versions 71, 72, 73, 74 & 75 were uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb:

• Chris Lamb:
  • New features:
    • Add --exclude option. (Closes: #854783)
    • Apply --max-report-size to --text reports. (Closes: #851147)
    • Add a machine-readable JSON output format. (Closes: #850791)
    • Show results from debugging packages last (Closes: #820427)
    • Specify lang="en" in HTML output. (re. #849411)
  • Bug fixes:
    • Fix errors when comparing directories with non-directories. (Closes: #835641)
    • Clean all temp files in signal handler thread instead of attempting to bubble exception back to the main thread. (Closes: #852013)
    • Correct logic of module_exists, ensuring we correctly skip tests when python3-debian is not installed. (Closes: #854745)
    • Extract archive members using an auto-incrementing integer, avoiding the need to sanitise filenames. (Closes: #854723)
    • Importing submodules (ie. parent.child) will attempt to import parent so we must catch that. (Closes: #854670)
    • Add missing Recommends for comparators. (Closes: #854655)
    • Device and RPM fallback comparisons needs xxd due to fixtures. (Closes: #854593)
    • Fix behaviour of setting report maximums to zero (ie. no limits)
  • Misc:
    • Don't uselessly run xxd(1) on non-directories.
    • Add .travis.yml from http://travis.debian.net.
    • Use diffoscope.tempfiles over tempfile.TemporaryDirectory to ensure correct cleanup at end of diffoscope run.
  • Tests:
    • Smoke test --progress output.
    • Test the --status-fd output.
    • Move many tests to use new @skip_unless_module_exists decorator.
    • Show local variables in pytest tracebacks.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • No need to do complex string formatting just to convert an integer in a string
• Holger Levsen:
  • README: Keep history, explain this was started in Debian.
• Ximin Luo:
  • Better way of performing the entry name sanitisation
  • Simplify call to subprocess.Popen
  • Remove pointless use of a thread
• Brett Smith:
  • diffoscope.diff: Improve FIFO writing robustness.

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.030-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb:

• Print log entry when fixing a file. (Closes: #777239)
• dh_strip_nondeterminism: Use error() from Dh_Lib.pm over manual die().

buildinfo.debian.net development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Drop raw_text fields now; we've moved them to default_storage (S3)

reproducible-website development

• Joshua Lock:
  • Link to Yocto Project on projects page

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Around 2 decades back and a bit more I was introduced to computers. The top-line was 386DX which was mainly used as fat servers and some lucky institutions had the 386SX where IF we were lucky we could be able to play some games on it. I was pretty bad at Prince of Persia or most of the games of the era as most of the games depended on lightning reflexes which I didn t possess. Then 1997 happened and I was introduced to GNU/Linux but my love of/for games still continued even though I was bad at most of them. The only saving grace was turn-based RPG s (role-playing games) which didn t have permadeath, so you could plan your next move. Sometimes a wrong decision would lead to getting a place from where it was impossible to move further. As the decision was taken far far break which lead to the tangent, the only recourse was to replay the game which eventually lead to giving most of those kind of games. Then in/around 2000 Maxis came out with Sims. This was the time where I bought my first Pentium. I had never played a game which had you building stuff, designing stuff, no violence and the whole idea used to be about balancing priorities of trying to get new stuff, go to work, maintain relationships and still make sure you are eating, sleeping, have a good time. While I might have spent probably something close to 500 odd hours in the game or even more so, I spent the least amount of time in building the house. It used to be 4 4 when starting (you don t have much of in-game money and other stuff you wanted to buy as well) to 8 8 or at the very grand 12 12. It was only the first time I spent time trying to figure out where the bathroom should be, where the kitchen should, where the bedroom should be and after that I could do that blind-folded. The idea behind my house-design used to be simplicity, efficient (for my character). I used to see other people s grand creations of their houses and couldn t understand why they made such big houses. Now few days back, I saw few episodes of a game called Stranded Deep . The story, plot is simple. You, the player are going in a chartered plane and suddenly lightning strikes ( game trope as today s aircrafts are much better able to deal with lightning strikes) and our hero or heroine washes up on a beach with raft with the barest of possessions. Now the whole game is based upon him/her trying to survive, once you get the hang of the basic mechanics and you know what is to be done, you can do it. The only thing the game doesn t have is farming but as the game has unlimited procedural world, you just paddle or with boat motor go island hopping and take all that what you need. What was interesting to me was seeing a gamer putting so much time and passion in making a house. When I was looking at that video, I realized that maybe because I live in a dense environment, even the designs we make either of houses or anything else is more to try to get more and more people rather than making sure that people are happy which leads to my next sharing. Couple of days back, I read Virali Modi s account of how she was molested three times when trying to use Indian Railways. She made a petition on change.org While I do condemn the molestation as it s an affront against individual rights, freedom, liberty, free movement, dignity. Few of the root causes as pointed out by her, for instance the inability or non-preference to give differently-abled people the right to board first as well as awaiting to see that everybody s boarded properly before starting the train are the most minimum steps that Indian Railways could take without spending even a paise. The same could be told/shared about sensitizing people, although I have an idea of why does Indian Railway not employ women porters or women attendants for precisely this job. I accompanied a blind gentleman friend few times on Indian Railways and let me tell you, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences. The bogies which is given to them is similar or even less than what you see in unreserved compartments. The toilets were/are smelly, the gap between the station and the train was/is considerable for everybody from blind people, differently-abled people, elderly people as well. This is one of the causes of accidents which happen almost every day on Indian Railways. I also learnt that especially for blind people they are looking for a sort of low-frequency whistle/noise which tells them the disabled coupe/bogie/coach will come at a specific spot in the Station. In a platform which could have anything between 1500-2000 people navigating it wouldn t be easy. I don t know about other places but Indian Railway Stations need to learn a lot to make it a space for differently abled to navigate by themselves. Pune Station operates (originating or passing through) around 200 odd trains, with exceptions of all the specials and weekly trains that ply through, adding those would probably another 5-10 trains to the mix. Each train carries anywhere between 750-1000 odd people so roughly anywhere between 15-20 million pass through Pune Railway Station daily. Even if we take conservative estimates of around 5% of the public commuting from Pune, it would mean around 750,000 people travelling daily. Pune Railway Station has 6 stations and if I spread them equally it would come to around 100,000 people on one platform in 24 hours. Divide that equally by 24 hours and it comes to 4,160 people per hour. Now you take those figures and you see the Pune platforms are under severe pressure. I have normalized many figures. For instance, just like airports, even in railways, there are specific timings where more trains come and go. From morning 0500 hrs to late night 2300 hrs. there would be lot many trains, whereas the graveyard shifts would have windows where maintenance of tracks and personnel takes place. I dunno if people can comprehend 4000 odd people on the platform. Add to that you usually arrive at least an hour or two before a train departs even if you are a healthy person as Indian Railways has a habit of changing platforms of trains at the last minute. So if you a differently abled person with some luggage for a long-distance train, the problems just multiply. See drag accidents because of gap between railway bogies and platforms. The width of the entrance to the bogie is probably between 30-40 inches but the design is such that 5-10 inches are taken on each side. I remembered the last year, our current Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi had launched Accessible Campaign with great fanfare and we didn t hear anything much after that. Unfortunately, the site itself has latency and accessibility issues, besides not giving any real advice even if a person wants to know what building norms should one follow if one wants to make an area accessible. This was easily seen by last year s audit in Delhi as well as other places. A couple of web-searches later, I landed up at a Canadian site to have some idea about the width of the wheelchair itself as well as additional room to manoeuvre. Unfortunately, the best or the most modern coaches/bogies that Indian Railways has to offer are the LHB Bogies/Coaches. Now while the Coaches/Bogies by themselves are a big improvement from the ICF Coaches which we still have and use, if you read the advice and directions shared on the Canadian site, the coaches are far from satisfactory for people who are wheel-chair bound. According to Government s own census records, 0.6% of the population have movement issues. Getting all the differently-abled people together, it comes between 2, 2.5% of the population which is quite a bit. If 2-3 people out of every 100 people are differently-abled then we need to figure out something for them.While I don t have any ideas as to how we could improve the surroundings, it is clear that we need the change. While I was thinking,dreaming,understanding some of the nuances inadvertently, my attention/memories shifted to my toilet experiences at both Mumbai and the Doha Airport. As had shared then, had been pleasantly surprised to see that both in Mumbai Airport as well as the Doha Airport, the toilets were pretty wide, a part of me was happy and a part of me was seeing the added space as wastefulness. With the understanding of needs of differently-abled people it started to make whole lot of sense. I don t remember if I had shared then or not. Although am left wondering where they go for loo in the aircraft. The regular toilets are a tight fit for obese people, I am guessing aircrafts have toilets for differently-abled people as well. Looking back at last year s conference, we had 2-3 differently-abled people. I am just guessing that it wouldn t have been a pleasant experience for them. For instance, where we were staying, at UCT it had stairs, no lifts so by default they probably were on ground-floor. Then where we were staying and where most of the talks were about a few hundred metres away and the shortest distance were by stairs, the round-about way was by road but had vehicles around so probably not safe that way as well. I am guessing they had to be dependant on other people to figure out things. There were so many places where there were stairs and no ramps and even if there were ramps they were probably a bit more than the 1:12 which is the advice given. I have heard that this year s venue is also a bit challenging in terms of accessibility for differently-abled people. I am clueless as to did differently-able find debconf16 in terms of accessibility or not ? A related query to that one, if a Debconf s final report mentions issues with accessibility, do the venues make any changes so that at some future date, differently-abled people would have a better time. I know of Indian institutions reluctance to change, to do expenditure, dunno how western countries do it. Any ideas, comments are welcome.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #386, #accessibility, #air-travel, #Computers, #differently-abled, #Railways, gaming

Fine art printing at home It is very interesting how people change over time. Way back in the analog film era, I was using a very cheap camera, and getting the film developed and pictures printed at random places in town. As the movement towards digital began, I started dreaming of a full digital workflow take picture, download from camera, enjoy on your monitor. No more pesky physical stuff. And when I finally got a digital camera, I was oh-so-happy to finally get rid of films and prints. But time passes, and a few years back though, at the end of 2013, I had the misfortune to learn on various photography forums that, within certain limits, one can do high quality printing at home quality high enough for serious prints. I always imagined that "serious" prints can only happen on big, professional stuff, but to my surprise, what I was reading was that many professional photographers can do their prints themselves (for certain paper sizes). I tried before printing photos on my laser printer that I wrote about, but that is a hilarious exercise, nothing more. Thinking process was pretty simple:

• another hobby? check!
• new gear to learn? check!
• something more palpable to do with my photos? good enough reason, check!

So I decided to get a photo printer. Because hey, one more printer was the thing I was missing the most. Ink The think with inkjet photo printers is that the bigger they are, the more cheaper the ink is, and the more optimised they are for large volume printing. The more optimisation for large volume, the worse the printers do if you don't print often enough, in the sense of dried ink. This means clogged heads, and each of the serious printer manufacturers (Canon, Epson, HP) deal in different ways with it; some by having extra, spare lines in the print head that replace the clogged ones, others have replaceable printer heads, others rely on wasting ink by trying to flush the ink lines, etc. Also within each manufacturer's lines, different printers behave differently. So one must take this into account how often will you print? Of course I thought very often, but the truth is, this is just another hobby, so time is lacking, and I have weeks going by without turning the printer on. And so, I did have some problems with dried ink, but minor I'd say; I only had once to run a "power cleaning", when due to real world I didn't have time to turn the printer on for months; I managed to choose a good printer in this regard. I never though computed how much ink I wasted with cleaning the heads Paper Another issue with printing is the fact that the result is a physical object, outside of the digital realm. And the transition from digital to physical is tricky. First, the printer itself and the ink are one relatively straightforward choice: decide (by whatever criteria you want) on the printer, and most printers at this level have one set of inks only. But the problem is: which paper? And as I learned, since how the paper looks is a subjective thing, this is an endless topic

• first question: glossy or matte ink?
• if glossy, which type of paper? actually glossy (uh, no), semi-gloss, pearl, satin?
• if matte, are we talking about textured or smooth matte?
• what weight? fine art paper that I tested can go from a very interesting 100gsm (almost like standard paper) Rice Paper, to 210, 286, 310 (quite standard), 325, 350 and finally towards 390-410 heavy canvas;
• on the more professional side, do you care about lifetime of paper? if you choose yes, then take care of choosing paper with no OBA optical brightening agents;
• and if you really want to go deep, what base? cellulose, alpha-cellulose or cotton?

As you can see, this is really a bottomless pit. I made the mistake of buying lots of sample packs, thinking that settling on a specific paper will be an objective process, but no. Three years later, I have a few favourite papers, but I'm sure I could have almost randomly chosen them (read 3 reviews, choose) and not gotten objectively different results. ICC profiles and processing Another thing is that simply having the printer and the paper doesn't mean everything is fixed. Since printers are analog devices, there needs to be a printer and paper specific colour profile, so that you get (on paper) what you see on the screen (which also needs to be calibrated). So when choosing the printer you should be careful to choose one which is common enough that it has profiles, ideally profiles done by the paper manufacturer themselves. Or, you can go the more basic route, and calibrate the printer/paper combination yourself! I skipped that part though. However you get a profile, if you tell your photo processing application what is your display profile and your printer+paper profile, ideally you what you see is what you get, this time for real. Except that sometimes the gamut of colours in the picture can't be represented entirely in either the display nor the printer profile, so the display is an approximation, but a different one than your printer will do on paper. So you learn about relative and perceptual colorimetric conversions, and you read many blog posts about which one to use for what type of pictures (portraits have different needs than landscapes), and you wonder why did you chose this hobby? Of course, you can somewhat avoid the previous two issues by going more old-school to black and white printing. This should be simple, right? Black and white, nothing more. Hah, you wish. Do you do the B&W conversion in your photo processing application, or in your printer? Some printers are renowned by their good B&W conversions, some not. If you print B&W, then the choice of papers also change, because some papers are just awesome at B&W, but only so-so for colours. So says the internet, at least. But even if you solve all of the above, don't give up just yet, because there is still a little problem. Even if you send the right colours to the printer, the way a certain picture looks on paper is different than on screen. This circles somewhat back to paper choice (glossy type ink having deeper blacks than matte, for example) and colour-vs-b&w, but is a general issue: displays have better contrasts than paper (this doesn't mean the pictures are better looking on screen though). So you use the soft-proofing function, but it looks completely weird, and you learn that you need to learn how specific papers will differ from screen, and that sometimes you don't need any adjustment, sometimes you need a +15, which might mean another run of the same print. You print, then what? So you print. Nice, high quality print. All colours perfect! And then what? First, you wait. Because ink, as opposed to laser toner, is not "done" once the paper is out of the printer. It has to dry, which is a process taking about 24 hours in its initial phase, and which you help along by doing some stuff. The ink settles during this time in the paper, and only after that you know what the final look of the print will be. Depending on what you plan to do with the print, you might want to lay a layer of protective stuff on top of it; a kind of protective film that will keep it in better shape over time, but which has the downside that a) it must definitely be applied after the ink has dried and the the paper has for sure finished outgassing and b) it's a semi-hard layer, so you can roll the paper anymore (if you were planning to do that for transport). Or you say damn it, this is anyway a poor picture So with the print all good and really in its final state, you go on and research what solutions are there for hanging prints at home. And look at frames, and think about behind-glass framing or no glass-framing, and and and and you realise that if you just printed your photos at a lab, they'd come directly framed! I still have the really minimalist hanging solution that I bought a year ago unpacked Getting there, sometime! Costs/economic sense If you think all this effort is done in order to save money on prints, the answer is "Ha ha ha" While professional prints at a lab are expensive, how much do you think all the above (printer, inks, paper, framing, TIME) costs? A lot. It's definitely not worth unless your day job is photography. No, for me it was more the desire to own the photographic process from start to end: learn enough to be able to choose everything (camera which implies sensor which implies a lot of things, lens, post-processing, printer/ink, paper), and see (and have) the end result of your work in your hands. Is it worth all the trouble? Fast forward three years later, I still have the printer, although many times I was thinking of getting rid of it. It takes space, it costs some money (although you don't realise this as you print, since you already sunk the money in consumables), it takes time. Being able to print small photos for family (e.g. 10 15) is neat, but a small printer can do this as well, or you can order prints online, or print them from a memory card at many places. Being able to print A4-size (for which framing for e.g. desk-use is a pain) is also neat, but here there are still simpler solutions than your own big printer. The difference is when you print large. You look at the picture on your big screen, you think/imagine how it will look printer, and then you fire an A2 print. The printer starts, makes noises for about 10 minutes, and then you have the picture in your hands. The ink is still fresh (you know it takes 24 hours to settle), and has that nice ink smell that you don't get anymore in day to day life. With a good paper and a good printer, the way the picture looks is so special, that all the effort seems trivial now. I don't know how looking at pictures on an 8K 30+ inch monitor will be; but there's an indescribable difference between back-lighted LCD and paper for the same picture. Even at the same relative size, the paper is real, while the picture is virtual. You look at the people in the picture on your display, whereas the people in the print look at you. Maybe this is just size. A2 is bigger than my monitor wait, no. A2 has a diagonal of ~29 inches (vs. the display at 30"). Maybe it's resolution? An A2 print out of D810 is small enough to still have good resolution (it's about 320dpi after the small cropping needed for correcting the aspect ratio, which matches the printer's native 360dpi resolution). Coupled with a good printer, it's more than high enough resolution that even with a loupe, there's enough detail in the picture to not see its "digital" history (i.e. no rasterization, no gradients, etc.) Note that 360dpi for photo inkjet printers is much different from 600-1200dpi for laser printers (which are raster-based, not ink droplet based, so it's really not comparable). In any case, the print, even at this (relatively large) size, feels like a reflection of reality. On the monitor, it still feels like a digital picture. I could take a picture of the print to show you, but that would defeat the point, wouldn't it And this is what prompted this blog post. I had a pretty intense week at work, so when the weekend came, I was thinking what to do to disconnect and relax. I had a certain picture (people, group photo) that I wanted to print for a while, and it was OK on the screen, but not special. I said, somewhat not very enthusiastic, let's print it. And as the printer was slowly churning along, and the paper was coming out, I remembered why I don't get rid of the printer. Because every time I think about doing that, I say to myself "let's do one more print", which quickly turns into "wow, not, I'm keeping it". Because, even as our life migrates into the digital/virtual realm or maybe more so we're still living in the real world, and our eyes like to look at real objects. And hey, on top of that, it was and still is a pretty intense learning experience!

Updating Britney often makes our life easier. Like:

• smooth-updates (winter 2011)
• Adam s accidental upgrade of the original auto-hinter[1] (winter 2012)
• A non-leaking installability tester (winter 2013)
• Fix non-determinism of easy-hinted smooth updatable packages (summer 2014)
• Support for non-hinted multi-item migrations (autumn 2015)

Concretely, transitions have become a lot easier. When I joined the release team in the summer 2011, about the worst thing that could happen was discovering that two transitions had become entangled. You would have to wait for everything to be ready to migrate at the same time and then you usually also had to tell Britney what had to migrate together. Today, Britney will often (but not always) de-tangle the transitions on her own and very often figure out how to migrate packages without help. The latter is in fact very visible if you know where to look. Behold, the number of manual easy and hint -hints by RT members per year[2]:

Year   Total   easy   hint
-----+-------+------+-----
2005     53      30    23 
2006    146      74    72
2007     70      40    30
2008    113      68    45
2009    229     171    58
2010    252     159    93
2011    255     118   137
2012     29      21     8
2013     36      30     6
2014     20      20     0
2015     25      17     8
2016     16      11     5
2017      1       1     0

As can be seen, the number of manual hints drop by factor of ~8.8 between 2011 and 2012. Now, I have not actually done a proper statistical test of the data, but I have a hunch that drop was significant (see also [3] for a very short data discussion). In conclusion: Smooth-updates (which was enabled late in 2011) have been a tremendous success. [1] A very surprising side-effect of that commit was that the ( original ) auto-hinter could now solve a complicated haskell transition. Turns out that it works a lot better, when you give correct information! [2] As extracted by the following script and then manually massaged into an ASCII table. Tweak the in-line regex to see different hints.

respighi.d.o$ cd "/home/release/britney/hints" && perl -E '
    my (%years, %hints);
    while(<>)   
        chomp;
        if (m/^\#\s*(\d 4 )(?:-?\d 2 -?\d 2 );/ or m/^\#\s*(?:\d+-\d+-\d+\s*[;:]?\s*)?done\s*[;:]?\s*(\d 4 )(?:-?\d 2 -?\d 2 )/)  
             $year = $1; next;
          
         if (m/^((?:easy hint) .*)/)  
             my $hint = $1; $years $year ++ if defined($year) and not $hints $hint ++;
             next;
          
         if (m/^\s*$/)   $year = undef; next;  
     ;
    for my $year (sort(keys(%years)))   
        my $count = $years $year ;
        print "$year: $count\n"
     ' * OLD/jessie/* OLD/wheezy/* OLD/Lenny/* OLD/*

[3] I should probably mention for good measure that extraction is ignoring all hints where it cannot figure out what year it was from or if it is a duplicate. Notable it is omitting about 100 easy/hint-hints from OLD/Lenny (compared to a grep -c), which I think accounts for the low numbers from 2007 (among other). Furthermore, hints files are not rotated based on year or age, nor am I sure we still have all complete hints files from all members.
Filed under: Debian, Release-Team

Solarized A while back I was looking for some information on the web, and happened upon a blog post about the subject. I don't remember what I was looking for, but on the same blog, there was a screen shot of what I then learned was the Solarized theme. This caught my eye that I decided to try it myself ASAP. Up until last year, I've been using for many years the 'black on light yellow' xterm scheme. This is good during the day, but too strong during night, so on some machines I switched to 'white on black', but this was not entirely satisfying. The solarized theme promises to have consistent colours over both light and dark background, which would help to make my setups finally consistent, and extends to a number of programs. Amongst these, there are themes for mutt on both light and dark backgrounds using only 16 colours. This was good, as my current hand-built theme is based on 256 colours, and this doesn't work well in the Linux console. So I tried changing my terminal to the custom colours, played with it for about 10 minutes, then decided that its contrast is too low, bordering on unreadable. I switch to another desktop where I still had open an xterm using white-on-black, and this being at night my eyes immediately go 'no no no too high contrast'. In about ten minutes I got so used to it that the old theme was really really uncomfortable. There was no turning back now Interestingly, the light theme was not that much better than black-on-light-yellow, as that theme is already pretty well behaved. But I still migrated for consistency. Programs/configs Starting from the home page and the internet, I found resources for:

• Vim and Emacs (for which I use the debian package elpa-solarized-theme).
• Midnight Commander, for which I currently use peel's theme, although I'm not happy with it; interestingly, the default theme almost works on 16-custom-colours light terminal scheme, but not quite on the dark one.
• Mutt, which is both in the main combined repository but also on the separate one. I'm not really happy with mutt's theme either, but that seems mostly because I was using a quite different theme before. I'll try to improve what I feel is missing over time.
• dircolors; I found this to be an absolute requirement for good readability of ls --color, as the defaults are too bad
• I also took the opportunity to unify my git diff and colordiff theme, but this was not really something that I found and took 'as-is' from some repository; I basically built my own theme.

16 vs 256 colours The solarized theme/configuration can be done in two ways:

• by changing the Xresources/terminal 16 basic colours to custom RGB values, or:
• by using approximations from the fixed 256 colours available in the xterm-256color terminfo

Upstream recommends the custom ones, as they are precisely tuned, instead of using the approximated ones; honestly I don't know if they would make a difference. It's too bad upstream went silent a few years back, as technically it's possible to override also colours above 16 in the 256-colour palette, but in any case, each of the two options has its own cons:

• using customised 16-colour means that all terminal programs get the new colours scheme, even if they were designed (colour-wise) based on the standard values; this makes some things pretty unreadable (hence the need to fix dircolors), but at least somewhat consistent.
• using 256-colour palette, unchanged programs stay the same, but now they look very different than the programs that were updated to solarized; note thought I haven't tested this, but that's how I understand things would be.

So either way it's not perfect. Desktop-wide consistency Also not perfect is that for proper consistent look, many more programs would have to be changed; but I don't see that happening in today's world. I've seen for example 3 or 4 Midnight Commander themes, but none of them were actually in the spirit of solarized, even though they were tweaked for solarized. Even between vim and emacs, which both have one canonical solarized theme, the look is close but not really the same (looking at the markdown source for this blog post: URLs, headers and spelling mistakes are all different), but this might be due not necessarily the theme itself. So no global theme consistency (I'd wish), but still, I find this much better on the eyes and not lower on readability after getting used to it. Thanks Ethan!

I was an happy user of rxvt-unicode until I got a laptop with an HiDPI display. Switching from a LoDPI to a HiDPI screen and back was a pain: I had to manually adjust the font size on all terminals or restart them. VTE is a library to build a terminal emulator using the GTK+ toolkit, which handles DPI changes. It is used by many terminal emulators, like GNOME Terminal, evilvte, sakura, termit and ROXTerm. The library is quite straightforward and writing a terminal doesn t take much time if you don t need many features. Let s see how to write a simple one.

A simple terminal Let s start small with a terminal with the default settings. We ll write that in C. Another supported option is Vala.

#include <vte/vte.h>
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
 
    GtkWidget *window, *terminal;
    /* Initialise GTK, the window and the terminal */
    gtk_init(&argc, &argv);
    terminal = vte_terminal_new();
    window = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
    gtk_window_set_title(GTK_WINDOW(window), "myterm");
    /* Start a new shell */
    gchar **envp = g_get_environ();
    gchar **command = (gchar *[]) g_strdup(g_environ_getenv(envp, "SHELL")), NULL  ;
    g_strfreev(envp);
    vte_terminal_spawn_sync(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal),
        VTE_PTY_DEFAULT,
        NULL,       /* working directory  */
        command,    /* command */
        NULL,       /* environment */
        0,          /* spawn flags */
        NULL, NULL, /* child setup */
        NULL,       /* child pid */
        NULL, NULL);
    /* Connect some signals */
    g_signal_connect(window, "delete-event", gtk_main_quit, NULL);
    g_signal_connect(terminal, "child-exited", gtk_main_quit, NULL);
    /* Put widgets together and run the main loop */
    gtk_container_add(GTK_CONTAINER(window), terminal);
    gtk_widget_show_all(window);
    gtk_main();
 

You can compile it with the following command:

gcc -O2 -Wall $(pkg-config --cflags --libs vte-2.91) term.c -o term

And run it with ./term:

More features From here, you can have a look at the documentation to alter behavior or add more features. Here are three examples.

Colors You can define the 16 basic colors with the following code:

#define CLR_R(x)   (((x) & 0xff0000) >> 16)
#define CLR_G(x)   (((x) & 0x00ff00) >>  8)
#define CLR_B(x)   (((x) & 0x0000ff) >>  0)
#define CLR_16(x)  ((double)(x) / 0xff)
#define CLR_GDK(x) (const GdkRGBA)  .red = CLR_16(CLR_R(x)), \
                                    .green = CLR_16(CLR_G(x)), \
                                    .blue = CLR_16(CLR_B(x)), \
                                    .alpha = 0  
vte_terminal_set_colors(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal),
    &CLR_GDK(0xffffff),
    &(GdkRGBA)  .alpha = 0.85  ,
    (const GdkRGBA[]) 
        CLR_GDK(0x111111),
        CLR_GDK(0xd36265),
        CLR_GDK(0xaece91),
        CLR_GDK(0xe7e18c),
        CLR_GDK(0x5297cf),
        CLR_GDK(0x963c59),
        CLR_GDK(0x5E7175),
        CLR_GDK(0xbebebe),
        CLR_GDK(0x666666),
        CLR_GDK(0xef8171),
        CLR_GDK(0xcfefb3),
        CLR_GDK(0xfff796),
        CLR_GDK(0x74b8ef),
        CLR_GDK(0xb85e7b),
        CLR_GDK(0xA3BABF),
        CLR_GDK(0xffffff)
 , 16);

While you can t see it on the screenshot¹, this also enables background transparency.

Miscellaneous settings VTE comes with many settings to change the behavior of the terminal. Consider the following code:

vte_terminal_set_scrollback_lines(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), 0);
vte_terminal_set_scroll_on_output(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), FALSE);
vte_terminal_set_scroll_on_keystroke(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), TRUE);
vte_terminal_set_rewrap_on_resize(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), TRUE);
vte_terminal_set_mouse_autohide(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), TRUE);

This will:

• disable the scrollback buffer,
• not scroll to the bottom on new output,
• scroll to the bottom on keystroke,
• rewrap content when terminal size change, and
• hide the mouse cursor when typing.

Update the window title An application can change the window title using XTerm control sequences (for example, with printf "\e]2;$ title \a"). If you want the actual window title to reflect this, you need to define this function:

static gboolean
on_title_changed(GtkWidget *terminal, gpointer user_data)
 
    GtkWindow *window = user_data;
    gtk_window_set_title(window,
        vte_terminal_get_window_title(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal))?:"Terminal");
    return TRUE;
 

Then, connect it to the appropriate signal, in main():

g_signal_connect(terminal, "window-title-changed", 
    G_CALLBACK(on_title_changed), GTK_WINDOW(window));

Final words I don t need much more as I am using tmux inside each terminal. In my own copy, I have also added the ability to complete a word using ones from the current window or other windows (also known as dynamic abbrev expansion). This requires to implement a terminal daemon to handle all terminal windows with one process, similar to urxvtcd. While writing a terminal from scratch ² suits my need, it may not be worth it. evilvte is quite customizable and can be lightweight. Consider it as a first alternative. Honestly, I don t remember why I didn t pick it. UPDATED: evilvte has not seen an update since 2014. Its GTK+3 support is buggy. It doesn t support the latest versions of the VTE library. Therefore, it s not a good idea to use it. You should also note that the primary goal of VTE is to be a library to support GNOME Terminal. Notably, if a feature is not needed for GNOME Terminal, it won t be added to VTE. If it already exists, it will likely to be deprecated and removed.

---

1. Transparency is handled by the composite manager (Compton, in my case).
2. For some definition of scratch since the hard work is handled by VTE.

Couple of weeks ago, either on some mailing list, on IRC or somewhere else, somebody mentioned that people always put higher amount of airline expenditure for self when asking for sponsorship. Now last year, between sending the application and getting the approval for sponsorship, there was 3 months of difference between the two. Now if you put up an application for sponsorship like I did last year, I had added 10% to the cost of flight tickets of the cheapest prevailing prices at that point in time on skyscanner or any of the meta-search-engines were showing me at that point in time. I was sceptical whether the amount that I had put for the to and fro tickets would be enough or not. Strangely, I was lucky enough to get my ticket around the new estimated price. I would have to mention though that there were only 2 tickets left at the new price and if I had waited just a few hours more, those tickets would have gone too and all other tickets were around 25% more than before. The only reasons I could fathom are a. Luck, pure and simple. b. Going at the end of the tourism season This was evident as I was able to book my extended stay at any hostel just 2 days before my stay at UCT (University of Cape Town) was over. Was corroborated by hostel staff, shop-owners as well as whatever info. I found on the web before and during my stay in SA. c. South Africa being more lenient than probably Canada is giving and processing visas. While looking at the third point, thought I better check world tourism rankings and saw the Wikipedia page for it. Interestingly, South Africa seems to have a slight edge over Canada when it comes to statistics and hence strengthens my assumptions that probably more people apply for SA than Canada as they know the possibility of more people making through visa processing. It would stand to be logical that more people would apply for a tourist or similar short-term resident visas if they know they have a good chance going through. While researching on the topic I also came across/ hunted to find the hardest places to get a Visa for and was surprised to find India being lasted therein.Coincidentally, that site also has a UK domain.It does burst the bubble in Incredible India a little bit. As a newbie who had no clue I knew I was probably a victim of Information Asymmetry where the airlines have much more information about travel trends, ongoing trends at Airports, Politics and Economics of Countries, Price of Crude Oil, Profit, Competition and probably many more factors that I haven t taken into account which decide fares. While researching on the topic, one of the interesting finds I had while trying to figure the above is that Airlines didn t pass on fuel savings to their customers. Now I don t know whether this was the same around the world or was this only in UK. I am shocked that British (and by definition EU, as UK was part of EU at that time) travellers or consumer groups didn t file a suit in the court of law as reading the above smells of anticompetitive behaviour. The most shocking statement was this Average fares to Spain rose by 10 per cent over the same period. Telegraph, UK. In order to lessen this information asymmetry a bit, I used google flights and its data of the past 2 months to see how the fares have been changing to have some insight of where the fares might end up. I know google is hated by one and all, but in this instance I couldn t find any comparable site which does this kind of thing. As can be seen in the graph, the tickets had started relatively cheap from around INR 65k ish to around 80k ish at this point in time. That is a jump of around 30% in the last couple of months. All of these flights have a layover somewhere in Europe and taking a second flight from there to Canada. The one which didn t show much of action is the direct plan between BOM YUL and back but then this seems to be a premium service . Taking a direct flight from BOM YUL is north of INR 90k/- which doesn t make much sense unless one is fond of spending 13+ hours in flight. Definitely not my cup of tea. With layovers it makes the experience a bit more bearable. While the real action is probably 3 or bit more months away, its interesting to see how things are panning out at least on airline price tickets and the dynamics involved therein. Even with all the above attempts at finding the answer, I m no closer to figuring out to estimate airline ticket prices when window is largish 3 months in making. Any ideas anybody? If the previous jump is any indication, then 10-15% escalation bit might not hack this time around. Any strategies that people could advise while trying to put a ball-park figure.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #air-travel, #Airfares, #Competition, #Price Estimation, #Sponsorship

A new version of the nanotime package for working with nanosecond timestamps is now on CRAN. nanotime uses the RcppCCTZ package for (efficient) high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. This release adds an improved default display format always showing nine digits of fractional seconds. It also changes the print() method to call format() first, and we started to provide some better default Ops methods. These fixes were suggested by Matt Dowle. We also corrected a small issue which could lead to precision loss in formatting as pointed out by Leonardo Silvestri.

Changes in version 0.1.1 (2017-02-04)

• The default display format now always shows nine digits (#10 closing #9)
• The default print method was updated to use formated output, and a new new converter as.integer64 was added
• Several 'Ops' method are now explicitly defined allowing casting of results (rather than falling back on bit64 behaviour)
• The format routine is now more careful about not loosing precision (#13 closing #12)

We also have a diff to the previous version thanks to CRANberries. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Scratch is a block-based programming language created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group (LLK) at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch gives kids the power to use programming to create their own interactive animations and computer games. Since 2007, the online community that allows Scratch programmers to share, remix, and socialize around their projects has drawn more than 16 million users who have shared nearly 20 million projects and more than 100 million comments. It is one of the most popular ways for kids to learn programming and among the larger online communities for kids in general.

Front page of the Scratch online community (https://scratch.mit.edu) during the period covered by the dataset.

Since 2010, I have published a series of papers using quantitative data collected from the database behind the Scratch online community. As the source of data for many of my first quantitative and data scientific papers, it s not a major exaggeration to say that I have built my academic career on the dataset. I was able to do this work because I happened to be doing my masters in a research group that shared a physical space ( The Cube ) with LLK and because I was friends with Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez, who started in my masters cohort at the Media Lab. A year or so after we met, Andr s conceived of the Scratch online community and created the first version for his masters thesis project. Because I was at MIT and because I knew the right people, I was able to get added to the IRB protocols and jump through the hoops necessary to get access to the database. Over the years, Andr s and I have heard over and over, in conversation and in reviews of our papers, that we were privileged to have access to such a rich dataset. More than three years ago, Andr s and I began trying to figure out how we might broaden this access. Andr s had the idea of taking advantage of the launch of Scratch 2.0 in 2013 to focus on trying to release the first five years of Scratch 1.x online community data (March 2007 through March 2012) most of the period that the codebase he had written ran the site. After more work than I have put into any single research paper or project, Andr s and I have published a data descriptor in Nature s new journal Scientific Data. This means that the data is now accessible to other researchers. The data includes five years of detailed longitudinal data organized in 32 tables with information drawn from more than 1 million Scratch users, nearly 2 million Scratch projects, more than 10 million comments, more than 30 million visits to Scratch projects, and much more. The dataset includes metadata on user behavior as well the full source code for every project. Alongside the data is the source code for all of the software that ran the website and that users used to create the projects as well as the code used to produce the dataset we ve released. Releasing the dataset was a complicated process. First, we had navigate important ethical concerns about the the impact that a release of any data might have on Scratch s users. Toward that end, we worked closely with the Scratch team and the the ethics board at MIT to design a protocol for the release that balanced these risks with the benefit of a release. The most important features of our approach in this regard is that the dataset we re releasing is limited to only public data. Although the data is public, we understand that computational access to data is different in important ways to access via a browser or API. As a result, we re requiring anybody interested in the data to tell us who they are and agree to a detailed usage agreement. The Scratch team will vet these applicants. Although we re worried that this creates a barrier to access, we think this approach strikes a reasonable balance. Beyond the the social and ethical issues, creating the dataset was an enormous task. Andr s and I spent Sunday afternoons over much of the last three years going column-by-column through the MySQL database that ran Scratch. We looked through the source code and the version control system to figure out how the data was created. We spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out which columns and rows were public. Most of our work went into creating detailed codebooks and documentation that we hope makes the process of using this data much easier for others (the data descriptor is just a brief overview of what s available). Serializing some of the larger tables took days of computer time. In this process, we had a huge amount of help from many others including an enormous amount of time and support from Mitch Resnick, Natalie Rusk, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Berg at MIT as well as from many other on the Scratch Team. We also had an enormous amount of feedback from a group of a couple dozen researchers who tested the release as well as others who helped us work through through the technical, social, and ethical challenges. The National Science Foundation funded both my work on the project and the creation of Scratch itself. Because access to data has been limited, there has been less research on Scratch than the importance of the system warrants. We hope our work will change this. We can imagine studies using the dataset by scholars in communication, computer science, education, sociology, network science, and beyond. We re hoping that by opening up this dataset to others, scholars with different interests, different questions, and in different fields can benefit in the way that Andr s and I have. I suspect that there are other careers waiting to be made with this dataset and I m excited by the prospect of watching those careers develop. You can find out more about the dataset, and how to apply for access, by reading the data descriptor on Nature s website.

The past few days I've been doing more arduino-work. In between dying of sleep-exhaustion. One thing that always annoyed me was that I had to hard-code my WiFi credentials in my projects, with code like this:

//
// Connect to the SCOTLAND network
//
WiFi.mode(WIFI_STA);
WiFi.hostname("tram-clock");
WiFi.begin("SCOTLAND", "highlander1");
//
// Attempt to connect - TODO: Timeout on failure
//
while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED)
    delay(500);
//
// Now we're connected show the local IP address.
//
lcd.print("WiFi connected  ");
lcd.print(WiFi.localIP());

Whilst looking at another project I found a great solution though. There is a library called WiFiManager which behaves perfectly:

• If you've stored connection details it will connect to the local WiFI network using those, automatically.
• If you've not saved previous connection details it will instead configure the device to work as an Access Point
  • You can then connect to that access point and see a list of local WiFi networks.
  • Choose the appropriate one from the list, enter your password, and these details are saved for the future.
  • The device will then reset, join the network via your saved choices and acquire an IP via DHCP as you'd expect.

The code for this is beautifully simple:

//
// Connect to WiFI with saved credentials, if any.
//
// Otherwise work as an access-point, named TRAM-TIMES, and
// let the user fill out their details.
//
WiFiManager wifiManager;
wifiManager.autoConnect("TRAM-TIMES");

This means my current project, which continues to revolve around tram-times, is so very much more user-friendly. It is a product you could package and take to a friends house, not a project you have to recompile to tweak. For that reason, user-niceness, I reworked the on-board HTTP status-page to use bootstrap, be themed, and look nicer. Other than being housed in a horrid case the project actually looks like a product. Not one I'd buy, but neither one I'm ashamed of sharing.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month):

• Created github-sync, a tool to mirror arbitrary repositories onto GitHub.
• Submitted two pull requests to the word-wrap Chrome browser extension that adds the ability to wrap text via the right-click context menu:
  • Support dynamically-added <textarea> elements in "rich" Javascript applications such as mail clients, etc. (#2)
  • Avoid an error message if no "editable" has been selected yet. (#1)
• Submitted a pull request to wordwarvi (a "retro-styled old school side-scrolling shooter") to ensure the build is reproducible. (#5)
• Filed a pull request with the yard Ruby documentation tool to ensure the generated output is reproducible. (#1048)
• Made some improvements to travis.debian.net, my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds on every code change:
  • Merged a pull request from Evgeni Golov to allow for skipped tests. (#39)
  • Add logging when running autopkgtests. (commit)
• Merged a pull request from jwilk for python-fadvise my Python interface to the posix_fadvise(2) interface to predeclare an pattern for accessing data. (#6)
• Filed an issue against the redis key-value database regarding build failures on non-x86 architectures. (#3768)

---

As children use digital media to learn and socialize, others are collecting and analyzing data about these activities. In school and at play, these children find that they are the subjects of data science. As believers in the power of data analysis, we believe that this approach falls short of data science s potential to promote innovation, learning, and power. Motivated by this fact, we have been working over the last three years as part of a team at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Washington to design and build a system that attempts to support an alternative vision: children as data scientists. The system we have built is described in a new paper Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists that will be published in the proceedings of CHI 2017. Our system is built on top of Scratch, a visual, block-based programming language designed for children and youth. Scratch is also an online community with over 15 million registered members who share their Scratch projects, remix each others work, have conversations, provide feedback, bookmark or love projects they like, follow other users, and more. Over the last decade, researchers including us have used the Scratch online community s database to study the youth using Scratch. With Scratch Community Blocks, we attempt to put the power to programmatically analyze these data into the hands of the users themselves. To do so, our new system adds a set of new programming primitives (blocks) to Scratch so that users can access public data from the Scratch website from inside Scratch. Blocks in the new system gives users access to project and user metadata, information about social interaction, and data about what types of code are used in projects. The full palette of blocks to access different categories of data is shown below.

Project metadata

User metadata

Site-wide statistics

The new blocks allow users to programmatically access, filter, and analyze data about their own participation in the community. For example, with the simple script below, we can find whether we have followers in Scratch who report themselves to be from Spain, and what their usernames are. In designing the system, we had two primary motivations. First, we wanted to support avenues through which children can engage in curiosity-driven, creative explorations of public Scratch data. Second, we wanted to foster self-reflection with data. As children looked back upon their own participation and coding activity in Scratch through the project they and their peers made, we wanted them to reflect on their own behavior and learning in ways that shaped their future behavior and promoted exploration. After designing and building the system over 2014 and 2015, we invited a group of active Scratch users to beta test the system in early 2016. Over four months, 700 users created more than 1,600 projects. The diversity and depth of users creativity with the new blocks surprised us. Children created projects that gave the viewer of the project a personalized doughnut-chart visualization of their coding vocabulary on Scratch, rendered the viewer s number of followers as scoops of ice-cream on a cone, attempted to find whether love-its for projects are more common on Scratch than favorites , and told users how talkative they were by counting the cumulative string-length of project titles and descriptions. We found that children, rather than making canonical visualizations such as pie-charts or bar-graphs, frequently made information representations that spoke to their own identities and aesthetic sensibilities. A 13-year-old girl had made a virtual doll dress-up game where the player s ability to buy virtual clothes and accessories for the doll was determined by the level of their activity in the Scratch community. When we asked about her motivation for making such a project, she said:

I was trying to think of something that somebody hadn t done yet, and I didn t see that. And also I really like to do art on Scratch and that was a good opportunity to use that and mix the two [art and data] together.

We also found at least some evidence that the system supported self-reflection with data. For example, after seeing a project that showed its viewers a visualization of their past coding vocabulary, a 15-year-old realized that he does not do much programming with the pen-related primitives in Scratch, and wrote in a comment, epic! looks like we need to use more pen blocks. :D.

Doughnut visualization

Ice-cream visualization

Data-driven doll dress up

Additionally, we noted that that as children made and interacted with projects made with Scratch Community Blocks, they started to critically think about the implications of data collection and analysis. These conversations are the subject of another paper (also being published in CHI 2017). In a 1971 article called Teaching Children to be Mathematicians vs. Teaching About Mathematics , Seymour Papert argued for the need for children doing mathematics vs. learning about it. He showed how Logo, the programming language he was developing at that time with his colleagues, could offer children a space to use and engage with mathematical ideas in creative and personally motivated ways. This, he argued, enabled children to go beyond knowing about mathematics to doing mathematics, as a mathematician would. Scratch Community Blocks has not yet been launched for all Scratch users and has several important limitations we discuss in the paper. That said, we feel that the projects created by children in our the beta test demonstrate the real potential for children to do data science, and not just know about it, provide data for it, and to have their behavior nudged and shaped by it.

Statutory warning It s a long read. I start by sharing I regret, I did not hold onto the Budget and Economics 101 blog post for one more day. I had been holding/thinking on to it for almost couple of weeks before posting, if I had just waited a day more, I would have been able to share an Indian Express story . While I thought that the work for the budget starts around 3 months before the budget, I came to learn from that article that it takes 6 months. As can be seen in the article, it is somewhat of a wasted opportunity, part of it probably due to the Government (irrespective of any political party, dynasty etc.) mismanagement. What has not been stated in the article is what I had shared earlier, reading between the lines, it seems that the Government isn t able to trust what it hears from its advisers and man on the street. Unlike Chanakya and many wise people before him who are credited with advising about good governance, that a good king is one who goes out in disguise, learns how his/er subjects are surviving, seeing what ills them and taking or even not taking corrective steps after seeing the problem from various angles. Of course it s easier said then done, though lot of Indian kings did try and ran successful provinces. There were also some who were more interested in gambling, women and threw/frittered away their kingdoms. The 6-month things while not being said in the Express article is probably more about checking and re-checking figures and sources to make sure they are able to read whatever pattern the various Big Businesses, Industry, Social Welfare schemes and people are saying I guess. And unless mass digitalization as well as overhaul of procedures, Right to Information (RTI) happens, don t see any improvement in the way the information is collected, interpreted and shared with the public at large. It would also require people who are able to figure out how things work sharing the inferences (right or wrong) through various media so there is discussion about figures and policy-making. Such researchers and their findings are sadly missing in Indian public discourses and only found in glossy coffee table books :(. One of the most basic question for instance is, How much of any policy should be based on facts and figures and how much giving fillip to products and services needed in short to medium term ? Also how much morality should play a part in Public Policy ? Surprisingly, or probably not, most Indian budgets are populist by nature with some scientific basis but most of the times there is no dialog about how the FM came to some conclusion or Policy-making. I am guessing a huge part of that has also to do with basic illiteracy as well as Economic and Financial Illiteracy. Just to share a well-known world-over example, one of the policies where the Government of India has been somewhat lethargic is wired broadband penetration. As have shared umpteen times, while superficially broadband penetration is happening, most of the penetration is the unreliable and more expensive mobile broadband penetration. While this may come as a shock to many of the users of technology, BSNL, a Government company who provides broadband for almost 70-80% of the ADSL wired broadband subscribers gives 50:1 contention ratio to its customers. One can now understand the pathetic speeds along with very old copper wiring (20 odd years) on which the network is running. The idea/idiom of running network using duct-tape seems pretty apt in here Now, the Government couple of years ago introduced FFTH Fiber-to-the-home but because the charges are so high, it s not going anywhere. The Government could say 10% discount in your Income Tax rates if you get FFTH. This would force people to get FFTH and would also force BSNL to clean up its act. It has been documented that a percentage increase in broadband equals a similar percentage rise in GDP. Having higher speeds of broadband would mean better quality of streaming video as well as all sorts of remote teaching and sharing of ideas which will give a lot of fillip to all sorts of IT peripherals in short, medium and long-term as well. Not to mention, all the software that will be invented/coded to take benefit of all that speed. Although, realistically speaking I am cynical that the Government would bring something like this Moving on Another interesting story which I had shared was a bit about World History Now the Economist sort of confirmed how things are in Pakistan. What is and was interesting that the article is made by a politically left-leaning magazine which is for globalization, business among other things . So, there seem to be only three options, either I and the magazine are correct or we both are reading it wrong. The third and last option is that the United States realize that Pakistan can no longer be trusted as Pakistan is siding more and more with Chinese and Russians, hence the article. Atlhough it seems a somewhat far-fetched idea as I don t see the magazine getting any brownie points with President Trump. Unless, The Economist becomes more hawkish, more right-wingish due to the new establishment. I can t claim to have any major political understanding or expertise but it does seem that Pakistan is losing friends. Even UAE have been cautiously building bridges with us. Now how this will play out in the medium to long-term depends much on the personal equations of the two heads of state, happenings in geopolitics around the world and the two countries, decisions they take, it is a welcome opportunity as far they (the Saudis) have funds they want to invest and India can use those investments to make new infrastructure. Now, I need a bit of help of Java and VCS (Version control system) experts . There is a small game project called Mars-Sim. I asked probably a few more questions than I should have and the result was that I was made a member of the game team even though I had shared with them that I m a non-coder. I think such a game is important as it s foss. Both the game itself is foss as well as its build-tools with a basic wiki. Such a game would be useful not only to Debian but all free software distributions. Journeying into the game Unfortunately, the game as it is currently, doesn t work with openjdk8 but private conversations with the devs. have shared they will work on getting it to work on OpenJDK 9 which though is sometime away. Now as it is a game, I knew it would have multiple multimedia assets. It took me quite sometime to figure out where most of the multimedia assets are. I was shocked to find that there aren t any tool/s in Debian as well a GNU/Linux to know about types of content is there inside a directory and its sub-directories. I framed it in a query and found a script as an answer . I renamed the script to file-extension-information.sh (for lack of imagination of better name). After that, I downloaded a snapshot of the head of the project from https://sourceforge.net/p/mars-sim/code/HEAD/tree/ where it shows a link to download the snapshot. https://sourceforge.net/code-snapshots/svn/m/ma/mars-sim/code/mars-sim-code-3847-trunk.zip unzipped it and then ran the script on it [$] bash file-extension-information.sh mars-sim-code-3846-trunk
theme: 1770
dtd: 31915
py: 10815
project: 5627
JPG: 762476
fxml: 59490
vm: 876
dat: 15841044
java: 13052271
store: 1343
gitignore: 8
jpg: 3473416
md: 5156
lua: 57
gz: 1447
desktop: 281
wav: 83278
1: 2340
css: 323739
frag: 471
svg: 8948591
launch: 9404
index: 11520
iml: 27186
png: 3268773
json: 1217
ttf: 2861016
vert: 712
ogg: 12394801
prefs: 11541
properties: 186731
gradle: 611
classpath: 8538
pro: 687
groovy: 2711
form: 5780
txt: 50274
xml: 794365
js: 1465072
dll: 2268672
html: 1676452
gif: 38399
sum: 23040
(none): 1124
jsx: 32070 It gave me some idea of what sort of file were under the repository. I do wish the script defaulted to showing file-sizes in KB if not MB to better assess how the directory is made up but not a big loss . The above listing told me that at the very least theme, JPG, dat, wav, png, ogg and lastly gif files. For lack of better tools and to get an overview of where those multimedia assets used ncdu [shirish@debian] - [~/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk] - [10210]
[$] ncdu mars-sim/ --- /home/shirish/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk/mars-sim --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
46.2 MiB [##########] /mars-sim-ui
15.2 MiB [### ] /mars-sim-mapdata
8.3 MiB [# ] /mars-sim-core
2.1 MiB [ ] /mars-sim-service
500.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-main
188.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-android
72.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-network
16.0 KiB [ ] pom.xml
12.0 KiB [ ] /.settings
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.store
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.iml
4.0 KiB [ ] .project
I found that all the media is distributed randomly and posted a ticket about it. As I m not even a java newbie, could somebody look at mokun s comment and help out please ? On the same project, there has been talk of migrating to github.com Now whatever little I know of git, it makes a copy of the whole repository under .git/ folder/directory so having multimedia assets under git is a bad, bad idea, as each multimedia binary format file would be unique and no possibility of diff. between two binary files even though they may be the same file with some addition or subtraction from earlier version. I did file a question but am unhappy with the answers given. Can anybody give some definitive answers if they have been able to do how I am proposing , if yes, how did they go about it ? And lastly America was founded by immigrants. Everybody knows the story about American Indians, the originals of the land were over-powered by the European settlers. So any claim, then and now that immigration did not help United States is just a lie. This came due to a conversation on #debconf by andrewsh

[18:37:06] I d be more than happy myself to apply for an US tourist not transit visa when I really need it, as a transit visa isn t really useful, is just as costly as a tourist visa, and nearly as difficult to get as a tourist visa
[18:37:40] I m not entirely sure I wish to transit through the US in its Trumplandia incarnation either
[18:38:07] likely to be more difficult and unfun

FWIW I am in complete agreement with Andrew s assessment of how it might be with foreigners. It has been on my mind and thoughts for quite some time although andrewsh put it eloquently. But as always I m getting ahead of myself. The conversation is because debconf this year would be in Canada. For many a cheap flight, one of the likely layovers/stopover can be the United States. I actually would have gone one step further, even if it was cheap transit visa, it would equally be unfun as it would discriminate. About couple of years back, a friend of mine while explaining what visa is, put it rather succinctly the visa officer looks at only 3 things a. Your financial position something which tells that you can take care of your financial needs if things go south b. You are not looking to settle there unlawfully c. You are not a criminal. While costs do matter, what is disturbing more is the form of extremism being displayed therein. While Indians from the South Asian continent in US have been largely successful, love to be in peace (one-off incidents do and will happen anywhere) if I had to take a transit or tourist visa in this atmosphere, it would leave a bad taste in the mouth. When one of my best friends is a Muslim, 20% of the population in India is made of Muslims and 99% of the time both of us co-exist in peace I simply can t take any alternative ideology. Even in Freakonomics 2.0 the authors when they shared that it s less than 0.1 percent of Muslims who are engaged in terrorist activities, if they were even 1 percent than all the world s armed forces couldn t fight them and couldn t keep anyone safe. Which simply means that 99.99% of even all Muslims are good. This resonates strongly with me for number of reasons. One of my uncles in early to late 80 s had an opportunity for work to visit Russia for official work. He went there and there were Secret Police after him all the time. While he didn t know it, I later read it, that it was SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) when all and any foreigners came visiting the country, and not just foreigners, they had spies for their own citizens. Russka a book I read several years ago explained the paranoia beautifully. While U.S. in those days was a more welcoming place for him. I am thankful as well as find it strange that Canada and States have such different visa procedures. While Canada would simply look at the above things, probably discreetly inquire about you if you have been a bad boy/girl in any way and then make a decision which is fine. For United States, even for a transit visa I probably would have to go to Interview where my world view would probably be in conflict with the current American world view. Interestingly, while I was looking at conversations on the web and one thing that is missing there is that nobody has talked about intelligence community. What Mr. Trump is saying in not so many words is that our intelligence even with all the e-mails we monitor and everything we do, we still can t catch you. It almost seems like giving a back-handed compliment to the extremists saying you do a better job than our intelligence community. This doesn t mean that States doesn t have interesting things to give to the world, Star Trek conventions, Grand Canyon (which probably would require me more than a month or more to explore even a little part), NASA, Intel, AMD, SpaceX, CES (when it s held) and LPC (Linux Plumber s conference where whose who come to think of roadmap for GNU/Linux). What I wouldn t give to be a fly in the wall when LPC, CES happens in the States. What I actually found very interesting is that in the current Canadian Government, if what I read and heard is true, then Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada made 50 of his cabinet female. Just like in the article, studies even in Indian parliament have shown that when women are in power, questions about social justice, equality, common good get asked and policies made. If I do get the opportunity to be part of debconf, I would like to see, hear, watch, learn how the women cabinet is doing things. I am assuming that reporting and analysis standards of whatever decisions are more transparent and more people are engaged in the political process to know what their elected representatives are doing. One another interesting point I came to know is that Canada is home to bicycling paths. While I stopped bicycling years ago as it has been becoming more and more dangerous to bicycle here in Pune as there is no demarcation for cyclists, I am sure lot of Canadians must be using this opportunity fully. Lastly, on the debconf preparation stage, things have started becoming a bit more urgent and hectic. From a monthly IRC meet, it has now become a weekly meet. Both the wiki and the website are slowly taking up shape. http://deb.li/dc17kbp is a nice way to know/see progress of the activities happening . One important decision that would be taken today is where people would stay during debconf. There are options between on-site and two places around the venue, one 1.9 km around, the other 5 km. mark. Each has its own good and bad points. It would be interesting to see which place gets selected and why.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #budget, #Canada, #debconf organization, #discrimination, #Equal Opportunity, #Fiber, #svn, #United States, #Version Control, Broadband, Git, Pakistan, Subversion

Review: Summer in Orcus, by T. Kingfisher

Publisher:	Red Wombat Studio
Copyright:	2016
ASIN:	B01N26G2I0
Format:	Web serial
Pages:	268

In September, Ursula Vernon started posting Summer in Orcus as a web serial, funded by her Patreon supporters. The entire story is now complete and available on-line for free, which is how I read it, but it's also available as an ebook from the expected places if you prefer to read it that way. The ebook publication lists T. Kingfisher as the author, Vernon's pen name for her books for adults. While I would have been happy to read this book as a kid, it does have one fairly gruesome chapter, which is probably the reason for that choice. Summer is eleven, and her mother loves her very much. So much so that she's never allowed to do anything even slightly risky, and she spends quite a lot of her time and emotional energy reassuring her mother, dealing with the burden of that suffocating love, and helping her through her bad days. Then, one day, a house with giant chicken feet walks into the alley behind her house. Summer in Orcus is a portal fantasy. It's the story of how Summer meets Baba Yaga and asks for her heart's desire, finds herself in the magical country of Orcus, and is desperately moved by the plight of a frog tree. It has a talking weasel and a werehouse and antelope women who are not to be trusted, and it's about Summer making friends her mother would never have approved of and learning what she's capable of, and about doing what one can to put things right. Even though it may appear that way at times, Summer in Orcus is not really a book about large things. It's not a saving the world sort of portal fantasy. And it's not really a wish fulfillment portal fantasy, because heart's desires are complicated and subtle. It's a story about being scared and tired and lost, and about making friends, and doing the things one can do rather than learning how to be a completely different person. The plot itself is not particularly complex, but the joy of this story is in all the small things. Vernon's writing is an absolute delight. Summer in Orcus is packed with sentences and paragraphs that I just want to read again and again and quote at people.

Summer had never had a father, and wasn t entirely sure what you did with one, and certainly her mother never had anything good to say about the one Summer didn t have.

Or:

The house lifted its back end up and inched forward a little, like a dog wanting to play. This must have made the floors tilt inside, because Summer heard a banging and sliding of furniture and Baba Yaga yelled, "Fool house! I ll trade you in for one with turtle feet and a three-car garage!" The house sank back down, but wiggled forward a little more, until the front door was only a few feet away.

Vernon mentions in her author notes at the end that Summer in Orcus started as a place to put a whole bunch of fragmentary ideas that she'd come up with but that didn't seem to fit into other stories, and it does have a bit of a grand tour feel to it. But unlike a lot of grand tour figures, the protagonist is not at all bland. Summer is entirely believable and very sympathetic, torn between wanting a grand adventure and being afraid of circumstance and danger entirely outside of her limited experience. She channels the reader's awe and delight, but is still very much her own person, trying to figure out who she wants to be and believe in without the stifling presence of her mother. The tour nature of the story does mean that some things weren't explored as deeply as I would have liked. I would dearly love to read more about the dogs, for instance. I also have to admit that Zultan's motives never made sense to me, even after they were explained, and I found him an odd and weirdly random character to the end. But Glorious is, well, glorious, and I utterly adored the bits with the Forester. The ending is highly unusual for a story of this sort, and I thought it was wonderful, with a great symbolic tie back to the start of the story. The aftermath is even better, including Summer standing firm against one of the tropes of portal fantasies that I dislike the most. This is a great story, with some excellent writing. If you're anything like me, once you read the first chapter you won't want to stop (and since it's all available on the web for free, there's no reason to stop). Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

I still remember vividly my first visit to Europe, back in 2010. I had just barely gotten off a plane in Hamburg and on to a bus to Lubeck, and struck up a conversation with a friendly, well-educated German classical musician next to me. We soon started to discuss politics and religion. Over the course of the conversation, in response to his questions, I explained I had twice voted against George W. Bush, that I opposed the war in Iraq for many reasons, that I did thought there was an ethical imperative to work to defeat climate change, that I viewed health care as an important ethical and religious issue, that I thought evolution was well-established, and that I am a Christian. Finally, without any hint of insult intended, and rather a lot of surprise written all over his face, he said: Wow. You re an American, and a Christian, and you re so . normal! This, it seems to me, has a lot to do with Trump. Ouch It felt like a punch to the gut. The day after the election, having known that a man that appeared to stand for everything that honorable people are against won the election, like people all around the world, I was trying to make sense of how could this happen? As I ve watched since, as he stacks government with wealthy cronies with records nearly as colorful as his own, it is easy to feel even more depressed. Based on how Trump spoke and acted, it would be easy to conclude that the deplorables won the day that he was elected by a contingent of sexists or racists ascendent in power. But that would be too simple an explanation. This is, after all, the same country that elected Barack Obama twice. There are a many people that voted twice for a black man, and then for Trump. Why? Racism, while doubtless a factor, can t explain it all. How Trump could happen Russ Allbery made some excellent points recently:

[Many Americans are] hurt, and they re scared, and they feel like a lot of the United States just slammed the door in their faces. The status quo is not working for people. Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances. Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I m part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too. The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country.

Russ is, of course, right. The Democrats have been either complicit in policies damaging to many, or ineffective in preventing them. They have often appeared unconcerned with the plight of people outside cities (even if that wasn t really the case). And it goes deeper. When s the last time you visited Kansas? I live in Kansas. The nearest paved road is about a 3-mile drive from my home. The nearest town, population 600, is a 6-mile drive. My governor whom I did not vote for cut taxes on the wealthy so much that our excellent local schools have been struggling for years. But my community is amazing, full of loving and caring people, the sort of people who you know you ll be living with for 40 years, and so you make sure you get along well with. I have visited tourist sites in Berlin, enjoyed an opera and a Broadway show in New York, taken a train across the country to Portland, explored San Francisco. I ve enjoyed all of them. Many rural people do get out and experience the world. I have been in so many conversations where I try to explain where I live to people that simply cannot fathom it. I have explained how the 18 acres I own is a very small amount where I am. How, yes, I do actually have electricity and Internet. How a bad traffic day is one where I have to wait for three cars to go past before turning onto the paved road. How I occasionally find a bull in my front yard, how I can walk a quarter mile and be at the creek on the edge of my property, how I can get to an airport faster than most New Yorkers and my kids can walk out the front door and play in a spot more peaceful than Central Park, and how all this is way cheaper than a studio apartment in a bad part of San Francisco. It is rare indeed to see visitors actually traveling to Kansas as a destination. People have no concept of the fact that my mechanic would drop everything and help me get my broken-down car to the shop for no charge, that any number of neighbors or uncles would bring a tractor and come plow the snow off my 1/4-mile driveway out of sheer kindness, that people around here really care for each other in a way you don t see in a city. There are people that I know see politics way differently than me, but I know them to be good people. They would also do anything for a person in need, no matter who they are. I may find the people that they vote for to be repugnant, but I cannot say I ve looked this person in the eyes and they are nothing but deplorable. And so, people in rural areas feel misunderstood. And they are right. Some perspectives on Trump As I ve said, I do find Trump to be deplorable, but not everyone that voted for him is. How, then, do people wind up voting for him? The New Yorker had an excellent story about a man named Mark Frisbie, owner of a welding and fab shop. The recession had been hard on his business. His wife s day-care center also closed. Health care was hard to find, and the long, slow decline had spanned politicians of every stripe. Mark and his wife supposedly did everything they were supposed to: they worked hard, were honest, were entrepreneurial, and yet he had lost his business, his family house, his health coverage, everything. He doesn t want a handout. He wants to be able to earn a living. Asked who he d vote for, he said, Is none of the above an option? The Washington Post had another insightful article, about a professor from Madison, WI interviewing people in rural areas. She said people would often say: All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody s listening to us. Nobody s paying attention, nobody s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them. She pushed back, hard, on the idea that Trump supporters are ignorant, and added that liberals that push that line of thinking are only making the problem worse. I would agree; seeing all the talk about universities dis-inviting speakers that don t hew to certain political views doesn t help either. A related article talks about the lack of empathy for Trump voters. And then we have a more recent CNN article: Where Tump support and Obamacare use soar together, explaining in great detail how it can be logical for someone to be on Obamacare but not like it. We can all argue that the Republicans may have as much to do with that as anything, but the problem exists. And finally, a US News article makes this point:

His supporters realize he s a joke. They do not care. They know he s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who ve long ignored their interests. When you re earning $32,000 a year and haven t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price. According to the Republican Party, the biggest threat to rural America was Islamic terrorism. According to the Democratic Party it was gun violence. In reality it was prescription drug abuse and neither party noticed until it was too late.

Are we leaving people out? All this reminded me of reading about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist and something of the father of modern computing, writing about his feelings of trepidation about sharing with his university colleagues that he was working on a project related to the Bible. I am concerned about the complaints about the PC culture , because I think it is good that people aren t making racist or anti-semitic jokes in public anymore. But, as some of these articles point out, in many circles, making fun of Christians and conservatives is still one of the accepted targets. Does that really help anything? (And as a Christian that is liberal, have all of you that aren t Christians so quickly forgotten how churches like the Episcopals blazed the way for marriage equality many years ago already?) But they don t get a free pass I have found a few things, however, absolutely scary. One was an article from December showing that Trump voters actually changed their views on Russia after Trump became the nominee. Another one from just today was a study on how people reacted when showed inauguration crowd photos. NPR ran a story today as well, on how Trump is treating journalists like China does. Chilling stuff indeed. Conclusion So where does this leave us? Heading into uncertain times, for sure, but perhaps just maybe with a greater understanding of our neighbors. Perhaps we will all be able to see past the rhetoric and polarization, and understand that there is something, well, normal about each other. Doing that is going to be the only way we can really take our country back.