Gogs I installed today Gogs and configured it with mysql (yes, yes, I know - use postgres you punk!). I will not post details of how I did it because:

• It still has "weird" coding as pointed already by others
• It doesn't have fork and pull request ability yet

And there was end of journey. When they code in fork/PR , I will close my eyes on other coding stuff and try it again because Gitlab is not close to my heart and installing their binary takes ~850MB of space which means a lot of ruby code that could go wrong way. It would be really awesome to have in archive something to apt install and have github-like place. It would be great if Debian infrastructure would have the possibility to have that.

Diaspora* Although I am thrilled about it finally reaching Debian archive, it still isn't ready. Not even closely. I couldn't even finish installation of it and it's not suitable for main archive as it takes files from github repo of diaspora. Maybe poking around Bitnami folks about how they did it.

The power of Free software Text Secure is was an mobile app that I thought it could take on Viber or WhatsUp. Besides all its goodies it had chance to send encrypted SMS to other TS users. Not anymore. Fortunate, there is a fork called SMSSecure which still has that ability.

Trolls So there is this Allwinner company that does crap after crap. Their latest will reach wider audience and I hope it gets resolved in a matter how they would react if some big proprietary company was stealing their code. It seems Allwinner is a pseudo for Alllooser. Whoa, that was fun!

A year old experiment So I had a bet with a friend that I will run for a year Debian Unstable mixed with some packages from experimental and do some random testings on packages of interest to them. Also I promised to update aggressively so it was to be twice a day. This was my only machine so the bet was really good as it by theory could break very often. Well on behalf of Debian community, I can say that Debian hasn't had a single big breakage. Yay! The good side: on average I had ~3000 packages installed (they were in range from 2500-3500). I had for example xmonad, e17, gnome, cinnamon, xfce, systemd from experimental, kernels from experimental, nginx, apache, a lot of heavy packages, mixed packages from pip, npm, gems etc. So that makes it even more incredible that it stayed stable. There is no bigger kudos to people working on Debian, then when some sadist tries countless of ways to break it and Debian is just keeps running. I mean, I was doing my $PAID_WORK on this machine! The bad side: there were small breakages. It's seems that polkit and systemd-side of gnome were going through a lot of changes because sometimes system would ask password for every action (logout, suspend, poweroff, connect to network etc), audio would work and would not work, would often by itself just mute sound on every play or it would take it to 100% (which would blow my head when I had earplugs), bluetooth is almost de facto not working in gnome (my bluetooth mice worked without single problem in lenny, squeeze, in wheezy it maybe had once or twice a problem, but in this year long test it's almost useless). System would also have random hangs from time to time. The test: in the beginning my radeon card was too new and it was not supported by FLOSS driver so I ended up using fglrx which caused me a lot of annoyance (no brightness control, flickering of screen) but once FLOSS driver got support I was on it, and it performed more fluid (no glitches while moving windows). So as my friends knew that I have radeon and they want to play games on their machines (I play my Steam games on FLOSS driver) they set me the task to try fglrx driver every now end then. End result - there is no stable fglrx driver for almost a year, it breaks graphical interface so I didn't even log into DE with it for at least 8 months if not more. On the good side my expeditions in flgrx where quick - install it, boot into disaster, remove it, boot into freedom. Downside seems to be that removing fglrx driver, leaves a lot of its own crap on system (I may be mistaking but it seems I am not). Well, that's all for today. I think so. You can never be sure.

One project I've worked on at Nebula is a Python module for remote configuration of server hardware. You can find it here, but there's a few caveats:

1. It's not hugely well tested on a wide range of hardware
2. The interface is not yet guaranteed to be stable
3. You'll also need this module if you want to deal with IBM (well, Lenovo now) servers
4. The IBM support is based on reverse engineering rather than documentation, so who really knows how good it is

There's documentation in the README, and I'm sorry for the API being kind of awful (it suffers rather heavily from me writing Python while knowing basically no Python). Still, it ought to work. I'm interested in hearing from anybody with problems, anybody who's interested in getting it on Pypi and anybody who's willing to add support for new HP systems.

comments

So I started migrating some of my LXCs to Jessie, to test the migration in advance. The upgrade itself was easy (the LXC is mostly empty and only runs radicale), but after the upgrade I couldn't login anymore (using lxc-console since I don't have lxc-attach, the host is on Wheezy). So this is mostly a note to self. auth.log was showing:

Mar 25 22:10:13 lxc-sync login[1033]: pam_loginuid(login:session): Cannot open /proc/self/loginuid: Read-only file system
Mar 25 22:10:13 lxc-sync login[1033]: pam_loginuid(login:session): set_loginuid failed
Mar 25 22:10:13 lxc-sync login[1033]: pam_unix(login:session): session opened for user root by LOGIN(uid=0)
Mar 25 22:10:13 lxc-sync login[1033]: Cannot make/remove an entry for the specified session

The last message isn't too useful, but the first one gave the answer. Since LXC isn't really ready for security stuff, I have some hardening on top of that, and one measure is to not have rw access to /proc. I don't really need pam_loginuid there, so I just disabled that. I just need to remember to do that after each LXC upgrade. Other than that, I have to boot using SystemV init, since apparently systemd doesn't cope too well with the various restrictions I enforce on my LXCs:

lxc-start -n sync
Failed to mount sysfs at /sys: Operation not permitted

(which is expected, since I drop CAP_SYS_ADMIN from my LXCs). I didn't yet investigate how to stop systemd doing that, so for now I'm falling back to SystemV init until I find the correct customization:

lxc-start -n sync /lib/sysvinit/init   
INIT: version 2.88 booting
[info] Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S.
hostname: you must be root to change the host name
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
[FAIL] udev requires a mounted sysfs, not started ... failed!
 failed!
mount: permission denied
[info] Setting the system clock.
hwclock: Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.
hwclock: Use the --debug option to see the details of our search for an access method.
[warn] Unable to set System Clock to: Wed Mar 25 21:21:43 UTC 2015 ... (warning).
[ ok ] Activating swap...done.
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
[ ok ] Activating lvm and md swap...done.
[....] Checking file systems...fsck from util-linux 2.25.2
done.
[ ok ] Cleaning up temporary files... /tmp.
[ ok ] Mounting local filesystems...done.
[ ok ] Activating swapfile swap...done.
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
[ ok ] Cleaning up temporary files....
[ ok ] Setting kernel variables ...done.
[....] Configuring network interfaces...RTNETLINK answers: Operation not permitted
Failed to bring up lo.
done.
[ ok ] Cleaning up temporary files....
[FAIL] startpar: service(s) returned failure: hostname.sh udev ... failed!
INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
[info] Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel 2.
dmesg: read kernel buffer failed: Operation not permitted
[ ok ] Starting Radicale CalDAV server : radicale.

Work around Google evil .ics feeds I've happily been using 2015/akonadi-install for my calendars, and yesterday I added an .ics feed export from Google, as a URL file source. It is a link in the form: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/person%40gmail.com/private-12341234123412341234123412341234/basic.ics After doing that, I noticed that the fan in my laptop was on more often than usual, and I noticed that akonadi-server and postgres were running very often, and doing quite a lot of processing. The evil I investigated and realised that Google seems to be doing everything they can to make their ical feeds hard to sync against efficiently. This is the list of what I have observed Gmail doing to an unchanged ical feed:

• Date: headers in HTTP replies are always now
• If-Modified-Since: is not supported
• DTSTAMP of each element is always now
• VTIMEZONE entries appear in random order
• ORGANIZER CN entries randomly change between full name and plus.google.com user ID
• ATTENDEE entries randomly change between having a CN or not having it
• TRIGGER entries change spontaneously
• CREATED entries change spontaneously

This causes akonadi to download and reprocess the entire ical feed at every single poll, and I can't blame akonadi for doing it. In fact, Google is saying that there is a feed with several years worth of daily appointments that all keep being changed all the time. The work-around As a work-around, I have configured the akonadi source to point at a local file on disk, and I have written a script to update the file only if the .ics feed has actually changed. Have a look at the script: I consider it far from trivial, since it needs to do a partial parsing of the .ics feed to throw away all the nondeterminism that Google pollutes it with. The setup The script needs to be run periodically, and I used it as an opportunity to try systemd user timers:

    $ cat ~/.config/systemd/user/update-ical-feeds.timer
    [Unit]
    Description=Updates ical feeds every hour
    # Only run when on AC power
    ConditionACPower=yes
    [Timer]
    # Run every hour
    OnActiveSec=1h
    # Run a minute after boot
    OnBootSec=1m
    Unit=update-ical-feeds.service
    $ cat ~/.config/systemd/user/update-ical-feeds.service
    [Unit]
    Description=Update ICal feeds
    [Service]
    # Use oneshot to prevent two updates being run in case the previous one
    # runs for more time than the timer interval
    Type=oneshot
    ExecStart=/home/enrico/tmp/calendars/update
    $ systemctl --user start update-ical-feeds.timer
    $ systemctl --user list-timers
    NEXT                         LEFT       LAST                         PASSED UNIT                    ACTIVATES
    Wed 2015-03-25 22:19:54 CET  59min left Wed 2015-03-25 21:19:54 CET  2s ago update-ical-feeds.timer update-ical-feeds.service
    1 timers listed.
    Pass --all to see loaded but inactive timers, too.

To reload the configuration after editing: systemctl --user daemon-reload. Further investigation I wonder if ConditionACPower needs to be in the .timer or in the .service, since there is a [Unit] section is in both. Update: I have been told it can be in the .timer. I also wonder if there is a way to have the timer trigger only when online. There is a network-online.target and I do not know if it is applicable. I also do not know how to ask systemd if all the preconditions are currently met for a .service/.timer to run. Finally, I especially wonder if it is worth hoping that Google will ever make their .ics feeds play nicely with calendar clients.

We are very pleased to announce that HP has committed support of DebConf15 as Platinum sponsor. "The hLinux team is pleased to continue HP's long tradition of supporting Debian and DebConf," said Steve Geary, Senior Director at Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-Packard is one of the largest computer companies in the world, providing a wide range of products and services, such as servers, PCs, printers, storage products, network equipment, software, cloud computing solutions, etc. Hewlett-Packard has been a long-term development partner of Debian, and provides hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (HP hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page). With this additional commitment as Platinum Sponsor, HP contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software, helping to strengthen the community who continue to collaborate on their Debian projects throughout the rest of the year. Thank you very much, Hewlett-Packard, for your support of DebConf15! Become a sponsor too! DebConf15 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf15 website at http://debconf15.debconf.org.

TSDgeos had a good idea: Lazyweb travel recommodations. So, dear lazyweb: What are things to do or to avoid in Hongkong and Shenzhen if you have one and a half week of holiday before and after work duties? Any hidden gems to look at? What electronic markets are good? Should I take a boat trip around the waters of Hongkong? If you have any decent yet affordable sleeping options for 2-3 nights in Hongkong, that would also be interesting as my "proper" hotel stay does not start immediately. Not much in ways of comfort is needed as long as I have a safe place to lock my belongings. In somewhat related news, this Friday's bug report stats may be early or late as I will be on a plane towards China on Friday.

I follow a few blog aggregators (or "planets") and it's always a struggle to keep up with the amount of posts that some of these get. The best strategy I have found so far to is to filter them so that I remove the blogs I am not interested in, which is why I wrote PlanetFilter.

Other options In my opinion, the first step in starting a new free software project should be to look for a reason not to do it So I started by looking for another approach and by asking people around me how they dealt with the firehoses that are Planet Debian and Planet Mozilla. It seems like a lot of people choose to "randomly sample" planet feeds and only read a fraction of the posts that are sent through there. Personally however, I find there are a lot of authors whose posts I never want to miss so this option doesn't work for me. A better option that other people have suggested is to avoid subscribing to the planet feeds, but rather to subscribe to each of the author feeds separately and prune them as you go. Unfortunately, this whitelist approach is a high maintenance one since planets constantly add and remove feeds. I decided that I wanted to follow a blacklist approach instead.

PlanetFilter PlanetFilter is a local application that you can configure to fetch your favorite planets and filter the posts you see. If you get it via Debian or Ubuntu, it comes with a cronjob that looks at all configuration files in /etc/planetfilter.d/ and outputs filtered feeds in /var/cache/planetfilter/. You can either:

• add file:///var/cache/planetfilter/planetname.xml to your local feed reader
• serve it locally (e.g. http://localhost/planetname.xml) using a webserver, or
• host it on a server somewhere on the Internet.

The software will fetch new posts every hour and overwrite the local copy of each feed. A basic configuration file looks like this:

[feed]
url = http://planet.debian.org/atom.xml
[blacklist]

Filters There are currently two ways of filtering posts out. The main one is by author name:

[blacklist]
authors =
  Alice Jones
  John Doe

and the other one is by title:

[blacklist]
titles =
  This week in review
  Wednesday meeting for

In both cases, if a blog entry contains one of the blacklisted authors or titles, it will be discarded from the generated feed.

Tor support Since blog updates happen asynchronously in the background, they can work very well over Tor. In order to set that up in the Debian version of planetfilter:

1. Install the tor and polipo packages.
2. Set the following in /etc/polipo/config:

    proxyAddress = "127.0.0.1"
    proxyPort = 8008
    allowedClients = 127.0.0.1
    allowedPorts = 1-65535
    proxyName = "localhost"
    cacheIsShared = false
    socksParentProxy = "localhost:9050"
    socksProxyType = socks5
    chunkHighMark = 67108864
    diskCacheRoot = ""
    localDocumentRoot = ""
    disableLocalInterface = true
    disableConfiguration = true
    dnsQueryIPv6 = no
    dnsUseGethostbyname = yes
    disableVia = true
    censoredHeaders = from,accept-language,x-pad,link
    censorReferer = maybe
   

3. Tell planetfilter to use the polipo proxy by adding the following to /etc/default/planetfilter:

    export http_proxy="localhost:8008"
    export https_proxy="localhost:8008"
   

Bugs and suggestions The source code is available on repo.or.cz. I've been using this for over a month and it's been working quite well for me. If you give it a go and run into any problems, please file a bug! I'm also interested in any suggestions you may have.

I wrote last month about buying a new laptop and I still haven t made a decision. One reason for this is because Dell doesn t seem to be shipping the E7250. Some online shops claim to be able to deliver it, but aren t clear on what configuration it has and I really don t want to end up with Dell Wifi. Another issue has been the graphic issues with the Broadwell GPU (see the comment section of my last post). It seems unlikely that this will be fixed in time for Debian Jessie. I really want a stable OS on this machine, as it will be a work-horse and not a toy machine. I haven t made up my mind whether the graphics issue is a deal-breaker for me. Meanwhile, a couple of more sub-1.5kg (sub-3.3lbs) Broadwell i7 s have hit the market. Some of these models were suggested in comments to my last post. I have decided that the 5500U CPU would also be acceptable to me, because some newer laptops doesn t come with the 5600U. The difference is that the 5500U is a bit slower (say 5-10%) and lacks vPro, which I have no need for and mostly consider a security risk. I m not aware of any other feature differences. Since the last round, I have tightened my weight requirement to be sub-1.4kg (sub-3lbs), which excludes some recently introduced models, and actually excludes most of the models I looked at before (X250, X1 Carbon, HP 1040/810). Since I m leaning towards the E7250, with the X250 as a reliable fallback option, I wanted to cut down on the number of further models to consider. Weigth is a simple distinguisher. The 1.4-1.5kg (3-3.3lbs) models I am aware that of that is excluded are the Asus Zenbook UX303LN, the HP Spectre X360, and the Acer TravelMate P645. The Acer Aspire S7-393 (1.3kg) and Toshiba Kira-107 (1.26kg) would have been options if they had RJ45 ports. They may be interesting to consider for others. The new models I am aware of are below. I m including the E7250 and X250 for comparison, since they are my preferred choices from the first round. A column for maximum RAM is added too, since this may be a deciding factor for me. Higher weigth is with touch screens.

Toshiba Z30-B	1.2-1.34kg	16GB	13.3	1920 1080
Fujitsu Lifebook S935	1.24-1.36kg	12GB	13.3	1920 1080
HP EliteBook 820 G2	1.34-1.52kg	16GB	12.5	1920 1080
Dell Latitude E7250	1.25kg	8/16GB?	12.5	1366 768
Lenovo X250	1.42kg	8GB	12.5	1366 768

It appears unclear whether the E7250 is memory upgradeable, some sites say max 8GB some say max 16GB. The X250 and 820 has DisplayPort, the S935 and Z30-B has HDMI, and the E7250 has both DisplayPort/HDMI. The E7250 does not have VGA which the rest has. All of them have 3 USB 3.0 ports except for X250 that only has 2 ports. The E7250 and 820 claims NFC support, but Debian support is not given. Interestingly, all of them have a smartcard reader. All support SDXC memory cards. The S935 has an interesting modular bay which can actually fit a CD reader or an additional battery. There is a detailed QuickSpec PDF for the HP 820 G2, haven t found similar detailed information for the other models. It mentions support for Ubuntu, which is nice. Comparing these laptops is really just academic until I have decided what to think about the Broadwell GPU issues. It may be that I ll go back to a fourth-gen i7 laptop, and then I ll probably pick a cheap reliable machine such as the X240.

Out is the new version of ctioga2, which brings:

• a much better handling of heterogeneous x,y coordinates in heat maps: ctioga2 now automatically splits the data into homogeneous segments;
• control on the properties of the fill and the stroke of symbols (image)
• decent improvement of error messages
• and some bug fixes and other minor improvements

As usual, the new release is available as a gem:

~ gem update ctioga2

The website has also been decently improved, with now a search box for finding images in the gallery

The Debian Project will celebrate its 22nd birthday during DebConf15 in Heidelberg in August 2015. At this age, it s unsurprising that children of Debian contributors have attended our developer conference for several years. Going with the times, we would like to work further towards making DebConf15 a child-friendly (parents-friendly) conference. The conference venue is far away from traffic, self-contained, and there is a dedicated children s play room. There are green areas around, and the Heidelberg Zoo is literally within sight of the venue. We haven t yet discussed deals with them, but we could. In short: if you d like to attend DebConf, but you are yet unsure what to do with your children bring your kids along! The hostel has a number of 3 and 4 bed-rooms with en-suite bathrooms, plus a good supply of cots available for the very little ones. We will allocate such rooms to families exclusively for your privacy (subject to availability, so please register yourself ASAP, and include a note about your kids). We are maintaining answers to commonly-asked questions on the wiki. Please let us know if anything is missing, and feel free to update the page yourself. We would also like to explore additional possibilities to make it easier for parents to participate in the conference. At the moment, we re still scouting for ideas and there are already a number of promising leads. To help us figure out what we d best offer, we need to know about the demand. If you are planning to bring your children, or if you re thinking about it, please drop a short note with number and ages and any other relevant information to kids@debconf.org. Your mail will be read by a few parents involved in the organisation of DebConf15 and we will obviously keep your data private. We also created a (publicly archived) mailing list to discuss options and keep people updated on our plans. Please subscribe yourself to the list, if interested, and feel free to write to debconf-kids@lists.debian.org with any questions or ideas you might have.

Review: Fukushima, by David Lochbaum, et al.

Author:	David Lochbaum
Author:	Edwin Lyman
Author:	Susan Q. Stranahan
Author:	Union of Concerned Scientists
Publisher:	The New Press
Copyright:	2014
ISBN:	1-59558-927-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	320

This is a very interesting book, and I can recommend it, but there are two things you should be aware of up-front. The packaging does not necessarily make clear what expectations you should have of it going in. First, the subtitle (The Story of a Nuclear Disaster) should have appended to it And Its Implications for US Nuclear Power Policy. This book is very concerned with the impact of the Fukushima disaster on US policy and nuclear regulation, to the point where I think more than half of the book is about US agencies, nuclear regulatory history, and US reaction. There's nothing wrong with that, of course: the US should take a hard look at its own nuclear energy policy given the events at Fukushima, and it's a worthy topic for a book. But if you go into this book expecting a broader perspective, you will be disappointed. For example, I think the fact that France has a lot of nuclear power was mentioned maybe twice in the whole book, and French reaction was never discussed at all. There is a very detailed examination of exactly what happened at Fukushima (more on that in a moment), but most of the policy implications are examined purely from a US perspective. Even Japanese nuclear policy gets somewhat short shrift. Second, note that the fourth listed co-author is the Union of Concerned Scientists. For those not familiar with US environmental groups, the UCS has a reputation as an anti-nuclear advocacy organization. I don't think that's entirely fair; I think the UCS's position on nuclear power is better summarized as holding that it is theoretically possible to run a nuclear power plant safely, but the actual US nuclear power industry is not very close to that standard, and it would require much tighter regulation and more investment in safety systems to reach that standard. But be aware that the authors of this book have a clear position on the adequacy of current nuclear power safety standards, namely that they aren't. And they don't try to conceal that position in this book. Personally, I prefer authors to be open about their perspective in books like this, but your mileage may vary. There, disclaimers out of the way. I bought this book for a specific reason: I had followed some of the news coverage at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, and then (like many people, I suspect) lost track of the final outcome as the story fell out of the news and I started ignoring people who didn't understand how large the Pacific Ocean is. Now that we've had the benefit of several years of analysis and thoughtful reconstruction of events, I wanted to know what had actually happened. I'm happy to say that this book delivers quite well on that front. Roughly the first half of the book is a detailed blow-by-blow description of exactly what happened at Fukushima, at least as well as we've been able to reconstruct, told as an engrossing and dramatic narrative. There may be a little too much interleaving of reactions within the US government, which I suspect will particularly annoy non-US readers, but the level of factual detail is excellent, clear, and well-explained. What I wasn't expecting, but was pleasantly surprised by, is that it's also a great story. There's tension, conflict, heroism, hard choices, and moral quandries, and the authors do a great job conveying factual information while still giving the reader the sense of being in the middle of the unfolding drama. They resist the urge to disclose all the results of later analysis in the middle of the story, which may provide a slightly less clear view of the disaster, but which makes the telling far more compelling. I usually read non-fiction more slowly than fiction, but Fukushima dragged me in. I found myself grabbing moments to read just another few pages. Unfortunately, this is only about half the book. The other half is a mix of other things that won't have as broad of appeal: an analysis of the challenges of US nuclear regulation, a history of the US nuclear power industry, and a presentation of the authors' opinions about the best path forward for regulation of nuclear power in the US. Since I'm a US citizen and resident with an interest in both nuclear power and regulation of nuclear power in my country, I found this interesting, if not as engrossing as the rest of the book. But it felt a bit oddly tacked on, and I think it's a stretch to say that it's part of the story of Fukushima. The authors try to draw that link by presenting the Japanese nuclear power industry as heavily influenced by their US counterparts, and their regulatory problems as similar to the problems in the US, but there is nowhere near enough detail about Japanese regulatory practices here to support that conclusion. I think the largest weakness, and the most obvious gap, in this book is the lack of detailed analysis of the history and players in the Japanese nuclear regulatory environment. This is an odd miss. If one is concerned about regulatory inadequacy, Japanese government policy is far more obviously part of the story of Fukushima than US policy. I can only speculate that the authors had inside sources for the US policy discussions but not for the Japanese policy discussions (and, sadly, fall back on painting with a rather broad brush and making unsupported generalizations about Japanese regulatory approaches in a few spots). The result feels like two partly-unrelated books stacked and partly shuffled together. So, there are parts of Fukushima that are rather disappointing, particularly for non-US readers. But I still recommend it as a great detailed history of the actual incident and a summary of what we now think happened. That summary is unfortunately sketchy and still very unclear, but I don't think that's the fault of the authors. The inside of a nuclear power plant during a meltdown is a very difficult environment to measure or analyze, and there's a lot of data that we will probably never have. Some details may never be known. But what we do know, and how that knowledge unfolded, is told very well. This is the only book-length treatment on Fukushima I've read, so I can't compare it against other books on the same topic. But it satisfied my curiousity nicely. If you have a similar curiosity, I recommend this book to your attention, although be aware of its approach and its US-centric analysis going in so that you're not surprised by a mismatch of expectations. Rating: 8 out of 10

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter or Diaspora* Unverified backups are useless, every sysadmins know that. But manually verifying a backup means wasting time and resources. Moreover it s boring. You should automatize it! Backup Checker is a command line software developed in Python 3.4 on GitHub (stars appreciated :) ) allowing users to verify the integrity of archives (tar, gz, bz2, lzma, zip, tree of files) and the state of the files inside an archive in order to find corruptions or intentional of accidental changes of states or removal of files inside an archive. The new feature of the latest version 1.4 is the control of outdated archives with the new outdated parameter. Lots of data are outdated quite fast, because they are dependent of other data, or because they are only useful in a specific context.

Hey, this database dump is 6 months old, it s useless today!

Backup Checker now controls the expiration duration and triggers a warning if the given duration starting from the last modification of the archive (mtime) is expired. Short examples of the warning: WARNING:root:/backups/backups-12022015.tar.gz is outdated. Was good until 01/03/15 00:00:00 now 22/03/15 21:38:20 You won t be surprized any more by outdated useless data in your backups. Backup Checker also offers lots of other controls. Check the features list! Installing Backup Checker Backup Checker is available from PyPI using the following command:

# pip3.4 install backupchecker

It s also available for your Debian Squeeze or Debian Wheezy. Check how to get it for your specific distributions. What about you? How and what for do you use Backup Checker? We would be happy to get your feedbacks. The project cares about our users and the outdated feature was a awesome idea in a feature request by one of the Backup Checker user, thanks Laurent!

I haven't blogged anything in months and figured that now might be a good time to get around that. Here it goes:
Free Software
While I occasionally upgrade the packaging of the software I maintain at Debian to keep up with best practices, my activity downsizing goes on. Simply put: I never had any ambition to become a Debian Developer. My involvement has always remained pragmatic and mostly from the perspective of packaging software that I found useful. Even then, my motivation for doing that keeps on dwindling into nothingness, because key pieces of software keep on breaking, whenever someone upstream decides to reinvent the wheel.
For instance, GNOME no longer works at all on Geode chipsets and it barely works on Nouveau chipsets. This happened as soon as GNOME 3.14 was uploaded into unstable, right before the freeze started. Then again, I wouldn't jump to a conclusion that GNOME itself might be at fault, since Plymouth also stopped working on the same two video platforms at the same time. For all we know, this could be caused by some changes in the X.Org server code. Bugs were filed, additional information was provided, but no fix has taken place.
Given how Geode and Nouveau represent 80% of my hardware investment (my Intel laptop being the sole exception), it essentially means that the upcoming Debian "stable" is useless for me. Now try and remain motivated, even just as a mere Free Software end-user. At this point, I'm done.
Politics
Finland is holding national elections this April. I still have no idea who I'll vote for this time. The guy I voted for last time has become a career politician with an inflated ego and zero connection to the average Finn's aspirations and worries. Meanwhile, two friends are standing as candidates: one who is a razor-sharp fact finder and who is a proven pragmatic decision-maker, but whose values are slightly off with mine, and one whose actions come straight from the heart but whose concept of today's Finnish reality leaves a lot to be desired.
National Defence
There's been a lot of recent articles about how former hardware and locations of the Finnish defence forces and border guards have been sold, often for peanuts, to Russian interests. In some cases, we're only talking about buildings formerly used for on-site staff accommodations. In other cases, former patrol boats and navy harbours changed hands. Now, to top it all, it appears that our north-western neighbour, Norway, has sold a former submarine base to German investors who, in turn, leased it to you guessed it Russian interests.
Looking at Russian actions in Ukraine, I cannot help but feel great concern that strategic locations are falling into potentially dangerous hands. Just seeing the picture of a former navy harbour with a handful of patrol boats on standby, right on the Finnish coastline, half-way between Helsinki and Turku, was a sobering experience. While the whole idea of shooting at people even invading armies gives me the creeps, at this point, I cannot help but start pondering whether defending this country might in fact be an occupation worth training for.
Employment
It has now been 6 years since I held my last dayjob. Since then, the only thing I've found is an unpaid training in the national bureaucracy. I've also freelanced as an actor and model, but that barely brought me pocket change, if even that. Seeing my face on posters advertising a movie I participated in last year was indeed nice, getting some media attention in connection to that too, but it hasn't lead to additional gigs. As far as I can tell, this was just my Warholian 15 minutes of fame.
However, there's a larger issue at stake. Newspapers recently published an employment statistics map for Nordic countries and the truth couldn't be more bleak: while Norway and Sweden's employment figures are nearly spotless for almost every province, those of Finland are save for a couple of mildly successful provinces outright catastrophic. Given this and despite feeling relatively happy living in Finland and having developed a will to defend this country from an eventual Russian assault, I've come to the conclusion that I would be better off going West, with a strong preference for Norway.
Now, the main question is, doing what? 6 years later, I have strong doubts that I would be remotely considered for any high-tech job. Besides, come to think of it, I wouldn't want any new office job. Off the top of my head, my idea of a cool job that would allow me to stay physically fit would be working as a tourist guide in Lapland. However, if Norway is anything like Finland, someone probably needs a dozen of permits of all sorts (first aid certification, C or even D class driving license, college degree in tourism, etc.) that I cannot afford. What then?

While evaluating the cross-platform accessibility of Qt5, I stumbled across this deficiency: (compile with -std=c++11). On my system, this "application" does not show the correct glyph always. Sometimes, it renders a a white square with black border, i.e., the symbol for unknown glyph. However, if I invoke the same executable several times, sometimes, it renders the glyph correctly. In other words: The glyph choosing mechansim is apparently non-deterministic!!! UPDATE: Sune Vuorela figured out that I need to set QT_HARFBUZZ=old in the environment for this bug to go away. Apparently, harfbuzz-ng from Qt 5.3 is buggy.

Now I'm back to Linux on the Desktop for my dayjob, I was slightly nervous about checking out the state of the art for Linux music players; an area I've never felt the Linux desktop was very strong on. However for the time being I've largely side-stepped the issue by listening to BBC 6 Music for most of the day. For better or worse, I scrobble, and somebody has written a neat web app for scrobbling along to radio stations. When I want to listen to something different for a change, I've been trying out a trial of Google Play Music, for which somebody has written a Chrome extension to scrobble. On the rare occasions I listen to local music, I'm using VLC. Google Play Music seems pretty good, but I'm not getting a lot from my trial because 6 Music is generally fantastic. Scrobbling 6 Music has revealed a bit of a disconnect for how I use last.fm, and how website thinks you should use it. Within a day or two, my "music compability" with 6 Music was (predictably) "SUPER". Looking at my "Top artists", right near the top are 6 Music's current playlist favourites Courtney Barnett and Nadine Shah, who I can (at least) recall the songs that have been played; just below them are Young Fathers, who I cannot. A little lower are Hot Chip and Slaves: both artists who have current singles out which I enjoyed for a while, but the relentless BBC playlist policy is overdoing them and I'm inclined to switch over when they come on now. If I listen to a whole album in a given week, then the artist will likely (and rightly) be sat at the top of "last 7 days"; if I don't, then it could be something I can't even remember listening to.

Today early in the morning my monitoring system notified me about unusual high outgoing traffic on my hosting plattform. I traced the problem down the webserver which is also hosting this abondened website. Looking into this with iptraf revealed that this traffic is coming only from one IP. At first I thought anybody might grabbing my Debian packages from ftp.cyconet.org. But no, it was targeting my highly sophisticated blogging plattform.

$ grep 46.235.43.146 /var/log/nginx/vhosts/access_logs/blog.waja.info-access.log   tail -2
46.235.43.146 - - [23/Mar/2015:08:20:12 +0100] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.0" 404 22106 "-" "-"
46.235.43.146 - - [23/Mar/2015:08:20:12 +0100] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.0" 404 22106 "-" "-"
$ grep 46.235.43.146 /var/log/nginx/vhosts/access_logs/blog.waja.info-access.log   wc -l
83676
$ grep 46.235.43.146 /var/log/nginx/vhosts/access_logs/blog.waja.info-access.log   wc -l
83782
$ grep 46.235.43.146 /var/log/nginx/vhosts/access_logs/blog.waja.info-access.log   grep -v wp-login.php   wc -l
0

It makes me really sad to see, that dictionary attacks are smashing with such a high power these days, even without evaluating the 404 response.

Friday the 13th was my day. In so many different ways. I received a package which was addressed to Rhonda D'Vine with a special hoodie in it. The person at the post office desk asked me whether it was for my partner, my response was a (cowardly) "no, it's my pseudonym" but that settled any further questions and I got my package. Later I received an email which made me hyper happy (but which I can't share right now, potentially later). In the evening there was the WortMacht FemSlam (WordMight FemSlam) poetry slam to which the host asked me to attend just the day before. I was hyper nervous about it. The room was fully packed, there were even quite some people who didn't have a place to sit and were standing at the side. I presented Mermaids because I wasn't able to write anything new on the topic. One would think I am attached enough to the poem by now to not be nervous about it, but it was the environment that made my legs shake like hell while presenting. Gladly I hope it wasn't possible to see it enough under my skirt, but given that it was the first time that I presented it in my home town instead of the "anonymous" internet made me extra anxious. In the end I ended up in place 5 of 7 attendees, which I consider a success given that it was the only text presented in English and not in typical poetry slam style.
(Small addition to the last part: I've been yesterday to the Free Hugs Vienna event at the Schloss Sch nbrunn, and one of the people I hugged told me I know you, I've seen you at the FemSlam!. That was extra sweet. :)) I'm happy that I was notified about the FemSlam on such short notice, it was a great experience. So today's entry goes out to the host of that event. This is about Yasmo. One can just be envious about what she already accomplished in her still young life. And she is definitely someone to watch out for in the years to come. I have to excuse to my readers who don't understand German yet again, but I'll get back to something English next time, I promise. :)

• Kein Platz f r Zweifel: The title track from her last album.
• Wer hat Angst vorm wei en Mann: Most straight-to-the-point line of the lyrics is Wie kann es sein, dass es immer noch diesen Jolly-Buntstift gibt, der "Hautfarbe" hei t?" (How is it possible that there is still this jolly crayon called "colour of the skin"?)
• Wo kommst du her?: Not a song but one of her great slam poetry texts that I love since I first heard it.

Like always, enjoy!

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I have just released version 1.9 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian. Due to the freeze of Debian for the jessie release, I've not uploaded this version to Debian yet (not experimental and not backports). This is the first Obnam release since May 13, 2014, 313 days ago. That's a long time. I make no excuses: Obnam is a hobby project, which I work on when I have the time and energy. The past year has been very /interesting/ year for me, in all sorts of stressful ways: I've changed jobs, moved to another country, and dealt with the loss of a close relative. Because of this, I've not been able to spend as much time on Obnam as I'd like. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what has happened to Obnam during this time. There's been a lot of things, actually. My plans for Obnam next are mainly centered around performance. This will require developing a new repository format, to allow things that are not possible with the current format. For example, the current format stores each data chunk in its own file in the repository, and that is quite wasteful when live data files (and therefore their chunks) are quite small. As preparation for this work, the silly-looking "simple" format has been added, mostly to make sure the internal code infrastructure is ready to support multiple repository formats in the same Obnam version. Those interested in discussing ways to make Obnam fast should join the obnam-dev mailing list. Version 1.9, released 2015-03-22 New features:

• James Vasile changed Obnam so it can backup an individual file, instead of an entire directory.
• James Vasile added the --include option to Obnam, allowing one to include files that would otherwise be excluded (see --exclude).
• Carlo Teubner changed obnam fsck to remove unused chunks, if the --fsck-fix or --fsck-rm-unused settings are used. He also made it not check for unused chunks when it's useless to do so, because of various --fsck-skip settings are used.
• A start of a French translation of the manual by pedrito2.
• Ian Cambell provided a new Obnam command, obnam kdirstat, which makes the KDE k4dirstat utility be able to show graphically which parts of a backup generation use most space.
• Lars Wirzenius added the simple repository format, which is for demonstration only. It is much too simplistic to be used for real.

Minor changes:

• The manual page and obnam --help are now clearer that the --root setting and command line arguments to obnam backup can be SFTP URLs. Thanks to Simone Piccardi for reporting the issue.
• David Fries filled in the displayed file permission mode bits.
• Grammar and typo fixes for the obnam.1 manual page, from Jean Jordaan.
• Tom Chiverton suggested a clarification to the manual page for "obnam mount" to say that each generation is a subdirectory.
• David Fries changed restore to set the group ownership if possible even when not root. No warnings are issued if the attempt fails.
• Jan Niggemann added a little to the German translation of the Obnam manual.
• Lars Wirzenius added the path to the error message about a missing chunk (R43272X).
• Lars Wirzenius made the message at the end of a backup report more statistics about transfers during the backup.

Bug fixes:

• The Obnam SFTP plugin would loop infinitely if it lost the connection to the SSH server while creating a temporary file. Itamar Turner-Trauring provided a fix for this.
• Will Dyson fixed a bug about locking while removing checkpoint generations.
• Michel Alexandre Salim fixed a Python 2.6 compatibility problem in the unit tests (use of assertRaises as a context manager).
• Lars Kruse fixed a bug with backing up of overlapping backup roots (e.g., / and /boot), given a test case by Adrien Clerc.
• Thomas Eschenbacher fixed a bug in the format 6 repository code that would crash when there is an obscure problem and a B-tree code can't be found in the tree.
• Tom Chiverton pointed out that the manual page was using "obnam restore" instead of "obnam mount" in an example for "obnam mount".
• The yarn test suite now runs FUSE tests (obnam mount) when fusermount is available, rather than checking for membership in the group fuse. The latter is a Debianism (fixed in Debian jessie).
• Thomas Waldmann noticed that obnam verify didn't notice that a file had new data, when the modification time was the same. Obnam now notices this.
• Thomas Waldmann fixed many typos and minor bugs in the source code.
• Laurence Perkins reported that the Tahoe-LAFS SFTP server returned some stat fields as None. Fixed to change those to be 0 instead.
• Lars Wirzenius fixed double-downloading of chunks during restores.

Every year, Debian organizes a DPL election. Around end of March, one waits for the beginning of the DPL campaign. Everyone can ask questions to nominated candidates on debian-vote. This year, and for the first time, I nominated myself as a candidate for the 2015 DPL election. You can read my platform here.

Over the past few years, I've followed DPL campaigns on debian-vote reading questions and replies from candidates. It didn't seem easy to keep up with flood of questions and find the right wording while replying. Intuitively, you may think that a question is the first mail of every thread and replies follow... but, not at all :-) Questions can be asked in any mail. So candidates have to read every single mail posted to the list :-) The campaign ends within a week (or so) and it is still time to ask more questions.

Following discussions on debian-vote is a very good opportunity for newcomers to understand, for example, how Debian works and where help is needed. It is also a good place to see what are the main current issues (as perceived by contributors) and read a list of proposals to fix them. I invite anyone interested in Debian in reading debian-vote's archives.

While preparing my platform, I've also realized how much writing down thoughts and ideas was important. It really helps to put things into perspective and re-evaluate priorities. It may sound obvious but I think we are not used to do this often. I really recommend everyone to do this as an exercise, and for any perimeter (personal, team, project-wide, ...).

Last but not least, I'd like to thank all those who helped me to polish my platform and to prepare my candidacy. I am sure they will recognize themselves :-) (whatever the outcome of the election may be)