The Norwegian nationwide open channel Frikanalen is still going strong. It allow everyone to send the video they want on national television. It is a TV station administrated completely using a web browser, running only Free Software, providing a REST api for administrators and members, and with distribution on the national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV. But only between 12:00 and 17:30 Norwegian time. This has finally changed, after many years with limited distribution. A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out the channel the rest of the day. This is presented on the Frikanalen web site now. And since a few days ago, the channel is also available via multicast on UNINETT, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in the Norwegian National Research and Education network. If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player to one of these sources. The first should work with most players and browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work with VLC.

• http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv
• udp://@224.17.43.129:1234

The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video and audio is slightly out of sync. We have not been able to figure out how to fix it. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar. If you have ideas how to fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no. We currently use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:

./ffmpeg2theora.linux <OBE_gemini_URL.ts> -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
 --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
 --nosync -V 700 -o -   oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 <pw> /frikanalen.ogv

If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as I am curious how far the multicast stream reach. It do not make it to my home network, nor any other commercially available network in Norway that I am aware of.

I recently learnt that my former coworker Jonny took his efforts around his own monitoring system Bloonix and moved to self-employment. If you're considering to outsource your monitoring consider Bloonix. As a plus all the code is open under GPLv3 and available on GitHub. So if you do not like to outsource it you can still build up an instance on your own. Since this has been a one man show for a long time most of the documentation is still in german. Might be a pro for some but a minus for others, if you like Bloonix I guess documentation translations or a howto in english is welcome. Beside of that Jonny is also the upstream author of a few Perl modules like libsys-statistics-linux-perl. So another one has taken the bold step to base his living on free and open source software, something that always has my admiration. Jonny, I hope you'll succeed with this step.

A coworker and I debugged a fascinating problem today. They had a tomcat7 installation with a couple of webapps, and one of the bundled libraries was logging in German. Everything else was logging in English (the webapps themselves, and the things the other bundled libraries did). We searched around a bit, and eventually found that the wrongly-logging library (something jaxb/jax-ws) was using, after unravelling another few layers of library bundling another library as convenience copy (gah, Java!), com.sun.xml.ws.resources.WsservletMessages which contains quite a few com.sun.istack.localization.Localizable members. Looking at the other classes in that package, in particular Localizer, showed that it defaults to the java.util.Locale.getDefault() value for the language. Which is set from the environment. Looking at /proc/pid-of-JVM-running-tomcat7/environ showed nothing, of course . The system locale was, properly, set to English. (We mostly use en_GB.UTF-8 for better paper sizes and the metric system (unless the person requesting the machine, or the admin creating it, still likes the system to speak German *shudder*), but that one still had en_US.UTF-8.) Browsing the documentation for java.util.Locale proved more fruitful: it also contains a setDefault method, which sets the new default locale JVM-wide. Turns out another of the webapps used that for some sort of internal localisation. Clearly, the containment of tomcat7 is incomplete in this case. Documenting for the larger net, in case someone else runs into this. It s not as if things like this would be showing up in the USA, where the majority of development appears to happen.

That inevitable led to this on the office wall.

Even if you disregard how amazing this is, this quote blows my proverbial mind: The test rig is carefully designed to remove any possible sources of error. Even the lapping of waves in the Gulf of Mexico 25 miles away every three to four seconds would have showed up on the sensors, so the apparatus was floated pneumatically to avoid any influence. The apparatus is completely sealed, with power and signals going through liquid metal contacts to prevent any force being transmitted through cables.

My current Lenovo X201 laptop has been with me for over four years. I ve been looking at new laptop models over the years thinking that I should upgrade. Every time, after checking performance numbers, I ve always reached the conclusion that it is not worth it. The most performant Intel Broadwell processor is the the Core i7 5600U and it is only about 1.5 times the performance of my current Intel Core i7 620M. Meanwhile disk performance has increased more rapidly, but changing the disk on a laptop is usually simple. Two years ago I upgraded to the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB disk, and this year I swapped that for the Samsung 850 Pro 1TB, and both have been good investments. Recently my laptop usage patterns have changed slightly, and instead of carrying one laptop around, I have decided to aim for multiple semi-permanent laptops at different locations, coupled with a mobile device that right now is just my phone. The X201 will remain one of my normal work machines. What remains is to decide on a new laptop, and there begins the fun. My requirements are relatively easy to summarize. The laptop will run a GNU/Linux distribution like Debian, so it has to work well with it. I ve decided that my preferred CPU is the Intel Core i7 5600U. The screen size, keyboard and mouse is mostly irrelevant as I never work longer periods of time directly on the laptop. Even though the laptop will be semi-permanent, I know there will be times when I take it with me. Thus it has to be as lightweight as possible. If there would be significant advantages in going with a heavier laptop, I might reconsider this, but as far as I can see the only advantage with a heavier machine is bigger/better screen, keyboard (all of which I find irrelevant) and maximum memory capacity (which I would find useful, but not enough of an argument for me). The sub-1.5kg laptops with the 5600U CPU on the market that I have found are:

Lenovo X250	1.42kg	12.5	1366 768
Lenovo X1 Carbon (3rd gen)	1.44kg	14	2560 1440
Dell Latitude E7250	1.25kg	12.5	1366 768
Dell XPS 13	1.26kg	13.3	3200 1800
HP EliteBook Folio 1040 G2	1.49kg	14	1920 1080
HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G3	1.4kg	11.6	1366 768

I find it interesting that Lenovo, Dell and HP each have two models that meets my 5600U/sub-1.5kg criteria. Regarding screen, possibly there exists models with other screen resolutions. The XPS 13, HP 810 and X1 models I looked had touch screens, the others did not. As screen is not important to me, I didn t evaluate this further. I think all of them would suffice, and there are only subtle differences. All except the XPS 13 can be connected to peripherals using one cable, which I find convenient to avoid a cable mess. All of them have DisplayPort, but HP uses DisplayPort Standard and the rest uses miniDP. The E7250 and X1 have HDMI output. The X250 boosts a 15-pin VGA connector, none of the others have it I m not sure if that is a advantage or disadvantage these days. All of them have 2 USB v3.0 ports except the E7250 which has 3 ports. The HP 1040, XPS 13 and X1 Carbon do not have RJ45 Ethernet connectors, which is a significant disadvantage to me. Ironically, only the smallest one of these, the HP 810, can be memory upgraded to 12GB with the others being stuck at 8GB. HP and the E7250 supports NFC, although Debian support is not certain. The E7250 and X250 have a smartcard reader, and again, Debian support is not certain. The X1, X250 and 810 have a 3G/4G card. Right now, I m leaning towards rejecting the XPS 13, X1 and HP 1040 because of lack of RJ45 ethernet port. That leaves me with the E7250, X250 and the 810. Of these, the E7250 seems like the winner: lightest, 1 extra USB port, HDMI, NFC, SmartCard-reader. However, it has no 3G/4G-card and no memory upgrade options. Looking for compatibility problems, it seems you have to be careful to not end up with the Dell Wireless card and the E7250 appears to come in a docking and non-docking variant but I m not sure what that means. Are there other models I should consider? Other thoughts?

Akonadi client example After many failed attemps I have managed to build a C++ akonadi client. It has felt like one of the most frustrating programming experiences of my whole life, so I'm sharing the results hoping to spare others from all the suffering. First thing first, akonadi client libraries are not in libakonadi-dev but in kdepimlibs5-dev, even if kdepimlibs5-dev does not show in apt-cache search akonadi. Then, kdepimlibs is built with Qt4. If your application uses Qt5 (mine was) you need to port it back to Qt4 if you want to talk to Akonadi. Then, kdepimlibs does not seem to support qmake and does not ship pkg-config .pc files, and if you want to use kdepimlibs your build system needs to be cmake. I ported by code from qmake to cmake, and now qtcreator wants me to run cmake by hand every time I change the CMakeLists.txt file, and it stopped allowing to add, rename or delete sources. Finally, most of the code / build system snippets found on the internet seem flawed in a way or another, because the build toolchain of Qt/KDE applications has undergone several redesignins during time, and the network is littered with examples from different eras. The way to obtain template code to start a Qt/KDE project is to use kapptemplate. I have found no getting started tutorial on the internet that said "do not just copy the snippets from here, run kapptemplate instead so you get them up to date". kapptemplate supports building an "Akonadi Resource" and an "Akonadi Serializer", but it does not support generating template code for an akonadi client. That left me with the feeling that I was dealing with some software that wants to be developed but does not want to be used. Anyway, now an example of how to interrogate Akonadi exists as is on the internet. I hope that all the tears of blood that I cried this morning have not been cried in vain.

The wonders of missing documentation Update: I have managed to build an example Akonadi client application. I'm new here, I want to make a simple C++ GUI app that pops up a QCalendarWidget which my local Akonadi has appointments. I open qtcreator, create a new app, hack away for a while, then of course I get undefined references for all Akonadi symbols, since I didn't tell the build system that I'm building with akonadi. Ok. How do I tell the build system that I'm building with akonadi? After 20 minutes of frantic looking around the internet, I still have no idea. There is a package called libakonadi-dev which does not seem to have anything to do with this. That page mentions everything about making applications with Akonadi except how to build them. There is a package called kdepimlibs5-dev which looks promising: it has no .a files but it does have haders and cmake files. However, qtcreator is only integrated with qmake, and I would really like the handholding of an IDE at this stage. I put something together naively doing just what looked right, and I managed to get an application that segfaults before main() is even called: I didn't achieve what I wanted, but I feel like I achieved something magical and beautiful after all. I shall now perform some haruspicy on those oscure cmake files to see if I can figure something out. But seriously, people?

Introduction The drat package was released earlier this month, and described in a first blog post. I received some helpful feedback about what works and what doesn't. For example, Jenny Bryan pointed out that I was not making a clear enough distinction between the role of using drat to publish code, and using drat to receive/install code. Very fair point, and somewhat tricky as R aims to blur the line between being a user and developer of statistical analyses, and hence packages. Many of us are both. Both the main point is well taken, and this note aims to clarify this issue a little by focusing on the former. Another point make by Jenny concerns the double use of repository. And indeed, I conflated repository (in the sense of a GitHub code repository) with repository for a package store used by a package manager. The former, a GitHub repository, is something we use to implement a personal drat with: A GitHub repository happens to be uniquely identifiable just by its account name, and given an (optional) gh-pages branch also offers a stable and performant webserver we use to deliver packages for R. A (personal) code repository on the other hand is something we implement somewhere---possibly via drat which supports local directories, possibly on a network share, as well as anywhere web-accessible, e.g. via a GitHub repository. It is a little confusing, but I will aim to make the distinction clearer.

Just once: Setting up a drat repository So let us for the remainder of this post assume the role of a code publisher. Assume you have a package you would like to make available, which may not be on CRAN and for which you would like to make installation by others easier via drat. The example below will use an interim version of drat which I pushed out yesterday (after fixing a bug noticed when pushing the very new RcppAPT package). For the following, all we assume (apart from having a package to publish) is that you have a drat directory setup within your git / GitHub repository. This is not an onerous restriction. First off, you don't have to use git or GitHub to publish via drat: local file stores and other web servers work just as well (and are documented). GitHub simply makes it easiest. Second, bootstrapping one is trivial: just fork my drat GitHub repository and then create a local clone of the fork. There is one additional requirement: you need a gh-pages branch. Using the fork-and-clone approach ensures this. Otherwise, if you know your way around git you already know how to create a gh-pages branch. Enough of the prerequisities. And on towards real fun. Let's ensure we are in the gh-pages branch:

edd@max:~/git/drat(master)$ git checkout gh-pages
Switched to branch 'gh-pages'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/gh-pages'.
edd@max:~/git/drat(gh-pages)$ 

Publish: Run one drat command to insert a package Now, let us assume you have a package to publish. In my case this was version 0.0.1.2 of drat itself as it contains a fix for the very command I am showing here. So if you want to run this, ensure you have this version of drat as the CRAN version is currently behind at release 0.0.1 (though I plan to correct that in the next few days). To publish an R package into a code repository created via drat running on a drat GitHub repository, just run insertPackage(packagefile) which we show here with the optional commit=TRUE. The path to the package can be absolute are relative; the easists is often to go up one directory from the sources to where R CMD build ... has created the package file.

edd@max:~/git$ Rscript -e 'library(drat); insertPackage("drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz", commit=TRUE)'
[gh-pages 0d2093a] adding drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz to drat
 3 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 src/contrib/drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz
Counting objects: 7, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
Writing objects: 100% (7/7), 7.37 KiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Total 7 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:eddelbuettel/drat.git
   206d2fa..0d2093a  gh-pages -> gh-pages
edd@max:~/git$ 

You can equally well run this as insertPackage("drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz"), then inspect the repo and only then run the git commands add, commit and push. Also note that future versions of drat will most likely support git operations directly by relying on the very promising git2r package. But this just affect package internals, the user-facing call of e.g. insertPackage("drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz", commit=TRUE) will remain unchanged. And in a nutshell that really is all there is to it. With the newly drat-ed package pushed to your GitHub repository with a single function call), it is available via the automatically-provided gh-pages webserver access to anyone in the world. All they need to do is to point R's package management code (which is built into R itself and used for e.g._ CRAN and BioConductor R package repositories) to the new repo---and that is also just a single drat command. We showed this in the first blog post and may expand on it again in a follow-up. So in summary, that really is all there is to it. After a one-time setup / ensuring you are on the gh-pages branch, all it takes is a single function call from the drat package to publish your package to your drat 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.

I just had my hands on some mobile devices (a Samsung's Galaxy Tab S 8.4", an Apple's iPad mini 3, and my no-name tablet that runs Android). I got curious to see how the different browsers identify themselves to the world via their User agent strings and I must say that each browser's string reveals a lot about both the browser makers and their philosophies regarding user privacy. Here is a simple table that I compiled with the information that I collected (sorry if it gets too wide):

Device	Browser	User-Agent String
Samsung Galaxy Tab S	Firefox 35.0	Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:35.0) Gecko/35.0 Firefox/35.0
Samsung Galaxy Tab S	Firefox 35.0.1	Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:35.0.1) Gecko/35.0.1 Firefox/35.0.1
Samsung Galaxy Tab S	Android's 4.4.2 stock browser	Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; en-gb; SAMSUNG SM-T700 Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.5 Chrome/28.0.1500.94 Safari/537.36
Samsung Galaxy Tab S	Updated Chrome	Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; SM-T700 Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.109 Safari/537.36
Vanilla tablet	Android's 4.1.1 stock browser	Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.1.1; en-us; TB1010 Build/JRO03H) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/534.30
Vanilla tablet	Firefox 35.0.1	Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:35.0.1) Gecko/35.0.1 Firefox/35.0.1
iPad	Safari's from iOS 8.1.3	Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 8_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12B466 Safari/600.1.4
Notebook	Debian's Iceweasel 35.0.1	Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0 Iceweasel/35.0.1

So, briefly looking at the table above, you can tell that the stock Android browser reveals quite a bit of information: the model of the device (e.g., SAMSUNG SM-T700 or TB1010) and even the build number (e.g., Build/KOT49H or Build/JRO03H)! This is super handy for malicious websites and I would say that it leaks a lot of possibly undesired information. The iPad is similar, with Safari revealing the version of the iOS that it is running. It doesn't reveal, though, the language that the user is using via the UA string (it probably does via other HTTP fields). Chrome is similar to the stock Android browser here, but, at least, it doesn't reveal the language of the user. It does reveal the version of Android, including the patch-level (that's a bit too much, IMVHO). I would say that the winner respecting privacy of the users among the browsers that I tested is Firefox: it conveys just the bare minimum, not differentiating from a high-end tablet (Samsung's Galaxy Tab S with 8 cores) and a vanilla tablet (with 2 cores). Like Chrome, Firefox still reveals a bit too much in the form of the patch-level. It should be sufficient to say that it is version 35.0 even if the user has 35.0.1 installed. The bonus points with Firefox is that it is also available on F-Droid, in two versions: as Firefox itself and as Fennec.

"As long as people still think of people like me as "a dude in a dress" there is a lot work to do to fight transphobia and gain tolerance and acceptance."

This line in Rhonda's most recent blogpost broke my heart a little, and sparked an interesting conversation with her about the (perceived?) value of clothes, respect and identity. So, guess what? Here's a pic of a "girl in trousers". Just because. (Sorry for the quality: couldn't find my camera and had to use a phone. Also, I don't own a binder, so I used a very light binding)

Hello Thanks to Devel::NYTProf, I ve realized that Module::CoreList was used in a not optimal way (to say the least) in Config::Model::Dpkg::Dependency when checking the dependency between Perl packages. (Note that only Perl packages with many dependencies were affected by this lack of performance) After a rework, the performance are much better. Here s an example comparing check time before and after the modification of libconfig-model-dpkg-perl. With libconfig-model-dpkg-perl 2.059:
$ time cme check dpkg
Using Dpkg
loading data
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
checking data
check done real 0m10.235s
user 0m10.136s
sys 0m0.088s With libconfig-model-dpkg-perl 2.060:
$ time cme check dpkg
Using Dpkg
loading data
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
checking data
check done real 0m1.565s
user 0m1.468s
sys 0m0.092s All in all, a 8x performance improvement on the dependency check. Note that, due to the freeze, the new version of libconfig-model-dpkg-perl is available only in experimental. All the best
Tagged: Config::Model, debian, dpkg, package

Over the last few days I put together a new package RcppAPT which interfaces the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, ... commands and their GUI-based brethren. The package currently implements two functions which permit search for package information via a regular expression, as well as a (vectorised) package name-based check. More to come, and contributions would be very welcome. A few examples just to illustrate follow.

R> hasPackages(c("r-cran-rcpp", "r-cran-rcppapt"))
   r-cran-rcpp r-cran-rcppapt 
          TRUE          FALSE 

This shows that Rcpp is (of course) available as a binary, but this (very new) package is (unsurprisingly) not yet available pre-built. We can search by regular expression:

R> library(RcppAPT)
R> getPackages("^r-base-c.")
          Package      Installed       Section
1 r-base-core-dbg 3.1.2-1utopic0 universe/math
2 r-base-core-dbg           <NA> universe/math
3     r-base-core 3.1.2-1utopic0 universe/math
4     r-base-core           <NA> universe/math
R> 

With the (default) expression catching everything, we see a lot of packages:

R> dim(getPackages())
[1] 104431      3
R> 

A bit more information is on the package page here as well as as the GitHub repo.

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

Now a days I'm more and more attracted towards Plan9, an Operating System meant to be the successor of UNIX and created by same people who created original UNIX. I'm always baffled by the simplicity of Plan9. Sadly Plan9 never took off for whatever reasons. I've been for a while trying to run Plan9, I ran Plan9 on Raspberry Pi model B using 9pi, but I couldn't experiment with it more due to some restrictions in my home setup. I installed original Plan9 4th Edition from Bell labs (now part of Alcatel-Lucent), I will write about it in on different post. But running virtual machine on my system is again PITA as system is already old (3 and half year). I came across the 9vx which is port of Plan9 for FreeBSD, Linux and Mac OSX by Russ Cox. I downloaded original 9vx version 0.9.12 from Russ's page linked above. The archive contains a Plan9 rootfs along with precompiled 9vx binaries for Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X. I ran the Linux binary but it crashed. I was seeing some illegal instruction error in dmesg. I didn't bother to do more investigation. A bit of googling showed me Arch Linux's wiki page on 9vx. I got errors trying to compile the original vx32 from rsc's repository but later saw that AUR 9vx package is built from different repository forked from rsc's found here. I cloned the repository to local and compiled it, I don't really remember if I had installed any additional packages. But if you get error you will know what additional thing is required. After compilation the 9vx binary is found inside src/9vx/9vx. I used this newly compiled 9vx to run the the rootfs I downloaded from Russ's website. This launches Plan9 and allows you to work inside Plan9. The good part is its not resource hungry and still looks like you have a VM running with Plan9 on it. But there seems to be a better way to do this directly from plan9 iso from bell labs. It can be found on 9fans list. Now I'm going to try that out too :-). And in next post I will share my experience of using Plan9 on Qemu.

The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

• In Total: 1069 (Including 188 bugs affecting key packages)
  • Affecting Jessie: 147 (key packages: 114) That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
    • Affecting Jessie and unstable: 96 (key packages: 81) Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
      • 23 bugs are tagged 'patch'. (key packages: 19) Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
      • 2 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. (key packages: 0) This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
      • 71 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. (key packages: 62) Help make a first step towards resolution!
    • Affecting Jessie only: 51 (key packages: 33) Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to Jessie. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
      • 34 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team. (key packages: 22)
      • 17 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked. (key packages: 11)

How do we compare to the Squeeze and Wheezy release cycles?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Jessie
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	319 (240+79)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	274 (224+50)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	295 (229+66)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	427 (313+114)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	342 (260+82)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	274 (189+85)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	226 (147+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	???
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	189 (134+55)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	147 (112+35)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	140 (104+36)
2	82 (46+36)	271 (162+109)	157 (124+33)
3	25 (15+10)	249 (165+84)	172 (128+44)
4	14 (8+6)	244 (176+68)	187 (132+55)
5	2 (0+2)	224 (132+92)	175 (124+51)
6	release!	212 (129+83)	161 (109+52)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)	147 (106+41)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)	147 (96+51)
9	release+3	174 (105+69)
10	release+4	120 (72+48)
11	release+5	115 (74+41)
12	release+6	93 (47+46)
13	release+7	50 (24+26)
14	release+8	51 (32+19)
15	release+9	39 (32+7)
16	release+10	20 (12+8)
17	release+11	24 (19+5)
18	release+12	2 (2+0)

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Just recently I stumbled upon one of these songs again and thought to myself: Are there more out there? With these songs I mean songs that could from its lyrics be considered queer-positive. Lyrics that cointain parts that speak about queer topics. To get you an idea of what I mean here are three songs as examples:

• Saft by Die Fantastischen Vier: The excert from the lyrics I am refering to is: "doch im Grunde sucht jeder Mann eine Frau // Wobei so mancher Mann besser mit M nnern kann // und so manche Frau l sst lieber Frauen ran" ("but basically every man looks for a woman // though some man prefer men // and some women prefer women").
• Liebe schmeckt gut by Grossstadtgefl ster: Here the lyrics go like "Manche lieben sich selber // manche lieben unerkannt // manche drei oder f nf" ("some love themself // some love in secrecy // some three or five"). For a stereo sound version of the song watch this video instead, but I love the video. :)
• Mein sch nstes Kleid by Fr chte des Zorns: This song is so much me. It starts off with "Eines Tages werd ich aus dem Haus geh'n und ich trag mein sch nstes Kleid" ("One day I'll go out and I'll wear my most beautiful dress" sung by a male voice). I was made aware of it after the Poetry Night at debconf12 in Nicaragua. As long as people still think of people like me as "a dude in a dress" there is a lot work to do to fight transphobia and gain tolerance and acceptance.

Do you have further examples for me? I know that I already mentioned another one in my blog entry about Garbage for a start. I am aware that there probably are dedicated bands that out of their own history do a lot songs in that direction, but I also want to hear about songs in which it is only mentioned in a side note and not made the central topic of the whole song, making it an absolutely normal random by-note. Like always, enjoy and I'm looking forward to your suggestions!

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I've been a mostly happy Thinkpad owner for almost 15 years. My first Thinkpad was a 570, followed by an X40, an X61s, and an X220. There might have been one more in there, my archives only go back a decade. Although it's lately gotten harder to buy Thinkpads at UNB as Dell gets better contracts with our purchasing people, I've persevered, mainly because I'm used to the Trackpoint, and I like the availability of hardware service manuals. Overall I've been pleased with the engineering of the X series. Over the last few days I learned about the installation of the superfish malware on new Lenovo systems, and Lenovo's completely inadequate response to the revelation. I don't use Windows, so this malware would not have directly affected me (unless I had the misfortune to use this system to download installation media for some GNU/Linux distribution). Nonetheless, how can I trust the firmware installed by a company that seems to value its users' security and privacy so little? Unless Lenovo can show some sign of understanding the gravity of this mistake, and undertake not to repeat it, then I'm afraid you will be joining Sony on my list of vendors I used to consider buying from. Sure, it's only a gross income loss of $500 a year or so, if you assume I'm alone in this reaction. I don't think I'm alone in being disgusted and angered by this incident.

Looks like I'll be speaking at LOADays again. This time around, at the suggestion of one of the organisers, I'll be speaking about the Belgian electronic ID card, for which I'm currently employed as a contractor to help maintain the end-user software. While this hasn't been officially confirmed yet, I've been hearing some positive signals from some of the organisers. So, under the assumption that my talk will be accepted, I've started working on my slides. The intent is to explain how the eID middleware works (in general terms), how the Linux support is supposed to work, and what to do when things fail. If my talk doesn't get rejected at the final hour, I will continue my uninterrupted "speaker at loadays" streak, which has started since loadays' first edition...

I m getting increasingly cynical about our largest organisations and their voting-centred approach to democracy. You vote once, for people rather than programmes, then you re meant to leave them to it for up to three years until they stand for reelection and in most systems, their actions aren t compared with what they said they d do in any way. I have this concern about Cooperatives UK too, but then its CEO publishes http://www.uk.coop/blog/ed-mayo/2015-02-18/rebooting-democracy-case-citizens-constitutional-convention and I think there may be hope for it yet. Well worth a read if you want to organise better groups.