Sorry about the lack of posting recently. Work has been rather problematic, and also very distracting, and on my time away from work I've been relaxing rather than writing. Didn't even get reviews written while on vacation. I am still hoping to catch up on reviews, however. In the meantime, I have been reading some, and buying more books. Here's a new haul list. Elizabeth Bear Steles of the Sky (sff)
Katherine Boo Behind the Beautiful Forevers (non-fiction)
John Chu The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere (sff)
Lewis Dartnell The Knowledge (non-fiction)
David Lochbaum, et al. Fukushima (non-fiction)
Ben Goldacre Bad Pharma (non-fiction)
Mira Grant Parasite (sff)
Thomas Olde Heuvelt The Ink Readers of Doi Saket (sff)
Mary Robinette Kowal The Lady Astronaut of Mars (sff)
Madeline Miller The Song of Achilles (historical)
Edmund S. Morgan American Slavery, American Freedom (non-fiction)
Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb (non-fiction)
Lee Smolin The Trouble with Physics (non-fiction)
Charles Stross Equoid (sff)
Charles Stross Neptune's Brood (sff) This is a bit of a grab-bag, including a variety of non-fiction that I had recommended to me by various people. I also picked up the remaining Hugo nominees for best novel that won't be in the voter packet, and the short fiction from Tor.com that was nominated and was available for free from Amazon for the Kindle. I read The Knowledge while I was on vacation, and it's in my large backlog of pending reviews.

A few days ago, version 0.2.1 of RcppGSL---our interface package between R and the GNU GSL using our Rcpp package for seamless R and C++ integration---appeared on CRAN making it the first release in some time. And it turned that this version tickled an obscure and long-dormant bug under clang which was found on OS X Mavericks---which Kevin Ushey consequently squashed. So this is now reflected in version 0.2.2 which just arrived on CRAN. Besides the bugfix, a few things were modernized to reflect capabilities of Rcpp 0.11.0 and later. The releases also contain a few changes that had accumulated since the previous release in 2012 such as an additional example using B-splines, and use of updated vignette build options provided by R. The NEWS file entries follows below:

Changes in version 0.2.2 (2014-05-31)

• A subtle bug (tickled only by clang on some OS versions) in vector and matrix view initialization was corrected by Kevin Ushey

Changes in version 0.2.1 (2014-05-26)

• Added new example based on B-splines example in GSL manual illustrating simple GSL use via Rcpp attributes
• Vignette compilation has been reverted to using highlight since version 0.4.2 or greater can be used as a vignette engine (with R 3.0.* or later).
• Vignette compilation is now being done by R CMD build as R 3.0.0 supports different vignette engines, so the vignette build process has been simplified. A convenience helper script has also been added for command-line builds.
• Unit tests now use sourceCpp() instead of cxxfunction() from the inline package
• The DESCRIPTION file now uses Suggests: Rcpp (instead of Depends: Rcpp) to permit building of the vignette
• The package now takes advantage of the simplified build process available with Rcpp (>= 0.11.0)
• Similar updates to the build process were made for the example package included with RcppGSL

And courtesy of CRANberries, a summaries of changes to release 0.2.0 and this week's release 0.2.1 are available. More information is on the RcppGSL page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

Hello, This has been a terrific week and a real learning experience for me. I finished packaging both Muon and QApt for Debian; my first two real debian packages, with very different packaging styles! Sune (svuorela), Maximiliano (maxy) and others helped me allot to understand the tools and I thank them very much for their support. While the first part of this second week was all about trying to make a solid package, the second part was me figuring out Policykit and KAuth in order for us to let go (as much as possible) of Kdesudo. I have managed to do a complete turnaround from kdesudo through policykit and now I am working on making an add-repo helper in C++/Qt using KAuth to keep it in line with QApt, in order to have a more uniform codebase. Big thanks to Aleix (apol) that guided me through the different uses of policykit and Kauth. To keep it short, policykit will not be used directly except QApt, in every other case we ll use KAuth. I m very close to finishing the KAuth add-repo helper and that will add improved functionality, as it extends well in what I will be doing next: renouncing specific backend support; The helper will manage how backends add/remove repos, meaning that if you use PackageKit you will no longer be tied to Apt if you want to use Muon! Here is a screenshot of the configure-software button in muon-discovery (finally) working on Debian and launching software-properties-kde:
And below are some screens of Muon in the wild, running on Debian:
I hope you enjoyed this update and stay tuned for the debian package which is currently under review. Floris.

So I've recently been looking at proxy-server source code, for obvious reasons. The starting point was a simple search of the available options:

~$ apt-cache search proxy filter
...
trafficserver - fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server
ssh-agent-filter - filtering proxy for ssh-agent

Hrm? trafficserver? That sounds like fun. Lets look at the source.

cd /tmp
apt-get source trafficserver

Lots of code, but scanning it quickly with my favourite tool, grep, we find this "gem":

$ rgrep /tmp .
./mgmt/tools/SysAPI.cc:  tmp = fopen("/tmp/shadow", "w");
./mgmt/tools/SysAPI.cc:    system("/bin/mv -f /tmp/shadow /etc/shadow");

Is that really what it looks like? Really? Sadly yes. There's lots of abuse of /tmpfiles in the code in mgmt/tools/, and although the modular structure took a while to understand the code that is compiled here ultimately ends up being included in /usr/bin/traffic_shell. That means it is a "real" security issue, allowing race-tastic local-attackers to do bad things. Bug reported as #749846. In happier news, the desk I was building is now complete. Pretty.

I feel like I should write about auditing software, but equally I feel unqualified - better people than me have already done so, e.g. David Wheeler. Also I've done it before, and nobody paid attention. (Or rather the poeple that should consider security frequently fail to do so, which is .. frustrating.)

Last week was the OpenStack Design Summit in Atlanta, GA where we, developers, discussed and designed the new OpenStack release (Juno) coming up. I've been there mainly to discuss Ceilometer upcoming developments. The summit has been great. It was my third OpenStack design summit, and the first one not being a PTL, meaning it was a largely more relaxed summit for me! On Monday, we started by a 2.5 hours meeting with Ceilometer core developers and contributors about the Gnocchi experimental project that I've started a few weeks ago. It was a great and productive afternoon, and allowed me to introduce and cover this topic extensively, something that would not have been possible in the allocated session we had later in the week. Ceilometer had his design sessions running mainly during Wednesday. We noted a lot of things and commented during the sessions in our Etherpads instances. Here is a short summary of the sessions I've attended. Scaling the central agent I was in charge of the first session, and introduced the work that was done so far in the scaling of the central agent. Six months ago, during the Havana summit, I proposed to scale the central agent by distributing the tasks among several node, using a library to handle the group membership aspect of it. That led to the creation of the tooz library that we worked on at eNovance during the last 6 months. Now that we have this foundation available, Cyril Roelandt started to replace the Ceilometer alarming job repartition code by Taskflow and Tooz. Starting with the central agent is simpler and will be a first proof of concept to be used by the central agent then. We plan to get this merged for Juno. For the central agent, the same work needs to be done, but since it's a bit more complicated, it will be done after the alarming evaluators are converted. Test strategy The next session discussed the test strategy and how we could improve Ceilometer unit and functional testing. There is a lot in this area to be done, and this is going to be one of the main focus of the team in the upcoming weeks. Having Tempest tests run was a goal for Havana, and even if we made a lot of progress, we're still no there yet. Complex queries and per-user/project data collection This session, led by Ildik V ncsa, was about adding finer-grained configuration into the pipeline configuration to allow per-user and per-project data retrieval. This was not really controversial, though how to implement this exactly is still to be discussed, but the idea was well received. The other part of the session was about adding more in the complex queries feature provided by the v2 API. Rethinking Ceilometer as a Time-Series-as-a-Service This was my main session, the reason we met on Monday for a few hours, and one of the most promising session I hope of the week. It appears that the way Ceilometer designed its API and storage backends a long time ago is now a problem to scale the data storage. Also, the events API we introduced in the last release partially overlaps some of the functionality provided by the samples API that causes us scaling troubles. Therefore, I've started to rethink the Ceilometer API by building it as a time series read/write service, letting the audit part of our previous sample API to the event subsystem. After a few researches and experiments, I've designed a new project called Gnocchi, which provides exactly that functionality in a hopefully scalable way. Gnocchi is split in two parts: a time series API and its driver, and a resource indexing API with its own driver. Having two distinct driver sets allows it to use different technologies to store each data type in the best storage engine possible. The canonical driver for time series handling is based on Pandas and Swift. The canonical resource indexer driver is based on SQLAlchemy. The idea and project was well received and looked pretty exciting to most people. Our hope is to design a version 3 of the Ceilometer API around Gnocchi at some point during the Juno cycle, and have it ready as some sort of preview for the final release. Revisiting the Ceilometer data model This session led by Alexei Kornienko, kind of echoed the previous session, as it clearly also tried to address the Ceilometer scalability issue, but in a different way. Anyway, the SQL driver limitations have been discussed and Mehdi Abaakouk implemented some of the suggestions during the week, so we should very soon see more performances in Ceilometer with the current default storage driver. Ceilometer devops session We organized this session to get feedbacks from the devops community about deploying Ceilometer. It was very interesting, and the list of things we could improve is long, and I think will help us to drive our future efforts. SNMP inspectors This session, led by Lianhao Lu, discussed various details of the future of SNMP support in Ceilometer. Alarm and logs improvements This mixed session, led by Nejc Saje and Gordon Chung, was about possible improvements on the alarm evaluation system provided by Ceilometer, and making logging in Ceilometer more effective. Both half-sessions were interesting and led to several ideas on how to improve both systems. Conclusion Considering the current QA problems with Ceilometer, Eoghan Glynn, the new Project Technical Leader for Ceilometer, clearly indicated that this will be the main focus of the release cycle. Personally, I will be focused on working on Gnocchi, and will likely be joined by others in the next weeks. Our idea is to develop a complete solution with a high velocity in the next weeks, and then works on its integration with Ceilometer itself.

Since the release of xf86-video-intel 2.99.911 lots of changes landed in upstream git. Hence for better Haswell support it was decided to use latest git. Again testing is appreciated (positive tests known on Haswell-ULT HD 4400 and Haswell HD Graphics 5000): xserver-xorg-video-intel packages.

Debian recently instituted a code of conduct which makes the astute observation that "a community in which people feel threatened is not a healthy community". So imagine my shock when I read Russell Cokers blog via Debian Planet, where commenting on a link from the intellectual powerhouse known as salon.com he said "The next logical step is to treat conservatism as a mental health problem." Being a conservative myself I immediately lost all my self-esteem and Dovecots SSL cert handling stopped working. What if I attend debconf and Coker uses his white privilege to sic Mental Health Services on me? I'm scared, so very scared and I don't know if I can continue not working on Debian Minix any longer. I demand that the Debian project, nay the world, should be OUTRAGED I'm talking spelling naughty words in hexadecimal levels of outrage and force this maniac to shut up before any more innocent flowers are brutalized by his "opinions."

The new xf86-input-synaptics 1.8 release is available in experimental. It supports the new Lenovo *40 series and the cute Carbon X1 thingy. Testing is appreciated, as this might soon move to unstable: xerver-xorg-input-synaptics packages.

Wheezy for industrial software development I'm helping with setting up a wheezy-based toolchain for industrial automation. The basic requirements are: live-build, C++11, Qt 5.3, and a frozen internal wheezy mirror. debmirror A good part of a day's work was lost because of #749734 and possibly #628779. Mirror rebuild is still ongoing, and fingers crossed. This is Italy, and you can't simply download 21Gb of debs just to see how it goes. C++11 Stable toolchains for C++11 now exist and have gained fast adoption. It makes sense, since given what is in C++11 it is unthinkable to start a new C++ project with the old standard nowadays. C++11 is supported by g++ 4.8+ or clang 3.3+. None of them is available on wheezy or wheezy-backports. Backports exist of g++ 4.8 only for Ubuntu 12.04, but they are uninstallable on wheezy due at least to a different libc6. I tried rebuilding g++4.8 on wheezy but quickly gave up. clang 3.3 has a build dependency on g++ 4.8. LOL. However, LLVM provides an APT repository with their most recent compiler, and it works, too. C++11 problem solved! Qt 5.3 Qt 5.3 is needed because of the range of platforms it can target. There is no wheezy backport that I can find. I cannot simply get it from Qt's Download page and install it, since we need it packaged, to build live ISOs with it. I'm attempting to backport the packages from experimental to wheezy. Here are its build dependencies: libxcb-1.10 (needed by qt5) Building this is reasonably straightforward. libxkbcommon 0.4.0 (needed by qt5) The version from jessie builds fine on wheezy, provided you remove --fail-missing from the dh_install invocation. libicu 52.1 (needed by harfbuzz) The jessie packages build on wheezy, provided that mentions of clang are deleted from source/configure.ac, since it fails to build with clang 3.5 (the one currently available for wheezy on llvm.org). libharfbuzz-dev Backporting this is a bloodbath: the Debian packages from jessie depend on a forest of gobject hipsterisms of doom, all unavailable on wheezy. I gave up. qt 5.3 qtbase-opensource-src-5.3.0+dfsg can be made to build with an embedded version of harfbuzz, with just this change:

diff -Naur a/debian/control a/debian/control
--- a/debian/control    2014-05-20 18:48:27.000000000 +0200
+++ b/debian/control    2014-05-29 17:45:31.037215786 +0200
@@ -28,7 +28,6 @@
                libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev,
                libgstreamer0.10-dev,
                libgtk2.0-dev,
-               libharfbuzz-dev,
                libicu-dev,
                libjpeg-dev,
                libmysqlclient-dev,
diff -Naur a/debian/rules b/debian/rules
--- a/debian/rules  2014-05-18 01:56:37.000000000 +0200
+++ b/debian/rules  2014-05-29 17:45:25.738634371 +0200
@@ -108,7 +108,6 @@
                -plugin-sql-tds \
                -system-sqlite \
                -platform $(platform_arg) \
-               -system-harfbuzz \
                -system-zlib \
                -system-libpng \
                -system-libjpeg \

(thanks Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer for helping me there!) There are probably going to be further steps in the Qt5 toolchain. Actually, let's try prebuilt binaries The next day with a fresh mind we realised that it is preferable to reduce our tampering with the original wheezy to a minimum. Our current plan is to use wheezy's original Qt and Qt-using packages, and use Qt's prebuilt binaries in /opt for all our custom software. We run Qt's installer, tarred the result, and wrapped it in a Debian package like this:

$ cat debian/rules
#!/usr/bin/make -f
QT_VERSION = 5.3
%:
    dh $@
override_dh_auto_build:
    dh_auto_build
    sed -re 's/@QT_VERSION@/$(QT_VERSION)/g' debian-rules.inc.in > debian-rules.inc
override_dh_auto_install:
    dh_auto_install
    # Download and untar the prebuild Qt5 binaries
    install -d -o root -g root -m 0755 debian/our-qt5-sdk/opt/Qt
    curl http://localserver/Qt$(QT_VERSION).tar.xz   xz -d   tar -C debian/our-qt5-sdk/opt -xf -
    # Move the runtime part to our-qt5
    install -d -o root -g root -m 0755 debian/our-qt5/opt/Qt
    mv debian/our-qt5-sdk/opt/Qt/$(QT_VERSION) debian/our-qt5/opt/Qt/
    # Makes dpkg-shlibdeps work on packages built with Qt from /opt
    # Hack. Don't try this at home. Don't ever do this unless you
    # know what you are doing. This voids your warranty. If you
    # know what you are doing, you won't do this.
    find debian/our-qt5/opt/Qt/$(QT_VERSION)/gcc_64/lib -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "lib*.so*" \
          sed -re 's,^.+/(lib[^.]+)\.so.+$$,\1 5 our-qt5 (>= $(QT_VERSION)),' > debian/our-qt5.shlibs
$ cat debian-rules.inc.in
export PATH := /opt/Qt/@QT_VERSION@/gcc_64/bin:$(PATH)
export QMAKESPEC=/opt/Qt/@QT_VERSION@/gcc_64/mkspecs/linux-clang/

To build one of our packages using Qt5.3 and clang, we just add this to its debian/rules:

include /usr/share/our-qt5/debian-rules.inc

Wrap up We got the dependencies sorted. Hopefully the mirror will rebuild itself tonight and tomorrow we can resume working on our custom live system.

Charmian Gooch gave an interesting TED talk about her efforts to fight organised crime and corruption by prohibiting anonymous companies [1]. The idea of a company is to protect the owner from unlimited liability not to protect them from law enforcement. Dr Nerdlove has an insightful article about sexual harassment in geek culture [2]. Rebecca Rose wrote an insightful article for Jezebel about the worse bullying advice ever, her summary is that it should be called Ways We Can Get You Goddamn Kids to Act So We Never Have to Deal With Your Problems Ever [3]. In the wake of the Heardbleed bug Imperial Violet wrote an informative article explaining why revocation checks isn t the solution [4]. Martin Lukacs and Shiri Pasternak wrote an insightful article about the Canadian government s attempts to stop Canadian aboriginies from exercising their legal rights [5]. I bet that the Australian government is doing the same things. Nelson Groom wrote an interesting interview with Norrie May Welby, the first recognised agender person in Australia [6]. Marriage equality is bound to happen soon in Australia, now that the government officially recognises non-binary gender people it can t refuse them the right to get married and therefore the straight/gay marriage distinction isn t relevant. BDA Technology has an interesting article on choosing fonts to make text more readable for dyslexic people [7]. Eamon Waterford wrote an informative article for the ABC about how early-intervention social policies save significant amounts of tax money [8]. Conservatives claim to want to save money and try to cut such programs which costs everyone in the long term. Greta Christina wrote an insightful article for Salon about why religious people want atheists to lie and pretend to believe [9]. Chris Mooney wrote an informative URL about a machine to test whether someone is liberal or conservative [10]. Paul Rosenberg wrote an informative article on the link between conservatism, evil, and psychopathy [11]. The next logical step is to treat conservatism as a mental health problem. Sociological Images has an interesting article by Jay Livingston about the hypocrisy of conservative tax policies [12]. Scientific American reprinted an article from The Conversation by Elaine McKewon about the climate deniers who intimidated a journal into retracting an article about their belief in conspiracy theories [13]. It seems obvious that the climate deniers are the ones who conspire. Ben Caldecott wrote an interesting article for the ABC about the fossil fuel divestment campaign [14]. It seems that this is getting some success already, as renewable energy will soon be cheaper than coal power this could kill off coal. Mark Taylor wrote an interesting blog post titled Observations of an Internet Middleman about the operations of Level3 and Internet peering [15]. He explains how monopoly Telcos throttle their customers Internet access. Matt Savoy wrote an informative and disturbing article about the fact that US cops are twice as likely to beat their wives as the general population [16]. Apparently the police hierarchy aren t interested in prosecuting such crimes. Paul Rosenberg wrote an insightful article about mythos vs logos and the conservative approach to relity [17]. One interesting point he makes is that white men (and members of privileged groups generally) fear a loss of status more than more realistic concerns (such as global warming). Nick wrote an interesting blog post about using GPG encrypted email on an Android phone [18]. I should get this going on my phone.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/lyrdepn
• [2] http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2014/04/ending-sexual-harassment-geek-culture/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/o2ueqcm
• [4] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/04/19/revchecking.html
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/plqdn97
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/lxbg4fp
• [7] http://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/lycqvng
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/ldvrztn
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/mtk9gxs
• [11] http://www.salon.com/2014/05/01/conservatives_evil_and_psychopathy_science_makes_the_link/
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/kvqfjf4
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/ko5ykrr
• [14] http://tinyurl.com/kltjar4
• [15] http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-internet-middleman/
• [16] http://tinyurl.com/oqoqvey
• [17] http://tinyurl.com/n5e6945
• [18] http://geekyschmidt.com/2010/12/09/gpg-on-your-android-phone

Five years ago, I opened The Eye of the World, the first book in the Wheel of Time series, and read:

Lord of the Morning, he said, I have come for you.

On the island, the air shimmered and coalesced. The black-clad man stood staring at the fiery mountain rising out of the plain. His face twisted in rage and contempt. You cannot escape so easily, Dragon. It is not done between us. It will not be done until the end of time. Then he was gone, and the mountain and the island stood alone. Waiting.

And then, as often, Robert Jordan began books citing some of the prophecy he invented:

And it came to pass in those days, as it had come before and would come again, that the Dark lay heavy on the land and weighed down the hearts of men, and the green things failed, and hope died. And men cried out to the Creator, saying, O Light of the Heavens, Light of the World, let the Promised One be born of the mountain, according to the prophecies, as he was in ages past and will be in ages to come. Let the Prince of the Morning sing to the land that green things will grow and the valleys give forth lambs. Let the arm of the Lord of the Dawn shelter us from the Dark, and the great sword of justice defend us. Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time. from Charal Drianaan to Calamon,
The Cycle of the Dragon.
Author unknown, the Fourth Age

And then, the grand opening to each of the books in the 11,000-page series, something like this:

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. Born below the ever cloud-capped peaks that gave the mountains their name, the wind blew east, out across the Sand Hills, once the shore of a great ocean, before the Breaking of the World. Down it flailed into the Two Rivers, into the tangled forest called the Westwood, and beat at two men walking with a cart and horse down the rock-strewn track called the Quarry Road.

And yesterday, 11,000 pages later, I have completed the series. Really, how could I have put down a book with such a majestic beginning as that? It hinted at the epic that was to come, the amazing literature I was going to read. I didn t read it straight through; I enjoyed books like War and Peace along the way. But what a trip the Wheel of Time series was. The characters were so detailed, so deep, the setting so elaborate, the plots so grand and also so small everyone from servants to queens were well-represented in the books. Not every section was a page-turner; in fact, around the 4th or 5th book, the series started to plod for a thousand pages or two, reading more like a history book than a novel. Sometimes the prejudices and stereotypes of the characters, particularly the sexism that both the men and women displayed, were frustrating to read. I never quite figured out of this was brilliant writing (making the reader feel frustrated at the plodding pace of the book when it was describing characters being frustrated at the plodding pace of events), or if it could have been trimmed down by 2/3 in some places. But really, the number of brilliant endings, laugh-out-loud situations, and page-turning suspense that somehow managed to build over hundreds, and then even thousands of pages, outweighed the flaws.

Politics is a foggy mire full of snakes. - The Eye of the World

Ah. Furlan washed his hands in one direction, then rubbed them in the other. Ah. Forgive me, Master Andra, but Lady Alys is a fierce sounding woman. Only with those who displease her, Lan said blandly. Her bite is far worse than her bark. Ah. Ah. Ah. Your rooms are this way. . . - The Dragon Reborn

One of the marks of truly good writing is that I leave a book or series with a sense of sadness or nostalgia, leaving characters that seem almost like friends. I felt that after finishing the last book in the series, A Memory of Light. The ending was deep, and satisfying, but ultimately left me wanting even more even more than 11,000 pages, somehow.

Elienda and Briain woke from the dream. She might have been speaking of the weather rather than two deaths among women she knew. We all must wake eventually. - Knife of Dreams

I was often touched by the way the Aiel referred to each other. A desert people, their fond farewall was may you always find water and shade. A fitting metaphor for anyone s life, I think. And they referred to their spouse as shade of my heart. Jordan touched on quite a few themes of religion and philosophy. In that quote above, he has the Aiel referring to death as waking from a dream. An intriguing metaphor, isn t it? He even writes conflicts of philosophy, religion, and culture into the series. I was particularly impressed with his treatment of theodicy and the problem of evil (the argument and religious response relating to the presence of evil in the world in the face of a loving God.) It is the most impressive treatment I have seen in fiction, and does a better job of advancing the theodistic argument than many philosophers have, I suspect. It is hard to really go into that one here because of the length and potential for spoilers. I can, however, comment on his treatment of existential nihilism the theory that life and the universe is without meaning, and the sometimes-related comment that what does anything matter then anyway? Here are a couple of quotes:

In Maradon, I saw what had been done to men who followed me. I saw Light in them, Min. Defying the Dark One no matter the length of his shadow. We will live, that defiance said. We will love and we will hope. And I saw him trying so hard to destroy that. He knows that if he could break them, it would mean something. Something much more than Maradon. Breaking the spirit of men he thirsts for that. He struck far harder than he otherwise would have because he wanted to break my spirit. His voice grew softer and he opened his eyes, looking down at her. And so I stood against him. - Towers of Midnight

What if I think it s all meaningless? he demanded with the loud voice of a king. What if I don t want it to keep turning? We live our lives by the blood of others! And those others become forgotten. What good is it if everything we know will fade? Great deeds or great tragedies, neither means anything! They will become legends, then those legends will be forgotten, then it will all start over again!

Why? Rand thought with wonder. Because each time we live, we get to love again.

It felt relaxing to stare out at that distant light, so welcoming and noble. Storms will soon come, it seemed to say. But for now, I am here. I am here. - The Gathering Storm

I unfortunately can t put in in its proper context due to spoilers, but it is a pivotal turning point in the series, relating to the preservation of the world. By giving what we might normally call a characteristic or behavior evil an almost-human voice and character, it can be discussed in interesting ways.

We are always more afraid than we wish to be, but we can always be braver than we expect. Hold on to your heart, and the Aes Sedai cannot harm what is really you, your heart. They are not nearly so far above us as we believed. May you always find water and shade, Egwene. And always remember your heart. - Lord of Chaos

Eben is dead. Would you want to forget your pain if you lost that hulking giant of yours? Have your feelings for him cut away like some spoiled chunk of flesh in an otherwise good roast? - The Gathering Storm

These quotes are examples of characters in the series dealing with difficult situations. In one, a character is yelled at for offering to use her special powers to numb the pain of another person over a death. It brings up a question that those of us that have known pain might find interesting: would we really have wanted our pain erased? And suggests perhaps not. That there is a benefit to it. That we get through it by embracing it by embracing it while still being true to our heart.

He had four rules concerning action and information. Never make a plan without knowing as much as you can of the enemy. Never be afraid to change your plans when you receive new information. Never believe you know everything. And never wait to know everything. - Lord of Chaos

Sometimes the series treats us to logical thinkers, whether they are generals or innkeepers, and gives us little tidbits like this one.

Androl brushed off his hands, smiling. Children were so adaptable. Before them, centuries of tradition, terror and superstition could melt away like butter left too long in the sun. - Towers of Midnight

And sometimes, things to chew over. Isn t that an interesting comment on prejudice? Children aren t born prejudiced; we can see how easily they make friends with anyone. It is sad that we teach them to be, isn t it? Wheel of Time is a fine story, expertly woven. But it is not just a story. It is true, in the sense that it illuminates truths, just like Romeo and Juliet can. In it, I see lessons and echoes of the civil rights era, comments on what makes good leaders, characters wrestling with decisions without adequate data, people putting on a mask of emotions, sacrifice, and the overall theme of the entire series: the power of love and compassion. The inspiration of the series for me well, it is there, but it may take a few more days to figure it out. I think it has something to do with this: The wind rose high and free, to soar in an open sky with no clouds.

The Debian Haskell Group has no proper policy about when to update a certain package to a new version from Hackage. So far, we upgrade when one of us personally needs something, when someone nudges us, if its required as a dependency or just when we feel like it. I was thinking about ways to improve that. One thing that we should definitely do is to upgrade to new versions that differ only in the forth version number, e.g. from 1.2.3.4 to 1.2.3.5 these are most likely bug fix uploads and have little risk of breaking things. (Unless they are only changes to the .cabal file, then they might not be an improvement for our users or us.) I plan to code that soon. But what else can we do? Ideally we d package versions that will be the newest version for a long time, and not versions that are going to be replaced the next day. Unfortunately, deciding that requires visionary powers. But maybe there is a correlation between the upload history and the lifetime of a new package? Maybe there are patterns, e.g. the first upload after a long time tends to be replaced fast, but the third package in a short succession has a high chance to live long? Can we predict the livetime of a freshly uploaded package? So after a bit of hacking I got this graphic: It needs a bit explanation: Both axis are time differences, the picture is one year by one year. For every release of which we know the lifetime (i.e. there has been an upload later), we draw its history on a vertical line. The horizontal position of the line corresponds to the lifetime of the release: A package that was superseded immediately later (which I sometimes do after spotting annoying typos) would appear on the far left, a package that is stable for one year on the far right. The history itself is a series of dots, representing the previous uploads of that package, with their distance from the lower edge indicating the time that has passed since then. So if a package had two updates half a year ago, and then no update for another half year, it would contribute two dots right above each other in the middle of the picture. Unfortunately, the picture does not yield any insight, besides that short-lived packages are more frequent than long-lived packages. So I tried another view: I grouped uploads by the livetime of their two preceding uploads. For each such groups, the circle indicates the average livetime. The darkness indicates the absolute number in the sample. So we see a correlation between the packages livetime and the livetime of its predecessor, which is also not very surprising. We can state some hypothesis, like: A package replacing a very old package is likely to be long-lived if its pre-predecessor lived very long or very shortly, but less so if that lived for a few months. But I m not sure of the significance of these. I could have also taken into account which uploads are major and which are minor, by looking at the version number, but I didn t. What s the conclusion? Nothing much. I got some funny looking graphs. And there needs to be a way to render pictures like the first within the axes of a Chart diagram. I put the (somewhat hackish) code online feel free to play with it.

For use with http://web.dit.upm.es/vnxwiki/index.php/Vnx-rootfsolive and http://blog.gns3.net/2009/10/olive-juniper/2/

$ cd /var/lib/libvirt/images
$ sudo qemu-img create -f qcow2 vnx_rootfs_olive.qcow2 7G
$ sudo wget ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/4.11/4.11-RELEASE-i386-miniinst.iso
$ sudo brctl addbr testnet
$ sudo ip addr add 172.18.36.2/24 dev testnet
$ sudo ip link set up dev testnet
$ wget -O /tmp/olive.xml https://wp.colliertech.org/cj/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/olive.xml
$ sudo virsh define /tmp/olive.xml
$ sudo virsh start olive

/tmp/olive.xml follows:

<domain type='kvm'>
  <name>olive</name>
  <memory unit='KiB'>1048576</memory>
  <currentMemory unit='KiB'>1048576</currentMemory>
  <vcpu placement='static'>2</vcpu>
  <os>
    <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-1.1'>hvm</type>
    <boot dev='cdrom'/>
  </os>
  <features>
    <acpi/>
    <apic/>
    <pae/>
  </features>
  <clock offset='utc'/>
  <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
  <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
  <on_crash>restart</on_crash>
  <devices>
    <emulator>/usr/bin/kvm</emulator>
    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='qcow2'/>
      <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/vnx_rootfs_olive.qcow2'/>
      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>
    </disk>
    <disk type='file' device='cdrom'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>
      <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/4.11-RELEASE-i386-miniinst.iso'/>
      <target dev='hdc' bus='ide'/>
      <readonly/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='1' target='0' unit='0'/>
    </disk>
    <controller type='usb' index='0'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x2'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='ide' index='0'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x1'/>
    </controller>
    <controller type='sata' index='0'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x03' function='0x0'/>
    </controller>
    <interface type='bridge'>
      <mac address='52:54:00:4d:b2:c8'/>
      <source bridge='testnet'/>
      <model type='e1000'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x06' function='0x0'/>
    </interface>
    <serial type='pty'>
      <target port='0'/>
    </serial>
    <console type='pty'>
      <target type='serial' port='0'/>
    </console>
    <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
    <graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes'/>
    <video>
      <model type='cirrus' vram='9216' heads='1'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x02' function='0x0'/>
    </video>
    <memballoon model='virtio'>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/>
    </memballoon>
  </devices>
</domain>

Allowing computer suspend Major desktop environments such as Xfce or KDE have a built-in computer suspend feature, but when you use a lighter alternative, things are a bit more complicated, because basically: only root can suspend the computer. Possible solutions include:

• using sudo to allow members of a given group to run a suspend command, e.g. pm-suspend as root;
• using a D-Bus UPower thingy, which communicates with a running daemon upowerd:

  $ dbus-send --system --print-reply \
              --dest='org.freedesktop.UPower' \
              /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend
          

With recent updates of the related Debian packages no idea of which one exactly the latter solution may not work any more, in which case it will only return the following error:

Error org.freedesktop.UPower.GeneralError: not authorized

It appears that this error is linked to ConsoleKit, a part of all this modern *Kit gizmo pile. If you are in this case, try prefixing your session launcher with the undocumented dark magic call ck-launch-session. For instance, this is what I have in my .xsession to launch my window manager i3:

exec ck-launch-session i3

Note: I do not know what ck-launch-session does exactly, why it is needed, and I do not want to know. To me, all that WhatsitKit pile is just some opaque, under-documented as in: no man page crap, that no one but their author really understand, designed to solve theoretical problems no one really cares about like: how to allow locally connected users to use the sound card while forbidding it to remote users while creating new issues such as this one. This stuff is too complex and under-documented for me to dive into it, so if it does not work out of the box, it is just some crap that gets in my way to using my computer as I wish. Disabling a monitor In some configurations, you have two monitors and want to disable one. For instance, in addition to my LCD monitor, I have a projector which I only use for movies. According to xorg.conf's man page, it can be disabled this way:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Internal graphic card"
    Option      "Monitor-DVI"   "LCD Monitor"
    Option      "Monitor-VGA"   "Projector"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "LCD Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "Projector"
    Option      "Enable"    "false"
EndSection

Except that does not work, because contrary to what the man page says the real option to use is not Enable but Disable! So here is the correct configuration to disable that monitor at start-up:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Internal graphic card"
    Option      "Monitor-DVI"   "LCD Monitor"
    Option      "Monitor-VGA"   "Projector"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "LCD Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "Projector"
    Option      "Disable"   "true"
EndSection

Note: yes, I will send a bug report with a patch against xorg.conf's man page.

I spent the bank holiday weekend mostly in Manchester with my brother and a couple of friends, mostly to see Nine Inch Nails perform, but also to enjoy the pleasures of the city. We arrived on the Sunday and after checking in headed out to get some food. I'd booked us a table at the historic Marble Arch - the pub which gives its name to the parent company Marble Beers - and produce my most favourite ales. Whenever a Marble beer ends up as a guest at one of the Newcastle real ale pubs a friend of mine (who is much more on top of this stuff than I am) lets me know and we stop off for a few. Invariably there's a crowd of a dozen or so Manchester expats in bar when we do. I reserved our table over twitter, which is a bit of a novelty for me. My two friends are ale skeptics but - due to lack of choice - we all ended up sampling the Chocolate Marble and the Ginger 5.1, which went down a storm. They are possibly converts now. There was an Earl Grey IPA too, which was nice but a bit on the strong side for sessioning. The gig was great - I prefer club gigs to arena gigs but the sound techs for NIN know what they are doing and the mix was great. The visuals were stunning too. Highlights for me were "The Great Destroyer" - in particular the extended, improvised 5 minute glitch-meltdown coda; the slow build of "Eraser" and "The Day The World Went Away" - played faithfully to the CD mix rather than the traditional extended live arrangement. I miss the former live arrangement, which includes a drawn out drum-backed finish, but this arrangement had a lot of force, with all four of the band bashing guitars into a pummelling wall of sound. I've heard that at least one person has taped the show and it turns out recordings have just recently surfaced for the two club gigs my brother and I attended back in 2005 and 2007 - meaning there are now widely available, high quality ROIO copies for every NIN gig I've ever been to. Afterwards we tried to find a decent club. Manchester is a lot larger than my native city and there's plenty of places to go, if you know where they are. We had originally planned to visit The Factory on Charles Street, but we didn't believe it was open on the Sunday. The Factory is Peter Hook's (formerly of Joy Division/New Order) club - occupying the former office spaces of Factory records. I've chanced in there once before as it's right across the road from the Lass O' Gowrie pub, which is the haunt of choice for HE/tech people whenever we're in Manchester for conferences. Instead we gravitated towards Dry Bar on Oldham street. By coincidence this place also has historic ties to Factory Records. However the doormen wouldn't let us in! Finally we landed at a place which had one name on the door and a different name on the inside (Jack's). Like the aformentioned Lass O' Gowrie and perhaps half of all pubs and clubs in Manchester, the place is decked out as a shrine to the former musical giants of the City, with framed pictures of Mark E Smith, the Ha ienda again, the Stone Roses in their boy-band-looks hay day, John Peel (champion of many of them) and of course Tony Wilson. I can't help but wonder whether people who live here get royally sick of that. This place served some delicious albeit clich -titled Cocktails and played a pretty good set - the obligatory Madchester throwback interlude was followed by a chunk of Northern Soul and a couple of early Rap classics. Setlist wise it was pretty much identical to that of Foundation in Newcastle, 12 years ago, no doubt because Foundation was cribbing heavily from the Ha ienda in the first place. Monday was dedicated to exploring and shopping. Top of my list of places to go was my pilgrimage venue Vinyl Exchange. Whilst waiting for it to open we rolled around in Affleck's Palace, which turned out to have a small record stall within. After Vinyl Exchange we chanced across another record store right across the road - Picadilly Records - which happens to be larger and focuses more on new releases. It didn't take long before we found another small, DIY record shop, then another. We tried out the Fopp branch here - more Vinyl; then Urban Outfitters - more; then an Oxfam branch - even more. I actually got Vinyl snow blind at this point. I've been controlling myself admirably and only picked up a couple of bits and pieces. My best find was Fad Gadget's sophmore album "Incontinent".

As often is the case, the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic (http://smbc-comics.com/ gets it right. And I cannot help but share today's comic. The picture explains it much better than what I ever could.

2013 is nearly all finished up and so I thought I'd spend a little time writing up what was noteable in the last twelve months. When I did so I found an unfinished draft from the year before. It would be a shame for it to go to waste, so here it is. 2012 was an interesting year in many respects with personal highs and lows. Every year I see a lots of "round-up"-style blog posts on the web, titled things like "2012 in music", which attempt to summarize the highlights of the year in that particular context. Here's JWZ's effort, for example. Often they are prefixed with statements like "2012 was a strong year for music" or whatever. For me, 2012 was not a particularly great year. I discovered quite a lot of stuff that I love that was new to me, but not new in any other sense. In Music, there were a bunch of come-back albums that made the headlines. I picked up both of Orbital's Wonky and Brian Eno's Lux (debatably a comeback: his first ambient record since 1983, his first solo effort since 2005, but his fourth collaborative effort on Warp in the naughties). I've enjoyed them both, but I've already forgotten Wonky and I still haven't fully embraced Lux (and On Land has not been knocked from the top spot when I want to listen to ambience.) There was also Throbbing Gristle's (or X-TG) final effort, a semi/post-TG, partly posthumous double-album swan song effort which, even more than Lux, I still haven't fully digested. In all honesty I think it was eclipsed by the surprise one-off release of a live recording of a TG side project featuring Nik Void of Factory Floor: Carter Tutti Void's Transverse, which is excellent. Ostensibly a four-track release, there's a studio excerpt V4 studio (Slap 1) which is available from (at least) Amazon. There's also a much more obscure fifth "unreleased" track cruX which I managed to "buy" from one of the web shops for zero cost. The other big musical surprise for me last year was Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. I knew nothing of BJH, although it turns out I've heard some of her singles repeatedly on Radio 6, but her band's guitarist Ed Blazey and his partner lived in the flat below me briefly. In that time I managed to get to the pub with him just once, but he kindly gave me a copy of their album on 12" afterwards. It reminds me a bit of Goldfrapp circa "Seventh Tree": I really like it and I'm looking forward to whatever they do next. Reznor's How To Destroy Angels squeezed out An Omen EP which failed to set my world on fire as a coherent collection, despite a few strong songs individually. In movies, sadly once again I'd say most of the things I recall seeing would be "also rans". Prometheus was a disappointment, although I will probably rewatch it in 2D at least once. The final Batman was fun although not groundbreaking to me and it didn't surpass Ledger's efforts in The Dark Knight. Inception remains my favourite Nolan by a long shot. Looper is perhaps the stand-out, not least because it came from nowhere and I managed to avoid any hype. In games, I moaned about having moaning about too many games, most of which are much older than 2012. I started Borderlands 2 after enjoying Borderlands (disqualified on age grounds) but to this day haven't persued it much further. I mostly played the two similar meta-games: The Playstation Plus download free games in a fixed time period and the more sporadic but bountiful humble bundle whack-a-mole. More on these another time. In reading, as is typical I mostly read stuff that was not written in 2012. Of that which was, Charles Stross's The Apocalypse Codex was an improvement over The Fuller Memorandum which I did not enjoy much, but in general I'm finding I much prefer Stross's older work to his newer; David Byrne's How Music Works was my first (and currently last) Google Books ebook purchase, and I read it entirely on a Nexus 7. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but the experience has not made a convert of me away from paper. He leans heavily on his own experiences which is inevitable but fortunately they are wide and numerous. Iain Banks' Stonemouth was an enjoyable romp around a fictional Scottish town (one which, I am reliably informed, is incredibly realistical rendered). One of his "mainstream" novels, It avoided a particular plot pattern that I've grown to dread with Banks, much to my suprise (and pleasure). Finally, the stand-out pleasant surprise novel of the year was Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth. With a plot device not unlike Banks' Transition or Stross's Family Trade series, the pair managed to write a journey-book capturing the sense-of-wonder that these multiverse plots are good for. (Or perhaps I have a weakness for them). It's hard to find the lines between Baxter and Pratchett's writing, but the debatably-reincarnated Tibetan Monk-cum-Artificial Intelligence 'Lobsang' must surely be Pratchett's. Pratchett managed to squeeze out another non-Discworld novel (Dodger) as well as a long-overdue short story collection, although I haven't read either of them yet. On to 2013's write-up...

Dear lazyweb: does anybody know if the suggestion not to use pgp.mit.edu as a keyserver is still valid?

The only source that claims that it should not be used seems to be on OpenPGP Best Practices, but even there there are no explanation on why it shouldn't be used today (it does mention some old problems, but it also admits that they have been solved) or other sites that give that article as their source.

I don't use it as my primary keyserver, and there are others that work, but blacklisting a server without giving actual reasons sounds wrong to me, so I'd like to hear if some of those reasons are actually listed elsewhere.

P.S. if you don't have a friendica account to comment, this post will also appear on my pump.io account, or you can send me an email to the address listed on my homepage.

Edit: direct link to the pump.io post