AltOS 1.3.2 Bug fixes and improved APRS support Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 1.3.2. AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of firmware for our cc1111, STM32L151, LPC11U14 and ATtiny85 based electronics and Java-based ground station software. This is a minor release of AltOS, including bug fixes for TeleMega, TeleMetrum v2.0 and AltosUI . AltOS Firmware GPS Satellite reporting and APRS improved Firmware version 1.3.1 has a bug on TeleMega when it has data from more than 12 GPS satellites. This causes buffer overruns within the firmware. 1.3.2 limits the number of reported satellites to 12. APRS now continues to send the last known good GPS position, and reports GPS lock status and number of sats in view in the APRS comment field, along with the battery and igniter voltages. AltosUI TeleMega GPS Satellite, GPS max height and Fire Igniters AltosUI was crashing when TeleMega reported that it had data from more than 12 satellites. While the TeleMega firmware has been fixed to never do that, AltosUI also has a fix in case you fly a TeleMega board without updated firmware. GPS max height is now displayed in the flight statistics. As the u-Blox GPS chips now provide accurate altitude information, we ve added the maximum height as computed by GPS here. Fire Igniters now uses the letters A through D to label the extra TeleMega pyro channels instead of the numbers 0-3.

Init system I am happy that Debian's Technical Committee was able to reach a very good decision with the choice of systemd as the default init system for the Linux ports. In particular, I was very pleasantly surprised by the lucidity of Russ Allbery's analyses and, above all, his patience even with people that, in my understanding, were just being trolls or trying to cause confusion and disrupt a process that was already chaotic. Russ, thank you for your exemplary role. (Also, you type fast or what? You fill whole e-mails seemingly faster than I can read!)

Unexpected union of forces It seems to me that Mark Shutterworth's decision of (perhaps?) embracing Debian's decision in the init system is a good thing. I think that one way where Ubuntu did a great thing with respect to Debian was their initial attitude towards cherry-picking the best of breed of Free Software from Debian's archive and polishing that to create a really "for human beings" operating system. I hope that this means that, at least in part, money (Mark's?) can be channeled in the best of the interests so that we all gain from it. (And, to be honest, I see no problem in making money with Free Software and I welcome a well done integration job).

More polarizing things I feel that, now, I may even have some hope of sending another potentially polarizing bug to the Tech Ctte (that is ffmpeg vs. libav) and have faith that some rational decision would be made. I was not even aware of it, but the ffmpeg folks even featured a news item in their page of me having filed the RFP bug mentioned above.

DebConf 14 If everything goes as expected, I hope to attend this year's DebConf. In fact, I am anticipating this, since I would love to, e.g., talk with Joey Hess and discuss a better way of having GNU parallel and the parallel program in moreutils have amicable co-installability among many, many other things with respect to my packages. And, quite probably, work on packaging ffmpeg with other interested people (which seem to be numerous).
Edit: Fix markdown link pointing twice to the ffmpeg site. Thanks Marius Gedminas for pointing this out.

I love Free Software, and the people behind it. Even though I have been a free software user and developer for more than a decade now, there's still more to be amazed at, still more to contribute, and still more to learn. I love the Free Software community, because it never ceases to amaze me. It's not just about the technical side, but the social, human side of it, too!During the past year, I came to another milestone in my career: as of july first, I am a Free Software developer, and enjoying every moment of it. This is a feat that could not have been done without there being demand for what I do, without the free software community as a whole. For that, I owe you all a big thank you, you make it possible for me to make my dream come true. I can only hope that through my work, and through my example, I can contribute back enough.To this day, I take delight in contributing to free software, be it a Lisp on Python (or projects built in it), any of my own projects, syslog-ng, Google Summer of Code mentoring, Debian work - any and all of that are great fun. Even processing NEW is (I really should do that more often)! It's an endless source of not only entertainment and knowledge, but inspiration too.Whenever I read something as amazing as Russ Allbery's mail on the Debian technical committee impasse, I realize just how amazing people we have in our community, and how much we all can learn from them, and how much we owe them. This is yet another reason why I feel that contributing to Free Software is a passion many can share, because it teaches us good values too, atop of being technically excellent.I love Free Software, because without it, I would be lost. Thank you.

Barely one and half month after the release of the Wheezy version of the Debian Administrator s Handbook, I m proud to announce that two translations have been completed: French and Spanish. And, as promised in the last liberation campaign, the French translation has been published as a paperback by Eyrolles (see the cover above). Check out the article on debian-handbook.info for more information.

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Andrzej's C++ blog has a nice series on type erasure. I found it interesting to read and have learnt some things from it. For instance, I vaguely guessed, but did not fully realize, that std::function<> is of course a performance hit, since the way how std::function<> is implemented makes it impossible for the compiler to do anything useful with that function call. Inlining is totally out of the question, since we have just erased the type information. You might say, "of course!", but for me it was sort of a revelation. The series is in four parts: part I, part II, part III, part IV.

Today was another busy day. Zoe had a check up at her dentist first thing this morning. This dentist was such a good find, and although it's a trek (it's over an hour round trip for a 15 minute appointment) I think it's well worth it to instill a positive view of dentists into Zoe, and it's all covered by insurance, so really the only expense is time and petrol. After we got home, Zoe was a bit sick of being in the car, and wanted to watch TV. I'm trying to restrict TV to just the late afternoon, while I'm preparing dinner, so I thought this was a good opportunity to break out the Goldie Blox set that I haven't introduced her to yet. That went pretty well, but Mum and Dad (aka Grandma and Grandpa) arrived early for lunch, so we didn't finish working our way through the book. I think it was more of a hit than Robot Turtles is at the moment. We all jumped in the car, and drove down to Bulimba, and caught the cross river ferry over to the CityGlider bus and had Yum Cha for lunch. That went pretty well, and we returned the same way. Zoe had a little play in the park at Bulimba with her grandparents while I popped over to the florist, and then we came home and Zoe gave them a demonstration of the kinetic sand and then Grandma and Grandpa went home and I managed to convince Zoe to take a late nap. We didn't get much of an opportunity for something Science Friday-related today, with all of the other activities. Zoe didn't wake up from her nap until close to 5pm, just after my girlfriend arrived for dinner. Zoe watched a bit of TV and then the three of us walked down to collect pizza for dinner, and that was pretty much how the evening ended. I let Zoe stay up a little bit later, because she'd napped so late.

After so many attempts to have my shiny Movistar Peru (Internet M vil) 3G ZTE MF193 modem to work out-of-the-box in Debian jessie (unstable) with NetworkManager, the word frustration was hitting on my head. Even trying to do the right thing, led me to craziness. I gave up on fanzines and decided to take the old-school route. Release wvdial and friends! Trying different combinations for wvdial.conf was no heaven for sure, but I ve found this wonderful guide from Christian Ams ss from Vienna, Austria! that really made a difference. Of course he s talking about the MF180 model but you get the idea. So I m sharing what was different for the MF193. Basically, I ve done the eject and disable CD-ROM thing already, but still no progress. I ve also tried using wvdial to send AT commands to the evasive /dev/ttyUSBX device. Starting from scratch confirmed that I ve done such things properly indeed. I was amused by the fact that I could use screen to talk to the modem! (yo, all the time wasted trying to have minicom and friends play nice) So, let s get to the point. After following this procedure, you should be able to use NetworkManager to connect to the Interwebs using the 3G data service from Movistar Peru.

1. Step 1 follow the guide
2. Step 2 Here I had to use /dev/ttyUSB4
3. Step 3 follow the guide
4. Unplug your USB modem
5. Plug your USB modem. This time you should see only /dev/ttyUSB 0,1,2 and /dev/gsmmodem should be missing (not sure if this is a bug). Now /dev/ttyUSB2 is your guy.
6. Step 4 use /dev/ttyUSB2
7. Run wvdial from CLI it should connect successfully.
8. Stop wvdial
9. Select the Network icon on GNOME3, click on the Mobile Broadband configuration you have, if not create one.
10. Voil . Happy surfing!

I m pasting my wvdial.conf, just in case.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB2
Username = movistar@datos
Password = movistar
APN = movistar.pe
Phone = *99#
Stupid Mode = 1
Init2 = AT+CGDCONT=4,"IP","movistar.pe"

I ve been hacking (on and off) on a small bit of code (written in Hy) called Acid. So, all of this is *really* fluid, and I m going to change it s API and code (it s currently just one massive hack), but I think the idea has kinda jelled enough for me to chat a bit about. Acid is a DSL for writing event-driven Hy. Currently it s just using global events (that ll change soon), and it s a monumental hack (not sure how much I can do there), but it works pretty well. It s built on top of tulip / asyncio, which is an amazing new Python 3.4 standard library package for working with async code. Although asyncio is designed around network-based usecases, I ve been trying to shoehorn in an event system on top of it. It s going well so far. A basic Acid script looks something like:

(trip
  (on :startup
    (every 1 second (emit :clock-pulse nil)))
  (on :clock-pulse (print "."))
  (emit :startup nil))

which will print a dot ( . ) every second forever. Something a bit more advanced (fetch the MBTA Red line T information once a minute forever)

(defn get-endpoint-url [line]
  (.format "http://developer.mbta.com/lib/rthr/ 0 .json"
    (get  :red-line  "red"
          :blue-line "blue"  line)))
(trip
  ;; OK. Let's do some work with MBTA feeds.
  (on :update-feed
      ;; let's just update feeds on a cron.
      (print (.json (.get requests (get-endpoint-url event))))
      (emit :feed-updated event))
  (every 1 minute
         (emit :update-feed :red-line)))

Clearly, both of these examples are just as clear as their straight functional counterparts, but I m keen to see what I can do with temporal recursion for long-running daemons. I think my first job will be porting snitch's codebase to Acid. Let me know if you have any ideas!

HP recently announced that they are no longer offering free firmware updates for their ProLiant line of servers. I have a HP ProLiant G7 N36L MicroServer at home (running Debian stable, naturally) which I got back in early 2011. While it has, and continues, to serve me well, I'll have to reconsider my options when I go looking for a replacement. This is a pity because I really like the MicroServer form factor. As recently as November 2013, HP released a BIOS update to fix random lockups when installing Windows 8.1/2012 R2 on a MicroServer (I'd never ever be running these operating systems, but the point still stands). I'd be worried if I couldn't upgrade my system for fear of uncovering a bug in firmware that I couldn't get an update for. Non-free firmware is bad, but in certain circumstances, it can be tolerated. Non-free firmware behind a paywall is worse, and can never be tolerated.

Recently I started doing a internet-wide scan for rsync servers, thinking it might be fun to write a toy search-engine/indexer. Even the basics such as searching against the names of exported shares would be interesting, I thought. Today I abandoned that after exploring some of the results, (created with zmap), because there's just too much private data out there, wide open IP redacted for obvious reason:

shelob ~ $ rsync  rsync://xx.xx.xx.xx/
ginevra        	Ginevra backup
krsna          	Alberto Laptop Backup
franziska      	Franz Laptop Backup
genoveffa      	Franz Laptop Backup 2

Some nice shares there. Lets see if they're as open as they appear to be:

shelob ~ $ rsync  rsync://xx.xx.xx.xx/ginevra/home/
drwxrwsr-x        4096 2013/10/30 13:42:29 .
drwxr-sr-x        4096 2009/02/03 10:32:27 abl
drwxr-s---       12288 2014/02/12 20:05:22 alberto
drwxr-xr-x        4096 2011/12/13 17:12:46 alessandra
drwxr-sr-x       20480 2014/02/12 22:55:01 backup
drwxr-xr-x        4096 2008/10/03 14:51:29 bertacci
..

Yup. Backups of /home, /etc/, and more. I found numerous examples of this, along with a significant number of hosts that exported "www" + "sql", as a pair, and a large number of hosts that just exported "squid/". I assume they must be some cpanel-like system, because I can't understand why thousands of people would export the same shares with the same comments otherwise. I still would like to run the indexer, but with so much easy content to steal, well I think the liability would kill me. I considered not posting this, but I suspect "bad people" already know..,

Google Summer of Code 2014 is currently open for mentoring organizations to register. I've decided to not apply for GSoC with my data mining open source project ELKI anymore.

• You don't get any feedback for your application. So unless you were accepted, you have no idea if it is worth trying again (I tried twice).
• As far as I can tell, you only have a chance if there is someone at Google advocating your project. For example, someone involved in your project actually working at Google.
• I don't really trust Google anymore. They've been too much exploiting their market dominance, leveraging YouTube and Android to force people into Google+ etc. (see Google turning evil blog post).
• I'll be looking for a Post-Doc position in fall, so the timing of the GSoC isn't ideal anyway.

I ve written a lot lately about ZFS, and one of its very nice features is the ability to make snapshots that are lightweight, space-efficient, and don t hurt performance (unlike, say, LVM snapshots). ZFS also has zfs send and zfs receive commands that can send the content of the snapshot, or a delta between two snapshots, as a data stream similar in concept to an amped-up tar file. These can be used to, for instance, very efficiently send backups to another machine. Rather than having to stat() every single file on a filesystem as rsync has to, it sends effectively an intelligent binary delta which is also intelligent about operations such as renames. Since my last search for backup tools, I d been using BackupPC for my personal systems. But since I switched them to ZFS on Linux, I ve been wanting to try something better. There are a lot of tools out there to take ZFS snapshots and send them to another machine, and I summarized them on my wiki. I found zfSnap to work well for taking and rotating snapshots, but I didn t find anything that matched my criteria for sending them across the network. It seemed par for the course for these tools to think nothing of opening up full root access to a machine from others, whereas I would much rather lock it down with command= in authorized_keys. So I wrote my own, called simplesnap. As usual, I wrote extensive documentation for it as well, even though it is very simple to set up and use. So, with BackupPC, a backup of my workstation took almost 8 hours. (Its incremental might take as few as 3 hours) With ZFS snapshots and simplesnap, it takes 25 seconds. 25 seconds! So right now, instead of backing up once a day, I back up once an hour. There s no reason I couldn t back up every 5 minutes, in fact. The data consumes less space, is far faster to manage, and doesn t require a nightly hours-long cleanup process like BackupPC does zfs destroy on a snapshot just takes a few seconds. I use a pair of USB disks for backups, and rotate them to offsite storage periodically. They simply run ZFS atop dm-crypt (for security) and it works quite well even on those slow devices. Although ZFS doesn t do file-level dedup like BackupPC does, and the lz4 compression I ve set ZFS to use is less efficient than the gzip-like compression BackupPC uses, still the backups are more space-efficient. I am not quite sure why, but I suspect it s because there is a lot less metadata to keep track of, and perhaps also because BackupPC has to store a new copy of a file if even a byte changes, whereas ZFS can store just the changed blocks. Incidentally, I ve packaged both zfSnap and simplesnap for Debian and both are waiting in NEW.

It's been quite a busy, varied day today. Lot's of fun as usual. Zoe has a dentist appointment tomorrow morning, so we went to the Thursday offering of her Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class instead, and skipped Playgroup. We biked over extra early this morning, to make sure we were on time. There were two other kids in the class today, a 3 year old boy and a 2 and a half year old girl. The class went really well. We biked home the scenic way again, and grabbed a BBQ chicken for lunch along the way. The box of kinetic sand that I'd ordered was sitting on the doorstep. That still left us with about 45 minutes to kill before lunch, so I thought I'd start on making a second miniature clothes line with Zoe. Bunnings were selling these little kids safety sets at half price because they were a deleted product, and the set came with proper fitting eye protection, hearing protection and some gloves. The gloves are currently too big, but the glasses and hearing protection is great. I introduced her to the power drill and the hand saw. She liked drilling, and marking, but mostly was happy just watching. We managed to make most of the top of the clothes line before lunch, and then I whipped up some chicken quesadillas for lunch. We had a few disruptions during quiet time, so Zoe didn't nap. After quiet time, we did a mix of cleaning up the house a bit, some more wood working, and some self-directed play. After that, Zoe's friend Mackensie and her little sister came over for a play date after her Kindergarten class. She goes to the same Kindergarten as Zoe, but in the second half of the week. Mackensie's mum brought me a coffee, and we had some afternoon tea, and then I busted out the kinetic sand. It was a real hit with all the girls, as well as the adults. A very good product. That kept them occupied for a while. Zoe had found a Wallace and Gromit DVD while we were cleaning up, and she hasn't watched it for a while, so she was very keen to watch it. I told her she could watch it after Mackensie went home, and so we've kicked back on the couch to watch that while we wait for Sarah to arrive.

FOSDEM is over, and it has been a great time! I talked to many people (thanks to full devrooms Graph Databases and Config management was crazy, JavaScript as well ) and there might be some cool new things to come soon, which we discussed there
I also got some good and positive feedback on the projects I work on, and met many people from Debian, Kubuntu, KDE and GNOME (haven t seen some of them for almost 3 years) one of the best things of being at FOSDEM is, that you not only see people of your own kind for example, for me as Debian developer it was great to see Fedora people and discuss things with them, something which rarely happens at Debian conferences. Also, having GNOME and KDE closely together again (litterally, their stands were next to each other ) is something I missed since the last Desktop Summit in 2011. My talks were also good, except for the beamer-slides-technical-error at the beginning, which took quite some time (I blame KScreen ). In case you re interested in the slides, here they are: slides for FOSDEM 14 AppStream/Listaller talks. The slides can likely be understood without the talk, they are way too detailed (usually I only show images on slides, but that doesn t help people who can t see the talk ^^) I hope I can make it to FOSDEM 15 as well I ve been there only once, but it already is my favourite FOSS-conference (and I love Belgian waffles)

More and more packages are getting autopkgtest aka DEP-8 testsuites these days. Thanks to Antonio Terceiro, there is ci.debian.net" running the tests. Last weekend, I've added a "CI" column on DDPO that shows the current test results for your packages. Enjoy, and add tests to your packages!

There are currently roughly 1500 source packages in Debian which possibly (very likely actually) do have broken URLs in debian/control. While it is quite useful that we have VCS information and Homepage URLs in the Packages file these days, we also created a rather big source of bitrot. These URLs are typically paste-and-forget. Sure, people occasionally catch the fact that a homepage or VCS has moved, especially if they are active and in good contact with their upstreams. However, there are also other cases...

A new release 0.2.11 of RInside is now on CRAN. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package. This release, the first in fourteen months, fixes one important initialization issue created by the recent Rcpp 0.11.0 release, adds a few other changes related to that release and improves a number of small points such as new or improved examples. The NEWS extract below has more details.

Changes in RInside version 0.2.11 (2014-02-11)

• Updated for Rcpp 0.11.0:
  • Updated initialization by assigning global environment via pointer only after R itself has been initialized with special thanks to Kevin Ushey for the fix
  • Updated DESCRIPTION with Imports: instead of Depends:
  • Added correspondiing importFrom(Rcpp, evalCpp) to NAMESPACE
  • Noted in all inst/examples/*/Makefile that Rcpp no longer requires a library argument, but left code for backwards compatibility in case 0.11.0 is not yet installed.
• Added --vanilla --slave to default arguments for R initialization
• Added a few more explicit #include statements in the qt example which Qt 5.1 now appears to require with thanks to Spencer Behling for the patch
• Added new MPI example with worker functions and RInside instance, kindly contributed by Nicholas Pezolano and Martin Morgan

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp 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.

I'm reserving the Wednesdays that Zoe doesn't have Kindergarten for longer excursions. Yesterday, we used it to go to Wet 'n' Wild. Zoe loves the place. She's been asking to go since last week. We've been three times now, the first time with friends, and twice by ourselves. I bought discounted VIP Passes for Zoe and I last year when they became available, so it makes going to Seaworld, Wet 'n' Wild or Movie World a no-brainer. So far Zoe's been to Seaworld twice too, once with me and once with Sarah. I'm saving Movie World for when it's too cold to go to Wet 'n' Wild any more. I've shifted my weekly chiropractic adjustment to 8am to help keep the day clear. Zoe came with me for that, and then we jumped in the car and headed down, running a couple of errands along the way, since the theme park doesn't open until 10am. We got there a little before it opened, so I used the extra time to apply sunscreen to Zoe and get her changed, and we got into the park pretty quickly. Zoe's only currently tall enough for Buccaneer Bay, the kid's play area, which is a shallow pool with a bunch of small slides in it, the giant wave pool, and Calypso Beach, which just involves floating around on an inflatable tube. We started, as usual, at Bucanneer Bay, then moved onto the wave pool for a bit, and then had some lunch and then lazed around at Calypso Beach. This was the first time we'd been in the wave pool for a wave cycle. I hadn't realised that they did it on a cycle. Last time and this time, when we jumped in, it was right at the end of a cycle, and it takes a while before they start it up again. Zoe thought jumping over the waves was pretty cool. This time at Calypso Beach, Zoe was quite confident fooling around in a kids tube by herself. She also figured out the water was only 0.8m deep, and was happy standing up and spinning around in her tube. We did about 3 laps of the course there. My cousin lives about 12 minutes from Wet 'n' Wild, and we usually drop in to visit her and her four kids on the way back. We've often stayed the night for a sleepover when it's a weekend. We hung out at their place for a little while afterwards, and then headed home. Zoe had a good nap in the car on the way home, and we were home slightly late for Sarah to pick her up.

I'm a huge fan of Org-mode, and I keep all of my org-mode files in git repositories which are under myrepos control. However, because I often make lots of changes to my agenda and notes, I hate having to manually visit each individual project and make changes to it. [And it's also annoying when I forget to commit a specific change and then have to try to get my laptop and desktop back into sync.] Luckily, myrepos can easily run a command in parallel in all of the repositories! The following "update_org_files" command will update all of my org-file containing repositories in parallel: An updated version of this lives in my git repository