This is the best response to this (simplistic) claim about net access and revolt in Egypt featured in the New York Times: [m] In a widely circulated American Political Science Association conference paper, Yale scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that shutting down the internet made things difficult for sustaining a centralized revolutionary movement in Egypt. But, he adds, the shutdown actually encouraged the development of smaller revolutionary uprisings at local levels where the face-to-face interaction between activists was more intense and the mobilization of inactive lukewarm
[m] maybe we ll have some more fiber optic cable cuts in silicon valley and then the revolution will happen

Even though Enrico is not smiling on this picture, he s one of the friendliest Debian person that I know. I always enjoy his presentations because he can t refrain from inserting jokes or other funny tricks. That said he s serious too, there s lots of good stuff that he has developed over the years (starting with Debtags) and he has put a lot of effort in reforming the New Maintainer process. Read on to learn more about his various projects. Raphael: Who are you? Enrico: Hi, I m Enrico Zini, a DD from Italy. I m 35 and I work as a freelance Free Software developer. One of my historical roles in Debian is taking care of Debtags, but that is not all I do: my paid work led me to write and maintain some weather forecast related software in Debian, and recently I gained a Front Desk hat, and then a DAM hat. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Enrico: It was 2001, I was at uni, I was using Debian. At some point I wanted to learn packaging so I read through the whole Policy from top to bottom. Then I thought: why package only for myself? . There were many DDs at my uni, and it only seemed natural to me to join Debian as well. Evidently this was also natural for Zack [Note from editor: Stefano Zacchiroli], who had become DD 6 months earlier and didn t hesitate to advocate me. I found the Policy and the Developer s Reference to be very interesting things to read, and I welcomed my AM s questions as an excuse to learn more. I completely understand those people who have fun trying to answer all the questions in the NM templates while they wait for an AM. With my super DAM powers I can see that my AM report was submitted on October 16, 2001 by my AM Martin Michlmayr, and that James Troup created my account 9 days later, on October 25. Raphael: You have a special interest in the New Maintainer (NM) Process since you are a Debian Account Manager (DAM) and a member of the NM Frontdesk. Thanks to your work the process is much less academic/bureaucratic than it used to be. Can you remember us the main changes? Enrico: One of the first things I noticed when I become a Front Desk member is that there was a tendency to advocate people too early, thinking by the time they ll get an AM, they ll know enough . Unfortunately, this didn t always work, and once the real NM process started it would turn into a very long and demotivating experience both for the applicant and for the AM. So we tried raising the bar on advocacies, and that seems to have helped a lot. If people join NM when they are ready, it means that NM is quick and painless both for them and their AMs, who are therefore able to process more applicants. We also did a rather radical cleanup of the NM templates , which are a repository of questions that Application Managers can ask to their applicants. We realized that AMs were just sending the whole templates to their applicants, so we moved all non-essential questions to separate files, to drastically reduce the amounts of questions that are asked by default. Other improvements in the NM process came from other parts of Debian: nowadays there are lots of ways to learn and gradually gain experience and reputation inside the project before joining NM, which means that we get many candidates who we can process quickly. For example, packages can now be uploaded via sponsors, and the Mentors project helps new contributors to find sponsors and get their first packages reviewed. Then one can now become Debian Maintainer and take full responsibility of their own packages, gaining experience and reputation. The idea of working in teams also helped: big teams like the Perl, Python, KDE, Ocaml, Haskell teams (and many more) are excellent entry points for people who have something to package. But Debian is not just for packagers, and one could join teams like the Website team, the Press and Publicity team, the Events and Merchandise team or their local translation team. Becoming DDs the non-uploading way is not just for non-technical people: one could enjoy programming but not packaging. An interesting way to get involved in that way is to help writing or maintaining some of the many Debian services. Note that I m not suggesting this as a way to learn how to program, but as a way to get involved in Debian by writing code. Finally, we started to appreciate the importance of having people activities in Debian explicitly visible, which means that the more obviously good work one has done in Debian, the less questions we need to ask. Jan Dittberner s DDPortfolio is an excellent resource for AMs and Front Desk, and I m maintaining a service called minechangelogs that for people who have done lots of work in Debian is able to fully replace the Tasks&Skills parts of the NM process. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Enrico: For Wheezy I hope to be able to streamline and simplify Debtags a bit more. At Debconf11 I had a conversation with FTP-masters on how to make some tags more official, and I now have to work a bit more on that. I d also like to considerably downsize the codebase behind the debtags package, now that its job is quite clear and I don t need to experiment with fancy features the way I did in the past. I have to say that I enjoy programming more than I enjoy packaging, so most of my plans in Debian are not tied to releases. For example, I d like to finish and deploy the new NM website codebase soon: it would mean to have a codebase that s much easier to maintain, and in which it s much easier to implement new features. I d also like to design a way to allow maintainers to review the tag submission to their own packages instead of having to wait for me or David Paleino to do a regular review of all the submissions. Finally, I d like to promote the usage of apt-xapian-index in more cutting-edge packaging applications. And to design a way to maintain up to date popcon information in one s local index. And improve and promote those services that I maintain, and I tend to often have ideas for new ones. Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Enrico: If I could spend all my time on Debian, I would do a lot of software development: I love doing software development, but most of my development energy is spent on my paid work. I guess I would start my all your time in Debian by taking better care of the things that I m already doing, and by promoting them better so that I wouldn t end up being the only person maintaining them. After that, however, I reckon that I do have a tendency of noticing new, interesting problems in need(?) of a solution, and I guess I would end up wildly experimenting new ideas in Debian much like a victorian mad scientist. Which reminds me that I most definitely need minions! Where can I find minions? Raphael: You re the author of the Debian Community Guidelines. I have always felt that this document should be more broadly advertised. For example by integrating it in the Developer s Reference. What do you think? Enrico: The DCG was really a collection of tips to improve one s online communication, based on ideas and feedback that I collected from pestering many experienced and well-respected people for some time. Like every repository of common sense, I think it should be widely promoted but never ever turned into law. It wouldn t be a bad idea to mention it in the Developer s Reference, or to package it as a separate file in the developers-reference package. The reasons I haven t actively been pushing for that to happen are two: there isn t much in the DCG that is specific to Debian, and I don t have the resources to do a proper job maintaining it. It d be great if somebody could take over its maintenance and make it become some proper, widespread, easy-to-quote online reference document, like one of those HOWTOs that all serious people have read at some point in their lives. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Enrico: It s sometimes hard to get feedback or help if you work on something unusual. That is partly to be expected, and partly probably due to me not having yet learnt how to get people involved in what I do. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Enrico: Debian keeps evolving, so there is always something to learn. And Debian is real, so everything I do is constantly measured against reality. What more intellectual stimulation could one possibly want? Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Enrico: I don t think I could reasonably list everyone I admire in Debian: pretty much in every corner of the project there is someone, sometimes not very well known, who is putting a lot of Quality in what they do. Someone who decided that X should work well in Debian or that Debian should work well for Y or that Z is something Debian people can rely on and makes sure that it is so. Those are the people who make sure Debian is and will be not just a hobby, but a base upon which I can rely for my personal and working life.

---

Thank you to Enrico for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

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There was another question recently on StackOverflow that I had meant to discuss in a follow-up post here. User deltanovember asked about slow recursive functions and used the very classic Fibonacci number as an example. To recap, Fibonacci number are defined with two initial values F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1; thereafter the Fibonacci number F(n) is defined as the sum of the two preceding numbers: F(n) = F(n-2) + F(n-1). This leads to very straightforward implementations using recursion:

## R implementation of recursive Fibonacci sequence
fibR <- function(n)  
    if (n == 0) return(0)
    if (n == 1) return(1)
    return (fibR(n - 1) + fibR(n - 2))
 

Unfortunately, this elegant implementation which remain close to the abtract formulation of the recurrence algorithm performs very poorly in R as there is noticeable overhead in function calls which becomes dominant in a recursion. This lead to the original question on StackOverflow, and the accepted answer uses a trick presented by Pat Burns in his lovely R Inferno: rewrite the solution using a computer science trick called memoization:

fibonacci <- local( 
    memo <- c(1, 1, rep(NA, 100))
    f <- function(x)  
        if(x == 0) return(0)
        if(x < 0) return(NA)
        if(x > length(memo))
        stop("'x' too big for implementation")
        if(!is.na(memo[x])) return(memo[x])
        ans <- f(x-2) + f(x-1)
        memo[x] <<- ans
        ans
     
 )

That is a fair answer, and even more was suggested with a link to a terrific analysis calling the Fibonacci recurrence the worst algorithm in the world. That is also fair, but all the basic research into better algorithms exploiting some structure of the problem to advance performance (and of course understanding) is overlooking one crucial part: algorithm analysis is essentially independent of the language. So whatever improvements we obtain by thinking really hard about a problem are then available for other implementations too. So with a tip of the hat to the old Larry Wall quote about Lazyness, Impatience and Hubris, I would like to suggest what I consider a much simpler route to much better performance: recode it in C++ using both Rcpp (for the R/C++ integration) and inline for the on-the-fly compilation, linking and loading of C++ code into R.

## inline to compile, load and link the C++ code
require(inline)
## we need a pure C/C++ function as the generated function
## will have a random identifier at the C++ level preventing
## us from direct recursive calls
incltxt <- '
  int fibonacci(const int x)  
     if (x == 0) return(0);
     if (x == 1) return(1);
     return (fibonacci(x - 1)) + fibonacci(x - 2);
   '
## now use the snippet above as well as one argument conversion
## in as well as out to provide Fibonacci numbers via C++
fibRcpp <- cxxfunction(signature(xs="int"),
                       plugin="Rcpp",
                       incl=incltxt,
                       body
                       ='
   int x = Rcpp::as<int>(xs);
   return Rcpp::wrap( fibonacci(x) );
')

This single R function call cxxfunction() takes the code embedded in the arguments to the body variable (for the core function) and the incltxt variable for the helper function we need to call. This helper function is needed for the recursion as cxxfunction() will use an randomized internal identifier for the function called from R preventing us from calling this (unknown) indentifier. But the rest of the algorithm is simple, and as beautiful as the initial recurrence. Three lines, three statements, and three cases for F(0), F(1) and the general case F(n) solved by recursive calls. This also illustrates how easy it is to get an integer from R to C++ and back: the as and wrap simply do the right thing converting to and from the SEXP types used internally by the C API of R. A performance comparison of the basic R version fibR, its byte-compiled variant fibRC and and the C++ version fibRcpp shown above is very compelling. We have added a file fibonacci.r to the large and still growing set of examples included with Rcpp, and we can just execute that script with Rscript or (as here) r from the littler package:

edd@max:~/svn/rcpp/pkg/Rcpp/inst/examples/Misc$ r fibonacci.r
Loading required package: inline
Loading required package: methods
Loading required package: compiler
        test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self
3 fibRcpp(N)            1   0.092   1.0000      0.09     0.00
2   fibRC(N)            1  61.480 668.2609     61.47     0.00
1    fibR(N)            1  61.877 672.5761     61.83     0.02
edd@max:~/svn/rcpp/pkg/Rcpp/inst/examples/Misc$ 

So the recursion for the original argument of N=35 takes just over a minute at about 61.5 and 61.9 seconds, respectively, for the R version and its byte-compiled variant (as per the column titled elapsed). So byte-compilation essentially offers no help for the bottleneck of slow function calls. The C++ versions relying on Rcpp which created in a few lines of code and a single call to cxxfunction however takes just 92 milliseconds---or a relative gain of well over six-hundred times. That provides another nice demonstration of what Rcpp can do. Improved algorithms for well-understood problems are surely one way to accelerate solutions. But there are (many ?) times when we do not have the luxury of being able to think through to a new and improved approach. Or worse, such an approach may even introduce new errors or inaccurracies if we get it wrong on a first try. With Rcpp, we are able to the express the problem as written in its original statement: a simple recursion. The gain relative to a slow R implementation is noteworthy---and could of course be improved further if we really needed to by relying on better algorithms like memoization. But for day to day tasks, I gladly take speedups of (up to) a few hundred times thanks to Rcpp without having to do hard algorithmic work. Before closing, a quick reminder that I will be giving two classes on Rcpp in a few weeks. These will be in New York on September 24, and San Franciso on October 8, see this blog post as well as this page at Revolution Analytics (who are a co-organiser of the classes) for details and registration information.

After many years of successfully dodging doing any serious programming in PHP, I had to get my feet wet with PHP for my RL job: I was requested to develop a simple but non-trivial module for our Institute's Drupal-based webpage. It basically meant two and a half weeks devoted to head-scratching: I had read the very good John van Dyk's Pro Drupal Development book, and knew it would be an important resource were I to face writing a module or work on a theme beyond the most basic stuff So I checked it out of the library, and started basically writing something similar to my good and trusty Perl code. After all, PHP seems quite similar to Perl, although forcing you to write more for no gain (i.e. requiring an array() declaration whenever you want to store more than one value together) or lacking important and useful constructs (not having a sane way to prepare a SQL statement for multiple executions with different parameters Yes, there are DB access methods that do provide it, but Drupal 6 does not use them). Anyway, book in hand, I started understanding while implementing (which is way different than just reading the book, right?) Drupal's notions. I cannot say I like them, but it's ahem doable. Now, I hit a problem twice. I chose to ignore it the first time, as it was a corner case I'd look into later on, but had to devote for hours of my attention later on. When designing the menu (which for Drupal means not only the facility which prepares/displays links to the bits of functionality, but also the access control layer and the action dispatcher a huge yay! for responsability separation!), I had only two access levels: Public and administrator. So, this seemed like a good fit: But... No matter what I did, the first element in $public refused to be publicly visible. It was not until after a severe amount of head-scratching I came across this jewel in the PHP online manual:

Warning This function may return Boolean FALSE, but may also return a non-Boolean value which evaluates to FALSE, such as 0 or "". Please read the section on Booleans for more information. Use the === operator for testing the return value of this function.

GRAH. Using a sane language for some time had made me forget about the problems of true/false sharing space with other meaningful values. So, yes, checking for inclusion of a value in an array in PHP this way should be compared with class-bound identity (that's what === means) to FALSE, or better yet, using a function that exclusively returns a boolean (as in_array()). Anyway While arrays (which in PHP are any kind of list, be it keyed as a hash or consecutive as a traditional array) are such an usual construct in any language, please do take a look at PHP's array-handling API. Too long. Too complex. Too many corner cases. I cannot but wonder what keeps PHP as a popular language. It hurts.

Brent S. Elmer reported the Debian bug #640000 on Thursday September 1st, against evolution. Bug #630000 was reported as of June 10th. This time, it took a little bit more than 2.5 months for 10,000 bugs. This #640000 bug was indeed "fixed" very quickly as it turns out it was not a bug..:-).. Congratulations to Corsac for fixing it..:-)

I have a pathological use of browser tabs: I use a lot of them. A lot is probably an understatement. We could say I use them as bookmarks of things I need to track. A couple weeks ago, I was saying I had around two hundred tabs opened. I now actually have much more. It affected startup until I discovered that setting the browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs pref to 0 was making things much better by only loading tabs when they are selected. This preference has/will become browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand. However, since I only start my main browser once a day, while other applications start and while I begin to read email, I hadn t noticed that this was still heavily affecting startup time: about:startup tells me reaching the sessionRestored state takes seven seconds, even on a warm startup. It also affects memory usage, because even when tabs are only loaded on demand, there is a quite big overhead for each tab. And more importantly, it gets worse with time. And I think the user interface is actively making it worse. So, to get an idea how bad things were in my session, I wrote a little restartless extension. After installing it, you can go to the about:tabs url to see the damage on your session. Please note that the number of groups is currently wrong until you open the tab grouping interface. This is what the extension has to say about my session 2 days ago, right after a startup:

• 556 tabs across 4 groups in 1 window
• 1 tab has been loaded
• 444 unique addresses
• 105 unique hosts
• 9 empty tabs
• 210 http:
• 319 https:
• 14 ftp:
• 2 about:
• 2 file:
• 55 addresses in more than 1 tab
• 39 hosts in more than 1 tab

The first thing to note is that when I filed the memory bug 4 days earlier, I had a bit more than 470 tabs in that session. You can see 4 days later, I now have 555 tabs (if excluding the about:tabs tab). The second thing to note is something I suspected because it s so easy to get there: a lot of the tabs are opened on the same address. Since Firefox 4.0, if I m not mistaken, there is a great feature in the awesomebar, that allows to jump to an existing tab matching what you type in the urlbar. That is very useful, and I use it a lot. However, there are a lot of cases where it s not as useful as it could be. One of the addresses I visit a lot is http://buildd.debian.org/iceweasel. It gives me the build status of the latest iceweasel package I uploaded to Debian unstable. That url is particularly known in my browsing history, and is the first hit when I type buildd in the urlbar (actually, even typing b brings it first). Unfortunately, that url redirects to https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=iceweasel through an HTTP redirection. I say unfortunately because when I type buildd in the urlbar, I get 6 suggestions for urls in the form http://buildd.debian.org/package (I also watch other packages build status), and the suggestion to switch to the existing tab for what the first hit would get me to is 7th. Guess what? The suggestion list only shows 6 items ; you have to scroll to see the 7th. The result is that I effectively have fifteen tabs open on that url. I also keep a lot of bugzilla.mozilla.org bugs open in different tabs. The extension tells me there are 255 of them for 166 unique bugs. Largely, the duplicate bug tabs are due to having these bugs open in some tab, but accessing the same bugs from somewhere else, usually a dependent bug or TBPL. I also have 5 tabs opened on my request queue. I usually get there by going to the bugzilla home page and clicking on the My Requests link. And I have several tabs opened on the same bug lists. For the same reason. When I started using tab groups, I splitted in very distinct groups. Basically, one for Mozilla, one for Debian, one for stuff I want to follow (usually blog posts I want to follow comments from), and one for the rest. While I was keeping up with grouping at the beginning, I don t anymore, and the result is that each group is now a real mess. Firefox has hundreds of millions users. It s impossible to create a user experience that works for everyone. One thing is sure, it doesn t work for me. My usage is probably very wrong at different levels, but I don t feel my browser is encouraging me to use it better, except by making my number of opened tabs explode to an unmanageable level (I already have 30 tabs more than when I started writing this post 2 days ago). There are a few other things I would like to know about my usage that my extension hasn t told me yet, either because it doesn t tell, or because I haven t looked:

• How many tabs end up loaded at the end of a typical day?
• How many tabs do I close?
• How many duplicate tabs do I open and close?
• How long has it been since I looked at a given tab?
• How do the number of tabs and duplicates evolve with time?

Reflecting on my usage patterns, I think a few improvements, either in the stock browser, or through extensions, could make my browsing easier:

• Auto-grouping tabs: When I click on a link to an url under mozilla.org, I most likely want it in the Mozilla group. An url under debian.org would most likely go in the Debian group.
• Switch to an existing tab when following a link to an already opened url: That might not be very useful as a general rule, but at least for some domains, it would seem useful for me that the browser switches to an existing tab not only through the urlbar, but also when following links in a page. If I m reading a bug, click on a bug it depends on, and that bug is already opened in another tab, get me there. There would be a history problem to solve, though. (e.g. where do back and forward bring?)

Maybe these exist as extensions, I don t know. It s hard to find very specific things like that through an add-on search (though I haven t searched very hard). [Looks like there is an experiment for the auto tab grouping part] I think it would also be interesting to have something like Test Pilot, but for users that want to know the answer to How do I use my browser? . As I understand it, Test Pilot can show individual user data, but it only can do so if there is such data, and you can t get data for past studies you didn t take. In my case, I m not entirely sure that, apart from the pinned tabs, I use the tab bar a lot. And even for pinned tabs, most of the time I use keyboard shortcuts. I m not using the menu button that much either. I already removed the url and search bar (most of the time) with LessChrome HD. Maybe I could go further and use the full window for web browsing.

I stopped my story in early 1994, after my Big Switch to the mysterious and new world of Linux. My home server, kheops, is now running Debian and is fed with news and mail by FrMug, formerly French Minix Users Group and now run by AFAU, the "Association Fran aise des Amateurs de Usenet". As I'm still console-challenged, I'm reading mail and news on another machine I have at home, named "khephren", which is running an, ahem, beta copy of Microsoft Windows 95. Yeah, I know...:-) These 1994-1999 years were mostly the Usenet years, for me. I gradually became more and more involved in several fr.* newsgroups, either related to the Linux world...or to the Windows world. The latter was professionnally a bonus for me as 1994 is also the year where I switched from the Material Science department at Onera to the Network and Computing Department. My mission there was to accompany the increasing prevalence of personal desktop workstations in the daily life of what was formerly the Big Castle of Computing at Onera, hosting various generations of Cray computers, most of which being in the Top500 world supercomputers (we even had one in the Top10, very briefly, at somepoint). So, I was "the PC and Windows guy" in this world of supercomputing, Unix and network wizards. But my hobby at home helped me keeping and growing skills in both "worlds" which, over the years, has proven to be a not so common profile..:-) Meanwhile, at home, I was spending hours and nights reading those newsgroups...or getting involved in fr.* hierarchy management..or expanding my friends network to many people in the news, Linux, BSD worlds. That lasted for about 3 years with ups and downs (with three young kids at home, you end up having slightly less time...). I was gradually improving my home server use, adding more functionalities to it, for instance setting it up as a file and print server with Samba 1.9.something (this will be the beginning of a long story with samba!). Unfortunately, my dear Ren had passed in the meantime. Ren did so much for Linux in France that he'll be the only link I give in this article. If you happen to go through P re Lachaise cemetery in Paris, go to its Memory garden instead of visiting Jim Morrison's grave and drink a whisky bottle in memory of Ren . Or just install one of the most funnily named Debian packages: le-dico-de-rene-cougnenc and, again, drink something to his memory (whisky is highly preferred). We then reached 1997 and a specific event: my father (who was very sick for years) passed during summer, some time after my grand-father passed too. As it apparently happens for many people, it triggerred me into the interest for family history. After all, those people who are going away are family memories. And, in some way, I wanted to keep track of this memory. As a consequence, I started collecting family memories, interviewing my close relatives (the oldest ones) and ending, of course, in tracking all this with my computers. That was the start of a long genealogy research that sent me on the track of the Perrier family (of course), but also all other branches, on my mother and father side, as well as reconstructing the tree of cousins we have, etc, etc. As anybody who did that knows, this is quite an endless task but I went very committed to it. I quickly ended up in joining research groups that were using the recent growth of personal access to Internet communication. Those groups were, in these 90's, building elaborated systems where people can help together in their research instead of having to travel to places where archives are stored. I participated to many such groups and even ended up animating one who was doing research in archives of the "Yvelines" "d partement", my place of living (even though I have no family branch there). At the same time, other groups were sending me research results for my own family in the French region where my roots are. Collective effort, help others for free, you can recognize things that are a constant all over these years, indeed. It actually helped me in tracking my Perrier ancestors up to about 1680, with 11 generations of men holding that name (from Jean-Baptiste, my son, up to tienne Perrier, who is born about 1640-1650, in the small village named Briant in Sa ne et Loire, in France). Or even climbing up to Laurent Polette, born circa 1510, mentioned in a document date February 1562. He his my oldest known ancestor.Those folks being 15 generations before me. My oldest ancestor is born under Fran ois the First, King of France, protector of Leonardo Da Vinci, at the time La Joconde was painted or the Chambord castle was built. Doh. Unfortunately, genealogy software, at that time, was quite poor for Unix systems. Lifelines was a quite strong development but wasn't that user-friendly and I ended up using a Windows-based "shareware" software written by an individual. Still, my Linux machine was used quite intensively: databases were stored there, and saved there, all important informations were there, my mail was received there, along with dozens of mailing lists I was reading. I even hosted a few mailing lists on my home server. Still, in the meantime also, again in 1997, in October, another event happened. We had a pollution peak in Paris area and October 1st was the first (and as of now the only ever) day where driving restrictions were applied. Up to that moment, I was driving to/from work (30 kilometers one way). I decided to use this opportunity to really test public transport, for one full month. As I knew it would take me much more time than driving, I tried to imagine a way to use that time. How about reading mail and news on a laptop instead of only at home? Done... In a few days, I found a used Compaq Aero laptop (486 16MHz), I installed Debian "bo" on it, switched my mail and news workflow to console programs (mutt and slrn) and here we go! So, finally, in October 1997, I was using Linux nearly all time long, the only exception being genealogy data handling. That laptop was named "mykerinos" (the small pyramid) and....my laptop is still named mykerinos, though it's now the 5th mykerinos I have..:-) Ah, and since then, I nearly always use public transport to go to/from work. Debian addiction is good for the planet! At some point (I don't remember exactly when...about 1999, I think), DSL connections appeared and one of the first DSL FAI emerged on France: Free. I was already using their services for dialup access, but DSL was then a revolution: persistent connection! And nearly immediately, static IP! I became one of their first DSL customers (and I'm still one). Moreover, I had then friends working there...and they had many Debian machines to host their services. So, with the help of my Freenix friends, some DNS hosting on their machines and the still tireless eu.org entirely free domain, perrier.eu.org was born. Immediately, this gave me opportunities for doing many interesting things with my home server: setting up www.perrier.eu.org and use it....for learning web things and sharing genealogical data. For instance, I ended up hosting some data sent by other genealogists such as digital copies of archives for some French regions, all served through my 512/128kbps DSL line (quickly upgraded to 2Mb, IIRC). And, very quickly, I felt the need to share my family tree, of course! And here comes Geneweb. Written (in Ocaml) by Daniel de Rauglaudre, Geneweb was (and still is) by far one of the best tools to share genealogy data over the Net. So, I ended up installing it on my home machine. Guess how I did that? "apt-get install geneweb", of course. Yes, it was packaged. Indeed by Brent Fulgham who did the initial release on July 22nd 2000. Here, my memory is a little bit vague. I think I actually packaged Geneweb for my own use and sharing it on upstream FTP site, forking Brent's package as a start, but updating to latest upstream release. Then I quickly ended up having discussions with Brent about this new upstream release, and that lead to:

geneweb (3.10-3) unstable; urgency=low
  * Merging with unofficial package from Geneweb ftp site
    (in preparation of new maintainer [Christian Perrier] takeing
    over responsibility).  Note that all of this work is from
    Christian.
  * Default database dir is now writable by members of geneweb group
  * New geneweb group added at installation
  * Package tries to properly handle former installations of the
    unofficial Geneweb package available on Geneweb ftp site
  * Debconf dialogs translated in french
  * More languages available
  * Creation of /var/geneweb/etc, /var/geneweb/cnt, /var/geneweb/images
    with proper permission so that authorised users may use these also
  * When de-installed, all databases are exported with gwu (should allow
    smooth upgrades when the databse format changes)
 -- Brent A. Fulgham <bfulgham>  Mon, 22 Jan 2001 19:30:47 -0800

See? Already "debconf translation to French"! "More languages available". Here we are. As discussed with Brent, he propsoed me to take the package over. So, on January 11th 2001, I had applied in the New Maintainer Process. I'm amazed how quickly it went indeed: there was a tool I needed, it needed to be packaged, I could handle the packaging...and then I decided to be involved. Here we are: bubulle is on his way to become one of those magicians who are building the best universal operating system. Yes, me, the clueless material scientist..:-) How did it go? You'll know this in next episode, of course...

For a (german) talk I ll be giving soon I was interested in a list of open source projects which use Jenkins. Jenkins is a great open source continuous integration server. I was wondering whether such a list exists but since it doesn t exist yet I created my own and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (creator of Hudson/Jenkins) suggested to blog about it. There we go.

• Apache
• Bazar
• cocos2d-x
• coreboot
• Creativecommons
• Django CMS
• Doom Port Build Service
• Eclipse Communication Framework
• Freeswitch
• Grml
• iceScrum
• JBoss
• Jenkins
• JMRI
• JRuby
• KDE
• Linaro
• Mahara
• Mozilla
• Nuxeo
• OpenQuake
• Pentaho
• Piwik
• Plone
• PODAM
• Pylons Project
• Saiku
• Scala-Tools
• SQLAlchemy
• SQLAlchemy-migrate
• Tapestry 5 modules breadcrumbs + tagselect
• TYPO3
• UTGB (University of Tokyo Genome Browser) Toolkit
• Wicket Stuff
• Zikula

Open source projects using Jenkins, though Jenkins service not accessible for the public (yet):

• ConfigureMe
• DistributeMe
• Evolvis
• Fusionforge
• Icinga
• Joomla
• OpenJDK 7 for OS/X
• Openstack
• sip:provider CE

And Cloudbees hosts some OSS projects providing Jenkins as a service. Update [2011-08-29]: thanks for all the feedback, I ve updated the list accordingly.
If you re aware of another open source project using Jenkins please leave it in the comments, I ll update the list accordingly then.

So, we stopped our very boring story around 1992. Let's summarize where I was at that moment:

• 31 years old
• married for 7 years, 2 kids and a soon-to-born 3rd
• still working as Head of Mechanical Testing Lab at Onera
• running a BBS named BuBulle System
• Member of Fidonet (IIRC, even Network Coordinator for 2:320)
• Having a great Lantastic 1Mbps network between my BBS machine (running DesqView/386, that so wonderful multitasking software, aha
• Tons of friends in the BBS world
• Most of them using MS-Dos with pirated software at home
• A friend named Ren Cougnenc

We're in 1992. Magali is about to come. Three children, from 0 to 4. I'm getting bored of these BBS things. OK, I did fun things like translating (eh) the documentation of Frontdoor a Fidonet node system written by a norwegian dude. But, still. Among my BBS friends, Ren is now playing regularly with a strange thing coming from Finland. This is pretty much like these mysterious "Unix" machines I hear about, sometimes at Onera, ran by strange wizards that often look like hippies from the 70's (hey...these were my youth years). I also have these few friends from the BBS world who are also playing with these thingies. Ollivier, noticeably, who is using of these mysterious @frmug.fr.net "email" addresses, from his PC running 386BSD (what? A PC not running those wonderful MS-DOS programs? How weird). Ren is apparently playing with another tribe. He often talks about an evolution of Minix written by a Finnish student, which is available with source code, just like Ren programs. Ren is also a member of that FrMug tribe, the FRench Minix Users Group, who are comunicating with "newsgroups" that are apparently similar to what we're doing with our BBS....but apparently more funnily hackish...and most often in that mysterious "U**x" world. Ah, that thing is called Linux. You can download it by FTP on "the Internet". But I don't have "the Internet". Oh, sure, we have this thing called BitNet at work, I even have what they call "an email address" as perrier@froner81.bitnet. We can maybe do things with that. Ah yes, there are funny tools that allow "downloading" files on "FTP" (WTH is that?) servers but doing that by mail. You receive dozenes of mails "uuencoded" (WTH is that? I'm not using Unix, I'm using Dos...but, eh, it works, still). Oh, fun, I now downloaded a full set of disks (14....I need to find 14 floppies, doh!) of something called Slackware. Apparently, a crazy freak, somewhere, did assemble things so that it's easy for dummies like me to install "a Linux machine". What? This 386 DX/16 PC I borrowed from my lab could be something like one of these very very very mysterious and expensive Sun machines that a few very bearded and very smelly dudes are using at Onera to perform high performance calculations? I have to do this. Not growing a beard, but install Linux. I could even "read mail" on them. Doh, I could even read those mysterious "newsgroups", that look like our Fidonet "conferences", the only difference being. All this is so interesting. So, at first, let's help my friend Ren to spread out this marvel to the world. Ren did setup his "Renux" box for this and everybody can access it through this very modern UUCP technology, to download Slackware disk images, last versions of the Linux kernel (direct from ftp.ibp.fr, thanks to another pionneer, R my Card....ext2fs author). So, I did setup an incredibly weird system to "download" this stuff by FTPmail, de-uuencode it, process it on my work machine and then re-upload it to my home BBS and make it available in one of the first "Linux" sections of French BBS. Yay. Even of my BBS machine is not running this wonder. Still, gradually, I was becoming bored of this BBS stuff. The sirens of open systems were constantly singing in my ears and the amount of work to put in running a Fidonet node wasn't really motivating for me anymore. Finally, after our daughter Magali was born, in March 1992, I decided to shut down my BBS....and just run as a Fidonet "point" (a personal system not opened to the public) and gradually switched my interest to these open systems. I thus ended running an "experimental" Linux system at work on this refurbished 386DX machine, already and playing between both worlds for about 18 months. At some point, around mid-1993, it became obvious to me that I more wanted to participate to newsgroups-style communication, participate to the advent of this Linux thing and learn things about what was to become "The Internet" (understand "the web", aha). Meanwhile, Ren did great work translating "The Linux System" by this guy, Matt Welsh, making The Thing accessible to dummies like me. So, after summer, I decided it was time to move on and shutdown this Fidonet thing and build something like my "Freenix" friends were running, and be able to download news and mail by UUCP, with my fast HST modem, and process them with Real Men tools such as inn, sendmail, pine and trn. And then, around October 1993, here I come ready to install a Linux machine at home, and therefore zap a few years of BBS stuff on my 40MB hard disk. But, eh, I just read about this shiny new thing named Debian, that was just announced a few weeks ago. It seems to be meant for dummies like me who need a little bit more than tarballs of binary code and have no clue about libraries, ABI and such mysterious things that apparenyl constantly lead to "core dumps" on my work experimental Slackware machine. Also, I don't really understand everything to what these dude says in his "Manifesto" but that seems interesting and his (their? dunno) thing seem easy to use. Let's download the 0.93whatever version of this thing and put this on a big set of floppies. A few days after, voil . I have my first Linux system at home and it is running that Debian thing. It will need several weeks of poking around documentations, playing weird things with INN and sendmail without understanding a s**t of both....and a lot of help from Freenix friends....and I end up with a working machine that can call out FrMug for UUCP downloads of mail and news and then feed local sendmail and INN servers with them and then allow the "bubulle" user to read them remotely...from his Windows machine. Yay, admitedly, I spent a few years still using a Windows machine for mail and news! How to say that? At that time, the GUI environments were a little bit rustic and, anyway, there was no point-and-click programs for mail and news. In the meantime, the machine got upgraded to Debian 1.1 by reinstalling the system. "kheops" was born....and so was bubulle@kheops.frmug.fr.net. We're probably around early 1994 and I'm running my first Debian server at home. The beard didn't grew up, I'm not eating pizzas all day long (but I drink beer) and I'm even practicing physical activities (I was a volleyball player at that time). Despite all these flaws, I'm turning into a geek, slowly. In next episode, you'll learn how I ended up dropping the use of Windows, compiling some free software and contributing to my first package. These will be "the genealogy years".

User BobH asked on StackOverflow about accelerating path-dependent loops. He provided a simple example in which a vector gets filled conditional on the value of the preceding element. Simple to code, but hard to vectorise. By the time I saw that question yesterday evening, Josh Ulrich had already posted a nice answer suggesting to switch from ifelse to if to escape the overhead of a vectorised expression on simple scalars. I meekly added a comment suggesting that Rcpp would likely do well on this and that someone should volunteer such an answer. Well, it is still August and Mr. Someone is on holiday, so this morning I followed up with such an answer. And as it turns out to work quite well indeed, we will repost it here. Let's start with the general setup, and the two functions supplied by Josh. We also byte-compile these using the compiler package which is the culmination of several years of work by R core member Luke Tierney. This package was added to R during the last major release, and we assessed it in this earlier blog post as well as several Rcpp-related follow-ups. We also load the packages for on-the-fly 'inline' compilation and easy benchmarking:

library(inline)
library(rbenchmark)
library(compiler)
fun1 <- function(z)  
  for(i in 2:NROW(z))  
    z[i] <- ifelse(z[i-1]==1, 1, 0)
   
  z
 
fun1c <- cmpfun(fun1)
fun2 <- function(z)  
  for(i in 2:NROW(z))  
    z[i] <- if(z[i-1]==1) 1 else 0
   
  z
 
fun2c <- cmpfun(fun2)

We see that basic worker just assign to the i-th element based on the preceding element. Function two uses the aforementioned if statement, and both are also byte-compiled. Writing the same code in C++ using both Rcpp (for the R/C++ integration) and inline for the on-the-fly compilation, linking and loading of C++ code into R is pretty straightforward too:

funRcpp <- cxxfunction(signature(zs="numeric"), plugin="Rcpp", body="
  Rcpp::NumericVector z = Rcpp::NumericVector(zs);
  int n = z.size();
  for (int i=1; i<n; i++)  
    z[i] = (z[i-1]==1.0 ? 1.0 : 0.0);
   
  return(z);
")

This single R function call takes the code embedded in the argument to the body variable, builds a complete function in temporary file, and then compiles, links and loads it. We can now call funRcpp() just like the other four functions and do so via the benchmark() function of the rbenchmark package.

R> z <- rep(c(1,1,0,0,0,0), 100)
R> identical(fun1(z),fun2(z),fun1c(z),fun2c(z),funRcpp(z))
[1] TRUE
R> 
R> res <- benchmark(fun1(z), fun2(z),
+                  fun1c(z), fun2c(z),
+                  funRcpp(z),
+                  columns=c("test", "replications", "elapsed", "relative", "user.self", "sys.self"),
+                  order="relative",
+                  replications=1000)
R> print(res)
        test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self
5 funRcpp(z)         1000   0.005      1.0      0.01        0
4   fun2c(z)         1000   0.482     96.4      0.48        0
2    fun2(z)         1000   1.989    397.8      1.98        0
3   fun1c(z)         1000  11.365   2273.0     11.37        0
1    fun1(z)         1000  13.210   2642.0     13.21        0

We can focus on the columns labelled elapsed and relative. The C++ version is faster by a factor of almost one-hundred compared to the byte-compiled version of funtion2, and almost four-hundred times faster than the plain-R variant of function2. And function1 is even worse, coming at well over twenty-two-hundred times the run-time of the C++ version. Byte-compilation also helps little here. For comparison, we also ran the original example of a very short vector, called more frequently:

R> z <- c(1,1,0,0,0,0)
R> res2 <- benchmark(fun1(z), fun2(z),
+                  fun1c(z), fun2c(z),
+                  funRcpp(z),
+                  columns=c("test", "replications", "elapsed", "relative", "user.self", "sys.self"),
+                  order="relative",
+                  replications=10000)
R> print(res2)
        test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self
5 funRcpp(z)        10000   0.047  1.00000      0.04        0
4   fun2c(z)        10000   0.134  2.85106      0.13        0
2    fun2(z)        10000   0.328  6.97872      0.32        0
3   fun1c(z)        10000   1.080 22.97872      1.08        0
1    fun1(z)        10000   1.243 26.44681      1.24        0

The qualitative ranking is unchanged: the Rcpp version dominates. Function2 using if instead of the vectorised ifelse is second-best with the byte-compiled version being about twice as fast that the plain R variant, but still almost three times slower than the C++ version. And the relative differences are less pronounced: relatively speaking, the function call overhead matters less here and the actual looping matters more: C++ gets a bigger advantage on the actual loop operations in the longer vectors. That it is an important result as it suggests that on more real-life sized data, the compiled version may reap a larger benefit. All in all a nice demonstration of Rcpp, and a gain of almost one-hundred to the best byte-compiled version is nothing to sneeze at---especially when it is so easy to write and load a five-line C++ function thanks to Rcpp. Before closing, a quick reminder that I will giving two classes on Rcpp in a few weeks. These will be in New York on September 24, and San Franciso on October 8, see this blog post as well as this page at Revolution Analytics (who are a co-organiser of the classes) for details and registration information.

This year without our friends from Grml, but The MirOS Project (all two active developers and our Booth Babe gecko2@) will of course attend FrOSCon, nicknamed Froschkon, again. We ll have a pre-event meal time at my favourite Jugoslawian Restaurant on Friday (20:00 CEST) contact me privately for the co rdinates if interested. On Saturday and Sunday we ll staff a booth and answer questions about the many projects we have (more or less) running, including but not limited to paxmirabilis (aka MirCPIO), The MirBSD Korn Shell aka mksh(1), jupp the editor, and developers private projects such as slowly undermining Debian or Google-Go. While slow we are still working on World Domination. And teaching people good shell programming by example code. We might even bring CDs, but I m still working on the ISO last night s build aborted because the OS grew a bit making the floppy image not fit any more. (Solution, drop ping(8) and rtsol(8), but re-add sf(4) and bce(4) now that they fit again.)

The first day of the Desktop Summit was yesterday, Saturday, August 6. I loved it and gave a presentation. There are two very different stories I can tell on the topic of gender equality in free software. I'll start with the bad.

---

It's pretty easy, in the U.S. at least, to get people of privilege to stop using terms that evoke centuries of oppression from slavery. It's harder to ask people to stop doing that to women. I'm writing this post to ask for that. There were two different times that people I generally respect used words that historically have been used to hurt and minimize women. "Cygnus Solutions is prostitutes." Dave Neary was delivering a talk (that I found impressively informative) called, "The cost of going it alone". When the talk covered the cost (in time and money) of getting your corporation's code into the community branch of an open-source project, he pointed out you could hire someone with the skills. Cygnus was the go-to company for that in the 1990s; to explain that Cygnus does not care who they work for, he said the sentence in bold. "The OpenSuSE Build Service is a slut." I was at a party at a hackerspace last night. Someone who I admire for his work in free in free software, both technical and community, was joking with me about that no one should compile (or use) GTK. I riffed on the joke and remarked, "The OpenSuSE build service will build anything." He replied with the sentence in bold. "Slut" and "prostitute" are terms that recall the objectification of women. They're terms that attempt to measure a woman's worth as a sex object. It's not nice to the many women in attendance to bring that up. You might not have thought this through. You might want to read one woman's take "On Sluts, Rape, and Fuckery". Give it a read. Then, give it a rest. The thing is, this matters all the time. That's why I have to call you two out on it. Now for the happy story.

---

While watching the Desktop Summit's intern showcase, I was floored. One hacker implemented Off-The-Record instant messaging for Telepathy. Another implemented pluggable back-ends for Getting Things GNOME, a task manager. I heard about overwhelming documentation and usability improvements to GNOME mainstays Cheese and Anjuta. In a short summer, these students made huge changes. For most of them, this was the first time they delivered any sort of presentation. Every single talk was delivered in earnest and enthusiasm. They told us about the work they had done and what might happen in the future. The other remarkable thing about the intern presentations was the demographics. I didn't keep count, but it seemed like as many women as men presented. We heard about hugely-important changes to documentation, code, and usability. People from central Europe, South Asia (yay), and Brazil took the stage. I hope that is the future of free software.

---

There are two things I want to see for our community. I want to know that people are respected and not reminded of centuries of oppression. I also want to see our community grow in size and diversity. I treat these issues as separate. We should choose respectful words when we speak not because we want more women to show up, but because it part of the expectation of decency that we should be able to expect from each other. And I failed the community when I did not make it clear there and then that this kind of language is not okay with me. It took me a day to understand this failure, so here I am writing this blog post. P.S. Thanks to Karen Rustad for her feedback while writing this post.

Together with Revolution Analytics, I will be offering two more one-day classes on the Rcpp package for seamless integration of R and C++. The format will follow the workshop Romain and I gave during the tutorial day preceding this year's R/Finance conference. The style will once again be hands-on, with copious concrete examples and solid coverage of most aspects of Rcpp and related packages such as RInside, RcppArmadillo and others. The eight-hour schedule contains about six hours of instruction, split into four sessions of around ninety minutes. This leaves ample time for both lunch and coffee breaks, and for informal discussions and Q+A. Two one-day classes will be offered: The first in New York on Saturday, September 28, 2011 and the second one two weeks later in San Franciso on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Please see the official course page for more details, concrete location info and maps as well as registration details. Feel free to contact me at the usual email address with questions.

I recently got myself a FONIC account for mobile Internet. This (German) prepaid-provider offers a "daily flatrate" for 2.50 per day. After the 10th day of usage (i.e., 25 ) you don't pay any more. This means, even if you need mobile Internet access 31 days a month, you only pay for 10 days. After 500MB/day or 5GB/month you're throttled down to GPRS speed (but you can still connect, and you don't pay more). The FONIC account comes with the "FONIC Surf-Stick", a Huawei E1750 HSPA USB modem (apparently it supports GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA (up to 7.2Mbit/s), HSUPA (up to 5.76 Mbit/s), and a SIM card. In order to use the device on Linux you need two packages, usb_modeswitch and wvdial:

  $ apt-get install usb-modeswitch wvdial

Recent versions of usb_modeswitch (and matching udev entries) already support the Huawei E1750 out of the box, a few seconds after attaching the device it's automatically switched into modem mode. After this has been done you should have three new serial devices, usually /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, and /dev/ttyUSB2. You'll need /dev/ttyUSB0 for talking to the device using AT commands. The lsusb output should look like this (see here for full lsusb -vvv):

  $ lsusb
  Bus 001 Device 045: ID 12d1:1436 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 

(before usb_modeswitch was run, the USB IDs were 12d1:1446) The required settings for connecting are documented at fonic.de, specifically the APN (pinternet.interkom.de). A username and/or password is not required. You need to provide your FONIC PIN though. Dialing is done using the *99# number and using the ATDT command. I'm using the following wvdial config file:

  $ cat /etc/wvdial.conf
  [Dialer Defaults]
  Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
  Baud = 460800
  [Dialer pin]
  Init1 = AT+CPIN=1234
  [Dialer fonic]
  Phone = *99#
  Username = foo
  Password = foo
  Stupid Mode = 1
  Dial Command = ATDT
  Init2 = ATZ
  Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","pinternet.interkom.de"

For mobile Internet access you would do the following:

1. Attach the device via USB, wait a few seconds to let usb_modeswitch do its magic.
2. Run wvdial pin and wait a few seconds (until the prompt returns):

     $ wvdial pin
     --> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.61
     --> Initializing modem.
     --> Sending: AT+CPIN=1234
     AT+CPIN=1234
     OK
     --> Modem initialized.
     --> Configuration does not specify a valid phone number.
     --> Configuration does not specify a valid login name.
     --> Configuration does not specify a valid password.
   

3. Run wvdial fonic and wait until the "CONNECT" message appears and you get DNS addresses:

     $ wvdial fonic
     --> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.61
     --> Initializing modem.
     --> Sending: ATZ
     ATZ
     OK
     --> Sending: ATZ
     ATZ
     OK
     --> Sending: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","pinternet.interkom.de"
     AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","pinternet.interkom.de"
     OK
     --> Modem initialized.
     --> Sending: ATDT*99#
     --> Waiting for carrier.
     ATDT*99#
     CONNECT
     --> Carrier detected.  Starting PPP immediately.
     --> Starting pppd at Mon Aug  1 xx:xx:xx 2011
     --> Pid of pppd: 18672
     --> Using interface ppp0
     --> local  IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
     --> remote IP address yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy
     --> primary   DNS address 193.189.244.225
     --> secondary DNS address 193.189.244.206
   

If everything worked fine you should now have connected successfully. There are other alternatives for achieving the same result, including umtsmon (Qt3 in the last release from 2009, looks a bit unmaintained), kppp, the GNOME NetworkManager, and others, but wvdial worked OK for me. For more details about the Huawei E1750 device (e.g. lsusb -vvv and more photos), see my wiki page at http://randomprojects.org/wiki/FONIC_Surf-Stick_Huawei_E1750 Update 2011-08-03: My measured download speed for a Debian ISO (over HTTP via wget, at night, roughly 22:00 o'clock) is 350-470 KB/s in case anyone is interested. During this download the blue LED on the stick was enabled, which denotes a UMTS connection (green == GPRS/EDGE, turquoise == HSDPA).