Search Results: "ag"

13 November 2013

Raphael Geissert: A bashism a week: heredocs

One great feature of POSIX shells is the so-called heredoc. They are even available in languages such as Perl, PHP, and Ruby.

So where is the bashism?

It's in the implementation. What odd thing do you see below?


$ strace -fqe open bash -c 'cat <<EOF
foo
EOF' 2>&1 grep -v /lib
open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY O_CLOEXEC) = 3
open("/dev/tty", O_RDWR O_NONBLOCK O_LARGEFILE) = 3
open("/proc/meminfo", O_RDONLY O_CLOEXEC) = 3
[pid 6696] open("/tmp/sh-thd-1384296303", O_WRONLY O_CREAT O_EXCL O_TRUNC O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 3
[pid 6696] open("/tmp/sh-thd-1384296303", O_RDONLY O_LARGEFILE) = 4
[pid 6696] open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY O_CLOEXEC) = 3
foo
--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---


Yes, it uses temporary files!

So do ksh, pdksh, mksh, posh and possible other shells. Busybox's sh and dash do not use temporary files, though:


$ strace -fqe open dash -c 'cat <<EOF
foo
EOF' 2>&1 grep -v /lib
open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY O_CLOEXEC) = 3
[pid 6767] open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY O_CLOEXEC) = 3
foo
--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---


Next time you want data to never hit a hard disk, beware that heredocuments and herestrings are best avoided.

12 November 2013

Russell Coker: Bad Advertising of Protoplast

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome In early 2010 I wrote about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, I gave a picture of the wrist brace and a description of the process of creating it [1]. A few months later I wrote a follow-up about how the wrist brace had helped me, at the time I was anticipating wearing it at night for the rest of my life [2]. But my wrist has continued to improve. Nowadays I never wear the wrist brace and hardly even think of it. I am a little more careful about posture than I was before, but mostly it has no impact on my life. I think this counts as a full recovery. At the time I was mildly interested in buying some thermo-plastic of that type to make things, but the only source I found was Jaycar which sold 100 grams for $14.95, Jaycar prices have now dropped to $11.50 for 100 grams or $89.50 for a kilo but it s still expensive [3]. Protoplast When looking at the sites that link to my blog I saw a site advertising Protoplast which is a type of thermo-plastic that can be used for making things [4]. Protoplast have more reasonable prices, E30 ($AU42.75) for a kilo and their web site offers better prices for anyone who purchases 10kg or more (good for hackerspaces etc). As they post no further than Belgium they aren t an option for me but they do seem to make a good offer, better than Jaycar offers in Australia. Protoplast is probably a good product, but I think that their advert is misleading. While it is probably possible to make a wrist-brace similar to mine with Protoplast it s a fact that my wrist brace was not made with it. My wrist brace started out as a flat sheet of plastic which could be formed to the final product without being melted. Converting a packet of plastic granules (as sold by Protoplast or Jaycar) to a sheet to even start work on such a wrist brace would take some work. To make a sheet of plastic out of beads sold by Jaycar or Protoplast you would ideally completely melt the plastic, if you just softened the plastic then it wouldn t be as strong as using a pre-made sheet. During the time that I wore the wrist brace I probably repaired it more than 30 times, this wasn t particularly difficult to do, I poured boiling water over it to soften the part that cracked until it became tacky and then pushed it together again. But the result was significantly weaker than the original due to the difficulty in welding the broken sections together. I ended up cutting some strips from less important parts of the wrist brace (the part nearest to my elbow) to reinforce the weakest part which was between my thumb and fore-finger. That section ended up being about three times thicker than it was originally while also not being as strong as it was originally. I also had difficulty in making it flat so it wasn t nearly as comfortable as the original version. It seems rather misleading to include the picture of my wrist brace on a site advertising plastic which wasn t used to make it and which probably couldn t be used to make something that looks as good with the same ratio of strength to mass. But with a suitable disclaimer indicating that the user probably can t get the same result it would be OK to give it as an example of what could be done. I can imagine someone using a product like Protoplast to make a wrist brace that can hold a mobile phone, that can be worn with a watch, or has other features that aren t offered by medical staff. License Issues The license for my blog doesn t permit people to just copy pictures, it s a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike based license [5]. I am interested in supporting companies that make interesting products and anything that can help people with medical issues is also of interest. So I wouldn t rule out the possibility of a free license for a picture from my blog to be used in the way that they used it (with a link back to the original blog post). But I would want a description that informs readers that it s not an item made with their product, merely something similar that can be used for inspiration.
Related posts:
  1. Carpal Tunnel Getting Better Three months ago I wrote about getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome...
  2. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Diagnosis A few weeks ago I was referred to...
  3. Desks Lindsay Holmwood has written about the benefits of a standing...

11 November 2013

Simon Josefsson: Using Replicant on Samsung Galaxy S III

For the last half-year I have used CyanogenMod on an Nexus 4 as my main phone. Recently the touch functionality stopped working on parts of the display, and the glass on the back has started to crack. It seems modern phones are not built to last. For comparison, before the N4 I used a Nokia N900 for around 3 years without any hardware damages (in my drawer now, still working). A few weeks ago I started looking for a replacement. My experience with CyanogenMod had been good, but the number of proprietary blobs on the N4 concerned me. Finding something better wasn t easy though, so I m documenting my experience here. My requirements were, briefly, that I wanted a phone that I could buy locally that had a free software community around it that produced a stable environment. I have modest requirements for things I wouldn t give up on: telephony, data connection (3G), email (IMAP+SMTP), chat (XMPP), and a web browser. I like the philosophy and openness around the Firefox OS but the more I have read about it, it seems unlikely that it would deliver what I need today. In particular none of the devices capable of running Firefox OS appealed to me, and the state of email reading seemed unclear. I m sure I ll revisit Firefox OS as an alternative for me in the future.

As I had been happy with CyanogenMod, but concerned about its freeness, it felt natural to move on and test the more free software friendly project Replicant. Replicant only supports a small number of devices. After talking with people in the #replicant IRC channel, it seemed the Samsung S3 would be a decent choice for me. The Samsung S2 would have worked as well, but it cost almost as much as the S3 where I looked. Despite the large number of Samsung S3 devices out there, it seems the prices even for used devices are high (around 2500 SEK in Sweden, ~380 USD). I ended up buying a brand new one for 3200 SEK (~500 USD) which felt expensive, especially after recalling the recent $199 sale for Nexus 4. Noticing that brand new Nexus 4 devices are still over 3000 SEK in Sweden comforted me a bit. I would have preferred a more robust phone, like the CAT B15, but the state of free software OSes on them seem unclear and I wanted something stable. So, enough about the background, let s get started. Building and installing Replicant on the device was straight forward. I followed the Replicant Samsung S3 Build instructions to build my own images. The only issue I had was that I had not set JAVA_HOME and the defaults were bad; make sure to set JAVA_HOME before building. I built everything on my Lenovo X201 running Debian Wheezy, with OpenJDK 6 as the Java implementation. Installing the newly built firmware was easy, I just followed the installation process documentation. I made sure to take a clockworkmod backup to an external SD card before wiping the old system. To get a really clean new device, I also re-formated /sdcard inside clockworkmod; I noticed there were some traces left of the old system there. I spent about one week testing various configurations before settling on something I could use daily. A fair amount of time was spent looking into backup and restore options for Android devices. My idea was that I would take a backup of the apps I ran on the N4 and transfer them to the S3. The Android Debug Bridge (adb) has a backup/restore command, however it (intentionally) ignores apps marked as allowBackup=false which a number of apps has. It doesn t seem possible to override that settings so much for the freedom to backup your own device. I then discovered oandbackup. It can backup your entire system, saving each app (together with associated data) into a separate directory, for simple review and inspection before restore. You can do batch backups and batch restore. I couldn t get it to automatically restore things, though, which would be neat for really automated re-installations (there is an open issue about this feature). After noticing that some apps did not like being moved from the N4 (running Android 4.2) to the S3 (running 4.0), I ended up installing most apps from scratch on a freshly installed Replicant. I use oandbackup to the external SD card so that I can quickly restore my phone. For backup/restore of SMS/MMS and Call Log, I use SMS Backup+ against my own IMAP server. Camera pictures are synced manually using adb when I am connected to my laptop. There is a number of apps that deserve to be mentioned because they are what I use on a daily basis. All of them come via the free software market F-Droid. For email (IMAP/SMTP), I use K-9 Mail which is feature rich but still easy to use. For chat, I use Xabber. I use NewsBlur s free software app to read RSS flows. For two-factor authentication, I use Google Authenticator. I haven t evaluated different PDF viewers, but the first one I tried (APV PDF Viewer) has worked fine so far. Handling a a synchronized address book and calendar deserve its own blog post because it is a challenging topic, but briefly, I m currently using a combination of aCal and DAVdroid. Finally, since Replicant is still work in progress, some words about stability and notes on what doesn t work. This is probably the most interesting part if you are considering running Replicant on an S3 yourself. Overall system stability is flawless, I hadn t had any crash or problem with the fundamental functionality (telephony, 3G, Camera). People have said graphics feels a bit laggy, but I cannot compare with the stock ROM and it doesn t get in the way of daily use. First some notes about non-free aspects: Some other observations: I am quite happy with the setup so far, and I will continue to use it as my primary phone. flattr this!

Daniel Pocock: Outreach Program for Women applications

The deadline for Outreach Program for Women applications is very imminent and a range of applications have now appeared on the OPW wiki It is great to see Debian has attracted a diverse range of women who all appear to have coding experience. Code samples have been submitted in Java, C++ and Python among other things and they come from a range of locations around the globe, including Brazil, the UK, Iran and India. Experience counts Looking through the records of some of these applications, it is interesting to see a range of experience and connections in industry and the wider open source family:
  • translator for O'Reilly
  • IBM internship
  • Linux module programming
  • Working alongside one of the Mercurial contributors in a previous role
Funding needed Recent emails from the OPW organisors and DPL have highlighted the need to raise more funding to ensure that Debian can offer OPW internships to the selected applicants. Solving the biggest problem of GSoC 2014 Many of these applicants are students and will be eligible for GSoC 2014. According to the Google FAQ, even students who graduate in 2014 are eligible as long as they are enrolled in a course on the cut-off date 21 April 2014 One of the biggest challenges facing GSoC mentors is the selection of students who are capable of completing good work and have a long term interest in open source. One of the best ways to overcome that challenge is to start forming relationships with potential GSoC students well in advance and get to know them as they make small contributions over an extended period of time. The interest that these candidates have expressed in Debian and OPW suggests that some of them may well be suitable for Debian to help them get onto this track for the next GSoC. Not only will this make the GSoC 2014 selection process easier but it may help us to select more GSoC candidates with a long term outlook. Women in science, engineering and the wider business world More news items have appeared recently about women in science and engineering and other leadership roles:

In the early 1950s, Morgan was the only female analyst among 900 rocket scientists at North American Aviation. She was also one of the few without a college degree.

"What I saw a thousand times during the downturn was, 'We'd like to give her that opportunity, but we need to go with the sure thing - we can't afford diversity right now,'" - Sallie Krawcheck, former chief executive at Merrill Lynch

Vincent Bernat: Snimpy: SNMP & Python

While quite old fashioned, SNMP is still an ubiquitous protocol supported by most network equipments. It comes handy to expose various metrics, like network interface counters, to be gathered for the purpose of monitoring. It can also be used to retrieve and modify equipments configuration. Variables exposed by SNMP agents (servers) are organized inside a Management Information Base (MIB) which is a hierarchical database1. Each entry is identified by an OID. Querying a specific OID allows a manager (client) to get the value of an associated variable. For example, one common MIB-module is IF-MIB defined in RFC 2863. It contains objects used to manage network interfaces. One of them is ifTable whose rows are representing agent s logical network interfaces. Each row will expose the interface name, characteristics and various associated counters.
ifIndex ifDescr ifPhysAddress ifOperStatus ifOutOctets
1 lo up 545721741
2 eth0 0:18:f3:3:4e:4 up 78875421
3 eth1 0:18:f3:3:4e:5 down 0
ifTable is indexed by its first column ifIndex. If you want to get the operational status of the second interface, you need to query IF-MIB::ifOperStatus.2 which is translated to OID .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.8.2 using information provided by the MIB definition.

Scripting SNMP An SNMP agent can deliver a lot of interesting information: You can gather those information manually with tools like snmpget and snmpwalk: 
$ snmpwalk -v 2c -c public localhost IF-MIB::ifDescr      
IF-MIB::ifDescr.1 = STRING: lo
IF-MIB::ifDescr.2 = STRING: eth0
IF-MIB::ifDescr.3 = STRING: eth1
However, building robust scripts with them is quite challenging. For example, if you wanted to get the descriptions of all active interfaces as well as the total number of octets transmitted, you could do something like that: 
#!/bin/sh
set -e
host="$ 1:-localhost "
community="$ 2:-public "
args="-v2c -c $community $host"
for idx in $(snmpwalk -Ov -OQ $args IF-MIB::ifIndex); do
    descr=$(snmpget -Ov -OQ $args IF-MIB::ifDescr.$idx)
    oper=$(snmpget -Ov -OQ $args IF-MIB::ifOperStatus.$idx)
    in=$(snmpget -Ov -OQ $args IF-MIB::ifInOctets.$idx)
    out=$(snmpget -Ov -OQ $args IF-MIB::ifOutOctets.$idx)
    [ x"$descr" != x"lo" ]   continue
    [ x"$oper" = x"up" ]   continue
    echo $descr $in $out
done
Hopefully, SNMP bindings in various languages are pretty common. For example, Net-SNMP ships with a Python binding: 
import argparse
import netsnmp
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("host", default="localhost", nargs="?",
                    help="Agent to retrieve variables from")
parser.add_argument("community", default="public", nargs="?",
                    help="Community to query the agent")
options = parser.parse_args()
args =  
    "Version": 2,
    "DestHost": options.host,
    "Community": options.community
 
for idx in netsnmp.snmpwalk(netsnmp.Varbind("IF-MIB::ifIndex"),
                            **args):
    descr, oper, cin, cout = netsnmp.snmpget(
        netsnmp.Varbind("IF-MIB::ifDescr", idx),
        netsnmp.Varbind("IF-MIB::ifOperStatus", idx),
        netsnmp.Varbind("IF-MIB::ifInOctets", idx),
        netsnmp.Varbind("IF-MIB::ifOutOctets", idx),
        **args)
    assert(descr is not None and
           cin is not None and
           cout is not None) #  
    if descr == "lo":
        continue
    if oper != "1": #  
        continue
    print("     ".format(descr, cin, cout))
This binding is quite primitive and has several drawbacks:
  1. It exports everything as strings. See .
  2. Error handling is just deficient. If you mispell something, like a variable name, you ll get snmp_build: unknown failure on the standard error. No exception. If a variable does not exist, you ll get None instead. See .
This inability to sanely handle failures makes this binding quite dangerous to use in scripts. Imagine making important modifications on the basis of the returned values. If you forget to check against None, your script may cause havoc!

Snimpy Because I didn t find any reliable Python binding for SNMP, I decided to write Snimpy with two goals in mind:
  1. Leverage information contained in MIBs to provide a pythonic interface.
  2. Any error condition should raise an exception.
Here is how the previous script could be written: 
#!/usr/bin/env snimpy
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("host", default="localhost", nargs="?",
                    help="Agent to retrieve variables from")
parser.add_argument("community", default="public", nargs="?",
                    help="Community to query the agent")
options = parser.parse_args()
m = M(options.host, options.community, 2)
load("IF-MIB")
for idx in m.ifDescr:
    if m.ifDescr[idx] == "lo":
        continue
    if m.ifOperStatus[idx] != "up":
        continue
    print("     ".format(m.ifDescr[idx],
                            m.ifInOctets[idx],
                            m.ifOutOctets[idx]))
You can also use a list comprehension: 
load("IF-MIB")
print("\n".join([ "     ".format(m.ifDescr[idx],
                                    m.ifInOctets[idx],
                                    m.ifOutOctets[idx])
                  for idx in m.ifDescr
                  if m.ifDescr[idx] != "lo"
                  and m.ifOperStatus[idx] == "up" ]))
Here is another simple example to get the routing database from the agent: 
load("IP-FORWARD-MIB")
m=M("localhost", "public", 2)
routes = m.ipCidrRouteNextHop
for x in routes:
    net, netmask, tos, src = x
    print(" :>15s / :<15s  via  :<15s  src  :<15s ".format(
        net, netmask, routes[x], src))
IP-FORWARD-MIB::ipCidrRouteNextHop is a more complex table with a compound index. Despite this, querying the table still seems natural. Have a look at Snimpy s documentation for more information. Behind the hood, SNMP requests are handled by PySNMP and MIB parsing is done with libsmi2. Snimpy supports both Python 2, Python 3 and Pypy.
  1. A MIB is defined using a subset of ASN.1 called SMI. However, it is not uncommon to refer to the definition as a MIB too.
  2. Unfortunately, there is currently no robust SMI parser written in pure Python. For example, PySNMP relies on smidump which comes with libsmi. Snimpy uses a custom CFFI wrapper around libsmi.

Matthew Palmer: Timezones are not optional information

In high school, I had a science teacher who would mark your answers wrong if you forgot to include units. What does that mean? , he would write, 17.2 elephants? The point he was trying to get across was that a bare number, without the relevant units, wasn t precise enough to be useful. Also, carrying the units with you helped to cross-check your work if you got a numeric answer, but the units were garbage (seconds per kilogram, for instance, when you were trying to find an acceleration), then you could be pretty sure you d made a mistake somewhere. Fast forward to today, and I m currently working with a database containing a pile of timestamps. Without timezones. Where the timestamps being inserted are in local time. Thankfully, so far, this particular system has always been run in one timezone, so I ve only got one timezone to deal with, but the potential ramifications of systems with different timezones inserting data into this database terrify me. The naive answer is to just store everything in UTC and be done with it. I m not particularly averse to that solution, as long as it s very clear to everyone what s going on. The correct answer, though, I think, is to always keep timezone information with your timestamps otherwise, you ll never know whether it s 0830 in elephants

Gunnar Wolf: Talking in Paran : Free Software philosophy / the Debian project. PS: Want to contribute?

I'm very happy: I was finally able to present a talk at a Free Software conference in Paran , Argentina Regina's hometown. Not only in Paran , but at the Vieja Usina culture center, half a block away from her parents' house. So, I must doubly thank Laura: First, for letting us know there would be a Free Software conference there, and second, for taking some pictures :- What was this conference? Conferencia Regional de Software Libre, organized by Grupo de Usuarios de GNU/Linux de Entre R os (GUGLER). Of course, flying to Argentina (and more specifically, to Paran , which is ~500Km away from the international airport) just for a one day conference was out of the question So I gave the talk by videoconference. Of course, given we will be travelling for the December vacations to Argentina, I expect to meet in person the GUGLER guys soon. I gave a single talk, mixing together two different topics: (my very personal take on) the Free Software philosophy and Debian's place in the Free Software universe. I had a very good time giving the talk, and while I was unable to look at my audience, I got reports saying they were happy and interested. I even got some mails from them, which makes me quite happy ;-) Now, one of the recurring points whenever I talk about Debian: I often tell people that I cannot tell them why they should use Debian instead of other distributions. My years testing every distribution I come across are long gone, and I nowadays am familiar with Debian only. But I also tell them that personally I gain nothing by having more Debian users in the world What I want to achieve is the next logical step: To have more people contributing to Debian. So, here is a great opportunity for interested people, specifically a group that often has a hard time finding a way to collaborate with Free Software projects. Today, Paul Tagliamonte published a call for proposals for Debian 8 (Jessie)'s artwork. So, given many people always want to find a way to contribute to Free Software without being a coder, here's a golden opportunity. You can look at the themes sent for Debian 7 as a reference; look also at the technical requirements for your artwork, and... Well, you have until early February to work on it!

10 November 2013

Steve Kemp: So I have a new project

Recently I decided to set myself a big photography challenge. The three options which I discussed with a couple of people were: Ultimately I decided pubs would be most fun. Not least because you could do it every year or two, to see what changes occurred. To make it more useful I decided to not only take the pictures, but to collect, and share, the meta-data too: Today I spent an hour walking up Easter road, and down Leith Walk. I shot the outside of about 20 pubs, and then fiddled with the layout and organization of the images. I'm reasonably happy with the result, but it remains obvious that I'm not a designer. The data-set use to generate the site - which is perhaps the most interesting/useful part of the whole exercise to other people - is available online too: All the data, even the images, is stored on github for collaboration purposes. I'm not sure if folk will join in, but I can probably manage a few of the major thoroughfares every weekend indefinitely it will only take a couple of days to get "city-wide coverage", then the rest is gravy.

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2013/45

here's the list of RC bugs I've worked on during the last week.

Sylvain Le Gall: opam2debian, a tool to create Debian binary package out of OPAM

One week ago, a thread in opam-devel mailing list started about the possibility to create binary snapshot to distribute OPAM packages. Distributing binary packages with everything already compiled is pretty useful when you want to make sure that everyone has the same version of packages installed and you don't want to spend time configuring all the computer of your colleague. As a matter of fact I was also interested to see that happening. I have several computers where I want to install a set of packages and I want to snapshot OPAM archives when I am ready for an upgrade. I have tested for a long time another source distribution: GODI. I even wrote a puppet module to drive it. This was a fun experience, but as with any source only distribution, there are some drawbacks. Especially even if it is fully automated, you get a lot of errors and timeout when trying to build automatically from source. This is how opam2debian has started. I wanted a replacement for puppet-godi that takes advantage of OPAM and the possibility to distribute my set of packages everywhere quickly. The goals of this project are:
  1. generate a Debian binary package with all the dependencies set on external packages (like libpcre)
  2. use OPAM to build everything
  3. use standard Debian process to build package
  4. create snapshot of OPAM repository that allow to rebuild exactly the same thing on different arches
The real challenge behind opam2debian was to be able to use standard Debian process to create package to get all the power of dependencies computation provided by the Debian maintainer scripts. My great achievement on this topic was to find a tool called proot that allows you to bind mount a directory as a user. This is an achievement because it allows to create a package using a directory where you are not allowed to write (i.e. /opt/opam2debian directory which is owned by root). This is a way to do it on any Jenkins builder without root access and a standard way for Debian to build packages. Usage example I need to compile a set of package to install on all my Jenkins builder. Here is the list of packages I need and I also want to use the latest OCaml version. I want to build a Debian package for Debian Wheezy which has only OCaml 3.12.1. Building the package: 
$ opam2debian create --build --name opam2debian-test2 --compiler 4.01.0 \
 ocamlfind fileutils ocaml-data-notation ocaml-expect ounit \
 ocamlmod ocamlify oasis yojson sexplib extlib pcre-ocaml \
 calendar ocaml-inifiles ocamlnet ocurl gettext inotify ocaml-sqlexpr \
 ocamlrss ocaml-xdg-basedir
Getting the package list right can be tricky because the process will stop at the first error -- and if it is because the last package fails to build it can be long. I have implemented a --keep-build-dir in case you want to tune the package list live. The program will build everything and it can takes quite a while. At the end you get a file opam2debian-test2_20131105_amd64.deb which has a reasonable size of 232MB. That is big, but it looks like the biggest directory is $OPAMROOT/4.01.0/build, I am not sure if I can remove it but we may save some space here (the build directory represents 50% of the package size). Then you can just do a standard Debian installation: 
$ sudo dpkg -i opam2debian-test2_20131105_amd64.deb
And you can use it: 
$ eval $(opam config env --root /opt/opam2debian/opam2debian-test2/)
$ which ocamlfind
 /opt/opam2debian/opam2debian-test2/4.01.0/bin/ocamlfind
$ ocamlfind list
 [...]
 stdlib              (version: [distributed with Ocaml])
 str                 (version: [distributed with Ocaml])
 threads             (version: [distributed with Ocaml])
 threads.posix       (version: [internal])
 threads.vm          (version: [internal])
 type_conv           (version: 109.41.00)
 unidiff             (version: 0.0.2)
 unix                (version: [distributed with Ocaml])
 userconf            (version: 0.3.1)
 xdg-basedir         (version: 0.0.3)
 xmlm                (version: 1.1.1)
 yojson              (version: 1.1.5)
A nice thing to note, is that it is a standard OPAM install. You can install, update and upgrade OPAM from there, as root. However, I would recommend not to do it, and just rebuild a newer Debian package to upgrade. Install You will need the opam and proot Debian package available in Debian jessie and sid. You will also need various OCaml libraries (cmdliner, calendar, fileutils and jingoo). Download the opam2debian tarball on the forge, build and install it. The project is hosted on github. Open issues On the initial list of goals of the project. Not everything is completed. I have still several open issues. In particular 4. (create snapshot of OPAM repository) was blocked by a bug in opam-mk-repo, that prevents snapshots (see my pull-request to solve it). Another issues is about licenses of the included files. I should list them all and I need to figure out a way to extract every licences. Submit bugs directly to github.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Running TP-Link MR3040 as a batman-adv mesh node using openwrt

Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I bought arrived on Friday. Here are my notes on how to set up the MR3040 as a mesh node using OpenWrt. I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for TL-MR3040, and downloaded the recommended firmware image (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and uploaded it into the original web interface. The flashing went fine, and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port. After logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node. I started off by reading the instructions from Wireless Africa, which had quite a lot of useful information, but eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for using batman-adv on OpenWrt. A small snag was the fact that the opkg install kmod-batman-adv command did not work as it should. The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its dependency crc16 was not already loaded. I reported the bug to the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon. But the problem only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration seem to work when booting from scratch. The setup is done using files in /etc/config/. I did not bridge the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates. The following files were changed and look like this after modifying them: /etc/config/network 
config interface 'loopback'
        option ifname 'lo'
        option proto 'static'
        option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
        option netmask '255.0.0.0'
config globals 'globals'
        option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
config interface 'lan'
        option ifname 'eth0'
        option type 'bridge'
        option proto 'dhcp'
        option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
        option netmask '255.255.255.0'
        option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
        option ip6assign '60'
config interface 'mesh'
        option ifname 'adhoc0'
        option mtu '1528'
        option proto 'batadv'
        option mesh 'bat0'
/etc/config/wireless 
config wifi-device 'radio0'
        option type 'mac80211'
        option channel '11'
        option hwmode '11ng'
        option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
        option htmode 'HT20'
        list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
        list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
        list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
        list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
        option disabled '0'
config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
        option device 'radio0'
        option ifname 'adhoc0'
        option network 'mesh'
        option encryption 'none'
        option mode 'adhoc'
        option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
        option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
/etc/config/batman-adv 
config 'mesh' 'bat0'
        option interfaces 'adhoc0'
        option 'aggregated_ogms'
        option 'ap_isolation'
        option 'bonding'
        option 'fragmentation'
        option 'gw_bandwidth'
        option 'gw_mode'
        option 'gw_sel_class'
        option 'log_level'
        option 'orig_interval'
        option 'vis_mode'
        option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
        option 'distributed_arp_table'
        option 'network_coding'
        option 'hop_penalty'
# yet another batX instance
# config 'mesh' 'bat5'
#       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
The mesh node is now operational. I have yet to test its range, but I hope it is good. I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box still wrapped up in plastic.

Jelmer Vernooij: The state of distributed bug trackers

A whopping 5 years ago, LWN ran a story about distributed bug trackers. This was during the early waves of distributed version control adoption, and so everybody was looking for other things that could benefit from decentralization. TL;DR: Not much has changed since. The potential benefits of a distributed bug tracker are similar to those of a distributed version control system: ability to fork any arbitrary project, easier collaboration between related projects and offline access to full project data. The article discussed a number of systems, including Bugs Everywhere, ScmBug, DisTract, DITrack, ticgit and ditz. The conclusion of our favorite grumpy editor at the time was that all of the available distributed bug trackers were still in their infancy. All of these piggyback on a version control system somehow - either by reusing the VCS database, by storing their data along with the source code in the tree, or by adding custom hooks that communicate with a central server. Only ScmBug had been somewhat widely deployed at the time, but its homepage gives me a blank page now. Of the trackers reviewed by LWN, Bugs Everywhere is the only one that is still around and somewhat active today. In the years since the article, a handful of new trackers have come along. Two new version control systems - Veracity and Fossil - come with the kitchen sink included and so feature a built-in bug tracker and wiki. There is an extension for Mercurial called Artemis that stores issues in an .issues directory that is colocated with the Mercurial repository. The other new tracker that I could find (though it has also not changed since 2009) is SD. It uses its own distributed database technology for storing bug data - called Prophet, and doesn't rely on a VCS. One of the nice features is that it supports importing bugs from foreign trackers. Some of these provide the benefits you would expect of a distributed bug tracker. Unfortunately, all those I've looked at fail to even provide the basic functionality I would want in a bug tracker. Moreso than with a version control system, regular users interact with a bug tracker. They report bugs, provide comments and feedback on fixes. All of the systems I tried make these actions a lot harder than with your average bugzilla or mantis instance - they provide a limited web UI or no web interface at all. Update: LWN later also publishe articles on on SD and on Fossil. Other interesting links are Eric Sink's article on distributed bug tracking (Erik works at Sourcegear who develop Veracity) and the dist-bugs mailing list.

Paul Tagliamonte: call for Jessie artwork proposals

(This is a reproduction of the mail sent to -announce for the planet readers) Aloha, hackers, As some of you notice from the slamn default background in wheezy, (BTW;
a round of applause for Adrien Aubourg for creating Joy!) we ask
for contributions to the debian-desktop team in the form of themeing. This is the official call for proposals for the Jessie cycle. Please
look on the wiki (thank you, Valessio Soares de Brito for creating
the page!) So, if you d like (or know someone who d like) to create a desktop look
and feel that will be seen by trillions of people, be sure to send in
your artwork ASAP! Breaking with tradition, I d like to have the re-themed desktop in place
well before freeze, to ensure we have time to properly integrate it. I m picking the arbitrary deadline of Feb 5th (subject to change) for
artwork to be submitted. I know this isn t a lot of time, but we can
iterate as we integrate. The artwork is usually picked based on which theme looks the most:
- Debian (I m not defining this since I think everyone has their own take
of what Debian means to them) - plausible to integrate without patching core software (As much as I love some of the insanely hot looking themes, some
would require heavy GTK+ theming and patching GDM/GNOME.) - clean / well designed (without becoming something that gets annoying to look at a
year down the road - I think Joy does a good job of this)
This year, do keep in mind the Debian logo *is* freely licensed, so feel
free to use it in your theme.

Russell Coker: Aldi Changes, Cheap Telcos, and Estimating Costs

I ve been using Aldi as my mobile phone provider for two months now since Kogan was shut down [1]. Now Aldi have cut the transfer quota on their Unlimited plan from 5G per month to 2.5G per month. The most charitable interpretation of this would be that Aldi got a lot of former Kogan customers who needed the 6G per month that Kogan offered and that forced them to make changes to remain profitable. But the most likely possibility is that with less competition Aldi can just offer less for the same price. This isn t a huge problem for me, in two months on Aldi my biggest month involved almost exactly 2.5G of data transfer. But it s annoying to lose something and it s enough to make me consider other options. Also some of my relatives are looking for new plans so now is a good time to research the options. Other Pre-paid Options Lebara offers Unlimited plans that start at $30 per month and offer 1.5G of data [2], this compares well to the Unlimited plan of $35 per month from Aldi which has 2.5G of data (depending on whether 1.5G is enough). Amaysim has an Unlimited plan that includes 4G of data for $40 per month [3]. If you make lots of phone calls and transfer more than 2.5G of data per month then that would be a really good deal. Lebara uses the Vodafone network and Amaysim uses Optus. Neither of them compare to the Telstra 3G network if you want access outside major urban areas. I had Virgin (Optus network) work well for me for years and Three (their own network now part of Vodafone) work well for many years before that. But data transfer is becoming more important to me and the Telstra network is a major feature of Aldi. Lebara has one of the wost web sites I ve ever seen and Amaysim isn t much better. Aldi is great, they just provide all the key data in one page. Aldi and Amaysim have Android apps that can be used for recharging and viewing the balance, Aldi s app works well but I haven t been able to test the Amaysim app. Lebara doesn t even have an app. Generally Lebara doesn t seem to have anything going for it unless you want to make lots of calls to other Lebara customers, you want to make calls to certain other countries where Lebara has very low international rates, or unless you need a plan with unlimited calls but don t need more than 1.5G of data. The following table summarises the costs of the three pre-paid telcos.
Telco Flagfall Cost/min (Australia calls) SMS Data Cost/Meg Data Increment Credit Expiry and Minimum 30day Data Packs
Aldi 0 $0.12 $0.12 $0.05 1M 1 year $15 2G=$15
Lebara $0.29 $0.15 $0.15 $0.05 1K 90 days $10
Amaysim 0 $0.12 $0.12 $0.05 1M 90 days $5 1G=$10 2G=$20 4G=$30
Post-paid Options Virgin s cheapest offer is $20 per month for $200 of calls (at $0.98/min + $0.40 flagfall) and 200M of data [4], they currently have a special offer of an extra 1G if you sign up before the 18th of November. Virgin have a long history of periodically offering special deals so if you want to sign up with them some time in the next few months it s best to poll their web site and wait for a deal. The TeleChoice Global Liberty plan is a slightly better deal of $20 per month for $500 of calls (at $0.97/min + $0.40 flagfall) and 1G of data which also has free SMS [5]. TeleChoice Global Rebel Texter is a plan for $15 per month that includes $200 of calls and 200M of data and free SMS [6]. They also have a $10 per month plan which charges $0.22 per SMS, which would be bad value for anyone who sends 1 SMS per day. At Aldi rates if you spend $15 per month on 2G of data and $5 on calls then you will get 41 * one minute calls as opposed to $200/($0.98+$0.40)==145 * one minute calls with the cheapest Virgin plan. It seems to me that there is little possibility for those two $20 post-paid plans (which seem to be two of the best value plans currently available) to compete well with the pre-paid options from Aldi and Lebara. Even if you have the same usage pattern every month there are only particular patterns which make the Virgin or TeleChoice deals most appealing options, for example if you need to make more than 40 minutes of calls but less than 145 minutes of calls then Virgin will look good. TeleChoice Global Liberty looks good if you make between 40 and $500/($0.97+$0.40)==365 * one minute calls. If you only need a small amount of data transfer (less than 200M billed in 10K increments) then the TeleChoice Rebel Texter plan would look good as the Aldi 1M increments matter for small amounts of data transfer. But I don t think that many people are in that situation, even my mother in law can t easily stick within 200M of data transfer. Measuring Phone Use The first program I used for measuring phone calls is the Call & SMS Stats app from the Android Market [7]. I wouldn t recommend this to technical users as it demands a lot of access to the phone (including reading SMS, accessing the phone storage, and sending data to the Internet), but it s good for less technical users. For my use I prefer Call Meter 3G from the F-Droid repository [8]. I trust the Call Meter 3G program more because it s source is available under the GPL and it also has the convenient feature of adding up the costs of the calls, SMS, and data used. According to Call Meter 3G I m using less than $20 of calls and SMS per month, so if I continue my current use with a 2G data pack every month from Aldi instead of buying a $35 Unlimited pack and don t use more than 2G of data then I ll save at least a few dollars every month. My wife makes fewer calls so I ve already moved her phone away from the Unlimited plan and I ll move my phone later if it looks like it will save money she will now use my phone for making calls when we are together so the Unlimited plan may become good value when we share it. The Case for Aldi Aldi offers competitive options for phones for most levels of usage. While there are some post-paid plans which are better in some areas such as the ones from TeleChoice Aldi has the benefit of flexibility. A phone with Aldi can have it s plan scaled up or down easily with no penalty fees. For a phone to be usable for an entire year the cheapest option at the moment is Aldi which has a $15 recharge that lasts for a year. The next best option seems to be Amaysim with a $5 recharge that lasts for 90 days. Saving Money In the past I ve been used to SMS being significantly cheaper than phone calls. When I was on Virgin and calls just over $1 per minute ($0.98 per minute plus the flag-fall) and SMS were $0.28 which made a simple question and answer cheaper by SMS than calling. But with Aldi charging the same for a 1 minute call and sending an SMS a simple question and answer will cost half as much if it s done with a call so SMS isn t a good deal. Also I ve started using Google Hangouts to communicate with my wife instead of SMS as extra use of Hangouts is essentially free (we both have it running all the time for Ingress related communication anyway). The financial incentive now is to use Google Hangouts to replace some calls. One down-side to saving money in such ways is that it restricts usage of the phone. While moving from SMS to Google Hangouts (or any other instant-messaging system) isn t any great cost having to reduce the number of calls does. The ability to talk for as long as you want without bothering about cost is something that s worth paying for. I Hate Telcos For most things that I spend money on I wouldn t invest much effort to try and save $10 or $15 per month. Even when doing research that will help my friends and relatives and random people on the Internet I probably wouldn t take so much time for a small saving. But the Telcos seems to avoid competing as much as possible which is obvious from the way that they increase prices and decrease services at the same time. Also most Telcos seem to have a business model that is based around exploiting customers, they have confusing terms in the contracts that make it very likely for customers to go over the included usage and hit penalty rates and charge unreasonable prices for the phones that are bundled with a telephony contract. I want to reduce the amount of money I pay to Telcos as a matter of principle. Aldi is better than most Telcos, they have clear terms that are explained on a single web page [9], and they have an Android app to show the remaining credit that can reduce the risk of excessive fees if a 2G data block is used. Aldi sells phones in their stores at low prices, the phones that they sell aren t the highest quality but the customer gets what they pay for and the warranty return policy is good. But we still need to find the best options so that market forces will encourage Telcos to make more reasonable offers.
Related posts:
  1. The End of Kogan Mobile Kogan Mobile has just announced that Telstra succeeded in it s...
  2. Australian Mobile Phone Costs I previously wrote about the changes to bundling prices by...
  3. Changing Phone Prices in Australia 18 months ago when I signed up with Virgin Mobile...

Luke Faraone: Why I use my bank's mobile site on my desktop

(or, cutting out bloat by using a platform where bloat won't fly)

Let me start off by saying I'm generally a huge fan of my bank, USAA. Their offerings are free of hidden fees, their phone support excellent, and the perks they provide are competitive. They don't have the best savings interest rates, but you can always find a better deal online to park money not actively in your checking account.

However, USAA's website is a behemoth. My account page took about 8 seconds to fully load, downloading 1.4MiB of content.

The "My Accounts" page you're redirected to after logging in.
It is frequently buggy; whenever I log in via Google Chrome on Ubuntu 12.04 I land on a page with a URL beginning with "https://www.usaa.com/inet/gas_bank/AccountBannerAjax" and a bunch of GET parameters like "currentaccountkey" and "accnumber" with values like "encrypted12a1f4dd1[ ]". The server returns a 200 OK, promises a Content-Length of 20, but then actually returns zero bytes. After navigating to the homepage and clicking a button, I end up getting logged in, but I wonder what percentage of their userbase are experiencing this problem?

For some strange reason, I get a lot of checks. It appears that nobody else informed the banking system that it's 2013, and the easiest mechanism for people to send money without paying fees is still on paper. To its credit, USAA made remote deposit of checks available to all customers in 2006, when it was mostly an offering limited to businesses. However, it seems like they haven't updated their web workflow since then.


Using it on the web still requires using a signed Java applet (itself discouraged by CMU's CERT) that does the incredibly complex task of letting you select a file from your computer and upload it to their servers. At least, that's what I think it does, because any time I chose "Run", my browser complained a few minutes later that the tab had stopped responding. Regardless of functionality, you can accomplish almost anything their site could currently be doing with HTML5 and a third party service if they want to crop images locally.

Spinning after logging
in on Android
USAA's mobile app for Android has another host of problems; I haven't been able to log into it for 2 weeks, and when I chatted with someone today I was told they were "doing some maintenance this weekend", so I should try again in a few hours once that's finished.

I googled around a bit for some way to perhaps make the applet work in Ubuntu (which admittedly is not a supported platform), and came upon a Facebook thread where a rep suggested using the mobile web site.

A breath of fresh air
I loaded it in my browser, and was amazed at how well it functioned. Obviously designed for higher-end devices (It didn't even load in one WAP emulator I tried), the mobile web interface was a refreshing breath of fresh air. It scaled well to a full-screen device (see below), loaded quickly, and gave me all the information I would have wanted out of the normal web interface.

Most notably: remember the whole "upload a check" workflow that required a buggy Java applet on the main website? We get bog-standard HTML form fields, no additional magic. There goes any theories about the Java client doing some magic validation or prep of the image; here, all they're getting is the images and my session cookie.


I'm still shocked at whoever thought a My Yahoo!-style homepage was the best layout for a bank, but props to the web developers who managed to make a mobile interface that was both pretty and allowed me to work around broken functionality in their implementations on every other platform I had access to.

But why was the mobile web interface the least bloated? Easy. On the desktop, you generally have a nice pipe, or if not, the user knows it and won't be too upset if your site is just as slow as other sites similarly situated. On mobile, the user downloaded all the code already, so the only latency should be the API requests against the server, right?

On the mobile web users have come to expect relatively speedy mobile-optimised sites and there's less screen real estate to do fancy things that get in the way of content. For many sites, that's a huge improvement. Of course, it would be really nice if more banks supported open protocols for interactions (USAA has a read-only, limited-duration OFX feed), but I would settle for a better web interface.

So tl;dr: USAA, please make www.usaa.com redirect to m.usaa.com, kthxbai.

9 November 2013

Ricardo Mones: The Debian Project...

...is reading my mind!

I didn't tell anybody, but a couple of months ago, when I finally had time at work to upgrade my work computer desktop from Squeeze to Wheezy I also switched from GNOME to XFCE. Now I read via LWN that Debian is doing the same, at least for a while :)

BTW, I knew newer GNOME was different (had seen it in Fedora 18 for example), anyway I installed it (because I was lazy enough just to apt-get dist-upgrade the box) and tried it.

Maybe it's me, becoming an old dog which doesn't want to learn new tricks, but in order to get my work done as fast as usually I had to install something usable, hence went back to XFCE. I had to manually convert GNOME panel launchers to XFCE launchers but, besides that and some missing applet I'm pretty happy with the switch.

Carl Chenet: Brebis 0.8, the fully automated backup checker, released

Follow me also on Twitter The new version of Brebis "Claquette" 0.8 was published two days ago. Brebis is a fully automated backup checker. Brebis does not create backups. It only performs controls on them. Brebis is able to detect a corrupted archive compressed with different formats (tar, gzip, bzip2, lzma and zip), automatically checking the integrity of your archives and lots of parameters of the files inside these archives or inside a tree of files and provide detailed reports if unexpected states are detected. Check out the list of the supported features. What s new? The main features of this new version are: The official archive of Brebis 0.8 is available in Debian Sid or from sources at http://brebisproject.org/attachments/download/9/brebis-0.8.tar.gz The documentation has improved and a full example of how to secure you backup checking process is now available. Feedback about Brebis What do you think about the Brebis project ? We at the Brebis Project welcome any feedback about Brebis. Feel free to comment on this blog, to subscribe to the Brebis-users mailing list, by Twitter or email me directly at carl.chenet@brebisproject.org 
Official website: http://www.brebisproject.org
Mailing-list: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brebis-users

Russ Allbery: Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2011

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2011
Editor: Gordon van Gelder
Issue: Volume 121, No. 1 & 2
ISSN: 1095-8258
Pages: 258
Nothing of particular interest in the book reviews in this issue, although I was entertained to see Charles de Lint review a collection of the Prince Valiant strip. I have memories of that strip being one of the most boring works of art created by mankind. De Lint, of course, quite likes it. Our tastes seem to be very disjoint, although I have to admit that I've not read it collected and it may be more coherent and more interesting in that format. The science column in this issue, by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy, deserves special mention. It's on roshambo (rock-paper-scissors), human difficulties with randomness, and strategy in roshambo competitions. It's also the first essay I've read that clearly explains how there can be strategy to roshambo, and why that strategy is worth studying. Even though the primary topic of the column is randomness, it's worth reading from the perspective of strategy in competitive human vs. human games. "Bronsky's Dates with Death" by Peter David: Anyone familiar with PAD's body of work will immediately expect a humorous story with some deeper thoughtful bits, and that's exactly what this is. Bronsky, the title character, is a man almost incapable of saying exactly what's on his mind, and what's on his mind is his eventual death. Not that it bothers him that much; he's just thinking a lot about it. But his incessant discussion of it certainly bothers the people around him. This leads to a few entertaining exchanges with his family, and then to more entertaining exchanges with Death. Or Deaths, as there appear to be several different kinds. I found the exact metaphysics a bit confused, but the ending was still touching and a bit funny. (7) "The Way It Works Out and All" by Peter S. Beagle: This is a reprint of a special fund-raising story about Avram Davidson, so a lot of it was lost on me given that I know almost nothing about Davidson and have yet to get to any of his novels I own. But even without that background, it's a diverting story of hidden and parallel worlds and unexpected explorations. There isn't all that much in the way of a plot, but it's a nice bit of characterization set against a fun SF twist. (6) "Less Stately Mansions" by Rob Chilson: This is a story about conservatism in life, about a farmer staying on his farm and resisting change, and about nostalgia, but I liked it much better than I normally like stories with those themes. It's set against a future world in which climate change is making life increasingly untenable. Humans are migrating into space colonies of various types, but Jacob refuses. This frustrates some parts of the family who want a piece of the substantial cash-out he's being offered for his farm, which of course makes Jacob even more stubborn. It's more of an elegy than a story, but I think it captures a particular stubborn mood, and a conscious decision to go with what one knows even if it doesn't have a long future, quite well. (7) "The Ants of Flanders" by Robert Reed: This is the novella of the issue, and, as you might expect from the author, it's thoughtful, meaty, and satisfying. At the start of the book, the planet is visited by an extraterrestrial ship (or ships it's not entirely clear at first). One of the people near one landing is Bloch, a huge teenager who has an odd lack of natural fear. He stays near the center of the story as Reed slowly develops a cosmology and a galactic political background that makes it clear humans may be incidental to everything that's happening. I liked this. It's a touch depressing in spots, and Bloch is a strange protagonist, but the cosmology is not the normal SF background and sparks some thoughts about how a status quo would be maintained by powers that don't care much about individual lives. The interlude with the leopard is nicely done, even if its significance is inobvious at first. (7) "Hair" by Joan Aiken: This is one of those weird Gothic horror stories about creepy families and half-explained supernatural events that some people love and that do nothing for me. (3) "The Witch of Corinth" by Steven Saylor: This is straight historical fantasy, featuring a Roman and his Greek tutor (heroes, apparently, of a series of historical mysteries) visiting the ruins of Corinth and encountering some bloody and dangerous local conflicts. It's slow and atmospheric, carried along by good characterization and description of ruins. It's not that much of a mystery the characters don't figure things out as much as stick around until the answer becomes obvious but it kept me entertained throughout a sizable story. Numerous elements of the story appear to be fantasy and then get other explanations, but there is a fantasy twist to the ending. (6) "Sir Morgravain Speaks of Night Dragons and Other Things" by Richard Bowes: This odd story is set among the knights of King Arthur on Avalon, where they sleep (mostly), awaiting their call to aid Britain again. Most of the story is told as one-sided dialogue from Morgravain, interspersed with some italic narration. Again, not much of a plot; the story, as such, is figuring out what Morgravain is doing and the point of his interactions with the other knights. I thought it was slight and oddly pointless, but I may have just missed the point. (4) "Someone Like You" by Michael Alexander: A time travel story, but one that's less about time travel per se than about examining and speculating about the alternate paths childhood could take and whether those changes produce different people. It takes some time to figure out what's going on, during which Alexander fills in the protagonist's past and the murder mystery that drives the tale. The time travel mechanism is blatantly hand-waved, making this more of a fantasy than an SF story, which matches the emphasis on emotion and psychology. It's not a bad story, and I think I see where the author was going with the slowly-constructed central conflict, but I still found it hard to take the conflict that seriously. One of the problems with time travel is that undermining of causality also undermines finality of decisions and consequences in ways that can rob stories of their punch. (6) "The Ramshead Algorithm" by KJ Kabza: The first-person protagonist is a well-respected and experienced fixer in a world of chaos and dimensional connection, a world with physics and inhabitants very much unlike ours. But the story doesn't spend much time there; his connection to his home earth is threatened, and he returns to try to stabilize it, which leads to the reader discovering that his family considers him a worthless appendage on a wealthy business family whose sole purpose in life is to stay out of their way. And his portal is rooted in a hedge maze that his father intends to demolish. This is one of those stories that gets more interestingly complex the deeper one gets into it. Ramshead's family is badly screwed up along multiple axes, but not without some hope of redemption. He's desperate and ineffective in his home universe, but more confident and capable when it comes to dealing with dimensional portal problems (although he still seems very young and relies on tools given to him by others). And there's always more going on than it first appears, and not as few obvious villains as it first appears. Good stuff, although I would have liked to understand more about Ramshead's world. (7) Rating: 7 out of 10

7 November 2013

Matt Zimmerman: Management: a rant

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. -Inigo Montoya
Having worked in full-time management positions for some years now, I am increasingly convinced that management is widely misunderstood as a role, as a discipline and as a field, and that this makes a lot of lives more difficult and stressful than necessary. It is the subject of much speculation and misbelief, and I ve chosen a few of my favorite examples to deconstruct here. Misbelief #1: management is what managers do I ve noticed a trend among a certain class of companies, whose employees will tell anyone who will listen that there is no management in their organization, they never plan to have any, and neither should you. I think these statements are respectively a lie, a na ve belief, and a piece of bad advice. Usually, these companies are just a few years old and relatively small, most of the people in the company have been there for less than a year, and the speaker is trying to persuade us what a unique and innovative company they work for because nobody there is a manager . They invariably have not read The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Management is the practice of enabling people to effectively cooperate. A manager is someone whose job is to do that. It s that simple. It usually involves tasks such as sharing information, agreeing on a course of action, dividing up work, and figuring out what to do when there s a problem. They re things that every team needs to do, whether anyone is designated a manager or not. Teams can function without managers, but they can t function properly without management. Someone (or everyone) has to do the work to make cooperation possible. Modern management is a specialized discipline, which draws on a broad range of skills in communication, psychology, empathy, problem-solving, leadership, and more. These skills aren t unique to managers, but it often makes sense to designate certain people to do more of the management work, on behalf of the team. By devoting more of their time and attention to it, they free other members of the team to focus on other tasks. They can act as a coordinator to help the team stay in sync, and by focusing on this job, they may be able to do a better job of it, and acquire a higher level of skill through practice and study. But it remains an inherently collaborative practice. Misbelief #2: management is about telling people what to do There are many different varieties of management, each of which is oriented toward a particular type of team or organization. Factories are managed differently from design studios, large companies are managed differently from small companies, and every team has its own distinct management style which arises from the unique group of people involved. Some managers are specialists in a particular type of management, while others are more generalists. The telling people what to do style of management is called command and control . It s characterized by authority, hierarchy, and strict adherence to protocol. It s widely employed by military organizations, and by the managers we see in television and film. It has some advantages and disadvantages, which I won t discuss here. My point is that it is just one example, but this example is used to represent the general concept of management. Self-organization, where no one in particular is responsible for group decisions, is another, quite different, style of management. Small, self-organizing teams are capable of amazing feats of productivity. They re less difficult to manage because they re comparatively simple, and so simple tools and techniques work well. Everyone can be fully aware of what everyone else is doing, and new information propagates quickly throughout the team. But as the team or organization grows, it will often outgrow this way of working, and needs to adapt. There is no single management approach which works universally well. Misbelief #3: management is a promotion You know the story. When an employee is successful within their area of expertise, someone will eventually offer them a management role as a reward for their good work. This is utter nonsense. Management is not a promotion: it s a career change. It means starting over as a beginner in a new discipline and learning from the ground up. Domain expertise is important, as a manager needs to understand the work of the other people on their team, but it is no longer paramount. The team, the human system, becomes their focus. When organizations fail to provide career advancement within a discipline, people may turn to management as the only way to get promoted , only to discover that they are completely unprepared for this new field, and often their new job when they realize what they ve gotten into. If someone were promoted from a position as a financial analyst to a new job as a biochemist with no training or expertise, we would probably find this bizarre. But this is analogous to what happens to new managers all the time, and has become almost standard practice in many organizations and industries. So what? Management is misunderstood. So are science, engineering, and many other fields. What does it matter?
People leave managers not companies in the end, turnover is mostly a manager issue, - Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman, First, Break All the Rules
This mythology leads to massive organizational dysfunction, making it harder for everyone to do their jobs. It virtually guarantees incompetent management, which is a scourge on anyone who is exposed to it. It ruins days, weeks, jobs and careers. It leads talented people to leave companies, and it drives them out of their chosen professions. I recommend that we stop denigrating and ignoring management, and start doing a better job of it.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Weblate 1.8

Weblate 1.8 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in registration process where you can now use many third party services. Full list of changes for 1.8:
  • Please check manual for upgrade instructions.
  • Nicer listing of project summary.
  • Better visible options for sharing.
  • More control over anonymous users privileges.
  • Supports login using third party services, check manual for more details.
  • Users can login by email instead of username.
  • Documentation improvements.
  • Improved source strings review.
  • Searching across all units.
  • Better tracking of source strings.
  • Captcha protection for registration.
You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery. Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others. If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!

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