Expiring my old 1024 bit GPG key Today I have expired my old 1024 bit GPG, 0xAC583520, ten years and a bit after creating it, as part of my journey to become a DD. Since 2010 I've been using 0x069AAA1C instead, but up until now I haven't had done anything about the old key, also because revoking a GPG key is a permanent and unrevocable action. Thanks to an unnamed friend in Berlin who gave me the idea I can expire a key too, which basically has the same effect, except that is's possible to undo...

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

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

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

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

Error org.freedesktop.UPower.GeneralError: not authorized

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

exec ck-launch-session i3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edit: direct link to the pump.io post

For ages I've been advocating for the dissolution of the tech-ctte, one of the biggest bugs in the Constitution. However, for the longest time I was unable to suggest a suitable replacement; there will always be people whose characters are so flawed that they will appeal to authority as a matter of first recourse, and those people need some sort of forum within which to waste time. Then the circus of #727708 came about, possibly the only useful thing the tech-ctte has ever done. Suddenly it became clear to me what would be a drastic improvement: replace the entire shitshow with a close analog of the Gowachin legal system from Frank Herbert's ConSentiency universe. Sure, it wouldn't fix the structural problems of a self-selecting group, or the related problem of the wider community not understanding such basic concepts as nomocracy, conflicts of interest, separation of duties, separation of powers, accountability, responsibility, independence, oversight, due diligence, corruption, transparency, and egomania, but it would still be better in nearly every aspect. Or maybe term-limit band-aids will magically fix everything.

Jebediah boarded the airplane. It was a Bombardier CRJ900 with two turbofan jet engines. Run by SPARK, a subset of Ada. He sat down in his assigned seat and listened to the purser inform him that he was free to use his phone door-to-door on all Delta Connection flights. As long as the Airplane Mode was switched on. Jebediah knew that this was why Delta owned 49% of Virgin Atlantic. On the plane ride, a woman in too much makeup asked Jebediah to get the man next to him so she could borrow his copy of the Economist. The man said she could keep it and that it was old. He had stubby little fingers. She was foreign. At Terminal 2, they passed by Kids on the Fly, an exhibit of the Chicago Children's Museum at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. A play area. Jebediah thought of Dennis. The Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority was disrupted by weekend construction, so they had to take a small detour through Wicker Park. Wicker Park is a neighborhood. In Chicago. Jebediah looked at Glazed & Infused Doughnuts. He wondered if they made doughnuts there. Because of the meeting, he knocked someone off a Divvy bike and pedaled it to the Loop. The Berghoff was opened in 1898 by Herman Joseph Berghoff. Once he got to the Berghoff, he got a table for seven on the west wall. He eyed the electrical outlet and groaned. He had brought 3 cigarette lighter adapters with him, but nothing to plug into an AC outlet. How would he charge his device? An older gentleman came in. And greeted him. Hello, I'm Detective Chief Inspector Detweiler. Did you bring the evidence? Said the man. Jebediah coughed and said that he had to go downstairs. He went downstairs and looked at the doors. He breathed a sigh of relief. Seeing the word washroom in print reminded him of his home state of Canada. Back at the table he opened a bag, glared angrily at a cigarette lighter adapter, and pulled out a Palm m125. Running Palm OS 4.0. He noticed a third person at the table. It was the ghost of Bob Ross. , said the ghost of Bob Ross. It was good for him to communicate telepathically with Sarah Palin. This has eight megabytes of RAM, Jebediah informed the newcomer. Bob Ross's ghost right-clicked on his face and rated him one star. Jebediah looked angrily at the AC outlet and fidgeted with two of his cigarette lighter adapters. DCI Detweiler said, I had a Handspring Visor Deluxe, and pulled out a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 eight-inch Android-based tablet computer running the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system by Google. This also has eight megabytes of RAM, he continued. As you requested, I brought the video of your nemesis at the Robie House. Jebediah stared at the tablet. He could see a compressed video file, compressed with NetBSD compression and GNU encryption. It was on the tablet. Some bridges you just don't cross, he hissed. Meanwhile, in Gloucestershire, someone who looked suspiciously like Bobby Rainsbury opened up a MacBook Air and typed in a three-digit passcode. Across the street a wall safe slid out of the wall. And dropped onto someone's head. She closed the laptop. And went to Dumfries. Not far from the fallen safe, a group of men held a discussion. FBI: Why are we here on this junket? CIA: Where are we? DIA: We're here. JIA: This is confusing. NSA: I have to get back to that place in Germany where I don't work. ATF: We're talking about giant robots here, people. EPA: Huh? Part 2 AUD:USD 1.0645 donuts:dozen 12 Gold $1318.60 Giant robot spiders fought each other in a supermarket parking lot. Detective Seabiscuit sucked on a throat lozenge. Who are you again? he asked the toll-booth operator. I said my name is Rogery Sterling, replied the toll-booth operator. Rajry what? I said my name is Rogery Sterling, replied the toll-booth operator. Again. Where am I? Look, I'm telling you that that murder you're investigating was caused by software bugs in the software. Are we on a boat? Look at the diagram. This agency paid money to introduce, quite deliberately, weaknesses in the security of this library, through this company here, and this company here. Library, oh no. I have overdue fees. And they're running a PR campaign to increase use of this library. Saying that the competing options are inferior. But don't worry, they're trying to undermine those too. Detective Seabiscuit wasn't listening. He had just remembered that he needed to stop by the Robie House.

And again, another KDE-AppStream post If you want to know more about AppStream metadata and why adding it to your project is a good idea, you might be interested in this blogpost (and several previous ones I wrote). Originally, my plan was to directly push metadata to most KDE projects. The problem is that there is no way to reach all maintainers and have them opt-out for getting metadata pushed to their repositories. There is also no technical policy for a KDE project, since KDE is really only about the community right now, and there are no technical criteria a project under the KDE umbrella has to fulfill (at least to my knowledge, in theory, even GTK+ projects are perfectly fine within KDE). Since I feel very uncomfortable in touching other people s repositories without sending them a note first, I think the best way forward is an opt-in approach. So, if you want your KDE project to ship metadata, follow these simple steps: 1. Check if there already is metadata for your project That s right we already have some metadata available. Checkout the kde-appstream-metadata-templates repository at Github. You can take the XML file from there, if you want. Just make sure that there are no invalid tags in the description field (no <a/> nodes allowed, for example the content is not HTML!), check if you have an SPDX-compliant <project_license/> tag, check if the provided public interfaces in the <provides/> tag match your project and also test if the URLs work. Then you can copy the modified AppStream metadata to your project. 2. Write new metadata How to write new metadata is described in detail at this TechBase Wiki page. Just follow the instructions. In case you need help or want me to push the metadata to your project if you don t have the time, you can also write me an email: matthias [ AT ] tenstral . net or alternatively file a bug against the Github project linked above. Don t forget to have CMake install your shiny new metadata into /usr/share/appdata/. All metadata you add to your project will automatically get translated by the KDE l10n scripts, no further action is required. So far, projects like Ark, K3b and Calligra are shipping metadata, and the number of AppStream-aware projects in KDE is growing constantly, which greatly improves their visibility in software centers, and will help distributions a lot in organizing installed software. If you have further questions, please ask! .-)

I m writing this in the lunch break of TFP in Soesterberg. The invited talk this morning was by Geoffrey Mainland, and he talked about the difficulties of (informal) reasoning about performance in high-level languages like Haskell, especially with fancy stuff in the compiler like fusion. So I couldn t help but think about a (very small) help here. Consider the the two very similar expressions foldl (+) 0 [0..1000] and foldr (+) 0 [0..1000]. Which of these fuse away the list? Hopefully both, but hard to predict. So with my list-fusion-probe library, you can write

import Data.List.Fusion.Probe (fuseThis)
main = print $ foldr (+) 0 (fuseThis [0..1001])

and find out. If you compile this (with -O!), it will print

500500

If you change the foldr to foldl, it will print

Test: fuseThis: List did not fuse

So you can see that the function fuseThis :: [a] -> [a] does nothing if the list gets fused away, but causes a run-time error if not. It allows you to annotate your code with your assumptions of list fusion, and get shouted at if your assumptions are wrong. It wouldn t be hard to have the compiler give a warning or error message at compile time; we d just need to introduce a special function abortCompilation that, when found in the code during compilation, does just that. Note that you ll have trouble reproducing the above in GHC HEAD, where foldl does fuse (which is what I m going to talk about tomorrow here).

5213. 5213. Silence. Train office to train 5213. More silence. Train office to train 5213. Is there an emergency? At this point, I had a decision to make. Jacob s voice was sounding a little vexed over the radio he was using to talk to me from the next room. Do I answer it, even though he had told me I was a different train number? I decided yes. So I said into my radio, What do you need, train office? An exasperated sigh came over my radio. DAD! You are train 51. If I call a different train, DO NOT ANSWER! Well. I guess now I know. Jacob has been having a lot of fun with radios lately. His favorite game is to pretend to be a train dispatcher. He ll tell me, Laura, or Oliver where to go, what track to take, what passengers to pick up, or anything else he can come up with. Sometimes one radio isn t enough he may even have two radios clipped to him in various places. We play radio hide and seek (where you use radios to give hints or tell people when you re ready to be found). We play train office. We use radios to communicate across the room sometimes, even. Pretty amazing to see him doing that. He s taken an interest in my amateur radios, too. He s been practicing under close supervision, of course how to use them, and how to properly give his callsign on the air. The boy is a natural. It s fun to watch him dive into something like that and enjoy it so much!

I managed to spend a few hours doing Debian stuff again today, which was great. Today I learned about blhc, which is sadly not mentioned in the wiki page on hardening, which I always refer to. It turns out that it is mentioned in the walkthrough wiki page linked off it though. I'd not read that page until today. Many thanks to Samuel Bronson on IRC for pointing out the tool to me. Initially I didn't think the tool told me anything I didn't already know, but then I realised it was saying that the upstream Makefile wasn't passing in $(CPPFLAGS) and $(LDFLAGS) when it invoked the compiler. Know that I know all of that, the build warning also mentioned in the PTS made a whole lot more sense. Definitely a case of "today I learned..." So I made a simple patch to the upstream Makefile.in and simpleproxy is now all appropriately hardened. I'm very happy about that, as it was annoying me that it wasn't Lintian-clean. I was able to use the same technique to similarly fix up sma. It's somewhat entertaining when you maintain a package for almost 7 years, and the upstream homepage changes from being the software author's website to what appears to be erotic fiction advertising for London escorts... That made for some entertaining reading this morning. I've now managed to give all my packages a spring clean. I might do another pass and convert them all to debhelper 9 as a way of procrastinating before I touch isc-dhcp.

I ve been playing with qemu-user-static a bit to create a set of porterboxes for my Deb-o-Matic build farm. After reading gregoa s post on how to create cross-chroot with qemu-debootstrap, I was immediately able to create armel, armhf and powerpc boxes with very little efforts. I tried to extend the number of porterboxes available by adding mips* and s390x, in order to have all the Linux-based architectures supported in Jessie, but with no luck. Here s a summary of my attempts. MIPS*
Chroot creation fails under both mips and mipsel trying to configure libuuid1. The problem is due to the fact libuuid1 s postinst script calls groupadd and useradd. Those two utilities rely on NETLINK sockets, which apparently are not handled by QEMU at the moment. I raised the question upstream to see whether it is possible to solve this problem. s390x
Chroot creation used to fail with a SIGSEGV. This particular bug has been fixed recently, but it seems it s not enough to have a working chroot. It fails with some gzip errors, probably because some portions of dpkg-deb are not fully covered by qemu-s390x-static. Preparing to unpack .../base-files_7.3_s390x.deb ...
Unpacking base-files (7.3) ...
dpkg-deb (subprocess): decompressing archive member: internal gzip read error: '<fd:5>: incorrect data check'
/bin/tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
/bin/tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
/bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess tar returned error exit status 2
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/base-passwd_3.5.33_s390x.deb (--install):
subprocess dpkg-deb --control returned error exit status 2

At one particular customer, increasing storage needs require that we add a large file server which should be as fast as possible. In that context, I'm currently evaluating using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD ("Debian," from now on) on ZFS. Not being hampered by a large degree of knowledge on the subject, here's a blog post with things I've learned so far. For context, the system on which we'll be installing will have 64 gigs of RAM, about two dozen SAS disks connected to a RAID controller of which I'm reasonably sure (though not 100% so) that it supports JBOD mode, and a PCIe-attached solid state storage device of several terabytes. If it turns out the RAID controller doesn't support JBOD mode, I'll probably create as many RAID0 devices as possible and hand those over to ZFS as "hard disks", instead; this wouldn't be an ideal solution, but I don't have much of a choice of hard disk attachment, unfortunately. That being said, the system on which I'm testing right now is the latest incantation of samba, an HP ProLiant ML115 server. A system with far more modest hardware specifications, it has 2G of RAM (which isn't really enough for ZFS), a single 160G SATA hard disk, and a dual-core AMD processor of about half a decade ago. And oh yes, no SSD. So for evaluating ZFS performance it's not ideal, but for evaluating Debian and ZFS features, it will do. Anyway, what I've found so far on samba:

• partman-zfs (that is, the ZFS support in the installer) works, but could use some improvements.
  • It allows me to create a system that boots off a ZFS filesystem, but does not allow me to create nested ZFS filesystems; i.e., if I create a ZFS filesystem for / and one for /home, the /home filesystem won't be a child of the / filesystem, which would be the way you'd usually set this up. Workaround: "zfs rename".
  • I can't set random ZFS options at filesystem creation time. I would like to be able to do things like set the "compression" and/or the "dedup" property for certain filesystems, but that isn't possible from the installer. Workaround: create the filesystem layout in partman, and when choosing the "finish partitioning and continue" option, switch to a shell and issue "zfs set" commands to change things. You'll miss the first few files that way, but this shouldn't matter all that much.
  Given that I've only got one hard disk in this machine, I can't test whether partman-zfs supports many options for creating vdevs. I'll have to see whether that's the case when the actual server arrives.
• ZFS has a "sharenfs" property that's supposed to transparently and automatically share filesystems via NFS. However, this isn't supported in Debian, with the zfs binary issueing a warning to that extent. Digging a bit deeper in how things work, people have told me that setting the "sharenfs" property should simply produce a file "/etc/zfs/exports" that I can pass on to mountd, which should be restarted after every change to that file. I'm not sure why the zfs binary doesn't just do that; after all, it's perfectly possible to hand two exports configuration files to the FreeBSD mountd binary...
• Somewhat disappointingly, NFSv4 is not supported on Debian (it is on vanilla FreeBSD, but a necessary component for NFSv4, nfsuserd, isn't packaged). For my environment, this isn't a showstopper, but it would've been nice had this worked.
• The "sharesmb" property, which also exists, seems to be not supported at all. But that's okay, the environment in which we're working doesn't need SMB, only NFS.
• ZFS seems to have no soft quota, only hard quota. Workaround, valid for our environment (but not necessarily for everyone's environment): use reservations (plus daily warning mails) in place of soft quota, and place the ZFS quota on the level of what would've been the hard quota on ext4 (might be a little higher than what we use on the current fileserver).

We'll see what else I learn.

AAAAHHH! LOOK OUT! A SHARK! Such were the cries a few first graders raised Monday. Laura and I had gone to school to eat lunch with Jacob this was his last week of first grade. We stayed for recess after lunch, and Jacob and his friend told us to pretend to be a shark lurking underneath the bridges and things of the playground. I was told that adults are too old to climb up here. So Laura and I started chasing Jacob and his friend around the playground equipment. And, much to their delight, they were usually able to evade us. And, to their even greater delight, sometimes I could reach up and brush a shoe or leg. Pretty soon Laura had enough of the game, but about then other kids started to notice what was going on. Shark-taunting began ( nana-booboo! ), and pretty soon half a dozen first-graders were running away from the shark! Eventually, it was time to go in, and it had been a great time. Jacob had been proud to have Laura and me there to eat lunch with him. He got to be the first in his class to go to lunch, happily slipping into the tour guide role he loves. Sometimes he would tell us in exacting detail what would happen. Other times, I d ask something like how will we know when lunch is over, and he d get a sly smile and say, You will see! The next day was Jacob s last at school, and Oliver had also recently finished preschool. So Laura and I planned a graduation party . We came up with some ideas of things they might like to do, and let them choose. Thankfully they both agreed on a choice: water slide. My parents gave them water slides one time, and we got one out, hooked it up to the hose, and let them have fun. And boy, did they ever! And after the better part of an hour running with delight on the water slide, they decided to turn another slide into a water slide. So I helped them rig up a hose on our slide, and they d slide down it, and splash into a giant mud puddle at the bottom. Or, as the case may be, just stand in the mud, enjoying it. We then went out to eat at one of their favorite restaurants and even had time to play in a park. Yes, a wonderful celebration. All four of us were wearing smiles that day. It reminded me of Jacob s school year, but also of the past year it was about a year ago that Jacob and Oliver first had the chance to really meet Laura. I have many photos and stories from the past year that I ll be sharing in the next little while. What an incredible year it has been!

Somebody recent got in touch offering to mail me a Cubox, in exchange for me experimenting with it and writing about it. In the past I've written book reviews in exchange for receiving free copies, and while I don't want to make a habit of it I don't see a problem providing I'm up-front and honest. So, what is the cubox-i? It's another one of those "small computers", roughly similar to the Raspberry Pi, but with slightly different hardware, and a really neat little case design, as the name suggests it just looks like a tiny two inch cube, only spoiled by the mass of cabling attached to the back. Me? I was cheeky and said I'd have no use for one, unless it was the fancy-model. The hardware comes in 4 different versions, which you can read about on the Cubox-i product page. Ignoring the smaller/cheaper models the fancy version is the CuBox-i4Pro, and this differentiates itself from the Rasberry Pi:

• It has built in WiFi support.
• It has two USB ports, and a SATA port too.
• It has a built in infrared receiver/transmitter.
• The onboard NIC is 1Gb - though limited to 400Mb or so due to bus-constraints, certainly faster than the Pi.
• The on-board storage is micro SD.
• It looks lovely.

I had two uses for this toy; the first was to be a random NAS-box hosting local backups, the second was to be a media-center. In the past I used a Rasberry PI as a media-box, but unfortunately performance was appalling, largely because of the low-spead of the USB WiFi dongle I bought. The video playback would stall at times, even though the hardware could display full HD-output, the network constraints seemed to be a limiting factor. In the end I abandoned it and these days use it sporadically for emulation, and little else. I've been meaning to do something more interesting with it, but never quite got round to it. By contrast the Cubox-i is wonderful at being a media-box. I've exported some shares of MP4/AVI files from my desktop host, via NFS, then downloaded a binary image of the geexbox (XBMC) distribution which I installed onto the MicroSD card via dd. The box boots in about seven seconds, was configured to use WiFi (via "Programs Settings"), and was streaming media in less than two minutes. There is a Debian disitribution available for download from the cubox-i wiki, but sadly it is an ancient snapshot of Jessie from December last year. It did install, but there was no WiFi out of the box. Gunnar Wolf wrote about bootstrapping an image from sources, rather than using a binary snapshot. He's kindly shared the resulting image he built, but again sadly no WiFi support, so for the moment I'm just enjoying the media-suport. In the future I need to decide what to do:

• Keep the Cubox-i as a media box, using the PI for backup-hosting.
• Avoid having two devices and lose media-streaming.

I also need to look at running Pure Debian, for obvious reasons, but if I can't use WiFi the machine is no good to me. (The TV is in a different room to the office which contains our Linux hosts.) Either way I've not been excited about new hardware for a while, not since I bought a Logitech Squeezebox, and we're both enjoying watching media on the TV.

Hello, My name is Floris (FlowRiser) and during GSoC I will be working at the project Getting Muon ready . I am guided by two awesome mentors: Sune Vuorela (svuorela) and Aleix Pol (apol). Essentially what we are trying to accomplish is not only port Muon to Debian, but also make it part of Debian; making users that use and love Debian confortable with it. Some of our goals are: integrating apt-listbugs into muon, making installing updates easier and contributing to both KDE and Debian at the same time. The exact plan (week by week), subject to change is here: https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/StudentApplications/FlorisAndreiStoicaMarcu. This week, we focused on getting the core functionality of Muon for Debian; Browsing packages, installing/updating, getting update notifications; Today I will also be making some packaging work, so that other people can begin testing Muon. The exact changes so far:
*changes to the .desktop files parsing, so you can browse packages as expected
*changes to the way more than one backend interract
*created a new releasechecker script for future use Plans for next week include:
*fixing kdesudo use
*fixing use of specific backend resources Cheers,
Floris.

This post is mostly a sum-up of the Wikipedia page History of Australia, with some content taken from History of the British Empire. Both texts are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. I do not seem to be able to learn about a new topic without taking notes: in this case I have decided to publish my work, hoping that someone will find it useful. Some very important themes such as the Gold Rush and Australian History during the World Wars have been impudently ignored.

On May 21st 2014, the two Mikes (Gabriel DePaulo) from the X2Go core developer team were interviewed about X2Go by the famous Randal L. Schwartz (merlyn) and equally famous Randi Harper (freebsdgirl) on the FLOSS Weekly Netcast [1]. If you're having trouble watching the embedded video on that page, try one of the below alternatives: HD Video [2]
SD Video, large [3]
SD Video, small [4]
Audio only [5] light+love,
Mike [1] http://twit.tv/floss295 read more

I was talking about scripting languages at a table at linuxcon. I was probably too negative about perl and too in love with C++ for scripting tasks. Martin Pauley at the table was very much for perl but then he has his affiliation and experience with perl. I too am too affiliated with scripting with C++. I wrote binfmtc, although I don't know if anybody other than me is using it seriously.