A new bug-fix release release 0.4.1 of RProtoBuf, is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides GNU R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects. Murray once more shouldered most of the actual burden and fixed a number of issues detailed below.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.1 (2014-03-25)

• Document and add a test for the deprecated group functionality.
• Add a CITATION file pointing to our arXiv.org preprint.
• Fix a bug in the show method for EnumDescriptor types.
• Import all top-level enums from imported .proto files.
• Removed duplicate enum value type from the unit tests that caused problems with the most recent libprotobuf-2.5. (without option allow_alias).

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. More information is at the RProtoBuf page which has a draft package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette and a unit test summary vignette. Questions, comments etc should go to the rprotobuf mailing list off the RProtoBuf page at R-Forge.

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

And done! It took me just 8 months to do this entire book project around Python. From the first day I started writing to today, where I finally publish and sell almost entirely myself this book. I'm really proud of what I've achieved so far, as this was something totally new to me. Doing all of that has been a great adventure, and I'll promise I'll write something about that later on. A making of. For now, you can enjoy reading the book and learn a bit more about Python. I really hope it'll help you bring your Python-fu to a new level, and help you build great projects! Go check it out, and since this is first day of sale, enjoy 20% off by using the offer code THGTP20.

A quick roundup of things I made during the last months, following tutorials here and there. 1: a soft bunny more or less based on this one 2: skelly man! You can find pattern and instructions on Chez Beeper Bebe's blog 3: bibs: the embroidered one is based on this pattern by Charlotte Lyons on SouleMama's blog, the other re-uses the same pattern but add a bird applique instead. 1, 4: my first try with the beautiful Weekender Bag ended with something else entirely: apparently, where euclidean geometry principles apply, cutting a piece of fabric 10 cm smaller will result in a bag 10 cm smaller!
Go figure! Fhtang! I'm happy anyway with the final result, but it resembles more a tote bag than a weekender one. I then made also a successful Weekender, but haven't taken a pic yet. If you try that pattern, you may find this blogpost helpful. 2: This is my try at copycatting this model without a pattern and didn't end very well.
However, a couple lessons learned:

• you don't improvise armholes and sleeves: you have to carefully plan them. I know this now, but at the time I was just a kid with a crazy dream ;)
• a-line dresses with straight necklines are definitely not meant for my body type. no matter how cute they look on someone else.
• I really should hack my mannequin, so to have it of my actual size. Or I will continue sew clothes fitting it, and not me.

3: Blouse with knit-stretchy stuff! (You love me when I speak technical, don't you?)
I did that without pattern, mostly using a similar top I have as inspiration/guide

And today from our ever-growing collection of what the fuck is wrong with you people?!... This is wrong on so many levels, I can't even begin to describe it. Sadly, it seems that this will get funded. And if it does not, technology will only become cheaper over time...

Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been changed since it was created? Or, did you ever need to document that a given document was received at some point in time, like some archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it was received? The problem in these settings is to remove the need to trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past. A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document looked a given way. Such notarius service have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is called a trusted timestamping service. The Internet Engineering Task Force standardised how such service could work a few years ago as RFC 3161. The mechanism is simple. Create a hash of the file in question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the signed hash + timestamp. Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and checking the signature using the trusted third party public key. There are several commercial services around providing such timestamping. A quick search for "rfc 3161 service" pointed me to at least DigiStamp, Quo Vadis, Global Sign and Global Trust Finder. The system work as long as the private key of the trusted third party is not compromised. But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted timestamp services available for everyone. I've been looking for one for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at Deutches Forschungsnetz mentioned in a blog by David M ller. I then found a good recipe on how to use the service over at the University of Greifswald. The OpenSSL library contain both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service. See the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details. The following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
cafile=chain.txt
if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
    wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
fi
openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert   tee "$reqfile" \
      /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
base64 < "$resfile"
rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"

The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details about the signature to STDERR. Note that due to a bug in the tsget script, you might need to modify the included script and remove the last line. Or just write your own HTTP uploader using curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been changed. But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services. Perhaps something for Uninett or my work place the University of Oslo to set up?

I ve just been given an Armourdillo Hybrid case for the Nexus 5 [1] to review. The above pictures show the back of the case, the front of the case, the stand, and the front of the case with the screen blank. When I first photographed the case the camera focused on a reflection of the window, I include that picture for amusement and to demonstrate how reflective the phone screen is. This case is very hard, the green plastic is the soft inner layer which is still harder than the plastic in a typical gel case . The black part is polycarbonate which is very hard and also a little slippery. The case is designed with lots of bumps for grip (a little like the sole of a running shoe) so it s not likely to slip out of your hand. But the polycarbonate slides easily on plastic surfaces such as the dash of a car. It s fortunate that modern cars have lots of cup holders that can be used for holding a phone. I haven t dropped the phone since getting the new case, but I expect that the combination of a hard outer shell and a slightly softer inner shell (to cushion the impact) will protect it well. All the edges of the case extend above the screen so dropping the phone face down on a hard flat surface shouldn t cause any damage. The black part has a stand for propping the phone on it s side to watch a movie. The stand is very solid and is in the ideal position for use on soft surfaces such as a doona or pillow for watching TV in bed. Appearance This case is mostly designed to protect the phone and the bumps that are used for grip detract from the appearance IMHO. I think that the Ringke Fusion case for my Nexus 4 [2] looks much better, it s a trade-off between appearance and functionality. My main criteria for this case were good protection (better than a gel case) and small size (not one of the heavy waterproof cases). It was a bonus to get a green case for the Enlightened team in Ingress. NB Armourdillo also offers a blue case for the Resistance team in Ingress as well as other colors. MobileZap also have a number of other cases for the Nexus 5 [3].

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/k8sy7ry
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/08/13/nexus-4-ringke-fusion-case/
• [3] http://www.mobilezap.com.au/34606/google/nexus-5/covers.htm

There was quite the torrential downpour overnight. It woke me up, and it woke Zoe up too, and at about 1:45am she ended up in bed with me. I think she managed to invent a new baby sleep position, where she was on my pillow, perpendicular to me along the bed head, and had somehow ejected the pillow that was on her side of the bed. We got up, with a slow start, and the weather was still looking a bit dicey, so Zoe wanted to go to Kindergarten by car. That actually meant we were the first ones there, because I'd been working to a timetable of leaving home by bike. One of the chickens was starting to hatch (and subsequently hatched around noon) so that was exciting. Funnily enough, Zoe had spent all morning telling me how she didn't want to go to Kindergarten, but by the time we got there, she didn't seem to mind being there all that much. After I got home from Kindergarten, I biked down to Bulimba to go to the bank to finalise opening my business bank accounts. I've since discovered that one can't do much without an ABN, I can't even get a cheque book, so I've sicked my accountant on that one for me. I got stuck into my US taxes some more today, and made a very satisfactory amount of progress on them. I think I should be able to finish them off in the next session I get to work on them. I felt like getting out of the house after that. It was looking quite like rain again, making picking up Zoe by bike out, so I ran a few errands in the car before getting to Kindergarten quite early. Zoe was fast asleep, but I let her have a long, slow wake up, and that made our departure much easier. She got to have a little hold of one of the baby chicks before we left. Today I learned that baby chicks smell absolutely divine. We got home, and Zoe did some self-directed craft for a bit, and then wanted to play hide and seek, so we did that and finally got around to looking at all of the Woolworths DreamWorks Heroes cards she's been collecting. I was disappointed to discover there's only a single card per pack, so that's going to mean I have to spend at least $840 on groceries, excluding duplicates, before we get all of them. I'm glad the checkout operators aren't sticking to the rules and are handing them out a little more generously than that. After that, we did a bit more rough and tumble play, and then it was time to start making dinner, so Zoe watched a DVD. We got dinner out of the way relatively early, so I practiced plaiting her hair (I've surprised myself with the half-decent job I can do) and then did bath time and bed time. Bed time was a little protracted (she didn't like her bedroom and wanted to sleep in my bed) but otherwise seems to have gone smoothly.

I am happy to announce the release of OASIS v0.4.3. OASIS is a tool to help OCaml developers to integrate configure, build and install systems in their projects. It should help to create standard entry points in the source code build system, allowing external tools to analyse projects easily. This tool is freely inspired by Cabal which is the same kind of tool for Haskell. You can find the new release here and the changelog here. More information about OASIS in general on the OASIS website. Here is a quick summary of the important changes:

• Added -remove switch to the setup-clean subcommand designed to remove unaltered generated files completely, rather than simply emptying their OASIS section.
• Translate path of ocamlfind on Windows to be bash/win32 friendly.
• Description is now parsed in a more structured text (para/verbatim).

Features:

• stdfiles_markdown (alpha): set default extension of StdFiles (AUTHORS, INSTALL, README) tp be '.md'. Use markdown syntax for standard files. Use comments that hides OASIS section and digest. This feature should help direct publishing on GitHub.
• disable_oasis_section (alpha): it allows DisableOASISSection to be specified in the package with a list of expandable filenames given. Any generated file specified in this list doesn't get an OASIS section digest or comment headers and footers and is therefore regenerated each time oasis setup is run (and any changes made are lost). This feature is mainly intended for use with StdFiles so that, for example, INSTALL.txt and AUTHORS.txt (which often won't be modified) can have the extra comment lines removed.
• compiled_setup_ml (alpha): allow to precompile setup.ml to speedup.

This new version closes 4 bugs, mostly related to parsing of _oasis. It also includes a lot of refactoring to improve the overall quality of OASIS code base. The big project for the next release will be to setup a Windows host for regular build and test on this platform. I plan to use WODI for this setup. I would like to thanks again the contributor for this release: David Allsopp, Martin Keegan and Jacques-Pascal Deplaix. Their help is greatly appreciated.

mk-configure is a project which tries to be autotools done right. Instead of supporting an exceedingly large number of platforms, modern and ancient, at costs of generated unreadable multi-kilobyte shell scripts, mk-configure aims at better support of less platforms, but those which are really in use today. One of the main differences of this project is that it avoids code generation as much as possible. The author of mk-configure, Aleksey Cheusov, a NetBSD hacker from Belarus, uses NetBSD make (bmake) and shell script snippets instead of monstrous libraries written in m4 interleaved with shell scripts. As the result, there s no need in a separate step of package configuration or bootstrapping the configure script, everything is done by just running bmake, or a convenience wrapper for it, mkcmake, which prepends a proper library path to bmake arguments, so you don t have to specify it yourself. Today, mk-configure is already powerful enough to be able replace autotools for most of the projects, and what is missing from it can be easily done by hacking the Makefile, which would otherwise be quite simple. Try it for your project, you may really like it. I already did. And report bugs.

Kamailio is an Open Source SIP Server. Since beginning of March 2014 a new setup for Kamailio s Debian packages is available. Development of this setup is sponsored by Sipwise and I am responsible for its infrastructure part (Jenkins, EC2, jenkins-debian-glue). The setup includes support for building Debian packages for Debian 5 (lenny), 6 (squeeze), 7 (wheezy) and 8 (jessie) as well as Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) and 12.04 (precise), all of them architectures amd64 and i386. My work is fully open sourced. Deployment instructions, scripts and configuration are available at kamailio-deb-jenkins, so if you re interested in setting up your own infrastructure for Continuous Integration with Debian/Ubuntu packages that s a very decent starting point. NOTE: I ll be giving a talk about Continuous Integration with Debian/Ubuntu packages at Linuxdays Graz/Austria on 5th of April. Besides kamailio-deb-jenkins I ll also cover best practices, Debian packaging, EC2 autoscaling,

In a project I recently worked on we wanted to provide a jenkins-debian-glue based setup on Amazon s EC2 for building Debian and Ubuntu packages. The idea is to keep a not-so-strong powered Jenkins master up and running 24 7, while stronger machines serving as Jenkins slaves should be launched only as needed. The project setup in question is fully open sourced (more on that in a separate blog post), hereby I am documenting the EC2 setup in usage. Jenkins master vs. slave Debian source packages are generated on Jenkins master where a checkout of the Git repository resides. The Jenkins slaves do the actual workload by building the binary packages and executing piuparts (.deb package installation, upgrading, and removal testing tool) on the resulting binary packages. The Debian packages (source+binaries) are then provided back to Jenkins master and put into a reprepro powered Debian repository for public usage. Preparation The starting point was one of the official Debian AMIs (x86_64, paravirtual on EBS). We automatically deployed jenkins-debian-glue on the system which is used as Jenkins master (we chose a m1.small instance for our needs). We started another instance, slightly adjusted it to already include jenkins-debian-glue related stuff out-of-the-box (more details in section Reduce build time below) and created an AMI out of it. This new AMI ID can be configured for usage inside Jenkins by using the Amazon EC2 Plugin (see screenshot below). IAM policy Before configuring EC2 in Jenkins though start by adding a new user (or group) in AWS s IAM (Identity and Access Management) with a custom policy. This ensures that your EC2 user in Jenkins doesn t have more permissions than really needed. The following policy should give you a starting point (we restrict the account to allow actions only in the EC2 region eu-west-1, YMMV):

 
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
     
      "Action": [
        "ec2:CreateTags",
        "ec2:DescribeInstances",
        "ec2:DescribeImages",
        "ec2:DescribeKeyPairs",
        "ec2:GetConsoleOutput",
        "ec2:RunInstances",
        "ec2:StartInstances",
        "ec2:StopInstances",
        "ec2:TerminateInstances"
      ],
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Resource": "*",
            "Condition":  
                "StringEquals":  
                    "ec2:Region": "eu-west-1"
                 
             
     
  ]
 

Jenkins configuration Configure EC2 access with Access Key ID , Secret Access Key , Region and EC2 Key Pair s Private Key (for SSH login) inside Jenkins in the Cloud section on $YOUR_JENKINS_SERVER/configure. Finally add an AMI in the AMIs Amazon EC2 configuration section (adjust security-group as needed, SSH access is enough): As you can see the configuration also includes a launch script. This script ensures that slaves are set up as needed (provide all the packages and scripts that are required for building) and always get the latest configuration and scripts before starting to serve as Jenkins slave. Now your setup should be ready for launching Jenkins slaves as needed: NOTE: you can use the Instance Cap configuration inside the advanced Amazon EC2 Jenkins configuration section to place an upward limit to the number of EC2 instances that Jenkins may launch. This can be useful for avoiding surprises in your AWS invoices. Notice though that the cap numbers are calculated for all your running EC2 instances, so be aware if you have further machines running under your account, you might want to e.g. further restrict your IAM policy then. Reduce build time Using a plain Debian AMI and automatically installing jenkins-debian-glue and further jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv* packages on each slave startup would work but it takes time. That s why we created our own AMI which is nothing else than an official Debian AMI with the bootstrap.sh script (which is referred to in the screenshot above) already executed. All the necessary packages are pre-installed and also all the cowbuilder environments are already present then. From time to time we start the instance again to apply (security) updates and execute the bootstrap script with its &dash&dashupdate option to also have all the cowbuilder systems up2date. Creating a new AMI is a no-brainer and we can then use the up2date system for our Jenkins slaves, if something should break for whatever reason we can still fall back to an older known-to-be-good AMI. Final words How to set up your Jenkins jobs for optimal master/slave usage, multi-distribution support (Debian/Ubuntu) and further details about this setup are part of another blog post. Thanks to Andreas Granig, Victor Seva and Bernhard Miklautz for reading drafts of this.

I've now generated a new GPG-key for myself:

$ gpg --fingerprint 229A4066
pub   4096R/0C626242 2014-03-24
      Key fingerprint = D516 C42B 1D0E 3F85 4CAB  9723 1909 D408 0C62 6242
uid                  Steve Kemp (Edinburgh, Scotland) <steve@steve.org.uk>
sub   4096R/229A4066 2014-03-24

The key can be found online via mit.edu : 0x1909D4080C626242 This has been signed with my old key:

pub   1024D/CD4C0D9D 2002-05-29
      Key fingerprint = DB1F F3FB 1D08 FC01 ED22  2243 C0CF C6B3 CD4C 0D9D
uid                  Steve Kemp <steve@steve.org.uk>
sub   2048g/AC995563 2002-05-29

If there is anybody who has signed my old key who wishes to sign my new one then please feel free to get in touch to arrange it.

For years, I've used a gmail account to subscribe to public mailing lists because it was convenient, it had excellent spam filtering and since the lists were already available on google-indexed public archive I felt that there was no real privacy issue.
I already have a local copy of every message in the account, in case I lose access to it for some random reason, and my real contacts already know and use my other email address(es), so I'm not really worried about continuing to use gmail for this kind of traffic.

When I started contributing to Debian I also used that email address, because I was already subscribed to a few mailing lists under it, and it was going to end up being used on the BTS and other spam-attracting public places like that, but I was less happy with the choice.

Lately, however, gmail's spam filters have started to behave oddly, with lots of false positives including a number of messages from @debian.org addresses, and this basically removes the main reason why I was using gmail in the first place, so I'm seriously considering dropping it also for publicly indicized communications.

My first step, right before leaving for Barcelona was to create a couple other email addresses, one for mailing lists and the other for debian-related work, and add them to my gpg/OpenPGP key, so that any new signature on them from the conf would also include the new UIDs.

If you've received a badly signed message (thanks heirloom mailix for mangling stuff :) ) followed by an hopefully correctly signed one where I was asking you to sign new UIDs, and you were wondering, this is the reason.

Now that the new UIDs have been signed by a few DDs I'm going to start using the new address in Debian: I believe I have changed it everywhere I needed to, except for the maintainer/uploader field for my packages, where it will change on their next uploads.

As for mailing lists, I still don't know how to proceed: I could proceed in a systematic way, but I'm lazy and I will probably just change a few main subscriptions, use the new address for new subscriptions and then migrate the rest a few at a time, unless some other event happens and I'll have to hurriedly migrate everything or risk losing important messages. Even in the latter case, I don't need any information that is only stored on google's servers, so I won't will panic just a bit :)

Now, where did I put that documentation about xmpp servers?

As usual, I look at the application stats for phpMyAdmin just after student application period of Google Summer of Code is over. First of all we got more proposals than in last years, this time there is way more students from India and discussions on mentors lists shows this is quite similar for other projects. Maybe it's just different timing which works better for students there, but there might be different reasons as well. There is also quite low number of spam or bogus proposals. Same as in past years, people leave the submission to the last moment, even though we encourage them to submit early so that they can adjust the application based on our feedback. Anyway we're just working on evaluation and will finalize it in upcoming days. Of course you will know the results from Google on April 21st.

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Until this time next month I'll be posting code-based discussions only. Recently I've been wanting to explore creating clustered services, because clusters are definitely things I use professionally. My initial attempt was to write an auto-clustering version of memcached, because that's a useful tool. Writing the core of the service took an hour or so:

• Simple KeyVal.pm implementation.
• Give it the obvious methods get, set, delete.
• Make it more interesting by creating a read-only append-log.
• The logfile will be replayed for clustering.

At the point I was done the following code worked:

use KeyVal;
# Create an object, and set some values
my $obj = KeyVal->new( logfile => "/tmp/foo.log" );
$obj->incr( "steve" );
$obj->incr( "steve" );
print $obj->get( "steve" ) # prints 2.
# Now replay the append-only log
my $replay = KeyVal->new( logfile => "/tmp/foo.log" );
$replay->replay();
print $replay->get( "steve" ) # prints 2.

In the first case we used the primitives to increment a value twice, and then fetch it. In the second case we used the logfile the first object created to replay all prior transactions, then output the value. Neat. The next step was to make it work over a network. Trivial. Finally I wanted to autodetect peers, and deploy replication. Each host would send out regular messages along the lines of "Do you have updates made since $time?". Any that did would replay the logfile from the given unixtime offset. However here I ran into problems. Peer discovery was supposed to be basic, and I figured I'd write something that did leader election by magic. Unfortunately Perls threading code is .. unpleasant:

• I wanted to store all known-peers in a singleton.
• Then I wanted to create threads that would announce and receive updates.

This failed. Majorly. Because you cannot launch the implementation of a class-method as a thread. Equally you cannot make a variable which is "complex" shared across threads. I wrote some demo code which works without packages and a shared singleton:

• https://github.com/skx/peer-discovery

The Ruby version, by contrast, is much more OO and neater. Meh. I've now shelved the project. My next, big, task was to make the network service utterly memcached compatible. That would have been fiddly, but not impossible. Right now I just use a simple line-based network protocol. I suspect I could have got what I wanted using EventMachine, or similar, but that's a path I've not yet explored, and I'm happy enough with that decision.

I got up this morning with the intent of knocking out a 10km run. I managed to last 8km today, so it's an improvement, but I don't know what's up with my running fitness at the moment. After that, I pretty much did Debian stuff all day. I managed an upload of dstat and found a potential security bug in another of my packages when I was trying to update it, so I raised that issue with the package's upstream. I also mostly sorted out opening a bank account for my company. I just have to visit the branch in person tomorrow. Sarah had indicated to me that Zoe had slept poorly last night, on top of a big weekend, and that I should probably pick her up in the car, so I drove to Kindergarten expecting to find her fast asleep and not take too kindly to being woken. Instead, she was wide awake, not having napped at all. The highlight of her day was they had some baby chickens at Kindergarten. They had four day-old hatchlings, with more eggs in an incubator. Megan wanted Zoe to have a coffee with her, so we stopped at the local coffee shop, with her Dad and little sister, for a babyccino on the way home. I had a pretty big weekend away, and didn't feel up to doing the grocery shopping yesterday afternoon when I got home, so we went to the supermarket on the way home to do the weekly grocery shop. After we got home, I got stuck into making dinner while Zoe watched TV. My girlfriend came around after work and joined us for dinner, and the three of us had a nice dinner together. Zoe started showing signs of being particularly tired during dinner, and was a bit uncooperative around bath time, but we got through it all, and I managed to get her down to bed a little bit early, and she fell asleep without too much trouble. It's a fairly warm night. Hopefully she'll sleep well.

I was awarded the Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software this weekend[1]. I'd been given some forewarning, and I spent a bunch of that time thinking about how free software had influenced my life. It turns out that it's a lot.

I spent most of the 90s growing up in an environment that was rather more interested in cattle than in computers, and had very little internet access during that time. My entire knowledge of the wider free software community came from a couple of CDs that contained a copy of the jargon file, the source code to the entire GNU project and an early copy of the m68k Linux kernel.

But that was enough. Before I'd even got to university, I knew what free software was. I'd had the opportunity to teach myself how an operating system actually worked. I'd seen the benefits of being able to modify software and share those modifications with others. I met other people with the same interests. I ended up with a job writing free software and collaborating with others on integrating it with upstream code. And, from there, I became more and more involved with a wider range of free software communities, finding an increasing number of opportunities to help make changes that benefited both me and others.

Without free software I'd have started years later. I'd have lost the opportunity to collaborate with people spread over the entire world. My first job would have looked very different, as would my entire career since then. Without free software, almost everything I've achieved in my adult life would have been impossible.

To me, free software means I've lived a significantly better life than would otherwise have been the case. But more than that, it means doing what I can to make sure that other people have the same opportunities. I am here because of the work of others. The most rewarding part of my continued involvement is the knowledge that I am part of a countless number of people working to make sure that others can tell the same story in future.

[1] I'd link to the actual press release, but it contains possibly the worst photograph of me in the entire history of the universe

comments

This is a fairly small Perl module that provides a more convenient interface to the ANSI color escape sequences. The primary change in this release is interesting for me but not so much for anyone else. It's the first of my core Perl modules that I've converted to Module::Build and to the new Perl test infrastructure that's now maintained in rra-c-util. (Yes, I know that Module::Build is apparently going to be dropped from Perl core, but the package also generates a Makefile.PL for backward compatibility.) Starting with this release, all my subsequent package releases will start using the Lancaster Consensus environment variables to control whether to run non-default tests (namely AUTOMATED_TESTING, RELEASE_TESTING, and AUTHOR_TESTING). Hopefully this won't cause me too many problems. I'm currently setting AUTHOR_TESTING unconditionally, since I really want to see the results of those tests for all my code, but it's possible that will cause me too many problems with other people's code. (It would have been nice if the spec for AUTHOR_TESTING would let you set the value of the variable to the identity of the author whose tests you want run.) I like having all my release tests run by automated testing so that I can identify any problems with the code to conditionally skip them, so I enable all the release tests when AUTOMATED_TESTING is set. This is probably peculiar to me. The other changes in this release are all documentation and test suite fixes. There are no code changes in this release. Thanks to Olivier Mengu and David Steinbrunner for various bug reports. You can get the latest release from the Term::ANSIColor distribution page.

Loanwords can often appear more insightful than they really are. How prescient of another culture to codify such a concept into a single word! They surely must have lofty and perceptive discussions if it was necessary to coin and codify one. But whilst there is always the danger of over-inflating the currency of the loanword especially the compound one there must be a few that are worth the trouble. One such term is fingerspitzengef hl. Literally meaning "finger-tips feeling" in German, it attempts to capture the idea of an intuitive sophistication, flair or instinct. Someone exhibiting fingerspitzengef hl would be able to respond appropriately, delicately and tactfully to certain things or situations. Oliver Reichenstein clarifies the distinction from a personal taste:

Whether I like pink or not, sugar in my coffee, red or white wine, these things are a matter of personal taste. These are personal preferences, and both designers and non-designers have them. This is the taste we shouldn't bother discussing. Whether I set a text s line height to 100% or 150% is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of knowing the principles of typography. However, whether I set a text s line height at 150% or 145% is a matter of Fingerspitzengef hl; wisdom in craft, or sophistication.

Fingerspitzengef hl is therefore not innate and is probably refined over the years via subconscious rather than conscious study and reflection. However, it always flows naturally in the moment, not dissimilar to Castiglione's sprezzatura. Personally, I am particularly enamoured how this concept of a "trained taste" appears to blur the line between an objective and subjective aesthetic, putting me somewhat at odds with those who baldly assert that taste is "obviously" entirely individual.

since people keep talking to me about my RC bug fixing activities, I thought it might be time again for a short report. to be honest, I mostly stopped my almost daily work at some point in december, partly because the overall number of RC bugs affecting both testing & unstable is quite low (& therefore the number of easy-to-fix bugs), due to the auto-removal policy of the release team (kudos!). but I still kept track about RC bugs I worked on, & here's the list; as you can see, mostly pkg-perl bugs

• #711430 src:libcgi-cookie-splitter-perl: "libcgi-cookie-splitter-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  add patch from CPAN RT (pkg-perl)
• #711436 src:libdbix-abstract-perl: "libdbix-abstract-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #711444 src:libgraph-readwrite-perl: "libgraph-readwrite-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failure"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #711620 src:libthread-queue-any-perl: "libthread-queue-any-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.18: test failures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #724137 src:libschedule-cron-perl: "libschedule-cron-perl: FTBFS: Tests failures"
  upload new upstream release
• #725570 src:pgfincore: "build postgresql-9.3 extension only"
  send improved debdiff to the bug, thanks to Martin Pitt
• #730906 src:libredis-perl: "libredis-perl: FTBFS: Failed tests"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #730925 src:libgeo-ip-perl: "libgeo-ip-perl: FTBFS: Failed tests"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #731794 libanyevent-perl: "FBFTS: AnyEvent fails t/81_hosts.t on system with OpenDNS"
  upload new upstream release prepared by Xavier Guimard (pkg-perl)
• #733364 src:libjxp-java: "libjxp-java: FTBFS: [javac] / PKGBUILDDIR /src/java/org/onemind/jxp/servlet/JxpServlet.java:29: error: package javax.servlet does not exist"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-java)
• #733379 src:libonemind-commons-java-java: "libonemind-commons-java-java: FTBFS: [javac] / PKGBUILDDIR /src/java/org/onemind/commons/java/util/ServletUtils.java:28: error: package javax.servlet does not exist"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-java)
• #733429 src:libcatalyst-modules-perl: "libcatalyst-modules-perl: FTBFS: Tests failed"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #735054 src:libpoet-perl: "libpoet-perl: FTBFS: test failures: t/App.t"
  add missing (build) dependency (pkg-perl)
• #735367 bti: "bti: stopped working after SSL/TLS traffic restriction, due to obsolete URL"
  upload new upstream release
• #735823 src:libgtk3-perl: "libgtk3-perl: FTBFS: Tests failures"
  set HOME for tests (pkg-perl)
• #736275 libmarc-xml-perl: "libmarc-xml-perl: CVE-2014-1626: XML External Entity privilege escalation"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #736718 libalien-sdl-perl: "libalien-sdl-perl: depends on libtiff4 which is going away"
  fix dependencies (pkg-perl)
• #736820 libnet-frame-perl: "libnet-frame-perl: package seems to depend on things that are not packaged"
  upload new upstream release prepared by Daniel Lintott (pkg-perl)
• #736866 src:libjpfcodegen-java: "[src:libjpfcodegen-java] Sourceless file (minified)"
  drop sourceless minified .js files (pkg-java)
• #737739 src:mumble: "mumble: CVE-2014-0044 CVE-2014-0045"
  sponsor security upload for Chris Knadle
• #738419 src:libsvn-hooks-perl: "libsvn-hooks-perl: FTBFS: Tests failures"
  fix (build) dependencies (pkg-perl)
• #738431 src:latex-make: "latex-make: FTBFS: Font T1/cmr/m/n/10=ecrm1000 at 10.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found"
  propose patch, then fixed by maintainer
• #739144 src:librpc-xml-perl: "librpc-xml-perl: FTBFS: Test failure"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)

ps: the how-can-i-help package is a nice tool for finding RC bugs in packages you care about. install it if you haven't so far!