After years of missing this conference, I will finally make it to Brussels this time! I will even have some talks, one about Listaller (in the lightning-talks section) and one about AppStream and Listaller in the Distributions track. The lightning-talk will explain why distributing (some) applications independent from the distribution makes sense, and how Listaller does this. I will also very briefly talk about the concepts behind Listaller and which tools it offers for application developers to create & package cross-distro apps. The AppStream & Listaller talk will be much more detailed. It will cover the rationale for AppStream, what AppData is good for and how AppData files relate to AppStream. I will also reflect the AppData adoption in GNOME/Fedora and why GNOME-Software is the right way to go forward in developing software-centers. It will of course also include our future plans for AppStream. On the Listaller side, I will talk about how Listaller is connected to AppStream and PackageKit and why distributions should ship a way to install cross-distro packaged apps at all. I will explain module-definitions and why they are useful. An overview of the internals of Listaller and it s system integration is also included, as well as how it can be compared to competing installation solutions. If you are at FOSDEM and have questions about AppStream/PackageKit/Listaller/Tanglu/Debian/etc., please ask them! See you there!

A maintenance release of RcppClassic, now at version 0.9.5, went out to CRAN today. Nothing changed in user-facing code. The build was triggered by a change in an upcoming Rcpp release (more about that another time), and a few minor updates were needed for extended checks done by R. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is the set of changes relative to the previous release 0.9.4. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

Friday was my last day at Solarflare Communications, which I joined in 2006 (originally as Level 5 Networks). When I started, Level 5 Networks (L5N) had a 2-port gigabit Ethernet controller called EF1 and a user-level network stack called EtherFabric which ran on Linux. It had nearly completed the Falcon project to develop a 10-gigabit controller (also supporing a 2-port gigabit mode) and was porting EtherFabric to Windows. Later that year, however, L5N merged with Solarflare Communications (SF), which was developing a 10GBASE-T PHY (for 10-gigabit Ethernet over twisted-pair cables). The investors and management saw the opportunity to create an integrated 10GBASE-T LAN-on-motherboard chip that would be attractive to OEMs and so had the potential for mass sales. EtherFabric was put on the back-burner, but regular net drivers for Linux, Windows and other operating systems became more important. In a change from my previous jobs, my initial role at L5N was to maintain and extend the in-house test automation software, Runbench, written in Python. I worked with Dickon Reed who had written most of Runbench up to then. One of my first major tasks was to extend it to cover DUTs running Windows. Aside from changing Runbench itself, I wrote a simple SSH server to be installed on DUTs, using the Twisted.Python framework. (Cygwin's port of OpenSSH wasn't suitable for running a lot of native Windows commands.) I rewrote the test-installation script for the Windows driver itself, converting it to Python (with a C extension to get around the WOW64 nonsense). As Windows does not allow loading a driver just once (like insmod in Linux), except by using the kernel debugger, I added a time check in the driver so the test-installation script can make it fail early when reloaded after a reboot, so that a crasher bug in the probe path would usually be recoverable. In 2007 I persuaded management in Cambridge to loan several older servers to DebConf. I took them there and back by car, and they were used to convert video for live streams and recordings. (This was repeated in 2009.) I was also asked to work on other small development tasks, including some cleanup on the Linux net driver (sfc). In mid-2007, when SF decided it was time to get sfc upstream (in-tree), I joined Steve Hodgson and Robert Stonehouse in working on that. Out-of-tree (separately distributed) drivers for Linux normally need a large number of preprocessor conditions for compatibility with Linux's kernel module API across a range of supported versions. They may also implement some features with a driver-specific interface that should be replaced with a standard interface (possibly including the work to define that standard). They may not comply with the kernel coding style or unwritten conventions for kernel code. All of these problems were present and had to be dealt with. As part of this work, I extended unifdef so that it could be used to remove all of the backward-compatibility and not-for-upstream code without introducing extra blank lines. I could then export the out-of-tree driver from CVS(!) into a kernel source tree automatically and turn it into a patch or patch series that would stand a chance of being acceptable upstream. Our first few attempts got little response, but eventually we newbies got the message that the driver was simply too big for a single submission and that putting patches on a web site because they're too big for the list was not a solution. In the next week, I removed about half of the code (on a git branch), resulting in a relatively lean driver that could be sent to the netdev list. And finally the 9th (I think) submission was accepted. Following this, I continued to work on sfc but was also brought into the Siena project. Siena (SFL9021) was the LAN-on-motherboard chip that had been planned following the merger. It combined a dual-port controller based on Falcon with a 10GBASE-T PHY and a management controller (MC) to support Lights-Out Management (LOM). (Since 10GBASE-T has not taken off, it is now mostly sold as the SFC9020 variant in which the PHY is disabled.) I worked on some of the test framework and test cases for validating the controller design in software simulation and FPGA. In the course of this I learned to read and (somewhat) understand the chip design written in Verilog, but only made a single trivial fix to it. In August 2009, the first Siena ASICs came back from the fab. There were a few ASIC-specific bugs but all of them were quickly worked around in firmware, so it would soon be ready for production. But there was much work still to be done on the driver and firmware. The firmware had until then been running in a smaller block of RAM with no peripherals to manage, while sfc had earlier been modified just enough to configure a sim or FPGA for running a userland test application. sfc now had many special cases scattered around it, and would tell the MC firmware to peek and poke registers that were no longer directly accessible from the host. The software and firmware developers had agreed that, in order to support LOM, the MC would be responsible for managing the ports and all peripherals and drivers would send higher-level requests to the MC. As a bonus, this removed the need for the driver to know the details of each new board, so that it would not be necessary to backport sfc into distribution kernels very often. Over the next few months, the firmware team did an excellent job of defining and implementing those operations, including writing the driver-side functions to invoke them. Meanwhile, Steve and I concentrated on refactoring sfc so most of the Falcon/Siena differences could be abstracted through a few structures with function pointers. The refactoring and new code for Siena were completed and submitted upstream in several large patch series in October and November. In fact, there were so many patches that Solarflare appeared in LWN's table of who wrote Linux 2.6.33 (as did I, thanks also to another patch series adding firmware metadata to many drivers). Sadly we had missed Linux 2.6.32 which was a longterm stable branch and used in many distributions, but I was able to get this version backported into all the major distributions over the next year. (To be continued.)

Fast Coexist has an interesting article about the art that Simon Beck creates by walking in snow [1]. If you are an artist you can create art in any way, even by walking in patterns in the snow. Russ Altman gave an interesting TED talk about using DNA testing before prescribing drugs [2]. I was surprised by the amount of variation in effects of codeine based on genetics, presumably many other drugs have a similar range. Helen Epstein wrote an interesting article about Dr. Sara Josephine Baker who revolutionised child care and saved the lives of a huge number of children [3]. Her tenacity is inspiring. Also it s interesting to note that the US Republican party was awful even before the Southern Strategy . The part about some doctors opposing child care because it s the will of God for children to die and keep them in employment is chilling. Jonathan Weiler wrote an insightful article about the problems with American journalism in defending the government [4]. He criticises the media for paying more attention to policing decorum than to content. Tobias Buckell wrote an interesting post about the so-called socialised health-care in the US [5]. He suggests that Ronald Reagan socialised health-care by preventing hospitals from dumping dying people on the street. I guess if doing nothing for people until they have a medical emergency counts as socialised health-care then the US has it. Kelvin Thomson MP made some insightful comments about climate change, the recent heat-wave in Australia, and renewable energy [6]. Iwan Baan gave an interesting TED talk about ways that people have built cheap homes in unexpected places [7], lots of good pictures. Racialicious has an interesting article by Arturo R. Garc a about research into the effects of concussion and the way the NFL in the US tried to prevent Dr. Bennet Omalu publicising the results of his research [8]. Stani (Jan Schmidt) wrote an interesting post about how they won a competition to design a commemerative Dutch 5 Euro coin [9]. The coin design is really good (a candidate for the geekiest coin ever), I want one! Seriously if anyone knows how to get one at a reasonable price (IE close to face value for circulated or not unreasonably expensive for uncirculated) then please let me know. When writing about Edward Snowden, Nathan says Imagine how great a country would be if if it were governed entirely by people who Dick Cheney would call Traitor [10]. That s so right, that might make the US a country I d be prepared to live in. Andrew Solomon gave an interesting TED talk Love No Matter What about raising different children [11]. Aditi Shankardass gave an interesting TED talk about using an ECG to analyse people diagnosed wit severe Autism and other developmental disorders [12]. Apparently some severe cases of Autism have a root cause that can be treated with anti-seizure medication. George Monbiot wrote an insightful article about the way that Bono and Bob Geldoff promote G8 government intervention in Africa and steal air-time that might be given to allow Africans to represent themselves in public debates [13]. Daniel Pocock wrote an informative article about racism in Australian politics and how it is bad for job-seekers and the economy (in addition to being horribly wrong) [14]. Aeon Magazine has an interesting article by Anne Buchanan about the difference between scientists and farmers [15]. She has some interesting points about the way that the lack of general knowledge impacts research, but misses the point that in most fields of study there is a huge problem of people not knowing about recent developments in their own field. I don t think it s a pipe dream to be well educated in humanities and science, but I guess that depends on the definition of well educated . Brian Cox gave an interesting TED talk titled Why We Need the Explorers about the benefits of scientific research [16]. Yupu Zhang, Abhishek Rajimwale, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau from the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote an interesting paper about ZFS corruption in the face of disk and memory errors [17]. One thing to note is that turning off atime can reduce the probability of a memory error leading to corrupt data being written to disk, run zfs set atime=off tank to fix this. The comedian Solomon Georgio celebrated Martin Luther King day by tweeting I love you to racists [18]. It s an interesting approach and appears to have worked well.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/k4eojcn
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/pp8o7l6
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/pq9xo4w
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/kgsloep
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/olsjgtf
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/md4wn2c
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/iwan_baan_ingenious_homes_in_unexpected_places.html
• [8] http://www.racialicious.com/2013/10/16/the-unsung-hero-of-league-of-denial/
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/lmjf2vu
• [10] http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary.html?start=446
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_love_no_matter_what.html
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/26zq53o
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/qem2lmd
• [14] http://progressivedirection.com/australias-war-on-brains
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/mtecglz
• [16] http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers.html
• [17] http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/zfs-corruption-fast10.pdf
• [18] http://tinyurl.com/nrr68po

I took Valve s offer up (by way of the kickass Collabora folks) for some games. I can confirm that I got them, and it looks like it s working great. Just want to give a shout-out and express my gratitude. I know it s not something they had to do, so it s super cool that they wanted to. Thalve!

Data science has been called "the sexiest job" so often, this has recently led to an integer overflow.

---

---

• When you are doing statistics, call it statistics.
• When you are doing unsupervised learning, call it machine learning.
• When your focus is distributed computation, call it distributed computing.
• When you do data management, continute to call it data management and databases.
• When you do data indexing, call it data indexing.
• When you are doing unsupervised data mining, call it cluster analysis, outlier detection, ...
• Whatever it is, try to use a precise term, instead of a buzzword.

This is something different. It is something special. She is something special. I don't even remember how I stumbled upon her, actually. I think it was some suggested video somehow. I feel deeply sorry for those who don't understand German. But that's the way it is, the text is in German. And it's touching. Take your time, listen to it in a relaxed environment, when you don't have any distraction.

• One Day/Reckoning: I didn't expect what I was about to see or rather hear. But it made me instantly look for more from her.
• Stille Wasser sind attraktiv: This was an obivous choice for me, if you think of my most important text written.
• Erwachsen werden: The oldest video I was able to find about her. It sounds a bit strange of trying to go back to the roots for a phenomenon that just started a few years ago, but there you are.

There you are. And I'm sorry for those who don't understand German, but I don't want to hold this back from the others. And I am definitely looking forward to hear more from her. Hopefully she helps me motivate myself to write something new for the upcoming debconf and hold yet another poetry night there. And hopefully it also motivates others to join in.

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Yesterday, the second milestone of the Icehouse development branch of Ceilometer has been released and is now available for testing and download. This means the first half of the OpenStack Icehouse development has passed! New features For the Icehouse-1 milestone, we barely had enough time to implement 2 blueprints. We almost did a better job this time, but finally only 2 blueprints were implemented again. This is really far from what we planned initially. The infrastructure slowdown issues and the lower number of reviews is probably the root cause here. Anyway, Ceilometer now offers a REST API to accesses the stored event. The initial work to replace the /v2/meters endpoint with something more RESTy has started with the implementation of /v2/samples. Bug fixes Thirty-one bugs were fixed, though most of them might not interest you so I won't elaborate too much on that. Go read the list if you are curious. Toward Icehouse 3 We now have 29 blueprints targeting the Ceilometer's third Icehouse milestone, with some of them are already started and ready to merge. However, it's likely that we won't make all of them. As usual, the priority should indicate how confident we are that we want and need a feature. Still, it's likely the roadmap will be adjusted in the upcoming weeks. I'll try to make sure we'll get there without too much trouble for the 6th March 2013. Stay tuned!

I m writing a bit about ZFS these days, and I thought I d write a bit about why I am using it, why it might or might not be interesting for you, and what you might do about it. ZFS Features and Background ZFS is not just a filesystem in the traditional sense, though you can use it that way. It is an integrated storage stack, which can completely replace the need for LVM, md-raid, and even hardware RAID controllers. This permits quite a bit of flexibility and optimization not present when building a stack involving those components. For instance, if a drive in a RAID fails, it needs only rebuild the parts that have actual data stored on them. Let s look at some of the features of ZFS:

• Full checksumming of all data and metadata, providing protection against silent data corruption. The only other Linux filesystem to offer this is btrfs.
• ZFS is a transactional filesystem that ensures consistent data and metadata.
• ZFS is copy-on-write, with snapshots that are cheap to create and impose virtually undetectable performance hits. Compare to LVM snapshots, which make writes notoriously slow and require an fsck and mount to get to a readable point.
• ZFS supports easy rollback to previous snapshots.
• ZFS send/receive can perform incremental backups much faster than rsync, particularly on systems with many unmodified files. Since it works from snapshots, it guarantees a consistent point-in-time image as well.
• Snapshots can be turned into writeable clones , which simply use copy-on-write semantics. It s like a cp -r that completes almost instantly and takes no space until you change it.
• The datasets ( filesystems or logical volumes in LVM terms) in a zpool ( volume group , to use LVM terms) can shrink or grow dynamically. They can have individual maximum and minimum sizes set, but unlike LVM, where if, say, /usr gets bigger than you thought, you have to manually allocate more space to it, ZFS datasets can use any space available in the pool.
• ZFS is designed to run well in big iron, and scales to massive amounts of storage. It supports SSDs as L2 cache and ZIL (intent log) devices.
• ZFS has some built-in compression methods that are quite CPU-efficient and can yield not just space but performance benefits in almost all cases involving compressible data.
• ZFS pools can host zvols, a block device under /dev that stores its data in the zpool. zvols support TRIM/DISCARD, so are ideal for storing VM images, as they can instantly release space released by the guest OS. They can also be snapshotted and backed up like the rest of ZFS.

Although it is often considered a server filesystem, ZFS has been used in plenty of other situations for some time now, with ports to FreeBSD, Linux, and MacOS. I find it particularly useful:

• To have faith that my photos, backups, and paperwork archives are intact. zpool scrub at any time will read the entire dataset and verify the integrity of every bit.
• I can create snapshots of my system before running apt-get dist-upgrade, making it easy to track down issues or roll back to a known-good configuration. Ideal for people tracking sid or testing. One can also easily simply boot from a previous snapshot.
• Many scripts exist that make frequent snapshots, and retain the for a period of time as a way of protecting work in progress against an accidental rm. There is no reason not to snapshot /home every 5 minutes, for instance. It s almost as good as storing / in git.

The added level of security in having cheap snapshots available is almost worth it by itself. ZFS drawbacks Compared to other Linux filesystems, there are a few drawbacks of ZFS:

• CDDL will prevent it from ever being part of the Linus kernel tree
• It is more RAM-hungry than most, although with tuning it can even run on the Raspberry Pi.
• A 64-bit kernel is strongly preferred, even in low-memory situations.
• Performance on many small files may be less than ext4
• The ZFS cache does not shrink and expand in response to changing RAM usage conditions on the system as well as the normal Linux cache does.
• Compared to btrfs, ZFS lacks some features of btrfs, such as being able to shrink an existing pool or easily change storage allocation on the fly. On the other hand, the features in ZFS have never caused me a kernel panic, and half the things I liked about btrfs seem to have.
• ZFS is already quite stable on Linux. However, the GRUB, init, and initramfs code supporting booting from a ZFS root and /boot is less stable. If you want to go 100% ZFS, be prepared to tweak your system to get it to boot properly. Once done, however, it is quite stable.

Converting to ZFS I have written up an extensive HOWTO on converting an existing system to use ZFS. It covers workarounds for all the boot-time bugs I have encountered as well as documenting all steps needed to make it happen. It works quite well. Additional Hints If setting up zvols to be used by VirtualBox or some such system, you might be interested in managing zvol ownership and permissions with udev.

I am not (yet?) reporting this as a bug as this happened with a several days old session open, and just while I was upgrading my Sid system, after a long time without doing so (probably since before the vacations started... In December 2013). But I cannot avoid sharing this interesting screenshot. Of course, this does not happen in other browsers. And AFAICT it only happens while reading the Debian Policy (either online or locally, even recoding it to UTF-8). Funniest thing, the Debian policy specifies no Javascript, no stylesheets at all... (Hey, and FWIW... Why is the online copy of the Debian policy still in iso-8859-1 It's not 1995 anymore...) [update] Of course, it's the default font, not only the Debian policy. Just as an example, the following text: Yields the following output: [update 2] And, of course, after finishing the update process... I got a new version of Iceweasel. Restarted it, and everything is back to normal :-

AltOS 1.3.1 Bug fixes and improved APRS support Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 1.3.1. AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of firmware for our cc1111, STM32L151, LPC11U14 and ATtiny85 based electronics and Java-based ground station software. This is a minor release of AltOS, including bug fixes for TeleMega, TeleMetrum v2.0 and AltosUI . AltOS Firmware Antenna down fixed and APRS improved Firmware version 1.3 has a bug in the support for operating the flight computer with the antenna facing downwards; the accelerometer calibration data would be incorrect. Furthermore, the accelerometer self-test routine would be confused if the flight computer were moved in the first second after power on. The firmware now simply re-tries the self-test several times. I went out and bought a real APRS radio, the Yaesu FT1D to replace my venerable VX 7R. With this in hand, I changed our APRS support to use the compressed position format, which takes fewer bytes to send, offers increased resolution and includes altitude data. I took the altitude data out of the comment field and replaced that with battery and igniter voltages. This makes APRS reasonably useful in pad mode to monitor the state of the flight computer before boost. Anyone with a TeleMega should update to the new firmware eventually, although there aren t any critical bug fixes here, unless you re trying to operate the device with the antenna pointing downwards. AltosUI TeleMega support and offline map loading improved. I added all of the new TeleMega sensor data as possible elements in the graph. This lets you see roll rates and horizontal acceleration values for the whole flight. The Fire Igniter dialog now lists all of the TeleMega extra pyro channels so you can play with those on the ground as well. Our offline satellite images are downloaded from Google, but they restrict us to reading 50 images per minute. When we tried to download a 9x9 grid of images to save for later use on the flight line, Google would stop feeding us maps after the first 50. You d have to poke the button a second time to try and fill in the missing images. We fixed this by just limiting how fast we load maps, and now we can reliably load an 11x11 grid of images. Of course, there are also a few minor bug fixes, so it s probably worth updating even if the above issues don t affect you.

Nice gift from Valve to Debian Developers although when I m reading first reactions on #debian-devel I expect this to be bigger flamewar than systemd/upstart battle

Total keys: 996
Key versions:
    996 4
Primary key pubkey algorithms:
    623 "DSA"
    373 "RSA"
Primary key pubkey sizes:
    624 1024
     27 2048
      2 3072
    340 4096
      2 8192
      1 10240
Total number of UIDs + UAts: 4394
Hash algorithm used for most recent self-sig:
      1 "RIPEMD160"
   3188 "SHA1"
   1041 "SHA256"
      1 "SHA384"
    163 "SHA512"
Judgment on preferred hash algorithms:
   1776 null
   2618 "weak hash with higher preference"
Judgment on expiration times:
     53 "expiration passed"
    111 "expiration too far in future"
   3887 "no expiration set"
    343 null

This was generated with debian-keyring 2013.12.13, hopenpgp-tools 0.4-1, jshon 20131010-3, and the following inefficient script:

#!/bin/zsh
infile=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg
tempfile=$(mktemp)
trap 'rm $ tempfile ' EXIT
hokey lint --output-format JSON <$ infile  >$ tempfile 
print -n "Total keys: "
jshon -a -e keyFingerprint <$ tempfile    wc -l
print "Key versions: "
jshon -a -e keyVer -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Primary key pubkey algorithms: "
jshon -a -e keyAlgorithmAndSize -e pubkeyalgo -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Primary key pubkey sizes: "
jshon -a -e keyAlgorithmAndSize -e pubkeysize -e val <$ tempfile    sort -n   uniq -c
print -n "Total number of UIDs + UAts: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -k <$ tempfile    wc -l
print "Hash algorithm used for most recent self-sig: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidSelfSigHashAlgorithms -a -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Judgment on preferred hash algorithms: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidPreferredHashAlgorithms -a -e explanation <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Judgment on expiration times: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidKeyExpirationTimes -a -e explanation <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c

This represents incorrect handling of revoked UIDs and user attributes, and possibly unknown bugs. "Judgments" are based on this document and are not generalized per key.

I m a geek. I enjoy playing with different filesystems, version control systems, and, well, for that matter, radios. I have lately started to worry about the risks of silent data corruption, and as such, looked to switch my personal systems to either ZFS or btrfs, both of which offer built-in checksumming of all data and metadata. I initially opted for btrfs, because of its tighter integration into the Linux kernel and ability to shrink an existing btrfs filesystem. However, as I wrote last month, that experiment was not a success. I had too many serious performance regressions and one too many kernel panics and decided it wasn t worth it. And that the SuSE people got it wrong, deeply wrong, when they declared btrfs ready for production. I never lost any data, to its credit. But it simply reduces uptime too much. That left ZFS. Before I build a system, I always want to make sure I can repair it. So I started with the Debian Live rescue image, and added the zfsonlinux.org repository to it, along with some key packages to enable the ZFS kernel modules, GRUB support, and initramfs support. The resulting image is described, and can be downloaded from, my ZFS Rescue Disc wiki page, which also has a link to my source tree on github. In future blog posts in the series, I will describe the process of converting existing Debian installations to use ZFS, of getting them to boot from ZFS, some bugs I encountered along the way, and some surprising performance regressions in ZFS compared to ext4 and btrfs.

Well if you can read this then you know it s working. After way too many weeks, Debian will have WordPress version 3.8. Thanks to Rapha l for his kind assistance and answering my questions about how it was built. The upload is still gurgling along and will make it there in its own time. He said Handing over packages is hard, I d agree but say taking over them is too. So, what does WordPress 3.8 look like? From the frontend I didn t really notice much. The big changes, at least cosmetically, seem to be for the admin backend. It just look slicker and cleaner. Hopefully Debian users find the update useful and I ve not broken anything. There s always the BTS if there is. I ve deliberately tried to minimise the changes for this version to limit the breakage.

A bug fix release of Armadillo came out and was turned into a new RcppArmadillo release which is now on CRAN and will go shortly to Debian. The complete list of changes is below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.000.2 (2014-01-21)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.000.2
  • fix for randi() generating out-of-interval values
  • workaround for a bug in the Intel compiler

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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