Search Results: "ag"

14 May 2013

Iustin Pop: no-reply@

I had the surprise of seeing this at the bottom of the confirmation email when I ordered something online:
Bei Fragen zu deiner Bestellung antworte bitte auf diese E-Mail.
In translation: If you have questions about your order, please reply to this e-mail . Wow. Someone out there still reads email. The address pointed helpfully to info@ instead of the usual no-reply@ . I am really surprised.

James Morrison: Google IO Predictions: Appengine

Well, I put out crappy predictions for Google IO related to Android. So here are my crappy predictions for Appengine:
It should be obvious, but I really have no clue what Appengine related things could be announced. If PHP is not there then the Appengine team deserves some applause for their slight of hand. The rest is mostly my wishlist :)

Martín Ferrari: A new life

A week ago, I made the big step and presented my resignation letter at Google. It was not an easy decision, to leave a good job to pursue a blurry plan that sounds a bit infeasible, but I feel this what I want to do: it's a dream becoming reality. After the 31st of May, I will become self-employed, working as a freelancer, while travelling around the world. I plan to live with a small budget, working with my laptop from wherever I am, instead of stressing about getting many clients to keep an expensive lifestyle. I've had the travelling bug for some time, always thinking about my next trip, leaving for the airport just after finishing work, coming back on Monday and going directly to the office. You end up wishing for more vacation days all the time (and I had a fair amount of them). Now, for different reasons I want to spend some time in my old house in Nice, and in Argentina. There was no way I could do that with my current job, and that was the trigger for my decision. After that, I will come back to Ireland, just to think where my next destination will be. I know this is going to be a great experience, we'll see how well it works! If you think you -or your employer- might need my services, I'd be more than happy to talk! I'll be concentrating on the kind of work I've been doing at Google and before: finding creative solutions for difficult problems, be it systems administration, or (systems) programming. Think of hiring an SRE for just a few hours or days.

Hideki Yamane: net-snmp 5.7.2 is in unstable

Hi, I've put net-snmp 5.7.2(upstream LTS) to unstable, it's jump from 5.4.3 and fix 20 or 30 bugs from it. Have fun.

M nica Ram rez Arceda: Outreach Program for Women talk

Last Saturday (2013-05-11), I gave a talk about Outreach Program for Women (OPW) at the Ubuntu Party Festa Raring Ringtail. I was invited to give this talk because I'm one of the coordinators of this program in Debian side. This was a small talk and was split in three parts. During the first part I talked about the problem in general: lack of women in technology world. In the second part I talked about the paradox that there are even less women in FLOSS, giving Debian as an example: a very wonderful project, where techie (or non-techie) women should be in love with (at least I am!), has only about 1.6% of women DD. The last part was focused in OPW itself, the successful experience of GNOME with an increasing number of women in their organization and how the program works. I hope that women attendees will think about applying to OPW or collaborating actively in FLOSS :-) Here you have the slides (in Catalan): talk_debian_opw

Matthew Palmer: A Modest Vocabulary Proposal

I would like to suggest that the word unprofessional be struck from the dictionary and anyone who uses it struck with a dictionary. It is a word which conveys no useful information or proposal for action, and is thus nothing but meaningless noise. The purpose of communication is to adjust another person s process of cognition. I ve heard it said that all communication is persuasion , which is quite true you re trying to persuade someone to change what they think. We can consider the intention and effectiveness of an attempt to communicate in this light. What is someone trying to achieve when they label a person or behaviour unprofessional ? If we re being charitable, we would probably say that they re trying to highlight that something is bad, or could be better. However, just stamping our foot and saying bad! isn t enough it s also important to provide some information that the recipient can act upon. The problem with the word unprofessional is that it really isn t specific enough on the subject of what is wrong . Have you ever had someone say something like, your behaviour yesterday was really unprofessional ? They re assuming you know what they re talking about and you might well have a reasonable guess but what if you guess wrong? Should you never do anything you did yesterday, just in case that particular thing was unprofessional? When I ve caught myself thinking, that was unprofessional , of my own behaviour, or someone else s, I think about what caused me to think that. Once I drill down into it, I usually come to the conclusion that what I really meant was, I don t like that . Since I m not paid to like things, that s pretty much irrelevant as a reason to tell someone not to do something. On the occasions when I come up with something more concrete, it is invariably a more useful expression than unprofessional . Things like, it frustrates the customer , or it pisses off the person sitting in the next cube are a much better expression of why something is bad than unprofessional . I d encourage everyone to keep a careful watch over themselves and those around them for use of the word. When you catch yourself saying it (or thinking it), examine your motives more closely. Whatever the more specific adjective is, use that instead. If it just comes down to I don t like that , at the very least say that to the person you re talking to. Don t try and hang anything grandiose on your personal prejudices. You might come off as being petty, but at least you ll be honest.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.3.820

Conrad rolled up a new Armadillo release 3.820 (following two minor fix release in the 0.3.810 series of which we packaged the one that was relevant for us). This new version is now out in a release 0.3.820 of RcppArmadillo which is already on CRAN and in Debian. The summary of the main changes follows:
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.3.820 (2013-05-12)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 3.820 (Mt Cootha)
    • faster as_scalar() for compound expressions
    • faster transpose of small vectors
    • faster matrix-vector product for small vectors
    • faster multiplication of small fixed size matrices
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.

13 May 2013

Daniel Pocock: Get WebRTC going fast

A question that comes up more and more these days: what's the quickest way to try WebRTC and see it working? How can a web developer start experimenting with WebRTC in their blog or demo site? Good news: it's no longer necessary to compile anything from source - and many of the components are available on Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu) or RPM-based solutions like Fedora A quick look at how easy it is, explanation below:
# apt-get update
# apt-get install -t experimental repro resiprocate-turn-server
# apt-get install -t unstable chromium sipml5-web-phone
# cd /var/www && mkdir jssip && cd jssip
# wget -r -nH http://tryit.jssip.net
# vi /etc/repro/repro.config
# vi /etc/reTurnServer.config
# vi /var/www/jssip/js/custom.REMOVE_THIS.js
and then try browsing to /jssip or /sipml5-web-phone Start with a SIP proxy As explained in the RTC Quick Start guide for regular RTC, a SIP proxy is a clean and simple component to start with. The same is true for WebRTC: start with a proxy. There are two I'll emphasize here:
  • repro from reSIProcate is quick and easy to set up and has built in TLS support. A 1.9 alpha release with WebSocket support for WebRTC has just been uploaded to Debian experimental and is ready to use on wheezy. RPM users just need to download the alpha release tarball and use rpmbuild to get packages from it.
  • Kamailio provides very good WebRTC support too. The packages are available but due to GPL license issues must be recompiled with TLS, see the README.Debian file for details. Also feel free to try the upstream package repository for binaries that do include TLS
Get a TURN server TURN servers help media streams traverse NAT. They are very easy to set up, but must have real IP addresses. Put the JavaScript in the web server Adding WebRTC to a web site can be as simple as cutting and pasting some JavaScript code into the HTML. Three working samples to start with: Browser Users need a recent browser. The latest Chromium packages in Debian are based on Google Chrome M26 code and this should work. Help and support Please come and ask on the users mailing lists or IRC channels for any of the packages mentioned here.

Jan Wagner: 500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot ()

If you updated recently your system to Debian wheezy and you are using vsftpd with enabled chrooted local users ...
[~] # grep -i  ^chroot_local_user=yes /etc/vsftpd.conf   tail -1
chroot_local_user=YES
... you maybe faced with the following problem:
500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()
Login failed.
This problem raised already in Bug #656900 and it was fixed by adjusting the documentation. Beside that there maybe configurations you want to relax such a strict check. Unfortunately this feature was implemented in version 3.0.0 which is not part of Debian wheezy:
- Add new config setting "allow_writeable_chroot" to help people in a bit of
a spot with the v2.3.5 defensive change. Only applies to non-anonymous.
The Frontier Group created a patched package of vsftpd for Ubuntu. After reviewing the patch we decided to also create a Debian package for wheezy. You can easily install the package by the following sniplet:
echo "deb http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian wheezy-updates main non-free contrib" >> \
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-updates.cyconet.list; \
aptitude update; aptitude install -t wheezy-updates debian-cyconet-archive-keyring vsftpd && \
echo "allow_writeable_chroot=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd.conf && /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart
Updates, in case of bugfixes in Debian wheezy, should be also available through this distribution channel.

Hideki Yamane: 100th Tokyo Debian meeting & "Wheezy" release party

We are please to report that we held "100th, Tokyo Area Debian Meeting"... yes, 100th!!! (since 2005), 11th May in Shibuya, Tokyo


Discussed about "stable" releasing,



lectured "cdn.debian.net" by Yasuhiro Araki
and "modern packaging" by Osamu Aoki.



Also, Ubuntu folks showed "Ubuntu phone" and it looks good and interesting (however, it's on the development stage, yet).
Then, party!!! :-) happy to release "Wheezy"







I hope we'll hold "Jessie" in early 2015.

12 May 2013

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Recent Rcpp talks at U of C and MCW

A couple of days ago, I had an opportunity to give a guest lecture on our Rcpp package for R and C++ integration. This was in CMSC 12300 Computer Science with Applications-3 in the Department of Computer Science at University of Chicago. The course is the final part of a three term sequence introducing students to data-centric work in R, Python, Java and C++. I tried to keep it brief and engaging in order to motivate the why or R/C++ integration while providing plenry of useful examples. And yesterday I got to spend a day giving an invited day-long workshop at the Medical College of Wisconsin as part of a two-day R workshop sponsored by the Milwaukee Chapter of the American Statistical Assocation as well as the CTSI and PCOR centers at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In the workshop, I followed the previously-used setup of four parts on introduction, Rcpp details, advanced topics and last-but-not-least applications, but also updated and extended to more recent topics. Pdf slides from both events are now on my presentations page.

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2013/19

after the release is before the release. this week I started to pick up my RC bug squashing activities again. first results: besides that I've also started to look at the "FTBFS with perl 5.18 in experimental" bugs which are not RC yet. yes, perl 5.18 is already in experimental!

Ian Campbell: qcontrol 0.5.1

I've just released qcontrol 0.5.1. Changes since the last release: I also put together a very basic homepage. Get it from gitorious or http://www.hellion.org.uk/qcontrol/releases/0.5.1/. The Debian package will be uploaded shortly.

Matthias Klumpp: PackageKit, AppStream and Listaller A status report

I was asked by some people to write a status report about the whole PK/AS/LI stuff sorry guys that it took so much time to write it ;-) . PackageKit (PackageKit is an abstraction layer for package-management systems, allowing applications to access the package-manager using simple DBus calls)Package (with list) PackageKit is an incredibly successful project. With the 0.8.x series, it received many performance improvements, and has now the same speed on my computer than the distribution s native tools. PackageKit is used in almost all major Linux distributions, except for Ubuntu[1]. But even Ubuntu has written some compatibility layer, so most calls to PackageKit will work. The only major distro where PackageKit is currently not available, seems to be Gentoo (and I am not sure about the shape of the Gentoo PackageKit backend too). Debian Wheezy includes PackageKit by default, and in Jessy we are going to replace some distribution-specific tools with PackageKit frontends (mostly the old and unmaintained update-notifier and Software-Updater no worries, we are not going for a Synaptic replacement ;-) (currently this won t be possible with PK anyway)) Unfortunately, some PackageKit backends are still not adjusted for the 0.8.x API and are only running on 0.7.x. This is bad, since 0.8.x is a huge step forward for PackageKit. But the situation is slowly improving, with the latest OpenSUSE release, the Zypper backend is now available on 0.8.x too. Being able to run a PackageKit from the 0.8.x series is a requirement for both AppStream and Listaller. AppStream (AppStream is a cross-distro effort for building Software-Center-like Software Center Logoapplications. It contains stuff like a screenshot-service, ratings&reviews etc. The most important component is a Xapian database, storing information about all available applications in the distribution s repositories. The Xapian DB is distro-agnostik, but distributors need to provide data to fill it. AppStream offers an application-centric way to look at a package database) The AppStream side doesn t look incredibly great, but the situation is improving. As far as I know, OpenSUSE is shipping AppStream XML to generate the database. Ubuntu ships the desktop-files, and I am working on AppStream support in Debian s Archive Kit. On the Fedora side, negotiations with the infrastructure-team are still going on. I haven t heard anything from Mageia and other AppStream participants yet. Unfortunately, at least for OpenSUSE, the AppStream efforts seem to be stalled, due to people having moved to different tasks. But efforts to add the remaining missing things exist. On the software side, Apper (KDE PackageKit frontend) has full support for AppStream. Apper just needs to be compiled with some extra flags to make it use the AppStream database. On the GNOME-side, GNOME-Software is being developed. The tool will make use of the AppStream database, on distributions where it is available. Also, a Software-Center for Elementary and other GTK+-based desktops is being developed, which is based on AppStream (already quite usable!). Using the Ubuntu Software Center on not-Ubuntu-based distributions ist still not much fun, but with the AppStream database available and a working PackageKit 0.8.x with a backend which supports parallel transactions, it is possible to use it. On the infrastructure side: I recently landed some patches in AppStream-Core, which will improve the search function a lot. AppStream-Core contains all tools necessary to generate the AppStream database. It also contains libappstream, a GObject-based library which can be used to access the AppStream database. Also, we discuss dropping PackageKit s internal desktop-file-cache in favour of using the AppStream database. If we do that, we will also add software descriptions to the AppStream db, to improve search results and to speed up search for applications. Because we have to deprecate API for that, I expect this change to happen with PackageKit 0.9.x. As soon as the Freedesktop-Wiki is alive again and my account is re-enabled, I will create compatibility-list, showing which distribution implements what of the PK/AS/LI stuff, especially focusing on components needed for AppStream. Only a few distributions package AppStream-Core so far. Although it is beta-software, creating packages for it and shipping the required data to generate the AppStream database would be a very huge step forward. Listaller (Listaller is a cross-distro 3rd-party software installer, which integrates into Listaller-LogoPackageKit and AppStream. It allows installing 3rd-party applications, which are not part of the distributor s repositories, using standard tools used also for native-package handling. Everything which uses PackageKit can make use of Listaller packages too. Listaller also allows sandboxing of new applications, and uses an AppDir-like approach for installing software.) Listaller is currently undergoing it s last transition before a release with stable API and specifications can be made. Dependency solving will be improved a lot during the current release-cycle, making it less powerful, but working on all distributions instead. (Fedora always had an advantage in dependency-solving, due to RPM providing more package metadata for Listaller to use) This change was delayed due to discussing a possible use of ZeroInstall-feeds to provide missing dependencies with the ZeroInstall team. We did not come to a conclusion about extending the XML, so Listaller will contain an own format to define a dependency, which can reference a ZeroInstall feed. That should be a good solution for everyone. All these changes will result in IPK1.2, a new version of the IPK spec with small changes in the pkoptions file syntax and huge changes in dependency-handling. The new code is slowly stabilizing in a separate branch, and will soon be merged into master. The next Listaller release will be the last one of the 0.5.x series, we will start 0.6.x then. KDE currently has support for Listaller through Apper, which is enabled on a few distributions. In GNOME, optional Listaller support is being developed and will be available in one of the upcoming releases. Currently, to my knowledge, only a few distributions package Listaller. This should improve, so it is easier for application developers to deploy IPK packages. The upcoming changes in KDE and GNOME to build stable developer platforms will help Listaller a lot in finding matching dependencies, and for stuff which only depends on one software frameworks, installations should be a matter of seconds. As you can see, lots of things are happening, and there is improvement in all components related to installing and presenting software on Linux machines. However, all these projects have a severe lack of manpower, especially AppStream and Listaller have the lowest number of developers working on the tools (at time, only two active developers). This is the main reason for the slow development. But I am confident that we will have something shipped in the next distribution releases. At least AppStream should be ready then. [1]: I don t blame Ubuntu for that during the time they wrote an own solution, PackageKit did not have all the required features. (This situation has changed now, fortunately.) NOTE: I might extend this post with feedback from the different distributions, as soon as I get it.

11 May 2013

Steve Kemp: The rain in Scotland mainly makes me code

Lumail <http://lumail.org> received two patches today, one to build on Debian Unstable, and one to build on OpenBSD. The documentation of the lua primitives is almost 100% complete, and the repository has now got a public list of issues which I'm slowly working on. Even though I can't reply to messages I'm cheerfully running it on my mail box as a mail-viewer. Faster than mutt. Oddly enough. Or maybe I'm just biased.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?

In January, I announced a new IRC channel #debian-lego, for those of us in the Debian and Linux community interested in LEGO, the marvellous construction system from Denmark. We also created a wiki page to have a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes. And several people showed up to help. I was very happy to see the effect of my call. Since the small start, we have a debtags tag hardware::hobby:lego tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to LEGO and Mindstorms:
brickosalternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++
leocadvirtual brick CAD software
libnxtutility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX
lnpddaemon for LNP communication with BrickOS
nbccompiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
nqcNot Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX
python-nxtpython driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
python-nxt-filersimple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT
scratcheasy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up
t2nsimple command-line tool for Lego NXT
Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are currently available in Jessie/testing. leocad is so far only available in experimental. If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux for LEGO designers.

Russell Coker: Geographic Sorting Lessons to Learn from Ingress

I ve recently been spending a bit of my spare time playing Ingress (see the Wikipedia page if you haven t heard of it). A quick summary is that Ingress is an Android phone game that involves geo-location of portals that you aim to control and most operations on a portal can only be performed when you are within 40 meters so you do a lot of travelling to get to portals at various locations. One reasonably common operation that can be performed remotely is recharging a portal by using it s key, after playing for a while you end up with a collection of keys which can be difficult to manage. Until recently the set of portal keys was ordered alphabetically. This isn t particularly useful given the fact that portal names are made up by random people who photograph things that they consider to be landmarks. If people tried to use a consistent geographic naming system (which was short enough to fit in large print on a phone display) then it would be really difficult to make it usable. But as joke names are accepted there s just no benefit in having a sort by name. A recent update to the Ingress client (the program which runs on the Android phone and is used for all game operations) changed the sort order to be by distance. This makes it really easy to see the portals which are near you (which is really useful) but also means that the order changes whenever you move which isn t such a good idea for use on a mobile phone. It s quite common for Ingress players to recharge portals while on public transport. But with the new Ingress client the list order will change as you move so anyone who does recharging on a train will find the order of the list changing during the process and it s really difficult to find items in a list which is in a different order each time you look at it. This problem of ordering by location has a much greater scope than Ingress. One example is collections of GPS tagged photographs, it wouldn t make any sense to mix the pictures of two different sets of holiday pictures because they were both taken in countries that are the same distance from my current location (as the current Ingress algorithm would do). It seems to me that the best way of sorting geo-tagged items (Ingress portals, photos, etc) is to base it on the distance from a fixed point which the user can select. It could default to the user s current location but in that case the order of the list should remain unchanged at least until the user returns to the main menu and I think it would be ideal for the order to remain unchanged until the user requests it. I think that most Ingress players would agree with me that fixing annoying mis-features of the Ingress client such as this one would be better for the game than adding new features. While most computer games have some degree of make-work (in almost every case a computer could do things better than a person) I don t think that finding things in a changing list should be part of the make-work. Also it would be nice if Google released some code for doing this properly to reduce the incidence of other developers implementing the same mistakes as the Ingress developers in this regard.

Bastian Venthur: Wee! Wheezy is out (better late than never)

Last week we released Wheezy, roughly two years after our last release Squeeze. I d like to thank all the contributors in- and outside of Debian for your fine work! Every single contribution no matter how big or small summed up to the wonderful release we finished last week. Without you this release would not have been possible. Keep up the good work guys and make Jessie rock even harder! PS: It is very nice to see once again fresh packages rolling into unstable and spending some time fixing broken dependencies :)

James Morrison: Google IO predictions

I don't work at Google, so I can play to Google IO prediction game. Here are my Android predictions:
  1. New android version -- 99%
  2. New Nexus 7 -- 90%
  3. Upgraded storage on the Nexus 4 -- 70%
  4. T-mobile LTE for Nexus 4 -- 40%
  5. AT&T LTE for Nexus 4 -- 30%
  6. Verizon Nexus 4 -- 15%
So I think that means there is a (0.99 * 0.9 * 0.7 * 0.4 * 0.3 * 0.15) a 1% chance of all of these things happening.

10 May 2013

Richard Hartmann: Release Critical Bug report for Week 19

Still not sure what to do with this whole thing, but preserving the sharp increase in RC bug count for posterity can't hurt either way. Not sure if it's sad that so many issues may have been overlooked, if this means that Debian is very much alive, either. The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs: How do we compare to the Squeeze release cycle?
Week Squeeze Wheezy Diff
43 284 (213+71) 468 (332+136) +184 (+119/+65)
44 261 (201+60) 408 (265+143) +147 (+64/+83)
45 261 (205+56) 425 (291+134) +164 (+86/+78)
46 271 (200+71) 401 (258+143) +130 (+58/+72)
47 283 (209+74) 366 (221+145) +83 (+12/+71)
48 256 (177+79) 378 (230+148) +122 (+53/+69)
49 256 (180+76) 360 (216+155) +104 (+36/+79)
50 204 (148+56) 339 (195+144) +135 (+47/+90)
51 178 (124+54) 323 (190+133) +145 (+66/+79)
52 115 (78+37) 289 (190+99) +174 (+112/+62)
1 93 (60+33) 287 (171+116) +194 (+111/+83)
2 82 (46+36) 271 (162+109) +189 (+116/+73)
3 25 (15+10) 249 (165+84) +224 (+150/+74)
4 14 (8+6) 244 (176+68) +230 (+168/+62)
5 2 (0+2) 224 (132+92) +222 (+132/+90)
6 release! 212 (129+83) +212 (+129/+83)
7 release+1 194 (128+66) +194 (+128/+66)
8 release+2 206 (144+62) +206 (+144/+62)
9 release+3 174 (105+69) +174 (+105/+69)
10 release+4 120 (72+48) +120 (+72/+48)
11 release+5 115 (74+41) +115 (+74/+41)
12 release+6 93 (47+46) +93 (+47/+46)
13 release+7 50 (24+26) +50 (+24/+26)
14 release+8 51 (32+19) +51 (+32/+19)
15 release+9 39 (32+7) +39 (+32/+7)
16 release+10 20 (12+8) +20 (+12/+8)
17 release+11 24 (19+5) +24 (+19/+5)
18 release+12 2 (2+0) +2 (+2/+0)
Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

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