Replying to an old blog post of Martin F. Krafft: Configuration management, I want to give my point of view. The problems listed by madduck are quite common with Puppet, but I think Puppet is still worth, mostly because you can solve all these problems. Let give you my opinion on the list:

• Non-Unix approach to everything (own transport, self-made PKI, non-intuitive configuration language, a faint attempt at versioning (bitbucket), and much much more )

True. I think the approach of puppet is not really UNIXish. It is probably on purpose. The biggest issue is probably the PKI. It breaks frequently for unknown reason. The "non intuitive configuration language" is probably a matter of taste. I think the language is not very well designed and strange, but I can cope with that. The attempt to versioning -- if I understand correcly what it means -- refers to the fact that when Puppet replace a file it moves the old file to a bucket. This is not a good thing, but you can say "backup => '.puppet-bak'" and you get almost the same behavior as ".dpkg-old".

• Ruby

False debate. We can discuss for hours on Ruby, PHP, Java or whatever pet language people has invented. I am not a fan of Ruby but it is still nice as a general purpose language. To my mind, Ruby is still better to write daemon than bash.

• Abysmal slowness

False debate.

   info: Caching catalog for centi.....
   info: Applying configuration version '1350597216'
   notice: Finished catalog run in 3.08 seconds

The config of this node is not complex, but 3s is not that bad for something that runs every 30min. If you need sub-second speed for this kind of thing, maybe you are not looking for this kind of tool. Does 144s of server time per day is a big deal ? With a lot more complex setup, I can reach 30s for a run, although this is the point where I manage a lot of thing with it.

• Lack of basic functionality (e.g. replace a line of text)

False and True. Augeas allows you to replace a single value (even more precise than a line). Just have a look at the augeas type. This is pretty nice and allow to do thing like replacing "Defaults env_reset" by "Defaults env_reset, !tty_tickets" in 4 lines of code. So this i not precisely "a single line of text", but there is other way to do it.

• Host management and configuration programming intertwined, lack of a high-level approach to defining functionality

False. Well if you organize your code with manifests/site.pp and manifests/classes/*.pp, it seems like there is a separation between the two. Next you can try inheritance and define to create specific high-level features.

• Horrific error messages

False-ish. Hey at least there are error message ;-) Now, most of the error that are related to the programming language are useless (at least as cryptic as a C++ error message). But as usual with error message in programming language

• Catastrophic upgrade paths

True. Multi versions installation is horrible and you have to fix a lot of stuff to manage a sane overall configuration.

• Lack of IPv6 support

Not sure to understand this point, I use puppet over IPv6... To whoever is considering using puppet, this is worth a try. It is a nice system that really helps to maintain a decent configuration across nodes.

I'll soon be disposing of the Nissan Leaf that we leased a few months ago, so I thought it a useful exercise to write about my experiences with it. I am not a car man. I am a gadget man. For me, driving is a means to an end, and I'm much more interested in what I call the "cabin" experience, than the "driving" experience, so this is going to slanted much more that way. That said, I found the Nissan Leaf a fun car to drive, from my limited experiences of having fun driving cars. I liked how responsive it was when you put your foot down. It has two modes of operation, "D" and "Eco". I've actually taken to driving it in "Eco" mode most of the time, as it squeezes more range out of the batteries, but occasionally I'll pop it back into "D" to have a bit of fun. The main difference between the two modes, from a driving perspective, is it seems to limit the responsiveness of the accelerator. In "Eco" mode it feels more like you're driving in molasses, whereas in "D" mode, when you put your foot down, it responses instantly. "D" is great for dragging people off at the lights. It's a very zippy little car in "D" mode. It feels lighter. I've noticed that it has a bit of a penchant for over steering. Or maybe that's just my driving. If I have floored it a bit to take a right turn into oncoming traffic, I've noticed slight over steering. That's about all the driving type "real car stuff" I'll talk about. Now to the driver's "cabin experience". It's absolutely fabulous. I love sitting in the driver's seat of this car. Firstly, the seat itself is heated (in fact all of them are). As is the steering wheel. Nissan has gone to great lengths to allow you to avoid needing to run the car's heating system to heat the car, as doing so immediately drops at least 10 miles off the range. Unfortunately I found the windscreen had a tendency to fog up in the winter rainy periods, so I'd have to intermittently fire up the air conditioning to defog the windscreen. Of course, in the summer months, you're going to want to run the AC to cool down, so the range hit in that situation is unavoidable. I've only had this car from late Autumn until late Winter so far, so that hasn't been an issue I've had to contend with. The dashboard is all digital, and looks relatively high tech, which appeals to my inner geek. It's a dashboard. It tells you stuff. The stuff you'd expect it to tell you. Enough said. The audio system is nice. It supports Bluetooth audio, so one can be streaming Pandora from one's phone, through the sound system, for example. Or listening to audio from the phone. There's also a USB port, and it will play various audio files from USB storage. I found the way it chose to sort the files on a USB stick to be slightly surprising though. I haven't invested the time to figure out how I should be naming files so that they play in the order I expect them to play. The ability to play from USB storage compensates nicely for the fact that it only has a single CD player. (We have a 6 disc stacker in our 2006 Prius). The car also came with a 3 month free trial of Sirius XM satellite radio. This was fun. The only dance music FM station in the Bay Area has a weak signal in Mountain View, and I hate dance music with static, whereas there was an excellent electronic music station that I could listen to in glorious high definition. As long as I wasn't driving under a bridge. There's no way I'd pay money for satellite radio, but it was a fun gimmick to try out. The navigation system is really, really good. I haven't bothered using Google Maps on my phone at all. It gives such good spoken directions, that you don't even need to have the map on the screen. It names all the streets. I couldn't figure out a way to get distances in metric. The telematics service, Carwings, is probably my favourite feature. This is what really makes it feel like a car of the future. Through the companion Android application, I can view the charging status (if it's plugged in) or just check the available range (if it's not plugged in). From a web browser, I can plan a route, and push the route to the vehicle's navigation system. If the car is plugged in, I can also remotely turn on the vehicle's climate control system, pre-warming or cooling the car. It's a little thing, but the door unlocking annoyed me a little bit. I'm used to the Prius, where if you unlock the boot (that's trunk, Americans), or the front passenger door, all the doors unlocked. This was a convenient way of unlocking the car for multiple people as you approached it. With the Leaf, unlocking the boot only unlocks the boot. Unlocking the front passenger door only unlocks that door. It requires a second unlock action to unlock all the doors. I've found this to be slightly cumbersome when trying to unlock the car for everyone all at once, quickly (like when it's raining). Another minor annoyance is the headlights. I've gotten into the habit of driving with the headlights on all the time, because I believe it's safer. In the Prius, one could just leave the headlights switched to the "on" position, and they'd turn off whenever the driver's door was opened after the car was switched off. If you try that in the Leaf, the car beeps at you to warn you you've left the headlights on. It has an "auto" mode, where the car will choose when to turn the headlights on, based on ambient light conditions. In that case, when you turn the car off, it'll leave the headlights on for a configurable period of time and then turn them off. This is actually slightly unsettling, because it makes you think you've left your headlights on. The default timeout was quite long as well, something like 60 seconds. The way multiple Bluetooth phones are handled is just as annoying in the Leaf as it is in the Prius, which disappoints me, given 6 years have passed. The way I'd like to see multiple phones handled is the car chooses to pair with whichever phone is in range, or if multiple phones are in range, it asks or uses the last one it paired with. In reality, it tries to pair with whatever it paired with last time, and one has to press far too many buttons to switch it to one of the other phones it knows about. Range anxiety is definitely something of a concern. It can be managed by using the GPS navigation for long or otherwise anxiety-inducing trips, and then one can compare the "miles remaining" on the GPS with the "miles remaining" on the battery range, and reassure oneself that they will indeed make it to where they're trying to go. The worst case I had was getting to within 5 miles of empty. The car started complaining at me. The charging infrastructure in the Bay Area is pretty good. There are plenty of charging stations in San Francisco and San Jose. I'm spoiled in that I have free charging available at work (including a building at the end of my street, so I never bothered with getting a home charger installed). I've almost never had to pay for charging, so it's been great while gas prices have been on the rise. The car's navigation system knows about some charging stations, so you can plan a route with the charging stations it knows about in mind. The only problem is it doesn't know if the charging stations are in use. If you use the ChargePoint Android app, you can see if the charging stations are in use, but then you have to do this cumbersome dance to find an available charging station and plug the address into the vehicle's navigation system. Of course, what can then happen is in the time you're driving to the charging station, someone else starts using it. I actually got bitten by this yesterday. Would I buy a Leaf again? Not as my sole car. It makes a perfect second/commuter car, but as a primary vehicle, it's too limited by its range. They're also ridiculously expensive in Australia, and Brisbane has absolutely no charging infrastructure.

Ruby 2.0 was released today. This new version of the language brings some very interesting features, and according to the core team, an effort has been made to keep source level compartibility with Ruby 1.9. Debian packaging is under way and should hit NEW soon. During the last few days I gave more attention to getting the new multiarch support fixed upstream than to the packaging bits, but the remaining packaging work should be pretty much about housekeeping. Next steps from a Debian point of view (after Wheezy is out) include:

• add Ruby 2.0 support in gem2deb (should be trivial).
• check what packages need fixing to support Ruby 2.0, and which are broken beyond repair.
• figure out how to better exploit a multiarch-enabled Ruby.

Now let s get back to fixing RC bugs and getting Wheezy released. :-)

I just got this message through my University, and the least I can do (given I'm still, although barely, in time) is to repost it here, hoping it helps to spread the activity we have on this regard in Latin America:

Saturday, February 23 is the International Day of Open Data. Following its policy of promoting free, open and unrestricted access to the results of research funded with public money, CLACSO calls research centers and individual researchers to free their public data so they are available for other researchers and, most importantly, for the community as a whole. That's the reason CLACSO invites researchers and institutions to announce in social networks, mentioning "#DatosAbiertos #OpenData", which are their freed public documents, pointing to the web pages where they can be found. The International Open Data Day is an effort to:

• Spread the concept of Open Data
• Debate on the why of Open Data
• Publish analysis done using open public data
• Find out how more local and national (not reserved) open data can be published (i.e. Brazil)
• Call towards using open data in research
• Find which applications have been developed to handle and visualize open data
• Organize events for the International Open Data Day (i.e. Monterrey
• Call towards adding data catalogs in Latin America and the Caribbeanin the Data catalogs directory, in Datacatalogs.org, and in Open data census.

For further information on how to spread research and/or archives in digital repositories and in the CLACSO Digital Repository, please mail biblioteca@clacso.edu.ar We can between all contribute for the Latin American and Caribbean open data community to grow, democratizing access to public data about our societies.

So, what do I consider worthy of adding to a list of resources I can point to?

• I am part of the team that set up and has worked on convincing the Economics Research Institute (my workplace) academic groups to publish their research results and products in our institutional repository under Open Access-friendly licenses (CC-BY-SA-NC and more liberal). We have published a wealth of economics-related information there; I must thank and single out V ctor Corona, who has been long working on the digitalization and re-publication of the institute's journals from the (at least) past three decades.
• As the repository administrator, I am part of the RAD-UNAM (Red de Acervos Digitales, Digital Repositories Network) in our university. We administer at least 10 similar repositories in different institutes and faculties, and work on finding how to promote acceptance of open access ideas in UNAM's academic circles, and providing standards-based ways to share our work.
• As part of my information gathering activities for the e-voting analysis work we have been doing, I have set up the E-Voting observatory in Latin America site, where I gather the news I find on the topic, flagged by several categories.
• As for my personal work, although I am pretty young and little in formal academia, I publish most of I write in my personal webpage. Several different topics are at hand; of interest to this initiative, I think it's mostly the e-voting articles and presentations.

Two papers got published recently. The first one is Bates and Eddelbuettel (2013). It is titled Fast and Elegant Numerical Linear Algebra Using the RcppEigen Package, and provides a pretty thorough introduction to our RcppEigen package which uses Rcpp to provide access to the Eigen C++ template library from GNU R. The paper is out as Volume 50, Issue 5 at the (all electronic, open, and generally awesome) Journal of Statistical Software. A bibtex entry is available. The second paper is Eddelbuettel and Sanderson (2013). This one is titled RcppArmadillo: Accelerating R with high-performance C++ linear algebra and introduces the RcppArmadillo package which brings Conrad Sanderson's Armadillo C++ template library to GNU R by deploying Rcpp. The paper is currently "in press" at Computational Statistics & Data Analysis but the DOI 10.1016/j.csda.2013.02.005 will remain once a volume and issue is assigned by CSDA. Preprints of both papers are available via my papers page, and as vignettes in the corresponding packages. The upcoming Rcpp class in New York will feature Rcpp, RcppArmadillo and RcppEigen. Space is still available.

I have recently started to work on OUnit 2.0. The point of this new version will be to adapt OUnit to improve speed and compatibility with third party system:

• better configuration setup (through the use of environment variable, command line options and configuration files)
• systematic logging (verbose always on), but output log in a file
• allow vim quickfix to jump in the log file where the error has happened
• output HTML report
• output JUnit report
• run tests in parallel
• automatic selection of tests (choose the one that failed in the last run, before re-running the one that was ok)

Only the 3 last point needs to be completed. Here is a screenshot of Jenkins reading JUnit output of an OUnit test: So if you have a long standing issue with OUnit, this is the time to submit a bug. OUnit BTS

in a random disorder:

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Here was a talk I gave at Boston Python a few weeks ago. Check it out, and feel free to follow along with the slides, and take a look at the source. Sorry about the major futzup at 40 minutes in, and small mistakes throughout first time giving this talk! (link to the video for those on the planets)

This evening I was driving through one of the inner suburbs of Melbourne when a man flagged me down. He said that his mother was dying and he needed a taxi ride to some hospital far away and needed to borrow $200. He was saying something about his phone, I wasn t sure if he was planning to give me his phone number so I could call him to ask for repayment or offering his phone as collateral on the loan (incidentally a well known scam is to offer a stolen phone as collateral for a loan, it s a way of selling a locked phone that doesn t have cables). I ve encountered many beggars over the years, but he was by far the most serious about it he demonstrated the level of desperation that I ve only previously seen documented in history books and reports from travelers who visited developing countries. I will never know if his mother was dying, there are lots of other reasons why someone might urgently need cash (most of which won t get much sympathy). I gave him $20 as a gift. If his story was legitimate then I gave him 10% of what he needed so he only had to find another 9 people willing to do the same. If he was lying then I can afford to lose $20. In any case I definitely wasn t going to do what he asked and withdraw hundreds of dollars from an ATM for him. Also regardless of whether he was telling the truth I didn t want to have him repay me, if he s telling the truth then I m happy to give money to him and if he s not then I m better off avoiding him in future. If I had $50 I would probably have given it to him, but $200 is too much. As I drove off I looked in my rear-vision mirror and saw him running between cars on the road trying to flag someone else down. Running through moving traffic on a Saturday night is another indication of how serious he was, generally someone who s in a good state of mind and wants a long and healthy life won t do that.

Following up on using Debian on the WeTab with GNOME Shell I had a look at automatically adjusting the screen orientation when rotating the device. The accelerometer is handled in the asus_laptop module since kernel 3.2, so this shows up in /proc/bus/input/devices:

I: Bus=0019 Vendor=0000 Product=0000 Version=0000
N: Name="Pegatron Lucid Tablet Accelerometer"
P: Phys=pega_accel/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/asus_laptop/input/input4
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=event4 js0 
B: PROP=0
B: EV=9
B: ABS=7

Whenever the screen orientation changes the driver emits a udev event. The helper in /lib/udev/accelerometer processes it thanks to /lib/udev/rules.d/61-accelerometer.rules, determines the orientation and adds the ID_INPUT_ACCELEROMETER_ORIENTATION property to the event which can be checked with udevadm monitor --property:

UDEV  [5778.534171] change   /devices/platform/asus_laptop/input/input4 (input)
ABS=7
ACTION=change
DEVPATH=/devices/platform/asus_laptop/input/input4
EV=9
ID_FOR_SEAT=input-platform-asus_laptop
ID_INPUT=1
ID_INPUT_ACCELEROMETER=1
ID_INPUT_ACCELEROMETER_ORIENTATION=right-up
ID_PATH=platform-asus_laptop
ID_PATH_TAG=platform-asus_laptop
MODALIAS=input:b0019v0000p0000e0000-e0,3,kra0,1,2,mlsfw
NAME="Pegatron Lucid Tablet Accelerometer"
PHYS="pega_accel/input0"
PRODUCT=19/0/0/0
PROP=0
SEQNUM=1550
SUBSYSTEM=input
TAGS=:seat:
UDEV_LOG=3
USEC_INITIALIZED=6154288

This is captured by gnome-settings-daemon (>=3.2) that adjusts the screen rotation using xrandr2 accordingly. This can be checked by running gnome-settings-daemon with --debug. The old way of using xinput events is no longer supported. Unfortunately Debian's udev has a minor bug that misdetects the input device so this patch is needed to have the screen orientation changed automatically on the WeTab. This blog is flattr enabled.

(Wasn't that the subject of the last journal post I made? Oh, no, it was just similar.) Hi. Sorry that I've been a bad correspondant! I owe lots of people mail and I'm rather behind in various things. Over the past couple of weeks, I've dealt with a couple of ant invasions, a compromised credit card number, and then a respiratory infection that completely knocked me on my ass. I'm still only back up to about 80%, although I did manage to do a complete day of work today for the first time in over a week. More normal posting and communication should hopefully resume shortly. The System of the World is a very long book, and is not, so far, all that horribly interesting, but I'm going to finally finish this series if it kills me, and illness thankfully let me get a solid start on it. Finally finishing Stephenson's Baroque Cycle so that I can stop thinking about it was one of my reading goals for the year. (I would have considered just not finishing the series, but it won an award, and I have a thing about eventually reading all the winners of certain awards so that I can judge them fairly.)

Finland. Helsinki, Lahti, streets Arriving at Helsinki airport, we filed a claim with Lufthansa as a hard shell suitcase had a splintered corner. We were surprised that so many Finns arrived from Munich with skis, more on that later. We picked up our car and started on our way towards Koli; driving with a top speed of 100 km/h and often being limited to 80 km/h or even 60 km/h is... unusual... Finnish police/authorities seem to be obsessed with enforcing those speed limits as there are a lot of speed cameras along the way. Finnish people seem to be similarly obsessed with slot machines; there is an incredible amount of them at gas stations and a constant stream of people playing them. From an outsider's perspective, it's weird that a country as strict about one form of addiction, alcohol, and working against it vigorously, by means of taxes, would allow another form of addiction, gambling, run as freely and this allow so many slot machines. Speaking of taxes on alcohol: a single 0.33 l bottle of beer is more expensive in a Finnish supermarket than 0.5 l of beer in a German restaurant. Which also explains why supermarkets tend to have a rather large section with relatively cheap alcohol free beer. Anyway, coming back to streets: Highway intersections don't have continuous on/off ramps from which you change from one highway to another; you drive off of the highway, stop at a traffic light, and then continue onto the other highway. Weird system, but given the amount of traffic we witnessed, it's probably Good Enough (tm). Stopping for a short time in Lohti simply because it's apparently famous for winter sports competitions, we arrived at Future Freetime in Koli national park after about five to six gruelling hours of net driving through somewhat bad weather and behind slow drivers. Koli Hiking up to Ukko-Koli and its sister peaks proved to be rather exhausting as we kept on breaking through the snow cover to our knees and sometimes even our hips. Once we were up there, we realized that even though you couldn't see it in between the trees, there was fog all over the plains so we couldn't see anything. Still, it was a nice hike even if somewhat short. Note to self: Even when a trail is marked locally, if OpenStreetMap does not know about it... don't walk along it. Especially not when the going's rough already. And if there's a sign suggesting you wear snow shoes... wear snow shoes. Returning to Koli Hotel and the museum next to it, we walked over to the ski slope. The highest peak within Koli,Ukko-Koli, is 347 meters high, the local ski slope starts a good way below that. This would explain why a lot of Finns came back from Munich with their skis... Afterwards, we rented a snow mobile, without guide or supervision, and drove from Loma-Koli over lake Pielien towards Purnuniemi and in a large circle down towards lake Ryyn skyl where we turned around and went back the same way. If we thought Finnish streets don't have a lot of signs we soon realized that snow mobile tracks have even less. There are at most two or three signs pointing you in the right direction, but on the plus side, there are no posted speed limits for snow mobiles, either. In somewhat related news, snow mobiles can go at least 95 km/h. At that point, the scratched and dirty visor of your rental helmet will keep slamming down, forcing you to take one hand off the handle and thus stop accelerating to maintain stability. To round off the day, we heated up the sauna built into our little wooden hut. Running outside three times to rub myself off with snow from head to toes, I almost slipped and fell while standing still. When your feet are too hot for the snowy ground, you'll start to melt your own little pools of slippery water/snow mush within seconds. File that one under "I would never have guessed unless I had experienced it myself". Generic The MarkDown source of this blog post is not even 5 kiB in size; even in a worst case scenario, pushing this to my ikiwiki instance via git will eat up less 10 kiB of mobile data. Which is good because I have 78 MiB of international data left on this plan. This is also the reason why there are no links in this blog post: I am writing everything off line and don't want to search for the correct URLs to link to. I really wish EU regulators would start to tackle data roaming now that SMS and voice calls are being forced down into somewhat sane pricing regions by regulations. PS:

-rw-r--r-- 1 richih richih 4.6K Feb 11 22:55 11-Finland-I.mdwn
[...]
Writing objects: 100% (7/7), 2.79 KiB, done.

Second part; bullet points to save time

• For the first time in a long time, I used something that comes "from Nokia": Nokia_n tires with spikes. Nokia_n means "from Nokia", i.e. a former business unit which Nokia sold and allowed the new owner to keep the modified name. I don't expect to use anything else from Nokia any time soon, which is a pity imo.
• Roads are often plowed, but a lot of ice still remains. This is not a problem because of the spikes; they, in turn, will be a problem for non-icy roads as they turn tarmac into gravel and potholes... At least while I was there, most streets, both within and without cities, were covered with either snow or ice.
• Cars moving snow are not purpose-built, but re-use existing machinery. Plows tend to be smaller dump trucks (~20-30 tons?) while actual shovelling is done by tractors and small diggers.
• Plow drivers expect you to make way. In narrow streets, they will not slow down even if their shovel extends well onto your lane. You get out of the way, and quickly, or your car is scrap.
• Finland is a nation of tailgaters. Distance between cars driving at around 80 km/h on icy roads averages at about 10-20 meters.
• One reason why tailgating is somewhat understandable, if still highly dangerous, is that a single slow driver can accumulate literally a dozen or more car behind them as there's almost no chance to overtake on those wavy single-lane roads. I witnessed a car driving at a constant 50 km/h in a 80 km/h zone. As they refused to stop at the side to let others pass, this was... infuriating.
• Overtaking is generally done at the lowest speed delta possible without crashing into oncoming traffic. This ensures that only one car per overtaking opportunity gets to overtake.
• Licorice all the things. Licorice ice cream. Yay.
• There are a lot of body building products in Finnish super markets. Even the smallest stores always have their own section.
• Lactose and gluten free food is a Big Thing.
• Foreign loanwords always have at least one letter doubled; tack an "i" at the end and you're good to go.
• Finns are fiercely proud of their own country and its achievements. Most if not all of them sport a Nokia phone. Try and find a door hinge not made by Fiskars.
• Angry. Birds. Everything. There is even Angry Birds coffee beans on sale.
• Keys are half-round, of a system I have never seen before, and tend to jam in the locks.
• Self-locking doors are not opened automagically by depressing the inner handle; you are forced to turn an extra knob. The same system is used for doors you lock manually. Said knob needs to be turned clock-wise to open and vice versa to close. The German system follows standard screws (clock-wise to tighten/close) and thus is the exact opposite. If you are used to the exact opposite of a system like that, you get to run into doors a lot.
• Energy seems to be free or nearly so. Doors of many heated buildings just stay open all the time. Lights burn continuously. Both cabins I stayed at were heated with electric stoves of all things.
• Drafty (thus non-insulated) windows are apparently common enough that you can buy plastic tape marketed specifically to tape over drafty windows.

Boat Again, technology.. I am on a boat in international waters somewhere in between Stockholm and Tallinn and there's a (sluggish) satellite uplink so I can push out this post. We really do live in the future.. Beta git annex assistant runs on Android now; get it, break it, report it. Bugs The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

• In Total: 795
  • Affecting wheezy: 206 That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
    • Affecting wheezy and unstable: 144 Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
      • 33 bugs are tagged 'patch'. Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
      • 9 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
      • 103 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. Help make a first step towards resolution!
    • Affecting wheezy only: 62 Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to wheezy. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
      • 24 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team.
      • 38 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked.

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)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)	+194 (+128/+66)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)	+206 (+144/+62)

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Some weeks ago I posted about the long-expected demise of my old phone. And even given I don't usually don't pay much attention to phones (and could care less about the smartphone fad), I asked for a recommendation here on what to change to. The only thing that made me look for something other than a ~US$15 phone is that I enjoy having a GPS-enabled device. So, with that in mind, I went to my carrier's offices, with a top budget of MX$2,000 (~US$150), and asked for help. After being a Telcel subscriber for ~10 years (and ~6 with the same device), even though I use prepaid cards only (and seldom pay over MX$100 a month), I expected some advice. So, when the employee told me to go to the phone exhibit they have and pick my favorite, I declined, by telling I just want the cheapest unit with a GPS. He almost immediately offered me the ZTE V791, an Android 2.3-based unit, for MX$990 (~US$75), just around half of what I expected to pay. So I got two - One for myself, one for Regina, as her previous "nice" phone died under the Bosnian rain and had one of the sturdy, reliable but utterly boring US$15 phones for over a year ;-) As a new Mexican resident, she can surely use a GPS as well! (and some other tools in it). So, two nice phones, and still (squarely!) in my projected budget! I *did* give some thought to the comments posted in my original post, but given I don't want to bite in to the tendency too much, I let price determine what we get. And after all, I do not plan to ever enable data over the phone network (if at all, I use it on wifi). A recommendation for people with similar profiles/interest than me: Maps with me allows for downloading OpenStreetMap data on a country basis (so I get all of Mexico with me). I also got Vespucci OSM Editor, to be able to do OpenStreetMap updates from the phone, but given it has some stability issues I have not used it much (and it's understandably not so disconnected-mode-friendly) Not much more to add to this. I am writing this prompted by Russell's "iPhone vs. Android" post. My point after getting these two cheap phones? Having a wide range of devices under this same OS (even if it still has long ways to go freedom-wise) makes it a choice for people like me, who don't want to save money for a couple of months in order to get the newest gadget. I hope this phone lasts with me several years as well, without changing my usage pattern!

Taking advantage of a new hard drive, I decided to reinstall my Ubuntu (Precise 12.04.2) laptop from scratch so that I could easily enable full-disk encryption (a requirement for Mozilla work laptops). Reinstalling and reconfiguring everything takes a bit of time though, so here's the procedure I followed to keep the configuration to a minimum.

Install Ubuntu/Debian on the new drive While full-disk encryption is built into the graphical installer as of Ubuntu 12.10, it's only available through the alternate install CD in 12.04 and earlier. Using that CD, install Ubuntu on the new drive, making sure you select the "Encrypted LVM" option when you get to the partitioning step. (The procedure is the same if you use a Debian CD.) To make things easy, the first user you create should match exactly the one from your previous installation.

Copy your home directory Once the OS is installed on the new drive, plug the old one back in (in an external enclosure if you need to) and mount its root partition as a read-only drive on /mnt. Then log in as root (not just using sudo, actually login using the root user) and copy your home directory on the new drive:

rm -rf /home/*
cp -a /mnt/home/* /home/

Then you should be able to log in as your regular user.

Reinstall all packages The next step is to reinstall all of the packages you had installed on the old OS. But first of all, let's avoid having to answer all of the debconf questions we've already answered in the past:

rm -rf /var/cache/debconf
cp -a /mnt/var/cache/debconf /var/cache/

and set the debconf priority to the one you usually use (medium in my case):

dpkg-reconfigure debconf

Next, make sure you have access to all of the necessary repositories:

cp -a /mnt/etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/
cp -a /mnt/etc/apt/sources.list.d/* /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
apt-get update

Getting and setting the list of installed packages To get a list of the packages that were installed on the old drive, use dpkg on the old install:

mount -o remount,rw /mnt
chroot /mnt
dpkg --get-selections > /packages
exit
mount -o remount,ro -r /mnt

Use that list on the new install to reinstall everything:

dpkg --set-selections < /mnt/packages
apt-get dselect-upgrade

Selectively copy configuration files over Finally, once all packages are installed, you can selectively copy the config files from the old drive (in /mnt/etc) to the new (/etc/). In particular, make sure you include these ones:

cp -a /mnt/etc/alternatives/ /mnt/etc/default/ /etc/

(I chose not to just overwrite all config files with the old ones because I wanted to get rid of any cruft that had accumulated there and suspected that there might be some slight differences due to the fresh install of the distro.)

Reboot Once that's done, you should really give that box a restart to ensure that all service are using the right config files, but otherwise, that's it. Your personal data and config are back, all of your packages are installed and configured the way they were, and everything is fully encrypted!

A friend who s a long-time iPhone user just asked for my advice about whether to get a Samsung Galaxy S3, a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, or a iPhone 5. Advantages for Android I think that liberty should be the first consideration, I ve previously written about how Android phones won t necessarily give you as much freedom as you desire if you buy on the basis of price and features [1]. But even the least free Android options are way better than the iOS (iPhone and iPad) environment. This isn t necessarily a big deal for my friend, like most of the population he usually just wants things to work being able to hack them isn t such an issue. However unlike most of the population he does make a reasonable portion of his income from software development and it could be that he will have a contract for developing an app on a mobile device in which case the freedom to tinker on Android will help him. He could use an iPhone for his personal use and develop on an Android platform for his clients, but generally it s more efficient if your personal use of technology is similar to that of your clients. The Nexus devices are very good for liberty and they also have nice hardware at a low price, I ve just got a Nexus 4 for my wife and it s very nice. The next issue is that of hardware standards, I ve previously written about the potential for developing a standard form factor for Android phones [2] although this doesn t seem likely to be implemented in the near future. The wide range of Android hardware means that the range of cases etc on the market is rather small. But the advantage of the wide range is that with an Android phone you can have a device that s bigger, smaller, cheaper, cuter, or faster than an iPhone. There are Android devices which have a higher resolution, more RAM, more storage (if you include SD storage), or has other benefits over an iPhone. For whatever reasonable range of specs appeal to you you can probably find a device to match. I ve previously written about the way the ideal size for devices depends on your hand size and your preferred manner of gripping the device [3], so the lack of size range in Apple devices is not just a limitation on personal choice but also a failure to properly support people with different size hands. Depending on the preferred manner of gripping a phone the iPhone 5 is either too big for an average woman or too small for a tall man. The Google Play store apparently has more applications than the iPhone/iPad App Market. This difference can be expected to increase now that the Samsung Galaxy S3 is outselling the iPhone 5. Comparing the number of unit sales of the iPhone vs Android phones is no longer interesting, comparing Samsung to Apple is the interesting thing. Advantages for the iPhone By all accounts it s quite an easy process to backup and restore all iPhone settings. You can expect that after losing an iPhone you can just connect the new one to your PC and have it work in exactly the same way after all the data is transferred. Trying to do such things on Android is merely difficult if you have root access to your phone and the source and destination phones are of exactly the same make and model. But if you have different versions of the phone or if you don t have root access then it may be impossible. I welcome comments from anyone who knows of good solutions to this problem. The iPhone achieved a reasonable share of the smart-phone market before Android really started going well so there are a lot of people who are used to the iPhone. Simply by being unfamiliar Android will be a more difficult option for people who have used the iPhone such as my friend. But it is possible to learn other systems. Generally I think that this may be a big issue for people who use Macs for all their other computing. But if the only Apple product you use is an iPhone then switching to Android shouldn t be a big deal. Update: One feature of the iPhone that is very important to my friend is the ability to add arbitrary tags in the contacts. In addition to name, address, phone number, etc he wants to add arbitrary notes related to his business. While he could put that sort of thing into the Notes field in Android he would rather have several fields with his own names. Android 4.1.x definitely doesn t have this and I can t test Android 4.2.x at this time. Is there any way of doing such things on Android? Conclusion It seems to me that Android devices are better in every way apart from backup, restore, and general management. If I was about to buy 100 phones then I d probably consider the iPhone (not necessarily buy but definitely consider). But for a single user I definitely recommend Android devices. The Android devices which seem good at the moment are the Galaxy S3 (which I m using now), the Nexus 4 (which is really good apart from being unable to change the battery or add more storage), and the Galaxy Note 2 (which is about the biggest phone available). One of the things that my friend wants to do is to use a phone instead of a tablet or laptop. I think that the Galaxy Note 2 is the only option for him.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/05/06/liberty-mobile-phones/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/01/04/standardising-android/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/02/11/phone-tablet-sizes/

For a while, it looked to me like my bicycle's rear-light was somewhat dim. I supposed that the batteries might be getting low, but I was not sure. So, given that I have a multimeter, and that the internets give ~20% decrease in voltage as reasonable limit for a non-recheargable battery that is not "dead", I set to measure. The batteries are type N Battery (which were not as common as I hoped, at least not as common as either AA, AAA, D or C, all of which I could find at the nearby store, but not N). Battery "marked" voltage: 1.5V. New batteries (after I replaced them): 1.451V (good enough). My old batteries 1.041V. Ouch! That's ~30% decrease. No wonder I could stare in the light without problems With the new batteries in, it's a bit painful to look directly into the small light. In hindsight, 3 years of light (pun intended) use is more than reasonable. So note to self: test batteries more often, at least at the beginning of the cycling season.