Search Results: "rul"

24 October 2013

Steve Kemp: Some things change, some things do not.

After seven years working from home I've resigned from my position at Bytemark. Why? A combination of wanting to do something different coupled with the desire to reclaim my second bedroom, which is currently tied up as an office. Working in an office in the future will be weird ("You mean I have to get dressed every day?!") but hopefully not unduly burdonsome. My two-year plan still remains in effect: Pay off this flat as soon as possible, then purchase another and rent this one out. Giving me some income of my own, which I will need. The "five" year plan involves me quitting work, so that I can stay home and raise children. That makes sense because sometime next year I'll become the partner who earns the least amount of monies, and I'll also be the partner with the lowest upper-bound on salary potential (short of moving to London/similar which I've always ruled out). Having rental income for myself means I'm not utterly dependant on other money, and all being well this place will be 100% paid off within 18 months. (After that lots of saving will take place for a deposit for the second place. We did bid on a couple of places locally, which were outstanding, but it is perhaps for the best we didn't win them. No more looking at ESPC!) Bytemark now becomes a company I recommend 100% for hosting in the UK. In the past I've always said nice things, but I've not strongly recommended them/us, because I'm too biased. All my personal hosting, except for one virtual machine, will remain at Bytemark indefinitely. Lovely, flexible, and great. (I have one outside guest for the purposes of diversification. That currently lives at Mythic Beasts.)

17 October 2013

Stefano Zacchiroli: org-mutt ported to org-capture

org-mutt with org-mode >= 8 Thanks to Don I just remembered that I haven't yet announced org-mutt support for org-mode >= 8. Let's catch up! Since a few weeks I've been aware of the fact that my mutt/org-mode glue, AKA org-mutt, was no longer working with org-mode >= 8, due to the ditching of org-remember in favor of org-capture. Allegedly, org-capture should have been backward compatible, but it clearly is not. Before I had time to fix it myself, Mako came to my rescue and submitted a patch (now accepted) that does the needed porting. Free Software is truly amazing, isn't it? I've just updated the canonical org-mutt blog post, so that the documentation in there is up to date again. If you're using org-mutt, I suggest to refer to the Git repository as the canonical location for future updates, if any. Thanks Don, thanks Mako!

8 October 2013

Raphael Geissert: Faster, more stable and new opportunities

A new version of the code behind http.debian.net was deployed a few days ago. It has proved to be far more stable, faster, and scalable compared to the previous mod_perl-based deployment.

There were a couple of glitches during the earlier roll-out for IPv6 users, fixed thanks to the reports by Cyril Brulebois, Michael Stapelberg and Robert Drake.

What's behind?
The redirector is now a plack application (with no middlewere) running under the Starman server with an apache fronted. Requests are processed faster than before and there mod_perl-induced system overload is finally gone.

The redirector is now easier to test and develop. Deploying the live instance is not yet fully streamlined, but it has seen a lot of improvement. Some important changes to the way the redirector works are already on their way to see the light and I am going to be announcing them when they do. Fork the repository and hack a few changes, contributions are welcome :)

It's probably time to move it under debian.org, and finish making it the default everywhere. It's even made its way into the installation manual.

Russ Allbery: Review: Grimspace

Review: Grimspace, by Ann Aguirre
Series: Sirantha Jax #1
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: March 2008
ISBN: 0-441-01599-9
Format: Mass market
Pages: 312
Sirantha Jax is a jumper: a person with the rare genetic ability to jump spaceships through the shortcut dimension of grimspace. It's a science fiction idea with a long pedigree. It creates a separate in-group for the characters to belong to, a society with its own rules, and sets up tension with the rest of the institutions of the world. In Aguirre's version, jumpers can provide the transition but direction in grimspace has to be done by a pilot, and the jumper and the pilot develop a deep psychic bond. Jax had been jumping with her husband piloting, but on their last trip their ship crashed, killing everyone on board except her. As Grimspace opens, Jax is in a treatment facility that's much more like a prison. In theory, they're trying to figure out whether she's still able to (and safe to allow to) jump. In practice, something quite a bit more sinister is going on, a fact that the reader senses early but only learns more about after Jax is helped to escape. Scarred, deeply depressed, and nearly suicidal, she's pulled into the subversive plans of a small ship of renegades who are trying to break open the Corp monopoly on grimspace travel and their tight hold over every jumper. But she's not sure whether she trusts them, or whether she cares enough about their crusade to truly join in. Grimspace follows well-trod SF paths of special cadres of pilots and navigators, lawless corners of space with local warlords, and rebellion against smothering centralization, but its first-person protagonist and point of view have more in common with urban fantasy. It's written in first-person and, at times, nearly stream of consciousness from Jax's perspective, and Jax displays plenty of profanity, acidic commentary, and emotional angst. If her special ability were shapeshifting or magic instead of jumping spaceships, one could easily see her as the typical burned-out urban fantasy detective. I liked that. It's a fun point of view when it's written well, and it felt fresh when applied to a science fiction background instead of the more typical fantasy. That said, Grimspace has a rather rough start. Jax isn't sure what's going on at first and also isn't sure she cares, and I thought that carried over to the reader's experience. The first section of the book is rough and jagged, with staccato bursts of character introduction, world-building that doesn't quite cohere, and an extended stop on a very odd outback planet that felt to me like a repurposed stage from a western. Part of the early problem is that Jax and the reader are being intentionally kept in the dark about the real goal of this group, but part of the problem is also that none of the characters start off as very likable. That includes Jax, who is a complete mess and who is both scared and despairing to the point of being almost nihilistic. The world-building unfortunately does not carry the reader through that part of the story, and at about eighty pages in I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. It does, however, get much better. For one, Jax calms down and starts making emotional connections with the rest of the crew, and that lets her demonstrate skills as a fearless problem solver. For another, while the goal of the group of people she's fallen in with isn't exactly deep, it does make sense and it does slowly become a cause the reader (and Jax) can believe in. The frenetic pace of introduction and discovery also slows down, the cast stabilizes, and the surroundings get a bit less weird (and a bit more conventional for a science fiction novel). I didn't care for the alien baby subplot I rarely do but the rest of the story slowly pulled me in. One thing Aguirre did extremely well was surprise me. There are several points later in the book where Jax gets put in a fairly typical high-stress position and does something very atypical in reaction to it, twisting the story into a shape quite a bit unlike what I had been expecting. That made Jax feel like a true free agent, establishing her independence and her desire to control her own life, and that appealed to me. Aguirre also palms one card exceptionally well, setting up an ending that I thought was the best set of scenes in the whole book, and that had me thoroughly engrossed. One can see the bones of the urban fantasy heroine inside Jax's character, but they're fresh and interesting in an SF world, and they work better than I would have expected. There is a romance, in fitting with the urban fantasy inspiration, and it didn't quite work for me, but Aguirre also builds in a reason why it might not make sense and makes it spiky and fragile without being too cliched. By the end of the book, I was, if not entirely persuaded, at least willing to go along for the ride. And that's the best summary of Grimspace, I think. Parts of it don't make a great deal of sense, and parts of it are quite choppy. But I liked Jax once she starts getting a handle on her trauma, the other characters grew on me, and the plot surprised me in some interesting ways. It's not the smoothest or most polished SF novel I've read, but it has a lot of energy and an unusual genre mix. I think I'll stick along for the ride. Followed by Wanderlust. Rating: 7 out of 10

6 October 2013

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2013/37-40

not much activity around RC bugs on my side in the last weeks; & the ones I worked on were all in the Debian Perl Group: on an unrelated note: following the discussion on debian-project, I finally revoked my old opengpg key 0x00F3CFE4 which served me well from 1998 until 2009. since then, I've only been using 0x8649AA06 anyway ...

5 October 2013

Vincent Sanders: If I have a style, I am not aware of it.

I wish I had known about that quote from Michael Graves before now. I would have perhaps had an answer to some recent visitors to makespace.

There are regular scheduled visits to makespace where people can come and view our facilities, and perhaps start the process of becoming a member if they decide they like what they see.

Varnishing a folding chair using a stool as a stand
However, we sometimes get people who just turn up at the door. If a member feels charitable they may choose to give a short tour rather than just turn the person away. I happened to be in one Friday afternoon recently varnishing a folding chair when two such people rang the doorbell. There were few other members about and because watching varnish dry was dull I decided to be helpful and do a quick tour.

I explained that they really ought to return for a scheduled event for a proper tour, gave the obligatory minimal safety briefing, and showed them the workshops and tools. During the tour it was mentioned they were attending a certain local higher education establishment and were interested in makespace as an inexpensive studio.

Before they left I was asked what I was working on. I explained that I had been creating stools and chairs from plywood. At this point the conversation took a somewhat surreal turn, one of them asked, well more demanded, who my principle influence had been in designing with plywood.

When I said that I had mainly worked from a couple of Google image searches they were aghast and became quite belligerent. They both insisted I must have done proper research and my work was obviously influenced by Charles and Ray Eames and Arne Jacobsen and surely I intended to cite my influences in my design documents.

My admission that I had never even heard the names before and had no design documents seemed to lead to a distinctly condescending tone as they explained that all modern plywood design stemmed from a small number of early 20th century designers and any competent designers research would have revealed that.

At this point in proceedings I was becoming a bit put out that my good deed of showing off the workshop had not gone unpunished. I politely explained that I designed simply by generating a requirement in my head, maybe an internet search to see what others had done, measuring real things to get dimensions and then a great deal of trial and error.

I was then abruptly informed that my "design process was completely invalid and there were well established ways to design furniture correctly and therefore my entire design was invalid" and that I was wasting time and material. I thanked them for their opinion and showed them out, safe and well before anyone gets any ideas.

I put the whole incident out of my mind until I finished writing up the final folding chair post the other day. It struck me that perhaps I had been unknowingly influenced by these designers. It was certainly true I had generated ideas from the hundreds of images my searches had revealed.

I did some research and it turns out that from the 1930s to the 1950s there were a string of designers using plywood in novel ways from the butterfly stool by Sori Yanagi through formed curvy chairs by Alvar Aalto and eero saarinen.

While these designers produced some wonderfully iconic and contemporary furniture I think that after reviewing my initial notes that two more modern designers Christian Desile and Leo Salom probably influenced me more directly. Though I did not reference their designs beyond seeing the images along with hundreds of others, certainly nothing was directly copied.

And there in lies an often repeated observation: no one creates anything without being influenced by their environment. The entire creative process of several billion ape descendants (or Golgafrincham telephone sanitisers if you prefer) is based on the simple process of copying, combining and transforming what is around us.

Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I must accept that certain individuals at points in history have introduced radical improvements in their field, people like Socrates Galileo Leonardo Newton Einstein. However, even these outstanding examples were enlightened enough to acknowledge those that came before. Newtons quotation "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" pretty much sums it up.

In my case I am privileged enough to live in a time where my environment has grown to the size of the world thanks to the internet. My influences, and therefore what I create, is that much richer but at the same time it means that my influence on others is similarly diminished.

I have joined the maker community because I want to create. The act of creation teaches me new skills in a physical, practical way and additionally I get to exercise my mind using new techniques or sometimes things I had forgotten I already knew. I view this as an extension of my previous Open Source software work, adding a physical component to a previously purely mental pursuit.

But importantly I like that my creations might provide inspiration for someone else. To improve those chances in the wider world I force myself to follow a few basic rules:
Release
Possibly one of the hardest things for any project. I carefully avoided the word finish here because my experience leads me to the conclusion that I always want to improve my designs.

But it is important to get to a point in a project where you can say "that is good enough to share", this is more common in software but it really applies to any project.

Share
If your aim here is to improve your society with your contribution sharing your designs and information is important. I think there is nothing better than someone else taking one of your designs and using it and perhaps improving on it, remember that is what you probably did in one way or another better to make it less hard for that to happen.

Ensure your design files are appropriately licensed and they are readily accessible. I personally lean towards the more generally accessible open source licences like MIT but the decision is ultimately yours.

Licencing is important, especially in the current copyright happy society. I know it sounds dull and no one takes that seriously, right? Sorry, but yes they do and it is better for you to be clear from the start, especially if there is a software component to your project. Oh one personal plea, use an existing well known licence, the world simply does not need another one!

Write about it
The blog posts about the things I have made sometimes take almost as much time as the creation. The clear recording on my thoughts in written and photographic form often gives me more inspiration for improvements or other projects.

If someone else gets pleasure from the telling then that can only be good. If you do not do this then your voice cannot be heard and you wasted an opportunity to motivate others.

Feedback
If you do manage to get feedback on your creation, read it. You may disagree or not be interested for the current project but the feedback process is important. In software this often manifests as bug reports, in more physical projects this often becomes forum or blog comments.

Just remember that you need a thick skin for this, the most vocal members of any society are the minority with inflammatory opinion, the silent majority are by definition absent but there is still useful feedback out there.

Create again
By this I simply mean that once you are satisfied yourself on a project move on to the next. This may sound a little obvious but once you have some creative momentum it is much easier to keep going project to project than in you leave time between.

Also do not have too many projects ongoing, by all means have a couple so you do not get stuck waiting for materials or workshop time but more than three and four and you will never be able to release any of them.
Those students were perhaps somewhat misguided in how they stated their opinions, but they are correct that in the world in which we find ourselves we are all influenced. Though contrary to received wisdom those influences are more likely to be from the internet and our peers in the global maker society than historical artists.

4 October 2013

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in September 2013

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (86.18 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Package Tracking System^U Distro Tracker Marko Lalic implemented quite a few interesting features in the last weeks of the Google Summer of Code (support of teams most notably). Unfortunately he didn t deploy (yet) the latest changes on pts.debian.net. Given the good work he made over the summer, I marked him as successful in his GSOC. Hopefully he will stick around and continue to contribute, he promised to try to handle some mass renaming that we agreed upon. Effectively, after much bike-shedding, I decided that the software would be called Distro Tracker . Once those last-minute cleanups are done, I plan to request tracker.debian.org to Debian System Administrators. This means that it will be deployed in parallel to the current PTS at least until we re at feature parity in the new codebase. The new codebase should be much more easy to get started with, so I should do some promotion and invite people to contribute to it possibly by writing some short how to get started documentation. I started by creating a dedicated wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/distro-tracker
 Misc packaging I got two REJECTs from ftpmasters this month (one for galette, one for dolibarr). I took care of fixing the various issues in galette and the package has been promptly accepted afterwards. For dolibarr, I mentored the upstream maintainer about the various problems and got him to fix it. It took a bit more time and the package is thus still in NEW. I packaged wordpress 3.6, and then wordpress 3.6.1 (security update). python-django also had multiple security updates this month, I took care of one or two uploads but Luke Faraone dealt with most of them (including backports to Squeeze!). I packaged Publican 3.6.1 and uploaded dh-linktree 0.4 to fix a FTBFS issue introduced with Perl 5.18. Of anecdotal importance, but I also filed bug #721849 after seeing how much energy was spent to ensure debian/rules didn t contain an improper copyright statement. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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1 October 2013

Michael Casadevall: Spanish or Bust: Attaining fluency in 90 days or else ...

"How do you have an adventure?"

"You take a stupid idea, and follow through ..."

Perhaps, I've truly lost my mind for once, but I've decided to embark on a personal project to try and achieve some fluency in Spanish in just 90 days, and posting it to the internet to try and keep me honest and on track towards doing so. I will post future updates as I go, and would welcome help from anyone who would be interested in helping!

The cost of failure: being forced to praise Wndows 8 in a future video, and run it for one week on my laptop.



(I apologize for the quality, but I finally managed to find the nerve to record myself doing this, and just uploaded before I lost it again)


21 September 2013

Niels Thykier: Lintian 2.5.18

I have just uploaded Lintian 2.5.18 to unstable. While fixing 22 bugs, it only features 5 new tags. The release also include fixes to some false-positives, such as python:any dependencies triggering python-script-but-no-python-dep, a rewritten README file. We also included a patch to make Lintian accept the Original-Maintainer field by default for non-Debian vendors (even if they do not have a profile and Lintian ends up loading the debian/main profile). We also added support for running Lintian directly from a git checkout or source tree without setting LINTIAN_ROOT (or passing root). Since that was the primary use-case for root that option has now been deprecated. I also had lintian and lintian-info require the include-dir and [no-]user-dir options as the first if given at all. I would like to thank Bastien Roucari s, Gaudenz Steinlin, Gunnar Wolf, J r my Bobbio and Lucas Nussbaum for contributing to Lintian and the many who submitted reports or suggestions for improvements. I would also like to thank Brian hugmeir Fraser, who assisted me in identifying and working around a bug in Perl s glob function when run under threads (filed upstream as RT#119897).

17 September 2013

Tanguy Ortolo: Google, your IPv6-related email restrictions suck

After years of waiting, Google has finally enabled IPv6 for their email service Gmail. And a few weeks ago, they updated their policy, adding one specific rule: reject email from IP addresses with no reverse name: 
% nc -Cv gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. smtp
Connection to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. 25 port [tcp/smtp] succeeded!
220 mx.google.com ESMTP bz2si13656083wjc.108 - gsmtp
HELO boo.example.com
250 mx.google.com at your service
MAIL FROM: <me@example.com>
250 2.1.0 OK bz2si13656083wjc.108 - gsmtp
RCPT TO: <you@gmail.com>
250 2.1.5 OK bz2si13656083wjc.108 - gsmtp
DATA
354  Go ahead bz2si13656083wjc.108 - gsmtp
Subject: Test
From: Me <me@example.com>
To: You <you@gmail.com>
Test.
.
550-5.7.1 [2001:db8:8e3f:43c7::12      16] Our system has detected that this
550-5.7.1 message does not meet IPv6 sending guidelines regarding PTR records
550-5.7.1 and authentication. Please review
550-5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=ipv6_authentication_error for more
550 5.7.1 information. bz2si13656083wjc.108 - gsmtp
That sucks By the way, I would love to have a perfect Internet access provider, but that does not exist where I live, and I do not think it exists at all anywhere. Google, instead of complaining about lame access providers, you are welcome to offer me a fibre service with decent upload rate, static IPv4, static IPv6 /64, customizable reverse DNS for IPv4 and IPv6, and full respect of the network neutrality. Until then, I am doing the best I can with the least bad provider available. Workaround As I said, their is an easy workaround. Google does not accept my mail on IPv6? Fine, I will keep using IPv4. Only for Google of course, no need to punish the whole Internet for Google's damn restrictions. With Postfix, you can do that this way (thanks to Christian Skala for his blog post about this problem). In /etc/postfix/master.fr, enable an IPv4-only SMTP client service: 
smtp4     unix  -       -       -       -       -       smtp -o inet_protocols=ipv4
Then, in /etc/postfix/main.cf, define a transport map if you do not already use one: 
transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport
Create that transport map /etc/postfix/transport or complete it: 
gmail.com smtp4:
Finally, hash that transport map and have Postfix reload its configuration: 
# postmap /etc/postfix/transport
# service postfix reload

Cyril Brulebois: Fixing bugs

It s a somewhat strange feeling to spend time fixing things that broke instead of implementing new things, but it s not like I m a creative guy anyway For those last two points, the long term plan is: Hopefully getting this done this week (famous last words, eh?).

13 September 2013

Daniel Pocock: Calendar and Contact data with free software in the Smartphone era

Since the rise of smartphones, first Blackberry, then iPhone and now Android, the world at large has had a convenient option to fall back on for management of contact and calendar data. The data itself seems somewhat trivial: many of us software developers have worked with a plethora of obscenely more obscure schemas. It is unlikely that most people would ever have to perform an operation on their address book that requires a statistical toolkit like the R project or any of the other advanced tools we now have for data processing. In terms of data, addresses and phone numbers can appear quite boring. So why hasn't the free software community mastered it and cloud providers are currently running rampant hoovering up the data of billions of users? Ruling out LDAP One problem that people have faced is the existence of different standards. LDAP has quite a high profile and appears to be supported by default in many desktop applications. For this reason, it tends to grab people's attention but after a close look, many people find it is not the right solution. LDAP tends to work well for organisations where the data is centrally managed and in situations where fine-grained access control is not required. LDAP servers often need a capable UNIX administer to manage effectively. To top it off, LDAP itself does not provide an effective solution for two-way synchronization of data with remote and mobile users. The emergence of SyncML, CalDAV, GroupDAV and CardDAV Addressing this final problem (two-way mobile/portable device sync) has brought on the development of further standards. Initially, SyncML (now known as Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management) grabbed significant attention, partly because it had been included in some of the first generation of smartphones from once-prominent vendors like Nokia. Open source server solutions for SyncML did not gain traction though. The most prominent is Funambol, however, it is not packaged in any major Linux distribution and it requires some basic Java knowledge to maintain it effectively. Like LDAP it appears to be most comfortable in enterprise use cases and doesn't appeal to the people who run a private mail and web server. SyncML has further suffered with the lack of support in more recent generations of smartphones. WebDAV was formalised in 1999 and there are now various derivative standards such as CalDAV and CardDAV which use WebDAV as a foundation. However, standards didn't arrive at this place directly: CalDAV only appeared as RFC 4791 in 2007 and CardDAV as RFC 6352 in 2011. In the meantime, some vendors experiemented with an alternative called GroupDAV. GroupDAV is largely obsolete now and GroupDAV v2 is a subset of CalDAV and CardDAV. Finally gaining traction The good news is, CardDAV and CalDAV are gaining traction, in no small part due to support from Apple and the highly proprietary iPhone. Some free software enthusiasts may find that surprising. It appears to be a strategic move from Apple, using open standards to compete with the dominance of Microsoft Exchange in large corporate networks. Both protocols are supported natively in iPhones and Mac OS X. More exciting, Apple releases their Contacts Server and Calendar Server as open source software, making it easier to look under the hood and observe any deviations from the standards. Apple's adoption of CardDAV and CalDAV has been accompanied by a similar effort in free software, however, support is more patchy. The Mozilla Lightning calendar plug-in for Thunderbird (known as the iceowl-extension plugin for icedove on Debian) has supported CalDAV for some time. In contrast, Thunderbird's address book lacks native support for CardDAV and has other limitations (discussed in detail below). Limited CardDAV support in Thunderbird can be achieved using the third-party SOGo Connector, which is not just for ScalableOGo server. The Evolution PIM appears to support both CardDAV and CalDAV relatively smoothly and appears to be more functional and easier to get started with. Free software servers are also emerging. DAViCal, despite the name, supports both CardDAV and CalDAV. It is a good solution for people who have an existing mail server and don't want to transition to an all-in-one groupware suite. Packages available in Debian make it easy to deploy and get started. It is a PHP solution, using a PostgreSQL database underneath. For people who do want a groupware suite, CardDAV and CalDAV are supported in products like ScalableOGo and Zimbra. For people who don't want a server at all and just want to sync between a desktop and a mobile device, there are options like Calypso. Mobile support: the missing link A number of people have blogged about using the Android apps CardDAV-Sync and CalDAV-Sync to complete the picture. I've tested these myself and verified that they work. However, there is one vital thing missing: the source code. Nobody knows what is inside these apps except the developer. That makes it impossible for other developers to troubleshoot them and improve them and it also makes it impossible to be certain that they do not leak information. An alternative is the aCal app for Android. Despite the name, aCal can synchronize the address book as well as the calendar. However, in my tests against DAViCal, I found that the addressbook can only be synced once and that on subsequent syncs, it fails to discover any new server-side contacts. aCal source code is available on gitorious.
aCal appears to be a compelling solution for Android users, hopefully the contact sync will be fixed soon. It only syncs once after installation and then fails to detect any new contacts. Thunderbird's limitations It has already been mentioned that the Thunderbird address book can be synchronized to a CardDAV server by adding the SOGo Connector plugin. However, this is not a perfect solution. The plugin itself is fine: the SOGo web site describes the connector (as opposed to the SOGo Integrator plugin) as a portable solution: in other words, it is vendor neutral, compatible with any standards-compliant server. The first limitation is that it is necessary to duplicate the setup process for both the calendar sync and the address book sync. This is just a question of convenience.
The SOGo Connector plugin configuration window is very trivial. I recommend using read-only mode to avoid the problems with multiple email addresses or telephone numbers. More serious limitations exist in the address book itself: if the CardDAV server has more than 2 email addresses, they will not appear in the Thunderbird address book. Changing an email address on the client side will result in loss of those additional email addresses on the server-side. The Mozilla team initially committed to rewrite the address book from the ground up but it is not clear whether that work is still in progress. DAViCal confusion I had been using DAViCal for quite some time as a CalDAV server before I recently decided to try and use it for CardDAV as well. As a calendar server, it had been working fine. I have a small number of users with some private calendars and also some shared calendars. When I installed the SOGo Connector plugin and went to setup the client-side configuration, it asked me for the server URL. Having used CalDAV already, I simply tried copying the existing CalDAV URL, which is of the form https://myserver.example.org/davical/caldav.php/daniel/home The URL was accepted and I could create address book entries on the client side. No errors appeared. I then tried setting up the same URL as an address book in Evolution. This time, I found I was able to create contacts and sync them to the server and access them from another copy of Evolution. It appeared DAViCal was working fine and I felt that Thunderbird or the SOGo Connector was somehow broken, because the Evolution clients were syncing but Thunderbird was not. The lack of any errors from the Thunderbird GUI further undermined my confidence in the SOGo Connector. Nonetheless, I decided to dig a little deeper, looking through the DAViCal source code. This brought me to the realisation that each URL could be flagged as either a calendar resource or an address book resource. This had not been obvious to me before. Evolution had effectively been storing the contact entries into a calendar URL and DAViCal had been happily accepting them. SOGo Connector, querying the URL, appears to have received both calendar and contact records from DAViCal and given up.
Here is where I configured the extra resource for an address book store under my user account in DAViCal In the DAViCal web management console, I created an extra resource for my user ID and set the appropriate checkbox to mark the resource as an address book. Then I put this resource URL into all the clients and found that they were all able to sync with each other. DAViCal's maintainer has explained that this is a limitation in the CardDAV/CalDAV protocols: technically, it is valid for the client to store the wrong type of objects in each URL. Clients need to be more resilient when they stumble across objects they don't expect in a particular resource. Conclusion A complete free software based contact-management solution can be easily deployed using any of the servers mentioned above, particularly if Evolution is the preferred client software. Using Thunderbird as a client, it can also work, but attention is needed to avoid data loss on sync. Thunderbird could also be used in a read-only mode to access address books maintained with Evolution. Mobile support is still patchy on Android. The closed source solution (CardDAV-Sync and CalDAV-Sync) appears to work and a promising open source close, aCal, appears to be "nearly there". Some people would obviously prefer to use a standalone contact/calendar server, while others may prefer an all-in-one groupware suite. Both approaches appear to be feasible, but the standalone contact/calendar server appears to offer a more compelling way to start quickly and have minimal administrative overhead, particularly due to the fact that DAViCal is available in a supported package.
This is the contact server configuration window in Evolution. It offers slightly more options than SOGo Connector in Thunderbird and appears to be a more finished solution overall.

11 September 2013

Bastian Venthur: What are the most popular .vimrc options?

Hi always wondered what the most popular options are, you usually find in .vimrc files. So I downloaded 155 .vimrc files from the net (mostly from dotfiles.org and github.com), and wrote a little script which counts the number of times an option has been set. Since most options come in normal- and shortcut form, I mapped the shortcuts to the long version whenever I recognized them. So without further ado, here are the most popular .vimrc options (without values!). The number specifies the number of times this option has been set. The most popular option is on the bottom:
10 tselect
10 dictionary
10 runtimepath
11 mousehide
11 t_vb
11 foldlevel
11 foldopen
12 suffixes
12 matchtime
12 fileencoding
13 modelines
13 wrap
14 sidescrolloff
14 clipboard
14 lines
14 novisualbell
15 linebreak
15 cursorline
15 fileformats
15 columns
15 cindent
16 undolevels
16 shiftround
16 lazyredraw
16 completeopt
18 modeline
18 whichwrap
18 comments
18 wildignore
19 list
19 autowrite
19 foldcolumn
19 grepprg
19 titlestring
20 autoread
20 title
21 foldenable
21 cmdheight
22 pastetoggle
23 formatoptions
23 fileencodings
24 tags
24 directory
25 ttyfast
26 termencoding
26 complete
27 nohlsearch
27 noerrorbells
27 visualbell
28 shortmess
30 showmode
31 wildmode
32 t_Co
32 listchars
32 backupdir
34 hidden
34 backup
35 smarttab
35 foldmethod
36 viminfo
36 textwidth
37 scrolloff
37 nobackup
41 nowrap
44 encoding
47 guifont
51 guioptions
53 smartcase
54 wildmenu
57 smartindent
60 mouse
63 background
64 softtabstop
66 history
70 showmatch
72 ignorecase
74 showcmd
74 laststatus
79 number
82 hlsearch
91 statusline
94 expandtab
94 ruler
96 autoindent
96 backspace
99 tabstop
109 incsearch
114 shiftwidth
124 nocompatible Out of 155 .vimrcs
Fun fact: nocompatible is the most popular, but also most useless one. The fact that you have an .vimrc automatically implies the nocompatible mode in vim.

8 September 2013

Joachim Breitner: You-Say-First has dice

A while ago I wrote a small web application called You-Say-First. It allows multiple users to join a chat room where they can, besides chatting, enter moves that are only shown to everyone once everyone has submitted one. This way you can play games like Rock-Stone-Scissors or Diplomacy online, even if you want to play by your own strange rules that none of the standard, game-specific web sites support. Or even make up many kind of games on the spot!
I was approached by Jason Worley who said he liked the site, but would have a need for dice rolling to play the games he wants to play. So he gets dice rolling: Just say, in the chat, what kind of dice you want and the server will roll them for you and tell everyone about them. I tried to make it understand many variations of the command, so you can say roll a die, please , toss five coins or throw 3D20 . If the server does not react, try modifying your command. As always I m happy about feedback, bugreports and patches, and I hope that it is a useful tool for you.

7 September 2013

Daniel Pocock: Evacuating Australia

With the news that Australia's 100mbit (and potentially gigabit) fibre to the home is to be abolished and replaced with a cheap 25mbps service using Europe's ADSL hand-me-downs (which will be obsolete in 5 years when the deployment is finished), I've had quite a few emails from people asking just how easy it is to move abroad.
The acoustic modem has a nice retro look Word has got out that I've been spending some time in Switzerland enjoying the world-beating rate of IPv6 deployment. That is not the only reason to leave Australia of course, nor is it the only criteria for people choosing which country will give them a better deal than either of the two non-choices we had in Australia's elections. A free $20,000 for leaving Australia The first good news is that any recent graduate with a big bad ugly HECS bill is only obliged to pay this extra tax when they earn a salary from an Australian employer and file an Australian tax return. Australians who live abroad are not automatically obliged to file tax returns and are not slogged with this extra tax for having attended university. If somebody just graduated and has this hanging over their head, or if they've just started working and seen how much is being deducted on the payslip, moving abroad could make a lot of sense financially. If you have any moral qualms about this, just reflect on the fact that while the Government intimidates students with the feeling that they have to "pay" for fulfilling an education that makes them into a productive member of society, thousands of would-be athletes are given money with no obligation to repay it. The easiest route: a second passport One in four Australians has a parent born abroad. Most of those people qualify for a passport from their parent's country of birth. In some cases this also applies to people with grandparents born abroad. With the European Union now spanning 28 countries and guaranteeing the rights of any citizen from any country to live, work and study in any of the other 27 countries, a passport from any of the EU countries gives a lot of choices, including places where I have lived myself such as the UK, Ireland, France and Switzerland. Europe's citizen-friendly immigration In other words, an Australian with an Italian parent can go up to the Italian embassy in Canberra, collect an Italian passport and immediately fly into London and start working there with no bureaucratic delays, invasive and degrading medical checks or other Government interference in their life.
London's nightlife is popular for Australians. The UK started rolling out their high speed 21CN many years before Australia started the NBN. The rights also transfer automatically to all family members (spouse and children) - an Australian with a second passport is not restricted to living in Australia simply because they are married to somebody who does not have a second passport. As long as they arrive together at a European airport, they can simply show a marriage/birth certificate (in any language) and cross the border immediately, enjoy the same rights as a citizen, including work, study, healthcare and better broadband. No paperwork is necessary, no cottage industry for otherwise unemployable immigration agents, these are basic human rights for those living in Europe.
Eiffel tower: potentially part of the wireless network for France's new 4G internet, potentially two to four times the fixed-line speed planned for Australia's crippled broadband Uncle Sam wants more Australians Although it is not widely known, the US has a fast lane for immigration from Australia. The regular programs for skilled visas in the US are usually exhausted every year, whereas 10,000 "E3" class visas for Australians are never fully taken in any year. Surely it's not that easy to go to the US? It is. To qualify, an Australian only needs a university degree and a suitable job offer. Although the visa is for 2 years, it can be renewed and Australians who meet and marry an American have in various cases have gained full residence or citizenship. Anything is possible, you could even end up becoming a NASA Astronaut.
San Francisco, home to leading technology professionals and innovators from many countries. Some US cities such as Austin and Kansas City have let Google install fibre to the home, San Francisco could follow Working holiday schemes are not just for Britain Most Australians know somebody who went to London on a "working holiday" visa. These visas are not just for the UK and Australia has similar reciprocal programs with many other countries too. These rules for these schemes are rooted in the industrial age concept of workers with punch cards. Participants are typically limited to work 20 hours per week. Of particular interest for those in IT, such rules are hard to quantify for freelancers, web designers or creative people who earn their living charging fees per-project or undertaking management work without specified working hours. Although the visas are limited to 4 years, I've heard of Australians benefiting from the open borders of mainland Europe, spending 4 years in one country and then obtaining another 4 year visa for an adjacent country and travelling freely back and forth, building up a business and lifestyle of their own design. Singapore and Hong Kong Singapore and Hong Kong have become enormously popular destinations for Australians, particularly those with special skills in IT, finance, engineering and international business.
Singapore is respected as one of the cleanest and most orderly cities in Asia while embracing significant diversity in dining, shopping, leisure and lifestyle possibilities. They have recently boosted speeds to help people get a full 100MBit over fibre. A SIM card with high speed broadband charges SGD 7 (about $5) for 1 Gigabyte. These are not necessarily destinations that a graduate can easily move to. People are measured by their salary and the Government simply assumes that anybody earning a high salary is going to make a valuable contribution to society and they are given a visa in 1 or 2 weeks. Usually 3-5 years employment experience is required before making a move to one of these countries. The Not Ordinarily Resident (NOR) scheme gives some hints about the minimum salary level that ex-pats aim for, many earn significantly more with bonuses, stock programs and properly engineered tax-free offshore pension arrangements. These countries offer particularly low taxes (around 10%) and great technology. They have some rough edges too: like Europe, spouses are automatically given a visa too, but in contrast, their visa does not permit them to work unless they also work in a profession that is highly paid. Visas are issued quickly but they are also canceled very quickly if the job is terminated or the company goes bust. There have been various stories of people paying the typical 2-month deposit on an appartment in Singapore and then finding that it is forfeited when their job and visa are canceled and they have 4 weeks to leave. The bottom line is that people moving to these locations usually have a wide professional network and confidence to change their job quickly if necessary. Freestyle immigration and the visa run Not too long ago I was at a house party in Prague, Czech Republic, which is like a Paris of eastern Europe. Somebody introduced me to some Americans who I was told had similar interests in technology. They were operating an offshore web site and living very well. They had spent 10 years in Prague living on tourist visas. Authorities seemed quite happy for them to remain as long as they left every 3 months and spent 1 night abroad, a typical visa run. That could be as simple as a train journey to Vienna, Austria and an overnight stay.
Making a visa run in comfort and style with European railways. The Railjet train pictured includes free wifi, a lot cheaper than the $20 billion Tony Abbott plans to spend rolling out yesterday's technology in Australia When European countries abolished border controls, this system became much more convoluted for those who depend on the visa run. However, it remains common in many Asian and Latin American countries and many ex-pats live this way. Officials in many of these medium sized economies recognise the value of people bringing in money from offshore business (such as web sites) and using it to pay rent, food and local services. To make this effective, the ex-pats typically need to have an international private health insurance policy (high quality offshore policies can be found quickly with a search engine) and not aspire to work in a normal 9-5 job. Conclusion Young Australians might not want to just consider travel, it may even become unavoidable. The reality is, by 2020, one in three Australians will be a retired baby boomer and one way or another, whichever Government is in office will be unable to avoid taxing those of working age to pay for the health care and pension promises made to older generations. Serious expenditure on public infrastructure such as broadband or high speed rail appears to remain a pipe dream. Moving abroad, however, is just so much fun. Look at the way multinational companies make countries compete to attract their new factories and other projects: why should any individual citizen be any less demanding in choosing where they work, play and get the best value for whatever taxes they have to pay? Some people raise questions of patriotism or responsibility to the nation. Think again. The 200,000 Australians who live abroad or travel extensively make a significant contribution to Australia's international profile, engage in new trade initiatives, bring skills back to Australia and generally represent what our country is really about much better than some of those who are paid to do so.

4 September 2013

Russell Coker: Ownership of a Club

Last night at the Annual General Meeting we had a motion to disincorporate The Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) [1]. The proposal was for LUV to cease being an incorporated society on condition that Linux Australia (LA) [2] accepts us as a sub-committee. As a sub-committee of LA we would elect our own committee to run things locally but have LA hold the finances, deal with all the paperwork that the government demands, and generally do as many of the non-core tasks associated with running a users group as possible. When we discussed this at the LUV committee meetings it didn t seem like a big deal. But as is often the case with political discussions it turned out to be difficult. There was a lot of discussion about LUV supposedly ceasing to exist, people seem to think that LUV is defined by having an incorporated society. My impression was always that it was defined by a mailing list and having meetings and I was involved in both before there was an incorporated society. Lurkers and Ownership During the discussion we had some input from members who were typically lurkers who seemed to feel that their property rights towards LUV were being infringed, this annoys me. I think that if someone chooses not to be involved in running an organisation then they should choose not to concern themselves with the details of how the organisation is to be run. People who attend the meetings should have a say in how the meetings are run and have reason to be concerned about anything that might affect them and the opinions of speakers also matter. People who are involved with mailing list discussions should have a say in how the lists are run. But people who have never volunteered for a position on the committee shouldn t be greatly concerned about the internal issues of how things are run. Finance Some concern was expressed about the financial situation of LUV and whether we would still get enough donations to keep it running when combined with LA. There was even some FUD suggesting that LA would just take our money (they had assured us that all funds and donations would be ear-marked for us). The current LUV financial situation is that Red Hat pays for the venue for the monthly meetings and the rent for the venue comprises about 2/3 of all donations. The remaining 1/3 comes from one company. So in the current situation if Red Hat ceased donating then we would have 18 months to find another donor or cease holding meetings before our bank balance became unreasonably low. If the company which gives the other significant annual donation was to cease doing so then we could operate for a few years on savings but we would need to find some other source of funding. It seems to me that joining LA would give us more financial security. Then if Red Hat ceased paying for the venue then LA could keep things running until we found another donor, I m confident that LA wouldn t allow LUV to just shut down because of a shortage of donations. If people are really concerned about the financial situation of LUV then they should urgently seek further donations such that if any one donor decided to stop giving then we could still operate as normal. To achieve that goal I think we need at least another $1,000 per annum. This issue of redundancy in donations is something I raise every time that LUV finances are discussed. My conclusion is that people aren t really bothered about the financial security of LUV except when they are looking for reasons to avoid change. Doing New Things During the course of discussion about the future of LUV there were a number of requests for improvement. One significant request was for more support for regional Linux users. Some years ago we held a mini-conference in Ballarat which went well. I think it would be good to do such things again, the cost is not particularly great and I m sure it would be accepted by LA for funding, but we need to organise it. Organising such events is something that anyone can do. Any LUV member can plan an event, get costs for everything that is needed (food, accommodation, travel, etc) and then pitch it to the LUV committee in terms of which things should be paid by LUV and which by the members concerned. We could then work on getting additional funding from LA if necessary. But planning an event takes some effort and it s often effort that can only be done by a local. Finding a suitable venue and getting some assurance that a large enough audience will attend is something that can t be done remotely. I think that the problem for LUV in regard to such things isn t a lack of money or independence. I think that the problem is that the committee spends too much volunteer time on administrative tasks and not enough time directly doing things that benefit members and the community in general. In the past I have declined nomination to the LUV committee because I felt that I could contribute more by giving lectures, finding other speakers, and doing other things to directly improve the group. I was on the committee last year and have now been elected to it again, but I m starting to think that I made a mistake. Maybe I should have declined and let others work on the new model rules and other paperwork. One committee member has claimed that the time taken on administrative tasks isn t taking time away from other LUV related tasks, I invite any committee members who feel that way to address some of the services that members are requesting. Speaking for myself my lack of time directly impacts that I can do for the club. I think that ownership of a club should be related to what people do for the club. If you have a feeling of ownership and lack ideas for how to contribute then you can ask the LUV mailing list, there are lots of people with suggestions for things to do.
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3 September 2013

Jan Wagner: nagios-plugins: Call for testing

Some of you might have noticed there is a new nagios-plugins version in the row. To support upstream in evaluating bugs and bringing the code to a wider audience, I uploaded the latest development version into Debian unstable. Since this package version contrib/ is dropped by upstream. But we stopped shipping the latest plugins of contrib/ with Debian wheezy. We also removed perlmods/ from the upstream tarball, as this was never used by our package. The packaging changes are: 
* New upstream git snapshot (b15adb7762)
  - Adjust debian/copyright
* Droped the following upstream integrated patches
  - 05_fix_gets_undefined_in_iso_c11.dpatch
  - 10_check_apt_perfdata.dpatch
  - 11_check_nt_npe.dpatch
  - 12_check_smtp_double_threshold.dpatch
* Fix removing empty /usr/include
* Add new check_dbi into nagios-plugins-standard
* Remove whois from Recommands, as check_bgpstate is removed
* Cleanup debian/rules from unused stuff
* Provide information about repackaging
  - Extend debian/README.source
  - Add debian/bin/repack.sh
* Updating standards version to 3.9.4 (no changes needed)
* Add libfreeradius-client-dev to build-deps and remove libradiusclient-ng-dev
  (Closes: #721621)
* Remove traces of contrib/ from debian/copyright
* Remove command.cfg from examples in nagios-plugins-common, it was removed
  upstream
The Debian Nagios Maintainer and Upstream Developer are asking you to try out this new package on non production systems. Not that we think there might be a high risk for damage, but you know .. :) The latest version of the plugins are running on several systems already, but it is nearly impossible to test all scenarios even automated. If you find bugs, please report all packaging bugs into the BTS. Upstream bugs you might consider to report in the upstream bugtracker. If you want to give it a try on Debian wheezy, you could install the packages from our wheezy-backports repository: 
    # wget "http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list" \
        -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list
    # aptitude update
    # aptitude -t wheezy-backports install nagios-plugins
For adding our archive key, you can just install the package "debian-cyconet-archive-keyring"

2 September 2013

Daniel Pocock: Australia's Labor Party exposed spying on their own members

Australia's Labor Party claims to represent the little guy, advocating the interests of a wide slice of the population over the interests of those who might supposedly exploit them. In this latest blog I'll look at just how the Victorian state branch of the party is emulating the more sinister elements of monitoring and control that you would typically expect from marketers, spammers and the NSA. It makes you wonder, if they do this to their own members, how can Australia's government ever hope to rein in spammers or other undesirable practices? Europe has tried cookie laws and the right to be forgotten, while the ALP has taken these developments almost as a guide to exploiting their own most valuable resource, their membership. The email version of invisible ink Straight out of an email attempting to recruit party members to the federal election campaign, we find that the ALP's logo itself has been turned into a sinister tracking mechanism. Looking underneath the logo, there is a hidden tracking number attached to every message: 
http://gallery.mailchimp.com/3021e68df9a7200135725c633/images/Email_Header_ThisisLabor.jpg
There it is, that big long code 3021e68df9a7200135725c633. On it's own, you may think this number can't do much harm. Think again. After all, as the filename says, "ThisisLabor". Reaching the grass roots by long distance email When a party member sees any of the images in the email or clicks any of the links, their email software or web browser sends a HTTP request to the ALP's outsourced tracking server in the United States. Here is an example of what that request may contain: 
TCP Headers:
  SOURCE IP ADDRESS: 198.51.100.56
HTTP headers:
  GET /3021e68df9a7200135725c633/images/Email_Header_ThisisLabor.jpg
  HTTP/1.1
  Host: gallery.mailchimp.com
  User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130515 Firefox/17.0 Iceweasel/17.0.6
  Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
  Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
  Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
  X-Forwarded-For: 192.168.1.54
  Connection: keep-alive
These codes are all transmitted from the recipient of the email back to the ALP. Notice the tracking number is in the very first line of the HTTP request? These codes send many details to the tracking server. Just what is revealed?
  • What time the message was read
  • How many times the message was opened
  • Whether the message was read on multiple computers (perhaps it was forwarded)
  • The IP addresses reveal which network was used.
    • For people reading email at work or on wifi, the IP address reveals the name of the employer, it can be easily looked up in this public database. Here is an example querying one of the ALPs own IP addresses, 203.24.72.2
    • For people using an internet connection at home, the IP address reveals the service provider. There is more to it though: if one party member regularly visits another party member and uses their wifi, they will both appear to be using the same IP address and the party will be able to deduce that there is a connection between these two people.
  • The web browser name and version and the operating system name and version.
  • The language normally used on the computer
Crunching the numbers You may think that nobody would be interested in all that data or that it is even too much data for anybody to easily study. Think again. The ALP has outsourced processing of this data to an offshore firm that specializes in bulk email, MailChimp. After lecturing everybody about the dangers of outsourcing, the ALP has literally sold the farm (their own membership data) - to a foreign marketing company. Here are some of the claims MailChimp make on their web site:
"Dig even deeper with Subscriber Activity Reports, which give you a real time report for every subscriber s email activities: when they opened, what they clicked, and when they came back for more. You can even generate a list of people who didn t open, and send them a modified campaign."
That's right: if ALP members don't read their emails fast enough, they will send even more of them. Just who has access to this data? Well, the scope is quite broad. According to these rules, it is not only the dubious officials in the party's state office, but Labor Party regulations also list a whole lot of other officials who have access to some subset of the data: branch and FEA district committees, policy committees and maybe some trade union officials too. Once you start to contemplate this, it becomes apparent that the probability of somebody profiling members at an individual level is very real. On the other hand, those rules clearly do not permit the state branch to process the member's data offshore. Double whammy In fact, even MailChimp is further outsourcing the data. When receiving an image from the booby-trapped link in the email, we receive a response like this: 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 407474
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 06:25:55 GMT
Last-Modified: Tue,  03 Sep 2013 04:05:37 GMT
ETag: "df9a7200135725c6331369a22"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Server: AmazonS3
Age: 62097
Via: 1.0 e71fe855f29513f54a41e213fe653fb1.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
X-Cache: Hit from cloudfront
X-Amz-Cf-Id: S2V2aW4gUnVkZCBpcyBhIGJhZCBib3kuCg==
which contains more tracking numbers and clearly indicates that the data is being processed in the massive AmazonS3 (a.k.a Amazon online bookstore) cloud platform. Thanks to cloud computing, there is considerable scope for cross-referencing records across other web sites. The IP address becomes a magic key, allowing a range of sinister forces to join the dots at the click of a button and profile the whole private and professional identity of any individual ALP member. Googling ALP members It doesn't stop there however, after following these links a victim will eventually end up on one of the ALP's own web pages. Looking through the HTML code underneath http://www.viclabor.com.au is very easy, in most web browsers, you can just press Control-U to see what is hidden away in the shadows. Buried in the code, I found this little gem: 
  var _gaq = _gaq   [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-35325645-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  (function()  
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
   )();
This may be even scarier: it's a JavaScript code that channels all access to the ALP web site into an outsourced tracking system provided by Google. Google can now cross-reference ALP members against their Gmail accounts, their friends and the topics they search for to further profile the type of advertising they should be exposed to. Google, like any private company, has a loyalty to its shareholders and the laws of the country where it is domiciled. Will that coincide with the best interests of ALP members in Victoria? Australia's other parties: samples needed Do you have similar communications from Australia's other political parties? Please send them to me and I'll be happy to examine them for similar shortcomings.

1 September 2013

Eddy Petri&#537;or: Integrating Beyond Compare with Semanticmerge

Note: This post will probably not be on the liking of those who think free software is always preferable to closed source software, so if you are such a person, please take this article as an invitation to implement better open source alternatives that can realistically compete with the closed source applications I am mentioning here. I am not going to mention here where the open source alternatives are not up to the same level as the commercial tools, I'll leave that for the readers or for another article.



Semanticmerge is a merge tool that attempts to do the right thing when it comes to merging source code. It is language aware and it currently supports Java and C#. Just today the creators of the software have started working on the support for C.

Recently they added Debian packages, so I installed it on my system. For open source development Codice Software, the creators of Semanticmerge, offers free licenses, so I decided to ask for one today, and, although is Sunday, I received an answer and I will get my license on Monday.

When a method is moved from one place to another and changed in a conflicting way in two parallel development lines, Semanticmerge can isolate the offending method and can pass all its incarnations (base, source and destination or, if you prefer, base, mine and theirs) to a text based merge tool to allow the developer to decide how to resolve the merge. On Linux, the Semanticmerge samples are using kdiff3 as the text-based merge tool, which is nice, but I don't use kdiff3, I use Meld, another open source visual tool for merges and comparisons.


OTOH, Beyond Compare is a merge and compare tool made by Scooter Software which provides a very good text based 3-way merge with a 3 sources + 1 result pane, and can compare both files and directories. Two of its killer features is having the ability split differences into important and non-important ones according to the syntax of the compared/merged files, and the ability to easily change or add to the syntax rules in a very user-friendly way. This allows to easily ignore changes in comments, but also basic refactoring such as variable renaming, or other trivial code-wide changes, which allows the developer to focus on the important changes/differences during merges or code reviews.

Syntax support for usual file formats like C, Java, shell, Perl etc. is built in (but can be modified, which is a good thing) and new file types with their syntaxes can be added via the GUI from scratch or based on existing rules.

I evaluated Beyond Compare at my workplace and we decided it would be a good investment to purchases licenses for it for the people in our department.


Having these two software separate is good, but having them integrated with each other would be even better. So I decided I would try to see how it can be done. I installed Beyond compare on my system, too and looked through the examples


The first thing I discovered is that the main assumption of Semanticmerge developers was that the application would be called via the SCM when merges are to be done, so passing lots of parameters would not be problem. I realised that when I saw how one of the samples' starting script invoked semantic merge:
semanticmergetool -s=$sm_dir/src.java -b=$sm_dir/base.java -d=$sm_dir/dst.java -r=/tmp/semanticmergetoolresult.java -edt="kdiff3 \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\"" -emt="kdiff3 \"#basefile\" \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" --L1 \"#basesymbolic\" --L2 \"#sourcesymbolic\" --L3 \"#destinationsymbolic\" -o \"#output\"" -e2mt="kdiff3 \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" -o \"#output\""
Can you see the problem? It seems Semanticmerge has no persistent knowledge of the user preferences with regards to the text-based merge tool and exports the issue to the SCM, at the price of overcomplicating the command line. I already mentioned this issue in my license request mail and added the issue and my fix suggestion in their voting system of features to be implemented.

The upside was that by comparing the command line for kdiff3 invocations, the kdiff3 documentation and, by comparison, the Beyond Compare SCM integration information, I could deduce what is the command line necessary for Semanticmerge to use Beyond Compare as an external merge and diff tool.

The -edt, -emt and -e2mt options are the ones which specify how the external diff tool, external 3-way merge tool and external 2-way merge tool is to be called. Once I understood that, I split the problem in its obvious parts, each invocation had to be mapped, from kdiff3 options to beyond compare options, adding the occasional bell and whistle, if possible.

The parts to figure out, ordered by compexity, were:

  1. -edt="kdiff3 \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\"

    2.
  2. -e2mt="kdiff3 \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" -o \"#output\""

    3.
  3. -emt="kdiff3 \"#basefile\" \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" --L1 \"#basesymbolic\" --L2 \"#sourcesymbolic\" --L3 \"#destinationsymbolic\" -o \"#output\""

Semantic merge integrates with kdiff3 in diff mode via the -edt option. This was easy to map to Beyond Compare, I just replaced kdiff3 with bcompare:
-edt="bcompare \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\""
Integration for 2-way merges was also quite easy, the mapping to Beyond Compare was:
-e2mt="bcompare \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" -savetarget=\"#output\""
For the 3-way merge I was a little confused because the Beyond Compare documentation and options were inconsistent between Windows and Linux. On Windows, for some of the SCMs, the options that set the titles for the panes are '/title1', '/title2', '/title3' and '/title4' (way too descriptive for my taste /sarcasm), but for some others are '/lefttitle', '/centertitle', '/righttitle', '/outputtitle', while on Linux the options are the more explicit kind, but with a '-' instead of a '/'.

The basic things were easy, ordering the parameters in the 'source, destination, base, output' instead of kdiff3's 'base, source, destination, -o ouptut', so I wanted to add the bells and whistles, since it really makes more sense for the developer to see something like 'Destination: [method] readOptions' instead of '/tmp/tmp4327687242.tmp', and because that's exactly what is necessary for Semanticmerge when merging methods, since on conflicts the various versions of the functions are placed in temporary files which don't mean anything.

So, after some digging into the examples from Beyond Compare and kdiff3 documentation, I ended up with:
-emt="bcompare \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" \"#basefile\" \"#output\" -lefttitle='#sourcesymbolic' -righttitle='#destinationsymbolic' -centertitle='#basesymbolic' -outputtitle='merge result'"

Sadly, I wasn't able to identify the symbolic name for the output, so I added the hard coded 'merge result'. If Codice people would like to help with with this information (or if it exists), I would be more than willing to do update the information and do the necessary changes.

Then I added the bells and whistles for the -edt and -e2mt options, so I ended up with an even more complicated command line. The end result was this monstrosity:
semanticmergetool -s=$sm_dir/src.java -b=$sm_dir/base.java -d=$sm_dir/dst.java -r=/tmp/semanticmergetoolresult.java -edt="bcompare \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" -lefttitle='#sourcesymbolic' -righttitle='#destinationsymbolic'" -emt="bcompare \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" \"#basefile\" \"#output\" -lefttitle='#sourcesymbolic' -righttitle='#destinationsymbolic' -centertitle='#basesymbolic' -outputtitle='merge result'" -e2mt="bcompare \"#sourcefile\" \"#destinationfile\" -savetarget=\"#output\" -lefttitle='#sourcesymbolic' -righttitle='#destinationsymbolic'"
So when I 3-way merge a function I get something like this (sorry for high resolution, lower resolutions don't do justice to the tools):



I don't expect this post to remain relevant for too much time, because after sending my feedback to Codice, they were open to my suggestion to have persistent settings for the external tool integration, so, in the future, the command line could probably be as simple as:
semanticmergetool -s=$sm_dir/src.java -b=$sm_dir/base.java -d=$sm_dir/dst.java -r=/tmp/semanticmergetoolresult.java
And the integration could be done via the GUI, while the command line can become a way to override the defaults.

Russ Allbery: Review: An Artificial Night

Review: An Artificial Night, by Seanan McGuire
Series: October Daye #3
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: September 2010
ISBN: 1-101-44276-X
Format: Kindle
Pages: 368
This is the third book of the October Daye series, following A Local Habitation. It could be read out of order, as each chapter of Toby's story so far is somewhat standalone, but I wouldn't recommend it. You'd miss the character development and the background behind several friendships. As with the previous book review, a caveat: I am reviewing this book four months after finishing it, rather than the normal couple of weeks, so apologies in advance for any thinness or inaccuracies. The first sign that something is about to go seriously wrong in Toby's life this time is a visitor. She says her name is May Daye, and apparently she's Toby's Fetch: a duplicate in nearly every respect except personality, manifested to guide someone to their death. Their imminent death. The second sign is that her best friend's children are kidnapped. The children who treat her like an aunt. And the cause of that kidnapping is far, far beyond the level of power that Toby could be expected to deal with. I have profound mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, McGuire further expands Toby's web of connections and shows us more of Toby's friends and their background, and that's becoming my favorite part of this series. She introduces May, who I think is a great character: at first apparently much different than Toby, but with a similarity beneath surface impressions that one notices more over time. And I thought the climax of the story, once we finally got there, was very moving and well-done. Also, I just love the way that McGuire uses children's rhymes and doggerel throughout this series as a magical element, and that's particularly well-handled here. Due to the nature of the antagonist, McGuire has a good excuse to bring that front and center, and the process of familiar rhymes expanding into deep magical rules was a fun intellectual experience. Best of all, the Luidaeg plays a significant role in the story again. The Luidaeg is, hands down, my favorite character in McGuire's constructed universe, and she becomes even more so over the course of this story. Her complex relationship with Toby is clearly blossoming into a friendship that's surprising both of them deeply, but a friendship that has to play by an odd set of rules (like so much else in Toby's life). I loved her here. Seeing someone that difficult and abrupt show unexpected emotional depths is one of the story elements I enjoy the most. The problem, though, is that quite a lot of An Artificial Night is very, very dark. And by that, I don't mean that there is a lot of tension, or that Toby is struggling against monsterous things, although both of those statements are also true. Rather, Toby is not only out of her league but ends up in some viciously nasty situations, and they persist for rather more of this book than I would have preferred. Putting one's protagonist through hell has a long tradition in urban fantasy, but I found the level of sheer helplessness that Toby struggled through to be a bit more than I wanted to read about. It was too reminiscent of events from Toby's background (as discussed in Rosemary and Rue) that I still don't like to think about. There is, of course, an eventual payoff, as dark as the interim events seem. One knows that, given the genre and given that this is an ongoing series, and even just given the nature of stories. But as much as I like the growing cast of this series, and adored the scenes with the Luidaeg, I found parts of this journey to be deeply disturbing, and not in an enjoyable dramatic tension sort of way. I don't mind protagonists being seriously hurt (although it's not my favorite plot), or even some amount of despair, but this went beyond that. I think McGuire was going for a story about sacrifice and self-definition, about trying even when one can't possibly win, and I can appreciate the narrative arc. But parts of the book were simply awful to read for me. I'm therefore not quite sure what to say in terms of a recommendation. I'm still reading the series, and will definitely read the next book. I think my reaction is somewhat idiosyncratic; the events here will probably not bother others as much as they bothered me. And I can't disagree with their dramatic effectiveness, or with the way that McGuire builds conflict out of the rules of fairy and is building Toby into a stronger and more capable person than she ever thought she could be. But there were still spots where I wished I were reading a different book. Hopefully the next book in the series will be that book I wanted to read. Followed by Late Eclipses. Rating: 6 out of 10

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