Review: Emissaries from the Dead, by Adam-Troy Castro

Series:	Andrea Cort #1
Publisher:	Eos
Copyright:	March 2008
ISBN:	0-06-144372-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	387

As a small child, Andrea Cort was a colonist on Bocai, part of a utopian project to create a mixed human and Bocaian community. Until, that is, all the members of the community woke up one day and started horrifically murdering each other for reasons that none of the survivors could ever explain. Now, she's protected from extradition by a life contract with the Diplomatic Corps and serves them as a special investigator. The scene of the investigation of this book is the strange habitat One One One. The habitat was created by the AIsource, an alliance of artificial intelligences now independent of their original creators. It's in deep space, far from any sun, and would have remained entirely unknown to the other inhabitants of the galaxy if the AIsource hadn't announced its presence. The choice to announce it was baffling, since it contains a sentient species entirely under the control of the AIsource, something that's against the shared rules of all the other species, but which they wouldn't have known about if the AIsource hadn't drawn their attention to it. After extensive negotiations, one unofficial human research group has been allowed access, and now two of the members of that group have been murdered. That's where Andrea comes in. This is Castro's first original solo novel, but he has a background in short fiction in the SF, fantasy, and horror genres and some previous collaborations and shared universe writing. The horror shows through a bit more than I'd personally prefer: the preface briefly describing Andrea's past would have been sufficient, but Castro goes back and shows it in horrific and gruesome detail as a flashback. His fight scenes are also strangely and disturbingly detailed. If you have a sensitive stomach, be aware that you may want to skim some parts of this. The overall construction of this novel, though, is not horror. It's an SF murder mystery, about halfway between a procedural and a noir detective story. Andrea does follow a coherent procedure and uses an investigative technique more sophisticated than stirring the pot and seeing what jumps out, making it not quite noir, but it has the noir tendency towards story progress via attacks on the detective and quite a lot of ongoing tension. It also involves quite a lot of setup; be aware going in that we get over a hundred pages of description of the various research group members, the details of the crimes, possible motives, and the details of the artificial habitat without a lot of forward progress on understanding the crime. Castro puts a lot of work into the design of the habitat despite leaving it mostly in the background. It could easily serve as the backdrop of a more typical Big Dumb Object SF novel. The habitable zone where the research team is and where all of Andrea's investigations take place is the effective "top" of the habitat, covered in dense foilage to which the native sentient species clings and crawls its entire life. Below is an effectively infinite fall into crushing acidic atmosphere. Castro managed to not set off my dislike of heights too badly, in part because he focuses more on Andrea's own dislike of heights rather than vividly describing the drop, but it's a constant presence throughout the novel and adds a persistant background tension. It also leads to some minor but neat clashes of perspective in conversations with the native species. For most of the book, I would have described Emissaries from the Dead as an enjoyable but not horribly original detective novel with a neat science fiction background. But there are several interesting ending twists that I won't spoil and some decisions that quite surprised me. They don't have a large effect on the plot of this book, but they make for a fascinating hook and setup for later books in the series (and I see there is a sequel). It's definitely not the sort of thing that you want spoiled before reading this book, so avoid reading blurbs and details about the sequel before reading this one. I wouldn't go out of my way to hunt down this book, but it's solid, enjoyable detective SF with a surprisingly good ending. I can see why it won the Philip K. Dick award (for best SF paperback original). Mildly recommended. Followed by The Third Claw of God. Rating: 7 out of 10

I had attend to Debian Bug Squashing Party in Tokyo at 24th Nov. 2012. The place was provided by Plat Home Co., Ltd. The attendee was about 7 people, it s not so many men.

It s working! (ish) Here are some snapshots (and fully automated as much as I could) This comprises a lot of work, so I m fairly proud of it. Feel free to browse over at debuild.me. Patches & feedback welcome!

A the new Rcpp release 0.10.1 arrived this morning on CRAN (as already has Windows binaries) and in Debian. This is a follow-up to the recent 0.10.0 release which extends the exciting new Rcpp-attributes and Rcpp-sugar work further, and as in a number of other areas as detailed below in the NEWS sections. This release brings an change to some of the binary interfaces. If you have packages using Rcpp, you will most likely have to reinstall them from source. Some change were made to const correctness as well as other aspects, and it seems that we have temporarily broken the excellent RcppEigen and RcppOctave packages. We are looking into this, and are sorry about the bug. The complete NEWS entry for 0.10.1 is below; more details are in the ChangeLog file in the package and on the Rcpp Changelog page.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.10.1 (2012-11-26)

• Changes in Rcpp sugar:
  • New functions: setdiff, union_, intersect setequal, in, min, max, range, match, table, duplicated
  • New function: clamp which combines pmin and pmax, e.g. clamp( a, x, b) is the same as pmax( b, pmin(x, a) )
  • New function: self_match which implements something similar to match( x, unique( x ) )
• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • The Vector template class (hence NumericVector ...) get the is_na and the get_na static methods.
  • New helper class no_init that can be used to create a vector without initializing its data, e.g. : IntegerVector out = no_init(n) ;
  • New exception constructor requiring only a message; stop function to throw an exception
  • DataFrame gains a nrows method
• Changes in Rcpp attributes:
  • Ability to embed R code chunks (via specially formatted block comments) in C++ source files.
  • Allow specification of argument defaults for exported functions.
  • New scheme for more flexible mixing of generated and user composed C++ headers.
  • Print warning if no export attributes are found in source file.
  • Updated vignette with additional documentation on exposing C++ interfaces from packages and signaling errors.
• Changes in Rcpp modules:
  • Enclose .External invocations in BEGIN_RCPP/END_RCPP
• Changes in R code :
  • New function areMacrosDefined
  • Additions to Rcpp.package.skeleton:
    • attributes parameter to generate a version of rcpp_hello_world that uses Rcpp::export.
    • cpp_files parameter to provide a list of C++ files to include the in the src directory of the package.
• Miscellaneous changes:
  • New example 'pi simulation' using R and C++ via Rcpp attributes

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release 0.10.0. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

I happen to be a great fan of ocean races, so like many, particularly here in France, I'm following the Vend e Globe ocean race, alone around the world on 60-feet IMOCA race ships, without stop or assistance. In its early editions, Vend e Globe was easy to explain : start from Les Sables d'Olonne and come back there after going around Antarctica by leaving it to starboard. Period. Now, it's a bit more complicated as, for security reasons, the sailors have to pass a few points meant to prevent them from going too south (during first editions, some sailors went as south as 65 S). Sailors are currently heading "down" the Atlantic and will probably pass in the vicinity of the Tristan da Cunha island. This island has always been fascinating to me. It is the remotest point inf the world with a permanent population. The closest inhabited land is over 2800km away. 271 people live there. No airport. No regular ship line. Only fishing boats from time to time and that's all. It's probably hard to imagine what is the life there....but I find this fascinating, in some way. Maybe one of these parts of the world where I would like to go and never will. And there's even a volcano (indeed, the island *is* a volcano) : I wonder if there is a Linux user over there...

Every Ubuntu release gets an alliterative code name from Mark Shuttleworth. It is a composition of an adjective and an animal. The upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 has the code name Raring Ringtail . Since nearly the beginning, the code names follow the alphabetical order. We will reach the letter Z with Ubuntu 17.04 if no letters are skipped. Will we wrap then and begin with A again? At UDS-R in Copenhagen, Mark Shuttleworth jokingly said between Jono Bacon s introduction and Mark s keynote speech, that vegetables will be used once we run out of letters. He proposed the code name for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS: Brilliant Broccoli!

In supporting a labful of Debian GNU/Linux machines with NFS-mounted home directories, i find some of my users demand a few proprietary programs. Adobe Flash is one of the most demanded, in particular because some popular streaming video services (like Amazon Prime and Hulu) seem to require it. I'm not a fan of proprietary network services, but i'm happy to see that Amazon Prime takes Linux support seriously enough to direct users to Adobe's Linux Flash "Protected Content" troubleshooting page (Amazon Prime's rival NetFlix, by comparison, has an abysmal record on this platform). Of course, none of this will work on any platform but i386, since the flash player is proprietary software and its proprietors have shown no interest in porting it or letting others port it :( One of the main issues with proprietary network services is their inclination to view their customer as their adversary, as evidenced by various DRM schemes. In two examples, the Flash Player's DRM module appears to arbitrarily break when you use one home directory across multiple machines. Also, the DRM module appears to depend on HAL, which is being deprecated by most of the common distributions. Why bother with this kind of gratuitous breakage? We know that video streaming can and does work fine without DRM. With modern browsers, freely-formatted video, and HTML5 video tags, video just works, and it works under the control of the user, on any platform. But Flash appears to throw up unnecessary hurdles, requiring not only proprietary code, but deprecated subsystems and fiddly workarounds to get it functional. I'm reminded of Mako's concept of "antifeatures" -- how much engineering time and effort went into making this system actually be less stable and reliable than it would have otherwise been? How could that work have been better-directed? Tags: antifeatures, flash, hal, proprietary, streaming

We have this PostgreSQL server with plenty of RAM that is still using some of its swap over the day (up to 600MB). Then suddenly everything is swapped in again. It turned out the reason is there are two clusters running, and the second one isn't used as heavily as the first one. Disk I/O activity of the first cluster slowly evicts pages from the second shared buffers cache to swap, and then the daily pg_dump run reads them back every evening. I was not aware of an easy way to get numbers for "amount of SysV shared memory swapped to disk", but some googling led to shmctl(2):

#define _GNU_SOURCE 1
#include <sys/ipc.h>
#include <sys/shm.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main ()
 
        struct shm_info info;
        int max;
        long PAGE_SIZE = sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE);
        max = shmctl(0, SHM_INFO, (struct shmid_ds *) &info);
        printf ("max: %d\nshm_tot: %ld\nshm_rss: %ld\nshm_swp: %ld\n",
                        max,
                        info.shm_tot * PAGE_SIZE,
                        info.shm_rss * PAGE_SIZE,
                        info.shm_swp * PAGE_SIZE);
        return 0;
 

The output looks like this:

max: 13
shm_tot: 13232308224
shm_rss: 12626661376
shm_swp: 601616384

Update: Mark points out that ipcs -mu shows the same information. Thanks for the hint!

# ipcs -mu
------ Shared Memory Status --------
segments allocated 2
pages allocated 3230544
pages resident  3177975
pages swapped   51585
Swap performance: 0 attempts     0 successes

rc bugs, cloud, and getting involved This past week-end has been rather intense. In addition to another, non free software related event I was volunteering for, I had the pleasure to participate in the 2nd Paris mini DebConf. Once again, the organization has been great and the average quality of the talks have been very high. I'd say talk quality is now totally up to par with the yearly full blown DebConf (and yes, talks have been in English ). If I had to single the talk that intrigued me the most, I'd name Joss' talk on large GNOME deployments: it's full of insights on the GNOME architecture and of tips useful to all power users, no matter the size of your GNOME "deployment". For more info on the talks have a look at the program. To catch up with the talks you missed you can peruse the slides there and/or keep an eye on http://video.debian.net, where we usually post conference videos "when they are ready". At the conference I've also witnessed the usual healthy mix of country origins that I remember from the previous Paris mini DebConf. Once again I've been happy to meet (and host!) Debian friends from many countries including Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Finland, you name it. Kudos to the organizers (hi Sylvestre and Mehdi!) and to all the volunteers who made this possible. On my part, I didn't have any full blown talk scheduled (ETOOMANYTALKS struck me this month ) but I did book two lightning talks slots that I've used for:

• rambling on RC bugs and the effects of long freezes on Debian
• presenting the debian-cloud initiative, which is rather new but incredibly active and effective despite its infancy

On the subject of lightning talks, I also recommend to promote Lucas' talk on how to get involved in Debian. It's dense and straight to the point, able to both convey useful tips and point wannabe contributors to the most useful contributions they can make to Debian.

Finally, I've managed to update SUSE Studio images with Weblate to recently released 1.3. So you can now fetch there various images for your virtual machines or clouds. There is also new support for SUSE Cloud or OpenStack in SUSE Studio, so you can enjoy these as well. Within this version, I've upgraded the system to openSUSE 12.2 and included MTA in the image, so that you can send out registration emails. You can find more information about Weblate at http://weblate.org/.

Filed under: English Suse Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

I've put up my nearly unedited, unsorted, and uncommented photos from my recent trip to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, for the Libre Software World Conference. It was a beautiful place (and a great conference) -- I hope to write more about it soon.

Good news, everyone! So as of last Sunday, this works on all Linux archs in Debian unstable and gives you a modern version of upstart:

echo 'Yes, do as I say!'   apt-get -o DPkg::options=--force-remove-essential -y --force-yes install upstart

Thanks to the ifupdown, sysvinit, and udev maintainers for their cooperation in getting upstart support in place; to the Debian release team for accomodating the late changes needed for upstart to be supported in wheezy; and to Scott for his past maintenance of upstart in Debian. Benchmarking One of the consequences is that it's now possible to do meaningful head-to-head comparisons of boot speed between sysvinit (with startpar), upstart, and systemd. At one time or another people have tested systemd vs. sysvinit when using bash as /bin/sh, and upstart vs. sysvinit, and systemd vs. sysvinit+startpar, and there are plenty of bootcharts floating around showing results of one init system or another on one distro or another, but I'm not aware of anyone having done a real, fair comparison of the three solutions, changing nothing but the init system. I've done some initial comparisons in a barebones sid VM, and the results are definitely interesting. Sysvinit with startpar (the default in Debian) can boot a stock sid install, with no added services, in somewhere between 3.37 and 3.42 seconds (three runs). That's not a whole lot, but on the other hand this is a system with a single filesystem and no interesting services yet. Is this really as fast as we can boot? No, even this minimal system can boot faster. Testing with upstart shows that upstart can do the same job in between 3.03 and 3.19 seconds (n=3, mean=3.09). This confirms what we'd already seen in Ubuntu, that it makes a difference to boot speed to have filesystem mounting handled by an integrated process that understands the whole system instead of as a group of serialized shell scripts. What about systemd? The same test gives a boot time between 2.32 and 2.85 seconds (n=4, mean=2.48). Interesting; what would make systemd faster than upstart in sid? Well, a quick look at the system shows one possible contributing factor: the rsyslog package in Debian has a systemd unit file, but not an upstart job file. Dropping in the /etc/init/rsyslog.conf from Ubuntu has a noticeable impact, and brings the upstart boot time down nearer to that of systemd (2.78-3.03s, n=5, mean=2.92). Besides telling me that it's time to start spamming Debian maintainers with wishlist bugs asking them to include upstart jobs in their packages, this suggests that the remaining difference in boot time may be due to the outstanding init scripts in rcS.d that are made built-in no-ops by systemd but not (yet) by upstart in Debian (e.g., hwclock, hostname, udev-mtab). (In Ubuntu, /etc/rcS.d has long since been emptied out in favor of upstart jobs in the common case, since the time it takes to get to runlevel=2 is definitely a major issue for boot speed and boot parallelization.) It also gives the lie to the claim that's been made in various places that spawning shells is a major bottleneck for upstart vs. systemd. More study is certainly needed to confirm this, but at least this naive first test suggests that in spite of the purported benefits of hard-coding boot-time policies in C code, upstart with its default degree of runtime configurability is at least in the ballpark of systemd. Indeed, when OpenSuSE switched from upstart to systemd, it seems that something else in the stack managed to nullify any benefit from improving the boot-time performance of apparmor. Contrary to what some would have you believe, systemd is not some kind of silver bullet for boot speed. Upstart, with its boot-time flexibility and its long history of real-world testing in Ubuntu, is a formidable competitor to systemd in the boot speed department - and a solid solution to the many longstanding boot-time ordering bugs in Debian, which still affect users of sysvinit. I've published the bootcharts for the above tests here. Between the fact that Debian's bootchart package logs by default to /var/log/bootchart.tgz (thus overwriting on every boot) and the fact that these tests are in a VM, I haven't bothered to include the raw data, just the bootcharts themselves. The interested reader can probably generate more interesting boot charts of their own anyway - in particular, it will be interesting to see how the different init systems perform with more complicated filesystem layouts, or when booting a less trivial set of services. Other musings The boot charts have been created with the bootchart package rather than with bootchart2. For one thing, it turns out that bootchart2 includes systemd units, not init scripts; so when replacing bootchart with bootchart2, the non-matching init script is left behind and systemd in particular gets terribly confused. This is now reported as Bug #694403. In an amusing twist, while I was experimenting with bootchart2, I also noticed that having systemd installed would slow down booting with other init systems, because systemd installs udev rules which take a noticeable amount of time to run a helper command at boot even though the helper should be a no-op. So if you're doing boot speed testing of other init systems, be sure you don't have systemd on the system at the time!

Julian Treasure gave an informative TED talk about The 4 Ways Sound Affects US [1]. Among other things he claims that open plan offices reduce productivity by 66%! He suggests that people who work in such offices wear headphones and play bird-songs. Naked Capitalism has an interesting interview between John Cusack and Jonathan Turley about how the US government policy of killing US citizens without trial demonstrates the failure of their political system [2]. Washington s blog has an interesting article on the economy in Iceland [3]. Allowing the insolvent banks to go bankrupt was the best thing that they have ever done for their economy. Clay Shirky wrote an insightful article about the social environment of mailing lists and ways to limit flame-wars [4]. ZRep is an interesting program that mirrors ZFS filesystems via regular snapshots and send/recv operations [5]. It seems that it could offer similar benefits to DRBD but at the file level and with greater reliability. James Lockyer gave a movingTEDx talk about his work in providing a legal defence for the wrongly convicted [6]. This has included overturning convictions after as much as half a century in which the falsely accused had already served a life sentence. Nathan Myers wrote an epic polemic about US government policy since 9-11 [7]. It s good to see that some Americans realise it s wrong. There is an insightful TED blog post about TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi who has brain cancer [8]. Apparently he had some problems with medical records in proprietary formats which made it difficult to get experts to properly assess his condition. Open document standards can be a matter of life and death and should be mandated by federal law. Paul Wayper wrote an interesting and amusing post about Emotional Computing which compares the strategies of Apple, MS, and the FOSS community among other things [9]. Kevin Allocca of Youtube gave an insightful TED talk about why videos go viral [10]. Jason Fried gave an interesting TED talk Why Work Doesn t Happen at Work [11]. His main issues are distraction and wasted time in meetings. He gives some good ideas for how to improve productivity. But they can also be used for sabotage. If someone doesn t like their employer then they could call for meetings, incite managers to call meetings, and book meetings so that they don t follow each other and thus waste more of the day (EG meetings at 1PM and 3PM instead of having the second meeting when the first finishes). Shyam Sankar gave an interesting TED talk about human computer cooperation [12]. He describes the success of human-computer partnerships in winning chess tournaments, protein folding, and other computational challenges. It seems that the limit for many types of computation will be the ability to get people and computers to work together efficiently. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting and amusing article for Locus Magazine about some of the failings of modern sci-fi movies [13]. He is mainly concerned with pointless movies that get the science and technology aspects wrong and the way that the blockbuster budget process drives the development of such movies. Of course there are many other things wrong with sci-fi movies such as the fact that most of them are totally implausible (EG aliens who look like humans). The TED blog has an interesting interview with Catarina Mota about hacker spaces and open hardware [14]. Sociological Images has an interesting article about sporting behaviour [15]. They link to a very funny youtube video of a US high school football team who make the other team believe that they aren t playing until they win [16]

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us.html
• [2] http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/john-cusack-jonathan-turley-on-obamas-constitution.html
• [3] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/08/top-economists-iceland-did-it-right-everyone-else-is-doing-it-wrong.html
• [4] http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html
• [5] http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/zrep/
• [6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k22MJpgTUiM
• [7] http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary.html?start=434
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/9zzsg4s
• [9] http://www.mabula.net/tbfw/blosxom.cgi/2012/09/17
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kevin_allocca_why_videos_go_viral.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/shyam_sankar_the_rise_of_human_computer_cooperation.html
• [13] http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/09/cory-doctorow-why-science-fiction-movies-drive-me-nuts/
• [14] http://blog.ted.com/2012/09/21/tinker-tailor-solderer-fellows-friday-with-catarina-mota/
• [15] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/12/28/context-how-do-you-play-football/
• [16] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UIdI8khMkw

Related posts:

1. Links April 2012 Karen Tse gave an interesting TED talk about how to...
2. Links March 2012 Washington s Blog has an informative summary of recent articles about...
3. Links November 2011 Forbes has an interesting article about crowd-sourcing by criminals and...

During the Paris Mini-Debconf, Nicolas Dandrimont talked about The state of mentors.debian.net: GSoC and beyond. He said that Half of Debian s packages are maintained by sponsored maintainers. That statement was actually wrong, as he confirmed later. However, using a few UDD queries, I could come up with:

• 3147 packages out of 18649 packages in sid (17%) were last uploaded using a sponsored upload.
• There are 963 distinct sponsorees, vs. a total of 2015 distinct emails in the Changed-By field of packages in sid. Given that it s more likely for DDs to have used several emails to upload packages, it s very likely that half of the package maintainers are sponsored maintainers.
• There are 2185 packages without a DD in either the Maintainer: or the Uploaders: fields. (That includes some packages that are maintained by a team that could include some DDs)

Full UDD notes:

all packages in sid:
select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid'
packages in sid known to upload_history:
select source, version from upload_history where
(source, version) in (select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid')
packages that were uploaded by the changed_by person:
create temporary table sources_not_sponsored as select distinct source, version
 from upload_history, carnivore_keys, carnivore_emails
 where (source, version) in (select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid')
 and fingerprint = key
 and carnivore_keys.id = carnivore_emails.id
 and carnivore_emails.email = changed_by_email;
packages not uploaded by the changed_by person:
create temp table uh_sid as select source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email
from upload_history
where (source, version) in (select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid');
create temp table uh_sid_sponsored as select source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email from uh_sid
where (source, version) not in (select source, version from sources_not_sponsored);
list with sponsor login:
select distinct source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email, login
from uh_sid_sponsored
left join carnivore_keys on fingerprint = key
left join carnivore_login on carnivore_keys.id = carnivore_login.id;
=> 4188 sponsored packages. some of them are in a strange state (changed_by is a DD, but uploaded by another DD). excluding those:
create temp table sponsored_but_dds as select distinct source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email, login
from uh_sid_sponsored, carnivore_emails, carnivore_login
where changed_by_email = carnivore_emails.email
and carnivore_emails.id = carnivore_login.id;
create temp table really_sponsored as select distinct source, version, fingerprint, changed_by_email, login
from uh_sid_sponsored
left join carnivore_keys on fingerprint = key
left join carnivore_login on carnivore_keys.id = carnivore_login.id
where (source, version) not in (select source, version from sponsored_but_dds);
=> 3147 sponsored packages
select distinct changed_by_email from really_sponsored ;
=> 963 different sponsorees
select distinct changed_by_email from upload_history where
(source, version) in (select source, version from sources_uniq where release = 'sid');
=> 2015 distinct emails.
no DD amongst maintainer or uploader:
create temp table dds_emails as select email from carnivore_emails, carnivore_login
where carnivore_emails.id = carnivore_login.id;
select source, version, maintainer, uploaders from sources_uniq
where release='sid'
and maintainer_email not in (select * from dds_emails)
and not exists (select * from uploaders where release = 'sid' and sources_uniq.source = uploaders.source and sources_uniq.version = uploaders.version and email in (select * from dds_emails))
and maintainer_email != 'packages@qa.debian.org'
and (source, version) in (select source, version from really_sponsored);

This week-end I attended the Paris Mini-Debconf, which was really a great event, and a nice opportunity to meet everybody again.
I delivered a lightning talk on Get involved! It s not that hard! , which was also a good excuse to mention the Debian packaging tutorial and the Debian Maintainer Dashboard.

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #677861 lftp: FTBFS[kfreebsd-i386]: error: conflicting declaration 'typedef __int32_t gl_intptr_t'
  I provided some analysis. By rebuilding lftp s configure script with recent autotools, this should be fixed.
• #676229 gnustep-make: should depend on a chosen version of gobjc, not just "gobjc"
  This issue was fixed by an upload, but not marked as closed. I tried to reproduce it and failed (as expected), so I closed the bug.
• #694091 bcrypt: Tries to load whole file into memory regardless of the size
  I patched bcrypt to use a window of 256K over the input and output file instead of loading it into memory. I also fixed the offset types so that it works with files > 2 GiB on 32-bit platforms.

I have to say that I find the BTS to be very hard to read from the perspective of a newcomer who wants to help squashing RC bugs, both from a technical and a social standpoint. As an example for the technical side: blocking bugs are very easy to miss, so innocent bugreports which seem actionable turn out to just wait for another bug with lots of discussion. Also, it seems like the best interface to the BTS for RC bugs is UDD, so RichiH s RC report was quite helpful. For the social side: Bugreports often are in a state in which it is not clear what the next course of action is, e.g. #634261 (the bug is not considered RC, but still has severity: grave) or #684633 (dropping from testing suggested but not clear whether a removal request has been filed or not). I m aware that this is very vague critic. I suppose what I am missing is a way in which we can make the list of RC bugs more actionable. When I am browsing through RC bugs, I often open bugreports and figure out that there s nothing I can do. Possibly a way to improve this situation is by letting people claim ownership of a bug and then filtering for un-owned bugs and those which have an owner but have not seen any activity for some period of time.

I'm typing this from the departure gate of the Beauvais airport, about to board my plane back home. I came to Paris for the Debian MiniConf, a/k/a another excuse to meet so many friends. Needless to say, it was great fun. I already signed and mailed all the keys from the KSP, and spent some time during the weekend finishing the transition of my blog from Blosxom to Ikiwiki. I liked Blosxom, specially the fact that it produced static pages, but I wanted to try Ikiwiki, with its elegance and so many interesting features. The combination of web-edition, backed by revision control, with a static blog finished convincing me. So, I have just changed the feed link in Planet. I hope I don't flood you! (I took the effort of adding meta tags to all my old posts so the GUID won't change). And thanks to the MiniConf team!

A new version of the digest package (which generates hash function summaries for arbitrary (and possibly nested) R objects using any of the standard md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512 or crc32 algorithms) is now on CRAN, and I will push the corresponding version into Debian in a moment. For this release, Hannes Muehleisen added support for sha-512 using an older standalone function by Aaron D. Gifford which I had to whip into slightly more portable shape to work on Windows. (Hint: uint32_t from stdint.h, not u_int32_t) CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to version 0.5.2. As usual, our package is available via the R-Forge page leading to svn and tarball access, my digest page and the local directory here.

I have made a presentation at the Paris MinDebconf 2012 about the work I ve done to bring more semantic meta-data to the Debian PTS (see previous posts). Here are my slides :
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/15336720" style="border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="427"> </iframe> Also available here as PDF.

I just finished to address the awesome debian crowd at the Mini Deb conf in paris. My presentation was about a few challenges we have ahead to bootstrap debian on a new architecture. Johannes Schauer and Wookey did a lot of work in the last few months particularly focusing on Linaro/Ubuntu. After Wheezy I think it is important to catch up with their work and integrate it in debian. The two main take away messages from my presentation :

• Add Multi Arch annotations to your packages. This is essential to cross compile packages automatically. We are still not able to cross compile a minimal debian system in debian because we still miss many multi-arch annotations. Experiments show that with these annotations, these packages will cross compile just fine. A lot of work has been done in this direction by Wookey.

• Debian should consider adding build profiles to build dependencies. Build Profiles are global build dependencies filters to create packages with a different set of functionalities. Build profiles are of the form Build-Depends: foo (>=0.1) [amd64] <!stage1 bootstrap> bar.

This week we just reached an important milestone toward a fully automatic bootstrap procedure. Hopefully we are going to tell you more about this work during fosdem 2013 My slides are attached.

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