Search Results: "ed"

8 June 2013

Daniel Pocock: Rendition link to PRISM

The Guardian is reporting that Britain's GCHQ first started getting produtive with PRISM early 2012. It was about the same time that their buddies down under, ASIO revised their earlier assessment of a refugee, Ranjini, and scooped her up in Australia's domestic rendition program. This may be more than a notable co-incidince, because it adds further support to the hypothesis that Ranjini is a victim of Big Data and PRISM. If ASIO first gained access to PRISM at the same time as GCHQ, then they may have used some tenuous PRISM data to form their revised assessment of her suitability for a visa. Making such inferences, and using them as the basis for a cruel program of indefinite detention is a gross violation of human rights and goes far beyond the claim that PRISM is about catching real terrorists. I've previously mentioned the systematic persecution of coloured people in my own country. Like many honest people, I'm utterly ashamed of it. The Government also has similar programs for indigineous people (they cooked one aboriginal elder alive on our national holiday) and they've also toyed with outlawing homosexuality. Having seen first hand some of the prejudiced, Government-sanctioned evil that exists in Australia, it's not hard to imagine small-minded members of the public service using PRISM data to target these classes of people for an unhealthy dose of bastardisation. Ranjini was ripped away from her husband by the rendition program and dumped in Sydney's Villawood death camp. Twenty-four hours after the gestapo got their hands on her, it was discovered she was pregnant - her child, an Australian citizen, was recently born and confined to the same concentration camp. Ranjini has racked up more than 12 months in captivity now, most of it while pregnant, and the Government has still not made any official charges against this woman. They say they can't comment on her case for fear of revealing their sources: once again, they don't want to talk about programs like PRISM that they share with the US. Maybe she just had one of the wrong people in her facebook friends list? That is not the sort of evidence that can be used to convict somebody in court, especially if the Government wants to avoid public questioning about their access to a close ally's secret database. Various rapists and murderers have made multiple court appearances in the last 12 months, tried and convicted in accordance with the procedures of justice. Ranjini has not been brought into a court room even once because the spooks don't want to reveal their sinister sources like PRISM.
Potential PRISM victim Ranjini Australia's close ties with the US Australia has had particularly close ties with the US for many years and just as the British GCHQ has been linked to PRISM, it seems Australia's ASIO is also in on the act. For those not familiar with the depth of this alliance, it is worth checking up on Pine Gap, the ECHELON program and the recent exposure (by Wikileaks) of one of our senators with unauthorised US spy connections - he quietly resigned for family reasons'. Pine Gap
Pine Gap, Australia This is not to say that the US is universally bad or that the strategic alliance is undesirable: rather, it is simply to demonstrate the strength of these links and the real risk that data-sharing is used for inappropriate purposes. While many of us in a technical field treat large volumes of data from a very theoretical perspective, it is worth remembering that in the wrong hands, data can be very dangerous and there are real human victims.

Benjamin Mako Hill: London and Michigan

I ll be spending the week after next (June 17-23) in London for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association where I ll be presenting a paper. This will be my first ICA and I m looking forward to connecting with many new colleagues in the discipline. If you re one of them, reading this, and would like to meet up in London, please let me know! Starting June 24th, I ll be in Ann Arbor, Michigan for four weeks of the ICPSR summer program in applied statistics at the Institute for Social Research. I have been wanting to sign up for some of their advanced methods classes for years and am planning to take the opportunity this summer before I start at UW. I ll be living with my friends and fellow Berkman Cooperation Group members Aaron Shaw and Dennis Tennen. I would love to make connections and meet people in both places so, if you would like to meet up, please get in contact.

Thorsten Glaser: Waypoint Statistics

mirabilos found waypoints I ve finally gotten around to listing all Waypoints (Geocaches, Opencaches, Closedcaches, Earthcaches, Terracaches including Locationless, Navicaches, etc.) I ve found a box, enjoyful, educating, a good place to hide one myself, etc. and putting up a list and, of course, generate my own statpic.

I ll put them up for the other project members, too (already made a picture for gecko2@ but bsiegert@ still needs one; we also need to collect offline lists of found, owned and attended waypoints) A bit of background story: I decided, years ago, to have an offline list of cache finds in case something would happen. Just, I had found way too many already, so this was a huge bit of work. Oh well I of course procrastinated, and then something did happen (Opencaching wanting to force a Restricted Commons licence; me disagreeing and suggesting a change; some trigger-happy person immediately deleting my account without waiting for the discussion or the decision period to end; weeks of forum discussions; Opencaching allowing dual-licencing; them telling me they can t restore my data probably never heard of databa sorry, MySQL backups). And I still didn t have the list. Now I do; recreated even the OC information from what was still accessible and with help from one OC supporter ( mic@ , thanks); merged caches that are co-listed on several platforms, etc. (still need to put in the FTF/STF/TTF/4TF/LTF and voting/favourites information) and a statpic, all in Open Source and Open Data, in cvs(1) with mksh(1) and a frontend for libgd2 I admit, but we had been using that for the MirWebsite for a while already. I suggest every geocacher keep an offline or local record of all their finds (and hides and attended logs) for things like this, in case some platform decides to let s say, put your data into the cloud where it is? I don t know .

Steve Kemp: Migrations and movements

Recently I wanted to cleanup my "main" remote machine. It is a system I've had for many years, which started off as a i386 KVM-guest and was later migrated in place to an AMD64 installation. These days the host runs: The plan was originally to move the "mail stuff" to a new (wheezy) guest. I aborted that after discovering that the mutt-patched package has (IMHO) regressed. So today I spun up a new virtual machine, and configured it to host websites. Thus far I've migrated steve.org.uk, and lumail.org to the new host. Both simple sites that are built via my static-site-generator. Migration mostly involved configuring the proxy and the thttpd instances - then using rsync to migrate the content. I've renamed my current host, which was previously www.steve.org.uk and is now ssh.steve.org.uk, and pushed DNS changes. If all is smooth and happy I'll slowly migrate the rest of the sites. Fingers crossed this will be painless and I'll have a clean split between "login + mail" and "websites".

Michael Stapelberg: Uploading packages via SFTP

Yesterday I uploaded a big package and got multiple timeouts. I then figured out that DDs can also upload using SFTP (i.e. SSH s file transfer thingie) instead of traditional FTP, which seems like a more modern alternative. So let s give that a try. With dput-ng, the following configuration leads to using sftp by default: 
mkdir -p ~/.dput.d/profiles/
cat > ~/.dput.d/profiles/ftp-master.json <<EOT
 
    "fqdn": "ssh.upload.debian.org",
    "incoming": "/srv/upload.debian.org/UploadQueue/",
    "method": "sftp"
 
EOT
Note that uploading via SFTP will lead to debianqueued uploading the files via FTP for you. But maybe that is more reliable than doing it yourself. We ll see :-).

Hideki Yamane: Ubuntu Magazine Japan 2013 summer

Ubuntu Magazine Japan 2013 summer has been published
(advertisement from one of writers... :-)

Paul Tagliamonte: Crossgrading from 32 to 64 bit

Yes! It is possible! I ve done it! On my production linode! It was a bit hard, and I made quite a few mistakes, but I m convinced that a minimal system can be sanely crossgraded. I did it and only had an hour or so of server downtime In the process. However, most of the stack gets stripped down and back out, so I fear what happens with the X stack (nevermind GNOME Or anything that depends on it) A more detailed post to follow! Thanks to the dpkg team for making this happen!

7 June 2013

Daniel Pocock: "Do as we say, not as we do"

When I was preparing my blog entry about the Gold Standard in Free communications, I had absolutely no idea that The Guardian (another Ganglia user) would be hot on my heels with dramatic revelations about US Government surveillance of dangerous terrorists and maybe sucking up a little bit of data about a few hundred million of their own citizens and another 90% of the world's population for good measure. Some people even thought I've been a bit paranoid with my concerns about excessive surveillance. However, it is just remarkable to see that in the same week that the trial of Bradley Manning is getting under way for inappropriate use of his employer's computer, the US has been exposed plotting cyber attacks and setting a very bad example for all those little script kiddies out there. Practical questions for every one of us Is it time to start blocking email to and from sites like gmail and hotmail? What about the reports that the US Government was engineering back doors in the OpenBSD operating system? Have any open source projects actually been comprised in this way? Will spammers and other criminals take this as a cue that there is nothing morally wrong with hacking? Have certificate authorities been infiltrated too? They may well be the elephant in the room - while everybody was joking about the NSA key hidden in the depths of Microsoft Windows, maybe one or more of the well known trusted root certificates, right under our noses, is also a back door? The danger is real Anybody wondering about the practical implications of all this data gathering doesn't have to look very far to find out what can go wrong. In the same week as all these things were exposed, there have been more dramatic revelations about law enforcement officers selling private data for their own commercial gain. While the vast majority of police are surely good citizens, every organisation has it's bad apples and as Bradley Manning demonstrated so well, it only takes one person to breach security and enormous volumes of data can end up escaping.

Tanguy Ortolo: Looking for an SPF milter

Envelope

For email extensions such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC, I think the most flexible and portable system is the milter protocol. Originally developed for Sendmail, it is now also supported by Postfix, and it allows to plug specific filters in the mail server without the hassle of the previous systems like SMTP proxies.

SPF milters in Debian OpenDKIM provides a good milter for checking DKIM. OpenDMARC provides a similar milter for DMARC. But the situation is more difficult for SPF in Debian which is a requirement for DMARC! :
spf-milter
It was based on the buggy libspf0 and was never updated to libspf2, and was finally removed from Debian;
spf-milter-python
This one seems a bit Sendmail-centric it uses a dbm configuration file for instance and not very documented.
Packaging a new SPF milter? There are other milters for SPF, which have not been packaged for Debian yet, but I am ready to package one. Has anybody tried another SPF milter?
spfmilter
Still in beta test, still to be ported to libspf2 which may never happen since it was not updated since 2005.
smf-spf
Based on libspf2, seems rather neat, with a clean configuration, but inactive since 2007.
milter-spiff
Proprietary.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: The Rcpp Book is now shipping

My book about Rcpp (and its R and C++ integration) is now available from Springer. Amazon still lists it as not-yet-released; I expect this to change in the next few days.

Marco d'Itri: Torre Telecom Italia, Rozzano

Today I was lucky enough to be able to visit the Telecom Italia telecommunications tower located in Rozzano, just south of Milano, and took some photos. This tower, with its 187 meters, is one of the tallest man-made structures in Italy. It was built by Telecom Italia in 1990 to create high capacity radio links to Genova and Torino and nowadays it contains radio transmitters for a TV station and many kinds of radio networks. It is an impressive monument to an age when telcos had no optical fibers, but plenty of money.

6 June 2013

Olivier Berger: New paper Authoritative linked data descriptions of debian source packages using ADMS.SW accepted at OSS 2013

I ll be presenting Authoritative linked data descriptions of debian source packages using ADMS.SW at OSS 2013. Here s the abstract :
The Debian Package Tracking System is a Web dashboard for Debian contributors and advanced users. This central tool publishes the status of subsequent releases of source packages in the Debian distribution. It has been improved to generate RDF meta-data documenting the source packages, their releases and links to other packaging artifacts, using the ADMS.SW 1.0 model. This constitutes an authoritative source of machine-readable Debian facts and proposes a reference URI naming scheme for Linked Data resources about Debian packages. This should enable the interlinking of these Debian package descriptions with other ADMS.SW or DOAP descriptions of FLOSS projects available on the Semantic Web also using Linked Data principles. This will be particularly interesting for traceability with upstream projects whose releases are packaged in Debian, derivative distributions reusing Debian source packages, or with other FLOSS distributions.
If you are interested, a previous paper which describes the same experiment is available online. See also previous installments on ADMS.SW in this blog.

5 June 2013

Daniel Pocock: The Gold Standard in Free Communications Technology

In a previous blog entry, I posed the question whether open source communications software is really free and came to the conclusion that additional principles need to be defined for free communications, above and beyond the normal expectations of free software. This is a fundamental problem that projects like the FreedomBox, Lumicall and other privacy-enabling free communications solutions must be familiar with. Otherwise there is a risk that development will never end as there is no finish line in sight. Practical solutions are not so easily defined though: so let's just imagine a perfect solution for a moment. Later, we can contemplate the trade-offs that are necessary to make it practical. Perfect privacy Here are some attributes that may exist for a perfect solution: Privacy must be the default: the user should not have to explicitly request privacy. If there is a risk that an incoming communication will establish a session without full privacy, the user should be able to decline the opportunity to participate. Only participants to a communication can receive the communication A third party should not be able to replay, modify or forge any aspect of the communication or the request to initiate a session Only participants to a communication are aware that a communication occurred Only participants to the communication are aware of who participated in the communication A participant may be anonymous: but in this case, all other participants will be aware that there is an anonymous party present in the communication Participants may not deduce any information about the other participants that is not explicitly shared (e.g. location, type of device, service provider) In the case of real-time communication, a participant may leave the communication without any other party even realising that they left or why. Communication is off-the-record: No participant can save and reproduce a copy of the communication in such a way that a third-party will know it was authentic. Anonymous reception of communications - the perfect post-office box: someone may create an anonymous identifier that allows other people to call them without being able to trace their location or identity Some consequences of a perfect solution Just imagine if all communications worked in this manner. There are many potential consequences. For example, if you call somebody and the call is not connected, you will get no feedback about whether their line is busy, out of service or whether they deliberately chose to reject your call. Another example is somebody who is driving while talking on a telephone. If they have an accident, there will be no way to prove that they were using the phone. This may already be the case if somebody uses a VoIP app on their phone - the police investigating the accident later will simply find no records of calls through the mobile phone account. Conclusion The perfect solution described here is something of a holy grail rather than a recipe that a developer can implement. It is unlikely that such a solution will fall out of the sky in the immediate future. Most software products that offer secure communications only address less than half the issues described above: for example, digital mobile phones prevent eavesdropping with arbitrary radio receivers, but they don't prevent shops detecting the IMEI (serial numbers) of phones that pass through their store and using that information to identify repeat visits to their store.

Guido G nther: Calendar synchronisation between Nokia N900 and the Calypso CalDAV server

One of the replies to the post about Debian's last groupware meeting was from Patrick Ohly of syncevolution fame pointing out that syncevolution already implements calendar autodetection for CalDAV calendars as described in draft-daboo-srv-caldav-10. While looking at the code I noticed that there's a backend for the N900s calendar by Ove K ven as well. When I tried Ove's latest package on my N900 it lead to an immediate crash when doing a: 
syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar
According to Patrick the bug was supposed to be fixed in recent versions so I set up scratchbox and built a newer git snapshot for maemo (sources). This wouldn't crash but didn't show up any items either. It turned out to be a minor bug in calypso returning no content type for REPORT queries which resulted in libneon discarding the whole reply (now already fixed in calypso upstream). With this out of the way setting up synchronisation is quiet simple: 
# Configuration
CALDAV_SERVER=192.168.0.10
syncevolution --configure username=<username> password=<password> \
              calendar/backend=caldav calendar/database=https://$ CALDAV_SERVER :5233/private/my_calendar \
              target-config@webdav calendar
syncevolution --configure --template SyncEvolution_Client sync=none syncURL=local://@webdav username= password= webdav
syncevolution --configure sync=two-way backend=calendar webdav calendar
You should then be able to print the items on the local (N900) and from the remote (CalDAV server) end: 
# This lists the current calendar items on the server
syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar
# This lists the current calendar items on the N900
syncevolution --print-items @default calendar
And from there on sync away: 
# initial slow sync
syncevolution --sync slow webdav
# from there on
syncevolution webdav
The syncevolution source code has great documentation about debugging problems (e.g. src/backends/webdav/README). So check that in case you run into problems. The tl;dr version is 
SYNCEVOLUTION_DEBUG=1 src/syncevolution loglevel=10 --print-items target-config@webdav calendar
to debug CalDAV related problems. In case you need to run syncevoluton from source be sure to set these beforehand: 
export SYNCEVOLUTION_TEMPLATE_DIR=$PWD/src/templates/
export SYNCEVOLUTION_XML_CONFIG_DIR=$PWD/src/syncevo/configs/
On the CalDAV side I used current Calypso git which (with some additional minor fixes) now also interoperates nicely with Iceowl/Icowl-Extension aka Sunbird/Lightning on the desktop side. There's also an ITP for it. So it'll hopefully end up in Debian soon.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Is there a PHP expert in the building? Debian Edu need help!

Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project. We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we hope to get released soon. The two problems require some with PHP skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in the project:
  1. It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface (slbackup-php) using the root user and password. This is BTS report #700257. This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze. Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?
  2. It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither using ldif nor using CSV files. The feature was disabled after a major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system. This is BTS report #698840.
If you can help us, please join us on IRC (#debian-edu on irc.debian.org) and provide patches via the BTS.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.3.900.0

A Armadillo release 3.900.0 was provided by Conrad yesterday. It has been rolled into a new RcppArmadillo release 0.3.900.0 which is now on CRAN and in Debian. It has a number of nice changes, mostly on the performance side of things (see below) and a minor cleanup/improvement in our Kalman filter example (which, as I just realized, I forgot to note in the \code NEWS.Rd in the released tarball):
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.3.900 (2013-06-04)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 3.900.0 (Bavarian Sunflower)
    • added automatic SSE2 vectorisation of elementary expressions (eg. matrix addition) when using GCC 4.7+ with -O3 optimisation
    • added support for saving & loading of cubes in HDF5 format, contributed by Szabolcs Horvat
    • faster median(), contributed by Ruslan Shestopalyuk
    • faster handling of compound expressions with transposes of submatrix rows
    • faster handling of compound expressions with transposes of complex vectors
  • Kalman filter example switched from inline to \code sourceCpp , which simplifies / streamlines the C++ side a little
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

Steve Kemp: How do people deal with email?

As part of writing a new mail client I'm wondering about how to change my email-life, and how other people process/handle their incoming email. I sort my incoming email into folders at delivery-time using procmail. Mail is generally filtered into mailboxes on the basis of the company that sent it, the person that sent it, or the machine which generated it. Because I manage a lot of machines personally I've split things up so that I have a folder per host. So on a morning I might have unread mail in the following folders: 
machines.steve.org.uk/
machines.da-db1/
machines.da-db2/
machines.da-web1/
machines.da-web2/
machines.da-web3/
machines.da-web4/
The per-machine mailboxes usually contain a single mail every day from LogWatch, along with output from any cron-jobs. For example today I received the mail: 
From: Cron Daemon
To: steve@steve.org.uk
Subject: Cron steve@steve.org.uk /home/steve/bin/download-check
URL http://nodejs.org/ - no longer matches v0.10.9
Generally speaking I don't need to read the per-machine messages. I'll keep the most recent 100 for reference, but only need to look if something seems "off" on a machine. But if I don't look I'd not see the node upgrade notice, so find that I do read them after all. This suggest to me that email isn't the right way to handle this kind of thing. Instead I should use a notification system - at work we have a central service called MauveAlert (yes, Red Dwarf reference). Mauve receives "alerts" of various kinds, via UDP. The alerts are then fanned out to appropriate people via XMPP, Email, or SMSs. I have a similarly-inspired system I use on my Debian Administration cluster. A (node) service runs non-stop collecting UDP messages and showing them on a dashboard. I look at it throughout the day to see when slaughter runs, etc. Anyway in conslusion I get a lot of mail. Some of it is related to random projects, and all ends up in the steve.org.uk/ mailbox, some of it relates to machines, and gets filed away, and I have regular conversions with folk so I have a .people.kirsi/ folder which receives a lot of attention, for example. ObRandom:daily() - Mark ~/Maildir/.machines.*, etc, read.

Lior Kaplan: Getting patches into PHP

One of the various ways to measure an open source project is the way it encourages and accepts patches from community members (or future members). The various open source projects I m involved with have many ways to send patches: mailing list, bug tracking systems and more recently pre-commit tools for peer review (such as gerrit). Another popular option is to use github s pull request feature for this. Personally, I find it too complex for simple patches and would prefer gerrit over it. As part of my work at Zend, I try to make sure patches are sent back upstream. Comparing to other open source projects I know, it seems to me that PHP isn t open enough for contributions. This might be just my private case, but if not, it would be discouraging people to contribute and blocking the community from expanding. 6 Months ago I submitted patch to #36103 (patch is at #63767), but no response. A month ago I submitted a simple patch to FPM s shell script (#64764), and no response there as well. To ease things up, I ve created a github fork of the php-src repository and sent pull requests with each of the patches (as suggested at http://php.net/git-php.php). Even edited the bugs reports with the pull request details (as they provide such integration). I m waiting to see if this will trigger a more rapid review process from the project. For the simple patch, I got a response very fast from a user, but still waiting for a core member to check it. Going over the pull requests (both open and closed), I m not too optimistic about having the patches merged, judging by past merged patches (most of them are at least 2 months) and by the open patches (e.g. a typos fix patch is waiting for month).
Filed under: PHP

Johannes Schauer: Reliable IMAP synchronization with IDLE support

The task: reliably synchronize my local MailDir with several remote IMAP mailboxes with IDLE support so that there is no need to poll with small time intervals to get new email immediately. Most graphical mail clients like icedove/thunderbird or evolution have IDLE support which means that their users get notified about new email as soon as it arrives. I prefer to handle email fetching/reading/sending using separate programs so after having used icedove for a long time, I switched to a offlineimap/mutt based setup a few years ago. Some while after that I discovered sup and later notmuch/alot which made me switch again. Now my only remaining problem is the synchronization between my local email and several remote IMAP servers. Using offlineimap worked fine in the beginning but soon I discovered some of its shortcomings. It would for example sometimes lock up or simply crash when I switched between different wireless networks or switched to ethernet or UMTS. Crashing was not a big problem as I just put it into a script which re-executed it every time it crashed. The problem was it locking up for one of its synchronizing email accounts while the others were kept in sync as usual. This once let to me missing five days of email because offlineimap was not crashing and I believed everything was fine (new messages from the other accounts were scrolling by as usual) while people were sending me worried emails whether I was okay or if something bad had happened. I nearly missed a paper submission deadline and another administrative deadline due to this. This was insanely annoying. It turned out that other mail synchronization programs suffered from the same lockup problem so I stuck with offlineimap and instead executed it as: 
while true; do
    timeout --signal=KILL 1m offlineimap
    notmuch new
    sleep 5m
done
Which would synchronize my email every five minutes and kill offlineimap if a synchronization took more than one minute. While I would've liked an email synchronizer which would not need this measure, this worked fine over the months. After some while it bugged me that icedove (which my girlfriend is using) was receiving email nearly instantaneously after they arrived and I couldnt have this feature with my setup. This instantaneous arrival of email works by using the IMAP IDLE command which allows the server to notify the client once new email arrives instead of the client having to poll for new email in small intervals. Unfortunately offlineimap (and any other email synchronizer I found) would not support the IDLE command. There is a fork of it which supports IDLE by using a newer python imap library but this is of little use to me as there is no possibility of a hook which executes when new email arrives so that I can execute notmuch new on the new email. At this point I could've used inotify to execute notmuch new upon arrival of new email but I went another way. Here is a short python script idle.py which connects to my IMAP servers and sends the IDLE command: 
import imaplib
import select
import sys

class mysock():
    def __init__(self, name, server, user, passwd, directory):
        self.name = name
        self.directory = directory
        self.M = imaplib.IMAP4(server)
        self.M.login(user, passwd)
        self.M.select(self.directory)
        self.M.send("%s IDLE\r\n"%(self.M._new_tag()))
        if not self.M.readline().startswith('+'): # expect continuation response
        exit(1)

    def fileno(self):
        return self.M.socket().fileno()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sockets = [
       mysock("Name1", "imap.foo.bar", "user1", "pass1", "folder1"),
        mysock("Name1", "imap.foo.bar", "user1", "pass1", "folder2"),
        mysock("Name2", "imap.blub.bla", "user2", "pass2", "folder3")
            ]
    readable, _, _ = select.select(sockets, [], [], 1980) # 33 mins timeout

    found = False
    for sock in readable:
        if sock.M.readline().startswith('* BYE '): continue
        print "-u basic -o -q -f %s -a %s"%(sock.directory, sock.name)
        found = True
        break

    if not found:
        print "-u basic -o"
It would create a connection to every directory I want to watch on every email account I want to synchronize. The select call will expire after 33 minutes as most email servers would drop the connection if nothing happens at around 30 minutes. If something happened within that time though, the script would output the arguments to offlineimap to do a quick check on just that mailbox on that account. If nothing happened, the script would output the arguments to offlineimap to do a full check on all my mailboxes. 
while true; do
 args= timeout --signal=KILL 35m python idle.py     
        echo "idle timed out" >&2;
        args="-u basic -o";
    
   echo "call offlineimap with: $args" >&2
   timeout --signal=KILL 1m offlineimap $args    
       echo "offlineimap timed out" >&2;
     continue;
    
   notmuch new
done
Every call which interacts with the network is wrapped in a timeout command to avoid any funny effects. Should the python script timeout, a full synchronization with offlineimap is triggered. Should offlineimap timeout, an error message is written to stderr and the script continues. The above naturally has the disadvantage of not immediately responding to new email which arrives during the time that idle.py is not running. But as this email will be fetched once the next message arrives on the same account, there is no much waiting time and so far, this problem didnt bite me. Is there a better way to synchronize my email and at a same time make use of IDLE? I'm surprised I didnt find software which would offer this feature.

Raphael Geissert: The "let the tool do the work" update

Over the last few weeks I've been making several changes to http.debian.net to detect mirrors that don't follow Debian's mirroring guidelines and end up causing problems to the end users. The changes will mean less hash mismatches and similar errors.

As I wrote back in December, the redirector is becoming nicer but also stricter. Some of the changes I recently made caused over 30 mirrors to be completely disabled from the redirector. This is not ideal and I don't like having to disable mirrors. They are contributions afterall.

The only thing I can do, and can't stress enough, is encourage people to use an up to date ftpsync script (available at project/ftpsync/ on every mirror) to mirror Debian.
It takes care for you of all the little but important things needed. Really. A mirror that uses ftpsync is easier for the administrator to properly configure, and provides a consistent mirror for the benefit of the users.

Speaking of ftpsync, there is a new version! If you use ftpsync please upgrade it as soon as possible.

Other improvements are on their way. Contributions are welcome (if you like refactoring, there's quite a bit of explicitly-redundant code in check.pl that should now give a better idea of the way it needs to be refactored.)

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