It's important to back things up. You should also make your life easier by using some good software. I use obnam for some backups, but I wanted to try out bup for a new backup workflow I needed. I will describe the workflow here.The situation: I have a laptop with things to be backed up. I also have a Raspberry Pi which I use as a network attached storage (it has a 1 TB external drive attached to it) and runs Raspbian Wheezy on it. Naturally, you can do this on any NAS running some GNU/Linux variant. In addition, I also have an external portable USB hard disk where another backup copy will be stored. How do I automate this?Here is how I went about this process. First, for the Raspberry Pi:

1. First, identify the directory or directories to be backed up. To keep this simple, the directory I am backing up is /home/kumar/Work.
2. On the Raspberry Pi, install bup. If you want to build it from the git clone, you would need python-dev, and pandoc for the documentation.

   sudo aptitude install pandoc python-dev
   git clone git://github.com/apenwarr/bup.git
   cd bup;make;sudo make install
   

3. Initialize the backup directory on the Raspberry Pi:

   BUP_DIR=/home/kumar/BACKUPS bup init

   BACKUPS is the place where bup is asked to store the backups (much like it's analogue of .git). You can store all your backups within this directory, and you can still classify backup sets within this directory with different names (much like git branches).
4. On the local machine, initialize the backup directory.

   bup index -uv /home/kumar/Work

5. Back it up. This will take time the first time, if the Work directory has several contents within it.

   bup save -r kumar@<raspberry_pi_ip_address>:BACKUPS -n workbackup /home/kumar/Work
   

   workbackup is the name of the backup set. This can be paperbackup or databackup or notesbackup so that several classes can be backed up within the BACKUPS directory.
6. Now, you have backed things up. Make changes in the Work directory. For instance, add/edit/remove/move some files.
7. Rerun the index and save commands from steps 4 and 5 above. Enjoy the speedup and ability to rewind to the previous state.
8. Test restoration of ONE directory of backup (just to save time) on Pi itself directly on the Pi:

   bup -d /home/kumar/BACKUPS/ restore -C /tmp/ /workbackup/latest/home/kumar/Work/offset-coupling-params
   

   Then scp it back if you need it.
9. Alternative: Use fuse. On the Pi:

   sudo aptitude install python-fuse
   sudo adduser kumar fuse
   mkdir Mount
   bup -d /home/kumar/BACKUPS fuse Mount
   Then cd into Mount and cp/scp the correct files wherever.
   fusermount -u Mount
   

10. Once happy, write the bup index/bup save commands into a script and run it periodically to back up (check this at the end of the post). Have fun.

Next, to prepare the external hard disk, I went with the old-style autofs automounting solution:

1. To automount the disk, in /etc/auto.master, add

   /auto			/etc/auto.misc	--timeout=60
   

2. In /etc/auto.misc add:

   backupdrive	-fstype=btrfs	:UUID="7927a7ab-8c3f-4198-bd73-d3cc519a9ac3"
   

   fstype may need changing for your file system, and UUID can be found using blkid on the exact partition of the hard disk you wish to back up to.
3. Initialize the backup directory:

   sudo mkdir /auto/backupdrive/BACKUPS
   sudo chown kumar.kumar /auto/backupdrive/BACKUPS
   bup -d /auto/backupdrive/BACKUPS/ init
   

4. Index and back up:

   bup -d /auto/backupdrive/BACKUPS/ index -uv /home/kumar/Work
   bup -d /auto/backupdrive/BACKUPS/ save -n workbackup /home/kumar/Work
   

5. Make changes in the Work directory. Add/edit/remove/move files.
6. Rerun index and save commands from step 5. Enjoy the speed.
7. Test restoration of ONE directory of backup from removable disk:

   bup -d /auto/backupdrive/BACKUPS/ restore -C /tmp/ /workbackup/latest/home/kumar/Work/offset-coupling-params
   

8. Once happy, write the bup index/bup save commands into a script and run it periodically to back up. Have fun.

Finally, a quick script to automate all of the above.

#!/bin/sh
bup index -u /home/kumar/Work
bup save -r kumar@<raspberry_pi_ip_address>:BACKUPS -n workbackup /home/kumar/Work
if ls /auto/backupdrive/ 2> /dev/null;then
    echo Backing up to the removable disk...
    bup -d /auto/backupdrive/BACKUPS/ index -u /home/kumar/Work
    bup -d /auto/backupdrive/BACKUPS/ save -n workbackup /home/kumar/Work
    echo Backed up to the removable disk! Yay!
else
    echo WARNING: Not backing up to the removable disk
fi

What this script does it, it backs up to the NAS, and then checks if the external disk is connected. If the disk is mounted, then it backs up to that disk as well. It might be a good idea to cron or anacron this script, or have someone remind you to run this periodically. The only limitation I have is that you can't use bup restore to restore from a remote repository yet, but that isn't a huge issue for me now. In addition, metadata is not stored by the bup save/restore commands. You would have to use split and join with tar to get that. However, bup is fast moving, so I'd expect these features soon. Till then, this workflow works all right for data only backups.Although this is just a mental dump of the procedure I made for myself, suggestions for improvement are welcome. Thanks.

A few days ago I had the great pleasure to interview Allan Day, GNOME designer and enthusiastic contributor. Me: Hello Allan, mind presenting yourself? Allan: I m a designer working on the GNOME Project. I ve been involved for quite a few years now. Last year I was lucky to be hired by Red Hat to work in their Desktop Team. Me: Can you tell us something more about GNOME 4? Can we alias it GNOME OS? Allan: GNOME 4 isn t something that is being seriously considered right now, at least as far as I m aware. Those of us in the GNOME Project are thinking about the future though, and have been setting some big goals for the next few years. Who knows, maybe those things will lead to a big new version? It s probably too soon to tell though. Me: Which new features will be introduced in the incoming GNOME 3.6, and what about GNOME 3.8? Allan: 3.6 is already out, so you can read the release notes if you want to find out about it. I was really happy with it, and the last release had quite a lot of new features. My personal favourites where the input sources work, the Lock Screen and the work we need on notifications and the Message Tray. Oh, and I m really pleased with the new Clocks application that we released a preview of. Members of the community are still proposing features for 3.8, so it s a little early to say what we will be working on for the next six months. I think I d be happy if we can continue to polish the core user experience, and hopefully get some more new applications off the ground. Me: GNOME Fallback is due to be completely dropped, are you in favor of that choice and why? Allan: I think that s mostly a technical discussion, and I m not a developer. Also, GNOME needs to have an open discussion about that question as a community which is something we might be doing at this year s Boston
Summit. What I would say is that it is important for us to deliver high quality user experiences, so if fallback mode isn t good enough, or if it is holding back the primary GNOME 3 UX, then we obviously need to think about what needs to happen. Me: Ubuntu has recently released the first two Alphas of the Ubuntu GNOME Remix, do you think this will strengthen the cooperation between GNOME and Canonical as in the past? Allan: As far as I understand it, the GNOME Remix is a community effort, and isn t coming from Canonical itself. That said, we always want to see more involvement in GNOME by Canonical and Ubuntu. Me: Do you see anything in the current GNOME 3 that would require an improvement? and can you add a few words about the brand new login screen recently introduced? Allan: GNOME 3 is getting better all the time, and I m particularly pleased with the latest version. That said, there is plenty of work still to do. I think the big area for us right now is to filling the missing blanks in our application story, so we have a suite of consistent core applications. That will enable people to access content more easily, and will serve as a springboard for other new GNOME applications. What to say about the Lock Screen?! Well, it was originally conceived as something that is like a screensaver, but is really really useful (rather than just looking pretty). We wanted something that looks cool when the machine is locked, but we also wanted to add plenty of features on top, like having media playback controls and built-in notifications. The idea is to make some things possible without having to enter a password, like pausing your music or checking to see if you have received any emails. Me: Many have argued new contributors most of the times aren t redirected correctly to their area of interest, thus they lose interest in contributing and leave. Do you feel anything could be improved in how GNOME welcomes new contributors? Allan: That s a good observation. I agree that one of the hardest things about contributing to open source projects is finding the right place to start. In GNOME we are working to help with this, such as through new mentoring schemes, but there is certainly more that we could do. One thing would be to run more online events, like bug days. Another thing is advertising good tasks for newcomers; we do some of that, but we could be better at it. Me: Anything else you would like to add? Allan: Just that anyone is always welcome in GNOME! That s what we re about really creating opportunities for people, having fun and making great technologies.

A few days ago I had the great pleasure to interview Allan Day, GNOME designer and enthusiastic contributor. Me: Hello Allan, mind presenting yourself? Allan: I m a designer working on the GNOME Project. I ve been involved for quite a few years now. Last year I was lucky to be hired by Red Hat to work in their Desktop Team. Me: Can you tell us something more about GNOME 4? Can we alias it GNOME OS? Allan: GNOME 4 isn t something that is being seriously considered right now, at least as far as I m aware. Those of us in the GNOME Project are thinking about the future though, and have been setting some big goals for the next few years. Who knows, maybe those things will lead to a big new version? It s probably too soon to tell though. Me: Which new features will be introduced in the incoming GNOME 3.6, and what about GNOME 3.8? Allan: 3.6 is already out, so you can read the release notes if you want to find out about it. I was really happy with it, and the last release had quite a lot of new features. My personal favourites where the input sources work, the Lock Screen and the work we need on notifications and the Message Tray. Oh, and I m really pleased with the new Clocks application that we released a preview of. Members of the community are still proposing features for 3.8, so it s a little early to say what we will be working on for the next six months. I think I d be happy if we can continue to polish the core user experience, and hopefully get some more new applications off the ground. Me: GNOME Fallback is due to be completely dropped, are you in favor of that choice and why? Allan: I think that s mostly a technical discussion, and I m not a developer. Also, GNOME needs to have an open discussion about that question as a community which is something we might be doing at this year s Boston
Summit. What I would say is that it is important for us to deliver high quality user experiences, so if fallback mode isn t good enough, or if it is holding back the primary GNOME 3 UX, then we obviously need to think about what needs to happen. Me: Ubuntu has recently released the first two Alphas of the Ubuntu GNOME Remix, do you think this will strengthen the cooperation between GNOME and Canonical as in the past? Allan: As far as I understand it, the GNOME Remix is a community effort, and isn t coming from Canonical itself. That said, we always want to see more involvement in GNOME by Canonical and Ubuntu. Me: Do you see anything in the current GNOME 3 that would require an improvement? and can you add a few words about the brand new login screen recently introduced? Allan: GNOME 3 is getting better all the time, and I m particularly pleased with the latest version. That said, there is plenty of work still to do. I think the big area for us right now is to filling the missing blanks in our application story, so we have a suite of consistent core applications. That will enable people to access content more easily, and will serve as a springboard for other new GNOME applications. What to say about the Lock Screen?! Well, it was originally conceived as something that is like a screensaver, but is really really useful (rather than just looking pretty). We wanted something that looks cool when the machine is locked, but we also wanted to add plenty of features on top, like having media playback controls and built-in notifications. The idea is to make some things possible without having to enter a password, like pausing your music or checking to see if you have received any emails. Me: Many have argued new contributors most of the times aren t redirected correctly to their area of interest, thus they lose interest in contributing and leave. Do you feel anything could be improved in how GNOME welcomes new contributors? Allan: That s a good observation. I agree that one of the hardest things about contributing to open source projects is finding the right place to start. In GNOME we are working to help with this, such as through new mentoring schemes, but there is certainly more that we could do. One thing would be to run more online events, like bug days. Another thing is advertising good tasks for newcomers; we do some of that, but we could be better at it. Me: Anything else you would like to add? Allan: Just that anyone is always welcome in GNOME! That s what we re about really creating opportunities for people, having fun and making great technologies.

I wondered how to properly maintain an OpenWRT installation that needs to track trunk for one reason or another. For instance the OpenWRT release pace is quite slow and "new" devices or various fixes are only available in this particular branch.

Now the OpenWRT project does offer snapshot builds. These are images built with the default config for the particular device type. You can even upgrade most models using sysupgrade, which preserves a list of configuration files you specify when flashing the new image, instead of doing a dreadful tftp upload. But you still lose all the packages you installed and accumulate a bit of cruft when reinstalling them. If you do not flash new images, you will be unable to install kernel modules after a while, because the kernel version they're based upon was updated.

So what's suggested is this:

• You checkout the trunk from svn. You enable all the feeds you need (e.g. packages and luci) and install the packages you want. (See scripts/feeds.)
• Run make menuconfig and select the target system type and the device profile.
• make defconfig will now give you the default configuration for the selected profile. It is important to use this as the starting point.
• Again invoke menuconfig and select all the packages you need. You can get the current list of packages installed on your device with opkg list_installed. You can search in menuconfig as you would in a kernel build config screen.
• If you're happy with the configuration, save the difference to the default configuration to a file: scripts/diffconfig.sh > my-own-config
• Now start the build with make. With the package configuration I picked I need about 5 GB of disk space. It will start off compiling a toolchain, the kernel and then the packages you selected. If something seems to go wrong, you probably want to restart the build with make V=s to see the build messages (the default is pretty quiet). Some -jX option for parallel building might shorten your waiting time.
• Finally you will get an image in bin/<system type>. You want to grab the squashfs & sysupgrade image.
• Check /etc/sysupgrade.conf on the live system if files are missing. /etc/config, passwd, shadow and some other files are preserved even if they are not listed. Those are then the only files that are copied into a temporary ramdisk during upgrade and written back to the filesystem post-flash. You need to keep this file up-to-date if you include new packages that have non-UCI configuration.
• For actually executing the upgrade process, you can either use the luci web interface or start sysupgrade over SSH. For the latter you will have to copy the image yourself. If you go via luci, you should check the md5 hash presented to you against the one of the image on your disk.
• If you want to update your image, just svn update (in the hope that the OpenWRT developers did not break anything in trunk), get the new defconfig, append your saved configuration delta (the file "my-own-config" above) to .config and run make oldconfig. This will keep track of feature changes in the default configuration (like shadow password support).

The advantage of building an image that includes all the packages is that you don't get to reinstall them and due to the use of squashfs, all files provided by those packages are actually kept in compressed form in flash. The image I built has a size of about 7 MB and contains "heavyweight" packages like isc-dhcpd, bind, openvpn (using openssl), bash, vim-tiny, tcpdump-mini, luci, and a webserver with TLS support.

As always: Take great care when you're flashing devices. The devices I bought cannot be bricked, but this might not be true for all devices that run OpenWRT. You might need and go doing a tftp image upload if something goes wrong. Check the OpenWRT wiki for instructions and possibly make your computer ready for them before starting to play with your box. For my Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300H the sysupgrade procedure is stable.

Is Asperger Syndrome a Disability? Some people tell me that I m disabled. Usually it s an unstated implication such as referring to Asperger Syndrome as a disability with the assumption that I ll agree. One time I had someone assume that I had never had a paid job because they knew I m an Aspie, maybe I should boast more about my career successes. One interesting take on this is represented by Maco s bost about Disablism/Ablism where she says Vocab note: A person has an impairment. Society s treatment of that impairment is what disables the person [1]. The same concept is presented by BRAINHE in their Social Model of Disability document [2]. The Wikipedia page on Ableism says The ableist worldview holds that disability is an error, a mistake, or a failing, rather than a simple consequence of human diversity, akin to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender [3]. This is fairly close to the position that Neurodiversity [4] advocates take on Autism. Jaarsma P and Welin S wrote an interesting paper titled Autism as a Natural Human Variation: Reflections on the Claims of the Neurodiversity Movement [5] which considers these issues in depth and comes to the conclusion that High Functioning Autism (for which Asperger Syndrome is generally regarded as a synonym) is a difference while Low Functioning Autism is a disability. I think that generally we should accept the opinion of the person in question. Someone who is unable to communicate or is too young to make an informed decision could have their disability status determined by carers. But anyone who is capable of making an informed decision and communicating it should have their opinion respected. I am not going to argue with any of the people who claim that they are disabled due to an Autism Spectrum Disorder. But I don t think that I am disabled and I think that people shouldn t argue with me about this. Over Pathologising Lynne Soraya wrote an interesting article for Psychology Today about one aspect of the supposed over-diagnosis [6]. She responds to Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist who made a number of claims about Asperger Syndrome which lack evidence. Paul s main idea seems to be that anyone who has social problems but who seems to be successful regardless shouldn t have an Autism Spectrum diagnosis and he claims that such people should be regarded as having a social disability instead. His main idea seems to be that having a diagnosis is a bad thing, but his idea of having a social disability diagnosis instead doesn t seem so great. In many other discussions I ve seen people claim that a large number of diagnosis of anything is a problem. Their idea seems to be that the vast majority of the population shouldn t have a diagnosis for anything and that whenever a significant number of people are diagnosed with a psychological condition (and 1% of the population seems to be a significant number) then it s a problem. I don t think that having a large portion of the population diagnosed is necessarily a problem, I think that it would be OK if the majority of the population was diagnosed with something. The issue is not whether people are diagnosed but what happens after the diagnosis. When a child is diagnosed their parents can help them deal with whatever the issues are this may or may not require further involvement with psychologists or special schools. For the milder cases (of Autism, ADHD, and other conditions) merely knowing what areas will cause difficulty and teaching kids how to deal with them will be enough to solve many problems. When someone is diagnosed as a child but doesn t have obvious symptoms as an adult that is more likely to be an indication that they were taught good coping mechanisms and protected from bad situations as a child not that the diagnosis was wrong. There are some serious issues with special schools and psychiatric drugs, but diagnosis doesn t necessarily imply mistreatment and avoiding a diagnosis is not the correct way to avoid such mistreatment. When someone is diagnosed as an adult they have to learn to deal with it. The general lack of psychologists (waiting times as long as 6 months are common) and the fact that most psychologists won t do any good for someone on the Autism Spectrum is a real problem. But merely knowing the source of your problems is a major step towards alleviating or solving them. One of the arguments that is commonly used against so-called over-diagnosis is that adults don t show apparent symptoms. The issue here is that with some effort and planning adults on the spectrum can act like NTs. Acting like an NT doesn t imply being an NT, it usually requires a lot of ongoing effort that could be applied to other things if society didn t expect us to act like NTs all the time. Conclusion I wish people would stop telling me that I m either disabled or too high functioning to be on the Autism Spectrum. I will never think like an NT and I don t want to, so I ll always be an Aspie. By most objective measures I m at least as successful as the general population in all things that require social skills, so unless something like always losing at Poker is considered a disability I don t think that it s reasonable to consider me to be disabled. It would be nice if I could lock the people who claim that Autism is always a disability in a room with the people who think it s over-diagnosed and let them debate it, no matter which side lost the debate the result would be good! Update: I removed a broken link to a Youtube video, I published this post from a 3G connection and didn t test that the Youtube link still worked. For some reason the author had marked it private since the last time I visited it.

• [1] http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/blogging-against-disablism-day-asl.html
• [2] http://www.brainhe.com/TheSocialModelofDisabilityText.html
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ableism
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity
• [5] http://www.imh.liu.se/avd_halsa_samhalle/filarkiv1/1.264263/JaarsmaWelin2011Autismasanaturalvariation.pdf
• [6] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/aspergers-diary/201202/is-aspergers-overdiagnosed

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Last week, my first student ever submitted his bachelor thesis Visualization of Lazy Evaluation and Sharing about a tool he created that allows you to investigate the heap of a running Haskell program, including unevaluated values and their sharing properties, in a visual and interactive manner. You can see it in action at the end of the video of my lightning talk about ghc-dup at the Haskell Implementors Workshop this year, and read more about it on Dennis ghc-vis web page. I m quite happy about the result and I think I can get used to have other people implement my ideas and needs :-) Dennis said he is willing to continue the maintenance of the tool, so give it a shot and bombard him with bug reports and feature requests!

Playing with boost spirit. I've been playing with C++ parser generator for a while, parsing Debian control files and Packages files. It's interesting because grammers are easier to handle this way, and rather than handcrafted parsers that I don't feel like looking at it ever again, it's something prettier.

A day or two ago I tried sending an email to a friend who happens to use the Road Runner ISP for his mail service. Now this ISP doesn t like dynamic IP addresses (using the increasing inaccurately named Dial Up List) so I have to punt the email through my ISP s mailserver first. Now that server is telling me this:

The reason for the problem: 4.3.2 Not accepting messages at this time 554- 5.7.1 ERROR: Mail refused <150.101.137.131> See http://sendersupport.senderscore.net

So their ISP mailserver is refusing connections from my ISP s mailserver for some reason, probably on some spam list. There s a URL to look up the problem, so going there gives you three things:

1. A redirection to https://sendersupport.senderscore.net/
2. A badly configured webserver that uses the above URL with a certificate for www.senderscore.net
3. A page that says It works

Either Road Runner or Senderscore, preferably both, need to get a clue. Oh and going to https://www.senderscore.net/ gives connection refused. A bit of digging around shows the correct URL is https://senderscore.org/ Now I just realized that my SSL certificate for https://enc.com.au/ expired on the weekend so I know these things can happen, but I m one person (who was away for a while), why can t companies get their act together?

A day or two ago I tried sending an email to a friend who happens to use the Road Runner ISP for his mail service. Now this ISP doesn t like dynamic IP addresses (using the increasing inaccurately named Dial Up List) so I have to punt the email through my ISP s mailserver first. Now that server is telling me this:

The reason for the problem: 4.3.2 Not accepting messages at this time 554- 5.7.1 ERROR: Mail refused <150.101.137.131> See http://sendersupport.senderscore.net

So their ISP mailserver is refusing connections from my ISP s mailserver for some reason, probably on some spam list. There s a URL to look up the problem, so going there gives you three things:

1. A redirection to https://sendersupport.senderscore.net/
2. A badly configured webserver that uses the above URL with a certificate for www.senderscore.net
3. A page that says It works

Either Road Runner or Senderscore, preferably both, need to get a clue. Oh and going to https://www.senderscore.net/ gives connection refused. A bit of digging around shows the correct URL is https://senderscore.org/ Now I just realized that my SSL certificate for https://enc.com.au/ expired on the weekend so I know these things can happen, but I m one person (who was away for a while), why can t companies get their act together?

It appears that a recent incident at a different campus of the "preschool" (I call it day care) that Zoe goes to has gotten the attention of the Free-Range Kids blog. Firstly, I need to say that on the parenting spectrum, I definitely self-identify closer to the free-range end than the helicopter end. I'm not sure that I'd let an 8 year old ride the New York subway on their own, but Zoe's not 8 yet, so I really can't say. Sarah and I received the same email that is reprinted on the blog, on Friday night, and we were both (very) mildly alarmed at the situation, but not particularly concerned, mostly because it wasn't the facility that Zoe goes to. I'm not sure I'd be that much more concerned if it was, to be honest. I did like the statistics that the parent quoted in response. I thought that that put things into perspective, but didn't really take abductions by estranged parents into consideration. My one reaction to reading the email was, "why did they wait until after the incident to escalate it?" but then, from my own experiences in dropping off or picking up Zoe, I could totally understand not all the staff knowing on sight all the parents or guardians that do pickups and drop offs. This does lead to one asking how they know who to buzz in, but that's another can of worms. Anyway, I read the 50 or so varyingly indignant comments on the Free Range Kids blog, and since they were talking about the company that I give a not inconsequential amount of money to, I feel the need to write a response.

• it's a day care centre "chain". They have kids ranging from infant to pre-K (if I'm getting my grade terminology correct). It's not what I'd call a "school", hence they call themselves a "preschool"
• having actually been to one of the facilities, I can understand the request to not mingle in the lobby. It's tiny, and it blocks the view of the doors from the front office, where an employee is usually buzzing people in from
• I can totally understand the desire by the staff to not hold the door open for other people, even if we "know" them, because of possible changes in family circumstances. I would say that there's a difference between knowing someone by sight, because they're always dropping off or picking up their kid at the same time as you are, and knowing their name, where they live, etc. Having done pickups and drop offs, there are parents in both categories. I'll still hold the door open for a parent that we socialise with outside of "school", but I'll think twice now before doing it for someone who only looks familiar but I don't really know. I don't want to be the one who facilitates a future incident
• I think a lot of the conservative position the day care management has stems from liability. I have no problem with that. If the shoe was on the other foot, and an estranged parent had walked in and taken their child, and the centre had a "locked door" policy, there'd be some uncomfortable questions to answer. I'm paying them a boatload of money, they say they operate under a "locked door" policy, I expect them to keep my kid safe

The whole episode raises the question: who was this person and what were they doing there? Some of the commentators hypothesize that they were casing the joint for a future incident, or just giving themselves an impromptu tour before placing their child there (Zoe and I toured before we signed up, but that was an official, prearranged thing). It really is unfortunate that the staff didn't challenge this person, but as I said, they probably all had to review the video surveillance footage together to ascertain that none of them knew who the person was. I consider this a bit of a deficiency itself, but I don't really expect them to all have photographic memory, especially if one parent mostly does drop off and pick up. The other (expensive) option would be to issue each authorized person with an electronically revocable proximity card, so they can let themselves in, but I feel that that's taking things to the extreme. They staff all carry portable radios. If they don't have a discreet "code" they can call when one of them sees a person they don't know, I'm sure they will have after this incident. I personally found the majority of the comments on the Free Range Kids blog to be on the extreme overreaction side of things. As much as I'm a believer in Free Range parenting, I think the day care provider has mostly reacted appropriately. Do I agree with their "locked facility" policy? It's my first experience with a commercial day care facility, so I don't have anything to compare it with. As I said earlier, I can totally understand where they're coming from in terms of limiting their liability. Previously, Zoe was in a "home day care" facility, without any locks, and I for one wasn't constantly worrying about someone wandering into that provider's home and abducting my daughter, so I guess the whole "locked facility" thing is on the more extreme end of the scale for me in the first place, but like I said, I'm uncalibrated for commercial day care centres. I'd certainly like to see the primary school environment that Zoe goes to not be such a locked down affair.

It s been a very long time coming, but symlink and hardlink restrictions have finally landed in the mainline Linux kernel as of version 3.6. The protection is at least old enough to have a driver s license in most US states, with some of the first discussions I could find dating from Aug 1996. While this protection is old (to ancient) news for anyone running Chrome OS, Ubuntu, grsecurity, or OpenWall, I m extremely excited that is can now benefit everyone running Linux. All the way from cloud monstrosities to cell phones, an entire class of vulnerability just goes away. Thanks to everyone that had a part in developing, testing, reviewing, and encouraging these changes over the years. It s quite a relief to have it finally done. I hope I never have to include the year in my patch revision serial number again. :)

2012, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Day 9 is a bit of a strange one. I had a rare three evenings spare, but I have been feeling very ill so I didn't achieve much, relatively, despite the increase. I update game-data-packager with experimental support for Hexen 2, which paved the way for uploading the first version of uhexen2, which has been accepted into experimental contrib. I also sponsored a new version of vavoom, both by Gustavo Panizzo. Picking up the pre-freeze musicbrainz work, I contacted the musicbrainz devel mailing list to see if they had any definitive plans to get rid of the old web services API, which a lot of packages in soon-to-be-stable depend upon. I also got in touch with linuxppc-devel regarding suspend to RAM on a PowerPC G4 Mac Mini. This is presently not supported due to lack of support for waking up the graphics chip; however I'm running the mac headless. Finally I want to try and put more time into stuff which is relevant for the next release. The best interface to relevant RC bugs, in my opinion, is the Ultimate Debian Database (UDD) 'bugs' query. I considered hacking a copy of that to display stuff only for a given maintainer, and then track what RC bugs were owned by the Debian Games Team. I didn't get that far, but I did submit an inaugural patch and fix a wiki page.

Well this weeks log comes bit late as my week got extended till today ;-). I had working day at office on Saturday and Sunday due to 2nd Quarter end and instead today is declared as compensatory holiday and tomorrow any how is Gandhi Jayanti. So here it goes. Debian Related Most of my work this week was done for Debian-IN team

• Integrated the KGB bot for Debian-IN team repository. Thanks to gregoa Tincho and dam for extending helping hand in getting it configured
• Updated the setup-repository to install a proper post-receive hook when creating new repositories.
• Copied the set-git-hook from pkg-ruby-extras team and modified it slightly to install post-receive hook for KGB integration for already existing repository. With this script I fixed few of the packages to use KGB which I own. Waiting for Kartik to fix remaining repositories as he is the DD for our team :-)
• Configured my personal instance of KGB which now stands in Debian-IN's channel (#debian-in). But bot is named RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) equivalaent of KGB and CIA in India :-P

Well most of this weeks work involved KGB ;-) Personal Works

• Attended the PyconIndia-2012 on Saturday, Got a NFC card :-) which I can't use as my phone is not NFC capable. Only handful of talks were nice rest were all newbie like talk which even lacked proper presentation skills hence didn't attend on second day. Looks like quality of conference in India is decreasing.
• Finally completed answering all questions on Philosophy and Procedures - 1 part of NM process :-). Phew it took me more time than I expected. Waiting for my AM's comment. Hopefully I will get next bunch of questions soon :-)

Misc Played Cricket after very long time (Guess after 10 long years). Well it was not official match or anything it was just another Gully Cricket. After the match it came to mind that I need regular physical workout :-P. Well that's it Cya till next week :-)

I was working on writing tests for gnome-settings-daemon a week or so ago, and finally got blocked on being unable to set up upower/ConsoleKit/etc. the way I need them. Also, doing so needs root privileges, I don t want my test suite to actually suspend my machine, and using the real service is generally not suitable for test suites that are supposed to run during make check , in jhbuild, and the like these do not have the polkit privileges to do all that, and may not even have a system D-Bus running in the first place. So I wrote a little test_upower.py helper, then realized that I need another one for systemd/ConsoleKit (for the system idle property), also looked at the mock polkit in udisks and finally sat down for two days to generalize this and do this properly. The result is python-dbusmock, I just released the first tarball. With this you can easily create mock objects on D-Bus from any programming language with a D-Bus binding, or even from the shell. The mock objects look like the real API (or at least the parts that you actually need), but they do not actually do anything (or only some action that you specify yourself). You can configure their state, behaviour and responses as you like in your test, without making any assumptions about the real system status. When using a local system/session bus, you can do unit or integration testing without needing root privileges or disturbing a running system. The Python API offers some convenience functions like start_session_bus() and start_system_bus() for this, in a DBusTestCase class (subclass of the standard unittest.TestCase ). Surprisingly I found very little precedence here. There is a Perl module, but that s not particuarly helpful for test suites in C/Vala/Python. And there is Phil s excellent Bendy Bus, but this has a different goal: If you want to thoroughly test a particular D-BUS service, such as ensuring that it does the right thing, doesn t crash on bad input, etc., then Bendy Bus is for you (and python-dbusmock isn t). However, it is too much overhead and rather inconvenient if you want to test a client-side program and just need a few system services around it which you want to set up in different states for each test. You can use python-dbusmock with any programming language, as you can run the mocker as a normal program. The actual setup of the mock (adding objects, methods, properties, etc.) all happen via D-Bus methods on the org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock interface. You just don t have the convenience D-Bus launch API. The simplest possible example is to create a mock upower with a single Suspend() method, which you can set up like this from Python:

import dbus
import dbusmock
class TestMyProgram(dbusmock.DBusTestCase):
[...]
    def setUp(self):
        self.p_mock = self.spawn_server('org.freedesktop.UPower',
                                        '/org/freedesktop/UPower',
                                        'org.freedesktop.UPower',
                                        system_bus=True,
                                        stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
        # Get a proxy for the UPower object's Mock interface
        self.dbus_upower_mock = dbus.Interface(self.dbus_con.get_object(
            'org.freedesktop.UPower', '/org/freedesktop/UPower'),
            'org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock')
        self.dbus_upower_mock.AddMethod('', 'Suspend', '', '', '')
[...]
    def test_suspend_on_idle(self):
        # run your program in a way that should trigger one suspend call
        # now check the log that we got one Suspend() call
        self.assertRegex(self.p_mock.stdout.readline(), b'^[0-9.]+ Suspend$')

This doesn t depend on Python, you can just as well run the mocker like this:

python3 -m dbusmock org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower

and then set up the mocks through D-Bus like

gdbus call --system -d org.freedesktop.UPower -o /org/freedesktop/UPower \
      -m org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock.AddMethod '' Suspend '' '' ''

If you use it with Python, you get access to the dbusmock.DBusTestCase class which provides some convenience functions to set up and tear down local private session and system buses. If you use it from another language, you have to call dbus-launch yourself. Please see the README for some more details, pointers to documentation and examples. Update: You can now install this via pip from PyPI or from the daily builds PPA. Update 2: Adjusted blog entry for version 0.0.3 API, to avoid spreading now false information too far.

Hello, World! At OLF, mgilbert and I planned to have a Debian BSP sessionlet. We sadly forgot to find a way to announce this, so we just sort of hacked off in a corner for a few hours. The following is a digest of our activity. bugs 685958, 685959 and 675220 were closed (they re currently working through the DELAYED queue) by Markus Koschany (hey, thanks!) with NMUs. I happily sponsed their upload (RFS bugs 688122, 688126 and 688124) Mike triaged 646981, 689118, 687378, 643628, 658252 and 688229, and I processed 688668, 605732, 598776 and 611170.

Dear Facebook friend, I like you and I want to chat with you, just not on Facebook! My Facebook account is there to reach you where you are, but I do not hang out there. Please join me at Free and Open spaces instead - via email, IRC or Jabber

Good old email If you cannot be bothered with change, then simply email me! My email address is dr@jones.dk like always

Simple webchat If you are in a hurry and do not use Jabber yet, then try use my Simple Groupchat. Use guest login if you are not a user at jones.dk.

Proper Jabber Jabber is similar to email: You need 1) an account somewhere, 2) some client application setup to use that account, and 3) the address of those you want to connect.

1. Register an account at e.g. Indonesian http://jabin.org/ or some other server.
2. Install a Jabber client program :
   • on Windows try install Gajim from http://gajim.org/.
   • on smartphone try app from https://imo.im/.
   • on Ubuntu try use the Me menu in top right corner.
   • on Debian try install Pidgin: aptitude install pidgin.
3. Invite me as your friend/buddy: my Jabber ID is jonas@jones.dk
4. Tell your friends to do the same!

Geeky IRC Many computer geeks hang out on IRC. I find it ugly and clumsy to use, but most of my techie friends are there, so I recommend going there to discuss technical matters. On OFTC my nickname is jonas, and I often hang out at the chatroom #debian-devel (plus a few others).

Why not Facebook? Facebook is a closed system: all activities happen at one central place. Email, Jabber and IRC are open protocols, exchanging between many Free systems (and some non-free ones as well).

Imagine having an overprotecting mother, who allow you only to meet your friends at one spot in town - where she can look after you. You maybe have no secrets from your mom, but probably still appreciate the option of being alone - to have some privacy.

Facebook is that one spot in town. Jabber is "let's go meet somewhere". Regards, Jonas

Linux 3.6, which was released earlier today, saw continuing improvements in the factoring out of common code in the API lots of new features making drivers smaller and easier to write!

• Initial framework support for GPIO controlled enable signals, saving a bunch of code in drivers.
• Move fixed regulator enable time and voltage mapping table specifications to data.
• Used some of the recent framework enhancements to make voltage change notifications more useful, passing the voltage in as an argument to the notification.
• New drivers for Maxim MAX77686, TI LP872x and LP8788, Samsung S2MPS11, Wolfson Arizona microphone supplies and LDOs

SMS is used to lock car doors Copenhagen Carpool soon receive a new batch of electric cars. The new cars will contain a cellphone tied to the door locks, to only let into the car the member who booked its current timeslot. I am setting up the system to connect the cars with their booking calendar. The general idea is to

1. Connect a standard cellphone to a computer.
2. Forward sms messages received on the phone to the calendar.
3. Send messages from the calendar through the phone.
4. Leave the system in a corner, turned on 24/7.

Most of my work is in trying to avoid ways things might go wrong which so often happens when computers are involved. What if

• messages are delayed or lost?
• a chain of messages arrive out of order?
• messages are sent faster than they can be delivered?

Reliable conversation Human conversation is most reliable when using plain speak. Slang, sarcasm or jokes raise the risk of misunderstandings. This is quite similar in computer conversation. When surfing the Web, you normally "GET" a web page or "POST" new data like a search query. The words "GET" and "POST" are "plain speak" of the World Wide Web defined as a principle called "REST" or "RESTful design". I use the Kannel tool to talk directly to the phones. When an sms arrives on the phone, Kannel "GET"s it to the calendar. That's weakly expressed better if it had "POST"ed the message instead. Kannel is a quite reliable tool, but not RESTful in conversations. That requires extra attention at other parts of the setup to avoid breakage in special situations. That worries me.

Each car has a blog So I setup a gateway from Kannel to RESTful conversation. And choose classic blogging as style of conversation:

• The carpool fleet is a blogroll
• each car has a blog
• each sms emitted from a car is a blog entry

Blogging comes in two flavors, RSS and Atom. Both cover distribution of messages. I use Atom because it is newest and coolest, and because it also covers creating and editing meesages with the AtomPub extension. AtomPub allows the calendar to create an empty message which then triggers an sms from the car which "fills it in." AtomPub also let the calendar "PUT" tags onto existing messages, to mark them as processed, read etc., and let an admin or a cleanup script "DELETE" outdated entries or blogs. The words "PUT" and "DELETE" are RESTful conversation as well.

The system is dancing! My sms-to-blog gateway is written in Perl, using the Dancer toolkit. Dancer makes it simple to setup a RESTful web conversation, and when I contacted the authors on IRC, they swiftly added support for the non-RESTful quirk that I needed. My sms-to-blog gateway is not yet ready, but basic routines work. The project is public, and code is Free Software.

Another release of Rcpp has just appeared on CRAN and was just uploaded to Debian. It addresses yet another issue we had on OS X and should hopefully put the build issues to rest. Three new (vectorized) sugar functions were added, along with some new regression tests and more. The complete NEWS entry for 0.9.14 is below; more details are in the ChangeLog file in the package and on the Rcpp Changelog page.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.9.14 (2012-09-30)

• Added new Rcpp sugar functions trunc(), round() and signif(), as well as unit tests for them
• Be more conservative about where we support clang++ and the inclusion of exception_defines.h and prevent this from being attempted on OS X where it failed for clang 3.1
• Corrected a typo in Module.h which now again permits use of finalizers
• Small correction for (unexported) bib() function (which provides a path to the bibtex file that ships with Rcpp)
• Converted NEWS to NEWS.Rd

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release 0.9.13. 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

Problem #2: How to add a wireless module to a d-i image? Slightly longer version: As reported in #686605, a whole wireless module family is missing from the linux kernel udebs, meaning they re missing from the d-i images. Please note the hypothesis here is that the regular linux kernel images contain the relevant modules, only the udebs don t. Recipe #2: Craft a local udeb!

1. The following assumes one is interested in adding a wireless module, but that can be adapted to other module families. The relevant udeb base name is nic-wireless-modules.
2. When it comes to linux kernel modules, picking the right ones is important, so one has to consider the ABI. Right now, the current ABI in testing is 3.2.0-3-amd64. The complete udeb name is therefore nic-wireless-modules-3.2.0-3-amd64-di.
3. If you re running a kernel with the same ABI, all good, relevant modules should be available under /lib/modules/$(uname -r), which is what will be assumed below. Otherwise, one would have to download a proper linux-image-$ABI package, and extract it into a temporary directory to grab the wanted module(s).
4. Determine the relevant module and its dependencies. As an example, I ll pick a Realtek module: rtl8192cu.ko. If it s loaded, one can use the following to detect its dependencies:

   $ lsmod grep rtl8192cu
   rtl8192cu              78863  0
   rtlwifi                81350  1 rtl8192cu
   rtl8192c_common        52602  1 rtl8192cu
   mac80211              192768  4 iwlwifi,rtl8192c_common,rtlwifi,rtl8192cu
   cfg80211              137140  3 mac80211,iwlwifi,rtlwifi
   usbcore               128498  7 ehci_hcd,usbhid,uvcvideo,rtlwifi,rtl8192cu
   

   But it isn t even needed to load the module to get those dependencies:

   $ /sbin/modinfo /lib/modules/3.2.0-3-amd64/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/rtlwifi/rtl8192cu/rtl8192cu.ko grep ^depends
   depends:        rtlwifi,mac80211,rtl8192c-common,usbcore
   

   Compared to what the d-i image contains, only rtlwifi and rtl8192c-common are missing.
5. Fetch the udeb using http://packages.debian.org/ or browsing your favourite mirror if you know the paths by heart.
6. Extract the udeb into a temporary data/ directory, along with its meta data:

   dpkg -x nic-wireless-modules-3.2.0-3-amd64-di_3.2.23-1_amd64.udeb data
   dpkg --control nic-wireless-modules-3.2.0-3-amd64-di_3.2.23-1_amd64.udeb data/DEBIAN
   

7. Copy the 3 modules under the relevant subdirectory under data/.
8. Update the version in data/DEBIAN/control, for example by adding the +local1 suffix.
9. Build a new binary package, using fakeroot to avoid owner/group noise in the diff:

   fakeroot dpkg -b data nic-wireless-modules-3.2.0-3-amd64-di_3.2.23-1+local1_amd64.udeb
   

10. Use debdiff to check the results:

    $ debdiff nic-wireless-modules-3.2.0-3-amd64-di_3.2.23-1*_amd64.udeb
    Files in second .deb but not in first
    -------------------------------------
    -rw-r--r--  root/root   /lib/modules/3.2.0-3-amd64/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/rtlwifi/rtl8192cu/rtl8192c-common.ko
    -rw-r--r--  root/root   /lib/modules/3.2.0-3-amd64/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/rtlwifi/rtl8192cu/rtl8192cu.ko
    -rw-r--r--  root/root   /lib/modules/3.2.0-3-amd64/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/rtlwifi/rtlwifi.ko
    Control files: lines which differ (wdiff format)
    ------------------------------------------------
    Version: [-3.2.23-1-]  +3.2.23-1+local1+ 
    

11. Put the resulting udeb under localudebs/ in your d-i build tree, and rebuild your image as usual. Almost-tada!

Why almost ? Because a firmware is needed, so one can go back to the 7th step, extract the proper file (lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin) from the non-free firmware-realtek package, and add it under data/lib/firmware/realtek/. Rebuild the udeb, rebuild the d-i image. Then: tada!