Some of my Romanian readers might know that for the last two years I've got involved in the skeptical movement to such a degree that I am a co-producer of a bi-weekly podcast on science and skepticism (in Romanian) called Skeptics in Romania . Some might even be regular listeners of the show.

(There isn't much to see now visually on the site, but me and the other people behind the project have some ongoing plans to change that.)

In spite of our modest site, up until now we had some successes, one of them being the publication of an article on us in a known Romanian printed publication and another being the invitation to a live show face to face with Oreste Teodorescu, a well known Romanian mysticist and woo promoter.

During that live show we managed to show a demonstration (video below, in Romanian) of how astrology gives the impression of working, without actually working, and, taking into account we had no prior TV camera experience and that it was a live show, I think we managed an honourable presence.


We also have a series of interviews in English with some really interesting people: Dr. Eugenie Scott, Prof. Christopher French, Prof. Edzard Ernst, Samantha Stein and others. We did these interviews at Denkfest 2011, in Zurich, and we integrated the translated (voice over) interviews in our podcast. The conlusion is that most of our activities revolve around the podcast, so let me tell you more about that.

The podcast has a somewhat fixed structure, it starts with a conversation between ourselves, then we have a segment on the history of science, technology, skepticism and woo, and then we have a segment called The dangers of not being skeptical . In this segment we present cases of people who lost their lives, their health, their money or any combination of the former because they were duped into some scam, science-y sounding non-science, unfounded claim or some other woo.

Having lost recently my brother-in-law to a form of cancer known as Hodgkin lymphoma, I became especially sensitive about miracle-cure claims for cancer, and this section of the show has lately seen its fair share of such cases. Honestly, if there could be a way to prosecute the irresponsible, ignorant and/or cynical people promoting all sorts of quack "therapies", especially for cancer*, I would really like to see it happen. But there isn't, and we're trying the best accessible approach, informing the public.

During my brother-in-law's last two years of his life, he went through lots of chemotherapy and radiotherapy sessions, repeated periods of hospitalisation, and lots of drugs. This is the best of what we currently have for treating and curing most forms of cancer, and too many times this isn't enough. I can't even imagine how stressful and discouraging it must feel when the best of what we have doesn't help.

Here is where the desperation and hopes of patients and their families meet the purely irresponsible cynical or ignorant promoters of woo and quack therapies. Because it takes either an ignorant or a really cynical (I really feel this word isn't enough) person to prey on the suffering of other people to make easy money under the false pretence of offering a cure.

It almost happened to my brother-in-law and his family, because they almost went for some herbal concoction promoted as a cancer cure on some forum, blog or page of a seller of this fake therapy. It was really hard for me to make them understand why using such a product it not advisable, not even in parallel with the medical treatment due its possible counter effect or interactions with the real medical treatment, without them getting the wrong idea that I wasn't trying to help. While trying to be brief and informative not to lose their attention, I told them how "natural" doesn't necessarily mean "good" (uranium, lead and Irukandji's venom are all natural), and how plants are drugs because they all contain chemical substances (and no, "chemical" does not mean "human made" or "artificial") which could interact with the medical treatment.


But most people don't even have the chance of having close by a person with a more science-leaning thought process and a skeptical mind. Those unfortunate people are the most vulnerable people and constitute the biggest chunk of the victims of baseless pseudo-cures or pseudo-treatments.

On our last show, I presented the case of Yvonne Main, a cancer suffering patient who mistook an invasive carcinoma for a cyst, and irdologist Ruth Nelson for a real healthcare giver.

Yvonne Main, died from an invasive carcinoma after seeking help from a iridologist, and delaying real medical treament for 18 months

Yvonne, after seeking medical advice from a person that essentially promotes the dead idea of guessing diseases by looking at the eyes**, used natural treatments for about 18 months and, after all this time, her carcinoma grew to a size of 10 to 11 cm, eating through her skull and causing damage which was later attempted to be countered through bone transplant from her ribs.

Ruth Nelson wasn't prosecuted in any way and continues her practice of quackery unharmed.

This is not the only case, nor even one case from a select few where woo and quackery lead to grave consequences for patients. There are many, many more; they're so many that even after splitting them in categories they seem too many per category, especially when you realise these are only the findings of, essentially, a single man:




This is part of what I have been doing in the last few years, instead of working on Debian. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Maybe it's good. I want to know what do you think?


* you will, most likely, never hear such a promoter of non-therapies say that there isn't just one cancer, and that, in fact, cancer is a name for a certain family of diseases which are all called cancer - that's a first sign that you might be dealing with quack
** probably in the line of thought that the eyes are the gates to the soul so they must tell something significant about health

In the light of the recent announcement by the European central bank to bail out states without limits which is breaking the very law that the EU was built upon Italy s stock market supervisors have removed the restriction on short sales. In Italy, you may now again sell stuff on the financial market that you don t have. The only condition is that you have to be able to prove that you could currently buy it. But that, of course, is not a guarantee for you to be able to buy the good/stock/whatever when the person you sold it to actually wants it, given the volatility of the markets. I expect other countries to follow suit. Currencies and especially the Euro was made by bankers for bankers to earn money. Who actually believes that the ESM, to which Germany enslaved itself this week would fix anything is simply na ve. Temporarily, the markets were on hold, how convenient that this coincided with summer break. Now everything is back to normal and the next financial crisis is being built. NP: Porcupine Tree: Stupid Dream

I recently blogged about 3 languages reaching 100% translation for debconf templates in wheezy. Today, two more languages joined the club: French and Portuguese. We're still on our way to get seven or even eight complete translations in wheezy. Czech is now only missing "linux-latest" and Spanish waits for sysvinit (which I just NMU'ed) and nova (unfortunately an error in former translation was unnoticed and I discovered it quite late). David Pr vot is still trying to get Danish complete, by doing many fast update rounds and NMUs. I hope he succeeds in this.

I have been toying around with Erlang since quiet some time and finally made something that could be considered the de facto Hello World of Erlang. Unlike most of the other programming languages where concurrency is an added feature, Erlang was built around the concept of concurrent programming. If you love functional programming and can get over the weird Erlang syntax, learning Erlang will not be very difficult and is definitely worth the effort. I have been reading Joe Armstrong s Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World and will definitely recommend it to anyone starting out with Erlang. I am yet to dive into OTP, but so far, so good. :) I have taken the naive recursive factorial algorithm and parallelized it to take advantage of multiple cores available on average system these days. Lets assume that we need to distribute the task of calculating N factorial over K processes. To do that, I have divided the set of integer 1 N to K subsets, say S , S , ., S_k, such that S S S_k = 1 N and S S S_k = Where, S = [ 1, K+1, 2K+1, , (x )*K+1 ];
x : (x )*K + 1 <= N and (x +1)*K + 1 > N and x S = [ 2, K+2, 2K+2, , (x )*K+2 ];
x : (x )*K + 2 <= N and (x +1)*K + 1 > N and x

S_k = [ K, K+K, 2K+K, , (x_k)*K+2 ];
x_k : (x_k)*K + 2 <= N and (x_k+1)*K + 1 > N and x_k Product of all the elements in each of the sets in calculated in a separate thread and all these calculations, theoretically, can be done in parallel. These sub-products are then multiplied together to get the final factorial. *Update*: The algorithm described above works but is not the best way to find the factorial of a number and after some time on Google, I am convinced that Luschny s is the resource on the internet if you are looking for something faster and has a factorial somewhere in it. I am an Erlang beginner, and this could be very well a sub-optimal implementation. Comment and let me know, what you think of it and if you enjoyed reading this, you should follow me on twitter.

Start the Erlang shell
$ erl
Compile the code
1> c(factorial).
Call the calculate function
2> factorial:calculate(10000).

<script src="https://gist.github.com/3715155.js"> </script>

Two bits here - debuild.me I ve started working on a site to host my build stuff, and i ve called it debuild.me None of it s active, and I m going to be slowly using it more as it becomes more, well, implemented. atlantic, etc I ve been working (mostly quietly) on a cut down buildd, to test packages I intend to sponsor over a couple of different conditions. I m going to run deep source checks, build the package a few different ways, check the basics (lintian, piuparts, etc) and lots of other stuff I might think is a good idea while doing it. At it s core, it doens t use buildd nodes like the archive, rather, it uses aws. When I dput a package, it spins up at least one AWS instance, based on an AMI I set up (and update frequently), and builds on that. This means yes! No queues! :) It also means I need careful oversight of the nodes, and pay attention to not running up a big bill. It should also be noted, this is not for uploading a built package to the archive, this is for testing packages before uploading them to the archive. Ideas / patches welcome

AltOS 1.1 Bug fixes and some nice new features Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 1.1. AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of cc1111-based micro-controller firmware and Java-based ground station software. We ve spent the last flying season chatting with people flying TeleMetrum and TeleMini boards and they came up with some great ideas to add to the system. AltOS Firmware Features and fixes There are bug fixes in both ground station and flight software, so you should plan on re-flashing both units at some point. However, there aren t any incompatible changes, so you don t have to do it all at once. New features:

• Apogee-lockout timer. For situations where the normal apogee determination algorithm could be fooled, we ve added a timeout value to prevent premature firing of the apogee charge. Normal flights won t need this, but a couple of users asked for this feature.
• RSSI value for Monitor Idle mode. The TeleDongle firmware has been updated to report signal strength information for data received from the altimeter. This allows the user to see how well the radio is working without having to switch to flight mode.
• Force the radio to 434.550MHz. This is useful with TeleMini devices where the only way to talk to the device is through the radio. If you don t know the frequency, it s really hard to make that work.

Bug fixes:

• Stale telemetry data reported when switching frequencies. TeleDongle would accidentally re-transmit old telemetry packets when the radio frequency was changed. This would be harmless except that when scanning to find the frequency used by an altimeter, you d appear to get packets at every frequency.

AltosUI Easier to use AltosUI has also seen quite a bit of work for the 1.1 release. There aren t any huge new features, but some activities are restructured to make them easier to navigate. And, of course, we ve fixed a bunch of bugs. New features:

• Configure Ground Station activity. This provides a way to set the default radio frequency for each TeleDongle. This replicates the frequency menu present in the Monitor Flight activity, but doesn t also bring up that giant window.
• Support the apogee lockout timer. This just adds another entry in the dialog for configuring the altimeter to configure the new timer. By default, the timer is disabled, allowing the apogee detection code in the flight computer to operate normally.
• Add imperial units option. When enabled, this uses imperial units (feet and miles) for all values on the screen and in the voice announcements.

User interface changes:

• Make the look-n-feel configurable. Java offers many different user interface styles on each platform. This exposes the available set and lets the user pick one. By default, we continue to use the native platform appearance.
• Add an Age element to the Monitor Flight UI. This shows how long it has been since the last valid telemetry packet was received, making it easy to tell when communications are lost.
• Change flight data downloading. Instead of selecting which to download and which to delete at the same time, the interface now has separate steps for downloading and then deleting files. This makes it easier to verify that the files were downloaded before deleting flights from the on-board memory.
• Re-compute boost and landing times. Given the whole flight history, it s easy to find the time when the rocket started and stopped flying. Having these get recomputed means the boost time, acceleration values and main descent rates are computed more accurately.

Bug fixes:

• Wait for 10 valid GPS messages before marking GPS as ready. Before this fix, GPS was marked as ready when 10 valid packets were received from the flight computer after the first valid GPS data arrived. This waits for 10 valid GPS packets instead.
• Fix Google Earth file export. The format requirements for Google Earth files became more strict in recent releases; this patch changes how the files are formatted to make them work again.
• Make AltosUI run on Mac OS X Lion . Apple changed the default heap size for Java applications with this release, dramatically reducing the memory available to applications. This would cause map tiles to fail to load and other random problems.
• Improve COM port handling on Windows. This eliminates the need to wait 5 seconds between closing and re-opening devices, and also eliminates other spurious errors when opening devices.

My email's been out of control for a while now. I've noticed a correlation between the state of my email and my state of mind - I don't know which way the causation flows, if any. At the weekend (after assembling the shelves), I archived my entire inbox. Again. But I find the hard part with email bankruptcy is preventing the entire cycle recurring. This time, I was more drastic. I deleted all my labels, and all but three of my filters. I removed the Smart Labels, the chat widget, the calendar integration, the Google+ circles (more on that soon). There are no distractions in my inbox any more. I'm forcing myself to process every non-spam email that comes to my address. (Yes, I'm embarassed to say that I use Gmail - it seemed like a good idea at the time, because of the spam filtering. I occasionally notice bugs with ancient emails becoming unarchived or unread, and wonder if Google uses a probabilistic data structure to access all those attributes quickly enough. Can't investigate, though, because it's Gmail. Consider this the first step towards moving away.) So rather than hiding the deluge in the background, I'm unsubscribing from a lot of mailing lists, and informing marketers that I don't want their communications. It turns out that I get a lot less email than I feared - and processing them this way means that high-traffic sources get removed first. My remaining problem is what to do with email from mailing lists like debian-private - I don't really care enough to read everyone's vacation plans, but unsubscribing doesn't seem like the right thing either - there's (obviously) no online archive for this type of mailing list. For the moment, I've added a filter back to hide just vacation messages, but there's a more general problem lurking here.

I was pointed at a great online course If you are into e-voting analysis (or, more broadly, into democratic processes' history, evolution and future), I strongly suggest you to take a look at Securing Digital Democracy . Just the name of the teacher should be enough to make it interesting: University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman, the guy who has analized/hacked several electronic booths, and one of the clearest, smartest voices to explain what should we require of a voting system and how electronic booths are the worst fit for any purpose. The course is delivered through Coursera; I have found Coursera to be an effective, usable, unobtrusive platform So much I even signed up for another course. I am not so happy with online courses requiring to wait so much between lessons, but after all, it tries to mimic what we see at "regular" (i.e. classroom) teaching settings. And, after all, we autodidacts are still a minority. The course in question started ten days ago, but you can still perfectly join. Each week has two lessons, worth of approximately 40 minutes of video each, and are "graded" through a quiz. Lets see how this evolves.

Here s a summary of what happened at this conference. Opening address. Keynote from Nick Hurd MP, @minforcivsoc. Lot less money around. Called canals and rivers trust the biggest social enterprise. Blames lack of large social enterprises on culture, leadership and access to capital. First Big Society Capital investments announced tomorrow. Questions (and responses) about what had changed in commissioning (determination?), something about accountability in health I think but I didn t hear (more public scrutiny), other models besides worker-led (gov is agnostic, but that s just the type of mutuals so far), and capital renewal (gov is challenging the banks with Big Society Bank). This is going to get a bit long, so click through to our site to read what the other the speakers had to say and what that block of flats in the picture has to do with it Still here? Good! Harriet Hounsell from John Lewis Partnership was next. What s the Right level of profit? Structure of the partnership. The registry seems like the member services function and a bit more. Partner suggestions make a real difference. Beliefs have been tested. Recession hit us. Vivian Woodall, the co-operative phone, back to how it started. He knew people working for NGOs with high international phone bills. Bulk buy. Solid steady growth. Paid all tax. Living our cooperative values. Employee council and profit-shared. Adoption of new brand. Questions to both on redundancies (debate openly, try to redeploy, ultimately division of responsibilities: managers manage staff levels, not members), and being rejected as too small to help other social enterprises (ask why? Try local level instead of head office?), plus praise for John Lewis. Then there was coffee, workshops, lunch, workshops and coffee. I don t think I should report all of that, so a quick comment on the venue at Anglia Ruskin Uni Cambridge: is the Lord Ashcroft it s named after the same one who said it was legal to attack Iraq? Anyway Based on the workshops, I don t think our co-op will do SROI accounting any time soon (needs too much people time) and I m little the wiser on leadership. Some people are intrigued by collective management and cooperative working, though. The closing keynote was Wayne Hemingway, formerly of Red or Dead and now of Hemingway Design. He gave a quick history of himself and of those two enterprises and a bit of an entertaining ramble around. He seemed very much from the business end and how to use business to benefit society, but I ve not really looked at his companies before. I probably should do, as they ve a regeneration project in Lynn (pictured: before Wayne). Then it was the closing address, the thanks (yes, thanks to the workers and sponsors) and then time to head for the exit. It s a shame that some people who made good points during the keynotes (coop party!) left quickly instead of staying to chat.

Last Saturday I have held a talk at the Meta Main-Rhein Chaosdays 2012 in Darmstadt, an event of the local Chaos Computer Club groups and not unsimilar to Karlsruhe s yearly GPN. I was asked to give an talk on a advanced, Haskell related topic, so I took my audience on a guided tour through the memory of a running Haskell program, explained the different types of closures and their layout, and showed how info tables are used to allow the garbage collector to uniformly treat the objects. We also used that knowledge to roughly predict the memory footprint of a program processing a large file using the String data type. Besides showing raw bytes (using my ghc-heap-view package and a small utility function) I included two visualizations: One is the video of a copying garbage collector at work that I blogged about last week, and the other is a nice tool that a student of mine creates for his bachelor thesis: It allows you to visualize the heap structure of a (potentially partially evaluated) value from GHCi and interactively evaluate parts of the structure if you want, even thunks that are hidden behind other thunks, something that you cannot do from Haskell code. The following picture is a screen shot of ghc-vis visualizing the evaluation of the famous two-line primes definition: The slides of my talk do not cover everything that was included, but the transcript does. It is in German, so as before, if you want me to translate it, then (convince your professor or employer to) invite me to hold the talk again. The ghc-vis tool can be found on Hackage, more information about it is on the author s website.
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What I have done (on my packages for Wheezy) in the last weeks? imvirt 0.9.4-3 and 0.9.4-4 adds two upstream patches to remove an applicable use of /proc in Perls procfs_read() method, which fixes LXC detection and another patch to not count the dmesg lines twice within the KVM detection module.
Much thanks to Thomas Liske! mlt The 0.8.0-4 upload also adds two upstream patches to fix an major memory leak in the mlt_cache function and a crash with LADSPA plugins on dlclose().
And here much thanks to Dan Dennedy!
I have also uploaded 0.8.2-1 to experimental. roaraudio 1.0~beta2-2 and 1.0~beta2-3 added a few upstream patches to fix security and major use problems. The debdiff was a bit huge so it took a bit more time to unblock/migrate.
1.0~beta5-1 is also available in experimental.
Much thanks for the patch support to Philipp Schafft! otrs2 With the 2.4.9+dfsg1-3+squeeze3 upload (DSA-2536-1) there was an security update for otrs2 on Squeeze which fixes a cross-site scripting issue and improved the e-mail filter to detect nested tags. Those with a few other fixes migrated with 3.1.7+dfsg1-5 to testing, while I also uploaded 3.1.10+dfsg1-1 to experimental.
Now I can focus on the upcoming 3.2.x packaging. :)

Today was a black day for democracy in Germany. The German constitutional court ruled in favour of the European Stability Mechanism. In combination with last week s announcement by the European Central Bank to purchase government bonds without limits (breaking the No-Bail-Out clause at the core of their mandate more obviously and irreversably than ever before), the German people have lost a good deal of democracy today. Why? you may ask because from now on, fiscal and financial policy will be made in Brussels, by people enjoying full immunity, but who are not elected democratically by the European people, let alone the Germans, and they will freely decide over who has to pay and be liable for whom. I am talking about people like Klaus Regling, who was already involved the very first time the Maastricht Criteria were violated. He is now at the front of the largest and most powerful financial weapon ever conceived. With immunity. And people like Mario Draghi, whom I would possibly call the most corrupt person I know. His announcement to save the Euro at whatever cost accidentally came only a day before his motherland Italy had to go to the market for more money and was able to place a bond at such ridiculously low interest rates that anyone who s kept up to speed with Italy s development had to rightfully ask how that was possible. While in the past, for whatever reason, the European people have let the ECB get by saying that they are not bailing out countries when they buy bonds on the secondary market (wtf!), they have finally dropped that restriction (the law). And as of today, the ESM is ready to go, along with the fiscal pact. Germany is now liable for more than quarter of all of the Eurozone s past and future debts. And no citizen will be able to have any more influence in this, or reverse it. Budget, fiscal policy and currency control are forever gone. Not that parliamentarian democracies were ever direct. Yet, in the past, one could at least vote for those people whose promises one was inclined to believe the most. You can still do that in the future, but those people won t be able to influence fiscal or financial policy anymore. There is no way back. The ESM and its employees enjoy full immunity, and the ESM is forever-binding. There is no exit clause. Thanks to the ECB s law breaking and the ESM, which I consider highly unconstitutional, at least in Germany, Eurozone-countries may refinance their debts at interest rates that are in no way related to their ability to pay back loans. All other countries foremost Germany are henceforth liable for others debts. The fundamental rule of the EU that no country would have to stand up for another country, is gone with the wind. Within an hour, the markets reacted. Germany, which previously had to pay negative interest (a sign of stability) saw interests on its bond shoot up. And Spain, Portugal, Greece and others who couldn t previously refinance their old debts, are now getting fresh money cheaper than ever. Spain s president Rajoy today didn t even bother beating around the bush anymore, he s now going to apply for fresh money but won t bother with any saving schemes or other restructurings. Monti in Italy has suggested the same. Wouldn t you take money if you were offered it for free, without the need to pay it back? This is more than inflation, in my opinion. What is currently happening in Europe is active depreciation of individual wealth. Our heads of state are actively working against the people. The Euro has lost all credibility and everyone knows it. It is only a question of time until it will tremble and fall. Meanwhile, the market celebrates and continues their gambles while they still can, on the backs of our currency and our wealth. Most affected are the people who have savings in Euros, whose life insurances are decreasing in worth and who cannot afford to diversify into other asset classes or currencies. On the other hand, those who let their money do the work are being saved. Whoever previously invested into bonds of struggling states, hoping to reap massive interest gains, is now proven right. Brussels has eliminated the risk factor. What kind of message does this send??? Hands up if you thought that our politicians are even interested in closing the rapidly widening gap between rich and poor. Really? That s naive. The Eurozone is corrupt, and our currency has never been as virtual as today. Nobody can say whether saving the Euro at all cost is the right thing and noone knows whether what s currently happening is just bad. I would have wished that our politicians had taken the crisis as an incentive to fix the system in the interest of the people and with a long-term focus:

• Europe should have returned to the law it gave itself, without exceptions: The No-Bailout-Clause, as well as the Masstricht Criteria. In general, you cannot spend more than you earn, and this principle seems to have been forgotten entirely, and those who had most actively forgotten it, are being rewarded.
• A shared currency requires a shared fiscal policy. This policy has to be in place before the currency, the currency can only ever be the result of a common strategy. The EU has done this the wrong way around and it failed. Trying to put a fiscal policy in place now is patchwork that is guaranteed to fail. And putting fiscal policy into the hands of undemocratically chosen people in Brussels is not representing the people.

But on the contrary! Europe s policiticans are making it crystal clear that the foundation upon which it was built, the laws and rules, the promises and guarantees, no longer apply. The people were not asked. The promises once made were broken. Our politicians have ruled over our heads. More debts are being made, and more debts to pay off debts, and so on. It s long gotten out of control, now the process is institutionalised. I feel sorry for our kids. I find it irresponsible what is being done to them (in addition to the way we rape the environment). I also feel deeply with the people in the struggling countries who are being screwed by the crisis and are not at fault. What our politicians are doing is unfortunately not going to help long term. The problems are just postponed, and with every day, the inevitable crash will be more painful. I am sorry. Today is a black day for democracy. We have lost souvereignity. We have lost control over our currency. We have lost our budget rights. And I have lost my faith in the last instance of the German government that I trusted. As of today, I know that the German constitutional court is nothing more than a puppet in the hands of the politicians (who are themselves puppets of Brussels and the banks). The limit they imposed (Germany s liability must not increase beyond 190 billion Euros without the federal parliament s consent) is worthless. Soon the politicians will explain to us why it s inevitable that we must raise this limit. Not that the people could prevent it, but still I had hoped for a fundamental ruling. They should not have touched numbers. The EU had a no-bailout-clause from day one. It was conditional from the start. If one of the fundamental principles of a contract is broken, the contract becomes invalid. Not only did I expect the court to rule against socialised debt, I would have wished them to go a step further. The German national bank gave up control over the currency to the ECB only because the ECB incorporated the principles of the German national bank. Once the ECB overturned those principles, Germany should have reclaimed their souvereignity. But noone else in Europe would have wanted that. Merkel became a puppet herself. I am grateful that our daughter has dual citizenship. NP: Porcupine Tree: Live at Atlanta 2010

It happens occasionally that I need to validate an optimization by benchmarking, and the benchmark results are a bit noisy. Usually the situation does not ask for a heavy-duty statistical analysis, and I am too lazy for that anyway. However, sometimes having at least the fundamental statistics of a sample would be handy.

Obviously, calculating the standard deviation of a sample in the 21st century by itself is not a problem. There is LibreOffice, there is R, there's a bazillion statistical tools out there. They do feel a bit heavyweight for the task though, and the friction involved in starting them up and entering the data in the right format means that often I just do not bother. Google brings up some dynamic webpages for the task, a much more lightweight solution, but most of these are ugly and ad-riddled.

What's a programmer to do? Code up another weekend app, statsb.in, of course. And it is the way I like it: there is a textarea where it is easy to paste and edit inline snippets of text, say, shell script output in full; non-numeric data are ignored; statistics are computed on the fly (no stupid "Submit" buttons); and you can save the snippet on the server and get a short link (useful for footnotes pointing to data sources).

The service probably will not be expanded much further. After all, if those basic statistics are not enough, you are probably better off firing up a real statistics tool. However, I do plan to add another page for the most common task that I run into, namely, comparing the means of two populations (did my optimization have an effect?). In other words, calculating the p-value of the hypothesis that the means of two populations are the same. Stay tuned.

Hi, It's been three weeks already since the end of the Google Summer of Code 2012, and I've been told I still haven't blogged about the state of multiarch cross-toolchains. So, here it is! Building multiarch cross-toolchains This section is mostly a rehash of my previous post. Cross-toolchains build properly for most architectures in Debian, with the exception of arches having clashing ld.so paths. The following instructions assume you are using Wheezy or unstable, and have applied my patches. Adding a foreign architecture You are going to use some packages meant for a different architecture than your native one. This means you'll have to tell dpkg about a foreign architecture, for instance, armel.

# dpkg --add-architecture armel

Then, you need to update apt's database.

# apt-get update

If one of the repository you use only supports a subset of your configured architecture (for instance, when working with an unofficial port), you will need to use arch restrictions in your sources.list (see the manpage). Cross-binutils Absolutely nothing has changed there, it works exactly the same way it did before the GSoC. That is, grab binutils' source package, set $TARGET to a GNU triplet or a Debian arch, and run dpkg-buildpackage.

$ apt-get source binutils
$ cd binutils-*/
$ TARGET=arm-linux-gnueabihf dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

Cross-gcc Building cross-gcc is done the same way it was before the GSoC, except it uses cross-arch dependencies instead of mangled packages for foreign packages. This means you shouldn't use dpkg-cross at all, but use multiarch instead. Then, building the cross-compiler is as easy as running (with $target being a Debian arch name):

$ export DEB_CROSS_NO_BIARCH=yes
$ echo $target > debian/arch
$ debian/rules control
$ dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

Biarch/multilib and multiarch do not really play well. Using some trickery, you might be able to build multilib cross-compilers, but I would recommend building two cross-compilers instead. You will of course need to install the required build-dependencies, some of which are packages for the target architecture, but that is no different from building any other Debian package, provided that multiarch is correctly configured. This will produce cross-compilers packages using multiarch paths and cross-arch deps, along with some binary packages for the target architecture. Those binary packages are cross-built versions of the runtime libs. They are not needed, as they should be identical to the natively-built ones present in the archive, but using them shouldn't be a problem. Installing the cross-toolchains Installing cross-binutils is straightforward, installing cross-gcc itself is, but installing cross-g++ is not. Indeed there is bug #678623: g++-4.7 depends on libstdc++6-4.7-dev, which is multiarch-unaware and depends on g++-4.7. Assuming you've compiled your cross-gcc using my patches, the cross-compiled libstdc++6-4.7-dev will not have these problems, but still won't be co-installable with your native libstdc++6-4.7-dev, since it's not M-A: same. The easiest way to work around this issue is probably to download the binary package, modify its control file to include Multi-Arch: same , and install the modified package. Using the cross-toolchains Once installed, using the cross-toolchains should be as easy as running $triplet-gcc-4.7 file.c . Note the -4.7 part. Indeed, the cross-compilers packages do not provide the $triplet-gcc symlink. This matches what is done with the native compiler pase, where the gcc symlink is not provided by the compiler's package, but by the gcc package. However, there is no cross-gcc package or anything like that yet, which means you have to use the full name, or provide the symlink yourself. Another issue is pkg-config. To know where to search for libraries, pkg-config has to be told which architecture you are compiling for. Autotools does that by calling $triplet-pkg-config instead of pkg-config if it exists. The pkg-config binary packages comes with a wrapper you can symlink to: /usr/share/pkg-config-crosswrapper . Conclusion Despite a few shortcomings (bug #678623, missing symlinks, multilib issues and clashing ld.so paths), multiarch cross-toolchains are already usable on Wheezy. There is still quite a lot of work left (like fixing #678623, splitting gcc-4.7 in two, or changing wanna-build, britney etc. to handle cross-arch deps) but hopefully this will be done for Jessie.

Yesterday, IETF announced the publication of of RFC 6716, the Definition of the Opus Audio Codec, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec intended for both VoIP, film and music. This is the first time, as far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec. In RFC 3533, IETF standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great royalty free container for audio, video and movies. I hope IETF will continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish multimedia content on the Internet. IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty free specifications. Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet. Visit the Opus project page if you want to learn more about the solution.

A big gap since the last Debian Day. On request I reviewed Gustavo Panizzo's Hexen 2 Package which is in pretty good shape and should be ready for upload fairly soon. A prerequisite for that is support for Hexen 2 in game-data-packager: I've hacked in preliminary support and pushed a package to experimental (version 31), it should be available not long after you read this. There's quite a lot more we could do with Hexen 2 support: rip the CD audio; encode it, there's an open question as to which codec to use, or to support multiple codecs; detect different versions of the game and re-order the CD tracks accordingly; support the mission pack; generalise any new ripping code so Quake support could use it; etc. etc.

Last year, via jwz, I watched the video "Archive Team: A distributed Preservation of Service Attack" from Defcon 19. I learned about the Archive Team and the work of Jason Scott. More recently I learned about the archive.org Shareware CD Archive. In the fledgling days of the Internet, shareware (and cover-mount) CD-ROMs were a popular way for files to be distributed. They therefore archive an interesting age in the history of modern Internet culture. Inspired by the above, I dug out some of my old shareware Doom CDs, ripped them, scanned their covers (where I had them) and uploaded them to archive.org. Here they are:

• The Ultimate Add-On Collection for Doom and Doom II
• D! 1000 (better CD scan needed)
• D! Zone Gold
• 3D Game Alchemy the CD that accompanied the book "3D Game Alchemy" (needs a better CD scan). I thought everyone had seen the stuff on this, but when Justin Fisher's NEMESIS.WAD appeared on Doomworld - relatively recently - I was surprised how few people were familiar with it.

They are all part of the growing Doom Level CD Collection. In most cases, the CDs are a super set of files that exist in the /idgames archive. I'm fairly sure there is some stuff on these CDs that never made out of BBSes or the AOL and CompuServe walled gardens onto the wider Internet, with the exception of these shovelware collections. A follow-on project would be to cross-reference their indexes with the /idgames archive and upload whats missing (that can be done so, legally.) Finally, I also had a single, solitary PC ZONE covermount CD that I held on to because it was a Quake (and Duke Nukem 3D) add-on special:

• CD Zone issue 48, March 1997

From an archive-perspective, Quake has not fared as well as Doom did. The Internet was young when Doom was popular, the World Wide Web was not the all-encompassing thing it has become and by accident rather than design nearly all Doom add-ons ended up being uploaded to a single FTP server: The Walnut Creek CDROM FTP Server, to a sub-folder /idgames. This single archive was mirrored wide and has lived on past the death of Walnut Creek. Today, it is small enough for casual enthusiasts to mirror, and has been kept alive by volunteer admins. The most popular front-end is now http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/. The WWW had grown up by the time Quake came along. There is an /idgames2, but it was never as popular as /idgames was for Doom. The Quake modding community was centered around a series of commercial websites such as Planet Quake, later part of the Gamespy network. Sadly the vast majority of web pages on the old Planet Quake site and similar sites have died completely from bit-rot. Large chunks of the history of the Quake community are therefore lost to a sort-of technological dark age.

I'm maintaining a host under acaia.ca. I intend to share it with friends and encourage them to use non-evil services to host their stuff. For now I'm providing the following:

• http://bookmarks.acaia.ca using semanticscuttle
• https://clipperz.acaia.ca/beta/ using clipperz
• http://owncloud.acaia.ca/ using owncloud
• ikiwiki for personal website and blog

...and testing these:

• https://contacts.acaia.ca/ using PHP iAddressBook
• http://minigal.acaia.ca/ using a minigal
• https://money.acaia.ca/html/ using Personal Finance Manager

As I'm not happy with minigal I'm trying mediagoblin, Zenphoto and Plogger for media hosting. Any other idea? I want light and simple stuff, my VPS is cheap. (btw, I didn't renew my flickr pro last month so I'm very likely leaving this service. I used flickrbackup to have all my pictures and some of meta-data saved, as they didn't provide me any better way to do a backup.)

I'm no longer using the domain tiagovaz.org. So website and emails under it will be off soon. I mostly use now tiago @acaia.ca and @debian.org.

Seems I've forgotten to announce Enca 1.13 here, but I won't do the same mistake with 1.14, which has been released today. If you don't know Enca, iit is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs. It's code is currently available at Gitorious. The full changes for 1.14 release are short:

• Allow standard names for belarusian and slovenian languages, thanks to Branislav Ger o for suggestion.
• Reset strictness when check buffer less than file size, thanks to Sam Liao.
• Fixed typos in man page, thanks to A. Costa.

Still enca is in maintenance mode only and I have no intentions to write new features. However there is no limitation to other contributors :-). You can download from http://cihar.com/software/enca/.

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