I generated 0x94FA372B2DA8B985 (my 4096R GPG key) back in 2008, and revoked my old 1024R v3 key around the same time. However I left my main 1024D key alone, figuring I'd get round to revoking it at some point once the new one was sufficiently trusted. This probably happened some time ago, so today I have finally revoked this key:

pub   1024D/0xF1BD4BE45B430367 1999-10-26 [revoked: 2012-07-13]
uid                            Jonathan McDowell <noodles@earth.li>

If you're not in the habit of refreshing your GPG keyring regularly now might be a good time to (gpg --refresh-keys) or at the very least pull my updated key (gpg --recv-key 0xF1BD4BE45B430367) to make sure you don't accidentally continue to use it. (If I haven't signed your key with my stronger one please do wave a fingerprint/ID at me next time we meet, and ask me for the same in return.)

Conrad released version 3.2.4 of Armadillo yesterday. It contains a workaround for g++ 4.7.0 and 4.7.1 which have a regression triggered by the Armadillo codebase for small fixed-sized matrices. The corresponding RcppArmadillo package 0.3.2.4 arrived on CRAN earlier today. The short NEWS entry follows below.

0.3.2.4  2012-07-11
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 3.2.4
          * workaround for a regression (bug) in GCC 4.7.0 and 4.7.1

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for 0.3.2.4 relative to 0.3.2.3 As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

I m leaving myself some room for bug fixes. It works for us in house. I would love to help others to give it a try. especially those who could benefit from making nearly immediately answered queries to the NIST s NVD database. The code in this release cannot by itself track the feed from the feds in real time. The nvd entry loader needs a little bit of love in the area of record merging before this starts working. It s on my TODO list. I m sorry for the outage of git.colliertech.org. I ll get that back up here shortly. In the meantime, feel free to grab it from this location while the CPAN indexes and processes my submission. http://www.colliertech.org/federal/NIST/NIST-NVD-1.00.00.tar.bz2 don t forget to check the cryptographic signature: http://www.colliertech.org/federal/NIST/NIST-NVD-1.00.00.tar.bz2.crc

I read an interesting question about mutt on IRC some days ago, which was: how do I find out which threads I have trolled^Wtaken part in. Obviously, there s ~P to filter the mails I have sent (which uses addresses declared through the alternates config directives to know who I am). But how do I find about the whole thread? Easily enough, one can wrap a given search through ~( ) so that the whole threads containing the matching mails are selected. In this case: ~(~P). Given the amount of outstanding requests on debian-release@, one can use the following to only see the threads with unread mails: ~(~N), which helps spotting the threads where attention is needed. Thinking of it, that probably should become the default when opening a given Maildir Gotta love people with interesting questions.

And I still get into arguments about why I prefer apt-get over aptitude... Sometimes, stupid is good.

# apt-get update
[...get Debian sid package list...]
# aptitude install libdbd-csv-perl
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libdbd-csv-perl libparams-util-perl a  libsql-statement-perl a  libtext-csv-xs-perl a 
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libdbi-perl perl perl-base perl-modules
4 packages upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1459 not upgraded.
Need to get 9,845 kB of archives. After unpacking 1,069 kB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libperl5.14: Depends: perl-base (= 5.14.2-7) but 5.14.2-12 is to be installed.
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
      Remove the following packages:
1)      elinks
2)      irssi
3)      irssi-scripts
4)      libperl5.14
5)      perlmagick
6)      vim-gtk
7)      xchat
      Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
8)      elinks-data recommends elinks (= 0.12~pre5-7)
9)      vim-gui-common recommends vim-gnome   vim-gtk   vim-athena
10)     xchat-common recommends xchat
11)     inkscape recommends perlmagick
Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] ^C
# apt-get install libdbd-csv-perl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libdbi-perl libparams-util-perl libperl5.14 libsql-statement-perl libtext-csv-xs-perl perl perl-base perl-modules
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libdbd-csv-perl libparams-util-perl libsql-statement-perl libtext-csv-xs-perl
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libdbi-perl libperl5.14 perl perl-base perl-modules
5 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1458 not upgraded.
Need to get 10.6 MB of archives.
After this operation, 1,081 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Get:1 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main perl i386 5.14.2-12 [3,701 kB]
Get:2 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main libperl5.14 i386 5.14.2-12 [731 kB]
Get:3 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main perl-base i386 5.14.2-12 [1,494 kB]
Get:4 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main perl-modules all 5.14.2-12 [3,438 kB]
Get:5 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main libtext-csv-xs-perl i386 0.90-1 [73.1 kB]
Get:6 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main libdbi-perl i386 1.622-1 [897 kB]
Get:7 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main libparams-util-perl i386 1.07-1 [25.4 kB]
Get:8 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main libsql-statement-perl all 1.33-1 [179 kB]
Get:9 http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/debian/debian/ unstable/main libdbd-csv-perl all 0.3500-1 [36.4 kB]
Fetched 10.6 MB in 10s (980 kB/s)
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
Reading changelogs... Done
(Reading database ... 278465 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace perl 5.14.2-7 (using .../perl_5.14.2-12_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement perl ...
Preparing to replace libperl5.14 5.14.2-7 (using .../libperl5.14_5.14.2-12_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libperl5.14 ...
Preparing to replace perl-base 5.14.2-7 (using .../perl-base_5.14.2-12_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement perl-base ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up perl-base (5.14.2-12) ...
(Reading database ... 278465 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace perl-modules 5.14.2-7 (using .../perl-modules_5.14.2-12_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement perl-modules ...
Selecting previously unselected package libtext-csv-xs-perl.
Unpacking libtext-csv-xs-perl (from .../libtext-csv-xs-perl_0.90-1_i386.deb) ...
Preparing to replace libdbi-perl 1.617-1 (using .../libdbi-perl_1.622-1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libdbi-perl ...
Selecting previously unselected package libparams-util-perl.
Unpacking libparams-util-perl (from .../libparams-util-perl_1.07-1_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously unselected package libsql-statement-perl.
Unpacking libsql-statement-perl (from .../libsql-statement-perl_1.33-1_all.deb) ...
Selecting previously unselected package libdbd-csv-perl.
Unpacking libdbd-csv-perl (from .../libdbd-csv-perl_0.3500-1_all.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up libperl5.14 (5.14.2-12) ...
Setting up perl-modules (5.14.2-12) ...
Setting up perl (5.14.2-12) ...
Setting up libtext-csv-xs-perl (0.90-1) ...
Setting up libdbi-perl (1.622-1) ...
Setting up libparams-util-perl (1.07-1) ...
Setting up libsql-statement-perl (1.33-1) ...
Setting up libdbd-csv-perl (0.3500-1) ...
#

And don't get me started about waiting for aptitude *upgrade to resolve its dependency graph...

I failed. I didn't go running the day after the Cheese and Wine party (tuesday). I wonder why...:-) Indeed, I was feeling well, but slightly tired and I woke up at 8am, which means that I would have to go out quite late, in the heat...and run while feeling tired. And something I have learnt in all my running activities is that when one feels not in shape, better not insist. This is where injuries can come. Moreover, the next day was meant to be the Day Trip, with a goal for me: climb the Cerro negro volcano as fast as I can, training with my sticks for difficult climbs, in the heat...in the perspective of future races I would like to do in French Alps, in the upcoming years (such as La Montagn'hard : I recommend watching the video). Sadly, a landslide has cut the road 2km away from the starting point and, despite my desperate attempts to still form a group of "strong people" to go there and do the extra 4km walk anyway....we later learned that the entire road to Cerro Negro is closed and we'd have no chance to go on it. That infortunate, though I hopefully have another chance in the upcoming two weeks, where I'm supposed to come back and climb the volcano with Elizabeth (but, I of course will not leave my beloved one alone on a volcano!). So, I ended up staying on the beach at Las Pe itas. And, as I explained to No l, on days where I *decided* to run, I *need* to run. It's like a drug as you'd guess. So, I went running on the beach..:-). In the early afternoon, during a very hot day (probably the best weather we ever had, which makes me even more regret "my" volcano), about 34 C, no shade...and some wind, and sand...:-) Running on the beach is not as hard as one would imagine as long as you stay at the limit of the water, where the sand is compact. Indeed, this is even good for articulations as the sand soil is of course soft and absorbs impacts. The only drawback is that this beach is quite not so flat and this is sometimes like running across a hill all time long. Anyway, I went north up to Poneloya, up to the point where a river blocks the path along the beach, then I headed back. I had originally the intent to continue south-east, past the place where we were, up to the start of Juan Venaco island. However, the face wind when comign back, as well as the very hot sun, really achieved me....and I decided it would be wiser to stop. I however couldn't resist running IN the waves, which means I now have very humid shoes (but I have two pairs of those...:-)) Today (Thursday), was a more standard run in Managua, with No l and Ralf. We once again went to the South suburbs hills. All three of us were suite tired as it seems, so we chose a quite slow pace and, still, the climb was not that easy. We went the same way I went with Ralf a few days ago, but we didn't enter the "dogs path" this time, but rather tried to continue the road south. After 4.5 km, we had however to stop because the path didn't go further and, anyway, I think it was enough for all of us..:-) The way back, we tried another way, which was not particularly touristic (close to the National Soccer Stadium....a not so impressive stadium, but soccer is not the national sport here in Nicaragua, where people are more in base-ball or boxing). Both GPS traces:

• Run on the beach
• Run in South Managua

See you tomorrow for yet another GPS trace..:-)

More diversity in Debian skills This blog post has been co-authored with Francesca Ciceri. In his Debconf talk, zack said:

We need to understand how to invite people with different backgrounds than packaging to join the Debian project [...] I don't know what exactly, but we need to do more to attract those kinds of people.

Francesca and I know what we could do: make other kinds of contributions visible. Basically, we should track and acknowledge the contributions of webmasters, translators, programmers, sysadmins, event organisers, and so on, at the same level as what we do for packagers: DDPO, minechangelogs, Portfolio... For any non-packaging activity that we can make visible and credited, we get:

• to acknowledge the people who do it, and show that they are active contributors in the project;
• to acknowledge the work that gets done, and show the actual amount of non-packaging work that gets done in Debian every day;
• to allow non-packagers to have a reputation, too: first of all, they deserve it, and among other things, it would make nm processing trivial.

Here's an example: who's the lead translator for German? And if you are German, who's the lead translator for Spanish? Czech? Thai? I (Enrico) don't know the answers, not even for Italian, but we all should! Or at least it should be trivial to find out. To start to change this, is just a matter of programming. Francesca already worked on a list of trackable data sources, at least for translators. Here are some more details, related to translation:

• Translations can be tracked via the i18n robot (and relative statistics). This works only with teams who activated the robot and actively use the pseudo-urls in their messages on localisation mailing lists. Some translators don't bother to do it but it's ok to only support the main workflow. It beats extracting .po files from l10n-tagged BTS bugs at any rate.
• DPN and website translations: for wml pages there's a specific field to be extracted for each translated page: grep for maintainer="name" on normal wml pages, while for DPN translations we have a specific translator="name" field. The problem is that this field is not mandatory, so sometimes there's no indication of the maintainer. Again, it's ok to only support the main workflow. Anyway, this is preferable to the cvs log: often the commit is done by the coordinator of the team and not by the actual translator. See above for the alternative solution of using the statistics provided by the i18n bot.
• DDTSS: since the new release of DDTSS-Django, done by Martijn van Oosterhout about a year ago, the contributions are by default non-anonymous. This should be easy to track.
• : it is more complicated because in the wiki we do not have a proper l10n translation workflow, so the only thing that can be tracked are changelogs $LANG/* pages. A nice idea would be to have translated pages list the version of the page that was translated and who did the translation.
• translation of debian manuals and release notes: usually in the translation of manuals and long documentation there is a specific translator field.

And here are some notes about other fields:

• DPN editors: for each issue there's a list of editors at the bottom of the page. In the wml: grep for editor=.
• Artwork: artwork submitted via debianart are easy to track on the portal. Anyway usually you can find the author in the license and copyright file.
• Programming: the only thing we have is the list of services which can be expanded if needed.
• Press and publicity: there seems to be not much besides svn logs.
• l10n-english: The Smith Review Project page has some tracking links. Other activities can probably only be tracked, at the moment, via mailing list activity.
• Events: we can use the "main coordinator" field on www.debian.org/events/$year/$date-$eventname.wml: grep for <define-tag coord>; for events not published on the http://www.debian.org, but only on http://wiki.debian.org, the coordinator or the contact for the event is usually present on the page itself.
• Sysadmins: we haven't asked DSA.

And finally, if you are still wondering who those translation coordinators are, they are listed here, although not all teams keep that page up to date. Of course, when a data source is too hard to mine, it can make sense to see if the workflow could be improved, rather than spending months writing compicated mining code. This is a fun project for people at Debconf to get together and try. If by the end of the conference we had a way to credit some group of non-packaging contributors, even if just one like translators or website contributors, at least we would finally have started having official trackers for the activities of non-packagers.

After reading Jakub s pet peeve about debhelper build-dependencies I decided to check my own and sponsored packages to see how they fare. Oops! Something to fix in all subsequent releases.

Continuing in my better running through technology phase that I'm currently going through, I got all excited when I discovered that Polar make a Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor chest strap. Prior to this, I'd be lamenting how there wasn't a large choice of ANT+ enabled Android phones (to my knowledge there's just something Sony makes) So I got all excited and ordered a strap and it arrived today. This is my initial review (I haven't gone running with it yet, I've just had a tinker) I'll start with the bad first

the battery cover is a bit dicky

I took the battery cover off to confirm it came with a battery and then had a whale of a time getting it back on. I haven't managed to get it on as flush with the back as before I took it off. This appears to be a common complaint in the Amazon product reviews also.

hard to tell what its auto off timeout is, whether it's on, etc

Basically there's a large lack of feedback as to what's going on. Is it on or off? Is it wet enough to turn itself on? Is it reading a heart rate, or is the Bluetooth pairing just not working? The most accurate way I've found to determine if it's "working" or not is to unpair it and then repair it again. If you get a PIN prompt it's talking. By accident, I've found indications that it will turn itself off after not reading a heart rate for 10 minutes, and to reset it, you detach it and wait 30 seconds and reattach it. This would have been good information to include in the manual

Now for the good

reasonable Android app support

Heart Rate Monitor for Polar claims to support it, but I haven't managed to get it to do anything useful yet. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that My Tracks has support for it. Noom CardioTrainer is one that I was already trying out alongside Strava Run (which doesn't have support for it). There's also Sports Tracker and Endomondo. The UI for both of these also show the battery level. I've found that trying to have multiple apps reading the heart rate monitor simultaneously seems to be an exercise in fail, and that the Sports Tracker app seems to start a background service which subsequently causes all sorts of problems for any of the other apps started after it has started.

And the ugly Looking back at all the Amazon product reviews, they're pretty much split equally between 5 stars and 1 stars. The product seems to either work flawlessly or absolutely dreadfully. I was beginning to think I was in the latter group and that I'd bought a white elephant, but now that I've gotten to the bottom of the idiosyncrasies of talking to it from Android, it seems to be behaving fairly reliably. Talking to it from Linux, and the reason behind the title of this post One of the first things I tried doing after Android was being initially flaky for me, was to try and talk to it from a Linux laptop. This proved fairly straightforward using rfcomm. I didn't get anything human readable out of it though. Being curious as to how these Android apps were able to decode the data, I went looking for some API documentation, and a Google search led me to this sad forum discussion. So the API information is not freely available, and their CEO personally signs off on who gets access to it. How ludicrous. Do they want to sell product or not? That said, I did also find this blog post which, courtesy of the aforementioned Open Source My Tracks Android app, lays it all out for you. So them being all anti-development with their information is kind of pointless. Polar's website doesn't mention anything about their management, so I have no idea who their CEO even is. Wikipedia is also none the wiser. I'm looking forward to going for a run tomorrow and seeing how this thing pans out.

Even though I've planned to do this on Monday, it somehow slipped to Wednesday, but I've finally filled in GSoC 2012 evaluations for all students I mentor at phpMyAdmin. Generally all of them perform quite well, but there is always room for improvements :-). The greatest pain every year is filling up evaluations for more students - every each of them starts with same questions for mentor (eg. how many GSoC did you participate in or how much time you spend on GSoC). I know I can copy and paste answers, but still this looks like something not necessary. Also some information is probably already known to Google (eg. in which years I did participate in GSoC).

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

Weblate just got new feature, which might help you attracting new translators - embeddable widgets. You can put them to your website to show current state of the translation and attract new ones to simple introduction page. Right now, there is only one widget, but I hope to add more in future. However I'm far from being good in graphics, so if anybody could come up with some templates, I'd gladly use them :-). Anyway the current widget for Weblate itself looks like this:

Filed under: English Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

A couple of days ago, I had posted a short Python script to convert numpy files into a simple binary format which R can read quickly. Nice, but still needing an extra file. Shortly thereafter, I found Carl Rogers cnpy library which makes reading and writing numpy files from C++ a breeze, and I quickly wrapped this up into a new package RcppCNPy which was released a few days ago. This post will show a quick example, also summarized in the short pdf vignette describing the package, and provided as a demo within the package.

R> library(RcppCNPy)
Loading required package: Rcpp
R> library(rbenchmark)
R> 
R> n <- 1e5
R> k <- 50
R> 
R> M <- matrix(seq(1.0, n*k, by=1.0), n, k)
R> 
R> txtfile <- tempfile(fileext=".txt")
R> write.table(M, file=txtfile)
R> 
R> pyfile <- tempfile(fileext=".py")
R> npySave(pyfile, M)
R> 
R> pygzfile <- tempfile(fileext=".py")
R> npySave(pygzfile, M)
R> system(paste("gzip -9", pygzfile))
R> pygzfile <- paste(pygzfile, ".gz", sep="")
R> 
R> 

We first load the new package (as well as the rbenchmark package used for the benchmarking example) into R. We then create a large matrix of 100,000 rows and 50 columns. Not quite big data by any stretch, but large enough for ascii reading to be painfully slow. We also write two npy files and compress the second one. Next, we use the benchmark function to time the three approaches:

R> res <- benchmark(read.table(txtfile),
+                  npyLoad(pyfile),
+                  npyLoad(pygzfile),
+                  order="relative",
+                  columns=c("test", "replications", "elapsed", "relative"),
+                  replications=10)
R> print(res)
                 test replications elapsed relative
2     npyLoad(pyfile)           10   1.241  1.00000
3   npyLoad(pygzfile)           10   3.098  2.49637
1 read.table(txtfile)           10  96.744 77.95649
R> 

As shown by this example, loading a numpy file directly beats the pants off reading the data from ascii: it is about 78 times faster. Reading a compressed file is somewhat slower as the data stream has to be passed through the uncompressor provide by the zlib library. So instead of reading a binary blob in one go (once the file header has been parsed) we have to operate piecemeal---which is bound to be slower. It does however save in storage space (and users can make this tradeoff between speed and size) and is still orders of magnitude faster than parsing the ascii file. Finally, and not shown here, we unlink the temporary files. Summing up, this post demonstrated how the RcppCNPy package can be a useful to access data in numpy files (which may even be compressed). Data can also be written from R to be accessed later by numpy.

I s pose a better name would be How to preform automated deep-source checks I ve pushed the code to paultag/qlight, and it s just for personal use at the moment. It s built to use paultag/sb around sbuild. Basically, it preforms a crudload of tests such as licensecheck, suspicious-source, pyflakes, bashisms, cppcheck, php in linter mode, and a ton of other checks. You can see a large majority of them in the source file. The batch runner is a singleton , so it s safely called more then once. It s running on a 5-minute cron, and I ve configured a dput target to push it into it s queue & run the enqueue script. Here s some example output from a random package I had lying around:

  ===== build status =====
sbo-run-clang  successful
sbo-run-gcc  successful
  ===== global status =====
Ran plugin extract, exit code 0
Ran plugin watch, exit code 0
Ran plugin licensecheck, exit code 0
Ran plugin validate-source, exit code 0
Ran plugin build, exit code 0
Ran plugin descr, exit code 0
Ran plugin lintian, exit code 0
  ===== descr =====
I: PT: Does this sound right? "gbemol is/are a(n) Graphical frontend for the Music Player Daemon (MPD)"
  ===== piuparts =====
   [last 20 lines]
  ===== licenses =====
BSD (3 clause) 
GPL (v2 or later) 
GPL (v2 or later) GENERATED FILE
GPL (v2 or later) (with incorrect FSF address) 
LGPL (v2 or later) (with incorrect FSF address) 
*No copyright* GPL (v2 or later) 
*No copyright* UNKNOWN
  ===== lintian =====
I: gbemol: spelling-error-in-binary usr/bin/gbemol Wheter Whether
W: gbemol: hardening-no-relro usr/bin/gbemol
I: gbemol: spelling-error-in-manpage usr/share/man/man1/gbemol.1.gz allows to allows one to
  ===== watch =====
-- Scanning for watchfiles in .
-- Found watchfile in ./debian
-- In debian/watch, processing watchfile line:
   http://sf.net/gbemol/gbemol-(.*)\.tar.gz
-- Found the following matching hrefs:
     gbemol-0.3.tar.gz
     gbemol-0.3.1.tar.gz
     gbemol-0.3.2.tar.gz
Newest version on remote site is 0.3.2, local version is 0.3.2
 => Package is up to date
-- Scan finished
  ===== source issues =====
suspicious-source:
bashisms:
script ./ltmain.sh does not appear to have a #! interpreter line;
you may get strange results
possible bashism in ./ltmain.sh line 368 ($RANDOM):
        my_tmpdir="$ my_template -$ RANDOM-0 $$"
error: ./ltmain.sh: Unterminated quoted string found, EOF reached. Wanted: <">
pyflakes:
cppcheck:
[src/gbemol-utils.c:167]: (error) Memory leak: path
[src/libmpdclient.c:1654]: (error) Possible null pointer dereference: output - otherwise it is redundant to check if output is null at line 1663
[src/libmpdclient.c:1655]: (error) Possible null pointer dereference: output - otherwise it is redundant to check if output is null at line 1663
[src/libmpdclient.c:1656]: (error) Possible null pointer dereference: output - otherwise it is redundant to check if output is null at line 1663
[src/libmpdclient.c:1664]: (error) Possible null pointer dereference: output - otherwise it is redundant to check if output is null at line 1663
phplint:
desktop validate:
.//.pc/desktop_file.patch/gbemol.desktop: warning: key "Encoding" in group "Desktop Entry" is deprecated
.//.pc/desktop_file.patch/gbemol.desktop: error: (will be fatal in the future): value "gbemol.png" for key "Icon" in group "Desktop Entry" is an icon name with an extension, but there should be no extension as described in the Icon Theme Specification if the value is not an absolute path
.//.pc/desktop_file.patch/gbemol.desktop: warning: value "Application;AudioVideo;Player;" for key "Categories" in group "Desktop Entry" contains a deprecated value "Application"
mp3check:
mp3val:
fontlint:
ftvalid:
msgfmt:
POFileChecker:
POFileSpell:
pngcheck:
jpeginfo:
ogginfo:
oggz-validate:
xmllint:
lacheck:
jslint:
check for environ calls to home:
check for use of /tmp:
./intltool-extract.in:    $OUTFILE     = "./tmp/$OUTFILE.h"
check for use of system():
./aclocal.m4:    lt_ld_extra= awk '/^include /   system(sprintf("cd /etc; cat %s 2>/dev/null", \[$]2)); skip = 1;     if (!skip) print \[$]0; skip = 0;  ' < /etc/ld.so.conf   $SED -e 's/#.*//;/^[  ]*hwcap[    ]/d;s/[:,  ]/ /g;s/=[^=]*$//;s/=[^= ]* / /g;/^$/d'   tr '\n' ' ' 
./intltool-merge.in:    return 1 if ((-x $file) or (system("$file -l >$devnull") == 0));
./intltool-merge.in:    system ("$iconv -f $encoding -t UTF-8 <$devnull 2>$devnull");
./intltool-update.in:    return 1 if ((-x $file) or (system("$file --version >$devnull") == 0));
./intltool-update.in:          system ($EXTRACT, "--update", "--srcdir=$SRCDIR",
./intltool-update.in:          system ($EXTRACT, "--update", "--type=$gettext_type", 
./intltool-update.in:    system ("$MSGMERGE", "-o", $outfile, $infile, "$MODULE.pot");
./intltool-update.in:    system ("$MSGFMT", "-o", "$devnull", "--verbose", $output_file);
./intltool-update.in:   system ("$MSGFMT", "-o", "$devnull", "--verbose", "$SRCDIR/$lang.po");
./configure:    lt_ld_extra= awk '/^include /   system(sprintf("cd /etc; cat %s 2>/dev/null", \$2)); skip = 1;     if (!skip) print \$0; skip = 0;  ' < /etc/ld.so.conf   $SED -e 's/#.*//;/^[   ]*hwcap[    ]/d;s/[:,  ]/ /g;s/=[^=]*$//;s/=[^= ]* / /g;/^$/d'   tr '\n' ' ' 
./intltool-extract.in:        system ("mkdir -p $dirname");
./intltool-extract.in:        system("mkdir tmp/"); 
./debian/gbemol.1:the \fBDebian\fP system (but may be used by others).  Permission is 
./debian/manpage.sgml:      the &debian; system (but may be used by others).  Permission is
  ===== sbo-run-clang.log warnings =====
update-binfmts: warning: unable to close /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register: Invalid argument
update-binfmts: warning: unable to enable binary format python2.6
dpkg-source: warning: extracting unsigned source package (gbemol_0.3.2-2.dsc)
dpkg-buildpackage: warning: using a gain-root-command while being root
gbemol-preferences.c:483:13: warning: 'gbemol_preferences_load_spin' defined but not used [-Wunused-function]
gbemol-net.c:60:11: warning: variable 'res' set but not used [-Wunused-but-set-variable]
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libfontconfig.so.1 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libatk-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against librt.so.1 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libgio-2.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libcairo.so.2 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpango-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libfreetype.so.6 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-gencontrol: warning: File::FcntlLock not available; using flock which is not NFS-safe
     + add misc-depends to fix lintian warning.
  ===== sbo-run-gcc.log warnings =====
dpkg-source: warning: extracting unsigned source package (gbemol_0.3.2-2.dsc)
dpkg-buildpackage: warning: using a gain-root-command while being root
gbemol-preferences.c:483:13: warning: 'gbemol_preferences_load_spin' defined but not used [-Wunused-function]
gbemol-net.c:60:11: warning: variable 'res' set but not used [-Wunused-but-set-variable]
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libfontconfig.so.1 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libatk-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against librt.so.1 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libgio-2.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libcairo.so.2 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpango-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libfreetype.so.6 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-gencontrol: warning: File::FcntlLock not available; using flock which is not NFS-safe
     + add misc-depends to fix lintian warning.

Not as interesting as it can get, but still pretty cool. Andrea, I swear I m not picking on you :) More to come later (hopefully) :)

I have this bunch of Dell R610, with iDrac6 Express management cards. I used these, among other things, for developing IPMI support in NUT and working on Infrastructure & Cloud power management. But that's the topic of another post (still, if you're interested in, check this and that). The thing is that this "IPMI" monitoring development has been limited to local support (Ie, power supplies can't be monitored remotely by the nut-ipmipsu driver), due to an issue : any attempt to enable IPMI access over the network was miserably failing! Well, these attempts were limited to a couple of 15 minutes runs, without plain motivation, almost a year ago. The various firmwares were up to date (iDrac 1.70, ...) , everything was running and configured fine, locally. But still... no IPMI available through the network! Looking on the Net, I've learned that many Dell customers with iDrac Express cards, were having the same issue. Dell support seems to have replaced tons of motherboards! There, I switched to other things, and time has passed.... A good year later (last week), I decided that it was time to get back on this. And I've found the solution there Incredible: this was due to a 'bug' in the Broadcom NetXtreme II LoM (LAN on Motherboad) firmware! I've not had time to dig this issue in depth, but here is a base explanation, for what it's worth: Some LoM initial self tests are failing. Thus, the LoM are not switched to the managed mode, and can't actually be available for BMC management (thus no IPMI over the network). In my case, the tests were wrongly failing at 'A07', a test which tries to establish a Gigabit connection! Strangely, all these servers are connected on a Gb switch! Not a fully satisfactory answer, but that said, there is a solution, and I've not much time to pour into this investigation (comments may always change my mind though!). So here is a comprehensive procedure to fix this, from your Linux system, and using FreeDOS:

• Get a USB key, at least 1,44 Mb (damn!), but a good old 32Gb will also do the trick
• Open a terminal and format the USB key (WARNING: this will ERASE all data on the key! You've been warned. Really!)

$ mkfs.msdos /dev/sdX1

Note: 'X' is to be replaced by the exact name of your USB key. An hint: call 'tail -f /var/log/syslog" and unplug / replug your USB key. You will see some entries like "...sdb Attached SCSI removable disk". So, there, it's "sdb".

• Download a FreeDOS image
• Now use qemu to create the DOS boot disk on your USB key (replace 'X' again!):

$ qemu -boot a -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sdX A:\> sys c: A:\> xcopy /E /N a: c:

Note that you will need "root" privileges.

• (Optional) You can check the bootability with:

$ qemu -hda /dev/sdX

• Download Broadcom DOS utilities there
• Unzip this archive (self extract)

$ unzip Bcom_LAN_14.2.x_DOSUtilities_A03.exe

• Copy only 'Userdiag/NetXtremeII/uxdiag.exe' to your USB key.
• Plug the key in your server, and reboot it
• Press F11 to enter the BIOS boot sequence,
• Select the default entry, and press Enter. Once the system is booted, type:

c:\ uxdiag -t abcd mfw 1

• Reboot your system, and enjoy your *working* IPMI access over the network

For what it's worth (again), I just hope that it will be useful to others... I will now prepare another post using using FreeIPMI to manage your servers, the GNU way... cheers,
-- Arno Thanks to Jordi Clariana, his enlightening post, Daniel for this one, Aur lien was motivating me again in solving this iDrac Express issue and Al Chu (FreeIPMI project leader) for all his invaluable help on IPMI.

This blog has been cited in an academic paper! On October 2011 I drafted a blog post about Infosuicide, or "Infocide" as I prefer, prompted by Mark Pilgrim's disappearance. I never got around to finishing the post up in particular I felt it was too long but my draft was exposed to the Internet and somebody noticed it. Assistant Professor Joseph Reagle stumbled across my draft and wrote an in-depth paper 410 Gone : Infocide in Open Content Communities citing a whole load of writings on the subject, including my own. I believe his paper has now been submitted to a conference proceedings (I'll update this when I find out which!) For that reason I've gone ahead and published the draft as-is.

One week. One long week. One beautiful week. One of the two major weeks of the year has passed since my previous post. Surely, we are in the middle of the two Major Weeks of the year, in the yearly schedule I have upheld for almost(!) ten years: DebConf+DebCamp. Yesterday, DebConf officially started. For the first time ever, we had a DebConf track targetted at the local (for a wide definition of local: All of the Central American countries) communities, which I chaired. We had the following talk lineup during this track:

• Empaquetando software para Debian (Gunnar Wolf)
• Introduction to Debian translation workflow and processes (Christian Perrier)
• OpenPGP discussion and skillshare (Daniel Kahn Gillmor)
• Empaquetando colaborativamente con git y collab-maint (Ulises Vitulli)
• Uso del sistema de manejo de errores de Debian (Hector Colina)
• Building free software communities (Leandro G mez

I believe it was a great success, and I hope the talks are useful in the future. They will be put online soon thanks to the tireless work of our work team. Today we sadly lost the presence of our DPL due to very happy circumstances he will surely announce himself. But DebConf will continue nevertheless - And proof of that is our anual, great, fun and inviting Cheese and Wine Party! After a series of organizational hiccups I hope nobody notices (oops, was I supposed not to say this?), today we had a beautiful, fun and most successful cheese and wine party, as we have had year after year since 2005. As many other people, we did our humble contribution for this party to be the success it deserves. There is lots of great cheeses, great wines, and much other great stuff we have to thank to each of the individuals who made this C&W party the success it was. Yes, it might be among the least-academic parts of our conference, but at the same time, it's one of its most cherished -and successful- traditions. And above all else, we have to thank our Great Leader^W^WCheeseMaster (who we still need to convince to play by our Great Leader's mandates - And no, I don't mean Zack here!) Hugs and thanks to my good and dear friend Christian Perrier for giving form to one of DebConf's social traditions that makes it so unique, so different from every other academic or communitary conference I have ever been part of. We still have most of the week to go. And if you are not in Managua (and are not coming soon), you can follow our activities following our video streams. Remember, debian/rules, now more than ever! And even given the (perpetual) heat in Managua: Wheezy is frozen, whee! [ all photos here taken by regina ]

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It's almost seven years now since I wrote/published Mermaids. It was an important step in my life, confessing publicly what I've found out about myself, how I feel and identify myself. It definitely has been a certain turning point in my life. A year later, there was the Debconf6 in Mexico, which was just as important. I was wearing a skirt for the first time, and that for the whole duration of the two weeks. It was an enormous feeling of freedom, and I knew I was feeling at home. That was also the time I shaved off my beard. And since? Well, I sort of limited myself to these two weeks every year. Debconf is my haven, Debconf is my home. Here I allow myself to be myself. Debian is my family. And like in every family, there are people who won't understand, but that doesn't matter. I feel comfortable to express myself in this crowd in the way I feel. Being abroad seems to help with the confidence, and it seems like it also shines through. I haven't had lots of strange looks. To the contrary, when I went with a skirt to a homosexual acceptance event at home in Vienna, there was a group of gays who were pointing and laughing. Quite an interesting experience, one would assume that people who are wanting more acceptance would be more acceptable and tolerant themselves... But, I don't think I will ever take the step toward actually turning my body into a female one. It was an important step for me to find out about my inner self, and it actually managed to make me accept my male body; even though I can totally relate to people not being able to understand this both people not in the situation and people being in the situation and needing the physical adjustment to be able to be happy again. But this is what and how I am: Contents may vary from packaging. This though has an inherited problem: as I am not (usually) heading for a female appearance (besides my skirt during Debconf), people keep addressing me with a male pronoun, even, or rather especially when using my nick Rhonda. This is something that I consider a fair bit disturbing, especially when it comes from people that I consider to address with the term friends. One would assume that people who you share a fair bit of private life with would be the ones who can understand and relate better than others. But that's where we are, and I also can understand the troubles: I'm not giving them much visual help for fixing their thoughts. I found the confidence in my body, and like most of you know, I have a son I dearly love (and miss like hell these two weeks), so I know how to use the tools it comes with, frankly spoken. But I won't go the road to adjust my body to be a female one instead, just to convince people that I really am the female person that I identify as. It might be hard for you to understand that, it might be hard for you to accept it it is also hard for me, to fight for the acceptance that I thought are an inherent part of the term friendship. I have deepest respect for the people who feel the requirement and have the strength to adjust their body to their mind. It though just isn't the road for me. I already have enough uncertainties in my life to cope with, and I don't need another one to deal with, related to that I might not be able to accept my body after the transition than I am able to accept it now. It's just not important enough for me to find my place. My place is here, my home is Debconf.

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Hey fellows Debian lovers, and old friends reading this, after more than a decade serving Debian, our greatest and beloved OS, I've finally decided to start blogging. Please, bear with me, I'm still very new at blogging. Thus, constructive comments and mails are welcome So here we actually go with the usual 'quick introduction post': I'm Arnaud Quette, 36 years old, and Debian developer since 2001. I'm leading the upstream project called 'NUT' (Network UPS Tools project) since 2005, and I'm a Free Software hacker since 1997 (incomplete list of contribs and linkedIn profile). I'm working at Eaton, a Debian partner participating in the power protection of our Debian infrastructure (FTP masters and Alioth). If you're a Debian admin, and feel Eaton can help, drop me a mail. My main Opensource contribution, for some years, is to lead 'NUT', and the related power management developments and distribution. As such, I also ensure that all this work lands finely in Debian, and is useful and reliable to users. In the past, I've also been working on some Media Center packages (Coherence UPnP, moovida, LIRC, ...), Synaptics touchpads app and some more. Here is the current list of maintained and co-maintained packages, though not up to date. It's not always that easy to balance between upstream lead and the numerous developments on one hand, and Debian packaging and support on the other hand... Not counting real life and the many others responsibilities I have. Just forgive me for the time it has taken (and is still taking, sometimes) to update my various packages. Just remember that I'm always doing my best So dear Planet Debian readers, I'll be bothering you with some news on power management and GreenIT in Debian. There will be both upstream and Debian developments and releases info, so that you all can react. There may probably be some diversion, on other Debian related topics, one way or another... All this will depend on your feedback, and the balance with my available time and pleasure to share with you these few tech bits. cheers,
Arnaud

For once, I went north. Which means going *into* the city but I also need to explore that part of Managua, right? Therefore, I went down north heading to the lake and Old Cathedral. Surroundings of the Old Cathedral and Presidential House are strange. There is nearly nobody around, few activity. Doesn't look like a city's "heart". I also reached the lakeshore. I already read that managua is more or less "turning its back" to its lake. It's really true. There's nearly no place where one can actually freely reach the lakeshore, at least where I was. Seems that, here also, the nasty habit of bars and restaurants to "privatize" the shores, as one can see in Italy, sometimes Mexico....is also happening. I'm happy we have laws against this in France, indeed. Fun to also see a small recreation park...just like Coney Island, in some way..:) Anyway, I could still reach the lakeshore at some point and take a picture of the Chiltepe Peninsula (guess what on it? A volcano, of course...). I finally went back up through a different neighbourhood than the one I went down. Often "not so nice" streets, in some poor neighbourhood but, again, I always felt very safe....and people are still saying "bon dia" when you meet them. GPS trace is here, as usual.