The acpi-support maintainer unfortunately decided 2012-06-21 that having some script installed by a package to cleanly shut down the computer should not be possible without having consolekit and thus dbus installed. So (assuming this package will migrate to wheezy which it most likely will tomorrow) with wheezy you will either have to write your own event script or install consolekit and dbus everywhere. You need two files. You need one in /etc/acpi/events/, for example a /etc/acpi/events/powerbtn:

event=button[ /]power
action=/etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh

Which causes a power-button even to call a script /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh, which you of course also need:

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/shutdown -h -P now "Power button pressed"

You can also name it differently, but /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh has the advantage that the script from acpi-support-base (in case it was only removed and not purged) does not call shutdown itself if it is there. (And do not forget to restart acpid, otherwise it does not know about your event script yet). For those too lazy I've also prepared a package acpi-support-minimal, which only contains those scripts (and a postinst to restart acpid to bring it into effect with installation), which can be get via apt-get using

deb http://people.debian.org/~brlink/acpi-minimal wheezy-acpi-minimal main
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~brlink/acpi-minimal wheezy-acpi-minimal main

or directly from http://people.debian.org/~brlink/acpi-minimal/pool/main/a/acpi-support-minimal/. Sadly the acpi-support maintainer sees no issue at all and ftp-master doesn't like so tiny packages (which is understandable but means the solution is more than a apt-get away).

Whilst nobody was looking, Mono became the most important framework in the world of games. And I mean that with only a smidge more than my usual levels of hyperbole. It really is fantastically important, as far as game development goes. I blogged a long time ago about its use inside EA s multi-million-selling The Sims 3. And the massive performance gains in Second Life when they switched from their in-house scripting language to Mono are well documented. But I m not talking about those, I m talking about the now, the recent stuff. First up is Unity 3D. Not to be confused with the Ubuntu user interface, Unity 3D is a proprietary game development tool which began life for Mac, and has now managed to become the single most popular game engine amongst smartphone developers. It targets a bunch of new platforms not just Android and Windows and iOS, but in the new 4.0 release, Linux too for the first time. And every Unity 3D game is a Mono game the core of Unity is a fork of Mono, which enables it to have the performance and ease of development which it does. A reasonably large percentage of the cross-platform games on Kickstarter, such as Wasteland 2 and Super Retro Squad, are cross-platform because Unity 3D makes it easy and each of those games is powered by Mono. However, I have better things to do today than gush about a proprietary tool. No, far more important are the Free ways to develop games. So today I m going to talk about MonoGame. MonoGame is an implementation of Microsoft XNA a high level framework for developing in .NET languages, originally designed to allow indie developers access to the Xbox 360. XNA covers many of the bases covered by SDL sound, graphics, input, and so on, but can go onto platforms where SDL isn t an option, such as the aforementioned Xbox 360. And with MonoGame, any game written for XNA is a game which can not only run on Microsoft s approved platforms Windows, Xbox 360, Windows Phone but also on other platforms such as Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad, Android, and Linux. Cross-platform is good. More games are good. And MonoGame enables every Xbox 360 indie developer to throw a Linux port out of the door with a relative minimum of fuss. There are 2,521 games on the Xbox Live Indie Games store (games by individuals or small groups, with no major publisher) and each of those can become a game for Debian and Ubuntu with very little work. Not to mention the games with actual publishers (some portion of the 492 games on XBLA), not to mention the mobile games written for Windows Phone, Android and iOS. All of these developers have an easy route to Linux releases, as long as the effort remains low. And with today s publishing in the Debian archive of MonoGame 2.5.1, the effort is as low as can be. Anyone who purchased the recent Humble Indie Bundle 5, and played Bastion, has seen MonoGame in action Bastion began life as an XNA game for Xbox 360, and the Linux port was made possible only by MonoGame. Bastion s 100+ industry awards should indicate the possibilities open to a creative mind with decent developer tools. MonoGame is Free Software, built on top of other Free Software, with an active upstream development team genuinely responsive to the needs of Linux distributions. It s well worth a look not just for porting, but for new projects too. And I m delighted that it will be available to all users of Debian 7.0, as well as Ubuntu 12.10.

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1088
Affecting Wheezy:	697
Wheezy only:	128
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	569

Of these 569 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	21
Patched in Wheezy:	77
Duplicates in Wheezy:	57
Can be fixed in a security Update:	22
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	8
Claimed in Wheezy:	1
Delayed in Wheezy:	2
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	44

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 375 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 603 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

I've been using Twitter's bootstrap library recently to build this Web site, and wondered how to be able to use the bootstrap-tab Javascript plugin in a bookmark friendly manner. I ended up with a simple solution. These are my first steps in Javascript and front-end manipulation, and it's really not my area of expertise, so don't be harsh. <figure>

function bootstrap_tab_bookmark (selector)   if (selector == undefined)  
    selector = "";  
    /* Automagically jump on good tab based on anchor */
    $(document).ready(function()  
        url = document.location.href.split('#');
        if(url[1] != undefined)  
            $(selector + '[href=#'+url[1]+']').tab('show');
         
     );
    var update_location = function (event)  
        document.location.hash = this.getAttribute("href");
     
    /* Update hash based on tab */
    $(selector + "[data-toggle=pill]").click(update_location);
    $(selector + "[data-toggle=tab]").click(update_location);
 

</figure> All you need is to use and call this function with a selector (only useful if you have several tabs/pills divisions) when the document is ready. The first part takes care of showing the good tab based on the hash contained in the URL. The second part takes care of changing the document location to add the current tab to it when the user clicks.

The bug-fix in version 0.9.12 of Rcpp turned out to be incomplete, so a new version 0.9.13 is now on CRAN and will get to Debian shortly. The Rcpp::Enviroment constructor is now properly fixed (using the global environment as a default value). As well, a new #define was created to detect the clang++ compiler before/after version 3.0.0 as one exceptions header changed location. Unit tests files were also once more updated. The complete NEWS entry for 0.9.13 is below; more details are in the ChangeLog file in the package and on the Rcpp Changelog page.

0.9.13  2012-06-28
    o   Truly corrected Rcpp::Environment class by having default constructor
        use the global environment, and removing the default argument of
        global environment from the SEXP constructor
    o   Added tests for clang++ version to include bits/exception_defines.h
        for versions 3.0 or higher (similar to g++ 4.6.0 or later), needed to
        include one particular exceptions header
    o   Made more regression tests conditional on the RunAllRcppTests to come
        closer to the CRAN mandate of running tests in sixty seconds
    o   Updated unit test wrapper tests/doRUnit.R as well as unitTests/runTests.R

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release 0.9.12. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

Starting next week, I'll start at new job. I will still stay at SUSE, so it's not that big change, but still it is new challenge for me. I'll be moving out of L3 department, where I've spend almost four years. L3 is really a great team where man can learn basically anything, simply because you can meet there anything from broken swap on S390 up to wrong icons in LibreOffice :-). The new position is inside Security team, still I'll be mostly focused on writing some internal tools, rather than doing security work (at least for first year or so). The current plan is base on work I've done for L3 tools and use Django for the web interface, but that's just a plan for now and might change in the future. Anyway looking forward to new challenges at new job.

Filed under: Django English Suse 0 comments Flattr this!

OASIS is a tool to integrate a configure, build and install system in your OCaml project. It helps to create standard entry points in your build system and allows external tools to analyse your project easily. It is the building brick of OASIS-DB, a CPAN for OCaml. This release takes almost 18 months to complete. This is too long and I will talk in another blog post on the way I am trying to improve this right now (esp. using continuous integration). This new release fixes a small bug (1 line) that prevents setup.ml to run with OCaml 4.00. If you have projects that was generated with a former release consider upgrading to OASIS 0.3.0. There are several big new stuff that comes with this release. It now supports Pack: field for libraries which allows to pack your library using -for-pack and so on. We are also compiling .cmxs (dynlink object for native) by default and we publish them in the META file. This feature was implemented in order to get more libraries to provide .cmxs and to help project like Ocsigen to take advantage of this. If you want to get rid of this at configure time, you can use ./configure --override native_dynlink false. We introduce two new default flags: --enable-tests and --disable-docs for configure. These are implicit flags that define if we will run Test sections or compile Document sections. They are especially useful to reduce the number of dependencies, because dependencies of Test will be excluded by default. We recommend to set Build$: flag(tests) to any Library or Executable sections that are only useful for tests. This allows you to really cut down the number of dependencies. The last change I want to introduce is about the old setup-dev subcommand which is now deprecated. It has been replaced by 2 different update schemes. I am pretty excited by this feature which in fact comes from OASIS user (esp. Lwt project). The former scheme was to have a big 'setup.ml' that always call the command oasis to update. This was complex and not very useful. We now have 2 mode: dynamic and weak. dynamic allow you to have a small setup.ml and to keep your VCS history clean but you need to install OASIS. weak need a big setup.ml but only need to call the command oasis if someone change something in _oasis. This mode is targeted to project that wants to be able to checkout from VCS an OCaml project without installing OASIS. The difference generated by weak mode doesn't pollute too much the VCS history because most the time they make sense. For example, you upgrade your package version number in _oasis and it produces a change with 6 lines where the version number changes in every META, setup.ml files and so on. This version has been tested on:

• Linux (Debian Sid and Debian Squeeze with GODI, OCaml 3.12)
• Windows Vista with MS Visual Studio 2008 toolchain, OCaml 3.12
• Mac OS X, OCaml 3.12 from GODI

You can download it here or use your favorite package manager: Debian (UPDATE: pending upload)

$ apt-get install -t experimental oasis

GODI

$ godi_console perform -build apps-oasis

odb.ml

$ ocaml odb.ml oasis

Here is the complete changelog: EXTREMLY IMPORTANT changes (read this)

• Fix bug with scanf %S@\n for ocaml 4.00. We were unfortunetaly using an undocumented tolerance of Scanf in the previous version. You should consider making new release using this version that fixed this.

PACKAGES uploaded to oasis-db will be automatically "derived" before OCaml 4.00 release (i.e. oUnit v1.1.1 will be regenerated with this new version as oUnit v1.1.1~oasis1). PACKAGES not uploaded to oasis-db need to be regenerated. In order not to break 3rd party tools that consider a tarball constant, I recommend to create a new version. Thanks to INRIA OCaml team for synchronizing with us on this point. Major changes:

• Handle the field Pack: true to be able to create packed libraries. It also installs .mli files for documentation into the target directory. The pack option is only supported for OASISFormat: 0.3, you will need to update the version of your _oasis file to match it.

• Introduce --enable-tests to disable tests and docs at oasis level. It seems a very common pattern to have a Flag tests to turn off by default the tests. This is now define as a standard var and you should remove you previous Flag tests but you can continue to use flag(tests) where needed.

You can now have the following example:

     ...
     Executable test_exec
       Install: false
       Build$: flag(tests)
       MainIs: testExec.ml
       BuildDepends: oUnit
     
     Test main
       Command: $test_exec
       TestTools: test_exec
     ...

The Run$: flag(tests) is implicit for the section Test main. The default value is false for tests. If all the executable for test are flagged correctly (Build$: flag(tests)), you'll get rid of the dependency on oUnit. It works the same for documentation, however the default is true. (Closes: #866)

• Allow to define interdependent flags

In order to allow interdependent flags, we transform back lazy values into unit -> string functions. This allows to change a flag value on the command line and to update all the dependent values. (Closes: #827, #938)

• Deprecate the subcommand oasis setup-dev in favor of oasis setup -setup-update none weak dynamic

It defines different ways to manage the auto-update of setup.ml:

• none: this is the default mode, and the one you should use when distributing tarballs. No update are performed at al.
• weak: the update is only triggered when something change in _oasis , we keep all files generated
• dynamic: the content of 'setup.ml' is ultra small (<2kB) and we only keep a small setup.ml, Makefile and configure.

The choice between weak and dynamic depends on your need with regard to VCS and to the presence of oasis. The weak allow to checkout the project from VCS and be able to work on it, without the need of installing 'oasis' as long as you don't change the file _oasis. But it clutter your VCS history with changes to the build system each time you change something in _oasis. The 'dynamic' mode gives you no VCS history pollution but makes mandatory to have installed oasis libraries.

• Don't copy executable in ocamlbuild

Avoid copying executable to their real name. It helps to call ocamlbuild a single time for the whole build rather than calling it n time (n = number of executable sections) and copying resulting exec. This speeds up the build process because ocamlbuild doesn't have to compute/scan dependencies each time. The drawback is that you have to use $foo when you want to call Executable foo, because $foo will be '_build/.../main.byte'.

• Change the way we parse command line like option (CCOpt, CCLib and the like). We have implemented a real POSIX command line parser, except that variables are processed by Buffer.add_substitute (except if correctly escaped, using Buffer.add_substitute escaping).

For example:

CCOpt: -DEXTERNAL_EXP10 -L/sw/lib "-framework vecLib"

Will be parsed correctly and outputed according to target OS.

• Minimize the dependencies of the project.

In order to ease building oasis, we have minimize the number of dependencies. You only need to install ocamlmod, ocamlify and ocaml-data-notation for a standard build without tests. Dependencies on pcre, extlib and ocamlgraph has been dropped. The remaining dependencies are hidden behind a flag tests.

• Implement proposal for handling plugin in META, using "plugin" extra directives

OASIS now produces .cmxs file by default and add them to META. Now a META looks like:

     ...
     archive(byte) = "oasis.cma"
     archive(byte, plugin) = "oasis.cma"
     archive(native) = "oasis.cmxa"
     archive(native, plugin) = "oasis.cmxs"
     ...

This will ultimately help to generate automatically .cmxs for all oasis enabled projects. We hope that this new feature will improve dynamic linking use in OCaml (esp. for project like Ocsigen). Other changes

• Produce only subcommands specific helps when asked (Closes: #783)
• Use pager for long textual output (Closes: #782)
• Give the help summary directly when running just "oasis" (Closes: #781)
• Remove pwd filename prefix to avoid too long command line on Windows (Closes: #1007)
• Install required .cmx when installing libraries (Closes: #686, #885)
• Retain blanks at the beginning of line in freeform (Closes: #811)
• Allow PreConfCommand to create setup.data with any variables inside (Closes: #823)
• Allow to use setup.data in shell script and Makefile (Closes: #982)
• Fix execute permissions (Closes: #980)
• Drop extra version in ocaml version (Closes: #964, #888)
• Always output info messages on stderr (Closes: #785)
• Fix interversion in version comparator lexer (Closes: #808)
• Document the fact that setup.data is mandatory (Closes: #946)
• configure translates getopt command line to Arg (Closes: #778, #804)
• Generate valid META when there are line breaks in synopsis (Closes: #933)
• Keep owner of generated files (Closes: #793)
• Set -I +threads for ocamlfind ocamldoc in ocamlbuild (Closes: #949)
• Exclude VCS directories by default (Closes: #847)
• Print the configure summary in the "normal" order.
• Merge findlib virtual containers with the same name
• Synchronize plugin data for section
• Improve documentation
• Verify validity of input when parsing in quickstart (Closes: #797)
• Fix stack overflow when there are twice the same library (Closes: #1130)
• Parse license examples for DEP5 specification (Closes: #1102)
• Be ultra-liberal regarding version syntax (allow '_' and ' ' in the version).
• Allow to add extra content to META files (XMETAExtraLines)
• Allow to use executable name that contains "-" as a variable (replacing "-" by "_").

Thanks to Anil Madhavapeddy, Pierre Chambart, Christophe Troestler, Jeremie Dimino, Ronan Le Hy, Yaron Minsky and Till Varoquaux for their help with this release. Also thanks to all the testers of the numerous release candidates. This was a long work and each time a tester has downloaded oasis has helped me to know that I was working for someone.

3 years ago I bought a OCZ Core v2 SSD... I was very disappointed by write freeze, price and capacity. Recently a friend of mine, told me that I should try the new ones that has much improved in the meantime. So I decided to give another try to SSD on my laptop. I bought a Crucial M4 128GB SSD, because they seems to be of better quality than OCZ (and probably because of my first failed attempt). The price is correct (~130 ) and after some tests it seems quite good at write and read speed. So from this point of view, I am more convinced than my first attempt. Now, the real problem of the SSD is how to migrate your old data to your new drive. I have always upgraded my HD to a larger one and so a simple dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M was enough... In the case of SSD you have to migrate to a smaller capacity. This includes to juggle a little bit with your partition to get something that fits. In order to improve a little bit the lifetime of my SSD, I have tried to follow various advice you can found on the Internet. One of this advice that seems to make sense, is to align your partition to a number modulo 2048 (rather than the default which is to start at 63). I followed this forum to do that. I end up with all partitions aligned to 2048. The GOOD news: doing data migration for Linux is a breeze. As a matter of fact, Linux support pretty well being move around, ending up on a different partition and so on... It just took me the time to transfer data, update grub and disk UUID and reboot. The BAD news: doing data migration for Windows is a hell. I always keep a Windows partition to test various OCaml software. But Windows doesn't like you like to be moved around. It especially doesn't like that the first sector of its partition get moved (i.e. from sector 63 to sector 2048). I spend a week trying to 'repair windows' but it was a pure waste of time. Thinkpad comes with a special ways to store passwords which is not compatible with the rescue mode of Windows, so you cannot access the repair mode -- because you need the Administrator password -- which is not readable... I decided to get back to the standard first sector on 63... Now Windows complained about 'hal.dll' missing. You know why ! Because the partition number has changed (from /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda3). Boot in Linux, run fdisk, enter expert mode, fix order -- after having remounted read-only the root partition and unmount everything else. Grub complains a little bit, fall into rescue mode. I fix that following these instructions and running 'grub-install --recheck /dev/sda'. So after 2 weeks of fights, I end up with a working windows (honestly, this is a pain, don't try to play with Windows partition, this OS is a lot more sensible sensitive than Linux).

The DebConf12 schedule is finally available! As usual, the DebConf conference can only be finalized a couple of days before DebConf itself starts. But hey Take a look at it, and start planning your activities! Not final, never final Remember that, even now that the conference schedule is announced, you can still submit talks to DebConf, following what we call ad-hoc talks. What are the steps to do it?

1. Check the schedule and find the timeslot (day, hour and room) you want to talk in
2. Register your event in Pentabarf, and note the generated event ID (the last number in the URL after the submission is accepted)
3. Send a mail to schedule@debconf.org detailing the event ID, title (just to confirm it), and the requested timeslot
4. All requests _must_ be received at least 24hr before the requested event for the scheduling team to act accordingly and for the video team to be able to plan on resources to cover the requested session
5. Video team coverage (event recording plus streaming on a best-effort basis) will be given to activities scheduled on the Aula Magna and Roberto Ter n auditoriums.
6. We will try to grant requests on a first-come-first-serve basis. If two events are requested for the same timeslot, the first will have precedence, and we will schedule the second as close as possible to it. We will notify the submitters if this happens, of course.

Conference tracks In DebConf12, many talks are organized around the following tracks:

DebianDay

This track is meant for the local (Nicaraguan/Central American) community to be attracted to Debian. It does not usually have technically minded talks; the DebConf general audience is, of course, invited to take part in it, as there will surely be interesting angles on how Debian is used in different use-cases, and there will be interesting Q&A session with the audience.

Getting involved in Debian

Central America is a very special region. It has vibrant Free Software user groups and communities, among which there is an important interest to get involved in Debian.
This track will have some talks in Spanish, some talks in English, explaining different Debian processes and tools, aiming at attracting locals to contribute to Debian.

Debian for the cloud

All about virtualization. Management infrastructure, details on virtual machine engines, insight on how to tweak your kernel for optimum virtualized performance, and of course how to get it all humming perfectly with your Debian packages.

Building and porting

With an every day stronger transit to mobile computing, we are seeing a renaissance of porting. At the same time, we finally have multiarch as part of Debian. And were that not to be enough, we finally have more than one compiler that can be used for most of the software in the archive. Put all this together, and you will have a very interesting track.

Social activities

DebConf is as much about technical stuff as it is about building closer ties within the members of its community. Eating cheese+wine, going on a trip to the guts of a volcano, having a nice banquet Do you want to add an activity to this pseudo-track?

Skills exchange

Knowledge can also be built by all of us putting our grain of sand. We first had explicit skills exchange sessions in Bosnia last year, and they were very well received. Feel free to propose similar sessions!

And Well, three days to DebCamp and counting. See you Real Soon Now in Managua!

The original image (in wallpaper resolution) was made^Whacked by my friend Aur lio .

Hello!

First of all: I'm going to DebConf :D and I really want to say a big "Thank you!" to every one who made this possible.


So, here's what I've done recently:

I spent some time putting everything in order for the departure to Nicaragua, things like finding a plane ticket through a route that does not require a Visa, making a new Passport, now all is in order.

I've integrated the changes for listing available ESSIDs, in order to close #637128 [0] into a separate branch , which can be found here [1].

The plan is to have only one new template which lists the available networks and which has a option for entering the ESSID manualy. In order to do so, a simple scan is performed on the wireless interface, and the configuration for a particular network resulted after the scan is kept if that one is chosen. The enter manually situation is treated exactly as it was before.

Furthermore, last week (or the week before) I've done some coding style fixes again in a separate branch [2], nothing very fancy, just trimming trailing white spaces and changing some tabs to spaces, where spaces were mostly used. I've also noticed some inconsistencies, regarding white spaces between functions names and the parenthesis. However I think I'm overreacting a little, those matters are not really that relevant, but when I'll have some free time I'll get to this as well.


Next in line: Issues

Testing is still giving me some troubles, the show essids part is not yet fully tested, so I couldn't say for sure if everything works as planned.

Apart from the classical: write the image to an USB and reboot method, I'm using Virtual Box for testing. I've managed to create a passthrough for the wireless interface, but now I have troubles with some firmware. Hopefully I'll solve this as soon as possible since it would really make my life easier.


Future plans:

I've realized that I've underestimated a little what the project implies and the amount of information that is new to me. I feel that I have learned a lot and that there is still a lot to learn and I'm very happy that it is so. I've now started documenting regarding IPv6, beginning with this [3]. We haven't decided yet what the next task will be exactly.


[0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=637128
[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/people/sorina/show_essids
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/people/sorina/coding_style
[3] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/

Upcoming Weblate 1.1 is now installed on both http://demo.weblate.org and http://l10n.cihar.com. There release is almost ready (I plan to add only one minor feature) and this setup was done to get more testing in real life setup before making actual release. As you can see from list of changes, there are no big changes from user point of view. In case indexing offloading is enabled (what is the case for l10n.cihar.com), the interface should respond more quickly while translating (and not produce errors in some setups). The rest of changes are even more hidden, like smarter handling of merges and commits (still there is place for improvements here) or better validation of admin forms. Anyway I hope to complete missing features and do possible bug fixes in first two week of July and you can expect 1.1 to be released around Friday 13th.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

Today, I wondered how much translations were done using Weblate since it was born. Of course I can give only numbers for services I maintain, the biggest one being translation server for phpMyAdmin, Gammu and Weblate. Looking at the logs, the server l10n.cihar.com helped to contribute over 20000 (actually little bit more as tracked are only changes after releasing Weblate 0.8), what is quite impressive number. Of course biggest amount of contributions came in time of preparing phpMyAdmin 3.5.0 release, where I gave it huge amount of publicity (AKA spamming my blog), but number of people accessing the website still grows since then (still number of submitted translations is slightly lower). Now as 1.0 release proved to be quite stable, it's time to focus on 1.1 development, which will bring offloading of fulltext indexing (it was proven to be unreliable to update index online for bigger sites). Almost all issues targeted for 1.1 are already fixed and all what needs to be done is testing in real life situations.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

As Paul already posted, desktop-base 7.0 was uploaded to Debian unstable.
I worked on the KDE related integration of Adrien Aubourg s Joy Wallpapers (Congratulations again). I am pretty happy with how well they work with KDE, hence I am sharing the result.

This is what KDE s login manager kdm will look like in debian wheezy:

As you can see, the chooser got a whole rework. It s now based on the kdm theme I prepared for my Roj proposal. The new ksplash theme then includes the Debian logo:
For your workspace wallpaper there also exisits the ink splatted alternative:
I am pretty happy with the artwork. I like it s minimalism and it s not getting boring after using it for a while.

I seem to have spend too much time online and used too much of blogging engines. Yesterday, I've completed yet another import of content to this blog, to have all my content available in single place. Looking at the import scripts I already have four of them - Movabletype, Nanoblogger, Wordpress and recent addition was Drupal. For Drupal, I had to install Node export module to have some sensible way to get the content. Then it was just matter of parsing XML and fixing up links. Quite challenging was rendering of Texy! markup in Python as there seem to no native solution available. Fortunately there is a XML-RPC service available, what made that part quite easy.

Filed under: English Website 0 comments Flattr this!

A few days ago I found this blog explaining how to improve the tab completion by tinkering with your .inputrc. The magic lines are:

set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-ignore-case on
set completion-map-case on
Last two lines make tab-completion ignore case, hyphens, underscores, the first one spares you one tab when more than one match was found. Very neat! I would have never found out, since there wasn t even an .inputrc in my home directory. Do you know any other cool .inputrc-tricks?

Today, OFCOM issued a press release entitled "New measures to protect online copyright and inform consumers". According to the announcement, internet users will be encouraged to download music and films through legal channels under the measures. Ofcom has published a draft code for consultation that would require large internet service providers (ISPs) to inform customers of allegations that their internet connection has been used to infringe copyright. There does seem to have been a number of concessions made, which is welcome, but I do still have a number of concerns. The code 'only' covers ISPs with more than 400k fixed lines - BT, Everything Everywhere, O2, Sky, TalkTalk Group and Virgin Media. This covers about 93% of the UK retail market. If an allegation of copyright infringement is made, the ISP would need to write to the customer with notice that an infringement has occurred, and in a new change, the number of copyright infringement reports connected to their account. If more than three letters are received in a year, anonymous information may be provided on request to copyright owners showing them which infringement reports are linked to that customer s account. The copyright owner may then seek a court order requiring the ISP to reveal the identity of the customer. Two more changes have been implemented:

• Copyright owners procedures for gathering evidence of infringement must now be approved by Ofcom, rather than by the copyright owners themselves.
• Ofcom has decided that subscribers should have 20 working days to appeal an allegation of infringement, but only on grounds specified in the Digital Economy Act.

Obviously the former of these will require further scrutiny, but I'm happier that this is not with the vested interest themselves. As for the latter, this gets a bit interesting. The Act states that

an appeal on any grounds must be determined in favour of the subscriber unless the copyright owner or internet service provider shows that a) the apparent infringement was an infringement of copyright, and b) the report relates to the subscriber s IP address at the time of that infringement.

This is good as it puts the burden of proof on the copyright owner, although it still uses IP addresses which is problematic. For example, New York Judge Gary Brown has ruled IP addresses are insufficient evidence to identify pirates, and has provided a lengthy and thoughtful explanation in his ruling. There has also been a consultation published on the how to share costs costs. The suggestion is fairly simple:

"Copyright Owners should bear all of the costs incurred by Ofcom, the majority of costs incurred by the appeals body, and 75% of the costs efficiently and reasonably incurred by Qualifying ISPs in carrying out their obligations."

This has the risk of driving up internet access prices as ISPs have to recover the costs of these notifications. Additionally:

"Under the Order, subscribers will have to pay a 20 fee to make an appeal against a report of infringement, which will be refunded in the event the appeal succeeds; the remaining costs of determining an appeal will be met by the Copyright Owner who submitted the CIR which has been appealed."

I disagree with the concept of having to pay for an appeal in this way. If accused, someone should be able to refute the argument without cost. This will introduce a barrier to entry, and even if it is refundable is something I believe should be avoided. Finally, the exact costs of implementing this have been set out. It looks like the Copyright Owners would have to pay 60p per letter (with the ISPs shouldering the remaining 20p), a similar split around capital costs - which are the ones that are actually significant. Taking the above, it seems that in total that content owners will have to shell out 15M to use the DEA scheme. The cost seems to be more or less fixed which could encourage content owners to send out frivolous accusations. There's an iterative process which will run to determine the estimated number of notifications, and if eventually the Content Owners don't agree with the pricing, they will have elected not to take advantage of the provisions of the Initial Obligations Code, as they have not been able to make binding commitments to fund CIR processing. So, in summary, this is something to keep an eye on. It certainly hasn't gone away, it's due to start in March 2014. The revised draft code and consultation, which closes on 26 July 2012, can be found here, and the sharing of costs consultation runs until 18th September 2012, found here.

I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time we get to know Jos Luis Redrejo Rodr guez, one of our great helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published Debian Edu Squeeze version. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of ICT in schools How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are been used everyday inside Debian Edu. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or economical and technical resources in the different countries don't allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the technologies in school. Which free software do you use daily? Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time between Iceweasel, Geany and Terminator. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I think there is not a single strategy because there are very different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc. Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even universities. So different strategies are needed. But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue working there.

Review: Quiet, by Susan Cain

Publisher:	Crown
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	0-307-45220-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	263

I've always been an introvert. This is something that surprises some people when they first meet me since they equate introversion with shyness, and I'm not at all shy. It surprises others because I'm quite vocal and outspoken in meetings, but introversion also doesn't imply a lack of self-confidence. I can run meetings, give presentations, and argue my perspective in front of just about anyone, but I don't like parties, I crave time by myself, and I could happily go for weeks without seeing another human being. I'm an introvert because I find people draining rather than invigorating, written communication far easier and more comfortable than spoken, and superficial social contact more irritating and frustrating than enjoyable. If you think think that means there may be something wrong with me, or that I would be happier if "drawn out of my shell," I wish you would read this book. But I suspect its core audience will be people like me: those who are tired of being pushed to conform with extrovert beliefs about social interaction, those who are deeply disgusted by the word "antisocial" or feel pangs of irrational guilt when hearing it, or those who just want to read an examination of interpersonal interactions that, for once, is written by and about people who like quiet and solitude just like they do. I first encountered Susan Cain via her TED talk, which I think is both the best possible summary of this book and the best advertisement for it. If you've not already seen it, watch it; it's one of the best TED talks I've seen, good enough that I've watched it three times. If you then want more of the same, buy Quiet. Quiet has, I think, three messages. First, it's a tour of the science: what is introversion and extroversion? Is there evidence that these are real physiological differences? (Spoiler: yes.) What do we know about introversion? How do we know those things what experiments have been done and what methods have been used? Here, it's a good general introduction, although Cain is careful to point out that it only scratches the surface and there's much more scientific depth. For example, she touches on the connections between introversion and sensitivity to stimulus and points out that they're two separate, if related, categorizations, but doesn't have the space here to clarify the distinctions and tease them apart. But she lays a reasonable foundation, particularly in defense of introversion as a natural, physiologically grounded, scientifically analyzable, common, and healthy way of interacting with the world. (For those who are curious about the distinctions between introversion and sensitivity, and the argument that most of what Cain says here about introversion is actually about sensitivity, see the blog post by Elaine Aron.) The second message, the one that resonated with me the most, was Cain's passionate defense of introversion. Business culture (at least in the United States, which is what both Cain and I know) is strongly biased towards extroversion; at least faking extroversion seems to be required for some career advancement. Extrovert culture dominates politics and most public discourse. It's common to find people who consider introversion, particularly in children, to be a sign of unhappiness, poor social adjustment, psychological problems, or other issues that should be "cured" or changed. Cain's gentle but firm passion in defense of introversion is a breath of fresh air. She attacks open plan offices, the current obsession with group learning and social school settings, and the modern group-think bias towards collaboration over solitude and concentration, and she does that with a combination of polite frustration and the conclusions of multiple studies. Introverts will be cheering as she constructs solid arguments and musters evidence against things that we've always found miserable and then been told we were wrong, short-sighted, or socially inept for finding miserable. I am so utterly on her side in this argument that I have no way of knowing how persuasive it will be, but it's lovely just to hear someone put into words what I feel. This defense does skew the book. Quiet is not, and does not purport to be, an even-handed presentation of introversion and extroversion. It's written proudly and unabashedly from the introvert's point of view. I'm fine with that: I, like Cain, think the US is saturated in extrovert perspectives and extrovert advice, particularly in the business world, and could use some balancing by activism from the other perspective. But be aware that this is not the book to look to for an objective study of all angles of the introvert/extrovert dichotomy, and I'm not sure her descriptions of extroversion are entirely fair or analogous to those of introversion. The extroversion described here seems somewhat extreme to me. I'm dubious how many extroverts would recognize themselves in it, which partly undermines the argument. The third message of the book, once Cain has won the introvert's heart, is some advice on how to be a proud introvert, to make the space and find the quiet that one desires, and to balance that against places where one may want and need to act like an extrovert for a while. Cain thankfully does not try to make this too much of the book, nor does she hold up any particular approach as The Answer. All the answers are going to be individual. But she does offer some food for thought, particularly around how to be conscious of and make delibrate choices about one's energy expenditures and one's recharge space. She also captures beautifully something that I've not seen explained this well before: the relief that an introvert can feel in the company of an extrovert who helps navigate social situations, make conversation, and keep discussions going until they can reach the depth and comfort level where the introvert can engage. I wish anyone in a position of authority over social situations would read this book, or at least watch the TED talk and be aware of the issues. Particularly managers, since (at least in my relatively limited experience) workplace culture is so far skewed towards extroversion that it can be toxic to introverts. Many of the techniques used by extrovert managers, and the goals and advice they give their employees, are simply wrong for introverts, and even damaging. Cain speaks well to the difficulties of empathy between people with very different interaction preferences, such as the problems with extroverts trying to "draw out" introverts who have hit social overload (or sensitive people who have hit stimulus overload). She also discusses something that I'd previously not thought about, namely how the pressure towards extroversion leads people to act extroverted even when naturally introverted, and how it's therefore very difficult to tell from behavior (and sometimes even to tell internally!) what one's natural interaction style is. But mostly I recommend this book if you're an introvert, if the TED talk linked above speaks to you. Even if we can't convince the world to respect introversion more, or at least stop treating it as abnormal, it's a lovely feeling to read a book from someone who gets it. Who understands. Who fills a book with great stories about introverts and how they construct their worlds and create quiet space in which to be themselves. Rating: 9 out of 10