Ten years ago, this very day, my first Debian package entered the Debian unstable repository. It was an addon for Mozilla Composer, Daniel Glazman s Cascades. On the same day, my second Debian package entered the Debian unstable repository as well. It was an addon for Mozilla Browser, Checky. A few days later, my third Debian package entered Debian unstable. It was an addon for Mozilla Browser, Diggler. Do you see a pattern? They are now abandoned software, although I made Checky and Diggler live a little longer (and I m actually considering reviving Diggler) but they had their importance in my journey, and are part of the reason why I am where I am now. My journey on the web started with NCSA Mosaic on VAX/VMS, then continued with Netscape Navigator, Netscape Communicator and Mozilla Suite on Linux. That s where I was ten years ago, sailing between Galeon (a browser using the Mozilla engine) and Mozilla Suite, and filing some layout bugs. Ten years ago, there was a new kid on the block. It used to be called Phoenix, it had just changed its name to Firebird. Eventually, it changed again for Firefox. You may have heard about it. Because Firebird was so much nicer than the browser in the Mozilla Suite, I started using its Debian package, and wanted my packaged addons to work with it. So I contacted Eric Dorland, Phoenix/Firebird package maintainer at the time, and got the addons working. I then ended up fixing a bunch of packaging issues. This is how I got involved in Firefox packaging for Debian, and what eventually led me to work for Mozilla.

Open question to enthusiasts, theoretical computing scientists and mathematicians of all sorts: is it possible to construct a valid QR-code that leads to interesting results when used as an initial configuration for the Game of Life? The rules:

• QR-code or DataMatrix or whatever, I'm not picky;
• valid code as in maybe not exactly what would be produced from the text, but which the error-correction can reconstruct;
• interesting results, as in not decaying to a stable state (or not too soon, at least);
• for bonus points, it would lead to at least one glider;
• for extra bonus points, a glider gun or a breeder of such;
• for awesomeness, the QR-code should encode an URL pointing at the demonstration of its own evolution in Life.

For Science! Update: The answer seems to be yes. Jurij Smakov assembled a QR-code generator and a Life engine and plugged them together for easy experimenting. And Stefano Zacchiroli noticed that using "free software" (no quotes) as the input leads to a couple of gliders endlessly traveling a field with a few still lifes. This is way beyond awesome.

My last two blog posts were largely about the needs of subunit, but a key result of any protocol is how easy working with it in a high level language is. In the weekend and evenings I ve done an implementation of a new set of classes StreamResult and friends that provides:

• Adaption to and from the existing TestResult APIs (the 2.6 and below API, 2.7 API, and the testtools extended API).
• Multiplexing multiple streams together.
• Adding timing data to a stream if it is absent.
• Summarising a stream.
• Copying a stream to multiple outputs
• A split out API for instructing a test run to stop.
• A simple test-at-a-time stream processor that makes it easy to just deal with tests rather than the innate complexities of an event based interface.

So far the code has been uniformly simple to write. I started with an API that included an estimate function, which I ve since removed I don t believe the complexity is justified; enumeration is not significantly more expensive than counting, and runners that want to be efficient can either not enumerate or remember the enumeration from prior runs. The documentation in the linked pull request is a good place to start to get a handle on the API; I d love feedback. Next steps for me are to do a subunit protocol revision that maps to the Python API, both parser and generator and see how it feels. One wrinkle there is that the reason for doing this is to fix intrinsic limits in the existing protocol so doing forward and backward wire protocol compatibility would defeat the point. However we can make the output side explicitly choose a protocol version, and if we can autodetect the protocol version in the parser, even if we cannot handle mixed streams we can get the benefits of the new protocol once data has been detected. That said, I think we can start without autodetection during prototyping, and add it later. Without autodetection, programs like TestRepository will need configuration options to control what protocol variant to expect. This could be done by requiring this new protocol and providing a stream filter that can be deployed when needed.

A new Rcpp master class is scheduled for March 9 in New York. The format will an updated version of the one-day workshops I have given at the University of Rochester in 2010, in San Franciso in 2011 (organised by Revolution Analytics) and at the UseR! conference in 2012. The style will be hands-on, with numerous concrete examples and solid coverage of most aspects of Rcpp and related packages. As before, about six hours of instruction, split into four sessions of around ninety minutes focussing (loosely) on motivation/intro, core parts, extensions and applications. This should leave ample time for informal discussions and Q+A---as well as for lunch and coffee breaks---for a total of eight hours in the classroom. This is being put together in New York with the help of Jared Lander, and we will have some technical assistance from RStudio in order to use their EC2 farm for exercises with Rcpp. Registrations details are available here; information about other Rcpp events is also available. Feel free to contact me or Jared at our usual email addresses with questions.

My lovely wife Jo has signed up for a charity event in May this year. To help support the UK Fire Fighters Charity, she has committed to a sponsored driving challenge. If she can raise enough funds in sponsorship, she'll get to drive a fire engine, a tractor and (it's rumoured) maybe even a combine harvester too! I've chipped in some money towards the total already; I'm sure Jo would love it if some other nice people pledged on her JustGiving page too. Go on, it's for a good cause! :-)

Some of our customers are using central CUPS systems for managing their printer infrastructure. In the last years the demand for support printing (called Airprint) from mobile apple products increased. This worked well for us on Debian squeeze as documented here (updated scrips). I tried this on a fresh installed Debian wheezy amd64, but no printer was found on any IOS device. Hmm .... let's see if the printer is announces via avahi:

$ avahi-browse -a   grep -i print
+   eth0 IPv6 Kyocera FS-1020D @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv6 AirPrint Kyocera @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv4 Kyocera FS-1020D @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv4 AirPrint Kyocera @ service                    Internet Printer     local

WTF?!? Fortunately we have an Ubuntu 12.04 running in our office and printing from IOS devices works without problems (without copying any files to /etc/avahi/services/):

$ avahi-browse -a   grep -i print
+   eth2 IPv6 Ricoh Aficio MP C2800 @ printing              Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv6 Ricoh Aficio MP 171 @ printing                Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv4 Ricoh Aficio MP 171 @ printing                Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv4 Ricoh Aficio MP C2800 @ printing              Internet Printer     local

I just copied the whole configuration over to my wheezy system, but it didn't worked out. I tried this all on a kfreebsd-i386 system again without success. Sorry, but I don't understand the source of this issue. Cups on wheezy has the same upstream version as on precise. Avahi-daemon on wheezy is just one minor version ahead off precise. Is this a bug/incompatibility in cups and/or avahi? A missing patch compared to the packages of precise? Is this a configuration problem? Update: Looking into LP #1054495 and the debdiff of cups 1.5.3-0ubuntu6 indicates, that there seems modifications beside simple changes of mime configurations files. Update: The fix for LP #1054495 does really fix the problem on wheezy too. With the help of Didier Raboud I was able test a binary package with this fixapplied on our test setup. The good news is, there are no extra modifications needed beside just configuring cups to export it's printers for enabling support for iOS devices. I opened #700961 and hopefully release managment will accept this fix for wheezy. Hints, rants and comments could be send to 'blog - at - waja - dot - info' or via @blogwajainfo.

Hello, World! There are details coming out soon with regards to GSoC:2013, so all this is without any official hat of any sort on. However, I had an idea, and I was wondering if there were people interested in mentoring it. For a long time, I ve wanted a Debian android application one that will use API calls to fetch PTS info, BTS info, and intercept bug URLs to display Debian related information on the native interface. It d also be neat to set a profile (e.g. my emails) and get notifications when things happen that I care about. Anyone know how to code for android and interested in GSoC?

If you are comming from an old SCM like subversion, you may have difficulties to internalize the new workflow. Peter Cottle created Learn Git Branching which is really nice.

Thanks for the group hug! Francesca started a DPL game and I've been mentioned a few times, by people I like deeply. Thank you! However I don't intend to run, and I hope I won't disappoint those who nominated me by saying so. But I don't think of it in terms of letting people down: I can't let anyone down since I never mentioned I'd like to run in the first place. Rather, I like to think that I've just received a wonderful group hug, and hey, wow, come here and let me hug you back! <3 And let me hug some more:

• Gregor Herrmann, I'm in a constant state of awe for what you have done with the Perl team. If you think that some of what you did could also be done as a DPL, please go for it!
• Bdale Garbee, I didn't think there could be such a thing as a reliable source of common sense until I got to know you. And you've been DPL and quite a good deal of other things and definitely know the drill. And you can't say you're busy with your day job. The last thing I want is for you to get bored after your retirement! :P
• Paul Tagliamonte, you seem to bring an incredible energy in everything you get involved with. Let's admit it: Zack's been a perfect DPL in many aspects, he has been incredibly, inhumanly smooth, but he was a bit boring. Zack has left Debian as a perfectly working train steaming on professionally towards awesomeness. Let's give it colours! Let's give it excitement! Let's give it creativity, and silliness! We need someone to cheer Christian up, and I if you can't do it, I can't think of anyone else who can!

I cannot think of a fourth DPL candidate right now and I don't want to postpone this post indefinitely. Think about it this way: you three are so good I can't think of a fourth one right now There are actually lots of people I admire in Debian. I tried to name a few without thinking, but I wasn't thinking so I lost count as soon as I ran out of fingers. I know however that many enjoy to stay out of the spotlight and keep their fun focused on a few specific things. I am one of those myself. Oh dear, FOSDEM was too short, can I have DebConf soon? In the meantime, let's have some fun with the DPL campaign.

It's that time of year again, my hair has all gone!

A new minor release RQuantLib 0.3.10 is now on CRAN and in Debian. RQuantLib combines (some of) the quantitative analytics of QuantLib with the R statistical computing environment and language. The discount curve building code in QuantLib has shown some overly large numerical instabilities. We have used the same example parameters (taken from the Swap example in QuantLib) for years; it currently fails to solve for a rate at some term further out the curve. So I made the decistion to disable this just in the examples in order to not upset the CRAN testing framework. The examples now use a flat curve instead. I also updated one function to silence some new warnings from R-devel about symbols from another packages's namespace (in this case rgl, and it is just for surface plots, a purely cosmetic function). Thanks to CRANberries, there is also a diff to the previous release 0.3.9. Full changelog details, examples and more details about this package are at my RQuantLib page.

Linux is a great platform for dealing with all kinds of different file systems, partition tables etc. But one of the few annoying situations when working in IT forensics are Microsoft Windows dynamic disks, AKA LDM (Logical Disk Manager). Thanks to libldm s ldmtool this is no longer true. A short demonstration from a real-life IT forensics investigation (actual IDs/data randomized for obvious reasons):

# ldmtool
ldm> scan /dev/sdc*
[
  "1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003"
]
ldm> show diskgroup 1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003
 
  "name" : "FOOBAR-Dg0",
  "guid" : "1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003",
  "volumes" : [
    "Volume1"
  ],
  "disks" : [
    "Disk1",
    "Disk2"
  ]
 
ldm> show volume 1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003 Volume1
 
  "name" : "Volume1",
  "type" : "striped",
  "size" : 3907039232,
  "chunk-size" : 128,
  "hint" : "D:",
  "partitions" : [
    "Disk1-01",
    "Disk2-01"
  ]
 
ldm> show partition 1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003 Disk1-01
 
  "name" : "Disk1-01",
  "start" : 1985,
  "size" : 1953519616,
  "disk" : "Disk1"
 
ldm> create all
Unable to create volume Volume1 in disk group 1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003: Disk Disk2 required by striped volume Volume1 is missing
[
]
ldm> scan /dev/sdd*
[
  "1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003"
]
ldm> create all
[
  "ldm_vol_FOOBAR-Dg0_Volume1"
]
ldm>

The just created device mapper device then can be handled as usual:

# dmsetup ls   grep ldm
ldm_vol_FOOBAR-Dg0_Volume1        (254:4)
# mount /dev/mapper/ldm_vol_FOOBAR-Dg0_Volume1 /mnt/whatever

ldmtool just hit Debian unstable (and I intend to ship the tool with the upcoming version of Grml-Forensic).

Weblate recently got another new feature - charting of translation project activity. It counts and charts daily contributions in last month and weekly contributions in last year and draws nicely looking charts out of that: Originally I wanted to use some existing charting library and first implementation was actually done using PyCha, but in the end I ended up rendering charts using completely custom code, what allowed me to draw better graphs.

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Server management on daily basis in a growing environment could be a challenge. Most of the tasks is here done with ClusterSSH in help with a homebrew mail notification. Unfortunately this workflow is not scaling well for 200+ systems. I had a look into apt-dater but this seems not to fit our workflow. FAI looks a bit overengineered at the first glance. Maybe Puppet is an option? There seems to be many extensions for it, unfortunately ruby is needed on every single node. Is there a CTO-compatible overview about puppet, any other alternatives? ;) Update: Many thanks for the hints from Andr Lu s Lopes, Stig Sandbeck Mathisen, Phil Miller, Steve Kemp, Andrew Latham, Bob Proulx and Natxo Asenjo

• Chef
  • Packaged in Debian
  • Upstream Debian packages (no recent one)
• CFEngine3
  • No ruby/perl/python dependencies
  • Light, fast
  • (A bit) harder to understand
  • Packaged in Debian
  • Upstream Debian packages
• Salt
  • Very young
  • Packaged in Debian
• Ansible
  • Very flexible
  • Easy to understand
  • Relies on ssh
  • Open ITP
  • PPA
• MCollective
  • Framework for building server orchestration and parallel job execution
  • Could extend for example Puppet or Chef
  • Packaged in Debian
  • Upstream Debian packages (no recent one)
• Foreman
  • Puppet dashboard and node classifier
  • Open ITP
  • Upstream Debian packages

Old but conceptual still valid: www.infrastructures.org, for example Bootstrapping an Infrastructure Other thoughts: push- or pull-infrastructure? Software footprint (on nodes and your central instance)! Hints, rants and comments could be send to 'blog - at - waja - dot - info' or via @blogwajainfo.

So, the price of heating my apartment has gone up significantly since last year and a lot of people have noticed the same trend. As a geek, I want not just any solutions, but geekiest solutions possible to that enter a Smart Home system. The heating in my apartment is separated from all other apartments with a separate heat meter that measures both heating water flow and the temperature difference on the incoming and outgoing pipes, so if I reduce the heating consumption I will immediately see that in lower heating bills. This particular smart home system is very simple and made in Latvia and also relatively cheap, so I decided to give this a try. The start was very simple I filled out a form on their home page and got a call the next day to verify the specifics. They already knew my building and had experience installing there, so they offered me two options: I could have two thermal sensors and a radiator controller on each of the 3 radiators in my apartment or (seeing how my apartment is relatively small and well ventilated thus reducing the efficiency of per-room control) one thermal sensor and one radiator controller installed on a new valve that they would build into the heating pipe just outside my apartment. I chose the second option as that was cheaper, simpler and involved less installation for me. Also they offered a nice discount. A plumber of my building installed the valve at some point during the day, I did not even have to be there or arrange anything special, it was all included in the main bill. Then the next day a friendly guy came by to my office and gave me three very cute boxes. The packaging was very, very Apple-like. The three devices were named mother , spy and puller basically that is a base station, a temperature sensor and a radiator regulator a wireless stepper motor. The installation was straight forward I connected the base station (something very similar to this thin in size and looks) to Ethernet and power, went to the web address specified on the sticker on the base station, completed a registration process there, entered a code from the base of the base station into the website and it just found it. After that I pressed a button on the temperature sensor (a Zippo lighter sized box with a built-in Li-Ion battery rechargeable via microUSB once a year or so) and put that on a shelf. I secured it with some double-sided tape after the cat got to it once and played some hockey while I was away. The temperature sensor immediately showed up in the Web UI and I could assign it to a room. The regulator installation was the most complex bit, but it was trivial as well all I had to do was insert some AA batteries (helpfully included in the box, should last a couple years by their estimates), then go outside to the newly installed inlet valve, put this thing on, screw the thread with my hands and then push and hold a button for 10 seconds. After that the controller came to life, connected with the base station and started spinning the valve, testing its operational range I presume. The range is very good you can see 13% signal in the screenshots that is across the whole of the apartment, trough 3 solid walls and another 5 meters out in the hallway inside another wall. As soon as that was done, the Web UI showed the controller and asked my to assign it to a room. So now I have 1 room defined with 1 temperature sensor and one controller. That is all that is needed. From the charts I have already found out that at current inside/outside temperatures my apartment cools down at around 0.3 degrees C per hour and with current radiator settings it heats up by around 1 degree C per hour. I should turn the radiators up a bit thus increasing the rate at which the system is able to heat things up. Also I should try to re-inspect all possible cold spots to see why the cooldown speed is so high. I expected it to be lower. At least now I have real data to compare things. At this point you can either fire up your web browser or a Android/iOS client on you mobile device to monitor and control the temperature of the apartment. But that was not enough for me I opted for the PRO upgrade which includes the ability to program a weekly cycle of desired temperatures. The programming is limited and thus simple to do there are three temperature modes: day, night and eco. The idea is that you have the night mode every night, then at some time during the day, you have the day mode (to wake up), then you switch to eco mode (when noone is home) and then in the evening you go back to day mode and later to night mode. There are separate sliders for each day of the week and temperature settings for each of the modes for every programmed room. Total investment so far 210 Ls (or around 3 months worth of just heating bills). The experience of other users tells of 30-50% heating bill reduction, so this should pay for itself in 2-3 years. In addition I get a more stable and predictable temperature at home and some more geeky stuff to brag about yay! These guys have their work cut out for them I have no idea how/of they do international orders, I would definately like to see more information in the web site about how my system is working (more temperature history, valve state history, wireless signal and battery history, mobile apps are a bit wonky it feels like the mobile app does not respect the temperature set over the web and tries to reassert itself when opened and it often shows out-of-date temperature data with no indication that it is out-of-date + the mobile apps are missing charts. All in all this is a great start: easy, quite cheap and stylish home heating automation. Good work! P.S. I am pretty sure they use Linux, but it is so packaged, that there is basically no way to confirm or deny that. P.P.S. Also check out this overnight chart, there is definitely some mode switch anticipation going on

I will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo (and yes, given the topics covered, it's missing a GNU). My talk, "Four Freedoms for Freedom," is on Sunday, February 24, 2013 from 16:30 to 17:30.

The most obvious people affected by all four of the freedoms that define free software are the programmers. They are the ones who will likely want to -- and are able to -- modify software running on their computers. But free software is a movement to advance and defend freedom for anyone and everyone using any computing device, not just programmers. In many countries now, given the ubiquity of tablets, phones, laptops and desktops, "anyone and everyone using any computing device" means nearly all citizens. But new technological innovations in these areas keep coming with new restrictions, frustrating and controlling users even while creating a perception of empowerment. The Free Software Foundation wants to gain the support and protect the interests of everyone, not just programmers. How do we reach people who have no intention of ever modifying a program, and how do we help them?

Other presentations on my list to check out (in chronological order, some conflicting):

• Matthew Garrett
• Deb Nicholson
• Sofia Kelly
• Bradley Kuhn
• Mark Holmquist
• Kyle Rankin
• Jenn Greenaway
• Dennis Kibbe
• Stephen Walli

If you will be there and want to meet up, drop me a line.

After a release cycle longer than between each beta (which is slightly sad, but I can t spend all my time on Debian), here comes the first release candidate of the Debian Installer for Wheezy. The Debian Installer 7.0 RC1 announce on the website has links to relevant bug reports in the Debian BTS, and the errata page lists things you probably want to know about (including gotchas with grub-install we ve been having for a while, now diagnosed, and hopefully fixed for the next release candidate). According to Arwen s sleepy attitude, it s officially time for a nap!