Search Results: "ag"

22 April 2012

Joey Hess: moving my email archives and packages to git-annex

I've recently been moving some important data into git-annex, and finding it simplifies things while also increasing my flexability. email archives I've kept my email archives in git for years. This works ok, just choose the right file format (compressed mbox) and number of files (one archive per mailbox per month or so) and git can handle this well enough, as email is not really large. But, email is not really small either. Keeping my email repository checked out on my netbook consumes 2 gigabytes of its 30 gigabyte SSD, half of which is duplication in .git. Also, I have only kept it at 2 gigabytes through careful selection of what classes of mail I archive. That made sense when archival disk was more expensive, but what makes sense these days is to archive everything. For a while I've wanted to have a "raw" archive, that includes all email I receive. (Even spam.) This protects against various disasters in mail filtering or reading. Setting that up was my impetus for switching my mail archives to git-annex today. The new system I've settled on is to first copy all incoming mail into a "raw" maildir folder. Then mailfilter sorts it into the folders I sync (with offlineimap) and read. Each day, the "raw" folder is moved into a mbox archive, and that's added to the git annex. Each month, the mail I've read is moved into a monthly archives, and added to the git annex. A simple script does the work. I counted the number of copies that existed of my mail when it was stored in git, and found 7 copies spread amoung just 3 drives. I decided to slim that back, and configured git-annex to require only 5 copies. But those 5 copies will spread amoung more drives, including several offline archival drives, so it will be more robust overall. My netbook will have an incomplete checkout of my mail, omitting the "raw" archive. If I need to peek inside a spam folder for a lost mail, I can quickly pull it down; if I need to free up space I can quickly drop older archives. This is the flexability that git-annex fans love. :) By the way, this also makes it easier to permanantly delete mail, when you really need to (ie, for contractual reasons). Before, I'd have to do a painful git-filter-branch if I needed to get rid of eg, mail for old jobs. Now I can git annex drop --force. Pro Tip: If you're doing this kind of migration to git-annex, you can save bandwidth by not re-transferring files to machines that already have a copy. I ran this command on my netbook to inject the archives it had in the old repository into the new repository, verifying checksums as it goes: 
cd ~/mail/archive; find -type l -exec git annex reinject ~/mail.old/archive/    \;
Note on mairix compatability: I use mairix to index and search my mail. But it refuses to follow git-annex's symlinks to the content. So I have to point it at .git/annex/objects/. I also configured annex.backend to SHA256E, which keeps the extensions on my compressed mailbox files, which is necessary for mairix to realize they're compressed. debian packages I'd evolved a complex and fragile chain of personal apt repositories to hold Debian packages I've released. I recently got rid of the mess, which looked like this: dput local mini-dinstall repo dput→mini-dinstallrepo on my server →dput Debian The point of all that was that I could "upload" a package locally while offline and batch transfer it later. And I had a local and a public apt repository of just the packages I've uploaded. But these days, packages uploaded to Debian are available nearly immediately, so there's not much reason to do that. My old system also had a problem: It only kept the most recent single copy of each package. Again, disk is cheap, so I'd rather have archives of everything I have uploaded. Again I switched to git-annex. My new system is simplicity itself. I release a package by checking it into a "toupload" directory in my git annex repository on my netbook. Items in that directory are dput to Debian and moved to "released". I have various other clones of that repository, which I git annex move packages to periodically to free up SSD space. In the rare cases when I build a package on a server, I check it into the clone on the server, and again rely on git-annex to copy it around. Now, does anyone know a good way to download a copy of every package you're ever released from archive.debian.org? (Ideally as a list of urls I can feed to git annex addurl.) conclusion My email and Debian packages were the last large files I was not storing in git-annex. Even backups of my backups end up checked into git-annex and archived away. Now that I'm using git-annex in every place I can, my goal with it is to make it as easy as possible for as many of you to use it as possible, too. I have some inotify tricks up my sleeve that seem promising. Kickstarter may be involved. Watch this space!

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2012/16

this week I've started to look at the (not yet release critical) gcc 4.7 bugs. luckily there are still enough patches for them in the BTS but at the time of writing, at least 138 are not fixed & don't have a patch yet. so still some work ahead.

& for those who prefer to fix debian/rules files, lucas' last archive rebuild (where build-arch was used) still leaves enough work, & many bugs are not difficult to fix with a basic understanding of makefiles & debian build sytems.

Julian Andres Klode: Reference Counting and Tail Calls

One thing I thought about today is reference counting in combination with tail calls. Imagine a function like this: 
function f(x)   return g(x+1);
Now consider that x is a reference counted object and that x + 1 creates a new object. The call to g(x + 1) shall be in tail call position. In most reference counted languages, the reference to an argument is owned by the caller. That is, f() owns the reference to x + 1. In that case, the call to g() would no longer be in a tail call position, as we still have to decrease the reference count after g() exits. An alternative would be that the callee owns the reference. This however, will most likely create far more reference count changes than a caller-owns language (increase reference count in caller, decrease reference count in callee). For example, the following function requires an increment before the call to g(). 
function f1(x)   return g(x);
Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve the problem of tail calls while avoiding the callee-owns scenario? Something that does not require a (non-reference-counting) garbage collector would be preferably.
Filed under: General

Lars Wirzenius: Obnam 1.0 planning

Obnam is my backup program. See http://liw.fi/obnam/ for details. Debian is hopefully going to be freezing the current testing version in June, in preparation for a release late this year. I'd like Obnam 1.0 to be included. In preparation for that I reviewed the currently open bugs and tagged the ones that I think are blockers. See list of 1.0 blocker bugs. Did I miss anything? Is anything there that isn't really a blocker? Other than that, the roadmap for 1.0 has the following things that aren't done yet: Performance is one of those things that's always going to be a problem. I'm hoping to optimize the sftp performance a big, but apart from that, I don't consider it to be a blocker for 1.0. The verification test I'm confident I will pass, but it needs to actually be performed. (See the roadmap for details of the test.) Anyone else have opinions of what needs to be done for Obnam 1.0? PS. There's a mailing list for Obnam now.

Russell Coker: Neighborhood Watch

While writing my previous post I heard a huge noise at the front of my house. I found one man being restrained in a seated position on the ground at my front door, the man who was holding him down was accusing him of theft and asking me to call the police, and a woman was hanging around and crying. When calling the police I discovered that Optus (the Telco that provides the virtual service which Virgin Mobile uses) doesn t accept 112 as an emergency number! This combined with the fact that CyanogenMod 7 on my phone doesn t accept 000 as an emergency number meant that I had to unlock my phone before calling the police. Unlocking your phone late at night when there s a situation that needs police attention isn t as easy as you would hope. As an aside there are usually no penalties for testing the emergency service on your phone, people who install PABX systems and other significant telephony devices test emergency services calls as a matter of routine, so testing emergency calls from your phone is a really good idea. If anyone knows how to configure CyanogenMod 7 to support 000 as an emergency call then please let me know! Anyway the man who was held down claimed that a friend of his had given him a bag containing tools that he had lugged from some place not particularly near my house. The man who was holding him down said that he witnessed the other man stealing the tools from his neighbor not far from my house. The woman was apparently the girlfriend of the man who was accused of burglary. The end result was that the police arrested the man who was accused of burglary and his girlfriend. He didn t have any obvious injuries and the police said that the man who detained him did them a favor, so it seems unlikely that there will be any assault charges filed. Presumably the man who detained the burglar is explaining it all at the police station now, I hope the police gave him a chance to put on pants and shoes first. The man who made the burglary accusation said that his house was robbed last night which is why he was more observant than usual tonight. This makes me glad of my policy of rejecting every job offer which involves moving to the US. In Australia hand guns are really hard to get so there s no way that a house burglary will involve a gun and there s also no way that someone who wants to help the police will have a gun. So while it was unpleasant to have this happen at my front door it didn t involve any risk to me. It could have ended up with someone other than me getting a beating but the probability of serious injury or death for them was quite low. As everyone knew that no-one had a gun and no-one wanted to be charged with assault it made sense for everyone to avoid excessive force. From what I saw no excessive force was used. The police arrived fairly quickly and EVERYONE was glad to see them. All up it took a bit more than 30 minutes from the first noise to the police departing after arresting both suspects and filling out a bunch of paperwork. I was impressed by that! Related posts:
  1. CyanogenMod and the Galaxy S Thanks to some advice from Philipp Kern I have now...

Russell Coker: Autism as an Excuse

A Polish geek going by the handle of mmemuar has recently written a blog post claiming that people use Autism as an excuse for bad behavior [1]. He gets enough things wrong in one short post to make it worth debunking it. It seems that Google s translation of Polish isn t as good as some other languages, but unless Google mistranslated about a dozen sections such that they had the exact opposite meaning then mmemuar s post has a lot of wrong ideas. Does Anyone use Autism as an Excuse? I ve read a lot of blog posts written by people on the Autism Spectrum, read many forum discussions, and talked to more than a few people in person. So far I haven t yet encountered any evidence of people using an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis as an excuse. There are probably about 70,000,000 people who meet the diagnostic criteria (most of whom have not been diagnosed due to not having access to anyone who is qualified to do an assessment). The number of people who have been diagnosed is large enough that I couldn t claim that none of them have ever used it as an excuse. The number of self-diagnosed people is also large enough that there has to be some people who wouldn t get diagnosed if professionally assessed. But I don t see any evidence that using an ASD as an excuse is at all common. I imagine that some people would take someone merely mentioning the fact that they have an ASD diagnosis in a public place (EG a mailing list or a blog post) as some sort of an excuse. One problem with such an interpretation is that for every way in which people on the Autism Spectrum annoy other people it s the ones who aren t diagnosed (or who reject a diagnosis) that will do it the most. Being diagnosed with an ASD is correlated with annoying other people less. Another problem is that keeping quiet about such things when they get raised for discussion so often takes a psychological toll. When someone is diagnosed as an adult a fairly common reaction is to study Psychology and Sociology (usually through web sites such as Sociological Images which I highly recommend [2]) and try to get a better understanding of other people. Any time you assume that everyone else thinks like you then you will get things wrong, when someone gets an ASD diagnosis they will probably take more care to avoid making such mistakes. Is Autism Obvious? Mmemuar says if you were full of autistic, which is very easy to overheat the brain from excess signals at the input, it would be very obvious to all . There are some people who are utterly incapable of acting like an NT. But the majority of people on the Autism Spectrum have some ability to pass as NT, it just takes a lot of effort. So if someone is spending all their effort to walk, talk, and make eye contact in a way that most people expect then they will have little spare effort for other things. This can result in them having little patience for other people. The solution to this is to not require people to look average. Even apart from Autism there are people who fidget, don t make eye contact in the way you expect, and do other things a little differently. Being tolerant of such things won t hurt you and will generally make things easier for everyone. TheAnMish gave a good Youtube presentation about the way that she has to act normal [3]. Note that while her video represents her own personal experiences (which differ slightly from those of other Aspies particularly male Aspies) they are regarded as representative enough for her video to be shown by Tony Attwood (a world renowned expert on Asperger Syndrome) at a conference about women on the Autism Spectrum. As an aside I disagree with her use of the word normal without scare-quotes. Learning about Psychology through Sci-Fi In the end of the blog post and in some of the comments there is discussion about learning to understand people through reading sci-fi books. The first problem with this is that fiction books generally have a range of characters that is determined by the author s understanding of people, if you read multiple books by an author then you will usually notice the same character types. The second problem is that characters in fiction books are simplified to fit into a reasonable sized book, in real life people have lots of really boring reasons for doing what they do, in fiction only stuff that is interesting ends up in print. But the biggest problem is that fiction books just aren t a good way of learning about people. Whatever lessons might be in a fiction book will probably be missed by a reader who is concentrating on the plot. You can learn things about people by reading an analysis of literature by a Psychologist or a Sociologist, but apart from that you probably won t be able to learn things if you don t already know them. As an aside, my experience of reading sci-fi books suggests that some of the popular sci-fi authors have such a poor understanding of people that it impairs their ability to write believable fiction about human characters. If I was going to try and learn about people by reading fiction I d choose something that s been popular for a long time. If a book has been popular for more than 100 years and sold well in different times, cultures, and languages then it probably has something to say about the human condition. Catching up on Youth Mmemuar says absolutely nothing prevents you to the age of twenty he began to catch up on some of youth . Actually one significant thing is that the human brain develops in particular stages, the older you get the more difficult it becomes to learn things. So even if it was just a matter of learning things someone who was behind at age 20 would have some significant difficulty in catching up. But some things just can t be learned, for example someone who has extreme discomfort in making eye contact can t just learn to be happy with it. Also there are some things which people would have learned if it was possible. For example people who have Prosopagnosia (an inability to recognise faces) suffer extreme bullying in school, if they could just learn to recognise people then they surely would do so, so if they complete school without learning then it s probably going to be impossible for them. Prosopagnosia is one of many conditions which can contribute to social difficulties and therefore contribute to an ASD diagnosis. Can Aspies get Married? Some people think that people on the Autism Spectrum can t get married. In fact this belief is so widely held that some people who seem very obviously Autistic are convinced that they are NT simply because they are married! The fact that there are more than few books offering advice to people who have married someone who is on the Autism Spectrum is clear proof that such claims are bogus. The Relevance to Geek Communities People who meet the diagnostic criteria for Asperger Syndrome will almost certainly be Geeks due to the Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities section of the diagnostic criteria (the proposed revision for the DSM-V is the best reference I know for this [4]) as the modern use of the term Geek applies to anyone who has an extreme interest in something. The more Geeky a community is the greater the incidence of people who could be diagnosed with an ASD. Spreading ideas such as those of mmemuar will lead to people not being assessed for an ASD. I would have been assessed earlier if it wasn t for hearing an influential member of the Linux community say some things which were similar in concept (although not as deliberate). Having people not be assessed is bad for the individuals in question and bad for the community. Related posts:
  1. Autism Awareness and the Free Software Community It s Autism Awareness Month April is Autism Awareness month, there...
  2. Autism vs Asperger Syndrome Diagnostic Changes for Autism Spectrum Disorders Currently Asperger Syndrome (AS)...
  3. Communication Shutdown and Autism The AEIOU Foundation The AEIOU Foundation [1] is a support...

Christian Perrier: Bug #670000

Julien Cristau reported Debian bug #670000 on Sunday April 22th, against libgtkada. This bug is indeed part of a MBF for packages that are "marked as Multi-Arch: same, but contain files in arch-independent paths with arch-specific contents" (doh, these multi-arch things are sometimes giving me headaches!) Bug #660000 was reported as of February 15th: 2 months and 7 days for 10,000 bugs. As expected, QA work and release preparation do trigger an increase in bug report rate and we're now again quite close from the "10,000 bugs in two months mark". I forgot to report that bug #666666 has been reported in the meantime. This time by one of the top bug reporters in Debian, namely Lucas Nussbaum, during one of his archive-wide package rebuilds, against psimedia. Next step will be bug #680000, targeted in June 2012. With this rate, bug #700000 should be reported around mid-November 2012 and Kartik Mistry would win the Bug #700000 prediction contest". In the meantime, Launchpad will have reached bug #1000000 (the highest bug number is currently #986849....which will be no longer true by the time you read this). The rate in LP is currently about 20,000 bugs per month. I wonder how many of these are closed as I feel like this is humanly impossible to process that many bug reports.

Steve Kemp: Work on my bathroom continues

Work on my bathroom continues. I had expected it to be complete on Friday but it lookse like the new completion date will be Tuesday or Wednesday. It will be very nice to have a working shower, and a toilet I don't need to "flush" with a bucket. The only interesting thing I've been doing is planning on a kernel to support long-term for some poor unfortunate souls who cannot use Debian-based kernels. I know building, supporting, and maintaining a kernel will be a pain. But at the moment it looks like a valid thing to be suggesting. Otherwise life goes on. I've been hit by the DIY bug, largely as the result of seeing all the bathroom work going on, and figuring I was going to live with dust/mess anyway - so I've erected some more book-shelves, and ordered a pair of ceiling fans. The only other thing to report is that I've started deleting emails. (shock!) I look after a few machines for myself, friends and so on. Each one will send me automated emails at times. I've got them going back years - but no longer: 
#
#  Prune old mailboxes.
#
for maildir in .Automated.backups .machines.spotlight .machines.skx; do
   nrecent --keep=150 $HOME/Maildir/$ maildir /cur
done
Another new use for my nrecent tool. (Note: Only delete files from ./cur, to avoid deleting messages I've not read. Maildir is your friend!) ObQuote: "I'm sorry I'm sweating on you... " - Knocked Up.

Iustin Pop: Running: Z rich city run rain, rain, rain

This year was the 10th anniversary of the Z rich marathon, so they had a new category: 10km city run (at least, I think it was a new category). So I went along, thinking 10k would be a nice Sunday run. But oh, even the famed Swiss organisational skills fail some time. And when they fail, they fail hard. First, if you have 3 events all going on at the same time (marathon, team run, city run), please, please mark the road appropriately. The finish line was marked only marathon and team run, so I didn't even knew when I finished, I only realised well, that must have been it when I reached the place where I gave back the transponder chip. This marking issue was on-going for the last ~500-600 metres, as I thought I was lost when running along a road marked (again) only with marathon and team run and almost exited the road to look for my actual trail. Of course, if I had remembered that the finish is common to all three categories, all would have been good, but don't ask me to remember such stuff at the end of a race. Second, clothes storage. They had clothes storage organised nicely, in railroad freight cars, 500 people per car. This went well, except that they underestimated the number of people registering, so the last car had well over 700 bags, which created a huge bottleneck for this single car, which of course was where I also had the clothes (as I registered late). So I run for ~1 hour and then spend 30 minutes getting my clothes back. This wouldn't have been an issue, if the weather would have been fine. But it started raining seriously 500 meters into the race, and by the time I finished I was already fully drenched, just in a t-shirt (thanks fully with long pants) and waiting in the rain for 30 minutes was painful. I think also unhealthy, due to the abrupt switch from running to just standing in the rain. I haven't been so cold in a long while. By the time I got home my hands were shaking so hard I couldn't unzip my jacket (and I couldn't stop shaking, which is not a good sign). So yeah, I learned a few things. Try not to use the clothes storage if you can (it was the first time I used it), especially if you can pick up the stuff they give you a day early (and I could have gone to the race directly dressed) and I hope the organisers learned to provide better conditions just in case it rains. Which in Z rich happens, well, quite often. People were joking in the line: "1 hour running, 1 hour picking the clothes, 1 week sick". I hope I won't get sick (a hot tea after a hot bath can do wonders), but still, at least my voice will sound like after whole-night partying. OK, rant over. What about the race? It's nice (except the very dark overcast & rain, as said), through the centre of the city; as a friend says: Running on Bahnhofstrasse is cool . Otherwise, 10k seem to go quite quick nowadays . Having ~1,600 people all in red t-shirts was funny, especially if you're trying to look for friends. It was a very diverse crowd, you could see more varied people than in the other races (where more running-focused people seem to come); here there were all kind of people, children, teenagers, adults and so on, no per-category start or such. As to myself, I still am bothered by some small injuries, so I can't enjoy the nice result I got: 47m26.4s, for a 4m.44s/km! Yay! Of course, the reason I run so fast was because I was cold and needed to run to heat up. Also, again a flat race. I should start getting friends with hills. And due to the fact that it was a more diverse crowd, for the first time I didn't class (in my age category) around the ~66% down the list, but around ~44% only (~13 minutes slower than the winner). Yay!

Stefano Zacchiroli: deferred bits from the DPL for March 2012

Posted a week ago, already deferred back then, this report is even more deferred now! But as there are people interest in knowing what the "DPL job" is about even among non debian-devel-announce subscribers, here is a blog-conveyed reproduction, for the records.
Dear project members,
here is my monthly DPL activity report, this time for last March. It is delayed by a couple of weeks because, myself being both incumbent and candidate DPL, I preferred not to use d-d-a during the voting period unless really needed. Apologies for the delay (or the unneeded paranoia, you name it). As a side effect of the delay, the results of the DPL election are now known. I'd like to thank all the people who took part in the elections: voters, people who asked questions on -vote, the secretary, and obviously Gergely and Wouter, without whom the campaign wouldn't have allowed to discuss relevant aspects of Debian "politics". Thanks for your trust. I'll do my best to match your expectations. ... and just to remind you what you've just asked for, here goes the BigMonthlyBlurb! Highlight: long-term hardware replacement planning The highlight for this month is long term planning of hardware replacement. It's something I've been discussing with DSA for quite a while and on which DSA has worked hard during the recent sprint. As a result, we now have a quite ambitious 5-year hardware replacement plan that will guarantee that all machines in production are under warranty at any given time (with the nice side effect of generally better performances, as they go hand in hand with newer hardware). The current estimated cost per year is 29'000 USD. That does not yet include buildds and porter-boxes, so it is expected to increase a bit to cover all our hardware needs. But we expect it not increase too much, as we tend to get explicit hardware donations to cover arch-specific needs. Given the current state of Debian finances and donation trends, the plan looks sustainable for at least 2-3 years. But this assessment still needs to be refined as soon as, together with the auditors, we'll manage to obtain the history of past Debian transactions, in particular from SPI. We've been waiting for this for about 5 months now, but I'm positive it could become a reality in the next weeks. In the meantime, it is surely safe to start with the plan for the next 1-1.5 years, so I'll give green light to DSA for the first acquisitions as soon as they're ready for it. When implemented, this plan will increase our ability to rely on hardware. But it also means we will need to become a bit more organized about fund-raising. The discussion started with the sprint report has some insights about how to do that. As part of this, we'll also need to share resources (e.g. contact databases, people, etc.) among the yearly DebConf fund-raising initiatives and the initiatives mentioned in the aforementioned discussion. Ongoing discussions Summer of Code Debian has been accepted as an organization for the Google Summer of Code. At the time these bits go out, the student application deadline has also elapsed. In March I've contributed a few project ideas and chased potential mentors for them, when I thought the project could be important for Debian and the prospective student. I'm happy that one (a dak building block needed for the implementation of PPAs and more) has found both mentors and students. We'll see if any of the corresponding student proposal is retained and how it goes. Communication I've given an interview, about Debian and Free Software in general, to La Repubblica, one of the major newspapers in Italy. The interview is available online, but only in Italian. If some kind (and Italian-speaking) soul would like to translate it into English, I'll be happy to publish the translation as well. (update 22/04/2012: Matteo Cortese has contributed an English translation of the interview, which I'll make available shortly) Legal stuff In order to transfer ownership of the Debian trademark in Japan to SPI, I've contacted the current owners (all Japanese Debian Developers or contributors) to do the needed paperwork. I've been blessed by the help of Kenshi Muto that has taken the matter in his hands. He is now navigating through Japanese trademark procedures, a subject neither myself nor SPI lawyers were familiar with. Thanks also to Jonathan McDowell who has done the needed paperwork, SPI-side. Sprints Plenty of sprints and sprint reports in March!: Debian Med, DSA, DAM/FrontDesk. Everything should also be available from the wiki sprint page where you can find info to organize your team sprint. Assets miscellanea Cheers.
PS the boring day-to-day activity log for March is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201203

Robert Collins: Reading list

I ve recently caught up on a bunch of reading some of which are worth commending. Read them all, or none. I enjoyed them all.

21 April 2012

Andreas Metzler: balance sheet snowboarding season 2011/12

Finally a year with real snow again. Winter started rather late this year, I was still hiking at above 2000m end of November with zero snow there. First day of snowboarding was December 21st. Starting from there we never had too little snow. At home we topped out at 175cm, and had more than 125cm for a long time. Start of February was very cold, I had to skip a good day of good weather as I got a tiny bit of frostburn on my nose. (1200m of descent was a little to much at below -20 C.) A very warm end of March/start of April neverless quickly killed the snow here down at the bottom of the valley. There is still lots of snow in the mountains, although the ski-lifts have closed April 15th. Judging from the number of snowboarding days the season was a bad one. It started late and ended early (31st of March). In spring I simply need good weather to have fun. - Cloudy nights are too warm, the slope does not freeze properly, which is perfect only for breaking one's leg. Nevertheless if I could choose between a repetition of 2010/11 or 2011/2012, I would always go for the latter. :-) On a sidenote, my local hill has switched from www.hoehenmeter.com to www.skiline.cc to provide statistical information. Here is the balance sheet:
2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 2010/11 2011/12
number of (partial) days25172937303025
Dam ls1010510162310
Diedamskopf154242313414
Warth/Schr cken0304131
total meters of altitude12463474096219936226774202089203918228588
highscore10247m8321m12108m11272m11888m10976m13076m
# of runs309189503551462449516

Vasudev Kamath: Update: Issue in Kannada Dictionary Bot

Just a short update for those who are wondering what is Kannada Dictionary bot, it is a small Jabber chat bot written in Python which pulls out meaning for given English or Kannada word from Kannada Wiktionary. More about the usage of this bot can be found in my previous post Recently I've been getting many queries from users that they are not able to access the bot from their GTalk account. Of course no one contacted me directly they were pinging my friend Omshivaprakash and in turn he was pinging and telling that some one contacted him and told bot is not online. But I have monit service monitoring bot 24x7 additionally I could see it online all the time, even when shiv is telling me its offline!. Finally figured out the reason when I went to Jabber So here is the reason
As you ve probably noticed, the jabber.org service has been experiencing connectivity problems with gmail.com and other Google Talk domains (e.g., you might not be able to see if your contacts there are online). The folks at Google are working on a solution and we will post again once they have fixed the problem.
Now folks please have patience till a solution comes up and once its in place you should be able to use the bot without any issue.

Christian Perrier: 2012 update 20 for Debian Installer localization

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files): Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.): Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader) Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for 22 languages: Asturian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, German, Esperanto, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese

Paul Tagliamonte: gcc 4.7 patchathon part III

S more days, s more patches: Hacked out a few over the last few days, this time, to some good eats. I m making a habit of this tv-hack-time thing. Consider helping out with the gcc-4.7 ftbfss, there s a bunch!

20 April 2012

Jon Dowland: Abrash on working for Valve

I've just read and enjoyed this post by Mike Abrash about working at Valve. I enjoyed it for two reasons: firstly, doom played a pivotal role in shaping Abrash's thinking about the future of computing, or perhaps it shaped the future of computing itself. I'm not ashamed to admit that Doom played a pivotal role in making me the person I am today: it derailed my ambition to become a graphics designer, introduced me to the PC, programming and various other computer design technologies and concepts: things moved on from there. The second reason is the culture that Abrash describes at Valve: flat, creative-driven, unafraid of failure. I've been thinking a lot about work environments and the nature of management, both in the context of my work and Debian. What Abrash describes is still vastly different to life at University, but it did force me to reflect on how lucky I am to have the freedom and conditions I have, and consider the ways in which I define and shape the environment for myself and others.

Sven Mueller: Ex-TSA lead on air traffic security woes

I came across this article today and really found it noteworthy: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303815404577335783535660546.html Original title: Why Airport Security Is Broken And How To Fix It Kip Hawley, TSA head from July 2005 to January 2009, writes about how the current TSA procedures came into being, how he failed at some of his goals (to make the checks less annoying) during his involvement and what could be done to fix procedures. I especially liked these points:
By the time of my arrival, the agency was focused almost entirely on finding prohibited items. Constant positive reinforcement on finding items like lighters had turned our checkpoint operations into an Easter-egg hunt. When we ran a test, putting dummy bomb components near lighters in bags at checkpoints, officers caught the lighters, not the bomb parts.
(also quoted on LWN.net) And this one:
The public wants the airport experience to be predictable, hassle-free and airtight and for it to keep us 100% safe. But 100% safety is unattainable.
I think the most important thing he mentioned is the fifth and last of his action items to improve both experience by passengers and security:
5. Randomize security: Predictability is deadly. Banned-item lists, rigid protocols if terrorists know what to expect at the airport, they have a greater chance of evading our system.
He got it nailed there, in my opinion: If security measures are predictable, the loopholes in it are also predictable, so you basically give attackers a handbook of what to avoid when planning the attack. This, by the way isn t limited to physical security and air travel, but also applies to IT security (though it is much easier to hide your IT security measures and make them somewhat unpredictable that way, then it is to do so with physical security and passenger screening on airports.

Dominique Dumont: A success story for Config::Model

Hello Here s a mail telling how the Config::Model Perl module was used to refactor existing configuration tools in Perl. Some punctuation and blank lines were added to improve the flow of this text. The full name and mail address of gkr is withheld on his request.
I took over a perl script that was responsible to pull data from several sources and push it after validation and re-packaging including some meta data into one of our production systems. The script was never intended to be used for more then a few month. But as things go, we were still using it after a few years. Only now for a lot more sources. Since all the configuration of sources and meta data were contained as a single hash in this script, it became very unwieldy. Although the configuration seldom changed, once it got added it was not an option to keep it like this especially as we decided to prepare a Debian package for faster installation and version tracking. So I had to re-work it and was looking for some library that was allowing me to define how the configuration has to look like, providing sensible hard coded and computed defaults for some of the values. This was when I found Config::Model on Cpan. It was, after some digging into the documentation, quite simple to define a rough first version of the complete config, including global default values as ini file and very simple to read in and write out. A more advanced version was not working because the Config::Model in Debian squeeze did not provide needed features. Switching to yaml as configuration file format not only increased readability but also worked with the standard Squeeze package. Consistency is checked automatically inside the model so broken configurations are more unlikely in the future. Of course I had some work re-factoring the original source but Config::Model allowed an easy addition of a value-checked and documented configuration file. To access the Config::Model::Instance I added small wrapper packages that allowed an easy access of the config elements by name to make the source easier to understand. The re-factoring needed for creating a Debian package for the Script which is now a set of modules and a small executable was simple once I had Config::Model working, since I was able to add new configuration items effortlessly and remove a lot of hard coded parameters. I don t use the cli tool yet for configuration editing but that s going to be the next step.
Many thanks to gkr for this feedback. Let s hope he will continue to give feedback on his usage of Config::Model. All the best
Tagged: config-model, configuration, debian, Perl

Michal Čihař: Weblate gets experimental support for Android resources

I did sort of commit to at least trying to add support for Android string resource to Weblate on Stack Overflow, now while waiting for bugs to fix in 1.0 release it was right time to look at it. It turned out to be few lines of code but it took me some time to figure them out as translate-toolkit internals are not really god documented. Anyway I've hacked something what works for Weblate (and one random project I've tried) so it might be actually useful. You can find the code for it in pull request, let's see if it will get upstream. To use that, you need patched translate-toolkit (see above) and latest Git checkout from Weblate. As the changes on Weblate side were quite minor and not intrusive, I've decided to put this into 1.0 release, even if I originally did not plan to do so.

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Christian Perrier: 21 languages to be deactivated in Debian Installer

Some more progress since my last entry.... Belarusian, Basque, Macedonian, Vietnamese are now safe for wheezy. Also, some people popped up, offering help for Romanian and Croatian. And the Slovenian translator answered my mails, mentioning he'll do something. Still, If I follow the policy we chose in D-I, I should deactivate languages that are not complete for what we call "sublevel 1" and "sublevel 2" in code Debian Installer. At this very moment, it means that I would deactivate 21 languages:

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