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 (stats in parenthesis are those in these sublevels, respectively):

• Amharic (9f59u, 14f17u)
• Asturian (1f in sublevel 2 only!)
• Belarusian (1f in sublevel 1 only!)
• Welsh (54f118u, 32f47u)
• Spanish (1u in sublevel 1 only!)
• Basque (4u, 1f)
• Galician (24f42u, 6f9u)
• Hebrew (12f32u, 1f8u)
• Croatian (33f51u, 6f9u)
• Hungarian (2f1u, 6f9u)
• Icelandic (2f2u, 1f)
• Georgian (34f79u, 10f21u)
• Khmer (2f2u, 1f)
• Kurdish (29f57u, 6f22u)
• Lao (2f2u, 6f9u)
• Lithuanian (24f27u, 12f20u)
• Latvian (40f40u, 6f9u)
• Macedonian (2f4u, 6f9u)
• Malayalam (5u in sublevel 2 only!)
• Marathi (2f2u in sublevel 1)
• Nepali (33f86u, 10f21u)
• Norwegian Nynorsk (30f66u, 13f23u)
• Punjabi (28f58u, 1f)
• Brazilian Portuguese (24f43u, 6f9u)
• Romanian (2f1u, 1f)
• Slovenian (21f10u, 6f9u)
• Albanian (36f82u, 13f23u)
• Tamil (2f2u, 1f)
• Tagalog (35f86u, 24f39u)
• Ukrainian (1f in sublevel 2 only!)
• Vietnamese (22f11u, 8f10u)
• Traditional Chinese (22f23u, 6f9u)

For several of these, the fix is easy! So, even if you're not the person in charge officially for the said language, please get in touch with me (bubulle@d.o) if you want to complete the translation. For some of these languages, where contact with the translator in charge has apparently been lost, it could be their only chance to stay in wheezy.

I d be interested in getting an instance set up of a Django powered Git project viewer (or rather, something between GitHub and viewgit) The ideal implementation would use something like dulwich, and be super snappy. If anyone feels like writing this, let me know. If something like this exists, please let me know even faster.

long life to notmuch-mutt

• Bad news: I've just killed mutt-notmuch
• Good news: mutt-notmuch has been integrated upstream as a notmuch contrib script under the name notmuch-mutt
  (note the word switch, due to uniformity with other tools of the notmuch suite)
• Good news (for Debian users): starting with next notmuch upload there will be a Debian notmuch-mutt package. It will work out of the box with Mutt, without requiring any ~/.muttrc fiddling

As a consequence, no further separate releases of mutt-notmuch will be made. Future releases (of notmuch-mutt) will happen as part of notmuch. In other news, several changes have been implemented in notmuch-mutt wrt mutt-notmuch 0.2:

• move cache dir to ~/.cache/notmuch/mutt/ by default
  (Note: given that, from the point of view of notmuch, the next one will be the first release, no migration code from the previous cache location is present. Please switch to the new version and get rid of ~/.mutt-notmuch* manually.)
• support for XDG basedir, allowing to override the cache dir
• switch to String::ShellQuote for proper shell escaping in all notmuch calls
• system-wide Mutt configuration snippet for /etc/Muttrc.d/ (Debian-specific) or /etc/Muttrc

---

Many thanks to David Bremner (for shepherding my changes in) and to Ben Boeckel (whose desire to package mutt-notmuch in Fedora made me kick Debian bug #628018, this time for real).

My public radio station is engaged in a most obnoxious spring pledge drive. Good time to listen to podcasts. Here are the ones I'm currently liking.

• Free As In Freedom: The best informed podcast on software licensing issues, and highly idealistic. What keeps me coming back, though is that Karen and Bradley never quite agree on things, and always end up in some lawyerly minutia culdesac that is somehow interesting to listen to. They once did a whole show about a particular IRS tax form, and I listened to it all. (Granted, I often listen to this while cleaning house, but as Bradley would say, at least I'm not listening to it while driving.)
• This Developer's Life: At least the early episodes before it got popular are a unashamed imitation of This American Life, and I have quite enjoyed them. Although I often roll my eyes at the proprietary developer mindsets on display in the show. For example, often they'll have a bug and not root cause it, because well, they don't have the source code for the Windows layers. Still, beneath that it's mostly about the parts of software development that are common to all our lives. A particular episode I can recommend is #10 "Disconnecting" -- the first 20 minutes is a perfect story.
• Off the Hook: This is actually a live radio show, quite well done, with call-ins and everything. So much more polished than your typical podcast. It's hosted by Emmanuel Goldstein! And it's been going on for over 20 years, so why did I never hear about it before? Probably I'm not quite in the right hacker circles. Since it's out of NYC and very anti-authoritarian, I've mostly been enjoying it as a view into the Occupy protests.
• StarShipSofa: The best science fiction podcast around. Probably not news to anyone who ever looked for such a podcast. Long, and tends to be frontloaded with a lot of administrivia, which I fast-forward to get to the stories.
• Spider on the Web: The best music and science fiction podcast around. Mostly on hiatus since Jeanne died, but I hope Spider picks it back up. A good examplar is "Bianca's Hands"
• Long Now Seminars: Consistently interesting. I visited their space last time I was in SF only to learn they'd had a talk the night before, which would have been a bummer, except they ran the bits of the Clock for us.
• Linux Outlaws: After 18 years using Linux, I find the level of discourse in most Linux podcasts typically rather annoying. Including this one, but when Fab gets on a rant, it's all worth it. Sometimes some interesting guests.
• This Week In Debian: Sadly no new episodes lately, and I've been too lame to respond to repeated interview requests. Probably it needs to move away from being an interview show if it is to continue; there are only so many DD's who can give excellent interviews like liw did.

Back from Banja Luka was the DebConf bus trip to Zagreb. Even though the train connection should allow to catch the night train to M nchen, the time in Zagreb was too short to be sure (as with the other Bosnian track, two trains per day - taking a earlier train was not possible if I wanted to get at least a bit of sleep). So, I went on the DebConf-bus to Zagreb, and arrived there on time. Border checks into Hrvatska were a bit more time consuming then in the other direction - too much traffic but nothing else. In Zagreb, I dropped off my luggage at the train station again, and then went by tram to the parts of the city I hadn't been before (and which were more normal parts, and not the tourist-areas). Incidently I also experienced tram track works, and so had to switch to the bus; however, information was so bad that not only I didn't notice it (which wasn't too bad and unexpected - I plan with enough time as tourist) but also locals were taken by surprise. (Many parts of) Zagreb appears to have many too wide roads, with pedestrians pushed away. Not too uncommon for some cities here as well. But sad to see if public space is not created with humans in mind. This used to be modern in the 60ies, whereas it should have now advanced to center around humans again. If one compares the situation how one feels while standing in a too far road (where the wind blows easily cold) with a decent road in any city center, one could see the difference. But as said, many german cities make the same mistake. After arriving back at the train station, this was in time for taking the night train. Obviously there were many DDs on board. Passport checks in Hravatska went smooth but with many boarder guards. The train had an extra stop not in the official timetable so that they didn't leave their territory armed. On arriving in Slovenija the train had to stop some time. Border checks were quite strict (as this was entering the european union) and time consuming, e.g. partly cover sheets of the train were removed. After entering Slovenija the reminder of the trip was uneventful (or at least: ignored while sleeping), so the trip ended in M nchen as planned. Summarising it was an interesting and nice trip. I had no problem using public transport in spite of the warnings before. Of course, as always while traveling in foreign countries one should expect the country to be more different to home than just temperature and language - i.e. one should expect a bit of the unexpected, and be able to cope with. But that's true for any place one is going to. And these areas are worth another visit another time. I also learned more about "local" history (whereas local covers everything within 1000 kilometers around M nchen). However, the really bad thing is when comparing Hrvatska and Bosna i Hercegovina to see how much more Bosna i Hercegovina could have advanced within the last 16 years, but didn't due to incompetent management. Thinking that the same ways of obstructing decision-making happens in this country (and the european union as a whole) as well (but isn't as visible - we hadn't had a war, but also not much advances in our infrastructure) makes me more sad. Having said this, I still enjoyed the tour quite much - it was a good decision to have done it.

Some Random WTFs The Daily WTF is an educational and amusing site that recounts anecdotes about failed computer projects. One of their stories titled Remotely Incompetent concerns someone who breaks networking on a server and is then granted administrative access to someone else s server by the Data Center staff [1]! In one of the discussions about that I saw people make various claims about Data Center security, such as claiming that having their own locked room helps. My experience indicates that such things don t do much good, I have often been granted access to server rooms without appropriate checks. My experience is that security guards on site generally don t directly do any good. I once had a guard hold a door for me when I was removing a server from a DC without even bothering to ask for ID! On another occasion in the Netherlands I had a security guard who didn t speak English unlock the wrong server room for me, I used hand gestures to inform him that I needed access to the room with the big computers and he gave me the access I needed! It seems that the benefit of security guards is solely based on scaring people who don t have the confidence needed to bluff their way in. Preventing children from thieving is a good thing, On another occasion I showed ID and signed in for access to a DC owned by my employer and I used my security key to go through a locked door with a sign that promised many bad consequences if I failed to lock the door behind me. Then I discovered that the back door was wide open for the benefit of some electricians who were working in the building. Presumably the electricians who had no security training were expected to act as ad-hoc security guards if someone tried to enter through the back door presumably they would not have been good at it. When a company uses part of their own office for a server room then many of these problems disappear. But a common issue in such ad-hoc DCs is the lack of planning and procedures, I have lost count of the number of times I ve seen doors (and even windows) propped open to allow ventilation because there were too many servers for the air-conditioning to cope. The most ironic example of this is the company that had a walk-in safe (think of a small bank vault with concrete walls and thick solid steel door) used for storing servers but with it s door propped open to allow cooling. The advantage of a serious hosting company is that they will have procedures for cooling etc and will be very unlikely to do strange and silly things. Having a locked room in a DC makes some sense, but if security guards have the master keys and are allowed to use them then it might not do much good. The one time I locked my keys in such a room I had a guard let me in without verifying my ID or the claim that there were actually keys locked in the room. Presumably anyone could just claim to have forgotten their keys and get the door unlocked just like a cheap hotel. Locking a rack sounds like a good idea, but the racks I ve seen have had locks which are quite easy to pick. On the one occasion when I had to pick a lock on a rack (due to keys being too difficult to manage for the relevant people) the security guards didn t investigate, so either the security cameras were not supervised or they just didn t care about people picking locks in a shared server room. Also if you allow people to do things freely in a shared server room they could install devices to monitor network traffic. A locked cage in a server room should work well. In the one case where I worked for a company that used such a cage I found it to mostly work well apart from the few weeks when the lock was broken. One company that I worked for had scales before the door between a server room and the car-park to prevent people from stealing heavy servers. Of course that wouldn t stop people stealing hard drives full of data which is worth more than the servers! Also an over-weight colleague had to have the scales disabled for him (as they were based on absolute mass not unexpected changes in an individual s mass) which presumably means that any skinny employee could steal a 2RU server and still be below the mass threshold. How to Solve some of these Problems Computers are subject to all manner of security problems. But they tend not to do arbitrary things for no apparent reason and they will never give in to someone who is charming, attractive, or aggressive unlike humans. I have servers running on Hetzner, Linode, and the Rackspace Cloud. I am always concerned about possible security compromises. But I am not worried about someone climbing in a window of a server room or convincing a security guard to let them in through the door. All three of those hosting companies have the vast majority of interactions automated. I can change many aspects of the servers without involving ANY human interaction. Out of the three of those companies I have had some human interaction with Hetzner (who provide managed servers) when a hard drive needed to be replaced obviously replacing a disk in the wrong server would have been a significant system integrity issue even though everyone would be running RAID-1 and if Hetzner improperly disposed of the broken disk then there could be security issues but this is an unlikely mistake in the face of a rare occurrence. With Linode and the Rackspace Cloud (and the previous Slicehost hosting that was purchased by Rackspace) the most common interactions I have with employees of those companies are when my clients don t pay their bills on time and that s an administrative not a technical issue. When I do have to contact the support people about a technical issue it s usually something that s not immediately connected to the virtual server (EG a loss of routing to the DC). It seems most likely that there are a fairly small number of people who are allowed in the DCs for companies like Hetzner, Linode, and Rackspace. Those people would probably be recognised by the security guards and their work would be restricted to replacing failing hardware and not involve granting access requests. There are some unusual requests that they can process (EG one of my clients recently transferred a virtual server between business units) but even in those cases the administrative software controls who gets access. This is much better than just handing hardware access to what seems to be the correct physical server to a client. If you have software running a few computers and operating correctly then you can probably scale it up to run thousands of computers and have it still work correctly. But if you have a team of people controlling access requests and want to scale it up significantly then there are huge problems in hiring skilled people and training them correctly. There is a real risk of security flaws in such administrative software, if someone managed to exploit the automated management system for one of those three companies then they could probably gain access to the private data of any of their customers. But the risk of this seems a lot less than the risk of general incompetence among humans who perform routine and boring tasks which have the potential for great errors.

• [1] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Remotely-Incompetent.aspx

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You have probably noticed that phpMyAdmin is again participating in Google Summer of Code 2012. This year we don't want to bring dozens of new features like we did in past year, but rather to improve quality and maintainability of existing code. This is all in sync with our plan for phpMyAdmin 4.0. So if you are student interested in improving phpMyAdmin and have knowledge of PHP (especially with some refactoring experiences), you would be welcome to join us. More information is available in our applicant guide. PS: Please note that for removal of frames we already have few applications right now, so you might want to focus some other parts to have higher chance to get accepted.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 2 comments Flattr this!

Some bashisms are syntax sugar at first sight, such as the += concatenation syntax. Usually, they happen to be faster than their more portable counterparts. But only with bash itself.

Take the following script as an example:

#!/bin/sh
# script1-portable.sh
part="$(seq 1 100000)"

for i in $(seq 1 10); do
seq="$ part "
seq="$ seq $ part "
done

$ time bash script1-portable.sh
user 0m20.837s

Now, compare to the following script that uses += :

#!/bin/sh
# script1-bash.sh
part="$(seq 1 100000)"

for i in $(seq 1 10); do
seq="$ part "
seq+="$ part "
done

$ time bash script1-bash.sh
user 0m14.227s

Yes, it's faster. However, when the first script is run with dash:

$ time dash script1-portable.sh
user    0m0.609s

[[ is another example:

#!/bin/sh
# script2-portable.sh
a="$(seq 1 100000)"; b="$(seq 1 100)"

for i in $(seq 1 10); do
[ "$a" = "$b" ]
done

$ time bash script2-portable.sh
user    0m9.148s

And the version using the bashism:

#!/bin/sh
# script2-bash.sh
a="$(seq 1 100000)"; b="$(seq 1 100)"

for i in $(seq 1 10); do
[[ $a = $b ]]
done

$ time bash script2-bash.sh
user    0m4.223s

Then again, the bash way is faster, yet it doesn't compare to dash:

$ time dash script2-portable.sh
user    0m0.588s

I received the email yesterday and was like wow, I m in . I would like to thank:

• Raphael Hertzog and Roland Mas who motivated me to contribute to the Debian project in the first place.
• Sandro Tosi, who taught me a lot while I have been working on Reportbug.
• A huge, huge thanks to Piotr O arowski, who patiently sponsored all the packages I asked him to review.
• Xavier Oswald who allowed me to start the NM process.
• And finally a huge thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and Holger Levsen who were my application managers.

Sorry for the other readers who will find this post boring, but it means a lot to me

OK, this is not another post on how to use Mutt and Gmail. This is just to comment on a feature I found in Mutt that was not obvious, and that helped me to stop running my own anti-spam tool. So, for a number of reasons, my company stop filtering spams. I was setting up dspam to take over that job when I decided that it was just too much pain for a single account. Besides, although I am spammed a lot, I would never possibly be more efficient than Gmail anti-spam, given the load of emails their users classify everyday. I am not migrating my old emails over to Gmail, though. And I am pretty comfortable with my current email work-flow I am simply not going to use a webmail (even one as powerful as Gmail). OK, I am using GNOME 3 after being a Fluxbox and Bluetile user, but everything has a limit But how to keep the best of both worlds? And, more important, how to do that with minimum disruption of what I already have (my own IMAP server and Mutt managing my account there as spoolfile)? The answer is a little known trick using the mailboxes directive in .muttrc. This directive accepts a fully-qualified imap mailbox address. So I just added something like: and added some shortcuts to save email from my inbox to that mailbox (the same as train-as-spam) and to rescue email from it (the same as train-as-ham): and that was it. In my IMAP machine I got a fetchmail downloading emails from Gmail s INBOX so I can get trained-as-ham and new emails (all emails arrive first in my Gmail account) into my IMAP server. All my sieve rules are in place and nothing changed in my email work-flow. It s been working flawlessly for a week now. The only drawbacks are (1) Gmail knowing everything that arrives to me (not a big deal, since unencrypted emails aren t private anyway), and (2) not getting the spam-count once Mutt is run: I have to change into that mailbox to log-in to Gmail. Update: Mar 30, 2012 @ 18:15: I just found out that drawback number (2) above can be fixed by adding the following to .muttrc:

You enable tainting checks, you hack some code to untaint the input, you run the code and no error message appears: you succeeded.

Did you?

No, of course you didn't: not triggering any tainted data warning (or error) doesn't guarantee that your code is "safe". It doesn't mean you can take untrusted input and handle it correctly. It doesn't mean there are no code arbitrary execution vulnerabilities, no XSS vulns, no SQL injections, you name it.

What does it mean then? that, is left as an exercise to the reader.

One of features I wanted to introduce with Weblate is ability to do some quality checks while translating. We want contributors to have easy access to translating, but still we need to ensure some quality of translations. That's why Weblate comes with set of quality checks which are performed on every translation unit. The current set of checks (see documentation) is pretty basic and more might be easily added in the future pretty easily. There are two ways how checks are used in Weblate. During translating, if any of checks fires, translator stays on current translation with warning that something might be wrong. This is not a hard error as he still can be correct, but should at least prevent accidental mistakes like corrupted format strings or missing trailing colon. The other way is to do review of a translation. Failing checks are shown on each translation page or you can browse them by project to give you overview what can be wrong. For example with phpMyAdmin this helped me discover that there were few languages where almost half of translated strings are actually not translated but simply copied from English. There were also other problems like inconsistent translations across branches. All in all using these features helped me to improve quality of translations in phpMyAdmin quite a lot and I hope we will keep it for the future.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Weblate 2 comments Flattr this!

I am usually fortunate at conferences and aside from the obligatory "group photo" manage to completely avoid being in photos and videos of the event. However recently I attended the Linaro connect event in San Francisco and somehow got volunteered to be on a panel.

I'm back with a blog.

After being inactive for a while on my previous blog, hosted at my.opera.com, they apparently nuked my account. Blog, pictures, and other files, all gone; no prior notification. I'm rather sad of such lack of courtesy.
Even when some months ago a friend asked me about my blog (by saying something along the lines of it being unavailable) it never occurred to me that it had been cancelled. It was until I tried to post about something the other day that I noticed it was gone, for real.

There doesn't even appear to be a way to recover the account.

Anyway, time for a fresh start (sort of). This time at blogger. Hello blogosphere, hello world.

I recently started working on a webshop called e-webshops which mainly sells e-books. If I want to attract customers there are various things to do so that people can actually find you. So I started using various services from Google, looking at my results in queries and things like that, and noticed that some queries didn't return the expected results. One of the problems is that I can spell and a lot people can't, and Google doesn't consider the words to be synonyms. The proper way to spell e-book in Dutch is either e-boek (preferred) or e-book, but lots of people write it as ebook (or eBook). I of course use the preferred spelling everywhere. So what do I do? I contact Google asking them to make them synonyms. Almost 2 weeks later I get a mail back from someone that doesn't seem to be getting what I'm asking for, so I reply back. Finally after an other month I get a mail back pointing me to a blog post, which suggest posting it to a forum or tweeting about it. I don't think either form is good way to contact a company about such a thing, which is why I contacted them by email in the first place. I have strong doubts that the right people would actually read all the forum posts. How hard can it be to forward an email to the right people? At the same time I have various other problems with Google, like things that don't work as advertised, broken documentation links, incorrect documentation, no way to contact them about the topic you want and you need to select a random other one, asking me to rate a help page I visited that day and then give an obviously broken URL, and a whole bunch more.

I own a DAS Ultimate S keyboard, and am very happy with it. Yes, the price tag is pretty high, especially when compared to those cheap keyboards you'll find in every bakery shop these days; but the difference in quality isn't something to be ignored. A while back, I got three PowerMac G4 machines from someone, so I could work on them for Debian. They'd been gathering dust for a while, since I'd been busy with other things, but this week I had a look at them. One of the three was incomplete; it lacked a video card. The other two, however, were quite usable. They came with MacOS 10.4.something, and one of them had a 40GB hard disk, while the other had an 80GB one. The disks were quite noisy, but I've already replaced them with a CF-IDE adapter, so now they're running off some solid-state storage, which should be at least somewhat faster, if not entirely efficient. However, installing a quality operating system on them proved to be somewhat harder than expected. When I connect the DAS keyboard to the PowerMac, put the Debian CD in the drive, and reboot the machine, it will eject the CD rather than trying to boot off of it. When I disconnect the keyboard, it will boot off the CD fine, but since OpenFirmware apparently doesn't support USB hotplugging, that means yaboot will sit there forever waiting for me to enter "install" and hit enter. When I replace the high-quality, 130-euro DAS keyboard with a cheap crappy "I don't know what a proper ISO layout looks like" 5-euro Logitech "keyboard", suddenly everything works as it should. Except that my hands hurt from trying to type on that thing, of course. I swear, Apple hates quality.

The GNOME project released today GNOME 3.4, the second major update to the GNOME 3 platform. Congrats! I know there's lots of polish and improvements to some of the major rough edges in GNOME 3.2, but I think that of all changes in this release, Epiphany really stands out, as you can see in blog posts by Xan and Diego.

Work to bring GNOME 3.4 to Debian wheezy users has been underway for a few weeks already, and some bits and pieces have been hitting unstable since the tarballs were released a pair of days ago. We still need more base work to be done before some exciting components like GNOME Shell can hit our archive, and we want to fix as many FTBFS with GLib 2.32 bugs as possible before pushing it to unstable, but all in all, hopefully this time, shepherding a major GNOME release to Debian testing won't be as painful as it was not so long ago. However, we have already identified some fun bits involving clutter, cogl and mutter in our initial analysis, but nothing that hopefully can't be dealt with in a civilised way. As always, if you think you can help us, we're reachable at #debian-gnome at OFTC!

Sarah's Mum had accrued too much annual leave and had to take some time off work, so Sarah did some (very mild) arm twisting and convinced her to come over for 3 weeks, and do a 5 day cruise to Mexico out of New Orleans. Unfortunately, my annual leave situation wasn't quite so abundant, and I had a lot going on at work, so regretfully I didn't join them on the cruise, and instead went to New Orleans for a four day weekend when they returned. From all reports, the cruise was very good. Zoe handled it well, although she did say "home" a lot. One of the two stops in Mexico was to check out some Mayan ruins, which looked awesome from the photos. The other stop involved a dolphin encounter. I was incredibly envious of all that they got to do, and would have loved to have gone with them, as I've never been on a cruise ship either. I can also report that no cats were lost during this bachelor stint. I had a night flight on the Wednesday evening to get there, which was scheduled to get in at around midnight, and I'd booked a motel room near the airport for that night, and we'd booked a vacation rental home for Thursday to Sunday nights. Unfortunately, my flight ended being delayed something like 2.5 hours, so I didn't get into New Orleans until around 2am. The house we rented did the trick nicely. It was a small "shotgun" duplex in what looked like a nice neighbourhood. It was advertised as being close to the street car line, but they were doing some work on the tracks, so the street car didn't seem to be running as far down the line as it usually did, so it ended up being a bit more of a trek to get to it. It was also extremely slow, and there was a marathon on the Sunday, which closed everything down for a long time, making it a generally pretty unreliable form the transport. We ended up renting a car for Saturday and Sunday, which was something of a saga in itself, as Enterprise didn't have any cars at the location we'd booked one, so after a couple of hours cooling our heels there (Zoe was incredibly well-behaved, all things considered), they shuttled us over to another location and we ended up with a minivan instead of a compact, which for the same price, allayed our concerns about being able to transport all of our luggage to the airport on Monday morning. We had a very early morning flight on Monday morning to come back, which got into SFO at around 9am, and I went directly to work from there. Thursday We all arrived at the house, separately. It ended up taking them 2 hours to disembark the ship when it came back into port, with Customs taking an eternity to process everyone. I think we went exploring the local area that afternoon, and took a street car into the city to check out Bourbon Street, having a Cajun dinner at Remoulade. Friday In the morning, we went to check out Lafayette Cemetery Number 2. Sarah took Zoe back to the house for a nap, and Sarah's Mum and I continued back to explore the French Quarter some more, walking down the length of Royal Street (which was vastly different from Bourbon Street, just one block over). We had lunch at the French Market. The cemetery was interesting, as pretty much all of the graves were these huge above ground tombs, that seemed to have multiple family members interred in them. Apparently the cemetery filled up quite quickly courtesy of a Yellow Fever outbreak. After lunch, Sarah's Mum and I continued wandering around the French Quarter. We went and took a look at the Mississippi River, and I had an encounter with a grifter who was so good at his job I couldn't bring myself to argue with him over the $20 he diddled me out of. We tried to get to the Civil War Museum, but it closed at 4pm. We looked at the Robert E. Lee Monument, which seemed to be draped in drunks, and then I think we rendezvoused with Sarah and Zoe back on Canal Street for dinner at The Court of Two Sisters (which apparently we were under-dressed for, as Sarah and her Mum said we were getting a lot of dirty looks from other patrons). Saturday On Saturday morning, we had the aforementioned car rental experience from hell, and by the time we had the car it was lunchtime, so Zoe napped in the car after lunch on the way out to Oak Alley Plantation, where we were introduced to the delightful beverage known as the mint julep, and took a tour of the house and wandered the grounds. Sunday On Sunday, Sarah and her Mum did a swamp tour, and Zoe and I went to the zoo. As I said earlier, there was a marathon that completely closed down Saint Charles Avenue, which is where the street cars run, so after walking down to where the street cars started operating (which ended up being most of the way down South Carrollton Avenue), the driver informed me that the street cars were queuing up at the corner of South Carrollton and Saint Charles, and I should get off her street car and get on the one at the front of the queue. I did this, but the driver of the front street car informed me that she wouldn't be leaving for an hour and half. At this point, I started considering a bus instead. Zoe and I went to check out the Mississippi River, which was quite close to where we were, and then I went back, and despite a street car having left (without any passengers) the driver of the current street car couldn't tell me when she'd be leaving, so I started walking down Saint Charles Avenue. Unfortunately, Zoe's going through a phase where she wants to be carried everywhere, so I was lugging her all over the place on my hip. Sarah didn't take a stroller with her, and instantly regretted it. Lesson learned. Eventually we managed to get onto a bus, which dropped us off at Audubon Park, which had Audubon Zoo at the other end of it. There was a playground near the Saint Charles Avenue end of the park, so Zoe had a bit of a play on that, and then we continued through the park to the zoo. Mercifully, the zoo had dodgy strollers for rent, and there was no way in the world I wasn't going to rent one of them, so that made getting around with Zoe a lot easier on my back. We had a really good time at the zoo. There was some sort of a music festival on in the parklands within the zoo grounds, and that included a jumping castle, which Zoe expressed a desire to have a go on. She had a fabulous time on it. I think she probably spent about 15 minutes in there, without any tears. I was very impressed. I took a brief video of some of her antics. It was getting close to Zoe's nap time, and she was getting tired, but fortunately Sarah and her Mum were able to pick us up from the zoo after their swamp tour and Zoe got to nap back at the house. Monday We had a very early start. Unfortunately, our flight (with United) was a couple of days after United and Continental officially merged, and despite having checked in online, we had to queue up with everyone else (for an extended period of time) to drop off our checked luggage. Then there was a 45 minute line for security screening. We pulled the "toddler going to melt down" card and jumped to the head of the line, but Sarah's Mum had to wait. The flight ended up being delayed because people were stuck in the security line. Overall impressions of New Orleans Fabulous architecture. There were so many gorgeous houses on Saint Charles Avenue and the surrounding area. I'd have loved to do an architecture tour. Crap (but cheap) public transport. $3 gets you a day pass. The street cars are cute, but slow and unpredictable. The drivers were remarkably unhelpful. The buses were okay. Great food. Zoe seemed to have a liking for the spicy stuff. I gave her some fresh alligator jerky, and after some initial coughing and spluttering at the spiciness of it, she came back for more. Post-Katrina recovery. We really only saw a very small part of the city, but there were still some houses with boarded up windows, and some vacant blocks where buildings had been demolished, but largely you'd not have been able to tell that large parts of the city had been underwater, from casual inspection. I really enjoyed the trip, even though it was brief, I feel like I got a good feel for the place. We were there just after Mardi Gras, and there were still beads everywhere. Draped all over fences. Over power lines. Trees on the parade route were absolutely covered in beads. I'd have loved to have been there for Mardi Gras. My friend Brandon, who is an excellent street photographer, took some great photos that capture some of it. Photos from Sarah's cruise and our time in New Orleans are here.

Conrad is readying his fabulous Armadillo C++ template library for linear algebra for a new 3.0.0 release, and started to make pre-releases. His version 2.99.1 came about a good week ago, it took us a few days to make a small required change in RcppArmadillo (which is our R package providing Armadillo to R via Rcpp) but our release 0.2.37 was ready last weekend. But then the good folks at CRAN did not want it. That is at the same time disappointing to us as developers / maintainers: work we do will not get pushed to largest number of users immediately. On the other hand, we do understand that CRAN is under a lot of strain. Years ago John Fox demonstrated exponential growth of packages at CRAN, the rate was then around 40% per year. Right now the number of packages exceeds 3600, and there are often several dozen daily updates (which you can follow with the CRANberries service for html and rss I had set up years ago). And the three CRAN maintainers all have full-time jobs as academics, and they also happen to be busy R Core members. Plus the new R version 2.15.0 is to be released at the end of the week, and this usually entails a number of package changes, putting extra strain on CRAN right now. For more on new or updated CRAN policies, see this long thread. Now, as I wrote on the rcpp-devel list, there is of course always install.packages("RcppArmadillo", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org") for a direct installation from R-Forge. But as I just put 0.2.38 there, it may take the running of the batch updates on the site so if you want it now, follow this link to my local Rcpp archive. All that said, here are the NEWS entries for these two last releases:

0.2.38  2012-03-28
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.99.2 "Antarctic Chilli Ranch (Beta 2)"
          * added .i()
          * much faster handling of .col() and .row()
          * expressions X=A.i()*B and X=inv(A)*B are automatically converted
            to X=solve(A,B) 
0.2.37  2012-03-19
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.99.1 "Antarctic Chilli Ranch (Beta 1)"
          * added non-contiguous submatrix views
          * added hist() and histc()
          * faster handling of submatrix views
          * faster generation of random numbers
          * faster element access in fixed size matrices
          * better detection of vector expressions by sum(), cumsum(),
            prod(), min(), max(), mean(), median(), stddev(), var() 

As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

The winter has been busy everywhere, and not much happened in FusionForge land. However, this is over, and we've started pushing again, with a focus on making our next 5.2 release ready. We've started a stabilisation branch and set up Jenkins jobs to run our various testsuites on it. Packages built from that branch have also been uploaded to the "experimental" suite in Debian (they need a manual approval before they actually appear there, but that shouldn't take too long). They should be installable and working even on Debian Squeeze (stable), although they focus mostly on Wheezy (testing). My personal goal is to have a solid 5.2 release and include it in Wheezy so it can be part of an official Debian system. What this all means is that we welcome tests and reports of breakage; users of 5.1 or earlier versions in particular are encouraged to test upgrades (in virtual machines or development environments, obviously, if the production server is sensitive). We also welcome translators; there are many new plugins, which means many new translatable strings. We'll probably do release candidates before the final release; I'll announce them here (in addition to the fusionforge.org website). Stay tuned!