Search Results: "ag"

5 March 2012

Benjamin Mako Hill: Unhappy Birthday Hall of Shame

/copyrighteous/images/no_happy_bday.png I roll my eyes a little when I think that Unhappy Birthday is the document I have written that has been read by the most people. The page -- basically a website encouraging people to rat on their friends for copyright violation for singing Happy Birthday in public -- has received millions of page views and has generated tons of its own media (including a rather memorable interview of CBC's WireTap). At the bottom of the page I am listed, by name and email, as the "copyrighteous spokesman" for the initiative. And since the page has been online, I have received hate mail about it. Constantly. Since the email only goes to me, I thought it might be fun to share some of these publicly. All these messages are quoted verbatim but I have not included the senders' names. Be warned: the language is often salty. This email is years old now but it is probably still my favorite:
Atrocity and strife run rampant in this world. Babies are abandoned in dumpsters. Teachers molest students. Impoverished Indonesians make sneakers for pennies while the spoiled jackhole in the 30-second commercial makes millions for sinking a three-pointer and smirking at the camera. Forms of religion are interpreted as to compel people to strap explosives to their chest and board buses full of innocents. Boss Tweeds embezzle and get severance pay while John Q. Workingman gets put out on the street when the corporation goes belly up. Out of all these indignities and countless others I haven't the time to mention, why do you make it your personal crusade to assist in the flagrant persecution of family restaurants for partaking in the time-honored tradition of singing "Happy Birthday"? God forbid these foul brigands bend copyright law in order to bring a smile to somebody's face. Food for thought...without the accompanying song.
Many others strike a defiant, if less poetic, tone:
Good luck! There are millions of us who refuse to accept the ridiculous "copyright" on Happy Birthday. If Time Warner were an ethical company rather than a greedy megacorp they would do something truly special and release it into the public domain. There are some things in this world more important than money.
Quite a few people notice that my last name is Hill and suspect that I must be related to the Hill sisters who originally penned the song. I'm not, to my knowledge, although since Time Warner bought the rights, it's not clear it would matter:
I am writing to just let you know how disappointed I am that a large corporation and others (like the HILL family) are making $2 million plus for a song that was created over 100 years ago with noone knowing who created the lyrics! None of us at our place of employment could believe this and we certainly won't encourage people to send money to ASCAP. It is a shame that ASCAP license fees aren't used to pay more to up-and-coming artists who I'm sure need this money alot more than Time Warner. We all plan to sing Happy Birthday MORE now in public places and if anyone asks if it is copyrighted we will say "of course not". Maybe this way the song will not die out completely as more and more other "birthday" songs are being sung. It would also be nice if your website cited whose opinion is writing the piece and your obvious conflict of interest.
Or another:
Is it a coincidence that your last name is the same as the last name of the authors of the song "Happy Birthday?" You seem to have a personal monetary motive for your work with the "grassroots project" you call Unhappy Birthday, and if you do not, your concern is misplaced all the same. Whom do you imagine your campaign serves? And do you realize whom it harms? I do not question the illegality of performing the copyrighted song publicly. And you are correct that most of the public is not even aware that the song is under copyright. I think the harm done to Time Warner and its associates by such public performances is far outweighed by the joy created when the much-loved happy tune is shared. I urge you to ask yourself why you think the immortal Hill sisters wrote the song in the first place. It was not to put more money Time Warner's pocket. It was, I would argue, for the sake of the song itself and the happiness it brings when performed (publicly or otherwise). Please consider siding with the children and the artists; let the lawsuits alone.
Some people suspect the site may be satire, but include insults and and attacks just in case it isn't:
I'm trying to figure out if your Unhappy Birthday site is meant to be in jest. If so Rofl, and congrats on a hilarious site. If you're actually serious, then fuck you Nazi cunts and your corporate butt buddies. Thank you for your time.
Or these two alternatives (each were separate emails):
If this is a joke then it's rather funny. However if this website is serious then you're a fucking idiot. Get a life!!!! if it is a form of protest, then THANK YOU! if it is not, then screw you all!
One memorable piece of mail was from someone who knew of me from my activities in the free software and free culture communities and had a hard time reconciling my work there with the high protectionist website:
I was quiet surprised to see your name and email address at the bottom of the home page of the site Unhappy Birthday. The site claims that you are their spokesman. Is this correct? I do not understand... You have all this Open Source/ Free Software background and then this site that defends one of the most controversial copyright issues??? Do you really mean this? Do you want to help Time Warner?
I've also received probably half a dozen mails that offer some sort of support! For example, this person liked the website -- and even wanted to buy one of our t-shirts -- but objected to our logo:
I was going to buy one of your products from your Unhappy Birthday Shop at CafePress but there's a problem. I hate emblems that uses human skulls in them. Being a member of ASCAP I really do support your cause but I can't buy a product that I would never wear.
And many people are simply confused asking something like this one:
So I saw the unhappy birthday site and I'm just a little confused. Is this a joke or a serious thing?
I usually reply and explain that I have tried to ensure that the site describes the legal situation around Happy Birthday honestly and correctly. That said, the vast majority of messages I receive are unequivocal. Like this email that I received last week addressed to "you anti-free speech fascists": 
         __
        /  \
            
            
            
 __  __      __
/  \/  \    /  \
                \
                  
                 /
                 \
                  /
\                /
Half an hour later, the author followed up with a English version of the same message, set to the tune of happy birthday. You might think that getting insulted and flipped off by confused people on the Internet might get me down. It doesn't! I made Unhappy Birthday because I thought that the fact that something as important to our culture as Happy Birthday could be owned was outrageous. Every piece of hate mail means that somebody else -- almost always somebody who isn't a "copyfighter" or a free culture geek -- is now upset about the current state of copyright too. Sure, Unhappy Birthday makes me a tiny bit sad about people's ability to recognize satire. But it makes me really happy about people's ability to get very annoyed at what they think is the outrageous control of our culture through copyright. When more people are as mad as the the people I've quoted above, we will be able to change copyright into something less outrageous to all of us.

4 March 2012

Jamie McClelland: Managing KVM instances

At May First/People Link we have been using KVM for several years now and recently I have been running KVM instances on my local laptop. I'm pleased to see all the work that has gone into libvirt, which seems like a robust and full-featured suite of tools for managing many virtualization technologies, including KVM. However, we don't use it at May First/People Link for a number of reasons. The most pressing is that it runs all virtual guests as the same user, but also because it offers far more features than we need (such as graphical access to virtual server, which we don't need since none of our guest servers run X). On May First/People Link hosts, we are using a relatively simple set of bash scripts (accessible via git at git://lair.fifthhorseman.net/~dkg/kvm-manager). These scripts re-use many tools we are already familiar with to build and launch kvm guests. Each guests runs as a dedicated non-provileged user, with a console available using screen, and the kvm process is managed using runit. Since our admins are familiar with these tools already, the learning curve involved is much less steep. Despite the relative simplicity of kvm-manager, it was still more complicated and involved than I wanted on my laptop. Additionally, I wanted to fully understand every piece of the puzzle and separating out user privileges wasn't important to me. So - I wrote the following bash script to launch virtual servers. It assumes you are using logical volume manager. Some editing required if you want to re-use it. 
#!/bin/bash
# manage a virtual server
# add /etc/udev/rules.d/92-kvm.rules with the following line (change "jamie" 
# to the group you are running as and vg_animal0 to the name of your volume 
# group):
# ACTION=="change", SUBSYSTEM=="block", ATTR dm/name =="vg_animal0-*_root", GROUP="jamie"
#
# install a new server by:
# * create logical volume with the name: servername_root
# * $0 servername start /usr/local/share/ISOs/default.iso
bridge=virbr0
user=jamie
base=/home/jamie
server="$1"
vg=vg_animal0
# modify server memory here
mem=768
command="$2"
[ -z "$command" ] && command=start
die ()  
  printf "$1\n"
  exit 1
 
cdarg=
if [ -n "$3" ]; then
  [ ! -f "$3" ] && die "Third argument should be path to cd iso. Can't find that path."
  cdarg="-cdrom $3"
fi
function start()  
  lvname="$ vg -$ server _root"
  # trigger udev to ensure we have proper ownership of the block device
  sudo udevadm trigger --subsystem-match=block --attr-match=dm/name="$lvname"
  lv="/dev/mapper/$lvname"
  [ ! -e "$lv" ] && die "Can't find $lv"
  sudo modprobe -v tun   die "Failed to modprobe tun module"
  # create network device if it doesn't already exist
  ip tuntap   grep "$tap"   sudo ip tuntap add dev "$tap" mode tap user "$user"   die "Failed to create device $tap"
  # bring up device if it's not already up
  ip link   grep " $tap "   sudo ip link set "$tap" up   die "Failed to set $tap to up"
  # add the device to the bridge so it get use the upstream network connections
  /sbin/brctl show   grep "$tap"   sudo brctl addif "$bridge" "$tap"   die "Failed to add tap to bridge"
  # launch kvm in a screen session
  screen -S "$server" kvm -drive "file=$lv,if=virtio,id=hda,format=raw" -m "$mem" -device "virtio-net-pci,vlan=1,id=net0,mac=$mac,bus=pci.0" -net "tap,ifname=$tap,script=no,downscript=no,vlan=1,name=hostnet0" $cdarg -nographic   die "Failed to start kvm" 
 
function cleanup()  
  read -p "Please shutdown the host first then hit any key to continue..."
  sudo brctl delif "$bridge" "$tap"
  sudo ip link set "$tap" down
  sudo ip tuntap del mode tap dev "$tap"
 
# generate reproducible mac address
mac="$(printf "02:%s" "$(printf "%s\0%s" "$(hostname)" "$ server "   sha256sum   sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g'   cut -f1-5 -d:)" )"
tap="$ server 0"
case "$command" in
  start)
    start
    ;;
  cleanup)
    cleanup
    ;;
  *)
    die "Please pass start or cleanup as first argument"
esac

Iustin Pop: Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D

I'm still (ever) looking for the portable, somewhat lightweight photo system but with fast AF, adequate low light capabilities system. Also, I love prime lenses. I have a Nikon DX format camera, but none of the zoom lenses are what I want, and Nikon hasn't updated their wide primes. So I tried for a while a Fuji X100, which has much better ISO/noise results than my camera, but it focuses very badly in low light. What's the use of the low-light capability if you can't focus? So, after also fighting with the UI, I realised that the Fuji was not for me, and went back to my Nikon. And the first photo I took again with a DSLR was like Yes, this is what I expect: shutter half-press, instant focus, confirmation beep, shutter full-press, photo taken, ready for next one . Don't get me wrong, the Fuji X100 is a very nice camera, but it is not a DSLR; and I realised I wanted a portable DSLR, not simply a portable camera. What I did learn though from the Fuji is how good the 23mm (35mm FX equivalent) lens is for general , i.e. street photography. And it was also a prime. So after much head-scratching, I got myself a Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D lens. Yes, I know, it's the old 'D' type, the optics are the same for about 20-25 years, and it's not as sharp as the 're-issued' primes (not even close to the famous 35mm f/1.8 G DX), and it has lots of flare in direct sunlight (as common with wide-angle lenses). However it's a lightweight (270g), small (64.5 46 mm) and quite nice lens. And to be honest, I rather like the old-style distance scale (since it has lots of numbers!), so it compensates for the lack of AF-S. The only downside of the non-AF-S is that it wouldn't work on some of the DX bodies. As to the image quality actually a bit better than I expected. Here is a picture I took in Z rich, granted in perfect light. JPEG, straight-from-camera, just with EXIF data removed (click on the link for the original, full-size image; note that the camera was configured for the 'medium' size instead of 'large' you can see how careful I am when taking pictures: not):
Near Z rich Central
Settings were: I think this is quite good quality for a non-processed JPEG; and given how light the lens is, and that it can go down to f/2.8 (with more softness, though), I think this is quite good for a travel lens. And since I have a short trip coming up sometimes soon, I'll only take this lens, to see how it goes as an all-around lens. If it doesn't perform well, I can always blame my bad technique ;-) PS: I had to learn about the 'underlay' plugin in ikiwiki, as I didn't want to commit megabytes of basically read-only, binary data to git; it works well, so I'll be able to post more pics in the future.

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2012/09

as usual, here's my RCBW report. like in the last weeks, a mixture of NMUs and mails to the BTS, grabbing and writing patches, ...

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for February 2012

Released a few hours ago, here is the monthly report of DPL activities for February 2012.
Howdy, dear Project Members,
here's another round of updates about what has happened in DPL land, this time during February 2012. Highlights Quit a bit of highlights for this month: Talks, interviews, and the like Sprints Plenty of sprints related news! It would be amazing to have an average of one sprint per month for 2012, and we're on good track for it. If you want to help, organize one for your team as documented on the wiki. Legal stuff Appointments In addition to the GSoC admins delegation (see above), I've agreed with former secretary Kurt Roeckx to reappoint him as a secretary for another year. Many thanks, Kurt! Miscellaneous Happy Debian hacking.
PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

Joey Hess: case study: adding box.com support to git-annex

git-annex has special remotes that allow large files checked into git to be stored in arbitrary places, that are not proper git remotes. One key use of the special remotes is to store files in The Cloud. Until now the flagship special remote used Amazon S3, although a few other things like Archive.org, rsync.net, and Tahoe-Laffs can be made to work too. One of my goals is to add as many cloud storage options to git-annex as possible. Box.com came to my attention because they currently have a promotion that provides 50 gigabytes of free "lifetime" service. Which is a nice amount of cloud storage to have for free. I decided that I didn't want to spend more than 4 hours of my time to make git-annex use it though. (I probably have spent a week on the S3 support by contrast.) So, this is a case study in quickly adding support for one cloud storage provider to git-annex. The end result is that there are detailed instructions for using box.com as a special remote. And it seems to work quite well now. I just set up my production box.com special remote. All content written to it is gpg encrypted, and various of my computers have access to it, each using their own gpg key to decrypt the files uploaded by the others. (git-annex's encryption feature makes this work really well!) So..
There is a DropBox API for haskell. But as I'm not a customer, the 2 gb free account hardly makes it worth my while to make git-annex use it. Would someone like to fund my time to add a dropbox special remote to git-annex?

Eddy Petrișor: HOWTO: Fix: Baobab opens directories in Totem/VLC (and some Xfce4 related things)

If you ever used filelight or baobab you probably know how useful they are. If you didn't, then you missed a lot on how you can spot (and fix) where your disk space is wasted.

With my recent attempt to upgrade to GNOME 3 which, because of its innate property to be useless and counter-productive, actually made me to use Xfce4 with a mix of GNOME aplications (since Xfce lacks a few functionalities here and there), I ran into all sorts of problems.

As a side note, Xfce4 is quite decent, but if you like some icons on your panels to be left aligned and some right aligned, you should know that you can add a Separator item to the panel, right click on it -> Properties and tick the Expand* check box. And if you also set the Transparent style, it will look nice, too.

Back to the topic. With my mix of Xfce and Gnome apps, I configured my top panel to contain a Free Space Checker for my /home file system and today it alerted me that I was low on disk space, so I started baobab to check what I can clean up.

When I found a possible suspect, I wanted to open the directory with a file browser, but, instead, Totem was started and started trying to queue all the files in the offending directory. The problem is that one way or another, Totem (or VLC) was configured to be the default handler for directories instead of the file manager.

The solution is simple, open with an editor the file ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list and search for the line starting with inode/directory= and you'll see something like:

inode/directory=nautilus-folder-handler.desktop;baobab-usercreated.desktop;vlc-usercustom.desktop;


Remove the offending part, vlc-usercustom.desktop;, save the file and try again to open that directory from baobab. If you are double-lucky :P and now it opens with Totem, you will have to remove a reference to a "totem-usercustom.desktop;" or something of that sort. Now, on my system, that line looks like this:

inode/directory=nautilus-folder-handler.desktop;baobab-usercreated.desktop;


And now it works as expected**

* I suppose it's called like that in English, I have my desktop in Romanian
** Except that I would like it to start my desktop preferred file manager, not Nautilus, but that's another issue.

Steve Kemp: Symbiosis is wonderful

Symbiosis
Symbiosis is the collective name given to a group of Debian GNU/Linux packages which implement simple virtual hosting. It is developed by my employers Bytemark. Symbiosis is basically a collection of configuration snippets, code, and libraries which works to offer virtual hosting in a reliable consistent and easy to understand fashion. You implement hosting for a new domain by merely creating a directory tree. So for example you might configure the hosting for the domain example.com by running: 
mkdir -p /srv/example.com/public/htdocs
echo "hello, world" >> /srv/example.com/public/htdocs/index.html
mkdir -p /srv/example.com/mailboxes/webmaster
echo "super-secret" > /srv/example.com/mailboxes/webmaster/password
mkdir -p /srv/example.com/config
echo "3l33t" > /srv/example.com/mailboxes/config/ftp-password
There you are, now http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ will work, and you may login to check mail with the email address webmaster@example.com via POP3, IMAP, IMAPS, or POP3S. Finally you can FTP with username example.com and be dropped into the public directory. The mail handling is very flexible, and the webhosting supports wonderful things. I don't generally talk about work-stuff explicitly, but we've just made a major new release of the Symbiosis system such that it works upon Squeeze and has lots of IPv6 support out of the box. (Email, DNS, HTTP, Firewalling, FTP etc.) All in all it is simple, well-documented, and open-source with a reasonably large user-base. More external testers, users, and developers would be a wonderful thing..
Mutt Mailboxes & Idle Hooks?
Mutt is wonderful but I'm starting to get annoyed by its lack of auto-mailbox discovery. Assuming you use procmail you might deliver mail to ~/Maildir/.foo/ and mutt won't notice that if the directory is created once it starts. (This is because generally mailboxes are defined via "mailboxes =one =two ..", even if you use a shell snippet it won't get updated unless you re-read configuration, or re-exec mutt). I wish it were possible to use inotify/dnotify/something magic such that everything beneath ~/Maildir would just work. (Re-reading mailboxes manually is one solution but it is .. nasty?) I'm thinking that of all the possible solutions one of the most potentially interesting would be to define a new hook: "idle-hook command .." That way "command" would be executed every time the client is idle. (This is a distinct state unrelated to IMAP IDLE times.) Nopte: There is already "mail_check" & "timeout" options. Even running a defined command immediately following the code for mail_check would be reasonable.
Reverse Proxy
I continue to use, love, and enjoy my node.js-based reverse HTTP proxy, and pub discussions seemed to suggest it is a great idea (due to flexibility) but it will never take on because people don't trust node. I'm almost tempted to re-code it in LUA & C. But I can't help but think that would be a waste of time which would not increase adoption - after all most people use "simple" reverse proxies, and they are well suited by Apache, nginx, or even varnish. Still no rush I suppose.
In more personal news after living in this flat for 7 years, or so, I'm getting a new bathroom designed and deployed. Good times. In the meantime I've been steadily watching Stargate SG-1 having recently purchased a box-set of series 1-10. I've just started series six this evening, and I'm enjoying it a lot. ObQuote: "You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada. " - The Last Starfighter (1984). First film I ever saw at a cinema as a child.

Kai Wasserb ch: ZTE MF190 under Debian with KDE SC 4.7

I've recently acquired an UMTS USB stick, a ZTE MF190 (USB ID 19d2:0117/19d2:2000, after and before mode switch, the second ID can be seen while the stick offers its data partition for Windows driver installation). Naturally I wanted to use the stick with Debian. Normally that is no problem at all (as long as you've usb-modeswitch, modemmanager, ppp and a kernel configured with CONFIG_USB_SERIAL, the driver for your device, most likely CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_OPTION in this case, and CONFIG_PPP installed; in short a Debian standard kernel plus network-manager with its recommended packages does the trick). So why write about this at all? Simple: if you have KDE SC 4.7 installed (from experimental), then you need to recompile networkmanagement, the source package building the Plasma widget for controlling the NetworkManager under KDE, as there have been incompatible changes (see e.g KDE bug #282453 for one related bug), which cause a crash after PIN entry. To do that, just follow the few easy steps below:
  1. Download the networkmanagement source package: dget -d http://cdn.debian.net/debian/pool/main/n/networkmanagement/networkmanagement_0.9.0-1.dsc (please note, that the version available in Debian might have changed, check the latest version on the PTS page).
  2. Build the source package. (Make sure you build in an experimental chroot, otherwise you end up with the same binary.)
  3. Install the binary package(s) you just built (most likely plasma-widget-networkmanagement and maybe the debug package).
  4. Restart your KDE session.

Neil Williams: Rubbish in the archive

I've been asked (or been criticised through indirect media) about why packages are removed and as I've just done quite a lot of removals at the Cambridge BSP (I've done some uploads too, it's not one-sided), I thought I'd explain my rationale in the hope that it will encourage others to remove more packages and fix those which warrant fixing. This, is an approximation of the kind of scoring I would use when assessing whether to fix a package or remove it. All bug counts are for the entire source package, including all bugs reported against binaries built from that source.



RUBBISH - easy to remember, maybe.

If someone comes up with a UDD query which can resolve the above as an algorithm, a) I'll buy them a beer at DebConf and b) it could be a useful addition to the PTS...

Vasudev Kamath: Lato Fonts for Debian

For giving new look to my blog I was trying out a lot of fonts from the FontSquirrel website but none of them satisfied my taste. While searching for the fonts identi.ca website fonts attracted my notice and the font used was Lato. I found it and used in this website. I was wondering why such a nice font is not present on Debian. Since it was on FontSquirrel that means the license should be friendly. So searched for the font in DuckDuckGo and found their website. So after all Lato fonts where under Open Font License which is DFSG compilant. That was sufficient for me to package it for Debian. Here is the ITP for fonts-lato and its already uploaded to Debian and waiting in the NewQueue Thanks to bubulle for uploading it quickly. Hope Debian users will love this new font. And yeah I packaged it using dh-make-font which I wrote majorly with help of my friends. And one more news is its waiting to be added into dh-make package here.

Craig Small: JFFNMS 0.9.2 Released

JFFNMS version 0.9.2 was released today both as an upstream tar.gz file and a new debian package. This version fixes some bugs including making sure it works with PHP5.4. The biggest change in PHP 5.4 is that you can no longer call by reference. Previously you could call a function like myfunc(&blah); which would send a pointer to blah and not the item itself. Now the function definition needs to define what it wants rather than change it each time.
Related articles

3 March 2012

Iustin Pop: Laufsporttag Winterthur 2012

Today I went to the Laufsporttag Winthertur, another 11km run. Overall it was a smaller event (about a third of participants) than the Bremgarter Reusslauf; the organisation was OK, but you could see that it was smaller-scale. The big difference was that this was definitely not a flat course; the official course lists 150m gain in altitude, my Garmin recorded 220m (given that it has a barometric altimeter, and that the course was hard, I tend\^Wwant to believe the latter). The course starts with 50m of flat, and then up and up until you're in the woods, at which point it's a one third flat, one third down, one third up course; by the 8th km or so, you start the final descent (back to the starting point), and you simply go down and down for a long while, until the final (about 800m) flat distance. You can see a nice graph of the elevation profile here. I thought that since I'm not used to hills, I will simply go slower, and finish about 10 minutes later. However, I definitely underestimated the competition effect , and how much one can get into the spirit of the race . The end effect was that by the official timer, I finished about 1m30s faster than the previous race. I was so glad that the race was over that I forgot to press 'stop' on my Garmin ; also, it recorded only 10.51km (with the missing 500 meters all occurring in the last 2 km, I wonder what's up with these inconsistent numbers?). The final descent was so long that I managed to do kilometres 9 and 10 (according to the Garmin) at 4:34 each, which is something I definitely can't sustain (for 2km) on flat land. Speaking of the group run, it was nice that from about the 6th km until the end I have run in the same mini-group with two other people; it was helpful to have someone to follow/help you keep the pace (even though I finished last of this mini-group, ha!). This time I also had the heartbeat sensor, and I found out that I averaged about ~13 more bpm than in my training (flat) runs. So that's what running alongside other people does: it makes you push yourself (much) harder. On the cadence part, I was again averaging ~82 (times two), and for the last ~5 minutes I was running constantly at 83. Did I mention I like stats? One thing that surprised me on this hilly race was that most people kept about the same speed on downhill as on the flat parts; I wonder why, for me it seemed easy to go much faster (within the same heart rate). It is harder on the knees, so you have to be careful on how you set the foot down, but not that much that I would keep the same speed. Hmm And speaking of hilly races: one of the brochures I saw at the race was about this race: Glacier 3000 run, a 26km run with a nice 1,900 meters of gained altitude (starts at 1,050m and finishes at 2,950m). Basically, up, up and more up. Nice, but one would have to be quite crazy That's all, thanks for reading!

Jonathan Wiltshire: Cambridge BSP


Comments
Cambridge BSP is a post from: jwiltshire.org.uk Flattr

Andrew Cater: Raspberry Pi - order

Farnell did take note of the pre-order: I've just had an email asking me to confirm an order. I've just put one in for 30 days delivery ...

A work colleague has also added me to a list he's putting together - this means I might get two :(

Torrent was running at 5.90 sharing ratio a couple of days ago when I stopped it. It's now running at 1.4 share ratio - there's a lot of interest

I put up most of the Debian AMD64 DVDs plus a couple of netinsts at the same time - only a couple of those have reached 1.0 share ratio or better and been deleted.

UPDATE - Using instructions on how to run the image in QEMU, I have managed to get the basic Debian image meant for the RaspberryPI to run on my small i686 laptop.

Well done to the folks at the University of Cambridge who've been using this as a development distribution: Fedora from University of Toronto will follow.
LXDE, compilers - and all running in 256M :)

Julian Andres Klode: hardlink 0.2 RC1 released

I have just released version 0.2 RC1 of my hardlink program. Compared to the 0.1.X series, the program has been rewritten in C, as Python was to memory-hungry for people with millions of files. The new program uses almost the same algorithm and has almost completely the same bugs as the old version. The code should be portable to all UNIX-like platforms supporting nftw(). I have tested the code on Debian, FreeBSD 9, and Minix 3.2. For storing path names, it uses a flexible array member on C99 compilers, a zero-length-array on GNU compilers, and a array of length 1 on all other compilers (which should work everywhere as far as I heard). The new version may have slightly different behaviour compared to 0.1.2 when regular expressions are specified on the command-line, as a result of the switch from Python s regular expression engine to PCRE (if compiled with PCRE support, you can also use POSIX extended regular expressions if you like). The code is significantly faster than the old code (in situations where it s not I/O bound), and uses much less memory than the old one. Per file, we now store a <tt>struct stat</tt>, a pointer, an int, a char, and the filename; as well as three pointers for a binary search tree (which uses tsearch()). It should also be compatible to Red Hat s original hardlink tool now command-line-wise, there is at least a -c option now. The history and the name conflict are interesting, but probably nothing for this post. We re even less resistant against changing trees than Fedora s tool (and derived) currently, but should otherwise be better (and far more complicated and feature-packed). And we don t require mmap(), but use fread() instead. There was no real performance difference in testing. And we are not GPL-licensed, but use the MIT/Expat license. The package is currently entering Debian experimental for testing purposes. If you have used hardlink previously, or are just curious, give it try. And the makefile is now compatible with the various BSD makes out there, if that s interesting for you. Link to website: http://jak-linux.org/projects/hardlink/
Filed under: General

Andreas Barth: Traveling to DebConf 11 - Split to Mostar

Second half of the second day saw me entering the bus to Mostar in Split. Starting in Split, the bus was rather empty. As the bus went along the coast in Hrvatska to Ploce, it filled with more and more people (and was in many traffic jams). In Ploce, it met the train station which is in an industrial area. On this trip, one could see the disadvantages of busses: Not only one couldn't get up and meet new people, but also the bus needs to leave the main road for every stop, so a stop has a drastic effect on the speed of the connection. (However, as this bus was after the last train of the day, I had little choice; going from Zagreb to Mostar via Split in one day with minimum bus is basically impossible unless the train to Split is strictly on time.) From Ploce, the bus went parallel to the train tracks. The boarder checks were quite easy to pass - except for one passenger who needed the passport stamped, but the stamp had to be fetched from the office first. That took a few minutes, but nothing too bad either. On entering Bosna i Hercegovina, I had the feeling of a rather dark country, at least compared to Hrvatska (but might be influenced as well that it was just getting dark, and I was in Zagreb on the previous evening). The journey for this day ended in Mostar, where I found a warm welcome in the hotel (which was some 10 minutes away from the bus and train station). An additional difficulty was that the hotel booking system I used to book hotels uses Google maps, but different to openstreetmaps, Google maps doesn't really know much about Bosna i Hercegovina.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded

Many years ago, the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project initiated a student project to create a tool for making stop motion movies. The proposal came from a teacher needing such tool on Skolelinux. The project, called "stopmotion", was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a national aware with this great project. The project was initiated and mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bj rn Erik Nilsen and Fredrik Berg Kj lstad. They got in touch with people at Aardman Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by animators around the globe. But as is usual after studying, both got jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the project, and it has been lingering for a few years now. Until last year... Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new name, linuxstopmotion. The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I mean). I've been following the mailing list and the improvement already in place and planned for the future is encouraging. If you want to make stop motion movies. Check it out. :)

Ingo Juergensmann: Goodbye Google, hello Diaspora!

Well, at least in Germany there was lot of press coverage about Google changing its data protection policies and joining the user profiles of their services like Youtube, GMail, Google+ and so on. There were even HowTos to delete some tracking relevant data and history before of March 1st. like on German Spiegel Online news magazine. Because I'm no big fan of Google and being a strong privacy advocate, I tried to follow the steps mentioned there and got some surprises. First of all I discovered in Googles Dashboard that Google already joined my private account or email address with the one I used at work when I was testing some Android phones for some reasons. The mail address from work was considered as primary address and I couldn't change this. I could delete my private mail address from that account, but not the primary address from work. So, time was pressing because 1st of March was coming near, only one hour left, but what to do know? I'm already using plugins like Ghostery and AdBlockPlus for some time now to minimize the chance of being tracked and such. I registered with Google+ to have a look onto it and to reserve my name and account there, but I was not actively using it for privacy reasons nor do I use Facebook. Therefor the decision was simple and easy: deleting my Google account was probably the best idea I got on that day. That was easy and a quick win for my privacy concerns! On the other hand having some sort of a social network can be nice. And I'm a fan of decentralized solutions like Jabber, which I prefer over AIM/ICQ. I'm running my own Jabber server for some years now, so it was a natural thought to me to make this step for a social network as well. Diaspora* started as a distributed social network in 2010 after some students listened to a speech by Eben Moglen about "Freedom in the Cloud" and is currently still in Alpha stage of development. But it is working and it is running on free software. That's a fairly good reason alone to prefer, support and use Diaspora* over other proprietary social networks like G+ or Facebook, isn't it? So, give it a try! Everyone can run a Diaspora* node, called "pod", on their own server. There are some good installation guides available at Github.com Wiki even covering installation on Debian! Although these installation HowTo is quite good there are some pitfalls left. For example you'll need good SSL cert from an CA authority that is wildly installed on all systems. CAcert seems not to be supported and self-signed certs and CAs doesn't work either. Without a good SSL cert you won't be able to interconnect with other Diaspora* pods. Another pitfall for Debian seems to be the installation of Ruby. First I used the Debian Ruby packages, but got some errors when starting the server that some CSS files couldn't be found. After using the RVM installation metioned in the installation guide these problems were solved (please note that the described way of using RVM didn't work for me either and I got help from some really helpful people on #diaspora-de@freenode). But anyway, I managed to get Diaspora* up and running on my own server and get it to interconnect with other pods. Although installing Diaspora* from source is currently a little pain compared with the ease and comfort of pre-built Debian packages, it's worth the effort! Everyone who consider Google evil and Facebook bad should consider switching to Diaspora*! The more people join, the better the social network will get! Help to fight against the AOL-ism of the Internet by using open and non-proprietary APIs and software like Jabber and Diaspora*! You can find my Diaspora* pod at: http://nerdwind.de/ where my account is "ij".
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Christian Perrier: 2012 update 13 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 13 languages: Bulgarian, Czech, German, French, Indonesian, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Turkish

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