I have been asked for advice from several people recently on how to get started programming, or how to further develop a nascent interest in coding or software engineering. The people asking the questions range in age from about 10 years old to older than me. These are people that, for various reasons, are not very easily able to take computer science courses right now. One would think that, since I ve been doing this for somewhere around a quarter century (oh I do feel old now), that I d be ready to offer up some great advice. And offer some suggestions I have. But I m not convinced they re good ones. I have two main tensions. The first is that I, like many in the communities I tend to hang out in such as Debian s, have a personality that leads me to take a deep dive into details of anything that holds my interest. Whether it s Linux, Haskell, or amateur radio, I want to do more than skim the surface if I m having fun with it. Many people are not like that. They may have a lot of fun programming in Visual Basic, not really caring that other languages are out there. Or some people are not like this yet. I feel unqualified to provide good advice to people that are different from me in that way. To put it a different way: most people don t want to wait 4 years to be useful, and want to start out right away and get better over time (and I was the same way too.) The second is related. I learned programming at a time when, other than BASIC, interpreted languages were not really available to me. (Yes, they were available, but not to me.) I cut my teeth on BASIC, Pascal, and C. Although I rarely use C anymore, I can still drop into it at a moment s notice and be perfectly comfortable. I feel it was a fundamentally valuable experience, and that it would be very hard to become a great programmer without ever having lived and breathed something like C, where memory and pointers must be managed manually. Having said that, it is probably possible to become a good coder without ever having touched C. Here, then, is an edited version of some rambly advice I sent to someone recently, where learning OOP was particularly mentioned. I would welcome your comments and suggestions. I may point people that ask to this post in the future. For simply learning how to write code, Dive Into Python has long been a decent resource, though it may assume more experience than some have. I haven t read them myself, but I ve also heard good things about the How to Think Like a Computer Scientist series from Green Tea Press. They re all available as free PDF downloads, too! Eric S. Raymond s The Art of Unix Programming is another work I ve heard good things about, despite having never read it myself. A quick glance at the table of contents makes me think that even if people don t wind up working on Unix, the lessons and philosophy should be informative. It seems that many Computer Science programs are using Java for the core of their instruction, or even almost exclusively. Whether that is good or bad, I m not completely sure. It certainly gets people into OOP more deeply, but I m a right tool for the job kind of person. Despite the hype, OO like everything else isn t the right tool for every job. It is fine for people to dive straight into OO and become good programmers/engineers. However, I think it would be difficult to become a great programmer/engineer without ever having a solid understanding of a more low-level language, such as C in particular. I did my CS work when it was mostly based in C, and am glad for it. If someone never has to manage memory or pointers, I suspect they will be at a disadvantage in the long run for not being able to understand or work with the system at a more fundamental level. If a person knows C, plus some concepts of OO and Functional Programming (FP), it should be easy to pick up just about any other language out there. I used to think Python was a great first language, but during the 2.x series they added so much fluff and so many special cases that I m less enthusiastic now, though I don t know how much of that got cleaned up in 3.x. I am not too keen on Java as a first language, because too many things that should be simple aren t. I have a fondness for Haskell, and its close relationship to mathematics could make it a great first language or maybe a poor one, depending on your perspective. One other thing I think it s important for good programmers to have experience with all three major models of programming (procedural, OO, functional.) Even if a person winds up working mostly in one universe, knowledge of and experience with the others is important and informative and, in my experience, leads to better algorithms and architecture all around.

• Procedural languages: Obviously C, but also Unix shell
• OO languages: Python, Java, plenty of other fine choices
• Functional: Lisp, Scheme, Haskell (also the only lazy and pure language on this list)
Having said all that, more important than a choice of book or language is experience. I have heard people suggest that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a superstar at something, whatever that something is, and I wouldn t doubt it. Seth Godin discusses that a bit, with some criticism of the idea too. So that leads to the most important piece of advice: dive in to whatever your interest is. Experiment, write code, put theory into practice in a way that holds interest and excitement. People that try to do things they don t enjoy don t seem to stick with them as long or execute as well, and thus will never become great.

Third day of GUADEC already. And in Coru a! This is a very special city for me. I came here in 1996 to study Computer Science. Here I discovered UNIX for the first time, and spent hours learning how to use it. It s funny to see now those old UNIX servers being displayed in a small museum in the auditorium where the main track takes place. It was also here where I learnt about free software, installed my first Debian system, helped creating the local LUG and met the awesome people that founded Igalia with me. Then we went international, but our headquarters and many of our people are still here so I guess we can still call this home. So, needless to say, we are very happy to have GUADEC here this time. I hope you all are enjoying the conference as much as we are. I m quite satisfied with how it s been going so far, the local team has done a good job organising everything and taking care of lots of details to make the life of all attendees easier. I especially want to stress all the effort put into the network infrastructure, one of the best that I remember in a GUADEC conference. At Igalia we ve been very busy lately. We re putting lots of effort in making WebKit better, but our work is not limited to that. Our talks this year show some of the things we ve been doing:

• A bright future for GNOME.
• WebKitGTK+: current status and roadmap.
• Web to the core.
• OCRFeeder OCR made easy on GNOME.
• Grilo: present and future.
• GNOME 3 accessibility: State of the Union.
• Skeltrack: A Free Software library for skeleton tracking.
• Sketching interactions.
• Sandbox all the pipelines!.
• Web application stores in GNOME.

We are also coordinating 4 BOFs (a11y, GNOME OS, WebKit and Grilo) and hosted a UX hackfest in our offices before the conference. And we have a booth next to the info desk where you can get some merchandising and see our interactivity demos. In case you missed the conference this year, all talks are being recorded and the videos are expected to be published really soon (before the end of the conference). So enjoy the remaining days of GUADEC, and enjoy Coru a! And of course if you re staying after the conference and want to know more about the city or about Galicia, don t hesitate to ask me or anyone from the local team, we ll be glad to help you.

As I recently reported, I have been trying to configure my Linksys WRT54GL running the OpenWRT firmware (version 0.9 a.k.a. White Russian) to support SLAAC and DHCPv6 out of the box.Most of the feedback I got involved upgrading the OpenWRT firmware to a more recent release that might not fit the available storage capacity of the device, which felt like too risky of an operation to attempt.The solution I found instead involved adding ipkg sources to OpenWRT's backports repository, which offers a minimalistic DHCPv6 client. Although I haven't been able to find any proper documentation for this client, the content of its configuration file is mostly intelligible. What remains now is to actually configure it to cooperate with the kernel's native SLAAC implementation and, whenever an IPv6 network is found on the ISP side, to propagate the address space, DNS and routing information to my LAN using radvd.Would anyone located within the Helsinki metropolitan area happen to have an IPv6 testing environment that would at least allow me to configure and test my router?

I've been thinking a lot recently about information security and passwords. It's widely agreed that two-factor authentication, which combines something-you-know (a password) with something you have (eg. a smart card or some one-time-password) is superior to using a password by itself. Most solutions I've seen, short of client-side certificates, both require a trusted third party and provide little auditability.

I'm working on a project which attempts to address those problems. Basically, the idea is that you attempt to perform an action on a website, like logging in, moving some money between accounts, or restarting a cluster. Then, your mobile device ((iPhone used in the graphic to the right because a SVG was handy. Image adapted from work by Virgile Pypaert [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons)) (Android, iPhone, or some custom hardware) starts buzzing, displaying the text of the action. When you approve or deny the action, your device uses a locally stored private key to sign the text of the approval and send it back to the server. The server checks that you approved the same transaction number and text, then allows the action. The server can store the approval notice to allow auditors later to determine that somebody in possession of the private key signed the action request.

So far, I've written a small Django server application, and a Python CLI device and client. They're not yet ready for a public release; I need to write up installation instructions and test it a bit more, but I'll publish them soon on Launchpad. On the usability side of things, I plan to conduct some trials in January comparing it to things like Google Authenticator.

This should be less susceptible to MITM attacks than one-time-passwords, since you can authenticate specific transactions, rather than entire sessions.

On the other hand, I'm no security researcher. Dear lazyweb, are there any problems with the above approach? Also, if I'm going to release this (as I plan to once I get something working), I need a name. Ideas?

On a lark, I signed up for the pilot program of the Google Cr-48 about a week ago. To my surprise, I found the distinctive box on my doorstep a week later. After initially mistaking it for an overpacked, late-model OLPC XO-1 I would have to repair, I sort of did a double-take as I realized what I had received.
Using Chrome OS


Wow, they weren't kidding about the boot time. Chrome OS responds (to suspend / resume and boot / power-off) very quickly. Responsiveness elsewhere in the OS of course varies on system load and other factors. On the "terms" page, there is a "system security setting" which tells me I have a Trusted Platform Module, and that my TPM has a randomly generated password. The dialog could use some rewording; I'm pretty familiar with the idea of a TPM, but I'm still not sure what I'm to do with that information.

Cloud print is really a problem for me, right now. I use school printers for the majority of my work, which I was previously able to use by adding them by IP address. Unless there's some magic I'm missing here, I can't do that with Chrome OS, and such a feature will not be supported. (except by "connectors" on Windows and Mac computers)
General thoughts
I can't imagine using a system running Chrome OS as a primary computer. The biggest missing feature is PGP (or any sort of encryption) support for email. This is probably not terribly difficult to implement as an extension, but the idea of my cryptographic software being automatically updated is rather unsettling. I think I'll have to agree with Paul Buchheit that ChromeOS will have to merge with Android; there is a utility for local apps, even if they're becoming less and less critical.

Last day of Hackweek VIII is over and I think Weblate is pretty much ready for 1.2 release. Today I continued to analyzing performance and did few optimizations of some frequently used code paths. There is still lot of area for improvement, but I think Weblate is now fast enough for daily usage on even quite big projects. Rest of the day was spend by looking at various questions which people have asked me and distilling that into documentation. The most extended part were frequently asked questions, which now includes some hints for setup. Of course the demo server is running latest and greatest git version, I will probably push it soon to http://l10n.cihar.com/ as well.

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For the last months, I've been working on a metering project for OpenStack, so it's time to talk a bit about it. OpenStack is a growing cloud platform providing IaaS. A problem easily identified by everyone building a public cloud platform is that nothing is provided to retrieve the platform usage data. Some data are available in some places, but not everything is, and you have to do a lot of processing from the various components to get something useful in the end. But in order to bill customers that are using your public cloud platform, you need to dot his. In this regard, a lot of companies running public OpenStack based infrastructure wrote their own solution to cover this functional areas, and to become able to bill theirs customers. To avoid everybody doing and maintaining such a stack in their corners, the Ceilometer has been created. The project aims to cover the metering aspect of the OpenStack components, pulling usage data from every components and storing them into a single place. It then offer a retrieving point for this data via a REST API. The initial specifications have been written in April this year, and actual implementation started in May. The project is currently worked on by me, Dreamhost and Canonical. We already have designed an architecture that we are implementing, and we hope to release a first usable version with Folsom. I did a presentation of this project yesterday at XLCloud, which has been very well received. <iframe allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0" height="389" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/embed?id=11ALGC4xuWcRvXKTSnnsteJUkArsTfQW-7IAfWRRI5kQ&amp;start=false&amp;loop=false&amp;delayms=3000" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="480"></iframe> If you are interested in helping us and contributing, feel free to join us during one of our weekly IRC meeting or fix some bugs. :-)

Hiroki Sato, a member of FreeBSD core team, reported to work FreeBSD on OpenBlocks A6, a ARM based machine with Debian. Here is the boot message. And NetBSD also works.

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc. When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so that they are managed using virt-manager. My experience doing this in the Eastsound lab has proved to be quite rewarding. Once network, storage and memory allocation are handled by libvirt, it will be trivial to automate the process of deploying, reclaiming, and managing these Telecommunications Resources efficiently and effectively using Perl. The new equipment we racked over the last weekend all has hardware assisted virtualization and is capable of hosting operating systems which have not been patched to communicate with the host hypervisor. This provides a higher level of assurance that guests will receive the full amount of provisioned resources and reduces the likelihood of resource conflicts, should the cluster operations team mistakenly over-commit. It also makes it possible for these nodes to host Windows-based operating systems. Oh, and they will also host these not insignificant things called BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition (VE) and BIG-IP GTM Virtual Edition.

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc. When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so that they are managed using virt-manager. My experience doing this in the Eastsound lab has proved to be quite rewarding. Once network, storage and memory allocation are handled by libvirt, it will be trivial to automate the process of deploying, reclaiming, and managing these Telecommunications Resources efficiently and effectively using Perl. The new equipment we racked over the last weekend all has hardware assisted virtualization and is capable of hosting operating systems which have not been patched to communicate with the host hypervisor. This provides a higher level of assurance that guests will receive the full amount of provisioned resources and reduces the likelihood of resource conflicts, should the cluster operations team mistakenly over-commit. It also makes it possible for these nodes to host Windows-based operating systems. Oh, and they will also host these not insignificant things called BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition (VE) and BIG-IP GTM Virtual Edition.

Playing around with LLC controls on Sandybridge today. What I wanted to know was how caching backbuffers affects application performance. The reason for this question is that when the driver uses page flipping to display a new frame, we force the new scanout buffer to be uncached because the display hardware only scans out from main memory. However, when we go back to using this buffer as the next back-buffer, we don t turn the caching bits back on as that requires writing GTT entries to change caching modes. This means that swapping via page-flipping and swapping via copying has a large change in main memory access patterns during rendering page flipping applications use an uncached back buffer while copying applications use a cached back buffer. What effect does the back-buffer caching-mode have on application performance? The changes In the kernel, I have three modes 1) Existing code. Set buffer objects to cache mode none when preparing them as scanout buffers. The first time the application flips to a back buffer, caching is disabled on that buffer forever 2) Flip back and forth. Set buffers to cache mode none when used as scanout. When that stops, flip them back to cache mode llc. This involves a whole lot of clflushing and GTT rewriting, obviously. 3) Flush to memory, but don t disable caching. In this mode, the buffer gets flushed (from both CPU and GPU) before being used as a scanout, but the cache mode isn t changed. Benchmarking with glxgears The first test was pretty simple I hacked up glxgears (yes, glxgears is not a benchmark) to redraw the same frame multiple times (including the clear) per swap to provide a scalable amount of work per swap. No pixel operations, so this is just writing to the back buffer. Thes numbers are the median of 5 runs, except for those obviously limited by the refresh rate.

Reps	Existing	Flip	Flush
10	60	60	60
20	60	60	60
40	42.070	34.113	37.130
80	21.259	17.957	18.658

Note the linear scaling over reps (once you get below refresh). I think this means that the swap overhead is in the noise, including flushing and rewriting GTT entries. Given that my screen is (yuck) 1366x768 pixels, or just over 4MB, and my total LLC is 4MB, it s seems like the performance changes here are likely caused by the rendering ejecting every other object from the cache. What s wrong with benchmarking with glxgears? Of course, glxgears is not a benchmark, and I realized while collecting this data that, in particular, it never reads from the backbuffer, and most pixels are only written once by the clear operation at the start of the rendering code. So, it forces everything else out of the cache at the start of each drawing cycle, but doesn t stick anything useful into the cache. Benchmarking nexuiz, a (more) real application For the next test, I ran nexuiz demo1.dem in all three modes. Numbers out of that weren t nearly as stable as glxgears, and I m afraid I didn t write all of them down, but I got numbers between 45 and 50 frames per second in all three modes. None significantly faster, none significantly slower. So, for these two tests, caching has no positive effect on overall rendering performance. Obviously, I need to collect data from more applications to see if the effect is general. I sure hope so, because the alternative will be to find some heuristic to direct when to enable caching. The patch This is on top of kernel version 3.5.

diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.h b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.h
index b0b676a..f69fba8 100644
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.h
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.h
@@ -1335,6 +1335,10 @@ int __must_check
 i915_gem_object_pin_to_display_plane(struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj,
                     u32 alignment,
                     struct intel_ring_buffer *pipelined);
+
+void
+i915_gem_object_unpin_from_display_plane(struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj);
+
 int i915_gem_attach_phys_object(struct drm_device *dev,
                struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj,
                int id,
diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
index 288d7b8..b606bd2 100644
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c
@@ -2851,6 +2851,9 @@ int i915_gem_object_set_cache_level(struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj,
    return 0;
  
+#define JUST_FLUSH 0
+#define FLIP_CACHING   0
+
 /*
  * Prepare buffer for display plane (scanout, cursors, etc).
  * Can be called from an uninterruptible phase (modesetting) and allows
@@ -2883,7 +2886,11 @@ i915_gem_object_pin_to_display_plane(struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj,
     * of uncaching, which would allow us to flush all the LLC-cached data
     * with that bit in the PTE to main memory with just one PIPE_CONTROL.
     */
+#if JUST_FLUSH
+   ret = i915_gem_object_finish_gpu(obj);
+#else
    ret = i915_gem_object_set_cache_level(obj, I915_CACHE_NONE);
+#endif
    if (ret)
        return ret;
@@ -2913,6 +2920,16 @@ i915_gem_object_pin_to_display_plane(struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj,
    return 0;
  
+void
+i915_gem_object_unpin_from_display_plane(struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj)
+ 
+   i915_gem_object_unpin(obj);
+#if FLIP_CACHING
+   if (HAS_LLC(obj->base.dev))
+       i915_gem_object_set_cache_level(obj, I915_CACHE_LLC);
+#endif
+ 
+
 int
 i915_gem_object_finish_gpu(struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj)
  
diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
index a8538ac..76a2012 100644
--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
@@ -1821,7 +1821,7 @@ err_interruptible:
 void intel_unpin_fb_obj(struct drm_i915_gem_object *obj)
  
    i915_gem_object_unpin_fence(obj);
-   i915_gem_object_unpin(obj);
+   i915_gem_object_unpin_from_display_plane(obj);
  
 static int i9xx_update_plane(struct drm_crtc *crtc, struct drm_framebuffer *fb,

After seeing this post on reddit, I ported the OP s code to ERMAHGIT after following the following (simple) instructions:

sudo ./setup.py install

then, head over to a friendly git repo, and do the following:

git config core.editor /usr/local/bin/ermahgit

Anyway, here s a few lines from some random git commits I have handy:

Added chamber to vote page heading
ERDDERD CHERMBER TO VERTE PERGE HERERDERNG
Fixing the import I just broke
FERXERNG THE ERMPERT I JERST BRERKER
Bugfix for non-ascii chars using encode
BERGFERX FER NERN-ERSCERI CHERS ERSERNG ERNCERDER
Add this sorry excuse for a manpage.
ERDD THERS SERRER ERXCERSE FER A MAHNPERGER.

Please, never, ever use this :)

Shozo TAKEOKA had described to work RetroBSD on PIC32 1chip micro computer in 14th JNUG BOF. The board is Chipkit MAX32 with SD card socket. He bought it 5,900 JPY. More detail is http://ameblo.jp/takeoka/entry-11308169137.html (Japanese). RetroBSD is based on 2.2 BSD (!), and work without MMU. So it can work only one process in their ram, other processes are in swap space. It was really funny presentation.

With L szl B sz rm nyi we adopted mime-support, which was maintained since September 1996 by Brian White. It is the first package of standard priority that I take care of. It gives me the same feeling as when side wheels were removed from my bicycle, a long, long time ago. We transferred the source package on Alioth, and uploaded a first update allowing the extraction of information for the mailcap file directly from Desktop files. I think that the next two works will be to resolve the bug about the handling of PHP files, and to update the mime.types base, if possible in synergy with Fedora or other distributions.

I was invited onto NPR in Boston this week for a segment on user innovation alongside Eric von Hippel (my advisor at MIT) and Carliss Baldwin from Harvard Business School. I talked about innovation that has happened on the CHDK platform -- a cool firmware hack for Canon cameras example I use in some of my teaching -- plus a little bit about free software, the democratization of development and design tools, and a little bit about user communities that LEGO has cultivated. I would have liked the conversation and terminology to do more to emphasize user freedom and free software, but I'm otherwise pretty happy with the result. The segment will be aired again on NPR in Boston this weekend and is available on the WGBH website.

Fourth day of Hackweek VIII was for me again mostly spent on Weblate. This time there are no new nice features, but rather general improvements to the code. First task was to add support for django-registration 0.8. Originally my plan was to support both 0.7 and 0.8, but that proven to be too complicated so Weblate now requires 0.8, which brings quite a lot of differences in API. Later I've installed django-debug-toolbar and looked at some bottlenecks in some hot paths. This resulted in few optimizations of translations merging and new caching for translation stats. This turned out to be too expensive for bigger translations and caching these can save few seconds on page load. I will probably focus more on performance tuning tomorrow as I don't plan to add any new features to 1.2 release.

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In July 7, I attended to Japan NetBSD Users Group (JNUG) 14th annual meeting and BoF. There ware many technical sessions, and key-signing party. So I can connect between Debian developers and NetBSD developers with the web of trust.

I had an old English blog with bloxsum, but it is hard to maintainance so I created a new site with wordpress.

Fowler published his paper on Continuous Integration (CI) way back in 2000. Personally at the time I was a much more naive developer, I was not really an adherent to the whole XP community and had worked for a series of companies where the idea of a release build was of a month long process and the concept that the whole codebase could be built and tested on every commit was a comical notion at best.

By the time the time the 2006 edition of the paper came out however I was convinced. Ever since then I have tried to make the projects I worked on have as many CI features as possible. It is one reason I ran the ARM Kernel autobuilder for years as an attempt to provide at least build coverage.

I especially like the way these concepts mean that releases are much less "scary" events and release anxiety is reduced to a minimum. When every commit produces something that is of release quality a project really is doing it right.

The reason I mention any of this is I have recently set up the NetSurf projects CI server. The heavy lifting is being done by a Jenkins instance running on a VPS fulfilling the "Every Commit Should Build the Mainline on an Integration Machine" part of the Fowler guidelines.

Setting up Jenkins was much less trouble than many of the previous systems I have used. I have been a little underwhelmed by the support for plain old make based projects which you have to resort to shell scripts for, but leaving that aside the rest was straightforward. The documentation could do with a purge pass for the old hudson name and the error reporting (especially under memory pressure) is not great.

And there lies my one real issue with the tool, memory. The VPS has 512MByte RAM and runs nothing beyond a web server, jenkins and the C compiler to build the project components. One would hope that was plenty of memory, doing the builds by hand it did seem gcc is happy in that space, alas Jenkins is a Java application and guzzles RAM (over 60% of RSS right now) and causes itself out of memory exceptions with distressing frequency.

The project is left with the choices:

• The project is relatively poor (and I already blew the budget) so "living with it" and keeping an eye on it manually is a possibility.
• Extending the VPS with another 512MBytes of RAM (Due to my VPS provider choice I had not anticipated the need so this option would cost almost as much as the original set-up)
• Buying another more suitable VPS from somewhere reputable like Mythic Beasts (why I did not go there in the first place...dumb, sometimes I am just dumb)

It is such a pity too, aside from the RAM issues it is all going well and it has already encouraged us to get the toolchains for the less commonly built targets (ppc amiga and windows for a start) working.

As you can see on github, there are currently no open issues for Weblate's 1.2 milestone. Looks like I've done most of my Hackweek VIII project faster than expected, but I might add some more improvements. Everything went quite smoothly, but anyway I've decided to postpone some issues. The major reason is that I'm not really sure whether these are good ideas and won't implement something until I'll get more feedback. You can find such issues labeled "needs decision". Comments there are especially welcome :-). On the code side, I've improved support for po file headers, did various improvements on maintenance scripts and improved about page. Also current code from git is now deployed at demo.weblate.org, so feel free to test it. I'm especially curious how the simple and stupid spam protection will work in reality. Now it's time for ice cream and then I'll think what to implement next :-).

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