Charmian Gooch gave an interesting TED talk about her efforts to fight organised crime and corruption by prohibiting anonymous companies [1]. The idea of a company is to protect the owner from unlimited liability not to protect them from law enforcement. Dr Nerdlove has an insightful article about sexual harassment in geek culture [2]. Rebecca Rose wrote an insightful article for Jezebel about the worse bullying advice ever, her summary is that it should be called Ways We Can Get You Goddamn Kids to Act So We Never Have to Deal With Your Problems Ever [3]. In the wake of the Heardbleed bug Imperial Violet wrote an informative article explaining why revocation checks isn t the solution [4]. Martin Lukacs and Shiri Pasternak wrote an insightful article about the Canadian government s attempts to stop Canadian aboriginies from exercising their legal rights [5]. I bet that the Australian government is doing the same things. Nelson Groom wrote an interesting interview with Norrie May Welby, the first recognised agender person in Australia [6]. Marriage equality is bound to happen soon in Australia, now that the government officially recognises non-binary gender people it can t refuse them the right to get married and therefore the straight/gay marriage distinction isn t relevant. BDA Technology has an interesting article on choosing fonts to make text more readable for dyslexic people [7]. Eamon Waterford wrote an informative article for the ABC about how early-intervention social policies save significant amounts of tax money [8]. Conservatives claim to want to save money and try to cut such programs which costs everyone in the long term. Greta Christina wrote an insightful article for Salon about why religious people want atheists to lie and pretend to believe [9]. Chris Mooney wrote an informative URL about a machine to test whether someone is liberal or conservative [10]. Paul Rosenberg wrote an informative article on the link between conservatism, evil, and psychopathy [11]. The next logical step is to treat conservatism as a mental health problem. Sociological Images has an interesting article by Jay Livingston about the hypocrisy of conservative tax policies [12]. Scientific American reprinted an article from The Conversation by Elaine McKewon about the climate deniers who intimidated a journal into retracting an article about their belief in conspiracy theories [13]. It seems obvious that the climate deniers are the ones who conspire. Ben Caldecott wrote an interesting article for the ABC about the fossil fuel divestment campaign [14]. It seems that this is getting some success already, as renewable energy will soon be cheaper than coal power this could kill off coal. Mark Taylor wrote an interesting blog post titled Observations of an Internet Middleman about the operations of Level3 and Internet peering [15]. He explains how monopoly Telcos throttle their customers Internet access. Matt Savoy wrote an informative and disturbing article about the fact that US cops are twice as likely to beat their wives as the general population [16]. Apparently the police hierarchy aren t interested in prosecuting such crimes. Paul Rosenberg wrote an insightful article about mythos vs logos and the conservative approach to relity [17]. One interesting point he makes is that white men (and members of privileged groups generally) fear a loss of status more than more realistic concerns (such as global warming). Nick wrote an interesting blog post about using GPG encrypted email on an Android phone [18]. I should get this going on my phone.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/lyrdepn
• [2] http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2014/04/ending-sexual-harassment-geek-culture/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/o2ueqcm
• [4] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/04/19/revchecking.html
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/plqdn97
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/lxbg4fp
• [7] http://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/lycqvng
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/ldvrztn
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/mtk9gxs
• [11] http://www.salon.com/2014/05/01/conservatives_evil_and_psychopathy_science_makes_the_link/
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/kvqfjf4
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/ko5ykrr
• [14] http://tinyurl.com/kltjar4
• [15] http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-internet-middleman/
• [16] http://tinyurl.com/oqoqvey
• [17] http://tinyurl.com/n5e6945
• [18] http://geekyschmidt.com/2010/12/09/gpg-on-your-android-phone

Allowing computer suspend Major desktop environments such as Xfce or KDE have a built-in computer suspend feature, but when you use a lighter alternative, things are a bit more complicated, because basically: only root can suspend the computer. Possible solutions include:

• using sudo to allow members of a given group to run a suspend command, e.g. pm-suspend as root;
• using a D-Bus UPower thingy, which communicates with a running daemon upowerd:

  $ dbus-send --system --print-reply \
              --dest='org.freedesktop.UPower' \
              /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend
          

With recent updates of the related Debian packages no idea of which one exactly the latter solution may not work any more, in which case it will only return the following error:

Error org.freedesktop.UPower.GeneralError: not authorized

It appears that this error is linked to ConsoleKit, a part of all this modern *Kit gizmo pile. If you are in this case, try prefixing your session launcher with the undocumented dark magic call ck-launch-session. For instance, this is what I have in my .xsession to launch my window manager i3:

exec ck-launch-session i3

Note: I do not know what ck-launch-session does exactly, why it is needed, and I do not want to know. To me, all that WhatsitKit pile is just some opaque, under-documented as in: no man page crap, that no one but their author really understand, designed to solve theoretical problems no one really cares about like: how to allow locally connected users to use the sound card while forbidding it to remote users while creating new issues such as this one. This stuff is too complex and under-documented for me to dive into it, so if it does not work out of the box, it is just some crap that gets in my way to using my computer as I wish. Disabling a monitor In some configurations, you have two monitors and want to disable one. For instance, in addition to my LCD monitor, I have a projector which I only use for movies. According to xorg.conf's man page, it can be disabled this way:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Internal graphic card"
    Option      "Monitor-DVI"   "LCD Monitor"
    Option      "Monitor-VGA"   "Projector"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "LCD Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "Projector"
    Option      "Enable"    "false"
EndSection

Except that does not work, because contrary to what the man page says the real option to use is not Enable but Disable! So here is the correct configuration to disable that monitor at start-up:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Internal graphic card"
    Option      "Monitor-DVI"   "LCD Monitor"
    Option      "Monitor-VGA"   "Projector"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "LCD Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "Projector"
    Option      "Disable"   "true"
EndSection

Note: yes, I will send a bug report with a patch against xorg.conf's man page.

2013 is nearly all finished up and so I thought I'd spend a little time writing up what was noteable in the last twelve months. When I did so I found an unfinished draft from the year before. It would be a shame for it to go to waste, so here it is. 2012 was an interesting year in many respects with personal highs and lows. Every year I see a lots of "round-up"-style blog posts on the web, titled things like "2012 in music", which attempt to summarize the highlights of the year in that particular context. Here's JWZ's effort, for example. Often they are prefixed with statements like "2012 was a strong year for music" or whatever. For me, 2012 was not a particularly great year. I discovered quite a lot of stuff that I love that was new to me, but not new in any other sense. In Music, there were a bunch of come-back albums that made the headlines. I picked up both of Orbital's Wonky and Brian Eno's Lux (debatably a comeback: his first ambient record since 1983, his first solo effort since 2005, but his fourth collaborative effort on Warp in the naughties). I've enjoyed them both, but I've already forgotten Wonky and I still haven't fully embraced Lux (and On Land has not been knocked from the top spot when I want to listen to ambience.) There was also Throbbing Gristle's (or X-TG) final effort, a semi/post-TG, partly posthumous double-album swan song effort which, even more than Lux, I still haven't fully digested. In all honesty I think it was eclipsed by the surprise one-off release of a live recording of a TG side project featuring Nik Void of Factory Floor: Carter Tutti Void's Transverse, which is excellent. Ostensibly a four-track release, there's a studio excerpt V4 studio (Slap 1) which is available from (at least) Amazon. There's also a much more obscure fifth "unreleased" track cruX which I managed to "buy" from one of the web shops for zero cost. The other big musical surprise for me last year was Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. I knew nothing of BJH, although it turns out I've heard some of her singles repeatedly on Radio 6, but her band's guitarist Ed Blazey and his partner lived in the flat below me briefly. In that time I managed to get to the pub with him just once, but he kindly gave me a copy of their album on 12" afterwards. It reminds me a bit of Goldfrapp circa "Seventh Tree": I really like it and I'm looking forward to whatever they do next. Reznor's How To Destroy Angels squeezed out An Omen EP which failed to set my world on fire as a coherent collection, despite a few strong songs individually. In movies, sadly once again I'd say most of the things I recall seeing would be "also rans". Prometheus was a disappointment, although I will probably rewatch it in 2D at least once. The final Batman was fun although not groundbreaking to me and it didn't surpass Ledger's efforts in The Dark Knight. Inception remains my favourite Nolan by a long shot. Looper is perhaps the stand-out, not least because it came from nowhere and I managed to avoid any hype. In games, I moaned about having moaning about too many games, most of which are much older than 2012. I started Borderlands 2 after enjoying Borderlands (disqualified on age grounds) but to this day haven't persued it much further. I mostly played the two similar meta-games: The Playstation Plus download free games in a fixed time period and the more sporadic but bountiful humble bundle whack-a-mole. More on these another time. In reading, as is typical I mostly read stuff that was not written in 2012. Of that which was, Charles Stross's The Apocalypse Codex was an improvement over The Fuller Memorandum which I did not enjoy much, but in general I'm finding I much prefer Stross's older work to his newer; David Byrne's How Music Works was my first (and currently last) Google Books ebook purchase, and I read it entirely on a Nexus 7. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but the experience has not made a convert of me away from paper. He leans heavily on his own experiences which is inevitable but fortunately they are wide and numerous. Iain Banks' Stonemouth was an enjoyable romp around a fictional Scottish town (one which, I am reliably informed, is incredibly realistical rendered). One of his "mainstream" novels, It avoided a particular plot pattern that I've grown to dread with Banks, much to my suprise (and pleasure). Finally, the stand-out pleasant surprise novel of the year was Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth. With a plot device not unlike Banks' Transition or Stross's Family Trade series, the pair managed to write a journey-book capturing the sense-of-wonder that these multiverse plots are good for. (Or perhaps I have a weakness for them). It's hard to find the lines between Baxter and Pratchett's writing, but the debatably-reincarnated Tibetan Monk-cum-Artificial Intelligence 'Lobsang' must surely be Pratchett's. Pratchett managed to squeeze out another non-Discworld novel (Dodger) as well as a long-overdue short story collection, although I haven't read either of them yet. On to 2013's write-up...

Jebediah boarded the airplane. It was a Bombardier CRJ900 with two turbofan jet engines. Run by SPARK, a subset of Ada. He sat down in his assigned seat and listened to the purser inform him that he was free to use his phone door-to-door on all Delta Connection flights. As long as the Airplane Mode was switched on. Jebediah knew that this was why Delta owned 49% of Virgin Atlantic. On the plane ride, a woman in too much makeup asked Jebediah to get the man next to him so she could borrow his copy of the Economist. The man said she could keep it and that it was old. He had stubby little fingers. She was foreign. At Terminal 2, they passed by Kids on the Fly, an exhibit of the Chicago Children's Museum at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. A play area. Jebediah thought of Dennis. The Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority was disrupted by weekend construction, so they had to take a small detour through Wicker Park. Wicker Park is a neighborhood. In Chicago. Jebediah looked at Glazed & Infused Doughnuts. He wondered if they made doughnuts there. Because of the meeting, he knocked someone off a Divvy bike and pedaled it to the Loop. The Berghoff was opened in 1898 by Herman Joseph Berghoff. Once he got to the Berghoff, he got a table for seven on the west wall. He eyed the electrical outlet and groaned. He had brought 3 cigarette lighter adapters with him, but nothing to plug into an AC outlet. How would he charge his device? An older gentleman came in. And greeted him. Hello, I'm Detective Chief Inspector Detweiler. Did you bring the evidence? Said the man. Jebediah coughed and said that he had to go downstairs. He went downstairs and looked at the doors. He breathed a sigh of relief. Seeing the word washroom in print reminded him of his home state of Canada. Back at the table he opened a bag, glared angrily at a cigarette lighter adapter, and pulled out a Palm m125. Running Palm OS 4.0. He noticed a third person at the table. It was the ghost of Bob Ross. , said the ghost of Bob Ross. It was good for him to communicate telepathically with Sarah Palin. This has eight megabytes of RAM, Jebediah informed the newcomer. Bob Ross's ghost right-clicked on his face and rated him one star. Jebediah looked angrily at the AC outlet and fidgeted with two of his cigarette lighter adapters. DCI Detweiler said, I had a Handspring Visor Deluxe, and pulled out a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 eight-inch Android-based tablet computer running the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system by Google. This also has eight megabytes of RAM, he continued. As you requested, I brought the video of your nemesis at the Robie House. Jebediah stared at the tablet. He could see a compressed video file, compressed with NetBSD compression and GNU encryption. It was on the tablet. Some bridges you just don't cross, he hissed. Meanwhile, in Gloucestershire, someone who looked suspiciously like Bobby Rainsbury opened up a MacBook Air and typed in a three-digit passcode. Across the street a wall safe slid out of the wall. And dropped onto someone's head. She closed the laptop. And went to Dumfries. Not far from the fallen safe, a group of men held a discussion. FBI: Why are we here on this junket? CIA: Where are we? DIA: We're here. JIA: This is confusing. NSA: I have to get back to that place in Germany where I don't work. ATF: We're talking about giant robots here, people. EPA: Huh? Part 2 AUD:USD 1.0645 donuts:dozen 12 Gold $1318.60 Giant robot spiders fought each other in a supermarket parking lot. Detective Seabiscuit sucked on a throat lozenge. Who are you again? he asked the toll-booth operator. I said my name is Rogery Sterling, replied the toll-booth operator. Rajry what? I said my name is Rogery Sterling, replied the toll-booth operator. Again. Where am I? Look, I'm telling you that that murder you're investigating was caused by software bugs in the software. Are we on a boat? Look at the diagram. This agency paid money to introduce, quite deliberately, weaknesses in the security of this library, through this company here, and this company here. Library, oh no. I have overdue fees. And they're running a PR campaign to increase use of this library. Saying that the competing options are inferior. But don't worry, they're trying to undermine those too. Detective Seabiscuit wasn't listening. He had just remembered that he needed to stop by the Robie House.

TL;DR I don t know much about fonts, I just use the stock ones that come with my system. From time to time I have issues with docs that others create, and use other fonts. This post is about my plans on learning a bit more and, at least, know how to solve those issues, if it s possible, while staying in the bright side (the free-software / free font side). Long version The context I use Debian, LibreOffice, sometimes Inkscape, and LaTeX. One of my favorite hashtags is #iloveplaintext, I don t know much about design in general, and fonts and typography in particular. I didn t change the fonts in my desktops (only reduced the size in the laptop, to be able to read a bit more in my low resolution screen), I rarely change the font in Writer (maybe from Liberation Serif to Liberation Sans), I never changed the font in a LaTeX document or LaTeX beamer presentation (I write boring documents, I know) and when I paste from the web, it s usually because I want to read a long article so I paste as plain text in gedit and print it or save it. So I ve never felt to learn more about fonts, it just works, and covers my needs, (or not, but I mostly could live with the issues). Then a friend in the Pump.io network, Adri n Perales, published a blog post about Typography (in Spanish) that I liked very much, and I began to think (and remember) some of the issues that I have from time to time with fonts. Issue #1: League Gothic: a free font that was not installed in my system Today, again in the Pump.io network, I discover that the FSF published a poster Privacy is impossible without free software , in SVG format, but it didn t look well when I opened it with GIMP, clearly due to some missing font. Nice that SVG format is a plain text format (XML)! So I opened the file with gedit and searched for the text string whose font was missing. It was League Gothic font, of course a free software font, but not packaged in Debian, it seems. No problem. I downloaded the font, copied the files in /usr/share/fonts and problem solved. Issue #2: Book Antiqua: a non-free font (must find equivalent) A document made with Microsoft Word that one friend sends to me so I review and resend (in PDF format) to other people. It s a leaflet, and it has text in Arial, in Tahoma, and in Book Antiqua. When I open it with LibreOffice the aspect is wrong (the substitutes are not the same size so some breaking lines and so). Book Antiqua is not free. I learned that it s an imitation of the Palatino font, and that a similar font in the free software systems is URW Palladio . In Writer (LibreOffice), I went to Tools > Options > Fonts and declared the equivalence of the two fonts, so the program would use URW Palladio as a substitute of Book Antiqua. I opened again the document and it was quite better, very similar to the original aspect. I didn t bother in changing the text in Arial or Tahoma, since the substitutes that LibreOffice used were quite good. But I bookmarked this page: A Web Designer Guide to Linux Fonts for remembering the different fonts that I can try to emulate the Windows ones. I also know that I can install the Microsoft Core Fonts for the web since they are packaged for Debian in the contrib archive. But I ll try to survive without them for now (until now, I didn t bother, why should I now that I have the substituting guide?). In other news, I got impressed that MS Core Fonts is #4 in Most downloads all over the time in SourceForge, with more than 450 million downloads \o/ Issue #3: Installing a new free font in Debian So I decided to install one of the fonts that Adri n Perales recommended in his blog post, Linux Libertine . Since it is packaged for Debian, it s super easy:

# apt-get install ttf-linux-libertine

(my LibreOffice was opened, so I closed it and opened again, and the font was there ready for use). Issue #4: Use a different font in LaTeX Well, as always, there is not one but many ways to do that in LaTeX. My intuition tells me that if there is a LaTeX package for the font that I want to use, it s probably a nice idea to just use it. So I searched about Linux Libertine in LaTeX and yes, there is a package (and you can find a very interesting font guide in The LaTeX font catalogue ). I installed the package texlive-fonts-extra, and then, I added two lines in my LaTeX document:

\usepackage libertine 
\usepackage[T1] fontenc 

Compiled, and the resultant PDF was using Libertine font instead of Computer Modern. TODO (and/or wishlist) When opening a document that uses a font not present in my system, I maybe wouldn t notice that a font is missing and I see a substitute (and maybe not the best one)!. It would be nice that the program tells the user This file uses the font X, and it seems it s not in your system. I ll use font Y as a substitute . I m not sure if there is a standard way to know which package contains a certain font. I use a web search engine to try to find out, and the websites that I linked in the article. I have to investigate and learn a bit more about free fonts equivalents to the ones that other people use, and fonts in general, so my documents are more beautiful and people gets interested to know about the tools that I use to produce them. Well, I ve written a long blog post (thanks if you read until here!), solved some issues, and try some things, but not even capturing a snapshot to show here! It seems that I m still lazy, forgive me I hope at least this #plaintext is useful for you :)
Filed under: My experiences and opinion, Uncategorized Tagged: Debian, English, Fonts, Free Software, LaTeX, libre software, LibreOffice, Moving into free software, pump.io

I recently bought a new Lenovo X1 Carbon. It is the new second-generation, type 20A7 laptop, based on Intel s Haswell microarchiteture with the adaptive keyboard. It is the version released in 2014. I also ordered the Thinkpad OneLink Dock which I have returned for the OneLink Pro Dock which I have not yet received. The system is still very new, challenging, and different, but seems to support GNU/Linux reasonably well if you are willing to run a bleeding edge version and/or patch your kernel and if you are not afraid to spend an afternoon or two tweaking things. What follows are my installation notes for Debian testing (jessie) when I installed it in early May 2014. My general impressions about the laptop as a GNU/Linux system and overall are at the end of this write-up.

Random thoughts of a new contributor I've started to contribute to Mozilla - and particularly to the Firefox Desktop QA team - at the end of March, in order to apply for the OPW with Mozilla as Bug Wrangler.
While being already part of the Free Software world as contributor clearly helps, it's always difficult to find your way at first in such a big project, no matter how helpful the people you're working with are. It's about trying to understand how the project is organized and who works on what, what is expected from you as contributor and the specific style of interaction and contribution accepted in the project. So, here's a couple of thought about it: the necessary disclaimer is that I'm a long-time Debian contributor meaning that, inevitably, Debian is my reference model. Also, everything I'm writing here regards only the specific part of the project I've been working in: Desktop QA and Bugmastering. Documentation The first thing that I noticed is the huge amount of documentation. Everything is very well documented and while this is definitely a plus in my book, it's sometimes difficult to keep track of all this resources. AFAICT, there are basically three main sources of documentation:

1. the wiki
2. the Mozilla Developer Network
3. the site of the QA team

Some of the documents on these three different places are sometimes similar, making them redundant and it's difficult to remember where you read what. At least for me. My workaround has been to bookmark pages as a mad woman, and also to make a list on my wikipage of the pages I found more useful.
My top five of useful pages? Here we go!

1. a bug's life: lifecycle of bugs in BMO
2. Tyler's BMO survival guide (parts 1, 2 and 3)
3. Tyler's Triage Guidelines
4. on reducing testcases
5. bug verification walkthrough

And speaking of triage, special shout-out for the most useful addon ever for Mozilla triagers/testers: Nightly Tester Tools. Community interaction For someone coming from Debian, where everything is done via public mailing lists and/or IRC chans, Mozilla was a bit of a cultural shock. The mailing lists are not very much used, at least in the QA community (or I'm not subscribed to the right ones ;)). As for IRC, while there are many channels, they are not very active: meetings and important discussions are held using a proprietary videoconference software (Vidyo), and are mostly restricted to employees (but other people can join if they have a guest URL). On the other hand, every time I asked for help - even the most stupid question - on IRC, I got a useful reply. And thanks to the folks on #testdays and #qa (especially petruta and Aleksej) I was able to speed up the learning process and understand how things work in the project. So, while I'd like to see more public meetings, it's also true that the community is working well on interaction among contributors. Community outreach This is where I think Debian could borrow a couple of ideas. Mozilla basically got me hooked thanks to their Bugdays: every Monday and Wednesday are - respectively - dedicated to Triage and Verification of bugs. The events are open to everyone, the wikipages for the events provide a good tutorial explaining the workflow in detail, and if you have any doubts there are always people willing to help you on the dedicated IRC chan. Every bug worked on during these events is also tagged: so that later it's possible to check how successful the day was in terms of participation. Bugzilla and the triaging/verification workflow About Bugzilla I can only say that I like it. I like how flexible is for search queries, I like the possibility to have custom tags on the whiteboard (as the [bugday-xxxxxx] one) and the smart way to interact among people in the bug without making the bug go stale (ie, mostly the needinfo feature). But beside the software used as BTS, I must admit that I really like the workflow and the whole concept of triaging in Mozilla. The granularity of rights (everyone, canconfirm, editbugs) and the clear procedure for a permission upgrade; the presence of a team constantly working on cleaning the incoming bugs, regardless of the product/component, to make easier for the developers the filtering and the resolution as well; the attention to details of the verification process: each bug marked as Resolved Fixed need to be Verified, to be sure that it's been actually fixed... All these things are really impressive. This, obviously, is something that can be done inside an upstream project where there are people doing paid work, and where the products are not too many. I cannot see how this kind of QA process can be applied to bugs against an entire OS.
But there are some things we (as in Debian) could take inspiration from. Organizing regular Bugdays, for instance. Creating a team of triagers to help both with incoming and with very old bugs. And this, again, is a kind of work that can be done by everyone, not only coding contributors: meaning that an additional effect would be to increase the diversity in the contributors pool. As a side note: I'll start my OPW internship next Monday, and will spend three months playing with bugs and learning how to be a Bug Wrangler! \o/\o/

This is an updated version of an earlier post in March. A number of talks about Rcpp are scheduled over the next couple of months:

• On Wednesday May 14 I will be speaking at the Chicago R Users Group meeting charmingly titled Warm Up for R/Finance, along with fellow R/Finance organizer Josh Ulrich, fellow R/Finance regular Kent Hosxey as well as Cliff Clive. I will talk about Redis and my rather recent nascent RcppRedis package.
• Our sixth international conference R/Finance will take place May 16 and 17, 2014, at UIC in Chicago. See the current agenda for details of the program---which once again will be preceded by one-hour workshops. And as in the past, I will offer a one-hour gentle introduction to Rcpp. This workshop requires registration and a fee, and registraion will close shortly. I will also present a short lightning talk about the RcppRedis package as part of the conference proper.
• A few days later, on May 20, 2014, I will present a one-hour webinar which is part of a series organized by Ray DiGiacomo and the Orange County R Users Group. See this page for details and registration information; the talk itself will be free of charge.
• Later in the month, on May 30, 2014, I will give a talk / guest lecture about Rcpp and RcppArmadillo and over in Economics at the University of Chicago. I reckon that this event is not open to anybody not part of U of C.
• Another three-hour tutorial is scheduled for the tutorial day preceding useR! 2014 at UCLA in early July. This tutorial will also require registration as part of the annual useR! conference. I am very honoured to have been asked to give one of the invited keynotes at useR! 2014. The talk may (or may not) cover at least some aspects of Rcpp. As my talk proposal about the recent RcppZiggurat package for faster Normal RNGs was accepted, I will also give a regular conference talk.

So the month of June remains pretty open. If someone wants me to talk somewhere else, preferably on a Saturday, feel free to get in touch.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Some brief notes, between tourist-moments.

Temporary file races

I reported some issues against the lisp that is bundled with GNU Emacs, the only one of any significance related to the fall-back uudecode option supported by tramp.el. (tramp allows you to edit files remotely, it is awesome.) Inadvertantly I seem to have received a CVE identifier refering to the Mosaic web-browser. Damn. That's an old name now.

Image tagging

A while back I wrote about options for tagging/finding images in large collections. Taking a step back I realized that I mostly file images in useful hierarchies:

Images/People/2014/
Images/People/2014/01/
Images/People/2014/01/03-Heidi/  RAW JPG thumbs  
Images/People/2014/01/13-Hanna/  RAW JPG thumbs  
..

On that basis I just dropped a .meta file in each directory with brief notes. e.g:

name     = Jasmine XXX
location = Leith, Edinburgh
source   = modelmayhem
theme    = umbrella, rain, water
contact  = 0774xxxxxxx

Then I wrote a trivial perl script to find *.meta - allowing me to create IMAGE_123.CR2.meta too - and the job was done.

Graphical Applications

I'm currently gluing parts of Gtk + Lua together, which is an experiment to see how hard it is to create a flexible GUI mail client. (yeah.) So far its easy if I restrict the view to three-panes, but I'm wondering if I can defer that, and allow the user to handle the layout 100%. I suspect "not easily". We'll see, since I'm not 100% sold on the idea of a GUI mail client in the first place. Still it is a diversion.

Finland

I actually find myself looking forward to my next visit which is .. interesting?

TL;DR This key is no longer usable:

pub  2048R/9C6C32C7 2014-02-16 Laura ARJONA REINA <larjona99@gmail.com>
                               Laura ARJONA REINA <larjona@fsfe.org>
                               Laura ARJONA REINA <laura.arjona@upm.es>
                               Old key 0xE20474C3 no longer valid: lost secret key. (Clave antigua 0xE20474C4 ya no es v lida: clave secreta perdida.)
Fingerprint=F29B A6D8 D1DC A30F 3E34  53DF 5CD1 FDE5 9C6C 32C7

Please act as if it does not exist. The reason is that I cannot remember the passphrase of my master GPG key. This is why I didn t signed any of the keys of people that I met in Barcelona MiniDebconf. My geek self steem is a bit undermined, but feeling sorry for myself accomplishes nothing, so I think I will not hide problems and move on. I ll post about my new key soon. Long version The bad news The bad news are many. I generated my key in February 2014 (I generated my very first GPG Key in 2010, as an exercise, but never used it again, and in 2014 I couldn t remember the passphrase, and the paper where it was written, had got lost before). Anyway, February 2014, new GPG key. I followed the Howto in FSFE wiki in order to use my brand new FSFE SmartCard. I have to admit that I didn t understand very well how all this works, and it seems that my main mistake was to miss-understand that since I was using a smartcard, with a PIN and an Admin PIN, remembering passphrases was no longer required (only remembering the PINs). I was WRONG! PINs are for daily use with the subkeys of your card (for encryption, decryption, and signing stuff different than GPG keys), you still have the master key that is not in the card (but in a separate medium in a safe place), and for the master key we still use passphrase, and the master key is the one that allows signing keys from other people, and changing, revoking, adding subkeys, etc. So, it seems I used a random passphrase that I didn t write down and I could not remember, due to this terrible missunderstanding. Another bad news is that I didn t generate a revocation certificate (well in fact, I was going to generate just before signing the first key of another person, and then I realize that it was asking the passphrase, hence the problem). First I thought that it should ask the PIN and my smartcard setup was wrong or anything, but after reading and interchanging emails with other people more experienced than me, I realized that I should remember that passphrase. And I couldn t. So there are no revocation certificates :( Another bad news is that some (awesome) people already signed my key, and it will be difficult to meet again so they sign my new key. I was thinking about applying to the Debian new member process this summer, and I have not many opportunities to meet Debian people in person, so I gathered quite a lot signs last March in MiniDebConf Barcelona. Now I m again at the starting point (well, this is perfect excuse to try to join a Debian event soon :) I don t know how I would manage to do it, but I ll try!). The good news (Always look at the bright side of life ) The main good news is that I didn t used the GPG key for signing/encrypting important stuff: I just interchanged some encrypted mail as test with friends, and signed some mails sent to public mailing lists (for signing mails I was using the smartcard PIN so I didn t notiece the problem). The other main good news is that my key is not compromised (well, you can never be sure, but I think so). I cannot revoke it but I m quite sure nothing important depends on that key. Other good news is that I have read a lot about how GPG works and how the smartcard works, keys and subkeys and all this stuff, and I think now I understand everything quite better. I have learned (and also tried) tools as nasty, John The Ripper and rephrase to try to recover the passphrase. I didn t recover it, but at least I know that all those (free software) tools exist and how to use them :) And I have learned the lesson: to be extremely careful, test that everything works (not just try one or two things, test everything) and to not leave work for later (and for example, generate the revocation certificates just right after the keys). Next steps I ll send a message to all the friends that signed or downloaded my old GPG key apologysing and pointing to this blog post so they learn the details about why I create a new key. I ll take this opportunity to download and use the Tails (The Agnostic Incognito System, a Debian derivative which is a live system and is focused in protecting privacy and anonymity of the user). Tails will be my safe, network disconnected environment to generate the new keys and do the sensible tasks with them. I think this time I will create my main key 4096-bit long (since now I understand that the main key is not stored in the card) and the subkeys can be 2048-bit or 3072 to fit in the smarcard. Well, hands on! I ll write another blog post when my new GPG keys are ready. I hope third time s the charm! Note: Thank you to all the people that gave me advice and support (knowledge, links, moral support) about this issue. You know who you are!
Filed under: My experiences and opinion, Tools Tagged: Debian, encryption, English, Free Software, gpg, libre software, Moving into free software, mswl-cases

I guess I ve had them around for a while Maybe I should clean these up

cjac@ns1:~$ ls /lib/modules/
2.6.18-4-xen-amd64colliertech.fw+0  2.6.32-5-amd64
2.6.24-19-xen                       3.2.0-4-amd64
cjac@ns2:~$ ls /lib/modules/
2.6.18-4-xen-amd64colliertech.fw+0  2.6.24-19-xen  2.6.32-5-amd64
cjac@ns2:~$ sudo rsync -aue ssh ns1:/lib/modules/ uname -r  /lib/modules

I remember editing the .config file for that kernel and building it on my first ever 64-bit system back in 2004 or so.

It took some time, but now it s finally done: KDE has translations for AppStream upstream metadata! AppStream is a Freedesktop project to extend metadata about the software projects which is available in distributions, especially regarding applications. Distributions compile a metadata file from data collected from packages, .desktop files and possibly other information sources, and create an AppStream XML file from it, which is then directly or via a Xapian cache read by software-center-like applications such as GNOME-Software or KDEs Apper. Since the metadata available from current sources is not standardized and rather poor, upstream projects can ship small XML files, AppStream upstream metadata or AppData in short. These files contain additional information about a project, such as a long description and links to screenshots. They also provide hints about public interfaces a software provides, for example binaries and libraries, making it possible for distributors to give users exactly the right package name in case they are missing a software component. So, in order to represent graphical KDE applications like they deserve it in the new software centers making use of AppStream, we need to ship AppData files, with long descriptions, screenshots and a few URLs. But how can you create these metadata files? In case you want your graphical KDE app to ship an AppData file, there is now a help page on the Techbase Wiki which provides all information needed to get started! For non-visual stuff or software which just wants to publish it s provided interfaces with AppStream metadata, there is a dedicated page for that as well. Shipping metadata for non-GUI apps will help programmers to satisfy depedencies in order to compile new software, enhance bash-completion for missing binaries and provides some other neat stuff (take a look at this blogpost to get a taste of it). And if you want to read a FAQ about the metadata stuff and get the bigger picture, just go to the Techbase Wiki page about AppStream metadata as well. The pages are not 100% final, so if you have questions, please write me a mail and I ll update the pages, or simply correct/refine it by yourself (it s a wiki afterall). And now to the best thing: As soon as you ship an AppStream upstream metadata file (*.appdata.xml* for apps or *.metainfo.xml* for other stuff), the KDE l10n-script (Scripty!) will automatically start translating it, just like we already do with .desktop files. No further actions are necessary. I already have a large amount of metadata files here, partially auto-generated, which show that we have about 160+ applications in KDE which could get an AppData file, not counting any frameworks or other non-GUI stuff yet. Since that is a bit much to submit via Reviewboard (which I originally planned to do), I hope I can commit the changes directly to the respective repositories, where the maintainers can take a look at it and adjust it to their liking. If that idea does not receive approval, I will just publish a set of data at some place for the KDE app maintainers to take as a reference (the auto-generated stuff needs some fixup to be commit-ready (which I d do in case I can just commit changes)). Either way, it is safe now to write and ship AppData files in KDE projects! In order to get your stuff translated, it is necessary that you follow the AppStream 0.6 metadata specification, and not one of ther older revisions. You can easily detect 0.6 metadata by the <component> root node, instead of <application>, or by it having a metadata_license tag. We don t support the older versions simply because it s not necessary, as there were only two KDE projects shipping AppData before, which are now using 0.6 data as well. Since 0.6, the metadata XML format is guaranteed to be stable, and the only reason which could make me change it in an incompatible way is to prevent something as bad as the end of the world from happening (== won t happen ). You can find the full specification (upstream and distro data) here. All parsers are able to handle 0.6 data now, and the existing tools are almost all migrated already (might take a few months to hit the distributions though). So, happy metadata-writing! Thanks to all people who helped with making this happen, and especially Burkhard L ck and Albert Astals Cid for their patch-review and help with integrating the necessary changes into the KDE l10n-script.

Alan How:

There's an Italian restaurant somewhere in the Lake District in the north of England. And if you can imagine, there are hills, lots of rain, lakes, and so on and so forth. And inside this Italian restaurant is a huge picture a wall-sized mural of Marlon Brando. Now, I asked my students once: Why Marlon Brando? Well he's The Godfather! I don't think he was a Godfather, you know... But he was in that film, wasn't he? It was called The Godfather. Ah, that film from 40 years ago, virtually.. 1970-something? Yes, yes, but he was The Godfather then, wasn't he? You mean if was a mafiosi? He was a leading figure in gangsterland in New York? Well, yes, he was The Godfather, they keep saying, ... and he was Italian. Well, no, actually he was American... So you get this regular kind of placing and misplacing of the real, ie. a very large American actor who played in a film called The Godfather about American gangsters, or Italian-American gangsters, nothing to do with godfathers in Christianity, in the north of England, stuck on a huge wall in a restaurant. All of which tells us that it's an Italian restaurant. And we don't demure, we don't say "no, that's all untrue", we just take it for granted: "Yeah, that's what it means - it's an Italian restaurant". And it's that kind of slippage between the real and the imagined or the true and the fictional which Baudrillard thinks is becoming inceasingly characteristic of how our society goes on.

This weekend, Bernd Zeimetz organized a BSP at the offices of conova in Salzburg, Austria. Three days of discussions, bugfixes, sparc removals and a lot of fun and laughter. We squashed a total of 87 bugs: 66 bugs affecting Jessie/Sid were closed, 9 downgraded and 8 closed via removals. As people tend to care about (old)stable, 3 bugs were fixed in Wheezy and one in Squeeze. These numbers might be not totaly correct, as were kinda creative at counting Marga promised a talk about an introduction to properly counting bugs using the Haus vom Nikolaus algorithm to the base of 7 . Speaking of numbers, I touched the following bugs (not all RC):

• #741806: pygresql: FTBFS: pgmodule.c:32:22: fatal error: postgres.h: No such file or directory
  Uploaded an NMU with a patch. The bug was introduced by the recent PostgreSQL development package reorganisation.
• #744229: qpdfview: FTBFS synctex/synctex_parser.c:275:20: fatal error: zlib.h: No such file or directory
  Talked to the maintainer, explaining the importance of the upload and verifying his fix.
• #744300: pexpect: missing dependency on dh-python
  Downgraded to wishlist after verifying the build dependency is only needed when building for Wheezy backports.
• #744917: luajit: FTBFS when /sbin is not in $PATH
  Uploaded an NMU with a patch, which later was canceled due to a maintainer upload with a slightly different fix.
• #742943: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_raid: wants mpt-statusd / mptctl
  Analyzed the situation, verified the status with the latest upstream version of the ckeck and commented on the bug.
• #732110: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_rbl error when nameserver available only in IPv6
  Verify that the bug is fixed in the latest release and mark it as done.
• #684726: nagios-plugins-contrib: RFP: check-v46 Icinga / Nagios plugin for dual stacked (IPv4 / IPv6) hosts
  Mark bug as done, the changelog was missing a proper Closes tag.
• #661167: nagios-plugins-contrib: please include nagios-check-printer-status
  Mark bug as done, the changelog was missing a proper Closes tag.
• #745895: nagios-plugins-contrib: does not compile against Varnish 4.0.0
  Write a patch for supporting the Varnish 3 and 4 APIs at the same time. Also proposed the patch upstream.
• #744922: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_packages: check for security updates broken
  Forward our security_updates_critical patch and Felix fixes to it upstream, then updating check_packages to the latest upstream version.
• #744248: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_cert_expire: support configurable warn/crit times
  Forward Helmut s patch upstream, then updating check_cert_expire to the latest upstream version.
• #745691: django-classy-tags: FTBFS: Sphinx documentation not found
  Analyze the issue and the fix proposed in SVN, comment on the bug.
• #713876: thinkfan: [PATCH] bugfix: use $MAINPID for ExecReload
  Prepare and upload of the latest upstream release, which includes Michael s patch.
• #713878: thinkfan: [PATCH] use dh-systemd for proper systemd-related maintscripts
  Apply Michael s patch to the Debian packaging.
• #728087: thinkfan: Document how to start thinkfan with systemd
  Apply Michael s patch to the Debian packaging.
• #742515: blktap-dkms: blktapblktap kernel module failed to build
  Upload an NMU with a patch based on the upstream fix.
• #745598: libkolab: FTBFS in dh_python2 (missing Build-Conflicts?)
  Upload an NMU with a patch against libkolab s cmake rules, tightening the search for Python to 2.7.
• #745599: libkolabxml: FTBFS with undefined reference to symbol _ZTVN5boost6detail16thread_data_baseE
  Upload an NMU with a patch against libkolabxml s cmake rules, properly linking the tests to the Boost libraries.
• #746160: libcolabxml: FTBFS when both python2 and python3 development headers are installed
  Filling the bug while working on #745599, then uploading an NMU with a patch against libkolabxml s cmake rules, tightening the search for Python to 2.7.
• #714045: blcr-dkms: blcr module is not built on kernel 3.9.1
  Checking the status of the bug upstream, and marking it as forwarded.
• #653404: hdapsd: init.d status support
  Added Peter s patch to the Debian packaging, upload yet pending.
• #702199: hdapsd: Typo in package description
  Fixed typo in the description, upload yet pending.
• #745219: crmsh: should depends on python-yaml
  Verifying the bug with Stefan Bauer and sponsoring his NMU.
• #741600: 389-ds-base: CVE-2014-0132
  Sponsoring the NMU for Tobias Frost.

A couple of (non-free) pictures are available at Uwe s salzburg-cityguide.at. Thanks again to Bernd for organizing and conova and credativ for sponsoring!

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The Debian Project is pleased to announce that registration is now open for DebConf14, taking place in Portland, Oregon, USA from Saturday, August 23 to Sunday, August 31, 2014. To request food, accommodation, or travel sponsorship, you must be registered by Thursday, May 15, 2014. After this date, registrations will still be accepted in any of the basic, professional, and corporate categories, but requests for sponsorship will no longer be accepted. Note that, as for previous years, you will be asked to confirm your registration later once sponsorship has been finalized. If you are not certain you will attend but are considering it, we encourage you to register now. Registration If you want to attend DebConf14, please fill out the registration form. This year, conference registration is integrated with the new Debian SSO system. If you are a Debian developer and have not previously used the Debian SSO system, you will need to configure an SSO password on db.debian.org. If you are not a Debian developer, you will have an opportunity to create an alioth account as part of the registration process. For more information about Debian single sign-on, see the Debian wiki. DebCamp In past years, DebConf has been preceded by a separate DebCamp event, for developers to gather before the conference and collaborate in person on Debian. This year the team is trying a different approach, with a longer conference period allowing for blocks of talks to be mixed with blocks of coding time throughout the week. More information about the schedule will be made available when the Call for Papers is posted in the near future. As mentioned in the last bits from the DPL mail, there is also an opportunity for Debian teams to organize sprints around DebConf. Teams who are interested should follow the documented process. Thank you The DebConf14 team would like to thank all of our sponsors who have made this event possible - a full list of whom can be found here. We are still seeking sponsors to help us make DebConf14 a success. If you or your company would like to give back to Debian, please consider becoming a sponsor. We look forward to seeing you in Portland in August! The DebConf team

Here are two separate ideas about programming, Internet security, Internet architecture, and free software. Both of them are fundamental to everything those of us who work on free software are doing.

1. Writing secure and reliable code is a highly complex and demanding task. It's something that one has to learn, like any other skilled profession. It's not something we're very good at teaching via any mechanism other than apprenticeship and experimentation. The field is changing quickly; if you took ten years off from writing security-critical code, you would expect to have to learn multiple new tools (static analysis, testing techniques, security features), possibly new programming languages, and not infrequently new ways of thinking about threat models and vulnerabilities.
2. Nearly every computer user trusts tens of thousands of other programmers and millions of lines of code with their day-to-day computer security and reliability, without auditing that code themselves. Even if you have the skill required to audit the code (and very, very few people have the skill to audit all of the code that they use), you do not have the time. Therefore, our computer security is built on trust. We're trusting other programmers not to be malicious, which is obvious, but we're also trusting other programmers to be highly skilled, careful, cautious (but still fast and productive, since we quickly abandon software that isn't "actively developed"), and constantly adopting new techniques and treat models.

I think both of those principles are very widely understood and widely acknowledged. And, as we all know, both of those principles have failure modes, and those failures mean that our computers are nowhere near as secure as we would like them to be. There has been quite a lot of technical discussion about both of these principles in recent days and months, ranging from better code analysis and testing through the flaws in particular programming languages to serious questions about the trust model we use for verifying the code that we're running. I'm going to switch gears away from that discussion for a moment to talk about a social aspect. When a piece of code that one is using has a security vulnerability, it is not unusual to treat that as a trust failure. In other words, technical flaws are very quickly escalated to social flaws. This is less likely among practitioners, since we're all painfully aware of how many bugs we have in our own code, but it's still not unheard of, particularly if the authors of the code do not immediately and publicly show a socially-acceptable level of humility and contrition (in the middle of what is often a horrifically stressful experience). I think this reaction comes largely from fear. Anyone who has given it a moment's thought is painfully aware of just how much code they are running on trust, and just how many ways it could be compromised, accidentally or maliciously. And how frequently that code is compromised. The less control one has over a situation, the more terrifying it is, and the cold reality is that we have very little control over our computer security. There is a natural tendency, when afraid, to look for targets for that fear. Now, go back and think about the first principle. Anyone who has ever worked on or near free software is painfully aware that we have far more good ideas about how to improve computing and security than we have skilled resources to execute on those ideas. My own backlog of things that I've already thought about, know would be good ideas, and simply have to implement is probably longer than my remaining lifespan. I suspect that's the case for nearly all of us. In other words, we have a severe shortage of programmers who care and who have skill. We desperately need more skilled programmers who can write secure and reliable code. We may (and I think do) also need better tools, techniques, languages, protocols, and all the other machinery that we, as technical people, spend most of our time thinking about. But none of that changes the fact that we need more skilled people. In fact, it makes that need more acute: in addition to skilled people to write the code we use, we need skilled people to write the tools. Skilled people are not born. They're made. And in professions where training techniques are still in their infancy and where we don't have a good formal grasp on which techniques work, those skilled people are made primarily through apprenticeship, experimentation, and learning from failure. Worse, people who were skilled do not remain skilled without continually participating in that learning process. See the above point about a fast-changing field with evolving best practices. It's not enough to know how to write secure code to the best known practices today, or even enough to retrofit all of your existing code to current knowledge (which is often so large of an effort as to be practically impossible). You have to constantly, continually learn more, for which there is no reliable formal training. We have to try, fail, try again, and fail better. But failure that leads to a security vulnerability is treated as a loss of trust. We trusted that person to write secure code that we could use. They failed. Now we can't trust them. Based on the trust model of security, we should revoke their ability to try again and instead rely on people who have not failed, since that will make us more secure. Except now we just broke the learning process. And there's no such thing as a programmer who can stop learning. So what does that do to our resource pool? It's sadly ironic, but I believe the free software community writ large has a very serious collaboration problem: we do not tolerate each other's learning processes. This leads to a wide variety of social failures around hostile communities and the failures of meritocracy that other people have talked about at much greater length. But even if you set that all aside, it threatens our security. We need secure code, a lot of it, a lot more than we have right now. To get that code, we need people who can write it. We need to grow, encourage, and support those people and enable their learning processes. Code is written by people. If we rip people apart when they write bad, insecure code, we don't get better, secure code. We get fewer people writing security code. We get far fewer people writing security code in public, since some of the people who haven't been ripped apart will look at that experience and say, "No way am I going near that problem area. It's too scary. I don't want to end up like those programmers." Fewer people writing security code means fewer people learning how to write better security code. Fewer people capable of writing good, secure code is not a solution to any of our problems. If we do not tolerate, support, and encourage the learning process required to become a skilled programmer, or maintain one's skill in programming, we are destroying our future as a community. When you find code that is broken and badly written, you have found a problem that should be reported, analyzed, and corrected. You have also found a programmer who is about to have one of two very different types of experiences. Either they are about to learn how to become a better programmer, or they are about to be publicly shamed, humiliated, and treated as untrustworthy. Which branch they take is partly up to them, but it's also heavily influenced by how all of us react socially to the discovery of bad code. One of those branches leads to more good, secure code being written in the future. The other does not.