Shanley wrote an insightful article about microagressions and management [1]. It s interesting to read that and think of past work experiences, even the best managers do it. Bill Stone gave an inspiring TED talk about exploring huge caves, autonamous probes to explore underground lakes (which can be used on Europa) and building a refuelling station on the Moon [2]. Simon Lewis gave an interesting TED talk about consciousness and the technology needed to help him recover from injuries sustained in a serious car crash [3]. Paul Wayper wrote an interesting article about reforming the patent system [4]. He also notes that the patent system is claimed to be protecting the mythical home inventor when it s really about patent trolls (and ex-inventors who work for them). This is similar to the way that ex-musicians work for organisations that promote extreme copyright legislation. Amanda Palmer gave an interesting TED talk about asking for donations/assistance, and the interactions between musicians and the audience [5]. Some part of this are NSFW. Hans Rakers wrote a useful post about how to solve a Dovecot problem with too many files open [6]. His solution was for a Red Hat based system, for Debian you can do the same but by editing /etc/init.d/dovecot. The use of the /proc/N/limits file was interesting, I ve never had a cause to deliberately use that file before. Krebs on Security has an interesting article about Android malware being used to defeat SMS systems to prevent bank fraud [7]. Apparently an infected PC will instruct the user to install an Android app to complete the process. Rick Falkvinge wrote an interesting article about how to apply basic economics terminology to so-called Intellectual Property [8]. Matthew Garrett wrote an interesting post about the way that Ubuntu gets a better result than Debian and Fedora because it has clear fixed goals [9]. He states that many people regard Fedora as a playground to produce a range of niche derivatives , probably a large portion of the Fedora and Debian developers consider this a feature not a bug. Ming Thein wrote an interesting article about the demise of the DSLR [10]. Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting post on the detention of David Miranda by the British authorities [11]. It s mostly speculation as to why they would do such a thing (which seems to go against their own best interests) and whether the NSA even knows which documents Edward Snowden copied. Jaclyn Friedman wrote an interesting article on Mens Rights Movements (MRAs) and how they are bad for MEN as well as for women [12]. Rodney S. Tucker wrote an insightful article for the IEEE about the NBN [13]. Basically the Liberal party are going to spend most of the tax money needed for a full NBN but get a significantly less than the full benefit. Lauren Drell wrote an interesting article for Mashable about TellSpec, a portable spectrometer that communicates with an Android phone to analyse food for allergens [14]. I guess this will stop schools from banning phones. Katie McDonough wrote an interesting article for Salon about the Pope s statements about the problems with unchecked capitalism [15]. His ideas are really nothing new to anyone who has read the Bible and read the news. It seems to me that the most newsworthy part of this is that most Christian leaders don t make similar statements. Daniel Leidert wrote an interesting post about power saving when running Debian on a HP Microserver [16]. Most of it is relevant to other AMD64 hardware too, I ll have to investigate the PCIE ASPM and spin down options on some of my systems that are mostly idle.

• [1] https://medium.com/about-work/65d4740f7a2f
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space.html
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/6zgcb3f
• [4] http://mabula.net/tbfw/2013/08/01
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.html
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/k3xz9a8
• [7] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/08/a-closer-look-perkele-android-malware-kit/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/orf9gds
• [9] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/27517.html
• [10] http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/08/24/the-demise-of-the-dslr/
• [11] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/detaining_david.html
• [12] http://prospect.org/article/good-mens-rights-movement-hard-find
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/q49b9fa
• [14] http://mashable.com/2013/11/26/tellspec/
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/nosxkj2
• [16] http://www.wgdd.de/2013/08/hp-n54l-microserver-energy-efficiency.html

I'm running a local unbound instance on my laptop to get working DNSSEC. It turns out that with the captive portal NSB (the Norwegian national rail company), this doesn't work too well and you get into an endless series of redirects. Changing resolv.conf so you use the DHCP-provided resolver stops the redirect loop and you can then log in. Afterwards, you're free to switch back to using your own local resolver.

Review: Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

Publisher:	William Morrow
Copyright:	2008
ISBN:	0-06-147409-6
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	935

Fraa Erasmas is a little less than twenty years old and is an avout of the decade math of the Concent of Saunt Edhar. As Anathem opens, he's approaching his first apert. All of those words are left for the reader to puzzle out for themselves, unless you cheat and read the glossary (which I would recommend doing only with caution, but more on that in a moment), since Erasmas, the first-person narrator of this story, writes (mostly) as if the reader is familiar with the mathic world and its concepts. Translated into English, it means that Erasmas was brought into something akin to a scientific monastery (the "math") at around the age of nine and has been there for ten years, since his math is a decade math and therefore remains closed to all outside (s cular) ideas and contact for periods of ten years at a time. He is still a student there, not yet declaring allegiance to one of the chapters. That's something that he will be expected to do after the first apert. Every ten years, the decade math opens its doors to the outside world for a period of ten days (apert), and the fraas and suurs can leave the math and travel through the outside world as they wish. The start of Anathem is an exercise in alienation and reorientation. Stephenson has constructed a complex society with a long history and its own specific technical jargon and throws the reader into it with a minimum of orientation. Despite being familiar with SF novels that use this technique, I did read the preface and recommend that other readers do as well unless they particularly love piecing together a world from hints and clues. The timeline, in particular, was invaluable and something I referred to throughout the story. But even with the preface, you should expect to read the first part of Anathem interpolating meanings from context or just letting things slip past until you later come to understand them. A lot of people bounce off of Anathem here, and it's one of the reasons why I'd been postponing reading it (the other being that it's a substantial doorstop and I wanted to give it my undivided attention). But it's really not as bad as I feared. One gets a feel for the terms fairly quickly, and the more difficult ones Stephenson defines as he goes with excerpts from a dictionary of the mathic world. I found it slightly disorienting for a chapter or two, and then it started growing on me. The terminology is sometimes different just for the sake of being different (jeejahs are indistinguishable from smartphones for all practical purposes), but usually the invented words provide either important links to the past of the constructed world of Arbre or are technical terms that add precision and clarity once you know their meanings. It can be a little bit frustrating to remember the mapping of famous theories and theorems to the Orth names, but only mildly. (And Diax's Rake is so useful of a name for something that English doesn't name that I may start using it myself.) This is also why I recommend against reading the glossary. The definitions of terms are linked to important parts of history, which are, in turn, linked to important parts of the plot, and the glossary therefore risks spoilers. I liked having the term introduced by the frequent dictionary excerpts scattered through the chapters, and enjoyed the feeling of the terminology unfolding with the plot. The glossary is there if you really get lost, but I think the experienced SF reader (particularly if you have enough history background to pick up on the obvious parallels and start mapping bits to Greece, Rome, the Catholic Church, etc.) will be able to navigate the language without that much difficulty. I also stopped caring about the terminology because the story is so engrossing that it pulled me right into the book, closed over me, and made Erasmas's world feel real, precious, and fascinating. Whether that's going to be true of other people is a surprisingly difficult question, and one that I'll try to tackle as part of this review. But I will say up-front that I think this is the best book that Stephenson has ever written, even better than Snow Crash, despite some undeniable flab and one extremely irritating choice. Anathem is, at its heart, a novel about the scientific method. I think it's the first book by Stephenson that elegantly mingles his tendencies (and obsessions) as a writer with the interests (and obsessions) of the characters and makes the whole novel feel coherent. All of Stephenson's books are prone to discursive infodumps, but they've usually had to be shoehorned in around the characters. Even with the Baroque Cycle, a series full of natural philosophers, the digressions are jammed in around the plot like the filling of an over-packed box and frequently stick out at odd angles or dribble out on the floor. With Anathem, Stephenson has populated a book full of characters who have completely believable and engrossing reasons to digress into scientific debate and analysis, can put them into dialogue and thereby avoid some of the strain of the infodump, and (most importantly) largely restrains himself from narrative digressions via first-person narration and careful attention to when the characters themselves would follow the same digression. In short, this is a book full of very smart and very well-educated people who figure things out from first principles using agreed-upon theory, thrown into an unknown and dangerous situation that requires a great deal of deep thinking, science, engineering, and philosophy. All of Stephenson's quirks are still here, on prominent display, but rarely have I ever seen a better match of writer, characters, plot, and world background than this book. I would go so far as to say that, if you don't like this book, you're unlikely to like any long Stephenson. I haven't said a lot about the plot. Erasmas's apert is only the first part, and barely touches on any significant plot elements. It's mostly there to set some groundwork, introduce characters, and get the reader oriented. I'm not going to say much more, since the way the novel transitions from routine to unusual to emergency, and the resulting scramble to understand the emergency, is the heart and soul of this book and should not be spoiled. (I spoiled myself slightly by reading some analysis that I shouldn't have and regretted it, although it wasn't too much of a problem.) This is one of Stephenson's best-plotted novels. It develops slowly enough for the reader (and the characters) to think hard about it and make some good and bad guesses, but fast enough to stay engrossing. Most of it is very well-paced provided that you find the background of science and philosophy of science interesting. (If you don't, this is probably not a book you're going to enjoy.) I say "most of it" because, as mentioned earlier, this book is a bit flabby. There are a couple of sections where the theory and analysis are pushed aside by exigent circumstances and more action-oriented plot elements, both of which reminded me that Stephenson is very bad at writing action sequences and both of which I wished were shorter. And there are a couple of sections where Erasmas is getting oriented to a new situation or working up the courage to do something where I wished he'd get on with it already. But for a novel of nearly 1,000 pages, the amount of tension and reader interest Stephenson maintained for me was quite impressive. But as good as the plot is, the best part of this book is its full-bore, no-apologies embrace of understanding things. This is a book about making sense of the world, and about what it means to make sense of the world, and how you go about it, and what preconditions are required to do so. It is not, contrary to so much science fiction, a book about knowing things. The people who are already experts appear in this book, but generally only in the context of figuring out new things they've not previously been exposed to. Rather, it's a book about learning things, the thrill that comes from applying theory to understand something new, and the satisfaction of working through something from first principles or previously-established theory, arriving at testable predictions, and then testing them. It's the first novel I've read that captures some of the joy and delight that I got from reading George Gamow's One Two Three... Infinity as a child. Stephenson novels have always been about showing the reader neat things he learned, but I think previous books relied on the reader to bring their own enthusiasm. Anathem, at least for me, goes a step farther and uses the passion and approach of its characters to create that enthusiasm. It's one of those books that I not only enjoyed but went away from feeling like it made me a better person in some subtle but detectable way. Sadly, this is also where the irritating part comes in. I'm going to be very careful and indirect here, since the details are all extremely significant spoilers. You may want to skip to the last paragraph of this review if you want to avoid any knowledge about the end of Anathem. Stephenson pulls several rabbits out of the hat in this book, but most of them are well-defended and nicely handled bits of misdirection. There are a few where I thought the science or engineering was dubious, but even those are usually backed with enough hand-waving about Arbre technology that I could swallow it enough for the purposes of this book. (The timeline here is very helpful in allowing one to write off a few things as unknown technology.) But he puts, at the core of the plot, one of the most scientifically dubious bits of the whole book, and there's simply no avoiding that by the end of the story. Now, this doesn't mean that he just expects the reader to swallow it. Much of Anathem is a carefully-constructed defense of the bits he uses for the plot, and the defense is not half-bad within his fictional world. There are substantial in-book justifications for believing these techniques will work on Arbre even if they wouldn't in our scientific domain. So it's not so much the plausibility that bothered me; the idea is at least as plausible as some of the FTL drive concepts that I've swallowed without complaint. I do hold Anathem to a higher standard because the book is about science in a way that most science fiction isn't, but even with that, I think Stephenson mostly managed to dance across the thin ice he built. The problem is more subtle but more serious: if taken seriously on its own terms, the approach Stephenson takes to the plot destroys science in his universe. I can't really say more than that, since all of the details are huge spoilers, but the more I thought about it, the more irritated and annoyed I got. Anathem is otherwise a brilliant defense of the scientific method, and it felt like Stephenson injected a poison pill in the center of it, leading necessarily to a world where the scientific method no longer works. This does not happen on camera, or even between the pages of the book; you have to think about the implications for a while before you realize that's what happened. But once you do, it's a bitter pill to swallow, and it's hard to escape the feeling that it fundamentally undermines Stephenson's whole project here. And, to make it worse (although also oddly better in a way), I think it was unnecessary. He would have had to reconstruct the ending, but I can't shake the feeling that there were ways to write the ending, even maintaining the same character strengths, without having to pull that particular rabbit out of the hat. Because I think it's, in the end, unnecessary, I was still able to enjoy the whole book, including the ending, despite this, but while the rest of Anathem is a wholehearted 10, that choice knocked a full point off my impression of the book. It's profoundly irritating precisely because Stephenson did such an excellent job with the rest of it. But, that said, this book is still exceptional. I think it's the book that Stephenson was meant to write. Not only did he get the overall construction nearly perfect, he gets so many of the details right, from the history (which for a while I thought was merely clever, once I started seeing the correspondences that moved it out of the realm of pure invention, but which transitioned back to profound with later revelations in the book) to the language to the way that he excerpted some theoretic digressions into very well-done appendices. If you've ever thought of a theory as beautiful, or like reading about smart people debating the nature of understanding and knowledge, I cannot recommend this book too highly. Despite the highly irritating flaw at its center, and despite a few sections that show Stephenson is not a well-rounded writer, I think it's brilliant. Rating: 9 out of 10

Snitch is the first DSL I ve written in Hy. It may be the first Hy DSL ever, but I have nothing to prove that. Since I ve had a bit of time while the hard-working Alioth maintainers hack on getting vasks alive, I wrote Snitch (and set up the Debian view to be shown on fraked.debian.net - more to come!) Snitch's DSL looks like:

(rules "personal"
  (rule "pault.ag" pingable httpable)
  (rule "lucifer.pault.ag" pingable httpable))

Which expands out to quite a few lines that query the server s status using Snitch s informants, and insert the result into MongoDB. More to come!

Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I bought arrived on Friday. Here are my notes on how to set up the MR3040 as a mesh node using OpenWrt. I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for TL-MR3040, and downloaded the recommended firmware image (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and uploaded it into the original web interface. The flashing went fine, and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port. After logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node. I started off by reading the instructions from Wireless Africa, which had quite a lot of useful information, but eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for using batman-adv on OpenWrt. A small snag was the fact that the opkg install kmod-batman-adv command did not work as it should. The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its dependency crc16 was not already loaded. I reported the bug to the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon. But the problem only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration seem to work when booting from scratch. The setup is done using files in /etc/config/. I did not bridge the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates. The following files were changed and look like this after modifying them: /etc/config/network

config interface 'loopback'
        option ifname 'lo'
        option proto 'static'
        option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
        option netmask '255.0.0.0'
config globals 'globals'
        option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
config interface 'lan'
        option ifname 'eth0'
        option type 'bridge'
        option proto 'dhcp'
        option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
        option netmask '255.255.255.0'
        option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
        option ip6assign '60'
config interface 'mesh'
        option ifname 'adhoc0'
        option mtu '1528'
        option proto 'batadv'
        option mesh 'bat0'

/etc/config/wireless

config wifi-device 'radio0'
        option type 'mac80211'
        option channel '11'
        option hwmode '11ng'
        option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
        option htmode 'HT20'
        list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
        list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
        list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
        list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
        option disabled '0'
config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
        option device 'radio0'
        option ifname 'adhoc0'
        option network 'mesh'
        option encryption 'none'
        option mode 'adhoc'
        option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
        option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'

/etc/config/batman-adv

config 'mesh' 'bat0'
        option interfaces 'adhoc0'
        option 'aggregated_ogms'
        option 'ap_isolation'
        option 'bonding'
        option 'fragmentation'
        option 'gw_bandwidth'
        option 'gw_mode'
        option 'gw_sel_class'
        option 'log_level'
        option 'orig_interval'
        option 'vis_mode'
        option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
        option 'distributed_arp_table'
        option 'network_coding'
        option 'hop_penalty'
# yet another batX instance
# config 'mesh' 'bat5'
#       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'

The mesh node is now operational. I have yet to test its range, but I hope it is good. I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box still wrapped up in plastic.

Wishing everyone a happy Gujarati New Year (Vikram Samvat 2070 called Vishvavasu.) You'll get your Diwali present tomorrow :-)

Wired has an interesting article by David Samuels about the Skybox, a small satellite (about the size of a bar fridge) that is being developed to provide cheap photographs of the Earth from low orbit [1]. Governments of major countries will probably try to limit what they do, but if they can prove that it s viable then someone else from a different jurisdiction will build similar satellites. Alice Dreger gave an interesting TED talk about the various ways that people can fall outside the expected genetic sex binary [2]. The short film Love is All You Need has an interesting way of showing the way that non-straight kids are treated [3]. The Guardian has an interesting article by Ranjana Srivastava about doctors and depression [4]. Don Marti wrote an interesting post about believing bullshit as a way of demonstrating group loyalty [5]. Zacqart Adam Green wrote an interesting article for the Falkvinge blog about the way that the Ouya gaming console can teach children about free software and political freedom [6]. Read more at www.ouya.tv [7]. It s a pity that the Ouya is not conveniently sold outside the US and the UK, with shipping it would probably cost a lot more than $99 in Australia. Tim Chevalier wrote an interesting post for Geek Feminism about the unintended consequences of some codes of conduct [8]. Tim Chevalier wrote an interesting Geek Feminism post about Wikipedia describing how the Neutral Point Of View is a way of representing the views of people in power [9]. Ramin Shokrizade wrote an interesting article for Gamasutra about the Free 2 Play (F2P) techniques [10]. The concept of F2P games is that the game can be installed for free but requires regular small payments to make the game easier, apparently some people pay $3000 per year or more. The TED blog has an interesting interview with Jack Andraka, a teenager who invented a new test for pancreatic cancer (and also ovarian and lung cancer) that is cheaper, faster, and less invasive than other tests [11]. The blog post also has a link to Jack s TED talk.

• [1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/startup-skybox/
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/alice_dreger_is_anatomy_destiny.html
• [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ROXTFfkcfo
• [4] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/doctors-depressed
• [5] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/misc/believing-bullshit/
• [6] http://falkvinge.net/2013/06/27/oh-boy-more-ouya-hype/
• [7] https://www.ouya.tv/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/q4lfp27
• [9] http://geekfeminism.org/2013/07/11/when-who-you-are-is-off-topic/
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/nbto4vm
• [11] http://tinyurl.com/l384e2s

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

"Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women - whether engineers, scientist, technologists or mathematicians - who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM". source

To celebrate, we asked to some of the "women behind Debian" to share their stories with us. Enjoy! Ana Guerrero Lopez (ana) Who are you? I'm a 30-something years old geek. I'm from Andalusia, Spain but live in France. What do you do in Debian? I work mostly on my packages, in sponsoring new people's packages and in this very blog you're reading now. I also maintain an unofficial Google+ page about Debian. At $PAID job, I work in an internal Debian distribution so from time to time, I get the opportunity to contribute back some of the stuff we do there. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I started using Debian around 2003 switching from Mandrake. I was a happy Debian user when the Debian Women project started in the summer 2004. When I saw the project announced, I asked myself why I wasn't contributing to Debian and the rest is history... in a couple of weeks it'll be my 7 years DD-versary! If for some reason you want a longer reply to this question, read here. Beatrice Who are you? I am a PhD student with a degree in Biology. I am a computer fan since my first C64 and I am a self-taught computer geek wanna-be. And I am a bug fan - not software bugs, real bugs :) What do you do in Debian? I work on translations - doing the translation work itself, but also reviewing other translators' work and helping in coordinating the translation effort. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I started using Linux because I liked the idea of an open source operative system based on collaboration and I began reviewing open source software translations. Since my first Linux system was Debian Potato and I sticked to Debian ever since, it only seemed natural to focus my translation work on Debian. Christine Caulfield Who are you? My name is Christine Caulfield. My day job is principal software engineer at Red Hat working on the cluster infrastructure components corosync & pacemaker. Outside computing I'm a musician and sound engineer. I play violin with lots of technology attached, and love avant garde music. What do you do in Debian? I'm not that active on Debian any more due to pressure of time, and maturity of the packages I work on. I currently maintain the, little-used, DECnet userspace packages and the, even less used I suspect, mopd bootloader. I used to maintain lvm2 for a while but dropped that a few years ago. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? My initial reasons for joining Debian were slightly selfish, to find a home for the DECnet project that I was heavily involved in at the time. I was a keep Debian user and people wanted a distribution where the software was easy to set up. DECnet is quite complicated for users to configure, being a totally independant networking stack to IP and so OS support is needed. Debian seemed like the logical place to make this happen. As mentioned above I got quite involved for a time and maintained other packages too. I picked up lvm2 because I was on the lvm2 dev team at work in Red Hat and as it was a new package at that time I seemed a logical choice. Elena Grandi (valhalla) Who are you? I'm a 30-something years old geek and Free Software enthusiast from Italy. What do you do in Debian? I'm currently maintaining a few packages (2 python modules and a python program) as a sponsored uploader; I'm also slowly looking around for other things to do (by preference technical, but not limited to packaging), with the aim to spend more time contributing to Debian. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? For a while I had being distro-hopping between "fun" distributions (the ones that break now and then) on the desktop while using Debian stable on the home server and in chroots. I was already doing marginal contributions to those distributions, where finding stuff that was missing was easy, but my perception as a stable user was that Debian was already working fine and probably didn't really need any help. Then I started to socialize on IRC with some DDs and DMs, and realized that my perception was superficial and that in reality there were dark holes in the depths of the archive where Evil festered and prospered and... ok, sorry, I got carried away :) Anyway, since I was actually using Debian more and more I decided to start contributing: I read documentation, I attended the useful IRC sessions on #debian-women and decided that it was probably best not to add new stuff, but look for things that I used and that needed help. Then nothing happened for a while, because finding stuff that doesn't work is hard (at least on my mostly textual systems). Then one day I was trying to write a python script that needed to verify gpg signed messages; it had to run on my Debian server, so I was trying to use python-pyme and its documentation was painful to use, while I remembered an earlier attempt using python-gnupg that was much more pythonic, but not available in Debian. In a fit of anger I decided to forgo all of my good intentions and actually add a new package: I checked the sources for problems, packaged, sent it to mentors@d-o, got reviews, fixed problems, resent and finally got sponsored and well, everything started. Francesca Ciceri (madamezou) Who are you? I'm Francesca, a 30-something Italian graduated in Social Sciences. What do you do in Debian? I'm a (non uploading) Debian Developer since 2011 and have been DPN editor, press officer, webmaster for www.debian.org and translator for the Italian l10n team. Recently, due to time constraints, I had to reduce my involvement and now only work on two things: writing/editing articles for bits.debian.org together with Ana Guerrero, and creating subtitles for the DebConf talks, in the DebConf Subs team. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? Basically thanks to the sudden abundance of free time - due to an health problem - and the desire to give something back to this wonderful operating system. After that, I found out that Debian is not only a great OS but also a very special community. Today, some of my dearest friends are people I met through Debian. :) Laura Arjona Who are you? I live in Madrid (Spain), and work as IT Assistant in the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). I'm married and I have a 4-years-old son. What do you do in Debian? In 2012 I started to clean spam and to translate Debian web pages into Spanish. I also follow the work of the web and publicity team, I hope I'll get more involved there too. And of course, I'm in Debian Women :) How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I'm using Debian at work since 2007 (servers), and in my desktops since 2010. I like very much that it is a community distro and I wanted to participate. I was already doing translations in other (small) free software projects, so I began here too. The Debian-Women list, the planet, and people in identi.ca helped me to learn a lot and feel part of the community even when I was not contributing yet. M nica Ram rez Arceda (monica) Who are you? My name is M nica Ram rez Arceda and I am an enthusiast of free software and sharing knowledge cultures: for me it's a kind of philosophy of life. I studied Maths a long time ago but ended up working as a developer for some years. Now I'm working as an IT teacher. What do you do in Debian? Debian is a huge project, so you can help in various scopes. Mainly, I work on packaging, fixing wnpp bug inconsistencies in BTS and helping in spam cleaning of the mailing lists. But I also enjoy doing some non-technical work from time to time: the project I am just now involved is organizing, with the rest of Debian Catalan community, a local team to propose Barcelona as the venue for a minidebconf where all the speakers will be women. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? In 2000 I discovered Free Software world and I fell deeply in love with its philosophy. Since then, I've been trying to do my best in different activities, like spreading the word, giving free courses, helping collectives and friends in technical stuff (from installing Debian to developing some helping apps for them)... but two years ago I was looking forward to join a free software project and I decided to try Debian, since it has been my first and only distro in my day-to-day life for about ten years. So, I wanted to give back Debian all what it had offered to me, but.... I thought I couldn't (hey, Debian is for real hackers, not for you little ant!), but I started to adopt some orphaned packages, do some QA uploads, fix some RC bugs, talk with some Debian Developers that helped me and encouraged me more than I expected, I traveled to my first Debconf... And one thing takes you to the other, and on March 2012 I became a DD. Now, I'm glad to see that everything that frightened me is not so scary :-)

A new version of the code behind http.debian.net was deployed a few days ago. It has proved to be far more stable, faster, and scalable compared to the previous mod_perl-based deployment.

There were a couple of glitches during the earlier roll-out for IPv6 users, fixed thanks to the reports by Cyril Brulebois, Michael Stapelberg and Robert Drake.

What's behind?
The redirector is now a plack application (with no middlewere) running under the Starman server with an apache fronted. Requests are processed faster than before and there mod_perl-induced system overload is finally gone.

The redirector is now easier to test and develop. Deploying the live instance is not yet fully streamlined, but it has seen a lot of improvement. Some important changes to the way the redirector works are already on their way to see the light and I am going to be announcing them when they do. Fork the repository and hack a few changes, contributions are welcome :)

It's probably time to move it under debian.org, and finish making it the default everywhere. It's even made its way into the installation manual.

Here s some documentation about a hack I ve been working on to allow publication of RDF views for Tastypie resources (in Django applications). While working on implementing support for RDF meta-data for descriptions of Debian packages for the Debian Package Tracking System rewrite, I ve tried and idetify which libraries/frameworks would allow to create some RDF views for Django model objects with a minimal effort. Ideally, this would save the hassle of writing code, and could just be a matter of mapping some Django model fields to proper ontology attributes. I haven t found an existing tool to do so, but it seemed to me that Tastypie could offer a nice starting point. Tastypie (I focused on v. 0.9.15 which is currently in Debian testing) offers some REST content-negociation support, and other niceties. This post is an attempt at documenting an initial implementation for my problem. I ve implemented it as some code in the example blog application described in the Tastypie documentation. Unfortunately, it s not yet a patch that could be applied to Tastypie, to add this as a standard feature. The code is available in my git clone of Tastypie, based on 0.9.15, and lies in the commit(s) between the example_myapp and rdfviews branches. It needs an up to date RDFLib to work (Debian s is too old, btw). It basically relies on the addition of a _rdf_mapping dict in the Django model objects, and an RdfModelResource as a base class for Tastypie ModelResources. To provide an RDF view for a ModelResource, it also requires to declare a particular MetaClass, and adding a few bits to its Meta subclass. The principle is that the dehydratation steps of the Tastypie system will replace fields values by their RDF objects counterparts, as either RDFLib Literals or URIRefs. Then the resuting Bundle will be converted to some RDFLib Graph. It is then just a matter of serialization of that Graph to turtle (I ve not added another format, but it should be pretty straightforward). There s a bit of hackish drak magic in the code, in particular when introspecting the Tastypie / Django resource / model objects to be able to dynamically add some dehydrate_FOO methods to perform the conversion to Literals or URIRefs. Custom dehydrate_Foo methods can still be written to process the fields in particular ways. I ve added some LDP style paging along the way, so I hope it will be quite usable by LDP compatible tools. Here s the result : First, listing all resources : $ curl -H 'Accept: text/turtle' "http://localhost:8000/api/v1/entry/"
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix ldp: <http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix sioc: <http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#> .
@prefix xml: <http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> . </api/v1/entry/#list> dcterms:hasPart </api/v1/entry/1/#post>,
</api/v1/entry/2/#post>,
</api/v1/entry/3/#post> . Then, details of one particular post : $ curl -L -H 'Accept: text/turtle' "http://localhost:8000/api/v1/entry/1"
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix sioc: <http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#> .
@prefix xml: <http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> . </api/v1/entry/1/#post> a sioc:Post ;
dcterms:created "2011-05-21T22:46:38+00:00"^^xsd:dateTime ;
dcterms:title "Another Post" ;
sioc:content "MESSAGE: This will prbbly be my lst post. /MESSAGE" ;
sioc:has_creator </api/v1/user/1/> ;
owl:sameAs </posts/another-post#post> .

I hope this is usable, and welcome any feedback.

And now for something completely different. No, this blog entry isn't about the great Monty Python's, even though they definitely deserve to be brought to the attention of the still unenlightened. This is about something completely different music style wise. This is about Caravan Palace. I was recently introduced to this band, and I must say, they definitely have the swing. Just listen to them and feel your feed starting to move along.

• Suzy: The first video that I listened to, and it definitely got me interested, as you can see.
• Jolie Coquine: The kind of swing our (grand?)parents did listen and dance to. I definitely feel it in my legs, too.
• Dramophone (for Germans): Also quite nice.

I hope you like the selection because I just started listening to them. They might not be the best options, but should get you started to get a feeling for the band. Like always, enjoy!

/music permanent link Comments: 0 Flattr this

na ir slavena ne tikai ar savu akmens m ri valsts zieme os, bat ar ar Di o nas Ugunsm ri apk rt visam s valsts Internetam, kas blo visu p c k rtas un iebremzina visu p r jo. Man pirm person g saskarsme ar o pakalpojumu notika jau anhajas lidost , kad tri vien izr d j s, ka valst blo ts ir ne tikai Facebook, bet ar Twitter, kas iev rojami apgr tin ja manas iesp jas tri un viegli apzi ot visus, ka es esmu v l joproj m esmu dz vs un vesels. P c p ris eksperimentiem izr d j s, ka, lai ar no telefona nav pieejama Google+ m jas lapa un nav lejupl d jama Google+ (un WhatsApp) programma uz Android, tom r, ja t s jau ir telefon , ie abi servisi turpina no telefona str d t. T p c es s ku rakst t ce ojuma piez mes Google+ un da as dienas p c ce ojuma s kuma man pat izdev s nokonfigur t If This Then That servisu, lai tas pa em manus Google+ ierakstus un uztaisa no tiem Twitter ierakstus (kas jau t l k pa citiem kan liem izplat s uz Facebook un Draugiem un ar par d s k ned as kopsavilkums aj blog ). Google+ ir savi plusi, bet ar savi m nusi. Galvenais m nuss, ko es aj ce ojum paman ju ir tas, ka Google+ Android aplik cij nav iesp jams sagatavot vair kus ierakstu melnrakstus (v lams katru ar savu geolok ciju) bez Interneta var rakst t tikai vienu ierakstu un t ieraksta GPS koordin tes b s t s kur viet p c tam Internets par d sies. Es jau uzrakst ju Googlei par o probl mu. Galvenais pluss Google plusam (no pun intended) ir Instant Upload ja bild t fotogr fijas ar Android telefonu, s fotogr fijas autom tiski tiks aug upiel d tas un par d sies jaun ieraksta izveides interfeis , kur t s var pievienot ierakstam ar vienu klik i bez jebk das gaid anas. Diem l tas nestr d ar norm laj m kamer m. Pagaid m Ta u es neb tu sts datori is, ja es nepam in tu uzlaust vai apiet o nelielo nas probl mu, ne? Visvienk r akais veids k apiet nas Lielo Ugunsm ru ir izmantot jebk du VPN, kas at auj ne tikai piek t VPN t kla resursiem, bet ar at auj laist visu trafiku caur o VPN savienojumu. dus VPN piesl gumus var nopirkt, vai (ja ir Linux serveris vai routeris rpus nas) izveidot pa am. Man gad jum tas bija ar vienu klik i iesl gts OpenVPN uz Fonera routera, kas st v man s m j s. Diem l na ir sav da. Blo to lapu, portu un protokolu saraksts main s gan da dos rajonos, gan ar atkar b no t vai Internets ir mob lais vai wifi vai ar piesl gumu, gan ar vienk r i no dienas dien . Liel da gad jumu blo to lietu sarakst iekr t ar VPN savienojumi. Bie i vien ar priv tie. Man kaut k ne iet, ka mana m jas IP adrese ir nas ugunsm ra sarakstos, ta u da reiz ar tam VPN pievienoties es nevar ju. Un t d s situ cij s, lai apskat tu k du YouTube video, atliek tikai viens, eni ls risin jums sshuttle! is eni lais r ks izveido ko l dz gu VPN savienojumam caur parasto SSH portu un protokolu. Uz lok l s ma nas ir nepiecie ams Python un root ties bas, bet uz servera ir vajadz gas tikai ties bas palaist Python programmas. sshuttle pats aizs ta sevi uz serveri un palai s tur, pat ie ifr un p rs ta visus savienojumus un ar DNS piepras jumus, ja vi am to paprasa. Var p rs t t konkr tus t klus vai visu trafiku. Un trums man pieredz tas ir bija pat tr ks par parasto VPN. Kopum Interneta blok de un t visp r gais l nums ir viens oti spec gs m nuss nai. Aizskrienot mazliet uz priek u st st jum pateik u, ka Hong Kong das probl mas nav tur Internets ir lielisks! L k t ds t zeris san ca

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (78.31 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Debian packaging I wanted to update publican to the latest upstream release but I stopped after a few hours of work during which I filed two bugs that a modicum of testing should have caught before release. So I decided to wait for the next minor release. I uploaded python-django 1.4.4 and 1.4.5, new upstream maintenance and security releases which thus went into wheezy. I also prepared a stable update of Django (1.2.3-3+squeeze5) which required me to backport the last 2 sets of security patches. I uploaded a new revision of wordpress to fix a problem with TinyMCE (#700289) and to update/add many translation files (#697208). Bug reporting and misc fixes Live-build issue. I experienced some intermittent failures when building HDD live images with live-build on armel. Daniel Baumann directed me to the problematic piece of code (the oversizing of the image size was not enough) so I committed a small fix by increasing the oversizing factor to 6%. Live-config issue. I also reported another issue that I diagnosed in live-config (#701788), namely that the script which setups sudo was failing when the default user is root. git-buildpackage issue. I filed #700411 after noticing that git-import-orig imported the debian directory provided by upstream. Those directories are not used with 3.0 (quilt) source package and their presence in the upstream branch is thus harmful: any change to the upstream debian directory will result in conflicts when you merge a new upstream release in your packaging branch. rubygems integration. Later I had to package a bunch of ruby applications that were using Bundler and I wanted to reuse as many packaged ruby modules that I could. But for this, those modules had to provide the required rubygems meta-information. I filed #700419 to request those on rake-compiler and with the help of C dric Boutillier (and others on #debian-ruby), we identified a bunch of ruby modules which could get those with a simple recompilation. I filed bin-nmu requests in #700605. Misc bugs. simple-cdd offers to select profiles to install but I noticed that the associated debconf template was not translated (#700915). The startup scripts (provided by initscripts) in charge of activating the swap are supposed to handle a noswap kernel command line option to disable swap. In #701301, I reported that the option was not working correctly if quiet was present first in the command line due to spurious break statements. Debian France Administrative work. We were late for some legal procedures so I wrote the report of the last general assembly and sent it to the Tribunal d instance of Sarreguemines to record the changes in the administrative board. I also completed the special register of the association, it s a notebook that is legally required and that must document any important change in the governance structure of the association (new members of the board, headquarters change, new bylaws, etc.). Galette developments. Debian France is funding a few enhancements to the Galette free software that we re using to manage the association. I am in touch with the Galette developer to answer his questions and ensure that his work will meet our needs. Librement I have been looking for talented developers who have a genuine interest in my Librement project. I want to fund the initial development of the project but I don t have the means to fund it entirely. So I really wanted to find developers who would find an interest beside the money that I would pay. I got in touch with the team of developers from Scopyleft and they look like very good candidates. But they re heavy users of the Scrum development method and asked me to play the role of product owner . So I started to describe the project with user stories (i.e. create the backlog in the Scrum jargon), you can have a look at them here on trello.com. If you re interested by the topic of free software funding, feel free to review and to send me your comments. My goal is clearly to have a minimal viable product with the first iteration(s) that I fund and then use the platform itself to fund further developments of the project. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

5 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Hi planet.ocaml.org. Just a quick post to thanks Marek Kubica for his help on the planet.ocaml.org spring cleaning. Here are the feeds that have been removed:

• Red Lizard Software

http://redlizards.com/blog/feed/?tag=ocaml

• Alp Mestan

http://blog.mestan.fr/feed/?cat=16

• Arlen Cuss

http://www.sairyx.org/tag/ocaml/feed/

• Daniel Patterson

http://blog.dbpatterson.com/rss

• Victor Nicollet, cannot find any feeds on the new blog

http://www.nicollet.net/toroidal/ocaml/feed/

• OCaml Hackers

http://ocamlhackers.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?tag=ocaml&xn_auth=no

• Mauricio Fernandez, offline

http://eigenclass.org/R2/feeds/rss2/all

• Christopher Conway, no OCaml-related posts since 2008

http://procrastiblog.com/category/ocaml/feed

• Liquidsoap, cannot find the HTML blog on the website

http://savonet.sourceforge.net/liquidsoap.rss Here is the feed that have been added:

• Marc Simpson

http://newblog.0branch.com/rss.xml Here are the feeds that have been updated:

• Jane Street Capital now points to

https://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=rss.xml

• Jamie Brandon now points to

http://scattered-thoughts.net/atom.xml

• Mihamina Rakotomandimby now points to

http://www.rktmb.org/feed/tag/ocaml/atom

• Dario Teixeira now points to

http://nleyten.com/feed/tag/ocaml/atom

• Erik de Castro Lopo now points to but FP-Sydney has been removed

http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/index.rss20

• Y-Node now points to

http://y-node.com/blog/feeds/latest/ If you want that we had back your blog, please follow the howto add your feed to planet. We didn't have removed feed on purpose, this was just a way to get rid of a lot of 404, And don't forget, planet.ocamlcore.org is now served by planet.ocaml.org! Update your feed reader.

I lost my will roll against placing another book order a couple of weeks ago. There are just too many people writing too many fascinating things that I want to read! Elizabeth Bear Shoggoths in Bloom (collection)
David Graeber Debt: The First 5,000 Years (non-fiction)
Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Revolution 1789 1848 (non-fiction)
China Mi ville Kraken (sff)
John McPhee Annals of the Former World (non-fiction)
C.E. Murphy The Queen's Bastard (sff)
C.E. Murphy The Pretender's Crown (sff)
Steven Pinker Words and Rules (non-fiction)
David Roodman Due Diligence (non-fiction)
Rebecca Skloot The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (non-fiction)
Richard G. Wilkinson & Kate Pickett The Spirit Level (non-fiction)
Fumi Yoshinaga oku: The Inner Chambers #1 (graphic novel) As you can see, mostly non-fiction. Which is, of course, the type of book that takes the longest to read. I'm so smart about managing a backlog. The Pinker was recommended by one of my favorite Teaching Company courses (Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage by John McWhorter), and I was interested enough in linguistics to want to read something a bit more intensive. John McPhee's Annals of the Former World is about geology, something I've wanted to know more about for a while, and won the Pulitzer for general non-fiction. It's also huge. It might take me a while to get to that. Of the fiction, I read the first Murphy a long time back, but it was a borrowed copy, and I want to re-read it before reading the second volume in the duology. I remember really enjoying it, but don't remember anything about what happened. oku is manga that won the Tiptree award, so that sounded too interesting to pass up. And since I own just about everything else Elizabeth Bear has published, I figured I should keep the streak alive, even if I'm a bit behind on reading it.