I spent the weekend at SCALE 12x running the Debian booth. SCALE is one of the best conferences that I get to attend every year; it has a great mix of commercial exhibitors and community groups, and routinely gets great speakers. As I've done for quite some time, I organized a Debian booth there, and talked to lots of people about Debian. If you're in the Southern California area, or have a chance to give a talk for SCALE 13x, you should do so! Thanks again to Matt Kraai and Paul Hardy for helping out in the Debian booth all weekend!

I realised yesterday morning that I will have biked up Hawthorne Road at least once a day for 5 days in a row by tomorrow (unless it happens to rain). It's not a bad hill, really, it has a sort of a stair-step gradient. There's a short, gentle incline, just to get your heart going, then there's a flat bit, to recover, then there's a less friendly incline, which is both more unfriendly and longer. Then you get to the top, gasping for breath, before there's a short decline and usually a red traffic light. This morning I had the bright idea of leaving the bike trailer at Kindergarten, so it made the journey home much more pleasant, as was the aforementioned climb up Hawthorne Road in the afternoon. I spent the day doing Debian stuff, but unfortunately didn't result in a package upload to show for it. Library packages are tricky, and I'm far from experienced or competent at maintaining them. Zoe didn't nap today at Kindergarten, and wasn't too worse for wear for it. When we got home, Zoe wanted to make a crown for Mummy like the one she made at Playgroup last week. Unfortunately we didn't really have any good crown-sized paper, so I made a little crown out of some surplus Letter-sized paper, and then Zoe decided to do some painting. The painting devolved into a lot of hand painting of her cardboard box rocket, inside and out. We managed to keep the mess to a minimum. After we cleaned up, Zoe watched a bit of TV, and my girlfriend came over and together we all made a vegetable stir fry for dinner. After dinner we walked down to the Hawthorne Garage to get some unwanted cardboard fruit boxes, to help with packing for our two night trip to Coochiemudlo Island later this week. Bedtime went pretty smoothly. Zoe managed to get a bunch of insect bites yesterday, which was the cause of a 4am wake up this morning. They're still giving her grief, so I'm expecting some sort of disturbance overnight tonight.

I ve spent a bit of time this saturday Dockerizing Debile s slave / workers (for those who don t know about Debile yet, there are a few posts where I explain it) Many thanks to Tianon Gravi for his work in helping me out :) I created two images to test - the base image for any slave (paultag/debile-slave-base, and a preconfigured image for our test master server. This includes a script to preconfigure the slave worker (OpenPGP keys, username, password) that are passed to it via a tarball generated by debile-remote. Hopefully this makes deploying debile slaves easier :) I was able to do a test build of about 300 packages with the dockerized slave, and I think it s a huge step forward. Onward!

Did you ever want to be able to tag your files, and use the tags to query and select the files you want? For many sorts of files we use, this is clearly better than being locked into a single hierarchial view of nested directories. Semantic file systems are a way to do things like this. But that's an entire separate filesystem, often implemented as a FUSE layer. I have never wanted tagging enough to take on that layer of complications. A week ago I realized that there was a way to do this without using an entirely separate filesystem. When we use git, we're used to having different views of our files, called branches, that we switch between. What then, if a git branch were generated from tags and other metadata that meet a query, providing a custom view that meet the user's current needs and could be incrementally refined. Here's a short screencast demoing these views.
And here's a walkthrough for setting it up. To build this, I needed a nice way to store metadata in git, and since git-annex happens to have a very nice way of using git as a database, I naturally built it on top of git-annex. This means that the tags and other metadata are automatically synchronized between different clones of the repository. Multiple users can be tagging and setting other metadata at the same time, and their changes will merge in a consistent way. I have a long list of things to do to fully integrate views into git-annex. However, they're already basically usable, and I'm very pleased with how these dymanic views of the contents of a repository are working out. Today's release of git-annex includes views support, so give them a try!

Wowsers, today was a pretty full, but laid back day. Zoe has this small wrist-sized ring with a bunch of different coloured long ribbons on it that she got from a birthday party a while ago. She plays with it every now and then, and uses it to torment Smudge. This morning she was dancing around with it, and it made me think of rhythmic gymnastics, so using my trusty Chromecast, I dug up some Youtube coverage from the 2012 Olympics. Zoe loved the sparkly costumes and the routines. The first video alternated between ball and hoop routines. Zoe went out and rummaged around her craft drawers and came back with a styrofoam ball and was using her crown from yesterday as a hoop. It kept her occupied for about an hour. I watched the first three competitors with her and she continued to watch it while I had a shower. I see a hula hoop in her future. We biked over to her Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class and had another really good class. I think Zoe's really enjoying the mix of gymnastics-style activities and game play. She also got to tackle me today, which she thoroughly enjoyed. The instructor suggested we might like to try out one of the 4-7 year old proper martial arts classes, so we'll try that in the coming weeks. We biked home the scenic way again and picked up a few additional supplies for lunch. When we got home, Zoe went off and played with some of her toys on her own. It's great that she's getting more independent and self-directed like that. I'd invited Zoe's great-grandparents (on her mother's side) over for lunch today. I think it's wonderful that Zoe has great-grandparents who are still alive and able to be in her life. We had a nice lunch and they wanted to see the kinetic sand I'd blogged about, so we got that out after lunch for a play. Then Zoe wanted to watch some more rhythmic gymnastics with them, so we did that for a bit. After they left, I swapped over to rhythmic gymnastics with the ribbon and clubs. The ribbon is my personal favourite one to watch, and I think Zoe enjoyed it too, because she immediately started waving her ribbons all over the place. I trialled skipping her nap today, and instead called watching the gymnastics "quiet time". After quiet time, we did our Science Friday activity, which was messing around with conductive play dough. Zoe had about as much fun just messing around with the play dough as she did running electricity through it, and enjoyed mushing the non-conductive white play dough in with the conductive blue play dough. We did a few experiments, notably one with three LEDs in series, and then shorting the play dough at either end of the series to see what it did to the lights. She enjoyed wearing her lab coat and safety glasses. I'd wanted to do bottle rockets today, because we'd built a cardboard box rocket earlier in the week, and that seemed like a good theme to stick with, but I was ill-prepared, and it was too hot anyway. I want to do Diet Coke and Mentos and reuse the Coke bottles for the bottle rockets, so that'll have to be in a few weeks' time. I prepped dinner on and off while Zoe played with the play dough, so it was all ready to pop in the oven nice and early. After I cleaned up the mess from the play dough, we played with her coloured peg board game for a bit, and then she wanted to see how the sofa bed folded out, so we did that I used it as an opportunity to give it a thorough vacuuming. After that she watched a bit more TV while dinner was in the oven. After dinner, we walked down to the Hawthorne Garage for a babyccino. Zoe had to pat every dog that crossed our path. Zoe didn't seem too worse for wear for having dropped her nap (which was to be expected, it's only a recent phenomenon for her to nap at home), but she was showing signs of possibly coming down with a cold (being a bit sniffy, without having obvious signs of a runny nose) so I put her to bed about half an hour early. She went down pretty easily, which was a pleasant change. I did miss the 2 hour opportunity to get things done during the day though. C'est la vie. The thing I liked most today is Zoe's independently going and playing with toys that she's had for ages, but not really shown much interest in. She's had this Melissa and Doug board with interchangeable sheets with animals on them and a bunch of different colour octagonal plastic pegs that you're supposed to match the coloured pegs to whatever colours are on the sheet you put on the board. We did that this afternoon, and this morning she played a lace up game where you thread shoelaces through some thick cardboard outlines of animals. I think she got both for Christmas in 2012.

Basic configuration There are a few basic things that most admins will already know (and that tiger will warn you about if you forget):

• only allow version 2 of the protocol
• disable root logins
• disable password authentication

This is what /etc/ssh/sshd_config should contain:

Protocol 2
PasswordAuthentication no
PermitRootLogin no

Whitelist approach to giving users ssh access To ensure that only a few users have ssh access to the server and that newly created users don't have it enabled by default, create a new group:

addgroup sshuser

and then add the relevant users to it:

adduser francois sshuser

Finally, add this to /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

AllowGroups sshuser

Deterring brute-force (or dictionary) attacks One way to ban attackers who try to brute-force your ssh server is to install the fail2ban package. It keeps an eye on the ssh log file (/var/log/auth.log) and temporarily blocks IP addresses after a number of failed login attempts. Another approach is to hide the ssh service using Single-Packet Authentication. I have fwknop installed on some of my servers and use small wrapper scripts to connect to them.

Using restricted shells For those users who only need an ssh account on the server in order to transfer files (using scp or rsync), it's a good idea to set their shell (via chsh) to a restricted one like rssh. Should they attempt to log into the server, these users will be greeted with the following error message:

This account is restricted by rssh.
Allowed commands: rsync 
If you believe this is in error, please contact your system administrator.
Connection to server.example.com closed.

Restricting authorized keys to certain IP addresses In addition to listing all of the public keys that are allowed to log into a user account, the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file also allows (as the man page points out) a user to impose a number of restrictions. Perhaps the most useful option is from which allows a user to restrict the IP addresses which can login using a specific key. Here's what one of my authorized_keys looks like:

from="192.0.2.2" ssh-rsa AAAAB3Nz...zvCn bot@example

You may also want to include the following options to each entry: no-X11-forwarding, no-user-rc, no-pty, no-agent-forwarding and no-port-forwarding.

Increasing the amount of logging The first thing I'd recommend is to increase the level of verbosity in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

LogLevel VERBOSE

which will, amongst other things, log the fingerprints of keys used to login:

sshd: Connection from 192.0.2.2 port 39671
sshd: Found matching RSA key: de:ad:be:ef:ca:fe
sshd: Postponed publickey for francois from 192.0.2.2 port 39671 ssh2 [preauth]
sshd: Accepted publickey for francois from 192.0.2.2 port 39671 ssh2 

Secondly, if you run logcheck and would like to whitelist the "Accepted publickey" messages on your server, you'll have to start by deleting the first line of /etc/logcheck/ignore.d.server/sshd. Then you can add an entry for all of the usernames and IP addresses that you expect to see. Finally, it is also possible to log all commands issued by a specific user over ssh by enabling the pam_tty_audit module in /etc/pam.d/sshd:

session required pam_tty_audit.so enable=francois

However this module is not included in wheezy and has only recently been re-added to Debian.

Identitying stolen keys One thing I'd love to have is a way to identify a stolen public key. Given the IP restrictions described above, if a public key is stolen and used from a different IP, I will see something like this in /var/log/auth.log:

sshd: Connection from 198.51.100.10 port 39492
sshd: Authentication tried for francois with correct key but not from a permitted host (host=198.51.100.10, ip=198.51.100.10).
sshd: Failed publickey for francois from 198.51.100.10 port 39492 ssh2
sshd: Connection closed by 198.51.100.10 [preauth]

So I can get the IP address of the attacker (likely to be a random VPS or a Tor exit node), but unfortunately, the key fingerprints don't appear for failed connections like they do for successful ones. So I don't know which key to revoke. Is there any way to identify which key was used in a failed login attempt or is the solution to only ever have a single public key in each authorized_keys file and create a separate user account for each user?

Thomas Habets has blogged about using your TPM (Trusted Platform Module) for SSH authentication a few weeks ago. We worked together to get his package simple-tpm-pk11 into Debian, and it has just arrived in unstable :-). Using simple-tpm-pk11, you can let your TPM generate a key, which you then can use for SSH authentication. This key will never leave the TPM, so it is safer than having your key on the filesystem (e.g. ~/.ssh/id_rsa), since file system access is not enough to steal your key anymore. Instead, you ll need remote code execution. To use this software, first make sure your TPM is enabled in the BIOS. In my ThinkPad X200 from 2008, the TPM is called Security Chip . Afterwards, claim ownership of your TPM using tpm_takeownership -z (from the tpm-tools package) and enter a password. You will not need to enter this password for every SSH authentication later (but you may choose to set a separate password for that). Then, install simple-tpm-pk11, create a key, set it as your PKCS11Provider and install the public key on the host(s) where you want to use it:

mkdir ~/.simple-tpm-pk11
stpm-keygen -o ~/.simple-tpm-pk11/my.key
echo key my.key > ~/.simple-tpm-pk11/config
echo -e "\nHost *\n    PKCS11Provider libsimple-tpm-pk11.so" >> ~/.ssh/config
ssh-keygen -D libsimple-tpm-pk11.so   ssh shell.example.com tee -a .ssh/authorized_keys

You ll now be able to ssh into shell.example.com without having the key for that on your file system :-). In case you have any feedback about/troubles with the software, please feel free to contact Thomas directly.

(Or "Today's yak shaving exercise") I'm trying to get back into some Debian work today, which involved trying to send an email from my laptop, relayed through daedalus, which is in a colo facility. Then I started shaving my yak. daedalus rejected the email, because the relay attempt wasn't authenticated. It wasn't authenticated because Exim on my laptop wasn't happy about the Diffie-Hellman parameters Sendmail on daedalus was advertising, and had failed STARTTLS, and like a sensible person, I only allow encrypted authentication. Along the way, I figured I'd need to address the fact that the host certificate has expired long ago (truth is, I probably just needed to fix the Diffie-Hellman parameters file), but my whole CA certificate expired over a year ago. I couldn't find the encrypted USB key with my CA on it, so I decided to cut my losses and start from scratch. It's good to see OpenSSL hasn't got any more user friendly with time. I futzed around and generated a new CA key and certificate, a new CSR for Sendmail, signed it, did the appropriate sacrifices, and confirmed that STARTTLS now worked using OpenSSL s_client. Still couldn't send an email. Still had some bleating in the Exim logs:

2014-02-17 11:29:26 1WFD1M-00086p-KI TLS error on connection to daedalus.andrew.net.au [203.33.60.161] (gnutls_handshake): The Diffie-Hellman prime sent by the server is not acceptable (not long enough).

Back on daedalus, /etc/mail/tls/sendmail-common.prm has been an empty file since time immemorial. I managed to find something in Google's cache suggesting I should put something in it with openssl dhparam -out /etc/mail/tls/sendmail-common.prm -2 1024 I initially went for 4096 bits, because it must be better, right? I'm still waiting for the key generation to come back, while I'm writing this. At least it warned me in advance it was going to take a long time. How thoughtful. What would be more thoughtful was verifying the write permission to the file before the long operation so it could fail fast, rather. Sigh. I ended up giving up on 4096 and sticking with 1024, because I was getting old waiting. Yak shaved, I can send mail from my laptop now.

This is the 2nd point release of OpenStack Havana (this is the name of the current stable release of OpenStack). It was out on Thursday (US time), and I uploaded it on Friday (Chinese time). Unfortunately, I realized that the latest python-keystoneclient didn t support the token and endpoint command line options, effectively breaking Keystone itself, and all automated endpoint registration in all core packages. So after fixing Keystone and openstack-pkg-tools, I had to re-upload a 2nd Debian release. However, after this glitch, the packages passed successfully our CI testing suite: my friends at eNovance and I run the tempest functional test suite each time there s this kind of major update, so that we can validate the packages are working as expected. And all went well after the new keystone command line options were fixed in the postinst scripts. As a side note, I fail to see consistency on deprecating these interfaces. While we still have the old glance index thing in the Glance client (this is really old), keystoneclient just broke backward compatibility, when keystone is quite recent. So, it looks to me that it wasn t a great idea to just remove token and endpoint this way (though I can understand the need of consistency). Hopefully, this will all be fixed anyway, when we move to the unified python-openstackclient command lines instead of per-project clients. I realized today that the pkg-openstack team now maintains more than 100 packages. This of course includes general purpose Python modules, which probably will move to the Python module team if it one day supports Git (life is too short: I do not wish to learn such a deprecated technology as SVN). Though this is still a lot of packages, and some more are coming: as per the OpenStack TODO list wiki page, Ironic (a replacement for nova-baremetal), TripleO (OpenStack on OpenStack), Tuskar (contols where things are deployed with TripleO) and Designate (DNS as a Service) are already packaged, and I am waiting for the Icehouse (this is the name of the next stable release) beta3 to be out to upload them to Experimental. This is scheduled for the 6th of March. I believe I am currently nearly up-to-date with the current global-requirements.txt (eg: python dependencies of OpenStack), pending a few Python module upgrades, so hopefully, packaging OpenStack Icehouse beta3 will smooth.

I love Free Software, and the people behind it. Even though I have been a free software user and developer for more than a decade now, there's still more to be amazed at, still more to contribute, and still more to learn. I love the Free Software community, because it never ceases to amaze me. It's not just about the technical side, but the social, human side of it, too!During the past year, I came to another milestone in my career: as of july first, I am a Free Software developer, and enjoying every moment of it. This is a feat that could not have been done without there being demand for what I do, without the free software community as a whole. For that, I owe you all a big thank you, you make it possible for me to make my dream come true. I can only hope that through my work, and through my example, I can contribute back enough.To this day, I take delight in contributing to free software, be it a Lisp on Python (or projects built in it), any of my own projects, syslog-ng, Google Summer of Code mentoring, Debian work - any and all of that are great fun. Even processing NEW is (I really should do that more often)! It's an endless source of not only entertainment and knowledge, but inspiration too.Whenever I read something as amazing as Russ Allbery's mail on the Debian technical committee impasse, I realize just how amazing people we have in our community, and how much we all can learn from them, and how much we owe them. This is yet another reason why I feel that contributing to Free Software is a passion many can share, because it teaches us good values too, atop of being technically excellent.I love Free Software, because without it, I would be lost. Thank you.

I ve written a lot lately about ZFS, and one of its very nice features is the ability to make snapshots that are lightweight, space-efficient, and don t hurt performance (unlike, say, LVM snapshots). ZFS also has zfs send and zfs receive commands that can send the content of the snapshot, or a delta between two snapshots, as a data stream similar in concept to an amped-up tar file. These can be used to, for instance, very efficiently send backups to another machine. Rather than having to stat() every single file on a filesystem as rsync has to, it sends effectively an intelligent binary delta which is also intelligent about operations such as renames. Since my last search for backup tools, I d been using BackupPC for my personal systems. But since I switched them to ZFS on Linux, I ve been wanting to try something better. There are a lot of tools out there to take ZFS snapshots and send them to another machine, and I summarized them on my wiki. I found zfSnap to work well for taking and rotating snapshots, but I didn t find anything that matched my criteria for sending them across the network. It seemed par for the course for these tools to think nothing of opening up full root access to a machine from others, whereas I would much rather lock it down with command= in authorized_keys. So I wrote my own, called simplesnap. As usual, I wrote extensive documentation for it as well, even though it is very simple to set up and use. So, with BackupPC, a backup of my workstation took almost 8 hours. (Its incremental might take as few as 3 hours) With ZFS snapshots and simplesnap, it takes 25 seconds. 25 seconds! So right now, instead of backing up once a day, I back up once an hour. There s no reason I couldn t back up every 5 minutes, in fact. The data consumes less space, is far faster to manage, and doesn t require a nightly hours-long cleanup process like BackupPC does zfs destroy on a snapshot just takes a few seconds. I use a pair of USB disks for backups, and rotate them to offsite storage periodically. They simply run ZFS atop dm-crypt (for security) and it works quite well even on those slow devices. Although ZFS doesn t do file-level dedup like BackupPC does, and the lz4 compression I ve set ZFS to use is less efficient than the gzip-like compression BackupPC uses, still the backups are more space-efficient. I am not quite sure why, but I suspect it s because there is a lot less metadata to keep track of, and perhaps also because BackupPC has to store a new copy of a file if even a byte changes, whereas ZFS can store just the changed blocks. Incidentally, I ve packaged both zfSnap and simplesnap for Debian and both are waiting in NEW.

A new release 0.2.11 of RInside is now on CRAN. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package. This release, the first in fourteen months, fixes one important initialization issue created by the recent Rcpp 0.11.0 release, adds a few other changes related to that release and improves a number of small points such as new or improved examples. The NEWS extract below has more details.

Changes in RInside version 0.2.11 (2014-02-11)

• Updated for Rcpp 0.11.0:
  • Updated initialization by assigning global environment via pointer only after R itself has been initialized with special thanks to Kevin Ushey for the fix
  • Updated DESCRIPTION with Imports: instead of Depends:
  • Added correspondiing importFrom(Rcpp, evalCpp) to NAMESPACE
  • Noted in all inst/examples/*/Makefile that Rcpp no longer requires a library argument, but left code for backwards compatibility in case 0.11.0 is not yet installed.
• Added --vanilla --slave to default arguments for R initialization
• Added a few more explicit #include statements in the qt example which Qt 5.1 now appears to require with thanks to Spencer Behling for the patch
• Added new MPI example with worker functions and RInside instance, kindly contributed by Nicholas Pezolano and Martin Morgan

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

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

I'm reserving the Wednesdays that Zoe doesn't have Kindergarten for longer excursions. Yesterday, we used it to go to Wet 'n' Wild. Zoe loves the place. She's been asking to go since last week. We've been three times now, the first time with friends, and twice by ourselves. I bought discounted VIP Passes for Zoe and I last year when they became available, so it makes going to Seaworld, Wet 'n' Wild or Movie World a no-brainer. So far Zoe's been to Seaworld twice too, once with me and once with Sarah. I'm saving Movie World for when it's too cold to go to Wet 'n' Wild any more. I've shifted my weekly chiropractic adjustment to 8am to help keep the day clear. Zoe came with me for that, and then we jumped in the car and headed down, running a couple of errands along the way, since the theme park doesn't open until 10am. We got there a little before it opened, so I used the extra time to apply sunscreen to Zoe and get her changed, and we got into the park pretty quickly. Zoe's only currently tall enough for Buccaneer Bay, the kid's play area, which is a shallow pool with a bunch of small slides in it, the giant wave pool, and Calypso Beach, which just involves floating around on an inflatable tube. We started, as usual, at Bucanneer Bay, then moved onto the wave pool for a bit, and then had some lunch and then lazed around at Calypso Beach. This was the first time we'd been in the wave pool for a wave cycle. I hadn't realised that they did it on a cycle. Last time and this time, when we jumped in, it was right at the end of a cycle, and it takes a while before they start it up again. Zoe thought jumping over the waves was pretty cool. This time at Calypso Beach, Zoe was quite confident fooling around in a kids tube by herself. She also figured out the water was only 0.8m deep, and was happy standing up and spinning around in her tube. We did about 3 laps of the course there. My cousin lives about 12 minutes from Wet 'n' Wild, and we usually drop in to visit her and her four kids on the way back. We've often stayed the night for a sleepover when it's a weekend. We hung out at their place for a little while afterwards, and then headed home. Zoe had a good nap in the car on the way home, and we were home slightly late for Sarah to pick her up.

Recently I've been thinking about getting a new laptop. I have this rule that a laptop should last me at least 3 years (ideally more) and my old laptop was bought in September 2010. So for the past few months I've been trying to work out if there's something suitable on the market that is a good replacement (last time I didn't manage to find something that ticked all the boxes, but did pretty well for the price I paid). To start with I decided to track my laptops over time - largely because one of my concerns was about the size of a replacement, because I have a significant leaning towards subnotebooks. In the end the reason I decided to upgrade was for some extra CPU grunt; my old machine had a tendency to get pretty hot under any sort of load.

Date	Model	CPU	Screen	RAM	Storage	W (mm)	H (mm)	D (mm)	Weight	Cost
1991	Amstrad PPC 640D	NEC V30 8MHz	9" 640x200 non-backlit green LCD	640k	2 x 3.5" FDD	450	230	100	10kg	???
August 1997	Compaq Aero 4/33c	486sx33	7.8" 640x480 CSTN LCD	4MB	80MB	260	190	43	1.6kg	???
July 2002	Compaq Evo N200	P-III 700MHz	10.4" 1024x768 TFT	192MB	20GB	251	198	20	1.1kg	939.99
August 2005	Toshiba Portege R200	Pentium M 753 1.2GHz	12.1" 1024x768 TFT	1280MB	60GB	286	229	20	1.29kg	1313.58
September 2008	Asus EEE 901	Atom N270 1.6GHz	8.9" 1024x600 TFT	2GB	4GB + 16GB SSD	248	175	23	1.1kg	299.99
September 2010	Acer Aspire 1830T	Core-i5 470UM 1.33GHz	11.6" 1366x768 TFT	8GB	500GB	284	203	28	1.4kg	$699.99 (~ 480)

The EEE didn't actually replace the Toshiba, but I mention it for completeness. It was actually the only machine I moved to the US with, but after about a month of it as my primary machine I realized it wasn't an option for day to day use - though it was fantastic as a machine to throw in an overnight bag, especially when coupled with a 3G dongle. I wasn't keen on significantly increasing the size of my laptop. There are a number of decent 13" Ultrabook options out there, and I looked at a few of them, but nothing grabbed me as being worth the increase in size. Also I wanted something better than the Acer - one of the major problems was finding something smaller than 13" that had 8G RAM, let alone more. There's a significant trend towards everything soldered in for the smaller/slimmer notebooks, which makes some sense but means that the base spec had better be right. Much to my surprise the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 looked like an option. It comes with an i5-4300U processor (at least since around Christmas 2013), and the 256/512G SSD models have 8G RAM. Screen resolution is an attractive true HD (1920x1080) and the 10" display means it's smaller than the Aspire. Unfortunately the keyboard lets it down. It's fine given a flat surface, but not great if you want to support the whole thing on your lap. Which is something I tend to do with my laptop, whether that's on the sofa, or in bed, or on a bus/train. Another option was the Sony Vaio Pro 11. This is a pretty sweet laptop (I managed to get to play with one at a Sony store in the US). Super slim and light. 8GB RAM. True HD screen. However I have bad memories of the build quality of the older Vaios and the fact that there was /no/ user replaceable parts put me off - it's a safe bet that a laptop battery is going to need replaced in a 3 year lifespan. What I managed to find, and purchase, was a Dell Latitude E7240. I admit that the Dell brand made me wary - while I've not had any issue with their desktops I didn't associated their laptops as being particularly high quality. Mind you, I could say the same for Acer and I've been very pleased with the Aspire (if they'd had a more up to date model I'd have bought it). I bought the E7240 with the Core-i5 4300U (so the same as the Surface Pro 2) and True HD touch screen. It has a replaceable battery, expandable RAM (up to 16G) and the storage is an mSATA SSD. It also came with a built in 3G card. At 12.5" it's a little bigger than my old machine, but I decided that was a reasonable idea given the higher resolution. I'm typing this article on it now, having finally completed the setup and migration of the data from the old laptop to it this evening. More details once I've been using it for a little bit I think.

I have always loved Drum and Bass. In 2013 I rediscovered my love for Darkstep and Neurofunk, and found that these genres have developed quite a lot in the recent years. Some labels like Black Sun Empire and Evol Intent produce mixes/sets on a regular basis as podcasts these days. This article aggregates some neurofunk podcasts I like a lot, most recent first. Enjoy 33 hours and 57 minutes of fun with dark and energizing beats. Thanks to BSE Contrax and Evol Intent for providing such high quality sets.

• Evolcast Episode 002 hosted by Gigantor (00:56:25) This is the second Evolcast episode, hosted by Gigantor. Featuring a mix spanning various genres.
  
  01 - The Sickness - SPL
  02 - Catch 22 - Misanthrop
  03 - Neo - Audio Remix - Hive
  04 - Can U Feel It VIP - Drumsound and Bassline Smith
  05 - Head Shrinker - NC-17 and Nusense
  06 - Lights - The Prototypes
  07 - Dibby Dibby Sound - Sigma Remix - Jay Fay and DJ Fresh feat. Ms. Dynamite
  08 - Operation Ivy - June Miller
  09 - Fire - Craze and Tropkillaz
  10 - The Illest - Rell The Soundbender Remix - Far East Movement feat. Riff Raff
  11 - Power Move - Evol Intent Reflip - Jackal
  12 - Kronos - Smooth and Markoman
  13 - Acid Howl - Rampage Anthem - Murdock and Doctrine
  14 - No Operative - State Of Mind
  15 - Jim Skynner - Evol Intent and Eye-D
  16 - Cata - Savoy and LoBounce
  17 - Chumps - The Al Gore Rhythm Method
  18 - Hideous - Haywyre Remix - Black Sun Empire and Noisia
  19 - Patty Cake - Bro Safari and Jesse Slayter
  20 - Temptation - Neosignal
  21 - KNAS Dillon Francis Remix - Steve Angello
  22 - Pay Me v4 - MUST DIE! and Mantis
  23 - Mistrust - Teddy Killerz and Aeph
  24 - Punish Me In The Middle Of The Night VIP - Evol Intent vs. Dom and Roland
  25 - Nightfall - Stealth feat. Codebreaker
  26 - Additional Faces - Computer Club Reflip - The M Machine
  27 - Undertaker - The Upbeats
  28 - Before The Sun - Doco
  29 - Click Clack - Buku
  30 - Fuk Yo Scene v5.9.i - Evol Intent
  31 - The Dealer - Evol Intent Remix - FINAL - Bro Safari and UFO!
  32 - Flare - Des McMahon Remix - Carver and Clock
  33 - Coffins - Pegboard Nerds feat. Misterwives
  34 - The Ladies - Throwback Mix - Evol Intent
  35 - Experts - The Prototypes Remix - SKiSM
  36 - We Are Not Alone - Evol Intent and Gridlok
  37 - Tsunami Jump - Friction Remix - Borgeous feat. Tinie Tempah
  38 - This Is Not A Dream v8c - Evol Intent
  
• Timeless Shock Podcast 008 (01:05:43) Contrax
  check our Homepage: http://contrax-dnb.com
  
  check our twitter: https://twitter.com/Contrax_DnB
  
  check our facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ContraxEyepax
  
  check our soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/contraxmusik
  https://soundcloud.com/dnb_contrax
  Tracklist Contrax:
  coming soon
  
  BlacKShark
  check Homepage: http://www.fsw-cru.de/
  
  check facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DJBlacKSharKFSW
  Tracklist BlacKShark:
  01 Calvin Clark-Oblivion
  02 Olly F-Special Bulletin
  03 Bassline Terrorist-Death Rattle (Majistrate RMX)
  04 Eski B-I am the Danger
  05 Misanthrop-Greed of Gain
  06 Lockjaw-Flatline
  07 Deadmau5-Ghosts 'N' Stuff ((Sub Focus RMX) The Ripper Master Edit)
  08 Loadstar-Give It To Me (DC Breaks RMX)
  09 Rammstein-Spring (BlacKSharK DnB Bootleg)
  10 Misanthrop-Deadlock
  11 Cyantific-Ice Cream
  12 Dj Emotion-No Fear
  13 Draven-Venom
  14 Serial Killaz-Killa Klash Annix Remix-Serial Killaz
  15 Deichkind-bon voyage (BlacKSharK DnB Bootleg)
  16 Dangerous-Work Boots VIP
  17 Kenesis feat. Talabun-Get Darker
  18 Nico Suave-Vergesslich (BlacKSharK DnB Bootleg)
• Timeless Shock Podcast 007 (00:47:54) Contrax
  check our Homepage: http://contrax-dnb.com
  
  check our twitter: https://twitter.com/Contrax_DnB
  
  check our facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ContraxEyepax
  
  check our soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/contraxmusik
  https://soundcloud.com/dnb_contrax
  Tracklist:
  01 Unknown Error - The Yearning (Apex VIP)
  02 Seba - Under The Sun
  03 Brother - Still Blue (Command Strange & Intelligent Manners RMX)
  04 Submatik - Sunset feat. Greg Cooke
  05 R-Monix - You Bring Nothing
  06 Technimatic - Sheltered Storm
  07 Contrax - The End Of Time
  08 Midnight Request - Come Home
  09 Jaydan - Shes Heaven
  10 Erick Trodly & Impish - Be Around
  11 Martin Solveig - The Night Out (Hosta RMX)
  12 Paramount - Electric Blue
  13 Tenorio Junior - Nebulosa (Nu:Tone RMX)
  14 Spillage - Systematic
  15 Bank - Magic Hour
  16 Chase & Status feat. Liam Bailey - Blind Faith (Loadstar RMX)
  17 Virtue feat. Bonnie Rabson - Hello Insomnia
  18 Korus - Humming Bird
  19 Whiney - Wasting Time
  20 Sound Tactix - Understand
  21 Keeno - Little Son (VIP RMX)
  22 Mars & Gala - Just One Night
• BSE - Podcast 028 - Guestmix by Maztek (01:32:38) First Podcast of 2014, This time a brand new 1,5 hour exclusive mix by Maztek!
• Evolcast Episode 001 Gigantor Live at Beta Nightclub (00:54:53) This is the inaugural episode of the Evol intent podcast. Starting things off with Gigantor's set from 22 November, 2013 in Denver at Beta Nightclub.
• BSE - Podcast 027 - Variations on Black (01:04:15) Brand new 45 min mix to celebrate the release of our new album 'Variations on Black',this time mixed by Black Sun Empire!
• Timeless Shock Podcast 006 (01:07:40) Contrax
  check our Homepage: http://contrax-dnb.com
  
  check our twitter: https://twitter.com/Contrax_DnB
  
  check our facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ContraxEyepax
  
  check our soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/contraxmusik
  https://soundcloud.com/dnb_contrax
  Tracklist Contrax:
  1.Future Primitive - Kryptic
  2.Amalgan - Space Hornet
  3.Contrax - ??? (unfinished track)
  4.Apolloud - Transmission
  5.Computerartist - Orbit
  6.Encode & Valrus - Face 2 Face
  7.Fourward - Robot (insideinfo remix)
  8.Receptor & Freqax - First Step
  9.June Miller - From autumn to Ashes
  10.Semantics & Kalu - 2025
  11.Quadrant & Cease - Built for War
  12.Rusty K - Kali
  13.The Prototypes - Blackout (feat Mc ID)
  14.Black Sun Empire & Eye D - Milkshake
  15.Optiv & BTK - Bad Attitude
  16.Rawtekk - Monopolists & Robberies
  17.State of MInd - Max Headroom
  18.Telekinesis - Diabolo
  
  Blind:Sight
  check Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/blind-sight
  
  check facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DJBlindSight
  Tracklist BlindSight:
  1) Manufactured Superstars feat. Selina Albright - SERIOUS (Ed Rush RMX)
  2) MSTRKRFT - PARIS (Upbeats RMX)
  3) EWUN - SCREW UP
  4) State of Mind - DESTINESIA
  5) AMC & T Phonic -WHERE U OUT
  6) Friction & K Tee - SET IT OFF (Icicle RMX)
  7) BTK & Mindscape - Bandits
  8) Suspicious Stench feat. FLOWDAN - SHUTDOWN (LoKo RMX)
  9) Dextems - QUARK (Absurd RMX)
  10) Twisted Facts & Brain Crisis feat MC DON - MURK
  11) BTK feat. Sam Wills - TRY
  12) D Iolax - KILLING THE FUTURE
  13) BTK - DROP IT (Optiv RMX)
  14) Engage & Forbidden Society - RIGID CRASH
  15) Bad Company - BULLET TIME (SPOR RMX)
• BSE - Podcast 026 - Guestmix by Neonlight (00:45:08) Brand new hour long mix for drum'n'bass this time mixed by Neonlight!
• Timeless Shock Podcast 005 (01:00:08) Contrax
  check our Homepage: http://contrax-dnb.com
  
  check our twitter: https://twitter.com/Contrax_DnB
  
  check our facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ContraxEyepax
  
  check our soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/contraxmusik
  https://soundcloud.com/dnb_contrax
  Tracklist Contrax:
  01.Danny Howells - September (Furney Remix)
  02.Calibre - Broken
  03.BCee feat Lingby - Count The Stars (Joe Syntax Remix)
  04.BCee feat Lingby - Count The Stars (Hybrid Minds Remix)
  05.Command Strange - Do Me Right
  06.Eveson feat Jo-S - Time Flows By
  07.Hibea - The Form (Phil Tangent Remix)
  08.Lenzman - Empty Promise
  09.LSB - The Hurting
  10.London Elektricity - Just One Second (Apex Remix)
  11.Lomax, Eveson - Under The Bridge
  12.Pedestrian - Hoyle Road (SpectraSoul Remix)
  13.S.P.Y - One Last Quest
  14.Technimatic - The Unspoken
  15.Utah Jazz - Burn Out
  16.Colossus - Under The Weather
  
  Discord
  check Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/discorddnb
  
  check facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Discord
  Tracklist Discord:
  01.Fields - Behind The Curtains
  02.London Elecricity - Ugotta Be Crazy
  03.Calyx & Teebee - Scavenger
  04.Calyx & TeeBee - Elevate This Sound
  05.Commix - Ultra Clean
  06.Nickbee - Alien
  07chris su - Fade
  08.Lenzman - Ever so slghtly
  09.?
  10.Marky & Spy - Yellow Shoes
• BSE - Podcast 025 - Guestmix by State of Mind (00:57:58) Brand new hour long drum'n'bass mix, this time mixed by State of Mind!
• Timeless Shock Podcast 004 (00:43:51) 01.Yanntek-Night Flight
  02.The Upbeats-Beyond Reality
  03.Black Sun Empire-Eraser (Neonlight RMX)
  04.Blockhe4d & Gridlok-Dumptruck
  05.Phace & Misanthrop-Motor
  06.Defazed-Am i Dreaming
  07.Effector-Revival
  08.Braincrack-Bad Business
  09.Black Sun Empire-All Is Lost (Memtrix RMX)
  10.Joe Ford-City 17
  11.Contrax-Elevator
  12.Contrax-Predator
  13.Fourward-Talk To Me
  14.Telekinesis-She Wants To Skate
  15.Braincrack-Board Steppa
  16.Insom-Final Decision (Braincrack RMX)
  17.Chris Su-F.A.T.E.
  18.Tenet-Krasnodar
  19.The Upbeats-Alone (Fourward RMX)
  20.Fourward-Steady State VIP Mix
• BSE - Podcast 024 - Special Edition (01:00:15) A bit different then usual The first 30 mins contains just demos that were send to podcastdemo(at)gmail.com, feel free to send us more track (just mail 320mp3s) and maybe you will make it to the next edition or more ... The second part is the mix we did for Crissy Criss s show on one extra, notice the new label =)
• BSE - Podcast 023 (00:49:53) Brand new hour long mix for drum'n'bass this time mixed by State of Mind!
• Timeless Shock Podcast 003 (01:02:40) 1.S.P.Y.-What The Future Holds Feat. Ian Shaw
  2.Tokyo Prose-Raised By Wolves
  3.A Sides-Undeniable
  4.Static-Bad For Me Original Mix
  5.Benzla-Dusk
  6.June Miller-Brave Man
  7.Jakwob-Blinding Hybrid Minds Remix
  8.Macca and Vector-Dawn
  9.Blueprint And Self Definition-Embrace
  10.Bungle-Astral Travel
  11.Hybrid Minds-Meant to Be
  12.Getz-Just Don t
  13.Ivy Lab-Afterthought feat. Frank Carter III
  14.Gerwin amp Nuage-Lying Portraits feat. 2Shy
  15.BrokenDrum-In My Dreams
  16.Hybrid Minds-Blame
  17.Roy Green amp Protone-2 Hours
  18.Survival amp Silent Witness-Feel It Original Mix
  19.S.P.Y-Love Hurts
  20.Technimatic-Solace
  21.Technimatic-Unfinished Business
  22.Original Sin-only love
• BSE - Podcast 022 - Guestmix by The Upbeats (01:02:00) Brand new hour long mix for drum'n'bass this time mixed by the Upbeats!
• BSE - Podcast 021 (01:01:18) Brand new hour long mix for drum'n'bass!
• BSE - Podcast 020 - BBC1xtra Black Sun Empire guestmix (00:43:37) This is the mix we did for Bailey on BBC 1xtra! Full of fresh bits check itout
• Timeless Shock Podcast 002 (00:54:42) 1.Yanntek - Ancients Of Future Original Mix
  2.Incube amp Lost - Lifepath
  3.Agressor bunx - Chupacabra original mix
  4.Jade - Test Subject Original Mix
  5.Audio - Headroom Original Mix
  6.Vidual - Nile feat. Annihilus
  7.Semantics - Too Close
  8.Optiv BTK - Whatever Mefjus Remix
  9.Royalston - Late Nights
  10.Vidual amp Voice EE - Code Of The Samurai
  11.Mefjus M Force - Abandon Original Mix
  12.Mindscape - Stardust
  13.Teddy Killerz NPhonix - Scary
  14.No Remorse - The Circular Motion
  15.Brainfuzz - Method Lean Original Mix
  16.Blokhe4d amp Prolix - Switchblade
  17.Teddy Killerz - New Drums
  18.Incube amp Lost - Satellite
  19.Black Sun Empire feat. Foreign Beggars - Dawn Of A Dark Day Original
  20.Enei - Movin Fast June Miller Remix
  21.Contrax - Black Orbit
  22.Aeph - One Last Chance
• Timeless Shock Podcast 001 (00:46:23) 1.hybrid minds - fade
  2.spectrasoul - away with me
  3.bcee-beyond belief(technicolour komatic remix)
  4.hybrid minds - i am trough
  5.bachelors of science - beast
  6.hybrid minds - inner beauty
  7.hybrid minds - lost
  8.lsb - overthinking
  9.hybrid minds - summer rain
  10.sabre - oblique
  11.totally enormous - gareden ( calibre remix)
  12.eatherwood - spoken
  13.override - white lights
  14.madmen - scandinavian
  15.flirt with dirt - beyond the rise
  16.survival - locked
  17.hybrid minds - patience
• BSE - Podcast 019 - Guestmix by Optiv and BTK (00:43:37) Warming up for Blackout Belgium June 23rd a special mix by BTK and Optiv! BTK is playing a b2b set with Optical at Blackout Belgium and a solo set Blackout London in Cable July 21st! For more information check www.blackoutbelgium.be or www.facebook.com/blackoutbelgium
• BSE - Podcast 018 - Guestmix by N.Phect (00:53:15) This edition N.Phect brings you a fresh mix to celebrate his new release on Obsessions! enjoy! If you like the podcast make sure to like us at www.facebook.com/blacksunempire
• BSE - Podcast 017 - Guestmix by Audio (00:25:21) This edition Audio takes control and brings it hard! enjoy! If you like the podcast make sure to like us at www.facebook.com/blacksunempire
• BSE - Podcast 016 (00:34:21) Lets start of 2012 with loads of new dark beats! If you like the podcast make sure to like us at www.facebook.com/blacksunempire
• BSE - Podcast 015 (01:04:21) End of the summer holiday is near so its time for new beats!
• BSE - Podcast 014 Guestmix by Rido (01:04:21) New Podcast specially mixed for you by Rido, who is about release on our label oBSEssions.
• BSE - Podcast 013 Studio Brussel mix by Black Sun Empire (01:04:21) A mix we did for Studio Brussel to promote the release of our new album "Lights and Wires".
• BSE - Podcast 012 Guestmix by Chris.SU (01:04:21) New Podcast specially mixed for you by Chris.SU, who is about to finish his solo album F.A.T.E., but you can listen to some of the forthcoming tracks right here.
• BSE - Podcast 011 - Guestmix by Nymfo (01:04:21) Special deep guest mix by our buddy Nymfo, Big upppppp
• BSE - Podcast 010 - Classics for the New Year (01:04:21) Special mix with a collection of classic but still inspirational tracks
• BSE - Podcast 009 - Subsessions guest mix by BSE (00:39:21) A mix we did for Bulletproofs Subsessions radio show on George FM
• BSE - Podcast 008 - Studio Brussel mix by BSE (00:34:04) A mix we did for Studio Brussel
• BSE - Podcast 007 - Guestmix by Mindscape and Jade (00:54:25) A slamming new mix our friends Mindscape & Jade made for us with mashing it up hungerian style :)
• BSE - Podcast 006 - Guestmix by Eye-D (00:54:25) A slamming new mix our friend Eye-D made for us exploring the harder sides of d'n'b :)
• BSE - Podcast 005 - Guestmix for DNB Arena by Black Sun Empire (00:54:25) A new mix including some dubstep tracks by us which will be released on our new label Shadows of the Empire and of course tons of new tracks on Black Sun Empire Recordings, oBSessions and many others!
• BSE - Podcast 004 (00:54:25) A new mix including some dubstep tracks by us which will be released on our new label Shadows of the Empire and of course tons of new tracks on Black Sun Empire Recordings, oBSessions and many others!
• BSE - Podcast 003 - Guestmix by Isotone (00:41:27) this episode consists of a guest mix by Isotone!
• BSE - Podcast 002 (00:51:17) mix by black sun empire and an interview with telemetrik
• BSE - Podcast 001 (00:13:17) mix by black sun empire

You can also see the Python source for the program that was used to generate this page.

This year I take care of organizing of the Debian booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2014 which has been approved a few days ago. The CLT is a yearly (mostly) german speaking Free Software community event which takes place on the weekend of 15th/16th march in Chemnitz (Germany). On the Linux-Live pages you find a lot of projects that will have a booth there and the talk schedule contains many interesting topics. There will also be a key signing event for which you can register until 11th of march. The Wiki page for the Event is already in a good shape. Many things are already organized, but we still have some items left. A lot of people from the Debian community have already told me that they will be there. We will have a Debian Wheezy BabelBox demonstration running on a VirtualBox host that Jan Wagner will provide as well as merchandising (Thanks to Alexander Wirt). Two talks from people on our Wiki page have been accepted by the CLT organizers too:

• Methoden zur Gewinnung neuer Teammitglieder by Andreas Tille
• Das Debian-LAN Projekt: Installation eines Debian-Netzwerks einfach gemacht by Andreas Mundt

I am happy to meet many nice people from the Free Software community in Chemnitz soon.

Solara is a fun turn-based fantasy strategy game for iOS which works perfectly well with VoiceOver. AppleVis has a review and all the details like a link into the AppStore. You build your castle level by level, and train your heroes to be stronger in battle. While your heroes are at battle, you can not control any real-time aspect of a battle. The combination of your heroes and their individual strengths (levels) is essential to determine if you can win a battle. So it sort of resembles rolling dice. At the beginning of a battle, you can choose which of your various heroes you'd like to send. You normally have four slots to fill, in earlier levels of Solara even less (to ease you into game play). Fighting is done in two different parts of the game. You need to use your heroes to solve quests, which will be rewarded by experience points and gold, which in turn will increase your playing level. From level 10 on, you will also be able to play in the arena against other player of solara. These arena fights are rewarded with arena points which in turn determine your place in an arena turnament. These turnaments usually last a few days. At the end, the top places are rewarded with gold. The way solara is structured makes it a perfect fit for VoiceOver. There are no real-time gesture problems to solve. It is basically an interactive text adventure with a fantasy theme and a weighted skills mechanism for determining the outcome of a fight. And luckily, the authors of solara realized this and did everything necessary to make this game really nicely playable with VoiceOver. My personal comment: I initially felt its implemented nicely, but playing it would be a waste of time. Now, a few months later, I am at level 39, and have seen hints that there are 50 levels in total. While I am not really hooked, I guess I will finish it eventually :-)

The simple external-comments code is now complete enough for me to stop poking it on a daily basis:

• Although the comments are styled minimally you can override that with CSS.
• Although the default "Add your reply" form is ugly you can replace it with your own.
  • The reply-form may go above or below the comments.
• If you add an email field then your comments will include a gravitar link.
• Comments are assumed to be in markdown now.
• The commments may be retrieved in newest-first, or oldest-first order.
• There's now a simple anti-spam plugin system present.

All in all I'm pretty happy with the way it works, and the server-code. The client-side Javascript is less good, but I'm probably done poking that too. In an ideal world the client-side code should be a jQuery plugin, but I've not worked out how to make a static method (the JSONP callback) be a member of a jQuery plugin-object. So without that I have to re-pass the options around too many places, rather than making them a member of "this". Meh, pull requests welcome for adding new storage back-ends (redis and sqlite are supported by default), and similarly for cleanups. Links:

• https://github.com/skx/e-comments
• Simple demo & Customized demo.

I was bracing myself for a rough night, but Zoe slept through until almost 6am. Today was playgroup again, so we just took a slow start to the day and headed out on the bike a bit after 9am. There was a mix of new faces and people from last week. I packed a lunchbox this time instead of relying on the snack collection in my "Dad Bag" backpack. We worked on trying to approach other girls to get them to play. Unfortunately they're all that little bit younger and more shy, so we haven't had a huge success. Zoe's been pretty happy just playing with the various toys and playing with me. Parachute time was a big hit again. I think there were about 25 adults there (I was the only Dad this week), with many with multiple children. The youngest baby I saw was a 7 week old. Zoe had been asking me what a honeydew was, so after Playgroup we dropped by the Hawthorne Garage and grabbed half a honeydew and a couple of tomatoes and I made some fritters for lunch with leftover corned beef from dinner the other night. Zoe wasn't too impressed with them. I think she didn't like the diced tomato. She declared that the honeydew was just like rockmelon. We read a story in the hammock and she went down pretty easily for nap after that. I'd just started doing the dishes when my mate Steve gave me a call. He was in the area, and he dropped in. That worked out well, because I'd been meaning to pick his brain about my little electronics project. We geeked it up for a bit. Zoe's mini lab coat arrived in the mail, and when she finally woke up after 3pm, I asked her if she wanted to go out to Bunnings to get a pair of kids-sized safety glasses, but she said she wanted to do something "fun" instead. When I asked her what she wanted to do, she initially wanted to go to Wet and Wild, but that's an all day outing and we're going next Wednesday, so she settled on going to Colmslie pool again instead. So we quickly got organised and jumped on the bike and biked over to the pool. We started out in the kid's play area, which had a couple of small slides and some fountains and whatnot, and then we gravitated over to the 50 metre pool, where Zoe practised her diving for a bit and generally quite confidently navigated the 1.5m deep end of the pool. It was good, because at least I could just stand up instead of tread water while she practised diving in off the blocks. We had a post-swim ice cream and biked home, and then I whipped up dinner and it was bathtime and bedtime. I'm going to have to start tracking my weekly kilometres with Zoe on the bike, because I think it'll be a reasonable distance.

I'm working in a very small web agency with 4 employees, one of them part time and our boss who doesn't do programming. It shouldn't come as a surprise, that our development infrastructure is not perfect. We have many ideas and dreams how we could improve it, but not the time.
Now we have two obvious choices: Either we just do nothing or we buy services from specialized vendors like github, atlassian, travis-ci, heroku, google and others.
Doing nothing does not work for me. But just buying all this stuff doesn't please me either. We'd depend on proprietary software, lock-in effects or one-size-fits-all offerings.
Another option would be to find other small web shops like us, form a cooperative and share essential services. There are thousands of web shops in the same situation like us and we all need the same things:

• public and private Git hosting
• continuous integration (Jenkins)
• code review (Gerrit)
• file sharing (e.g. git-annex + webdav)
• wiki
• issue tracking
• virtual windows systems for Internet Explorer testing
• MySQL / Postgres databases
• PaaS for PHP, Python, Ruby, Java
• staging environment
• Mails, Mailing Lists
• simple calendar, CRM
• monitoring

As I said, all of the above is available as commercial offerings. But I'd prefer the following to be satisfied:

• The infrastructure itself should be open (but not free of charge), like the OpenStack Project Infrastructure as presented at LCA. I especially like how they review their puppet config with Gerrit.
• The process to become an admin for the infrastructure should work much the same like the process to become a Debian Developer. I'd also like the same attitude towards quality as present in Debian.

Does something like that already exists? There already is the German cooperative hostsharing which is kind of similar but does provide mainly hosting, not services. But I'll ask them next after writing this blog post.
Is your company interested in joining such an effort? Does it sound silly?