Search Results: "beh"

7 November 2012

Russell Coker: Rape Apology and LCA 2011

After a lecture at LCA 2011 included some inappropriate slides there was a long discussion on several mailing lists about the issues related to this. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in question [1]. Of course the matter didn t end there, at LCA 2012 I was drawn into a few debates IRL about the issues, as long as there are more than a few men who want such porny pictures used in LCA talks the issue can t be properly resolved. The most serious aspect of the discussion in question is that of rape apology, the bad ideas that were presented have a real impact on the way people behave, merely making public statements saying that something is OK is going to increase the incidence of it happening. The Geek Feminism Wiki has a good page summarising the issue [2]. The Finally Feminism 101 post about Rape Culture is also worth reading in this context [3]. Recently Valeria Aurora wrote a post for the Ada Initiaive blog about the rape apology issue and how the community needs to act to prevent such behavior [4]. This inspired Matthew Garrett to write about the issue and state the position that In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I ll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I m compelled to as a result of my job [5]. I agree with Matthew s article, everything he writes is logical and I believe that it is all for the benefit of the FOSS community as a whole. I think that most guys have quietly defriended guys who are rape-positive in the past (for example when I was 12 I refused to play D&D with boys who were raping NPCs). But blogging about it, explaining the problem, and giving the offender the possibility to reform is a good idea and it s something that should be done more often. Sam Varghese has written about the issue for ITWire [6]. He has taken the wrong approach to this, he specifically claims that Matthew Garrett has kicked off what could be a damaging episode . I think that Matthew s approach is necessary and the situation demands it. If Matthew had been on holidays and I had read the TAI post earlier then I would probably have written a blog post which Sam could have described in a similar manner. So I don t think that Matthew kicked anything off (I think that someone had to do it). I also don t think that this has to be damaging it depends on how everyone reacts. On her personal blog Valerie says When I first read Ts o s comments, I couldn t sleep for two nights. I wanted to throw up every time I thought about it. I was furious and frightened at the same time. Every time I think about this, even now, I literally have nightmares. I can t bear the thought of working with him even over email, much less attending the same conferences [7]. I don t think that any of us who are seriously involved in the FOSS community have a way of avoiding this issue, allowing Valerie and other women who have the same understanding of the situation to go through that without any support is not a neutral action. I think we need to consider whether someone who gives other delegates and speakers nightmares should be welcome to attend a conference. Valerie s post makes sense to me and I can understand why she doesn t want to associated with Ted, my understanding of the issue isn t important or even required, I merely note this because I m sure that there are lots of readers who will ignore anything that a woman might say. ITWire has a follow-up article with Ted s response, Ted fails to address all the issues and seems to think that the people who disagree with him merely don t appreciate his nuance [8]. The thing is that the issue of the incidence of rape was raised in discussion to consider the probability that rape survivors would have been in the audience for the Mark Pesce talk in question. None of Ted s claims indicate that rape could be rare enough that a crowd of 500+ random people could be expected not to have multiple rape survivors so his comments weren t even relevant to the discussion. Ted seems unwilling to try to understand the position of all the people who disagree with him.

6 November 2012

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for October 2012

Freshly baked, bits from the DPL for October 2012.
Dear Project Members,
another month, another periodic report of DPL-ish activities, this time for October 2012. Highlights Debian on public clouds I've spent quite some time to improve Debian presence on the so called "public clouds". Following up to an inquiry of a fellow developer, I've reached out to Microsoft to investigate the possibility of having Debian as an option on Windows Azure. Around the same time, I've been approached by Amazon to have Debian as an option on the AWS marketplace. In both cases, we will need to overcome challenges of various kinds, at the technical (e.g. image preparation), bureaucratic (e.g. terms of the agreements we'll need to accept to be present), and political (e.g. chain of trust, platform freedom) levels. Up to now, discussions have been going on mostly in private, simply because they started as 1-to-1 inquiries and continued from there, but there is no good reason they should remain so. Hence, thanks to the listmasters and in particular Alexander Wirt, we have setup the new debian-cloud mailing list. If you are interested in these topics please join the list. For both Azure and AWS there is good progress on the technical part already; summaries will soon be posted on the list so that we are all on the same page. Similarly, I'll post there status reports about the bureaucratic requirements. And of course there is no reason to focus on specific clouds, if you'd like to support others and are willing to put some work to that end, please join the list and let us know. DPL helpers meeting I've already bothered you at least in my last platform and DebConf13 talk with observations about how non-scalable the DPL job is. After having collected applications of DPL helpers for a while, I've finally sat down and tried to put those applications into good use. The idea is simple: to the extend of possible, we should shift from a one-man-band job to a more "board-like" job, with people sharing an agenda, a list of outstanding tasks, and public communication. We have started slowly, setting up the #debian-dpl IRC channel and running periodic bi-weekly meetings there. You can find the meeting minutes and full logs at the usual place. We are still ramping up, so we don't have yet "fancy" stuff like a mailing list or an issue tracker entry, but they're in the working. Some of the outcome are starting to show, too (e.g. as part of recent discussions on 3rd party orphaning, or on our inbound trademark policy, or even in the forthcoming DMCA policy to make mentors.d.n an official project service). It's an experiment and a big challenge. I'm, for one thing, not yet convinced there are enough people interested in sharing the load of DPL duties (that look boring, for many tech geeks) in the long run. But I'm also convinced that the sustainability of the Debian organization model depends on this, so it's worth trying. If you're interested in the challenge and willing to volunteer some of your time, please join us on #debian-dpl . I'll take care of keeping the project informed of further evolution, in particular about the communication channels we will pick for day to day activities and accountability. Events / public communication I've spent most of my remaining Debian time in October attending events on behalf of the Project, in particular: On the topic of public communication, I've also coordinated with the press team an answer to a press inquiry about Secure Boot (which has become part of this article), and happily vouched for the Ubuntu charity marathon, adding some Debian challenges to it. Delegations As largely overdue matters, I've finalized the delegations mentioned last month, namely: FTP masters, New Members Front Desk, and Policy editors. Assets and legal stuff Miscellanea Now let's all go back to RC Bug squashing to make Wheezy a reality. SPAM-my link of the month is http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi and its various "views" at the bottom of the page. Cheers.
PS the day-to-day activity log for October 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201210

Russ Allbery: Review: Cerebus

Review: Cerebus, by Dave Sim
Series: Cerebus #1
Publisher: Aardvark-Vanaheim
Copyright: August 1987
Printing: July 2003
ISBN: 0-919359-08-6
Format: Graphic novel
Pages: 546
Cerebus is something of a legend in comics. Begun in December of 1977 by Dave Sim, it was one of the first entirely independent, self-published comics in a field dominated by the large work-for-hire companies like Marvel and DC. It ran for 300 issues and nearly 27 years and became one of the most influential independent comic books of all time, in part due to Sim's outspoken views in favor of creator rights and his regular use of the editorial pages in Cerebus issues to air those views. This collection (the first "phonebook") collects issues 1 through 25, with one of the amazing wrap-around covers that makes all of the phonebooks so beautiful (possibly partly by later Cerebus collaborator Gerhard, although if so it's uncredited so far as I can tell). Cerebus reliably has some of the best black-and-white art you will ever see in comics. There is some debate over where to start with Cerebus, and a faction that, for good reasons, argues for starting with the second phonebook (High Society). While these first twenty-five issues do introduce the reader to a bunch of important characters (Elrod, Lord Julius, Jaka, Artemis Roach, and Suenteus Po, for example), all those characters are later reintroduced and nothing that happens here is hugely vital for the overall story. It's also quite rough, starting as Conan parody with almost no depth. The first half or so of this collection features lots of short stories with little or no broader significance, and the early ones are about little other than Cerebus's skills and fighting abilities. That said, when reading the series, I like to start at the beginning. It is nice to follow the characters from their moment of first introduction, and it's delightful to watch Sim's ability grow (surprisingly quickly) through the first few issues. Cerebus #1 is bad: crude, simplistic artwork, almost nothing in the way of a story, and lots of purple narration. But flipping forward even to Cerebus #6 (the first appearance of Jaka), one sees a remarkable difference. By Cerebus #7, Cerebus looks like himself, the plot is getting more complex, and Sim is clearly hitting his stride. And, by the end of this collection, the art has moved from crude past competent and into truly beautiful in places. It's one of the few black-and-white comics where I never miss color. The detailed line work is more enjoyable than I think any coloring could be. The strength of Cerebus as an ongoing character slowly emerges from behind the parody. What I like the most about Cerebus is that he's neither a predestined victor (apart from the early issues that follow the Conan model most closely) nor a pure loner who stands apart from the world. He gets embroiled in political affairs, but almost always for his own reasons (primarily wealth). He has his own moral code, but it's fluid and situational; it's the realistic muddle of impulse and vague principle that most of us fall back on in our everyday life, which is remarkably unlike the typical moral code in comics (or even fiction in general). And while he is in one sense better and more powerful than anyone else in the story, that doesn't mean Cerebus gets what he wants. Most stories here end up going rather poorly for him, forcing daring escapes or frustrating cutting of losses. Sim quickly finds a voice for Cerebus that's irascible, wise, practical, and a bit world-weary, as well as remarkably unflappable. He's one of the best protagonists in comics, and that's already clear by the end of this collection. Parody is the focus of these first issues, which is a mixed bag. The early issues are fairly weak sword-and-sorcery parody (particularly Red Sonja, primarily a vehicle for some tired sexist jokes) and worth reading only for the development in Sim's art style and the growth of Cerebus as a unique voice. Sim gets away from straight parody for the middle of the collection, but then makes an unfortunate return for the final few issues, featuring parodies of Man-Thing and X-Men that I thought were more forced than funny. You have to have some tolerance for this, and (similar to early Pratchett) a lot of it isn't as funny as the author seems to think it is. That said, three of Sim's most brilliant ongoing characters are parodies, just ones that are mixed and inserted into the "wrong" genres in ways that bring them alive. Elrod of Melvinbone, a parody of Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone who speaks exactly like Foghorn Leghorn, should not work and yet does. He's the source of the funniest moments in this collection. His persistant treatment of Cerebus as a kid in a bunny suit shouldn't be as funny as it is, but it reliably makes me laugh each time I re-read this collection. Lord Julius is a straight insertion of Groucho Marx who really comes into his own in the next collection, High Society, but some of the hilarious High Society moments are foreshadowed here. And Artemis Roach, who starts as a parody of Batman and will later parody a huge variety of comic book characters, provides several delightful moments with Cerebus as straight man. I'm not much of a fan of parody, but I still think Cerebus is genuinely funny. High Society is definitely better, but I think one would miss some great bits by skipping over the first collection. Much of what makes it work is the character of Cerebus, who is in turn a wonderful straight man for Sim's wilder characters and an endless source of sharp one-liners. It's easy to really care about and root for Cerebus, even when he's being manipulative and amoral, because he's so straightforward and forthright about it. The world Sim puts him into is full of chaos, ridiculousness, and unfairness, and Cerebus is the sort of character to put his head down, make a few sarcastic comments, and then get on with it. It's fun to watch. One final note: I've always thought the "phonebook" collections were one of Sim's best ideas. Unlike nearly all comic book collections, a Cerebus phonebook provides enough material to be satisfying and has always felt like a good value for the money. I wish more comic book publishers would learn from Sim's example and produce larger collections that aren't hardcover deluxe editions (although Sim has an admitted advantage from not having to reproduce color). Followed by High Society. Rating: 7 out of 10

Cyril Brulebois: Network daemons

While I m not a big fan of clicky-clicky applications, I find it quite nice to be able to select some WEP/WPA settings in a GUI (as opposed to configuring wpa_supplicant manually) once in a while (new home, new couch by a friend s, new phone), and be done with it forever. Having mostly used Xfce over the years, I naturally came to trying out Wicd around 2006 (according to Wikipedia), and it looked like it did the job. It s been on all my laptops since then, and things were quite fine until the last laptop switch. For some (to be determined) reasons, that one comes up with a soft-blocked (rfkill) wireless LAN, which makes Wicd the biggest pain I have ever experienced as far as networking is concerned (see 4th bug report below). So I finally decided to try out that network-manager thing people apparently love to hate. A few bugs were filed in the process: I think nm-applet is the only Gtk3 application I have, meaning slightly bad visuals (no integration with the current Gtk2 theme for other applications), but besides that, everything is now running smoothly. Bottom line: contrary to Wicd, NetworkManager just works! I can t tell for sure since I m not using Gnome, but I m not sure why somebody would want to use Wicd there as it s clearly inferior on a technical level. Maybe something about the GUI/CLI? At least NetworkManager knows about netlink sockets, doesn t waste resources through useless polling, and is able to figure out when connections need kicking. That one just does its job. What triggered this Wicd NetworkManager switch is a look at the linux source, which reminded me of some strange polling noticed while playing around with auditd, as mentioned in #692417; that and the no network at boot-up unless one triggers several actions in a Wicd client bit.

5 November 2012

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RInside 0.2.9

A new version 0.2.9 of RInside arrived on CRAN earlier today; Windows binaries have already been built too. 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 adds a few new features as detailed in the extract from the NEWS below. A key new feature is the added support for resilience to bad user input based on discussions and an initial (but altered) patch by Theodore Lytras. There are a few ways that this can be deployedon so we also added two more example programs detailing it. The featured Qt example and the Wt example have been updated to use this too. Another feature that may be quite useful for some is the additonal attempt to find a value for R_HOME if none has been set. The value is typically found at compile time of the RInside package which poses a problem for those using the Windows build -- which is shipped as a binary reflecting the value of the build system. One alternative has always been to build the package locally too to get the local value, or to set it explicitly. But because the error behaviour a cryptic message of Cannot open base package is confusing to many, we now try to call the R function which gets this value from the registry. This may need more tweaking and testing, and if you use RInside on the Windows platform I would appreciate feedback. The complete list of changes since the last release are summarized below in the corresponding NEWS file entry:
Changes in RInside version 0.2.9 (2012-11-04)
  • Applied (modified) patch by Theodore Lytras which lets RInside recover from some parsing errors and makes RInside applications more tolerant of errors
  • Added non-throwing variants of parseEval() and parseEvalQ()
  • Modified Qt and Wt examples of density estimation applications to be much more resilient to bad user input
  • On Windows, have RInside use R's get_R_HOME() function to get R_HOME value from registry if not set by user
  • Added note to examples/standard/Makefile.win that R_HOME may need to be set to run the executables so either export your local value, or re-install RInside from source to have it reflected in the library build of libRinside
  • Updated CMake build support for standard, armadillo and eigen
  • Improved CMake builds of examples/standard, examples/eigen and examples/armadillo by detecting architecture
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.

4 November 2012

Russ Allbery: Review: Set This House in Order

Review: Set This House in Order, by Matt Ruff
Publisher: Perennial
Copyright: 2003
Printing: 2004
ISBN: 0-06-095485-X
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 479
A textbook case history would say that Andy Gage has disassociative identity disorder (referred to here as the more common although medically inaccurate "multiple personality disorder" for reasons of clarity and to match casual speech, according to the author). However, that's a completely inadequate description. A better description would be that Andy Gage's body is inhabited by a large set of different personalities, who take turns being in control. The original Andy Gage is dead, shattered by horrific childhood abuse. Aaron became the dominant personality and gave structure to the internal geography of the mind they all share, with the help of extensive counselling. But Aaron was exhausted by being the public face and maintaining control of the shared body. Hence, Andrew. Andrew Gage is the first-person narrator of half of this book. He is twenty-eight, the same age as the body, but he's only existed for two years. He considers Aaron his father, since Aaron called him out of the lake inside their internal metal geography. His purpose is to run the body and be the public face of the family. He is by turns capable and naive, shy on personal experience, but able to get the help of the others. The one heard from most frequently is Adam, a rude and mischevious teenager who also has an uncanny ability to read other people, and who frequently watches through the body's eyes from what the family calls the "pulpit" and gives Andrew advice. Andrew works for Julie Sivik, a woman he met the day he quit his job at a big-box store because he couldn't explain his behavior to his boss without discussing being a multiple. Julie is a wholly impractical, slightly unethical, well-meaning force of chaos who serves as the thread that draws the plot of the book together. She's running a startup on ingenuity and borrowed money that is attempting to create a comprehensive and customizable virtual reality world. She's the one who finds Penny and hires her, in part for her skills, and in part to push Penny and Andrew together. Penny Driver has the same condition as Andrew, but Penny is only vaguely aware of it. The world for her is full of blackouts, lost time, waking up in strange and sometimes horrific situations, and attempting to structure her life based on notes left for herself that she didn't write. When she meets Andrew, she's barely making it through life; thankfully, one of her personalities is remarkably good at computers, and that has been enough to make a living despite the chaos. But Julie is the unintentional catalyst for her losing that job, the best job she's ever had, leaving her with no real alternative but to take the job with Julie's company. There are a few things that are important to say up-front about this book. First, neither I nor the author are actually multiples (or, put another way, neither of us have DID), and writing about atypical mental states is fraught with peril. It's very easy to misrepresent other people's experiences, and multiple personalities in particular are frequent material for dramas of all sorts. There's something people find inherently fascinating about the idea, and it's easy for that fascination to run away with reality and distort the lived experience. I recommend reading Ruff's FAQ about the book, which spells out what his goals are and what approach he took. I did some quick searches and didn't uncover a lot of anger or dislike of the book among either people who have DID or psychiatrists, and it seems true to the descriptions of internal reality I've heard from people who are multiples. But despite being more respectful of real experience than most fictional treatments of DID, this is still a work of fiction written by someone without first-hand experience, and it's worth keeping that in mind. Second, DID is an intensely controversial diagnosis among psychiatrists. There are, generally speaking, two major controversies. One is over whether or not DID can actually be caused by traumatic experiences such as childhood abuse, or whether it is a creation of psychiatrists, a mental model that they've imposed on their patients or convinced their patients to believe. Set This House in Order comes down firmly on the first side of that controversy: that DID can be created by abuse and is not a creation of psychotherapy. (So, I should note, does every multiple that I've ever talked to or read.) Second, there is significant controversy over treatment, with some psychiatrists believing that integration of the personalities into one is the only true treatment, and others believing that multiples can remain stable and functional as multiple personalities. Set This House in Order leans strongly towards the view that multiples can be stable as multiples and that while integration may be appropriate for some, it's not for all. Both of these viewpoints are presented very convincingly by the narrative in the book, and both are consistent with the beliefs of a lot of multiples, but it's worth remembering that these are active and often quite heated controversies and a novel is not evidence. It's good to be aware of both of those points, and to read Put This House in Order as something of a what-if, where much more is clear about DID than is actually clear in our world. But once one has done that, one is in for an excellent book. I loved this book from start to finish. (Well, okay, I felt some surprise at the nature of the ending, but it grew on me after further consideration.) It's simply a brilliant novel, with a little bit of everything: very good characterization, messy love affairs, the satisfying tension of someone overcoming great odds to put themselves together with the help of friends, a startlingly original perspective of the world, some excellent surprises, and some absolutely wonderful characters. Andrew is a good choice of narrator: he brings an earnest calm to a story that could otherwise be quite chaotic and provides a great vantage point for the reader. And I found Penny (and particularly some of her other souls) impossible not to like. Set This House in Order is a tense book in places, and it's a book where people's lives break down before they can get better. It's also a book about rather horrific abuse, and while nearly all of the specifics happen off-stage, imagination fills in some nasty details. But Ruff manages to write it with a structure and with enough calm assurance that I felt just reassured enough without taking away the tension. That's a tricky balance; few books do it better. And the supporting characters are a delight. One might think, with all the complexity happening for both Andrew and Penny, that Ruff wouldn't have room in the narrative for other characters, but one would be wrong. There are very few saints and demons here, just a lot of complex people, with their own problems and their own perspectives, who are generally trying to do the best they can from day to day. There are some clear-cut villains in the past Ruff wisely makes no attempt to add shades of grey to abusers but even there one can see some clear signs of untreated severe mental illness and chaotic lives rather than mustache-twirling pre-meditated villainy. This is, in short, a book full of people, in all their messy complications, which is what makes it so delightful. I'm not going to say anything more about the plot, or even the various personalities, since discovering the direction of the book was so much of the fun. I will say that, despite the subject matter and some of the events, the book is surprisingly gentle. One of the things about it that I loved the most was the emotional tone Ruff gave to being a multiple: the sense of a squabbling but tight-knit family looking out for each other. I can't judge the reality of this impression, but it makes for a wonderful story. Highly recommended. The best book I've read so far this year. Rating: 10 out of 10

2 November 2012

Bastian Venthur: Introducing The Art of Asking

Since October 2011 my flatmate and I where quite busy realizing a little pet project of ours called The Art of Asking. The ultimate goal is to visualize the world s opinion in an intuitive fashion and make it easy for everyone to play around with the data. The idea behind The Art of Asking is that users submit interesting questions which are answered by users around the world. But instead of showing only the boring result, we want to provide interesting insights and statistics about the answers given. For now the users can see the results of the question visualized by geographical regions. For example on the page for the question How are you today? you can see the interactive map with the pie chart. The map shows the average/dominating answer for each continent encoded by color, and the pie chart the distribution of the different answers for that region. If you move the mouse over a continent the pie chart updates and shows the distribution of answers for that continent. You can also click to zoom into the map to see the same for countries and regions. This allows you to investigate how the answers are distributed around the world. This is already quite nice and fancy to play around with, but of course we want much more. Right now we re working on a feature which will users allow to combine two arbitrary questions and see how the answers are related. This doesn t sound like much, but it is very addictive to crawl through the list of questions and find interesting correlations. Here is a little plot how it could look like (the data is from the actual data base of answers). For each possible combination of answers it shows the percentage of people who answered in that combination. Of course those plots only make sense when enough users answered for both questions you want to compare which is right now not very often the case, so I guess we ll roll out that feature sometime later when we have more data. But we have lots of ideas and are working on further ways to investigate the answers. Obviously one low hanging fruit for example would be the distribution of the answers over time. We ve been working for over a year now on this project in our spare time and we built it more or less from scratch. I wrote a small WSGI framework in Python and on top of that the WSGI application which runs the site. We use MongoDB for the storage of the data, uWSGI and nginx for the server, Jinja2 and Bootstrap for the HTML and D3.js for the visualization of the data, where Maci did a wonderful job realizing the interactive map and charts. We re running this site since July 2012 now and are already quite satisfied with the number of users, and the quality of the questions. But of course we could always use more (especially more answers). So if you want to try it out, go to theartofasking.com and fill out the blank spots on the map! We re happy about every answer and question we can get and are eager to hear your suggestions.

1 November 2012

Antoine Beaupr : My short computing history

This is a long story. I wanted to document which tools I used on my desktop, but then realized it was difficult to do this without an historical context. This therefore, became a history of my computer usage and programming habits.

Before the desktop: vic 20 and apple My first contacts with computers were when my uncle showed me his Apple computers at his home. He was working at UQAM and had access to all sorts of crazy computers. My memory is vague, but I believe he showed me a turtle moving around the screen, which I suspect was Logo, and some rabbit game which I was quite fond of. Later, I hooked up with a Vic-20 (similar to a Commodore 64) and typed in my first programs. Back then, you would painstakingly transcribe the program from a book into the screen, type RUN at the end and really hope that you didn't make a typo. You could also read and write data off audio tape with an external tape drive, which was really amazing. To put things into perspective, the Vic-20 would plug into your television for a display, and the computer was "in the keyboard". Old school shit. The language was BASIC, which was awful. Later, we got luxurious and had the privilege of a Macintosh Plus computer. 3000$ plus the printer, that was quite something. Still, that modern system could run Word, had games, and a 9" black and white screen. But the best part, and where I really started to learn to program, is with Hypercard, the crazy software written by Bill Atkinson that became the inspiration for wikis, the Myst computer game and, to a certain extent, popularized the concept of hyperlinking, which is the basic principle of the World Wide Web.

The early years: afterstep and FreeBSD But my real computer life all started with FreeBSD 2.2.x (probably 2.2.5), around 1997, when I installed my first FLOSS operating system. This was just amazing: source code for everything, down to the compilers themselves, I was amazed, since I was coming from a Mac (still had that Mac Plus lying around) and Windows (95!) world. Back then, X11 (XFree86, it was called) was a fantasy. Something I would compile with the FreeBSD ports system and sometimes would be able to run. Window managers were some weird things I wasn't sure how to use, but I figured out twm (yuck!) but was still amazed. At the university, we had SGI workstations (remember the Indigo machines?) on which I started setting up the Afterstep window manager, which I used for a long time. The web browser was Netscape Communicator 4, and lo and behold, it also did email, although I mostly used Pine over a modem terminal to the university. Internet access at home was spotty and was dependent on students compiling discreetly copies of slirp which were allowing us, in a really clunky way, to run a PPP session over those terminal lines. That actually got my account suspended because I messed up my sendmail configuration and was sending emails that appeared to be coming as , which freaked out the sysadmins that be over there. The hardware was a Pentium 166Mhz with 32MB of ram and 20GB of disk space, which was a huge improvement over the 1MB of ram and 20MB of (external!) hard disk that the Mac Plus was proud of. By then, I started programming in more languages: I learned the basics of shell scripting, C programming and I had learned Pascal in a college class.

The real freedom: Debian and... enlightenment? I then switched to Debian, thanks to my friend scyrma, which showed me the power of dselect which, for a FreeBSD user, was really impressive. Imagine that: you could just install software and all dependencies without compiling anything! ;) I don't exactly remember when that was, but it was probably Woody. I probably still used afterstep, but at that time, changing window managers was like changing t-shirts and we would waste countless hours fiddling around with borders and background images and other silly things. I remember running Enlightenment and writing software for it, for example, but not much else. Back then, email was still over pine, but a new web browser was rearing its ugly head, Mozilla, and was quickly trimmed down to Phoenix, shortly lived as Mozilla Firebird, only to be finally renamed Mozilla Firefox, and was unleashed as a stable release to an unsuspecting Internet Explorer and Microsoft-dominated world. Throughout this chaos, I also used various Mozilla derivatives like Galeon since all of this was pretty unstable and heavy for my poor computers. This was probably around 2002 to 2005. By then, I had formal classes on programming languages, was forced to learn Java, discovered C++, and learned more C as the university assumed that you knew that language in the data structures and algorithm class, which some students really didn't find funny at all. I also learned some Prolog and Haskell back then. Through my experiences with free software, I discovered various eclectic programming languages like TCL, and kept an eye out for other languages like lisp (thanks to Emacs), Forth (thanks to the FreeBSD boot loader), HTML/CSS/Javascript (no thanks to the web). There are probably others I am forgetting here, voluntarily or not.

The years of the desktops: rox, sawfish and gnome Another stable increment on my desktop was the use of the sawfish window manager and the rox desktop, mostly because of the awesome Rox file manager that had no equal in the rest of the free software world. Gnome was an atrocity and KDE even more so: bloated and unstable. Eventually, however, KDE and Gnome not only matured, but simply took over the whole of the graphical environment psyche of the free world. People nowadays don't even know what a window manager is and assume that you now have a "desktop environment", which, for me, is a real desk with a bunch of papers, a radio transceiver and maybe a computer with a screen lying around. So I did use KDE, and then Gnome. I switched from KDE to Gnome because I felt that Gnome left me more space to run my own stuff without starting crazy daemons to preload everything. At this point, Firefox was the new thing and basically stable enough for daily use. This lasted until around 2009, I guess. On the programming side, I had picked up Perl because I had to learn it to work at Ericsson (don't ask) and learned PHP to pay my rent, which I consider one of the biggest professional mistakes I have made so far in that story. It is around that time that Koumbit was founded by me and other friends.

The tiles fall on the gnomes: awesome desktop and sysadmin programming At some point, friends (mostly comar and millette) introduced me to wmii as the best thing since sliced bread. I banged my head against it with great pains, but I really enjoyed the hands off approach to window management. Tiling window managers really got a hold on me there, and in fact we can say on the whole desktop, with recent Gnome 3 taking up some tiling concepts itself. I have since then switched to the Awesome Window Manager which is probably the worst name you can use for software (try googling for "Awesome crash" to get an idea). I have switched from Firefox to Chromium, after having repeated crashes from Firefox on a site that Chrome would load fine. I was expecting Chrome to crash only one tab, because of its design, and it turned out to not crash at all, and I have since given up on Firefox totally. I have also given up on desktop environments. While I have given them a chance in quick setups and still use them when forced to, I find them too bloated and single-minded for my needs. I want control over my desktop, and those tools work very hard to remove control and hide it behind user interfaces that treat me like a brain-dead dog. Finally, I have kept on programming in PHP for work, because that's what we do over there (unfortunately). Mostly because of Drupal and Aegir, in which I was and still am deeply involved. But I am quite fond of Python for my personnal project and still use shell scripting to get myself out of trouble or automate data processing from time to time. I have a rule though: once a program hits 100 lines of shell scripting, it needs to be rewritten, usually in Perl because the syntax is closer. During the years 2009 to 2012, I have started to work more and more on system administration however. In 2010, I became a Debian Developer and a lot of my work at Koumbit revolves around system administration, optimisation and maintenance. I work oncall and sometimes get called during the night to nurse servers (which is why I am up writing this right now).

The future of programming I have become seriously disgruntled with programming. I have seen the emergence of the web, where programmers felt it was relevant to rewrite 30 years of programs into the web framework (webmail? wtf?), and now we are seeing the same thing happen with mobile devices, the tracking devices they call phones and "pads", we should rather say. And again they are trying to make people pay for trivial software. I am tired of seeing our community reinvent the wheel every 10 years because of infatuated egos and marketing sprints. We are wasting great minds on this, a lot of energy and precious time. I would rather maintain 5 year old imperfect software than coordinate a 5 year project to rewrite that software into another imperfect software. That is what is happening right now, and it's going nowhere. So here's the current state of affairs, some perls, some tiles, but mostly system administration and less programming. Through all this time, the common pattern is that I have learned to solve problems and document my work, which are key concepts of the job of a system administrator, which is what I really am now. Somehow, that popped into my life like a natural fit. Maybe, one day, I will retire and become a shepherd in far away mountains, but I will always have in my mind the strong desire to fix shit up and make things right with the world. Maybe get involved in a project like Open Source Ecology and especially their Global Village Construction Set to make sure humankind survives all that stupidity.

31 October 2012

Paul Tagliamonte: dput-ng -- the next generation of your friendly upload tool

Hello, World! Arno and I have been in the middle of a 3 week long quest to rewrite dput. We feature tons of improvements over the old dput, such as: Support for even core features are treated as plugins, so derivative distributions should be able to add features without maintaining a patch against dput (current situation). In addition, I ve implemented some show-ey post-upload hooks, such as a Twitter plugin. Here s how it s defined: 
import twitter
import json
import os
def tweet(changes, profile, interface):
    tweet = "I've just uploaded %s/%s to %s's %s suite #debian" % (
        changes['Source'],
        changes['Version'],
        profile['name'],
        changes['Distribution']
    )
    if len(tweet) > 140:
        tweet = tweet[:140]
    obj = json.load(open(os.path.expanduser("~/.twitter.json"), 'r'))
    t = twitter.Api(
        consumer_key=obj['consumer_key'],
        consumer_secret=obj['consumer_secret'],
        access_token_key=obj['oath_token'],
        access_token_secret=obj['oath_secret']
    )
    t.PostUpdates(tweet)
This file is placed in ~/.dput.d/scripts, as tweet.py, and the plugin def file is placed in ~/.dput.d/processors (since it s a post-upload processor), which looks like: 
 
    "name": "Tweet after an upload.",
    "path": "tweet.tweet"
I know this sounds confusing, but it s actually quite nice. Check out the plugin in action Feedback, and contributors more then welcome! Documentation is at dput.rtfd.org. It s all a bit pre-beta at the moment, but the authors are using it for all their uploads, and should be stable for users who don t mind a bit of breakage. We ve filed the ITP, and updates on it & and upload will follow shortly. We re just weeding out some final major issues. Should be stable enough for general use in the next 30 days or so.

30 October 2012

Matthew Garrett: An overview of our Secure Boot implementation

I've written rather a lot about how we're implementing our Secure Boot support, but there's been a range of subtle changes over time. Here's an overview of how it all fits together.Secure Boot and signingSecure Boot is part of the UEFI specification. When enabled, systems will refuse to boot any UEFI executables (such as an OS bootloader) unless they've been signed by a trusted key. The only trusted key effectively guaranteed to be present is Microsoft's, and Microsoft will sign binaries if you have access to the Windows hardware dev center. You gain access to this by purchasing a certificate from Verisign that verifies your identity and then use that to create a developer account at the Sysdev website. Once you've agreed to the legal contracts, you can submit a UEFI executable and Microsoft will then send you back a signed one. The signature is added to the end of the binary, so it's trivial to verify that your executable hasn't otherwise been modified in the process.
Avoiding signing round tripsWe didn't want to have to get binaries re-signed every time we updated our bootloader or kernel, so we came up with a compromise approach. We implemented a shim bootloader (cunningly called "Shim") which is signed by Microsoft and includes a copy of a public key that's under our control. Shim will launch any binary signed with either a key installed in the system firmware or the public key built into it. This allows us to build and sign all other binaries ourselves.
Preventing Secure Boot circumventionSecure Boot is intended to prevent scenarios where untrusted code can be run before an OS kernel. Locking down the boot environment avoids the simple case of using a modified bootloader, and requiring that the kernel also be signed avoids simply booting arbitrary attack code that looks roughly like a kernel but does nothing to prevent the more complex case of using a running kernel to launch another kernel. To do that we've had to restrict the behaviour of the kernel in Secure Boot environments. Direct hardware access from userspace has been blocked, and modules must be signed by a key the kernel trusts.
Providing user control over trustMicrosoft requires that it be possible to modify the key database on all Windows-certified x86 systems, but the UI to do so may be inconsistent and awkward. Suse developed a plan to avoid this, involving adding an additional key database to the system. The user enrols a key from the running OS and enters a password. On the next reboot, shim detects that a key is awaiting enrolment and drops to a prompt. If the user does nothing or just hits enter, the system continues to boot. If the user chooses to enrol a new key, the user is asked to re-enter the password in order to confirm that they're the same user that initiated the original request. If successful, the key is then copied into a boot services variable which cannot be directly modified from the OS. Anything signed with the user's key will then be trusted.
Providing user control over signature verificationSome users (such as kernel developers) may be hampered by Secure Boot - forcing them to sign every new kernel they build is time consuming and unhelpful. Windows-certified x86 hardware will be required to provide an option to disable Secure Boot, but again that UI may be inconsistent. We've added an option where a user can generate a request to disable signature validation, again requiring a password. On next boot the user must explicitly choose the "Toggle signature validation" menu item and will then be requested to enter three randomly chosen characters from their password. After confirmation, signature validation in Shim will then be disabled.
Supporting other distributionsNot all distributions will want (or be able) to sign via Microsoft. They'll be able to take any other signed version of Shim and put it on their boot media. If their second stage bootloader is signed by a key that Shim doesn't trust, Shim will pop up a menu permitting the user to choose to enrol a new key off the install media. The user can select this, navigate a file browser and select the key. After confirmation, the key will be added to Shim's trusted key list. The user can then install the distribution.
Third party modulesThere's two approaches here. The first is for the third party to provide a module key that the user can install into Shim's database. The kernel will import this at boot time and trust any modules signed with it. The second is for the third party to provide a key signed by Microsoft. David Howells has come up with with the idea of utilising this approach of embedding a public key in a pe binary, with the kernel then having support for importing this key, noticing that it's signed by a trusted key and adding it to the kernel keyring.
How about ARM?We're not planning on supporting Secure Boot on ARM, for two reasons. The first is that Microsoft require that it be impossible to disable Secure Boot on ARM, and we don't want to support systems unless it's guaranteed that the user will be able to run what they want. The second is that there's no strong expectation that the signing key used for signing third party UEFI binaries will be present on ARM systems.
What are other distributions doing?As far as I know, Suse and Fedora will be shipping the same code. Ubuntu is shipping an older version of Shim but should pick up the local key management code in the next release. The only significant difference is that Ubuntu doesn't require that kernel modules be signed.

comment count unavailable comments

29 October 2012

Yves-Alexis Perez: Switching to OpenPGP smartcard

A friend of mine recently reminded me of the OpenPGP smartcard v2, and told me that it was perfectly able to handle 4096 bit RSA keys (provided you have GnuPG v2.0.18+). I had the opportunity to play with one a little, and notice it was super easy to use it for ssh authentication, especially since I already use gpg-agent as my ssh-agent (it should be easy to use a purely software authentication key as ssh key with GnuPG 2.1). So I decided to buy two of them and try to switch my main key (0x71ef0ba8) to it. The cards arrived this weekend, and I was able to play with it a little. I didn't log every command I typed, but it was pretty easy, in the end. What I decided to do was to use one smartcard for every day usage, and one only for key signing. So basically, I would generate three (signing, encryption, authentication) subkeys, put them on smartcard 1, then put the primary key on smartcard 2. Then erase the private parts, and only keep them on smartcards. In case it interests people, here the somehow detailed steps. Note that everywhere 'gpg' means 'gpg2' on Debian, we really need GnuPG v2 for correct smartcard handling. You'd better use gpg-agent too, although it doesn't seem mandatory.
  1. make a backup! As we're gonna play with private parts (!), it's always a good idea to have backups. And it'll be useful to have one later, in case there's a problem with the smartcards. You can do a copy of your complete ~/.gnupg folder, but I simply did: 
    corsac@scapa: umask 066
corsac@scapa: gpg -o 71ef0ba8.gpg --export-secret-keys 71ef0ba8
  2. Add three subkeys. Skip this is you already have subkeys (you usually already have an encryption subkey, but I wanted to switch to a new one too) --expert is needed in order to chose capabilities. 
    corsac@scapa: gpg --expert --edit-key 71ef0ba8
gpg> addkey
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
   (5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
   (6) RSA (encrypt only)
   (7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
   (8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
Your selection? 8
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate 
Current allowed actions: Sign Encrypt 
   (S) Toggle the sign capability
   (E) Toggle the encrypt capability
   (A) Toggle the authenticate capability
   (Q) Finished
Your selection? e
Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate 
Current allowed actions: Sign 
   (S) Toggle the sign capability
   (E) Toggle the encrypt capability
   (A) Toggle the authenticate capability
   (Q) Finished
Your selection? Q
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 
Requested keysize is 2048 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at dim. 27 oct. 2013 20:38:44 CET
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
    Repeat this for encryption and authentication subkeys. Then save and send the key to keyservers 
    gpg> save
corsac@scapa: gpg --send-keys 71ef0ba8
  3. Next, we'll switch to the smartcard part. I use a Gemalto PC ExpressCard reader which is perfectly recognized under Debian. You just need few tools: 
    root@scapa: ~# apt-get install pcscd scdaemon
    Plug the reader, insert the card, make sure it's detected: 
    corsac@scapa: gpg --card-status
Application ID ...: D2760001240102000005000016A10000
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: ZeitControl
...
    You can edit various parameter (name etc.) and change the PINs using gpg: 
    corsac@scapa: gpg --change-pin
corsac@scapa: gpg --card-edit
  4. Then we'll put the subkeys in the first smartcard. It might be a good idea to export again the private keys for backups. 
    corsac@scapa: gpg -o 71ef0ba8.gpg --export-secret-keys 71ef0ba8
  5. We'll now use the keytocard gpg command to move the private parts on the smartcard: 
    corsac@scapa: gpg --edit-key 71ef0ba8
gpg> key 1 # select encryption subkey
gpg> keytocard
gpg> key 2 # select signature subkey
gpg> keytocard
gpg> key 3 # select authentication subkey
gpg> keytocard
gpg> save
    A quick check on the card now reveals that it's populated: 
    corsac@scapa: gpg --card-status
Application ID ...: D2760001240102000005000016A10000
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: ZeitControl
Serial number ....: 000016A1
Name of cardholder: Yves-Alexis Perez
Language prefs ...: fr
Sex ..............: unspecified
URL of public key : http://www.corsac.net/71ef0ba8.asc
Login data .......: corsac
Signature PIN ....: forced
Key attributes ...: 2048R 2048R 2048R
Max. PIN lengths .: 32 32 32
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 7
Signature key ....: 9745 B022 7323 81FE 9E7E  AFF5 6DDB 53F2 A675 C0A5
      created ....: 2012-10-27 11:24:07
Encryption key....: F7E0 078F EA1A 5F23 92E0  20B3 A83A D136 D98D 0D9F
      created ....: 2012-10-27 11:27:01
Authentication key: 8CFD D478 AB4A 16F8 F0EC  CD33 24E2 3B5C CC0E 273D
      created ....: 2012-10-17 14:29:18
General key info..: pub  2048R/A675C0A5 2012-10-27 Yves-Alexis Perez 
sec>  4096R/71EF0BA8  created: 2009-05-06  expires: never     
                      card-no: 0005 000016A2
ssb   4096g/36E31BD8  created: 2009-05-06  expires: never     
ssb>  2048R/CC0E273D  created: 2012-10-17  expires: 2013-10-27
                      card-no: 0005 000016A1
ssb>  2048R/A675C0A5  created: 2012-10-27  expires: 2013-10-27
                      card-no: 0005 000016A1
ssb>  2048R/D98D0D9F  created: 2012-10-27  expires: 2013-10-27
                      card-no: 0005 000016A1
  6. At that point, the private part is replaced by a stub in the secret keyring, so when you export them, you only export stubs which you can then use anywhere without actually giving your private key. So now is a good idea to export the subkeys so you can import them on other boxes: 
    corsac@scapa: gpg -o 71ef0ba8-subkeys.gpg --export-secret-subkeys 71ef0ba8
    Note that only the subkeys private parts have been moved to the card, not the primary one, so you're still able to sign keys. Here, you have multiple choices. You can simply erase the private key (and later re-import the stubs) and use the offline copy made above when you need to sign another key.
  7. What I did is something else. I've put the primary key on my second OpenPGP smartcard. That way, I won't lose it, it'll be kept safely in my house, but still be on a hardware token where it won't come out. The procedure for doing is so is exactly the same as above. First take a backup (in case you didn't do it first, do it now since after the keytocard command you won't have a backup of your primary key and there'll be no way to extract it from the smartcard. Then put the new smartcard in the reader, edit the key (don't select a subkey) and run the keytocard command. After that, running gpg --export-secret-keys will export the stub and not the private part of your primary key.
In the end, it seems that everything is running fine. Only issue is that scdaemon is sometime not behaving nicely (especially after a card change or or suspend/resume cycle). I didn't yet report a bug but you might want to kill it in case it's stuck. You can also use the authentication subkey for ssh logins. When the card is inserted, the authentication subkey appears automatically (through the magic of gpg-agent):

corsac@scapa: ssh-add -L
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EA... cardno:0005000016A1 And now you can add it to your various authorized_keys and use the smartcard for SSH.

Matthew Garrett: Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist and why this matters

(This post contains some discussion of rape and sexual assault but does not go into any specifics)

There was a brief controversy at Linux.conf.au back in 2011. The final keynote speaker gave a compelling presentation on online privacy, including some slides containing sexualised imagery. This was against the terms of the conference policies, and resulted in an apology from the conference organisers and the speaker. The situation was unfortunate but well handled, and that should have been the end of it.

Afterwards, there was some pushback on the conference mailing list. Concerns were raised about the policy being overly restrictive and the potential for it to be used to stifle speech that influential groups disagreed with. I don't agree with these arguments, but discussion of why policies have been implemented is completely natural and provides an opportunity for a community to determine what its expected standards are.

And then Ted Ts'o effectively called rape victims liars[1]. At first I assumed that this was just some sort of horrific failure to understand the implications of what he was saying, so I emailed him to check. The reply I got drew a pretty clear distinction between the case of a drunk college student raping another drunk college student in their room and the case of knifepoint rape in a dark park. You know, the difference between accidental rape and rape rape. The difference between the one any of us might have done and the one that only bad people do. Legitimate rape and the "rape" that those feminists talk about. The distinction that lets rapists convince themselves that they didn't really rape anyone because they weren't holding a knife at the time.

Ted Ts'o argues that only a small percentage of rape really counts as what people think of as rape. Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist.

There's an ongoing scandal in the UK at the moment. A well known DJ, Jimmy Savile, died last year. He grew up in a working class family, but through hard work and natural talent was one of the most significant figures in promoting pop music in the UK in the 50s and 60s, and worked in various parts of the BBC for the best part of 30 years. He spent significant amounts of time raising money for charity, and it's estimated that he raised over 40 million for various causes. Since his death, around 300 people have accused him of sexually abusing them. The BBC is desperately trying to explain why it cancelled an expose shortly before it aired. Multiple people who worked there at the time claim that everyone knew he was involved in indecent activities, but saying anything would risk both their career and the charities that depended on his fundraising. Nobody said anything, and he was allegedly free to continue his abuse.

Ted Ts'o is a significant figure in the Linux kernel community. He has expressed abhorrent beliefs that damage that community. Condemnation was limited to a mailing list with limited readership, meaning, effectively, that nobody said anything. Last week the Ada Initiative published a blog post pointing out the damage that did, and I realised that my effective silence was not only helping to alienate 50% of the population from involving themselves with Linux, it was also implicitly supporting my community leadership. I was giving the impression that I was basically fine with our community leaders telling people that it wasn't really rape if you were both drunk enough. I was increasing the chances of members of our community being sexually assaulted. Silence is endorsement. Saying nothing is not ok.

In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I'll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I'm compelled to as a result of my job. I won't be attending any Linux Foundation events he's involved in organising. If I'm running any events, I won't be inviting him. At a time when we're finally making progress in making our community more open and supportive, we don't need leaders who undermine that work. Support organisations who encourage that progress, not the people who help drag us back.

Footnotes

[1]The original archive has vanished. I've put up a copy of the relevant thread here. Throughout, Ted states that he's actually arguing against the idea that women need to be frightened of sexual assault, and not against the definition of rape. Except saying things like This one does a pretty good job of taking apart the Koss / Ms. Magazine study, which is the source for the "1 in 4" number. For example, it points out that over half of those cases were ones where undergraduates were plied with alcohol, and did not otherwise involve using physical force or other forms of coercion is difficult to read in any way other than "Half of the people you're counting as having been raped haven't really been raped", and favourably referring to an article that asserts that the rate of false rape reports is probably close to 50% is pretty strong support for the idea that many rape victims are liars.

(Update 2012/10/30: Adam Williamson suggests in this comment that this mail is a better example of Ted's behaviour - there's some explicit victim blaming and a lot of "Is that rape" questioning with the obvious implication that the answer should be "no". Ted Ts'o is a victim blaming rape apologist.)

(Update 2012/11/05: It's been suggested that I haven't been sufficiently clear about which of Ted's statements justify my claims. So, here we go.

In this mail, Ted links to and endorses this article. He explicitly links to it because of its treatment of rape statistics. Quoting directly from that article:
the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent
Ted explicitly endorses an article that claims that a significant percentage of reported rapes are false. The study that generated that figure is held in poor regard by other researchers in the field - Australian police figures indicate that 2.1% of rape accusations were classified as false. Ted asserts that he was trying to argue against poor use of statistics, so it's a fair assumption that he agrees with the alternative statistics that he's citing. Ted believes that many rape victims are making false accusations. Ted believes that many rape victims are liars.

Again in this mail, Ted argues against a claimed figure that 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted. One of his arguments is that Also found in the Koss study, although not widely reported, was the statistic that of the women whom she classified as being raped (although 73% refused to self-classify the event as rape), 46% of them had subsequent sex with the reported assailant. Ted disagrees with a statistic because some rape victims subsequently have sex with the reported assailant. This means that Ted believes that this indicates that they were not really raped. Ted is a rape apologist.)

comment count unavailable comments

28 October 2012

Leo 'costela' Antunes: Silly Wal(l Cloc)k

Inspired by this clock, which made the rounds a few weeks back, and fueled by a bet to see who could make it first (hi Fabs!), ladies and gentleman, I m honored to introduce to you, the Silly Wal(l Cloc)k:

The finished clock This is a prototype version, done without any fancy precision tools and whatnot, so you can easily see that it s not the most high quality product you ll ever get your hands on. If anyone wants to reproduce this at home, here s how it was done: First get a hold of some cheap wall clock like this one: The original cheap clock Some things to think about when buying this beauty *cough*:

Disassembling this specific cheap model was pretty straightforward and didn t take more than a minute to get to juicy parts:

Clock parts: actual clock, cover tack and hands As a base image I used this and traced it to produce this SVG with the legs in different layers and a marker for the holes. For this prototype, it would probably have been ok to use the original photo directly, but having the vector version ready means it s easy to use a 3d printer and laser-cutter to make the next version of the hands and face, which will definitely look and behave a lot better. Next step is printing the three layers body and two legs. Since this specific clock is wider than an A4 sheet, I had to use some white cardboard as background (the clock s own box hurray for resourcefulness) and painstakingly cut the printed body s outline, to avoid the slight tone difference between cardboard and paper. If you use the provided SVG and a laser-cutter, you d hopefully avoid this sort of issue. I didn t have any black cardboard lying around, so I had to print the legs, cut the outline again and strengthen them with some thin cardboard from tea boxes (taken directly from the trash hurray for resourcefulness again). Again something that 3d printing will hopefully side-step. It s important to use light materials for the legs, since most clock mechanisms don t have enough force to move heavy hands, which would cause the clock to quickly loose precision. Depending on the width of the clock s axis, a paper hole puncher might be the ideal tool to make holes in the legs. Since the prototype was largely made with paper, there was no point in going for precision when making the holes, as there s no way to fit the legs tightly to the clock s axis. For this, the original hands were cut in length and used as a base on which to super-glue the legs, so the original holes could be used. After these few easy steps, it s only a matter of reassembling the clock and voil !

Silly Wal(l Clock)k

27 October 2012

Soeren Sonnenburg: Shogun at Google Summer of Code 2012

The summer came finally to an end and (yes in Berlin we still had 20 C end of October), unfortunately, so did GSoC with it. This has been the second time for SHOGUN to be in GSoC. For those unfamiliar with SHOGUN - it is a very versatile machine learning toolbox that enables unified large-scale learning for a broad range of feature types and learning settings, like classification, regression, or explorative data analysis. I again played the role of an org admin and co-mentor this year and would like to take the opportunity to summarize enhancements to the toolbox and my GSoC experience: In contrast to last year, we required code-contributions in the application phase of GSoC already, i.e., a (small) patch was mandatory for your application to be considered. This reduced the number of applications we received: 48 proposals from 38 students instead of 70 proposals from about 60 students last year but also increased the overall quality of the applications. In the end we were very happy to get 8 very talented students and have the opportunity of boosting the project thanks to their hard and awesome work. Thanks to google for sponsoring three more students compared to last GSoC. Still we gave one slot back to the pool for good to the octave project (They used it very wisely and octave will have a just-in-time compiler now, which will benefit us all!). SHOGUN 2.0.0 is the new release of the toolbox including of course all the new features that the students have implemented in their projects. On the one hand, modules that were already in SHOGUN have been extended or improved. For example, Jacob Walker has implemented Gaussian Processes (GPs) improving the usability of SHOGUN for regression problems. A framework for multiclass learning by Chiyuan Zhang including state-of-the-art methods in this area such as Error-Correcting Output Coding (ECOC) and ShareBoost, among others. In addition, Evgeniy Andreev has made very important improvements w.r.t. the accessibility of SHOGUN. Thanks to his work with SWIG director classes, now it is possible to use python for prototyping and make use of that code with the same flexibility as if it had been written in the C++ core of the project. On the other hand, completely new frameworks and other functionalities have been added to the project as well. This is the case of multitask learning and domain adaptation algorithms written by Sergey Lisitsyn and the kernel two-sample or dependence test by Heiko Strathmann. Viktor Gal has introduced latent SVMs to SHOGUN and, finally, two students have worked in the new structured output learning framework. Fernando Iglesias made the design of this framework introducing the structured output machines into SHOGUN while Michal Uricar has implemented several bundle methods to solve the optimization problem of the structured output SVM. It has been very fun and interesting how the work done in different projects has been put together very early, even during the GSoC period. Only to show an example of this dealing with the generic structured output framework and the improvements in the accessibility. It is possible to make use of the SWIG directors to implement the application specific mechanisms of a structured learning problem instance in python and then use the rest of the framework (written in C++) to solve this new problem. Students! You all did a great job and I am more than amazed what you all have achieved. Thank you very much and I hope some of you will stick around. Besides all these improvements it has been particularly challenging for me as org admin to scale the project. While I could still be deeply involved in each and every part of the project last GSoC, this was no longer possible this year. Learning to trust that your mentors are doing the job is something that didn't come easy to me. Having had about monthly all-hands meetings did help and so did monitoring the happiness of the students. I am glad that it all worked out nicely this year too. Again, I would like to mention that SHOGUN improved a lot code-base/code-quality wise. Students gave very constructive feedback about our (lack) of proper Vector/Matrix/String/Sparse Matrix types. We now have all these implemented doing automagic memory garbage collection behind scenes. We have started to transition to use Eigen3 as our matrix library of choice, which made quite a number of algorithms much easier to implement. We generalized the Label framework (CLabels) to be tractable for not just classification and regression but multitask and structured output learning. Finally, we have had quite a number of infrastructure improvements. Thanks to GSoC money we have a dedicated server for running the buildbot/buildslaves and website. The ML Group at TU Berlin does sponsor virtual machines for building SHOGUN on Debian and Cygwin. Viktor Gal stepped up providing buildslaves for Ubuntu and FreeBSD. Gunnar Raetschs group is supporting redhat based build tests. We have Travis CI running testing pull requests for breakage even before merges. Code quality is now monitored utilizing LLVMs scan-build. Bernard Hernandez appeared and wrote a fancy new website for SHOGUN. A more detailed description of the achievements of each of the students follows:

19 October 2012

Lior Kaplan: LibreOffice conference 2012 (day 2)

I ve started the morning with the easy hacks for non developers talks, which for my opinion lacked some code related tasks that even non developers can do like fixing translation problems in the source (in the English strings), fixing some simple logic bugs which doesn t require reading complex code (e.g. traversing records and first/last special cases). The other options mentioned in the talk aren t less important, but I think people shouldn t be afraid reading/touching the code to some level even with very limited coding skills. Later I ve used Rene s 3.7/master builds for Debian to verify two RTL bugs (fdo#43210, fdo#44925) fixed by the Motah guys from Saudi Arabia. After the verification, I pushed the changes to the 3.6 branch (should appear in 3.6.4).
Katya, which I ve met in the last conference, told me see watched my talked remotely, and took interest in RTL ui forcing right alignment to non aligned text. While reproducing the bug on her computer we were able to narrow the problem a bit, to be related to the locale and not only to the RTL interface. Till the end of the day she d identified the problem in the odp file and I hope a fix will be available by tomorrow. Jan (kendy) had a good progress with fdo#44657 (RTL problem #1). Checking the fix is quite confusing, and we had to use two laptops to understand and compare the right and desired behavior. Hopefully this problem will end soon, which will make coming to the conference worthwhile (as for the RTL status and efforts). Later I started working on moving the RTL status page from a wiki in Hebrew to the TDF wiki RTL Bugs page in English . By this I hope to get more visibility to the current status, and as a base to collaboration, let others help with RTL more easily. During one of the breaks I heard Lionel encourages someone to do builds on his own, and I decided that after avoiding this tasks for two years, it s about time. By the evening I got a build running according to the native build guide in the wiki (which took half the night on my laptop). There are still a few things to learn how to do with this build, but I how to now be more active in testing things without waiting for official Debian builds (which are quite hard when Debian is frozen). Thanks to Lionel for the encouragement. http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=a662d6d8c00f5a1cff724db51b0914aab36e201b
Filed under: LibreOffice

Martin F. Krafft: Configuration management

Puppet I've really had it with Puppet. I used to be able to put up with all its downsides
  • Non-Unix approach to everything (own transport, self-made PKI, non-intuitive configuration language, a faint attempt at versioning (bitbucket), and much much more )
  • Ruby
  • Abysmal slowness
  • Lack of basic functionality (e.g. replace a line of text)
  • Host management and configuration programming intertwined, lack of a high-level approach to defining functionality
  • Horrific error messages
  • Catastrophic upgrade paths
  • Did I mention Ruby and its speed?
  • Lack of IPv6 support
  • [I could keep going ]
but now that my fourth attempt to upgrade my complex configuration from version 0.25.5 to version 2.7 failed due to a myriad of completely incomprehensible errors ("err: Could not run Puppet configuration client: interning empty string") and many hours were lost in trying to hunt these down using binary searches, I am giving up. Bye bye Puppet.

An alternative But I need an alternative. I want a system that is capable of handling a large number of hosts, but not so complex that one wouldn't put it to use for half a dozen machines. The configuration management system I want looks about as follows: It
  • makes use of existing infrastructure (e.g. SSH transport and public keys, Unix toolchain, Debian package management and debconf)
  • interacts with the package management system (Debian only in my case)
  • can provision files whose contents might depend on context, particular machine data and conditionals. There should be a unified templating approach for static and dynamic files, with the ability to override the source of data (e.g. a default template used unless a template exists for a class of machine, or a specific hostname)
  • can edit files on the target machine in a flexible and robust manner
  • can remove files
  • can run commands when files change
  • can reference data from other machines (e.g. obtain the certificate fingerprint of each hosts that define me as their SMTP smarthost)
  • can control running services (i.e. enable init.d scripts, check that a process is running
  • is written in a sensible language
  • is modular and easily extensible, ideally using a well-known language (e.g. Python!)
  • allows to specify infrastructure with tags ("all webservers", "all machines in Zurich", "machines that are in Munich and receive mail"), but with the ability to override every parameter for a specific host
  • should just do configuration management, and not try to take away jobs from monitoring software
  • logs changes per-machine and collects data about applied configurations in a central location
  • is configured using flat files that are human-readable so that the configuration may be stored in Git (e.g. YAML, not XML)
  • can be configured using scripts in a flexible way
Since for me, Ruby is a downside of Puppet, I won't look at Chef, but from this page, I gleaned a couple of links: Ansible, Quattor, Salt, and bcfg2 (which uses XML though). And of course, there remains the ephemeral cfengine.

cfengine I haven't used cfengine since 2002, but I am not convinced it's worth a new look because it seems to be an academic project with gigantic complexity and a whole vernacular to its own. There is no doubt that it is a powerful solution, and the most mature of all of them, but it's far away from the Unix-like simplicity that I've come to love in almost 20 years of Debian. Do correct me if I am wrong.

Ansible Ansible looks interesting. It seems rather bottom-up, first introducing a way to remotely execute commands on hosts, which you can then later extend/automate to manage the host configurations. It uses SSH for transport, and its reason-to-be made me want to look at it. My ventures into the Ansible domain are not over yet, but I've put them on hold. First of all, it's not yet packaged for Debian (Ubuntu-PPA packages work on Debian squeeze and wheezy). Second, I was put off a bit by its gratuitous use of the shell to run commands, as well as other design decisions. Check this out: there are modules for the remote execution of commands, namely "shell", "command", and "raw". The shell modules should be self-explanatory; the command module provides some idempotency, such as not running the command if a file exists (or not). To do this, it creates a Python script in /tmp on the target and then executes that like so: 
$SHELL -c /tmp/ansible/ansible-1350291485.22-74945524909437/command
Correct me if I am wrong, but there is zero need for this shell indirection. My attempts at finding an answer on IRC were met by user "daniel_hozac" with a reason along the lines of "it's needed, believe me", and on the mailing list, I am told that only the shell can execute a script by parsing the interpreter line at the top of the module. Finally, the raw execution module also executes using the shell And there a few other design decisions that I can't quite explain, around the command-line switch --sudo see the aforementioned message In short: running a command like 
ansible -v arnold.madduck.net -a "/usr/bin/apt-get update" --sudo
does not invoke apt-get with sudo, as one might like; it invokes the shell that runs the Python script that runs the command. Effectively therefore, you need to allow sudo shell execution, and for proper automation, this has to be possible without a password. And then you might just as well allow root logins again. The author seems to think that "core behaviour" is that sudo allows all execution and that limiting the commands to run is not a use-case that Ansible will support. Apparently, I was the first to ever suggest this. There are always ways around (e.g. skip --sudo and just use sudo as the command, simply ignore the useless shell invocation and trust that your machine can handle it, but when such design decisions remain incomprehensible and get defended by the project people, then I am hesitant to invest more time on principle.

Salt Finally, I've looked at Salt, which is what I've spent most time on so far. From the discussions I started on host targeting and data collection, it soon became apparent that Salt is very thin and flexible, and that the user community is accomodating. Unfortunately, Salt does not use SSH, but at least it reuses existing functionality (ZeroMQ). As opposed to the push/pull model, Salt "minions" interestingly maintain a persistent connection to the server (which is not yet very stable), and while non-root usage is still not unproblematic, at least there has already been work done in this direction. I think I will investigate Salt more as it does look like it can do what I want. The YAML-based syntax does seem a bit brittle, but it's the best I've found so far. NP: The Pineapple Thief: Someone Here is Missing

18 October 2012

Petter Reinholdtsen: The fight for freedom and privacy

Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the drain, and it is hard to fight against it. I try to do my best, but time is limited. I hope you do your best too. A few years ago I came across a marvellous drawing by Clay Bennett visualising some of what is going on.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin
Do you feel safe at the airport? I do not. Do you feel safe when you see a surveillance camera? I do not. Do you feel safe when you leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions? I do not. I just remember the Panopticom, and can not help help to think that we are slowly transforming our society to a huge Panopticom on our own.

Jonas Smedegaard: SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE

# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc. # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package. # FIRST AUTHOR <email>, YEAR. # #, fuzzy msgid "" msgstr "" "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n" "POT-Creation-Date: 2012-10-12 12:27+0300\n" "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n" "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <email>\n" "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <ll>\n" "Language: \n" "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n" #. type: Title # #, no-wrap msgid "Robot-driven phone theater" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "I collaborate with [Hello!earth][] on creating theater performances." msgstr "" #. type: Title ## #, no-wrap msgid "You've got a message!" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "Unlike traditional theater, however, the "stage" is everyday life. The " "familiar streets of your home town, the supermarket, or perhaps your own " "home. And the story is yours uniquely, like ancient storytelling at a " "campfire unfolding inside your head, imagined by you, only seeded by the " "storyteller." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid " and the storyteller is robots, texting your cellphone." msgstr "" #. type: Title ## #, no-wrap msgid "Programming poems to be live-performed by machines" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "Vera and Jacob, the artists behind Hello!earth, compose "poems" that I " "program a system to "read" for the audience, triggered by a "dialogue" " "of words and actions of the audience." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "[[!graph src="""\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" "rankdir=LR\n" "subgraph robot botphone poetrybot chatbot \n" "authors -> poetrybot -> botphone -> "phone net" -> audience;\n" "admin -> chatbot;\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "#rank=same authors audience artists admin \n" msgstr "" #. type: Title ## #, no-wrap msgid "Who's behind the wheel?" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "When I say "robot-driven" I don't mean computers taking over." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "Like a car driven by the engine, these performances are driven by programs " "acting like agents with tiny missions. But like someone is (or should be!) " "steering the car to reach a sensible destination, the robot agents don't " "operate autonomously, but are steered throughout the performance." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "Our phone performances are guided by the plot and storyline(s) embedded " "into the robot system by HelloEarth and me. But the real beauty of it is " "that the one steering - the one really in control - are those traditionally " "called "audience", but here more accurately labelled "participants". " "Individually or collaboratively, depending on plot of each performance, the " "participants unfold the "play" in their minds, inspired by the weakest " "possible but accurately planted seeds of inspiration provided by our " "machinary." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "Theater performed by robots, controlled by the minds of the audience." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" "[hello!earth]: http://helloearth.cc/\n" " "hello!earth - platform for art projects crossing the edge of diverse performative practice"\n" msgstr ""

Jonas Smedegaard: SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE

# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc. # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package. # FIRST AUTHOR <email>, YEAR. # #, fuzzy msgid "" msgstr "" "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n" "POT-Creation-Date: 2012-10-12 11:14+0300\n" "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n" "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <email>\n" "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <ll>\n" "Language: \n" "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n" #. type: Title # #, no-wrap msgid "Status hos doktoren" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" "**Jonas Smedegaard** [dr.jones at pobox.com " "](mailto:friends%40jones.dk?Subject=Status%20hos%20doktoren&In-Reply-To=1.5.4.32.19971011010004.0067de34%40kaospilot.dk) " "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "_Sat Oct 11 15:22:00 CEST 1997_" msgstr "" #. type: Bullet: ' * ' #: msgid "Previous message: [Spamming? ](000001.html)" msgstr "" #. type: Bullet: ' * ' #: msgid "" "**Messages sorted by:** ? date (date.html#2) ? thread (thread.html#2) " "? subject (subject.html#2) ? author (author.html#2)" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " Hej Patrik (og alle Jer andre )!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " >_Vad sker med dig det var ett stycke tid diden?\n" " _>_Vad skedde der med ditt arbejde pa cafeet og pa skolen?\n" " _\n" " Lang historie!\n" " (den kommer nu )\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg tror snart jeg har laert (the hard way) hvor dyr jeg egentligt er i " "drift.\n" " Jeg har nu i 3 maneder "ligget med r ven *under* vandskorpen" " " konomisk: minus 15.000,- pa kontoen. Det vender forhabentligvis indenfor " "den naeste maned - ellers pa jeg tage et regulaert lan, hvis jeg fortsat " "skal have firma som fuldtidsbeskaeftigelse.\n" " Det betyder, at jeg for tiden arbejder fra ca. 9 morgen til 0:30 nat syv " "dage om ugen (med enkelte eftermiddage eller aftener fri). Der er faktisk " "opgaver at lave, som ogsa gi'r penge i kassen - men det har der ikke vaeret " "for nogle maneder siden, og nar der var, har jeg taget mig for billigt " "betalt (men du kender mig jo!). Jeg er begyndt mere at involvere min " "storebror, nar jeg udarbejder tilbud, til at hjaelpe mig med en mere reel " "prissaetning.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " Her er lidt(?) om, hvad jeg beskaeftiger mig med for tiden:\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Homebase ***\n" " Jeg far forbindelse fra mit kontor og ned til Mejlgade om en lille uge - " "rent teoretisk ihvertfald - derefter skal jeg ha' elektronikken til at " "fungere \n" " Jeg administrerer deres servere og netvaerk, og er "Boss" for Morten " "P. fra Frontl berne, som er blevet hyret til at vedligeholde alle " "arbejdspladserne pa skolen.\n" " Jeg har *intet* at g re med content pa webserveren. Efter i foraret at " "have haft DogSystem (et par nystartede edb-folk) til at udarbejde noget " "smart (som vist aldrig blev rigtigt til noget) har Uffe nu faet samlet nogle " "studerende (vist primaert fra hold 3), som skal hitte pa noget \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Her er et uddrag af en mail til Rasmus fra hold 3:\n" " >>_Du ma gerne f lge lidt med i arbejdet og sende mig en kommentar " "eller\n" " _>>_gode rad, hvis du f ler for det.\n" " _>_\n" " _>_Jeg har et ambivalent forhold til Jeres arbejde:\n" " _>_ - Jeg f ler for det, Ja. Meget!\n" " _>_ - I sidder og laver mit arbejde \n" " _>_ - Meningen med mit arbejde er ar g re mig selv arbejdsl s - sa det " "er\n" " _>_*godt*, at I laver det \n" " _>_ - I laver det maske bedre, maske darligere end jeg ville ha' gjort " "det -\n" " _>_men helt sikkert anderledes!\n" " _>_ - Min force (og min kaephest!) er grundstrukturer mere end visuel " "(og\n" " _>_anden) indpakning. Det er svaert at kommentere og komme med gode rad, " "nar de\n" " _>_er omkring grundstruktur. Det kraever naesten, at man sidder ved " "roret \n" " _>_ - Hvis ikke jeg kommer med mine kommentarer nu, skal jeg enten holde " "mund\n" " _>_med det (og det er svaert) eller de vil udvikles til bagklogskab og\n" " _>_bedrevidenhed \n" " _>_ - Jeg har egentligt for travlt til at beskaeftige mig med det: Jeg " "har hele\n" " _>_tiden haft "travlt". At jeg har "for travlt" er et udtryk for, at " "jeg er\n" " _>_blevet klar over, at for at leve et liv som selvstaendigt " "erhvervsdrivende\n" " _>_er det ikke nok at arbejde hardt - man skal ogsa ta' penge for " "det Jeg\n" " _>_har derfor ikke for travlt, hvis der er penge i lortet (men det er " "sjaeldent\n" " _>_tilfaeldet i Mejlgade - til gengaeld er der sa meget andet " "dernede!).\n" " _\n" " *** Brugerflade-design ***\n" " Jeg har faet et job ved Frontl berne: VPAE (Virtual Project Assistance " "Environment).\n" " De er med i et faelles-nordisk projekt om at lave en "virtuel " "projektvugge" - altsa et forum pa Internet med en raekke vaerkt jer til " "projektudvikling og administration af gamle projekter.\n" " Konkret arbejder jeg i diss uger pa design af brugergraenseflade " "(dialogbokse osv.) og n dvendige datastrukturer til et system til " "udarbejdelse af en projektbeskrivelse.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg arbejder taet sammen med Morten P., og det er utroligt spaendende at " "arbejde med en konkret, mindre opgave med stor paedagogisk og funktionel " "vaerdi.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Praktikant ***\n" " En af mine venner fra gymnasietiden, Henrik, studerer informatik (det " "hedder vist noget lidt andet ) her i rhus, og meget tyder pa, at han " "snart kommer i praktik her hos mig i en maned.\n" " Han skal arbejde meget selvstaendigt. Jeg har brug for hans viden " "indenfor PR, han kan bruge mig som "pr veklud", og jeg kan stille medier " "(webserver o.l.) til hans radighed.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg har en ide om at vaere meget aben overfor brug af praktikanter - " "ikke bare som nem arbejdskraft (det er kraevende at saette i arbejde, og at " "give opgaver fra sig!), men mere fordi det giver mig en traening i " "formidling af min viden, og erfaringer mht. "s saetning" af mine metoder " "og ideer som tekniker - men det kraever maske lidt uddybning :\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Mit virke er grundliggende at bygge bro mellem teknikere og brugere " "indenfor IT. Det har 2 aspekter - at naerme teknikeren til brugeren, og at " "naermere brugeren til teknikken. Jeg arbejder med undervisning (arketyper, " "paedagogik og kommunikation), brugerfladedesign og almen radgivning for at " "hjaelpe brugeren pa vej. For at hjaelpe teknikeren tager jeg udgangspunkt i " "mig selv og mit arbejde med brugeren, og udvikler herigennem en raekke " "metoder og tankesaet, som jeg vil formidle - gennem praktikanter eller " "evt. decideret undervisning - til andre teknikere, som ikke i det daglige " "arbejder "i begge lejre", og derfor ikke ser de samme problematikker som " "mig.\n" " konomisk skulle "Projekt dr. Jones" gerne baeres igennem " "vha. konkrete projekter - virksomheder og enkeltpersoner, som har behov for " "min viden og mit arbejde, og som er villige til at betale merprisen for " "forskning fremfor traditionelle l sninger (NB! jeg bruger bevidst ikke ord " "som "udvikling" og "innovation" - for mit arbejde f rer til tider " "tilbage til udgangspunktet - det er ikke *altid* n dvendigt at opfinde den " "dybe tallerken igen!)\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Henrik vil ikke give mig de store erfaringer mht. formidling af min " "viden - jeg har for stor en pukkel af opgaver liggende til at kunne gabe " "over ham ogsa. Denne gang er det primaert hans felt - PR - jeg kan drage " "nytte af.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Undevisning ***\n" " Jeg har nu i en maned undeervist i edb som valgfag pa IDA " "(Idraetsdagh jskolen). Indtil nu har det vaeret 2 timer om ugen, elever i " "alderen 30-60 ar - men om fa uger bliver der yderligere 4 timer om ugen med " "elever pa 20-30 ar.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Afl nningen er symbolsk (nej, god l n regnet som underviser, jeg far " "samme l n som en uddannet laerer - men ikke sammenholdt med, hvor " ""dyrebar" min tid er som selvstaendig ), men sjaeldent har jeg oplevet " "sa tydeligt et ryk i min paedagogiske forstaelse og opmaerksomhed.\n" " Jeg bliver sandsynligvis ikke haengende ved IDA i mere end et 1/2-1 ar - " "det er simpelthen for tids- og ressourcekraevende - men h ster gode " "erfaringer salaenge (og bader mig i deres positive feedback :-)\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Brugerflade-programmering ***\n" " Samtidig (egentligt burde jeg forlaengst vaere faerdig, men opgaven greb " "om sig) arbejder jeg pa mit eget projekt: BOS (BrugerOpdateringsSystem).\n" " Det er et CGI-script (lille program pa en web-server), som muligg r " "redigering af indholdet pa websider uafhaengigt af sidens grafiske " "opsaetning, og - vaesentligst - UDEN AT SKRIVE EEN ENESTE KODE!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " 1. udgave af BOS betalte jeg en programm r 15.000,- for at udvikle. Jeg " "havde brug for det til en opgave for AC (Akademikernes Centralorganisation), " "som skulle bruge det til bl.a. pressemeddelelser og publicering af et " "manedsblad pa deres 200+ siders websider (som jeg ogsa har lavet!).\n" " Da AC i sensommeren kom med rettelser og udvidelser til deres website " "blev der brug for forbedringer af BOS, og jeg erfarede, at min programm r " "havde lavet meget u-fleksibel kode, som var umulig at bygge videre pa.\n" " 2. udgave af BOS er nu naesten faerdig. Jeg valgte at skrive det om fra " "grunden selv (med hjaelp fra en god ven, som studerer datalogi), og har " "efterhanden skrevet ca. 750 linjers kode i programmeringssproget Perl \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg havde ikke troet, at jeg nogensinde skulle kunne programmere. Det " "kraever disciplin og god forstaelse for grundliggende datastrukturer, som " "jeg hidtil troede n dvendiggjorde et mangearigt universitetsstudie " "(datalogi).\n" " Jeg vil ikke sla mig ned som programm r, men kan nu bruge det som ekstra " "fjer i min vifte af erfaringsomrader, i min rejse mod "At vaere det ledende " "radgivningsorgan i Danmark indenfor anvendt edb"!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Internet-Cafe ***\n" " Jeg har jo kontor i 2 lokaler hos NETLAB, en spillecafe (computerspil i " "netvaerk). Det tog ikke mange jeblikke at slutte deres og mit netvaerk " "sammen, sa alle spillecomputerne ogsa kunne komme pa Internet - desvaerre " "fungerede det ikke med store computerspil (lang teknisk forklaring ), kun " "med alm. ting som e-mail og at "surfe" pa nettet.\n" " Jeg far snart (indenfor fa uger) "aegte" adgang til Internet, via fast " "forbindelse d gnet rundt. Sa kan der spilles computerspil via Internet, og " "spillecafeen er reelt blevet en Internet-Cafe \n" " Den kommende Internetforbindelse er dog ikke saerligt kraftig (64kbit - " "2-4 x modemhastighed) til deling mellem 20 kraftige maskiner, og har lagt en " "f ler ind hos Telia: Om ikke de har lyst til at sponsorere stedet. Give os " "en kraftig forbindelse til Internet, og til gengaeld fa reklamevaerdien af " "en stabil og hurtig forbindelse Folk der bliver rigtigt bidt af det vil " "jo f r eller siden k be en maskine selv, og sa far de jo brug for en " "Internet-udbyder \n" " Min rolle bliver at administrere "hullet" (eller "hullerne" til " "Internet, og evt. ogsa at strukturere og administrere mail-adresser til " "bes gende pa cafeen.\n" " konomisk forestiller jeg mig en fast procentdel af indtaegterne i " "cafeen - eller evt. simpelthen en billigere husleje?!?. Det gaelder om at " "finde en prispolitik, som spiller sammen med den grundliggende holdning ved " "bade dr. Jones og NETLAB om et indbydende, seri st (uden at blive kedeligt!) " "milj fremfor "flest muligt forbi kasseapperatet".\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " -\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Det blev et laengere brev - og jeg tror faktisk, jeg vil genbruge det " "til ogsa at fortaelle familie og andre venner, hvorfor de har h rst sa lidt " "til mig pa det sidste \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Hej allesammen!\n" " Haber I nyder tilvaerelsen. Det g r jeg - men traenger ogsa snart til et " "lille pusterum - juleferie i Sydfrankrig, regner jeg med!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Ha' det bra!\n" " Jonas\n" " :_-)\n" " _\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "[More information about the Friends mailing list](http://mail.jones.dk/cgi- " "bin/mailman/listinfo/friends)" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "This text is part of my friends scriblings." msgstr ""

17 October 2012

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: New phpMyAdmin theme

Today, I've finally found time to process new themes for phpMyAdmin. Result of this are two theme releases. First one was just a minor update to older theme (Darkblue/orange 2.11), which fixed behavior in Internet Exporer. Second one was completely new theme for phpMyAdmin 3.5 - blueorange (I admit the name is not too creative). This is actually first contributed theme compatible with 3.5 series. Of course you can find all of these on our themes page.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

Next.

Previous.