Search Results: "ana"

26 April 2020

Enrico Zini: Some Italian women

Artemisia Gentileschi - Wikipedia
art history people archive.org
2020-04-27
Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi (US: / d nt l ski, -ti -/, Italian: [arte mi zja d enti leski]; July 8, 1593 c. 1656) was an Italian Baroque painter, now considered one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists working in the dramatic style of Caravaggio. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists, Artemisia was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and had an international clientele.
Maria Pellegrina Amoretti - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-04-27
Maria Pellegrina Amoretti (1756 1787), was an Italian lawyer. She is referred to as the first woman to graduate in law in Italy, and the third woman to earn a degree.
Laura Bassi - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-04-27
Laura Maria Caterina Bassi (October 1711 20 February 1778) was an Italian physicist and academic. She received a doctoral degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna in May 1732. She was the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university. She is recognized as the first woman in the world to be appointed a university chair in a scientific field of studies. Bassi contributed immensely to the field of science while also helping to spread the study of Newtonian mechanics through Italy.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-04-27
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (UK: / n je zi/ an-YAY-zee,[1] US: / n -/ ahn-,[2][3] Italian: [ma ri a ae ta na a zi, - e z-];[4] 16 May 1718 9 January 1799) was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.[5]
Elena Cornaro Piscopia - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-04-27
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (US: /k r n ro p sko pi /,[4] Italian: [ lena lu kr ttsja kor na ro pi sk pja]) or Elena Lucrezia Corner (Italian: [kor n r]; 5 June 1646 26 July 1684), also known in English as Helen Cornaro, was a Venetian philosopher of noble descent who in 1678 became one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university, and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Maria Montessori - Wikipedia
education history italy people archive.org
2020-04-27
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori (/ m nt s ri/ MON-tiss-OR-ee, Italian: [ma ri a montes s ri]; August 31, 1870 May 6, 1952) was an Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori broke gender barriers and expectations when she enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is still in use today in many public and private schools throughout the world.
Rita Levi-Montalcini - Wikipedia
history italy people science archive.org
2020-04-27
Rita Levi-Montalcini OMRI OMCA (US: / le vi mo nt l t i ni, l v-, li vi m nt l -/, Italian: [ ri ta l vi montal t i ni]; 22 April 1909 30 December 2012) was an Italian Nobel laureate, honored for her work in neurobiology. She was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with colleague Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF). From 2001 until her death, she also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life. This honor was given due to her significant scientific contributions. On 22 April 2009, she became the first Nobel laureate ever to reach the age of 100, and the event was feted with a party at Rome's City Hall. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living Nobel laureate.
Margherita Hack - Wikipedia
history italy people science archive.org
2020-04-27
Margherita Hack Knight Grand Cross OMRI (Italian: [mar e ri ta (h)ak]; 12 June 1922 29 June 2013) was an Italian astrophysicist and scientific disseminator. The asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named in her honour.
Samantha Cristoforetti - Wikipedia
history italy people science archive.org
2020-04-27
Samantha Cristoforetti (Italian pronunciation: [sa manta kristofo retti]; born 26 April 1977, in Milan) is an Italian European Space Agency astronaut, former Italian Air Force pilot and engineer. She holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut (199 days, 16 hours), and until June 2017 held the record for the longest single space flight by a woman until this was broken by Peggy Whitson and later by Christina Koch. She is also the first Italian woman in space. Samantha Cristoforetti is also known as the first person who brewed an espresso in space.

Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Goodbye

Review: The Last Goodbye, by Matt Potter
Publisher: Silvertail
Copyright: 2014-2016
Printing: 2016
ISBN: 1-909269-42-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 308
In the contested space between the interested amateur and the trained expert lies the enthusiast. A topic has, for often inexplicable reasons, caught fire in their thoughts and become a mild obsession. They may not have formal training or systematic conceptual grounding beneath their interest, but they partly make up for that lack with sustained fascination. They research widely and obscurely about their particular focus, develop novel theories, see distinctions and classifications that few others would bother to investigate, and present their discoveries to anyone who will stand still long enough. And occasionally, when that interest happens to coincide with writing skill, they produce some surprisingly excellent essays or books. Matt Potter's enthusiasm is resignation letters.
Every damaging resignation letter, every cornered truth attack, every out-of-control speech by a former friend, is more than just an inconvenience, to be countered with positive spin and internal memos: it's an open challenge to the official version of the story, the perfectly controlled brand. They are breaks in an otherwise perfectly planned, smoothly executed narrative of the powerful. Holes in the program code. A rare, irresistible chance to hack into history's shiny, unstoppable operation.
The Last Goodbye: A History of the World in Resignation Letters is not, in truth, a history of the world. It is, first and foremost, a taxonomy, because there are types of resignation letters. The opening chapter, the truth bomb, is the type that one would expect upon discovering that someone wrote a book on the topic (that wasn't advice on how to write a good one). But there are other types, less heavy on the fireworks but just as fascinating. The unquotable expert construction. The knife in the back. The incoherent scream of rage. But also the surprisingly gentle and graceful conclusion.
It is the question that the letters themselves try in vain to answer, over and over again even as they explain, analyse, protest and bear witness to a million other details. The question is: Why? All the forces in the universe stack up against unburdening ourselves in a resignation letter. Professionally, it can be suicide. In practical terms, it is often self-defeating. Self-help books coach against unleashing its force; colleagues and confidantes urge caution, self-restraint. And yet we do it, and damn the consequences. We have no choice but to speak in sorrow, love, grief, cold anger, thirst for revenge, wounded pride, the pain of injustice, loyalty, pangs of regret, throes of vengeful madness, deluded righteousness, panic, black distress, isolation, ecstasies of martyrdom, and a million other shades of human extremity we need to say our piece even as we leave the stage.
The risk of the enthusiast's book is that the lack of structural grounding can leave the conclusions unsupported. A fair critique of this book is that it contains a lot of amateur sociology. Potter has a journalist's eye for motive and narrative, but some of his conclusions may not be warranted. But he compensates for the lack of rigor with, well, enthusiasm. Potter is fascinated by resignation letters and the insight they offer, and that fascination is irresistibly contagious. It's probably obvious that the chapters on truth bombs, fuck yous, and knives in the back have visceral appeal. The resignation letter as a force of truth-telling, as the revenge of a disregarded peon, as a crack in the alliance between the powerful that may let some truth shine through, is what got me to buy this book. And Potter doesn't disappoint; he quotes from both famous and nearly unknown examples, dissects the writing and the intent, and gives us a ringside seat to a few effective acts of revenge. That's not the best part of this book, though. The chapter that I will remember the longest is Potter's dissection of the constructed resignation letter. The carefully drafted public relations statement, the bland formality, the attempt to make a news story disappear. The conversation-ender. It's a truism that any area of human endeavor involves more expertise than those who have only observed it from the outside will realize, but I had never thought to apply that principle to the ghost-written resignation letter. The careful non-apology, the declaration that one has "become a distraction," the tell-tale phrasing of "spending more time with my family" is offensive in its bland dishonesty. But Potter shows that the blandness is expertly constructed to destroy quotability. Those statements are nearly impossible to remember or report on because they have been built that way: nouns carefully separated from verbs, all force dissipated by circuities and modifiers, and subtle grammatical errors introduced to discourage written news from including direct quotes. Potter's journalism background shines here because he can describe the effect on news reporting. He walks the reader through the construction to reveal that the writing is not incompetent but instead is skillfully bad in a way that causes one's attention to skitter off of it. The letter vanishes into its own vagueness. The goal is to smother the story in such mediocrity that it becomes forgettable. And it works. I've written several resignation letters of my own. Somewhat unusually, I've even sent several of them, although (as Potter says is typical) fewer than I've written. I've even written (and sent) the sort of resignation letter that every career advisor will say to never send. Potter's discussion of the motives and thought process behind those letters rang true for me. It's a raw and very human moment, one is never in as much control of it as one wishes, the cracks and emotions break through in the writing, and often those letters are trying to do far too many things at the same time. But it's also a moment in which one can say something important and have others listen, which can be weirdly challenging to do in the normal course of a job. Potter ends this book beautifully by looking at resignation letters that break or transcend the mold of most of the others he's examined: letters where the author seems to have found some peace and internal understanding and expresses that simply and straightforwardly. I found this surprisingly touching after the emotional roller-coaster of the rest of the book, and a lovely note on which to end. This is a great book. Potter has a good eye for language and the emotion encoded in it, a bracing preference for the common worker or employee over the manager or politician, and the skill to produce some memorable turns of phrase. Most importantly, he has the enthusiast's love of the topic. Even if you don't care about resignation letters going in, it will be hard to avoid some fascination with them by the end of this book. Recommended. This book was originally published as F*ck You and Goodbye in the UK. Rating: 8 out of 10

25 April 2020

Julian Andres Klode: An - EPYC - Focal Upgrade

Ubuntu Focal Fossa 20.04 was released two days ago, so I took the opportunity yesterday and this morning to upgrade my VPS from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. The VPS provides: I rebooted one more time than necessary, though, as my cloud provider Hetzner recently started offering 2nd generation EPYC instances which I upgraded to from my Skylake Xeon based instance. I switched from the CX21 for 5.83 /mo to the CPX11 for 4.15 /mo. This involved a RAM downgrade - from 4GB to 2GB, but that s fine, the maximum usage I saw was about 1.3 GB when running dose-distcheck (running hourly); and it s good for everyone that AMD is giving Intel some good competition, I think. Anyway, to get back to the distribution upgrade - it was fairly boring. I started yesterday by taking a copy of the server and launching it locally in a lxd container, and then tested the upgrade in there; to make sure I m prepared for the real thing :) I got a confusing prompt from postfix as to which site I m operating (which is a normal prompt, but I don t know why I see it on an upgrade); and a few config files I had changed locally. As the server is managed by ansible, I just installed the distribution config files and dropped my changes (setting DPkg::Options "--force-confnew"; ;" in apt.conf), and then after the upgrade, ran ansible to redeploy the changes (after checking what changes it would do and adjusting a few things). There are two remaining flaws:
  1. I run rspamd from the upstream repository, and that s not built for focal yet. So I m still using the bionic binary, and have to keep bionic s icu 60 and libhyperscan4 around for it. This is still preventing CI of the ansible config from passing for focal, because it won t have the needed bionic packages around.
  2. I run weechat from the upstream repository, and apt can t tell the versions apart. Well, it can for the repositories, because they have Size fields - but status does not. Hence, it merges the installed version with the first repository it sees. What happens is that it installs from weechat.org, but then it believes the installed version is from archive.ubuntu.com and replaces it each dist-upgrade. I worked around it by moving the weechat.org repo to the front of sources.list, so that the it gets merged with that instead of the archive.ubuntu.com one, as it should be, but that s a bit ugly.
I also should start the migration to EC certificates for TLS, and 0-RTT handshakes, so that the initial visit experience is faster. I guess I ll have to move away from certbot for that, but I have not investigated this recently.

23 April 2020

Evgeni Golov: Controlling roller shutters using a Shelly 2.5, ESPHome and Home Assistant

Our house has roller shutters on all windows and most of them have an electric motor to open and close them. The motors are Schellenberg shaft motors (not sure this is the right English term), that you can configure end positions for and then by applying current to the right pair of pins they move the shutters up and down until the current is removed or one of the endstops is reached. As the motors were installed over a long period of time, the attached control units varied in functionality: different ways to program open/close times, with and without battery for the clock/settings etc, but they all had something in common: no central management and pretty ugly. We decided to replace those control units with regular 2 gang light switches that match the other switches in the house. And as we didn't want to lose the automatic open/close timer, we had to add some smarts to it. Shelly 2.5 and ESPHome Say hello to Shelly 2.5! The Shelly 2.5 is an ESP8266 with two relays attached to it in a super tiny package you can hide in the wall behind a regular switch. Pretty nifty. It originally comes with a Mongoose OS based firmware and an own app, but ain't nobody needs that, especially nobody who wants to implement some crude logic. That said, the original firmware isn't bad. It has a no-cloud mode, a REST API and does support MQTT for integration into Home Assistant and others. My ESP firmware of choice is ESPHome, which you can flash easily onto a Shelly (no matter 1, 2 or 2.5) using a USB TTL adapter that provides 3.3V. Home Assistant has native ESPHome support with auto-discovery, which is much nicer than manually attaching things to MQTT topics. To get ESPHome compiled for the Shelly 2.5, we'll need a basic configuration like this: 
esphome:
  name: shelly25
  platform: ESP8266
  board: modwifi
  arduino_version: 2.4.2
We're using board: modwifi as the Shelly 2.5 (and all other Shellys) has 2MB flash and the usually recommended esp01_1m would only use 1MB of that - otherwise the configurations are identical (see the PlatformIO entries for modwifi and esp01_1m). And arduino_version: 2.4.2 is what the Internet suggests is the most stable SDK version, and who will argue with the Internet?! Now an ESP8266 without network connection is boring, so we add a WiFi configuration: 
wifi:
  ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
  password: !secret wifi_password
  power_save_mode: none
The !secret commands load the named variables from secrets.yaml. While testing, I found the network connection of the Shelly very unreliable, especially when placed inside the wall and thus having rather bad bad reception (-75dBm according to ESPHome). However, setting power_save_mode: none explicitly seems to have fixed this, even if NONE is supposed to be the default on ESP8266. At this point the Shelly has a working firmware and WiFi, but does not expose any of its features: no switches, no relays, no power meters. To fix that we first need to find out the GPIO pins all these are connected to. Thankfully we can basically copy paste the definition from the Tasmota (another open-source firmware for ESPs) template: 
pin_led1: GPIO0
pin_button1: GPIO2
pin_relay1: GPIO4
pin_switch2n: GPIO5
pin_sda: GPIO12
pin_switch1n: GPIO13
pin_scl: GPIO14
pin_relay2: GPIO15
pin_ade7953: GPIO16
pin_temp: A0
If we place that into the substitutions section of the ESPHome config, we can use the names everywhere and don't have to remember the pin numbers. The configuration for the ADE7953 power sensor and the NTC temperature sensor are taken verbatim from the ESPHome documentation, so there is no need to repeat them here. The configuration for the switches and relays are also rather straight forward: 
binary_sensor:
  - platform: gpio
    pin: $ pin_switch1n 
    name: "Switch #1"
    internal: true
    id: switch1
  - platform: gpio
    pin: $ pin_switch2n 
    name: "Switch #2"
    internal: true
    id: switch2
switch:
  - platform: gpio
    pin: $ pin_relay1 
    name: "Relay #1"
    internal: true
    id: relay1
    interlock: &interlock_group [relay1, relay2]
  - platform: gpio
    pin: $ pin_relay2 
    name: "Relay #2"
    internal: true
    id: relay2
    interlock: *interlock_group
All marked as internal: true, as we don't need them visible in Home Assistant. ESPHome and Schellenberg roller shutters Now that we have a working Shelly 2.5 with ESPHome, how do we control Schellenberg (and other) roller shutters with it? Well, first of all we need to connect the Up and Down wires of the shutter motor to the two relays of the Shelly. And if they would not be marked as internal: true, they would show up in Home Assistant and we would be able to flip them on and off, moving the shutters. But this would also mean that we need to flip them off each time after use, as while the motor knows when to stop and will do so, applying current to both wires at the same time produces rather interesting results. So instead of fiddling around with the relays directly, we define a time-based cover in our configuration: 
cover:
  - platform: time_based
    name: "$ location  Rolladen"
    id: rolladen
    open_action:
      - switch.turn_on: relay2
    open_duration: $ open_duration 
    close_action:
      - switch.turn_on: relay1
    close_duration: $ close_duration 
    stop_action:
      - switch.turn_off: relay1
      - switch.turn_off: relay2
We use a time-based cover because that's the easiest thing that will also turn the relays off for us after the shutters have been opened/closed, as the motor does not "report" any state back. We could use the integrated power meter of the Shelly to turn off when the load falls under a threshold, but I was too lazy and this works just fine as it is. Next, let's add the physical switches to it. We could just add on_press automations to the binary GPIO sensors we configured for the two switch inputs the Shelly has. But if you have kids at home, you'll know that they like to press ALL THE THINGS and what could be better than a small kill-switch against small fingers? 
switch:
  [ previous definitions go here ]
  - platform: template
    id: block_control
    name: "$ location  Block Control"
    optimistic: true
  - platform: template
    name: "Move UP"
    internal: true
    lambda:  -
      if (id(switch1).state && !id(block_control).state)  
        return true;
        else  
        return false;
       
    on_turn_on:
      then:
        cover.open: rolladen
    on_turn_off:
      then:
        cover.stop: rolladen
  - platform: template
    name: "Move DOWN"
    internal: true
    lambda:  -
      if (id(switch2).state && !id(block_control).state)  
        return true;
        else  
        return false;
       
    on_turn_on:
      then:
        cover.close: rolladen
    on_turn_off:
      then:
        cover.stop: rolladen
This adds three more template switches. The first one, "Block Control", is exposed to Home Assistant, has no lambda definition and is set to optimistic: true, which makes is basically a dumb switch that can be flipped at will and the only thing it does is storing the binary on/off state. The two others are almost identical. The name differs, obviously, and so does the on_turn_on automation (one triggers the cover to open, the other to close). And the really interesting part is the lambda that monitors one of the physical switches and if that is turned on, plus "Block Control" is off, reports the switch as turned on, thus triggering the automation. With this we can now block the physical switches via Home Assistant, while still being able to control the shutters via the same. All this (and a bit more) can be found in my esphome-configs repository on GitHub, enjoy!

21 April 2020

Gunnar Wolf: Fresh, daily built Debian images for your Raspberries (finally!)

So, after I took over or at least, said to take over maintainership of the Raspberry Pi build images originally produced by Michael Stapelberg in mid-2018, I pushed very few updates. Yes, there was some good and visible work, migrated the image-spec repository from GitHub to Salsa, ironed out several outstanding issues, and most important for me managed to get an image built and running for all Raspberry models below the Raspberry Pi 4 Today, I am happy to announce a very good step in the right direction, so I am now

Announcing raspi.debian.net! I have registered and set up an (unofficial!) site, raspi.debian.net, that should serve as a go-grab-it destination for regularly autobuilt images for the Raspberry Pi family. Of course, today you will get an early view of the site. I plan to fix the lack of https due to a mistake on my part WRT the processes at my hosting provider, do some testing in the hardware I have handy (and bless + gpg-sign some images as tested), migrate and update the information in the Debian Wiki, etc. Oh! And I hope to get good news on the Raspberry 4 front, as I know work is actively underway to achieve it.

19 April 2020

Enrico Zini: Little wonders

Gibbsdavidl/CatterPlots
devel
2020-04-20
Did you ever wish you could make scatter plots with cat shaped points? Now you can! - Gibbsdavidl/CatterPlots
Various things in MetaPost
wonder archive.org
2020-04-20
What is the best tool to use for drawing vector pictures? For me and probably for many others, the answer is pretty obvious: Illustrator, or, maybe, Inkscape.
SELinux Coloring Book
devel security archive.org
2020-04-20
A coloring book to help folks understand how SELinux works. - mairin/selinux-coloring-book
EURion constellation - Wikipedia
security archive.org
2020-04-20
The EURion constellation (also known as Omron rings[1] or doughnuts[2]) is a pattern of symbols incorporated into a number of banknote designs worldwide since about 1996. It is added to help imaging software detect the presence of a banknote in a digital image. Such software can then block the user from reproducing banknotes to prevent counterfeiting using colour photocopiers. According to research from 2004, the EURion constellation is used for colour photocopiers but probably not used in computer software.[3] It has been reported that Adobe Photoshop will not allow editing of an image of a banknote, but in some versions this is believed to be due to a different, unknown digital watermark rather than the EURion constellation.[4][3]
136 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena
wonder archive.org
2020-04-20
This huge collection of non-scary optical illusions and fascinating visual phenomena emphasizes interactive exploration, beauty, and scientific explanation.
Generated Photos Unique, worry-free model photos
ai archive.org
2020-04-20
Generated photos are created from scratch by AI systems. All images can be used for any purpose without worrying about copyrights, distribution rights, infringement claims, or royalties.
Rangierer im Bahnhof Dresden - Friedrichstadt 1984
history
2020-04-20
Dokumentarfilm ber die Rangierer im Bahnhof Dresden-Friedrichstadt in der DDR aus dem Jahr 1984.
Femmina accabadora - Wikipedia
culture history archive.org
2020-04-20
Il termine sardo femina accabadora, femina agabbad ra o, pi comunemente, agabbadora o accabadora (s'agabbad ra, lett. "colei che finisce", deriva dal sardo s'acabbu, "la fine" o dallo spagnolo acabar, "terminare") denota la figura storicamente incerta di una donna che si incaricava di portare la morte a persone di qualunque et , nel caso in cui queste fossero in condizioni di malattia tali da portare i familiari o la stessa vittima a richiederla. In realt non ci sono prove di tale pratica, che avrebbe riguardato alcune regioni sarde come Marghine, Planargia e Gallura[1]. La pratica non doveva essere retribuita dai parenti del malato poich il pagare per dare la morte era contrario ai dettami religiosi e della superstizione.
Cat Coat Genetics 101: A Tweetorial
nature archive.org
2020-04-20
Alright the people have spoken and they want more cat genetics. So, I present to you all "Cat Coat Genetics 101: A Tweetorial", feat. pics of many real life cats (for science, of course...this baby is Caterpillar).

Dirk Eddelbuettel: prrd 0.0.3: More improvements

Back in early 2018, the prrd package was introduced as release 0.0.1, uploaded to CRAN, and updated once as release 0.0.2. I have used it extensively for every CRAN release of Rcpp, RcppArmadillo, RcppEigen, BH, and possibly others. The idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development and is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the following (dated) screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in split byobu session). Since the two early releases, I made a few changes to e.g. the analysis of package checks and their summaries (but never pushed these) as well as a few usability enhancements. This release regroups these. The release is summarised in the NEWS entry:

Changes in prrd version 0.0.3 (2020-04-19)
  • Extended functionality summarise() with optional use of package foghorn (Dirk)
  • New scripts enqueueDepends, dequeueDepends and summmariseJobs (Dirk)
  • Added tweaks and enhancements throughout (Dirk)
  • The default queue location can now be set via options (Dirk)
  • Meta-data on package, version and date is now stored, and shown on dequeue startup (Dirk)
  • The README.md was clarified and improved (Dirk, Avraham Adler in #8, Robert Nuske in #10)

CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. See the aforementioned webpage and its repo for details. For more questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Russ Allbery: Review: Beyond the Galaxy

Review: Beyond the Galaxy, by Ethan Siegel
Publisher: World Scientific
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 981-4667-16-1
Format: Kindle
Pages: 370
In the preface of this book, Ethan Siegel recounts his experience as a new college professor in 2009, thrilled to learn that he would be teaching the college's introductory astronomy class. The only disappointment was that he could not find a textbook that described astronomy the way that he wanted to teach it. Siegel did not want to simply describe the current astronomical understanding. He wanted to start at the beginning and tell a story. What questions did we start with? How did we answer them? What new questions did those answers provoke? I enjoyed Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math, but I'm even happier that she included in it a recommendation of Beyond the Galaxy as a good introduction to modern astronomy. I am completely in agreement with Siegel: Astronomy is interesting however it is described, but the best presentation for the interested lay person who does not intend to become a professional astronomy is chronological. (I feel the same way about physics and mathematics.) The narrative structure of scientific discovery draws me in every time. It's so satisfying to see our knowledge growing, breakthrough by breakthrough, only to meet the next puzzling inconsistency. It also is a natural fit for bringing someone up to speed on a field, since the history of the field starts with simpler questions and problems, and the complications of later discoveries build on the gaps left by earlier theories. Siegel tells that story well. Beyond the Galaxy starts with observations of seasonal changes in the path of the Sun through the sky and phases of the moon, quickly moves on to Eratosthenes's calculation of the circumference of the Earth, and continues at pace through early astronomy. The first chapter brings the reader up to the start of the 20th century, after which Siegel slows down and spends the remaining 10 chapters on the last 100 years: special and general relativity, the expansion of the universe, the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, the inflationary period, and more. For me, this was perfect. The story of early astronomy and the fight over the heliocentric model of the universe is worth telling, but it's been told many times before and features prominently in history books outside of science classes. The weight of material in this book matched my interest: What new developments have there been after general relativity and the Big Bang theory? What inconsistencies are dark matter and dark energy explaining? What is the inflationary period and how did it modify the Big Bang theory? (My half-formed impression of this part of astronomy from news articles turned out to be almost entirely wrong.) And how do we know all of this? The question of how we know as much as we do about the early origins of the universe turned out to be far more interesting than I had realized. It's one of those pieces of science where, when given only the conclusions, it's hard to imagine how our theories could be as complete as they are. Siegel is a bit repetitive in how he talks about theory development and occasionally skims over the details to avoid getting too deep into techniques and math, but he does a great job explaining the predictions of a theory, the design of experiments to prove or disprove those predictions, and the implications for the boundaries of what we know. This is the first time someone has explained the theorized origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry in sufficient detail that I was able to understand and internalize it. Dark matter and dark energy are the current topics of astronomy that get the most press, and the coverage of both is very good here. I was particularly fascinated by the link between dark matter and the superstructures of the universe that we've discovered. Astronomy does scale in a way that no other science can manage, and the scale of structure we've discovered and been able to map has gone up considerably since the last time I refreshed my astronomical knowledge. If you're looking for a math-light, comprehensive introduction to modern astronomy, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. That goes double if you, like me, prefer a chronological view of scientific discovery so that you can understand what questions people were trying to answer and how our understanding changed over time. One note on format: Astronomy being what it is, this book is very heavy on pictures. It is not at all suitable for a dedicated ebook reader. The Kindle tries, but the combination of a small screen and black and white e-ink fail miserably. I switched to reading on a tablet, and that was a far better experience. The Kindle app still struggles to put the figures next to the text that discusses them, but that's a typesetting problem that I often have with physical books as well. If you don't have a tablet and you aren't willing to read on a computer screen, you probably want a physical copy of this one (which, sadly, means academic textbook pricing). Rating: 8 out of 10

15 April 2020

Antoine Beaupr : OpenDKIM configuration to send debian.org email

Debian.org added support for DKIM in 2020. To configure this on my side, I had to do the following, on top of my email configuration.
  1. add this line to /etc/opendkim/signing.table: 
    *@debian.org marcos-debian.anarcat.user
  2. add this line to /etc/opendkim/key.table: 
    marcos-debian.anarcat.user debian.org:marcos-debian.anarcat.user:/etc/opendkim/keys/marcos-debian.anarcat.user.private
    Yes, that's quite a mouthful! That magic selector is long in that way because it needs a special syntax (specifically the .anarcat.user suffix) for Debian to be happy. The -debian string is to tell me where the key is published. The marcos prefix is to remind me where the private is used.
  3. generate the key with: 
    opendkim-genkey --directory=/etc/opendkim/keys/ --selector=marcos-debian.anarcat.user --domain=debian.org --verbose
    This creates the DNS record in /etc/opendkim/keys/marcos-debian.anarcat.user.txt (alongside the private key in .key).
  4. restart OpenDKIM: 
    service opendkim restart
    The DNS record will look something like this: 
    marcos-debian.anarcat.user._domainkey   IN  TXT ( "v=DKIM1; h=sha256; k=rsa; "
"p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAtKzBK2f8vg5yV307WAOatOhypQt3ANQ95iDaewkVehmx42lZ6b4PzA1k5DkIarxjkk+7m6oSpx5H3egrUSLMirUiMGsIb5XVGBPFmKZhDVmC7F5G1SV7SRqqKZYrXTufRRSne1eEtA31xpMP0B32f6v6lkoIZwS07yQ7DDbwA9MHfyb6MkgAvDwNJ45H4cOcdlCt0AnTSVndcl"
"pci5/2o/oKD05J9hxFTtlEblrhDXWRQR7pmthN8qg4WaNI4WszbB3Or4eBCxhUdvAt2NF9c9eYLQGf0jfRsbOcjSfeus0e2fpsKW7JMvFzX8+O5pWfSpRpdPatOt80yy0eqpm1uQIDAQAB" )  ; ----- DKIM key marcos-debian.anarcat.user for debian.org
  5. The "p=MIIB..." string needs to be joined together, without the quotes and the p=, and sent in a signed email to changes@db.debian.org: 
    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
dkimPubKey: marcos.anarcat.user MIIB[...]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
[...]
  6. Wait a few minutes for DNS to propagate. You can check if they have with: 
    host -t TXT marcos-debian.anarcat.user._domainkey.debian.org nsp.dnsnode.net
    (nsp.dnsnode.net being one of the NS records of the debian.org zone.)
If all goes well, the tests should pass when sending from your server as anarcat@debian.org.

Testing Test messages can be sent to dkimvalidator, mail-tester.com or check-auth@verifier.port25.com. Those tools will run Spamassassin on the received emails and report the results. What you are looking for is:
  • -0.1 DKIM_VALID: Message has at least one valid DKIM or DK signature
  • -0.1 DKIM_VALID_AU: Message has a valid DKIM or DK signature from author's domain
  • -0.1 DKIM_VALID_EF: Message has a valid DKIM or DK signature from envelope-from domain
If one of those is missing, then you are doing something wrong and your "spamminess" score will be worse. The latter is especially tricky as it validates the "Envelope From", which is the MAIL FROM: header as sent by the originating MTA, which you see as from=<> in the postfix lost. The following will happen anyways, as soon as you have a signature, that's normal:
  • 0.1 DKIM_SIGNED: Message has a DKIM or DK signature, not necessarily valid
And this might happen if you have a ADSP record but do not correctly sign the message with a domain field that matches the record:
  • 1.1 DKIM_ADSP_ALL No valid author signature, domain signs all mail
That's bad and will affect your spam core badly. I fixed that issue by using a wildcard key in the key table: 
--- a/opendkim/key.table
+++ b/opendkim/key.table
@@ -1 +1 @@
-marcos anarc.at:marcos:/etc/opendkim/keys/marcos.private
+marcos %:marcos:/etc/opendkim/keys/marcos.private

References This is a copy of a subset of my more complete email configuration.

14 April 2020

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in March 2020

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in April) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. I am sure I am not the only one who will remember March 2020 in the future as a month nobody was really fond of. I was mostly occupied with non-Debian work and managed to get ill in the same week I wanted to celebrate my birthday but it didn t matter anyway because of ehm quarantine and social distancing. Maybe next year March will be great again.
Debian Games Debian Java Misc Debian LTS This was my 49. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 10 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following: ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 7 Wheezy . This was my 22. month and I have been paid to work 9 hours on ELTS. Thanks for reading and see you next time.

13 April 2020

Shirish Agarwal: Migrant worker woes and many other stories

I was gonna use this blog post to share about the migrant worker woes as there has been multiple stories doing the rounds. For e.g. a story which caught the idea of few people but most of us, i.e. middle-class people are so much into our own thing that we care a fig leaf about what happens to migrants. This should not be a story coming from a humane society but it seems India is no different than any other country of the world and in not a good way. Allow me to share
Or for those who don t like youtube, here s an alternative link https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=JGEgZq_1jmc Now the above two editorial shares two stories, one of Trump retaliatory threat to India in the Q&A of the journalist. In fact, Trump has upped the ante on visa sanctions as India buckled so easily under pressure. There have been other stories doing the rounds how people who have illnesses who need HCQ in India are either dying or are close to death because of unavailability of HCQ in the medicine shop. There have been reports in Pune as well as South Mumbai (one of the poshest localities in Mumbai/Bombay) that medicine shops are running empty or emptier. There have been so many stories on that, with reporters going to shops and asking owners of the medicine shops and shop-owners being clueless. I think the best article which vividly describes the Government of India (GOI) response to the pandemic is the free-to-read article shared by Arundhati Roy in Financial Times. It has reduced so much of my work or sharing that it s unbelievable. And she has shared it with pictures and all so I can share other aspects of how the pandemic has been affecting India and bringing the worst out in the Government in its our of need. In fact, not surprisingly though, apparently there was also a pro-Israel similar thing which happened in Africa too . As India has too few friends now globally, hence it decided to give a free pass to them.

Government of India, news agencies and paid News One of the attempts the state tried to do, although very late IMHO is that it tried to reach out to the opposition i.e. Congress party and the others. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, who is the Congress president asked that the Government should not run any of its ads on private television channels for a period of two years. There had been plenty of articles, both by medianama and others who have alleged that at least from the last 6 odd years, Government ads. comprise of almost 50-60% advertising budget of a channel advertising budget. This has been discussed also in medianama s roundtable on online content which happened few months back. While an edited version is out there on YT, this was full two day s event which happened across two different cities.
or the alternative to youtube https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=c1PhWR1-Urs It was as if the roundtable discussions were not enough, Mrs. Gandhi clarion call was answered by News Broadcaster s Association (NBA) and this is what they had to say
News Broadcasters Association reply to Mrs. Gandhi
To put it simply, NBA deplored the suggestion by Mrs. Gandhi and even called the economy in recession and all they had were the Government s own advertising budget to justify their existence. The statements in themselves are highly pregnant and reveal both the relationship that the media, print or mainstream news channels have with the Government of India. Now if you see that, doesn t it make sense that media always slants the story from the Government s perspective rather than remaining neutral. If my bread basket were on the onus of me siding with the Govt. that is what most sane persons would do, otherwise they would resign and leave which many reporters who had a conscience did. Interestingly enough, the NBA statement didn t just end there but also used the word recession , this is the term that Government of India (GOI) hates and has in turn has been maintaining the word, terminology slowdown . While from a layman s perspective the two terms may seem to be similar, if India has indeed been in recession then the tools and the decisions that should have been taken by GOI should have been much different than what they took. Interestingly, enough GOI has refrained from saying anything on the matter which only reveals their own interests in the matter. Also if an association head is making the statement, it is more than likely that he consulted a lawyer or two and used application of mind while drafting the response. In other words, or put more simply, this was a very carefully drafted letter because they know that tomorrow the opposition party may come into power so they don t want to upset the power dynamics too much.

Privacy issues arising due to the Pandemic On the same Financial Times, two stories which dealt with the possible privacy violations due to the Pandemic have been doing the rounds. The first one, by Yuval Noah Harari is more exploratory by nature and makes some very good points without going far too deep into specific instances of recent times but rather goes into history and past instances where Governments have used the pandemics to exert more control over their populace and drive their agenda. I especially liked the last few lines which he shared in his op-ed Even if the current administration eventually changes tack and comes up with a global plan of action, few would follow a leader who never takes responsibility, who never admits mistakes, and who routinely takes all the credit for himself while leaving all the blame to others. Yuval Noah Harari . The whole statement could right fit onto the American President which he was talking about while at the same time, fits right into the current Indian Prime Minister, Boris Johnson of UK and perhaps Jair Bolsanaro of Brazil. All these three-four individuals have in common is that most of them belong to right-wing and hence cater only to the rich industrialist s agenda. While I don t know about Jair Bolsanaro much, at least three out of four had to turn to socialism and had to give some bailout packages to the public at large, even though continuing to undermine their own actions. More on this probably a bit down the line. The second story shared by Nic Fildes and Javier Espinoza who broke the story of various surveillance attempts and the privacy concerns that people have. Even the Indian PMO has asked this data and because there was no protest by the civil society, a token protest was done by COAI (Cellular Operator Association of India) but beyond that nothing, I am guessing because the civil society didn t make much noise as everybody is busy with their own concerns of safety and things going on, it s possible that such data may have gone to the Government. There is not much new here that people who had been working on the privacy issues know, it s just how easy Governments are finding to do it. The part of informed consent is really a misnomer . Governments lie all the time, for e.g. in the UK, did the leave party and people take informed consent, no they pushed their own agenda. This is and will be similar in many countries of the world.

False Socialism by RW parties In at least the three countries I have observing, simply due to available time, that lot of false promises are being made by our leaders and more often than not, the bailouts will be given to already rich industrialists. An op-ed by Vivek Kaul, who initially went by his handle which means somebody who is educated but unemployed. While Vivek has been one-man army in revealing most of the Government s mischiefs especially as fudging numbers are concerned among other things, there have been others too. As far as the US is concerned, an e-zine called free press (literally) has been sharing Trump s hollowness and proclamations for U.S. . Far more interestingly, I found New York times investigated and found a cache of e-mails starting from early January, which they are calling Red Dawn . The cache is undeniable proof that medical personnel in the U.S. were very much concerned since January 2020 but it was only after other countries started lock-down that U.S. had to follow suit. I am sure Indian medical professionals may have done similar mail exchanges but we will never know as the Indian media isn t independent enough.

Domestic violence and Patriarchy There have been numerous reports of domestic violence against women going up, in fact two prominent publications have shared pieces about how domestic violence has gone up in India since the lockdown but the mainstream press is busy with its own tropes, the reasons already stated above. In fact, interestingly enough, most women can t wear loose fitting clothes inside the house because of the near ones being there 24 7 . This was being shared as India is going through summer where heat waves are common and most families do not have access to A/C s and rely on either a fan or just ventilation to help them out. I can t write more about this as simply I m not a woman so I haven t had to face the pressures that they have to every day. Interestingly though, there was a piece shared by arre. Interestingly, also arre whose content I have shared a few times on my blog has gone from light, funny to be much darker and more serious tone. Whether this is due to the times we live in is something that a social scientist or a social anthropologist may look into in the times to come. One of the good things though, there hasn t been any grid failures as no industrial activity is happening (at all). In fact SEB s (State Electricity Boards) has shown a de-growth in electricity uptake as no industrial activity has been taken. While they haven t reduced any prices (which they ideally should have) as everybody is suffering.

Loot and price rise Again, don t think it is an Indian issue but perhaps may be the same globally. Because of broken supply chains, there are both real and artificial shortages happening which is leading to reasonable and unreasonable price hikes in the market. Fresh veggies which were normally between INR 10/- to INR 20/- for 250 gm have reached INR 40/- 50/- and even above. Many of the things that we have to become depend upon are not there anymore. The shortage of plastic bottles being case in point.
Aryan Plastic bottle
This and many others like these pictures have been shared on social media but it seems the Government is busy doing something else. The only thing we know for sure is that the lock-down period is only gonna increase, no word about PPE s (Personal Protection Equipment) or face masks or anything else. While India has ordered some, those orders are being diverted to US or EU. In fact, many doctors who have asked for the same have been arrested, sacked or suspended for asking such inconvenient questions, although whether in BJP ruled states or otherwise. In fact, the Centre has suspended MPLADS funds , members of parliament get funds which they can use to provide relief work or whatever they think the money is best to spend upon.

Conditions of Labor in the Pandemic Another sort of depressing story has been how the Supreme Court CJI Justice SA Bobde has made statements and refrained from playing any role in directing the Center to provide relief to the daily wage laborers. In fact, Mr. Bobde made statements such as why they need salaries if they are getting food. This was shared by barandbench, a site curated by lawyers and reporters alike. Both livelaw as well as barandbench have worked to enhance people s awareness about the legal happenings in our High Courts and Supreme Court. And while sadly, they cannot cover all, they at least do attempt to cover a bit of what s hot atm. The Chief Justice who draws a salary of INR 250,000 per month besides other perks is perhaps unaware or doesn t care about fate of millions of casual workers, 400 460 million workers who will face abject poverty and by extension even if there are 4 members of the family so probably 1.2 billion people will fall below the poverty line. Three, four major sectors are going to be severely impacted, namely Agriculture, Construction and then MSME (Micro, small and medium enterprises) which cover everything from autos, industrial components, FMCG, electronics, you name it, it s done by the MSME sector. We know that the Rabi crop, even though it was gonna be a bumper crop this year will rot away in the fields. Even the Kharif crop whose window for sowing is at the most 2-3 weeks will not be able to get it done in time. In fact, with the extended lockdown of another 21 days, people will probably return home after 2 months by which time they would have nothing to do there as well as here in the cities. Another good report was done by the wire, the mainstream media has already left the station.

Ministry of Public Health There was an article penned by Dr. Edmond Fernandes which he published last year. The low salary along with the complexities that Indian doctors are and may face in the near future are just mind-boggling.

The Loss Losses have already started pouring in. Just today Air Deccan has ceased all its operations. I had loved Mr. Gopinath s airline which was started in the early 2000 s. While I won t bore you with the history, most of it can be seen from simplify Deccan . This I believe is just the start and it s only after the few months after the lock-down has been lifted would we really know the true extent of losses everywhere. And the more lenghthier the lockdown, the more difficult it would be businesses to ramp back. People have already diagnosed at the very least 15-20 sectors of the economy which would be hit and another similar or more number of sectors which will have first and second-order of losses and ramp-downs. While some guesses are being made, many are wildly optimistic and many are wildly pessimistic, as shared we would only know the results when the lockdown is opened up.

Predictions for the future While things are very much in the air, some predictions can be made or rationally deduced. For instance, investments made in automation and IT would remain and perhaps even accelerate a little. Logistics models would need to be re-worked and maybe, just maybe there would be talk and action in making local supply chains a bit more robust. Financing is going to be a huge issue for at least 6 months to a year. Infrastructure projects which require huge amount of cash upfront will either have to be re-worked or delayed, how they will affect projects like Pune Metro and other such projects only time will tell.

Raghuram Rajan Raghuram Rajan was recently asked if he would come back and let bygones be bygones. Raghuram in his own roundabout way said no. He is right now with Chicago Booth doing the work that he always love. Why would he leave that and be right in the middle of the messes other people have made. He probably gets more money, more freedom and probably has a class full of potential future economists. Immigration Control, Conferences and thought experiment There are so many clueless people out there, who don t know why it takes so long for any visa to be processed. From what little I know, it is to verify who you say you are and you have valid reason to enter the country. The people from home ministry verify credentials, as well as probably check with lists of known criminals and their networks world-wide. They probably have programs for such scenarios and are part and parcel of their everyday work. The same applies to immigration control at Airports. there has been a huge gap at immigration counters and the numbers of passengers who were flying internationally to and fro from India. While in India, we call them as Ministry of Home Affairs, in U.S. it s Department of Homeland security, other countries using similar jargons. Now even before this pandemic happened, the number of people who are supposed to do border control and check people was way less and there have been scenes of Air rage especially in Indian airports after people came after a long-distance flight. Now there are couple of thought experiments, just day before yesterday scientists discovered six new coronaviruses in bats and scientists in Iceland found 40 odd mutations of the virus on people. Now are countries going to ban people from Iceland as in time the icelandic people probably would have anti-bodies on all the forty odd mutations. Now if and when they come in contact onto others who have not, what would happen ? And this is not specifically about one space or ethnicity or whatever, microbes and viruses have been longer on earth than we have. In our greed we have made viruses resistant to antibiotics. While Mr. Trump says as he discovered it today, this has been known to the medical fraternity since tht 1950 s. CDC s own chart shows it. We cannot live in fear of a virus, the only way we can beat it is by understanding it and using science. Jon Cohen shared some of the incredible ways science is looking to beat this thing
or as again an alternative to youtube https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=MPVG_n3w_vM One of the most troubling question is how the differently-abled communities which don t have media coverage at the best of times, haven t had any media coverage at all during the pandemic. What are their stories and what they are experiencing ? How are they coping ? Are there anyways we could help each other ? By not having those stories, we perhaps have left them more vulnerable than we intend. And what does that speak about us, as people or as a community or a society ?

Silver Linings While there is not a lot to be positive about, one interesting project I came about is openbreath.tech . This is an idea, venture started by IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) , IUCAA (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics). They are collaborating with octogeneraian Capt (Retd) Rustom Barucha from Barucha Instrumentation and Control, besides IndoGenius, New Delhi, and King s College, London. The first two institutes are from my home town, Pune. While I don t know much of the specifics of this idea other than that there is an existing Barucha ventilator which they hope to open-source and make it easier for people to produce their own. While I have more questions than answers at this point, this is something hopefully to watch out for in the coming days and weeks. The other jolly bit of good news has come from Punjab where after several decades, people in Northern Punjab are finally able to see the Himalayas or the Himalayan mountain range.
Dhauladhar range Northern Punjab Copyright CNN.Com
There you have it, What I have covered is barely scratching the surface. As a large section of the media only focuses on one narrative, other stories and narratives are lost. Be safe, till later.

Matthew Garrett: Implementing support for advanced DPTF policy in Linux

Intel's Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) is a feature that's becoming increasingly common on highly portable Intel-based devices. The adaptive policy it implements is based around the idea that thermal management of a system is becoming increasingly complicated - the appropriate set of cooling constraints to place on a system may differ based on a whole bunch of criteria (eg, if a tablet is being held vertically rather than lying on a table, it's probably going to be able to dissipate heat more effectively, so you should impose different constraints). One way of providing these criteria to the OS is to embed them in the system firmware, allowing an OS-level agent to read that and then incorporate OS-level knowledge into a final policy decision.

Unfortunately, while Intel have released some amount of support for DPTF on Linux, they haven't included support for the adaptive policy. And even more annoyingly, many modern laptops run in a heavily conservative thermal state if the OS doesn't support the adaptive policy, meaning that the CPU throttles down extremely quickly and the laptop runs excessively slowly.

It's been a while since I really got stuck into a laptop reverse engineering project, and I don't have much else to do right now, so I've been working on this. It's been a combination of examining what source Intel have released, reverse engineering the Windows code and staring hard at hex dumps until they made some sort of sense. Here's where I am.

There's two main components to the adaptive policy - the adaptive conditions table (APCT) and the adaptive actions table (APAT). The adaptive conditions table contains a set of condition sets, with up to 10 conditions in each condition set. A condition is something like "is the battery above a certain charge", "is this temperature sensor below a certain value", "is the lid open or closed", "is the machine upright or horizontal" and so on. Each condition set is evaluated in turn - if all the conditions evaluate to true, the condition set's target is implemented. If not, we move onto the next condition set. There will typically be a fallback condition set to catch the case where none of the other condition sets evaluate to true.

The action table contains sets of actions associated with a specific target. Once we've picked a target by evaluating the conditions, we execute the actions that have a corresponding target. Actions are things like "Set the CPU power limit to this value" or "Load a passive policy table". Passive policy tables are simply tables associating sensors with devices and an associated temperature limit. If the limit is exceeded, the associated device should be asked to reduce its heat output until the situation is resolved.

There's a couple of twists. The first is the OEM conditions. These are conditions that refer to values that are exposed by the firmware and are otherwise entirely opaque - the firmware knows what these mean, but we don't, so conditions that rely on these values are magical. They could be temperature, they could be power consumption, they could be SKU variations. We just don't know. The other is that older versions of the APCT table didn't include a reference to a device - ie, if you specified a condition based on a temperature, you had no way to express which temperature sensor to use. So, instead, you specified a condition that's greater than 0x10000, which tells the agent to look at the APPC table to extract the device and the appropriate actual condition.

Intel already have a Linux app called Thermal Daemon that implements a subset of this - you're supposed to run the binary-only dptfxtract against your firmware to parse a few bits of the DPTF tables, and it writes out an XML file that Thermal Daemon makes use of. Unfortunately it doesn't handle most of the more interesting bits of the adaptive performance policy, so I've spent the past couple of days extending it to do so and to remove the proprietary dependency.

My current work is here - it requires a couple of kernel patches (that are in the patches directory), and it only supports a very small subset of the possible conditions. It's also entirely possible that it'll do something inappropriate and cause your computer to melt - none of this is publicly documented, I don't have access to the spec and you're relying on my best guesses in a lot of places. But it seems to behave roughly as expected on the one test machine I have here, so time to get some wider testing?

comment count unavailable comments

12 April 2020

Emmanuel Kasper: Putting a Red Hat on

I am switching jobs, and after a two year stint as a full stack developer at BPMasters, I am joining Red Hat as a Technical Account Manager (Platform and Openshift). A good friend of a good friend already worked at Red Hat, and advised me to apply, which I did, and I am starting in May in Vienna, the place where I live.
I have heard that there is already a number of Debian Developers working for Red Hat, so if you happen to be one of them, I hope we ll get in touch !

11 April 2020

Fran ois Marier: Using Gogo WiFi on Linux

Gogo, the WiFi provider for airlines like Air Canada, is not available to Linux users even though it advertises "access using any Wi-Fi enabled laptop, tablet or smartphone". It is however possible to work-around this restriction by faking your browser user agent. I tried the User-Agent Switcher for Chrome extension on Chrome and Brave but it didn't work for some reason. What did work was using Firefox and adding the following prefs in about:config to spoof its user agent to Chrome for Windows: 
general.useragent.override=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.117 Safari/537.36
general.useragent.updates.enabled=false
privacy.resistFingerprinting=false
The last two prefs are necessary in order for the hidden general.useragent.override pref to not be ignored.

Opt out of mandatory arbitration As an aside, the Gogo terms of service automatically enroll you into mandatory arbitration unless you opt out by sending an email to customercare@gogoair.com within 30 days of using their service. You may want to create an email template for this so that you can fire off a quick email to them as soon as you connect. I will probably write a script for it next time I use this service.

10 April 2020

Norbert Preining: TeX Live 2020 released

Get the Champagne ready, we have released the final images of TeX Live 2020.
Due to COVID-19, DVD production will be delayed, but we have decided to release the current image and update the net installer. The .iso image is available on CTAN, and the net installer will pull all the newest stuff. Currently we are working on getting those packages updated during the freeze to the newest level in TeX Live. Before providing the full list of changes, here a few things I would like to pick out: Most of the above features have been available already either via tlpretest or via regular updates, but are now fully released on the DVD version. Thanks goes to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release! Finally, here are the changes as listed in the master TeX Live documentation: General: epTeX, eupTeX: New primitives \Uchar, \Ucharcat, \current(x)spacingmode, \ifincsname; revise \fontchar?? and \iffontchar. For eupTeX only: \currentcjktoken. LuaTeX: Integration with HarfBuzz library, available as new engines luahbtex (used for lualatex) and luajithbtex. New primitives: \eTeXgluestretchorder, \eTeXglueshrinkorder. pdfTeX: New primitive \pdfmajorversion; this merely changes the version number in the PDF output; it has no e ect on any PDF content. \pdfximage and similar now search for image les in the same way as \openin. pTeX: New primitives \ifjfont, \iftfont. Also in epTeX, upTeX, eupTeX. XeTeX: Fixes for \Umathchardef, \XeTeXinterchartoks, \pdfsavepos. Dvips: Output encodings for bitmap fonts, for better copy/paste capabilities (https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-2/tb125rokicki-type3search.pdf). MacTeX: MacTeX and x86_64-darwin now require 10.13 or higher (High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina); x86_64-darwinlegacy supports 10.6 and newer. MacTeX is notarized and command line programs have hardened runtimes, as now required by Apple for install packages. BibDesk and TeX Live Utility are not in MacTeX because they are not notarized, but a README le lists urls where they can be obtained. tlmgr and infrastructure:

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.4.6: Bug fix interim version

rcpp logo Rcpp 1.0.4 was released on March 17, following the usual sequence of fairly involved reverse-depends check along with a call for community testing issued weeks before the release. In that email I specifically pleaded with folks to pretty-please test non-standard setups:
It would be particularly beneficial if those with unsual build dependencies tested it as we would increase overall coverage beyond what I get from testing against 1800+ CRAN packages. BioConductor would also be welcome.
Alas, you can t always get what you want. Shortly after the release we were made aware that the two (large) pull request at the book ends of the 1.0.3 to 1.0.4 release period created trouble. Of these two, the earliest PR in the 1.0.4 release upset older-than-CRAN-tested installation, i.e. R 3.3.0 or before. (Why you d want to run R 3.3.* when R 3.6.3 is current is something I will never understand, but so be it.) This got addressed in two new PRs. And the matching last PR had a bit of sloppyness leaving just about everyone alone, but not all those macbook-wearing data scientists when using newer macOS SDKs not used by CRAN. In other words, unsual setups. But boy, do those folks have an ability to complain. Again, two quick PRs later that was addressed. Along came a minor PR with two more Rcpp::Shield<> uses (as life is too short to manually count PROTECT and UNPROTECT). And then a real issue between R 4.0.0 and Rcpp first noticed with RcppParallel builds on Windows but then also affecting RcppArmadillo. Another quickly issued fix. So by now the count is up to six, and we arrived at Rcpp 1.0.4.6. Which is now on CRAN, after having sat there for nearly a full week, and of course with no reason given. Because the powers that be move in mysterious ways. And don t answer to earthlings like us. As may transpire here, I am little tired from all this. I think we can do better, and I think we damn well should, or I may as well throw in the towel and just release to the drat repo where each of the six interim versions was available for all to take as soon as it materialized. Anyway, here is the state of things. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. As of today, 1897 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 191 in BioConductor. And per the (partial) logs of CRAN downloads, we are running steasy at one millions downloads per month. The changes for this interim version are summarized below.

Changes in Rcpp patch release version 1.0.4.6 (2020-04-02)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • The exception handler code in #1043 was updated to ensure proper include behavior (Kevin in #1047 fixing #1046).
    • A missing Rcpp_list6 definition was added to support R 3.3.* builds (Davis Vaughan in #1049 fixing #1048).
    • Missing Rcpp_list 2,3,4,5 definition were added to the Rcpp namespace (Dirk in #1054 fixing #1053).
    • A further updated corrected the header include and provided a missing else branch (Mattias Ellert in #1055).
    • Two more assignments are protect with Rcpp::Shield (Dirk in #1059)
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • Empty strings are not passed to R CMD SHLIB which was seen with R 4.0.0 on Windows (Kevin in #1062 fixing #1061).
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • Travis CI unit tests now run a matrix over the versions of R also tested at CRAN (rel/dev/oldrel/oldoldrel), and coverage runs in parallel for a net speed-up (Dirk in #1056 and #1057).

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2356 previous questions. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

9 April 2020

Antoine Beaupr : Mumble dreams

With everyone switching to remote tools for social distancing, I've been using Mumble more and more. That's partly by choice -- I don't like videoconferencing much, frankly -- and partly by necessity: sometimes my web browser fails and Mumble is generally more reliable. Some friend on a mailing list recently asked "shouldn't we make Mumble better?" and opened the door for me to go on a long "can I get a pony?" email. Because I doubt anyone on that mailing list has the time or capacity to actually fix those issues, I figured I would copy this to a broader audience in the hope that someone else would pick it up.

Why Mumble rocks Before I go on with the UI critique, I should show why care: Mumble is awesome. When you do manage to configure it correctly, Mumble just works; it's highly reliable. It uses little CPU, both on the client and the server side, and can have rooms with tens if not hundreds of participants. The server can be easily installed and configured: there's a Debian package and resource requirements are minimal. It's basically network-bound. There are at least three server implementations, the official one called Murmur, the minimalist umurmur and Grumble, a Go rewrite. It has great quality: echo canceling, when correctly configured, is solid and latency is minimal. It has "overlays" so you can use it while gaming or demo'ing in full screen while still having an idea of who's talking. It also supports positional audio for gaming that integrates with popular games like Counterstrike or Half-Life. It's moderately secure: it doesn't support end-to-end encryption, but client/server communication is encrypted with TLS. It supports a server password and some moderation mechanisms.

UI improvements Mumble should be smarter about a bunch of things. Having all those settings is nice for geeky control freaks, but it makes the configuration absolutely unusable for most people. Hide most settings by default, and make better defaults. Specifically, those should be on by default:
  • RNNoise
  • echo cancellation (the proper "monitor" channels)
  • pre-configured shortcut for PTT (Push To Talk) -- right-shift is my favorite
  • "double-PTT" to hold it enabled
  • be more silent by default (I understand why it would want to do voice synthesis, but it would need to be much better at it before it's default)
The echo test should be more accessible, one or two clicks away from the main UI. I have only found out about that feature when someone told me where to find it. This basically means to take it out of the settings page and into its own dialog. The basic UI should be much simpler. It could look something like Jitsi: just one giant mute button with a list of speakers. Basically:
  1. Take that status bar and make it use the entire space of the main window
  2. Push the chat and room list dialog to separate, optional dialog (e.g. the room list could be a popup on login, but we don't need to continuously see the damn thing)
  3. Show the name of the person talking in the main UI, along with other speakers (Big Blue Button does this well: just a label that fades away with time after a person talks)
Some features could be better explained. For example, the "overlay" feature makes no sense at all for most users. It only makes sense when you're a gamer and use Mumble alongside another full-screen program, to show you who's talking. Improved authentication. The current authentication systems in Mumble are somewhat limited: the server can have a shared password to get access to it, and from there it's pretty much free-for-all. There are client certificates but those are hard to understand and the most common usage scenario is that someone manages to configure it once, forgets about it and then cannot login again with the same username. It should be easier to get the audio right. Now, to be fair, this is hard to do in any setup, and Mumble is only a part of this. There are way too many moving parts in Linux for this to be easy: between your hardware, ALSA drivers, Pulseaudio mixers and Mumble, too many things can go wrong. So this is a general problem when doing multimedia in general, and the Linux ecosystem in particular, but Mumble is especially hard to configure in there. Improved speaker stats. When you right-click on a user in Mumble, you get detailed stats about the user: packet loss, latency, bandwidth, codecs... It's pretty neat. But that is hard to parse for a user. Jitsi, in contrast, shows a neat little "bar graph" (similar to what you get on a cell phone) with a color code to show network conditions for that user. Then you can drill down to show more information. Having that info for the user would be really useful to figure out which user is causing that echo or latency. Heck, while I'm dreaming, we could do the same thing Jitsi and tell the user when we detect too much noise on their side and suggest muting! There's probably more UI issues, but at that point you have basically rebuilt the entire user interface. This problem is hard to fix because UX people are unlikely to have the skills required to hack at an (old) Qt app, and C++ hackers are unlikely to have the best UX skills...

Missing features Video. It has been on the roadmap since 2011, so I'm not holding my breath. It is, obviously, the key feature missing from the software when compared to other conferencing tools and it's nice to see they are considering it. Screensharing and whiteboarding would also be a nice addition. Unfortunately, all that is a huge undertaking and it's unlikely to happen in the short term. And even if it does, it's possible hard-core Mumble users would be really upset at the change... A good web app -- a major blocker to the adoption of Mumble is the need for that complex app. If users could join just with a web browser, adoption would be much easier. There is a web app called mumble-web out there, but it seems to work only for listening as there are numerous problems with recording: quality issues, audio glitches, voice activation, voice activation.. The CCC seems to be using that app to stream talk translation, so that part supposedly works correctly. Dial-in -- allow plain old telephones to call into conferences. There seems to be a program called mumsi that can do this, but it's unmaintained and it's unclear if any of the forks work at all. Update: according to samba, mumsi works, but sometimes freezes and needs to be restarted. Each SIP account shows up as a bot that comes up when someone calls the number. It supports multiple callers, although apparently mumsi crashes after a while with 4 callers. A comment here also mentioned there's a fork that mentions using a "pin" as well for dialing in.

Caveats Now the above will probably not happen soon. Unfortunately, Mumble has had trouble with their release process recently. It took them a long time to even agree on releasing 1.3, and when they did agree, it took them a long time again to actually do the release. There has been much more activity on the Mumble client and web app recently, so hopefully I will be proven wrong. The 1.3.1 release actually came out recently(correction:) is actually being worked on, which is encouraging. All in all, mumble has some deeply ingrained UI limitations. it's built like an app from the 1990, all the way down to the menu system and "status bar" buttons. It's definitely not intuitive for a new user and while there's an audio wizard that can help you get started, it doesn't always work and can be confusing in itself. I understand that I'm just this guy saying "please make this for me ktxbye". I'm not writing this as a critic of Mumble: I love the little guy, the underdog. Mumble has been around forever and it kicks ass. I'm writing this in a spirit of solidarity, in the hope the feedback can be useful and to provide useful guidelines on how things could be improved. I wish I had the time to do this myself and actually help the project beyond just writing, but unfortunately the reality is I'm a poor UI designer and I have little time to contribute to more software projects. So hopefully someone could take those ideas and make Mumble even greater. And if not, we'll just have to live with it. Thanks to all the Mumble developers who, over all those years, managed to make and maintain such an awesome product. You rock!

Update: a chat with Mumble folks Update: it seems the idea of simplifying the Mumble interface will take some time to sink in. After presenting this article in the #mumble Freenode IRC channel, it became obvious that having a more usable interface is not a priority. To put it in the words of a participant in the channel:
If someone is too stupid to use a piece of software than they should probably use something else or have someone capable of critical thinking set it up for them. -- meep
So I guess "I'm with stupid": I do not believe we should make software only for "smart" people because that leads to overly complicated and over-engineered user interfaces that are needlessly hard to use and configure. Mumble is actually an excellent example of such programs: powerful software, but too hard to use to actually reach critical mass. Thankfully, meep is not a Mumble developer and does not actually represent the official position of the Mumble project. A core developer (not representing the project either) was more nuanced:
The UI being not up to date is a matter of taste. The kind of UI you are describing is the kind of UI I certainly don't want. More gernally though I agree that the UI needs some rework and especially: Flexibility so that each user can (ideally) make it appear as (s)he wants. Before this can happen though, we'll have to rewrite a fair bit of code as we'll have to separate backend and frontend from one another. -- krzmbrzl
So this will take time. The fact that Qt seems to be moving back to closed-source does not help the situation with Mumble's GUI development, unfortunately. But the other hand, maybe it will provide the necessary "kick" to write a new, simpler GUI.

Elana Hashman: Repack Zoom .debs to remove the ibus dependency

For whatever reason, Zoom distributes .debs that have a dependency on ibus. ibus is the "intelligent input bus" package and as far as I'm aware, might be used for emoji input in chat or something?? But is otherwise not actually a dependency of the Zoom package. I've tested this extensively... the client works fine without it. I noticed when I installed ibus along with the Zoom package that ibus would frequently eat an entire core of CPU. I'm sure this is a bug in the ibus package or service, but I have no energy to try to get that fixed. If it's not a hard dependency, Zoom shouldn't depend on it in the first place. Anyways, here's how you can repack a Zoom .deb to remove the ibus dependency: 
scratch=$(mktemp -d)
# Extract package contents
dpkg -x zoom_amd64.deb $scratch
# Extract package control information
dpkg -e zoom_amd64.deb $scratch/DEBIAN
# Remove the ibus dependency
sed -i -E 's/(ibus,  , ibus)//' $scratch/DEBIAN/control
# Rebuild the .deb
dpkg -b $scratch patched_zoom_amd64.deb
Now you can install the patched .deb with 
dpkg -i patched_zoom_amd64.deb
The upstream fix would be for Zoom to move the ibus "Dependency" to a "Recommends", but they have been unwilling to do this for over a year. But wait, what version even is my package? By the way, you may have also noticed that the Zoom client downloads do not conform to the standard Debian package naming scheme (i.e. including the version in the filename). If you're not sure what version a zoom_amd64.deb package you've downloaded is, you can quickly extract that information with dpkg-deb: 
dpkg-deb -I zoom_amd64.deb   grep Version
# Version: 3.5.383291.0407

8 April 2020

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Using Jitsi Meet with Puppet for self-hosted video conferencing

Here's a blog post I wrote for the puppet.com blog. Many thanks to Ben Ford and all their team!. With everything that is currently happening around the world, many of us IT folks have had to solve complex problems in a very short amount of time. Pretty quickly at work, I was tasked with finding a way to make virtual meetings easy, private and secure. Whereas many would have turned to a SaaS offering, we decided to use Jitsi Meet, a modern and fully on-premise FOSS videoconferencing solution. Jitsi works on all platforms by running in a browser and comes with nifty Android and iOS applications. We've been using our instance quite a bit, and so far everyone from technical to non-technical users have been pretty happy with it. Jitsi Meet is powered by WebRTC and can be broken into multiple parts across multiple machines if needed. In addition to the webserver running the Jitsi Meet JavaScript code, the base configuration uses the Videobridge to manage users' video feeds, Jicofo as a conference focus to manage media sessions and the Prosody XMPP server to tie it all together. Here's a network diagram I took from their documentation to show how those applications interact: A network diagram that shows how the different bits of jitsi meet work together Getting started with the Jitsi Puppet module First of all, you'll need a valid domain name and a server with decent bandwidth. Jitsi has published a performance evaluation of the Videobridge to help you spec your instance appropriately. You will also need to open TCP ports 443, 4443 and UDP port 10000 in your firewall. The puppetlabs/firewall module could come in handy here. Once that is done, you can use the smash/jitsimeet Puppet module on a Debian 10 (Buster) server to spin up an instance. A basic configuration would look like this: 
  class   'jitsimeet':
    fqdn                 => 'jitsi.example.com',
    repo_key             => puppet:///files/apt/jitsimeet.gpg,
    manage_certs         => true,
    jitsi_vhost_ssl_key  => '/etc/letsencrypt/live/jitsi.example.com/privkey.pem'
    jitsi_vhost_ssl_cert => '/etc/letsencrypt/live/jitsi.example.com/cert.pem'
    auth_vhost_ssl_key   => '/etc/letsencrypt/live/auth.jitsi.example.com/privkey.pem'
    auth_vhost_ssl_cert  => '/etc/letsencrypt/live/auth.jitsi.example.com/cert.pem'
    jvb_secret           => 'mysupersecretstring',
    focus_secret         => 'anothersupersecretstring',
    focus_user_password  => 'yetanothersecret',
    meet_custom_options  =>  
      'enableWelcomePage'         => true,
      'disableThirdPartyRequests' => true,
     ;
The jitsimeet module is still pretty young: it clearly isn't perfect and some external help would be very appreciated. If you have some time, here are a few things that would be nice to work on: If you use this module to manage your Jitsi Meet instance, please send patches and bug reports our way! Learn more

7 April 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2020

Welcome to the March 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month and some plans for the future.
What are reproducible builds? One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.

News The report from our recent summit in Marrakesh was published and is now available in both PDF and HTML formats. A sincere thank you to all of the Reproducible Builds community for the input to the event a sincere thank you to Aspiration for preparing and collating this report. Harmut Schorrig published a detailed document on how to compile Java applications in such as way that the .jar build artefact is reproducible across builds. A practical and hands-on guide, it details how to avoid unnecessary differences between builds by explicitly declaring an encoding as the default value differs across Linux and MS Windows systems and ensuring that the generated .jar a variant of a .zip archive does not embed any nondeterministic filesystem metadata, and so on. Janneke gave a quick presentation on GNU Mes and reproducible builds during the lighting talk session at LibrePlanet 2020. [ ] Vagrant Cascadian presented There and Back Again, Reproducibly! video at SCaLE 18x in Pasadena in California which generated some attention on Twitter. Herv Boutemy mentioned on our mailing list in a thread titled Rebuilding and checking Reproducible Builds from Maven Central repository that since the update of a central build script (the parent POM ) every Apache project using the Maven build system should build reproducibly. A follow-up discussion regarding how to perform such rebuilds was also started on the Apache mailing list. The Telegram instant-messaging platform announced that they had updated their iOS and Android OS applications and claim that they are reproducible according to their full instructions, verifying that its original source code is exactly the same code that is used to build the versions available on the Apple App Store and Google Play distribution platforms respectfully. Herv Boutemy also reported about a new project called reproducible-central which aims to allow anyone to rebuild a component from the Maven Central Repository that is expected to be reproducible and check that the result is as expected. In last month s report we detailed Omar Navarro Leija s work in and around an academic paper titled Reproducible Containers which describes in detail the workings of a user-space container tool called dettrace (PDF). Since then, the PhD student from the University Of Pennsylvania presented on this tool at the ASPLOS 2020 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. Furthermore, there were contributions to dettrace from the Reproducible Builds community itself. [ ][ ]

Distribution work

openSUSE In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update as well as made the following changes within the distribution itself:

Debian Chris Lamb further refined his merge request for the debian-installer component to allow all arguments from sources.list files (such as [check-valid-until=no] ) in order that we can test the reproducibility of the installer images on the Reproducible Builds own testing infrastructure. (#13) Holger Levsen filed a number of bug reports against the debrebuild tool that attempts to rebuild a Debian package given a .buildinfo file as input, including: 48 reviews of Debian packages were added, 17 were updated and 34 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Many issue types were noticed, categorised and updated by Chris Lamb, including: Finally, Holger opened a bug report against the software running tracker.debian.org, a service for Debian Developers to follow the evolution of packages via web and email interfaces to request that they integrate information from buildinfos.debian.net (#955434) and Chris Lamb kept isdebianreproducibleyet.com up to date. [ ]

Software development

diffoscope Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, the Reproducible Builds project s in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including preparing and uploading version 138 to Debian:
  • Improvements:
    • Don t allow errors with R script deserialisation cause the entire operation to fail, for example if an external library cannot be loaded. (#91)
    • Experiment with memoising output from expensive external commands, eg. readelf. (#93)
    • Use dumppdf from the python3-pdfminer if we do not see any other differences from pdftext, etc. (#92)
    • Prevent a traceback when comparing two R .rdx files directly as the get_member method will return a file even if the file is missing. [ ]
  • Reporting:
    • Display the supported file formats into the package long description. (#90)
    • Print a potentially-helpful message if the PyPDF2 module is not installed. [ ]
    • Remove any duplicate comparator descriptions when formatting in the --help output or in the package long description. [ ]
    • Weaken Install the X package to get a better output message to may produce a better output as the former is not actually guaranteed. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Ensure we only parse the recommended packages from --list-debian-substvars when we want them for debian/tests/control generation. [ ]
    • Add upstream metadata file [ ] and add a Lintian override for upstream-metadata-in-native-source as we are upstream. [ ]
    • Inline the RequiredToolNotFound.get_package method s functionality as it is only used once. [ ]
    • Drop the deprecated py36 = [..] argument in the pyproject.toml file. [ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 138 [ ], as well as updating reprotest our end-user tool to build same source code twice in widely differing environments and then checks the binaries produced by each build for any differences to version 0.7.14 [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Project documentation There was further work performed on our documentation and website this month including Alex Wilson adding a section regarding using Gradle for reproducible builds in JVM projects [ ] and Holger Levsen added the report from our recent summit in Marrakesh [ ][ ]. In addition, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including correcting the syntax of some CSS class formatting [ ], improved some filed against copy a little better [ ] and corrected a reference to calendar.monthrange Python method in a utility function. [ ]

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org that, amongst many other tasks, tracks the status of our reproducibility efforts as well as identifies any regressions that have been introduced. This month, Chris Lamb reworked the web-based package rescheduling tool to:
  • Require a HTTP POST method in the web-based scheduler as not only should HTTP GET requests be idempotent but this will allow many future improvements in the user interface. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve the authentication error message in said rescheduler to suggest that the developer s SSL certificate may have expired. [ ]
In addition, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • Add a new ath97 subtarget for the OpenWrt distribution.
  • Revisit ordering of Debian suites; sort the experimental distribution last and reverse the ordering of suites to prioritise the suites in development. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Schedule Debian buster and bullseye a little less in order to allow unstable to catch up on the i386 architecture. [ ][ ]
  • Various cosmetic changes to the web-based scheduler. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve wordings in the node health maintenance output. [ ]
Lastly, Vagrant Cascadian updated a link to the (formerly) weekly news to our reports page [ ] and kpcyrd fixed the escaping in an Alpine Linux inline patch [ ]. The usual build nodes maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ].
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

This month s report was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen and Vagrant Cascadian. It was subsequently reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing list.

Next.

Previous.