Search Results: "nate"

14 October 2016

Jonathan Dowland: Hi-Fi Furniture

sadly obsolete

For the last four years or so, I've had my Hi-Fi and the vast majority of my vinyl collection stored in a self-contained, mildly-customized Ikea unit. Since moving house this has been in my dining room which we have always referred to as the "play room", since we have a second dining room in which we actually dine. The intention for the play room was for it to be the room within which all our future children would have their toys kept, in an attempt to keep the living room from being overrun with plastic. The time has thus come for my Hi-Fi to come out of there, so we've moved it to our living room. Unfortunately, there's not enough room in the living room for the Ikea unit: I need something narrower for the space available.

via IkeaHackers.net

In the spirit of my original hack, I started looking at what others might have achieved with Ikea components. There are some great examples of open-style units built out of the (extremely cheap) Lack coffee tables, such as this ikeahackers article, but I'd prefer something more enclosed. One problem I've had with the Expedit unit was my cat trying to scratch the records. I ended up putting framed records at the front to cover the spines of the records within. If I were keeping the unit, I'd look at fitting hinges (another ikeahackers article) Asides from hacked Ikea stuff, there are a few companies offering traditional enclosed Hi Fi cabinets. I'm going to struggle to fit both the equipment and a subset of records into these, so I might have to look at storing them separately. In some ways that makes life easier: the records could go into a 1x4 Ikea KALLAX unit, leaving the amp and deck to home somewhere. Perhaps I could look at a bigger unit for under the TV. My parents have a nice Hi-Fi unit that pretends to be a chest of drawers. I'm fairly sure my Dad custom-built it, as it has a hinged top to provide access to the turntable and I haven't seen anything like that on the market. That brings me onto thinking about other AV things I'd like to achieve in the living room. I've always been interested in exploring surround sound, but my initial attempt in my prior flat did not go well, either because the room was not terribly suited accoustically, or because the Pioneer unit I bought was rubbish, or both. It seems that there aren't really AV receivers which are designed to satisfy both people wanting to use them in a Hi-Fi and a home cinema setting. I could stick to stereo and run the TV into my existing (or a new) amplifier, subject to some logistics around wiring. A previous house owner ran some phono cables under the hard-wood flooring from the TV alcove to the opposite side of the fire place, which might give me some options. There's also the world of wireless audio, Sonos etcetera. Realistically the majority of my music is digital nowadays, and it would be good to be able to listen to it conveniently in the house. I've heard good reports on the entry level Sonos stuff, but they seem to be Mono, and even the more high-end ones with lots of drivers have very small separation. I did buy a Chromecast Audio on a whim recently, but I haven't looked at it much yet: perhaps that's part of the solution. So, lots of stuff in the melting pot to figure out here!

13 October 2016

Wouter Verhelst: Webserver certificate authentication with intermediate CAs

Authenticating HTTPS clients using TLS certificates has long been very easy to do. The hardest part, in fact, is to create a PKI infrastructure robust enough so that compromised (or otherwise no longer desirable) certificates cannot be used anymore. While setting that up can be fairly involved, it's all pretty standard practice these days. But authentication using a private CA is laughably easy. With apache, you just do something like:

SSLCACertificateFile /path/to/ca-certificate.pem
SSLVerifyClient require

...and you're done. With the above two lines, apache will send a CertificateRequest message to the client, prompting the client to search its local certificate store for certificates signed by the CA(s) in the ca-certificate.pem file, and using the certificate thus found to authenticate against the server. This works perfectly fine for setting up authentication for a handful of users. It will even work fine for a few thousands of users. But what if you're trying to set up website certificate authentication for millions of users? Well, in that case, storing everything in a single CA just doesn't work, and you'll need intermediate CAs to make things not fall flat on their face. Unfortunately, the standard does not state what should happen when a client certificate is signed by an intermediate certificate, and the distinguished name(s) in the CertificateRequest message are those of the certificate(s) at the top of the chain rather than the intermediates. Previously, browsers would not just send out the client certificate, but also send along the certificate that it knew to have signed that client certificate, and so on until it found a self-signed certificate. With that, the server would see a chain of certificates that it could verify against the root certificates in its local trust store, and certificate verification would succeed. It would appear that browsers are currently changing this behaviour, however. With the switch to BoringSSL, Google Chrome on the GNU/Linux platform no longer sent the signing certificates, and instead only sends the leaf certificate that it wants to use for certificate authentication. In the bug report, Ryan Sleevi explains that while the change was premature, the long term plans are for this to be the behaviour not just on GNU/Linux, but on Windows and macOS too. Meanwhile, the issue has been resolved for Chrome 54 (due to be released), but there's no saying for how long. As if that was not enough, the new version of Safari as shipped with macOS 10.12 has also stopped sending intermediate certificates, and expects the web server to be happy with just receiving the leaf certificates. So, I guess it's safe to say that when you want to authenticate a client in a multi-level hierarchical CA environment, you cannot just hand the webserver a list of root certificates and expect things to work anymore; you'll have to hand it the intermediary certificates as well. To do so, you need to modify the SSLCACertificateFile parameter in apache configuration so that it not only contains the root certificate, but all the intermediate certificates as well. If your list of intermediate certificates is rather long, it may improve performance to use SSLCACertificatePath and the c_rehash tool to create a hashed directory with certificates rather than a PEM file, but in essense, that should work. While this works, the problem with doing so is that now the DNs of all the intermediate certificates are sent along with the CertificateRequest message to the client, which (again, if your list of intermediate certificates is rather long) may result in performance issues. The fix for that is fairly easy: add a line like

SSLCADNRequestFile /path/to/root-certificates.pem

where the file root-certificates.pem contains the root certificates only. This file will tell the webserver which certificates should be announced in the CertificateRequest message, but the SSLCACertificateFile (or SSLCACertificatePath) configuration item will still be used for actual verification of the certificates in question. Note though that the root certificates apparently also seem to need to be available in the SSLCACertificatePath or SSLCACertificateFile configuration; if you do not do so, then authentication seems to fail, although I haven't yet found why. I've set up a test page for all of those "millions" of certificates, and it seems to work for me. I've you're trying to use one of those millions of certificates against your own webserver or have a similar situation with a different set of certificates, you might want to make the above changes, too.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Seinfeld streak at GitHub: Round Three

Two years ago in this post I reference the Seinfeld Streak used in an even earlier post of regular updates to to the Rcpp Gallery:

This is sometimes called Jerry Seinfeld's secret to productivity: Just keep at it. Don't break the streak.

and showed the this first chart of GitHub streaking

Last year a follow-up appeared in this post:

And as it is that time again, here is this year's version:

Special thanks go to Alessandro Pezz for the Chrome add-on GithubOriginalStreak.

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

11 October 2016

Vincent Sanders: The pine stays green in winter... wisdom in hardship.

In December 2015 I saw the kickstarter for the Pine64. The project seemed to have a viable hardware design and after my experience with the hikey I decided it could not be a great deal worse.

The system I acquired comprises of:

Quad core Allwinner A64 processor clocked at 1.2GHz
2 Gigabytes of DDR3 memory
Gigabit Ethernet
two 480Mbit USB 2.0 ports
HDMI type A
micro SD card for storage.

Hardware based kickstarter projects are susceptible to several issues and the usual suspects occurred causing delays:

Inability to scale, several thousand backers instead of the hundred they were aiming for
Issues with production
Issues with shipping

My personal view is that PINE 64 inc. handled it pretty well, much better than several other projects I have backed and as my Norman Douglas quotation suggests I think they have gained some wisdom from this.

I received my hardware at the beginning of April only a couple of months after their initial estimated shipping date which as these things go is not a huge delay. I understand some people who had slightly more complex orders were just receiving their orders in late June which is perhaps unfortunate but still well within kickstarter project norms.

As an aside: I fear that many people simply misunderstand the crowdfunding model for hardware projects and fail to understand that they are not buying a finished product, on the other side of the debate I think many projects need to learn expectation management much better than they do. Hyping the product to get interest is obviously the point of the crowdfunding platform, but over promising and under delivering always causes unhappy customers.

Despite the delays in production and shipping the information available for the board was (and sadly remains) inadequate. As usual I wanted to case my board and there were no useful dimension drawings so I had to make my own from direct measurements together with a STL 3D model.

Also a mental sigh for "yet another poor form factor decision" so another special case size and design. After putting together a design and fabricating with the laser cutter I moved on to the software.

Once more this is where, once again, the story turns bleak. We find a very pretty website but no obvious link to the software (hint scroll to the bottom and find the "support" wiki link) once you find the wiki you will eventually discover that the provided software is either an Android 5.1.1 image (which failed to start on my board) or relies on some random guy from the forums who has put together his own OS images using a hacked up Allwinner Board Support Package (BSP) kernel.

Now please do not misunderstand me, I think the work by Simon Eisenmann (longsleep) to get a working kernel and Lenny Raposo to get viable OS images is outstanding and useful. I just feel that Allwinner and vendors like Pine64 Inc. should have provided something much, much better than they have. Even the efforts to get mainline support for this hardware are all completely volunteer community efforts and are are making slow progress as a result.

Assuming I wanted to run a useful OS on this hardware and not just use it as a modern work of art I installed a basic Debian arm64 using Lenny Raposo's pine64 pro site downloads. I was going to use the system for compiling and builds so used the "Debian Base" image to get a minimal setup. After generating unique ssh keys, renaming the default user and checking all the passwords and permissions I convinced myself the system was reasonably trustworthy.

The standard Debian Jessie OS runs as expected with few surprises. The main concern I have is that there are a number of unpackaged scripts installed (prefixed with pine64_) which perform several operations from reporting system health (using sysfs entries) to upgrading the kernel and bootloader.

While I understand these scripts have been provided for the novice users to reduce support burden, doing even more of the vendors job, I would much rather have had proper packages for these scripts, kernel and bootloader which apt could manage. This would have reduced image creation to a simple debootstrap giving much greater confidence in the images provenance.

The 3.10 based kernel is three years old at the time of writing and lacks a great number of features for the aarch64 ARM processors introduced since release. However I was pleasantly surprised at kvm apparently being available.

# dmesg grep -i kvm
[    7.592896] kvm [1]: Using HYP init bounce page @b87c4000
[    7.593361] kvm [1]: interrupt-controller@1c84000 IRQ25
[    7.593778] kvm [1]: timer IRQ27
[    7.593801] kvm [1]: Hyp mode initialized successfully

I installed the libvirt packages (and hence all their dependencies like qemu) and created a bridge ready for the virtual machines.

I needed access to storage for the host disc images and while I could have gone the route of using USB attached SATA as with the hikey I decided to try and use network attached storage instead. Initially I investigated iSCSI but it seems the Linux target (iSCSI uses initiator for client and target for server) support is either old, broken or unpackaged.

I turned to network block device (nbd) which is packaged and seems to have reasonable stability out of the box on modern distributions. This appeared to work well, indeed over the gigabit Ethernet interface I managed to get a sustained 40 megabytes a second read and write rate in basic testing. This is better performance than a USB 2.0 attached SSD on the hikey

I fired up the guest and perhaps I should have known better than to expect a 3.10 vendor kernel to cope. The immediate hard crashes despite tuning many variables convinced me that virtualisation was not viable with this kernel.

So abandoning that approach I attempted to run the CI workload directly on the system. To my dismay this also proved problematic. The processor has the bad habit of throttling due to thermal issues (despite a substantial heatsink) and because the storage is network attached throttling the CPU also massively impacts I/O.

The limitations meant that the workload caused the system to move between high performance and almost no progress on a roughly ten second cycle. This caused a simple NetSurf recompile CI job to take over fifteen minutes. For comparison the same task takes the armhf builder (CubieTruck) four minutes and a 64 bit x86 build which takes around a minute.

If the workload is tuned to a single core which does not trip thermal throttling the build took seven minutes. which is almost identical to the existing single core virtual machine instance running on the hikey.

In conclusion the Pine64 is an interesting bit of hardware with fatally flawed software offering. Without Simon and Lenny providing their builds to the community the device would be practically useless rather than just performing poorly. There appears to have been no progress whatsoever on the software offering from Pine64 in the six months since I received the device and no prospect of mainline Allwinner support for the SoC either.

Effectively I have spent around 50usd (40 for the board and 10 for the enclosure) on a failed experiment. Perhaps in the future the software will improve sufficiently for it to become useful but I do not hold out much hope that this will come from Pine64 themselves.

9 October 2016

Bits from Debian: Debian is participating in the next round of Outreachy!

Following the success of the last round of Outreachy, we are glad to announce that Debian will take part in the program for the next round, with internships lasting from the 6th of December 2016 to the 6th of March 2017. From the official website: Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations. Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. If you want to apply to an internship in Debian, you should take a look at the wiki page, and contact the mentors for the projects listed, or seek more information on the (public) debian-outreach mailing-list. You can also contact the Outreach Team directly. If you have a project idea and are willing to mentor an intern, you can submit a project idea on the Outreachy wiki page. Here's a few words on what the interns for the last round achieved within Outreachy:

Tatiana Malygina worked on Continuous Integration for Bioinformatics applications; She has pushed more than a hundred commits to the Debian Med SVN repository over the last months, and has been sponsored for more than 20 package uploads.
Valerie Young worked on Reproducible Builds infrastructure, driving a complete overhaul of the database and software behind the tests.reproducible-builds.org website. Her blog contains regular updates throughout the program.
ceridwen worked on creating reprotest, an all-in-one tool allowing anyone to check whether a build is reproducible or not, replacing the string of ad-hoc scripts the reproducible builds team used so far. She posted regular updates on the Reproducible Builds team blog.
While Scarlett Clark did not complete the internship (as she found a full-time job by the mid-term evaluation!), she spent the four weeks she participated in the program providing patches for reproducible builds in Debian and KDE upstream.

Debian would not be able to participate in Outreachy without the help of the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides administrative support for Outreachy, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. If you want to donate, please get in touch with one of our trusted organizations. Debian is looking forward to welcoming new interns for the next few months, come join us!

Norbert Preining: Reload: Android 7.0 Nougat Root Pokemon Go

Ok, it turned out that a combinations of updates has broken my previous guide on playing Pokemon GO on a rooted Android device. What has happened that the October security update of the Android Nougat has changed the SecurityNet that is used for checking for rooted devices, and at the same time the Magisk rooting system as catapulted itself (hopefully temporarily) into the complete irrelevance by removing the working version and providing an improved version that does neither have SuperSU installed, nor the ability to hide root well done, congratulations.

But there is a way around, and I am now back at the latest security patch level, rooted, and playing Pokemon GO (not very often, no time, though!). My previous guide used Magisk Version 6 to root and hide root. But the recent security updated of Andorid Nougat (October 2016) has rendered Magisk-v6 non-working. I first thought that Magisk-v7 could solve the problem, but I was badly disappointed: After reflashing my device to pristine state, installing Magisk-v7, I suddenly was left with: no SuperSU (that means, X-plore, Titanium Backup etc do not work anymore), nor the ability to hide root for Pokemon Go or banking apps. Great update. Thus, I have decided to remove Magisk completely and make a clean start with SuperSU and suhide (and a GUI for suhide). And it turned out to be more convenient and more standard than Magisk, may it rest in peace (until they fix their stuff together). In the following I assume you have a clean slate Android Nougat device, if not, please see one of the previous guides for hints how to flash back without loosing your user data. Ingredients One need the following few items:

AutoCF root: If you are not rooted at the moment, this is the best method. For my Nexus 6p I used CF-Auto-Root-angler-angler-nexus6p.zip
SuperSU: At the moment you need at least v2.78 SR1 from this thread, at the time of writing one can get SR1-SuperSU-v2.78-SR1-20160915123031.zip
suhide: And improved method of hiding root that works also with the current October security patches. Furthermore, it makes hiding of root application specific. Current version is suhide-v0.54.zip
suhide GUI: For your convenience, this app can be installed from the Google app store, link.

Rooting Unzip the CF-Auto-Root-angler-angler-nexus6p.zip and either use the included programs (root-linux.sh, root-mac.sh, root-windows.bat) to root your device, or simply connect your device to your computer, and run (assuming you have adb and fastboot installed):

adb reboot bootloader
sleep 10
fastboot boot image/CF-Auto-Root-angler-angler-nexus6p.img

After that your device will reboot a few times, and you will finally land in your normal Android screen and a new program SuperSU will be available. At this stage you will not be able to play Pokemon GO anymore. Updating SuperSU The version of SuperSU packaged with the CF-AutoRoot is unfortunately too old, so one needs to update using the zip file SR1-SuperSU-v2.78-SR1-20160915123031.zip (or later). Here are two options: Either you use TWRP recovery system, or you install FlashFire (main page, app store page) which allows you to flash zip/ota directly from your Android screen. This time I used for the first time the FlashFire method, and it worked without any problem. Just press the + button in FlashFire, than the Flash zip/ota button, select the SR1-SuperSU-v2.78-SR1-20160915123031.zip, click two times yes, and then wait a bit and a few black screens (don t do anything!) later you will be back in your Nougat environment. Opening the SuperSU app should show you on the Settings tag that the version has been updated to 2.78-SR1. Installing suhide As with the update of SuperSU, install the suhide zip file, smae procedure, nothing special. After this you will be able to add an application (like Pokemon GO) from the command line (shell), but this is not very convenient. Better is to install the suhide GUI from the app store, start it, scroll for Pokemnon GO, add a tick, and you are settled. After that you are free to play Pokemon GO again. At least until the next security update brings again problems. In the long run this is a loosing game, anyway. Enjoy it while you can.

Laura Arjona Reina: New phone: Samsung Galaxy S III phone with Replicant

Thanks to the Bazaar effort of The Guardian Project, I ve been offered a phone to test F-Droid and other free software apps for Android. I accepted the offer, and chose a Samsung Galaxy S III phone with Replicant 4.2.2, installed and shipped by Tehnoetic.

I m using it now as my main phone, and since it uses Android 4.x I m able to install more modern apps than in my old Galaxy Ace (which remains usable with CyanongenMod 7.2 (Android 2.3.7)).

My plans with this new phone are:

Test Replicant and free software for Android on it
Get more involved in translations of Android apps
Get more involved in the F-Droid community
Keep an eye on Android tools in Debian
Post here in my blog articles about what I ve been doing (and of course report issues and contributions upstream)

Migration to the new phone

I ve migrated my stuff from the old phone to this one. Some notes:

Wrote down my list of apps
Used Slight Backup for contacts, call logs and messages
Periodical has its own backup tool
Whatsapp has its own backup tool
Exported settings in K-9 Mail
Exported Kontalk GPG key
Simply Do has its own backup tool
I don t use calendars in the phone so I didn t migrate any events (I have Offline Calendar to ad temporary notes/reminders, but that s all)

I moved the SIM card and the SD Card to the new phone and tried the restore tool for each app.

I found out that several apps could not find the backups because they were not looking at the SD Card for the files (seems that they were using internal memory locations). So for recovering my backups, I made new backups in the new phone with the empty apps, then found out where those backups were created (in the internal memory, /storage/emulated/0), and then copied the authentic backup files there (overwriting teh dummy ones), and then used the app to restore the backup.

For some apps (K-9) I had to set again the folder for attachments, since the SD was not anymore in /media/sdcard, now it was in /storage/sdcard1.

Apart from that, everything went well.

I was a bit upset that I could not migrate Kontalk conversations (there is no backup/export tool, and I am not sure where are the files/database stored).

I noticed that although Kontalk is registered using the phone number, and it uses the phone numbers for contacts, it kept working in the old phone (Whatsapp detects when you change to a new phone and kind of deactivates itself in the old one, but that s not the case for Kontalk: it works as any XMPP client (if it s open, it can send/receive messages)).

Replicant 4.2 in a Galaxy S III (i9300)

Here I write some particularities that I found in the phone, mostly bugs or problems. But don t get me wrong: overall I m very happy with it!

I experienced a problem when using the phone to make/receive calls, it seemed that the proximity sensor was not working well. I thought it was a Replicant issue, but later I realized that there was a Tehnoetic sticker that was partially covering the sensor. I removed the sticker and everything worked well.

The phone came with F-Droid installed which is nice. I upgraded to the latest alpha and I m testing the alpha releases since then

I found that I cannot choose where to install apps nor move apps from internal memory to the SD Card: there is no such option in Settings > Apps > Manage Apps (there is such setting in my CyanogenMod 7.2 phone, though). Since my phone is rooted and I have full access to both internal memory and SDCard, and I have plenty of room in the internal memory, I didn t bother too much. I m not sure if this is a bug, a feature, something related to Android 4 or specific to Replicant, o specific to this phone model. Pending to investigate, but low priority.

Replicant is almost fully translated to Spanish, yay!. I only found one untranslated string: You go to Settings > Wireless > Cell Broadcasts, and in the settings page, Cell Broadcasts is untranslated (but the settings themselves are). I still need to find where/how to send a patch for this (not sure if it comes from Android, CyanogenMod, or it s something specific for Replicant. Also, being Android 4.x, I m not sure about the usefulness of reporting such a minimal and unimportant patch upstream ).

When I turn on the phone, I get the Samsung S III splash screen, later the Replicant Splash screen, later the numeric pad to unlock the SIM card. After that, I see the screen lock but when I press the lock to enter the pattern, the screen turns off and on, screen lock appearing again (and I have to press the lock again to enter the pattern). If after unlocking the SIM card I wait a bit, I see the screen lock and again black screen and screen lock, so it s not my tap causing it. Doing like this (waiting a bit for the phone to show the screen lock for 2nd time) is less annoying, but I wonder why this happen and I cannot unlock the screen directly in the first attempt. This is also pending for research, but low priority.

When the phone boots, I find the splash screens too bright (the Samsung Galaxy S III splash, and later the red Replicant one). I don t know if I can change that. I know that other people have created different Replicant splash screens, so maybe I can create one almost black and only the Replicant text in very dark grey. But this is obviously a workaround, not a fix. OTOH, it s an annoying thing just some seconds: when the unlock screen is shown, the phone shows the brightness level that I ve set (usually, the lowest one).

From time to time, I suffer soft reboots:

the phone hangs for 2-3 seconds
then the red Replicant splash screen is shown (the phone is not totally rebooted, because I don t see the Samsung Galaxy S III splash screen and and the SIM card unlock PIN is not requested)
after unlocking the screen, I see a normal desktop (similar to what I see after rebooting the phone: no apps running, and no last used apps history. Time and date are ok, wireless or 3G starts correctly etc).

I ve tried to track the causes of these soft reboots, but I couldn t find anything specific. They are not frequent at all, and when I decide to launch CatLog to try to catch any hint, the phone works perfectly for hours or days :s

Replicant is currently using the fallback Android EGL implementation, which is incomplete. The missing features of this implementation cause multiple issues, which are described in #705. These are the ones that I experience (or I miss):

The phone comes with a video editor preinstalled: Movie Studio. I got excited about it, because I was jealous of the small built-in video editor that comes with Whatsapp, but I became sad because Movie Studio does not work
The camera does not record video.
When I long-press the central button of my phone to see the list of recent apps, I don t see their thumbnails (only the name, and their icons). This is quite unimportant for me, names and icons are enough.
The stock Gallery app does not work well: I cannot see thumbnails of the albums. This is not very important, because I installed Gallery.
I cannot use Firefox, Orfox and other derivative web browsers (I usually use the stock browser, and I installed Lightning too).
I cannot use barcode or QR scanners.
My son cannot play Shattered Pixel Dungeon (nor Pixel Dungeon). Fortunately he uses now my old Android 2.x devide for that.

I installed the non-free firmware to be able to use Wifi and tethering, GPS and some other things. This does not fix the graphics problems listed above.

New apps, and translations

Note: when I write about Android apps, I usually link to their pages in the F-Droid website. Here I talk about translations (contributions), so I ll link to their original website or souce code repos. But you can find all those apps in F-Droid too.

As I told before, I installed another gallery app called Gallery and submitted an update to it Spanish translation.

I installed Red Moon to reduce (even more) the screen brightness. At night it s a relieve. Maybe the brightness of the splash screen is not so much, and I perceive them annoying because I got accostumed to Red Moon! I contributed some strings to the Spanish translation.

I liked RadioDroid very much, and I translated the app to Spanish.

I translated Wifi Privacy Police, and I used for some time, but I became tired that it keeps asking all the time that I walk across my workplace (multiple buildings within the same Wifi network, but quite a lot access points ).

I keep on contributing to K-9 Mail to make it 100% translated to Spanish. Now with a modern Android I can move to the development branch (5.1xx releases), and just did it.

I submitted a Spanish translation to DAVDroid, although I m not using it yet (I have to see if my University s Owncloud instance allows to sync contacts and calendar).

I updated the Spanish translation of PassAndroid, although I don t use it yet (I tend to print my train/airplane tickets ). I keep it installed in my phone, just in case.

Other apps that I use

I m testing OwnCloud, NextCloud and NexCloud Beta clients with my University s Owncloud and with Davros in my Sandstorm box (with Davros, I could only make it work installing an old version of Owncloud/Nexcloud client, and then upgrading. See #65).

I didn t get accostumed to Conversations. Not sure why, though. Maybe it s just that I got accostumed to Xabber-Classic, so I upgraded to Xabber. It works like a charm, dark theme, and I can close it easily when I don t want to chat.

I got in love with KDE Connect. Later I realized that I could have been using it in my Android 2.x phone since long

Sometimes I have fun activating Voice Notification and entering the redeslibres XMPP multi user chat at salas.mijabber.es, for example while I m cooking in the kitchen (in that room people talk in Spanish and make many wordplays, mixing Spanish and English, and use tech slang, etc so it s really fun to hear the Spanish-TTS deal with the conversation there!).

More to come

As I told at the beginning of this long post, my plan is to keep on tinkering with the phone, testing and translating apps, and becoming more involved. So expect some more posts about Android in this blog, in the future.

For now, some big things in my TODO:

Watching again some videos: DebConf16 videos about Android tools in Debian, FOSDEM talks about Replicant, and some other talks about free software in Android.
I track the #fdroid and #fdroid-dev channels in IRC, but I m not very talkative there. I guess I could do more user support.
Participate more in the F-Droid (client, server, data) issue trackers (I send reports when the alpha version crashes, and comment on few issues, but I don t triage the issue tracker to find issues that I could reproduce or help to diagnose or contribute to fix).
Long time ago I learned to setup an Android development environment and build apps. I would like to re-learn and maybe do some small fixes in unmaintained or near unmaintained apps, and maybe adopt them or join their development teams (I m thinking, for example, in Puma, an Android client for pump.io network, the MediaGoblin app, or the DebianDroid app). And ship new versions of unmaintained apss, including Spanish translations.

We ll see how far I can go!

Comments?

You can comment about this post in this pump.io thread.

Filed under: My experiences and opinion, Tools Tagged: Android, Debian, English, F-Droid

Nathan Handler: Ohio Linux Fest

This weekend, I traveled to Columbus, Ohio to attend Ohio Linux Fest. I departed San Francisco early on Thursday. It was interesting getting to experience the luxurious side of flying as I enjoyed a mimosa in the American Express Centurion lounge for the first time. I even happend to cross paths with Corey Quinn, who was on his way to [DevOpsDays Boise]. While connecting in Houston, I met up with the always awesome Jos Antonio Rey, who was to be my travel companion for this trip. The long day of travel took its toll on us, so we had a lazy Friday morning before checking in for the conference around lunch time. I was not that interested in the afternoon sessions, so I spent the majority of the first day helping out at the Ubuntu booth and catching up with friends and colleagues. The day ended with a nice Happy Hour sponsored by Oracle. Saturday was the main day for the conference. Ethan Galstad, Founder and CEO of Nagios, started the day with a Keynote about Becoming the Next Tech Entrepreneur. Next up was Elizabeth K. Joseph with A Tour of OpenStack Deployment Scenarios. While I ve read plenty about OpenStack, I ve never actually used it before. As a result, this demo and introduction was great to watch. It was entertaining to watch her login to CirrOS with the default password of cubswin:), as the Chicago Cubs are currently playing the San Francisco Giants in the National League Divisional Series (and winning). Unfortunately, I was not able to win a copy of her new Common OpenStack Deployments book, but it was great getting to watch her signing copies for other attendees after all of the hard work that went into writing the book. For lunch, Jos , Elizabeth, and Svetlana Belkin all gathered together for an informal Ubuntu lunch. Finally, it was time for me to give my talk. This was the same talk I gave at FOSSCON, but this time, I had a significantly larger audience. Practice definitely makes perfect, as my delivery was a lot better the second time giving this talk. Afterwards, I had a number of people come up to me to let me know that they really enjoyed the presentation. Pro Tip: If you ever attend a talk, the speaker will really appreciate any feedback you send their way. Even if it is a simple, Thank You , it really means a lot. One of the people who came up to me after the talk was Unit193. We have known each other through Ubuntu for years, but there has never been an opportunity to meet in person. I am proud to be able to say with 99% confidence that he is not a robot, and is in fact a real person. Next up was a lesson about the /proc filesystem. While I ve explored it a bit on my own before, I still learned a few tips and tricks about information that can be gained from the files in this magical directory. Following this was a talk about Leading When You re Not the Boss. It was even partially taught by a dummy (the speaker was a ventriloquist). The last regular talk of the day was one of the more interesting ones I attended. It was a talk by Patrick Shuff from Facebook about how they have built a load balancer than can handle a billion users. The slide deck was well-made with very clear diagrams. The speaker was also very knowledgeable and dealt with the plethora of questions he received. Prior to the closing keynote was a series of lightning talks. These served as a great means to get people laughing after a long day of talks. The closing keynote was given by father and daughter Joe and Lilly Born about The Democratization of Invention. Both of them had very interesting stories, and Lily was quite impressive given her age. We skipped the Nagios After Party in favor of a more casual pizza dinner. Overall, it was a great conference, and I am very glad to have had the opportunity to attend. A big thanks to Canonical and the Ubuntu Community for fudning my travel through the Ubuntu Community Fund and to the Ohio Linux Fest staff for allowing me the opportunity to speak at such a great conference.

8 October 2016

Joachim Breitner: T430s T460s

Earlier this week, I finally got my new machine that came with my new position at the University of Pennsylvania: A shiny Thinkpad T460s that now replaces my T430s. (Yes, there is a pattern. It continues with T400 and T41p.) I decided to re-install my Debian system from scratch and copy over only the home directory a bit of purification does not hurt. This blog post contains some random notes that might be useful to someone or alternative where I hope someone can tell me how to fix and improve things.

Installation The installation (using debian-installer from a USB drive) went mostly smooth, including LVM on an encrypted partition. Unfortunately, it did not set up grub correctly for the UEFI system to boot, so I had to jump through some hoops (using the grub on the USB drive to manually boot into the installed system, and installing grub-efi from there) until the system actually came up.

High-resolution display This laptop has a 2560 1440 high resolution display. Modern desktop environments like GNOME supposedly handle that quite nicely, but for reasons explained in an earlier post, I do not use a desktop envrionment but have a minimalistic setup based on Xmonad. I managed to get a decent setup now, by turning lots of manual knobs:

For the linux console, setting
```
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="12x24"
```
in /etc/default/console-setup yielded good results.
For the few GTK-2 applications that I am still running, I set
```
gtk-font-name="Sans 16"
```
in ~/.gtkrc-2.0. Similarly, for GTK-3 I have
```
[Settings]
gtk-font-name = Sans 16
```
in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini.
Programs like gnome-terminal, Evolution and hexchat refer to the System default document font and System default monospace font . I remember that it was possible to configure these in the GNOME control center, but I could not find any way of configuring these using command line tools, so I resorted to manually setting the font for these. With the help from Alexandre Franke I figured out that the magic incarnation here is:
```
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name 'Monospace 16'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface document-font-name 'Serif 16'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Sans 16'
```
Firefox seemed to have picked up these settings for the UI, so that was good. To make web pages readable, I set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.5 in about:config.
GVim has set guifont=Monospace\ 16 in ~/.vimrc. The toolbar is tiny, but I hardly use it anyways.
Setting the font of Xmonad prompts requires the sytax
```
, font = "xft:Sans:size=16"
```
Speaking about Xmonad prompts: Check out the XMonad.Prompt.Unicode module that I have been using for years and recently submitted upstream.
I launch Chromium (or rather the desktop applications that I use that happen to be Chrome apps) with the parameter --force-device-scale-factor=1.5.
Libreoffice seems to be best configured by running xrandr --dpi 194 before hand. This seems also to be read by Firefox, doubling the effect of the font size in the gtk settings, which is annoying. Luckily I do not work with Libreoffice often, so for now I ll just set that manually when needed.

I am not quite satisfied. I have the impression that the 16 point size font, e.g. in Evolution, is not really pretty, so I am happy to take suggestions here. I found the ArchWiki page on HiDPI very useful here.

Trackpoint and Touchpad One reason for me to sticking with Thinkpads is their trackpoint, which I use exclusively. In previous models, I disabled the touchpad in the BIOS, but this did not seem to have an effect here, so I added the following section to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        Option "ignore" "on"
EndSection

At one point I left out the MatchProduct line, disabling all input in the X server. Had to boot into recovery mode to fix that. Unfortunately, there is something wrong with the trackpoint and the buttons: When I am moving the trackpoint (and maybe if there is actual load on the machine), mouse button press and release events sometimes get lost. This is quite annoying I try to open a folder in Evolution and accidentially move it. I installed the latest Kernel from Debian experimental (4.8.0-rc8), but it did not help. I filed a bug report against libinput although I am not fully sure that that s the culprit. Update: According to Benjamin Tissoires it is a known firmware bug and the appropriate people are working on a work-around. Until then I am advised to keep my palm of the touchpad. Also, I found the trackpoint too slow. I am not sure if it is simply because of the large resolution of the screen, or because some movement events are also swallowed. For now, I simply changed the speed by writing

SUBSYSTEM=="serio", DRIVERS=="psmouse", ATTRS speed ="120"

to /etc/udev/rules.d/10-trackpoint.rules.

Brightness control The system would not automatically react to pressing Fn-F5 and Fn-F6, which are the keys to adjust the brightness. I am unsure about how and by what software component it should be handled, but the solution that I found was to set

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "card0"
        Driver      "intel"
        Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
        BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

so that the command line tool xbacklight would work, and then use Xmonad keybinds to perform the action, just as I already do for sound control:

    , ((0, xF86XK_Sleep),       spawn "dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend")
    , ((0, xF86XK_AudioMute), spawn "ponymix toggle")
    , ((0, 0x1008ffb2  - xF86XK_AudioMicMute - ), spawn "ponymix --source toggle")
    , ((0, xF86XK_AudioRaiseVolume), spawn "ponymix increase 5")
    , ((0, xF86XK_AudioLowerVolume), spawn "ponymix decrease 5")
    , ((shiftMask, xF86XK_AudioRaiseVolume), spawn "ponymix increase 5 --max-volume 200")
    , ((shiftMask, xF86XK_AudioLowerVolume), spawn "ponymix decrease 5")
    , ((0, xF86XK_MonBrightnessUp), spawn "xbacklight +10")
    , ((0, xF86XK_MonBrightnessDown), spawn "xbacklight -10")

The T460s does not actually have a sleep button, that line is a reminiscence from my T430s. I suspend the machine by pressing the power button now, thanks to HandlePowerKey=suspend in /etc/systemd/logind.conf.

Profile Weirdness Something strange happend to my environment variables after the move. It is clearly not hardware related, but I simply cannot explain what has changed: All relevant files in `/etc` look similar enough. I use `~/.profile` to extend the `PATH` and set some other variables. Previously, these settings were in effect in my whole X session, which is started by `lightdm` with auto-login, followed by `xmonad-session`. I could find no better way to fix that than stating `. ~/.profile` early in my `~/.xmonad/xmonad-session-rc`. Very strange.

Charles Plessy: I just finished to read the Imperial Radch trilogy.

I liked it a lot. There are already many comments on Internet (thanks Russ for making me discover these novels), so I will not go into details. And it is hard to summarise without spoiling. In brief: The first tome, Ancillary Justice, makes us visit various worlds and cultures, and give us an impression of what it feels to be a demigod. The main culture does not make a difference between the two sexes, and the grammar of its language does not have genders. This gives an original taste to the story, for instance when the hero speaks a foreign language, he has difficulties to correctly address people without risking to frown them. Unfortunately the English language itself does not use gender very much, so the literary effect is a bit weakened. Perhaps the French translation (which I have not read) could be more interesting in that respect? The second tome, Ancillary Sword, shows us how one can communicate things in a surveillance society without privacy, by subtle variations on how to serve tea. Gallons of tea are drunk in this tome, of which the main interest is the relation between the characters and heir conversations. In the third tome, Ancillary Mercy, asks the question of what makes us human. Among the most interesting characters, there is a kind of synthetic human, who acts as ambassador for an alien race. At first, he indeed behaves completely alien, but in the end, he is not very different from a newborn who would happen by miracle to know how to speak: in the beginning the World makes no sense, but step by step and by experimenting, he deduces how it works. This is how this character ends up understanding that what is called "war" is a complex phenomenon where one of the consequences is a shortage of fish sauce. I was a bit surprised that no book lead us at the heart of the Radch empire, but I just see on Wikipedia that one more novel is in preparation... One can speculate that central Radch resembles to a future dystopian West, in which surveillance of everybody is total and constant, but where people think they are happy, and peace and well-being inside are kept possible thanks to military operations outside, mostly performed by killer robots controlled by artificial intelligences. A not so distant future ? It is a matter of course that there does not seem to by any Free software in the Radch empire. That reminds me that I did not contribute much to Debian while I was reading...

7 October 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: tint 0.0.2: Tint Is Not Tufte

The tint package is now on CRAN. Its name stands for Tint Is Not Tufte and it offers a fresh take on the excellent Tufte-style html (and now also pdf) presentations. As a little teaser, here is what the html variant looks like:

and the full underlying document is available too. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

6 October 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 75 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday September 25 and Saturday October 1 2016: Statistics For the first time, we reached 91% reproducible packages in our testing framework on testing/amd64 using a determistic build path. (This is what we recommend to make packages in Stretch reproducible.) For unstable/amd64, where we additionally test for reproducibility across different build paths we are at almost 76% again. IRC meetings We have a poll to set a time for a new regular IRC meeting. If you would like to attend, please input your available times and we will try to accommodate for you. There was a trial IRC meeting on Friday, 2016-09-31 1800 UTC. Unfortunately, we did not activate meetbot. Despite this participants consider the meeting a success as several topics where discussed (eg changes to IRC notifications of tests.r-b.o) and the meeting stayed within one our length. Upcoming events Reproduce and Verify Filesystems - Vincent Batts, Red Hat - Berlin (Germany), 5th October, 14:30 - 15:20 @ LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe 2016. From Reproducible Debian builds to Reproducible OpenWrt, LEDE & coreboot - Holger "h01ger" Levsen and Alexander "lynxis" Couzens - Berlin (Germany), 13th October, 11:00 - 11:25 @ OpenWrt Summit 2016. Introduction to Reproducible Builds - Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the SeaGL.org Conference In Seattle (USA), November 11th-12th, 2016. Previous events GHC Determinism - Bartosz Nitka, Facebook - Nara (Japan), 24th September, ICPF 2016. Toolchain development and fixes Michael Meskes uploaded bsdmainutils/9.0.11 to unstable with a fix for #830259 based on Reiner Herrmann's patch. This fixed locale_dependent_symbol_order_by_lorder issue in the affected packages (freebsd-libs, mmh). devscripts/2.16.8 was uploaded to unstable. It includes a debrepro script by Antonio Terceiro which is similar in purpose to reprotest but more lightweight; specific to Debian packages and without support for virtual servers or configurable variations. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible in our testing framework after being fixed:

ara/1.0.32 by Chris Lamb, original patch by Chris Lamb.
fracplanet/0.4.0-5 by Chris Lamb, original patch by Reiner Herrman.
gnarwl/3.6.dfsg-8 by Bernhard Schmidt, original patch by Chris Lamb.
kgb-bot/1.34-1 by gregor herrmann, original patch by gregor herrmann.
survex/1.2.29-1 by Olly Betts.
zpaq/1.10-3 by Chris Lamb, original patch by Reiner Herrman.
fig2dev/1:3.2.6-3 by Roland Rosenfeld.
luxio/11-1 by Daniel Silverstone.
monkeysign/2.1.1 by Antoine Beaupr , original patch by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
openarena-085-data/0.8.5split-9 by Simon McVittie.
openarena-088-data/0.8.8-7 by Simon McVittie.
openarena-data/0.8.5split-9 by Simon McVittie.
rc/1.7.4-1 by Reiner Herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.

The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.)

gkrellm/2.3.8-1 by Sandro Tosi
glassfish/1:2.1.1-b31g+dfsg1-4 by Emmanuel Bourg

Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

apache2/2.4.23-5 by Rapha l Hertzog
freeradius/3.0.11+dfsg-1 by Michael Stapelberg
libnss-ldap/265-4 by Chris Lamb
lift/2.5.0-1 by Nicolas Delvaux
linux/4.8~rc8-1~exp1 by Ben Hutchings
nose2/0.6.5-2 by Barry Warsaw
postgresql-9.6/9.6.0-1 Christoph Berg
strace/4.13-0.1 by Nicolas Braud-Santoni
yersinia/0.7.3-3 by No l K the

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

#838888 filed against dh-haskell by Chris Lamb.
#838971 filed against slang2 by Chris Lamb.
#839587 filed against sympa by Chris Lamb.
#839181 filed against transmission-remote-gtk by Chris Lamb.
#838829 filed against vala by Sebastian Reichel.
#838970 filed against webkit2pdf by Chris Lamb.
#831569 filed against websockets by Chris Lamb.
#839347 filed against xml-core by Lucas Nussbaum.
#839526 filed against xml-core by Adrian Bunk.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 77 package reviews have been added, 178 have been updated and 80 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 6 issue types have been updated:

Added clilibs_line_order, records_build_flags and hevea_captures_build_path.
Removed locale_dependent_symbol_order_by_lorder, fixed in bsdmainutils/9.0.11.
Updated diffoscope_runs_forever, captures_build_path.

Weekly QA work As part of reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

Adrian Bunk (3)
Chris Lamb (12)
Lucas Nussbaum (3)
Sebastian Reichel (1)

diffoscope development A new version of diffoscope 61 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

Ximin Luo:
- Improve the CLI --help text and add an --output-empty option.
Chris Lamb:
- Add a progress bar and show it if stdout is a TTY. You can read more about it here. It can also be read by higher-level programs via the --status-fd CLI option.
Maria Glukhova:
- Behaviour improvements in the case of OS-level errors.
Mattia Rizzolo:
- Testing and packaging improvements.

Post-release there were further contributions from:

Chris Lamb:
- Code architecture improvements.
Maria Glukhova:
- Testing improvements.

reprotest development A new version of reprotest 0.3.2 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from:

Ximin Luo:
- Add a --diffoscope-arg CLI option to pass extra args to diffoscope.

Post-release there were further contributions from:

Chris Lamb:
- Code quality improvements.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

Hans-Christoph Steiner continued work on setting up reproducible tests for F-Droid.
Holger cleaned up the script creating the page showing breakages, so that it now also cleans up some of the breakage it finds.
IRC notifications about diffoscope crashes and artifacts available for investigations have been dropped; instead the breakages page has a permanent pointer. (h01ger)
IRC notifications from the automatic package scheduler and status changes for packages have been moved -- as a temporary trial -- to #debian-reproducible-changes on irc.oftc.net (Mattia).

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

5 October 2016

Russ Allbery: Review: Uprooted

Review: Uprooted, by Naomi Novik

Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	2015
Printing:	2016
ISBN:	0-8041-7904-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	465

Agnieszka lives in a small peasant village on the border of the Wood. The malevolent forest is the source of dark corruption, illnesses that turn people into ravaging monsters, and lures and traps for the unwary who disappear into the Wood. Or, worse, return and appear the same, and then do horrific things, smiling all the time. This neighboring storehouse of horrors is not what occupies Agnieszka's thoughts at the start of the book, however. Instead, it's the village's protector against the Wood: the Dragon. The Dragon is not a flying lizard; he's a man, a wizard who has lived in his tower for living memory and fights back against the Wood with magic. And, once every ten years, he takes a girl from a village. They go to his tower and serve him for ten years, and then leave, generally to move to some far-away city and never return to their village. Each says afterwards that the Dragon never did anything untoward to them. No one entirely believes them. Agnieszka was born in the year that makes her one of the candidates for being taken by the Dragon. But that's not what she's worried about. She's known for certain since she was a small child that her best friend, Kasia, would be the one taken by the Dragon. Kasia was always the exceptional one: the most beautiful, the most talented, the one who stood out among all the girls in the neighboring villages. And she's about to be taken out of Agnieszka's life, to a mysterious and unknown fate. It will hopefully surprise no fantasy reader (and hence not be much of a spoiler) that awkward Agnieszka, who can't keep her dress unstained for more than five minutes and has none of the skills that Kasia has, is the one the Dragon chooses. I think a warning is important here, since I'm about to recommend this book highly. However, it is very fond of its stereotypes. Most of the other wizards are men, and they focus on books and formal understanding of magic. The one female wizard whose magic we see in some detail is a smith described as wearing male clothing. Uprooted then introduces a different type of magic that's much more intuitive, described largely through natural metaphors, and doesn't play well with formal rules... and is practiced by a woman. This is, unfortunately, persistently gendered, although the book never comes right out and calls it female magic. There are also quite a few traditional gender roles scattered through the rest of the book (although it does get a bit of a pass due to its obvious deep roots in traditional fairy tales). Uprooted is still an excellent book despite this, but it's best read when you're in the mood to tolerate this sort of story. If you go in feeling irritated about gender stereotypes, you'll probably get frustrated by the book, overwhelming its merits. Best saved for a forgiving mood (or skipped entirely if this style of story just doesn't sound fun). The beginning of Uprooted is about Agnieszka finding her feet in her bizarre arrangement with the Dragon, who turns out to be nothing like what either her or the reader expected. I think her panic and confusion drags on a little long, but Novik makes up for that by the delightful descriptions of Agnieszka's eventual understanding and the Dragon's frustrated consternation. Fantasy is full of prickly, arrogant wizards, but few have felt quite so human to me as the Dragon. Agnieszka is clearly nothing like he expected or like he's dealt with before, and his path from arrogant contempt to outrage to prickly confusion to uncomfortable respect is a delight. This is, of course, a coming-of-age story for Agnieszka, and by the end the book deals with both the origins of the Wood and some sort of resolution. But the path there wanders through an exploration of a rather interesting magic system, quite a lot of court intrigue, and Agnieszka persistently defying everyone's expectations. As with the introductory panic and confusion, I could have done with less of her awkward bumbling at court (in general, I think the book could have been a bit tighter), but once I reached the second half of the book I couldn't put it down. I've previously read a fair chunk of Novik's Temeraire series, which were fun (at least in spots), but Uprooted is definitely better. There is a fair bit of horror-tinged stuff in this book, as well as the stereotypes mentioned above, so it won't be for everyone. But I usually hate horror of any kind, and I still loved this. Agnieszka is sufficiently positive and solution-focused that the story never falls into the constant fear and panic and disgust that I particularly dislike in horror. If you're in the mood for a good fantasy coming-of-age story coupled with delightful disruption of the life of a prickly, cynical, but surprisingly ethical wizard, give this one a try. Rating: 8 out of 10

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGSL 0.3.1

A new version of RcppGSL in now on CRAN and in Debian. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp package. This release is one that entirely focused on maintenance. CRAN asked us to change on aspect relative to vignettes, and we added a few more small updates related entirely to packaging. In other words, no user-facing changes. The NEWS file entries follows below:

Changes in version 0.3.1 (2016-10-02)

The unit test driver was updated and simplified, (by request of CRAN) no longer leaves files in '/tmp', and removes two unexported (and unused) test helper functions (PR #10)

Switched to run.sh for Travis (PR #11)

Use canonical CRAN URLs in README.md

Restored 'boxed' display of code in vignette (PR #12)

Courtesy of CRANberries, a summary of changes to the most recent release is available. More information is on the RcppGSL page. Questions, comments etc should go to the issue tickets at the GitHub repo.

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

4 October 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in September 2016

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS With the increasing number of paid contributors, easy fixes (CVE with patches available) tend to be processed rather quickly. All the package I worked on had issues that were open for a long time because they were hard to handle. I prepared DLA-613-1 fixing 3 CVE on roundcube. The fix required to manually backport the CRSF handling code which was not available in the wheezy version. I spent almost 8 hours on roundcube. Then I started to work on tiff3. I reviewed many CVE: CVE-2016-3658, CVE-2015-7313, CVE-2015-7554, CVE-2015-8668, CVE-2016-5318, CVE-2016-3625, CVE-2016-5319. I updated their status for tiff3 in wheezy, requested reproducer files to people who reported the CVE when the files were not publicly available and made sure that everything was recorded in the upstream bug tracker. The 4.25 hours I spent on the package were not enough to work on patches, so I put the package back in the work queue. GNOME 3.22 transition I uploaded a new gnome-shell-timer that would work with GNOME 3.21 that had been uploaded to sid. Unfortunately, that new GNOME (and GTK+) version caused many regressions that affected Debian Testing (and thus Kali) users in particular in gnome-control-center. I uploaded a new version fixing some of those issues and I reported a bunch of them to upstream too (#771515, #771517, #771696). Kali I worked on #836211 creating a dpkg patch to work-around the overlayfs limitation (we use it in Kali because persistence of live system relies on overlayfs) and I contacted the upstream overlayfs maintainer to hopefully get a proper fix on the overlayfs side instead. I uploaded radcli 1.2.6-2.1 to fix RC bug #825121 as the package was removed from testing and openvas depends on it in Kali. As part of the pkg-security team, I sponsored/uploaded acccheck and arp-scan for Marcos Fouces, and p0f 3.09b as well. Misc Debian work Distro Tracker. I tested, fixed and merged Paul Wise s patch integrating multiarch hints into tracker.debian.org (#833623). Debian Handbook. I enabled the new Vietnamese translation on debian-handbook.info and updated all translations with Weblate updates. systemd units for apache2. I prepared systemd units for apache2 which I submitted in #798430. With approval of Stefan Fritsch, I committed my work to the git repository and then uploaded the result in version 2.4.23-5. Hindsight packaging. I first packaged lua-sandbox (#838969) which is a dependency of Hindsight and then Hindsight itself (#838968). In this process, I opened a couple of upstream tickets. PIE by default. I uploaded a new version of cpputest compiled with -fPIC so shat executable linking to its static library can be compiled with -fPIE (#837363, forwarded upstream here). Bugs filed. Bad homepage link in haskell-dice-entropy-conduit. Inconsistent options --onlyscripts and --noscripts in debhelper. pidgin entry in security-support-limited is out of date in debian-security-support. New upstream version (2.0.2) in puppet-lint. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

3 October 2016

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in September 2016

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Android, Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Android

I sponsored a new upstream release of android-platform-tools-base prepared by Kai-Chung Yan and Chirayu Desai.

Debian Games

I packaged a new upstream release of hyperrogue, a rogue-like game settled in a non-euclidian world, fixing one RC bug (#811991). I uploaded two more revisions later that addressed build failures on arm64 and hppa.
I fixed more RC bugs (build failures with GCC-6) in torus-trooper (#835712) and fife (#811858).
I packaged new upstream releases of pygame-sdl2, renpy, freeorion, netrek-client-cow, redeclipse, redeclipse-data, hitori, atomix, adonthell and adonthell-data.
I updated gtkballs and fixed a documentation bug (#820588) but also a /usr/share/locale issue that prevented the actual use of the translations.
I raised the severity of #797998 to grave in unknown-horizons because the game cannot be started currently. In order to fix this issue I packaged a new build-dependency, fifechan, which is currently awaiting approval by the FTP team. As soon as fifechan got accepted I will upload new upstream releases of fife and unknown-horizons.
I released debian-games 1.5, a Debian blend and collection of games metapackages.
Hardening-wrapper has been deprecated for some time and this issue became release critical now. I updated cookietool, alex4 and netrek-client-cow to use dpkg-buildflags instead.
Together with Russel Coker I packaged a new upstream release of warzone2100. This package would benefit from a new regular uploader. If you are interested in it, please get involved. (Same story for hyperrogue, redeclipse, renpy and unknown-horizons and many other games.)
I started a new Bullet transition (#839243). The package is currently waiting in the NEW queue and I hope to complete this work in October.
I triaged #838199 and reassigned the issue to fonts-roboto. Initially I prepared an NMU but eventually the maintainer uploaded a new revision himself. It is now possible to install the hinted and unhinted versions of fonts-roboto together which also resolved former installation problems with kodi and freeorion.

Debian Java

I packaged new upstream releases of undertow, activemq and jackrabbit.
I fixed RC bugs in libphonenumber (#836768), wagon2 (#837022) and activemq (#839244).
I updated syncany in experimental and simplified the packaging a little. Unfortunately upstream has been on hiatus for the past year and we haven t seen new releases in the meantime. Nevertheless give it a try, even though it is still alpha software, it s an useful cloud-storage and synchronization tool.
I sponsored a new upstream release of freeplane for Felix Natter.
I prepared and uploaded security updates for jackrabbit and zookeeper in Jessie.

Debian LTS This was my eight month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 12,25 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

From 12. September until 19. September I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I triaged bugs in tiff3, mysql-5.5, curl, dropbear, mantis, icu, dwarfutils, jackrabbit, zendframework, zookeeper and graphicsmagick. For the latter I skimmed through all commits since the last version to identify the patches that fix the recent issues in graphicsmagick. I also answered questions on the mailing list and contacted Diego Biurrun again about his progress with libav. It is now anticipated that Hugo Lefeuvre and Diego will issue a new libav security release this month.
I reviewed and tested a patch by Rapha l Hertzog for roundcube.
DLA-629-1. Issued a security update for jackrabbit fixing 1 CVE.
DLA-630-1. Issued a security update for zookeeper fixing 1 CVE.
DLA-633-1. Issued a security update for wordpress fixing 7 CVE. This one also required backports of certain functions from newer releases and a database upgrade that required careful testing.
I also issued DLA-622-1 and DLA-623-1, two security issues that I already mentioned last month. It was discovered that Debian s versions of Tomcat were vulnerable to a root privilege escalation issue. However it was also necessary that another exploit, for instance in a web application, could be used to gain write access as the tomcat user. Former security issues were already fixed and new ones are not known. Nevertheless since a zero-day exploit could not be ruled out, the issue was embargoed for a month to give other distributions time to fix this issue as well. You can read more about this topic at legalhackers.com.

Non-maintainer uploads

I fixed various RC bugs in several games that are not maintained by the Games Team. The following games will be available in Stretch again soon: solarwolf, enigma, open-invaders, crrcsim, noiz2sa, csmash, csmash-demosong and glob2.

Misc

I packaged a new upstream release of MediathekView.
I uploaded a new revision of xarchiver and applied a patch from Helmut Grohne that made it possible to cross-build the package.

Matthew Garrett: The importance of paying attention in building community trust

Trust is important in any kind of interpersonal relationship. It's inevitable that there will be cases where something you do will irritate or upset others, even if only to a small degree. Handling small cases well helps build trust that you will do the right thing in more significant cases, whereas ignoring things that seem fairly insignificant (or saying that you'll do something about them and then failing to do so) suggests that you'll also fail when there's a major problem. Getting the small details right is a major part of creating the impression that you'll deal with significant challenges in a responsible and considerate way.

This isn't limited to individual relationships. Something that distinguishes good customer service from bad customer service is getting the details right. There are many industries where significant failures happen infrequently, but minor ones happen a lot. Would you prefer to give your business to a company that handles those small details well (even if they're not overly annoying) or one that just tells you to deal with them?

And the same is true of software communities. A strong and considerate response to minor bug reports makes it more likely that users will be patient with you when dealing with significant ones. Handling small patch contributions quickly makes it more likely that a submitter will be willing to do the work of making more significant contributions. These things are well understood, and most successful projects have actively worked to reduce barriers to entry and to be responsive to user requests in order to encourage participation and foster a feeling that they care.

But what's often ignored is that this applies to other aspects of communities as well. Failing to use inclusive language may not seem like a big thing in itself, but it leaves people with the feeling that you're less likely to do anything about more egregious exclusionary behaviour. Allowing a baseline level of sexist humour gives the impression that you won't act if there are blatant displays of misogyny. The more examples of these "insignificant" issues people see, the more likely they are to choose to spend their time somewhere else, somewhere they can have faith that major issues will be handled appropriately.

There's a more insidious aspect to this. Sometimes we can believe that we are handling minor issues appropriately, that we're acting in a way that handles people's concerns, while actually failing to do so. If someone raises a concern about an aspect of the community, it's important to discuss solutions with them. Putting effort into "solving" a problem without ensuring that the solution has the desired outcome is not only a waste of time, it alienates those affected even more - they're now not only left with the feeling that they can't trust you to respond appropriately, but that you will actively ignore their feelings in the process.

It's not always possible to satisfy everybody's concerns. Sometimes you'll be left in situations where you have conflicting requests. In that case the best thing you can do is to explain the conflict and why you've made the choice you have, and demonstrate that you took this issue seriously rather than ignoring it. Depending on the issue, you may still alienate some number of participants, but it'll be fewer than if you just pretend that it's not actually a problem.

One warning, though: while building trust in this way enhances people's willingness to join your community, it also builds expectations. If a significant issue does arise, and if you fail to handle it well, you'll burn a lot of that trust in the process. The fact that you've built that trust in the first place may be what saves your community from disintegrating completely, but people will feel even more betrayed if you don't actively work to rebuild it. And if there's a pattern of mishandling major problems, no amount of getting the details right will matter.

Communities that ignore these issues are, long term, likely to end up weaker than communities that pay attention to them. Making sure you get this right in the first place, and setting expectations that you will pay attention to your contributors, is a vital part of building a meaningful relationship between your community and its members.

comments

Shirish Agarwal: Using JOSM and gpx tracks

This would be a longish post. I had bought a Samsung Galaxy J-5/500 just a few days before Debconf16 which I had written about a bit earlier as well. As can be seen in the specs there isn t much to explore other than A-GPS. There were a couple of temperature apps. which I wanted to explore before buying the smartphone but as there were budget constraints and there weren t any good budget smartphones with environmental sensors built-in had to let go of those features. I was looking for a free app. which would have OSM support and came across osmand . I was looking for an app. which would have support for OSM and support for the gpx format. I was planning to use osmand in South Africa but due to the over-whelming nature of meeting people, seeing places and just being didn t actually get the time and place to try it. Came back home and a month and a half passed. In-between I had done some simple small tracks but nothing major. This week-end I got the opportunity as I got some free data balance from my service provider (a princely 50 MB) as well an opportunity to go about 40 odd kms. from the city. I had read about osmand and was looking if the off-line method worked or not from the webpage Works online (fast) or offline (no roaming charges when you are abroad) So armed with a full battery I started the journey which took about an hour and half even though technically it was a holiday. On the way back, got a different route and recorded that as well. The app. worked flawlessly. I was able to get the speed of the vehicle and everything. The only thing I haven t understood till date is how to select waypoints but other than that I got the whole route on my mobile. What was cool to see that on most roads, at least through the app. there were speed limits. Now I don t know from where the data was getting there. Most city roads had 65 and some roads had 55 at the maximum. I am assuming that it was at km/hr as also shared later. Just for fun I also looked at the gpx file after copying it from mobile to hdd (an extract) https://paste.debian.net/853231/ While it s not a complete extract, What was interesting for me to note here is the time was in UTC . What was also interesting is that in the gpx tracks I also saw some entries about speed as can be seen in the paste above. Although it doesn t say whether it was in km/hr or mph, I believe it probably is km/hr. as that is the unit I defined in the app. Anyways, the next step was trying to see which tool was good enough to show me the tracks with tiles underneath and labels of places, paths etc. I tried three tools 1. jmapviewer this didn t work at all.
2. gnome-maps this worked remarkably well but has numerous gtk3.0 warnings

 [shirish@debian] - [~/osmand] - [10149]

 [$] gnome-maps 2016-10-01_08-11_Sat.gpx


(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk.css:63:28: The :prelight pseudo-class is deprecated. Use :hover instead.
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk.css:73:35: The :prelight pseudo-class is deprecated. Use :hover instead.
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: application.css:14:30: The style property GtkButton:image-spacing is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: application.css:15:31: The style property GtkWidget:interior-focus is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkClutterOffscreen 0x4c4f3f0 is drawn without a current allocation. This should not happen.

(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkImage 0x4ed4140 is drawn without a current allocation. This should not happen. Now I m not sure whether all of those are gtk3+ issues or me running them under Debian MATE. I know that there are issues with mate and gtk3+ as had been told/shared a few times in p.d.o. Anyways, one of the issues I encountered is that gnome-maps doesn t work in offline-mode, saw https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708799 . Also saw ~/.cache/champlain/osm-mapquest and the listing underneath is gibberish in the sense you don t know what it meant to do



 [shirish@debian] - [~/.cache/champlain/osm-mapquest] - [10163]

 [$] ll -h

drwx------  6 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11  2015 10

drwx------ 26 shirish shirish 4.0K Oct 24  2014 11

drwx------ 10 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11  2015 12

drwx------ 11 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11  2015 13

drwx------ 12 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11  2015 14

drwx------ 12 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11  2015 15

drwx------ 27 shirish shirish 4.0K Oct 24  2014 16

drwx------ 25 shirish shirish 4.0K Oct 24  2014 17

drwx------  4 shirish shirish 4.0K Mar  4  2014 3

drwx------  5 shirish shirish 4.0K Mar  4  2014 8

drwx------  9 shirish shirish 4.0K Mar 29  2014 9

What was/is interesting to see things like this maybe imagery offset

As I was in a moving vehicle, it isn t easy to know if the imagery is at fault or was it app. , sensor of my mobile ? Did see http://learnosm.org/en/josm/correcting-imagery-offset/ but as can be seen that requires more effort from my side. The last tool proved to be the most problematic 3. JOSM Getting the tracks into josm which was easily done. While firing up josm came across https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/13735 which I subsequently filed. One of the other first things which has been a major irritant for a long time is JOSM is, for a lack of better term, ugly. See the interface, especially the one having preferences, all cluttered look and specifically see the plugins corner/tab josm-preferences-plugin tab

The part about it being ugly, I dunno but have seen most java apps are a bit ugly. It is a bit generalist I know but that has been my experience with whatever little java apps. I have used. I don t know what the reasons for that are, maybe because java is known/rumoured to use lot of memory which seems true in my case as well OR it doesn t have toolkits like gtk3+ or qt quick, although have to say that the looks have improved from before when I used it last some years ago



 [shirish@debian] - [~] - [10340]

 [$] ps -eo size,pid,user,command   awk '  hr=$1/1024 ; printf("%13.6f Mb ",hr)     for ( x=4 ; x<=NF ; x++ )   printf("%s ",$x)   print ""  '   grep josm

     0.324219 Mb /bin/sh /usr/bin/josm

   419.468750 Mb /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/bin/java -Djosm.restart=true -Djava.net.useSystemProxies=true -jar /usr/share/josm/josm.jar

This is when I m just opening josm and have not added any tracks or done any work. Now I wanted to explore the routing in good amount of detail on josm. This was easily said than done. When trying to get imagery I got the Download area too large issue/defect . Multiple tries didn t get me anywhere. Then hunting on the web came across the continous-download plugin which is part of the plugin infrastructure . This I found to be a very good tool. It downloads the tiles and puts them in ~/.josm/cache/tiles



 [shirish@debian] - [~/.josm/cache/tiles] - [10147]

 [$] ll -h

total 28M

-rw-r--r-- 1 shirish shirish  28M Oct  2 02:13 TMS_BLOCK_v2.data

-rw-r--r-- 1 shirish shirish 290K Oct  3 12:59 TMS_BLOCK_v2.key

-rw-r--r-- 1 shirish shirish    4 Oct  3 12:59 WMS_BLOCK_v2.key

-rw-r--r-- 1 shirish shirish    4 Oct  3 12:59 WMTS_BLOCK_v2.key

While unfortunately I cannot see this/make sense of it I m guessing it is some sort of database with key and data files. What did become apparent is that the OSM needs lots more love if it is to become something which can be used everyday. At the end I had to change the open-source gpx track file to a Google map kml file to be able to make sense as there are whole areas which need to be named, numbered etc. One of the newbie mistakes that I did was trying to use the slippy map in josm (using Openstreetmap/Mapnik at the back-end) to move/pan using the left-hand mouse button. It took me quite sometime to figure out that it is with right-hand mouse button that you can make the slippy map pan. This is different from almost all maps, gnome-maps uses the traditional left-hand button, Google maps also uses the same. I have filed it in upstream as https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/13751 . So at least, in these rounds it is gnome-maps which has kind of won even though it doesn t do any of the things that josm claims to do. I am sure there might be some interesting tricks and tips that people might have to share about mapping

Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Debconf16, #GNOME-MAPS, #JOSM, OSM

Russ Allbery: Review: Winds of Fury

Review: Winds of Fury, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Mage Winds #3
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	August 1994
ISBN:	0-88677-612-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	427

This is the concluding book of the Mage Winds trilogy and a direct sequel to Winds of Change. This series doesn't make sense to read out of order. In traditional fantasy trilogies of this type, the third book is often the best. The author can stop developing characters, building the world, and setting the scene and can get to the meat of the story. All the guns on the mantles go off, all the twists the author has been saving can be used, and there's usually a lot more action than in the second book of a trilogy. That is indeed the case here. I'm not sure Winds of Fury rises to the level of a good book, but if you're invested in the Valdemar story, it works better than the previous books of this series. As one might expect, the protagonists do return to Valdemar, finally. The method of that return makes sense of some things that happened in Winds of Change and is an entertaining surprise, although I wish more had been done with it through the rest of the book and we'd gotten more world-building details. I also like how Lackey handles the Valdemar reactions to the returning protagonists, and their own reactions to Valdemar. Lackey's characters might fit some heavy-handed stereotypes a bit too neatly, but they do grow and change over the course of a series, and the return home is a good technique for showing that. Lackey also throws in her final twist for the villains of this series at the start of this book, and it's a good one (if typical Lackey; she does love her abused youth characters). The villains are still far too one-dimensional and far too stereotyped evil, but the twist (which I'll avoid spoiling) does make that dynamic a bit more interesting. And she manages to get the reader to root for one evil over another, since one of them is at least competent. You'd think from the direction the series was taking that Winds of Fury would culminate in another epic war of magic, but not this book. Lackey takes a more personal and targeted approach, heavier on characterization and individual challenge. This gives Firesong a chance to grow into an almost-likable character and earn some of that empathy and insight that he'd gotten for free. Unfortunately, it sidelines Nyara a lot, and pushes her back into a stereotyped role, which made me sad. The series otherwise emphasizes the importance of magic users who know their own limitations and can thoughtfully use the power they have, but rarely extends that to Nyara herself. I would have much rather seen her play a role like that in the final climax instead of the one she played. This is partly made up for by centering Need in the story and having her play the key connecting role between two different threads of effort. Those are probably the best parts of this book. I wish the entire series had been told from Need's perspective, with a heavy helping of exasperated grumbling, although I don't think Lackey could have written that series. But what we get of her is a delight. The gryphons, sadly, are relegated to fairly minor roles, but we get a few more tantalizing hints about the Companions to make up for it. (Although not enough to figure out their great mystery, which isn't revealed until future books.) This series is nowhere near as good as I remembered, sadly, but I did enjoy bits of it. If you like Valdemar in general, the world building is fairly important and reveals quite a lot about the underpinnings and power dynamics of Lackey's universe. I'm not sure that makes up for some tedious characters, poor communication, and some uncomfortable and dragging sections, but if you're trying to get the whole Valdemar story, the events here are rather important. And this ending was at least entertaining, if not great fiction. Rating: 6 out of 10

2 October 2016

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2016

FTP assistant This month I was rather busy with other stuff and only marked 191 packages for accept and rejected 21 packages. I also sent 6 emails to maintainers asking questions. Debian LTS This was my twenty-seventh month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 12.25h. During that time I did an upload of php5 fixing 17 CVEs and two additional bugs, I uploaded mactelnet and fixed one CVE. I also prepared a package for testing of zendframework, which will fix one CVE. Unfortunately my bind9 upload needed to be postponed as Florian Weimer found an incomplete patch of a previous CVE. I am trying to fix that as well. I also had some progress with the asterisk CVEs and of course the next round of php5 patches is waiting This month I also had a few days of frontdesk work at the beginning of the month and a few days at the end. Other stuff For the Alljoyn framework I uploaded alljoyn-services-1604 and as I forgot a Conflict:, I had to take care of RC-bugs: #836717, #836718 and #836719. Thanks a lot to Ralf Treinen for his automatic installation tests. As mentioned earlier, openzwave is on its way to the Debian archive. While it is still in non-free, the author of a used library gave his permission to relicense this code, so the way to main is paved now.

Next.

Previous.