Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday November 5 and Saturday November 11 2017: Upcoming events On November 17th Chris Lamb will present at Open Compliance Summit, Yokohama, Japan on how reproducible builds ensures the long-term sustainability of technology infrastructure. We plan to hold an assembly at 34C3 - hope to see you there! LEDE CI tests Thanks to the work of lynxis, Mattia and h01ger, we're now testing all LEDE packages in our setup. This is our first result for the ar71xx target: "502 (100.0%) out of 502 built images and 4932 (94.8%) out of 5200 built packages were reproducible in our test setup." - see below for details how this was achieved. Bootstrapping and Diverse Double Compilation As a follow-up of a discussion on bootstrapping compilers we had on the Berlin summit, Bernhard and Ximin worked on a Proof of Concept for Diverse Double Compilation of tinycc (aka tcc). Ximin Luo did a successful diverse-double compilation of tinycc git HEAD using gcc-7.2.0, clang-4.0.1, icc-18.0.0 and pgcc-17.10-0 (pgcc needs to triple-compile it). More variations are planned for the future, with the eventual aim to reproduce the same binaries cross-distro, and extend it to test GCC itself. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches filed upstream:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • clang - ASLR affects objective-C binaries.
• Chris Lamb:
  • nbsphinx (merged) - Random UUIDs used as element selectors.
  • stardicter (merged) - SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support.
  • stetl - Build path in documentation.

Patches filed in Debian:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • #881231 filed against chasen - Uninitialized memory from struct padding written into data files.
• Adrian Bunk:
  • #881453 filed against primesieve - FTBFS.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #881089 filed against stardicter - (merged) SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
  • #881094 filed against nbsphinx - random UUIDs.
  • #881157 filed against designate - build path.
  • #881217 filed against python-stetl - build path.
  • #881258 filed against sphinx-intl - drop date.
  • #881259 filed against soundmodem - build path.
  • #881262 filed against node-module-deps - build path.
  • #881474 filed against phatch - random memory address.
• Daniel Kahn Gillmor:
  • #881152 filed against npth - build path.

Patches filed in OpenSUSE:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • i4l-base (merged) - Uninitialized memory written to output.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 73 package reviews have been added, 88 have been updated and 40 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 4 issue types have been updated:

• Add randomness_in_files_generated_by_pinyin_gen_binary_files.
• Add build_path_captured_in_assembly_objects.
• Add timestamps_in_ifo_files_generated_by_python_stardicter.
• Update timestamps_in_source_generated_by_rcc.

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (69)
• Andreas Beckmann (3)
• Dmitry Shachnev (1)
• Graham Inggs (1)

diffoscope development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded version 88~bpo9+1 to stretch-backports. reprotest development

• Ximin Luo:
  • build: add comment that util-linux confirmed bug in nsenter, awaiting fix.
  • Make --print-sudoers work for --env-build as well.

reproducible-website development

• Holger Levsen:
  • rws3: add OTF as sponsor
  • rws3: add F-Droid, riot-os.org
• Chris Lamb:
  • Move the "contribute" page from the Debian wiki to /contribute/ on our main website.
• Eitan Adler:
  • Fix typo in FreeBSD mailing list.

theunreproduciblepackage development

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • aslr: document per-process workaround
  • aslr: add examples

tests.reproducible-builds.org in detail

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • reproducible archlinux: enable debugging mode
  • reproducible archlinux: don't use hidden files for the package lists
  • reproducible fedora: don't use hidden files for the package lists
  • udd-query: move from public-udd-mirror.xvm.mit.edu to udd-mirror.debian.net
  • udd-query: remove the temporary file with a trap in case this script is called with the wrong argument, and in case of failures, etc, the temporary file would be left around otherwise
  • reproducible debian: schroot-create: drop the reproducible gpg keyring into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ instead of using apt-key add
  • reproducible debian: setup_pbuilder: drop the reproducible gpg keyring into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ instead of using apt-key add
  • reprodocible debian: setup_pbuilder: stop installing gnupg2 in our chroot, not needed anymore now
  • Mattia also merged and deployed some commits from others this week.
• Alexander 'lynxis' Couzens
  • reproducible_lede: use correct place/variable to save results: Results on remote nodes are expected to be under $TMPDIR, which defined by openwrt_build. RESULTSDIR is undefined on the remote node
  • reproducible_lede: enable building all packages again, after it was disabled to improve the debug speed.
  • reproducible_lede: correct given path for node_cleanup_tmpdirs & node_save_logs- reproducible_lede: enable CONFIG_BUILDBOT to reduce inodes while building.
• kpcyrd:
  • reproducible-archlinux: try porting abs to asp
  • reproducible-archlinux: explicitly sync packages
  • reproducible-archlinux: use sudo for pacman
• Hans-Christoph Steiner:
  • reproducible fdroid: point jenkins to canonical URL
  • reproducible_fdroid: separate testsuite into its own job
  • reproducible fdroid: sync upstream script names with jenkins.debian.net, make things self-documenting by reusing the same names everywhere.
  • reproducible_fdroid_test: make script executable
• Chris Lamb:
  • Move some IRC announcements to #debian-reproducible-changes.
• Holger Levsen:
  • reproducible LEDE: try to deal gracefully with problems and report
  • as usual, Holger merged many of the above commits and deployed them.

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

Another videoteam report! We've now been hacking for a full day and we are slowly starting to be productive. It's always hard to get back in a project when you haven't touched it in a while... Anyway, let's start this report with some important announcement: we finally have been able to snap a good picture of the airbnb's cat! No more nagging me about the placeholder image from Wikipedia I used in yesterday's report! Set up Here's what the team did today: tumbleweed Stefano started the day by hacking away on our video archive. We eventually want to upload all our videos to YouTube to give them exposure, but sadly our archive metadata is in a pretty poor shape. With the script tumbleweed wrote, we can scrape the archive for matches against the old DebConf's pentabarf XML we have. tumbleweed also helped Ivo with the ansible PXE setup he's working on. Some recent contributions from a collaborator implemented new features (like a nice menu to choose from) but also came with a few annoying bugs. ivodd Ivo continued working on the PXE setup today. He also tried to break our ansible setup by using fresh installs with different user cases (locales, interfaces, etc.), with some success. The reason he and Stefano are working so hard on the PXE boot is that we had a discussion about the future of our USB install method. The general consensus on this was although we would not remove it, we would not actively maintain it anymore. PXE is less trouble for multiple machines. For single machines or if you don't control the DHCP server, using ansible manually on a fresh Debian install will be the recommended way. olasd After a very long drive, olasd arrived late in the evening with all our gear. Hurray! We were thus able to set up some test boxes and start wiring the airbnb properly. Tomorrow will certainly be more productive with all this stuff at our disposition. pollo Today I mainly worked on setting up our documentation website. After some debate, we decided that sphinx was the right tool for the job. I am a few pages in and if I work well I think we'll have something to show for at the end of the sprint! I also was thrown back into ansible after witnessing a bug in the locale management. I'm still rusty, but it's slowly coming back to me. Let's end this blog post with a picture of the neon pineapple that sits on the wall of the solarium.

Following up on propelling disk images, Propellor can now build custom ARM disk images for a variety of different ARM boards. The disk image build can run on a powerful laptop or server, so it's super fast and easy compared with manually installing Debian on an ARM board. Here's a simple propellor config for a Olimex LIME board, with ssh access and a root password:

lime :: Host
lime = host "lime.example.com" $ props
    & osDebian Unstable ARMHF
    & Machine.olimex_A10_OLinuXino_LIME
    & hasPartition (partition EXT4  mountedAt  "/"  setSize  MegaBytes 8192)
        & hasPassword (User "root")
        & Ssh.installed
    & Ssh.permitRootLogin (RootLogin True)

To make a disk image for that board, I only have to add this property to my laptop:

& imageBuiltFor lime
    (RawDiskImage "/srv/lime.img")
    (Debootstrapped mempty)

Propellor knows what kernel to install and how to make the image bootable for a bunch of ARM boards, including the Olimex LIME, the SheevaPlug, Banana Pi, and CubieTruck. To build the disk image targeting ARM, propellor uses qemu. So it's helpful that, after the first build, propellor incrementally updates disk images, quite quickly and efficiently. Once the board has the image installed, you can run propellor on it to further maintain it, and if there's a hardware problem, you can quickly replace it with an updated image.

computer tower that I will be maintaining with propellor

It's fairly simple to teach propellor about other ARM boards, so it should be quite easy to keep propellor knowing about all ARM boards supported by Debian (and other distros). Here's how I taught it about the Olimex LIME:

olimex_A10_OLinuXino_LIME :: Property (HasInfo + DebianLike)
olimex_A10_OLinuXino_LIME = FlashKernel.installed "Olimex A10-OLinuXino-LIME"
     requires  sunixi "A10-OLinuXino-Lime"
     requires  armmp

My home server is a CubieTruck which serves as a wireless access point, solar panel data collector, and git-annex autobuilder. It's deployed from a disk image built by propellor, using this config. I've been involved with building disk image for ARM boards for a long time -- it was part of my job for five years -- and this is the first time I've been entirely happy with the process.

First day of the videoteam autumn sprint! Well, I say first day, but in reality it's more day 0. Even though most of us have arrived in Cambridge already, we are still missing a few people. Last year we decided to sprint in Paris because most of our video gear is stocked there. This year, we instead chose to sprint a few days before the Cambridge Mini-Debconf to help record the conference afterwards. Since some of us arrived very late and the ones who did arrive early are still mostly jet lagged (that includes me), I'll use this post to introduce the space we'll be working from this week and our general plan for the sprint. House Party After some deliberations, we decided to rent a house for a week in Cambridge: finding a work space to accommodate us and all our gear proved difficult and we decided mixing accommodation and work would be a good idea. I've only been here for a few hours, but I have to say I'm pretty impressed by the airbnb we got. Last time I checked (it seems every time I do, some new room magically appears), I counted 5 bedrooms, 6 beds, 5 toilets and 3 shower rooms. Heck, there's even a solarium and a training room with weights and a punching bag on the first floor. Having a whole house to ourselves also means we have access to a functional kitchen. I'd really like to cook at least a few meals during the week. There's also a cat! It's not the house's cat per say, but it's been hanging out around the house for most of the day and makes cute faces trying to convince us to let it come inside. Nice try cat. Nice try. Here are some glamour professional photos of what the place looks like on a perfect summer day, just for the kick of it: Of course, reality has trouble matching all the post-processing filters. Plan for the week Now on a more serious note; apart from enjoying the beautiful city of Cambridge, here's what the team plans to do this week: tumbleweed Stefano wants to continue refactoring our ansible setup. A lot of things have been added in the last year, but some of it are hacks we should remove and implement correctly. highvoltage Jonathan won't be able to come to Cambridge, but plans to work remotely, mainly on our desktop/xfce session implementation. Another pile of hacks waiting to be cleaned! ivodd Ivo has been working a lot of the pre-ansible part of our installation and plans to continue working on that. At the moment, creating an installation USB key is pretty complicated and he wants to make that simpler. olasd Nicolas completely reimplemented our streaming setup for DC17 and wants to continue working on that. More specifically, he wants to write scripts to automatically setup and teardown - via API calls - the distributed streaming network we now use. Finding a way to push TLS certificates to those mirrors, adding a live stream viewer on video.debconf.org and adding a viewer to our archive are also things he wants to look at. pollo For my part, I plan to catch up with all the commits in our ansible repository I missed since last year's sprint and work on documentation. It would be very nice if we could have a static website describing our work so that others (at mini-debconfs for examples) could replicate it easily. If I have time, I'll also try to document all the ansible roles we have written. Stay tuned for more daily reports!

It finally happened On the 6th of April 2017, I finally took the plunge and applied for Debian Developer status. On 1 August, during DebConf in Montr al, my application was approved. If you re paying attention to the dates you might notice that that was nearly 4 months ago already. I was trying to write a story about how it came to be, but it ended up long. Really long (current draft is around 20 times longer than this entire post). So I decided I d rather do a proper bio page one day and just do a super short version for now so that someone might end up actually reading it. How it started In 1999 no wait, I can t start there, as much as I want to, this is a short post, so In 2003, I started doing some contract work for the Shuttleworth Foundation. I was interested in collaborating with them on tuXlabs, a project to get Linux computers into schools. For the few months before that, I was mostly using SuSE Linux. The open source team at the Shuttleworth Foundation all used Debian though, which seemed like a bizarre choice to me since everything in Debian was really old and its boot-floppies installer program kept crashing on my very vanilla computers. My contract work then later turned into a full-time job there. This was a big deal for me, because I didn t want to support Windows ever again, and I didn t ever think that it would even be possible for me to get a job where I could work on free software full time. Since everyone in my team used Debian, I thought that I should probably give it another try. I did, and I hated it. One morning I went to talk to my manager, Thomas Black, and told him that I just don t get it and I need some help. Thomas was a big mentor to me during this phase. He told me that I should try upgrading to testing, which I did, and somehow I ended up on unstable, and I loved it. Before that I used to subscribe to a website called freshmeat that listed new releases of upstream software and then, I would download and compile it myself so that I always had the newest versions of everything. Debian unstable made that whole process obsolete, and I became a huge fan of it. Early on I also hit a problem where two packages tried to install the same file, and I was delighted to find how easily I could find package state and maintainer scripts and fix them to get my system going again. Thomas told me that anyone could become a Debian Developer and maintain packages in Debian and that I should check it out and joked that maybe I could eventually snap up highvoltage@debian.org . I just laughed because back then you might as well have told me that I could run for president of the United States, it really felt like something rather far-fetched and unobtainable at that point, but the seed was planted :) Ubuntu and beyond One day, Thomas told me that Mark is planning to provide official support for Debian unstable. The details were sparse, but this was still exciting news. A few months later Thomas gave me a CD with just warty written on it and said that I should install it on a server so that we can try it out. It was great, it used the new debian-installer and installed fine everywhere I tried it, and the software was nice and fresh. Later Thomas told me that this system is going to be called Ubuntu and the desktop edition has naked people on it. I wasn t sure what he meant and was kind of dumbfounded so I just laughed and said something like Uh ok . At least it made a lot more sense when I finally saw the desktop pre-release version and when it got the byline Linux for Human Beings . Fun fact, one of my first jobs at the foundation was to register the ubuntu.com domain name. Unfortunately I found it was already owned by a domain squatter and it was eventually handled by legal. Closer to Ubuntu s first release, Mark brought over a whole bunch of Debian developers that was working on Ubuntu over to the foundation and they were around for a few days getting some sun. Thomas kept saying Go talk to them! Go talk to them! , but I felt so intimidated by them that I couldn t even bring myself to walk up and say hello. In the interest of keeping this short, I m leaving out a lot of history but later on, I read through the Debian packaging policy and really started getting into packaging and also discovered Daniel Holbach s packaging tutorials on YouTube. These helped me tremendously. Some day (hopefully soon), I d like to do a similar video series that might help a new generation of packagers. I ve also been following DebConf online since DebConf 7, which was incredibly educational for me. Little did I know that just 5 years later I would even attend one, and another 5 years after that I d end up being on the DebConf Committee and have also already been on a local team for one. It s been a long journey for me and I would like to help anyone who is also interested in becoming a Debian maintainer or developer. If you ever need help with your package, upload it to https://mentors.debian.net and if I have some spare time I ll certainly help you out and sponsor an upload. Thanks to everyone who have helped me along the way, I really appreciate it!

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In October, about 197 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 21h (out of 16h allocated + 8.75h remaining, thus keeping 3.75h for November).
• Ben Hutchings did 20 hours (out of 15h allocated + 9 extra hours, thus keeping 4 extra hours for November).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 7 hours (out of 20.75 hours allocated + 1.5 hours remaining, thus keeping 15.25 hours for November).
• Guido G nther did 6.5 hours (out of 11h allocated + 1 extra hour, thus keeping 5.5h for November).
• Hugo Lefeuvre did 20h.
• Lucas Kanashiro did 2 hours (out of 5h allocated, thus keeping 3 hours for November).
• Markus Koschany did 19 hours (out of 20.75h allocated, thus keeping 1.75 extra hours for November).
• Ola Lundqvist did 7.5h (out of 7h allocated + 0.5 extra hours).
• Rapha l Hertzog did 13.5 hours (out of 12h allocated + 1.5 extra hours).
• Roberto C. Sanchez did 11 hours (out of 20.75 hours allocated + 14.75 hours remaining, thus keeping 24.50 extra hours for November, he will give back remaining hours at the end of the month).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 20.75 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours increased slightly to 183 hours per month. With the increasing number of security issues to deal with, and with the number of open issues not really going down, I decided to bump the funding target to what amounts to 1.5 full-time position. The security tracker currently lists 50 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 36 (we re a bit behind in CVE triaging apparently). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 25 months)
• GitHub (for 16 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 41 months)
• Blablacar (for 40 months)
• Linode (for 30 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 19 months)
• Plat Home (for 19 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 40 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 40 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 38 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 35 months)
• Dalenys (for 31 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 26 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 26 months)
• Sonus Networks (for 20 months)
• maxcluster GmbH (for 14 months)
• Exonet B.V. (for 10 months)
• Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 4 months)
• Vente-privee.com
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 41 months)
• Evolix (for 41 months)
• Offensive Security (for 41 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 41 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 40 months)
• MyTux (for 40 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 38 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 38 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 36 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 35 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 35 months)
• NUMLOG (for 35 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 34 months)
• WinGo AG (for 34 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 30 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 28 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 25 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 23 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 17 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 17 months)
• Quarantainenet BV (for 17 months)
• RHX Srl (for 14 months)
• Bearstech (for 8 months)
• LiHAS (for 8 months)
• People Doc (for 5 months)
• Catalyst IT Ltd (for 3 months)

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I've been tempted to run own ElectrumX server for quite some. First attempt was to run this on Turris Omnia router, however that turned out to be impossible due to memory requirements both Bitcoind and ElectrumX have. This time I've dedicated host for this and it runs fine: The server runs Debian sid (probably it would be doable on stretch as well, but I didn't try much) and the setup was pretty simple. First we need to install some things - Bitcoin daemon and ElectrumX dependencies: Create users which will run the services: Now it's time to prepare configuration for the services. For Bitcoin it's quite simple - we need to configure RPC interface and enable transaction index in /home/bitcoind/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf: The ElectrumX configuration is quite simple as well and it's pretty well documented. I've decided to place it in /etc/electrumx.conf: I've decided to control both services using systemd, so it's matter of creating pretty simple units for that. Actually the Bitcoin one closely matches the one I've used on Turris Omnia and the ElectrumX the one they ship, but there are some minor changes. Systemd unit for ElectrumX in /etc/systemd/system/electrumx.service: And finally systemd unit for Bitcoin daemon in /etc/systemd/system/bitcoind.service: Now everything should be configured and it's time to start up the services: Now you have few days time until Bitcoin fetches whole blockchain and ElectrumX indexes that. If you happen to have another Bitcoin node running (or was running in past), you can speedup the process by copying blocks from that system (located in ~/.bitcoin/blocks/). Only get blocks from sources you trust absolutely as it might change your view of history, see Bitcoin wiki for more information on the topic. There is also magnet link in the ElectrumX docs to download ElectrumX database to speed up this process. This should be safe to download from untrusted source. The last think I'd like to mention is resources usage. You should have at least 4 GB of memory to run this, 8 GB is really preferred (both services consume around 4GB). On disk space, Bitcoin currently consumes 170 GB and ElectrumX 25 GB. Ideally all this should be running on the SSD disk. You can however offload some of the files to slower storage as old blocks are rarely accessed and this can save some space on your storage. Following script will move around 50 GB of blockchain data to /mnt/btc/blocks (use only when Bitcoin daemon is not running):

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

#!/bin/sh set -e DEST=/mnt/btc/blocks cd ~/.bitcoin/blocks/ find . -type f \( -name 'blk00[0123]*.dat' -o -name 'rev00[0123]*dat' \) sed 's@^\./@@' while read name ; do mv $name $DEST/$name ln -s $DEST/$name $name done

Anyway if you would like to use this server, configure btc.cihar.com in your Electrum client. If you find this howto useful, you can send some Satoshis to 3KPccmPtejpMczeog7dcFdqX4oTebYZ3tF.

Filed under: Crypto Debian English

About me Hello, world! For those who are meeting me for the first time, I am a 31 year old History teacher from Porto Alegre, Brazil. Some people might know me from the Python community, because I have been leading PyLadies Porto Alegre and helping organize Django Girls workshops in my state since 2016. If you don't, that's okay. Either way, it's nice to have you here. Ever since I learned about Rails Girls Summer of Code, during the International Free Software Forum - FISL 16, I have been wanting to get into a tech internship program. Google Summer of Code made into my radar as well, but I didn't really feel like I knew enough to try and get into those programs... until I found Outreachy. From their site:

Outreachy is an organization that provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

There were many good projects to choose from on this round, a lot of them with few requirements - and most with requirements that I believed I could fullfill, such as some knowledge of HTML, CSS, Python or Django. I ought to say that I am not an expert in any of those. And, since you're reading this, I'm going to be completely honest. Coding is hard. Coding is hard to learn, it takes a lot of studying and a lot of practice. Even though I have been messing around computers pretty much since I was a kid, because I was a girl lucky enough to have a father who owned a computer store, I hadn't began learning how to program until mid-2015 - and I am still learning. I think I became such an autodidact because I had to (and, of course, because I was given the conditions to be, such as having spare time to study when I wasn't at school). I had to get any and all information from my surroundings and turn into knowledge that I could use to achieve my goals. In a time when I could only get new computer games through a CD-ROM and the computer I was allowed to use didn't have a CD-ROM drive, I had to try and learn how to open a computer cabinet and connect/disconnect hardware properly, so I could use my brother's CD-ROM drive on the computer I was allowed to and install the games without anyone noticing. When, back in 1998, I couldn't connect to the internet because the computer I was allowed to use didn't have a modem, I had to learn about networks to figure out how to do it from my brother's computer on the LAN (local network). I would go to the community public library and read books and any tech magazines I could get my hands into (libraries didn't usually have computers to be used by the public back then). It was about 2002 when I learned how to create HTML sites by studying at the source code from pages I had saved to read offline in one of the very, very few times I was allowed to access the internet and browse the web. Of course, the site I created back then never saw the light of the day, because I didn't have really have internet access at home. So, how come it is that only now, 14 years later, I am trying to get into tech? Because when I finished high school in 2003, I was still a minor and my family didn't allow me to go to Vocational School and take an IT course. (Never mind that my own oldest brother had graduated in IT and working with for almost a decade.) I ended up going to study... teacher training in History as an undergrad course. A lot has happened since then. I took the exam to become a public school teacher and more than two years had passed without being called to work. I spent 3 years in odd-jobs that paid barely enough to pay rent (and, sometimes, not even that). Since the IT is the new thing and all jobs are in IT, finally, finally it seemed okay for me to take that Vocational School training in a public school - and so I did. I gotta say, I thought that while I studied, I would be able to get some sort of job or internship to help with my learning. After all, I had seen it easily happening with people I met before getting into the course. And by "people", of course, I mean white men. For me, it took a whole year of searching, trying and interviewing for me to get an internship related to the field - tech support in a school computer lab, running GNU/Linux. And, in that very same week, I was hired as a public school teacher. There is a lot more... actually, there is so much more to this story, but I think I have told enough for now. Enough to know where I came from and who I am, as of now. I hope you stick around. I am bound to write here every two weeks, so I guess I will see you then! o/

I ve been using Kitten Block for years, since I don t really need the blood pressure spike caused by accidentally following links to certain UK newspapers. Unfortunately it hasn t been ported to Firefox 57. I tried emailing the author a couple of months ago, but my email bounced. However, if your primary goal is just to block the websites in question rather than seeing kitten pictures as such (let s face it, the internet is not short of alternative sources of kitten pictures), then it s easy to do with uBlock Origin. After installing the extension if necessary, go to Tools Add-ons Extensions uBlock Origin Preferences My filters, and add www.dailymail.co.uk and www.express.co.uk, each on its own line. (Of course you can easily add more if you like.) Voil : instant tranquility. Incidentally, this also works fine on Android. The fact that it was easy to install a good ad blocker without having to mess about with a rooted device or strange proxy settings was the main reason I switched to Firefox on my phone.

Previously: v4.13. Linux kernel v4.14 was released this last Sunday, and there s a bunch of security things I think are interesting: vmapped kernel stack on arm64
Similar to the same feature on x86, Mark Rutland and Ard Biesheuvel implemented CONFIG_VMAP_STACK for arm64, which moves the kernel stack to an isolated and guard-paged vmap area. With traditional stacks, there were two major risks when exhausting the stack: overwriting the thread_info structure (which contained the addr_limit field which is checked during copy_to/from_user()), and overwriting neighboring stacks (or other things allocated next to the stack). While arm64 previously moved its thread_info off the stack to deal with the former issue, this vmap change adds the last bit of protection by nature of the vmap guard pages. If the kernel tries to write past the end of the stack, it will hit the guard page and fault. (Testing for this is now possible via LKDTM s STACK_GUARD_PAGE_LEADING/TRAILING tests.) One aspect of the guard page protection that will need further attention (on all architectures) is that if the stack grew because of a giant Variable Length Array on the stack (effectively an implicit alloca() call), it might be possible to jump over the guard page entirely (as seen in the userspace Stack Clash attacks). Thankfully the use of VLAs is rare in the kernel. In the future, hopefully we ll see the addition of PaX/grsecurity s STACKLEAK plugin which, in addition to its primary purpose of clearing the kernel stack on return to userspace, makes sure stack expansion cannot skip over guard pages. This stack probing ability will likely also become directly available from the compiler as well. set_fs() balance checking
Related to the addr_limit field mentioned above, another class of bug is finding a way to force the kernel into accidentally leaving addr_limit open to kernel memory through an unbalanced call to set_fs(). In some areas of the kernel, in order to reuse userspace routines (usually VFS or compat related), code will do something like: set_fs(KERNEL_DS); ...some code here...; set_fs(USER_DS);. When the USER_DS call goes missing (usually due to a buggy error path or exception), subsequent system calls can suddenly start writing into kernel memory via copy_to_user (where the to user really means within the addr_limit range ). Thomas Garnier implemented USER_DS checking at syscall exit time for x86, arm, and arm64. This means that a broken set_fs() setting will not extend beyond the buggy syscall that fails to set it back to USER_DS. Additionally, as part of the discussion on the best way to deal with this feature, Christoph Hellwig and Al Viro (and others) have been making extensive changes to avoid the need for set_fs() being used at all, which should greatly reduce the number of places where it might be possible to introduce such a bug in the future. SLUB freelist hardening
A common class of heap attacks is overwriting the freelist pointers stored inline in the unallocated SLUB cache objects. PaX/grsecurity developed an inexpensive defense that XORs the freelist pointer with a global random value (and the storage address). Daniel Micay improved on this by using a per-cache random value, and I refactored the code a bit more. The resulting feature, enabled with CONFIG_SLAB_FREELIST_HARDENED, makes freelist pointer overwrites very hard to exploit unless an attacker has found a way to expose both the random value and the pointer location. This should render blind heap overflow bugs much more difficult to exploit. Additionally, Alexander Popov implemented a simple double-free defense, similar to the fasttop check in the GNU C library, which will catch sequential free()s of the same pointer. (And has already uncovered a bug.) Future work would be to provide similar metadata protections to the SLAB allocator (though SLAB doesn t store its freelist within the individual unused objects, so it has a different set of exposures compared to SLUB). setuid-exec stack limitation
Continuing the various additional defenses to protect against future problems related to userspace memory layout manipulation (as shown most recently in the Stack Clash attacks), I implemented an 8MiB stack limit for privileged (i.e. setuid) execs, inspired by a similar protection in grsecurity, after reworking the secureexec handling by LSMs. This complements the unconditional limit to the size of exec arguments that landed in v4.13. randstruct automatic struct selection
While the bulk of the port of the randstruct gcc plugin from grsecurity landed in v4.13, the last of the work needed to enable automatic struct selection landed in v4.14. This means that the coverage of randomized structures, via CONFIG_GCC_PLUGIN_RANDSTRUCT, now includes one of the major targets of exploits: function pointer structures. Without knowing the build-randomized location of a callback pointer an attacker needs to overwrite in a structure, exploits become much less reliable. structleak passed-by-reference variable initialization
Ard Biesheuvel enhanced the structleak gcc plugin to initialize all variables on the stack that are passed by reference when built with CONFIG_GCC_PLUGIN_STRUCTLEAK_BYREF_ALL. Normally the compiler will yell if a variable is used before being initialized, but it silences this warning if the variable s address is passed into a function call first, as it has no way to tell if the function did actually initialize the contents. So the plugin now zero-initializes such variables (if they hadn t already been initialized) before the function call that takes their address. Enabling this feature has a small performance impact, but solves many stack content exposure flaws. (In fact at least one such flaw reported during the v4.15 development cycle was mitigated by this plugin.) improved boot entropy
Laura Abbott and Daniel Micay improved early boot entropy available to the stack protector by both moving the stack protector setup later in the boot, and including the kernel command line in boot entropy collection (since with some devices it changes on each boot). eBPF JIT for 32-bit ARM
The ARM BPF JIT had been around a while, but it didn t support eBPF (and, as a result, did not provide constant value blinding, which meant it was exposed to being used by an attacker to build arbitrary machine code with BPF constant values). Shubham Bansal spent a bunch of time building a full eBPF JIT for 32-bit ARM which both speeds up eBPF and brings it up to date on JIT exploit defenses in the kernel. seccomp improvements
Tyler Hicks addressed a long-standing deficiency in how seccomp could log action results. In addition to creating a way to mark a specific seccomp filter as needing to be logged with SECCOMP_FILTER_FLAG_LOG, he added a new action result, SECCOMP_RET_LOG. With these changes in place, it should be much easier for developers to inspect the results of seccomp filters, and for process launchers to generate logs for their child processes operating under a seccomp filter. Additionally, I finally found a way to implement an often-requested feature for seccomp, which was to kill an entire process instead of just the offending thread. This was done by creating the SECCOMP_RET_ACTION_FULL mask (n e SECCOMP_RET_ACTION) and implementing SECCOMP_RET_KILL_PROCESS. That s it for now; please let me know if I missed anything. The v4.15 merge window is now open!

2017, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Review: The Piper's Son, by Melina Marchetta

Series:	Francesca #2
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Copyright:	2010
Printing:	2011
ISBN:	0-7636-5458-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	330

Tom Mackee's family has fallen apart. The impetus was the death of his uncle Joe in the London tube terrorist bombings, but that was only the start. He destroyed his chances with the only woman he really loved. His father's drinking got out of control, his mother left with his younger sister to live in a different city, and he refused to go with them and abandon his father. But then, six months later, his father abandoned him anyway. As this novel opens, Tom collapses while performing a music set, high on drugs and no sleep, and wakes up to discover his roommates have been fired from their jobs for stealing, and in turn have thrown him out of their apartment. He's at rock bottom. The one place he can turn for a place to stay is his aunt Georgie, the second (although less frequent) viewpoint character of this book. She was the one who took the trip to the UK to try to find out what happened and retrieve her brother's body, and the one who had to return to Australia with nothing. Her life isn't in much better shape than Tom's. She's kept her job, but she's pregnant by her ex-boyfriend but barely talking to him, since he now has a son by another woman he met during their separation. And she's not even remotely over her grief. The whole Finch/Mackee family is, in short, a disaster. But they have a few family relationships left that haven't broken, some underlying basic decency, and some patient and determined friends. I should warn up-front, despite having read this book without knowing this, that this is a sequel to Saving Francesca, set five years later and focusing on secondary characters from the original novel. I've subsequently read that book as well, though, and I don't think reading it first is necessary. This is one of the rare books where being a sequel made it a better stand-alone novel. I never felt a gap of missing story, just a rich and deep background of friendships and previous relationships that felt realistic. People are embedded in networks of relationships even when they feel the most alone, and I really enjoyed seeing that surface in this book. All those patterns from Tom's past didn't feel like information I was missing. They felt like glimpses of what you'd see if you looked into any other person's life. The plot summary above might make The Piper's Son sound like a depressing drama fest, but Marchetta made an excellent writing decision: the worst of this has already happened before the start of the book, and the rest is in the first chapter. This is not at all a book about horrible things happening to people. It's a book about healing. An authentic, prickly, angry healing that doesn't forget and doesn't turn into simple happily-ever-after stories, but does involve a lot of recognition that one has been an ass, and that it's possible to be less of an ass in the future, and maybe some things can be fixed. A plot summary might fool you into thinking that this is a book about a boy and his father, or about dealing with a drunk you still love. It's not. The bright current under this whole story is not father-son bonding. It's female friendships. Marchetta pulls off a beautiful double-story, writing a book that's about Tom, and Georgie, and the layered guilt and tragedy of the Finch/Mackee family, but whose emotional heart is their friends. Francesca, Justine, absent Siobhan. Georgie's friend Lucia. Ned, the cook, and his interactions with Tom's friends. And Tara Finke, also mostly absent, but perfectly written into the story in letters and phone calls. Marchetta never calls unnecessary attention to this, keeping the camera on Tom and Georgie, but the process of reading this book is a dawning realization of just how much work friendship is doing under the surface, how much back-channel conversation is happening off the page, and how much careful and thoughtful and determined work went into providing Tom a floor, a place to get his feet under him, and enough of a shove for him to pull himself together. Pulling that off requires a deft and subtle authorial touch, and I'm in awe at how well it worked. This is a beautifully written novel. Marchetta never belabors an emotional point, sticking with a clear and spare description of actions and thoughts, with just the right sentences scattered here and there to expose the character's emotions. Tom's family is awful at communication, which is much of the reason why they start the book in the situation they're in, but Marchetta somehow manages to write that in a way that didn't just frustrate me or make me want to start banging their heads together. She somehow conveys the extent to which they're trying, even when they're failing, and adds just the right descriptions so that the reader can follow the wordless messages they send each other even when they can't manage to talk directly. I usually find it very hard to connect with people who can only communicate by doing things rather than saying them. It's a high compliment to the author that I felt I understood Tom and his family as well as I did. One bit of warning: while this is not a story of a grand reunion with an alcoholic father where all is forgiven because family, thank heavens, there is an occasional wiggle in that direction. There is also a steady background assumption that one should always try to repair family relationships, and a few tangential notes about the Finches and Mackees that made me think there was a bit more abuse here than anyone involved wants to admit. I don't think the book is trying to make apologies for this, and instead is trying to walk the fine line of talking about realistically messed up families, but I also don't have a strong personal reaction to that type of story. If you have an aversion to "we should all get along because faaaaamily" stories, you may want to skip this book, or at least go in pre-warned. That aside, the biggest challenge I had in reading this book was not breaking into tears. The emotional arc is just about perfect. Tom and Georgie never stay stuck in the same emotional cycle for too long, Marchetta does a wonderful job showing irritating characters from a slightly different angle and having them become much less irritating, and the interactions between Tom, Tara, and Francesca are just perfect. I don't remember reading another book that so beautifully captures that sensation of knowing that you've been a total ass, knowing that you need to stop, but realizing just how much work you're going to have to do, and how hard that work will be, once you own up to how much you fucked up. That point where you keep being an ass for a few moments longer, because stopping is going to hurt so much, but end up stopping anyway because you can't stand yourself any more. And stopping and making amends is hard and hurts badly, and yet somehow isn't quite as bad as you thought it was going to be. This is really great stuff. One final complaint, though: what is it with mainstream fiction and the total lack of denouement? I don't read very much mainstream fiction, but this is the second really good mainstream book I've read (after The Death of Bees) that hits its climax and then unceremoniously dumps the reader on the ground and disappears. Come back here! I wasn't done with these people! I don't need a long happily-ever-after story, but give me at least a handful of pages to be happy with the characters after crying with them for hours! ARGH. But, that aside, the reader does get that climax, and it's note-perfect to the rest of the book. Everyone is still themselves, no one gets suddenly transformed, and yet everything is... better. It's the kind of book you can trust. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

I'm taking the month of November off work, so that I can exclusively take care of our child. Despite it being a difficult time, with him teething, it has been a great half-month so far. During the course of the month I've found my interest in a lot of technological things waning, so I've killed my account(s) on a few platforms, and scaled back others - if I could exclusively do child-care for the next 20 years I'd be very happy, but sadly I don't think that is terribly realistic. My interest in things hasn't entirely vanished though, to the extent that I found the time to replace my use of etcd with consul yesterday, and I'm trying to work out how to simplify my hosting setup. Right now I have a bunch of servers doing two kinds of web-hosting:

• 100% static-sites
  • As created with my static-site-generator.
• 100% dynamic-sites
  • Largely written with Perl & CGI.
  • Although I did recode my blogspam-detector in golang, and that's performing very well.

Hosting static-sites is trivial, whether with a virtual machine, via Amazons' S3-service, or some other static-host such as netlify. Hosting for "dynamic stuff" is harder. These days a trend for "serverless" deployments allows you to react to events and be dynamic, but not everything can be a short-lived piece of ruby/javascript/lambda. It feels like I could setup a generic platform for launching containers, or otherwise modernising FastCGI, etc, but I'm not sure what the point would be. (I'd still be the person maintaining it, and it'd still be a hassle. I've zero interest in selling things to people, as that only means more support.) In short I have a bunch of servers, they mostly tick over unattended, but I'm not really sure I want to keep them running for the next 10+ years. Over time our child will deserve, demand, and require more attention which means time for personal stuff is only going to diminish. Simplify things now wouldn't be a bad thing to do, before it is too late.

Since I started to lean a bit towards the concept of minimalism I've got rid of stuff, including all stationary computers. So for now I'm left with just my laptop and that's something where I do not want to attach an USB entropy key permanently. That's why I've a spare Simtec Entropy Key I no longer use, and I'm willing to sell. In case someone is interested, I'm willing to give it away for 20EUR + shipping. If you can convince me it'll be of use for the Debian project (end up on a DSA managed machine for example) I'm willing to give it away for less. If you're located in Cologne, Copenhagen or Barcelona we might be able, depending on the timing, to do a personal handover (with or without keysigning). Otherwise I guess shipping is mainly interesting for someone also located in Europe. You can use sven at stormbind dot net or hoexter at debian dot org to contact me and use GPG key 0xA6DC24D9DA2493D1.

As a cat owner, being surprised by cat intelligence delights me. They re not exactly smart like a human, but they are smart in cattish ways. The more I watch them and try to sort out what they re thinking, the more it pleases me to discover they can solve problems and adapt in recognizably intelligent ways, sometimes unique to each individual cat. Each time that happens, it evokes in me affectionate wonder. Today, I had one of those joyful moments. First, you need to understand that some months ago, I thought I had my male cat all figured out with respect to mealtimes. I had been cleaning up after my oafish boy who made a watery mess on the floor from his mother s bowl each morning. I was slightly annoyed, but was mostly curious, and had a hunch. A quick search of the web confirmed it: my cat was left-handed. Not only that, but I learned this is typical for males, whereas females tend to be right-handed. Right away, I knew what I had to do: I adjusted the position of their water bowls relative to their food, swapping them from right to left; the messy morning feedings ceased. I congratulated myself for my cleverness. You see, after the swap, as he hooked the kibbles with his left paw out of the right-hand bowl, they would land immediately on the floor where he could give them chase. The swap caused the messes to cease because before, his left-handed scoops would land the kibbles in the water to the right; he would then have to scoop the kibble out onto the floor, sprinkling water everywhere! Furthermore, the sodden kibble tended to not skitter so much, decreasing his fun. Or so I thought. Clearly, I reasoned, having sated himself on the entire contents of his own bowl, he turned to pilfering his mother s leftovers for some exciting kittenish play. I had evidence to back it up, too: he and his mother both seem to enjoy this game, a regular fixture of their mealtime routines. She, too, is adept at hooking out the kibbles, though mysteriously, without making a mess in her water, whichever way the bowls are oriented. I chalked this up to his general clumsiness of movement vs. her daintiness and precision, something I had observed many times before. Come to think of it, lately, I ve been seeing more mess around his mother s bowl again. Hmm. I don t know why I didn t stop to consider why And then my cat surprised me again. This morning, with Shadow behind my back as I sat at my computer, finishing up his morning meal at his mother s bowl, I thought I heard something odd. Or rather, I didn t hear something. The familiar skitter-skitter sound of kibbles evading capture was missing. So I turned and looked. My dear, devious boy had squished his overgrown body behind his mother s bowls, nudging them ever so slightly askew to fit the small space. Now the bowl orientation was swapped back again. Stunned, I watched him carefully flip out a kibble with his left paw. Plop! Into the water on the right. Concentrating, he fished for it. A miss! He casually licked the water from his paw. Another try. Swoop! Plop, onto the floor. No chase now, just satisfied munching of his somewhat mushy kibble. And then it dawned on me that I had got it somewhat wrong. Yes, he enjoyed Chase the Kibble, like his mom, but I never recognized he had been indulging in a favourite pastime, peculiarly his own I had judged his mealtime messes as accidents, a very human way of thinking about my problem. Little did I know, it was deliberate! His private game was Bobbing for Kibbles. I don t know if it s the altered texture, or dabbling in the bowl, but whatever the reason, due to my meddling, he had been deprived of this pleasure. No worries, a thwarted cat will find a way. And that is the joy of cat intelligence.

Review: Night Moves, by Pat Green

Publisher:	Aquarius
Copyright:	2014
ISBN:	0-9909741-1-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	159

In the fall of 2012, Pat Green was a preacher of a failing church, out of a job, divorced for six months, and feeling like a failure at every part of his life. He was living in a relative's house and desperately needed work and his father had been a taxi driver. So he got a job as a 6pm to 6am taxi driver in his home town of Joliet, Illinois. That job fundamentally changed his understanding of the people who live in the night, how their lives work, and what it means to try to help them. This is nonfiction: a collection of short anecdotes about life as a cab driver and the people who have gotten a ride in Green's cab. They're mostly five or six pages long, just a short story or window into someone's life. I ran across Pat Green's writing by following a sidebar link from a post on Patheos (probably from Love, Joy, Feminism, although I no longer remember). Green has an ongoing blog on Patheos about raising his transgender son (who appears in this collection as a lesbian daughter; he wasn't out yet as transgender when this was published), which is both a good sample of his writing and occasionally has excerpts from this book. Green's previous writing experience, as mentioned at several points in this collection, was newspaper columns in the local paper. It shows: these essays have the succinct, focused, and bite-sized property of a good newspaper article (or blog post). The writing is a little rough, particularly the remembered dialogue that occasionally falls into the awkward valley between dramatic, constructed fictional dialogue and realistic, in-the-moment speech. But the stories are honest and heartfelt and have the self-reflective genuineness of good preaching paired with a solid sense of narrative. Green tries to observe and report first, both the other person and his own reactions, and only then try to draw more general conclusions. This book is also very hard to read. It's not a sugar-coated view of people who live in the night of a city, nor is it constructed to produce happy endings. The people who Green primarily writes about are poor, or alone, or struggling. The story that got me to buy this book, about taking a teenage girl to a secret liaison that turned out to be secret because her liaison was another girl, is heartwarming but also one of the most optimistic stories here. A lot of people die or just disappear after being regular riders for some time. A lot of people are desperate and don't have any realistic way out. Some people, quite memorably, think they have a way out, and that way out closes on them. The subtitle of this book is "An Ex-Preacher's Journey to Hell in a Taxi" and (if you followed the link above) you'll see that Green is writing in the Patheos nonreligious section. The other theme of this collection is the church and its effect on the lives of people who are trying to make a life on the outskirts of society. That effect is either complete obliviousness or an active attempt to make their lives even worse. Green lays out the optimism that he felt early in the job, the hope that he could help someone the way a pastor would, guide her to resources, and how it went horribly wrong when those resources turned out to not be interested in helping her at all. And those stories repeat, and repeat. It's a book that makes it very clear that the actual practice of Christianity in the United States is not about helping poor or marginalized people, but there are certainly plenty of Christian resources for judging, hurting people, closing doors, and forcing abused people back into abusive situations, all in the name of God. I do hope some Christians read this and wince very hard. (And lest the progressive Christians get too smug, one of the stories says almost as brutal things about liberal ministries as the stories of conservative ones.) I came away feeling even more convinced by the merits of charities that just give money directly to poor people. No paternalism, no assuming that rich people know what they need, no well-meaning intermediary organizations with endless rules, just resources delivered directly to the people who most need resources. Ideally done by the government and called universal basic income. Short of constructing a functional government that builds working public infrastructure, and as a supplement even if one has such a government (since infrastructure can't provide everything), it feels like the most moral choice. Individual people may still stay mired in awful situations, but at least that isn't compounded by other people taking their autonomy away and dictating life to them in complete ignorance. This is a fairly short and inexpensive book. I found it very much worth reading, and may end up following Green's blog as well. There are moments of joy and moments of human connection, and the details of the day-to-day worries and work style of a taxi driver (in this case, one who drives a company car) are pretty interesting. (Green does skip over some parts for various reasons, such as a lot of the routine fares and most of the stories of violence, but does mention what he's skipping over.) But it's also a brutal book, because so many people are hurting and there isn't much Green can do about it except bear witness and respect them as people in a way that religion doesn't. Recommended, but brace yourself. Rating: 8 out of 10

A shiny new (mostly-but-not-completely maintenance) release of RQuantLib, now at version 0.4.4, arrived on CRAN overnight, and will get to Debian shortly. This is the first release in over a year, and it it contains (mostly) a small number of fixes throughout. It also includes the update to the new DateVector and DatetimeVector classes which become the default with the upcoming Rcpp 0.12.14 release (just like this week's RcppQuantuccia release). One piece of new code is due to Fran ois Cocquemas who added support for discrete dividends to both European and American options. See below for the complete set of changes reported in the NEWS file. As with release 0.4.3 a little over a year ago, we will not have new Windows binaries from CRAN as I apparently have insufficient powers of persuasion to get CRAN to update their QuantLib libraries. So we need a volunteer. If someone could please build a binary package for Windows from the 0.4.4 sources, I would be happy to once again host it on the GHRR drat repo. Please contact me directly if you can help. Changes are listed below:

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.4 (2017-11-07)

• Changes in RQuantLib code:
  • Equity options can now be analyzed via discrete dividends through two vectors of dividend dates and values (Francois Cocquemas in #73 fixing #72)
  • Some package and dependency information was updated in files DESCRIPTION and NAMESPACE.
  • The new Date(time)Vector classes introduced with Rcpp 0.12.8 are now used when available.
  • Minor corrections were applied to BKTree, to vanilla options for the case of intraday time stamps, to the SabrSwaption documentation, and to bond utilities for the most recent QuantLib release.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Issue tickets can be filed 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.

Like many laptop users, I often plug my laptop into different monitor setups (multiple monitors at my desk, projector when presenting, etc.) Running xrandr commands or clicking through interfaces gets tedious, and writing scripts isn't much better. Recently, I ran across autorandr, which detects attached monitors using EDID (and other settings), saves xrandr configurations, and restores them. It can also run arbitrary scripts when a particular configuration is loaded. I've packed it, and it is currently waiting in NEW. If you can't wait, the deb is here and the git repo is here. To use it, simply install the package, and create your initial configuration (in my case, undocked):

 autorandr --save undocked

then, dock your laptop (or plug in your external monitor(s)), change the configuration using xrandr (or whatever you use), and save your new configuration (in my case, workstation):

autorandr --save workstation

repeat for any additional configurations you have (or as you find new configurations). Autorandr has udev, systemd, and pm-utils hooks, and autorandr --change should be run any time that new displays appear. You can also run autorandr --change or autorandr --load workstation manually too if you need to. You can also add your own ~/.config/autorandr/$PROFILE/postswitch script to run after a configuration is loaded. Since I run i3, my workstation configuration looks like this:

 #!/bin/bash
 xrandr --dpi 92
 xrandr --output DP2-2 --primary
 i3-msg '[workspace="^(1 4 6)"] move workspace to output DP2-2;'
 i3-msg '[workspace="^(2 5 9)"] move workspace to output DP2-3;'
 i3-msg '[workspace="^(3 8)"] move workspace to output DP2-1;'

which fixes the dpi appropriately, sets the primary screen (possibly not needed?), and moves the i3 workspaces about. You can also arrange for configurations to never be run by adding a block hook in the profile directory. Check it out if you change your monitor configuration regularly!

Yesterday, I printed the first draft of the first chapter when my little boy was here and he was impressed with this strange object called a "printer". Before I printed what I needed, I fired up LibreOffice and chose the biggest font size that was available and let him type his first name by himself. He was quicker than I thought with a keyboard. After seeing me print his first name, he was jumping up and down with joy of having created something and even showed grandma and grandpa what he had done. He, then, wanted more and I taught him how to use that backspace key, what it meant and he wanted to type his full name. I let him and taught him that there is a key called space that he should type every time he wants to start a new word and, in the end, he typed his first two names. To my surprise, he memorized the icon with the printer (which I must say that I have to hunt every time, since it seems so similar to the adjacent ones!) and pressed this new key called "Enter". When he pressed, he wasn't expecting the printer on his right to start making noises and printing his name. He was so excited and it was so nice to see his reaction full of joy to get a job done! I am thinking of getting a spare computer, building it with him and for him, so that he can call it his computer every time he comes to see daddy. As a serendipitous situation, Packt Publishing offered yesterday their title "Python Projects for Kids". Unfortunately, he does not yet know how to read, but I guess that the right age is coming soon, which is a good thing to make him be educated "the right way" (that is, with the best support, teaching and patience that I can give him). Anyway, I printed the first draft of the first chapter and today I have to turn it in. As I write this, I am downloading a virtual machine from Microsoft to try to install Java on it. Let me see if it works. I have none of the virtualization options used, tough the closest seems to be virtualbox. Let me cross my fingers. In other news, I updated some of the tags of very old posts of this blog, and I am seriously thinking about switching from [ikiwiki][0] to another blog platform. It is slow, very slow on my system with the repositories that I have, especially on my armel system. Some non-interpreted system would be best, but I don't know if such a thing even exists. But the killer problem is that it doesn't support easily the typing of Mathematics (even though a 3rd party plugin for MathJax exists). On the other hand, I just received an answer on twitter from @telegram and it was nice:

Hello, Telegram supports bold and italic. You can type **bold** and __italic__. On mobile, you can also highlight text for this as well.

It is nice that this works with telegram-desktop too. Besides that, I filed some bugs on Debian's BTS, responded to some issues on my projects on GitHub (I'm slowly getting back on maintaining things) and file wishlist bugs on some other projects. Oh, and I grabbed a copy of "Wonder woman" ("Mulher Maravilha") and "Despicable Me 3" ("Meu Malvado Favorito 3") dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese for my son. I have to convert the audio from AAC-LC in 6 channels to AC3 or to stereo. Otherwise, my TVs have problem with the videos (one refuses to play the entire file and another plays the audio with sounds of hiccups). Edit: After converting the VirtualBox image taken from Microsoft, I could easily use qemu/kvm to create screenshots of the installation of Java. The command that I used (for future reference) is: qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 2 -net nic,model=e1000 -net user -soundhw ac97 -drive index=0,media=disk,cache=unsafe,file=win7.qcow2 Edit: Fixed some typos.

Review: Sweep in Peace, by Ilona Andrews

Series:	Innkeeper Chronicles #2
Publisher:	NYLA
Copyright:	2015
ISBN:	1-943772-32-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	302

This is the sequel to Clean Sweep. You could pick up the background as you go along, but the character relationships benefit from reading the series in order. Dina's inn is doing a bit better, but it still desperately needs guests. That means she's not really in a position to say no when an Arbitrator shows up at her door and asks her to host a peace summit. Lucky for the Arbitrator, since every other inn on Earth did say no. Nexus has been the site of a viciously bloody conflict between the vampires, the Hope-Crushing Horde, and the Merchants of Baha-char for years. All sides have despaired of finding any form of peace. The vampires and the Horde have both deeply entrenched themselves in a cycle of revenge. The Merchants have the most strategic position and an apparently unstoppable warrior. The situation is hopeless; by far the most likely outcome will be open warfare inside the inn, which would destroy its rating and probably Dina's future as an innkeeper. Dina will need all of her power and caution just to stop that; peace seems beyond any possibility, but thankfully isn't her problem. Maybe the Arbitrator can work some miracle if she can just keep everyone alive. And well fed. Which is another problem. She has enough emergency money for the food, but somehow cook for forty people from four different species while keeping them all from killing each other? Not a chance. She's going to have to hire someone somehow, someone good, even though she can't afford to pay. Sweep in Peace takes this series farther out of urban fantasy territory and farther into science fiction, and also ups the stakes (and the quality of the plot) a notch. We get three moderately interesting alien species with only slight trappings of fantasy, a wonderful alien chef who seems destined to become a regular in the series, and a legitimately tricky political situation. The politics and motives aren't going to win any awards for deep and subtle characterization, but that isn't what the book is going for. It's trying to throw enough challenges at Dina to let her best characteristics shine, and it does that rather well. The inn continues to be wonderful, although I hope it becomes more of a character in its own right as the series continues. Dina's reshaping of it for guests, and her skill at figuring out the rooms her guests would enjoy, is my favorite part of these books. She cares about making rooms match the personality of her guests, and I love books that give the character a profession that matters to them even if it's unrelated to the plot. I do wish Andrews would find a few other ways for Dina to use her powers for combat beyond tentacles and burying people in floors, but that's mostly a quibble. You should still not expect great literature. I guessed the big plot twist several chapters before it happened, and the resolution is, well, not how these sorts of political situations resolve in the real world. But there is not a stupid love affair, there are several interesting characters, and one of the recurring characters gets pretty solid and somewhat unusual characterization. And despite taking the plot in a more serious direction, Sweep in Peace retains its generally lighthearted tone and firm conviction in Dina's ability to handle just about anything. Also, the chef is wonderful. One note: Partway into the book, I started getting that "oh, this is a crossover" feeling (well-honed by years of reading comic books). As near as I can tell from a bit of research, Andrews pulled in some of their characters from the Edge series. This was a bit awkward, in the "who are these people and why do they seem to have more backstory than any of the other supporting characters" cross-over sort of way, but the characters that were pulled in were rather intriguing. I might have to go read the Edge books now. Anyway, if you liked Clean Sweep, this is better in pretty much every way. Recommended. Followed by One Fell Sweep. Rating: 8 out of 10