Since introduction of Developer's Certificate of Origin in phpMyAdmin, we've struggled with automatically checking pull requests on GitHub that they match this. First attempt was to integrate this check into Travis environment, but that proven to be hard to understand by potential contributors as it did not give direct feedback what went wrong. So it was still useful for us, but still we had to explain the situation. With recent flood of contributions from potential GSoC students, it became quite tedious task. So let's automate that. GitHub has quite powerful API, so it should not be that hard. Looking at Webhooks documentation, it is quite easy to get hooked on pull request creation and updates and checking commits and adding comments is just a piece of cake. The hardest choice was choosing language in which to implement it :-). While not finding binding for GitHub in any of my favorite language packaged in Debian. I've decided to hack this quickly in PHP without using any library and if this turns out to be limitation in future, it can be easily rewritten. First incarnation of our commit checker did check just Signed-Off-By lines in commit messages, but I've found that there might be some other useful checks. So the script got extended for various simple coding style violations, which we see quite often like wrong indentation or using DOS end of lines (the example of all fired checks can be found in pull request 1081). You can find the code for it in our scripts repository.

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I was going to put out some of these changes in a 4.5.6 release late last year, but that didn't happen, and then more things kept coming up. So this release is rather large. The major new feature is a new WebAuthCookiePath directive for mod_webauth, which allows path-scoped WebAuth cookies so that different portions of a site can maintain separate authentication credentials. There are various caveats, and support will get better later, but it's a beginning. There are two bug fixes from Benjamin Coddington: WebAuthOptional should now work with Apache 2.4, and internal notes management in the module is now done better, which should prevent some cases where the user was redirected to WebLogin twice. Eventually, the things WebAuth uses notes for should become request context data, but that's for a later change. There are multiple changes to keyring handling to let mod_webauth and mod_webkdc work properly with the ITK Apache MPM, which allows each virtual host to run as a different user. Previously, all virtual hosts shared one in-memory keyring, which meant leaking authentication keys between virtual hosts. Now, each virtual host gets its own, lazily loaded from the keyring on disk when it's first needed. This allows ITK users to configure separate keyrings for each virtual host. To make this easier, keyring files are now locked for write, and writing a keyring preserves the ownership and permissions if possible. WebLogin now supports a new remctl-based password change protocol, which I developed for Stanford to work around some problems with the kpasswd when password change takes too long. All the tools for this will eventually be available outside of Stanford when I have a chance to polish them up and release them. There are a few other, more minor bug fixes. mod_webauth and WebLogin are now more aggressive about telling web browsers to really not cache pages. WebLogin also now uses the authenticated identity returned by the WebKDC for multifactor, since it may have canonicalized the user's identity. The correct template variable is now set when the user doesn't enter a code on the WebLogin multifactor page. Better error messages are returned for invalid principals and unknown realms. The workaround for invalid XML returned by the WebKDC should now actually work. And WebLogin logs a more detailed error message on password change failures. You can get the latest release from the official WebAuth distribution site or from my WebAuth distribution pages.

Today was a very busy day for me. First up, I had my chiropractic adjustment. Then I had my half-yearly dental checkup. Then I got stuck into cleaning the house. Fortunately I'd done a bit the afternoon before, otherwise I'd never have gotten it done before my massage. I'm starting to seriously consider getting a cleaner. I can make much better use of the limited time I get than cleaning the house. Zoe's Kindergarten has a Parent Advisory Group or something like that, which meets monthly. I wasn't able to attend the first one, but the second one was today, about an hour before pickup, so I grabbed a quick lunch after my massage and biked over to Kindergarten early. The meeting wasn't particularly interesting. The majority of it revolved around fund raising. At pickup time, Zoe was fast asleep again, and had another massive meltdown when I woke her up. It took forever to get her out. She wanted to give Megan a hug, but Megan had long gone. Then, rather fortuitously, Megan's Dad texted me to tell me they were in the playground on the neighbouring school grounds, so I managed to use that as an incentive to get Zoe moving. I didn't know until today, but at the foothill of the neighbouring primary school, there's some play equipment. A few of the Kindergarten kids seem to have a play over there after Kindergarten. Megan and Zoe played there for a bit before it was time to go. Once we got home, we unpacked and then walked down to the Hawthorne Garage to get some vegetables, and then, after buying some milk from the corner store and another grumpy meltdown, I figured a quiet afternoon was in order, so Zoe watched a DVD for a bit while I prepared dinner. I'd bumped into the mother of Zoe's friends Eva and Layla from her old day care while I was at the dentist in the morning, and arranged for her to drop by to pick up a copy of the photos I'd taken at their 4th birthday party. I'd hoped that she'd bring the girls with her, and had told Zoe they'd be dropping by, but unfortunately she came on the way to picking them up from day care, so Zoe was a bit disappointed. We did arrange to have them over for dinner next Friday, so I'm sure that will be very exciting. After that, we had dinner, and a fairly uneventful bedtime. It's hot again, so I hope that doesn't mess with her sleep.

Zoe's Kindergarten had a Pupil Free Day today. I think there's only that impacts the days Zoe attends Kindergarten for the whole year. I'd wanted to make the most of the fact that her friend Mackensie wasn't in Kindergarten on a Monday either, and have a play date with her at Southbank, but her little sister was having sleep issues, and her mother wanted her to nap at home today, so we had to scratch those plans. Given the forecast maximum temperature was going to be over 30 C today, I thought ice skating would be a great way to escape the heat, but the rink didn't have their open session until 1pm, so we had to do something in the morning to kill time. I decided we should go shoe shopping. Before we went to Westfield Carindale, we went to Officeworks to print out some more photos. Zoe really enjoys helping me with the self-serve printing kiosk, and is happy amusing herself at the kid's colouring table otherwise. I wanted some unusual size prints, so it involved one of the staff doing some additional faffing around with Photoshop for me. I'm rather amazed they'll spend the staff time doing that, when I only spend a couple of dollars on prints. After that, we headed out to Carindale. Zoe's in that limbo between size 3 and 4 at the moment. I bought her some new size 4 Autumn/Winter clothes the other weekend, and after that, went through her wardrobe and did a big cull of all her size 2 stuff and any size 3 stuff that didn't fit terribly well. That just left shoes and jumpers to sort out, so we concentrated on them today. First things first, we grabbed some morning tea at Muffin Break. They did a nice babyccino in a little china espresso cup, so Zoe enjoyed that, and we split a muffin between us. Zoe took a fancy to some ballerina pumps she saw at Cotton On Kids. We bought a few pairs of socks and a pair of size 10 pumps, and she wanted to wear them from that point on, so we wore them to the shoe shop. Almost as soon as we walked out of the store, she ran into heel problems on one foot, so after a few rounds of taking a couple of steps and needing to refit the heel of one shoe, I convinced her to go barefoot the remainder of the way. At Shoes and Sox she got properly measured for some light up closed-toe shoes. Zoe absolutely loved them, and wanted to wear them from that point on. Next we went to Target, and got a couple of jumpers. The kid's entertainment area was both a blessing and a curse. It was great for keeping her occupied when I needed to dash off and get some socks for myself for ice skating, but it was a negotiation challenge to get her away from it when it was time to leave. Toy Story 3 conveniently finished at just the right time. We dropped into Pumpkin Patch to get some boots. Despicable Me was playing there. Zoe is absolutely hooked on it at the moment. I managed to prime her to leave at the end of a scene though. She did score a couple of stickers while we were sitting there chilling out watching the movie though, so that was nice. I love Pumpkin Patch, but my God, it is expensive. I could have dropped $50 on a dress I really liked there, but I managed to resist. We decided to go back to Cotton On Kids to exchange the ballerina pumps. They didn't have any more of the style she'd chosen in her size, so we switched from gold glittery ones to red ones, which she wore out of the store. Cotton On Kids was also showing Despicable Me, so Zoe was very pleased. Shoes are horrendously expensive in Australia. The Sketchers and the boots set me back $60 each. The pumps were a bit more reasonably priced. I think they were about $20. I hope her feet don't grow too fast. After that shopping extravaganza it was lunchtime, and we split a spinach pide and had a quick fool around in the outdoor kid's play area and by then it was already after 1pm, so it was time to head to the ice skating rink. We got to the rink by about 1:45pm, and I changed Zoe into something a bit warmer. She was so excited, because we've talked about going ice skating on and off for a while, but it's just not something we've gotten around to doing yet, because neither of the two rinks are particularly convenient to home, and they have slightly odd hours. The rink had these slightly shorter than waist-height penguins that you could rent for little kids, so I rented one of them and Zoe pushed it around the rink, and got progressively better on her skates as time passed. We could also turn the penguin around and she could stand on the "feet" and I could push the penguin around by its head, which was fun for her, because we could get more speed up. By the end of the session, she was confident enough to have a few stints without the penguin, and stayed up pretty well. She was pretty buzzed afterwards. Going during the week was great, because there were maybe 20 people on the ice, tops, so it was nice and quiet. Zoe wasn't much of a hazard to anyone. She loved watching a couple of guys speed skate, and a lady do some figure skating. I'd booked myself a cut-throat razor shave at The Emporium Barber as a bit of a splurge, for 4:30pm, so we headed over there next. We got there a bit early, so I had a coffee, and Zoe had a juice while we waited. Then we discovered this dance apparel place a couple of doors down, that also had lots of fairy dresses and dress up dresses and whatnot. I asked on the off chance if they had ballet shoes, and of course they did, so we grabbed a pair of them while we were there, which was most serendipitous. Zoe has a trial dance class on Friday. She wants to do ballet or something of that ilk as her activity next term. Zoe was really good while I had my shave, and kept herself amused with my phone, and then we headed home, where Sarah was waiting to pick up Zoe. So it was really a rather non-stop, but nicely paced day. I'm looking forward to capping it off with a yoga class.

We had a pretty busy day today. Sarah dropped Zoe off at around 8:30am. I reminded Zoe that she'd forgotten to give Sarah her crown that she'd made at Playgroup the previous day, so she gave that to her. After Sarah left, I let Zoe watch a little bit of TV while I finished getting myself organised. We drove to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class today, because I wanted to go directly to the Planetarium afterwards. Zoe's BFF Megan came to BJJ class today for a trial class. Zoe was very excited. Megan picked everything up really quickly, and the girls had a good time. She didn't want to wear her uniform today though. I managed to get out of her later that she felt it made her sweaty. I told her it was probably all the running around that made her sweaty, not the uniform. We went out for a coffee with Megan, her Dad and her little sister afterwards. We found a little take away shop around the corner. Not quite the place that did babyccinos unfortunately, so Megan's Dad very cleverly got a chocolate milk and split it three ways with the girls and called it a "milkshake". I've realised that for Science Friday, I've pretty much been doing solely chemistry so far, so I wanted to throw in a bit of astronomy this week. The Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium had just recently reopened after getting a spanky new projector because 1978 called and wanted theirs back. Unfortunately, they weren't showing Perfect Little Planet today, but the slightly more specific Black Holes: Journey into the Unknown. I wanted Zoe to see something in the auditorium, so I thought we'd give it a shot anyway. I think we got to the Planetarium at around 11am, and the next show was at 1:30pm, so we had a bit of a look around the foyer for a bit, which Zoe quite enjoyed. They had a life-size model of Neil Armstrong's spacesuit, and a scale model of a Saturn V rocket. Zoe quite enjoyed both of them. I'll have to dig up some Youtube footage of a Saturn V launch. We then headed over to the cafe in the adjacent Botantic Gardens, and had a reasonable lunch. After lunch we wandered around the Botanic Gardens to kill some time, so you could say that today's Science Friday also included a goodly amount of botany as well. We went into the Tropical Dome and looked at the fish in the lily pond, and toured the fern garden, before heading back. We timed it pretty well, and got back to the Planetarium with about 10 minutes to kill. I'd prepped Zoe for the presentation, and told her that she needed to keep quiet, and if we had to leave we wouldn't be able to go back in again, and she could whisper to me if she needed to. I have to say, she was so well behaved. She sat through the whole 45 minute presentation and the projected tour of the night sky. I guess the presentation was sufficiently visually interesting to hold her attention for the duration. There was certainly a lot of "wow" out of her. I was so proud of how she went that I had to go and buy her an ice cream as a reward. After that, we went for a drive around Mount Coot-tha. I pointed out the TV towers that we can see from our balcony, and then she fell asleep on the way home. She didn't wake up particularly happy from her late, short nap, when we got home, but once she got herself sorted out, we baked the cookies that we'd made yesterday. They came out very nicely indeed. Once they were all baked, we dropped off a dozen to Megan's place, and then came home to have dinner. Bedtime went pretty well. I hope she has a good night's sleep, as we have a big day tomorrow.

As Jan has previously announced, the Debian project is maintaining a booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2014, which is also organized by him. This year we will have merchandising at the booth, which is provided by Alexander Wirt and of course a demo system with Debian wheezy BabelBox as the past years. I'll drop it tomorrow, as I have a conflicting appointment on Saterday, maybe I can attend later on Sunday. In case you have spare time at the weekend ahead, it may be worth to spend it with great lectures and meet nice people over there.

(ARMv7 A15 dual core) I ve covered how I set up my home LAVA lab and how I got two iMX.53 boards running, the next step was to sort out the LAVA server. My initial setup relied on using my Thinkpad as the server. This was somewhat convenient as that s how I develop the code, but didn t help me run jobs like health checks because the laptop was usually somewhere other than on the home LAN. There had been a long-standing problem with using LAVA on ARM the uwsgi support didn t compile but the code being used was old. As the same code has been in Debian for a long time, I suspected that this was fixed with a newer version. So as part of migrating LAVA to django1.6, apache2.4, postgres9.3, django-tables2 0.13 and a few other updated dependencies, I have been using the version of uwsgi from Debian unstable for quite a while without problems on x86. A simple tweak to the LAVA setup scripts and a newer version of uwsgi became available and it builds just fine on armhf. (I haven t tried armel because Linaro is ARMv7 or newer and we don t test with ARMv5/ARMv6 boards, so there s no point in trying armel it s not likely to be an issue for this fix though.) (Only the current lava-deployment-tool methods need to actually compile uwsgi directly from upstream without any patches the packaging which will replace l-d-t uses precompiled binaries, just as any admin would expect.) That initial install was on one of the iMX.53 boards, which ran as slowly as anyone who has used an iMX.53 would expect. I haven t run test jobs on that install, it had a hard enough time serving the frontend. Clearly some more cores would be a good step and when an arndale became available for the home lab, the next step was to get a SATA drive onto the arndale, put Debian unstable on that and then deploy LAVA to the arndale using the Debian packages. As a bonus, these packages are built for django1.6 (using an unreleased branch). Sounds simple enough. It works on iMX.53, it should work on an arndale. Well, it does but only after some unexpected faff. arndale, u-boot and SATA I hate u-boot every single time I ever touch it, the little I know about any other u-boot device is completely useless. Uniformity is a good thing infinite permutations are just rope to hang ourselves with cute embedded nonsense hacks and I m bored of that whole scene. So, boot the arndale, interrupt the bootloader to get to the prompt. What s the first thing most people would want? help. Denied this particular u-boot has been compiled without the ability to display any help messages. u-boot has just sunk further into the depths of please can we have something else which is uniform across devices . OK, well maybe I can get by without help. sata init unknown command sata . (Go away, do something else for a bit.) The arndale isn t one of the newest boards in the ARMv7 world, LAVA has been using them for a while, so someone has probably done some work to fix this . nope. There s a workaround a nice detailed guide by Phil Endecott which details that the kernel needs to continue to be loaded from SD and then the SATA can be used for just the rootfs. Mildly annoyed (I was hoping to be able to update the arndale kernel without the hassle of mounting the SD card at all), the rest was straight-forward. Preparing the SATA and installing Debian Due to the complexity of some of the transitions currently ongoing in Debian ahead of the Jessie release freeze, uwsgi is not in Debian testing right now so this install has to be Debian unstable. That s OK, I ve been running Debian unstable on all my machines for several years now usually updating ~5 times a week.

# parted /dev/sda -s unit mb mktable msdos
# parted /dev/sda -s unit mb mkpart primary 1 -- "-0"
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/root/
(note the in the mkpart command, that catches me out most times I try this. Without it, the special -0 gets interpreted as an option to parted but parted doesn t then tell you how to fix it, it just complains about an unknown option.) The SD image I am using is a LAVA master image, based on Ubuntu, so it was easy to put debootstrap onto it.

# apt-get install debootstrap
# debootstrap --arch=armhf sid /mnt/root/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian
# chroot /mnt/root/
Inside the chroot, it s Debian as usual:

apt-get update
apt-get install emdebian-archive-keyring
passwd
emdebian-archive-keyring is a package I (ab)use to sign my LAVA packaging as it has the advantage of being in Debian and Ubuntu going back to the time of Lenny, so it is always available from a repository which has already been authenticated to apt and doesn t involve downloading some random key from a website. I use passwd manually because this rootfs won t be using auto-login, it will have regular users. root passwords can be automated, if necessary. Thinking about login, remember to give the rootfs a usable tty. (The LAVA master image has a nasty habit of mangling editors like nano and vi when used over serial, so I m using echo.) For the arndale you need:

# echo T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttySAC2 115200 vt102 >> ./etc/inittab
# echo >> ./etc/securetty
# echo ttySAC2 >> ./etc/securetty
Then to make the hostname useful, adapt this to your needs:

echo 127.0.0.1 arndale.codehelp arndale >> ./etc/hosts
Finally, get the network running at boot and add the LAVA repository:

# echo auto lo eth0 > ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo iface lo inet loopback >> ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo iface eth0 inet dhcp >> ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo deb http://people.linaro.org/~neil.williams/lava sid main >> ./etc/apt/sources.list.d/lava.list
# apt-get update
# exit
Once the LAVA packaging is finalised, the packages will be uploaded to a normal Linaro PPA, I ll update the packages to use an official download location and we ll move to using sane version string handling. For now, the packages are still in development. Code for the packaging is in Alioth but there are issues with anonymous access to the pkg-linaro-lava repositories currently, so I ve also pushed to http://github.com/Linaro if you are interested in building the packages yourself. See also my packaging guide which is also linked from the Links page on my own site. With that done, time to reboot, set the SATA drive as the rootfs using the horrid u-boot and install LAVA.

# reboot
> setenv bootargs console=tty0 console=ttySAC2,115200n8 drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=edid-1920x1080.fw root=/dev/sda1
> boot
login
# apt-get install postgresql
After this operation, 63.0 MB of additional disk space will be used.

# apt-get install lava-server
After this operation, 231 MB of additional disk space will be used.

# a2dissite 000-default
# a2ensite lava-server
# apache2ctl restart
# service lava-server restart
Take note of the IP address of your new ARM LAVA server and sign in with your regular details, e.g. using OpenID before creating a temporary superuser:

# lava-server manage createsuperuser --username default --email=user@example.com
Choose a temporary password, log out, log in as the temporary superuser, promote your regular user to superuser and default owner of unrestricted devices in the django admin interface. Finally, log out and login as regular user to delete the temporary user. (Yes, that probably could do with some improvement remind me later and I ll see if a known user can be promoted from the command line.) See also Senthil s recent post on LAVA unit tests. Getting those to run without so many steps is also on the TODO list. Results
IP Address: 127.0.0.1
Is Master? : True
Uptime: 6:02:23.700000
Architecture: armv7l
Platform: Linux-3.10.1.0-1-linaro-arndale-armv7l-with-debian-jessie-sid
Insignal Arndale evaluation board based on EXYNOS5250
System memory: 1998MiB
Next! I m working on some code upstream to make it easier to add devices from the command line. The aim is that a set of simple commands will set up an initial device, run a job on that device and submit a result bundle to the LAVA server as job #1. This gives some assurance that everything has gone well. Now I can finally add health checks for the iMX.53 boards and start regular tests on those boards. The cubie boards will wait for a later blog post, there are interesting problems with the bootloader and serial connections. That s a whole different rant.

phpMyAdmin has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2014. So if you are a student and thinking about how to spend this summer, you might want to join us. As usual, we have prepared dozen of ideas, so in case you are interested, it's really the time to start to work on your application. We require you to contribute before GSoC, so that we can see you can handle the code and our tools. All details you might need are available in our applicant guide. Our requirements might sound strict, but without them, we would drown in hundredths of applications with no clue how to decide, so do your homework and prepare perfect application. If you have any questions, get in touch with us on mailing list and submit the application to to GSoC website.

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Go language has a strong type system unlike C, and some times this will be head ache when we want to interact with C data types with Cgo or just to convert a Go type to lets say byte slice. I recently faced the same problem and after poking around things, I learned the Go provides unsafe package which can be used to work around the Go's type system.

In an intriguing post, PragDave laments how empty the word agile has become. To paraphrase, I might say he s put words to a nagging feeling I ve had: that there are entire books about agile, conferences about agile, hallway conversations I ve heard about whether somebody is doing this-or-that agile practice correctly. Which, when it comes down to it, means that they re not being agile. If process and tools, even if they re labeled as agile processes and tools, are king, then we ve simply replaced one productivity-impairing dictator with another. And he makes this bold statement:

Here is how to do something in an agile fashion: What to do:

• Find out where you are
• Take a small step towards your goal
• Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
• Repeat

How to do it: When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier. Those four lines and one practice encompass everything there is to know about effective software development.

He goes on to dive into that a bit, of course, but I think this man has a rare gift of expressing something complicated so succinctly. I am inclined to believe he is right.

Zoe slept through the night again last night. Two nights of uninterrupted sleep has been totally amazing! We had a slower start to the day because we didn't have to be anywhere. I've been meaning to do a massive cull of Zoe's wardrobe for a while, and this morning seemed like as good an opportunity as any, so after TV, I managed to get Zoe to cooperate with trying on clothes for about an hour. She really enjoyed pulling everything out of her wardrobe and putting it all back again neatly. After that, she asked me if I could make her a bus out of the last remaining moving box, so I managed to make something approximating a bus. The port-a-robe boxes are really rather handy for this sort of thing. The balcony is starting to look like a cardboard box shanty town, with a cubby house, a rocket and now a bus. I think we need to host a few more play dates so they all get a good work out. It was time for lunch after that. I'd had a bucket of caramel popcorn, which I used for the journey to Coochiemudlo the other week. Zoe had asked me how popcorn was made, so I had resolved to make popcorn with her sometime soon. Yesterday at the health food shop, I opportunistically noticed some popping corn, so I grabbed a small bag of it. It turned out that buying peanut oil was good for more than just making peanut butter, as it came in handy today for popping corn. I've never popped corn before, aside from occasionally getting a bag of the microwave stuff, so it was a fun experience to do it "from scratch". It turned out pretty well, with only a few burned ones and a few unpopped ones. It'd be fun to try and dry out a corn cob and totally do it from scratch. After that I tried to get Zoe to take a nap, but it didn't work out so well, so after her quiet time we cleaned up her bedroom and generally fooled around for a bit. Throughout the day, Zoe did lots of little bouts of self-directed play. She dredged up this little wooden xylophone that we'd made in the US from a Kiwi Crate and had a great time banging away on it until she stood on it and broke it. The doctor's kit got a good workout. It was just a really nice, relaxing day at home. Zoe's Kindergarten was having a play date meet-and-greet in the park, for all the parents to meet each other. It was a fair way from home, but there was a nice, albeit circuitous, bike path to get there, and I decided to try and bike there, without really properly estimating the distance or length of time it would take. The play date was due to start at 3:30pm, and I was planning on leaving at 3pm. We were about 5 minutes late getting out of the door. I think it ended up taking us about 50 minutes to get there. It was a beautiful ride though, once we got onto the Bulimba Creek bikeway, through the Minippi Parklands. It would have been the longest ride Zoe's had on the bike, and she wasn't fazed at all. The play date itself was nice. For some reason, I'm a bit shy about going and introducing myself to the mothers (I kept wanting to write "other mothers"), but I sucked it up and made a few introductions. I'm terrible about remembering names though. At least I've got a few faces I can say hi to at drop off and pick up now. Sarah met us at the park and hung out for a bit as well, and then Zoe and her left together and I biked back home. I was feeling pretty good, and thought I'd try and bang out a run when I got home, but I didn't end up having the fuel in the tank, and blew up after about 1.5km.

Each year the 7DRL competion gives me an opportunity to abandon developing a roguelike game part way through. This year I am going to strive mightily to actually complete a playable game though owing to family commitments I have already gotten off to a rocky start which does not bode well. But enough negativity... So this year 7DRL coincides with the first ever Procedural Death Jam. This is a similar type of thing except the genre is Procedural Death Labyrinth. Procedural Death Labyrinths are a subset of Roguelikes (or is it the other way round?) If you have taken advantage of the wonderful offer Valve has given to Debian developers, you can find a number of examples of Procedural Death Labyrinths on Steam. The most important part of any software development project is of course choosing a cool name. My game is called "The Girl Who Played With The Dragons Nest" (Can you guess what I've been reading?) It is written in C++ with the Curses toolkit. It will of course be open source. I intend to blog my progress here if you care to follow along.

I got up not as early as I'd have liked, and did the first 10km run I've done for a while, with my new shoes and the orthotics in them. It was a bit cooler, and despite not being particularly well hydrated, I lasted the distance, and managed to complete it in under an hour. I'm a long way off my best time at the moment, but I'm hoping as it cools down my running fitness will improve. I ended up doing a bunch of startup-related stuff today, instead of Debian stuff. It felt good to make some vaguely forward progress, even if it was just business operations planning stuff. I picked up Zoe from Kindergarten by bike. We'd both confirmed with her several times since Friday as to which mode of transport she wanted to use to come home, and she'd indicated the bike. Zoe was asleep as usual, but woke up pretty easily. The Kindergarten has indicated that they want everyone out of the centre by 2:30pm, which makes it a bit of a challenge to rouse a deeply sleeping child and exit the centre in 10 minutes. I managed to sunscreen her while she was still horizontal, so that sped things up, and it helped greatly that she didn't have a post-nap meltdown. One of her class mates and her mother were hanging around waiting for her big brother to finish school, and the bike trailer tends to be a good conversation starter, so we chatted for a little bit before leaving. It was nice to properly meet another parent, and I'm glad to see Zoe's started learning some of her class mates names. I had a kale, carrot and apple juice for lunch today, and as I hate wasting the pulp out of the juicer, I'd previously found a nice muffin recipe that I could use the kale and carrot pulp in. I'd previously baked a batch of mini muffins for Zoe's lunches, and was pleased that she liked them. We were getting a bit low, so I thought we'd bake another batch this afternoon, so that's what we did after we got home. Once they were in the oven, Zoe went off to watch TV and I made a start on dinner. Bedtime went nice and smoothly tonight.

As a followup for my previous blog post, I decided to port QAntenna to Qt 5. Here's my experience.

First of all, I ran Qt 5's qmake:

qmake -qt5

Then I just ran make:

make

The first error that appeared was that QFileDialog does not has a setFilters() method. I couldn't find this on on the C++ API change page but looking at the class' documentation I found it was renamed to setSectionsMovable(). Fine, let's just change that and continue compiling.

The next errors came all from the same class QHeaderView. This time the changes are documented in the above linked page, so it was a matter to replace setMovable() with setSectionsMovable() and setResizeMode() with setSectionResizeMode(). Fixed, let's continue.

The following error turned out to be the last one: toAscii() has been deprecated in favor of toLatin1(). Once this was fixed voil , QAntenna is running with Qt 5.

Easy, wasn't it?

I have just pushed the new version to Debian unstable.

As you might know, Qt 4 is now in bug-fixes-only maintenance mode. This means that only bug fixes are allowed to be pushed to Qt 4's repository, but no new features.

On the other hand, Qt 5 is already here. Porting existing apps from Qt 4 to Qt 5 is actually easier than it was to port Qt 3 stuff to Qt 4. Take a look at this Qt project's wiki page for more info. Also pay attention at the links at the bottom of it under "Recommended Reading".

Some time ago I blogged about the 5.2.0 status in Debian experimental. We currently have it in testing with a much better status:


And we also have 5.2.1 in experimental with an even better status:

Note: qttools is FTBFS in armhf just because of some symbols changes, it will be fixed on the next upload.

Don't be afraid of getting it from experimental! Take a look at this blog post to know how to compile with Qt 5 in Debian.

BonusI have also uploaded Qt Creator built against Qt 5 to experimental. I plan to push it to unstable with Qt 5.2.1.

Today was Playgroup. We had a pretty early start to the day, and Zoe wanted porridge for breakfast, so we made that together in the Thermomix, and she got dressed while it cooked. After a bit of TV, we biked over. I got to witness semi-firsthand my first mother-to-mother altercation. I said hi to a mother I'd met a previous week, and asked her how she was, and got "Pissed off" as the response. Apparently a reasonably large boy (I'd put him at about the 4 mark) had been in the face of her daughter, and distressed her daughter a bit, so she'd apparently politely told the boy to back off, and then been revved by the mother of the boy for talking to her son. The boy continued hanging around her daughter, and she left Playgroup not long after telling me all about it. I worked out later on that the mother of the boy was one of the women who helped run the Playgroup. Fun times. He was a bit out of control. He full on screamed at me at the end of Playgroup for no reason. His mother did make him apologise to me for that, without me requesting it. There were some dress ups (mostly skirts) today, so Zoe had a fabulous time cavorting around on the stage in a big pink lacy skirt, doing "ballet". She dragged me up on stage with her, and we danced around for a bit. It was quite fun. She was very helpful at pack up time, and was bringing a lot of equipment back to the storage room at the back of the hall. I was helping load stuff into the large crate in the storage room. After parachute time, I lost sight of her briefly, and after a quick search, deduced that she must have gotten herself locked in the storage room. Sure enough, that's where she was. She was only missing for as long as it took me to notice and search in all the other possible places, so she wasn't particularly distressed. Poor thing. After Playgroup, we biked back home, and I had another photo I wanted to print out, so we drove over to Officeworks and had a sausage sizzle after we got the photo printed out, and then drove back home. Zoe had a pretty good bedtime last night, so I decided to try skipping her nap today. I wanted to get the 5-8 player extension pack for Settlers of Catan, which Mind Games in the Myer Centre had, so we hopped on a bus to the city. When we've been on longer public transport rides, Zoe's asked me if she can play games on my phone. This of course keeps her amused, but leaves me with nothing to amuse myself (I need to remember to bring a book). I have this cupboard full of old Android phones, so I decided to blow the dust off my old Nexus S and make it a dedicated games phone for her when we're on public transport. This worked pretty well today. She also decided to bring her handbag, which was convenient. I think she was pretty excited at the idea of her "own phone", even if it lacked a SIM card. After we'd bought the extension pack, I thought we could do something slightly more fun than just traipse into the city and traipse back out again. I've been meaning to introduce her to bubble tea for a while, so took this opportunity to track some down in the Myer Centre. We settled on some honeydew milk tea. She liked the honeydew, but after a couple of mouth fulls, was over the tapioca balls. She was a good sport and gave them a good college try though. It was fun watching her play around with the phone on the way home, and just fumbling her way around the user interface. She found the alarm setting UI, and was having a great old time creating alarms. (I'm glad I cleared them all out when we got home, there was at least one set for 4am). She had fun exploring all the ring tones. Towards the end of the journey home she figured out the camera, and was having a fabulous time taking snaps out the bus window. She still needs to work on keeping her hands and fingers away from the lens. She watched some TV while I made dinner and then I joined her on the couch for a cuddle while I flicked through my copy of 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) and 365 Science Experiments. My cousin Renata came around for dinner with us tonight. Zoe didn't have a particularly great dinner, but she did go to bed nice and easily. I'm not sure how she'll sleep tonight. I've gone back to having a light-weight doona on her, as it's possible last night's wake up was temperature-related.

The deadline for sponsored registration for DebConf11 in Banja Luka, originally May 8th, has officially been extended to May 19th. The reasons for the extension are as follows: Thanks to a significant increase in sponsorship from one of our main sponsors, we have been permitted and encouraged to welcome more people to the conference. The extension is a one-off occurrence in response to this new development, and to allow any potential attendees time to access more information before registering. Registration is required for everybody who plans to attend any part of Debconf. Access to the conference venue, food and accommodation is controlled through the registration badge. The only exception to the registration requirement is for those who plan to only attend Debian Day. It is possible to request sponsorship for food, accommodation, and travel. Those who have been involved or contributed to Debian or to other open source projects are eligible to apply for sponsorship, which will be decided on a case-by-case basis. The professional and corporate categories are for those who are sent and sponsored by their companies. Professional registration covers the actual costs of conference attendance, while corporate registration is just over double that price, and is aimed at those who, besides paying the actual costs, also want to contribute money and help Debian. the DebConf team

This weekend I received my 17th certification (or Statement of Accomplishment) for MOOCs. In particular, this last MOOC that I took was Creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps, offered by Lawrence Angrave of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While I certainly knew that the course was an Introduction to Programming, the reasons I took it were twofold:

1. For the "novelty" (for me, at least) of writing some Android Apps
2. To reacquaint myself with Java, which I have not touched since 1999, when I wrote a compiler, in the ages of JDK 1.0 being transitioned to JDK 1.1.

I think that the time the course took (and which I invested in) was really well spent. In fact, I learned some nice things which I would not have touched otherwise. For instance, I made the conscious effort to use an IDE (Eclipse), despite being a person that would do most of the things inside Emacs and compile the programs with command-line tools. Despite being huge, Eclipse has some really nice features and the auto-completion is amazing. Since Java is so strongly typed and Eclipse knows Java pretty well, it almost completely writes your programs for you. Of course, my interest also made me want to streamline the build process and use the command line tools (with ant, another tool that was "alien" to me, having used makefiles for everything that I needed). The use of Eclipse (and the Android development environment in general) in my Debian unstable computers was not without problems, but after spending more time trying to fix Eclipse than really doing the homework (and pulling the little hair that I still have left), one really helpful post nailed it. (Yes, I had to remove other packages like gimp, but such is life). While playing with the Android side of things, I put one badly written (and not really "android-ish") app in a github repository (which I think is aptly named "Toy Android Apps"), which served me the purpose of learning some Android-specific concepts. But the course was helpful not only to get in touch with the tools (Eclipse, ant, running Android virtual machines with the help of kvm), but also on the Java side. I lost a bit of the prejudice against it (even though I still think it is a verbose language, especially when compared to, say Python), and I, also intend to contribute to one apache project or another that have low-hanging fruits. Actually, I have signed their Contributor License Agreement and I even had my first patch accepted! Aside: Well, sadly SVN doesn't support different committer and author fields like git does and it seems that doing many small commits may not be the Apache way of doing things but the important part of all this is that the code is there and there is so much more to be done. Aside #2: After a lot of time spent converting the repository to git (which is, after all, what I use), I put a mirror of Apache's the commons graph project.

Spritz seems like a very interesting way to read quickly. It's the opposite of everything I've read (slowly) about speed reading, which focuses on using peripheral vision and not reading word-by-word. You're supposed to do things like move your eyes straight down the page, taking in whole lines at a time. Interruptions seem like a big problem; interruptions that make me look away, or interruptions in my brain, where I might realize I've not been paying attention for some amount of time. Maybe they should have navigation buttons similar to video players, so you can skip backward 15 seconds at a time. I also do want to go back and review previous pages sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with interruption, so I wouldn't want word-by-word to be the only way to view a text -- especially when reading nonfiction. I might event want it to work in a mode where you hold down the button on the side of your phone or tablet in order to move the words, and then have them automatically pause when you release. It feels like I'd want a lot of short breaks when reading in this style. It should also be free software, but unfortunately I'm guessing it won't be. I hope someone will make a free software application along these lines -- the basics seem pretty basic.