Debian is very difficult, a puzzle. This surprising statement was what I got last week when talking with a group of new IT students (and their teachers). I would like to write down here what I was able to obtain from that conversation. From time to time, as part of my job at CICA, we open the doors of our datacenter to IT students from all around Andalusia (our region) who want to learn what we do here and how we do it. All our infraestructure and servers are primarily built using FLOSS software (we have some exceptions, like backbone routers and switches), and the most important servers run Debian. As part of the talk, when I am in such a meeting with a visiting group, I usually ask about which technologies they use and learn in their studies. The other day, they told me they use mostly Ubuntu and a bit of Fedora. When I asked why not Debian, the answer was that it was very difficult to install and manage. I tried to obtain some facts about this but I failed in what seems to be a case of bad fame, a reputation problem which was extended among the teachers and therefore among the students. I didn t detect any branding biasing or the like. I just seems lack of knowledge, and bad Debian reputation. Using my DD powers and responsabilities, I kindly asked for feedback to improve our installer or whatever they may find difficult, but a week later I have received no email so far. Then, what I obtain is nothing new:

• we probably need more new-users feedback
• we have work to do in the marketing/branding area
• we have very strong competitors out there
• we should keep doing our best

I myself recently had to use the Ubuntu installer in a laptop, and it didn t seem that different to the Debian one: same steps and choices, like in every other OS installation. Please, spread the word: Debian is not difficult. Certainly not perfect, but I don t think that installing and using Debian is such a puzzle.

Categories:

• Debian-Blog
• General
• KDE
• Computing
• Technology

Keywords:

• calibre
• gnome
• multitouch
• touchscreen
• tablet
• goldendict
• onboard

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2 more weeks of my awesome Outreachy journey have passed, so it is time to make an update on my progress. I continued my work on improving diffoscope by fixing bugs and completing wishlist items. These include:

Improving APK support I worked on #850501 and #850502 to improve the way diffoscope handles APK files. Thanks to Emanuel Bronshtein for providing clear description on how to reproduce these bugs and ideas on how to fix them. And special thanks to Chris Lamb for insisting on providing tests for these changes! That part actually proved to be little more tricky, and I managed to mess up with these tests (extra thanks to Chris for cleaning up the mess I created). Hope that also means I learned something from my mistakes. Also, I was pleased to see F-droid Verification Server as a sign of F-droid progress on reproducible builds effort - I hope these changes to diffoscope will help them!

Adding support for image metadata That came from #849395 - a request was made to compare image metadata along with image content. Diffoscope has support for three types of images: JPEG, MS Windows Icon (*.ico) and PNG. Among these, PNG already had good image metadata support thanks to sng tool, so I worked on .jpeg and .ico files support. I initially tried to use exiftool for extracting metadata, but then I discovered it does not handle .ico files, so I decided to use a bigger force - ImageMagick s identify - for this task. I was glad to see it had that handy -format option I could use to select only the necessary fields (I found their -verbose, well, too verbose for the task) and presenting them in the defined form, negating the need of filtering its output. What was particulary interesting and important for me in terms of learning: while working on this feature, I discovered that, at the moment, diffoscope could not handle .ico files at all - img2txt tool, that was used for retrieving image content, did not support that type of images. But instead of recognizing this as a bug and resolving it, I started to think of possible workaround, allowing for retrieving image metadata even after retrieving image content failed. Definetely not very good thinking. Thanks Mattia Rizzolo for actually recognizing this as a bug and filing it, and Chris Lamb for fixing it!

Other work

Order-like differences, part 2 In the previous post, I mentioned Lunar s suggestion to use hashing for finding order-like difference in wide variety of input data. I implemented that idea, but after discussion with my mentor, we decided it is probably not worth it - this change would alter quite a lot of things in core modules of diffoscope, and the gain would be not really significant. Still, implementing that was an important experience for me, as I had to hack on deepest and, arguably, most difficult modules of diffoscope and gained some insight on how they work.

Comparing with several tools (work in progress) Although my initial motivation for this idea was flawed (the workaround I mentioned earlier for .ico files), it still might be useful to have a mechanism that would allow to run several commands for finding difference, and then give the output of those that succeed, failing if and only if they all have failed. One possible case when it might happen is when we use commands coming from different tools, and one of them is not installed. It would be nice if we still used the other and not the uninformative binary diff (that is a default fallback option for when something goes wrong with more clever comparison). I am still in process of polishing this change, though, and still in doubt if it is needed at all.

Side note - Outreachy and my university progress In my Outreachy application, I promised that if I am selected into this round, I will do everything I can to unload the required time period from my university time commitements. I did that by moving most of my courses to the first half of the academic year. Now, the main thing that is left for me to do is my Master s thesis. I consulted my scientific advisors from both universities that I am formally attending (SFEDU and LUT - I am in double degree program), and as a result, they agreed to change my Master s thesis topic to match my Outreachy work. Now, that should have sounded like an excellent news - merging these activities together actually mean I can allocate much more time to my work on reproducible builds, even beyond the actual internship time period. That was intended to remove a burden from my shoulders. Still, I feel a bit uneasy. The drawback of this decision lies in fact I have no idea on how to write scientific report based on pure practical work. I know other students from my universities have done such things before, but choosing my own topic means my scientific advisors can t help me much - this is just out of their area of expertise. Well, wish me luck - I m up to the challenge!

Review: Enchanters' End Game, by David Eddings

Series:	The Belgariad #5
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	December 1984
Printing:	February 1990
ISBN:	0-345-33871-5
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	372

And, finally, the conclusion towards which everything has been heading, and the events for which Castle of Wizardry was the preparation. (This is therefore obviously not the place to start with this series.) Does it live up to all the foreshadowing and provide a satisfactory conclusion? I'd say mostly. The theology is a bit thin, but Eddings does a solid job of bringing all the plot threads together and giving each of the large cast a moment to shine. Enchanters' End Game (I have always been weirdly annoyed by that clunky apostrophe) starts with more of Garion and Belgarath, and, similar to the end of Castle of Wizardry, this feels like them rolling on the random encounter table. There is a fairly important bit with Nadraks at the start, but the remaining detour to the north is a mostly unrelated bit of world-building. Before this re-read, I didn't remember how extensive the Nadrak parts of this story were; in retrospect, I realize a lot of what I was remembering is in the Mallorean instead. I'll therefore save my commentary on Nadrak gender roles for an eventual Mallorean re-read, since there's quite a lot to dig through and much of it is based on information not available here. After this section, though, the story leaves Garion, Belgarath, and Silk for nearly the entire book, returning to them only for the climax. Most of this book is about Ce'Nedra, the queens and kings of the west, and what they're doing while Garion and his small party are carrying the Ring into Mordor er, you know what I mean. And this long section is surprisingly good. We first get to see the various queens of the west doing extremely well managing the kingdoms while the kings are away (see my previous note about how Eddings does examine his stereotypes), albeit partly by mercilessly exploiting the sexism of their societies. The story then picks up with Ce'Nedra and company, including all of the rest of Garion's band, being their snarky and varied selves. There are some fairly satisfying set pieces, some battle tactics, some magical tactics, and a good bit of snarking and interplay between characters who feel like old friends by this point (mostly because of Eddings's simple, broad-strokes characterization). And Ce'Nedra is surprisingly good here. I would say that she's grown up after the events of the last book, but sadly she reverts to being awful in the aftermath. But for the main section of the book, partly because she's busy with other things, she's a reasonable character who experiences some actual consequences and some real remorse from one bad decision she makes. She's even admirable in how she handles events leading up to the climax of the book. Eddings does a good job showing every character in their best light, putting quite a lot of suspense (and some dramatic rescues) into this final volume, and providing a final battle that's moderately interesting. I'm not sure I entirely bought the theological ramifications of the conclusion (the bits with Polgara do not support thinking about too deeply), but the voice in Garion's head continues to be one of the better characters of the series. And Errand is a delight. After the climax, the aftermath sadly returns to Eddings's weird war between the sexes presentation of all gender relationships in this series, and it left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. (There is absolutely no way that some of these relationships would survive in reality.) Eddings portrays nearly every woman as a manipulative schemer, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, and there is just so much gender stereotyping throughout this book for both women and men. You can tell he's trying with the queens, but women are still only allowed to be successful at politics and war within a very specific frame. Even Polgara gets a bit of the gender stereotyping, although she remains mostly an exception (and one aspect of the ending is much better than it could have been). Ah well. One does not (or at least probably should not) read this series without being aware that it has some flaws. But it has a strange charm as well, mostly from its irreverence. The dry wise-cracking of these characters rings more true to me than the epic seriousness of a lot of fantasy. This is how people behave under stress, and this is how quirky people who know each other extremely well interact. It also keeps one turning the pages quite effectively. I stayed up for several late nights finishing it, and was never tempted to put it down and stop reading. This is not great literature, but it's still fun. It wouldn't sustain regular re-reading for me, but a re-read after twenty years or so was pretty much exactly the experience I was hoping for: an unchallenging, optimistic story with amusing characters and a guaranteed happy ending. There's a place for that. Followed, in a series sense, by the Mallorean, the first book of which is The Guardians of the West. But this is a strictly optional continuation; the Belgariad comes to a definite end here. Rating: 7 out of 10

A month or so ago I got involved in a discussion on IRC about notification methods for a headless NAS. One of the options considered was some sort of USB attached LED. DealExtreme had a cheap Webmail notifier , which was already supported by mainline kernels as a Riso Kagaku device but it had been sold out for some time. This seemed like a fun problem to solve with a tinyAVR and V-USB. I had my USB relay board so I figured I could use that to at least get some code to the point that the kernel detected it as the right device, and the relay output could be configured as one of the colours to ensure it was being driven in roughly the right manner. The lack of a full lsusb dump (at least when I started out) made things a bit harder, plus the fact that the Riso uses an output report unlike the relay code, which uses a control message. However I had the kernel source for the driver and with a little bit of experimentation had something which would cause the driver to be loaded and the appropriate files in /sys/class/leds/ to be created. The relay was then successfully activated when the red LED was supposed to be on. I subsequently ordered some Digispark clones and modified the code to reflect the pins there (my relay board used pins 1+2 for USB, the Digispark uses pins 3+4). I then soldered a tricolour LED to the board, plugged it in and had a clone of the Riso Kaguku device for about 1.50 in parts (no doubt much cheaper in bulk). Very chuffed. In case it s useful to someone, the code is released under GPLv3+ and is available at https://the.earth.li/gitweb/?p=riso-kagaku-clone.git;a=summary or on GitHub at https://github.com/u1f35c/riso-kagaku-clone. I m seeing occasional issues on an older Dell machine that only does USB2 with enumeration, but it generally is fine once it gets over that. (FWIW, Jon, who started the original discussion, ended up with a BlinkStick Nano which is a neater device with 2 LEDs but still based on an Tiny85.)

Modern XMPP Server

I've published a new HOWTO on my website 'http://www.trueelena.org/computers/howto/modern_xmpp_server.html':

http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2017/debian/modern-and-secure-instant-messaging/ already wrote about the Why (and the What, Who and When), so I'll just quote his conclusion and move on to the How.

I now have an XMPP setup which has all the features of the recent fancy chat systems, and on top of that it runs, client and server, on Free Software, which can be audited, it is federated and I can self-host my own server in my own VPS if I want to, with packages supported in Debian.

How

I've decided to install https://prosody.im/, mostly because it was recommended by the RTC QuickStart Guide http://rtcquickstart.org/; I've heard that similar results can be reached with https://www.ejabberd.im/ and other servers.

I'm also targeting https://www.debian.org/ stable (+ backports); as I write this is jessie; if there are significant differences I will update this article when I will upgrade my server to stretch. Right now, this means that I'm using prosody 0.9 (and that's probably also the version that will be available in stretch).

Installation and prerequisites

You will need to enable the https://backports.debian.org/ repository and then install the packages prosody and prosody-modules.

You also need to setup some TLS certificates (I used Let's Encrypt https://letsencrypt.org/); and make them readable by the prosody user; you can see Chapter 12 of the RTC QuickStart Guide http://rtcquickstart.org/guide/multi/xmpp-server-prosody.html for more details.

On your firewall, you'll need to open the following TCP ports:

• 5222 (client2server)


• 5269 (server2server)


• 5280 (default http port for prosody)


• 5281 (default https port for prosody)

The latter two are needed to enable some services provided via http(s), including rich media transfers.

With just a handful of users, I didn't bother to configure LDAP or anything else, but just created users manually via:

prosodyctl adduser alice@example.org

In-band registration is disabled by default (and I've left it that way, to prevent my server from being used to send spim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_spam).

prosody configuration

You can then start configuring prosody by editing /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua and changing a few values from the distribution defaults.

First of all, enforce the use of encryption and certificate checking both for client2server and server2server communications with:


c2s_require_encryption = true
s2s_secure_auth = true


and then, sadly, add to the whitelist any server that you want to talk to and doesn't support the above:


s2s_insecure_domains = "gmail.com"


virtualhosts

For each virtualhost you want to configure, create a file /etc/prosody/conf.avail/chat.example.org.cfg.lua with contents like the following:


VirtualHost "chat.example.org"
enabled = true
ssl =
key = "/etc/ssl/private/example.org-key.pem";
certificate = "/etc/ssl/public/example.org.pem";


For the domains where you also want to enable MUCs, add the follwing lines:


Component "conference.chat.example.org" "muc"
restrict_room_creation = "local"

the "local" configures prosody so that only local users are allowed to create new rooms (but then everybody can join them, if the room administrator allows it): this may help reduce unwanted usages of your server by random people.

You can also add the following line to enable rich media transfers via http uploads (XEP-0363):


Component "upload.chat.trueelena.org" "http_upload"

The defaults are pretty sane, but see https://modules.prosody.im/mod_http_upload.html for details on what knobs you can configure for this module

Don't forget to enable the virtualhost by linking the file inside /etc/prosody/conf.d/.

additional modules

Most of the other interesting XEPs are enabled by loading additional modules inside /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua (under modules_enabled); to enable mod_something just add a line like:


"something";

Most of these come from the prosody-modules package (and thus from https://modules.prosody.im/ ) and some may require changing when prosody 0.10 will be available; when this is the case it is mentioned below.

• mod_carbons (XEP-0280)
  To keep conversations syncronized while using multiple devices at the same time.
  
  This will be included by default in prosody 0.10.




• mod_privacy + mod_blocking (XEP-0191)
  To allow user-controlled blocking of users, including as an anti-spim measure.
  
  In prosody 0.10 these two modules will be replaced by mod_privacy.




• mod_smacks (XEP-0198)
  Allow clients to resume a disconnected session before a customizable timeout and prevent message loss.




• mod_mam (XEP-0313)
  Archive messages on the server for a limited period of time (default 1 week) and allow clients to retrieve them; this is required to syncronize message history between multiple clients.
  
  With prosody 0.9 only an in-memory storage backend is available, which may make this module problematic on servers with many users. prosody 0.10 will fix this by adding support for an SQL backed storage with archiving capabilities.




• mod_throttle_presence + mod_filter_chatstates (XEP-0352)
  Filter out presence updates and chat states when the client announces (via Client State Indication) that the user isn't looking. This is useful to reduce power and bandwidth usage for "useless" traffic.

@Gruppo Linux Como @LIFO

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 1 and Saturday January 7 2017: GSoC and Outreachy updates

• Maria Glukhova blogged about Getting to know diffoscope better.

Toolchain development

• #849999 was filed: "dpkg-dev should not set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to the empty string"

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #849968 filed against pciutils.
• #849972 filed against yard.
• #850556 filed against sed.

Dhole:

• #849926 filed against nxt-firmware.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 13 package reviews have been added, 4 have been updated and 6 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been added/updated:

• Add new randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_yardoc toolchain issue.
• Add fix for randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_yardoc toolchain issue.

Upstreaming of reproducibility fixes Merged:

• calibre
• jna
• rocksndiamonds
• avfs
• jackaudio1
• jackaudio2
• gri

Opened:

• rockdodger

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

• Chris Lamb (4)

diffoscope development diffoscope 67 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from :

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Optimisations:
  - Avoid multiple iterations over archive by unpacking once for an ~8X
    runtime optimisation.
  - Avoid unnecessary splitting and interpolating for a ~20X optimisation
    when writing --text output.
  - Avoid expensive diff regex parsing until we need it, speeding up diff
    parsing by 2X.
  - Alias expensive Config() in diff parsing lookup for a 10% optimisation.
* Progress bar:
  - Show filenames, ELF sections, etc. in progress bar.
  - Emit JSON on the the status file descriptor output instead of a custom
    format.
* Logging:
  - Use more-Pythonic logging functions and output based on __name__, etc.
  - Use Debian-style "I:", "D:" log level format modifier.
  - Only print milliseconds in output, not microseconds.
  - Print version in debug output so that saved debug outputs can standalone
    as bug reports.
* Profiling:
  - Also report the total number of method calls, not just the total time.
  - Report on the total wall clock taken to execute diffoscope, including
    cleanup.
* Tidying:
  - Rename "NonExisting" -> "Missing".
  - Entirely rework diffoscope.comparators module, splitting as many separate
    concerns into a different utility package, tidying imports, etc.
  - Split diffoscope.difference into diffoscope.diff, etc.
  - Update file references in debian/copyright post module reorganisation.
  - Many other cleanups, etc.
* Misc:
  - Clarify comment regarding why we call python3(1) directly. Thanks to J r my
    Bobbio <lunar@debian.org>.
  - Raise a clearer error if trying to use --html-dir on a file.
  - Fix --output-empty when files are identical and no outputs specified.
[ Reiner Herrmann ]
* Extend .apk recognition regex to also match zip archives (Closes: #849638)
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Follow the rename of the Debian package "python-jsbeautifier" to
  "jsbeautifier".
[ siamezzze ]
* Fixed no newline being classified as order-like difference.

reprotest development reprotest 0.5 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

[ Ximin Luo ]
* Stop advertising variations that we're not actually varying.
  That is: domain_host, shell, user_group.
* Fix auto-presets in the case of a file in the current directory.
* Allow disabling build-path variations. (Closes: #833284)
* Add a faketime variation, with NO_FAKE_STAT=1 to avoid messing with
  various buildsystems. This is on by default; if it causes your builds
  to mess up please do file a bug report.
* Add a --store-dir option to save artifacts.

Other contributions (not yet uploaded):

• Chris Lamb:
  • setup.py: Specify a Python3 env shebang
  • Drop reprotest/ runner,tools from DEP-5 copyright wildcard matching.

reproducible-builds.org website development

• website.git notifications now go to#reproducible-builds. Thanks todanielsh and the KGB bot maintainers.
• Daniel Shahaf:
  • events: add IRC meeting
  • Move mailing list from 'who' to 'resources'.
• Holger Levsen:
  • link to meetbot.debian.net IRC meetings archives
• Chris Lamb:
  • tools: Underscore that disorderfs is deliberately adding such randomness.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Debian arm64 architecture was fully tested in all three suites in just 15 days. Thanks again to Codethink.co.uk for their support!
• Log diffoscope profiling info. (lamby)
• Run pg_dump with -O --column-inserts to make easier to import our main database dump into a non-PostgreSQL database. (mapreri)
• Debian armhf network: CPU frequency scaling was enabled for three Firefly boards, enabling the CPUs to run at full speed. (vagrant)
• Arch Linux and Fedora tests have been disabled (h01ger)
• Improve mail notifications about daily problems. (h01ger)

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

There have been a two long threads on the debian-devel mailing list about the representation of the changes to upstream source code made by Debian maintainers. Here are a few notes for my own reference. I spent a lot of time defending the workflow I described in dgit-maint-merge(7) (which was inspired by this blog post). However, I came to be convinced that there is a case for a manually curated series of patches for certain classes of package. It will depend on how upstream uses git (rebasing or merging) and on whether the Debian delta from upstream is significant and/or long-standing. I still think that we should be using dgit-maint-merge(7) for leaf or near-leaf packages, because it saves so much volunteer time that can be better spent on other things. When upstream does use a merging workflow, one advantage of the dgit-maint-merge(7) workflow is that Debian s packaging is just another branch of development. Now consider packages where we do want a manually curated patch series. It is very hard to represent such a series in git. The only natural way to do it is to continually rebase the patch series against an upstream branch, but public branches that get rebased are not a good idea. The solution that many people have adopted is to represent their patch series as a folder full of .diff files, and then use gbp pq to convert this into a rebasing branch. This branch is not shared. It is edited, rebased, and then converted back to the folder of .diff files, the changes to which are then committed to git. One of the advantages of dgit is that there now exists an official, non-rebasing git history of uploads to the archive. It would be nice if we could represent curated patch series as branches in the dgit repos, rather than as folders full of .diff files. But as I just described, this is very hard. However, Ian Jackson has the beginnings of a workflow that just might fit the bill.

This is an extension to last month s article/sharing where I had shared the changes that had transpired in the last 2-3 months. Now am in a position to share the kind of issues a user can go through in case he is looking for support from IRCTC to help him/her go cashless. If you a new user to use IRCTC services you wouldn t go through this trouble. For those who might have TL;DR issues it s about how hard it can become to get digital credentials fixed in IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) a. 2 months back Indian Prime Minister gave a call incentivizing people to use digital means to do any commercial activities. One of the big organizations which took/takes part is IRCTC which handles the responsibility for e-ticketing millions of Rail tickets for common people. In India, a massive percentage moves by train as it s cheaper than going by Air. A typical fare from say Pune Delhi (capital of India) by second class sleeper would be INR 645/- for a distance of roughly 1600 odd kms and these are monopoly rates, there are no private trains and I m not suggesting anything of that sort, just making sure that people know. An economy class ticket by Air for the same distance would be anywhere between INR 2500-3500/- for a 2 hour flight between different airlines. Last I checked there are around 8 mainstream airlines including flag-carrier Air India. About 30% of the population live on less than a dollar and a half a day which would come around INR 100/-. There was a comment some six months back on getting more people out of the poverty line. But as there are lots of manipulations in numbers for who and what denotes above poor and below poor in India and lot of it has to do with politics it s not something which would be easily fixable. There are lots to be said in that arena but this article is not an appropriate blog-post for that. All in all, it s only 3-5% of the population at the most who can travel via Air if situation demands and around 1-2% who might be frequent, business or leisure travellers. Now while I can thankfully afford an Air Ticket if the situation so demands, my mother gets motion sickness so while together we can only travel by train. b. With the above background, I had registered with IRCTC few years ago with another number (dual-SIM) I had purchased and was thinking that I would be using this long-term (seems to my first big mistake, hindsight 50:50) . This was somewhere in 2006/2007. c. Few months later I found that the other service provider wasn t giving good service or was not upto mark. I was using IDEA (the main mobile operator) throughout those times. d. As I didn t need the service that much, didn t think to inform them that I want to change to another service provider at that point in time (possibly the biggest mistake, hindsight 50:50) e. In July 2016 itself IRCTC cut service fees, f. This was shared as a NEW news item/policy decision at November-end 2016 . g. While I have done all that has been asked by irctc-care haven t still got the issues resolved IRCTC s e-mail id care@irctc.co.in Now in detail This is my first e-mail sent to IRCTC in June 2016

Dear Customer care, I had applied and got username and password sometime back . The
number I had used to register with IRCTC was xxxxxxxxxx (BSNL mobile number not used anymore) . My mobile was lost and along with that the number was also lost. I had filed a complaint with the police and stopped that number as well. Now I have an another mobile number but have forgotten both the password and the security answer that I had given when I had registered . I do have all the conversations I had both with the ticketadmn@irctc.co.in as well as care@irctc.co.in if needed to prove my identity. The new number I want to tie it with is xxxxxxxxxx (IDEA number in-use for last 10 years) I see two options :- a. Tie the other number with my e-mail address b. Take out the e-mail address from the database so that I can fill in
as a new applicant. Looking forward to hear from you.

There was lot of back and forth with various individuals on IRCTC and after a lot of back and forth, this is the final e-mail I got from them somewhere in August 2016, he writes

Dear Customer, We request you to send mobile bill of your mobile number if it is post paid or if it is prepaid then contact to your service provider and they will give you valid proof of your mobile number or they will give you in written on company head letter so that we may update your mobile number to update so that you may reset your password through mobile OTP.
and Kindly inform you that you can update your profile by yourself also. 1.login on IRCTC website
2.after login successfully move courser on my profile tab.
3.then click on update profile
4.re-enter your password then you can update your profile
5.click on user-profile then email id.
6. click on update. Still you face any problem related to update profile please revert to us with the screen shots of error message which you will get at the time of update profile . Thanks & Regards Parivesh Patel
Executive, Customer Care
care@irctc.co.in
http://www.irctc.co.in
[#3730034]

IRCTC s response seemed responsible, valid and thought it would be a cake-walk as private providers are supposed to be much more efficient than public ones. The experience proved how wrong was I trust them with doing the right thing 1. First I tried the twitter handle to see how IDEA uses their twitter handle. 2. The idea customer care twitter handle was mild in its response. 3. After sometime I realized that the only way out of this quagmire would perhaps be to go to a brick-mortar shop and get it resolved face-to-face. I went twice or thrice but each time something or the other would happen. On the fourth and final time, I was able to get to the big Official shop only to be told they can t do anything about this and I would have to the appellate body to get the reply. The e-mail address which they shared (and I found it later) was wrong. I sent a somewhat longish e-mail sharing all the details and got bounce-backs. The correct e-mail address for the IDEA Maharashtra appellate body is appellette.mh@idea.aditybirla.com I searched online and after a bit of hit and miss finally got the relevant address. Then finally on 30th December, 2016 wrote a short email to the service provider as follows

Dear Sir,
I have been using prepaid mobile connection number xxxxxxx taken from IDEA for last 10 odd years. I want to register myself with IRCTC for online railway booking using
my IDEA mobile number. Earlier, I was having a BSNL connection which I discontinued 4 years back, For re-registering myself with IRCTC, I have to fulfill their latest
requirements as shown in the email below . It is requested that I please be issued a letter confirming my
credentials with your esteemed firm. I contacted your local office at corner of Law College Road and
Bhandarkar Road, Pune (reference number Q1 84786060793) who
refused to provide me any letter and have advised me to contact on the
above e-mail address, hence this request is being forwarded to you. Please do the needful at your earliest.

Few days later I got this short e-mail from them

Dear Customer, Greetings for the day! This is with reference to your email regarding services. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused to you and delay in response. We regret to inform you that we are unable to provide demographic details from our end as provision for same is not available with us. Should you need any further assistance, please call our Customer Service help line number 9822012345 or email us at customercare@idea.adityabirla.com by mentioning ten digit Idea mobile number in subject line. Thanks & Regards, Javed Khan Customer Service Team IDEA Cellular Limited- Maharashtra & Goa Circle.

Now I was at almost my wit s end. Few days before, I had re-affirmed my e-mail address to IDEA . I went to the IDEA care site, registered with my credentials. While the https connection to the page is weak, but let s not dwell on that atm. I logged into the site, I went through all the drop-down menus and came across My Account > Raise a request link which I clicked on . This came to a page where I could raise requests for various things. One of the options given there was Bill Delivery. As I wasn t a postpaid user but a prepaid user didn t know if that would work or not I still clicked on it. It said it would take 4 days for that to happen. I absently filed it away as I was somewhat sure that nothing would happen from my previous experience with IDEA. But this time the IDEA support staff came through and shared a toll-free SMS number and message format that I could use to generate call details from the last 6 months. The toll-free number from IDEA is 12345 and the message format is EBILL MON (short-form for month so if it s January would be jan, so on and so forth). After gathering all the required credentials, sent my last mail to IRCTC about a week, 10 days back

Dear Mr. Parivesh Patel, I was out-of-town and couldn t do the needful so sorry for the delay.
Now that I m back in town, I have been able to put together my prepaid
bills of last 6 months which should make it easy to establish my
identity. As had shared before, I don t remember my old password and the old
mobile number (BSNL number) is no longer accessible so can t go
through that route. Please let me know the next steps in correcting the existing IRCTC
account (which I haven t operated ever) so I can start using it to
book my tickets. Look forward to hearing from you.

Haven t heard anything them from them, apart from a generated token number, each time you send a reply happens. This time it was #4763548 The whole sequence of events throws a lot of troubling questions a. Could IRCTC done a better job of articulating their need to me instead of the run-around I was given ? b. Shouldn t there be a time limit to accounts from which no transactions have been done ? I hadn t done a single transaction since registering. When cell service providers including BSNL takes number out after a year of not using a number, why is that account active for so long ? c. As that account didn t have OTP at registration, dunno if it s being used for illegal activities or something. Update This doesn t seem to be a unique thing at all. Just sampling some of the tweets by people at @IRCTC_LTD https://twitter.com/praveen4al/status/775614978258718721 https://twitter.com/vis_nov25/status/786062572390932480 https://twitter.com/ShubhamDevadiya/status/794241443950948352 https://twitter.com/rajeshhindustan/status/798028633759584256 https://twitter.com/ameetsangita/status/810081624343908352 https://twitter.com/grkisback/status/813733835213078528 https://twitter.com/gbalaji_/status/804230235625394177 https://twitter.com/chandhu_nr/status/800675627384721409 , all of this just goes to show how un-unique the situation really is.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #customer-service, #demonetization, #IDEA-aditya birla, #IRCTC, #web-services, rant

I use openssh every day, be it the ssh command for connecting to remote hosts, or the scp command for uploading/downloading files. Once a day, or more, I forget that scp uses the non-obvious -P flag for specifying the port, not the -p flag that ssh uses. Enough is enough. I shall not file a bug report against the Debian openssh-client page, because no doubt compatibility with both upstream, and other distributions, is important. But damnit I've had enough. apt-get source openssh-client shows the appropriate code:

    fflag = tflag = 0;
    while ((ch = getopt(argc, argv, "dfl:prtvBCc:i:P:q12346S:o:F:")) != -1)
          switch (ch)  
          ..
          ..
            case 'P':
                    addargs(&remote_remote_args, "-p");
                    addargs(&remote_remote_args, "%s", optarg);
                    addargs(&args, "-p");
                    addargs(&args, "%s", optarg);
                    break;
          ..
          ..
            case 'p':
                    pflag = 1;
                    break;
          ..
          ..
          ..

Swapping those two flags around, and updating the format string appropriately, was sufficient to do the necessary. In other news I've done some hardware development, using both Arduino boards and the WeMos D1-mini. I'm still at the stage where I'm flashing lights, and doing similarly trivial things:

• Absolute Arduino Basic Tutorial
  • Recognizing the board.
  • Getting the development environment setup.
  • Running your first project.
• Absolute WeMos D1 Mini (ESP8266) Basic Tutorial
  • Recognizing the board.
  • Getting the development environment setup.
  • Installing the libraries/headers/examples
  • Writing your first WiFi project.

I have more complex projects planned for the future, but these are on-hold until the appropriate parts are delivered:

• MP3 playback.
• Bluetooth-speakers.
• Washing machine alarm.
• LCD clock, with time set by NTP, and relay control.

Even with a few LEDs though I've had fun, for example writing a trivial binary display.

So, once again I had a box that had been installed with the kind-of-wrong Debian architecture, in this case, powerpc (32 bit, bigendian), while I wanted ppc64 (64 bit, bigendian). So, crossgrade time. If you want to follow this, be aware that I use sysvinit. I doubt this can be done this way with systemd installed, because systemd has a lot more dependencies for PID 1, and there is also a dbus daemon involved that cannot be upgraded without a reboot. To make this a bit more complicated, ppc64 is an unofficial port, so it is even less synchronized across architectures than sid normally is (I would have used jessie, but there is no jessie for ppc64). Step 1: Be Prepared To work around the archive synchronisation issues, I installed pbuilder and created 32 and 64 bit base.tgz archives:

pbuilder --create --basetgz /var/cache/pbuilder/powerpc.tgz
pbuilder --create --basetgz /var/cache/pbuilder/ppc64.tgz \
    --architecture ppc64 \
    --mirror http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports \
    --debootstrapopts --keyring=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-ports-archive-keyring.gpg \
    --debootstrapopts --include=debian-ports-archive-keyring

Step 2: Gradually Heat the Water so the Frog Doesn't Notice Then, I added the sources to sources.list, and added the architecture to dpkg:

deb [arch=powerpc] http://ftp.debian.org/debian sid main
deb [arch=ppc64] http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports sid main
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian sid main
dpkg --add-architecture ppc64
apt update

Step 3: Time to Go Wild

apt install dpkg:ppc64

Obviously, that didn't work, in my case because libattr1 and libacl1 weren't in sync, so there was no valid way to install powerpc and ppc64 versions in parallel, so I used pbuilder to compile the current version from sid for the architecture that wasn't up to date (IIRC, one for powerpc, and one for ppc64). Manually installed the libraries, then tried again:

apt install dpkg:ppc64

Woo, it actually wants to do that. Now, that only half works, because apt calls dpkg twice, once to remove the old version, and once to install the new one. Your options at this point are

apt-get download dpkg:ppc64
dpkg -i dpkg_*_ppc64.deb

or if you didn't think far enough ahead, cursing followed by

cd /tmp
ar x /var/cache/apt/archives/dpkg_*_ppc64.deb
cd /
tar -xJf /tmp/data.tar.xz
dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/dpkg_*_ppc64.deb

Step 4: Automate That Now, I'd like to get this a bit more convenient, so I had to repeat the same dance with apt and aptitude and their dependencies. Thanks to pbuilder, this wasn't too bad. With the aptitude resolver, it was then simple to upgrade a test package

aptitude install coreutils:ppc64 coreutils:powerpc-

The resolver did its thing, and asked whether I really wanted to remove an Essential package. I did, and it replaced the package just fine. So I asked dpkg for a list of all powerpc packages installed (since it's a ppc64 dpkg, it will report powerpc as foreign), massage that into shape with grep and sed, and give the result to aptitude as a command line. Some time later, aptitude finished, and I had a shiny 64 bit system. Crossgrade through an ssh session that remained open all the time, and without a reboot. After closing the ssh session, the last 32 bit binary was deleted as it was no longer in use. There were a few minor hiccups during the process where dpkg refused to overwrite "shared" files with different versions, but these could be solved easily by manually installing the offending package with

dpkg --force-overwrite -i ...

and then resuming what aptitude was doing, using

aptitude install

So, in summary, this still works fairly well.

Candy from Strangers

A few days ago I gave a talk at ESC https://www.endsummercamp.org/ about some reasons why I think that using software and especially libraries from the packages of a community managed distribution is important and much better than alternatives such as pypi, nmp etc. This article is a translation of what I planned to say before forgetting bits of it and luckily adding it back as an answer to a question :)

When I was young, my parents taught me not to accept candy from strangers, unless they were present and approved of it, because there was a small risk of very bad things happening. It was of course a simplistic rule, but it had to be easy enough to follow for somebody who wasn't proficient (yet) in the subtleties of social interactions.

One of the reasons why it worked well was that following it wasn't a big burden: at home candy was plenty and actual offers were rare: I only remember missing one piece of candy because of it, and while it may have been a great one, the ones I could have at home were also good.

Contrary to candy, offers of gratis software from random strangers are quite common: from suspicious looking websites to legit and professional looking ones, to platforms that are explicitly designed to allow developers to publish their own software with little or no checks.

Just like candy, there is also a source of trusted software in the Linux distributions, especially those lead by a community: I mention mostly Debian because it's the one I know best, but the same principles apply to Fedora and, to some measure, to most of the other distributions. Like good parents, distributions can be wrong, and they do leave room for older children (and proficient users) to make their own choices, but still provide a safe default.

Among the unsafe sources there are many different cases and while they do share some of the risks, they have different targets with different issues; for brevity the scope of this article is limited to the ones that mostly concern software developers: language specific package managers and software distribution platforms like PyPi, npm and rubygems etc.

These platforms are extremely convenient both for the writers of libraries, who are enabled to publish their work with minor hassles, and for the people who use such libraries, because they provide an easy way to install and use an huge amount of code. They are of course also an excellent place for distributions to find new libraries to package and distribute, and this I agree is a good thing.

What I however believe is that getting code from such sources and using it without carefully checking it is even more risky than accepting candy from a random stranger on the street in an unfamiliar neighbourhood.

The risk aren't trivial: while you probably won't be taken as an hostage for ransom, your data could be, or your devices and the ones who run your programs could be used in some criminal act causing at least some monetary damage both to yourself and to society at large.

If you're writing code that should be maintained in time there are also other risks even when no malice is involved, because each package on these platform has a different policy with regards to updates, their backwards compatibility and what can be expected in case an old version is found to have security issues.

The very fact that everybody can publish anything on such platforms is both their biggest strength and their main source of vulnerability: while most of the people who publish their libraries do so with good intentions, attacks have been described and publicly tested, such as the fun typo-squatting http://incolumitas.com/2016/06/08/typosquatting-package-managers/ one (archived on http://web.archive.org/web/20160801161807/http://incolumitas.com/2016/06/08/typosquatting-package-managers) that published harmless malicious code under common typos for famous libraries.

Contrast this with Debian, where everybody can contribute, but before they are allowed full unsupervised access to the archive they have to establish a relationship with the rest of the community, which includes meeting other developers in real life, at the very least to get their gpg keys signed.

This doesn't prevent malicious people from introducing software, but raises significantly the effort required to do so, and once caught people can usually be much more effectively prevented from repeating it than a simple ban on an online-only account can do.

It is true that not every Debian maintainer actually does a full code review of everything that they allow in the archive, and in some cases it would be unreasonable to expect it, but in most cases they are at least reasonably familiar with the code to do at least bug triage, and most importantly they are in an excellent position to establish a relationship of mutual trust with the upstream authors.

Additionally, package maintainers don't work in isolation: a growing number of packages are being maintained by a team of people, and most importantly there are aspects that involve potentially the whole community, from the fact that new packages that enter the distribution are publicity announced on a mailing list to the various distribution-wide QA efforts.

Going back to the language specific distribution platforms, sometimes even the people who manage the platform themselves can't be fully trusted to do the right thing: I believe everybody in the field remembers the npm fiasco https://lwn.net/Articles/681410/ where a lawyer letter requesting the removal of a package started a series of events that resulted in potentially breaking a huge amount of automated build systems.

Here some of the problems were caused by some technical policies that caused the whole ecosystem to be especially vulnerable, but one big issue was the fact that the managers of the npm platform are a private entity with no oversight from the user community.

Here not all distributions are equal, but contrast this with Debian, where the distribution is managed by a community that is based on a social contract https://www.debian.org/social_contract and is governed via democratic procedures established in its https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution.

Additionally, the long history of the distribution model means that many issues have already been met, the errors have already been done, and there are established technical procedures to deal with them in a better way.

So, shouldn't we use language specific distribution platforms at all? No! As developers we aren't children, we are adults who have the skills to distinguish between safe and unsafe libraries just as well as the average distribution maintainer can do. What I believe we should do is stop treating them as a safe source that can be used blindly and reserve that status to actual trustful sources like Debian, falling back to the language specific platforms only when strictly needed, and in that case:

actually check carefully what we are using, both by reading the code and by analysing the development and community practices of the authors;
if possible, share that work by becoming ourselves maintainers of that library in our favourite distribution, to prevent duplication of effort and to give back to the community whose work we get advantage from.

Edit: fixed broken typosquatting url

Falling off the cliff is always a surprise. I know it's there; I've been living next to it for months. I chart its outline daily. Avoiding it has become routine, and so comfortable, and so failing to avoid it surprises. Monday evening around 10 pm, the laptop starts draining down from 100%. House battery, which has been steady around 11.5-10.8 volts since well before Winter solstice, and was in the low 10's, has plummeted to 8.5 volts. With the old batteries, the cliff used to be at 7 volts, but now, with new batteries but fewer, it's in a surprising place, something like 10 volts, and I fell off it. Weather forecast for the week ahead is much like the previous week: Maybe a couple sunny afternoons, but mostly no sun at all. Falling off the cliff is not all bad. It shakes things up. It's a good opportunity to disconnect, to read paper books, and think long winter thoughts. It forces some flexability. I have an auxillary battery for these situations. With its own little portable solar panel, it can charge the laptop and run it for around 6 hours. But it takes it several days of winter sun to charge back up. That's enough to get me through the night. Then I take a short trip, and glory in one sunny afternoon. But I know that won't get me out of the hole, the batteries need a sunny week to recover. This evening, I expect to lose power again, and probably tomorrow evening too. Luckily, my goal for the week was to write slides for two talks, and I've been able to do that despite being mostly offline, and sometimes decomputered. And, in a few days I will be jetting off to Australia! That should give the batteries a perfect chance to recover. Previously: battery bank refresh late summer

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS I was allocated 10 hours to work on security updates for Debian 7 Wheezy. During this time I did the following:

• I released DLA-741-1 on unzip. This was an easy update.
• I reviewed Roberto Sanchez s patch for CVE-2014-9911 in ICU.
• I released DLA-759-1 on nss in collaboration with Antoine Beaupr . I merged and updated Guido s work to enable the testsuite during build and to add DEP-8 tests.
• I created a git repository for php5 maintenance in Debian LTS and started to work on an update. I added patches for two CVE (CVE-2016-3141, CVE-2016-2554) and added some binary files required by (currently failing) tests.

Misc packaging With the strong freeze approaching, I had some customer requests to push packages into Debian and/or to fix packages that were in danger of being removed from stretch. While trying to bring back uwsgi into testing I filed #847095 (libmongoclient-dev: Should not conflict with transitional mongodb-dev) and #847207 (uwsgi: FTBFS on multiple architectures with undefined references to uwsgi_* symbols) and interacted on some of the RC bugs that were keeping the package out of testing. I also worked on a few new packages (lua-trink-cjson, lua-inotify, lua-sandbox-extensions) that enhance hindsight in some use cases and sponsored a rozofs update in experimental to fix a file conflict with inn2 (#846571). Misc Debian work Debian Live. I released two live-build updates. The second update added more options to customize the grub configuration (we use it in Kali to override the theme and add more menu entries) both for EFI boot and normal boot. Misc bugreports. #846569 on libsnmp-dev to accomodate the libssl transition (I noticed the package was not maintained, I asked for new maintainers on debian-devel). #847168 on devscripts for debuild that started failing when lintian was failing (unexpected regression). #847318 on lintian to not emit spurious errors for kali packages (which was annoying with the debuild regression above). #847436 for an upgrade problem I got with tryton-server. #847223 on firefoxdriver as it was still depending on iceweasel instead of firefox. Sponsorship. I sponsored a new version of asciidoc (#831965) and of ssldump 0.9b3-6 (for libssl transition). I also uploaded a new version of mutter to fix #846898 (it was ready in SVN already). Distro Tracker Not much happening, I fixed #814315 by switching a few remaining URLs to https. I merged patches from efkin to fix the functional test suite (#814315), that was a really useful contribution! The same contributer started to tackle another ticket (#824912) about adding an API to retrieve action items. This is a larger project and needs some thoughts. I still have to respond to him on his latest patches (after two rounds already). Misc stuff I updated the letsencrypt-sh salt formula for version 0.3.0 and added the possibility to customize the hook script to reload the webserver. The @planetdebian twitter account is no longer working since twitterfeed.com closed doors and the replacement (dlvr.it) is unhappy about the RSS feed of planet.debian.org. I filed bug #848123 against planet-venus since it does not preserve the isPermalink attribute in the guid tag Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Review: Castle of Wizardry, by David Eddings

Series:	The Belgariad #4
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	May 1984
Printing:	September 1991
ISBN:	0-345-33570-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	373

Castle of Wizardry is the fourth book of the Belgariad and very much the middle of the story. Despite coming after an intermediate climax, this isn't the sort of series you can start in the middle. The problem with intermediate climaxes in a long series is that the next book can be a bit of a let-down as the characters do the necessary regrouping and reorienting and determine next steps. I think that hurts Castle of Wizardry quite a lot. The best bits are at the beginning, as the party escapes the consequences of Magician's Gambit, collects one more party member, shows us a lot more of Errand (who is always delightful), and confounds Relg's life and world view considerably. (Although there's a good bit of authorial fiat in the last.) This builds into a major story event, which would normally help avoid the let-down after the climax, but it's the major story event that is so frequently and obviously foreshadowed that you'd have to be as dumb as, well, Garion to not know what's coming. That gives a certain "yes, yes, we know already" tone to proceedings that robs it of its ability to rebuild tension. That said, the appeal of this series continues to be in the small details. While the first major event of this book goes pretty much as expected (including Ce'Nedra's reaction, which is just as irritating as you might be expecting), my favorite part was the endless, bubbly enthusiasm of the incredibly powerful artifact that features heavily. Usually epic fantasy will treat such world-breaking objects with seriousness and awe, as treasures to be admired and sacred (or terrifying) great works. See, for instance, the ur-example of Tolkien's rings, both the One Ring and the elven rings of power. Eddings manages a mix of awe and bemusement that doesn't undermine their power but that adds a delightful human element. This series pulls off treating a powerful magical artifact like an over-enthusiastic puppy without making it feel any less dangerous. It's a very neat, and I think underappreciated, trick to pull off. Another part of this book I liked, if a more stock one, is Garion's reactions after the big story event. This isn't the first book to portray basic decency and thoughtfulness as a major feature in people from humble backgrounds elevated to great power, but I always enjoy seeing that. Garion stops whining (mostly) and starts acting like a decent, level-headed person who doesn't assume he has the right to arrange other people's lives, and is rewarded for it. Real life is often not that fair or ethical, but that's why one reads wish-fulfillment fantasy like this: for a world in which being a good person is rewarded. However, Eddings does have some structural issues here. The narrative arc of this book, as a stand-alone entity, is odd. Its most dramatic event is in the middle, and then has a long traveling section that's, by comparison, much less exciting. The events of that section feel more like random encounters than a coherent part of the story, and are preceded by the most utterly ridiculous temper tantrums. I think the tantrums were meant to be pure humor, but my reaction was primarily eye-rolling. I have a hard time reconciling a screaming fit and breaking furniture with the long life experience and thoughtful planning of the character in question. And then there is the Ce'Nedra section that closes this book, and Ce'Nedra in this book more generally. To be fair, Castle of Wizardry is clearly intended to be Ce'Nedra's moment to grow as a person and stop being a childish brat. This does happen somewhat, and there are moments in the last section of the book where she does admirable things. But I couldn't quite believe in the mechanism, and it doesn't help that it's one of the most ham-handed bits of pre-ordained success in a book that has a tendency towards them. That undermines the real attempts Eddings makes to ground that success in Ce'Nedra's actual skills. Also undermining this is that those skills are manipulating people shamelessly, which Eddings seems to think is charming and attractive and I... don't. But the real problem is that I flatly disbelieve in Ce'Nedra as a character, or, given the apparent existence of such a creature, the level of tolerance that other characters show her. If I'd been Polgara, within fifteen minutes of meeting her I would have been seriously debating whether the destruction of the world might be a small price to pay for the satisfaction of dumping her down the nearest well. And not only is she awful by herself but Garion also descends to the same level whenever he's around her, until both of them are behaving like blithering idiots. I suspect part of my issue is that, to the extent that she is realistic at all, Ce'Nedra is the sort of intensely high-drama person who I have some amount of life experience with, and that life experience says "do not let this person anywhere near your life." Red flags all over everything. Garion needs to nope the hell out, because this will not end well. (Except, of course, it will, because it's that sort of series and the power of the author is strong.) I want female characters with real agency in my fantasy, and I want a female protagonist who is doing things of equal importance as the male protagonist (not that Eddings attempts to go that far). But Ce'Nedra reads like a fictional character written by someone who had never met a woman, but has extensively studied female supporting characters in books about junior-high social cliques and then tried to reconcile that research with the stereotype of women as manipulative seductresses. Yes, this series is full of stereotypes and characters painted in broad strokes, but Ce'Nedra is several tiers below every other supporting character in the book in both believability and in my desire to read about her. It's not that Eddings doesn't know how to write women at all. Polgara still falls into a few stereotyped categories, but she's sensible, opinionated, and has clear agency throughout the story. Taiba is delightful, if minor here. Poledra is absolutely wonderful whenever she appears. Some of the queens are obviously practical and sensible. And this book features a surprisingly good resolution to the subplot around Barak's wife, although the mechanism is a bit eye-rollingly cliched. Ce'Nedra's character is unusual for the series and almost certainly a deliberate authorial choice, and this book is supposed to be her coming of age. But I am baffled by that choice, and there's very little about it that I enjoyed reading. One more minor complaint: Silk gets a "tragic secret" in this book, and I really wish he hadn't. More time with Silk is always a feature, and I still love the character, but his oddities were already adequately explained by both his innate character and his way of dealing with a particularly awkward court situation. (One that ties into Eddings's habit of using some bad relationship stereotypes, but that's a rant for another day.) I think this additional tragic secret was gratuitous and really unnecessary, not to mention weirdly implausible and oddly cruel towards the other character involved. I was hoping that Magician's Gambit had turned a corner for the series, but Castle of Wizardry, despite having some neat moments, has some serious flaws. One more book to go, in which we learn that some of the eastern races have redeeming qualities! Followed by Enchanter's End Game. Rating: 6 out of 10

I apologize to all potential readers of this blog for not writing a comprehensive Introduction post with details of the project I am taking part in during my internship, as well as some story about how I ended up there. Let me just say that I was a Debian user for years when I discovered it is taking part in Outreachy as one of organisations. Their Reproducible Builds effort has a noble goal and a bunch of great people behind it - I had no chances not to get excited by it. Looking for a place where my skills could be of any use, I discovered diffoscope - the tool for in-depth comparassion of files, archives etc. My mentor, Mattia Rizzolo, supported my decision to work on it, so now I am concentrating my efforts on improving diffoscope. As my first steps, I am doing small (but hopefully still somewhat important) job of fixing existing bugs. It helps me to better understand how diffoscope works, as well as introduces me to the workflow of opensource development. During December, I have done several small contributions, mostly fixing bugs.

Test data and jessie-backports First of them could be somewhat called cleaning up after my own mistake, although that mistake wasn t trivial. During the application period, I have fixed a bug with diffoscope failing while comparing symlinks to directory. That was a small change, but I included some tests for that case anyway. And that actually caused problems. With these tests, I included test data: two folders with symlinks. All was good in unstable version of Debian, but in jessie-backports, that commit caused build to fail. After some digging, I discovered the problem was caused by build process including copying that data. That was done using shutils Python module, and older version of that module, included in jessie, could not handle copying symlinks to directory properly. Thanks to my mentor for giving me a hint on how to resolve this: using temporary folders and creating these symlinks at runtime. That way, we ensured tests run without problems during build process on jessie. What have I learned: A great deal, actually. I spent too much time on that one, but I learned how to build packages, what happens during dpkg-buildpackage run and what debhelper tools are for. I also learned a bit about what chroot is and how to use it for testing.

ICC profile files and file type recognizing regexp Another one was also about failing tests and, therefore, failing build. Failing tests were all due to ICC files were not recognized by diffoscope. Turned out libmagic got an update which changed the description of ICC profile files. Diffoscope was relying on regexp applied to file type description to recognize the file, so I changed regexp to reflect the changes in libmagic. What have I learned: How diffoscope recognizes file types. Got me thinking: maybe there is a better way? That regexp-based approach is doomed to cause problems with every file type description change. I have this question still lingering in my mind - maybe I will come up with an idea later.

Order-like difference in text files Next, I decided to do something a bit bigger and fullfilled a feature request. That request was for detecting order-like difference in text files (when files has the same lines, but in different order). I did it by collecting added and removed lines in diff output in lists, sorting and then comparing them. Sadly, I forgot about one particular case - when one of the files is missing the newline at the end of file. I was kindly reminded of that quite soon in comments on the bug-tracker (thanks danielsh!) and have already fixed that. I also recieved feedback on how better implement it deeper in the diffoscope - not using the results of diff, but rather comparing sum of hashes of the lines directly in the difference module. I am yet to try that. What have I learned: That a call to diff is actually the slowest part of the diffoscope run when done on two big text files. Could it help somehow in speeding it up? I don t know yet. I also learned to comment on bugs in Debian bugtracker and was surprised by how much feedback I got. Thanks to my mentor for pushing me to do that - I definetely need to overcome my fear of communications to be more effective!

Random FTBFS There was also a very nasty bug that caused diffoscope to fail to be built from source randomly, failing with non-informative Fatal Python error: deallocated None. It already seemed strange when it was first reported; It got only more strange when suddenly that bug ceased to be reproducible. We hoped that would mean that bug was caused by some external tool, and was fixed there. Turns out it was not that easy. I tested this on two separate computers and on virtual machine; I used different versions of diffoscope. Well. Seems like that bug is still somehow tied to diffoscope version and not some external tool version - I still can do git checkout 64 and be able to reproduce the bug (still randomly, though). Although I spent quite a lot of time on that one, the only result was the information about connection between bug apperances and diffoscope version. I still wasn t able to get to the root of the problem - hopefully, someone else will be able to, given the information I found. What have I learned: git-bisect! Thanks to my friend for pointing me to it, that tool came handy in that situation. Also, got some experience in catching nasty bugs like that (pity that no experience in squashing them). I had some extra time commitements in December, one of them (Reproducible Builds Summit II) connected to my internship and one (my exam session in university) not. In January, I should be able to allocate more time to that work - I hope it will help me achieve more significant results. Many thanks to Mattia Rizzolo, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen and all other folks of Reproducible Builds project - I cannot stress enough how important your support is to me. Wish you all a great 2017!

A Safe and Happy New Year to all. While Debconf India is still a pipe-dream as of now, did see that India has been gradually doing it easier for tourists and casual business visitors to come visit India. This I take as very positive development for India itself. The 1st condition is itself good for anybody visiting India

Eligibility International Travellers whose sole objective of visiting India is recreation , sight-seeing , casual visit to meet friends or relatives, short duration medical treatment or casual business visit.

https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/visa/tvoa.html That this facility is being given to 130 odd countries is better still

Albania, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Island, Chile, China, China- SAR Hong-Kong, China- SAR Macau, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d lvoire, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Laos, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niue Island, Norway, Oman, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks & Caicos Island, Tuvalu, UAE, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, Vanuatu, Vatican City-Holy See, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

This should make it somewhat easier for any Indian organizer as well as any participants from any of the member countries shared. There is possibility that this list would even get longer, provided we are able to scale our airports and all and any necessary infrastructure that would be needed for International Visitors to have a good experience. What has been particularly interesting is to know which ports of call are being used by International Visitors as well as overall growth rate

The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November, 2016 among the top 15 source countries was highest from USA (15.53%) followed by UK (11.21%), Bangladesh (10.72%), Canada (4.66%), Russian Fed (4.53%), Australia (4.04%), Malaysia (3.65%), Germany (3.53%), China (3.14%), France (2.88%), Sri Lanka (2.49%), Japan (2.49%), Singapore (2.16%), Nepal (1.46%) and Thailand (1.37%).

And port of call

The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November 2016 among the top 15 ports was highest at Delhi Airport (32.71%) followed by Mumbai Airport (18.51%), Chennai Airport (6.83%), Bengaluru Airport (5.89%), Haridaspur Land check post (5.87%), Goa Airport (5.63%), Kolkata Airport (3.90%), Cochin Airport (3.29%), Hyderabad Airport (3.14%), Ahmadabad Airport (2.76%), Trivandrum Airport (1.54%), Trichy Airport (1.53%), Gede Rail (1.16%), Amritsar Airport (1.15%), and Ghojadanga land check post (0.82%) .

The Ghojadanga land check post seems to be between West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. Gede Railway Station is also in West Bengal as well. So all and any overlanders could take any of those ways.Even Hardispur Land Check post comes in the Bengal-Bangladesh border only. In the airports, Delhi Airport seems to be attracting lot more business than the Mumbai Airport. Part of the reason I *think* is the direct link of Delhi Airport to NDLS via the Delhi Airport Express Line . The same when it will happen in Mumbai should be a game-changer for city too. Now if you are wondering why I have been suddenly talking about visas and airports in India, it came because Hong Kong is going to Withdraw Visa Free Entry Facility For Indians. Although, as rightly pointed out in the article doesn t make sense from economic POV and seems to be somewhat politically motivated. Not that I or anybody else can do anything about that. Seeing that, I thought it was a good opportunity to see how good/Bad our Government is and it seems to be on the right path. Although the hawks (Intelligence and Counter-Terrorist Agencies) will probably become a bit more paranoid , their work becomes tougher.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Airport Metro Line 3, #CSIA, #Incredible India, #India, #International Tourism

So that was 2016! Here s a summary of what I got up to on my computer(s) in December, a check of how I went against my plan, and the TODO list for the next month or so. With a short holiday to Oslo, Christmas holidays, Christmas parties (at work and with Alexander at school, football etc.), travelling to Brussels with work, birthdays (Alexander & Antje), I missed a lot of deadlines, and failed to reach most of my Free Software goals (including my goals for new & updated packages in Debian Stretch the soft freeze is in a couple of days). To top it all off, I lost my grandmother at the ripe old age of 93. Rest in peace Nana. I wish I could have made it to the funeral, but it is sometimes tough living on the other side of the world to your family. Debian

• Worked on bootstrapping bluebird. Almost have it ready for sponsoring.
• Worked on converting Cree.py to Qt5.
• Packaged node-file-sync-cmp. The upload was sponsored by Pirate Praveen.

Ubuntu

• Added the Ubuntu Studio testsuites to the package tracker, and blogged about running the Manual Tests.

Other

• Finished converting my Family History Website to Jekyll.
• Had play with JMRI. Thinking of using it in the basement, and maybe packaging it for Debian.

Plan status & update for next month Debian Before the 5th January 2017 Debian Stretch soft freeze I hope to:

• Ensure node-tape makes it through into Stretch. failed
• Work on all the dependencies needed to get kosmtik into Stretch. failed
• Convert Cree.py from QT4 to QT5 to allow it to re-enter Stretch. In progress

For the Debian Stretch release:

• Keep an eye on the Release Critical bugs list, and see if I can help fix any.

Ubuntu

• Add the Ubuntu Studio Manual Testsuite to the package tracker, and try to encourage some testing of the newest versions of our priority packages. Done
• Finish the ubuntustudio-lightdm-theme, ubuntustudio-default-settings transition including an update to the ubuntustudio-meta packages. Still to do
• Reapply to become a Contributing Developer. Still to do
• Start working on an Ubuntu Studio package tracker website so that we can keep an eye on the status of the packages we are interested in. Still to do
• Start testing & bug triaging Ubuntu Studio packages.
• Test Len s work on ubuntustudio-controls

Other

• Continue working to convert my Family History website to Jekyll Done
  
• Try and resurrect my old Gammon one-name study Drupal website from a backup and push it to the new GoONS Website project.
• Give JMRI a good try out and look at what it would take to package it.

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

• I sponsored a new package for Seamlik called android-platform-tools-analytics-library.

Debian Games

• We have entered the final straight for Stretch, so I kept a close eye on new game releases and bug reports in packages which I think should be part of the next stable release. Bzflag is certainly one of them, a tank battling game that can be played in the first-person perspective and which has arrived in version 2.4.8. I also packaged new releases of trigger-rally, a racing game, Renpy, pygame-sdl2 and Minetest.
• B lint R czey introduced libopenhmd to Debian a while ago and asked me in #845657 to enable OpenHMD support for neverball. Neverball is now the first game in the archive, at least as far as I know, that is ready for virtual reality. I have never tried it though because I don t own the necessary gear from Oculus myself but it sounds like a cool feature.
• A user of caveexpress reported a bug (#847147) in one level that prevented him from finishing it. I forwarded this one to upstream and he was able to quickly fix the issue and I could release 2.4+git20160609-3 later.
• I triaged several RC bugs which were reported against our D language games and it turned out that the bug was in gdc (#845377).
• I also made some small improvements to monopd s packaging and applied a patch from Laurent Bigonville to Freeciv that corrected a problem with AppData files (#848720).
• I worked around another RC FTBFS bug in spring (#846921) which is apparently a regression in binutils (#847356) but its maintainer does not consider this to be release critical.
• I tried to fix #848063 in ri-li but it seems to surface again under special circumstances. Since compilation works on all buildds for all release architectures and on my systems I downgraded the severity to important.
• I uploaded Bullet 2.85.1 to experimental. It is currently waiting in the NEW queue due to the SONAME bump and because I decided to simplify the packaging. I don t think it is longer worth it to provide several standalone binary packages. All Bullet 2 and 3 core libraries can be found in libbullet2.85 now while all the extra stuff is part of libbullet-extras2.85.
• Last but not least I released debian-games 1.7 and updated the list of games. Castle Combat was removed this month from Debian.

Debian Java

• I promised to complete my work on Netbeans and spent several hours on completing this goal. Although I am aware of the package s obstacles by now it never ceases to amaze me how many build failures occur due to the apparent mismatch between Debian (build-)dependencies and the ones upstream is using. This time I got stuck when several core modules could not be built from source because they required classes from OpenJDK 9. Since JDK 9 will not be released with Stretch I am afraid to say that Netbeans 8.2 won t be part of it. I worked around these issues by replacing the modules with versions from 8.1 but this is obviously just a very crude hack. Nevertheless the new package is available in experimental now.
• New upstream releases this month: activemq, netbeans, libnb-platform18-java, svnclientadapter, jackrabbit, jboss-xnio, undertow.
• Package updates: jboss-classfilewriter, jboss-logging, libpicocontainer-java.
• RC bug fixes: jruby-maven-plugins (#844841), vorbis-java (#844753), jackson-datatype-guava (#849449), triaged libhamcrest-java (#846116).
• I sponsored freeplane 1.5.18-1 for Felix Natter.

Debian LTS This was my tenth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 13,5 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• From 12. December until 18. December I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I triaged bugs in jasper, openjdk-6, bluez, game-music-emu, simplesamlphp, imagemagick, nagios3, most, rabbitmq-server, html5lib and dcmtk.
• DLA-742-1. Issued a security update for chrony fixing 1 CVE. This update was prepared by Vincent Blut.
• DLA-745-1. Issued a security update for most fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-746-1. Issued a security update for tomcat6 fixing 1 CVE and two regressions from previous updates which were reported to Debian s bug tracker.
• DLA-747-1. Issued a security update for libupnp fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-748-1. Issued a security update for libupnp4 fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-746-2. Issued a regression update for tomcat6.
• DLA-753-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 1 CVE and three regressions that were similar in nature to the ones fixed in Tomcat 6.
• DLA-761-1. Issued a security update for python-bottle fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-763-1. Issued a security update for squid3 fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-766-1. Issued a security update for libcrypto++ fixing 1 CVE.
• I also worked on two CVEs for Asterisk, an Open Source PBX and telephony toolkit. The work is done and can currently be found at this location. I asked on the debian-lts mailing list for feedback and testing and already got some positive feedback. I will wait a few more days before I release the security update.

Non-maintainer uploads

• I did two NMUs this month. I sponsored an upload of libtorrent for Peter Pentchev fixing #828414 and I fixed a trivial bug in gnash myself (#845847).