Search Results: "reg"

25 December 2016

Russ Allbery: Review: A Man Called Ove

Review: A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman
Translator: Henning Koch
Publisher: Washington Square
Copyright: 2012, 2014
Printing: May 2015
ISBN: 1-4767-3802-5
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 337
Ove is 59 years old and drives a Saab. He's grumpy, often taciturn, very particular in how things should be done, and extremely judgmental about how other people do them. He is the sort of person who regularly rants about how poorly things are done these days and how much better they used to be. Ove does not like change. A Man Called Ove opens with him terrorizing the employees of an Apple Store, trying to buy a computer, but this incident is actually foreshadowing, and will only make sense at the very end of the book. The story actually begins in the second chapter, with Ove making his morning rounds of the neighborhood in which he lives, discovering an out-of-place bicycle and a mangy cat, and then starting to put a hook in his ceiling. But just as he's getting started, he's interrupted by new neighbors, who are incapable of backing up a trailer properly without scraping it against his house. Not that motor vehicles are allowed in the area anyway. That inauspicious beginning changes Ove's life, mostly through the sheer persistence of other people's disasters. It's not obvious at first that it will, and at the start A Man Called Ove could be a funny collection of stories about a curmudgeon. But as Backman shows more of Ove's life and tells more of his background and situation, it becomes something so much more, something satisfying and heart-breaking and deeply human. I've been struggling to review this book because I find it hard to capture what makes it so wonderful. Making that even harder, several key plot elements are introduced gradually in the story in ways that add a lot to the rhythm of the plot, and I don't want to spoil them. I think the closest I can get in a spoiler-free review is that A Man Called Ove is about empathy. It's about human connection, even when people seem unlikable, unreachable, or angrily off-putting. And it's a book about seeing the best inside other people, and about finding ways to be persistently oneself while still changing enough to find new connections, and about recognizing those moments when someone is showing you their best without getting caught up on the surface presentation. The man Ove is the center of this story, the subject of tight third person perspective for nearly all of the book. He's 59 when the story opens, but by the end of the book, mostly through flashback chapters, the reader knows his childhood and early adulthood and much of the story of his marriage. At first, he seems to be an obnoxious, surly, angry curmudgeon, the sort of old man who yells at clouds. But the joy of this book is how the reader's perception changes, how one gains sympathy, and then respect, first for Ove's unshakable inner sense of morality that he got from his father and then for his rule-based approach to how the world should work. One never entirely agrees with him, but Backman demystifies and explains Ove's thought process and ties it into a different generation and a different way of interacting with work (although Ove was still uncommon even in his youth, just not as unique). As I write this review, news and opinion in the United States are very focused on the plight of the white working class and how that does or does not explain recent election results. Backman is Swedish (I read this book in translation), so it's not coming from US culture and the cultural fault lines are not quite the same. But I think this book says something deeply valuable and fascinating about the working-class culture of Ove's youth, something that's much less about specific politics and much more about how it feels to make things with one's hands, to build or rebuild one's own house, or to work for thirty years at the same job and not be interested in a promotion to management. Backman does a truly spectacular job conveying the sense of angry frustration at the changes in work and life, the difficulty communicating one's internal feelings meaningfully, and the quiet joy of finding those places in life where one can do things properly. Ove is, of course, not the only character in this book, and every character here is a delight in their own idiosyncratic ways. The main story arc involves the various people in his neighborhood, particularly his new next-door neighbors: a pregnant Iranian woman and her very laid-back husband who is incapable of doing things around the house but keeps trying. I think Parvaneh, the woman, is my favorite character of the story except for Ove, and it's fitting that she's the first to work out the broad outlines of what's happening in Ove's life and the tricky path to effectively helping him. In a way, she's Ove's opposite: fiery, mercurial, talkative, and meddling. But she sees things in Ove that no one else seems to notice. (And the scene between her and Ove when she's learning to drive is a thing of beauty.) This is a book that could have been extremely sad, and yet isn't. It's a book about somber, depressing topics that somehow manages to be delightfully funny. And it's about a curmudgeon who persistently fails to have any sort of stereotyped heart of gold, but is nonetheless one of the most satisfying, fascinating, ethical, and good-willed characters I've ever read about. It manages to treat a collection of very different characters with individualized deep empathy and appreciation, while never pushing them all into the same mold. And the ending is wonderful. I rarely read slice of life stories, but this one is worth making an exception for. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 10 out of 10

Russ Allbery: Review: A Man Called Ove

Review: A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman
Translator: Henning Koch
Publisher: Washington Square
Copyright: 2012, 2014
Printing: May 2015
ISBN: 1-4767-3802-5
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 337
Ove is 59 years old and drives a Saab. He's grumpy, often taciturn, very particular in how things should be done, and extremely judgmental about how other people do them. He is the sort of person who regularly rants about how poorly things are done these days and how much better they used to be. Ove does not like change. A Man Called Ove opens with him terrorizing the employees of an Apple Store, trying to buy a computer, but this incident is actually foreshadowing, and will only make sense at the very end of the book. The story actually begins in the second chapter, with Ove making his morning rounds of the neighborhood in which he lives, discovering an out-of-place bicycle and a mangy cat, and then starting to put a hook in his ceiling. But just as he's getting started, he's interrupted by new neighbors, who are incapable of backing up a trailer properly without scraping it against his house. Not that motor vehicles are allowed in the area anyway. That inauspicious beginning changes Ove's life, mostly through the sheer persistence of other people's disasters. It's not obvious at first that it will, and at the start A Man Called Ove could be a funny collection of stories about a curmudgeon. But as Backman shows more of Ove's life and tells more of his background and situation, it becomes something so much more, something satisfying and heart-breaking and deeply human. I've been struggling to review this book because I find it hard to capture what makes it so wonderful. Making that even harder, several key plot elements are introduced gradually in the story in ways that add a lot to the rhythm of the plot, and I don't want to spoil them. I think the closest I can get in a spoiler-free review is that A Man Called Ove is about empathy. It's about human connection, even when people seem unlikable, unreachable, or angrily off-putting. And it's a book about seeing the best inside other people, and about finding ways to be persistently oneself while still changing enough to find new connections, and about recognizing those moments when someone is showing you their best without getting caught up on the surface presentation. The man Ove is the center of this story, the subject of tight third person perspective for nearly all of the book. He's 59 when the story opens, but by the end of the book, mostly through flashback chapters, the reader knows his childhood and early adulthood and much of the story of his marriage. At first, he seems to be an obnoxious, surly, angry curmudgeon, the sort of old man who yells at clouds. But the joy of this book is how the reader's perception changes, how one gains sympathy, and then respect, first for Ove's unshakable inner sense of morality that he got from his father and then for his rule-based approach to how the world should work. One never entirely agrees with him, but Backman demystifies and explains Ove's thought process and ties it into a different generation and a different way of interacting with work (although Ove was still uncommon even in his youth, just not as unique). As I write this review, news and opinion in the United States are very focused on the plight of the white working class and how that does or does not explain recent election results. Backman is Swedish (I read this book in translation), so it's not coming from US culture and the cultural fault lines are not quite the same. But I think this book says something deeply valuable and fascinating about the working-class culture of Ove's youth, something that's much less about specific politics and much more about how it feels to make things with one's hands, to build or rebuild one's own house, or to work for thirty years at the same job and not be interested in a promotion to management. Backman does a truly spectacular job conveying the sense of angry frustration at the changes in work and life, the difficulty communicating one's internal feelings meaningfully, and the quiet joy of finding those places in life where one can do things properly. Ove is, of course, not the only character in this book, and every character here is a delight in their own idiosyncratic ways. The main story arc involves the various people in his neighborhood, particularly his new next-door neighbors: a pregnant Iranian woman and her very laid-back husband who is incapable of doing things around the house but keeps trying. I think Parvaneh, the woman, is my favorite character of the story except for Ove, and it's fitting that she's the first to work out the broad outlines of what's happening in Ove's life and the tricky path to effectively helping him. In a way, she's Ove's opposite: fiery, mercurial, talkative, and meddling. But she sees things in Ove that no one else seems to notice. (And the scene between her and Ove when she's learning to drive is a thing of beauty.) This is a book that could have been extremely sad, and yet isn't. It's a book about somber, depressing topics that somehow manages to be delightfully funny. And it's about a curmudgeon who persistently fails to have any sort of stereotyped heart of gold, but is nonetheless one of the most satisfying, fascinating, ethical, and good-willed characters I've ever read about. It manages to treat a collection of very different characters with individualized deep empathy and appreciation, while never pushing them all into the same mold. And the ending is wonderful. I rarely read slice of life stories, but this one is worth making an exception for. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 10 out of 10

24 December 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: anytime 0.2.0: Feature, fixes and tests!

A brand new anytime package just arrived at CRAN. This is release number eight, evenly spread with over two per month, since the initial release in September. Needless to say I have been told off not to make this many releases. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, ... format to either POSIXct or Date objects -- and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples. This releases does a few things: The following is a quick illustration 
R> library(anytime)
R> p <- anytime("2010-01-02 03:04:05.123456")
R> p
[1] "2010-01-02 03:04:05.123456 CST"
R> iso8601(p)
[1] "2010-01-02 03:04:05"
R> rfc2822(p)
[1] "Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:04:05.123456 -0600"
R> rfc3339(p)
[1] "2010-01-02T03:04:05.123456-0600"
R>
For symmetry, it also works for dates, but is less detailed 
R> jl <- anydate("July 04, 1789")
R> jl
[1] "1789-07-04"
R> iso8601(jl)
[1] "1789-07-04"
R> rfc2822(jl)
[1] "Sat, 04 Jul 1789"
R> rfc3339(jl)
[1] "1789-07-04"
R>
Of course, all commands are also fully vectorised. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for more examples.

Changes in anytime version 0.2.0 (2016-12-24)
  • Added (exported) helper functions iso8601(), rfc2822() and rfc3339() to format date(time) objects according to standards
  • Conversion to dates is now more robust thanks to improved internal processing (PR #39 closing #36)
  • The ISO 8601 format is now recognised, however the timezone information is not parsed by Boost Date_Time (which is a known upstream limitation) (PR #38 closing #37)
  • The 'allFormats.R' test script was significantly strengthened (#40)
  • Test scripts like 'simpleTests.R' have as also been strengthened (#41); on Windows and in one file two tests need to be skipped.
  • A new 'bulkTest.R' test script was added testing parsing against what R returns

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

23 December 2016

Alessio Treglia: Creativity Draws on the Deep Well of the Past


Octagonal Well in the Cloister of Giuliano da Sangallo, Faculty of Engineering,
Via Eudossiana, Rome
In the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers , Thomas Mann states, Deep is the well of the past... . Sometimes this well is bottomless and it may appear far away and passed, yet all of our actions and everyday decisions come to life by its contents. It is the fundamental substrate, the raw material from which to draw the basic connections of our creativity. The image of the well, used by Thomas Mann, is very significant. In symbolism, the well is the place where you take contact with the deep self and where to get water that gives life. The ancient times remind us of the socializing role of the well, invested with an aura of sacredness, where sharing with others took place. It was <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

Petter Reinholdtsen: Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!

I received a very nice Christmas present today. As my regular readers probably know, I have been working on the the Isenkram system for many years. The goal of the Isenkram system is to make it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way to map hardware to packages. Isenkram have its own mapping database, and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream metadata format. And today, AppStream in Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it, ie using fnmatch(): 
% appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
  usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
Identifier: pymissile [generic]
Name: pymissile
Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
Package: pymissile
% appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
Identifier: libnxt [generic]
Name: libnxt
Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
Package: libnxt
---
Identifier: t2n [generic]
Name: t2n
Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
Package: t2n
---
Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
Name: python-nxt
Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
Package: python-nxt
---
Identifier: nbc [generic]
Name: nbc
Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
Package: nbc
%
A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool: 
% isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
pymissile
% isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
libnxt
nbc
python-nxt
t2n
%
You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias). If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users make the most of the hardware they have, please helpadd AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines documented in the wiki. So far only 11 packages provide such information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages, mostly related to USB dongles. Most of the packages with hardware mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as part of my involvement in the Debian LEGO team given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware. The team also got a nice Christmas present today. The nxt-firmware package made it into Debian. With this package in place, it is now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware binaries for the NXT brick. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

22 December 2016

Shirish Agarwal: My letter to Government of Maharashtra on Real Estate Rules and Regulation Draft rules

While I try to minimize Politics and Economics as much as I can on this blog, it sometimes surfaces. It is possible that some people may benefit or at least be aware. A bit of background is necessary before I jump into the intricacies of the Maharashtra Real Estate Rules and Regulation Draft Rules 2016 (RERA) . Since ever, but more prominently since 2007/8 potential homeowners from across the country have been suffering at the hands of the builder/promoter for number of years. While it would be wrong to paint all the Real Estate Developers and Builders as cheats (we as in all tenants and homeowners hope there are good ones out there) many Real Estate Builders and promoters have cheated homeowners of their hard-earned money. This has also lessened the secondary (resale) market and tenants like me have to fight over morsels as supply is tight. There were two broad ways in which the cheating is/was done a. Take deposits and run away i.e. fly by night operators Here the only option for a homeowner is to file an FIR (First Information Report) and hope the culprits are caught. 99% of the time the builder/promoter goes somewhere abroad and the potential home buyers/home-owners are left holding the can. This is usually done by small real estate promoters and builders. b. The big boys would take all or most money of the project, may register or not register the flat in your name, either build a quarter or half-finished building and then make excuses. There are some who do not even build. The money given is used by the builder/developer either for his own needs or using that money in some high-profile project which is expensive and may have huge returns. They know that home-owners can t do anything, at the most go to the court which will take more than a decade or two during which time the developer would have interest-free income and do whatever he wants to do. One of the bigger stories which came up this year was when the Indian Cricket Captain, M.S. Dhoni (cricket is a religion in India, and the cricketers gods for millions of Indians) had to end his brand engagement and ambassadorship from Amrapali Housing Group. Apparently, his wife Sakshi was on the Board of directors at Amrapali Housing and had to resign The Government knew of such issues and had been working since last few years. Under the present Government, a Model Agreement and a Model Real Estate Rules and Regulation Bill was passed on 31st March and came into force on 1st May 2016. India, similar to the U.S. and U.K. follows a federal structure. While I have shared this before, most of the laws in India fall in either of three lists, Central List, Concurrent Lists and State Lists. Housing for instance, is a state subject so any laws concerning housing has to be made by the state legislature. Having a statutory requirement to put the bill in 6 months from 1st of May, the Government of Maharashtra chose to put the draft rules in public domain on 12th December 2016, about 10 days ago and there were efforts to let it remain low-key so people do not object as we are still in the throes of demonetisation. By law they should have given 30 days for people to raise objections and give suggestions. The State Government too could have easily asked an extension and as both the State and the Centre are of the same Political Party they would have easily got it. With that, below is the e-mail I sent to suggesstionsonrera@maharashtra.gov.in Sub Some suggestions for RERA biggest suggestion, need to give more time study the implications for house-owners. Respected Sir/Madame, I will be publishing the below mail as a public letter on my blog as well. I am writing as a citizen, a voter, a potential home owner, currently a tenant . If houses supply is not in time, it is us, the tenants who have the most to lose as we have to fight over whatever is in the market. I do also hope to be a home buyer at some point in time so these rules would affect me also somewhere in the hazy future. I came to know through the media that Maharashtra Govt. recently introduced draft rules for RERA Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 . I hope to impress upon you that these proposed Rules and Regulations need to be thoroughly revised and new draft rules shared with the public at large with proper announcement in all newspapers and proper time ( more than a month ) to study and give replies on the said matter. My suggestions and complaints are as under a. The first complaint and suggestion is that the date between the draft regulations and suggestions being invited by members of public is and was too little 12 December 2016 23 December 2016 (only 11 days) for almost 90 pages of Government rules and regulations which needs multiple rounds of re-reading to understand the implications of the draft rules . Add to that unlike the Central Building Legislation, Model Agreement which was prepared by Centre and also given wide publicity, the Maharashtra Govt. didn t do any such publicity to bring it to the
notice of the people. b. I ask where was the hurry to publish these draft rules now when everybody is suffering through the result of cash-crunch on top of other things. If the said draft rules were put up in January 2017, I am sure more people would have responded to the draft rules. Ir raises suspicion in the mind of everybody the timing of sharing the draft rules and the limited time given to people to respond. E.g. When TRAI (Telephone Regulatory Authority of India) asked for suggestion it gives more than a month, and something like housing which is an existential question for everybody, i.e. the poor, the middle and the rich, you have given pretty less time. While I could change my telephone service providers at a moment s notice without huge loss, the same cannot be said either for a house owner (in case of builder) or a tenant as well. This is just not done. c. The documents are at https://housing.maharashtra.gov.in/sitemap/housing/Rera_rules.htm under different sub-headings while the correct structure of the documents can be found at nared s site
http://naredco.in/notifications.asp . At the very least, the documents should have been in proper order. Coming to some of the salient points raised both in the media and elsewhere 1. On page 6 of Part IV-A Ext1.pdf you have written Explanation.-The registration of a real estate project shall not be required,- (i) for the purpose of any renovations or repair or redevelopment which does not involve marketing, advertisement, selling or new allotment of any apartment , plot or building as the case may be under
the real estate project; RERA draft rules What it means is that the house owner and by the same stroke the tenant would have absolutely no voice to oppose any changes made to the structure at any point of time after the building is built. This means the builder is free to build 12-14-16 even 20 stories building when the original plans were for 6-8-10. This rule gives the builder to do free for all till the building doesn t get converted into a society, a process which does and can take years to happen. 2. A builder has to take innumerable permissions from different authorities at each and every stage till possession of a said property isn t handed over to a home buyer and by its extension to the tenant. Now any one of these authorities could sit on the papers and there is no accountability of by when papers would be passed under a competent authority s desk. There was a wide belief that there would be some
rules and regulations framed in this regard but the draft rules are silent on the subject matter. 3. In Draft rule 5. page 8 of Part IV-A Ext1.pdf you write Withdrawal of amounts deposited in separate account.-(1) With regard to the withdrawal of amounts deposited under sub-clause (D) of clause (l) of sub-section (2) of section 4, the following provisions shall apply:- (i) For new projects which will be registered after commencement. Deposit in the escrow account is from now onwards. So what happens to the projects which are ongoing at the moment, either at the registration stage or at building stage, thousands of potential house owners would be left to fend for themselves. There needs to be some recourse for them as well. 3b. Another suggestion is that the house-owners are duly informed when promoters/builders are taking money from the bank and should have the authority to see that proper documents and procedure was followed. It is possible that unscrupulous elements may either bypass it or give some different documents which are not in knowledge of the house-owner, thus defeating the purpose of the escrow account itself. 4. On page 44 of Pt.IV-A Ext.161 in the Model Agreement to be entered
between the Promoter and the Alottee you have mentioned (i)The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee one Apartment No. .. of the type .. of carpet area admeasuring .. sq. metres on floor in the building __________along with (hereinafter referred to as the Apartment ) as shown in the Floor plan thereof hereto annexed and marked Annexures C
for the consideration of Rs. . including Rs. . being the proportionate price of the common areas and facilities appurtenant to the premises, the nature, extent and description of the common/limited common areas and facilities which are more particularly described in the Second Schedule annexed herewith. (the price of the Apartment including the proportionate price of the limited common areas and facilities and parking spaces should be shown separately). (ii) The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee garage bearing Nos ____ situated at _______ Basement and/or stilt and /or ____podium being
constructed in the layout for the consideration of Rs. ____________/- (iii) The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee Car parking spaces bearing Nos ____ situated at _______ Basement and/or stilt and /or ____podium and/or open parking space, being constructed in the layout for the
consideration of Rs. ____________/-. The total aggregate consideration amount for the apartment including garages/car parking spaces is
thus Rs.______/- Draft rules. What has been done here is the parking space has been divorced from sale of the flat . It is against natural justice, logic, common sense as well-known precedents in jurisprudence (i.e. law) In September 2010, the bench of Justices R M Lodha and A K Patnaik had ruled in a judgement stating developers cannot sell parking spaces as independent real-estate units. The court ruled that parking areas are common areas and facilities . This was on behalf of a precedent in Mumbai High Court as well. http://www.reinventingparking.org/2010/09/important-parking-ruling-by-indias.html This has been reiterated again and again in courts as well as consumer
forums http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Cant-charge-flat-buyer-extra-for-parking-slot/articleshow/22475233.cms and has been the norm in several Apartment Acts over multiple states http://apartmentadda.com/blog/2015/02/19/rules-pertaining-to-parking-spaces-in-apartment-complexes/ 5. In case of dispute, the case will high court which is inundated by huge number of pending cases. As recently as August 2016 there was a news item in Indian Express which talks about the spike in pending cases. Putting a case in the high court will weigh heavily on the homeowner, financially and
mentally http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/more-cases-and-increased-staff-strength-putting-pressure-on-bombay-high-court-building-2964796/ It may be better to use the services of National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission'(NCDRC) where there is possibility of quicker justice and quick resolution. There is possibility of group actions taking place which will reduce duplicity of work on behalf of the petitioners. 6. There is neither any clarity, incentive or punitive action against the promoter/builder if s/he delay conveyance to the society in order to get any future developmental and FSI rights. To delay handing over conveyance, the builders delay completion of the last building in a said project. there should be both a compensatory and punitive actions taken against the builder if he is unable to prove any genuine cause for the same. 7. There needs to be the provision with regard to need for developers to make public disclosures pertaining to building approvals. This while I had shared above needs to be explicitly mentioned so house-owners know the promoter/builder are on the right path. 8. There needs to be a provision that prohibits refusal to sell property to any person on the basis of his/her religion, marital status or dietary preferences. 9. There is lot of ambiguity if criminal proceedings can be initiated against a promoter/developer if s/he fails to deliver the flat on time. The developer should be criminally liable if he doesn t give the flat with all the amenities, fixtures and anything which was on agreement signed by both parties and for which the payment has been given in
full at time of possession of a flat. 10. Penalties for the promoter/builder is capped at 10% in case of any wrong-doing. Apart from proving the charge, the onus of which would lie on the house-owner, capping it at 10% is similar to A teacher telling a naughty student, do whatever you want to do, I am only going to hit you 5 times. Such a drafting encourages the Promoter/builder to play mischief. The builder knows his exposure is pretty limited. Liability is limited so he will try to get with whatever he can. Having a high penalty clause will deter him. 11. There was talk and shown in the Center s model agreement the precedent of providing names, addresses and contact details of other allot-tees or home-owners of a building that would have multiple dwelling units . This is nowhere either in the agreement or mentioned anywhere else in the four documents. 12. An addition to the above would be that the details provided should be correct and updated as per the records maintained by the Promoter/builder. 13. Today, there is no way for a potential house-owner to know if the builder had broken any norms or has any cases in court pending against him. There should be a way for the potential house-owner to find out. 14. A builder can terminate a flat purchase agreement by giving just a week s notice on email to the buyer who defaults on an instalment. But the developer can refund the money without interest to the
purchaser at leisure, within six months.Under MOFA (the earlier rules), the developer could cancel the agreement after giving a 15 days notice, and the builder could resell the flat only after refunding money to the original buyer. Under the new draft rules, a builder can immediately sell the flat after terminating the agreement. 15. The new draft rules say a buyer must pay 30% of the total cost while signing the agreement and 45% when the plinth of the building is constructed. The earlier state law stipulated 20% payment when the
agreement is signed with the developer. 16. The Central model agreement and rules proposed a fee of INR Rs 1,000 for filing complaints before housing authority; the state draft has proposed to hike this fee to Rs INR Rs. 10,000/- 17. Reading the Central Model Agreement, key disclosures under Section 4 (2)and Rule 3 (2) of the Central Model Rules have been excluded to be put up on the website of the Authority. These included carpet area of flat, encumbrance certificate (this would have disclosed encumbrances in respect of the land where the real estate project is proposed to be undertaken), copy of the legal title report and sanctioned plan of the building. Due to this house-owner would always be in dark and assume that everything is alright. There have been multiple instances of this over years Some examples http://www.deccanchronicle.com/140920/nation-current-affairs/article/builder-encroaches-%E2%80%98raja-kaluve%E2%80%99 http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/surat-builder-grabs-tribal-land-using-fake-documents/ http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/bmtf-books-exmayor-wife-for-grabbing-ca-site/article7397062.ece http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thane/24-acre-ambernath-plot-usurped-with-fake-docus/articleshow/55654139.cms 18. The Central rule requires a builder to submit an annual report including profit and loss account, balance sheet, cash flow statement, directors report and auditors report for the preceding three financial years, among other things. However, the Maharashtra draft rules are silent on such a requirement. While the above is what I could perceive in the limited amount I came to know. This should be enough to convince that more needs to be done from the house-owner s side. Update Just saw Quint s Op-Ed goes in more detail.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Draft Rules for Real Estate Rules and Regulation (2016), #hurry, #Name, #Response, Amrapali Group, Contact details of other hom-owners in a scheme., M.S. Dhoni

Shirish Agarwal: The wine and dine at debconf16

For the wine connoisseur

FOR the Wine Connoisseur

All photos courtesy KK . If any deviations, would put up labels sharing whose copyright it is. Before I get into all of that, I was curious about Canada and taking the opportunity of debconf happening there in a few months, asked few people what they thought of digital payments, fees and expenses in their country and if plastic cash is indeed used therein. The first to answer was Tyler McDonald (no idea if he is anyway related to the fast-food chain McDonalds which is a worldwide operation.) This is what he had to say/share
You can use credit / debit cards almost everywhere. Restaurant waiters also usually have wireless credit / debit terminals that they will bring to your table for you to settle your bill. How much your bank charges depends on your Canadian bank and the banking plan you are on. For instance, on my plan through the Bank Of Montreal, I get (I think) 20 free transactions a month and then after that I m charged $0.50CDN/piece. However, if I go to a Bank Of Montreal ATM and withdraw cash, there is no service fee for that. There is no service fee for using *credit* cards, only *debit* cards tend to have the fee. I live in a really rural area so I can t always get to a Bank Of Montreal machine for cash. So what I usually end up doing, is either pay by credit and then pay of the balance right away so I don t have to pay interest, or when I do use my bank card to pay for something, I ask if I can get cash back as well. Yes, Canada converted to plastic notes a few years ago. We ve also eliminated the penny. For cashless transactions, you pay the exact amount billed. If you re paying somebody in cash, it is rounded up or down to the nearest 5 cents. And for $1 or $2, instead of notes, we ve moved over to coins. I personally like the plastic notes. They re smoother and feel more durable than the paper notes. I ve had one go through a laundry load by accident and it came out the other side fine.
Another gentleman responded with slightly more information which probably would interest travellers from around the world, not just Indians
Quebec has its own interbank system called Interac (https://interac.ca/en/about/our-company.html). Quebec is a very proud and independent region and for many historical reasons they want to stand on their own, which is why they support their local systems. Some vendors will support only Interac for debit card transactions (at least this was the case when I stayed there the beginning of this decade, it might have changed a bit). *Most* vendors (including supermarkets like Provigo, Metro, etc) will accept major credit and debit cards, although MasterCard isn t accepted as widely there as Visa is. So, if you have one of both, load up your Visa card instead of your MasterCard or get a prepaid Visa card from your bank. They support chip cards everywhere so don t worry about that. If you have a 5 digit pin on any of your cards and a vendor asks you for a 4 digit pin, it will work 90%+ of the times if you just enter the first 4 digits, but it s usually a good idea to go change your pin to a 4 digit just to be safe.
From the Indian perspective all of the above fits pretty neat as we also have Pin and Chip cards (domestically though most ATMs still use the magnetic strip and is suspected that the POS terminals aren t any better.) That would be a whole different story so probably left for another day. I do like the bit about pocketing the change tip. As far as number of free transactions go, it was pretty limited in India for few years before the demonetization happening now. Few years before, I do remember doing as many transactions on the ATM as I please but then ATM s have seen a downward spiral in terms of technology upgradation, maintenance etc. There is no penalty to the bank if the ATM is out-of-order. If there was significant penalty then we probably would have seen banks taking more care of ATM s. It is a slightly more complex topic hence would take a stab at it some other day. Do hope though that the terms for ATM usage for bank customers become lenient similar to Canada otherwise it would be difficult for Indians to jump on the digital band-wagon as you cannot function without cheap, user-friendly technology. Cash machines: Uneven spread, slowing growth - Copyright Indian Express The image has been taken from this fascinating article which appeared in Indian Express couple of days back. Coming back to the cheese and wine in the evening. I think we started coming back from Eagle Encounters around 16:30/17:00 hrs Cape Town time. Somehow the ride back was much more faster and we played some Bollywood party music while coming back (all cool). Suddenly remembered that I had to buy some cheese as I hadn t bought any from India. There is quite a bit of a post where I m trying to know/understand if spices can be smuggled (which much later I learnt I didn t need to but that s a different story altogether), I also had off-list conversations with people about cheese as well but wasn t able to get any good recommendations. Then saw that KK bought Mysore Pak (apparently she took a chance not declaring it) which while not being exactly cheese fit right into things. In her own words a South Indian ghee sweet fondly nicknamed the blocks of cholesterol and reason #3 for bypass surgery . KK So with Leonard s help we stopped at a place where it looked like a chain of stores. Each store was selling something. Seeing that, I was immediately transported to Connaught Place, Delhi Connaught Place, Delhi The image comes from http://planetden.com/food/roundabout-world-connaught-place-delhi which attempts to explain Connaught Place. While the article is okish, it lacks soul and not written like a Delhite would write or anybody who has spent a chunk having spent holidays at CP. Another day, another story, sorry. What I found interesting about the stores while they were next to each other, I also eyed an alcohol shop as well as an Adult/Sex shop. I asked Leonard as to how far we were from UCT and he replied hardly 5 minutes by car and was shocked to see both alcohol and a sex shop. While an alcohol shop some distance away from a college is understandable, there are few and far around Colleges all over India, but adult shops are a rarity. Unfortunately, none of us have any photos of the place as till that time everybody s phone was dead or just going to be dead and nobody had thought to bring a portable power pack to juice our mobile devices. A part of me was curious to see what the sex shop would have and look from inside, but as was with younger people didn t think it was appropriate. All of us except Jaminy and someone else (besides Leonard) decided to stay back, while the rest of us went inside to explore the stores. It took me sometime to make my way to the cheese corner and had no idea which was good and which wasn t. So with no idea of brands therein, the only way to figure out was the pricing. So bought two, one a larger 500 gm cheap piece and a smaller slightly more expensive one just to make sure that the Debian cheese team would be happy. We did have a mini-adventure as for sometime Jaminy was missing, apparently she went goofing off or went to freshen up or something and we were unable to connect with her as all our phones were dead or dying. Eventually we came back to UCT, barely freshened up when it was decided by our group to go and give our share of goodies to the cheese and wine party. When I went up to the room to share the cheese, came to know they needed a volunteer for cutting veggies etc. Having spent years seeing Yan Can Cook and having practised quite a bit tried to do some fancy decoration and some julian cutting but as we got dull knives and not much time, just did some plain old cutting
The salads

The Salads, partly done by me.

I have to share I had a fascinating discussion about cooking in Pressure Cookers. I was under the assumption that everybody knows how to use Pressure Cookers as they are one of the simplest ways to cook food without letting go of all the nutrients. At least, I believe this to be predominant in the Asian subcontinent and even the chinese have similar vessels for cooking. I use what is called the first generation Pressure Cooker. I have been using a 1.5 l Prestige Pressure Cooker over half a decade, almost used daily without issues. http://www.amazon.in/Prestige-Nakshatra-Aluminium-Pressure-Cooker/dp/B00CB7U1OU
Prestige 1.5 L Pressure Cooker

1.5 Litre Pressure Cooker with gasket and everything.

There are also induction pressure cookers nowadays in the Indian market and this model https://www.amazon.in/Prestige-Deluxe-Induction-Aluminum-Pressure/dp/B01KZVPNGE/ref=sr_1_2
Induction base cooking for basmati rice

Best cooker for doing Basmati Biryanis and things like that.

Basmati is long-grain, aromatic rice which most families used in very special occasions such as festivals, marriages, anything good and pure is associated with the rice. I had also shared my lack of knowledge of industrial Microwave Ovens. While I do get most small Microwave Ovens like these , cooking in industrial ovens I simply have no clue. Anyways, after that conversation I went back, freshened up a bit and sometime later found myself in the middle of this
Collection of Wine Bottles

Random selection of wine bottles from all over the world.

Also at times found myself in middle of this
Chocolates all around me.

CHOCOLATES

I tried quite a few chocolates but the best one I liked (don t remember the name) was a white caramel chocolate which literally melted into my mouth. Got the whole died and went to heaven experience . Who said gluttony is bad Or this
French Bread, Wine and chaos

French Bread, Wine and chaos

As can be seen the French really enjoy their bread. I do remember a story vaguely (don t remember if it was a children s fairy tale or something) about how the French won a war through their french bread. Or this
Juices for those who love their health

Juices for those who love their health

We also had juices for the teetotaller or who can t handle drinks. Unsurprisingly perhaps, by the end of the session, almost all the different wines were finito while there was still some juices left to go around. From the Indian perspective, it wasn t at all exciting, there were no brawls, everybody was too civilized and everybody staggered off when they met their quota. As I was in holiday spirit, stayed up late, staggered to my room, blissed out and woke up without any headache. Pro tip Drink lots and lots and lots of water especially if you are drinking. It flushes out most of the toxins and also helps in not having after-morning headaches. If I m going drinking, I usually drown myself in at least a litre or two of water, even if I had to the bathroom couple of times before going to bed. All in all, a perfect evening. I was able to connect/talk with some of the gods whom I had wanted to for a long time and they actually listened. Don t remember if I mumbled something or made some sense in small-talk or whatever I did. But as shared, a perfect evening
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #ATM usage, #Canada, #Cheese and Wine party, #Cheese shopping, #Connaught Place Delhi, #Debconf16, #Debit card, #French bread, #Julian cutting, #Mysore Pak, #white caramel chocolate

21 December 2016

Holger Levsen: 20161221-debian-edu-sprint-in-oslo

What we did at the Debian Edu / Skolelinux gathering in November 2016 in Oslo From November 25 to 27 some people met in the hackerspace bitraf in downtown Oslo. On Saturday and Sunday we met in the morning and hacked and translated all day until we went for dinners in the evening. Despite the short time I think we managed to get a lot done and had good fun, so I'm hoping we'll have another gathering in 2017! Debian Edu / Skolelinux is currently in better shape regarding the upcoming Debian release than we ever have been, which is pretty awesome. Today, on December 21st, all our changes are in Stretch, except for debian-edu-artwork.git, which awaits a desktop-base upload to unstable the only thing missing is being able to install Debian Edu using our profiles from official media releasing Debian Edu Stretch on the same day as Debian Stretch would be a huge success though! These are the notes taken in a pad (thanks riseup!) during the meeting: Phil Hands worked on Knut Yrvin worked on Ingrid Yrvin worked on Ole-Erik Yrvin worked on Wolfgang Schweer worked on Petter Reinholdtsen worked on Dominik George worked on Holger Levsen worked on Mike Gabriel was sick and couldnt come to Oslo and worked at home instead: Thanks to the Debian sprints programm and our sponsors for supporting the travel of Wolfgang, Dominik, Phil and myself! Mike opted out from reimbursement as he couldn't travel due to sickness.

19 December 2016

Mike Gabriel: [Arctica Project] Release of nx-libs (version 3.5.99.3)

Introduction NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a network, especially a slow one. NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in 2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name "nx-libs". Release Announcement On Monday, Dec 19th, version 3.5.99.3 of nx-libs has been released [1]. This release brings another major backport of libNX_X11 (to the status of X.org's libX11 1.6.4, i.e. latest HEAD) and also a major backport of the xtrans library (status of latest HEAD at X.org, as well). This big chunk of work has again been performed by Ulrich Sibiller. Thanks for your work on this. This release is also the first version of nx-libs (v3) that has dropped nxcompext as shared library. We discovered that shipping nxcompext as shared library is a big design flaw as it has to be built against header files private to the Xserver (namely, dix.h). Conclusively, code from nxcompext was moved into the nxagent DDX [2]. Furthermore, we worked again and again on cleaning up the code base. We dropped various files from the Xserver code shipped in nx-libs and various compilier warnings have been amended. In the upstream ChangeLog you will find some more items around code clean-ups and .deb packaging, see the diff [3] on the ChangeLog file for details. A very special and massive thanks to all major contributors, namely Ulrich Sibiller, Mihai Moldovan and Vadim Troshchinskiy. Well done!!! Also a special thanks to Vadim Troshchinskiy for fixing some regressions in nxcomp introduced by the Unix socketeering support. Change Log A list of recent changes (since 3.5.99.2) can be obtained from here. Known Issues from 3.5.99.2 (solved in 3.5.99.3) This version of nx-libs now works fine again with LDFLAGS / CFLAGS having the -pie / -fPIE hardening flags set. Binary Builds You can obtain binary builds of nx-libs for Debian (jessie, stretch, unstable) and Ubuntu (trusty, xenial) via these apt-URLs: Our package server's archive key is: 0x98DE3101 (fingerprint: 7A49 CD37 EBAE 2501 B9B4 F7EA A868 0F55 98DE 3101). Use this command to make APT trust our package server: 
 wget -qO - http://packages.arctica-project.org/archive.key   sudo apt-key add -
The nx-libs software project brings to you the binary packages nxproxy (client-side component) and nxagent (nx-X11 server, server-side component). Ubuntu developers, please note: we have added nightly builds for Ubuntu latest to our build server. This has been Ubuntu 16.10 so far, but we will soon drop 16.10 support in nightly builds and add 17.04 support. References

Chris Lamb: 10 years of Debian

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of my first contribution to Debian GNU/Linux. I will not recount the full history here but my first experience with Debian was a happy accident. I had sent off for a 5-CD set of Red Hat from The Linux Emporium only to discover I lacked the required 12MB of RAM. Annoyed, I reached for the Debian "potato" CD that was included gratis in my order due to it being outdated at the time Fast-forwarding a few years, whilst my first contribution was trivial, it was Thomas Bushnell's infectious enthusiasm that led me to contribute more, eventually becoming a Google Summer of Code student under Daniel Baumann, and finally becoming an official Debian Developer in September 2008 with Thomas Viehmann as my Application Manager. (Some things may never change, however I still struggle with the bug tracker's control@ interface.)
The response I got to my patch always reminds me of the irrational power of providing attibution. I've always liked to tell myself I'm above such vanities but perhaps the truly mature approach would be to accept that ego is part of the human condition and as a community take steps to avoid handicapping ourselves by underestimating the value of "trivialities" such as having one's name listed. I've since been fascinated by the number of maintainers who do not attribute patches in changelogs, especially from newcomers or when the changes are non-trivial a handful in particular have stung me fairly deeply. I would certainly concede that it adds nothing technical and can even be distracting, but it seems a reasonable concession that dramatically increases the chance of future efforts or, frankly, is simply a kindly gesture of thanks and good will. Given our level of technical expertise, I fear we regularly suffer from not having sufficient empathy for newcomers or first-time users who lack the context or orientation that we possess. Anyway, here's to another ten

18 December 2016

Iustin Pop: Printer fun

Had some printer fun this week. It was fun in the sense that failure modes are interesting, not that there was much joy in the process. My current document printer is an HP that I bought back in early 2008; soon 9 years old, that is. When I got the printer I was quite happy: it supports Postscript, it supports memory extension (which allowed me to go from the built-in 64MB to a whopping 320MB), it is networked and has automatic duplex. Not good for much more than document printing, but that it did well. I didn't print a lot on it (averaged it was well below the recommended monthly limit), which might explain the total trouble-free operation, but I did change the toner cartridges a couple of times. The current cartridges were running low for a while, but I didn't need to change them yet. As I printed a user manual at the beginning of the week (~300+ pages in total), I ran out of the black half-way through. Bought a new cartridge, installed it, and the first strange thing was that it still showed Black empty - please replace . I powered the printer off and turned it on again (the miracle cure for all IT-related things), and things seemed OK, so I restarted printing. However, this time, the printer was going through 20-30 pages, and then was getting stuck in "Printing document" with green led blinking. Waited for 20 minutes, nothing. So cancel the job (from the printer), restart printing, all fine. The next day I wanted to print a single page, and didn't manage to. Checked that the PDF is normal, checked an older PDF which I printed successfully before, nothing worked. Changed drivers, unseated & re-seated the extra memory, changed operating systems, nothing. Not even the built-in printer diagnostic pages were printing. The internet was all over with "HP formatter issues"; apparently some HP printers had "green" (i.e. low-quality) soldering, and were failing after a while. But people were complaining about 1-2-4 years, not 9 that my printer worked, and it was very suspicious that all troubles started after my cartridge replacement. Or, more likely, due to the recent sudden increase in printing. Given that formatter board fixes (bake in the oven for N minutes at a specific temperature to reflow the soldering) are temporary and that you can't find replacement parts for this printer, I started looking for a new printer. To my surprise (and dismay at the waste that capitalism produces), a new printer from a higher class was cheaper than replacing all 4 cartridges in my printer. So I had a 90% full black cartridge that I couldn't reuse, but I'd get a new printer for not much more. Interestingly, in 9 years, the development was: I was however happy that one can still get OS-independent (Postscript), networked printers that are small enough for home use and don't (necessarily) come with WiFi. However, one thing still bothered me: did I have such problems because the printer died of overwork at old age, or was it related to the cartridge change? So I start searching again, and I find a post on a forum (oh Google, why did you remove "forum search" and replaced it with "language level"?) that details a hidden procedure to format the internal storage of the printer, exactly for my printer model, exactly for my symptoms. Huh, I will lose page count, but this is worth a try So I do press the required keys, I see the printer booting and saying "erasing ", then asking for language, which makes me happy because it seems the forum post was correct in one regard. I confirm English, the printer reboots once more, and then when it comes up it warns me: "Yellow cartridge is a non-HP original, please confirm". I get confused, and re-seat all cartridges, to no avail. Yellow is non-HP. Sigh, maybe that cartridge had something that confused the printer? When I visit its web page however, all cartridges except the newly installed black one are marked as Non-HP; this only means that I can't see their remaining toner level, but otherwise the printer is restored back to life. I take the opportunity to also perform a firmware upgrade (only five years newer firmware, but still quite old), but this doesn't solve the Non-HP message. The printer works now, and I'm left wondering: was this all a DRM-related failure, something like new cartridge chip which had some new code that confused the printer so bad it needed reformatting, at which point the old cartridge code is no longer supported (for whatever reason)? Was it just a fluke, unrelated to DRM? Was the problem that I powered off the printer soon after replacing the cartridge, while it was still doing something (e.g. preparing to do a calibration after the change)? And another, more practical question: I have 3 cartridges to replace still; they were at 10% before this entire saga, and I'm not able to see their level anymore, but they'll get down to empty soon. The black cartridge in the printer is already at 77%, which is surprising as I didn't print that much. So should I replace the cartridges on what is a possibly fully functional, but also possibly a dying printer? Or buy a new one for slightly more, throwing out possibly good hardware? Even though I understand the business reason behind it, I hate the whole concept of "the printer is free, you pay for the ink". Though in my case "free" didn't mean bad, as a lifetime of 9 years is good enough for a printer.

Daniel Stender: How to cheat setuptools-scm (Debian diary)

[2016-12-19: some additions] This is another little issue from Python packaging for Debian which I came across lately packaging the compressed NumPy based data container Bcolz. Upstream uses setuptools-scm to determine the software s version during build time from the source code management environment the code is in. This method is convenient for the upstream development because with that the version number doesn t need to be hard-coded, and often people just forget to update that (and other version carrying files like doc/conf.py) when a new version of a project is released. python-setuptools just needs to be added to the setup.py to do its job, and in Bcolz the code goes like this: 
setup(
    name="bcolz",
    use_scm_version= 
        'version_scheme': 'guess-next-dev',
        'local_scheme': 'dirty-tag',
        'write_to': 'bcolz/version.py'
The file the version number is written to is bcolz/version.py. This file isn t in the upstream code revision nor in the tarball which was released by the upstream developers, it s always generated during build time. In Debian there is an error if you try to build a package from a source tree which contains files which aren t to be found in the corresponding tarball, like cruft from a previous build, or if any files have changed therefore every new package should be test build also twice in a row in a non-chroot environment. Generally there a two ways to solve this, either you add cruft to debian/clean, or you add the file resp. a matching file pattern to extend-diff-ignore in debian/source/options. Which method is the better one could be discussed, I m generally using the clean option if something isn t in the upstream tarball, and the source/options solution if something is already in the upstream tarball, but gets changed during a build. This is related to your preferred Git procedures, if you remove a file which is in the upstream tarball these removals have to be checked in separately, and that means everytime a new upstream tarball is released that is not very convenient. Another option which is available is to strip certain files from the upstream tarball by putting them on the Files-Excluded in deb/copyright. By the way, the same complex applies to egg-info/: that folder is shipped or is not shipped in the upstream tarball, and files in that folder get changed during build. When the source code is put into a Git environment for Debian packaging, there could be problems with the version number setuptools-scm comes up with. This setuptools extension gets the recent version from the latest Git tag when there is a version number to be found, and that s all right. In Git environments for Debian packaging (like e.g. of the Debian Science group, the Python groups and the others) that is available, like the commonly used upstream tags have that1. The problem is, sometimes the upstream version which Debian has2 doesn t match the original upstream version number which is wanted for version in bcolz/version.py. For example, the suffix +ds is used if the upstream tarball has been stripped from prebuild files or embedded convenience shipments (like it s the case with the Bcolz package where c-blosc/ has been stripped because that s build for another package), of the suffix +dfsg shows that non-DFSG free software has been removed (which can t be distributed through the main archive section). For example, the version string for Bcolz which is found after the build currently (1.1.0+ds1-1) is 1.1.0+ds1: 
# coding: utf-8
# file generated by setuptools_scm
# don't change, don't track in version control
version = '1.1.0+ds1'
But that s not wanted because this version never has been released, but appears everywhere: 
$ pip list   grep bcolz
bcolz (1.1.0+ds1)
$ python3 -c 'import bcolz; bcolz.print_versions()'
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
bcolz version:     1.1.0+ds1
There are several different ways how to fix this. The one with the crowbar (like said in German) is to patch use_scm_version out from setup.py, but if you don t provide any version in exchange the version number which is used by Setuptools then is 0.0.0. The upstream version could be hard-coded into the patch, but then again it has not to be forgotten to update it manually by the maintainer, which is not very convenient. Plus, setup.py could change and the patch then might need to be unfuzzed, thus more work. Bad. A patch could be spared by manipulating and exporting the SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION environment variable for setuptools-scm in debian/rules, which is sometimes used when I see the returns for that string on Debian Code Search. But how to prevent to hard code the version number, here? The dpkg-dev package (pulled by build-essential) ships a Makefile snippet /usr/share/dpkg/pkg-info.mk which could be included into debian/rules. It defines several variables which are useful for packaging, like DEB_SOURCE contains the source package name, they are extracted from debian/changelog. But, DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM which is available through that puts out the upstream version without epoch and Debian revision, but it s not getting any finer grained out of the box. For a custom fix, a regular expression which removes the +... extensions (if present) from the bare upstream version string would be s/\+[^+]*//: 
$ echo "1.1.0+ds1"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0
$ echo "1.1.0"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0
$ echo "1.1.0+dfsg12"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0
With that, a custom variable VERSION_UPSTREAM could be set on the top of DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM (from pkg-info.mk) in debian/rules: 
include /usr/share/dpkg/pkg-info.mk
VERSION_UPSTREAM = $(shell echo '$(DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM)'   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//')
export SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION = $(VERSION_UPSTREAM)
Bam, that works (see the commit here): 
# coding: utf-8
# file generated by setuptools_scm
# don't change, don't track in version control
version = '1.1.0'
An addition, I ve seen that dh-python also takes care of SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION since 2.20160609. The environment variable is set by the Debhelper build system if python 3, -setuptools-scm is among the build-dependencies in debian/control. The Perl code for that is in dh/pybuild.pm. I think the version number string above comes from dh-python s pretended version, and not from any of the Git tags (which are currently debian/1.1.0+ds1-1 and upstream/1.1.0+ds1).
  1. For Git in Debian packaging, e.g. see the DEP-14 proposal (Recommended layout for Git packaging repositories): http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep14/ [return]
  2. Following the scheme for package versions [epoch:]upstream_version[-debian-revision] [return]

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.7.600.1.0

armadillo image Earlier this week, Conrad released Armadillo 7.600.1. The corresponding RcppArmadillo release 0.7.600.1.0 is now on CRAN and in Debian. This follows several of rounds testing at our end with a full reverse-dependency of a pre-release version followed by another full reverse-depency check. Which was of course followed by CRAN testing for two more days. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language--and is widely used by (currently) 298 other packages on CRAN -- an increase of 24 just since the last CRAN release of 0.7.500.0.0 in October! Changes in this release relative to the previous CRAN release 0.7.500.0.0 are as follows:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.600.1.0 (2016-12-16)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.600.1 (Coup d'Etat Deluxe)
    • more accurate eigs_sym() and eigs_gen()
    • expanded floor(), ceil(), round(), trunc(), sign() to handle sparse matrices
    • added arg(), atan2(), hypot()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.500.1.0 (2016-11-11)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.500.1
  • Small improvement to return value treatment
  • The sample.h extension was updated to the newer Armadillo interface. (Closes #111)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

Mike Gabriel: Free Your Phone, Free Yourself, Get Sponsored for your Work

TL;DR; This is a call to every FLOSS developer interested in working towards Free Software driven mobile phones, esp. targetting the Fairphone 2. If your only show stopper is lack of development hardware or lack of financial support, please go on reading below. As I see it, the Fairphone 2 will be (or already is) the FLOSS community platform on the mobile devices market. Regularly, I get new notice about people working on this or that OS port to the FP2 hardware platform. The combination of a hardware-wise sustainably maintained mobile phone platform and a Free (or sort-of-Free) operating system being ported to it, makes the Fairphone 2 a really attractive device. Personally, I run Sailfish OS on my Fairphone 2. Some weeks ago, I got contacted by one of my sponsors letting me know that he got involved in setting up an initiative that works on porting the Ubuntu Table/Phone OS to FP2. That very project is in need of more developers. Possibly, it needs exactly YOU!!! So, if you are a developer that meets one or more of the below requirements and are interested in working in a highly motivated team, please get in touch with the UT4FP [1] project (skill requirements taken from the UT4FP website): My sponsor offers to send out FP2 devices to (seriously) interested developers and if needed, he can also back up developers financially. If you are interested, please get in touch with me (and I'll channel you through...) via IRC (on the OFTC or Freenode network). light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver on IRC) [1] https://www.ut4fp.org/

16 December 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.0.1: New package for Nanosecond Resolution Time for R

R has excellent tools for dates and times. The Date and POSIXct classes (as well as the 'wide' representation in POSIXlt) are versatile, and a lot of useful tooling has been built around them. However, POSIXct is implemented as a double with fractional seconds since the epoch. Given the 53 bits accuracy, it leaves just a bit less than microsecond resolution. Which is good enough for most things. But more and more performance measurements, latency statistics, ... are now measured more finely, and we need nanosecond resolution. For which commonly an integer64 is used to represent nanoseconds since the epoch. And while R does not a native type for this, the bit64 package by Jens Oehlschl gel offers a performant one implemented as a lightweight S3 class. So this package uses this integer64 class, along with two helper functions for parsing and formatting, respectively, at nano-second resolution from the RcppCCTZ package which wraps the CCTZ library from Google. CCTZ is a modern C++11 library extending the (C++11-native) chrono type.

Examples

Simple Parsing and Arithmetic 
R> x <- nanotime("1970-01-01T00:00:00.000000001+00:00")
R> print(x)
integer64
[1] 1
R> format(x)
[1] "1970-01-01T00:00:00.000000001+00:00"
R> cat("x+1 is: ")
x+1 is: R> x <- x + 1
R> print(x)
integer64
[1] 2
R> format(x)
[1] "1970-01-01T00:00:00.000000002+00:00"
R>

Vectorised 
R> options("width"=60)
R> v <- nanotime(Sys.time()) + 1:5
R> v
integer64
[1] 1481505724483583001 1481505724483583002
[3] 1481505724483583003 1481505724483583004
[5] 1481505724483583005
R> format(v)
[1] "2016-12-12T01:22:04.483583001+00:00"
[2] "2016-12-12T01:22:04.483583002+00:00"
[3] "2016-12-12T01:22:04.483583003+00:00"
[4] "2016-12-12T01:22:04.483583004+00:00"
[5] "2016-12-12T01:22:04.483583005+00:00"
R>

Use with zoo 
R> z <- zoo(cbind(A=1:5, B=5:1), v)
R> options("nanotimeFormat"="%d %b %H:%M:%E*S")  ## override default
R> z
                          A B
12 Dec 01:47:55.812513001 1 5
12 Dec 01:47:55.812513002 2 4
12 Dec 01:47:55.812513003 3 3
12 Dec 01:47:55.812513004 4 2
12 Dec 01:47:55.812513005 5 1
R>

Technical Details The bit64 package (by Jens Oehlschl gel) supplies the integer64 type used to store the nanosecond resolution time as (positive or negative) offsets to the epoch of January 1, 1970. The RcppCCTZ package supplies the formatting and parsing routines based on the (modern C++) library CCTZ from Google.

Status Version 0.0.1 has now been released. It works with some other packages, notably zoo and data.table. It (at least currently) requires RcppCCTZ to parse and format nanosecond resolution time objects from / to text --- and this package is on Linux and OS X only due to its use of system time zoneinfo. The requirement could be relaxed in the future by rewriting formating and parsing code. Contributions are welcome.

Installation The package is not yet on CRAN. Until it gets there, or to install the development versions, it can also be installed via a standard 
install.packages("RcppCCTZ")   # need 0.1.0 or later
remotes::install_github("eddelbuettel/nanotime")
If you prefer install.packages() (as I do), use the version from the ghrr drat: 
install.packages("drat")       # easier repo access + creation
drat:::add("ghrr")             # make it known
install.packages("nanotime")   # install it
If and when it gets to CRAN you will be able to do 
install.packages("nanotime")

Contact For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

15 December 2016

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Weblate 2.10

Quite on the schedule, Weblate 2.10 is out today. This release brings Git exporter module, improves support for machine translation services and adds various CSV exports and API interfaces. Full list of changes: If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions. You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Aptoide, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects. Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Filed under: Debian English phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments

14 December 2016

Antoine Beaupr : Debian considering automated upgrades

The Debian project is looking at possibly making automatic minor upgrades to installed packages the default for newly installed systems. While Debian has a reliable and stable package update system that has been an inspiration for multiple operating systems (the venerable APT), upgrades are, usually, a manual process on Debian for most users. The proposal was brought up during the Debian Cloud sprint in November by longtime Debian Developer Steve McIntyre. The rationale was to make sure that users installing Debian in the cloud have a "secure" experience by default, by installing and configuring the unattended-upgrades package within the images. The unattended-upgrades package contains a Python program that automatically performs any pending upgrade and is designed to run unattended. It is roughly the equivalent of doing apt-get update; apt-get upgrade in a cron job, but has special code to handle error conditions, warn about reboots, and selectively upgrade packages. The package was originally written for Ubuntu by Michael Vogt, a longtime Debian developer and Canonical employee. Since there was a concern that Debian cloud images would be different from normal Debian installs, McIntyre suggested installing unattended-upgrades by default on all Debian installs, so that people have a consistent experience inside and outside of the cloud. The discussion that followed was interesting as it brought up key issues one would have when deploying automated upgrade tools, outlining both the benefits and downsides to such systems.

Problems with automated upgrades An issue raised in the following discussion is that automated upgrades may create unscheduled downtime for critical services. For example, certain sites may not be willing to tolerate a master MySQL server rebooting in conditions not controlled by the administrators. The consensus seems to be that experienced administrators will be able to solve this issue on their own, or are already doing so. For example, Noah Meyerhans, a Debian developer, argued that "any reasonably well managed production host is going to be driven by some kind of configuration management system" where competent administrators can override the defaults. Debian, for example, provides the policy-rc.d mechanism to disable service restarts on certain packages out of the box. unattended-upgrades also features a way to disable upgrades on specific packages that administrators would consider too sensitive to restart automatically and will want to schedule during maintenance windows. Reboots were another issue discussed: how and when to deploy kernel upgrades? Automating kernel upgrades may mean data loss if the reboot happens during a critical operation. On Debian systems, the kernel upgrade mechanisms already provide a /var/run/reboot-required flag file that tools can monitor to notify users of the required reboot. For example, some desktop environments will popup a warning prompting users to reboot when the file exists. Debian doesn't currently feature an equivalent warning for command-line operation: Vogt suggested that the warning could be shown along with the usual /etc/motd announcement. The ideal solution here, of course, is reboot-less kernel upgrades, which is also known as "live patching" the kernel. Unfortunately, this area is still in development in the kernel (as was previously discussed here). Canonical deployed the feature for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release, but Debian doesn't yet have such capability, since it requires extra infrastructure among other issues. Furthermore, system reboots are only one part of the problem. Currently, upgrading packages only replaces the code and restarts the primary service shipped with a given package. On library upgrades, however, dependent services may not necessarily notice and will keep running with older, possibly vulnerable, libraries. While libc6, in Debian, has special code to restart dependent services, other libraries like libssl do not notify dependent services that they need to restart to benefit from potentially critical security fixes. One solution to this is the needrestart package which inspects all running processes and restarts services as necessary. It also covers interpreted code, specifically Ruby, Python, and Perl. In my experience, however, it can take up to a minute to inspect all processes, which degrades the interactivity of the usually satisfying apt-get install process. Nevertheless, it seems like needrestart is a key component of a properly deployed automated upgrade system.

Benefits of automated upgrades One thing that was less discussed is the actual benefit of automating upgrades. It is merely described as "secure by default" by McIntyre in the proposal, but no one actually expanded on this much. For me, however, it is now obvious that any out-of-date system will be systematically attacked by automated probes and may be taken over to the detriment of the whole internet community, as we are seeing with Internet of Things devices. As Debian Developer Lars Wirzenius said:
The ecosystem-wide security benefits of having Debian systems keep up to date with security updates by default overweigh any inconvenience of having to tweak system configuration on hosts where the automatic updates are problematic.
One could compare automated upgrades with backups: if they are not automated, they do not exist and you will run into trouble without them. (Wirzenius, coincidentally, also works on the Obnam backup software.) Another benefit that may be less obvious is the acceleration of the feedback loop between developers and users: developers like to know quickly when an update creates a regression. Automation does create the risk of a bad update affecting more users, but this issue is already present, to a lesser extent, with manual updates. And the same solution applies: have a staging area for security upgrades, the same way updates to Debian stable are first proposed before shipping a point release. This doesn't have to be limited to stable security updates either: more adventurous users could follow rolling distributions like Debian testing or unstable with unattended upgrades as well, with all the risks and benefits that implies.

Possible non-issues That there was not a backlash against the proposal surprised me: I expected the privacy-sensitive Debian community to react negatively to another "phone home" system as it did with the Django proposal. This, however, is different than a phone home system: it merely leaks package lists and one has to leak that information to get the updated packages. Furthermore, privacy-sensitive administrators can use APT over Tor to fetch packages. In addition, the diversity of the mirror infrastructure makes it difficult for a single entity to profile users. Automated upgrades do imply a culture change, however: administrators approve changes only a posteriori as opposed to deliberately deciding to upgrade parts they chose. I remember a time when I had to maintain proprietary operating systems and was reluctant to enable automated upgrades: such changes could mean degraded functionality or additional spyware. However, this is the free-software world and upgrades generally come with bug fixes and new features, not additional restrictions.

Automating major upgrades? While automating minor upgrades is one part of the solution to the problem of security maintenance, the other is how to deal with major upgrades. Once a release becomes unsupported, security issues may come up and affect older software. While Debian LTS extends releases lifetimes significantly, it merely delays the inevitable major upgrades. In the grand scheme of things, the lifetimes of Linux systems (Debian: 3-5 years, Ubuntu: 1-5 years) versus other operating systems (Solaris: 10-15 years, Windows: 10+ years) is fairly short, which makes major upgrades especially critical. While major upgrades are not currently automated in Debian, they are usually pretty simple: edit sources.list then: 
    # apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
But the actual upgrade process is really much more complex. If you run into problems with the above commands, you will quickly learn that you should have followed the release notes, a whopping 20,000-word, ten-section document that outlines all the gory details of the release. This is a real issue for large deployments and for users unfamiliar with the command line. The solutions most administrators seem to use right now is to roll their own automated upgrade process. For example, the Debian.org system administrators have their own process for the "jessie" (8.0) upgrade. I have also written a specification of how major upgrades could be automated that attempts to take into account the wide variety of corner cases that occur during major upgrades, but it is currently at the design stage. Therefore, this problem space is generally unaddressed in Debian: Ubuntu does have a do-release-upgrade command but it is Ubuntu-specific and would need significant changes in order to work in Debian.

Future work Ubuntu currently defaults to "no automation" but, on install, invites users to enable unattended-upgrades or Landscape, a proprietary system-management service from Canonical. According to Vogt, the company supports both projects equally as they differ in scope: unattended-upgrades just upgrades packages while Landscape aims at maintaining thousands of machines and handles user management, release upgrades, statistics, and aggregation. It appears that Debian will enable unattended-upgrades on the images built for the cloud by default. For regular installs, the consensus that has emerged points at the Debian installer prompting users to ask if they want to disable the feature as well. One reason why this was not enabled before is that unattended-upgrades had serious bugs in the past that made it less attractive. For example, it would simply fail to follow security updates, a major bug that was fortunately promptly fixed by the maintainer. In any case, it is important to distribute security and major upgrades on Debian machines in a timely manner. In my long experience in professionally administering Unix server farms, I have found the upgrade work to be a critical but time-consuming part of my work. During that time, I successfully deployed an automated upgrade system all the way back to Debian woody, using the simpler cron-apt. This approach is, unfortunately, a little brittle and non-standard; it doesn't address the need of automating major upgrades, for which I had to revert to tools like cluster-ssh or more specialized configuration management tools like Puppet. I therefore encourage any effort towards improving that process for the whole community. More information about the configuration of unattended-upgrades can be found in the Ubuntu documentation or the Debian wiki.
Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

Antoine Beaupr : Django debates privacy concern

In recent years, privacy issues have become a growing concern among free-software projects and users. As more and more software tasks become web-based, surveillance and tracking of users is also on the rise. While some software may use advertising as a source of revenue, which has the side effect of monitoring users, the Django community recently got into an interesting debate surrounding a proposal to add user tracking actually developer tracking to the popular Python web framework.

Tracking for funding A novel aspect of this debate is that the initiative comes from concerns of the Django Software Foundation (DSF) about funding. The proposal suggests that "relying on the free labor of volunteers is ineffective, unfair, and risky" and states that "the future of Django depends on our ability to fund its development". In fact, the DSF recently hired an engineer to help oversee Django's development, which has been quite successful in helping the project make timely releases with fewer bugs. Various fundraising efforts have resulted in major new Django features, but it is difficult to attract sponsors without some hard data on the usage of Django. The proposed feature tries to count the number of "unique developers" and gather some metrics of their environments by using Google Analytics (GA) in Django. The actual proposal (DEP 8) is done as a pull request, which is part of Django Enhancement Proposal (DEP) process that is similar in spirit to the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process. DEP 8 was brought forward by a longtime Django developer, Jacob Kaplan-Moss. The rationale is that "if we had clear data on the extent of Django's usage, it would be much easier to approach organizations for funding". The proposal is essentially about adding code in Django to send a certain set of metrics when "developer" commands are run. The system would be "opt-out", enabled by default unless turned off, although the developer would be warned the first time the phone-home system is used. The proposal notes that an opt-in system "severely undercounts" and is therefore not considered "substantially better than a community survey" that the DSF is already doing.

Information gathered The pieces of information reported are specifically designed to run only in a developer's environment and not in production. The metrics identified are, at the time of writing:
  • an event category (the developer commands: startproject, startapp, runserver)
  • the HTTP User-Agent string identifying the Django, Python, and OS versions
  • a user-specific unique identifier (a UUID generated on first run)
The proposal mentions the use of the GA aip flag which, according to GA documentation, makes "the IP address of the sender 'anonymized'". It is not quite clear how that is done at Google and, given that it is a proprietary platform, there is no way to verify that claim. The proposal says it means that "we can't see, and Google Analytics doesn't store, your actual IP". But that is not actually what Google does: GA stores IP addresses, the documentation just says they are anonymized, without explaining how. GA is presented as a trade-off, since "Google's track record indicates that they don't value privacy nearly as high" as the DSF does. The alternative, deploying its own analytics software, was presented as making sustainability problems worse. According to the proposal, Google "can't track Django users. [...] The only thing Google could do would be to lie about anonymizing IP addresses, and attempt to match users based on their IPs". The truth is that we don't actually know what Google means when it "anonymizes" data: Jannis Leidel, a Django team member, commented that "Google has previously been subjected to secret US court orders and was required to collaborate in mass surveillance conducted by US intelligence services" that limit even Google's capacity of ensuring its users' anonymity. Leidel also argued that the legal framework of the US may not apply elsewhere in the world: "for example the strict German (and by extension EU) privacy laws would exclude the automatic opt-in as a lawful option". Furthermore, the proposal claims that "if we discovered Google was lying about this, we'd obviously stop using them immediately", but it is unclear exactly how this could be implemented if the software was already deployed. There are also concerns that an implementation could block normal operation, especially in countries (like China) where Google itself may be blocked. Finally, some expressed concerns that the information could constitute a security problem, since it would unduly expose the version number of Django that is running.

In other projects Django is certainly not the first project to consider implementing analytics to get more information about its users. The proposal is largely inspired by a similar system implemented by the OS X Homebrew package manager, which has its own opt-out analytics. Other projects embed GA code directly in their web pages. This is apparently the option chosen by the Oscar Django-based ecommerce solution, but that was seen by the DSF as less useful since it would count Django administrators and wasn't seen as useful as counting developers. Wagtail, a Django-based content-management system, was incorrectly identified as using GA directly, as well. It actually uses referrer information to identify installed domains through the version updates checks, with opt-out. Wagtail didn't use GA because the project wanted only minimal data and it was worried about users' reactions. NPM, the JavaScript package manager, also considered similar tracking extensions. Laurie Voss, the co-founder of NPM, said it decided to completely avoid phoning home, because "users would absolutely hate it". But NPM users are constantly downloading packages to rebuild applications from scratch, so it has more complete usage metrics, which are aggregated and available via a public API. NPM users seem to find this is a "reasonable utility/privacy trade". Some NPM packages do phone home and have seen "very mixed" feedback from users, Voss said. Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs, said the project is considering using Sentry for centralized reporting, which is a different idea, but interesting considering Sentry is fully open source. So even though it is a commercial service (as opposed to the closed-source Google Analytics), it may be possible to verify any anonymity claims.

Debian's response Since Django is shipped with Debian, one concern was the reaction of the distribution to the change. Indeed, "major distros' positions would be very important for public reception" to the feature, another developer stated. One of the current maintainers of Django in Debian, Rapha l Hertzog, explicitly stated from the start that such a system would "likely be disabled by default in Debian". There were two short discussions on Debian mailing lists where the overall consensus seemed to be that any opt-out tracking code was undesirable in Debian, especially if it was aimed at Google servers. I have done some research to see what, exactly, was acceptable as a phone-home system in the Debian community. My research has revealed ten distinct bug reports against packages that would unexpectedly connect to the network, most of which were not directly about collecting statistics but more often about checking for new versions. In most cases I found, the feature was disabled. In the case of version checks, it seems right for Debian to disable the feature, because the package cannot upgrade itself: that task is delegated to the package manager. One of those issues was the infamous "OK Google" voice activation binary blog controversy that was previously reported here and has since then been fixed (although other issues remain in Chromium). I have also found out that there is no clearly defined policy in Debian regarding tracking software. What I have found, however, is that there seems to be a strong consensus in Debian that any tracking is unacceptable. This is, for example, an extract of a policy that was drafted (but never formally adopted) by Ian Jackson, a longtime Debian developer:
Software in Debian should not communicate over the network except: in order to, and as necessary to, perform their function[...]; or for other purposes with explicit permission from the user.
In other words, opt-in only, period. Jackson explained that "when we originally wrote the core of the policy documents, the DFSG [Debian Free Software Guidelines], the SC [Social Contract], and so on, no-one would have considered this behaviour acceptable", which explains why no explicit formal policy has been adopted yet in the Debian project. One of the concerns with opt-out systems (or even prompts that default to opt-in) was well explained back then by Debian developer Bas Wijnen:
It very much resembles having to click through a license for every package you install. One of the nice things about Debian is that the user doesn't need to worry about such things: Debian makes sure things are fine.
One could argue that Debian has its own tracking systems. For example, by default, Debian will "phone home" through the APT update system (though it only reports the packages requested). However, this is currently not automated by default, although there are plans to do so soon. Furthermore, Debian members do not consider APT as tracking, because it needs to connect to the network to accomplish its primary function. Since there are multiple distributed mirrors (which the user gets to choose when installing), the risk of surveillance and tracking is also greatly reduced. A better parallel could be drawn with Debian's popcon system, which actually tracks Debian installations, including package lists. But as Barry Warsaw pointed out in that discussion, "popcon is 'opt-in' and [...] the overwhelming majority in Debian is in favour of it in contrast to 'opt-out'". It should be noted that popcon, while opt-in, defaults to "yes" if users click through the install process. [Update: As pointed out in the comments, popcon actually defaults to "no" in Debian.] There are around 200,000 submissions at this time, which are tracked with machine-specific unique identifiers that are submitted daily. Ubuntu, which also uses the popcon software, gets around 2.8 million daily submissions, while Canonical estimates there are 40 million desktop users of Ubuntu. This would mean there is about an order of magnitude more installations than what is reported by popcon. Policy aside, Warsaw explained that "Debian has a reputation for taking privacy issues very serious and likes to keep it".

Next steps There are obviously disagreements within the Django project about how to handle this problem. It looks like the phone-home system may end up being implemented as a proxy system "which would allow us to strip IP addresses instead of relying on Google to anonymize them, or to anonymize them ourselves", another Django developer, Aymeric Augustin, said. Augustin also stated that the feature wouldn't "land before Django drops support for Python 2", which is currently estimated to be around 2020. It is unclear, then, how the proposal would resolve the funding issues, considering how long it would take to deploy the change and then collect the information so that it can be used to spur the funding efforts. It also seems the system may explicitly prompt the user, with an opt-out default, instead of just splashing a warning or privacy agreement without a prompt. As Shai Berger, another Django contributor, stated, "you do not get [those] kind of numbers in community surveys". Berger also made the argument that "we trust the community to give back without being forced to do so"; furthermore:
I don't believe the increase we might get in the number of reports by making it harder to opt-out, can be worth the ill-will generated for people who might feel the reporting was "sneaked" upon them, or even those who feel they were nagged into participation rather than choosing to participate.
Other options may also include gathering metrics in pip or PyPI, which was proposed by Donald Stufft. Leidel also proposed that the system could ask to opt-in only after a few times the commands are called. It is encouraging to see that a community can discuss such issues without heating up too much and shows great maturity for the Django project. Every free-software project may be confronted with funding and sustainability issues. Django seems to be trying to address this in a transparent way. The project is willing to engage with the whole spectrum of the community, from the top leaders to downstream distributors, including individual developers. This practice should serve as a model, if not of how to do funding or tracking, at least of how to discuss those issues productively. Everyone seems to agree the point is not to surveil users, but improve the software. As Lars Wirzenius, a Debian developer, commented: "it's a very sad situation if free software projects have to compromise on privacy to get funded". Hopefully, Django will be able to improve its funding without compromising its principles.
Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: anytime 0.1.2: Another bugfix

Another update, now at release 0.1.2, of anytime arrived at CRAN earlier today. anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, ... format to either POSIXct or Date objects -- and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples, or just consider the following illustration: 
R> library(anytime)
R> anytime("20161107 202122")   ## all digits
[1] "2016-11-07 20:21:22 CST"
R> utctime("2016Nov07 202122")  ## UTC parse example
[1] "2016-11-07 14:21:22 CST"
R>
Release 0.1.2 addresses a somewhat bizarre Windows-only bug reported at GitHub in #33 and at StackOverflow. Formats of the %Y-%b-%d form, ie 2016-Dec-12 for today would fail on Windows as the contiguous string was apparently getting split by a routine looking for splits on spaces. Really strange. Anyway, I switched to using more helper functions from the Boost String Algorithms library, and things are behaving now. An extra shoutout once more to G bor Cs rdi and the R Consortium for the most awesome R-Builder. I was able to test and fix on Windows during the weekend with no access to an actual windows environment. The NEWS file summarises the release:

Changes in anytime version 0.1.2 (2016-12-13)
  • The (internal) string processing and splitting now uses Boost algorithm functions which avoids a (bizarre) bug on Windows.
  • Test coverage was increased.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

12 December 2016

Jonathan McDowell: No longer a student. Again.

99 Problems (image courtesy of XKCD) Last week I graduated with a Masters in Legal Science (now taught as an MLaw) from Queen s University Belfast. I m pleased to have achieved a Distinction, as well an award for Outstanding Achievement in the Dissertation (which was on the infringement of privacy by private organisations due to state mandated surveillance and retention laws - pretty topical given the unfortunate introduction of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016). However, as previously stated, I had made the decision that I was happier building things, and wanted to return to the world of technology. I talked to a bunch of interesting options, got to various stages in the hiring process with each of them, and happily accepted a role with Titan IC Systems which started at the beginning of September. Titan have produced a hardware accelerated regular expression processor (hence the XKCD reference); the RXP in its FPGA variant (what I get to play with) can handle pattern matching against 40Gb/s of traffic. Which is kinda interesting, as it lends itself to a whole range of applications from network scanning to data mining to, well, anything where you want to sift through a large amount of data checking against a large number of rules. However it s brand new technology for me to get up to speed with (plus getting back into a regular working pattern rather than academentia), and the combination of that and spending most of the summer post DebConf wrapping up the dissertation has meant I haven t had as much time to devote other things as I d have liked. However I ve a few side projects at various stages of completion and will try to manage more regular updates.

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