The Debian Project currently runs about 100 machines all over the world with different services. Those are mainly managed by the Debian System Administration team. For central configuration management we use Puppet. The Puppet config we use is publicly available here. Our next goal is to have a more or less central configuration of our iptables rules on all those machines. Some of the machines have home-brewed firewall scripts, some use ferm. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to provide us with a new dsa-puppet git branch with a module "ferm" that we can roll out to all our hosts. It might want to use information from the other puppet modules like "apache2_security_mirror" or "buildd" to decide which incoming traffic should be allowed. DSA will of course provide you with all necessary further information.

While setting up GeoDNS for parts of the debian.org zone, we set up a new subzone security.geo.debian.org. This was mainly due to the fact we didn't want to mess up the existing zone while experimenting with GeoDNS. Now that our GeoDNS setup has been working for more than half a year without any problems, we will drop this zone. We will do that in two phases.

Phase 1 Beginning on July 1st, we will redirect all requests to security.geo.debian.org to a static webpage indicating that this subzone is deprecated and should not be used any more. If you still have security.geo.debian.org in your apt sources.list, updates will fail.

Phase 2 On August 1st, we will stop serving the subzone security.geo.debian.org from our DNS servers.

Conclusion In case you use a security.geo.debian.org entry in your /etc/apt/sources.list, now is the best time to change that entry to security.debian.org. Both zones currently serve the same content.

For the fifth year in a row the fearless WebKitGTK+ hackers have gathered in A Coru a to bring GNOME and the web closer. Igalia has organized and hosted it as usual, welcoming a record 30 people to its office. The GNOME foundation has sponsored my trip allowing me to fly the cool 18 seats propeller airplane from Lisbon to A Coru a, which is a nice adventure, and have pulpo a feira for dinner, which I simply love! That in addition to enjoying the company of so many great hackers. The goals for the hackfest have been ambitious, as usual, but we made good headway on them. Web the browser (AKA Epiphany) has seen a ton of little improvements, with Carlos splitting the shell search provider to a separate binary, which allowed us to remove some hacks from the session management code from the browser. It also makes testing changes to Web more convenient again. Jon McCan has been pounding at Web s UI making it more sleek, with tabs that expand to make better use of available horizontal space in the tab bar, new dialogs for preferences, cookies and password handling. I have made my tiny contribution by making it not keep tabs that were created just for what turned out to be a download around. For this last day of hackfest I plan to also fix an issue with text encoding detection and help track down a hang that happens upon page load. Martin Robinson and myself have as usual dived into the more disgusting and wide-reaching maintainership tasks that we have lots of trouble pushing forward on our day-to-day lives. Porting our build system to CMake has been one of these long-term goals, not because we love CMake (we don t) or because we hate autotools (we do), but because it should make people s lives easier when adding new files to the build, and should also make our build less hacky and quicker it is sad to see how slow our build can be when compared to something like Chromium, and we think a big part of the problem lies on how complex and dumb autotools and make can be. We have picked up a few of our old branches, brought them up-to-date and landed, which now lets us build the main WebKit2GTK+ library through cmake in trunk. This is an important first step, but there s plenty to do. Under the hood, Dan Winship has been pushing HTTP2 support for libsoup forward, with a dead-tree version of the spec by his side. He is refactoring libsoup internals to accomodate the new code paths. Still on the HTTP front, I have been updating soup s MIME type sniffing support to match the newest living specification, which includes specification for several new types and a new security feature introduced by Internet Explorer and later adopted by other browsers. The huge task of preparing the ground for a one process per tab (or other kinds of process separation, this will still be topic for discussion for a while) has been pushed forward by several hackers, with Carlos Garcia and Andy Wingo leading the charge. Other than that I have been putting in some more work on improving the integration of the new Web Inspector with WebKitGTK+. Carlos has reviewed the patch to allow attaching the inspector to the right side of the window, but we have decided to split it in two, one providing the functionality and one the API that will allow browsers to customize how that is done. There s a lot of work to be done here, I plan to land at least this first patch durign the hackfest. I have also fought one more battle in the never-ending User-Agent sniffing war, in which we cannot win, it looks like. I am very happy to be here for the fifth year in a row, and I hope we will be meeting here for many more years to come! Thanks a lot to Igalia for sponsoring and hosting the hackfest, and to the GNOME foundation for making it possible for me to attend! See you in 2014!

Last year I told you that I spent two full-time days working on Debian as a part of initiative sponsored by my current employer. This year I ve devoted these two days again for Debian. Quick summary of what I was able to do during these two days. 11 bugs, 4 lintian errors and 43 warnings were fixed. In addition 3 packages now use new source format (usually that means repackaging software from scratch). 4 uses new copyright format and the newest Standards-Version. 5 packages were updated to the newest upstream version. Changelog entries:
potrace (1.11-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* New upstream version.
* Completely repackaged from scratch (funny experience as usual):
- uses new copyright format
- uses debhelper compatibility level 9 w/hardening options
- uses the newest Standards-Version
- fixes 11 lintian warnings and 2 errors
* Fixes typo in manpage. (Closes: #694492) -- Bartosz Fenski Mon, 9 Dec 2013 11:23:32 +0100 makeself (2.2.0-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* New upstream release. (Closes: #690105)
- handles df output in more portable way (Closes: #641804)
* Repackaged from scratch.
- uses new packaging format 3.0 (Closes: #670738)
- uses new copyright format
- uses debhelper compatibility level 9
- uses the newest Standards-Version
- fixes 2 lintian errors and 6 warnings -- Bartosz Fenski Mon, 09 Dec 2013 17:32:45 +0100 dibbler (1.0.0~rc1-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* New upstream release candidate 1 version (Closes: #686539)
- doesn't drop dhcp session during pppd restarts (Closes: #641237)
- doesn't hang indefinitely on 'stop' (Closes: #675272)
* Calls dh --with autotools_dev to prevent build failures (Closes: 727356)
* Includes Japanese debconf translation (Closes: #718921)
* Updated Standards-Version (no changes needed)
* Uses debhelper compatibility level 9 w/hardening options
* init scripts now source init functions
* Fixes 20 lintian warnings. -- Bartosz Fenski Tue, 10 Dec 2013 10:05:56 +0100 calcurse (3.1.4-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* New upstream version.
* ACK previous NMU - thanks!
* Bumped Standards-Version (no changes needed) -- Bartosz Fenski Tue, 10 Dec 2013 12:22:06 +0100 ipcalc (0.41-4) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* Fixes overzealous input checking (Closes: #332468)
* Martin F Krafft removed as co-maintainer (Closes: #719098)
+ package now uses new copyright format
* Bumped Standards-Version (no changes needed) -- Bartosz Fenski Tue, 10 Dec 2013 13:05:15 +0100 msort (8.53-1) unstable; urgency=low * The Akamai Technologies paid volunteer days release.
* New upstream release.
* ACK previous NMUs, thanks!
* Switched to new source format.
* Switched to new copyright format.
* Moved patches to new quilt format and described them.
* Bumped Standards-Version (no changes needed)
* Has correct tcl/tk dependencies (Closes: #545135)
* Doesn't segfault with certain input (Closes: #630485) -- Bartosz Fenski Tue, 10 Dec 2013 16:39:44 +0100
Thank you Akamai

I ve been investigating the generation of WebID profiles for Debian project members for some time. After earlier experiments on webid.debian.net, in a static and very hackish manner, I ve investigated the use of Django. Django is no random choice, as it is being used in several ongoing efforts to rewrite some Debian Web services. Among these is a new LDAP UserDir, which could replace the current version which runs db.debian.org, started by Luca Filipozzi and Martin Zobel-Helas. I ve worked on integrating some of the LDAP querying code written by Luca together with the Django WebID provider app written by Ben Nomadic (both modified by me), and the result is a bit hackish for the moment. It s very early, but allows the generation of WebID profiles for Debian project members, using data queried in Debian s LDAP directory, and adding TLS certs to the profiles. The TLS certs could in principle be used later as a WebID + TLS authentication mechanism. There s plenty of work ahead, and this may never be deployed, but as an example see the kind of way such WebID profile documents may look (in Turtle format) :

@prefix cert: <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/cert#> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix wot: <http://xmlns.com/wot/0.1/> .
@prefix xml: <http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
<> a foaf:PersonalProfileDocument ;
    foaf:primaryTopic <http://db.debian.org/olivier#me> .
<#gpgkey> a wot:Pubkey ;
    wot:fingerprint "ACE46EBD89F6656D6642660BE941DEDA7C5BB6A5" ;
    wot:pubkeyAddress <ttps://db.debian.org/fetchkey.cgi?fingerprint=ACE46EBD89F6656D6642660BE941DEDA7C5BB6A5> .
<http://db.debian.org/olivier#me> a foaf:Person ;
    cert:key [ a cert:RSAPublicKey ;
            rdfs:label "key made on [...] on my laptop" ;
            cert:exponent 65537 ;
            cert:modulus "bb7d5735181c7687a09abf3c88a064513badfe351f14fc2d738978a7f573d12eb831140a7a02c579f31f4617c14145493aeff4009832ba7fd1c579d6da92f68cd4437072266b000451d6eb45c03cd00b20e1f2230d83bdc3caeebb317e6618dd38a3f53abbbb2b6495a893495d3df685a2f0f599be8a74ef88841ce283dd8f65"^^xsd:hexBinary ],
        [ a cert:RSAPublicKey ;
            rdfs:label "key made on [...] on my laptop" ;
            cert:exponent 65537 ;
            cert:modulus "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"^^xsd:hexBinary ] ;
    foaf:homepage <http://www.olivierberger.org/> ;
    foaf:mbox "mailto:obergix@debian.org" ;
    foaf:name "Olivier Berger" ;
    foaf:nick "obergix" ;
    wot:hasKey <#gpgkey> .

If you re interested in WebID in the frame of Debian project services, see the discussion list.

While reading stuff posted by others about AppStream, and because of the discussion happening about AppData on kde-core-devel right now, I feel the need to clarify a few things. Especially because some are implementing AppStream in a way which is not really ideal right now. This is to some extend my fault, because I should have communicated this in a much more visible way. To those people who don t know it already: AppStream is a Freedesktop project aiming at providing basic building blocks to create distro- and desktop-agnostic software centers. So, let s answer some questions about AppStream! Is AppStream GNOME or $distro specific? No, not at all! It was originally created by people from at least 4 different distributions, and I took great care of it not becoming specific to any desktop or distribution. GNOME just happened to go ahead and implement the specs, which was absolutely necessary, since there was less progress in implementing AppStream for a long time. How does AppStream actually work? AppStream is a bunch of things, so I will only focus on what we have specified right now and what is working. Basically, the distributor compiles a list of applications available in the repositories, and makes it available in some defined directories on the system. AppStream defines an XML specification for that, but since some peple don t want to use it or can t use it, there are also others ways to publish AppStream application data. For example, Debian will likely use YAML for that. This data is taked by the AppStream software (running as a PackageKit plugin) and transformed into a Xapian database. This database is then in turn used by software-centers, in combination with PackageKit, to present applications. This is the reason why it is bad to use the XML data directly it might not be available on every distribution. The Xapian database is what matters. The database can be accessed using libappstream, a GLib based library (so far, there was no need for a Qt version). Why is GNOME using the XML data directly then? The libappsream stuff was under heavy construction, and GNOME wanted to be fast and ship the stuff with Fedora in their next release. They ll likely switch to the Xapian db soon, or offer it as backend. Is AppStream already used in KDE? Yes, Apper can utilize it, see one of my previous blogposts. What is AppData? AppData is an initiative started by Richard Hughes in order to enhance the quality of applications descriptions shipped with AppStream. It defines a small file $appname.appdata.xml, which describes the application, sets screenshots etc. These files can be parsed at the distribution s side in order to enhance the app metadata. They can also be translated upstream. AppData might be merged into the XDG AppStream pages later, but that is to be discussed. Are application authors forced to ship AppData files? No, nobody is forced However, the GNOME Software application-center prefers applications shipping more metadata, and punishes the others, so shipping an AppData file makes sense for higher lising in GS. This is a policy decision by GNOME, KDE can make it s own ones here. Shipping AppData files makes sense, in general, because it enhances the metadata distributed with your application. It is also the file-format used by Listaller (well, a superset of it) in order to generate cross-distro app-packages, so you might want to consider adding one. Are there any rules for the AppData files? Yes, you can find them on the AppData specification page. However, these are more recommendations than forced , and it is currently aimed at GNOME apps. I later want to generalize that and create an own page with recommendations for KDE (martin had some good ideas already). Where do software-centers get the screenshots from? The screenshots are defined in AppData files, and the cached by the distributor. If there are no official screenshots, user-provided screenshots will be taken, using a screenshots-service with screenshots.d.n-like API. Where do I find the specs? The official AppStream spec, the thing which distributors should implement, can be found on Freedesktop. The AppData spec can be found here. It also includes some nice hints on how to handle screenshots etc. and includes it s own FAQ. Where do I find libappstream? The source code can be found on Gitorious, releases are available on fd.o software. Contributions to the code are welcome! I want to change X in the spec, because of argument Y which brings improvement Z Great! Please get in contact with me or Richard. The only feature we would not consider for the official standard is desktop/distro-specific stuff (which should be obvious ). I will extend this FAQ, if I feel the need for it, so this article might change a bit.

I feel like I m taking a big personal risk writing this, even though I know the internet is large and probably no-one will read this . So, dear reader, please be gentle. As we grow as people, as developers, as professionals some lessons are are hard to learn (e.g. you have to keep trying and trying to learn the task), and some are hard to experience (they might still be hard to learn, but just being there is hard itself ) I want to talk about a particular lesson I started learning in late 2008/early 2009 while I was at Canonical sadly one of those that was hard to experience. At the time I was one of the core developers on Bazaar, and I was feeling pretty happy about our progress, how bzr was developing, features, community etc. There was a bunch of pressure on to succeed in the marketplace, but that was ok, challenges bring out the stubborn in me . There was one glitch though we d been having a bunch of contentious code reviews, and my manager (Martin Pool) was chatting to me about them. I was as far as I could tell doing precisely the right thing from a peer review perspective: I was safeguarding the project, preventing changes that didn t fit properly, or that reduced key aspects- performance, usability from landing until they were fixed. However, the folk on the other side of the review were feeling frustrated, that nothing they could do would fix it, and generally very unhappy. Reviews and design discussions would grind to a halt, and they felt I was the cause. [They were right]. And here was the thing I simply couldn t understand the issue. I was doing my job; I wasn t angry at the people submitting code; I wasn t hostile; I wasn t attacking them (but I was being shall we say frank about the work being submitted). I remember saying to Martin one day look, I just don t get it can you show me what I said wrong? and he couldn t. Canonical has a 360 review system every 6 months / year (it changed over time) you review your peers, subordinate(s) and manager(s), and they review you. Imagine my surprise I was used to getting very positive reports with some constructive suggestions when I scored low on a bunch of the inter-personal metrics in the review. Martin explained that it was the reviews thing folk were genuinely unhappy, even as they commended me on my technical merits. Further to that, he said that I really needed to stop worrying about technical improvement and focus on this inter-personal stuff. Two really important things happened around this time. Firstly, Steve Alexander, who was one of my managers-once-removed at the time, reached out to me and suggested I read a book Getting out of the box and that we might have a chat about the issue after I had read it. I did so, and we chatted. That book gave me a language and viewpoint for thinking about the problem. It didn t solve it, but it meant that I got it , which I hadn t before. So then the second thing happened we had a company all hands and I got to chat with Claire Davis (head of HR at Canonical at the time) about what was going on. To this day the sheer embarrassment I felt when she told me that the broad perception of me amongst other teams managers was and I paraphrase a longer, more nuance conversation here technically fantastic but very scary to have on the team will disrupt and cause trouble . So, at this point about 6 months had passed, I knew what I wanted I wanted folk to want to work with me, to find my presence beneficial and positive on both technical and team aspects. I already knew then that what I seek is technical challenges: I crave novelty, new challenges, new problems. Once things become easy, it call all too easily slip into tedium. So at that time my reasoning was somewhat selfish: how was I to get challenges if no-one wanted to work with me except in extremis? I spent the next year working on myself as much as specific projects: learning more and more about how to play well with others. In June 2010 I got a performance review I could be proud of again I was in no way perfect, but I d made massive strides. This journey had also made huge improvements to my personal life a lot of stress between Lynne and I had gone away. Shortly after that I was invited to apply for a new role within Canonical as Technical Architect for Launchpad and Francis Lacoste told me that it was only due to my improved ability to play well with others that I was even considered. I literally could not have done the job 18 months before. I got the job, and I think I did pretty well in fact I was awarded an internal Spotlight on Success award for what we (it was a whole Launchpad team team effort) achieved while I was in that role. So, what did I change/learn? There s just a couple of key changes I needed to make in myself, but a) they aren t sticky: if I get overly tired, ye old terrible Robert can leak out, and b) there s actually a /lot/ of learnable skills in this area, much of which is derived lots of practice and critical self review is a good thing. The main thing I learnt was that I was Selfish. Yes capital S. For instance, in a discussion about adding working tree filter to bzr, I would focus on the impact/risk on me-and-things-I-directly-care-about: would it make my life harder, would it make bzr slower, was there anything that could go wrong. And I would spend only a little time thinking about what the proposer needed: they needed support and assistance making their idea reach the standards the bzr community had agreed on. The net effect of my behaviours was that I was a class A asshole when it came to getting proposals into a code base. The key things I had to change were:

1. I need to think about the needs of the person I m speaking to *and not my own*. [Thats not to say you should ignore your needs, but you shouldn't dwell on them: if they are critical, your brain will prompt you].
2. There s always a reason people do things: if it doesn t make sense, ask them! [The crucial conversations books have some useful modelling here on how and why people do things, and on how-and-why conversations and confrontations go bad and how to fix them.]

Ok so this is all interesting and so forth, but why the blog post? Firstly, I want to thank four folk who were particularly instrumental in helping me learn this lesson: Martin, Steve, Claire and of course my wife Lynne I owe you all an unmeasurable debt for your support and assistance. Secondly, I realised today that while I ve apologised one on one to particular folk who I knew I d made life hard for, I d never really made a widespread apology. So here it is: I spent many years as an ass, and while I didn t mean to be one, intent doesn t actually count here actions do. I m sorry for making your life hell in the past, and I hope I m doing better now. Lastly, if I m an ass to you now, I m sorry, I m probably regressing to old habits because I m too tired something I try to avoid, but it s not always possible. Please tell me, and I will go get some sleep then come and apologise to you, and try to do better in future. Less-assily-yrs,
Rob

There's been a recent spate of spam from domains held by Communicado Ltd, to counter this Martin A Brooks has created a lovely list of domains to easily filter, see his blog post for information on the distribution and usage of this list.

As you know, I am not big on reviews, so you should disregard the remainder of this entry. I recently found myself in what is called a theatre complex , watching an adaptation of Moli re's Les Femmes savantes by Freyda Thomas, who is apparently famous for playing Alenis Grem on Deep Space Nine. Called The Learned Ladies, this translation to English manages to approximate some of the rhyme of the original, thereby making it unquestionably better than DS9. Also noteworthy is the all-female cast, cobbled together from two all-female theater groups. Elizabeth Neptune plays Chrysale, occasionally channeling the spirit of Jackie Gleason or bringing adorable ardor to such epic lines as Tea! I won't say anything about her eyes, but I will say something about her slippers. Sara Montgomery, as B lise, is delightfully crazy in her singing, dancing, costume changes, and other antics, which serve to transform this otherwise-completely-serious play into a comedy. I definitely won't say anything about her shoes. Madeleine Maby begins playing Philaminte well before the show starts. Spoiler alert: she sits on the stage, pretending to look through a telescope and make notes from before the house opens until right before the start of the first scene. I still feel exhausted by the thought of having to do that myself. L' pine is portrayed by Alyssa Lott, who also plays three minor roles. Her mastery of physical comedy is not wasted on this production. Marta Kuersten plays Clitandre opposite Sarah Brill's Henriette. While Marta's performance was quite good, she looks much better as a woman. I will not be saying this about everyone. Katie Honaker delivers visceral smarm and sleaze as Trissotin. Even her hairstyle is somehow evocative of contempt. Susan Finch plays Vadius and Le notaire. Susan was definitely most convincing as a man. Despite mutterings to the contrary, some suspension of disbelief was necessary for the other male roles, but not for Vadius, oh no. Finishing out the list we have Janna Emig as Martine, Francesca Day as Armande, and Kathryn Alexander as Ariste, with good performances, particularly in the second half. Even though it didn't have Coppertop from Strangers With Candy and a boy-band song-and-dance cover of To Be with You by Mr. Big, I recommend this play.

Recently, I've been attending a training course in Moldova about the representation of gender in the media and the influence on society of gender stereotypes.
The course was organized by Inesa Lupu, of Invento and financed by the UE as part of the Youth in Action program. It was the first time, for me, in this kind of international project and it was, in a word, fantastic.
Among the participants, there were people from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Italy, Latvia, Moldova and Slovenia.
That meant a great mix of cultures, languages and experiences.
And that was the key, in my opinion, of the success: coming from different countries and different social and cultural contexts meant that we were able to have a very broad and diverse point of view on the problem of gender stereotypes. So, here's some highlights on what we discussed. The media representation of gender (aka: gender issues are not only women issues) Tough Guise by Jackson Katz is a interesting documentary about the way the modern society - particularly in the US - defines masculinity as intrinsically tied to violence, aggressivity and "toughness" and on the consequences of this on the society as a whole. The author's theory is "that male violence, misogyny, and homophobia are inextricably linked to how we define manhood as a culture. The film gives special attention to how American media have glamorized increasingly regressive and violence masculine ideals in the face of mounting social and economic threats to traditional white male heterosexual authority". It then results clear that we cannot avoid to think about gender issues as women and men issues, because after all is the cultural definition of both femininity and masculinity that heavily influences the behaviour of men and women and their interaction.
In particular, I liked Katz's analysis of media's use of victim blaming speech while reporting of violences against women which tend to shift the focus from the violence perpetrated by men as part of definition of masculinity. Another documentary we watched, more focused on women representation, is MissRepresentation by Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
The film analyses the under representation of women in position of power, and the issue of women and leadership, especially in politics, in the US. Nothing too new, if you are interested in gender issues, as it is a widely discussed and studied topic, but still worth watching. After watching them, we formed little groups of three-four persons from different countries to discuss them, and it was even more interesting to listen the opinion of the guys (we had four male participants). Photography and Phototherapy As a workshop on media representation of gender, photography and advertisement were two of the main argument we spoke about. We focused on it for two days: our trainer, Lietta Granato - photographer and phototherapist - first gave us a lesson on photography, making us experimenting a bit with exposure times and diaphragm's aperture. Then she presented the evolution in the last 50 year or so, of the depiction of women in the ads.
And that, to be honest, was a bit upsetting.
I've already had seen one of the most important and widely known films on this theme, the Killing Us Softly series by Jean Kilbourne, but some of the ads Lietta showed to us were really really horrible. Actually, most of them were horrible. Commenting and deconstructing these ads would take a separate blogpost, probably, and there are many people more competent than me on the topic, so I've decided to simply share some of the worst ads in a collage, without much commenting. These are vintage, from the fifties to the seventies. Do you think we got better? Pff. They go from promoting violence and rape to heavily objectifying women. Special mention for the Compaq ad: as a geek woman I feel particularly insulted by the idea that I'm supposed to use a "pocket pc" as "pocket mirror". Because I wouldn't be able, obviously, to use it as a computer. Lietta also introduced us to photographic therapy and particularly the work of Jo Spence and Rosy Martin. If you browse Jo Spence's site, please be aware that there is a series of pics documenting all the stages of her illness (she died of breast cancer) and they are pretty intense. "In 1984, alongside Rosy Martin, Spence developed Photo-Therapy , adopting techniques from co-counselling. The considerable achievement of Photo-Therapy was to invert the traditional relationship between the photographer and the subject. If historically the subject had little control over their own representation, Photo-Therapy shifts this dynamic. The subject was able to act out personal narratives and claim agency for their own biography." (source: http://www.jospence.org/biography.html)
I love this concept and I really really love Spence's photos. To close on a happier note, I really suggest you to allocate 20 minutes of your time to watch this great talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, about the role of "single story" in shaping stereotypes and misunderstandings.

Despite the fact that I've had very little time to either read or write reviews, I haven't stopped buying a few books here and there. And, of course, Powell's Indiespensable keeps coming. Matt Bell In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (mainstream)
Steven Brust Orca (sff)
Steven Brust Dragon (sff)
John W. Campbell Collected Editorials from Analog (non-fiction)
Jane Fletcher The Walls of Westernfort (sff)
Mira Grant How Green This Land, How Blu This Sea (sff)
Tate Hallaway Tall, Dark, & Dead (sff)
Diana Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle (sff)
Rebecca Lee Bobcat and Other Stories (mainstream)
Victor Lombardi Why We Fail (non-fiction)
George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois (ed.) Songs of Love and Death (sff anthology)
Seanan McGuire In Sea-Salt Tears (sff)
Seanan McGuire Late Eclipses (sff)
Justina Robson Selling Out (sff)
John Scalzi Muse of Fire (sff)
Mark Slouka Brewster (mainstream)
Tor.com (ed.) The Stories (sff anthology)
Carrie Vaughn Kitty and the Midnight Hour (sff) This is a wide variety of random stuff, including some stuff that was free (the Tor.com anthology, which is every piece of short fiction they've published and is about 4000 pages, the Campbell editorials from the Internet Archive) and a lot of stuff that was on sale. As well as another two shipments of Indiespensible. The Brust books I've already read and are already in the family, but I hooked a friend of mine on the Vlad Taltos series, and those were the only two that I both didn't have and that weren't available on Kindle. So I picked them up while he was visiting so that he could read the whole series.

The current default D-BUS configuration (at least on Ubuntu) disallows monitoring method calls on the system D-BUS (dbus-monitor --system), which makes debugging rather cumbersome; this has worked years ago, but apparently got changed for security reasons. It took me a half an hour to figure out how to enable this for debugging, and as this has annoyingly little Google juice (I didn t find any solution), let s add some. The trick seems to be to set a global policy to be able to eavesdrop any method call after the individual /etc/dbus-1/system.d/*.conf files applied their restrictions, for which there is already a convenient facility. Create a file /etc/dbus-1/system-local.conf with

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC
  "-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
<busconfig>
  <policy user="root">
    <!-- Allow everything to be sent -->
    <allow send_destination="*" eavesdrop="true"/>
    <!-- Allow everything to be received -->
    <allow eavesdrop="true"/>
    <allow send_type="method_call"/>
  </policy>
</busconfig>

Then sudo dbus-monitor --system displays everything. Needless to say that you don t want this file on any production system! Does anyone know an easier way? My first naive stab was to run dbus-monitor as root, but that doesn t make any difference at all. Update: Turns out this is already described in a better way at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingDBus. Yay me for not finding that.. I updated above recipe to limit access to root, which is much better indeed.

Hi always wondered what the most popular options are, you usually find in .vimrc files. So I downloaded 155 .vimrc files from the net (mostly from dotfiles.org and github.com), and wrote a little script which counts the number of times an option has been set. Since most options come in normal- and shortcut form, I mapped the shortcuts to the long version whenever I recognized them. So without further ado, here are the most popular .vimrc options (without values!). The number specifies the number of times this option has been set. The most popular option is on the bottom:

10 tselect
10 dictionary
10 runtimepath
11 mousehide
11 t_vb
11 foldlevel
11 foldopen
12 suffixes
12 matchtime
12 fileencoding
13 modelines
13 wrap
14 sidescrolloff
14 clipboard
14 lines
14 novisualbell
15 linebreak
15 cursorline
15 fileformats
15 columns
15 cindent
16 undolevels
16 shiftround
16 lazyredraw
16 completeopt
18 modeline
18 whichwrap
18 comments
18 wildignore
19 list
19 autowrite
19 foldcolumn
19 grepprg
19 titlestring
20 autoread
20 title
21 foldenable
21 cmdheight
22 pastetoggle
23 formatoptions
23 fileencodings
24 tags
24 directory
25 ttyfast
26 termencoding
26 complete
27 nohlsearch
27 noerrorbells
27 visualbell
28 shortmess
30 showmode
31 wildmode
32 t_Co
32 listchars
32 backupdir
34 hidden
34 backup
35 smarttab
35 foldmethod
36 viminfo
36 textwidth
37 scrolloff
37 nobackup
41 nowrap
44 encoding
47 guifont
51 guioptions
53 smartcase
54 wildmenu
57 smartindent
60 mouse
63 background
64 softtabstop
66 history
70 showmatch
72 ignorecase
74 showcmd
74 laststatus
79 number
82 hlsearch
91 statusline
94 expandtab
94 ruler
96 autoindent
96 backspace
99 tabstop
109 incsearch
114 shiftwidth
124 nocompatible Out of 155 .vimrcs

Fun fact: nocompatible is the most popular, but also most useless one. The fact that you have an .vimrc automatically implies the nocompatible mode in vim.

Longtime Debian Developer Martin Michlmayr was named as one of 6 winners of the 2013 O Reilly Open Source Awards. This Award recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Martin received the award for his investment in Debian where he served as Debian Project Leader for two terms between 2003 and 2005. Congratulations tbm!

This is time again for my annual report about the number of developers per country. This is now the fifth edition of this report, after the 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009 editions. So, here we are with the July 2013 version, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million population for each country.

Act: number of active developers
Dev: total number of developers
A/M: number of active devels per million pop.
D/M: number of devels per million pop.
2009: rank in 2009
2010: rank in 2010
2011: rank in 2011 (June)
2011: rank in 2012 (June)
2013: rank now

Code	Name	Population	Act Dev	Dev	Act/Million	Dev/Million	2009	2010	June 2011	June 2012	July 2013
fi	Finland	5259250	19	31	3,61	5,89	1	1	1	1	1
ie	Ireland	4670976	12	15	2,57	3,21	13	9	6	2	2
ch	Switzerland	7870134	20	27	2,54	3,43	2	2	2	3	3
mq	Martinique	396404	1	1	2,52	2,52			3	4	4
se	Sweden	9088728	22	37	2,42	4,07	3	6	7	5	5
no	Norway	4973029	12	15	2,41	3,02	5	4	4	6	6
nz	New Zealand	4331600	10	15	2,31	3,46	4	3	5	7	7
de	Germany	81471834	165	235	2,03	2,88	7	7	9	9	8	*
lu	Luxemburg	503302	1	1	1,99	1,99	8	5	8	8	9	*
at	Austria	8217280	16	26	1,95	3,16	6	8	10	10	10
fr	France	65350000	100	130	1,53	1,99	12	12	11	11	11
au	Australia	22607571	31	59	1,37	2,61	9	10	12	12	12
be	Belgium	11071483	14	17	1,26	1,54	10	11	13	13	13
uk	United-Kingdom	62698362	73	114	1,16	1,82	14	14	14	14	14
nl	Netherlands	16728091	19	40	1,14	2,39	11	13	15	15	15
ca	Canada	33476688	32	61	0,96	1,82	15	15	17	16	16
dk	Denmark	5529888	5	10	0,9	1,81	17	17	16	17	17
es	Spain	46754784	35	56	0,75	1,2	16	16	19	18	18
it	Italy	59464644	36	51	0,61	0,86	23	22	22	19	19
cz	Czech Rep	10190213	6	6	0,59	0,59	21	20	21	21	20	*
lt	Lithuania	3535547	2	2	0,57	0,57	28	19	20	22	21	*
us	USA	313232044	173	378	0,55	1,21	19	21	25	24	22	*
il	Israel	7740900	4	6	0,52	0,78	24	24	24	25	23	*
hu	Hungary	10076062	5	10	0,5	0,99	18	25	26	20	24	*
hr	Croatia	4290612	2	2	0,47	0,47	20	18	18	26	25	*
lv	Latvia	2204708	1	1	0,45	0,45	26	26	27	27	26	*
bg	Bulgaria	7364570	3	3	0,41	0,41	25	23	23	23	27	*
uy	Uruguay	3477778	1	2	0,29	0,58	22	27	28	28	28
jp	Japan	127078679	35	50	0,28	0,39	30	28	29	29	29
pl	Poland	38441588	10	14	0,26	0,36	29	29	30	30	30
cr	Costa Rica	4301712	1	1	0,23	0,23	31	30	31	31	31
by	Belarus	9577552	2	2	0,21	0,21	35	36	39	39	32	*
sg	Singapore	5183700	1	1	0,19	0,19				33	33
pt	Portugal	10561614	2	4	0,19	0,38	27	32	32	34	34
gr	Greece	10787690	2	3	0,19	0,28	33	38	34	35	35
sk	Slovakia	5477038	1	1	0,18	0,18	32	31	33	36	36
ar	Argentina	40677348	6	8	0,15	0,2	34	33	35	32	37	*
rs	Serbia	7186862	1	1	0,14	0,14					38	*
tw	Taiwan	23040040	3	3	0,13	0,13	37	34	37	37	39	*
br	Brazil	192376496	21	23	0,11	0,12	36	35	38	38	40	*
cu	Cuba	11241161	1	1	0,09	0,09		38	41	41	41
kr	South Korea	48754657	4	6	0,08	0,12	39	39	42	42	42
gt	Guatemala	13824463	1	1	0,07	0,07					43	*
ve	Venezuela	28047938	2	2	0,07	0,07	40	45	50	49	44	*
ec	Ecuador	15007343	1	1	0,07	0,07		40	43	43	45	*
co	Colombia	45566856	3	4	0,07	0,09	41	44	46	47	46	*
cl	Chile	16746491	1	2	0,06	0,12	42	41	44	44	47	*
za	South Africa	50590000	3	10	0,06	0,2	38	48	48	48	48
ru	Russia	143030106	7	8	0,05	0,06	43	42	47	45	49	*
mg	Madagascar	21281844	1	1	0,05	0,05	44	37	40	40	50	*
ro	Romania	21904551	1	2	0,05	0,09	45	43	45	46	51	*
my	Malaysia	28250000	1	1	0,04	0,04			49	50	52	*
pe	Peru	29907003	1	1	0,03	0,03	46	46	51	51	53	*
tr	Turkey	74724269	2	2	0,03	0,03	47	47	52	52	54	*
ua	Ukraine	45134707	1	1	0,02	0,02	48	53	58	59	55	*
th	Thailand	66720153	1	2	0,01	0,03	50	50	54	54	56	*
eg	Egypt	80081093	1	3	0,01	0,04	51	51	55	55	57	*
mx	Mexico	112336538	1	1	0,01	0,01	49	49	53	53	58	*
cn	China	1344413526	10	14	0,01	0,01	53	53	57	56	59	*
in	India	1210193422	9	9	0,01	0,01	52	52	56	57	60	*
sv	El Salvador	7066403	0	1	0	0,14			36	58	61	*
			957	1535	62,35%

A few interesting facts:

• Rankings are very stable: the first 7 countries are the same
• Germany takes Luxemburg over with 10 more active developers than last year
• Finland is still ranked 1st but loses two active developers. Still, it would need to lose 6 developers to lose rank 1
• By losing one active developer, Hungary drops from 20th to 24th
• Similar loss for Bulgaria, dropping from 23rd to 27th
• Belarus doubles its number of developers from 1 to 2 and therefore jumps from rank 39 to 32
• Serbia gains its first developer (indeed, the person registered with the "yu" ISO code and I arbitrarily decided that would count for Serbia.....please correct me if I'm wrong) and shows up at rank 38
• Argentina sadly loses two active developers and rops to rank 37
• Venezuela doubles its number of developers from 1 to 2 and slightly climbs up
• Even though both of them gained one developer, the two most populated countries in the world, China and India, remain very low. China would indeed need 2730 developers to reach the ratio of Germany and India would need 2470.
• Again, one new country : Guatemala. Let's take this as an achievement of another DebConf in Central America, last year.
• Ukraine shows up again and I'm partly responsible for that as I processed Boris Pek's application as DD!
• This year, DebConf will be hosted in one of the top-ranked countries, namely Switzerland. Guys, 9 more developers and you can overtake Finland!
• We have 37 more active Debian developers and 45 more developers overall.
• The ratio of active developers increases from 61.74% to 62.35%

As Americans we might like to believe that the US legal system is intended to protect all of our citizens. Unfortunately, it doesn t protect us all equally, and in fact disproportionately fails to protect the most vulnerable. We re surrounded by instances of injustice related to gender, race and other axes of social privilege, and the machinations of law are not exempt. The state of Florida has recently provided an especially stark example in the application of its self-defense laws in two cases: Marissa Alexander and George Zimmerman. This example is notable because although there were many similarities between the cases, the outcomes were very different. Alexander s case was tried in May 2012 , Zimmerman s in July 2013, both prosecuted by Florida state s attorney Angela Corey. Both cases involved the use of firearms which were legally purchased and carried, and their owners were trained in their use. Both prosecutions cast the defendant as the aggressor, who could have avoided the confrontation. Both of the encounters were with unarmed persons. Both defenses were based on Florida self-defense laws, which include stand your ground laws justifying the use of deadly force without the obligation to retreat. Both shooters admitted to firing a single shot with the intent of defending themselves. Beyond those similarities, each case had its own unique circumstances. The events of Alexander s case took place in her home. Her altercation was with her husband, Rico Gray Sr., who was under a restraining order following a conviction for domestic battery which put Alexander in the hospital. After Gray threatened to kill her, Alexander retrieved a handgun from her car, returned to confront him, firing once. She was arrested and charged the same day. She had had no prior criminal record. A jury deliberated for just 12 minutes before convicting her. A judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison, in accord with mandatory minimums specified by law. Gray, previously sentenced to probation for his earlier conviction, remains free. Zimmerman s shot was fired in his neighborhood, in an altercation with a teenager, Trayvon Martin, who was a guest in the community and walking by himself. The two were not acquainted. Zimmerman called police from his car, claiming that Martin appeared suspicious, and began to follow him. Some of the facts of their encounter remain in dispute, but that Zimmerman fired his gun is not in question. Afterward, Zimmerman was detained by police, questioned and released the same night without being arrested or charged. Following a public outcry, a new investigation was launched and two months later he was arrested and charged. He had been previously arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer, but the charges were later dropped. After 16 hours of deliberation, the jury found Zimmerman not guilty, and he is free today. The most striking difference between the two cases is where each defendant aimed their gun: George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in the chest and killed him, while Marissa Alexander fired at a wall and injured no one. Alexander, a black woman, is in prison for scaring her abusive husband away, while Zimmerman, who killed a young black man, walks free. Alexander and Martin s families have lost a mother and a son. The outcomes for the people involved in these cases could not be more different. Regardless of the merits of the relevant laws themselves, their radically unequal application is deeply troubling. What does this tell us about the relative value of these human lives, as weighed by the judicial system?

The Florida criminal justice system has sent two clear messages today. One is that if women who are victims of domestic violence try to protect themselves, the Stand Your Ground Law will not apply to them. [...] The second message is that if you are black, the system will treat you differently. - U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown

References

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin
• http://www.thefloridastar.com/new-trial-denied-battered-wife/
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/19/marissa-alexander-gets-20_n_1530035.html
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/protecting-marissa-at-the_b_1551998.html
• http://justiceformarissa.blogspot.com/
• http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/326700-full-transcript-zimmerman.html

I did a 0.2.2 maintenance release for umockdev to fix building with Vala 0.16.1, gcc 4.8 (the changed sizeof behaviour caused segfaults), and current udev releases (umockdev-record stumbled over the new link priority fields of udevadm). There are also a couple of bug fixes, but no new features.

All recent articles on packaging using a version control system should really appear over at Planet vcs-pkg. Feel free to just ping me with a feed URL that is vcs-pkg-specific.

I have a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian (wheezy) with a UVC camera available as /dev/video0. I've been trying for three weeks to live-stream the picture from the camera onto the local network. I have tried crtmpserver and vlc, read several dozens of how-tos, but so far I have not been able to get a streaming setup working, no matter what I tried. Hence my plea to the lazy web: does anyone have such a setup running on top of Debian? Would you please let me know how you did it? Thanks a lot! NP: Eels: End Times

Debian 7.0 (wheezy) has been released. Here are some notes if you're running Debian on an ARM-based NAS device or plug computer and are planning to upgrade. First of all, if you're running Debian on a plug computer, such as the SheevaPlug, make sure that you have u-boot version 2011.12-3 (or higher). If you're using an older version, the Linux kernel in wheezy will not boot! You can read my u-boot upgrade instructions on how to check the version of u-boot and upgrade it. Second, check your /etc/kernel-img.conf file. If it still contains the following line, please remove this line. This postinst_hook directive was needed in the past but flash-kernel is called automatically nowadays whenever you install a new kernel. Now you're almost ready to start with your upgrade. Before you start, make sure to read the release notes for Debian 7.0 on ARM. This document contains a lot of information on performing a successful upgrade. During the kernel upgrade, you'll get the following message about the boot loader configuration: On ARM-based NAS devices and plug computers, you can simply ignore this warning. We put the root device into the ramdisk so it will be updated automatically. There are no other issues I'm aware of, so good luck with your upgrade and have fun with Debian wheezy!