Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGetconf 0.0.2
A first update for the recent RcppGetconf package for reading system configuration --- not unlike getconf from the libc library --- is now out. Almost immediately after I tweeted / blogged asking for help with OS X builds, fellow Rcpp hacker Qiang Kou created a clever pull request allowing for exactly that. So now we cover two POSIX systems that matter most these days --- Linux and OS X --- but as there are more out there, please do try, test and send those pull requests.
We also added a new function getConfig() retrieving a single (given) value complementing the earlier catch-all function getAll(). You can find out more about RcppGetconf from the local RcppGetconf page and the GitHub repo.
Changes in this release are as follows:
Changes in inline version 0.0.2 (2016-08-01)Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. More about the package is at the local RcppGetconf page and the GitHub repo.
- A new function
getConfigfor single values was added.- The
struct varsis now defined more portable allowing compilation on OS X (PR #1 by Qiang Kou).
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
This is a repost and update of my retirement letter sent privately to Debian last month, July 10, 2016. At that time I received many notes of appreciation and good wishes which I treasure. Now, I d like to say goodbye to the broader Debian community and, as well, indicate which of the cleanup items have since been addressed in strikethrough style and with annotations. Also, I d like to stay in touch with many of you, so I have added some comments oriented towards those of you who are interested in doing that 
Now, business. These things remain to clean up upon my departure, and I d appreciate help from QA, and anyone else who can lend a hand. My packages are effectively orphaned, but I haven t the time to do any of the cleanup myself, so please speak up if you can help.
Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (
Unless you're into hardware hacking and want to hook wires up to the GPIO
pins, the best hardware feature is the complete keyboard, with even
Escape and Control and arrow keys. You can ssh around and run vi on it,
run your favorite REPL (I use ghci) to do quick programming, etc.
The keyboard is small and a little strange, but you get used
to it quickly; your QWERTY muscle memory is transferrable to it.
I had fun installing nethack on it and handing it to my sister who
had never played nethack before, to watch her learn to play.
The screen resolution is 480x272, which is pretty tiny. And, it's a cheap
resistive touchscreen, with a bezil around it. This makes it very hard to
use scroll bars and icons near the edge of the screen. The customized
interface that ships with it avoids these problems, and so I've been using
that for now. When I have time, I plan to put a fullscreen window
manager on it, and write a 
The first day of the real conference started with an excellent overview of what one can do with TeX, spanning from traditional scientific journal styles to generating router configuration for cruising ships.
After the closing of the session, one part of our group went off to the baseball match, while another group dived into a Japanese-style Izakaya where we managed to kill huge amounts of sake and quite an amount of food. The photo shows me after the first bottle of sake, while just seeping on an intermediate small amount of genshu (kind of strong undiluted sake) before continuing to the next bottle.
An interesting and stimulating first day of TUG, and I am sure that everyone was looking forward to day 2.
I'm looking at large touring frames and am currently thinking
of the 
The second 
seems I've neglected both my blog & my RC bug fixing activities in the
last months. anyway, since I still keep track of RC bugs I worked
on, I thought I might as well publish the list:
A bit different treatise on beauty and ugliness!
But then we also like to confirm the bugs are really gone, which (atm) requires manual
checking, and to look for the words "reproducible" and "deterministic"
(and spelling variations) in debian/changelogs of all uploads, to spot reproducible work
not tracked via the BTS.
And we still need to catch up on the backlog of weekly reports.
Bugs submitted with reproducible usertags
It seems 
It has been often said that you should continually try new things in life so that
a. Unlike the fish you do not mistake the pond to be the sea.
b. You see other people, other types and ways of living and being which you normally won t in your day-to-day existence.
With both of those as mantras I decided to take a leap into the unknown. I was unsure both about the visa process as well as the travel bit as I was traveling to an unknown place and although I had done some research about the place I was unsure about the authenticity of whatever is/was shared on the web.
During the whole journey both to and fro, I couldn t sleep a wink. The Doha airport is huge. There are 5 Concourses, A, B , C, D, E and around 30+ gates in each Concourse. The ambition of the small state is something to be reckoned with. Almost 95% of the blue workers in the entire airport were of Asian sub-continent. While the Qatari Rial is 19 times stronger to us, the workers I suspect are worse-off than people doing similar things back home. Add to that the sharia law, even for all the money in the world, I wouldn t want to settle therein.
Anyways, during the journey, a small surprise awaited me, Ritesh Raj Saraff, a DD was also traveling to Debconf. We bumped into each other while going to see the Doha City, courtesy Al-Hamad International Airport. I would probably share a bit more about Doha and my experiences with the city in upcoming posts.
Cut to Cape Town, South Africa, we landed in the city half an hour after our scheduled time and then we sped along to University of Cape Town (UCT) which was to become our home for the next 13 odd days.
The first few days were a whirlwind as there were new people to meet, old people whom I knew only as an e-mail id or an IRC nickname turned out to be real people and you have to try to articulate yourself in English, which is not a native language of mine. During Debcamp I was fortunate to be able visit some of the places and the wiki page had a lot of places which I knew I wouldn t be able to complete unless I had 15 days unlimited time and money to go around so didn t even try.
I had gone with few goals in mind :-
a. Do some documentation of the event In this I failed completely as just the walk from the venue to where the talks were energy-draining for me. Apart from that, you get swept in meeting new people and talking about one of million topics in Debian which interest you or the other person and while they are fulfilling, it is and was both physically and emotionally draining for me (in a good way). Bernelle (one of the organizers) had warned us of this phenomenon but you disregard it as you know you have a limited time-frame in which to meet and greet people and it is all a over-whelming experience.
b. Another goal was to meet my Indian brethren who had left the country around 60~100 years mostly as slaves of East India company In this I was partially successful. I met a couple of beautiful ladies who had either a father or a mother who was Indian while the other was of African heritage. It seemed in them a yearning to know the culture but from what little they had, only Bollywood and Indian cuisine was what they could make of Indian culture. One of the girls, ummm women to be more truer, shared a somewhat grim tale. She had both an African boyfriend as well as Indian boyfriend in her life and in both cases, she was rejected by the boy s parents because she wasn t pure enough. This was deja vu all over again as the same thing can be seen here happening in casteism so there wasn t any advice I could give but just nod in empathy. What was sort of relevation was when their parents or grandparents came, the name and surnames were thrown off and the surname was just the place from where they belong. From the discussions it emerged that there were also lot of cases of forced conversions to Christianity during that era as well as temptations of a better life.
As shared, this goal succeeded partially, as I was actually interested in their parents or grand-parents to know the events that shaped the Indian diaspora over there. While the children know only of today, yester-years could only be known by those people who made the unwilling perilous journey to Africa. I had also wanted to know more about Gandhiji s role in that era but alas, that part of history would have to wait for another day as I guess, both those goals would only have met had I visited Durban but that was not to be.
I had applied for one talk My Experience with Debian and one workshop for Installation of Debian on systems. The My Experience with Debian was aimed at newbies and I had thought of using show-and-tell to share the differences between proprietary Operating Systems and a FOSS distribution such as Debian. I was going to take simple things such as changelogs, apt-listbugs, real-time knowledge of updates and upgrades as well as /etc/apt/sources.list to share both the versatility of the Debian desktop and real improvements than what proprietary Operating Systems had to offer. But I found myself engaging with Debian Developers (DD s) rather than the newbies so had to change the orientation and fundamentals of the talk on the fly. I knew or suspected rather that the old idea would not work as it would just be repeating to the choir. With that in the back of mind, and the idea that perhaps they would not be so aware of the politics and events which happened in India over the last couple of decades, I tried to share what little I was able to recollect what little I was able to remember about those times. Apart from that, I was also highly conscious that I had been given just the before lunch slot aka You are in the way of my lunch slot. So I knew I had to speak my piece as quickly as possible being as clear as can be. Later, I did get feedback that I was fast and seeing it through couple of times, do agree that I could have done a better job. What s done is done and the only thing I could do to salvage it a bit is to make a presentation which I am sharing as below.
I just published the videos from 
Of course, for me, the really interesting part here is near the end of the
chain, with 
(Unfortunately, I forgot to take a screenshot of Nageru itself during this
run.)
Solskogen was the first time I'd really used Nageru in production, and
despite super-extensive testing, there's always something that can go wrong.
And indeed there was: First of all, we discovered that the local Internet
line was reduced from 30/10 to 5/0.5 (which is, frankly, unusable for
streaming video), and after we'd half-way fixed that (we got it to
25/4 or so by prodding the ISP, of which we could reserve about 2 for
video demoscene content is really hard to encode, so I'd prefer a lot
more) Nageru started crashing.
It wasn't even crashes I understood anything of. Generally it seemed like the
NVIDIA drivers were returning GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY on things like creating
mipmaps; it's logical that they'd be allocating memory, but we had 6 GB of
GPU memory and 16 GB of CPU memory, and lots of it was free. (The PC we used for encoding was much,
much faster than what you need to run Nageru smoothly, so we had plenty of
CPU power left to run x264 in, although you can of course always want more.)
It seemed to be mostly related to zoom transitions, so I generally avoided
those and ran that night's compos in a more static fashion.
It wasn't until later that night (or morning, if you will) that I actually
understood the bug (through the godsend of the
