| 1984: Library Edition | Novel by George Orwell, cover picture by Google Search result |
SOURCE_PREFIX_MAP. He also continued to
talk with the rustc team on
the topic.
Chris Lamb submitted a patch
to implement SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for wordwarvi, a game which gave extra points
to people who built it from source within one hour. This fixes Debian #786593.
Launchpad bug 1657704 was
filed for them to start accepting buildinfo files.
Bugs filed
Reviews of unreproducible packages
10 package reviews have been added, 149 have been updated and 153 have been
removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified
issues.
2 issue types have been updated:
Weekly QA work
During our reproducibility testing, the following FTBFS bugs have been detected
and reported by:
RE_FILE_TYPE and
RE_FILE_EXTENSION.--html-dir output and improve code quality elsewhere in tests.--help output.arm64 to https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/index_variations.html/dev/shm is mounted incorrectly (due to #851427) and deployed an
/etc/rc.local startup script to all systems which works around it. As a
result, jenkins_semaphore_setup_issue should be obsolete.jenkins.debian.net, for a total of 64GB RAM,
to better cope with the new jobs due to arm64. As usual, thanks to
profitbricks.com for the hardware resources
enabling this work.
http://social.gl-como.it/photos/valhalla/image/5a480cd2d5842101fc8975d927d030f3
http://social.gl-como.it/photos/valhalla/image/77e61745d9c43833b7c0a4a919d17222linux (usb0)/install.amd/vmlinuz
initrd (usb0)/install.amd/initrd.gz
bootIn casi rarissimi possono manifestarsi reazioni di ipersensibilit grave con tumefazione del viso, difficolt respiratoria (dispnea) e diminuzione della pressione arteriosa.What was surprising here was not the list of side effects (hah), but that this short phrase is 98% identical to the translation in Romanian; not only words, but also phrase structure. I don't think I've ever seen this before:
n cazuri rare se pot manifesta reac ii de hipersensibilitate grav cu tumefac ie a fe ei, dificultate respiratorie (dispnee) i diminuare a presiunii arteriale.Not all the words are identical, but even the one that is obviously different (it. 'del viso', ro. 'a fe ei') is easily translatable as 'visiune' in Romanian means 'to see', so the link is clear. This phrase structure is also quite a natural way to say the things in Romanian. I was then curious to see the French version, which is:
Dans de tr s rares cas, [the medicine] peut d clencher de violentes r actions d'hypersensibilit s'accompagnant d'un gonflement du visage, de d tresse respiratorie e d'une chute de tension.French is usually quite different from Romanian that one has to learn it (for quite a while, especially for grammar) in order to be proficient in it, but here you can make also word-by-word translation (transposition?) that doesn't lose the meaning:
n cazuri tare rari, [the medicime] poate declan a violente reac ii de hypersensibilitate acompaniate de o umflare a fe ei, de ???? respiratorie i de ???? a tensiunii.Basically here we have two non-equivalent words, and a bit more wierd phrase structure it sounds more like coloquial speech than written language but for French is also surprisingly close. You'd invert some of the adjective-noun pairs (fr. 'violentes r actions' is understandable in Romanian as 'violente reac ii', but it sounds very poetical and you'd usually write it as 'reac ii violente'). The next phrase is no longer that similar, but the one after is again obviously identical:
Se osserva effetti collaterali qui non descritti, dovrebbe informare il suo medico, il suo farmacista o il suo drogerie.which is:
[Dac /If] se observ effecte colaterale care nu sunt descrise, trebuie informat medicul vostru, farmacistul vostru sau [xxxx - no real equivalent].And the French is also identical, modulo again 'droguiste':
Si vouz remarquez de effets secondaires qui ne sont pas mentionn s dans cette notice, veuillez en informer votre m decin, votre pharmacien ou votre droguiste.which is:
Dac remarca i efecte secundare care nu sunt men ionate n aceast not , informa i medicul vostru, farmacistul vostru sau al vostru [xxxx].This is even closer; 'votre' is more similar to '[al] vostru' than 'suo', and the phrase structure is much more natural - this is exactly how you'd write it in 'native' Romanian, whereas the Italian is not (I had to add the 'if' to make it parseable). The 'vous' in 'vouz remarquez' is 'voi' in Romanian, but doesn't need to be added as it would be redundant; but it doesn't confuse the phrase. The 'veuillez en informer' doesn't have a 1:1 translation (it would be written as 'v rug m s informa i'), but is still understandable; a false friend translation would be 'vede i s informa i'/see to inform/voir informer. Why is this all surprising? Because Romanian has a significant amount of words of Slavic origin (~11% in overall vocabulary, 15% in most commonly used 2500 words) and some from other nearby countries (Turkey, Greek, some Hungarian and German). At a stretch, it's even possible to write simple but complete sentences entirely with words from Slavic origin, as I learned from this interesting youtube video. Also, our accent is almost always confused with Russian, not with Italian or French. So to get to a summary: normally you see sentence elements that are similar or identical, but not entire sentences, and definitely not phrases. What made the three languages here keep, in this particular case, not only similar but almost identical words and also almost identical phrase structure? Is it the subject (medicine)? Maybe. Is it a random fluke? If so, I don't remember seeing it before. Do I just see similarities where there are none? Possibly , but at least I thought it worth mentioning; it was quite surprising to me. Did my brain get confused by too many languages and I misinterpreted words that don't really exist (e.g. I was sure that 'vizajul' is a Romanian word, but upon checking, it isn't )? Also possible. In any case, for me it was a good subject for a blog post. Now let's not go near Spanish and definitely not near Portuguese
[Many Americans are] hurt, and they re scared, and they feel like a lot of the United States just slammed the door in their faces. The status quo is not working for people. Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances. Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I m part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too. The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country.Russ is, of course, right. The Democrats have been either complicit in policies damaging to many, or ineffective in preventing them. They have often appeared unconcerned with the plight of people outside cities (even if that wasn t really the case). And it goes deeper. When s the last time you visited Kansas? I live in Kansas. The nearest paved road is about a 3-mile drive from my home. The nearest town, population 600, is a 6-mile drive. My governor whom I did not vote for cut taxes on the wealthy so much that our excellent local schools have been struggling for years. But my community is amazing, full of loving and caring people, the sort of people who you know you ll be living with for 40 years, and so you make sure you get along well with. I have visited tourist sites in Berlin, enjoyed an opera and a Broadway show in New York, taken a train across the country to Portland, explored San Francisco. I ve enjoyed all of them. Many rural people do get out and experience the world. I have been in so many conversations where I try to explain where I live to people that simply cannot fathom it. I have explained how the 18 acres I own is a very small amount where I am. How, yes, I do actually have electricity and Internet. How a bad traffic day is one where I have to wait for three cars to go past before turning onto the paved road. How I occasionally find a bull in my front yard, how I can walk a quarter mile and be at the creek on the edge of my property, how I can get to an airport faster than most New Yorkers and my kids can walk out the front door and play in a spot more peaceful than Central Park, and how all this is way cheaper than a studio apartment in a bad part of San Francisco. It is rare indeed to see visitors actually traveling to Kansas as a destination. People have no concept of the fact that my mechanic would drop everything and help me get my broken-down car to the shop for no charge, that any number of neighbors or uncles would bring a tractor and come plow the snow off my 1/4-mile driveway out of sheer kindness, that people around here really care for each other in a way you don t see in a city. There are people that I know see politics way differently than me, but I know them to be good people. They would also do anything for a person in need, no matter who they are. I may find the people that they vote for to be repugnant, but I cannot say I ve looked this person in the eyes and they are nothing but deplorable. And so, people in rural areas feel misunderstood. And they are right. Some perspectives on Trump As I ve said, I do find Trump to be deplorable, but not everyone that voted for him is. How, then, do people wind up voting for him? The New Yorker had an excellent story about a man named Mark Frisbie, owner of a welding and fab shop. The recession had been hard on his business. His wife s day-care center also closed. Health care was hard to find, and the long, slow decline had spanned politicians of every stripe. Mark and his wife supposedly did everything they were supposed to: they worked hard, were honest, were entrepreneurial, and yet he had lost his business, his family house, his health coverage, everything. He doesn t want a handout. He wants to be able to earn a living. Asked who he d vote for, he said, Is none of the above an option? The Washington Post had another insightful article, about a professor from Madison, WI interviewing people in rural areas. She said people would often say: All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody s listening to us. Nobody s paying attention, nobody s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them. She pushed back, hard, on the idea that Trump supporters are ignorant, and added that liberals that push that line of thinking are only making the problem worse. I would agree; seeing all the talk about universities dis-inviting speakers that don t hew to certain political views doesn t help either. A related article talks about the lack of empathy for Trump voters. And then we have a more recent CNN article: Where Tump support and Obamacare use soar together, explaining in great detail how it can be logical for someone to be on Obamacare but not like it. We can all argue that the Republicans may have as much to do with that as anything, but the problem exists. And finally, a US News article makes this point:
His supporters realize he s a joke. They do not care. They know he s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who ve long ignored their interests. When you re earning $32,000 a year and haven t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price. According to the Republican Party, the biggest threat to rural America was Islamic terrorism. According to the Democratic Party it was gun violence. In reality it was prescription drug abuse and neither party noticed until it was too late.Are we leaving people out? All this reminded me of reading about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist and something of the father of modern computing, writing about his feelings of trepidation about sharing with his university colleagues that he was working on a project related to the Bible. I am concerned about the complaints about the PC culture , because I think it is good that people aren t making racist or anti-semitic jokes in public anymore. But, as some of these articles point out, in many circles, making fun of Christians and conservatives is still one of the accepted targets. Does that really help anything? (And as a Christian that is liberal, have all of you that aren t Christians so quickly forgotten how churches like the Episcopals blazed the way for marriage equality many years ago already?) But they don t get a free pass I have found a few things, however, absolutely scary. One was an article from December showing that Trump voters actually changed their views on Russia after Trump became the nominee. Another one from just today was a study on how people reacted when showed inauguration crowd photos. NPR ran a story today as well, on how Trump is treating journalists like China does. Chilling stuff indeed. Conclusion So where does this leave us? Heading into uncertain times, for sure, but perhaps just maybe with a greater understanding of our neighbors. Perhaps we will all be able to see past the rhetoric and polarization, and understand that there is something, well, normal about each other. Doing that is going to be the only way we can really take our country back.
Working with Preferences, AudioManager, RingtoneManager in Android.
Sometimes the noise can get too much. Imagine all the people around you at work or in a classroom. All of them have at least one cell phones. Even if they were all to make a tiny blip, the noise would be irritating and disruptive.
To avoid devices from interrupting the non-digital life, applications often provide settings that allow users to modify app volumes. My task this week was to enable/disable silent mode in Lumicall.
To provide settings for your application, instead of using multiple Views, Preference APIs should be used.
Each preference appears as an item in a list and provides the appropriate UI for users to modify the setting.
In Lumicall, when settings menu from the menubar is selected, a preference screen is displayed showing various setting options, where I appended a Configure Silent Mode option.
The UI for the preference screen is expected to be in Src->xml folder under the name preferences.xml
Snippet from Lumicall s preference.xml for Configure Silent Mode preference screen.
Every preference has a key and the result associated with it.
To fetch the result from the SharedPreferences file-
boolean silentflag=PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(ctx).getBoolean(org.sipdroid.sipua.ui.Settings.PREF_SILENT_MODE, org.sipdroid.sipua.ui.Settings.DEFAULT_SILENT_MODE);
Note, the arguments in getBoolean function is (Key, DefaultValue).
Don t forget to pass the Context object, ctx in the statement. I wasted a lot of time figuring that one out and created a non-optimal-working way which I eventually had to remove cos I figured out how to retrieve the result value.
To add a second method of setting silent mode, i.e where the user can enter his work days/time, I wanted to display an activity with required widgets .
To display an activity on a when a preference is selected, intent tags are used. (See the above snippet)
Note that the target package in the intent tags is not the package name of where the java file of the activity is to be found.It s the package name which is your applicationID.
Now this activity, like any other activity in android is a combination of an xml and java file.
1. My xml file contains the widgets for user to enter two set of time value in HH:MM format. i.e.the start and end time during which user requires application notifications to be silent it also contains checkboxes for user to select multiple days of the week.
2. The java file associated with this does the following:
2.1 Comparing the Real Time with User s Specified Start and End time
2.2 Checking the current day of the week with the days marked by the user in the checkboxes
I have used inbuilt Calendar class and Date class to accomplish this.
All done I felt quite proud but this.. this was something that tested my patience and endurance!
As I continue my work, I will keep sharing!
Please keep reading!
U
The Budget
The story which I wanted to share is there are few friends (from Debian as well as elsewhere) who shared that they didn t get the whole demonetisation play or what the Government is/was trying to do. As budget is just round the corner (India will be presenting its yearly budget on 1st of February), thought it is prudent to share at least some basics, ideas and theories of what goals the Finance Minister would be looking at when presenting his budget. I would NOT talk of Inflation targeting or some such exotica as those topics would require their own blog-posts altogether. I would mainly be talking a bit about Taxation and in that Personal Income Tax. I would also not use words like Receivables and like which thought bit more accurate are not used in everyday language.
Just like Private Companies and increasingly public utilities, The Government of the day has two-three different aims when it is presenting a budget
a. The first is to give an update about how things went last year. Did all the incomes that were projected, did it happen or was there a short-fall ? If there was a short-fall what were the reasons for the shortfall.
Similarly, did all the budgeted expenditure earmarked for the year was spent and were it spent under the heads they were supposed to ? If not what went wrong there ? There is usually a tussle between Planned and Unplanned expenditure and one of the hallmarks of good governance is that unplanned expenditure is kept at minimum, while planned expenditure and projects completion or/and assets coming on-line were within the estimated time-frames.
So these updates are given to the Parliament and hence public at large.
The second and the more interesting part are the plans for the immediate future, 1 year down-the-line. Based on the performance last year, a bit of crystal-ball gazing of external and internal conditions of the country, the Finance Minister along with her/his colleagues of Finance Ministry.
Trivia There hasn t been a female finance minister till date in India.
The Finance Ministry as a whole also holds consultations with most sections of the society before sharing/putting his Fiscal Policy (Planned Expenditure) for debate and passage in form of the Budget. While the budget itself is a technical exercise, it is also a Political exercise as both the budget and the finance bill (which contains the taxation proposals) need to be passed in Lok Sabha (Lower house).
After passing scrutiny of Lok Sabha (Lower House having people s representatives directly elected) and Rajya Sabha (Upper House, indirectly elected), the taxation proposals becomes the law. It isn t that simple but for our understanding, keeping it simple. This Political model of governance with two houses is modeled under the British (Westminister) model since 1947.
The Government, just like any other Organization gives a similar Profit and Loss Account and a Balance Sheet.
How A country s budget is made. A representational and simplified version of how things flow was made using Graphviz. Click on it to see image in detail.
graph Budget
subgraph tier1
node [color="limegreen",style="filled",group="tier1"]
Country_Budget
......
Country_Budget -- Profit_and_Loss_Account [type=s];
Indian Railways EMU local train
INR 2000 Rupees
I wrote a piece a few days ago about how the Meitu app asked for a bunch of permissions in ways that might concern people, but which were not actually any worse than many other apps. The fact that Android makes it so easy for apps to obtain data that's personally identifiable is of concern, but in the absence of another stable device identifier this is the sort of thing that capitalism is inherently going to end up making use of. Fundamentally, this is Google's problem to fix. Beware, this would be slightly longish.
Debian Contributions
In the last couple of weeks, was lucky to put up a patch against debian-policy which had been bothering me for a long-long time.
The problem statement is simple, man-pages historically were made by software engineers for software-engineers. The idea, probably then was you give the user some idea of what the software does and the rest the software engineer would garner from reading the source-code. But over period of time, the audience has changed. While there are still software engineers who use GNU/Linux for the technical excellence, the man-pages have not kept up with this new audience who perhaps are either not technically so sound that or they do not want to take the trouble to reading the source-code to understand how things flow. An example or examples in a man-page gives us (the lesser mortals) some insight as how the command works, how the logic flows.
A good example of a man-page is the ufw man-page
EXAMPLESNow if we had man-pages like the above which give examples, then the user at least can try to accomplish whatever s/he is trying to do. I truly believe not having examples in a man-page kills 50% of your audience and people who could potentially use your tool. Personal wishlist The only thing (and this might be my failure) is we need a good way to search through a man-page. The only way I know is using / and try to give a pattern. Lots of times it fails because I, the user doesn t know the exact keyword which the documenter was using. What would be nice, great if we do have some sort of parser where I tell it, $this is what I m looking for and the parser tries the pattern + all its synonyms and whatever seems to be most relevant passage from the content, in this case a manpage it tells me. It would make my life a lot easier while at the same time force people to document more and more. I dunno if there has been any research or study of the relationship between good documentation and popularity of a program. I know there are lots of different tiny bits which make or break a program, one of which would definitely be documentation and in that a man-page IF it s a command-line tool. A query on Quora gives some indication https://www.quora.com/How-comprehensible-do-you-find-Unix-Linux-Man-pages although the low response rate tells its own story. there have been projects like man2html and man2pdf and others which try to make the content more accessible to people who are not used to the man-page interface but till you don t have Examples the other things can work only so far. Also if anybody talks about X project which claims to solve this problem they will have to fight manpages who have been around like forever. As can be seen in the patch, did some rookie mistakes as can be seen. I also filed a lintian bug at the same time. Hope the patch does get merged at some point in debian-policy and then a check introduced in lintian in some future release. I do agree with anarcat s assertion that it should be at the level of the manpage missing level. I am no coder but finding 14,000 binary packages without a manpage left me both shocked and surprised. I came to know about manpage-alert from the devscripts package to know which all binary packages that have been installed but not have man-pages. I hope to contribute a manpage or two if I across a package I m somewhat comfortable with. I have made a beginning of sorts by running manpage alert and putting the output in a .txt file which I would grep through manually and see if something interesting jumps at me. The learning garnered from putting the patch to the debian package resulted in another patch but this time for an upstream project altogether. As can be seen all are just baby-steps that even a non-coder can take. Another couple of bugs I filed which were fixed were of a sim called unknown-horizons . A 2D realtime strategy simulation. I had filed three bugs, two of which were fixed in 2 days, the 3rd I hope is also fixed soonish. Lastly, I spent most of the week-end poring over packages who have left files in /etc/bash_completion.d/ . I spent almost 4-5 odd hours as each package in question as well as entries found in /etc/bash-completion.d/$filename I had to find which package it belonged to first
Deny all access to port 53: ufw deny 53 Allow all access to tcp port 80: ufw allow 80/tcp Allow all access from RFC1918 networks to this host: ufw allow from 10.0.0.0/8
ufw allow from 172.16.0.0/12
ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/16 Deny access to udp port 514 from host 1.2.3.4: ufw deny proto udp from 1.2.3.4 to any port 514 Allow access to udp 1.2.3.4 port 5469 from 1.2.3.5 port 5469: ufw allow proto udp from 1.2.3.5 port 5469 to 1.2.3.4 port 5469
[$] dpkg -S /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt
git: /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt
I know that dpkg-query also does the same
[$] dpkg-query -S /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt
git: /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt
But I am used to plain dpkg although do know that dpkg-query can do lot more intimate searching in various ways than dpkg can.
Once the package name was established, first simulate the purge
[$] sudo aptitude -s purge git
[sudo] password for shirish:
The following packages will be REMOVED:
git p
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 29.5 MB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libgit-wrapper-perl : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-extras : Depends: git (>= 1.7.0) but it is not going to be installed
bup : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-remote-gcrypt : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-svn : Depends: git (> 1:2.11.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: git ( 1:2.11.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: git (= 1:1.8.1) but it is not going to be installed
git-core : Depends: git (> 1:1.7.0.2) but it is not going to be installed
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
Remove the following packages:
1) bup [0.29-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
2) fdroidserver [0.7.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
3) git-annex [6.20161012-1 (now, testing)]
4) git-core [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
5) git-extras [4.2.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
6) git-remote-gcrypt [1.0.1-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
7) git-repair [1.20151215-1 (now, unstable)]
8) git-svn [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
9) gitk [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
10) libgit-wrapper-perl [0.047-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
11) python3-git [2.1.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
12) svn2git [2.4.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
13) devscripts recommends libgit-wrapper-perl
14) dh-make-perl recommends git
15) fdroidserver recommends git
16) git-annex recommends git-remote-gcrypt (>= 0.20130908-6)
17) gplaycli recommends fdroidserver
18) python-rope recommends git-core
Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] q
Abandoning all efforts to resolve these dependencies.
Abort.
Then I made a note of all the packages being affected, saw purging all of them wouldn t call others (the Package dependency Hell), made the purge and then reinstalled anew.
The reason I did this is that many a times during upgrade, either during update/upgrade sometimes the correct action doesn t happen. To take the git s example itself, there were two files git-extras and git-prompt which were in /etc/bash_completion.d/ both of which were showing their source as git. Purging git and installing git afresh removed git-extras file and git-prompt is the only one remaining.
While blogging about the package, did try to grep through changelog.Debian.gz and changelog.gz in git
[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/doc/git] - [10046]
[$] zless changelog.gz
[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/doc/git] - [10046]
[$] zless changelog.Debian.gz
[$] sudo aptitude -s purge ufw gufw
The following packages will be REMOVED:
gufw p ufw p
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 4,224 kB will be freed.
Note: Using 'Simulate' mode.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Would download/install/remove packages.
purged the packages, reinstalled it and then re-added all the rules. Doing it all for various sundry packages, had to do it manually as there is no one size fits all solution.
A sensitive one was grub which still has an entry in /etc/bash_completion.d/grub. Doing it wrong could have resulted in a non-bootable situation. There are workarounds for that, but it would have taken quite a bit of time, energy, notes and bit of recall factor what I did the last time something like that happened. Doing it manually, being present meant I could do it rightly the first time.
So, was it worth it It would be if the package maintainers do the needful and the remaining entries are moved out of /etc/bash_completion.d/ to /usr/share/bash-completions and some to my favourite /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/ for instance
[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions] - [10064]
[$] ll -h _youtube-dl-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.2K 2016-12-01 08:48 _youtube-dl
But trying to get all or even major packages to use zsh-completions would be hard work and would take oodles of time and this concerns upstream stuff, also very much outside what I was sharing.
World History
Before, during and even after South-African experience, I was left wondering why India and South Africa, two countries who had similar histories at least the last couple of hundred years or more, the final result of Independence was so different for both the countries. It took me quite sometime to articulate that in a form of question , while the answers were interesting, from what little I know of India itself, if I were an Englishman I would never leave Hindustan . What the people answering failed to take into account was that in that era it was Hindustan or un-divided India.
Pre-partition map of India
The second most difficult mountain in the world K2, Pakistan
Nageru, my live video mixer, is in the process of gaining HDMI/SDI
output for bigscreen use, and in that process, I ran some loopback tests
(connecting the output of one card into the input of another) to verify
that I had all the colorspace parameters right. (This is of course trivial
if you are only sending one input on bit-by-bit, but Nageru is much more
flexible, so it really needs to understand what each pixel means.)
It turns out that if you mess up any of these parameters ever so slightly,
you end up with something like this, this or this.
But thankfully, I got this instead on the very first try, so it really
seems it's been right all along. :-)
(There's a minor first-generation loss in that the SDI chain is 8-bit Y'CbCr
instead of 10-bit, but I really can't spot it with the naked eye, and it
doesn't compound through generations. I plan to fix that for those with spare
GPU power at some point, possibly before 1.5.0 release.)
During useR! 2016, Nick Tierney had asked on Twitter about rmarkdown and metropolis and whether folks had used RMarkdown-driven LaTeX Beamer presentations. My firm hell yeah answer, based on having used mtheme outright or in local mods for quite some time (see my talks page), lead to this blog post of mine describing this GitHub repo I had quickly set up during breaks at useR! 2016. The corresponding blog post and the repo have some more details on how I do this, in particular about local packages (also with sources on GitHub) for the non-standard fonts I use.
This week I got around to updating the repo / example a little by making the default colours (in my example) a little less awful, and a page on blocks and, most importantly, turning the example into the animated gif below:
More than five years ago I blogged about the configuration problem and a proposed solution for Haskell, which turned into some Template Haskell hacks in the seal-module package.
With the new GHC proposal process in plase, I am suddenly much more inclined to write up my weird wishes for the Haskell language in proposal form, to make them more coherent, get feedback, and maybe (maybe) actually get them implemented. But even if the proposal is rejected it is still a nice forum to discuss these ideas.
So I turned my Template Haskell hack into a proposed new syntactic feature. The idea is shamelessly stolen from Isabelle, including some of the keywords, and would allow you to write
context fixes progName in
foo :: Maybe Int -> Either String Int
foo Nothing = Left $ progName ++ ": no number given"
foo (Just i) = bar i
bar :: Int -> Either String Int
bar 0 = Left $ progName ++ ": zero no good"
bar n = Right $ n + 1foo :: String -> Maybe Int -> Either String Int
foo progName Nothing = Left $ progName ++ ": no number given"
foo progName (Just i) = bar progName i
bar :: String -> Int -> Either String Int
bar progName 0 = Left $ progName ++ ": zero no good"
bar progName n = Right $ n + 1
I wanted to write a more in-depth post about
RetroPie the Retro Gaming Appliance OS for Raspberry
Pis, either technically or more positively, but unfortunately I don't have much
positive to write.
What I hoped for was a nice appliance that I could use to play old games from
the comfort of my sofa. Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, I had a
malfunctioning Linux machine and the time I'd set aside for jumping on goombas
was being spent trying to figure out why bluetooth wasn't working. I have enough
opportunities for that already, both at work and at home.
I feel a little bad complaining about an open source, volunteer project: in its
defence I can say that it is iterating fast and the two versions I tried in a
relatively short time span were rapidly different. So hopefully a lot of my woes
will eventually be fixed. I've also read a lot of other people get on with it
just fine.
Instead, I decided the Nintendo Classic NES Mini was the plug-and-play
appliance for me. Alas, it became the "must have" Christmas toy for 2016 and
impossible to obtain for the recommended retail price. I did succeed in finding
one in stock at Toys R Us online at one point, only to have the checkout
process break and my order not go through. Checking Stock
Informer
afterwards, that particular window of opportunity was only 5 minutes wide. So
no NES classic for me!
My adventures in RetroPie weren't entirely fruitless, thankfully: I discovered
two really nice pieces of hardware.
ThinkPad Keyboard
8bitdo SFC30
As the freeze of the next release is closing in, I have updated a bunch of packages around TeX: All of the TeX Live packages (binaries and arch independent ones) and tex-common. I might see whether I get some updates of ConTeXt out, too.
The changes in the binaries are mostly cosmetic: one removal of a non-free (unclear-free) file, and several upstream patches got cherrypicked (dvips, tltexjp contact email, upmendex, dvipdfmx). I played around with including LuaTeX v1.0, but that breaks horribly with the current packages in TeX Live, so I refrained from it. The infrastructure package tex-common got a bugfix for updates from previous releases, and for the other packages there is the usual bunch of updates and new packages. Enjoy!
New packages
arimo, arphic-ttf, babel-japanese, conv-xkv, css-colors, dtxdescribe, fgruler, footmisx, halloweenmath, keyfloat, luahyphenrules, math-into-latex-4, mendex-doc, missaali, mpostinl, padauk, platexcheat, pstring, pst-shell, ptex-fontmaps, scsnowman, stanli, tinos, undergradmath, yaletter.
Updated packages
acmart, animate, apxproof, arabluatex, arsclassica, babel-french, babel-russian, baskervillef, beamer, beebe, biber, biber.x86_64-linux, biblatex, biblatex-apa, biblatex-chem, biblatex-dw, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-sbl, bidi, calxxxx-yyyy, chemgreek, churchslavonic, cochineal, comicneue, cquthesis, csquotes, ctanify, ctex, cweb, dataref, denisbdoc, diagbox, dozenal, dtk, dvipdfmx, dvipng, elocalloc, epstopdf, erewhon, etoolbox, exam-n, fbb, fei, fithesis, forest, glossaries, glossaries-extra, glossaries-french, gost, gzt, historische-zeitschrift, inconsolata, japanese-otf, japanese-otf-uptex, jsclasses, latex-bin, latex-make, latexmk, lt3graph, luatexja, markdown, mathspec, mcf2graph, media9, mendex-doc, metafont, mhchem, mweights, nameauth, noto, nwejm, old-arrows, omegaware, onlyamsmath, optidef, pdfpages, pdftools, perception, phonrule, platex-tools, polynom, preview, prooftrees, pst-geo, pstricks, pst-solides3d, ptex, ptex2pdf, ptex-fonts, qcircuit, quran, raleway, reledmac, resphilosophica, sanskrit, scalerel, scanpages, showexpl, siunitx, skdoc, skmath, skrapport, smartdiagram, sourcesanspro, sparklines, tabstackengine, tetex, tex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikzsymbols, tocdata, uantwerpendocs, updmap-map, uplatex, uptex, uptex-fonts, withargs, wtref, xcharter, xcntperchap, xecjk, xellipsis, xepersian, xint, xlop, yathesis.
Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
Individual reports
In December, about 175 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:
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Yesterday afternoon, the nineth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp made it to the CRAN network for GNU R. Windows binaries have by now been generated; and the package was updated in Debian too. This 0.12.9 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, the 0.12.7 release in September, and the 0.12.8 release in November --- making it the thirteenth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency.
Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 906 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by sixthythree packages over the two months since the last release -- or about a package a day!
Some of the changes in this release are smaller and detail-oriented. We did squash one annoying bug (stemming from the improved exception handling) in Rcpp::stop() that hit a few people. Nathan Russell added a sample() function (similar to the optional one in RcppArmadillo; this required a minor cleanup by for small number of other packages which used both namespaces 'opened'. Date and Datetime objects now have format() methods and << output support. We now have coverage reports via covr as well. Last but not least James "coatless" Balamuta was once more tireless on documentation and API consistency --- see below for more details.
Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.9 (2017-01-14)
- Changes in Rcpp API:
- The exception stack message is now correctly demangled on all compiler versions (Jim Hester in #598)
- Date and Datetime object and vector now have format methods and
operator<<support (#599).- The
sizeoperator inMatrixis explicitly referenced avoiding a g++-6 issues (#607 fixing #605).- The underlying date calculation code was updated (#621, #623).
- Addressed improper diagonal fill for non-symmetric matrices (James Balamuta in #622 addressing #619)
- Changes in Rcpp Sugar:
- Changes in Rcpp unit tests
- Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
- Changes in Rcpp build system
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
NetAddr::IP->new6() for resolving DNS names to IPv6 addresses, the addresses returned by NetAddr::IP are not what you might expect. See below for details.
Issue #2 in UIF
Over the last couple of days, I tried to figure out the cause of a weird issue observed in UIF (Universal Internet Firewall [1], a nice Perl tool for setting up ip(6)tables based Firewalls).
Already a long time ago, I stumbled over a weird DNS resolving issue of DNS names to IPv6 addresses in UIF that I reported as issue #2 [2] against upstream UIF back then.
I happen to be co-author of UIF. So, I felt very ashamed all the time for not fixing the issue any sooner.
As many of us DDs try to get our packages into shape before the next Debian release these days, I find myself doing the same. I started investigating the underlying cause of issue #2 in UIF a couple of days ago.
Issue #119858 on CPAN
Today, I figured out that the Perl code in UIF is not causing the observed phenomenon. The same behaviour is reproducible with a minimal and pure NetAddr::IP based Perl script (reported as Debian bug #851388 [2]. Thanks to Gregor Herrmann for forwarding Debian bug upstream (#119858 [3]).
Here is the example script that shows the flawed behaviour:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use NetAddr::IP;
my $hostname = "google-public-dns-a.google.com";
my $ip6 = NetAddr::IP->new6($hostname);
my $ip4 = NetAddr::IP->new($hostname);
print "$ip6 <- WTF???\n";
print "$ip4\n";
exit(0);
[mike@minobo ~]$ ./netaddr-ip_resolv-ipv6.pl
0:0:0:0:0:0:808:808/128 <- WTF???
8.8.8.8/32
NetAddr::IP is that with the new6() "constructor" you initialize a new IPv6 address. If the address is a DNS name, NetAddr::IP internally resolves it into an IPv4 address and converts this IPv4 address into some IPv6'ish format. This bogus IPv6 address is not the one matching the given DNS name.
Impacted Software in Debian
Various Debian packages use NetAddr::IP and may be affected by this flaw, here is an incomplete list (use apt-rdepends -r libnetaddr-ip-perl for the complete list):
NetAddr::IP->new6(<dnsname>) is being used. I haven't checked any of the code bases, but possibly the corresponding maintainers may want to do that.
References
A month or so ago I got involved in a discussion on IRC about notification methods for a headless NAS. One of the options considered was some sort of USB attached LED. DealExtreme had a cheap Webmail notifier , which was already supported by mainline kernels as a Riso Kagaku device but it had been sold out for some time.
This seemed like a fun problem to solve with a tinyAVR and V-USB. I had my USB relay board so I figured I could use that to at least get some code to the point that the kernel detected it as the right device, and the relay output could be configured as one of the colours to ensure it was being driven in roughly the right manner. The lack of a full lsusb dump (at least when I started out) made things a bit harder, plus the fact that the Riso uses an output report unlike the relay code, which uses a control message. However I had the kernel source for the driver and with a little bit of experimentation had something which would cause the driver to be loaded and the appropriate files in /sys/class/leds/ to be created. The relay was then successfully activated when the red LED was supposed to be on.
hid-led 0003:1294:1320.0001: hidraw0: USB HID v1.01 Device [MAIL MAIL ] on usb-0000:00:14.0-6.2/input0
hid-led 0003:1294:1320.0001: Riso Kagaku Webmail Notifier initialized
I now have an XMPP setup which has all the features of the recent fancy chat systems, and on top of that it runs, client and server, on Free Software, which can be audited, it is federated and I can self-host my own server in my own VPS if I want to, with packages supported in Debian.
prosodyctl adduser alice@example.orgc2s_require_encryption = true
s2s_secure_auth = trues2s_insecure_domains = "gmail.com" VirtualHost "chat.example.org"
enabled = true
ssl =
key = "/etc/ssl/private/example.org-key.pem";
certificate = "/etc/ssl/public/example.org.pem";
Component "conference.chat.example.org" "muc"
restrict_room_creation = "local"Component "upload.chat.trueelena.org" "http_upload""something";Next.