During holiday idling, I made a thing to generate picture slideshows similar to RAI's iconic "Intervallo" You can get it at https://github.com/spanezz/intervallo Usage: For example: The images are captioned with their file name, without extension. You may want to rename the image files to have nice descriptive names. For some audio to use, you can try https://archive.org/details/IntervalloRai-Paradisi Example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCERwjTB4ck

I recently had call to play with some 1-Wire devices at work (more of which in a future post). It was taking a while for the appropriate programmer to turn up, so of course I pulled out my trusty BusPirate. It turned out the devices in question would only talk in overdrive mode, while the Bus Pirate could only offer standard mode. So I set about trying to figure out how to add the appropriate support. This is is a huge endorsement for test equipment with Free Software firmware. Rather than giving up I was able to go and grab the current firmware, which has been adopted by the community since Dangerous Prototypes have discontinued development. What let me down was the ecosystem around the PIC24FJ64GA002. My previous recent experience with microcontrollers has been with the ATTiny range and the STM32. Getting up and running with both of these was fairly easy - the tool chains necessary were already present in Debian, so all it took was a simple apt invocation to install everything I needed to compile code and program it to the devices. Not so with the PIC series, which surprised me. There seems to be some basic support for the earlier PIC16 range, but for later chips there s nothing that works out of the box with Debian. Investigation revealed that this was because there s nothing maintained that enabled Free development for the PIC range. The accepted solution is the closed MPLAB X. Now, in one sense fair play to Microchip for making this available. But in another, shame on you. I can t imagine ever choosing to build something based on a chip that only had a closed source tool chain available. I want things I can use in Makefiles and properly script, that are available in my distro of choice and that generally work in the same fashion as the tool chains I m used to. I understand there might be some benefit in a closed compiler in terms of performance (and have HPC friends who would never trust a benchmark provided using GCC), but in general that s not the space I move in. Nor does it seem to be the sort of attitude you should be taking if you are trying to attract the hobbyist and small production run market. Any yet this seems common amongst hardware manufacturers. People whose core business is selling physical items, where the software is only relevant in terms of being able to use those items, seem to consider the software to be precious. Instead of opening up programming specifications and allowing a more widespread use of the hardware, increasing sales. I understand there are some cases where this isn t practical, but the default attitude is definitely one of being closed rather than open, which is a terrible shame. Anyway. I do have some Bus Pirate 1-Wire overdrive support now working (pending some testing to ensure standard mode still works), but I am glad I never spent a lot of time getting involved with PICs now.

A brand new anytime package just arrived at CRAN. This is release number eight, evenly spread with over two per month, since the initial release in September. Needless to say I have been told off not to make this many releases. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, ... format to either POSIXct or Date objects -- and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples. This releases does a few things:

• It fixes a misfeature apparent in some timezones: anydate() would somehow wrap around and return the previous day by accident. This has been addressed by moving the conversion to date directly into the C++ side of things.
• New format helpers were added to format datetime or dates objects according to ISO 7601, RFC 2822 or RFC 3339 (see examples below).
• Testing is now more stringent with actual comparisons to equivalent base R results; that way we are get getting bitten by different timezones.

The following is a quick illustration For symmetry, it also works for dates, but is less detailed Of course, all commands are also fully vectorised. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for more examples.

Changes in anytime version 0.2.0 (2016-12-24)

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

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

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

Review: Warchild, by Karin Lowachee

Series:	Warchild #1
Publisher:	Warner Aspect
Copyright:	April 2002
ISBN:	0-446-61077-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	451

In a future world of deep space stations and starship trade routes, Jos Musey grew up on a merchant ship with a loving family and typical childhood companions. But, at the age of eight, his ship was taken by pirates and he's taken as a slave. That might have been the end of his story, but after a year of captivity he manages to escape during an alien attack on a distant frontier station. Jos then learns more than he ever expected to learn about the ongoing deep space war between the human military and the aliens and their human sympathizers. From both sides. Warchild feels so much like a collection of 1980s SF tropes that I'm a bit surprised it was published in 2002. Some of those have been part of SF well before the 1980s: the coming-of-age story of a child in space, deep-space combat and merchant fleets, pirates, and sketchy stations. But when one adds the Japanese-inspired philosophy and combat training, with a bit of Karate Kid feel, plus the (oddly bolted on) cyberpunk "burndiving," this book feels deeply embedded in a specific generation of SF storytelling. That's not necessarily a drawback. I like some of those tropes. The martial arts training coupled with careful and patient psychology worked very well for me. It may be a bit stereotyped, but Lowachee is careful to never present it as Asian; it's an alien philosophy and environment, and although it happens to wear its influences on its sleeves, it makes no attempt to tie that to any particular human culture. And the philosophy and, more to the point, the approach Niko takes with Jos is exactly what Jos needs. That section of the book (the second) was by far my favorite. I wish the whole book had been like that. Unfortunately, it's not. The first part is a deeply uncomfortable account of Jos's capture and enslavement (with bonus implied pedophilia). It's thankfully the shortest section of the book, but it's an endless parade of horrors that I didn't enjoy reading. Lowachee took the stylistic choice of writing it in the second person, which is a literary trick that rarely works for me and didn't work here. I'm sure the goal is to make it feel more immediate, but I didn't need this scene to be more immediate, and second person always reads as awkward and forced. If the authors write characters well, I will identify with them, but if I feel like I'm being forced to identify with them, I just start getting irritated. The third part of the book goes in yet a different direction: military SF, complete with hazing, camaraderie, esprit de corps, and bloody combat, with an uncomfortable undertone of constant stress due to Jos's complex and dangerous position. I wanted this to be much shorter and wanted the book to return to the part that I really liked. Unfortunately, that's not to be; the tone of this section is the tone for the rest of the book. To be fair, it's better than I expected it to be, and Jos's recovery and coming-of-age continues in more subtle and more satisfying ways than at first it seemed like it would. But Lowachee complicates and largely breaks a recovery that I was hoping would proceed down a more peaceful path, and replaced a beautiful and interesting (if a bit stereotyped) environment with bog-standard military SF. If you like that sort of thing, there's a lot of that thing here, but I've read a lot of books with that setting and far fewer about an Asian-inspired martial alien philosophy. I think Warchild has a bit too much stuff going on and not enough recovery space. The cyberpunk angle probably gets developed more in later books of the series (the next book is Burndive, which is the name for cyberpunk hacking in this book), but it felt bolted on here. Jos's story has multiple false starts and complications, and Lowachee keeps pulling the rug out from under him again until both he and the reader go a bit numb. The ending mostly works, but it's a brutal resolution to the complex psychological situation Lowachee sets up. This book reminds me a bit of C.J. Cherryh in that the characters seem constantly stressed beyond their ability to cope. I wanted something a bit kinder and softer. Despite that, the psychology and the brief moments of understanding and light are compelling enough that I'm still tempted to read on in this series. The subsequent books follow other characters; maybe they'll be a bit less nasty to their protagonists. Followed by Burndive. Rating: 6 out of 10

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

Since the past few weeks I have been researching and working on creating a white label version of Lumicall with my mentors Daniel, Juliana and Bruno. Lumicall is a free and convenient app for making encrypted phone calls from Android. It uses the SIP protocol to interoperate with other apps and corporate telephone systems. Think of any app that you use to call others using an SIP ID. What does it mean to make a white label version of Lumicall?
White labelling is the idea of taking the whole or piece of Lumicall s code by business users and tweaking it according to their requirements and functionality they want. The white label version would have client s name, logo, icons, themes etc which reflect their brand. Although, the underlying working of both the applications would be same. Think of it like getting a cake from the local bakery, putting it into a home baking dish and passing it off as something you made in front of your friends and earning all the praise. Except cake is more appealing than apps.
What whitelabelling does is it takes away the pain of collecting cake ingredients, mixing them in right proportion, baking at the right temperature and uses the experience of one cake base to create more and more fancier, prettier, grander cakes. This lets the cool bakers (or the business users of lumicall) to focus on other aspects of the party like decoration, games and drinks (or monetization, publicity and new features)
Now you would wonder who these cool bakers or business users of lumicall would be?

• Existing SIP providers can use white label version of Lumicall to expand their business and launch SIP client. This would provide a one stop shop for them!!
• New SIP clients/developers can use Lumicall white label version to get the underlying working of making encrypted phone calls using SIP protocol, it will help them to focus on other additional functionalities they would like to include.
  
• Moreover, Companies that have existing clients such as shopping apps, social network apps can benefit from integrating lumicall to launch new business ideas

While researching this work that despite the commonalities, there would need to be a unique identifier for any application in the app store. I found that there is difference between the package name and the applicationID. When I create a new project in Android Studio, the applicationId exactly matches the Java-style package name I chose during setup. However, the application ID and package name are independent of each other beyond this point. The thing to keep in mind is that app stores identify as a changed application ID as a different app altogether.

So if I were to make N separate copies of the application code for N clients, it would be a maintenance nightmare, If the build system is Gradle, using product flavors is a trick that will make this maintenance easier. Instead of N separate copies, I would simply have N product flavors. Each flavor corresponds to a customized version of my application. Pro, free, whitelabel, Debug (for development purposes), Release (for production purposes) are the basic flavors I have identified.

Each flavor would use the same source code and files of the application but resources, icons, manifests etc that are specific to each flavor can be defined again in main/src/flavor_name directory under res folders etc. according to the requirement.
Here is a snippet from my build.gradle file::

Note: You have to define at least two flavors to be able to build multiple variants.
Because once you have flavors, you can only build flavored application. You can t just build default configuration anymore. Define an empty flavor, with no applicationIdSuffix at all, and it will use all of the default config section.

This week I d be moving forward with the implementation of whitelabelling using productFlavors in Lumicall.
I would love to hear from someone who has done this before!
Comment here or email me and I promise you an excellent home-made-store-brought cake!
Wishing you all HAPPY HOLIDAYS! !
-U

What we did at the Debian Edu / Skolelinux gathering in November 2016 in Oslo From November 25 to 27 some people met in the hackerspace bitraf in downtown Oslo. On Saturday and Sunday we met in the morning and hacked and translated all day until we went for dinners in the evening. Despite the short time I think we managed to get a lot done and had good fun, so I'm hoping we'll have another gathering in 2017! Debian Edu / Skolelinux is currently in better shape regarding the upcoming Debian release than we ever have been, which is pretty awesome. Today, on December 21st, all our changes are in Stretch, except for debian-edu-artwork.git, which awaits a desktop-base upload to unstable the only thing missing is being able to install Debian Edu using our profiles from official media releasing Debian Edu Stretch on the same day as Debian Stretch would be a huge success though! These are the notes taken in a pad (thanks riseup!) during the meeting: Phil Hands worked on

• improving automated tests of d-i and Debian Edu installations using jenkins.debian.net:
• Managed to get the Main Server install to the point where it should be runnable regularly on jenkins
• Worked around the current breakage in plymouth. Confirmed that the Standalone install is currently
• sabotaged by KDE, despite it supposedly being MATE (this took quite a while).
• Meanwhile, made some small steps towards making the Cucumber setup more flexible when adding new scenarios.

Knut Yrvin worked on

• testing Debian Edu Stretch installations

Ingrid Yrvin worked on

• reviewing translations to Norwegian

Ole-Erik Yrvin worked on

• translating the Debian Edu manual to Norwegian
• translating the Debian Edu Administrators Handbook (ITIL) to Norwegian

Wolfgang Schweer worked on

• fixing PXE installations from installed Debian Edu servers
• fixing desktop entries for our Mate desktop (Xfce benefits as well)
• updating https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Stretch
• testing sitesummary server/client with patch provided by Petter
• testing if MATE functionalities (caja, atril, some mimetypes) are improved compared to jessie (they are)
• filed bug #845997 about wrong mate-session priority.
• discussed pros and cons of various DEs and the choice of DE to install
• tested menu integration/translation for Xfce, LXQt, Plasma and MATE
• gave assistance to install the Debian Edu combi server (workaround plymouth the issue in d-i environment)

Petter Reinholdtsen worked on

• #832342 sitesummary: SiteSummary.pm fails to extract information w/ recent stretch linux-images
• Assisted norwegian translators.

Dominik George worked on

• xrdp
  • xrdp upload to unstable: new upstream version with some fixes, closing four bugs.
  • thus prepare xrdp for the 0.9.1 release that upstream will do, in cooperation with Debian, before the freeze.
  • preparing uploads of guacamole-(client server) to unstable
• guacamole
  • Ported guacamole-server code to OpenSSL 1.1.
  • Did a guacamole-server license/copyright review.
  • Java help needed: https://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2016/11/msg00061.html
• shared some nice/horrible experiences from school IT realities in Germany
• gave a talk/initiated a discussion about Skolelinux Cloud / Skolelinux as a Service / evilly fighting Google Apps for Education
• fixed #834065 (gosa-plugin-sudo: sudoHost does not allow '.' in GOsa, host.domain is not possible to be entered)
• had an online meeting with the Teckids kids who need to teach Debian to their fellows tomorrow because I am in Oslo
• set up some things for the pkg-remote team, which is the new umbrella for greate Debian remote desktop experience, needed by Debian Edu among others

Holger Levsen worked on

• this report
• getting icinga2 back into stretch
• filed #845765 RM: nagios3 -- ROM; unfixed security uploads, no maintainer upload since 2 years
• mentoring people
• discussed some unexplained changes in src:debian-edu and made sure we get a useful debian/changelog entry
• filed #845760 and #845762 against src:blends-dev
• update wiki status pages
• create sitesummary.git pkg testing job
• uploaded sitesummary 0.1.26
• uploaded debian-edu 1.915
• filed #846002 "blends-tasks must be priority:standard and not make a mess out of tasksel menu"
• filed #846003 "debian-cd: please provide different flavor/spins of netinst images"
• filed #846005 "debian-cd: please provide flavor/spin netinst image with blends-tasks installed"
• filed #846006 "debian-cd: please provide flavor/spin netinst image for Debian Edu"
• retitled and updated #474745: "debian-edu-config: please dont enable non-free by default"
• retitled #588510 rename thin-client-server profile to ltsp-server-profile (=found the name !)
• finally, uploaded debian-edu-doc 1.912~20161129

Mike Gabriel was sick and couldnt come to Oslo and worked at home instead:

• smarty3 3.1.30-1 -> unstable
• smarty-gettext 1.5.0-1 -> unstable, split up the plugin from tsmarty2c script. This avoids php-cli being pulled in when the plugin is needed only
• smarty-lexer 3.1.30+dfsg1-1 -> unstable
• argonaut 0.9.8-1 -> unstable (not so much Edu related)
• fusiondirectory 1.0.17-1 -> unstable (not so much Edu related)
• atril 1.16.1-1 -> unstable
• mate-themes 3.22.4-1 -> unstable

Thanks to the Debian sprints programm and our sponsors for supporting the travel of Wolfgang, Dominik, Phil and myself! Mike opted out from reimbursement as he couldn't travel due to sickness.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday December 11 and Saturday December 17 2016: Reproducible builds world summit The 2nd Reproducible Builds World Summit was held in Berlin, Germany on December 13th-15th. The event was a great success with enthusiastic participation from an extremely diverse number of projects. Many thanks to our sponsors for making this event possible! Whilst there is an in-depth report forthcoming, the Guix project have already released their own report. Media coverage

• ArsTechnica: "How to make Linux more trustworthy"

Reproducible work in other projects

• Guix: Reproducible builds: a means to an end.
• Ducible, a tool to make Windows builds reproducible.
• FreeBSD now has an option to eliminate kernel build metadata (Ed Maste).
• John Darrington has been working on a patch to Gettext.

Documentation update A large number of revisions were made to the website during the summit, including re-structuring existing content and creating a concrete plan to move the wiki content to the website:

• Ulrike Uhlig:
  • Add another FreeBSD talk and remove a trailing comma
  • Add talk about RB in FreeBSD
  • Create separate page for talks and resources.
  • Add FreeBSD contact information
  • Add contact to Tails project
• Clemens Lang:
  • docs/buy_in: Document improved dev speed
  • docs/buy_in: Document easier build sys refactoring
  • docs/buy_in: Document binary diff advantages
  • docs/buy_in: Document QA advantages
• Holger Levsen:
  • Add group photo
• Chris Lamb:
  • Add trydiffoscope to tools.
  • Add reprotest to tools.
  • Add some talks.
  • Streamline design on mobile browsers. (many commits)
• Ludovic Court s:
  • Add links for Guix.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Add contact information for Debian
• Valerie Young started to work on an FAQ, which is currently on a seperate git branch.

Elsewhere in Debian

• Chris Lamb submitted a patch for dak to preserve .buildinfo files on the local ftp-master filesystem. This is a temporary measure to prevent some "historical" data loss; the files are currently being silently discarded.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #847768 filed against hoichess.
• #848136 filed against python-setuptools.

Daniel Shahaf:

• #848297 filed against gst-plugins-bad1.0.

Reiner Herrmann:

• #848280 filed against qtltools.
• #848292 filed against fastqtl.
• #848295 filed against openni-sensor-primesense.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 9 package reviews have been added, 19 have been updated and 17 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been added:

• python_setuptools_install_files_txt toolchain issue
• disorderfs_sensitive
• translations_missing_in_desktop_files

One issue type was updated:

• Add fix for randomness_in_python_setuptools_install_files_txt toolchain issue.

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

• Chris Lamb (9)

diffoscope development

• Brett Smith:
  • Ensure set_locale fixture runs before all tests.
  • set_locale should call tzset. (Closes: #848249)
• Chris Lamb:
  • Improve documentation of new tests/conftest.py file.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • presenters/html: namespace the diffoscope CSS class
  • debian/control: Add trailing comma
• Reiner Herrmann:
  • Improved support for Android apk files
  • Fix wording in comment
• Baptiste Daroussin:
  • Improve portability by not relying on /dev/fd
  • comparators/directory: add compatibily with FreeBSD's getfacl

reprotest development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Use "generated binaries" over "produced binaries"; we use this elsewhere.

trydiffoscope development

• trydiffoscope was split from the main diffoscope repository by Chris Lamb so that the two projects can be released independently and so that trydiffoscope can more easily be available on PyPI. It also simplifies the diffoscope packaging.
• trydiffoscope 64 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and via email.

The Isenkram system I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still going strong. It is a system to look up the hardware present on or connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian packages. It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or using the user space daemon in the isenkram package. The latter will notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to install to get the dongle working. It will even provide a button to click on to ask packagekit to install the packages. Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:

% isenkram-lookup  
bluez
cheese
ethtool
fprintd
fprintd-demo
gkrellm-thinkbat
hdapsd
libpam-fprintd
pidgin-blinklight
thinkfan
tlp
tp-smapi-dkms
tp-smapi-source
tpb
%

It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because I have all the firmware my machine need:

% /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
%

The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250 packages in Debian with udev rules. These seem like good candidates to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found several that should be proposed by isenkram. I have not had time to check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram. 11 of these packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram. These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment. The marked packages are also announcing their hardware support using AppStream, for everyone to use: air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll, array-info, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter, bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, brltty, broadcom-sta-dkms, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord, colorhug-client, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux, dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd, fprintd-demo, galileo, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2, gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus, gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip, ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup, libnxt, libpam-fprintd, lomoco, madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel, nbc, nqc, nut-hal-drivers, ola, open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils, pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix, pymissile, python-nxt, qlandkartegt, qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl, soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools, t2n, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms, tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking, virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse, xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl, xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and zd1211-firmware If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package maintainer to add AppStream metadata according to the guidelines to provide the information for everyone. In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream. Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet card. See bug #838735 for the details. I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon. In the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.

This article might be perceived as a blatant ripoff of this Linux kernel document, but, on the contrary, it s intended as add-on, showing how to do a subtree merge (the multi-project merge strategy that s actually doable in a heterogenous group of developers, as opposed to subprojects, which many just can t wrap their heads around) with contemporary git ( stupid content tracker ). Furthermore, the commands are reformatted to be easier to copy/paste.

To summarise: you re on the top level of a checkout of the project into which the other project (Bproject) is to be merged. We wish to merge the top level of Bproject s master branch as (newly created) subdirectory dir-B under the current project s top level.

(mind the trailing slash after dir-B/ on the read-tree command!) Besides reformatting, the use of --allow-unrelated-histories recently became necessary. --no-tags is also usually what you want, because tags are not namespaced like branches.

Another command you might find relevant is how to clean up orphaned remote branches:

This command locally deletes all remote branches (those named origin/foo ) that have been deleted on the remote side. Update: Natureshadow wishes you to know that there is such a command as git subtree which can do similar things to the subtree merge strategy explained above, and several more related things. It does, however, need the pr fix on every subsequent pull.

[2016-12-19: some additions] This is another little issue from Python packaging for Debian which I came across lately packaging the compressed NumPy based data container Bcolz. Upstream uses setuptools-scm to determine the software s version during build time from the source code management environment the code is in. This method is convenient for the upstream development because with that the version number doesn t need to be hard-coded, and often people just forget to update that (and other version carrying files like doc/conf.py) when a new version of a project is released. python-setuptools just needs to be added to the setup.py to do its job, and in Bcolz the code goes like this:

setup(
    name="bcolz",
    use_scm_version= 
        'version_scheme': 'guess-next-dev',
        'local_scheme': 'dirty-tag',
        'write_to': 'bcolz/version.py'

The file the version number is written to is bcolz/version.py. This file isn t in the upstream code revision nor in the tarball which was released by the upstream developers, it s always generated during build time. In Debian there is an error if you try to build a package from a source tree which contains files which aren t to be found in the corresponding tarball, like cruft from a previous build, or if any files have changed therefore every new package should be test build also twice in a row in a non-chroot environment. Generally there a two ways to solve this, either you add cruft to debian/clean, or you add the file resp. a matching file pattern to extend-diff-ignore in debian/source/options. Which method is the better one could be discussed, I m generally using the clean option if something isn t in the upstream tarball, and the source/options solution if something is already in the upstream tarball, but gets changed during a build. This is related to your preferred Git procedures, if you remove a file which is in the upstream tarball these removals have to be checked in separately, and that means everytime a new upstream tarball is released that is not very convenient. Another option which is available is to strip certain files from the upstream tarball by putting them on the Files-Excluded in deb/copyright. By the way, the same complex applies to egg-info/: that folder is shipped or is not shipped in the upstream tarball, and files in that folder get changed during build. When the source code is put into a Git environment for Debian packaging, there could be problems with the version number setuptools-scm comes up with. This setuptools extension gets the recent version from the latest Git tag when there is a version number to be found, and that s all right. In Git environments for Debian packaging (like e.g. of the Debian Science group, the Python groups and the others) that is available, like the commonly used upstream tags have that¹. The problem is, sometimes the upstream version which Debian has² doesn t match the original upstream version number which is wanted for version in bcolz/version.py. For example, the suffix +ds is used if the upstream tarball has been stripped from prebuild files or embedded convenience shipments (like it s the case with the Bcolz package where c-blosc/ has been stripped because that s build for another package), of the suffix +dfsg shows that non-DFSG free software has been removed (which can t be distributed through the main archive section). For example, the version string for Bcolz which is found after the build currently (1.1.0+ds1-1) is 1.1.0+ds1:

# coding: utf-8
# file generated by setuptools_scm
# don't change, don't track in version control
version = '1.1.0+ds1'

But that s not wanted because this version never has been released, but appears everywhere:

$ pip list   grep bcolz
bcolz (1.1.0+ds1)
$ python3 -c 'import bcolz; bcolz.print_versions()'
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
bcolz version:     1.1.0+ds1

There are several different ways how to fix this. The one with the crowbar (like said in German) is to patch use_scm_version out from setup.py, but if you don t provide any version in exchange the version number which is used by Setuptools then is 0.0.0. The upstream version could be hard-coded into the patch, but then again it has not to be forgotten to update it manually by the maintainer, which is not very convenient. Plus, setup.py could change and the patch then might need to be unfuzzed, thus more work. Bad. A patch could be spared by manipulating and exporting the SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION environment variable for setuptools-scm in debian/rules, which is sometimes used when I see the returns for that string on Debian Code Search. But how to prevent to hard code the version number, here? The dpkg-dev package (pulled by build-essential) ships a Makefile snippet /usr/share/dpkg/pkg-info.mk which could be included into debian/rules. It defines several variables which are useful for packaging, like DEB_SOURCE contains the source package name, they are extracted from debian/changelog. But, DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM which is available through that puts out the upstream version without epoch and Debian revision, but it s not getting any finer grained out of the box. For a custom fix, a regular expression which removes the +... extensions (if present) from the bare upstream version string would be s/\+[^+]*//:

$ echo "1.1.0+ds1"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0
$ echo "1.1.0"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0
$ echo "1.1.0+dfsg12"   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//'
1.1.0

With that, a custom variable VERSION_UPSTREAM could be set on the top of DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM (from pkg-info.mk) in debian/rules:

include /usr/share/dpkg/pkg-info.mk
VERSION_UPSTREAM = $(shell echo '$(DEB_VERSION_UPSTREAM)'   sed -e 's/\+[^+]*//')
export SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION = $(VERSION_UPSTREAM)

Bam, that works (see the commit here):

# coding: utf-8
# file generated by setuptools_scm
# don't change, don't track in version control
version = '1.1.0'

An addition, I ve seen that dh-python also takes care of SETUPTOOLS_SCM_PRETEND_VERSION since 2.20160609. The environment variable is set by the Debhelper build system if python 3, -setuptools-scm is among the build-dependencies in debian/control. The Perl code for that is in dh/pybuild.pm. I think the version number string above comes from dh-python s pretended version, and not from any of the Git tags (which are currently debian/1.1.0+ds1-1 and upstream/1.1.0+ds1).

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

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.600.1.0 (2016-12-16)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.600.1 (Coup d'Etat Deluxe)
  • more accurate eigs_sym() and eigs_gen()
  • expanded floor(), ceil(), round(), trunc(), sign() to handle sparse matrices
  • added arg(), atan2(), hypot()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.500.1.0 (2016-11-11)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.500.1
• Small improvement to return value treatment
• The sample.h extension was updated to the newer Armadillo interface. (Closes #111)

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

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

The owncloud package was removed from Debian unstable and testing. I am thus now looking for an alternative. Unfortunately, finding such replacement seems to be harder than I initially thought, even though I only use a very small subset of what owncloud provides. What I require is some software which allows me to:

1. upload a directory of files of any type to my server (no "distributed" filesharing where I have to stay online with my laptop)
2. share the content of that directory via HTTP (no requirement to install any additional software other than a web browser)
3. let the share-links be private (no possibility to infer the location of other shares)
4. allow users to browse that directory (image thumbnails or a photo gallery would be nice)
5. allow me to allow anonymous users to upload their own content into that directory (also only requiring their web browser)
6. already in Debian or easy to package and maintain due to low complexity (I don't have enough time to become the next "owncloud maintainer")

I thought this was a pretty simple task to solve but I am unable to find any software that fits above criteria. The below table shows the result of my research of what's currently available. The columns mark whether the respective software fulfills one of the six criteria from above.

Software	1	2	3	4	5	6
owncloud
sparkleshare
dvcs-autosync
git annex assistant
syncthing
pydio
seafile
sandstorm.io
ipfs
bozon
droppy

Pydio, seafile and sandstorm.io look promising but they seem to be beasts similar in complexity to owncloud as they bring features like version tracking, office integration, wikis, synchronization across multiple devices or online editing of files which are features that I do not need. I would already be very happy if there was a script which would make it easy to create a hard-to-guess symlink to a directory with data tracked by git annex under my www-root and then generate some static HTML to provide a thumbnails view or a photo gallery. Unfortunately, even that solution would not be sufficient as it would still disallow public upload by anybody whom I would give the link to... If you know some software that meets my criteria or would like to submit corrections to above table, please shoot an email to josch@debian.org. Thanks!

I dunno if people heard or didn t hear about the demonetisation of INR 500 and INR 1000 which happened in India on 8th November 2016 with new currency designed in India of INR 2000 and INR 500. What they did was from that moment onwards, paper currency of INR 500 and INR 1000 notes were declared invalid except few places (Government Hospitals, Petrol Pumps, Booking of Air and Train tickets) . The reasons given were as a. End of corruption There is/was suspicion that there are people who have loads of unaccounted wealth which they keep in the form of Cash in hand, b. Charge against fake/duplicate currency There is/was suspicion that quite a bit of the money esp, high value notes such as INR 500 and INR 1000, so having made them illegal, people had to hand over cash to banks and fake money would go outside the system. c. Terror funding This is related with the above point. There is a popular theory/myth/fact that terrorists use fake money to buy people, arms and ammunition while further devaluing the value of INR against dollar and basket of other high-value currencies that Indian currency follows/bases itself on. Each of these theories/myths/facts has been contested. Every day we are seeing and reading reports of people being caught with new currency in absurd numbers while RBI , our central bank and Lender of Last Resort has had to play multiple roles such as policing along with the country s Income Tax Department as well as pumping in new notes of the NEW INR 2000/- and INR 500/- into ATM s and Bank branches around the country. Now while the above may seem to be reasonable, there have been multiple factors which has made the whole exercise less effective while implementing a. Banking reach While India does and can boast of somewhat good indicators of banking reach . But Quarter of these accounts were opened only in the last couple of years under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhana Yojana . There are quite a few limitations of such accounts. It is a good scheme as if you develop a good rapport with a bank and show good credit/debit understanding then there is possibility to move to normal full-fledged bank account. Almost all of these accounts had zero-balances till the demonetization move. Many of these accounts are suspected to have been conduits to convert black money to white as the Govt. had said it will not scrutinize small savings bank accounts. Also many bank accounts historically have laid dormant over the years. One of my first jobs was of a data entry operator in a bank and I used to see hundreds of bank accounts lying dormant for years together. This was in bank digitization in early 90s. Small Savings accounts would not be scrutinized if they bring upto INR 250000 while Jan Dhan accounts have an upper limit of only INR 50000 . Even then, it has lead to a huge surge in balances specifically in Zero balances account. What begs the question is if it is their hard-earned money why hadn t they deposited money before 8th November 2016. While I can t speak about them, I can certainly speak about myself. I hardly keep at the most INR INR 5/10K for medical emergencies in-house for number of years. Unless you are a businessman who has need of cash or have some function, nobody that I know would keep such amounts in their homes, simply for the possibility of theft in homes. So how did such people who are not able to open a full-fledged saving account get access to such large amounts? In most public sector banks, to have a full-fledged savings account the only requirements are a. Have INR 500 to 1000 as balance at all times.
b. Have permanent identity and residential proof
c. Two photographs
d. 2-3 people who are account holders who can act as guarantor. Of the above, b. and d. are probably sticking points for most migrants, while d. may be a sticking point for labourers, craftsman etc. hence the need for that specific scheme. Which leads to the natural suspicion that they may have been white-washing somebody s untaxed, unaccounted money which is being put into bank and made into legitimate white money. People do not have to file an Income Tax Return (ITR) unless they earn more than 250,000 in a single financial year. One good off-shot of the scheme though is the transparency gained about Bank Mitras b. Number of banks, quality of Bank services, number of people per bank at least in Nationalized Banks leaves much to be desired. We can t even try to compare with other BRIC countries, leave alone Germany. One another positive off-shoot has been the introduction of Mobile ATM Vans around the country. I had experienced such vans in Mumbai since ages, but not anywhere else. I do hope that both Bank Mitras as well as such Van Mobile ATMs happen more. There are huge swathes of people who are currently unbanked. Getting them into the banking infrastructure, getting them to *think* about taking rational financial decisions, i.e. saving and spending, different types of saving etc. should not make citizens and the banking systems more productive and efficient, but hopefully improves our GDP and make it more resilient to any outside financial shocks. c. Many bank websites have everything in English. That norm needs to change. I do have few queries though, one of the countries who is supposed to be a prominent supporter and user of cashless society is supposed to be Canada. Could any Canadians (also because debconf is going to happen in Canada in 2017) share how and if they had seen the Canadian banking system evolve in their country ? Also how much of Canada s economy is cashless i.e used to Electronic Money Transfer and other means (but not cash) and how much is cash, more in day-to-day usage and transactions. I am trying to get people s perspective rather than some website which may serve only raw numbers, although even that would be appreciable. Also what, if any charges/commission are paid to a Canadian bank for paying via card/electronic money transfer. I ask as India has reduced charges overall to 1% from 2% for making transactions upto INR 2000 in a day. There has also been recent talk of plastic notes instead of paper currency. Plastic notes are supposed to be more copy-proof and also will work for much longer time. They will not soil as paper notes do. How have countries been looking at Plastic currencies. I do suspect there would be issues while destroying plastic money vis-a-vis paper currencies. A sort of interesting discussion that I had with Bernelle before venturing into South Africa was asking her about monetary transactions in SA. She had replied that the highest denomination notes was 200 ZAR which is roughly equal to ( ZAR 200 x 5 = INR 1000) . What is/was interesting that Bernelle told me to be careful and as far as possible not to show 200 ZAR note, whereas in India, even the cheapest worker I have met, they have seen and used INR 1000 note. The context of the discussion was being safe in South Africa and doing transactions with people around as to what works. It would be curiouser to know how things work in Canada for instance ? Also has Canada or any other country have experimented with plastic notes. If yes, how has the experience been ? I would have to say this is in no way a definitive guide of the different impressions and repercussion that the decision and the way it s playing out even now. Another thing, while researching for the article there were lots of interesting knowledge, for e.g. the Big Mac Index and it s limitations which I didn t know how to integrate into the decision and Policy taken. I also came to know/saw that lots of Policy initiatives being taken by the current (NDA)Government is similar to initiatives taken elsewhere in the world.. Whether the Policy would be fruitful in getting the desired outcome or would it lead to more chaos and down-turn will know in next quarter only. It would be nice and interesting if people have observed something similar in their country s economic policies as well.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Bank Mitra, #Bank reach, #blackmoney, #debconf17, #Demonetisation, #fake currencies, #full-fledged savings account, #Jan Dhan scheme, #Moile ATM Van, #Plastic money, #Public Sector Banks (PSB), #Reserve Bank of India, Big Mac Index

(As usual, Julien finished this release a bit back, and then I got busy with life stuff and haven't gotten the announcement out.) This is a bug-fix and minor feature release over INN 2.6.0. The biggest change is adding support for the new COMPRESS extension. It also fixes various bugs around state changes when negotiating various compression or integrity layers and fixes some issues with nnrpd's validation of newly-posted messages. (Messages with Received and Posted headers are no longer rejected; messages with all-whitespace headers now are.) This release also supports OpenSSL 1.1.0 and fixes an nntpsend bug under systemd. As always, thanks to Julien LIE for preparing this release and doing most of the maintenance work on INN! You can get the latest version from the official ISC download page or from my personal INN pages. The latter also has links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation.

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

Examples

Simple Parsing and Arithmetic

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

Vectorised

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

Use with zoo

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

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

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

Installation The package is not yet on CRAN. Until it gets there, or to install the development versions, it can also be installed via a standard

install.packages("RcppCCTZ")   # need 0.1.0 or later
remotes::install_github("eddelbuettel/nanotime")  

If you prefer install.packages() (as I do), use the version from the ghrr drat:

install.packages("drat")       # easier repo access + creation
drat:::add("ghrr")             # make it known
install.packages("nanotime")   # install it

If and when it gets to CRAN you will be able to do

install.packages("nanotime")

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

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

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In October, about 150 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 4 hours (out of 11 hours allocated, thus keeping 7 extra hours for December).
• Balint Reczey did 11 hours.
• Ben Hutchings did 9 hours (out of 11 hours allocated, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
• Brian May did 11 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 11 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 11 hours.
• Guido G nther did 8 hours.
• Hugo Lefeuvre did 11 hours.
• Jonas Meurer did 12.75 hours (out of 11 hours allocated + 1.75 hours remaining).
• Markus Koschany did 11 hours.
• Ola Lundqvist did 11.75 hours (out of 11 hours allocated + 0.75 hours remaining).
• Rapha l Hertzog did 11 hours.
• Roberto C. Sanchez did 11 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 11 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours did not change this month and in fact we haven t had any new sponsor since September. We still need a couple of supplementary sponsors to reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. The security tracker currently lists 40 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 36. We don t seem to really catch up the small backlog. The reasons are not clear but I noticed that there are a few packages that take a lot of time due to the number of issues found with fuzzers. We also handle many issues that the security team ends up classifying as not worth an update because we add the package to dla-needed.txt before the security team has done its review and nobody checks afterwards. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 14 months)
• GitHub (for 5 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 30 months)
• Blablacar (for 29 months)
• Linode LLC (for 19 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 8 months)
• Plat Home (for 8 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 29 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 29 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 27 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 23 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 21 months)
• Dalenys (for 20 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 15 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 15 months)
• Sonus Networks (for 9 months)
• UR Communications BV (for 3 months)
• maxcluster GmbH (for 3 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 30 months)
• Evolix (for 30 months)
• Offensive Security (for 30 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 30 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 29 months)
• MyTux (for 29 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 27 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 26 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 25 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 24 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 24 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 23 months)
• NUMLOG (for 23 months)
• WinGo AG (for 22 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 19 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 16 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 14 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 11 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 6 months)
• Quarantainenet BV (for 6 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 5 months)
• RHX Srl (for 3 months)

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Bjarni R nar, the author of Mailpile released a blog about recent blogs disparaging OpenPGP. It's a good read. There's one reason to support OpenPGP missing from the blog: OpenPGP protects you if your mail server is hacked. I'm sure that Debbie Wasserman Schultz wishes she had been using OpenPGP. Having said all of this... OpenPGP didn't make my recent list of security tips. That ommission is for two reasons:

• I've never trusted my phone enough to store my OpenPGP keys on it. However, now that I am encrypting my data partition on the phone, should I re-consider? I use the K-9 email client which has had OpenPGP support for years, should I recommend that other people use K-9 and upload their keys to their phones? Suggesting that people use OpenPGP without the ability to use it on your phone seems like an empty suggestion. What about OpenPGP on the iPhone?
• I'm waiting for Mailiple 1.0 to be released so I have a viable suggestion for how people can start using encryption now on their desktops. The complexity of using Thunderbird with Enigmail (and the uncertain future of Thunderbird) make it a hard sell. Should I re-consider? What about Mailvelope? Should I be encouraging people to use Mailvelope with their Gmail, etc. accounts?

Feed2tweet 0.8, a self-hosted Python app to automatically post RSS feeds to the Twitter social network, was released this December, 14th. With this release Feed2tweet now smartly manages the hashtags, adding as much as possible given the size of the tweet. Also 2 new options are available :

• populate-cache to retrieve the last entries of the RSS feeds and store them in the local cache file without posting them on Twitter
• rss-sections to display available sections in the RSS feed, allowing to use these section names in your tweet format (see the official documentation for more details)

Feed2tweet 0.8 is already in production for Le Journal du hacker, a French-speaking Hacker News-like website, LinuxJobs.fr, a French-speaking job board and this very blog.

• Feed2tweet on Github (would be awesome if you star it on Github if you use/like it)
• Official documentation for Retweet

What s the purpose of Feed2tweet? Some online services offer to convert your RSS entries into Twitter posts. Theses services are usually not reliable, slow and don t respect your privacy. Feed2tweet is Python self-hosted app, the source code is easy to read and you can enjoy the official documentation online with lots of examples. Twitter Out Of The Browser Have a look at my Github account for my other Twitter automation tools:

• Retweet , retweet all (or using some filters) tweets from a Twitter account to another one to spread content.
• db2twitter, get data from SQL database (several supported), build tweets and send them to Twitter
• Twitterwatch, monitor the activity of your Twitter timeline and warn you if no new tweet appears

What about you? Do you use tools to automate the management of your Twitter account? Feel free to give me feedback in the comments below.