Search Results: "ema"

I will join Lars and Tincho in stating this, and presenting a version contrary to what Norbert portraits. I am very glad and very proud that the community I am most involved in, the Debian project, has kept its core identity over the years, at least for the slightly-over-a-decade I have been involved in it. And I am very glad and very proud that being less aggressive, more welcoming and in general more respectful to each other does not counter this. When I joined Debian, part of the mantra chants we had is that in order to join a Free Software project you had to grow a thick skin, as sooner or later we'd all be exposed to flamefests. But, yes, the median age of the DD was way lower back then I don't have the data at hand, but IIRC I have always been close to our median. Which means we are all growing old and grumpy. But old and wiser. A very successful, important and dear subproject to many of us is the Debian Women Project. Its original aim was, as the name shows, to try to reduce the imbalance between men and women participants in Debian IIRC back in 2004 we had 3 female DDs, and >950 male DDs. Soon, the project started morphing into pushing all of Debian to be less hostile, more open to contributions from any- and everyone (as today our diversity statement reads). And yes, we are still a long, long, long way from reaching equality. But we have done great steps. And not just WRT women, but all of the different minorities, as well as to diverging opinions within our community. Many people don't enjoy us abiding by a code of conduct; I also find it irritating sometimes to have to abide by certain codes if we mostly know each other and know we won't be offended by a given comment... Or will we? So, being more open and more welcoming also means being more civil. I cannot get myself to agree with Linus' quote, when he says that respect is not just given to everybody but must be earned. We should always start, and I enjoy feeling that in Debian this is becoming the norm, by granting respect to everybody And not losing it, even if things get out of hand. Thick skins are not good for communication.

Much has been written around the internet about this geeky kernel maintainer Sarah Sharp who left kernel development. I have now spent two hours reading through lkml posts, and want to summarize a few mails from the long thread, since most of the usual news sites just rewrap the original blog of hers without adding any background. darth-cookie

The whole thread evolved out call for stable kernel review by Greg Kroah-Hartman where he complained about too many patches that are not actually in rc1 before going into stable:

<rant>
  I'm sitting on top of over 170 more patches that have been marked for
  the stable releases right now that are not included in this set of
  releases.  The fact that there are this many patches for stable stuff
  that are waiting to be merged through the main -rc1 merge window cycle
  is worrying to me.
  [...]

from where it developed into a typical Linus rant on people flagging crap for stable, followed by some jokes:

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 8:47 AM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
> I tend to hold things off after -rc4 because you scare me more than Greg
> does ;-)

Have you guys *seen* Greg? The guy is a freakish giant. He *should*
scare you. He might squish you without ever even noticing.

              Linus

and Ingo Molnar giving advice to Greg KH:

So Greg, if you want it all to change, create some _real_ threat: be frank 
with contributors and sometimes swear a bit. That will cut your mailqueue 
in half, promise!

with Greg KH taking a funny position in answering:

Ok, I'll channel my "inner Linus" and take a cue from my kids and start
swearing more.

Up to now a pretty decent and normal thread with some jokes and poking, nobody minded, and reading through it I had a good time. The thread continues with a discussion on requirements what to submit to stable, and some side threads on particular commits. And then, out of the blue, Social Justice Warrior (SJW) Sarah Sharp pops in with a very important contribution:

Seriously, guys?  Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable?
Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence.
Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.
 
Not *fucking* cool.  Violence, whether it be physical intimidation,
verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable.  Keep it professional
on the mailing lists.
 
Let's discuss this at Kernel Summit where we can at least yell at each
other in person.  Yeah, just try yelling at me about this.  I'll roar
right back, louder, for all the people who lose their voice when they
get yelled at by top maintainers.  I won't be the nice girl anymore.

Onto which Linus answers in a great way:

That's the spirit.
 
Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release
your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me.
 
Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies.

On goes Sarah, gearing up in her SJW mode and starting to rant:

However, I am serious about this.  Linus, you're one of the worst
offenders when it comes to verbally abusing people and publicly tearing
their emotions apart.
 
http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=135628421403144&w=2
http://marc.info/?l=linux-acpi&m=136157944603147&w=2
 
I'm not going to put up with that shit any more.

Linus himself made clear what he thinks of her:

Trust me, there's a really easy way for me to curse at people: if you
are a maintainer, and you make excuses for your bugs rather than
trying to fix them, I will curse at *YOU*.
 
Because then the problem really is you.
[...]

It is easy to verify what Linus said, by reading the above two links and the answers of the maintainers, both agreed that it was their failure and were sorry. (Mauro s answer, Rafael s answer) It is just the geeky SJW that was not even attacked (who would dare to attack a woman nowadays?). The overall reaction to her by the maintainers can be exemplified by Thomas Gleixner s post:

Just for the record. I got grilled by Linus several times over the
last years and I can't remember a single instance where it was
unjustified.

What follows is a nearly endless discussion with Sarah meandering around, changing permanently her opinion what is acceptable. Linus tried to explain to her in simple words, without success, she continues to rant around. Here arguments are so weak I had nothing but good laugh:

> Sarah, that's a pretty potent argument by Linus, that "acting 
> professionally" risks replacing a raw but honest culture with a
> polished but dishonest culture - which is harmful to developing
> good technology.
> 
> That's a valid concern. What's your reply to that argument?
 
I don't feel the need to comment, because I feel it's a straw man
argument.  I feel that way because I disagree with the definition of
professionalism that people have been pushing.
 
To me, being "professional" means treating each other with respect.  I
can show emotion, express displeasure, be direct, and still show respect
for my fellow developers.
 
For example, I find the following statement to be both direct and
respectful, because it's criticizing code, not the person:
 
"This code is SHIT!  It adds new warnings and it's marked for stable
when it's clearly *crap code* that's not a bug fix.  I'm going to revert
this merge, and I expect a fix from you IMMEDIATELY."
 
The following statement is not respectful, because it targets the
person:
 
"Seriously, Maintainer.  Why are you pushing this kind of *crap* code to
me again?  Why the hell did you mark it for stable when it's clearly
not a bug fix?  Did you even try to f*cking compile this?"

Fortunately, she was immediately corrected and Ingo Molnar wrote an excellent refutation (starting another funny thread) of all her emails, statements, accusations (all of the email is a good read):

_That_ is why it might look to you as if the person was
attacked, because indeed the actions of the top level maintainer were
wrong and are criticised.
 
... and now you want to 'shut down' the discussion. With all due respect,
you started it, you have put out various heavy accusations here and elsewhere,
so you might as well take responsibility for it and let the discussion be
brought to a conclusion, wherever that may take us, compared to your initial view?

(He retracted that last statement, though I don t see a reason for it) Last but not least, let us return to her blog post, where she states herself that:

FYI, comments will be moderated by someone other than me. As this is my blog, not a
government entity, I have the right to replace any comment I feel like with 
 fart fart fart fart .

and she made lots of use of it, I counted at least 10 instances. She seems to remove or fart fart fart any comment that is not in line with her opinion. Further evidence is provided by this post on lkml. Everyone is free to have his own opinion (sorry, his/her), and I am free to form my own opinion on Sarah Sharp by just simply reading the facts. I am more than happy that one more SJW has left Linux development, as the proliferation of cleaning of speech from any personality has taken too far a grip. Coming to my home-base in Debian, unfortunately there is no one in the position and the state of mind of Linus, so we are suffering the same stupidities imposed by social justice worriers and some brainless feminists (no, don t get me wrong, these are two independent attributes. I do NOT state that feminism is brainless) that Linus and the maintainer crew was able to fend of this time. I finish with my favorite post from that thread, by Steven Rosted (from whom I also stole the above image!):

On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 18:37 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Emotions aren't bad. Quite the reverse. 
 
Spock and Dr. Sheldon Cooper strongly disagree.

Post Scriptum (after a bike ride) The last point by Linus is what I criticize most on Debian nowdays, it has become a sterilized over-governed entity, where most fun is gone. Making fun is practically forbidden, since there is the slight chance that some minority somewhere on this planet might feel hurt, and by this we are breaking the CoC. Emotions are restricted to the Happy happy how nice we are and how good we are level of US and also Japanese self-reenforcement society. Post Post Scriptum I just read Sarah Sharp s post on What makes a good community? , and without giving a full account or review, I am just pi**ed by the usage of the word microaggressions I can only recommend everyone to read this article and this article to get a feeling how bs the idea of microaggressions has taken over academia and obviously not only academia. Post³ Scriptum I am happy to see Lars Wirzenius, Gunnar Wolf, and Mart n Ferrari opposing my view. I agree with them that my comments concerning Debian are not mainstream in Debian something that is not very surprising, though, and I think it is great that they have fun in Debian, like many other contributors. Post⁴ Scriptum Although nobody will read this, here is a great response from a female developer:

[...] To Linus: You're a hero to many of us. Don't change. Please. You DO
NOT need to take time away from doing code to grow a pair of breasts
and judge people's emotional states: [...]

Nothing to add here!

Today I want to talk a bit about some cool features of systemd, the default Debian init system since the release of Jessie. Ubuntu has also adopted systemd in 15.04, meaning that you are going to find it literally everywhere.

Logging The component responsible for logging in systemd is called journal. It collects and stores logs in a structured, indexed journal (hence the name). The journal can replace traditional syslog daemons such as rsyslog and syslog-ng, or work together with them. By default Debian keeps on using rsyslog, but if you don't need to ship logs to a centralized server (or do other fancy things) it is possible to stop using rsyslog right now and rely on systemd-journal instead. The obvious question is: why would anybody use a binary format for logs instead of a bunch of tried and true plain-text files? As it turns out, there are quite a lot of good reasons to do so. The killer features of systemd-journald for me are:

Index tons of logs while being able to search with good performance: O(log(n)) instead of O(n) which is what you get with text files
No need to worry about log rotation anymore, in any shape or form

The last point in particular is really critical in my opinion. Traditional log rotation implementations rely on cron jobs to check how much disk space is used by logs, compressing/removing old files. Log rotation is usually: 1) annoying to configure; 2) hard to get right; 3) prone to DoS attacks. With journald, there is pretty much nothing to configure. Log rotation is built into the daemon disk space allocation logic itself. This also allows to avoid vulnerability windows due to time-based rotation, which is what you get with logrotate and friends. Enough high-level discussions though, here is how to use the journal! Check if you already have the directory /var/log/journal, otherwise create it (as root). Then restart systemd-journald as follows: sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald You can get all messages produced since the last boot with journalctl -b. All messages produced today can get extracted using journalctl --since=today. Want to get all logs related to ssh? Try with journalctl _SYSTEMD_UNIT=ssh.service. There are many more filtering options available, you can read all about them with man journalctl. journald's configuration file is /etc/systemd/journald.conf. Two of the most interesting options are SystemMaxUse and SystemKeepFree, which can be used to change the amount of disk space dedicated to logging. They default to 10% and 15% of the /var filesystem respectively. Here is a little cheatsheet:

journalctl -b                # Show all messages since last boot
journalctl -f                # Tail your logs
journalctl --since=yesterday # Show all messages produced since yesterday
journalctl -pcrit            # Filter messages by priority
journalctl /bin/su           # Filter messages by program
journalctl --disk-usage      # The amount of space in use for journaling

Further reading:

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemctl-journal.html
journalctl(1)
journald.conf(5)
systemd-journald(8)

Containers A relatively little known component of systemd is systemd-nspawn. It is a small, straightforward container manager. If you don't already have a chroot somewhere, here is how to create a basic Debian Jessie chroot under /srv/chroots/jessie:

$ debootstrap jessie /srv/chroots/jessie http://http.debian.net/debian/

With systemd-nspawn you can easily run a shell inside the chroot:

$ sudo systemd-nspawn -D /srv/chroots/jessie
Spawning container jessie on /srv/chroots/jessie.
Press ^] three times within 1s to kill container.
/etc/localtime is not a symlink, not updating container timezone.
root@jessie:~#

Done. Everything works out of the box: no need for you to mount /dev, /run and friends, systemd-nspawn took care of that. Networking also works. If you want to actually boot the system, just add the -b switch to the previous command:

$ sudo systemd-nspawn -b -D /srv/chroots/jessie
Spawning container jessie on /srv/chroots/jessie.
Press ^] three times within 1s to kill container.
/etc/localtime is not a symlink, not updating container timezone.
systemd 215 running in system mode. (+PAM +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA +SYSVINIT +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +ACL +XZ -SECCOMP -APPARMOR)
Detected virtualization 'systemd-nspawn'.
Detected architecture 'x86-64'.
Welcome to Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid!
Set hostname to <orion>.
[  OK  ] Reached target Remote File Systems (Pre).
[  OK  ] Reached target Encrypted Volumes.
[  OK  ] Reached target Paths.
[  OK  ] Reached target Swap.
[  OK  ] Created slice Root Slice.
[  OK  ] Created slice User and Session Slice.
[  OK  ] Listening on /dev/initctl Compatibility Named Pipe.
[  OK  ] Listening on Delayed Shutdown Socket.
[  OK  ] Listening on Journal Socket (/dev/log).
[  OK  ] Listening on Journal Socket.
[  OK  ] Created slice System Slice.
[  OK  ] Created slice system-getty.slice.
[  OK  ] Listening on Syslog Socket.
         Mounting POSIX Message Queue File System...
         Mounting Huge Pages File System...
         Mounting FUSE Control File System...
         Starting Copy rules generated while the root was ro...
         Starting Journal Service...
[  OK  ] Started Journal Service.
[  OK  ] Reached target Slices.
         Starting Remount Root and Kernel File Systems...
[  OK  ] Mounted Huge Pages File System.
[  OK  ] Mounted POSIX Message Queue File System.
[  OK  ] Mounted FUSE Control File System.
[  OK  ] Started Copy rules generated while the root was ro.
[  OK  ] Started Remount Root and Kernel File Systems.
         Starting Load/Save Random Seed...
[  OK  ] Reached target Local File Systems (Pre).
[  OK  ] Reached target Local File Systems.
         Starting Create Volatile Files and Directories...
[  OK  ] Reached target Remote File Systems.
         Starting Trigger Flushing of Journal to Persistent Storage...
[  OK  ] Started Load/Save Random Seed.
         Starting LSB: Raise network interfaces....
[  OK  ] Started Create Volatile Files and Directories.
         Starting Update UTMP about System Boot/Shutdown...
[  OK  ] Started Trigger Flushing of Journal to Persistent Storage.
[  OK  ] Started Update UTMP about System Boot/Shutdown.
[  OK  ] Started LSB: Raise network interfaces..
[  OK  ] Reached target Network.
[  OK  ] Reached target Network is Online.
[  OK  ] Reached target System Initialization.
[  OK  ] Listening on D-Bus System Message Bus Socket.
[  OK  ] Reached target Sockets.
[  OK  ] Reached target Timers.
[  OK  ] Reached target Basic System.
         Starting /etc/rc.local Compatibility...
         Starting Login Service...
         Starting LSB: Regular background program processing daemon...
         Starting D-Bus System Message Bus...
[  OK  ] Started D-Bus System Message Bus.
         Starting System Logging Service...
[  OK  ] Started System Logging Service.
         Starting Permit User Sessions...
[  OK  ] Started /etc/rc.local Compatibility.
[  OK  ] Started LSB: Regular background program processing daemon.
         Starting Cleanup of Temporary Directories...
[  OK  ] Started Permit User Sessions.
         Starting Console Getty...
[  OK  ] Started Console Getty.
[  OK  ] Reached target Login Prompts.
[  OK  ] Started Login Service.
[  OK  ] Reached target Multi-User System.
[  OK  ] Reached target Graphical Interface.
         Starting Update UTMP about System Runlevel Changes...
[  OK  ] Started Cleanup of Temporary Directories.
[  OK  ] Started Update UTMP about System Runlevel Changes.
Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid orion console
orion login:

That's it! Just one command to start a shell in your chroot or boot the container, again zero configuration needed. Finally, systemd provides a command called machinectl that allows you to introspect and control your container:

$ sudo machinectl status jessie
jessie
           Since: Wed 2015-10-07 11:22:56 CEST; 55min ago
          Leader: 32468 (systemd)
         Service: nspawn; class container
            Root: /srv/chroots/jessie
         Address: fe80::8e70:5aff:fe81:2290
                  192.168.122.1
                  192.168.1.13
              OS: Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid
            Unit: machine-jessie.scope
                   32468 /lib/systemd/systemd
                   system.slice
                     dbus.service
                       32534 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --nopidfile -...
                     cron.service
                       32539 /usr/sbin/cron
                     systemd-journald.service
                       32487 /lib/systemd/systemd-journald
                     systemd-logind.service
                       32532 /lib/systemd/systemd-logind
                     console-getty.service
                       32544 /sbin/agetty --noclear --keep-baud console 115200 38400 9600 vt102
                     rsyslog.service
                       32540 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd -n

With machinectl you can also reboot, poweroff, terminate your containers and more. There are so many things to learn about systemd and containers! Here are some references.

systemd-nspawn(1)
machinectl(1)
http://0pointer.net/blog/systemd-for-administrators-part-xxi.html

This stuff is pretty exciting. Now that all major distributions use systemd by default, we can expect to have access to tools like journalctl and systemd-nspawn everywhere!

On one of my regular walks with a friend, we decided today to walk part of the BLT Trail to Cranberry Lake and the bog just past it, an easy 5 km round trip.

On the trail to the lake, golds dominate

On the margins of the bog, brilliant orange and red

The reds, dark greens and dead trees in counterpoint

At our turning point, my cranberry patch provided a puckery snack

FTP assistant Another month passed and another statistic arrives: This month I marked 341 packages for accept and rejected only 48 of them. Almost like last month I had to send 14 emails to maintainers. Squeeze LTS This was my fifteenth month that I did some work for the Squeeze LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month I only got a workload of 14.5h. I finally uploaded a new version of php5. Unfortunately in one library a parameter to a function call introduced new values. As a result all running processes that used the old version of that library produced an error message until they got restarted. As complaints showed up on all channels, I rechecked my patches again and again but could not find an error. I wonder whether this happened once before. At least the php package does not have a mechanism to restart something
Altogether I uploaded those DLAs:

[DLA 307-1] php5 security update
[DLA 309-1] openldap security update
[DLA 311-1] rpcbind security update
[DLA 312-1] libtorrent-rasterbar security update

I also started to work on an upload of freeimage and the next upload of php5. This month I also had another term of doing frontdesk work. So I answered questions on the IRC channel and looked for CVEs that are important for Squeeze LTS or could be ignored. Other stuff Some time ago someone mentioned pump.io and that it would be nice to have it in Debian. I found a Wiki page listing dependencies, with lots of stuff already done and just a few holes. It didn t look like much work todo until I realized that this page showed only the surface and the shoals are hidden below. Anyway, I started to work on it and up to now

node-boolbase
node-domelementtype
node-eventsource
node-querystringify
node-rai
node-requires-port
node-url-parse
node-wrappy
node-xoauth2

are uploaded and

node-schlock
node-array-parallel
node-css-what
node-bufferjs
node-exit

are still in NEW. Luckily most of them could be handled by npm2deb, so it was mainly routine piece of work. So, expect more to come I also polished some smaller packages and could even close some bugs:

dict-elements
rplay -> #741567 #597152
setserial -> #786976 #761951 #761951
siggen -> #772364
texify

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

Barry Warsaw uploaded wheel/0.26.0-1 which now uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP and uses time.gmtime() to avoid timezone issues. Patches by Chris Lamb and Reiner Herrmann.

Andreas Metzler uploaded autogen/1:5.18.6-1 in experimental with several patches for reproducibility issues written by Valentin Lorentz. Groovy upstream has merged a change proposed by Emmanuel Bourg to remove timestamps generated by groovydoc. Ben Hutchings submitted a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in linux-kbuild as an alternate way to specify the build timestamp. Reiner Herrman has sent a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in docbook-utils. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: commons-csv. fest-reflect, sunxi-tools, xfce4-terminal, The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

httpcomponents-client/4.5.1-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
jhead/1:3.00-2 by Ludovic Rousseau.
libvigraimpex/1.10.0+dfsg-10 by Daniel Stender.
linux/4.2-1~exp1 by Ben Hutchings.
maelstrom/1.4.3-L3.0.6+main-7 by Santiago Vila.
nedit/1:5.6a-3 by Paul Gevers.
pitivi/0.94-4 by Sebastian Dr ge, reported by Scott Kitterman.
procenv/0.40-2 by James Hunt.
seyon/2.20c-32 by Santiago Vila.
slib/3b1-5 by Santiago Vila.
spock/0.7-groovy-2.0-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
u-boot/2015.10~rc4+dfsg1-1 by Vagrant Cascadian.
vdr-plugin-remote/0.7.0-1 by Tobias Grimm.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

dutch/1:2.10-4 uploaded by Thijs Kinkhorst, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

#800776 on cluster-glue: exports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in debian/rules.

Tomasz Rybak uploaded pycuda/2015.1.3-1 which should fix reproducibility issues. The package has not been tested as it is in contrib. akira found an embedded code copy of texi2html in fftw. reproducible.debian.net Email notifications are now only sent once a day per package, instead of on each status change. (h01ger) disorderfs has been temporarily disabled to see if it had any impact on the disk space issues. (h01ger) When running out of disk space, build nodes will now automatically detect the problem. This means test results will not be recorded as FTBFS and the problem will be reported to Jenkins maintainers. (h01ger) The navigation menu of package pages has been improved. (h01ger) The two amd64 builders now use two different kernel versions: 3.16 from stable and 4.1 from backports on the other. (h01ger) We now graph the number of packages which needs to be fixed. (h01ger) Munin now creates graphs on how many builds were performed by build nodes (example). (h01ger) A migration plan has been agreed with DSA on how to turn Jenkins into an official Debian service. A backport of jenkins-job-builder for Jessie is currently missing. (h01ger) Package reviews 119 reviews have been removed, 103 added and 45 updated this week. 16 fail to build from source issues were reported by Chris Lamb and Mattia Rizzolo. New issue this week: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_docbook_utils. Misc. Allan McRae has submitted a patch to make ArchLinux pacman record a .BUILDINFO file.

In August (that was 2 months ago, really!?) I attended DebCamp and DebConf in Heidelberg, Germany. This blog post is somewhat belated due to the debbug (flu obtained during DebConf) and all the catching up I had to do since then. Debcamp Debcamp was great, I got to hack on some of my Python related packages that were in need of love for a long time and also got to spend a lot of time tinkering with VLC for the Video Team. Even better than that, I caught up with a lot of great people I haven t seen in ages (and met new ones) and stayed up waaaaay too late drinking beer, playing Mao and watching meteor showers. Debconf At Debconf, I gave a short talk about AIMS Desktop (slides) but also expanded on the licensing problems we ve had with Ubuntu on that project. Not all was bleak on the Ubuntu front though, some Ubuntu/Canonical folk were present at DebConf and said that they d gladly get involved with porting Ubiquity (the Ubuntu installer, a front-end to d-i) to Debian. That would certainly be useful to many derivatives including potentiall AIMS Desktop if it were to move over to Debian. AIMS Desktop talk slides:

We re hosting DebConf in Cape Town next year and did an introduction during a plenary (slides). It was interesting spending some time with the DC15 team and learning how they work, it s amazing all the detail they have to care about and how easy they made it look from the outside, I hope the DC16 team will pull that off as well. Debconf 16 Slides:

DebConf 16 team members present at DebConf16 during DC16 presentation:

I uploaded my photos to DebConf Gallery, Facebook and Google, take your pick ;-), many sessions were recorded, catch them on video.debian.net. If I had to summarize everything that I found interesting I d have to delay posting this entry even further, topics that were particularly interesting were:

Reproducible Builds (project page on wiki)
Trademark Issues (general logo use discussion, and what can call itself Debian )
Many Derivative discussions
PPAs for Debian
Many packaging and workflow related talks and discussions where I was only qualified to listen and tried to take in as much as possible

Pollito s First Trip to Africa In my state of flu with complete lack of concentration for anything work related, I went ahead and made a little short story documenting Pollito s (the DebConf mascot chicken) first trip to Africa. It s silly but it was fun to make and some people enjoyed it ^_^

Well, what else can I say? DebConf 15 was a blast! Hope to see you at Debconf 16!

I've mentored a number of students in 2013, 2014 and 2015 for Debian and Ganglia and most of the companies I've worked with have run internships and graduate programs from time to time. GSoC 2015 has just finished and with all the excitement, many students are already asking what they can do to prepare and be selected for Outreachy or GSoC in 2016. My own observation is that the more time the organization has to get to know the student, the more confident they can be selecting that student. Furthermore, the more time that the student has spent getting to know the free software community, the more easily they can complete GSoC. Here I present a list of things that students can do to maximize their chance of selection and career opportunities at the same time. These tips are useful for people applying for GSoC itself and related programs such as GNOME's Outreachy or graduate placements in companies. Disclaimers There is no guarantee that Google will run the program again in 2016 or any future year until the Google announcement. There is no guarantee that any organization or mentor (including myself) will be involved until the official list of organizations is published by Google.

Do not follow the advice of web sites that invite you to send pizza or anything else of value to prospective mentors. Following the steps in this page doesn't guarantee selection. That said, people who do follow these steps are much more likely to be considered and interviewed than somebody who hasn't done any of the things in this list. Understand what free software really is You may hear terms like free software and open source software used interchangeably. They don't mean exactly the same thing and many people use the term free software for the wrong things. Not all projects declaring themselves to be "free" or "open source" meet the definition of free software. Those that don't, usually as a result of deficiencies in their licenses, are fundamentally incompatible with the majority of software that does use genuinely free licenses. Google Summer of Code is about both writing and publishing your code and it is also about community. It is fundamental that you know the basics of licensing and how to choose a free license that empowers the community to collaborate on your code well after GSoC has finished. Please review the definition of free software early on and come back and review it from time to time. The The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation have excellent resources to help you understand what a free software license is and how it works to maximize community collaboration. Don't look for shortcuts There is no shortcut to GSoC selection and there is no shortcut to GSoC completion. The student stipend (USD $5,500 in 2014) is not paid to students unless they complete a minimum amount of valid code. This means that even if a student did find some shortcut to selection, it is unlikely they would be paid without completing meaningful work. If you are the right candidate for GSoC, you will not need a shortcut anyway. Are you the sort of person who can't leave a coding problem until you really feel it is fixed, even if you keep going all night? Have you ever woken up in the night with a dream about writing code still in your head? Do you become irritated by tedious or repetitive tasks and often think of ways to write code to eliminate such tasks? Does your family get cross with you because you take your laptop to Christmas dinner or some other significant occasion and start coding? If some of these statements summarize the way you think or feel you are probably a natural fit for GSoC. An opportunity money can't buy The GSoC stipend will not make you rich. It is intended to make sure you have enough money to survive through the summer and focus on your project. Professional developers make this much money in a week in leading business centers like New York, London and Singapore. When you get to that stage in 3-5 years, you will not even be thinking about exactly how much you made during internships. GSoC gives you an edge over other internships because it involves publicly promoting your work. Many companies still try to hide the potential of their best recruits for fear they will be poached or that they will be able to demand higher salaries. Everything you complete in GSoC is intended to be published and you get full credit for it. Imagine a young musician getting the opportunity to perform on the main stage at a rock festival. This is how the free software community works. It is a meritocracy and there is nobody to hold you back.

Having a portfolio of free software that you have created or collaborated on and a wide network of professional contacts that you develop before, during and after GSoC will continue to pay you back for years to come. While other graduates are being screened through group interviews and testing days run by employers, people with a track record in a free software project often find they go straight to the final interview round. Register your domain name and make a permanent email address Free software is all about community and collaboration. Register your own domain name as this will become a focal point for your work and for people to get to know you as you become part of the community. This is sound advice for anybody working in IT, not just programmers. It gives the impression that you are confident and have a long term interest in a technology career. Choosing the provider: as a minimum, you want a provider that offers DNS management, static web site hosting, email forwarding and XMPP services all linked to your domain. You do not need to choose the provider that is linked to your internet connection at home and that is often not the best choice anyway. The XMPP foundation maintains a list of providers known to support XMPP. Create an email address within your domain name. The most basic domain hosting providers will let you forward the email address to a webmail or university email account of your choice. Configure your webmail to send replies using your personalized email address in the From header. Update your ~/.gitconfig file to use your personalized email address in your Git commits. Create a web site and blog Start writing a blog. Host it using your domain name. Some people blog every day, other people just blog once every two or three months. Create links from your web site to your other profiles, such as a Github profile page. This helps reinforce the pages/profiles that are genuinely related to you and avoid confusion with the pages of other developers. Many mentors are keen to see their students writing a weekly report on a blog during GSoC so starting a blog now gives you a head start. Mentors look at blogs during the selection process to try and gain insight into which topics a student is most suitable for. Create a profile on Github Github is one of the most widely used software development web sites. Github makes it quick and easy for you to publish your work and collaborate on the work of other people. Create an account today and get in the habbit of forking other projects, improving them, committing your changes and pushing the work back into your Github account. Github will quickly build a profile of your commits and this allows mentors to see and understand your interests and your strengths. In your Github profile, add a link to your web site/blog and make sure the email address you are using for Git commits (in the ~/.gitconfig file) is based on your personal domain. Start using PGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the industry standard in protecting your identity online. All serious free software projects use PGP to sign tags in Git, to sign official emails and to sign official release files. The most common way to start using PGP is with the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) utility. It is installed by the package manager on most Linux systems. When you create your own PGP key, use the email address involving your domain name. This is the most permanent and stable solution. Print your key fingerprint using the gpg-key2ps command, it is in the signing-party package on most Linux systems. Keep copies of the fingerprint slips with you.

This is what my own PGP fingerprint slip looks like. You can also print the key fingerprint on a business card for a more professional look. Using PGP, it is recommend that you sign any important messages you send but you do not have to encrypt the messages you send, especially if some of the people you send messages to (like family and friends) do not yet have the PGP software to decrypt them. If using the Thunderbird (Icedove) email client from Mozilla, you can easily send signed messages and validate the messages you receive using the Enigmail plugin. Get your PGP key signed Once you have a PGP key, you will need to find other developers to sign it. For people I mentor personally in GSoC, I'm keen to see that you try and find another Debian Developer in your area to sign your key as early as possible. Free software events Try and find all the free software events in your area in the months between now and the end of the next Google Summer of Code season. Aim to attend at least two of them before GSoC. Look closely at the schedules and find out about the individual speakers, the companies and the free software projects that are participating. For events that span more than one day, find out about the dinners, pub nights and other social parts of the event. Try and identify people who will attend the event who have been GSoC mentors or who intend to be. Contact them before the event, if you are keen to work on something in their domain they may be able to make time to discuss it with you in person. Take your PGP fingerprint slips. Even if you don't participate in a formal key-signing party at the event, you will still find some developers to sign your PGP key individually. You must take a photo ID document (such as your passport) for the other developer to check the name on your fingerprint but you do not give them a copy of the ID document. Events come in all shapes and sizes. FOSDEM is an example of one of the bigger events in Europe, linux.conf.au is a similarly large event in Australia. There are many, many more local events such as the Debian UK mini-DebConf in Cambridge, November 2015. Many events are either free or free for students but please check carefully if there is a requirement to register before attending. On your blog, discuss which events you are attending and which sessions interest you. Write a blog during or after the event too, including photos.

Quantcast generously hosted the Ganglia community meeting in San Francisco, October 2013. We had a wild time in their offices with mini-scooters, burgers, beers and the Ganglia book. That's me on the pink mini-scooter and Bernard Li, one of the other Ganglia GSoC 2014 admins is on the right. Install Linux GSoC is fundamentally about free software. Linux is to free software what a tree is to the forest. Using Linux every day on your personal computer dramatically increases your ability to interact with the free software community and increases the number of potential GSoC projects that you can participate in. This is not to say that people using Mac OS or Windows are unwelcome. I have worked with some great developers who were not Linux users. Linux gives you an edge though and the best time to gain that edge is now, while you are a student and well before you apply for GSoC. If you must run Windows for some applications used in your course, it will run just fine in a virtual machine using Virtual Box, a free software solution for desktop virtualization. Use Linux as the primary operating system. Here are links to download ISO DVD (and CD) images for some of the main Linux distributions:

If you are nervous about getting started with Linux, install it on a spare PC or in a virtual machine before you install it on your main PC or laptop. Linux is much less demanding on the hardware than Windows so you can easily run it on a machine that is 5-10 years old. Having just 4GB of RAM and 20GB of hard disk is usually more than enough for a basic graphical desktop environment although having better hardware makes it faster. Your experiences installing and running Linux, especially if it requires some special effort to make it work with some of your hardware, make interesting topics for your blog. Decide which technologies you know best Personally, I have mentored students working with C, C++, Java, Python and JavaScript/HTML5. In a GSoC program, you will typically do most of your work in just one of these languages. From the outset, decide which language you will focus on and do everything you can to improve your competence with that language. For example, if you have already used Java in most of your course, plan on using Java in GSoC and make sure you read Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch. Decide which themes appeal to you Find a topic that has long-term appeal for you. Maybe the topic relates to your course or maybe you already know what type of company you would like to work in. Here is a list of some topics and some of the relevant software projects:

System administration, servers and networking: consider projects involving monitoring, automation, packaging. Ganglia is a great community to get involved with and you will encounter the Ganglia software in many large companies and academic/research networks. Contributing to a Linux distribution like Debian or Fedora packaging is another great way to get into system administration.
Desktop and user interface: consider projects involving window managers and desktop tools or adding to the user interface of just about any other software.
Big data and data science: this can apply to just about any other theme. For example, data science techniques are frequently used now to improve system administration.
Business and accounting: consider accounting, CRM and ERP software.
Finance and trading: consider projects like R, market data software like OpenMAMA and connectivity software (Apache Camel)
Real-time communication (RTC), VoIP, webcam and chat: look at the JSCommunicator or the Jitsi project
Web (JavaScript, HTML5): look at the JSCommunicator

Before the GSoC application process begins, you should aim to learn as much as possible about the theme you prefer and also gain practical experience using the software relating to that theme. For example, if you are attracted to the business and accounting theme, install the PostBooks suite and get to know it. Maybe you know somebody who runs a small business: help them to upgrade to PostBooks and use it to prepare some reports. Make something Make some small project, less than two week's work, to demonstrate your skills. It is important to make something that somebody will use for a practical purpose, this will help you gain experience communicating with other users through Github. For an example, see the servlet Juliana Louback created for fixing phone numbers in December 2013. It has since been used as part of the Lumicall web site and Juliana was selected for a GSoC 2014 project with Debian. There is no better way to demonstrate to a prospective mentor that you are ready for GSoC than by completing and publishing some small project like this yourself. If you don't have any immediate project ideas, many developers will also be able to give you tips on small projects like this that you can attempt, just come and ask us on one of the mailing lists. Ideally, the project will be something that you would use anyway even if you do not end up participating in GSoC. Such projects are the most motivating and rewarding and usually end up becoming an example of your best work. To continue the example of somebody with a preference for business and accounting software, a small project you might create is a plugin or extension for PostBooks. Getting to know prospective mentors Many web sites provide useful information about the developers who contribute to free software projects. Some of these developers may be willing to be a GSoC mentor. For example, look through some of the following:

Planet / Blog aggregation sites: these sites all have links to the blogs of many developers. They are useful sources of information about events and also finding out who works on what.
Developer profile pages. Many projects publish a page about each developer and the packages, modules or other components he/she is responsible for. Look through these lists for areas of mutual interest.
- my package list in Debian
- my package list in Fedora
Developer github profiles. Github makes it easy to see what projects a developer has contributed to. To see many of my own projects, browse through the history at my own Github profile

Getting on the mentor's shortlist Once you have identified projects that are interesting to you and developers who work on those projects, it is important to get yourself on the developer's shortlist. Basically, the shortlist is a list of all students who the developer believes can complete the project. If I feel that a student is unlikely to complete a project or if I don't have enough information to judge a student's probability of success, that student will not be on my shortlist. If I don't have any student on my shortlist, then a project will not go ahead at all. If there are multiple students on the shortlist, then I will be looking more closely at each of them to try and work out who is the best match. One way to get a developer's attention is to look at bug reports they have created. Github makes it easy to see complaints or bug reports they have made about their own projects or other projects they depend on. Another way to do this is to search through their code for strings like FIXME and TODO. Projects with standalone bug trackers like the Debian bug tracker also provide an easy way to search for bug reports that a specific person has created or commented on. Once you find some relevant bug reports, email the developer. Ask if anybody else is working on those issues. Try and start with an issue that is particularly easy and where the solution is interesting for you. This will help you learn to compile and test the program before you try to fix any more complicated bugs. It may even be something you can work on as part of your academic program. Find successful projects from the previous year Contact organizations and ask them which GSoC projects were most successful. In many organizations, you can find the past students' project plans and their final reports published on the web. Read through the plans submitted by the students who were chosen. Then read through the final reports by the same students and see how they compare to the original plans. Start building your project proposal now Don't wait for the application period to begin. Start writing a project proposal now. When writing a proposal, it is important to include several things:

Think big: what is the goal at the end of the project? Does your work help the greater good in some way, such as increasing the market share of Linux on the desktop?
Details: what are specific challenges? What tools will you use?
Time management: what will you do each week? Are there weeks where you will not work on GSoC due to vacation or other events? These things are permitted but they must be in your plan if you know them in advance. If an accident or death in the family cut a week out of your GSoC project, which work would you skip and would your project still be useful without that? Having two weeks of flexible time in your plan makes it more resilient against interruptions.
Communication: are you on mailing lists, IRC and XMPP chat? Will you make a weekly report on your blog?
Users: who will benefit from your work?
Testing: who will test and validate your work throughout the project? Ideally, this should involve more than just the mentor.

If your project plan is good enough, could you put it on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site? This is a good test of whether or not a project is going to be supported by a GSoC mentor. Learn about packaging and distributing software Packaging is a vital part of the free software lifecycle. It is very easy to upload a project to Github but it takes more effort to have it become an official package in systems like Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Packaging and the communities around Linux distributions help you reach out to users of your software and get valuable feedback and new contributors. This boosts the impact of your work. To start with, you may want to help the maintainer of an existing package. Debian packaging teams are existing communities that work in a team and welcome new contributors. The Debian Mentors initiative is another great starting place. In the Fedora world, the place to start may be in one of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Think from the mentor's perspective After the application deadline, mentors have just 2 or 3 weeks to choose the students. This is actually not a lot of time to be certain if a particular student is capable of completing a project. If the student has a published history of free software activity, the mentor feels a lot more confident about choosing the student. Some mentors have more than one good student while other mentors receive no applications from capable students. In this situation, it is very common for mentors to send each other details of students who may be suitable. Once again, if a student has a good Github profile and a blog, it is much easier for mentors to try and match that student with another project.

Conclusion Getting into the world of software engineering is much like joining any other profession or even joining a new hobby or sporting activity. If you run, you probably have various types of shoe and a running watch and you may even spend a couple of nights at the track each week. If you enjoy playing a musical instrument, you probably have a collection of sheet music, accessories for your instrument and you may even aspire to build a recording studio in your garage (or you probably know somebody else who already did that). The things listed on this page will not just help you walk the walk and talk the talk of a software developer, they will put you on a track to being one of the leaders. If you look over the profiles of other software developers on the Internet, you will find they are doing most of the things on this page already. Even if you are not selected for GSoC at all or decide not to apply, working through the steps on this page will help you clarify your own ideas about your career and help you make new friends in the software engineering community.

A friend and I regularly meet to chat over coffee and then usually finish up by walking the maintained trail in the Halifax Mainland Common Park, but today we decided to take a brief excursion onto the unmaintained trails criss-crossing the park. The last gasp of a faint summer and early signs of fall are evident everywhere. Some mushrooms are dried and cracked in a mosaic pattern:

Ferns and other brush are browning amongst the various greens of late summer:

A few late blueberries still cling to isolated bushes here and there:

The riot of fall colours in this small clearing, dotted with cotton-grass, burst into view as we round a corner, set behind by a backdrop of nearby buildings:

The ferns here are vivid, like a slow burning fire that will take the rest of fall to burn out:

We appreciate one last splash of colour before we head back under the cover of woods to rejoin the maintained trail:

So many times we ve travelled our usual route on automatic . I m happy today we left the more travelled trail to share in these glimpses of the changing of seasons in a wilderness preserved for our enjoyment immediately at hand to a densely populated part of the city.

Inspired by Rapha l Hertzog, here is a monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world:

Added support for --allow-unauthenticated in Ansible's apt module. (#2023)
A proposal to change the nouns displayed in the Tails boot menu. (post)
A trivial change to the Tails packaging to use dpkg's --show-field option over manual invokations to sed. (post)
Added rudimentary netsplit support and Debian packaging to the stravabot IRC bot.
Helped Andrew Velis towards supporting custom message attachments and endpoint URLs in django-slack as well as merged two documentation updates (#7 & #8).
A trivial change to disque's documentation regarding web addresses. (#125)
Updated youtube-upload's documentation to suggest using Debian packages over pip. (#59)
Added support to to Strava Enhancement Suite for pre-populating fields on "Manual Upload" from GET parameters. (diff)
Blogged about "joining" strings in POSIX shell.

Debian

Celebrated the 7th anniversary of becoming an official Debian Developer.
Published the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification.
Joined the Debian Long Term Support team, issuing DLA 318-1 for flightgear.
Submitted cleanups to dak, including improving its packaging, making tests clearer and more robust, etc.
Sent many small improvements to the Reproducible Builds testing framework managed by Holger Levsen et al.
Sent Enrico Zini improvements to the new Debian Single Sign-On enrollment page to improve the user interface.
Relicensed my packaging efforts to assist in Michael Fladischer's adoption of python-django-treebeard.

The Reproducible Builds project was also covered in depth on LWN as well as in Lunar's weekly reports (#18, #19, #20, #21, #22).

Uploads

redis A new upstream release, as well as overhauling the systemd configuration, maintaining feature parity with sysvinit and adding various security hardening features.
python-redis Attempting to get its Debian Continuous Integration tests to pass successfully.
libfiu Ensuring we do not FTBFS under exotic locales.
gunicorn Dropping a dependency on python-tox now that tests are disabled.

Bugs filed

apt: Acquire::GzipIndexes breaks "copy" APT method ("Hash Sum mismatch")
cappuccino: Segfaults if DISPLAY is missing or invalid
console-data: Creates bogus keymaps under some locales
docker.io: Incompatible with systemd 226?
snapshot.debian.org: Files seem to appear and disappear

Patches contributed

abi-compliance-checker: Please drop timestamp from generated HTML reports
abi-compliance-checker: Please make the generated .abi.tar.gz files reproducible
apt-setup: Please refer to httpredir.debian.org over ftp.debian.org in commented-out examples
debmany: Please provide a hint if a "$package-doc" package also exists
docbook2x: Please re-enable autoreconfing
docbook2x: Does not build twice in a row
grub-installer: Please show size as well as the device id when selecting target
lintian: Please update link to Debian systemd packaging reference
lintian: Please emit when systemd service files are missing a Documentation key
netcfg: Change default wireless networking type from WEP to WPA

389-ds-base: Please make the build reproducible
cappuccino: Please make the build reproducible
dutch: Please make the build reproducible
python-sqlalchemy-utils: Please make the build reproducible
segment: Please make the build reproducible
sysstat: Please make the build reproducible
tunnelx: Please make the build reproducible
xbae: Please make the build reproducible

RC bugs

docbook2x: docbook2x-man binary broken due to literal $ prefix instead of path name
python-hacking: Overly-restrictive Build-Depends on python-sphinx
spice-gtk: spice-common/common/generated_* not reliably generated

bmon: Missing Build-Depends on pkg-config
commons-configuration: Missing Build-Depends on libeasymock-java
golang-github-hanwen-usb: Missing Build-Depends on pkg-config
gsm0710muxd: Illegal changelog date format
libsixel: Missing Build-Depends on python
maven-processor-plugin: Missing Build-Depends on junit4
nfdump: Missing Build-Depends on libz-dev
ntopng: Missing Build-Depends on pkg-config
sphinx-paramlinks: Missing Build-Depends on python3-docutils & python3-sphinx

I also filed FTBFS bugs against actdiag, actdiag, bangarang, bmon, bppphyview, cervisia, choqok, cinnamon-control-center, clasp, composer, cpl-plugin-naco, dirspec, django-countries, dmapi, dolphin-plugins, dulwich, elki, eqonomize, eztrace, fontmatrix, freedink, galera-3, golang-git2go, golang-github-golang-leveldb, gopher, gst-plugins-bad0.10, jbofihe, k3b, kalgebra, kbibtex, kde-baseapps, kde-dev-utils, kdesdk-kioslaves, kdesvn, kdevelop-php-docs, kdewebdev, kftpgrabber, kile, kmess, kmix, kmldonkey, knights, konsole4, kpartsplugin, kplayer, kraft, krecipes, krusader, ktp-auth-handler, ktp-common-internals, ktp-text-ui, libdevice-cdio-perl, libdr-tarantool-perl, libevent-rpc-perl, libmime-util-java, libmoosex-app-cmd-perl, libmoosex-app-cmd-perl, librdkafka, libxml-easyobj-perl, maven-dependency-plugin, mmtk, murano-dashboard, node-expat, node-iconv, node-raw-body, node-srs, node-websocket, ocaml-estring, ocaml-estring, oce, odb, oslo-config, oslo.messaging, ovirt-guest-agent, packagesearch, php-svn, php5-midgard2, phpunit-story, pike8.0, plasma-widget-adjustableclock, plowshare4, procps, pygpgme, pylibmc, pyroma, python-admesh, python-bleach, python-dmidecode, python-libdiscid, python-mne, python-mne, python-nmap, python-nmap, python-oslo.middleware, python-riemann-client, python-traceback2, qdjango, qsapecng, ruby-em-synchrony, ruby-ffi-rzmq, ruby-nokogiri, ruby-opengraph-parser, ruby-thread-safe, shortuuid, skrooge, smb4k, snp-sites, soprano, stopmotion, subtitlecomposer, svgpart, thin-provisioning-tools, umbrello, validator.js, vdr-plugin-prefermenu, vdr-plugin-vnsiserver, vdr-plugin-weather, webkitkde, xbmc-pvr-addons, xfsdump & zanshin.

It has been bugging me for a while. When responding to an email, you often want to delete all the content (or part of the previous content) until the end of the email's body. However it would be nice to leave your signature in place. For that I came up with this nifty little vim trick:

nnoremap <silent> <leader>gr <Esc>d/--\_.*Dariusz<CR>:nohl<CR>O

Assuming that your signature starts with -- and the following line starts with your name (in my case it is Dariusz), this will delete all the content from the current line until the signature. Then it will remove search highlighting, and finally move one line up.

I like Italian food and Mexican food, he said. Where are you from? she asked. Yemen, but I like Italian food and Mexican food, he answered. You don't like Yemeni food? she asked. Eh, well, it's the thing you grow up with, he replied. Do you know Yemeni food? Yes, she said, I like . Oh, is good if you like meat. If you like vegetables, try . Why wouldn't I like meat? she demanded. You know, every place in Yemen does differently. I like the way they do it in the west of Yemen, near Africa, he said, and proceeded to describe the cooking process.

Hello This problem has been bugging me for a while: how to setup my Kodi based home cinema to automatically mount an optical media ? Turns out the solution is quite simple, now that Debian has switched for systemd. Just add the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sr0 /media/bluray auto defaults,nofail,x-systemd.automount 0 2

Where:

/dev/sr0 is the device file. You can also use one of the symbolic links setup by udev in /dev/disk/by-id
/media/bluray is the mount point. You can choose another mount point
nofail is required to avoid failure report when booting without a disc in the optical drive
x-systemd.automount is the option to configure systemd to automatically mount the inserted disc

Do not specify noauto: this would prevent systemd to automatically mount a disc, which defeats the purpose. To test you setup:

Run the command journalctl -x -f in a terminal to check what is going on with systemd
Reload systemd configuration with sudo systemctl daemon-reload.
load a disc in your optical drive

Then, journalctl should show something like:

Sept. 27 16:07:01 frodo systemd[1]: Mounted /media/bluray.

And that s it. No need to have obsolete packages like udisk-glue or autofs. Last but not least: this blog is moderated, please do not waste your time (and mine) posting rants. All the best.
Tagged: automount, debian, kodi, optical, systemd

Here is a photo journal of our hike on the Bluff Wilderness Trail with my friend, Ryan Neily, as is our tradition at this time of year. Rather than hike all four loops, as we achieved last year, we chose to cover only the Pot Lake and Indian Hill loops. Like our meandering pace, our conversations were enjoyable and far ranging, with Nature doing her part, stimulating our minds and bodies and refreshing our spirits.

A break at the summit of Pot Lake loop. Click to start slideshow.

VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together. There's more information in the README file. I've just released v0.4, with a lot of changes included since the last release:

Large numbers of bugfixes and code cleanups
Code changes for integration with LAVA:
- Added db.find_lowest_unused_vlan_tag()
- create_vlan() with a tag of -1 will find and allocate the first unused tag automatically
Add port numbers as well as names to the ports database, to give human-recognisable references. See README.port-numbering for more details.
Add tracking of trunks, the inter-switch connections, needed for visualisation diagrams.
Add a simple http-based visualisation feature:
- Generate network diagrams on-demand based on the information in the VLANd database, colour-coded to show port configuration
- Generate a simple website to reference those diagrams.
Allow more ports to be seen on Catalyst switches
Add a systemd service file for vland

VLANd is Free Software, released under the GPL version 2 (or any later version). For now, grab it from git; tarballs will be coming shortly.

In a few weeks, I will have the opportunity to offer a weekend workshop to selected and motivated high school students¹ to a topic of my choice. My idea is to tell them something about logic, proofs, and the joy of searching and finding proofs, and the gratification of irrevocable truths. While proving things on paper is already quite nice, it is much more fun to use an interactive theorem prover, such as Isabelle, Coq or Agda: You get immediate feedback, you can experiment and play around if you are stuck, and you get lots of small successes. Someone² once called interactive theorem proving the worlds most geekiest videogame . Unfortunately, I don t think one can get high school students without any prior knowledge in logic, or programming, or fancy mathematical symbols, to do something meaningful with a system like Isabelle, so I need something that is (much) easier to use. I always had this idea in the back of my head that proving is not so much about writing text (as in normally written proofs) or programs (as in Agda) or labeled statements (as in Hilbert-style proofs), but rather something involving facts that I have proven so far floating around freely, and way to combine these facts to new facts, without the need to name them, or put them in a particular order or sequence. In a way, I m looking for labVIEW wrestled through the Curry-Horward-isomorphism. Something like this:

A proof of implication currying

So I set out, rounded up a few contributors (Thanks!), implemented this, and now I proudly present: The Incredible Proof Machine ³ This interactive theorem prover allows you to do perform proofs purely by dragging blocks (representing proof steps) onto the paper and connecting them properly. There is no need to learn syntax, and hence no frustration about getting that wrong. Furthermore, it comes with a number of example tasks to experiment with, so you can simply see it as a challenging computer came and work through them one by one, learning something about the logical connectives and how they work as you go. For the actual workshop, my plan is to let the students first try to solve the tasks of one session on their own, let them draw their own conclusions and come up with an idea of what they just did, and then deliver an explanation of the logical meaning of what they did. The implementation is heavily influenced by Isabelle: The software does not know anything about, say, conjunction ( ) and implication ( ). To the core, everything is but an untyped lambda expression, and when two blocks are connected, it does unification⁴ of the proposition present on either side. This general framework is then instantiated by specifying the basic rules (or axioms) in a descriptive manner. It is quite feasible to implement other logics or formal systems on top of this as well. Another influence of Isabelle is the non-linear editing: You neither have to create the proof in a particular order nor have to manually manage a proof focus . Instead, you can edit any bit of the proof at any time, and the system checks all of it continuously. As always, I am keen on feedback. Also, if you want to use this for your own teaching or experimenting needs, let me know. We have a mailing list for the project, the code is on GitHub, where you can also file bug reports and feature requests. Contributions are welcome! All aspects of the logic are implemented in Haskell and compiled to JavaScript using GHCJS, the UI is plain hand-written and messy JavaScript code, using JointJS to handle the graph interaction. Obviously, there is still plenty that can be done to improve the machine. In particular, the ability to create your own proof blocks, such as proof by contradiction, prove them to be valid and then use them in further proofs, is currently being worked on. And while the page will store your current progress, including all proofs you create, in your browser, it needs better ways to save, load and share tasks, blocks and proofs. Also, we d like to add some gamification, i.e. achievements ( First proof by contradiction , 50 theorems proven ), statistics, maybe a share theorem on twitter button. As the UI becomes more complicated, I d like to investigating moving more of it into Haskell world and use Functional Reactive Programming, i.e. Ryan Trickle s reflex, to stay sane. Customers who liked The Incredible Proof Machine might also like these artifacts, that I found while looking whether something like this exists:

Easyprove, an interactive tool to create textual proofs by clicking on rules.
Domino On Acid represents natural deduction rules in propositional logic with and as a game of dominoes.
Proofscape visualizes the dependencies between proofs as graphs, i.e. it operates on a higher level than The Incredible Proof Machine.
Proofmood is a nice interactive interface to conduct proofs in Fitch-style.
Proof-Game represents proofs trees in a sequent calculus with boxes with different shapes that have to match.
JAPE is an editor for proofs in a number of traditional proof styles. (Thanks to Alfio Martini for the pointer.)
Logitext, written by Edward Z. Yang, is an online tool to create proof trees in sequent style, with a slick interface, and is even backed by Coq! (Thanks to Lev Lamberov for the pointer.)
Carnap is similar in implementation to The Incredible Proof Machine (logical core in Haskell, generic unification-based solver). It currently lets you edit proof trees, but there are plans to create something more visual.
Clickable Proofs is a (non-free) iOS app that incorporates quite a few of the ideas that are behind The Incredible Proof Machine. It came out of a Bachelor s thesis of Tim Selier and covers propositional logic.
Euclid the game by Kasper Peulen is a nice game to play with geometric constructions.

Students with migration background supported by the START scholarship
Does anyone know the reference?
We almost named it Proofcraft , which would be a name our current Minecraft-wild youth would appreciate, but it is alreay taken by Gerwin Kleins blog. Also, the irony of a theorem prover being in-credible is worth something.
Luckily, two decades ago, Tobias Nipkow published a nice implementation of higher order pattern unification as ML code, which I transliterated to Haskell for this project.

Review: Getting Back to Full Employment, by Dean Baker & Jared Bernstein

Publisher:	CEPR
Copyright:	2013
ISBN:	0-615-91836-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	116

Getting Back to Full Employment is more of a policy paper than a book. The authors both work for economic think tanks; one of those, the Center for Economic and Policy research (co-founded by Baker), is the publisher of this book. It's also free on the Kindle, another sign that the purpose is more about educating and convincing the public than about selling a non-fiction analysis. I found out about this through Paul Krugman, and if you're a regular reader of Krugman's columns and blog, not much here will be a surprise. Baker and Bernstein are advocating what I would call conventional-liberal economic policy by US standards (which means that it's not really that liberal). The short version is that full employment is vital for improving the economic position of the average person, inflation is nowhere near as much of a risk as people claim, and the best economic action the US government can take at present is to aggressively pursue a full employment strategy without worrying excessively about inflation. If you're at all familiar with this debate, you probably already have an opinion about everything in that summary. I certainly do. If you follow economics at all, this debate has been raging ever since the 2008 financial crisis (and earlier versions of the debate were raging before then). Since I'm a regular Krugman reader, you probably know my opinion: the people who have been crying wolf about the dangers of inflation have been systematically wrong about everything for seven years solid, and it's amazing that anyone is still giving them the time of day. Baker and Bernstein make a similar argument at greater length, and with a more academic tone. The risk of any policy paper like this is that reactions will be almost entirely decided by one's pre-existing opinion about the political actions that each economic policy implies. If you (like me) have already decided that government intervention in the economy is useful to prevent concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and provide support for the most vulnerable, everything Baker and Bernstein say here is going to sound quite convincing. If you've already decided that government intervention in the economy almost always leads to tears, and that a large government with the ability to take economic action is far more dangerous than any of the effects of economic downturns and unemployment, it would surprise me if Baker and Bernstein will change your mind. In other words, I'm skeptical that policy papers like this accomplish much. That said, there are a lot of facts and data here, which at least help ground this ongoing argument in more specifics. The authors show you the math: the evidence for moderate inflation not leading to any serious impact for economies, the very strong correlations between low unemployment rates and rising median wages, the theoretical basis for lower bounds on unemployment rates and our extensive past history of assuming that lower bound is much higher than it actually is, and some pointed comparisons to countries like Germany that have taken many of the specific policy recommendations included here and have a far healthier labor market as a result. All the statistics, charts, and discussion of analysis techniques is fairly dry, but I think the data is compelling. Of course, I was already convinced by earlier reading. There are a few bits here that I hadn't seen before, or at least hadn't internalized. One is a subtle but very important statistical limitation: any uncertainty in measuring the inflation rate will lead to incorrect statistical findings that inflation slows growth. The explanation for this takes several pages and is somewhat technical: the short and somewhat inaccurate version is that growth is measured in inflation-adjusted GDP, so if you get inflation wrong, you magnify the correlation between GDP and inflation. An inaccurately-high measure of inflation rate simultaneously leads to underestimating GDP growth for that country; an inflation rate that's inaccurate on the low side leads to overestimating GDP growth. This is inherent in how this comparison is done, and it's hard to see how to avoid it. It's therefore worth taking any analysis of the growth impact from higher inflation with a grain of salt. (Please note here that we're talking about moderate inflation the typical rates between 1% and 8% that you see in developed economics.) Another bit that was new to me was the analysis of the connection between trade deficits and full employment. I typically dismiss any international trade analysis in macroeconomic policy for the US since international trade is a much smaller part of our economy than most people think it is, and because protectionism has been rightfully discarded as a policy approach. But Baker and Bernstein make an interesting argument here about the effects of a strong currency on increasing unemployment; even with the relatively small amount of trade, reducing the deficit would have a noticeable effect. (Increasing the volume of trade but not changing the balance would not.) The authors certainly don't recommend protectionism; they do recommend being willing to let the value of the dollar drop against other currencies as a good way to reduce the deficit, and to be aware that other central banks have intentional policies of propping up the dollar that we're largely ignoring. They also mention that this is a zero-sum game for the world economy as a whole, although I would have preferred a bit more emphasis on that. You can't get very far via beggar-thy-neighbor economic policy. But it's a good reminder that the obsession in some parts with not "devaluing the currency" is economic nonsense and directly hurts employment. The end of the book discusses a variety of sensible policy recommendations ranging from international currency policy to Germany's work-sharing program where the government subsidies reduction of worker hours the same way that we already subsidize unemployment. They all seemed reasonable to me, although, sadly, I have little faith that the dysfunctional US government will consider any of them seriously, particularly more direct approaches such as government taking on the role of employer of last resort. But they're fun to read about and imagine a US in which the government actually did sensible things like that. Getting Back to Full Employment is pretty dry, and it's hard to shake the feeling that writing things like this is basically pointless, so I'm not sure I can really recommend it. But if you like reading Krugman's columns and are interested in similar material from different people at a longer length, that's basically what this is. Rating: 6 out of 10

[As You Like It, Act III, Scene V] Hey Beautiful I thought of you on the Fourth of July; which does not, in and of itself, distinguish the day from any other since I met you. It was remarkable only in that it was justifiable, given our conversation about fireworks displays. Of course, I'm happy to take the flimsiest of displays as an excuse to mark you. I'm home alone right now, after watching The Bad Seed. Truth be told, the shadows keep spooking me. I can't seem to stop myself from imagining precocious blonde murderers in them. It's a manageable silliness, but made a little less so by the fact that I forgot to lock the door. Less troublesome than the night I spent after Ringu (the original Japanese version of The Ring). I finished watching it in the wee hours of the morning, and I wanted to go to sleep. I was in half a stupor, but the incessant inner critic in me kept imagining all the changes that could have been made to make the movie more truly unsettling until visions of Obake were swimming around me. Ordinarily I doubt I'd be bothered particularly by a 50's classic, but went back up to Boston this afternoon. 's at a conference in Finland, so I invited him down to visit while I have the apartment all to myself. It was strange to have a visitor actually in my home for whom I didn't have to play at being contented. At any rate, being around for three days essentially meant carrying on a three-day-long conversaiton, and the abrupt drop of sociability makes me feel my isolation a little more acutely. We watched The Way We Were together, and agreed that it should be remade with casting that actually works. I hadn't seen it before, and was surprised to find it unusually nuanced and substantial, yet still not good. It was nice to have someone around who would dissect it with me afterward. It's been a while since I actually discussed a film with someone. Partly out of my own fault; I don't always enjoy verbalizing my opinions of movies immediately after watching them if I've found them in the least bit moving. I guess I consider the aftertaste part of the experience. In this case, we both felt the film had missed its emotional mark so it wasn't so much of an issue. On the other hand, I don't find most movies moving. I find them frustratingly flawed, and by the time they end I'm raring to rant about their petty contradictions and failures of logic. I think it might give people the impression that I don't actually make any effort to tease out the messages filmmakers weave into their work. Or maybe I'm just making excuses for having uninteresting friends. Either way, it was pleasant to be in the company of someone eager to tolerate the convolutions of my thought process. On Wednesday night, I have a date to meet up with some former co-workers/friends that I've been passively avoiding for several years now. Every time I fail to carefully manage my visibility, people seem to come flooding back into my life. This time the culprit was a day spent logged into instant messaging without stringent privacy settings. I should feel lucky for that, I suppose. I'm not sure how I actually feel. One of the formers is a woman I was very close to, as far as most of the world her included could discern. The other is a Boston boy I admired for the touch of golden child in the air that hung about him. The main theme of his life was (and I suspect still is) getting to drinks with friends at one of his regular bars at the end of every evening. Which did not at all stop him from being productive, interested in the world, and bright. If he had been a girl I would have been hateful with envy. Instead he's always stood out in my memory as the only person I've had a bit of a crush on despite not finding him particularly intellectually stimulating. A month or so ago he sold his company to google. Now he spends a lot of time out of town giving lectures. I suspect I may be generally happy for him, and I'm not quite sure what to do with that. Thursday I'm leaving for a few days in Denver. I wish I hadn't scheduled it for a time when I could have been the sole occupant of my domicile, but other than that I'm looking forward to it. I've no idea what I'll do there, but at least that means I really am going someplace that wouldn't occur to me outside of a peculiar set of constraints. I think it would be advisable to work out the transportation system before I depart, though. I hope this letter finds you relatively satisfied, at a minimum. I don't actually need to tell you how much I miss talking to you, do I? You're wonderful. Affectionally, as always,

Review: Half Life, by S.L. Huang

Series:	Russell's Attic #2
Publisher:	S.L. Huang
Copyright:	2014
ISBN:	0-9960700-5-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	314

This is a sequel to Zero Sum Game and the second book about Cas Russell, a mercenary superhero (in a world without the concept of superheroes) with preternatural ability to analyze anything about her surroundings with mathematics. While it reuses some personal relationships from the first book and makes a few references to the villains, it's a disconnected story. It would be possible to start here if you wanted to. Cas is now in the strange and unexpected situation of having friends, and they're starting to complicate her life. First, Arthur has managed to trigger some unexpected storehouse of morals and gotten her to try to stop killing people on jobs. That conscience may have something to do with her willingness to take a job from an apparently crazy man who claims a corporation has stolen his daughter, a daughter who appears nowhere in any official records. And when her other friend, Checker, gets in trouble with the mob, Cas tries to protect him in her own inimitable way, which poses a serious risk of shortening her lifespan. Even more than the first book, the story in Half Life is a mix of the slightly ridiculous world of superheroes with gritty (and bloody) danger. It featuring hit men, armed guards, lots of guns, and quite a lot of physical injury and blood. A nasty corporation that's obviously hiding serious secrets shares pages with the matriarch of a mob family who considers Checker sleeping with her daughter to be an abuse of her honor. The story eventually escalates into more outlandish bits of technology, an uncanny little girl, and a plot that would feel at home in a Batman comic. I like books that don't take themselves too seriously, but the contrast between the brutal treatment Cas struggles through and the outrageous mad scientist villain provokes a bit of cognitive whiplash. That said, the villains of Half Life are neither as freakish nor as disturbing as those in Zero Sum Game, which I appreciated. Huang packs in several plot twists, some inobvious decisions and disagreements between Russell and her friends about appropriate strategy, and Cas's discovery that there are certain things she cares very strongly about other than money and having jobs. Cas goes from a barely moral, very dark hero in the first book to something closer to a very grumbly chaotic good who insists she's not as good as she actually is. It's a standard character type, but Huang does a good job with it. Huang also adds a couple of supporting cast members in this book that I hope will stick around. Pilar starts as a receptionist at one of the companies Cas breaks into, and at first seems like she might be comic relief. But she ends up being considerably more competent than she first appears (or that she seems to realize); by the end of the book, I had a lot of respect for her. And Miri makes only a few appearances, but her unflappable attitude is a delight. I hope to see more of her. The biggest drawback to this book for me is that Cas gets hurt a lot. At times, the story falls into one of the patterns of urban fantasy: the protagonist gets repeatedly beaten up and abused until they figure out what's going on, and spends most of the story up against impossible odds and feeling helpless. That's not a plot pattern I'm fond of. I don't enjoy reading about physical pain, and I had trouble at some points in the story with the constant feeling of dread. Parts of the book I read in short bursts, putting it aside to look at something else. But the sense of dread falls off towards the end of the book, as Cas figures out what's actually going on, and none of it is as horrible as it felt it could be. If you have a similar problem with some urban fantasy tropes, I think it's safe to stick with the story. This was a fun story, but it doesn't develop much in the way of deeper themes in the series. There's essentially no Rio, no further discoveries about the villains of the first book, and no further details on what makes Cas tick or why she seems to be the only, or at least one of the few, super-powered people in this world. The advance publicity for the third book seems to indicate that's coming next. I'm curious enough now that I'll keep reading this series. Recommended if you liked the first book. Half Life is very similar, but I think slightly better. Followed by Root of Unity. Rating: 7 out of 10

I stumbled over this CD a few weeks ago, and immediately ordered it from some second-hand dealer in the US: International Sad Hits Volume 1: Altaic Group. Four artists from different countries (2x Japan, Korea, Turkey) and very different music style, but connected in one thing: That they don t fit into the happy-peppy culture of AKB48, JPOP, KPOP and the like, but singers and songwriters that probe the depths of sadness. With two of my favorite Japanese appearing in the list (Tomokawa Kazuki and Mikami Kan), there was no way I could not buy this CD. international-sad-hits-volume-1

The four artist combined in this excellent CD are: Fikret K z lok, a Turkish musician, singer and songwriter. Quoting from the pamphlet:

However, in 1983 K z lok returned with one of his most important and best albums: Zaman Zaman (Time to time). [ ] These albums presented an alternative to the horrible pop scene emerging in Turkey they criticized the political situation, the so-called intellectuals, and the pop stars.

The Korean artist is (Kim Doo Soo), who was the great surprise of the CD for me. The sadness and beauty that is transmitted through is music is special. The pamphlet of the CD states:

The strictness of his home atmosphere suffocated him, and in defiance against his father he dropped out, and walked along the roads. He said later that, Hatred towards the world, and the emptiness of life overwhelmed me. I lived my life with alcohol every day.

After some problems due to political crisis, and fierce reactions to his song Bohemian (included) made him disappear into the mountains for 10 years, only to return with even better music. The third artist is one of my big favorites, Tomokawa Kazuki (Official site, Wikipedia) from Japan. I have written often about Tomokawa, but found a very fitting description in the booklet:

Author Tatematsu Wahei has described Tomokawa as a man standing naked, his sensibility utterly exposed and tingling. It s an accurate response to a creativity that seems unmediated by embarrassment, voraciously feeding off the artist s personal concern.

The forth artist is again from Japan, Mikami Kan, a well known wild man from the Japanese music scene. After is debut at the Nakatsugawa All-Japan Folk Jamboree in 1971, he was something like a star for some years, but without a record deal his popularity decreased steadily.

During this period his songwriting gradually altered, becoming more dense, surreal and uncompromisingly personal.

Every song on this CD is a masterpiece by itself, but despite me being a great fan of Tomokawa, my favorite is Kim Doo Soo here, with songs that grip your heart and soul, stunningly beauty and sad at the same time.

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8 October 2015

Gunnar Wolf: On evolving communities and changing social practices

Norbert Preining: Looking at the facts: Sarah Sharp s crusade

7 October 2015

Emanuele Rocca: systemd is your friend

6 October 2015

Ben Armstrong: Cranberry Lake and nearby bog Fall, 2015

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2015

4 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 23 in Stretch cycle

Jonathan Carter: Long Overdue Debconf 15 Post

2 October 2015

Daniel Pocock: Want to be selected for Google Summer of Code 2016?

30 September 2015

Ben Armstrong: Halifax Mainland Common: Early Fall, 2015

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in September 2015

29 September 2015

Dariusz Dwornikowski: Delete until signature in vim

27 September 2015

Clint Adams: He then went on to sing the praises of Donald Trump

Dominique Dumont: How to automount optical media on Debian Linux for Kodi

Ben Armstrong: Annual Bluff Hike, 2015

25 September 2015

Steve McIntyre: Linaro VLANd v0.4

24 September 2015

Joachim Breitner: The Incredible Proof Machine

23 September 2015

Russ Allbery: Review: Getting Back to Full Employment

22 September 2015

Clint Adams: 404 No forwarding address for Ryan Hockert-Lotz in Fall River, MA

Russ Allbery: Review: Half Life

21 September 2015

Norbert Preining: International Sad Hits Volume 1