Windows 10 is here, for better or worse. As the family sysadmin, I've been tasked to update the Windows machines: ultimately, failure modes are not well documented and I needed Free software and several hours to recover a vital machine.

The "free upgrade for users of prior Windows versions" is a limited time offer for a year from launch. Microsoft do not offer licence keys for the upgrade: once a machine has updated to Windows 10 and authenticated on the 'Net, then a machine can be re-installed and will be regarded by Microsoft as pre-authorised. Users don't get the key at any point.

Although Microsoft have pushed the fact that this can be done through Windows Update, there is the option to use Microsoft's Media Creation tool to do the upgrade directly on the Windows machine concerned. This would be necessary to get the machine to upgrade and register before a full clean install of Windows 10 from media.

This Media Creation Tool failed for me on three machines with "Unable to access System reserved partition'

All the machines have SSDs from various makers: a colleague suggested that resizing the partition might enable the upgrade to continue. Of the machines that failed, all were running Windows 7 - two were running using BIOS, one using UEFI boot on a machine with no Legacy/CSM mode.

Using GParted live .iso - itself based on Debian Live - allowed me to resize the System partition from 100MiB to 200MiB by moving the Windows partition but Windows became unbootable.

In two cases, I was able to boot from DVD Windows installation media and make Windows bootable again at which point the Microsoft Media Creation Tool could be used to install Windows 10

The UEFI boot machine proved more problematic: I had to create a Windows 7 System Repair disk and repair Windows booting before Windows 10 could proceed.

My Windows-using colleaague had used only Windows-based recovery disks: using Linux tools allowed me to repair Windows installations I couldn't boot

A week ago, we concluded our biggest DebConf ever! It was a huge success. We are overwhelmed by the positive feedback, for which we re very grateful. We want to thank you all for participating in the talks; speakers and audience alike, in person or live over the global Internet it wouldn t be the fantastic DebConf experience without you! Many of our events were recorded and streamed live, and are now available for viewing, as are the slides and photos. To share a sense of the scale of what all of us accomplished together, we ve compiled a few statistics:

• 555 attendees from 52 countries (including 28 kids)
• 216 scheduled events (183 talks and workshops), of which 119 were streamed and recorded
• 62 sponsors and partners
• 169 people sponsored for food & accommodation
• 79 professional and 35 corporate registrations

Our very own designer Valessio Brito made a lovely video of impressions and images of the conference. We re collecting impressions from attendees as well as links to press articles, including Linux Weekly News coverage of specific sessions of DebConf. If you find something not yet included, please help us by adding links to the wiki. We tried a few new ideas this year, including a larger number of invited and featured speakers than ever before. On the Open Weekend, some of our sponsors presented their career opportunities at our job fair, which was very well attended. And a diverse selection of entertainment options provided the necessary breaks and ample opportunity for socialising. On the last Friday, the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour was screened, with some introductory remarks by Jacob Appelbaum and a remote address by its director, Laura Poitras, and followed by a long Q&A session by Jacob. DebConf15 was also the first DebConf with organised childcare (including a Teckids workshop for kids of age 8-16), which our DPL Neil McGovern standardised for the future: it s a thing now, he said. The participants used the week before the conference for intensive work, sprints and workshops, and throughout the main conference, significant progress was made on Debian and Free Software. Possibly the most visible was the endeavour to provide reproducible builds, but the planning of the next stable release stretch received no less attention. Groups like the Perl team, the diversity outreach programme and even DebConf organisation spent much time together discussing next steps and goals, and hundreds of commits were made to the archive, as well as bugs closed. DebConf15 was an amazing conference, it brought together hundreds of people, some oldtimers as well as plenty of new contributors, and we all had a great time, learning and collaborating with each other, says Margarita Manterola of the organiser team, and continues: The whole team worked really hard, and we are all very satisfied with the outcome. Another organiser, Martin Krafft adds: We mainly provided the infrastructure and space. A lot of what happened during the two weeks was thanks to our attendees. And that s what makes DebConf be DebConf. Our organisation was greatly supported by the staff of the conference venue, the Jugendherberge Heidelberg International, who didn t take very long to identify with our diverse group, and who left no wishes untried. The venue itself was wonderfully spacious and never seemed too full as people spread naturally across the various conference rooms, the many open areas, the beergarden, the outside hacklabs and the lawn. The network installed specifically for our conference in collaboration with the nearby university, the neighbouring zoo, and the youth hostel provided us with a 1 Gbps upstream link, which we managed to almost saturate. The connection will stay in place, leaving the youth hostel as one with possibly the fastest Internet connection in the state. And the kitchen catered high-quality food to all attendees and their special requirements. Regional beer and wine, as well as local specialities, were provided at the bistro. DebConf exists to bring people together, which includes paying for travel, food and accomodation for people who could not otherwise attend. We would never have been able to achieve what we did without the support of our generous sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Thank you very much. See you next year in Cape Town, South Africa!

A new version of RcppGSL just arrived on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using our Rcpp package. Following on the heels of an update last month we updated the package (and its vignette) further. One of the key additions concern memory management: Given that our proxy classes around the GSL vector and matrix types are real C++ object, we can monitor their scope and automagically call free() on them rather then insisting on the user doing it. This renders code much simpler as illustrated below. Dan Dillon added const correctness over a series on pull request which allows us to write more standard (and simply nicer) function interfaces. Lastly, a few new typedef declaration further simply the use of the (most common) double and int vectors and matrices. Maybe a code example will help. RcppGSL contains a full and complete example package illustrating how to write a package using the RcppGSL facilities. It contains an example of computing a column norm -- which we blogged about before when announcing an much earlier version. In its full glory, it looks like this:

#include <RcppGSL.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_matrix.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_blas.h>
extern "C" SEXP colNorm(SEXP sM)  
  try  
        RcppGSL::matrix<double> M = sM;     // create gsl data structures from SEXP
        int k = M.ncol();
        Rcpp::NumericVector n(k);           // to store results
        for (int j = 0; j < k; j++)  
            RcppGSL::vector_view<double> colview = gsl_matrix_column (M, j);
            n[j] = gsl_blas_dnrm2(colview);
         
        M.free() ;
        return n;                           // return vector
    catch( std::exception &ex )  
        forward_exception_to_r( ex );
    catch(...)  
        ::Rf_error( "c++ exception (unknown reason)" );
   
  return R_NilValue; // -Wall
 

We manually translate the SEXP coming from R, manually cover the try and catch exception handling, manually free the memory etc pp. Well in the current version, the example is written as follows:

#include <RcppGSL.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_matrix.h>
#include <gsl/gsl_blas.h>
// [[Rcpp::export]]
Rcpp::NumericVector colNorm(const RcppGSL::Matrix & G)  
    int k = G.ncol();
    Rcpp::NumericVector n(k);           // to store results
    for (int j = 0; j < k; j++)  
        RcppGSL::VectorView colview = gsl_matrix_const_column (G, j);
        n[j] = gsl_blas_dnrm2(colview);
     
    return n;                           // return vector
 

This takes full advantage of Rcpp Attributes automagically creating the interface and exception handler (as per the previous release), adds a const & interface, does away with the tedious and error-pronce free() and uses the shorter-typedef forms for RcppGSL::Matrix and RcppGSL::VectorViews using double variables. Now the function is short and concise and hence easier to read and maintain. The package vignette has more details on using RcppGSL. The NEWS file entries follows below:

Changes in version 0.3.0 (2015-08-30)

• The RcppGSL matrix and vector class now keep track of object allocation and can therefore automatically free allocated object in the destructor. Explicit x.free() use is still supported.
• The matrix and vector classes now support const reference semantics in the interfaces (thanks to PR #7 by Dan Dillon)
• The matrix_view and vector_view classes are reorganized to better support const arguments (thanks to PR #8 and #9 by Dan Dillon)
• Shorthand forms such as Rcpp::Matrix have been added for double and int vectors and matrices including views.
• Examples such as fastLm can now be written in a much cleaner and shorter way as GSL objects can appear in the function signature and without requiring explicit .free() calls at the end.
• The included examples, as well as the introductory vignette, have been updated accordingly.

Courtesy of CRANberries, a summary of changes to the most recent release is available. More information is on the RcppGSL 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.

Review: Pound Foolish, by Helaine Olen

Publisher:	Penguin
Copyright:	2012, 2013
Printing:	2013
ISBN:	1-59184-679-X
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	241

For at least the last six years, it's not been surprising news that the relationship between the average person and the US financial system is tense at best, and downright exploitative at worst. The collapse of the housing bubble revealed a morass of predatory lending practices, spectacularly poor (or spectacularly cynical) investment decisions, and out-of-control personal debt coupled with erosion of bankruptcy law. Despite this, there's always a second story in all discussions of the finances of the US population: the problem isn't with financial structures and products, but with us. We're too stupid, or naive, or emotional, or uninformed, or greedy, or unprincipled, or impatient. Finances are complicated, yes, but that just means we have to be more thoughtful. All of these complex financial products could have been used properly. Helaine Olen's Pound Foolish is a systemtic, biting, well-researched, and pointed counter to that second story. The short summary of this book is that it's not us. We're being set up for failure, and there is a large and lucrative industry profiting off of that failure. And many (although not all) people in that industry know exactly what they're doing. Pound Foolish is one of my favorite forms of non-fiction: long-form journalism. This is an investigative essay into the personal finance and investment industry, developed to book length. Readers of Michael Lewis will feel right at home. Olen doesn't have Lewis's skill with characterization and biography, but she makes up for it in big-picture clarity. She takes a wealth of individual facts about who is involved in personal finance, how they make money, what they recommend, and who profits, and develops it into a clear and coherent overview. If you have paid any attention to US financial issues, you'll know some of this already. Frontline has done a great job of covering administrative fees in mutual funds. Lots of people have warned about annuities. The spectacular collapse of the home mortgage is old news now. But Olen does a great job of finding the connections between these elements and adding some less familiar ones, including an insightful and damning analysis of financial literacy campaigns and the widespread belief that these problems are caused by lack of consumer understanding. I've read and watched a lot of related material, including several full-book treatments of the mortgage crisis, so I think it's telling that I never got bored in the middle of Olen's treatment. I find the deep US belief in the power of personal improvement fascinating. It feels like one of the defining characteristics of US culture, for both good and for ill. We're very good at writing compelling narratives of personal improvement, and sometimes act on them. We believe that everyone can and should improve themselves. But that comes coupled to a dislike and distrust of expertise, even when it is legitimate and earned (Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life develops this idea at length). And I believe we significantly overestimate the ability of individuals to act despite systems that are stacked against us, and significantly overestimate our responsibility for the inevitable results. This was the main message I took from Pound Foolish: we desperately want to believe in the myth of personal control. We want to believe that our financial troubles are something we can fix through personal education, more will power, better decisions, or just the right investment. And so, we turn to gurus like Suze Orman and buy their mix of muddled financial advice and "tough love" that completely ignores broader social factors. We're easy marks for psychologically-trained investment sellers who mix fear, pressure, and a fantasy of inside knowledge and personal control. We're fooled by a narrative of empowerment and stand by while a working retirement system (guaranteed benefit pensions) is undermined and destroyed in favor of much riskier investment schemes... riskier for us, at least, but loaded with guaranteed profits for the people who "advise" us. And we cling to financial literacy campaigns that are funded by exactly the same credit card companies who fight tooth and nail against regulations that would require they provide simple, comprehensible descriptions of loan terms. One wonders if they support them precisely because they know they don't work. Olen mentions, in passing, the Stanford marshmallow experiment, which is often used as a foundation for arguments about personal responsibility for financial outcomes, but she doesn't do a detailed critique. I wish she had, since I think it's such a good example of the theme of this book. The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a psychological experiment from the late 1960s and early 1970s in delayed gratification. Children were put in a room in front of some treat (marshmallows, cookies, pretzels) and told that they could eat it if they wished. But if they didn't eat the treat before the monitor came back, they would get two of the treat instead. Long-term follow-up studies found that the children who refrained from eating the treat and got the reward had better life outcomes along multiple metrics: SAT scores, educational attainment, and others. On the surface, this seems to support everything US culture loves to believe about the power of self-control, self-improvement, and the Protestant work ethic. People who can delay gratification and save for a future reward do better in the world. (The darker interpretation, also common since the experiment was performed on children, is that the ability to delay gratification has a genetic component, and some people are just doomed to make poor decisions due to their inability to exercise self-control.) However, I can call the traditional interpretation into question with one simple question that the experimenters appeared not to ask: under what circumstances would taking the treat immediately be the rational and best choice? One answer, of course, is when one does not trust the adult to produce the promised reward. If the adult might come back, take the treat away, and not give any treat, it's to the child's advantage to take the treat immediately. Even if the adult left the treat but wouldn't actually double it, it's to the child's advantage to take the treat immediately. The traditional interpretation assumes the child trusts the adults performing the experiment a logical assumption for those of us whose childhood experience was that adults could generally be trusted and that promised rewards would materialize. If the child instead came from a chaotic family where adults weren't reliable, or just one where frequent unexpected money problems meant that promised treats often didn't materialize, the most logical assumption may be much different. One has to ask if such a background may have more to do with the measured long-term life outcomes than the child's unwillingness to trust in a future reward. And this is one of the major themes of this book. Problems the personal finance industry attributes to our personal shortcomings (which they're happy to take our money to remedy) are often systematic, or at least largely outside of our control. We may already be making the most logical choices given our personal situations. We're in worse financial shape because we're making less money. Our retirements are in danger because our retirement systems were dismantled and replaced with risky and expensive alternatives. And where problems are attributed to our poor choices, one can find entire industries that focus on undermining our ability to make good choices: scaring us, confusing us, hiding vital information, and exploiting known weaknesses of human psychology to route our money to them. These are not problems that can be solved by watching Suze Orman yell at us to stop buying things. These are systematic social problems that demand a sweeping discussion about regulation, automatic savings systems, and social insurance programs to spread risk and minimize the weaknesses of human psychology. Exactly the kind of discussion that the personal finance industry doesn't want us to have. Those who are well-read in these topics probably won't find a lot new here. Those who aren't in the US will shake their heads at some of the ways that the US fails its citizens, although many of Olen's points apply even to countries with stronger social safety nets. But if you're interested in solid long-form journalism on this topic, backed by lots of data on just how badly a focus on personal accountability is working for us, I recommend Pound Foolish. Rating: 8 out of 10

Well, that was quite some feedback to my last post; via blog, email, irc, and in person. I actually think this may be the most feedback I ever got to any single blog post. If you are still waiting for a reply after this new post, I will get back to you. To handle common question/information at once:

• It was the first download from an official Tor-enabled mirror; I know people downloaded updates via Tor before
• Yes, having this in the Debian installer as an option would be very nice
• Yes, there are ways to load balance Tor hidden services these days and the pre-requisites are being worked on already
  • Yes, that load balanced setup will support hardware key tokens
• A natively hidden service is more secure than accessing a non-hidden service via Tor because there is no way for a third-party exit node to mess with your traffic
• apt-get etc will leak information about your architecture, release, suites, desired packages, and package versions. That can't be avoided, but else it will not leak anything to the server. And even if it did.. see above
• Using Tor is also more secure than normal ftp/http/https as you don't build up an IP connection so the server can not get back to the client other than through the single one connection the client built up
• noodles Tor-enabled his partial debmirror as well: http://earthqfvaeuv5bla.onion/
  • It took him 14322255 tries to get a private key which produced that address
  • He gave up to find one starting with earthli after 9474114341 attempts
• I have been swamped with queries if I had tried apt-transport-tor instead of torify
  • I had forgotten about it, re-reading the blog post reminded me about apt transports
  • Tim even said in his post that Tor hidden mirror services would be nice
  • Try it yourself before you ask ;)
  • Yes, it works!

So this whole thing is a lot easier now:

# apt-get install torsocks apt-transport-tor
# mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list--backup2
# > /etc/apt/sources.list << EOF
deb tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb tor+http://earthqfvaeuv5bla.onion/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
EOF
# apt-get update
# apt-get install vcsh

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.

Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15

Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Toolchain fixes

• Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-12 which makes class and modules ordering predictable (#795835) and fixes __repr__ so memory addresses don't appear in docs (#795826). Patches by Val Lorentz.
• Sergei Golovan uploaded erlang/1:18.0-dfsg-2 which adds support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to erlc. Patch by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb.
• Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-5 which make grammar, inventory, and JavaScript locales generation deterministic. Original patch by Val Lorentz.
• St phane Glondu uploaded ocaml/4.02.3-2 to experimental, making startup files and native packed libraries deterministic. The patch adds deterministic .file to the assembler output.
• Enrico Tassi uploaded lua-ldoc/1.4.3-3 which now pass the -d option to txt2man and add the --date option to override the current date.

Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware.

• #796330 on d-shlibs by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.

St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apr/1.5.2-3 by Stefan Fritsch.
• aprx/2.08.svn593+dfsg-2 uploaded by Colin Tuckley, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• blkreplay/1.0-3 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, patch by Dhole.
• cal3d/0.11.0-6 uploaded by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, patch by akira.
• cgsi-gsoap/1.3.8-1 by Mattias Ellert.
• eyefiserver/2.4+dfsg-1 by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gnujump/1.0.8-3 uploaded by Evgeni Golov, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• hkgerman/1:2-29 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• jove/4.16.0.73-4 by Cord Beermann.
• libevhtp/1.2.10-3 by Vincent Bernat.
• libmkdoc-xml-perl/0.75-4 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• libparse-debianchangelog-perl/1.2.0-6 by Niko Tyni.
• librostlab-blast/1.0.1-5 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libxray-absorption-perl/3.0.1-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• lua-penlight/1.3.2-2 by Enrico Tassi.
• mosquitto/1.4.3-1 by Roger A. Light.
• nagios-plugins-contrib/15.20150818 by Jan Wagner and Bernd Zeimetz.
• nn/6.7.3-10 uploaded by Cord Beermann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pybik/2.1-1 by B. Clausius.
• pyepr/0.9.3-1 uploaded by Antonio Valentino, original patch by Juan Picca.
• python-xlrd/0.9.4-1 by Vincent Bernat.
• transmissionrpc/0.11-2 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Juan Picca.
• unoconv/0.7-1.1 sponsored by Vincent Bernat, fix by Dhole.
• vim-latexsuite/20141116.812-1 uploaded by Johann Felix Soden, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• volk/1.0.2-2 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• xbmc/2:13.2+dfsg1-5 by Balint Reczey.
• xdotool/1:3.20150503.1-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, initial patch by Chris Lamb.
• xfig/1:3.2.5.c-5 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• xfireworks/1.3-10 uploaded by Yukiharu YABUKI, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xul-ext-monkeysphere/0.8-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, original patch by Dhole.

Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues:

• brian/1.4.1-3 uploaded by Yaroslav Halchenko, original patch by Juan Picca.
• opennebula/4.12.3+dfsg-1 by Dmitry Smirnov.
• pcsx2/1.3.1-1008-g9f291a6+dfsg-1 by Miguel A. Col n V lez.
• webassets/3:0.11-1 uploaded by Agustin Henze, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

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

• apache2/2.4.16-3 uploaded by Stefan Fritsch, original patch by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gerris/20131206+dfsg-6 uploaded by Anton Gladky, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• kodi/15.1+dfsg1-1 by Balint Reczey.
• zshdb/0.05+git20101031-4 uploaded by Iain R. Learmonth, original patch by Chris Lamb.

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

• #795861 on fakeroot by Val Lorentz: set the mtime of all files to the time of the last debian/changelog entry.
• #795870 on fatresize by Chris Lamb: set build date to the time of the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795945 on projectl by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #795977 on dahdi-tools by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795981 on x11proto-input by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795983 on dbusada by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795984 on postgresql-plproxy by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795985 on xorg by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795987 on pngcheck by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795997 on python-babel by Val Lorentz: make build timestamp independent from the timezone and remove the name of the build system locale from the documentation.
• #796092 on a7xpg by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796212 on bittornado by Chris Lamb: remove umask-varying permissions.
• #796251 on liblucy-perl by Niko Tyni: generate lib/Lucy.xs in a deterministic order.
• #796271 on tcsh by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796275 on hspell by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamp from aff files generated by mk_he_affix.
• #796324 on fftw3 by Reiner Herrmann: remove date from documentation files.
• #796335 on nasm by Val Lorentz: remove extra timestamps from the build system.
• #796360 on libical by Chris Lamb: removes randomess caused Perl in generated icalderivedvalue.c.
• #796375 on wcd by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796376 on mapivi by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796527 on vserver-debiantools by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.

St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21^st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

Debconf is a great opportunity to meet people in real life, to express and share ideas in a different way, and to work on all sort of stuff.

I therefore spent some time to finish a couple of features in the editor for sources.debian.net. Here are some of the changes:

• Compare the source file with that of another version of the package
• And in order to present that: tabs! editor tabs!
• at the same time: generated diffs are now presented in a new editor tab, from where you can download it or email it

Get it for chromium, and iceweasel.

If your browser performs automatic updates of the extensions (the default), you should soon be upgraded to version 0.1.0 or later, bringing all those changes to your browser.

Want to see more? multi-file editing? in-browser storage of the editing session? that and more can be done, so feel free to join me and contribute to the Debian sources online editor!

Triggered by all the bugs around font problems I spent my weekend instead of mountaineering with crawling through the TeX Live history for changes and fixes to dvipdfm-x. Thanks to for his hints, I have pulled out the changes necessary to fix Type1 support in dvipdfm-x and have reincluded them into the Debian texlive-bin package. The uploaded binaries (version 2015.20150524.37493-6) are already compiled against the new C++ ABI, see the Debian transition, so most systems will still need to wait for the update to be installable. At the same time I did an update to the whole set of arch: all packages (texlive-base, texlive-lang, texlive-extra (version 2015.20150823-1). This was triggered by bug that seems to be caused by bad interplay between fontspec and l3 packages. Furthermore, I needed to remove the activation for fontconfig of the URW++ Base35 fonts, to ensure that fontconfig returns always the ones from the gsfonts package, instead of a mixture between TeX Live and gsfonts. Unrelated bug fix: libpaper intergration has been fixed and should work again. So for now all the bugs are now hopefully settled and we are back to normal. What remains is trying to fix jessie which is also broken in some respects. Updated packages acro, animate, babel-bosnian, babel-french, babel-latin, beamer-FUBerlin, beebe, breqn, chemformula, chet, cnltx, crossrefware, dantelogo, datetime2-it-fulltext, disser, drm, dvipdfmx-def, ecclesiastic, eledform, gradstudentresume, idxcmds, l3build, mcf2graph, media9, pageslts, pdfpages, reledmac, siunitx, tcolorbox, tex4ht, texlive-docindex, texlive-scripts, udesoftec, upmethodology, xindy. New packages blochsphere, e-french, fitbox, nar Enjoy.

Having had personal contact with Amazon employees, and having read the NYT article Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, I have only a few things to say:

• Most Japanese companies have different methods, but work hours are similar, and exploitation even worse (voluntary service etc)
• I loved one comment in the MobileRead thread on the article, link to the post:
  

  All you need to do is make one assumption: dishonest people will outperform honest people over the short term. Then every year Amazon s culling will get rid of the honest people and keep the dishonest ones. Rinse and repeat. Soon only the sociopaths are left. Best supporting quote from the article: You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus.

What remains I guess I would be a horrible performer at Amazon, and I am proud of it.

I tried to start to write this blog entry like I usually do: Type along what goes through my mind and see where I'm heading. This won't work out right now for various reasons, mostly because there is so much going on that I don't have the time to finish that in a reasonable time and I want to publish this today still. So please excuse me for being way more brief than I usually am, and hopefully I'll find the time to expand some things when asked or come back to that later. Part of the reason of me being short on time is different stuff going on in my private life which requires additional attention. A small part of this is also something that I hinted in a former blog entry: I switched my job in June. I really was looking forward to this. I made them aware of what the name Rhonda means to me and it's definitely extremely nice to be addressed with female pronouns at work. And also I'm back in a system administration job which means there is an interest overlap with my work on Debian, so a win-win situation on sooo many levels! I'm at DebConf15 since almost two weeks now. On my way here I was complimented on my outfit by a security guard at the Vienna airport which surprised me but definitely made my day. I was wearing one of these baggy hippie pants (which was sent to me by a fine lady I met at MiniDebConf Bucharest) but pulled up the leg parts to the knees so it could be perceived as a skirt instead. Since I came here I was pretty busy with taking care of DCschedule bot adjustments (like, changing topic and twittering from @DebConf at the start of the talks), helping out with the video team when I noticed there was a lack of people (which is a hint for that you might want to help with the video team in the future too, it's important for remote people but also for yourself because you can't attend multiple sessions at the same time). And I have to repeat myself, this is the place I feel home amongst my extended family, even though I it still is sometimes for me to get to speak up in certain groups. I though believe it's more an issue of certain individuals taking up a lot of space in discussions without giving (more shy) people in the round the space to also join in. I guess it might be the time that we need a session on dominant talking patterns for next year and how to work against them. I absolutely enjoyed such a session during last year's FemCamp in Vienna which set the tone for the rest of the conference, and it was simply great. And then there was the DebConf Poetry Night. I'm kinda disappointed with the outcome this year. It wasn't able to attract as much people anticipated, which I to some degree account to me not making people aware of it well enough, overlapping with a really great band playing at the same time in competition, and even though the place where we did it sounded like a good idea at first, it didn't had enough light for someone to read something from a book (but that was solved through smartphone lights). I know that most people did enjoy it, so it was good to do it, but I'm still a fair bit disappointed with the outcome and will try to work on improving on that grounds for next year. :) With all this going on there unfortunately wasn't as much time as I would have liked to spend with people I haven't seen for a long time, or new people I haven't met yet. Given that this year's DebConf had an height in attendees (526 being here at certain times during the two weeks, and just today someone new arrived too, so that doesn't even have to be the final number) it makes it a bit painful to have picked up so many tasks and thus lost some chances to socialize as much as I would have liked to. So, if you are still here and have the feeling we should have talked more, please look for me. As Bdale pointed out correctly in the New to DebConf BoF (paraphrased): When you see us DebConf old timers speaking to someone else and you feel like you don't want to disturb, please do disturb and speak to us. I always enjoyed to get to know new people. This for me always is one of the important aspects of DebConf. Also, I am very very happy to have received feedback from different people about both my tweets and my blog, thank you a lot of that. It is really motivating to keep going. So, lets enjoy the last few hours of DebConf! Another last side notice: While my old name in the Debian LDAP did manage to find some wrongly displayed names in the DebConf website, like for speakers, or volunteers, it was clear to me that having it exposed through SSO.debian.org isn't really something I appreciate. So I took the chance and spoke to Luca from the DSA team right here today, and ... got it fixed. I love it! Next step is getting my gpg key exchanged, RT ticket is coming up. :)

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The URW Base35 fonts are a great set of fonts, available for free as in free software. They have been part of various distributions and systems since long time. Big thanks to URW for their work. But these fonts don t have Cyrillic or Greek glyphs. Be it as it is, world would be easy. People would need to use different fonts for these languages. Comes around someone who did the unthinkable namely adding the Cyrillic and Greek glyphs to the fonts (by now nothing bad), but then NOT renaming the fonts. Here we see one point of the stupidity of GPL and absolute freedom. Because what we now have is that documents produced several TeX engines (in particular XeTeX and LuaTeX) which use fontconfig to search the fonts, suddenly pick up these changed fonts that fake their identity, and what comes out is this, a complete rubbish: And now we are suffering huge pain from that. Look at the bug reports of that are coming in:

• 796120 xdvipdfmx broken
• 789391 developers reference fonts broken
• 787759 fonts broken in dblatex

Just to name a few. And there is a simple way to circumvent this: Don t install gsfonts which guarantees that fontconfig finds the real original URW fonts within the TeX Live tree first. I have now spent many hours to track down these problems, find the reason, and at the end of the day there is always gsfonts with its broken fonts with added Cyrillic glyphs. I honestly don t care about the history, there are now many fonts with Cyrillic and Greek glyphs, there is no need to fake fonts, and incorrectly take over font names. This should be a lesson to all the GPL zealots that require absolute freedom of each and everything. Unfortunately things don t work like that. Using AND RENAMING is ok, the Knuth license as I would say, but anything else is just a source of much pain. End for today, I have to go to work now. Real work instead of fighting sins of the past. Nothing to enjoy here. Additional information Just to let you know, before starting a flame war, I have already contacted the upstream developers, that is TeX Live, and explained them the situation. I don t see much chance for fixing, since the problem is with fonts without upstream and support, which are probably only used in Debian (I haven t seen them anywhere else but some mentioning in RH), and which are not officially supported or distributed. It really needs a nice developer to look into why this breakage appeared. Let us hope. And instead of flaming, anyone here is invited to dig into the code him/herself and search for changes. Additional information 2015-08-22 Just to back up my complaints and counteract several of the comments: I am quoting from an email of a colleague on the list where we are discussing the problem:

However, the fonts extended by Valek Filippov are quite problematic. The Type1 spec clearly requires that there may not exist two different fonts with the same /FontName. The modified fonts shipped with Ghostscript have the same /FontName as the original fonts donated by URW and not even the /UniqueID was changed. IMO they are broken because they don t comply with the Type1 specification.

I hope that convinced also the last in doubt.

I ve just uploaded an update version of my puppet ssh module to the forge. The module aims at being a generic module to manage of ssh server and clients, including key generation and known_hosts management. It provides a mechanism to generate and deploy ssh keys without the need of storeconfig or PuppetDB but a server-side cache instead. This is neat, if you want to remain ssh keys during a reprovisioning of a host. Updates The update is mostly to push out some patches I ve received from contributors via pull requests in the last few months. It adds:

• Support for the AllowUsers, AllowGroups and DenyUsers aswell as DenyGroups parameters in the default sshd_config template. Thanks to cachaldora for the patches.
• Support for multiple ports in the default sshd template. Thanks to Arnd Hannemann for that patch.
• Fixes in the template for it to work with newer puppet versions. Untested by me, but this probably fixes compatibility with puppet 4. For that contribution my thanks go to Daine Danielson.Apart from this changes I ve added a couple of beaker tests.If the module is of any use for you, I d be happy for ratings at puppetforge. The same is true for critical feedback, bug reports or (even better pull requests.

I bumped into Mark Shuttleworth today at Linuxcon and we had a brief conversation about Canonical's IP policy. The short summary:

• Canonical assert that the act of compilation creates copyright over the binaries, and you may not redistribute those binaries unless (a) the license prevents Canonical from restricting redistribution (eg, the GPL), or (b) you follow the terms of their IP policy. This means that, no matter what Dustin's blogpost says, Canonical's position is that you must ask for permission before distributing any custom container images that contain Ubuntu binaries, even if you use no Ubuntu trademarks in the process. Doing so without their permission is an infringement of their copyright.
  
• Canonical have no intention of clarifying their policy, because Canonical benefit from companies being legally uncertain as to whether they have permission to do something or not.
  
• Mark justifies maintaining this uncertainty by drawing an analogy between it and the perceived uncertainties that exist around certain aspects of the GPL. I disagree with this analogy pretty strongly. One of the main reasons for the creation of GPLv3 was to deal with some more ambiguous aspects of GPLv2 (such as what actually happened after license termination and how patents interacted with the GPL). The FSF publish a large FAQ intended to provide further clarity. The major ambiguity is in what a derivative work actually is, which is something the FSF can't answer absolutely (that's going to be up to courts) but will give its opinion on when asked. The uncertainties in Canonical's IP policy aren't a result of a lack of legal clarity - they're a result of Canonical's refusal to answer questions.

The even shorter summary: Canonical won't clarify their IP policy because they believe they can make more money if they don't.

Why do I keep talking about this? Because Canonical are deliberately making it difficult to create derivative works, and that's one of the core tenets of the definition of free software. Their IP policy is fundamentally incompatible with our community norms, and that's something we should care about rather than ignoring.

comments

My semi serious stand up comedy notes Video Disclaimers

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. (Emma Goldman, on several things including mailing list flamewars)

Fascinating A da's "Dogging" song. Look for "dogging etiquette" for more examples of code of conducts. Just don't take your computer for repair immediately afterwards . Introduction

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian. (Emma Goldman, on the Debian Social Contract)

I am going to talk about many topics that we all know have so much in common:

• Anarchism
• Poliamory
• BDSM
• and Free Software

They are all, after all:

• People
• Consensually
• Doing Things
• Together

BDSM

A person is no less a slave because they are allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. (Lysander Spooner about proprietary cloud service providers)

If you thought you've seen it all with recursive acronyms, here's a chain acronym: Bondage Discipline, Dominance Submission, Sado Masochism. Why I think BDSM is interesting: not (just) because of whips, but for having a lot of awareness about power releationships. Why should one accept from a coworker a level of abuse that would be considered a hard limit when negotiating with a trusted dom? The BDSM Free Software definition: "I refuse to be bound by software I cannot negotiate with". YKINMKBYKIOK (Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is Okay) is a nice example of dealing with diversity, and it also definitely solves the emacs vs vi debate. Comfort zones, safewords, traffic light flow control, safety. "No means no", unless there has been a long discussion first, and a safeword is in place, in which case "Fuzzy purple unicorn" means "no" "No means no", and if someone insists after a "no", it becomes harassment. "No means no" is a precondition for being able to say "yes": http://pervocracy.blogspot.de/2011/03/no-and-no-and-no-and-yes.html Aftercare! Aftercare! Release parties! High fives! Solidarity after flamewars or votes! Poliamory

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus. (Emma Goldman, on volunteer projects)

Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of intimate relationships that are not exclusive with respect to other sexual or intimate relationships, with knowledge and consent of everyone involved. Compersion, n: the feeling you get when someone else also takes good care of one of your packages. We currently allow only one value in the Maintainer field: * takeover is traumatic, because values can only be replaced * if values could be added instead, and removed when they don't make sense anymore... What is your definition of love? My current one is: my world is better with you in it. Relationship anarchy is the practice of forming relationships which are not bound by rules aside from what the people involved mutually agree on. How do you call a relationship that is bound by rules that the people involved do not agree on? From discussions after the talk New Relationship Energy, the excitement when you start to maintain a new package, and the risk of been carried away by the excitement and neglecting all the other ones. Consent

Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship. (Voltairine de Cleyre about trusting lintian warnings)

You need to know what you are doing, and what situation you're putting yourself into. You need to know that the person asking a question really is able to accept any answer, and take it seriously. You need to feel that you have alternatives. Be selfish when you ask, honest when you reply, and when others reply, take them seriously. If any of this doesn't stand, I find it hard to trust that we are in a consensual situation. When is one supposed to learn about consent?

• I see little consensuality in standard education.
• I see little consensuality at work.

Consent explained with tea. Practical advice

Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, Freedom. Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully. (Lucy Parsons about the DFSG)

Relationship advice and work advice have a lot in common:

• Sick systems: How to keep someone with you forever
• What technical recruiters can learn from online dating

Relationship advice from 99 ways to ruin an open source project Online participation advice from How to Screw Up Your Relationship (and make everyone miserable while you re at it) Packaging advice from BDSM Basics: 20 Unsolicited Tips for New Dominants Advice about joining a new community from Advice to a newbie submissive about dominants Dear Debian, and dear everyone contributing to it: my world is better with you in it. I love you all :* <3

Some years ago Barwon South Water gave LUV 3 old 1RU Sun servers for any use related to free software. We gave one of those servers to the Canberra makerlab and another is used as the server for the LUV mailing lists and web site and the 3rd server was put aside for training. The servers have hot-swap 15,000rpm SAS disks IE disks that have a replacement cost greater than the budget we have for hardware. As we were given a spare 70G disk (and a 140G disk can replace a 70G disk) the LUV server has 2*70G disks and the 140G disks (which can t be replaced) are in the server for training. On Saturday I ran a BTRFS and ZFS training session for the LUV Beginners SIG. This was inspired by the amount of discussion of those filesystems on the mailing list and the amount of interest when we have lectures on those topics. The training went well, the meeting was better attended than most Beginners SIG meetings and the people who attended it seemed to enjoy it. One thing that I will do better in future is clearly documenting commands that are expected to fail and documenting how to login to the system. The users all logged in to accounts on a Xen server and then ssh d to root at their DomU. I think that it would have saved a bit of time if I had aliased commands like btrfs to echo you must login to your virtual server first or made the shell prompt at the Dom0 include instructions to login to the DomU. Each user or group had a virtual machine. The server has 32G of RAM and I ran 14 virtual servers that each had 2G of RAM. In retrospect I should have configured fewer servers and asked people to work in groups, that would allow more RAM for each virtual server and also more RAM for the Dom0. The Dom0 was running a BTRFS RAID-1 filesystem and each virtual machine had a snapshot of the block devices from my master image for the training. Performance was quite good initially as the OS image was shared and fit into cache. But when many users were corrupting and scrubbing filesystems performance became very poor. The disks performed well (sustaining over 100 writes per second) but that s not much when shared between 14 active users. The ZFS part of the tutorial was based on RAID-Z (I didn t use RAID-5/6 in BTRFS because it s not ready to use and didn t use RAID-1 in ZFS because most people want RAID-Z). Each user had 5*4G virtual disks (2 for the OS and 3 for BTRFS and ZFS testing). By the end of the training session there was about 76G of storage used in the filesystem (including the space used by the OS for the Dom0), so each user had something like 5G of unique data. We are now considering what other training we can run on that server. I m thinking of running training on DNS and email. Suggestions for other topics would be appreciated. For training that s not disk intensive we could run many more than 14 virtual machines, 60 or more should be possible. Below are the notes from the BTRFS part of the training, anyone could do this on their own if they substitute 2 empty partitions for /dev/xvdd and /dev/xvde. On a Debian/Jessie system all that you need to do to get ready for this is to install the btrfs-tools package. Note that this does have some risk if you make a typo. An advantage of doing this sort of thing in a virtual machine is that there s no possibility of breaking things that matter.

1. Making the filesystem
   1. Make the filesystem, this makes a filesystem that spans 2 devices (note you must use the-f option if there was already a filesystem on those devices):
      mkfs.btrfs /dev/xvdd /dev/xvde
   2. Use file(1) to see basic data from the superblocks:
      file -s /dev/xvdd /dev/xvde
   3. Mount the filesystem (can mount either block device, the kernel knows they belong together):
      mount /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
   4. See a BTRFS df of the filesystem, shows what type of RAID is used:
      btrfs filesystem df /mnt/tmp
   5. See more information about FS device use:
      btrfs filesystem show /mnt/tmp
   6. Balance the filesystem to change it to RAID-1 and verify the change, note that some parts of the filesystem were single and RAID-0 before this change):
      btrfs balance start -dconvert=raid1 -mconvert=raid1 -sconvert=raid1 force /mnt/tmp
      btrfs filesystem df /mnt/tmp
   7. See if there are any errors, shouldn t be any (yet):
      btrfs device stats /mnt/tmp
   8. Copy some files to the filesystem:
      cp -r /usr /mnt/tmp
   9. Check the filesystem for basic consistency (only checks checksums):
      btrfs scrub start -B -d /mnt/tmp
2. Online corruption
   1. Corrupt the filesystem:
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xvdd bs=1024k count=2000 seek=50
   2. Scrub again, should give a warning about errors:
      btrfs scrub start -B /mnt/tmp
   3. Check error count:
      btrfs device stats /mnt/tmp
   4. Corrupt it again:
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xvdd bs=1024k count=2000 seek=50
   5. Unmount it:
      umount /mnt/tmp
   6. In another terminal follow the kernel log:
      tail -f /var/log/kern.log
   7. Mount it again and observe it correcting errors on mount:
      mount /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
   8. Run a diff, observe kernel error messages and observe that diff reports no file differences:
      diff -ru /usr /mnt/tmp/usr/
   9. Run another scrub, this will probably correct some errors which weren t discovered by diff:
      btrfs scrub start -B -d /mnt/tmp
3. Offline corruption
   1. Umount the filesystem, corrupt the start, then try mounting it again which will fail because the superblocks were wiped:
      umount /mnt/tmp
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xvdd bs=1024k count=200
      mount /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
      mount /dev/xvde /mnt/tmp
   2. Note that the filesystem was not mountable due to a lack of a superblock. It might be possible to recover from this but that s more advanced so we will restore the RAID.
      Mount the filesystem in a degraded RAID mode, this allows full operation.
      mount /dev/xvde /mnt/tmp -o degraded
   3. Add /dev/xvdd back to the RAID:
      btrfs device add /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
   4. Show the filesystem devices, observe that xvdd is listed twice, the missing device and the one that was just added:
      btrfs filesystem show /mnt/tmp
   5. Remove the missing device and observe the change:
      btrfs device delete missing /mnt/tmp
      btrfs filesystem show /mnt/tmp
   6. Balance the filesystem, not sure this is necessary but it s good practice to do it when in doubt:
      btrfs balance start /mnt/tmp
   7. Umount and mount it, note that the degraded option is not needed:
      umount /mnt/tmp
      mount /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
4. Experiment
   1. Experiment with the btrfs subvolume create and btrfs subvolume delete commands (which act like mkdir and rmdir).
   2. Experiment with btrfs subvolume snapshot SOURCE DEST and btrfs subvolume snapshot -r SOURCE DEST for creating regular and read-only snapshots of other subvolumes (including the root).

Yet another relatively minor update. What with all the other stuff that's been going on in my life in the past year, I never updated my backport script to support backports to jessie or to reflect the new stable release. This release does that, at some email prompting (thank you!). It also adds a new -A or --architecture flag to specify which build architecture to pass to pdebuild. I have no idea if this works, but it at least should in theory. You can get the latest version of my backport script from my scripts page.

Just came back from a wonderful time hiking with my daughter at the finale Hike the Greenbelt event at the Backlands/McIntosh Run! This photo slideshow is from my HP snapshot camera which unfortunately has dust in the lens. But I felt it was more important to get them up soon than to get them perfect, so please click the photo below to start the slideshow. I want to thank everyone who made this event a success, and not going to name specific names as I m sure I ll miss someone important. But thanks especially to Martin, the leader of our group. [slb_group]

Marcos Zentilli explaining geology of the region. Click photo to start slideshow.