Search Results: "ema"

2 August 2015

Benjamin Mako Hill: Understanding Hydroplane Races for the New Seattleite

It s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. EllstromManufacturingHydroplaneIn my social circle, I m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! most people seem more puzzled than interested. I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites. Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines! The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn t bad. miss_thriftwayAlthough the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals. In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I m no follower of motorsports in general, I ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on. It s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

Benjamin Mako Hill: Understanding Hydroplane Races for the New Seattleite

It s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. EllstromManufacturingHydroplaneIn my social circle, I m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! most people seem more puzzled than interested. I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites. Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines! The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn t bad. miss_thriftwayAlthough the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals. In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I m no follower of motorsports in general, I ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on. It s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

1 August 2015

Russ Allbery: Review: The Pyramid Waltz

Review: The Pyramid Waltz, by Barbara Ann Wright
Series: Katya and Starbride #1
Publisher: Bold Strokes
Copyright: September 2012
ISBN: 1-60282-792-3
Format: Kindle
Pages: 264
Princess Katya Nar Umbriel is publicly a bored, womanizing, and difficult daughter to the rulers of Farraday. It's all an act, though, with the full knowledge of her parents. As the second child, she's the leader of the Order of Vestra: the equivalent of the Secret Service, devoted to protecting the royal family and, by extension, the kingdom, particularly against magical attacks. Starbride is new to court and entirely out of place. From a northern neighboring country, and far more comfortable in practical clothing than the frilled court dresses that her mother wants her to wear, she has been sent to court to make contacts. Her people are getting the bad side of various trade contracts and desperately need some political maneuvering space of their own. Starbride's best hope for this is to study law in the palace library when she can manage to avoid the other courtiers. But then she and Katya stumble across each other, outside of the roles they're playing, and might have an opportunity for a deeper connection. One that neither of them want to entangle in their personal worries. This is the last of a set of books I picked up while looking for lesbian romance with fantasy or science fiction elements. On the romance front, it's one of the better entries in that set. Both Katya and Starbride are likeable, in large part due to their mutual exasperation with the trappings of the court. (Making the protagonists more serious, thoughtful, and intelligent than the surrounding characters is an old trick, but it works.) Wright has a good ear for banter, particularly the kind when two people of good will are carefully feeling each other out. And despite Katya's need to keep a deep secret from Starbride for some of the book, The Pyramid Waltz mostly avoids irritating communication failures as a plot driver. The fantasy portion and the plot drivers, alas, are weaker. The world building is not exactly bad, but it's just not that interesting. There are a couple of moderately good ideas, in the form of pyramid magic and secret (and dangerous) magical powers that run in the royal family, but they're not well-developed. Pyramid magic turns out to look much like any other generic fantasy magic system, with training scenes that could have come from a Valdemar or Wheel of Time novel (and without as much dramatic tension). And the royal family's secret, while better-developed and integral to the plot, still felt rather generic and one-sided. Maybe that's something Wright develops better in future novels in this series, but that was another problem: the ending of The Pyramid Waltz was rather weak. Partly, I think, this is because the cast is too large and not well-developed. I cared about Katya and Starbird, and to a lesser extent their servants and one of the Order members. (Wright has a moderately interesting bit of worldbuilding about how servants work in Starbride's culture, which I wish we'd seen more of.) But there are a bunch of other Order of Vesta members, Katya's family, and various other bits of history and hinted world views, none of which seemed to get much depth. The ending climax involved a lot of revelations and twists that primarily concerned characters I didn't care about. It lost something in the process. This book is clearly set up for a sequel. There is an ending, but it's not entirely satisfying. Unfortunately, despite liking Katya and Starbird a lot, the rest of the story wasn't compelling enough to make me want to buy it, particularly since the series apparently goes through another three books before reaching a real ending. I enjoyed parts of this book, particularly Katya and Starbird feeling each other out and discovering similarities in their outlook. Katya teasing Starbird, and Starbird teasing herself, over her mother's choice of her clothing was probably the best part. It's not bad for what it's trying to do, but I think it's a bit too generic and not satisfying enough to really recommend. Followed by For Want of a Fiend. Rating: 6 out of 10

31 July 2015

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in July 2015

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 15 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following: Kali Linux / Debian Stretch work kaliKali Linux wants to experiment something close to Debian Constantly Usable Testing: we have a kali-rolling release that is based on Debian Testing and we want to take a new snapshot every 4 months (in order to have 3 releases per year). More specifically we have a kali-dev repository which is exactly Debian Stretch + our own Kali packages (the kali package take precedence) updated 4 times a day, just like testing is. And we have a britney2 setup that generates kali-rolling out of kali-dev (without any requirement in terms of delay/RC bugs, it just ensures that dependencies are not broken), also 4 times a day. We have jenkins job that ensures that our metapackages are installable in kali-dev (and kali-rolling) and that we can build our ISO images. When things break, I have to fix them and I try to fix them on the Debian side first. So here are some examples of stuff I did in response to various failures: If you analyze this list, you will see that a large part of the issues we had come down to package getting removed from testing due to RC bugs. We should be able to anticipate those issues and monitor the packages that have an impact on Kali. We will probably add new jenkins job that installs all the metapackages and then run how-can-i-help -s testing-autorm --old I just submitted #794238 as a wishlist against how-can-i-help. At the same time, there are bugs that make it into testing and that I fix / work around on the Kali side. But those fixes / work around might be more useful if they were pushed to testing via testing-proposed-updates. I tried to see whether other derivatives had similar needs to see if derivatives could join their efforts at this level but it does not look like so for now. Last but not least, bugs reported on the Kali side also resulted in Debian improvements: Other Debian work Sponsorship. I sponsored multiple packages for Daniel Stender who is packaging prospector, a software that I requested earlier (through RFP bug). So I reviewed and uploaded python-requirements-detector, python-setoptconf, pylint-celery and pylint-common. During a review I also discovered a nice bug in dh-python (#793609a comment in the middle of a Build-Depends could break a package). I also sponsored an upload of notmuch-addrlookup (new package requested by a Freexian customer). Packaging. I uploaded python-django 1.7.9 in unstable and 1.8.3 in experimental to fix security issues. I uploaded a new upstream release of ditaa through a non-maintainer uploaded (again at the request of a Freexian customer). Distro Tracker. Beside the work to integrate detailed security status, I fixed the code to be compatible with Django 1.8 and modified the tox configuration to ensure that the test suite is regularly run against Django 1.8. I also merged multiple patches of Christophe Siraut (cf #784151 and #754413). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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28 July 2015

Norbert Preining: ePub editor Sigil landed in Debian

Long long time ago I wanted to have Sigil, an epub editor, to appear in Debian. There was a packaging wishlist bug from back in 2010 with intermittent activities. But thanks to concerted effort, especially by Mattia Rizzolo and Don Armstrong, packaging progressed to a state that I could sponsor the upload to experimental about 4 months ago. And yesterday, after long waiting, finally Sigil passed the watchful eyes of the Debian ftp-masters and has entered Debian/experimental. sigil-debian I have already updated the packaging for the latest version 0.8.7, which will be included in Debian/sid rather soon. Thanks again especially Mattia for his great work.
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27 July 2015

Michael Stapelberg: dh-make-golang: creating Debian packages from Go packages

Recently, the pkg-go team has been quite busy, uploading dozens of Go library packages in order to be able to package gcsfuse (a user-space file system for interacting with Google Cloud Storage) and InfluxDB (an open-source distributed time series database). Packaging Go library packages (!) is a fairly repetitive process, so before starting my work on the dependencies for gcsfuse, I started writing a tool called dh-make-golang. Just like dh-make itself, the goal is to automatically create (almost) an entire Debian package. As I worked my way through the dependencies of gcsfuse, I refined how the tool works, and now I believe it s good enough for a first release. To demonstrate how the tool works, let s assume we want to package the Go library github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit: 
midna /tmp $ dh-make-golang github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
2015/07/25 18:25:39 Downloading "github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit/..."
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Determining upstream version number
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Package version is "0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c"
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Determining dependencies
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Packaging successfully created in /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Resolve all TODOs in itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt, then email it out:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     sendmail -t -f < itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Resolve all the TODOs in debian/, find them using:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     grep -r TODO debian
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 To build the package, commit the packaging and use gbp buildpackage:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     git add debian && git commit -a -m 'Initial packaging'
2015/07/25 18:25:55     gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 To create the packaging git repository on alioth, use:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     ssh git.debian.org "/git/pkg-go/setup-repository golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 'Packaging for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit'"
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Once you are happy with your packaging, push it to alioth using:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream
The ITP is often the most labor-intensive part of the packaging process, because any number of auto-detected values might be wrong: the repository owner might not be the Upstream Author , the repository might not have a short description, the long description might need some adjustments or the license might not be auto-detected. 
midna /tmp $ cat itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
From: "Michael Stapelberg" <stapelberg AT debian.org>
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: ITP: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit -- Go package for rate limiting
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg AT debian.org>
* Package name    : golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
  Version         : 0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
  Upstream Author : Aaron Jacobs
* URL             : https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
* License         : Apache-2.0
  Programming Lang: Go
  Description     : Go package for rate limiting
 GoDoc (https://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit)
 .
 This package contains code for dealing with rate limiting. See the
 reference (http://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit) for more info.
TODO: perhaps reasoning
midna /tmp $
After filling in all the TODOs in the file, let s mail it out and get a sense of what else still needs to be done: 
midna /tmp $ sendmail -t -f < itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
midna /tmp $ cd golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ grep -r TODO debian
debian/changelog:  * Initial release (Closes: TODO) 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $
After filling in these TODOs as well, let s have a final look at what we re about to build: 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ head -100 debian/**/*
==> debian/changelog <==                            
golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit (0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1) unstable; urgency=medium
  * Initial release (Closes: #793646)
 -- Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>  Sat, 25 Jul 2015 23:26:34 +0200
==> debian/compat <==
9
==> debian/control <==
Source: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
Section: devel
Priority: extra
Maintainer: pkg-go <pkg-go-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Uploaders: Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9),
               dh-golang,
               golang-go,
               golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-oglematchers-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-ogletest-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-syncutil-dev,
               golang-golang-x-net-dev
Standards-Version: 3.9.6
Homepage: https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
Vcs-Browser: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git;a=summary
Vcs-Git: git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
Package: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev
Architecture: all
Depends: $ shlibs:Depends ,
         $ misc:Depends ,
         golang-go,
         golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-oglematchers-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-ogletest-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-syncutil-dev,
         golang-golang-x-net-dev
Built-Using: $ misc:Built-Using 
Description: Go package for rate limiting
 This package contains code for dealing with rate limiting. See the
 reference (http://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit) for more info.
==> debian/copyright <==
Format: http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
Upstream-Name: ratelimit
Source: https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
Files: *
Copyright: 2015 Aaron Jacobs
License: Apache-2.0
Files: debian/*
Copyright: 2015 Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>
License: Apache-2.0
Comment: Debian packaging is licensed under the same terms as upstream
License: Apache-2.0
 Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 You may obtain a copy of the License at
 .
 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 .
 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 limitations under the License.
 .
 On Debian systems, the complete text of the Apache version 2.0 license
 can be found in "/usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0".
==> debian/gbp.conf <==
[DEFAULT]
pristine-tar = True
==> debian/rules <==
#!/usr/bin/make -f
export DH_GOPKG := github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
%:
	dh $@ --buildsystem=golang --with=golang
==> debian/source <==
head: error reading  debian/source : Is a directory
==> debian/source/format <==
3.0 (quilt)
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $
Okay, then. Let s give it a shot and see if it builds: 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git add debian && git commit -a -m 'Initial packaging'
[master 48f4c25] Initial packaging                                                      
 7 files changed, 75 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 debian/changelog
 create mode 100644 debian/compat
 create mode 100644 debian/control
 create mode 100644 debian/copyright
 create mode 100644 debian/gbp.conf
 create mode 100755 debian/rules
 create mode 100644 debian/source/format
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder
[ ]
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ lintian ../golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
I: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit source: debian-watch-file-is-missing
P: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev: no-upstream-changelog
I: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev: extended-description-is-probably-too-short
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $
This package just built (as it should!), but occasionally one might need to disable a test and file an upstream bug about it. So, let s push this package to pkg-go and upload it: 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ ssh git.debian.org "/git/pkg-go/setup-repository golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 'Packaging for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit'"
Initialized empty shared Git repository in /srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git/
HEAD is now at ea6b1c5 add mrconfig for dh-make-golang
[master c5be5a1] add mrconfig for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
To /git/pkg-go/meta.git
   ea6b1c5..c5be5a1  master -> master
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream
Counting objects: 31, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (25/25), done.
Writing objects: 100% (31/31), 18.38 KiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Total 31 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master
 * [new branch]      pristine-tar -> pristine-tar
 * [new branch]      upstream -> upstream
 * [new tag]         upstream/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c -> upstream/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ cd ..
midna /tmp $ debsign golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
[ ]
midna /tmp $ dput golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes   
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit using ftp to ftp-master (host: ftp.upload.debian.org; directory: /pub/UploadQueue/)
[ ]
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1.dsc
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c.orig.tar.bz2
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1.debian.tar.xz
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_all.deb
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
midna /tmp $ cd golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git tag debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
 * [new tag]         debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1 -> debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $
Thanks for reading this far, and I hope dh-make-golang makes your life a tiny bit easier. As dh-make-golang just entered Debian unstable, you can install it using apt-get install dh-make-golang. If you have any feedback, I m eager to hear it.

26 July 2015

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2015/30

this week, besides other activities, I again managed to NMU a few packages as part of the GCC 5 transition. & again I could build on patches submitted by various HP engineers & other helpful souls.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppZiggurat 0.1.3: Faster Random Normal Draws

ziggurats After a slight hiatus since the last release in early 2014, we are delighted to announce a new release of RcppZiggurat which is now on the CRAN network for R. The RcppZiggurat package updates the code for the Ziggurat generator which provides very fast draws from a Normal distribution. The package provides a simple C++ wrapper class for the generator improving on the very basic macros, and permits comparison among several existing Ziggurat implementations. This can be seen in the figure where Ziggurat from this package dominates accessing the implementations from the GSL, QuantLib and Gretl---all of which are still way faster than the default Normal generator in R (which is of course of higher code complexity). This release contains a few internal cleanups relative to the last release. It was triggered by a very helpful email from Brian Ripley who notices compiler warnings on the Solaris platform due to my incorrect use of on integer variables. The NEWS file entry below lists all changes.
Changes in version 0.1.3 (2015-07-25)
  • Use the SHR3 generator for the default implementation just like Leong et al do, making our default implementation identical to theirs (but 32- and 64-bit compatible)
  • Switched generators from float to double ensuring that results are identical on 32- and 64-bit platforms
  • Simplified builds with respect to GSL use via the RcppGSL package; added a seed setter for the GSL variant
  • Corrected use of fabs() to abs() on integer variables, with a grateful nod to Brian Ripley for the hint (based on CRAN checks on the beloved Slowlaris machines)
  • Accelerated Travis CI tests by relying exclusively on r-cran-* packages from the PPAs by Michael Rutter and myself
  • Updated DESCRIPTION and NAMESPACE according to current best practices, and R-devel CMD check --as-cran checks
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is on the RcppZiggurat 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.

Norbert Preining: Challenging riddle from The Talos Principle

When I recently complained that Portal 2 was too easy, I have to say, The Talos Principle is challenging. For a solution that, if known, takes only a few seconds, I often have to wring my brain about the logistics for long long time. Here a nice screenshot from one of the easier riddles, but with great effect. TTP-screenshot A great game, very challenging. A more length review will come when I have finished the game.
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25 July 2015

Sandro Tosi: DICOM viewer and converter in Debian

DICOM is a standard for your RX/CT/MRI scans and the format most of the times your result will be given to you, along with Win/MacOS viewers, but what about Debian? the best I could find is Ginkgo CADx (package ginkgocadx).

If you want to convert those DICOM files into images you can use convert (I dont know why I was surprised to find out imagemagik can handle it).

PS: here a description of the format.

Norbert Preining: PiwigoPress release 2.30

I just pushed a new release of PiwigoPress (main page, WordPress plugin dir) to the WordPress servers. This release incorporates some new features, mostly contributed by Anton Lavrov (big thanks!) piwigopress-logo The new features are: I also checked that the plugin runs with the soon to be released WordPress 4.3, and fixed a small problem with the setting of albumpicture not being saved. That s all, enjoy, and leave your wishlist items and complains at the issue tracker on the github project piwigopress.
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Steve Kemp: We're in Finland now.

So we've recently spent our first week together in Helsinki, Finland. Mostly this has been stress-free, but there are always oddities about living in new places, and moving to Europe didn't minimize them. For the moment I'll gloss over the differences and instead document the computer problem I had. Our previous shared-desktop system had a pair of drives configured using software RAID. I pulled one of the drives to use in a smaller-cased system (smaller so it was easier to ship). Only one drive of a pair being present make mdadm scream, via email, once per day, with reports of failure. The output of cat /proc/mdstat looked like this: 
md2 : active raid1 sdb6[0] [LVM-storage-area]
      1903576896 blocks super 1.2 2 near-copies [2/1] [_U]
md1 : active raid10 sdb5[1] [/root]
      48794112 blocks super 1.2 2 near-copies [2/1] [_U]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[0]  [/boot]
      975296 blocks super 1.2 2 near-copies [2/1] [_U]
See the "_" there? That's the missing drive. I couldn't remove the drive as it wasn't present on-disk, so this failed: 
mdadm --fail   /dev/md0 /dev/sda1
mdadm --remove /dev/md0 /dev/sda1
# repeat for md1, md2.
Similarly removing all "detached" drives failed, so the only thing to do was to mess around re-creating the arrays with a single drive: 
lvchange -a n shelob-vol
mdadm --stop /dev/md2
mdadm --create /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-devices=1 /dev/sdb6 --force
..
I did that on the LVM-storage area, and the /boot partition, but "/" is still to be updated. I'll use knoppix/similar to do it next week. That'll give me a "RAID" system which won't alert every day. Thanks to the joys of re-creation the UUIDs of the devices changed, so /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf needed updating. I realized that too late, when grub failed to show the menu, because it didn't find it's own UUID. Handy recipe for the future: 
set prefix=(md/0)/grub/
insmod linux
linux (md/0)/vmlinuz-3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64 root=/dev/md1
initrd (md/0)//boot/initrd.img-3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64
boot

23 July 2015

Daniel Pocock: Unpaid work training Google's spam filters

This week, there has been increased discussion about the pain of spam filtering by large companies, especially Google. It started with Google's announcement that they are offering a service for email senders to know if their messages are wrongly classified as spam. Two particular things caught my attention: the statement that less than 0.05% of genuine email goes to the spam folder by mistake and the statement that this new tool to understand misclassification is only available to "help qualified high-volume senders". From there, discussion has proceeded with Linus Torvalds blogging about his own experience of Google misclassifying patches from Linux contributors as spam and that has been widely reported in places like Slashdot and The Register. Personally, I've observed much the same thing from the other perspective. While Torvalds complains that he isn't receiving email, I've observed that my own emails are not always received when the recipient is a Gmail address. It seems that Google expects their users work a little bit every day going through every message in the spam folder and explicitly clicking the "Not Spam" button: so that Google can improve their proprietary algorithms for classifying mail. If you just read or reply to a message in the folder without clicking the button, or if you don't do this for every message, including mailing list posts and other trivial notifications that are not actually spam, more important messages from the same senders will also continue to be misclassified. If you are not willing to volunteer your time to do this, or if you are simply one of those people who has better things to do, Google's Gmail service is going to have a corrosive effect on your relationships. A few months ago, we visited Australia and I sent emails to many people who I wanted to catch up with, including invitations to a family event. Some people received the emails in their inboxes yet other people didn't see them because the systems at Google (and other companies, notably Hotmail) put them in a spam folder. The rate at which this appeared to happen was definitely higher than the 0.05% quoted in the Google article above. Maybe the Google spam filters noticed that I haven't sent email to some members of the extended family for a long time and this triggered the spam algorithm? Yet it was at that very moment that we were visiting Australia that email needs to work reliably with that type of contact as we don't fly out there every year. A little bit earlier in the year, I was corresponding with a few students who were applying for Google Summer of Code. Some of them also observed the same thing, they sent me an email and didn't receive my response until they were looking in their spam folder a few days later. Last year I know a GSoC mentor who lost track of a student for over a week because of Google silently discarding chat messages, so it appears Google has not just shot themselves in the foot, they managed to shoot their foot twice. What is remarkable is that in both cases, the email problems and the XMPP problems, Google doesn't send any error back to the sender so that they know their message didn't get through. Instead, it is silently discarded or left in a spam folder. This is the most corrosive form of communication problem as more time can pass before anybody realizes that something went wrong. After it happens a few times, people lose a lot of confidence in the technology itself and try other means of communication which may be more expensive, more synchronous and time intensive or less private. When I discussed these issues with friends, some people replied by telling me I should send them things through Facebook or WhatsApp, but each of those services has a higher privacy cost and there are also many other people who don't use either of those services. This tends to fragment communications even more as people who use Facebook end up communicating with other people who use Facebook and excluding all the people who don't have time for Facebook. On top of that, it creates more tedious effort going to three or four different places to check for messages. Despite all of this, the suggestion that Google's only response is to build a service to "help qualified high-volume senders" get their messages through leaves me feeling that things will get worse before they start to get better. There is no mention in the Google announcement about what they will offer to help the average person eliminate these problems, other than to stop using Gmail or spend unpaid time meticulously training the Google spam filter and hoping everybody else does the same thing. Some more observations on the issue Many spam filtering programs used in corporate networks, such as SpamAssassin, add headers to each email to suggest why it was classified as spam. Google's systems don't appear to give any such feedback to their users or message senders though, just a very basic set of recommendations for running a mail server. Many chat protocols work with an explicit opt-in. Before you can exchange messages with somebody, you must add each other to your buddy lists. Once you do this, virtually all messages get through without filtering. Could this concept be adapted to email, maybe giving users a summary of messages from people they don't have in their contact list and asking them to explicitly accept or reject each contact? If a message spends more than a week in the spam folder and Google detects that the user isn't ever looking in the spam folder, should Google send a bounce message back to the sender to indicate that Google refused to deliver it to the inbox? I've personally heard that misclassification occurs with mailing list posts as well as private messages.

Daniel Pocock: Recording live events like a pro (part 1: audio)

Whether it is a technical talk at a conference, a political rally or a budget-conscious wedding, many people now have most of the technology they need to record it and post-process the recording themselves. For most events, audio is an essential part of the recording. There are exceptions: if you take many short clips from a wedding and mix them together you could leave out the audio and just dub the couple's favourite song over it all. For a video of a conference presentation, though, the the speaker's voice is essential. These days, it is relatively easy to get extremely high quality audio using a lapel microphone attached to a smartphone. Lets have a closer look at the details. Using a lavalier / lapel microphone Full wireless microphone kits with microphone, transmitter and receiver are usually $US500 or more. The lavalier / lapel microphone by itself, however, is relatively cheap, under $US100. The lapel microphone is usually an omnidirectional microphone that will pick up the voices of everybody within a couple of meters of the person wearing it. It is useful for a speaker at an event, some types of interviews where the participants are at a table together and it may be suitable for a wedding, although you may want to remember to remove it from clothing during the photos. There are two key features you need when using such a microphone with a smartphone:
  • TRRS connector (this is the type of socket most phones and many laptops have today)
  • Microphone impedance should be at least 1k (that is one kilo Ohm) or the phone may not recognize when it is connected
Many leading microphone vendors have released lapel mics with these two features aimed specifically at smartphone users. I have personally been testing the Rode smartLav+ Choice of phone There are almost 10,000 varieties of smartphone just running Android, as well as iPhones, Blackberries and others. It is not practical for most people to test them all and compare audio recording quality. It is probably best to test the phone you have and ask some friends if you can make test recordings with their phones too for comparison. You may not hear any difference but if one of the phones has a poor recording quality you will hopefully notice that and exclude it from further consideration. A particularly important issue is being able to disable AGC in the phone. Android has a standard API for disabling AGC but not all phones or Android variations respect this instruction. I have personally had positive experiences recording audio with a Samsung Galaxy Note III. Choice of recording app Most Android distributions have at least one pre-installed sound recording app. Look more closely and you will find not all apps are the same. For example, some of the apps have aggressive compression settings that compromise recording quality. Others don't work when you turn off the screen of your phone and put it in your pocket. I've even tried a few that were crashing intermittently. The app I found most successful so far has been Diktofon, which is available on both F-Droid and Google Play. Diktofon has been designed not just for recording, but it also has some specific features for transcribing audio (currently only supporting Estonian) and organizing and indexing the text. I haven't used those features myself but they don't appear to cause any inconvenience for people who simply want to use it as a stable recording app. As the app is completely free software, you can modify the source code if necessary. I recently contributed patches enabling 48kHz recording and disabling AGC. At the moment, the version with these fixes has just been released and appears in F-Droid but not yet uploaded to Google Play. The fixes are in version 0.9.83 and you need to go into the settings to make sure AGC is disabled and set the 48kHz sample rate. Whatever app you choose, the following settings are recommended:
  • 16 bit or greater sample size
  • 48kHz sample rate
  • Disable AGC
  • WAV file format
Whatever app you choose, test it thoroughly with your phone and microphone. Make sure it works even when you turn off the screen and put it in your pocket while wearing the lapel mic for an hour. Observe the battery usage. Gotchas Now lets say you are recording a wedding and the groom has that smartphone in his pocket and the mic on his collar somewhere. What is the probability that some telemarketer calls just as the couple are exchanging vows? What is the impact on the recording? Maybe some apps will automatically put the phone in silent mode when recording. More likely, you need to remember this yourself. These are things that are well worth testing though. Also keep in mind the need to have sufficient storage space and to check whether the app you use is writing to your SD card or internal memory. The battery is another consideration. In a large event where smartphones are being used instead of wireless microphones, possibly for many talks in parallel, install a monitoring app like Ganglia on the phones to detect and alert if any phone has weak wifi signal, low battery or a lack of memory. Live broadcasts and streaming Some time ago I tested RTP multicasting from Lumicall on Android. This type of app would enable a complete wireless microphone setup with live streaming to the internet at a fraction of the cost of a traditional wireless microphone kit. This type of live broadcast could also be done with WebRTC on the Firefox app. Conclusion If you research the topic thoroughly and spend some time practicing and testing your equipment, you can make great audio recordings with a smartphone and an inexpensive lapel microphone. In subsequent blogs, I'll look at tips for recording video and doing post-production with free software.

20 July 2015

Niels Thykier: Performance tuning of lintian, take 2

The other day, I wrote about our recent performance tuning in lintian. Among other things, we reduced the memory usage by ~33%. The effect was also reproducible on libreoffice (4.2.5-1 plus its 170-ish binaries, arch amd64), which started at ~515 MB and was reduced to ~342 MB. So this is pretty great in its own right But at this point, I have seen what was in Pandora s box . By which, I mean the two magical numbers 1.7kB per file and 2.2kB per directory in the package (add +250-300 bytes per entry in binary packages). This is before even looking at data from file(1), readelf, etc. Just the raw index of the package. Depending on your point of view, 1.7-2.2kB might not sound like a lot. But for the lintian source with ~1 500 directories and ~3 300 non-directories, this sums up to about 6.57MB out of the (then) usage at 12.53MB. With the recent changes, it dropped to about 1.05kB for files and 1.5kB for dirs. But even then, the index is still 4.92MB (out of 8.48MB). This begs the question, what do you get for 1.05kB in perl? The following is a dump of the fields and their size in perl for a given entry: 
lintian/vendors/ubuntu/main/data/changes-file/known-dists: 1077.00 B
  _path_info: 24.00 B
  date: 44.00 B
  group: 42.00 B
  name: 123.00 B
  owner: 42.00 B
  parent_dir: 24.00 B
  size: 42.00 B
  time: 42.00 B
  (overhead): 694.00 B
With time, date, owner and group being fixed sized strings (at most 15 characters). The size and _path_info fields being integers, parent_dir a reference (nulled). Finally, the name being a variable length string. Summed the values take less than half of the total object size. The remainder of ~700 bytes is just overhead . Time for another clean up: Which leaves us now with: 
lintian/vendors/ubuntu/main/data/changes-file/known-dists: 698.00 B
  _path_info: 24.00 B
  date_time: 56.00 B
  name: 123.00 B
  parent_dir: 24.00 B
  size: 24.00 B
  (overhead): 447.00 B
Still a ~64% overhead, but at least we reduced the total size by 380 bytes (585 bytes for entries in binary packages). With these changes, the memory used for the lintian source index is now down to 3.62MB. This brings the total usage down to 7.01MB, which is a reduction to 56% of the original usage (a.k.a. the-almost-but-not-quite-50%-reduction ). But at least the results also carried over to libreoffice, which is now down to 284.83 MB (55% of original). The chromium-browser (source-only, version 32.0.1700.123-2) is down to 111.22MB from 179.44MB (61% of original, better results expected if processed with binaries). In closing, Lintian 2.5.34 will use slightly less memory than 2.5.33.
Filed under: Debian, Lintian

Matthew Garrett: Your Ubuntu-based container image is probably a copyright violation

Update: A Canonical employee responded here, but doesn't appear to actually contradict anything I say below.

I wrote about Canonical's Ubuntu IP policy here, but primarily in terms of its broader impact, but I mentioned a few specific cases. People seem to have picked up on the case of container images (especially Docker ones), so here's an unambiguous statement:

If you generate a container image that is not a 100% unmodified version of Ubuntu (ie, you have not removed or added anything), Canonical insist that you must ask them for permission to distribute it. The only alternative is to rebuild every binary package you wish to ship[1], removing all trademarks in the process. As I mentioned in my original post, the IP policy does not merely require you to remove trademarks that would cause infringement, it requires you to remove all trademarks - a strict reading would require you to remove every instance of the word "ubuntu" from the packages.

If you want to contact Canonical to request permission, you can do so here. Or you could just derive from Debian instead.

[1] Other than ones whose license explicitly grants permission to redistribute binaries and which do not permit any additional restrictions to be imposed upon the license grants - so any GPLed material is fine

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Daniel Pocock: RTC status on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora

Zoltan (Zoltanh721) recently blogged about WebRTC for the Fedora community and Fedora desktop. https://fedrtc.org has been running for a while now and this has given many people a chance to get a taste of regular SIP and WebRTC-based SIP. As suggested in Zoltan's blog, it has convenient integration with Fedora SSO and as the source code is available, people are welcome to see how it was built and use it for other projects. Issues with Chrome/Chromium on Linux If you tried any of FedRTC.org, rtc.debian.org or meet.jit.si using Chrome/Chromium on Linux, you may have found that the call appears to be connected but there is no media. This is a bug and the Chromium developers are on to it. You can work around this by trying an older version of Chromium (it still works with v37 from Debian wheezy) or Firefox/Iceweasel. WebRTC is not everything WebRTC offers many great possibilities for people to quickly build and deploy RTC services to a large user base, especially when using components like JSCommunicator or the DruCall WebRTC plugin for Drupal. However, it is not a silver bullet. For example, there remain concerns about how to receive incoming calls. How do you know which browser tab is ringing when you have many tabs open at once? This may require greater browser/desktop integration and that has security implications for JavaScript. Whether users on battery-powered devices can really leave JavaScript running for extended periods of time waiting for incoming calls is another issue, especially when you consider that many web sites contain some JavaScript that is less than efficient. Native applications and mobile apps like Lumicall continue to offer the most optimized solution for each platform although WebRTC currently offers the most convenient way for people to place a Call me link on their web site or portal. Deploy it yourself The RTC Quick Start Guide offers step-by-step instructions and a thorough discussion of the architecture for people to start deploying RTC and WebRTC on their own servers using standard packages on many of the most popular Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS and Fedora.

17 July 2015

John Goerzen: First steps with smartcards under Linux and Android hard, but it works

Well this has been an interesting project. It all started with a need to get better password storage at work. We wound up looking heavily at a GPG-based solution. This prompted the question: how can we make it even more secure? Well, perhaps, smartcards. The theory is this: a smartcard holds your private keys in a highly-secure piece of hardware. The PC can never actually access the private keys. Signing and decrypting operations are done directly on the card to prevent the need to export the private key material to the PC. There are lots of standards to choose from (PKCS#11, PKCS#15, and OpenPGP card specs) that are relevant here. And there are ways to use SSH and OpenVPN with some of these keys too. Access to the card is protected by a passphrase (called a PIN in smartcard lingo, even though it need not be numeric). These smartcards might be USB sticks, or cards you pop into a reader. In any case, you can pop them out when not needed, pop them in to use them, and well, pretty nice, eh? So that s the theory. Let s talk a bit of reality. First of all, it is hard for a person like me to evaluate how secure my data is in hardware. There was a high-profile bug in the OpenPGP JavaCard applet used by Yubico that caused the potential to use keys without a PIN, for instance. And how well protected is the key in the physical hardware? Granted, in most of these cards you re talking serious hardware skill to compromise them, but still, this is unknown in absolute terms. Here s the bigger problem: compatibility. There are all sorts of card readers, but compatibility with pcsc-tools and pcscd on Linux seems pretty good. But the cards themselves oh my. PKCS#11 defines an interface API, but each vendor would provide their own .so or .dll file to interface. Some cards (for instance, the ACOS5-64 mentioned on the Debian wiki!) are made by vendors that charge $50 for the privilege of getting the drivers needed to make them work and they re closed-source proprietary drivers at that. Some attempts I ordered several cards to evaluate: the OpenPGP card, specifically designed to support GPG; the ACOS5-64 card, the JavaCOS A22, the Yubikey Neo, and a simple reader listed on the GPG smartcard howto. The OpenPGP card and ACOS5-64 are the only ones in the list that support 4096-bit RSA keys due to the computational demands of them. The others all support 2048-bit RSA keys. The JavaCOS requires the user to install a JavaCard applet to the card to make it useable. The Yubico OpenPGP applet works here, along with GlobalPlatform to install it. I am not sure just how solid it is. The Yubikey Neo has yet to arrive; it integrates some interesting OAUTH and TOTP capabilities as well. I found that Debian s wiki page for smartcards lists a bunch of them that are not really useable using the tools in main. The ACOS5-64 was such a dud. But I got the JavaCOS A22 working quite nicely. It s also NFC-enabled and works perfectly with OpenKeyChain on Android (looking like a Yubikey Neo to it, once the OpenPGP applet is installed). I m impressed! Here s a way to be secure with my smartphone without revealing everything all the time. Really the large amount of time is put into figuring out how all this stuff fits together. I m getting there, but I ve got a ways to go yet. Update: Corrected to read signing and decrypting rather than signing and encrypting operations are being done on the card. Thanks to Beno t Allard for catching this error.

16 July 2015

Norbert Preining: Recent silence scientific freak weeks

If you wonder why it was so silent here over the last weeks, there is a simple explanation: I am on scientific freak weeks As you might know, in my main profession I am logician, mathematician, computer scientist at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (btw, searching urgently for a new job, in case someone is interested!!!). purity The last weeks have been very busy with attenting and presenting at LICS 2015 (Logic in Computer Science), followed by a workshop on Proofs as Processes organized by myself, then a presentation at CCA 2015 (Conference on Computability and Complexity in Analysis), and now working with visitors on our hyper natural deduction system. Above all that, there is also my lecture on Logical Decision Procedures at JAIST that a colleague and I a creating on the fly. All in all a very busy July, but I hope that after the weekend, and another workshop at JAIST, things settle down around beginning of August.
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Christoph Egger

Mostly a mental note as I've reinvented this the second time now. If you just quickly want to share some org-mode notes with some non-Emacs-users the built-in HTML export comes handy. However it has one Problem: All source syntax highlighting is derived from your current theme. Which of course is a bad idea if your editor has a dark background (say Emacs.reverseVideo: on). The same if your terminal's background color is dark. Running Emacs in batch mode and still getting colorful code formatting seems to be an unsolved problem. All that can be found on the Internet suggests adding a dark background to your HTML export (at least to the code blocks). Or maybe use an external style-sheet. Both not exactly the thing if you just want to scp snippets of HTML somewhere to share. However there's a working hack: 
#!/usr/bin/make -f
%.html: %.org
	xvfb-run urxvt +rv -e emacs -nw --visit $< --funcall org-html-export-to-html --kill >/dev/null
So use a terminal you can easily force into light-background-mode (like urxvt +rv) so the emacs -nw runs in light-background-mode and wrap the thing in xvfb-run so you can properly run this over ssh (and don't get annoying windows pop up and disappear again when typing make)

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