This is an old laptop, with AMD E-300 processor, 6 GB RAM, Radeon HD 6310 VGA and Atheros AR9485 wireless network adapter. It was running Windows 7 (preinstalled). The hard disk failed, and I put the hard disk of another laptop (a broken Acer Aspire One D255) on it. Surprisingly, the Windows 7 on it booted (after some self-configuration that took quite long), but it was a Windows 7 Home 32bits, so it was only recognizing 4 GB RAM. That was the perfect excuse to convince my husband to install Debian in the laptop and begin his transition to a free OS. Yay! I installed Debian Jessie from scratch last summer. Everything went well (the installer went fine, 8 months before than its RC1 release, congrats Debian-boot team!). I needed the non-free radeon driver for the graphical display :/ Jessie is running GNOME3 desktop, and I ve been seeing all these months the transition to 3.14 version, and later, the integration of the Lines theme (by Juliette Belin), which I like very much. I have problems to watch high quality videos, in every player that I tried (VLC, Totem, mplayer) the audio and video are not synced, and video sometimes freezes. I m almost sure that the problem is what mplayer says: Your system is too SLOW to play this! . I tried to install the ATI non-free driver for better performance, but after successfully install it and reboot, GNOME was not starting (I got a black screen, no gdm greeting me). I could log in tty2, though. I don t know if I did something wrong, how to solve the problem, and I don t wanted to waste time, so I uninstalled it and returned to the non-free firmware that goes to the Linux kernel. For now, when I need to watch a video that gives those problems, I upload the file to my GNU MediaGoblin site, or use WinFF to reduce size/quality. Overall impression Fine! Both my husband and me are very happy. The installation went really well. I m not a GNOME expert user but I find it easy, intuitive, and he found it easy too. My husband uses the computer to surf the web, watch some videos and online series (we had to install non-free flash plugin from Adobe #grr), read mail from the browser, write something in LibreOffice and print it (hey! we just plug the printer/scanner and it works, no need to install drivers!), scan some image and send it by email I set Debian as default in GRUB, and the switch from Windows has been very natural for him (he was already using Firefox and LibreOffice in Windows. He still says I m a Windows user although he is just using Debian for months!). He bought an IPhone 4S (#grr!) and I tried to connect it as shown in the corresponding Debian wiki page, but it didn t work (I got segmentation fault when connecting the phone). However, it is recognized by Shotwell and we can copy all the photos and videos to the computer, which is what we wanted to do. So no problem on that side, either. In conclussion, one more computer at home running Debian ( future stable ), and we don t run Windows at home anymore :)
Filed under: My experiences and opinion Tagged: Debian, English, Moving into free software

In the middle of OPW internship I originally thought taking part in FOSSOPW is a great chance to lift my coding skills and I shouldn t miss it. As time passes by, I now have a new thought towards it. # 1 It do improves your coding skill. Zack, Matthieu and I often have discussions on coding style. For example, once Zack said, For code like this, you should explicitly use an if/else clause, not if-return. I was totally unaware of this sort of issue. Actually I even didn t know how I should call this problem. Matthieu gave me a detailed FYI link on this in no time. Besides, my completeness of thinking is also trained. Recently, I was fixing a HTTP GET Method ?suite=suite-name issue. It s a trivial task. And you know most trivial tasks require lots of scattered modification on the source code base. I did have fixed most places, such as the pages of /src/packagename and /search/ . Zack did a thorough review, and pointed out that the pages rendered by /prefix has some malformed urls in the HTML. Waiiiit, I should have noticed it. But somehow I missed it. Maybe because my mind was wandering at that time? This made me think, I shall have a thorough view of what I should do before getting my hands dirty. Or more preferably, if I could write down what I exactly want to achieve before coding, then silly problems definitely wouldn t occur. This may sound a little bit like TDD. ;). # 2 It makes you look like a (not-that-good) ninja. I use a macbook. It s not my fault! I ve tried several times, but I never successfully find a laptop that is not capable of boiling eggs when running Debian. (and especially KDE+Debian). So I have no way but switched to OSX. The development of Debsources happens on a remote Ubuntu LTS (now Debian SID, haha) virtual machine. Of course I have to install all the dependency on my own, e.g., Postgres, set up port-forwarding, e.g., ssh -D, write automate shell scripts, e.g., dash, but more importantly, I am forced to live under the dark terminal with no GUI. You know the feeling when pain hurts? Yes, exactly! But I survived. How shall I call myself now? A dedicated with-a-lot-of-useless-plugin-installed vimmer? A fond-of-fancy-window tmux-er? Yep, both. I finally found a comfort zone under the black-white-blinking screen. I wonder how people feel when they see a girl hanging out in the library, facing a full-screened black console, typing at a speed of 140wpm (Yeah, I am kidding). I don t know, but please don t call me a geek. Show me your respect, I am a ninja! # 3 It tells you communication is the most important. I bet anyone who has participated in a group-based project would understand what I mean. For one perspective, communication helps to eliminate misunderstanding. So I won t doing some useless stuff for all day and finally find out that it totally doesn t meet the requirement. On the other hand, it speeds up your learning process. I often have problems on git. So in the email I will complain if I mess up with the git repo. After a short while, my dear mentors will reply in detail on how to correctly do the git stuff. My OPW journey is cool! ;).

I install the unattended-upgrades package on almost all of my Debian and Ubuntu servers in order to ensure that security updates are automatically applied. It works quite well except that I still need to login manually to upgrade my Rackspace servers whenever a new rackspace-monitoring-agent is released because it comes from a separate repository that's not covered by unattended-upgrades. It turns out that unattended-upgrades can be configured to automatically upgrade packages outside of the standard security repositories but it's not very well documented and the few relevant answers you can find online are still using the old whitelist syntax.

Initial setup The first thing to do is to install the package if it's not already done:

apt-get install unattended-upgrades

and to answer yes to the automatic stable update question. If you don't see the question (because your debconf threshold is too low -- change it with dpkg-reconfigure debconf), you can always trigger the question manually:

dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades

Once you've got that installed, the configuration file you need to look at is /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades.

Whitelist matching criteria Looking at the unattended-upgrades source code, I found the list of things that can be used to match on in the whitelist:

• origin (shortcut: o)
• label (shortcut: l)
• archive (shortcut: a)
• suite (which is the same as archive)
• component (shortcut: c)
• site (no shortcut)

You can find the value for each of these fields in the appropriate _Release file under /var/lib/apt/lists/. Note that the value of site is the hostname of the package repository, also present in the first part these *_Release filenames (stable.packages.cloudmonitoring.rackspace.com in the example below). In my case, I was looking at the following inside /var/lib/apt/lists/stable.packages.cloudmonitoring.rackspace.com_debian-wheezy-x86%5f64_dists_cloudmonitoring_Release:

Origin: Rackspace
Codename: cloudmonitoring
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 18:58:49 UTC
Architectures: i386 amd64
Components: main
...

which means that, in addition to site, the only things I could match on were origin and component since there are no Suite or Label fields in the Release file. This is the line I ended up adding to my /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades:

 Unattended-Upgrade::Origins-Pattern  
         // Archive or Suite based matching:
         // Note that this will silently match a different release after
         // migration to the specified archive (e.g. testing becomes the
         // new stable).
 //      "o=Debian,a=stable";
 //      "o=Debian,a=stable-updates";
 //      "o=Debian,a=proposed-updates";
         "origin=Debian,archive=stable,label=Debian-Security";
         "origin=Debian,archive=oldstable,label=Debian-Security";
+        "origin=Rackspace,component=main";
  ;

Testing To ensure that the config is right and that unattended-upgrades will pick up rackspace-monitoring-agent the next time it runs, I used:

unattended-upgrade --dry-run --debug

which should output something like this:

Initial blacklisted packages: 
Starting unattended upgrades script
Allowed origins are: ['origin=Debian,archive=stable,label=Debian-Security', 'origin=Debian,archive=oldstable,label=Debian-Security', 'origin=Rackspace,component=main']
Checking: rackspace-monitoring-agent (["<Origin component:'main' archive:'' origin:'Rackspace' label:'' site:'stable.packages.cloudmonitoring.rackspace.com' isTrusted:True>"])
pkgs that look like they should be upgraded: rackspace-monitoring-agent
...
Option --dry-run given, *not* performing real actions
Packages that are upgraded: rackspace-monitoring-agent

Making sure that automatic updates are happening In order to make sure that all of this is working and that updates are actually happening, I always install apticron on all of the servers I maintain. It runs once a day and emails me a list of packages that need to be updated and it keeps doing that until the system is fully up-to-date. The only thing missing from this is getting a reminder whenever a package update (usually the kernel) requires a reboot to take effect. That's where the update-notifier-common package comes in. Because that package will add a hook that will create the /var/run/reboot-required file whenever a kernel update has been installed, all you need to do is create a cronjob like this in /etc/cron.daily/reboot-required:

#!/bin/sh
cat /var/run/reboot-required 2> /dev/null   true

assuming of course that you are already receiving emails sent to the root user (if not, add the appropriate alias in /etc/aliases and run newaliases).

Lever Rukhin Photographs Los Angeles From His Car
Lever Rukhin shoots the sketchiest parts of Los Angeles from his car, taking a really unique perspective that helps you perceive what LA looks like, if you were in a car An experience that is apparently common to all LA people. People drive too much in the US :-). It s a very interesting interview that goes well with his full site: Lev Rukhin. What I love about this, besides the whole premise, is that Lev went the extra mile and actually hacked his car to make the images he wanted:

Phoblographer: It looks like many of these images have artificial lighting in them. What s your gear setup, and how do you introduce so much light into the scene from your car? Lever: About 9 months ago, I affixed a Mola beauty dish onto the roof rack of my 75 Volvo and juice it with a profoto bi-tube. This takes a bit of practice, as making a turn changes the light completely, which I always try to keep balanced. The Canon 5D3 with a 24mm f1.4 is set up on a tripod. The strobe has allowed me to capture more detail as well as creating a somewhat surreal feel to the sets.

Lev Rukhin http://www.levrukhin.com/

The Invisible Woman: A conversation with Bj rk
Bj rk is that Icelandic singer we all hear about but never really pay much attention to because her music is too smart for our simple ears. In this interview she goes over how her latest album is a very personal work, and unexpectedly (?) ends talking about how problematic it s been to be a female auteur in her generation. I have seen the same problem she denounces about people assuming that the male members of a team did all the work while the women just sticked to making coffee and sandwiches. I ve worked with exceptional women that don t get enough credit, but I ve also worked with potentially exceptional women who don t give themselves enough credit. It s a very interesting read, specially since it comes from someone who couldn t be higher in the art food chain. Bj rk is god-damn Bj rk. Only thing that bugs me is that Pitchfork decided to hold back most of the interview for publishing next month. I ll try to go back and read it in full, but I wonder if the technique works for them or if perhaps they are missing the opportunity for a bigger impact. But I digress.

Pitchfork: The world has a difficult time with the female auteur. B: I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this I m not dissing him this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second. If whatever I m saying to you now helps women, I m up for saying it. For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. [Matmos ] Drew [Daniel] is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don t even listen to him. It really is strange.

In Defense of the Selfie Stick
Miguel proposes a different take on the consequences of the selfies stick:

When you ask someone to take a picture of you, technically, they are the photographer, and they own the copyright of your picture. ( ) All of a sudden, your backpacking adventure in Europe requires you to pack a stack of legal contracts. Now your exchange goes from Can you take a picture of us? to Can you take a picture of us, making sure that the church is on the top right corner, and also, I am going to need you to sign this paper .

I don t know what s with the selfie stick hate. Let people have fun, it doesn t hurt. If anything, it prevents them from asking you to take their photo, and if we already established you are the kind of people not a big fan of strangers, all the better, right? Why Top Tech CEOs Want Employees With Liberal Arts Degrees
Here s a small extra. When I decided to pursue a humanities/art formal training, I got many naysayers telling me that I was screwing up not specializing even more as a formal (titled) engineer. I argued then, and now, that if I was gonna pay for training, I might as well pay for training outside my comfort zone. The result resonates perfectly with this article. Of course, it s not like the thing is settled, but I can back the various quotes in there. Working with purely technical/engineering types can be an echo chamber, and having trained myself in the humanities and arts I have become incredibly much more sensitive to the human factor of things. I used to think I was already good at this (because we hacker types have lots of confidence), but studying humanities like human communication, social conflict and development, film language, etc; it all has made me a much more capable hacker of things. There s also a nice argument to be made about joining the arts when you are already highly skilled on technical matters. Like Robert Rodr guez s teacher (mentioned in his diary/book Rebel Without a Cause, which I also have to review soon) used to say (generous paraphrasing here): the world is of those who can be their own creative and their own technician.

Both Yi and Sheer recognize that the scientific method is valuable, with its emphasis on logic and reason, especially when dealing with data or engineering problems. But they believe this approach can sometimes be limiting. When I collaborate with people who have a strictly technical background, says Yi, the perspective I find most lacking is an understanding of what motivates people and how to balance multiple factors that are at work outside the realm of technology.

Interesting food for thought, specially if you know an engineer that ditches the arts as of little value for personal growth in their careers/life.

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Read more Link Pack, you ll love it

Last weekend I went to Mumbai to attend the Mini-Debconf held at IIT-Bombay. These are my impressions of the trip. Arrival and Impressions of Mumbai Getting there was a quite an adventure in itself. Unlike during my ill-fated attempt to visit a Debian event in Kerala last year when a bureaucratic snafu left me unable to get a visa, the organizers started the process much earlier at their end this time and with proper permissions. Yet in India, the wheels only turn as fast as they want to turn so despite their efforts, it was only literally at the last minute that I actually managed to secure my visa. I should note however that Indian government has done a lot to improve the process compared to the hell I remember from, say, a decade ago. It's fairly straightforward for tourist visas now and I trust they will get around to doing the same for conference visas in the fullness of time. I didn't want to commit to buying a plane ticket until I had the visa so I became concerned that the only flights left would be either really expensive or on the type of airline that flies you over Syria or under the Indian Ocean. I lucked out and got a good price on a Swiss Air flight, not non-stop but you can't have everything. So Thursday afternoon I set off for JFK. With only one small suitcase getting there by subway was no problem and I arrived and checked in with plenty of time. Even TSA passed me through with only a minimal amount of indignity. The first leg of my journey took me to Zurich in about eight hours. We were only in Zurich for an hour and then (by now Friday) it was another 9 hours to Mumbai. Friday was Safala Ekadashi but owing to the necessity of staying hydrated on a long flight I drank a lot of water and ate some fruit which I don't normally do on a fasting day. It was tolerable but not too pleasant; I definitely want to try and make travel plans to avoid such situations in the future. Friday evening local time I got to Mumbai. Chhattrapati Shivaji airport has improved a lot since I saw t last and now has all the amenities an international traveller needs including unrestricted free wifi (Zurich airport are you taking notes?) But here my first ominous piece of bad luck began. No sign of my suitcase. Happily some asking around revealed that it had somehow gotten on some earlier Swiss Air flight instead of the one I was on and was actually waiting for me. I got outside and Debian Developer Praveen Arimbrathodiyil was waiting to pick me up. Normally I don't lke staying in Mumbai very much even though I have relatives there but that's because we usually went during July-August the monsoon season when Mumbai reverts back to the swampy archipelago it was originally built on. This time the weather was nice, cold by local standards, but lovely and spring-like to someone from snowy New Jersey. There have been a lot of improvements to the road infrastructure and people are actually obeying the traffic laws. (Within reason of course. Whether or not a family of six can arrange themselves on one Bajaj scooter is no business of the cops.) The Hotel Tuliip (yes, two i's. Manager didn't know why.) Residency where I was to stay while not quite a five star establishment was adequate for my needs with a bed, hot water shower, and air conditioning. And a TV which to the bellhops great confusion I did not want turned on. (He asked about five times.) There was no Internet access per se but the manager offered to hook up a wireless router to a cable. Which on closer inspection turned out to have been severed at the base. He assured me it would be fixed tomorrow so I didn't complain and decided to do something more productive thank checking my email like sleeping. The next day I woke up in total darkness. Apparently there had been some kind of power problem during the night which tripped a fuse or something. A call to the front desk got them to fix that and then the second piece of bad luck happened. I plugged my Thinkpad in and woke it up from hibernation and a minute later there was a loud pop from the power adapter. Note I have a travel international plug adapter with surge protector so nothing bad ought to have happened but the laptop would on turning on display the message "critical low battery error" and immediately power off. I was unable to google what that meant without Internet access but I decided not to panic and continue getting ready. I would have plenty of opportunity to troubleshoot at the conference venue. Or so I thought... I took an autorickshaw to IIT. There also there have been positive improvements. Being quite obviously a foreigner I was fully prepared to be taken along the "scenic route." But now there are fair zones and the rickshaws all have (tamperproof!) digital fare meters so I was deposited at the main gate without fuss. After reading a board with a scary list of dos and don'ts I presented myself at security only to be inexplicably waved through without a second glance. Later I found out they've abandoned all the security theatre but not got around to updating the signs yet. Mumbai is one of the biggest, densely populated cities in the world but the IIT campus is an oasis of tranquility on the shores of Lake Powai. It's a lot bigger than it looked on the map so I had to wander around a bit before I reached the conference venue but I did make for the official registration time. Registration I was happy to meet several old friends (Such as Kartik Mistry and Kumar Appiah who along with Praveen and myself were the other DDs there,) people who I've corresponded with but never met, and many new people. I'm told 200+ people registered altogether. Most seemed to be students from IIT and elsewhere in Mumbai but there were also some Debian enthusiasts from further afield and most hearteningly some "civilians" who wanted to know what this was all about. With the help of a borrowed Thinkpad adapter I got my laptop running again. (Thankfully, despite the error message, the battery itself was unharmed.) However, my streak of bad luck was not yet over. It was that very weekend that IIT had a freak campus-wide network outage something that had never happened before. And as the presentation for the talk I was to give had apparently been open when I hibernated my laptop the night before, the sudden forced shutdown had trashed the file. (ls showed it as 0 length. An fsck didn't help.) I possibly had a backup on my server but with no Internet access I had no way to retrieve it. I still remained cool. The talk was scheduled for the second day so I could recover it at the hotel. Keynotes Professor Kannan Maudgalya of the FOSSEE (Free and Open Source Software for Education) Project which is part of the central government Ministry for Human Resource Development spoke about various activities of his project. Of particular interest to us are:

• A scheme to get labs and college engineering/computer science departments off proprietary software by helping them identify relevant free software (writing it if necessary.) and helping them transition to it. Similarly getting curricula away from textbooks that use proprietary software by rewriting exercises to use free equivalents.
• A series of videos for self-instruction kind of like Khan Academy but geared to the challenges of being used in places where there might not be a net connection or even a trained teacher.
• The Vidyut tablet. A very low cost (~5000 Rupees) ARM-based netbook that runs Linux or Android software. You may have heard about earlier plans for a cheap tablet like this. Vidyut is the next generation correcting some flaws in previous attempts. Not only the software but the hardware is free too. It is currently running a stripped down version of Ubuntu but there was a request to port it to Debian and I'm happy to report several Debian users have accepted the challenge.

FOSSEE is well funded, backed by the government and has enthusiastic staff so we should be seeing a lot more from them in the future. Veteran Free Software activist Venky Hariharan spoke about his experiences in lobbying the government on tech issues. He noted that there has been a sea change in attitudes towards Linux and Open source in the bureacracy of late. Several states have been aggressively mandating the use of it as have several national ministries and agencies. We the community can provide a valuable service by helping them in the transition. They also need to be educated on how to work with the community (contributing changes back, not working behind closed doors etc.) Debian History and Debian Cycle Shirish Agarwal spoke about the Debian philosophy and foundational documents such as the social contract and DFSG and how the release cycle works. Nothing new to an experienced user but informative to the newcomers in the audience and sparked some questions and discussion. Keysigning One of my main missions in attending was to help get as many isolated people as possible into the web of trust. Unfortunately the keysigning was not adequately publicized and few people were ready. I would have led them through the process of creating a new key there and then but with the lack of connectivity that idea had to be abandoned. I did manage to sign about 8-10 keys during other times. Future Directions for Debian-IN BOF I led this one. Lots of spirited discussion and I found feedback from new users in particular to be very helpful. Some take aways are:

• Some people said it is hard to find concise, easily digestible information about what Debian can do. (I.e. Can I surf the web? Can I play a certain game? etc.) Debian-IN's web presence in particular needs a lot of improvement. We should also consider other channels such as a facebook page. A volunteer stepped up to look into these issues.
• Along these lines it was felt that we cannot just wait for people to come to us, we should do more outreach. I pointed out that one group that we need to reach out more to is the Debian Project at large. We need to do more publicity in debian-project, DWN, Planet etc. to let everyone know whats going on in India. I also felt that we have a strong base amongst CS/engineering students but should do more to attract other demographics.
• Debian events have suffered from organizational problems. Partly this is because the people involved are not professional event planners. They are learning how to do it which is an ongoing process and execution is improving with each iteration so no worries there but problems also arise because Debian-IN is dependent on other entities for many things and those entities do not always have, shall we say, the same sense of urgency. Therefore we need legal standing of our own for accepting donations, inviting foreign guests etc. This doesn't necessarily have to be a separate organization. Affiliating with an existing group is an option providing they share our ideology. Swathanthra Malayalam Computing was one suggestion.
• There is still not much Debian presence in the North and East of India. (Which includes large cities like Delhi and Kolkata.) Unfortunately until we can find volunteers in those areas to take the lead on organizing something there is not a lot we can do to rectify the situation.
• We must have Debian-IN t-shirts.

Lil' Debi Kumar Sukhani was a Debian GSoC student and his project which he demonstrated was to be able to install Debian on an Android phone. Why would you want to do this? Apart from the evergreen "Because I can", you can run server software such as sshd on your phone or even use it as an ARM development board. Unfortunately my phone uses Blackberry 10 OS which can run android apps (emulated under QNX) but wouldn't be able to use this. When I get a real Android phone I will try it out. Debian on ARM Siji Sunny gave this talk which was geared more towards hardware types which I am not but one thing I learned was thee difference between all the different ARM subarchitectures. I knew Siji first from a previous incarnation when he worked at CDAC with the late and much lamented Prof. R.K. Joshi. We had a long conversation about those days. Prof. Joshi/CDAC had developed an Indic rendering system called Indix which alas became the Betamax to Pango's VHS but he was also very involved in other Indic computing issues such as working with the Unicode Consortium and the preseration of Sanskrit manuscripts which is also an interest of mine. One good thing that cameout of Indix was some rather nice fonts. I had thought they were still buried in the dungeons of CDAC but apparently they were freed at one point. That's one more thing for me to look into. Evening/Next morning< My cousin met me and we had a leisurely dinner together. It was quite late by the time I got back to the hotel. FOSSEE had kindly lent me one of their tablets (which incidently are powerful enough to run LibreOffice comfortably.) so I thought I might be able to quickly redo my presentation before bedtime. Well, wouldn't you know it the wifi was not fixed. As I should have guessed but all the progress I'd had made me giddily optimistic. There was an option of trying to find an Internet cafe in a commercial area 15-20 minutes walk away. If this had been Gujarat I would have tried it but although I can more or less understand Hindi I can barely put together two sentences and Marathi I don't know at all. So I gave up that idea. I redid the slides from memory as best I could and went to sleep. In the morning I checked out and ferried myself and my suitcase via rickshaw back to the IIT campus. This time I got the driver to take me all the way in to the conference venue. Prof. Maudgalya kindly offered to let me keep the tablet to develop stuff on. I respectfully had to decline because although I love to collect bits of tech the fact it is it would have just gathered dust and ought to go to someone who can make a real contribution with it. I transferred my files to a USB key and borrowed a loaner laptop for my talk. Debian Packaging Workshop While waiting to do my talk I sat in on a workshop Praveen ran taking participants through the whole process of creating a Debian package (a ruby gem was the example.) He's done this before so it was a good presentation and well attended but the lack of connectivity did put a damper on things. Ask Me Anything It turned out the schedule had to be shuffled a bit so my talk was moved later from the announced time. A few people had already showed up so I took some random questions about Debian from them instead. GNOME Shell Accessibility With Orca Krishnakant Mane is remarkable. Although he is blind, he is a developer and a major contributor to Open Source projects. He talked about the Accessibility features of GNOME and compared them (favorably I might add) with proprietary screen readers. Not a subject that's directly useful to me but I found it interesting nonetheless. Rust: The memory safe language Manish Goregaokar talked about one of the new fad programming languages that have gotten a lot of buzz lately. This one is backed by Mozilla and it's interesting enough but I'll stick with C++ and Perl until one of the new ones "wins." Building a Mail Server With Debian Finally I got to give my talk and, yup, the video out on my borrowed laptop was incompatible with the projector. A slight delay to transfer everything to another laptop and I was able to begin. I talked about setting up BIND, postfix, and of course dovecot along with spamassassin, clamav etc. It turned out I had more than enough material and I went atleast 30 minutes over time and even then I had to rush at the end. People said they liked it so I'm happy. The End I gave the concluding remarks. Various people were thanked (including myself) mementos were given and pictures were taken. Despite a few mishaps I enjoyed myself and I am glad I attended. The level of enthusiasm was very high and lessons were learned so the next Debian-IN event should be even better. My departing flight wasn't due to leave until 1:20AM so I killed a few hours with my family before the flight. Once again I was stopping in Zurich, this time for most of a day. The last of my blunders was not to take my coat out of my suitcase and the temperature outside was 29F so I had to spend that whole time enjoing the (not so) many charms of Zurich airport. Atleast the second flight took me to Newark instead of JFK so I was able to get home a little earlier on Monday evening, exhausted but happy I made the trip.

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I expect this is obvious to many people but bahumbug To Phish, or Not to Phish? just woke me up to the fact that if Google hosts your company email then its Sender Policy Framework might make other Google-sent emails look legitimate for your domain. When combined with the unsupportive support of the big free webmail hosts, is this another black mark against SPF?

As I said, I did not certain events that begun with lea and end with ing prevent me from organising a Debian/m68k hack weekend. Well, that weekend is now. I m too unorganised, and I spent too much time in the last few evenings to organise things so I built up a sleep deficit already and the feedback was slow. (But so are the computers.) And someone I d have loved to come was hurt and can t come. On the plus side, several people I ve long wanted to meet IRL are coming, either already today or tomorrow. I hope we all will have a lot of fun. Legal disclaimer: Debian/m68k is a port of Debian to m68k. It used to be official, but now isn t. It belongs to debian-ports.org, which may run on DSA hardware, but is not acknowledged by Debian at large, unfortunately. Debian is a registered trademark owned by Software in the Public Interest, Inc.

The Replicant project released version 4.2 0003 recently. I have been using Replicant on a Samsung SIII (I9300) for around 14 months now. Since I have blogged about issues with NFC and Wifi earlier, I wanted to give a status update after upgrading to 0003. I m happy to report that my NFC issue has been resolved in 0003 (the way I suggested; reverting the patch). My issues with Wifi has been improved in 0003, with my merge request being accepted. What follows below is a standalone explanation of what works and what doesn t, as a superset of similar things discussed in my earlier blog posts. What works out of the box: Audio, Telephony, SMS, Data (GSM/3G), Back Camera, NFC. 2D Graphics is somewhat slow compared to stock ROM, but I m using it daily and can live with that so it isn t too onerus. Stability is fine, similar to other Android device I m used to. Video playback does not work (due to non-free media decoders?), which is not a serious problem for me but still likely the biggest outstanding issue except for freedom concerns. 3D graphics apparently doesn t work, and I believe it is what prevents Firefox from working properly (it crashes). I m having one annoying but strange problem with telephony: when calling one person I get scrambled audio around 75% of the time. I can still hear what the other person is saying, but can barely make anything out of it. This only happens over 3G, so my workaround when calling that person is to switch to 2G before and switch back after. I talk with plenty other people, and have never had this problem with anyone else, and it has never happened when she talks with anyone else but me. If anyone has suggestion on how to debug this, I m all ears. Important apps to get through daily life for me includes K9Mail (email), DAVDroid (for ownCloud CalDav/CardDAV), CalDav Sync Adapter (for Google Calendars), Conversations (XMPP/Jabber chat), FDroid (for apps), ownCloud (auto-uploading my photos), SMS Backup+, Xabber (different XMPP/Jabber accounts), Yubico Authenticator, MuPDF and oandbackup. A couple of other apps I find useful are AdAway (remove web ads), AndStatus, Calendar Widget, NewsBlur and ownCloud News Reader (RSS readers), Tinfoil for Facebook, Twidere (I find its UI somewhat nicer than AndStatus s), and c:geo. A number of things requires non-free components. As I discussed in my initial writeup from when I started using Replicant I don t like this, but I m accepting it temporarily. The list of issues that can be fixed by adding non-free components include the front camera, Bluetooth, GPS, and Wifi. After flashing the Replicant ROM image that I built (using the fine build instructions), I m using the following script to add the missing non-free files from Cyanogenmod.

# Download Cyanogenmod 10.1.3 (Android 4.2-based) binaries:
# wget http://download.cyanogenmod.org/get/jenkins/42508/cm-10.1.3-i9300.zip
# echo "073a464a9f5129c490502c77374495c38a25ba790c10e27f51b43845baeba6bf  cm-10.1.3-i9300.zip"   sha256sum -c 
# unzip cm-10.1.3-i9300.zip
adb root
adb remount
adb shell mkdir /system/vendor/firmware
adb shell chmod 755 /system/vendor/firmware
# Front Camera
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/vendor/firmware/fimc_is_fw.bin /system/vendor/firmware/fimc_is_fw.bin
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/vendor/firmware/setfile.bin /system/vendor/firmware/setfile.bin
adb shell chmod 644 /system/vendor/firmware/fimc_is_fw.bin /system/vendor/firmware/setfile.bin
# Bluetooth
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/bin/bcm4334.hcd /system/vendor/firmware/
adb shell chmod 644 /system/vendor/firmware/bcm4334*.hcd
# GPS
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/bin/gpsd /system/bin/gpsd
adb shell chmod 755 /system/bin/gpsd
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/lib/hw/gps.exynos4.so /system/lib/hw/gps.exynos4.so
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/lib/libsecril-client.so /system/lib/libsecril-client.so
adb shell chmod 644 /system/lib/hw/gps.exynos4.so /system/lib/libsecril-client.so
# Wifi
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_apsta.bin_b1 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_apsta.bin_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_mfg.bin_b0 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_mfg.bin_b1 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_mfg.bin_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_p2p.bin_b0 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_p2p.bin_b1 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_p2p.bin_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_sta.bin_b0 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_sta.bin_b1 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_sta.bin_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_mfg.txt /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_mfg.txt_murata /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_mfg.txt_murata_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_mfg.txt_semcosh /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt_murata /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt_murata_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt_semcosh /system/vendor/firmware/

I hope this helps others switch to a better phone environment!

There was a regression in Linux 3.2.65, which unfortunately was included in this weekend's Debian stable point release (7.8) as I didn't point out the bug reports to the stable release team. At least some systems are now failing to resume after suspending to RAM; instead they reboot. I have tracked down the change that caused this, and it should be fixed as part of a security update soon. The change is in code specific to 64-bit x86 (i.e. the Debian amd64 architecture). If you need suspend/resume to work, you might wish to avoid upgrading the linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 package until that future update. Update: I have uploaded packages with the problematic changes reverted to people.debian.org. The version number is 3.2.65-1+deb7u1~test (lower than the next security update will be). Mail 774436@bugs.debian.org if this doesn't work for you.

Re-joining HP Thursday was my first day back with HP. I've joined Steve Geary's group to work on Linux support for the machine I had a great time at Intel and wish my old team all the best.

A new release of my random package for truly (hardware-based) random numbers as provided by random.org is now on CRAN. The main change is a switch to the curl() function from the eponymous package by Jeroen Ooms. This was caused by random.org now using https instead of http, annd the fact that te url() function from R does not cope well with the redirect. Besides this (enforced) change, everything else remains the same. Courtesy of CRANberries comes a diffstat report for this release. Current and previous releases are available here as well as on CRAN.

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

R.I.P. Bernard Maris and his thoughts on research and the sharing economy via Le Monde, 16 Sep 2014: Le Monde: Que devrait tre une politique de gauche? Une r gulation du capitalisme ou une politique de rupture radicale avec ce syst me conomique? B.M.: [ ] Nous allons vers une conomie de partage, de la gratuit , du logiciel libre en effet. La figure centrale de demain sera le chercheur qui, lorsqu'il donne quelque chose la communaut , ne le perd pas. Le chercheur r pond aux besoins fondamentaux de l'homme: la cr ation, la curiosit , le changement, le progr s. Il est oblig de coop rer. La coop ration canalise la violence, que le lib ralisme esp rait canaliser par le doux commerce! L'au-del du capitalisme sera une conomie solidaire et fraternelle. Aujourd'hui, la question incontournable porte sur la nature du travail.[ ] translate to English (via Google Translate)

LCA 2015 is next week so it seems like a good time to offer some suggestions for other delegates based on observations of past LCAs. There s nothing LCA specific about the advice, but everything is based on events that happened at past LCAs. Don t Oppose a Lecture Question time at the end of a lecture isn t the time to demonstrate that you oppose everything about the lecture. Discussion time between talks at a mini-conf isn t a time to demonstrate that you oppose the entire mini-conf. If you think a lecture or mini-conf is entirely wrong then you shouldn t attend. The conference organisers decide which lectures and mini-confs are worthy of inclusion and the large number of people who attend the conference are signalling their support for the judgement of the conference organisers. The people who attend the lectures and mini-confs in question want to learn about the topics in question and people who object should be silent. If someone gives a lecture about technology which appears to have a flaw then it might be OK to ask one single question about how that issue is resolved, apart from that the lecture hall is for the lecturer to describe their vision. The worst example of this was between talks at the Haecksen mini-conf last year when an elderly man tried at great length to convince me that everything about feminism is wrong. I m not sure to what degree the Haecksen mini-conf is supposed to be a feminist event, but I think it s quite obviously connected to feminism which is of course was why he wanted to pull that stunt. After he discovered that I was not going to be convinced and that I wasn t at all interested in the discussion he went to the front of the room to make a sexist joke and left. Consider Your Share of Conference Resources I ve previously written about the length of conference questions [1]. Question time after a lecture is a resource that is shared among all delegates. Consider whether you are asking more questions than the other delegates and whether the questions are adding benefit to other people. If not then send email to the speaker or talk to them after their lecture. Note that good questions can add significant value to the experience of most delegates. For example when a lecturer appears to be having difficulty in describing their ideas to the audience then good questions can make a real difference, but it takes significant skill to ask such questions. Dorm Walls Are Thin LCA is one of many conferences that is typically held at a university with dorm rooms offered for delegates. Dorm rooms tend to have thinner walls than hotel rooms so it s good to avoid needless noise at night. If one of your devices is going to make sounds at night please check the volume settings before you start it. At one LCA I was startled at about 2AM but the sound of a very loud porn video from a nearby dorm room, the volume was reduced within a few seconds, but it s difficult to get to sleep quickly after that sort of surprise. If you set an alarm then try to avoid waking other people. If you set an early alarm and then just get up then other people will get back to sleep, but pressing snooze repeatedly for several hours (as has been done in the past) is anti-social. Generally I think that an alarm should be at a low volume unless it is set for less than an hour before the first lecture in which case waking people in other dorm rooms might be doing them a favor. Phones in Lectures Do I need to write about this? Apparently I do because people keep doing it! Phones can be easily turned to vibrate mode, most people who I ve observed taking calls in LCA lectures have managed this but it s worth noting for those who don t. There are very few good reasons for actually taking a call when in a lecture. If the hospital calls to tell you that they have found a matching organ donor then it s a good reason to take the call, but I can t think of any other good example. Many LCA delegates do system administration work and get calls at all times of the day and night when servers have problems. But that isn t an excuse for having a conversation in the middle of the lecture hall while the lecture is in progress (as has been done). If you press the green button on a phone you can then walk out of the lecture hall before talking, it s expected that mobile phone calls sometimes have signal problems at the start of the call so no-one is going to be particularly surprised if it takes 10 seconds before you say hello. As an aside, I think that the requirement for not disturbing other people depends on the number of people who are there to be disturbed. In tutorials there are fewer people and the requirements for avoiding phone calls are less strict. In BoFs the requirements are less strict again. But the above is based on behaviour I ve witnessed in mini-confs and main lectures. Smoking It is the responsibility of people who consume substances to ensure that their actions don t affect others. For smokers that means smoking far enough away from lecture halls that it s possible for other delegates to attend the lecture without breathing in smoke. Don t smoke in the lecture halls or near the doorways. Also using an e-cigarette is still smoking, don t do it in a lecture hall. Photography Unwanted photography can be harassment. I don t think there s a need to ask for permission to photograp people who harass others or break the law. But photographing people who break the social agreement as to what should be done in a lecture probably isn t. At a previous LCA a man wanted to ask so many questions at a keynote lecture that he had a page of written notes (seriously), that was obviously outside the expected range of behaviour but probably didn t justify the many people who photographed him. A Final Note I don t think that LCA is in any way different from other conferences in this regard. Also I don t think that there s much that conference organisers can or should do about such things.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/01/06/length-conference-questions/

All I want for 2015 is a Free/Open Source Software social network which is:

• easy to register on (no reCaptcha disability-discriminator or similar, a simple openID, activation emails that actually arrive);
• has an email help address or online support or phone number or something other than the website which can be used if the registration system causes a problem;
• can email when things happen that I might be interested in;
• can email me summaries of what s happened last week/month in case they don t know what they re interested in;
• doesn t email me too much (but this is rare);
• interacts well with other websites (allows long-term members to post links, sends trackbacks or pingbacks to let the remote site know we re talking about them, makes it easy for us to dent/tweet/link to the forum nicely, and so on);
• isn t full of spam (has limits on link-posting, moderators are contactable/accountable and so on, and the software gives them decent anti-spam tools);
• lets me back up my data;
• is friendly and welcoming and trolls are kept in check.

Is this too much to ask for? Does it exist already?

Every few days, someone publishes a new guide, tutorial, library or framework about web scraping, the practice of extracting information from websites where an API is either not provided or is otherwise incomplete. However, I find these resources fundamentally deceptive the arduous parts of "real world" scraping simply aren't in the parsing and extraction of data from the target page, the typical focus of these articles. The difficulties are invariably in "post-processing"; working around incomplete data on the page, handling errors gracefully and retrying in some (but not all) situations, keeping on top of layout/URL/data changes to the target site, not hitting your target site too often, logging into the target site if necessary and rotating credentials and IP addresses, respecting robots.txt, target site being utterly braindead, keeping users meaningfully informed of scraping progress if they are waiting of it, target site adding and removing data resulting in a null-leaning database schema, sane parallelisation in the presence of prioritisation of important requests, difficulties in monitoring a scraping system due to its implicitly non-deterministic nature, and general problems associated with long-running background processes in web stacks. Et cetera. In other words, extracting the right text on the page is the easiest and trivial part by far, with little practical difference between an admittedly cute jQuery-esque parsing library or even just using a blunt regular expression. It would be quixotic to simply retort that sites should provide "proper" APIs but I would love to see more attempts at solutions that go beyond the superficial.

Once upon a time I worked from home for seven years, for a company called Bytemark. Then, due to a variety of reasons, I left. I struck out for adventures and pastures new, enjoyed the novelty of wearing clothes every day, and left the house a bit more often. Things happened. A year passed. Now I'm working for Bytemark again, although there are changes and the most obvious one is that I'm working in a shared-space/co-working setup, renting a room in a building near my house instead of being in the house. Shame I have to get dressed, but otherwise it seems to be OK.

Happy New Year everyone! How did you celebrate the year change? I've been at the Seestadt Aspern listening to electric:indigo (who is also part of the open:sounds project powered by artists of the female:pressure collective), watching a show called "Laser-City", enjoying the really chilly air. With so much female power mentioned in the former paragraph, it is almost hard to find a matching artist/band to present you today. Almost I said, because Beth Ditto and her band Gossip are definitely up for the challenge. That woman is pure power and has a uniquely great voice. They are definitely worth listening into closer, and here are my suggestions:

• Standing In The Way Of Control: I guess this is a well known one.
• Pop Goes The World: Also pretty typical for their sound. And no, this has nothing to do with the 80ies classic from Men Without Hats. ;)
• Move In The Right Direction: Guess these lyrics can help people keep their new year's resolutions. :)

Like always, enjoy!

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The new year is starting with a new release of ctioga2, with a lot of new features, such as:

• patterned fills (shown on the right)
• loops in command files
• a CSS-like styling system (with full XPATH support)
• a backend for mathematical functions of two variables
• the possibility to hide elements that have been drawn before, useful for making animations using output-now for instance
• the possibility to have grid elements spanning two or more columns and/or rows
• many other improvements and bug-fixes

The new release is of course available using rubygems:

~ gem update ctioga2

It can also be downloaded from sourceforge.The possibilities of the new styling system are particularly interesting, and I'm working on ways to make it more powerful, and providing series of default style files that anyone could use as they want. Among other future changes, I want to improve the position of ticks, especially when using non-linear axes, and add functions to draw vector fields (though this still needs some thinking). Enjoy, and a happy new year to everyone !

Review: An Imaginary Tale, by Paul J. Nahin

Publisher:	Princeton University
Copyright:	1998, 2007
Printing:	2010
ISBN:	0-691-14600-4
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	259

Subtitled The Story of -1, An Imaginary Tale is a history of the use of the number mathematicians normally call i. Nahin starts in the 15th century with the discussion of the time on solving cubic equations, specifically del Ferro's solution to the depressed cubic. He walks through how to approach that solution with imaginary numbers, provides a brief introduction to the complex number plane, and then explains that del Ferro didn't follow the logic in those directions at all. Mathematicians at the time were dubious about negative numbers because they were not intuitive representations of real-world quantities. The square root of negative numbers was considered simply impossible. Nahin continues on in this historical vein for three chapters, walking through the mathematical problems that arose from analysis of cubics and the constant appearance of imaginary numbers, the early attempts to find a geometric interpretation, and then the slow development of the modern conception of imaginary numbers in the 19th century. The emphasis throughout is on the specifics of the math, not on the personalities, although there are a few personal tidbits. Along the way, he takes frequent side journeys to highlight the various places complex numbers are useful in solving otherwise-intractable problems. After that initial history come two chapters of applications of complex numbers: vector analysis, Kepler's laws, applications in electrical engineering, and more. He does win a special place in my heart by walking through the vector analysis problem that George Gamow uses to demonstrate complex numbers in One Two Three... Infinity: a treasure map whose directions depend on landmarks that no longer exist. Following that is a great chapter on deeper mathematical wizardry involving i, including Euler's identity, iⁱ, and a pretty good explanation of hyperbolic functions. The final chapter is an introduction to complex function theory. One's opinion of this book is going to vary a lot depending on what type of history of math you like to read. Unfortunately, it wasn't what I was hoping for. That doesn't make it a bad book other reviewers have recommended it highly, and I think it would be a great book for someone with slightly different interests. But it's a very mathematical book. It's full of proofs, calculations, and analysis, and assumes that you remember a reasonable amount of algebra and calculus to follow along. It's been a long time since I studied math, and while I probably could have traced the links between steps of his proofs and derivations with some effort, I found myself skimming through large chunks of this book. I love histories of mathematics, and even popularizations of bits of it (particularly number theory), but with the emphasis on the popularization. If you're like me and are expecting something more like The Music of the Primes, or even One Two Three... Infinity, be warned that this is less about the people or the concepts and more about the math itself. If you've read books like that and thought they needed more equations, more detail, and more of the actual calculations, this may be exactly what you're looking for. Nahin is fun to read, at least when I wasn't getting lost in steps that are obvious to him. He's quite enthusiastic about the topic and clearly loves being able to show how to take apart a difficult mathematical equation using a novel technique. His joy reminds me of when I was most enjoying my techniques of integration class in college. Even when I started skimming past the details, I liked his excitement. This wasn't what I was looking for, so I can't exactly recommend it, but hopefully this review will help you guess whether you would like it. It's much heavier on the mathematics and lighter on the popularization, and if that's the direction you would have preferred the other similar books I've reviewed to go, this may be worth your attention. Rating: 6 out of 10