I ve done some clean-up in the Debian BTS. The result can be seen in the QA graphs: The last remaining 6 bugs are only affecting OpenStack Essex (which is what Wheezy ships, and which unfortunately I have not enough time to support properly), and the last one is waiting for FTP masters approval after I added Python 3 support to oslo-config (OpenStack is slowly moving to Python3, and I ve tried to add support to Python3 in the packages as well each time it was possible). Also, the Icehouse packages have passed the tempest tests (a set of functional tests) which we run in our continuous integration system. As I was doing some triaging, it is possible that some bugs have been closed a bit quickly (like for example the Ceilometer FTBFS which I couldn t reproduce, even with sbuild and cowbuilder), so it is well possible that some more QA work will be needed later on. I m also expecting a new set of patches for supporting Ceph in Nova. I m sure there s issues which we will discover later on, however, it is nice to have this result right after the first Icehouse release of OpenStack. Next up: testing new components that I uploaded for this release: Trove (DB as a Service), Designate (DNS as a Service), Ironic (Metal as a Service, or cloud computing on bare-metal), and TripleO (OpenStack on OpenStack). I unfortunately know already that TripleO and Tuskar wont really work yet, and that it needs some patches to be sent upstream for it to support Debian correctly (let s work it out for Juno!). So please consider it as a technology preview only. Though Trove, Designate and Ironic are supposed to be in good enough shape, I didn t have the chance to test them more than just installing the packages and checking daemons are running and connected to the various components of OpenStack (eg: database, keystone and RabbitMQ). Please do test them and report bugs in the BTS. I d like to thanks Gustavo Panizzo & Thomas Bechtold who contributed to this release, and also the folks at eNovance (Emilien, Cyril, Seb ) who provided precious help with the CI and package quality. See you in the Juno Atlanta design summit next week (as hopefully, my plane ticket issue will be soon solved).

The very useful Valgrind tool had flagged an actual error in the package which the CRAN maintainers asked us to address. This was followed by a minor brown-bad oversight of a missing delete, also tagged by Valgrind. Both are pretty ancient bugs which we probably should have found aeons ago. Releases 0.1.3 and 0.1.4 made it to CRAN yesterday in short succession. To recap, RcppSMC combines the SMCTC template classes for Sequential Monte Carlo and Particle Filters (Johansen, 2009, JSS) with the Rcpp package for R/C++ Integration (Eddelbuettel and Francois, 2011, JSS) and thereby allows for easier and more direct access from R to the computational core of the Sequential Monte Carlo algorithm. The two NEWS entries are below:

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.1.4 (2014-05-02)

• Added missing delete operator to destructor in sampler

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.1.3 (2014-05-01)

• Bugfix in Sampler.iterate() for memory overrun detected by valgrind

Courtesy of CRANberries, there are also diffstat reports for 0.1.3. and 0.1.4. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppSMC 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.

As much as I love PowerPC, and as great as it is that they re doing this OpenPower thing, I don t think that the first step should be to eliminate the competition. Perhaps they should put some effort in to taking back a large part of the market. Didn t these guys read The Art of War?

The OpenPower Foundation, and how IBM and friends could oust x86 from the server room

I d certainly take a look at a server if they sent me one; it looks like Debian still supports powerpc arch on wheezy. ;-)

The seventh Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. We had one remote hacker from NYC which brings the number of attendants up to 9. This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• We decided to abandon Iceowl (based on the standalone calendar sunbird) since Mozilla started to actively remove the code. Unfortunately this leaves us without a proper GUI stand alone calendar client with GSSAPI support.
• The icedove package got a major cleanup including the switch from CDBS to dh and the removal of the rebranding logic. This will hopefully allow us to better keep in sync with upstream. Carsten's git repo usually carries the most up to date version and a automated build of these version is in the works.
• The sogo connector extension for icedove got uploaded and tested including a wiki page
• The Groupware Page got updated
• We discussed the possibility of caldav/carddav servers in Debian using autopkgtest. This resulted in caldav-tester being packaged. It's currently waiting for an updated dependency before it can be uploaded.
• Based on that we added minimal autopkg tests to calypso. The later also gained GSSAPI support.
• OpenChange got updated in experimental (now moved to sid) and got a debug package. There were also some upstream improvements to ease provisioning.
• Dovecot's installation of the Sieve ext_programs was fixed
• SOPE and SOGo got updated to the latest upstream versions
• The SOGo-OpenChange plugin got build against the OpenChange package in experimental
• Giraffe (aka Zarafa packaging) made nice progress including the switch to free artwork and further renaming of the services. For Details on the current state check the wiki page.
• Due to the warm spring we had two nice barbecues for lunch.

Since we had a nice mix of first time Debian contributors, Debian Maintainers and Debian Developers we had lots of room for discussion and co-working which made this an exciting weekend.

I've been following the Gnash project for quite a while now. It is a free software implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser plugin. Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the newer AVM2 format - see Lightspark for that one), allowing several flash based sites to work. Thanks to the friendly developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2 support, but it has not happened yet. If you install both Lightspark and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file, so you can get both handled as free software. Unfortunately, Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many sites do not work yet. A few months ago, I started looking at Coverity, the static source checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of the projects I decided to check out. Coverity is able to find lock errors, memory errors, dead code and more. A few days ago they even extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL. There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static code checkers I have tested over the years. Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity. I was quite happy today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed. This make me confident that the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than the previous one. Most of the reported issues were and are in the test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code. If you want to help out, you find us on the gnash-dev mailing list and on the #gnash channel on irc.freenode.net IRC server.

Background I ve previously written about the claim that people use Autism as an excuse for bad behavior [1]. In summary it doesn t and such claims instead lead to people not being assessed for Autism. I ve also previously written about empathy and Autism in the context of discussions about conference sexual harassment [2]. The main point is that anyone who s going to blame empathy disorders for the widespread mistreatment of women in society and divert the subject from the actions of average men to men in minority groups isn t demonstrating empathy. Discussions of the actions of average men are so often derailed to cover Autism that the Geek Feminism Wiki has a page about the issue of blaming Autism [3]. The Latest Issue Last year Shanley Kane wrote an informative article for Medium titled What Can Men Do about the treatment of women in the IT industry [4]. It s a good article, I recommend reading it. As an aside @shanley s twitter feed is worth reading [5]. In response to Shanley s article Jeff Atwood wrote an article of the same title this year which covered lots of other things [6]. He writes about Autism but doesn t seem to realise that officially Asperger Syndrome is now Autism according to DSM-V (they decided that separate diagnosis of Autism, Asperger Syndrome, and PDD-NOS were too difficult and merged them). Asperger Syndrome is now a term that refers to historic issues (IE research that was published before DSM-V) and slang use. Gender and the Autism Spectrum Jeff claims that autism skews heavily towards males at a 4:1 ratio and cites the Epidemiology of Autism Wikipedia page as a reference. Firstly that page isn t a great reference, I fixed one major error (which was obviously wrong to anyone who knows anything about Autism and also contradicted the cited reference) in the first section while writing this post. The Wikipedia page cites a PDF about the Epidemiology of Autism that claims the 4.3:1 ratio of boys to girls [7]. However that PDF is a summary of other articles and the one which originated the 4.3:1 claim is behind a paywall. One thing that is worth noting in the PDF is that the section containing the 4.3:1 claim also references claims about correlations between race and Autism and studies contradicting such claims it notes the possibility of ascertainment bias . I think that anyone who reads that section should immediately consider the possibility of ascertainment bias in regard to the gender ratio. Most people who are diagnosed with Autism are diagnosed as children. An Autism diagnosis of a child is quite subjective, an important part is an IQ test (where the psychologist interprets the intent of the child in the many cases where answers aren t clear) to compare social skills with IQ. So whether a child is diagnosed is determined by the psychologist s impression of the child s IQ vs the impression of their social skills. Whether a child is even taken for assessment depends on whether they act in a way that s considered to be obviously different. Any child who is suspected of being on the Autism Spectrum will be compared other children who have been diagnosed (IE mostly boys) and this will probably increase the probability that a boy will be assessed. So an Aspie girl might not be assessed because she acts like other Aspie girls not like the Aspie boys her parents and teachers have seen. The way kids act is not solely determined by neuro-type. Our society expects and encourages boys to be louder than girls and take longer and more frequent turns to speak, this is so widespread that I don t think it s possible for parents to avoid it if their kids are exposed to the outside world. Because of this boys who would be diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome by DSM-IV tend to act in ways that are obviously different from other kids. While the combination of Autism and the the social expectations on girls tends to result in girls who are quiet, shy, and apologetic. The fact that girls are less obviously different and that their differences cause fewer difficulties for parents and teachers makes them less likely to be assessed. Note that the differences in behavior of boys and girls who have been diagnosed is noted by the professionals (and was discussed at a conference on AsperGirls that my wife attended) while the idea that this affects assessment rates is my theory. Jeff also cites the book The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (who s (in)famous for his Extreme Male Brain theory). The first thing to note about the Extreme Male Brain theory are that it depends almost entirely on the 4.3:1 ratio of males to females on the Autism Spectrum (which is dubious as I noted above). The only other evidence in support of it is subjective studies of children which suffer from the same cultural issues this is why double blind tests should be used whenever possible. The book Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine [8] debunks Simon Baron-Cohen s work among other things. The look inside feature of the Amazon page for Delusions of Gender allows you to read about Simon Baron-Cohen s work [9]. Now even if the Extreme Male Brain theory had any merit it would be a really bad idea to cite it (or a book based on it) if you want to make things better for women in the IT industry. Cordelia s book debunks the science and also shows how such claims about supposed essential difference are taken as exclusionary. The Problem with Jeff Atwood Jeff suggests in his post that men should listen to women. Then he and his followers have a huge flame-war with many women over twitter during which which he tweeted Trying to diversify my follows by following any female voices that engaged me in a civil, constructive way recently . If you only listen to women who agree with you then that doesn t really count as listening to women. When you have a stated policy of only listening to women who agree then it seems to be more about limiting what women may feel free to say around you. The Geek Feminism wiki page about the Tone Argument [10] says the following: One way in which the tone argument frequently manifests itself is as a call for civility. A way to gauge whether a request for civility is sincere or not is to ask whether the person asking for civility has more power along whatever axes are contextually relevant (see Intersectionality) than the person being called incivil , less power, or equal power. Often, people who have the privilege of being listened to and taken seriously level accusations of incivility as a silencing tactic, and label as incivil any speech or behavior that questions their privilege. For example, some men label any feminist thought or speech as hostile or impolite; there is no way for anybody to question male power or privilege without being called rude or aggressive. Likewise, some white people label any critical discussion of race, particularly when initiated by people of color, as incivil. Writing about one topic is also a really good idea. A blog post titled What Can Men Do should be about things that men can do. Not about Autism, speculation about supposed inherent differences between men and women which are based on bad research, gender diversity in various occupations, etc. Following up a post on What Can Men Do with discussion (in blog comments and twitter) about what women should do before they are allowed to join the conversation is ridiculous. Jeff s blog post says that men should listen to women, excluding women based on the tone argument is gross hypocrisy. Swearing Jeff makes a big deal of the fact that Shanley uses some profane language in her tweets. This combines a couple of different ways of silencing women. It s quite common for women to be held to a high standard of ladylike behavior, while men get a free pass on doing the same thing. One example of this is the Geek Feminism article about the results of Sarah Sharp s request for civility in the Linux kernel community [11]. That s not an isolated incident, to the best of my recollection in 20+ years my local Linux Users Group has had only one debate about profanity on mailing lists in that case a woman (who is no longer active in the group) was criticised for using lesser profanity than men used both before and after with no comment (as an experiment I used some gratuitous profanity a couple of weeks later and no-one commented). There is also a common difference in interpretation of expressions of emotion, when a woman seems angry then she invariably has men tell her to change her approach (even when there are obvious reasons for her anger) while when a man is angry the possibility that other people shouldn t make him angry will usually be considered. The issues related to the treatment of women have had a large affect on Shanley s life and her friend s lives. It s quite understandable that she is angry about this. Her use of profanity in tweets seems appropriate to the situation. Other Links Newsweek s Gentlemen in Technology article has a section about Jeff [12], it s interesting to note his history of deleting tweets and editing his post. I presume he will change his post in response to mine and not make any note of the differences. Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote a good rebuttal to Jeff s post [13]. It s a good article and has some other relevant links that are worth reading.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/04/23/autism-as-an-excuse/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/12/08/empathy-autism-and-geeks/
• [3] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Autism_is_to_blame
• [4] https://medium.com/tech-culture-briefs/a1e93d985af0
• [5] https://twitter.com/shanley
• [6] http://blog.codinghorror.com/what-can-men-do/
• [7] http://idea.library.drexel.edu/bitstream/1860/2632/1/2006175339.pdf
• [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusions_of_Gender
• [9] http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244
• [10] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument
• [11] http://geekfeminism.org/2013/09/05/tone-policing-a-tool-for-protecting-male-power/
• [12] http://www.newsweek.com/today-tabs-meet-gentlemen-technology-248696
• [13] http://jacobian.org/writing/what-can-men-do/

Distributing software efficiently accross your platform can be difficult. Every distribution comes with a package manager which is usually suited for this task. APT can be relied upon on when using Debian or a derivative. Unfortunately, the official repositories may not contain everything you need. When you require unpackaged software or more recent versions, it is possible to setup your own local repository. Most of what is presented here was setup for Dailymotion and was greatly inspired by the work done by Rapha l Pinson at Orange.

Setting up your repositories There are three kinds of repositories you may want to setup:

1. A distribution mirror. Such a mirror will save bandwidth, provide faster downloads and permanent access, even when someone searches Google on Google.
2. A local repository for your own packages with the ability to have a staging zone to test packages on some servers before putting them in production.
3. Mirrors for unofficial repositories, like Ubuntu PPA. To avoid unexpected changes, such a repository will also get a staging and a production zone.

Before going further, it is quite important to understand what a repository is. Let s illustrate with the following line from my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

In this example, http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ is the repository and unstable is the distribution. A distribution is subdivided into components. We have three components: main, contrib and non-free. To setup repositories, we will use reprepro. This is not the only solution but it has a good balance between versatility and simplicity. reprepro can only handle one repository. So, the first choice is about how you will split your packages in repositories, distributions and components. Here is what matters:

• A repository cannot contain two identical packages (same name, same version, same architecture).
• Inside a component, you can only have one version of a package.
• Usually, a distribution is a subset of the versions while a component is a subset of the packages. For example, in Debian, with the distribution unstable, you choose to get the most recent versions while with the component main, you choose to get DFSG-free software only.

If you go for several repositories, you will have to handle several reprepro instances and won t be able to easily copy packages from one place to another. At Dailymotion, we put everything in the same repository but it would also be perfectly valid to have three repositories:

• one to mirror the distribution,
• one for your local packages, and
• one to mirror unofficial repositories.

Here is our target setup:

Initial setup First, create a system user to work with the repositories:

$ adduser --system --disabled-password --disabled-login \
>         --home /srv/packages \
>         --group reprepro

All operations should be done with this user only. If you want to setup several repositories, create a directory for each of them. Each repository has those subdirectories:

• conf/ contains the configuration files,
• gpg/ contains the GPG stuff to sign the repository¹,
• logs/ contains the logs,
• www/ contains the repository that should be exported by the web server.

Here is the content of conf/options:

outdir +b/www
logdir +b/logs
gnupghome +b/gpg

Then, you need to create the GPG key to sign the repository:

$ GNUPGHOME=gpg gpg --gen-key
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (1) RSA and RSA (default)
   (2) DSA and Elgamal
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
Your selection? 1
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
      <n>  = key expires in n days
      <n>w = key expires in n weeks
      <n>m = key expires in n months
      <n>y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 10y
Key expires at mer. 08 nov. 2023 22:30:58 CET
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Real name: Dailymotion Archive Automatic Signing Key
Email address: the-it-operations@dailymotion.com
Comment: 
[...]

By setting an empty password, you allow reprepro to run unattended. You will have to distribute the public key of your new repository to let APT check the archive signature. An easy way is to ship it in some package.

Local mirror of an official distribution Let s start by mirroring a distribution. We want a local mirror of Ubuntu Precise. For this, we need to do two things:

1. Setup a new distribution in conf/distributions.
2. Configure the update sources in conf/updates.

Let s add this block to conf/distributions:

# Ubuntu Precise
Origin: Ubuntu
Label: Ubuntu
Suite: precise
Version: 12.04
Codename: precise
Architectures: i386 amd64
Components: main restricted universe multiverse
UDebComponents: main restricted universe multiverse
Description: Ubuntu Precise 12.04 (with updates and security)
Contents: .gz .bz2
UDebIndices: Packages Release . .gz
Tracking: minimal
Update: - ubuntu-precise ubuntu-precise-updates ubuntu-precise-security
SignWith: yes

This defines the precise distribution in our repository. It contains four components: main, restricted, universe and multiverse (like the regular distribution in official repositories). The Update line starts with a dash. This means reprepro will mark everything as deleted before updating with the provided sources. Old packages will not be kept when they are removed from Ubuntu. In conf/updates, we define the sources:

# Ubuntu Precise
Name: ubuntu-precise
Method: http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Fallback: http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Suite: precise
Components: main main multiverse restricted universe
UDebComponents: main restricted universe multiverse
Architectures: amd64 i386
VerifyRelease: 437D05B5
GetInRelease: no
# Ubuntu Precise Updates
Name: ubuntu-precise-updates
Method: http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Fallback: http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Suite: precise-updates
Components: main restricted universe multiverse
UDebComponents: main restricted universe multiverse
Architectures: amd64 i386
VerifyRelease: 437D05B5
GetInRelease: no
# Ubuntu Precise Security
Name: ubuntu-precise-security
Method: http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Fallback: http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Suite: precise-security
Components: main restricted universe multiverse
UDebComponents: main restricted universe multiverse
Architectures: amd64 i386
VerifyRelease: 437D05B5
GetInRelease: no

The VerifyRelease lines are GPG key fingerprint to use to check the remote repository. The key needs to be imported in the local keyring:

$ gpg --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg \
>     --export 437D05B5   GNUPGHOME=gpg gpg --import

Another important point is that we merge three distributions (precise, precise-updates and precise-security) into a single distribution (precise) in our local repository. This may cause some difficulties with tools expecting the three distributions to be available (like the Debian Installer²). Next, you can run reprepro and ask it to update your local mirror:

$ reprepro update

This will take some time on the first run. You can execute this command every night. reprepro is not the fastest mirror solution but it is easy to setup, flexible and reliable.

Repository for local packages Let s configure the repository to accept local packages. For each official distribution (like precise), we will configure two distributions:

• precise-staging contains packages that have not been fully tested and not ready to go to production.
• precise-prod contains production packages copied from precise-staging.

In our workflow, packages are introduced in precise-staging where they can be tested and will be copied to precise-prod when we want them to be available for production. You can adopt a more complex workflow if you need. The reprepro part is quite easy. We add the following blocks into conf/distributions:

# Dailymotion Precise packages (staging)
Origin: Dailymotion #  
Label: dm-staging   #  
Suite: precise-staging
Codename: precise-staging
Architectures: i386 amd64 source
Components: main role/dns role/database role/web #  
Description: Dailymotion Precise staging repository
Contents: .gz .bz2
Tracking: keep
SignWith: yes
NotAutomatic: yes #  
Log: packages.dm-precise-staging.log
 --type=dsc email-changes
# Dailymotion Precise packages (prod)
Origin: Dailymotion #  
Label: dm-prod      #  
Suite: precise-prod
Codename: precise-prod
Architectures: i386 amd64 source
Components: main role/dns role/database role/web #  
Description: Dailymotion Precise prod repository
Contents: .gz .bz2
Tracking: keep
SignWith: yes
Log: packages.dm-precise-prod.log

First notice we use several components (in ):

• main will contain packages that are not specific to a subset of the platform. If you put a package in main, it should work correctly on any host.
• role/* are components dedicated to a subset of the platform. For example, in role/dns, we ship a custom version of BIND.

The staging distribution has the NotAutomatic flag (in ) which disallows the package manager to install those packages except if the user explicitely requests it. Just below, when a new dsc file is uploaded, the hook email-changes will be executed. It should be in the conf/ directory. The Origin and Label lines (in ) are quite important to be able to define an explicit policy of which packages should be installed. Let s say we use the following /etc/apt/sources.list file:

# Ubuntu packages
deb http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion precise main restricted universe multiverse
# Dailymotion packages
deb http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion precise-prod    main role/dns
deb http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion precise-staging main role/dns

All servers have the precise-staging distribution. We must ensure we won t install those packages by mistake. The NotAutomatic flag is one possible safe-guard. We also use a tailored /etc/apt/preferences:

Explanation: Dailymotion packages of a specific component should be more preferred
Package: *
Pin: release o=Dailymotion, l=dm-prod, c=role/*
Pin-Priority: 950
Explanation: Dailymotion packages should be preferred
Package: *
Pin: release o=Dailymotion, l=dm-prod
Pin-Priority: 900
Explanation: staging should never be preferred
Package: *
Pin: release o=Dailymotion, l=dm-staging
Pin-Priority: -100

By default, packages will have a priority of 500. By setting a priority of -100 to the staging distribution, we ensure the packages cannot be installed at all. This is stronger than NotAutomatic which sets the priority to 1. When a package exists in Ubuntu and in our local repository, we ensure that, if this is a production package, we will use ours by using a priority of 900 (or 950 if we match a specific role component). Have a look at the How APT Interprets Priorities section of apt_preferences(5) manual page for additional information. Keep in mind that version matters only when the priority is the same. To check if everything works as you expect, use apt-cache policy:

$ apt-cache policy php5-memcache
  Installed: 3.0.8-1~precise2~dm1
  Candidate: 3.0.8-1~precise2~dm1
  Version table:
 *** 3.0.8-1~precise2~dm1 0
        950 http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion/ precise-prod/role/web amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.0.8-1~precise1~dm4 0
        900 http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion/ precise-prod/main amd64 Packages
       -100 http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion/ precise-staging/main amd64 Packages
     3.0.6-1 0
        500 http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion/ precise/universe amd64 Packages

If we want to install a package from the staging distribution, we can use apt-get with the -t precise-staging option to raise the priority of this distribution to 990. Once you have tested your package, you can copy it from the staging distribution to the production distribution:

$ reprepro -C main copysrc precise-prod precise-staging wackadoodle

Local mirror of third-party repositories Sometimes, you want a software published on some third-party repository without to repackage it yourself. A common example is the repositories edited by hardware vendors. Like for an Ubuntu mirror, there are two steps: defining the distribution and defining the source. We chose to put such mirrors into the same distributions as our local packages but with a dedicated component for each mirror. This way, those third-party packages will share the same workflow as our local packages: they will appear in the staging distribution, we validate them and copy them to the production distribution. The first step is to add the components and an appropriate Update line to conf/distributions:

Origin: Dailymotion
Label: dm-staging
Suite: precise-staging
Components: main role/dns role/database role/web vendor/hp
Update: hp
# [...]
Origin: Dailymotion
Label: dm-prod
Suite: precise-prod
Components: main role/dns role/database role/web vendor/hp
# [...]

We added the vendor/hp component to both the staging and the production distributions. However, only the staging distribution gets an Update line (remember, packages will be copied manually into the production distribution). We declare the source in conf/updates:

# HP repository
Name: hp
Method: http://downloads.linux.hp.com/SDR/downloads/ManagementComponentPack/
Suite: precise/current
Components: non-free>vendor/hp
Architectures: i386 amd64
VerifyRelease: 2689B887
GetInRelease: no

Don t forget to add the GPG key to your local keyring. Notice an interesting feature of reprepro: we copy the remote non-free component to our local vendor/hp component. Then, you can synchronize the mirror with reprepro update. Once the packages have been tested, you will have to copy them in the production distribution.

Building Debian packages Our reprepro setup seems complete, but how do we put packages into the staging distribution? You have several options to build Debian packages for your local repository. It really depends on how much time you want to invest in this activity:

1. Build packages from source by adding a debian/ directory. This is the classic way of building Debian packages. You can start from scratch or use an existing package as a base. In the latest case, the package can be from the official archive but for a more recent distribution or a backport or from an unofficial repository.
2. Use a tool that will create a binary package from a directory, like fpm. Such a tool will try to guess a lot of things to minimize your work. It can even download everything for you.

There is no universal solution. If you don t have the time budget for building packages from source, have a look at fpm. I would advise you to use the first approach when possible because you will get those perks for free:

• You keep the sources in your repository. Whenever you need to rebuild something to fix an emergency bug, you won t have to hunt the sources which may be unavailable when you need them the most. Of course, this only works if you build packages that don t download stuff directly from the Internet.
• You also keep the recipe³ to build the package in your repository. If someone enables some option and rebuild the package, you won t accidently drop this option on the next build. Those changes can be documented in debian/changelog. Moreover, you can use a version control software for the whole debian/ directory.
• You can propose your package for inclusion into Debian. This will help many people once the package hits the archive.

Builders We chose pbuilder as a builder⁴. Its setup is quite straightforward. Here is our /etc/pbuilderrc:

DISTRIBUTION=$DIST
NAME="$DIST-$ARCH"
MIRRORSITE=http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion
COMPONENTS=("main" "restricted" "universe" "multiverse")
OTHERMIRROR="deb http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion $ DIST -staging main"
HOOKDIR=/etc/pbuilder/hooks.d
BASE=/var/cache/pbuilder/dailymotion
BASETGZ=$BASE/$NAME/base.tgz
BUILDRESULT=$BASE/$NAME/results/
APTCACHE=$BASE/$NAME/aptcache/
DEBBUILDOPTS="-sa"
KEYRING="/usr/share/keyrings/dailymotion-archive.keyring.gpg"
DEBOOTSTRAPOPTS=("--arch" "$ARCH" "--variant=buildd" "$ DEBOOTSTRAPOPTS[@] " "--keyring=$KEYRING")
APTKEYRINGS=("$KEYRING")
EXTRAPACKAGES=("dailymotion-archive-keyring")

pbuilder is expected to be invoked with DIST, ARCH and optionally ROLE environment variables. Building the initial bases can be done like this:

for ARCH in i386 amd64; do
  for DIST in precise; do
    export ARCH
    export DIST
    pbuilder --create
  done
done

We don t create a base for each role. Instead, we use a D hook to add the appropriate source:

#!/bin/bash
[ -z "$ROLE" ]    
  cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list <<EOF
deb http://packages.dm.gg/dailymotion $ DIST -staging role/$ ROLE 
EOF
 
apt-get update

We ensure packages from our staging distribution are preferred over other packages by adding an /etc/apt/preferences file in a E hook:

#!/bin/bash
cat > /etc/apt/preferences <<EOF
Explanation: Dailymotion packages are of higher priority
Package: *
Pin: release o=Dailymotion
Pin-Priority: 900
EOF

We also use a C hook to get a shell in case there is an error. This is convenient to debug a problem:

#!/bin/bash
apt-get install -y --force-yes vim less
cd /tmp/buildd/*/debian/..
/bin/bash < /dev/tty > /dev/tty 2> /dev/tty

A manual build can be run with:

$ ARCH=amd64 DIST=precise ROLE=web pbuilder \
>         --build somepackage.dsc

Version numbering To avoid to apply complex rules to chose a version number for a package, we chose to treat everything as a backport, even in-house software. We use the following scheme: X-Y~preciseZ+dmW.

• X is the upstream version⁵.
• Y is the Debian version. If there is no Debian version, use 0.
• Z is the Ubuntu backport version. Again, if such a version doesn t exist, use 0.
• W is our version of the package. We increment it when we make a change to the packaging. This is the only number we are allowed to control. All the others are set by an upstream entity, unless it doesn t exist and in this case, you use 0.

Let s suppose you need to backport wackadoodle. It is available in a more recent version of Ubuntu as 1.4-3. Your first backport will be 1.4-3~precise0+dm1. After a change to the packaging, the version will be 1.4-3~precise0+dm2. A new upstream version 1.5 is available and you need it. You will use 1.5-0~precise0+dm1. Later, this new upstream version will be available in some version of Ubuntu as 1.5-3ubuntu1. You will rebase your changes on this version and get 1.5-3ubuntu1~precise0+dm1. When using Debian instead of Ubuntu, a compatible convention could be : X-Y~bpo70+Z~dm+W.

Uploading To upload a package, a common setup is the following workflow:

1. Upload the source package to an incoming directory.
2. reprepro will notice the source package, check its correctness (signature, distribution) and put it in the archive.
3. The builder will notice a new package needs to be built and build it.
4. Once the package is built, the builder will upload the result to the incoming directory.
5. reprepro will notice again the new binary package and integrate it in the archive.

This workflow has the disadvantage to have many moving pieces and to leave the user in the dark while the compilation is in progress. As an alternative, a simple script can be used to execute each step synchronously. The user can follow on their terminal that everything works as expected. Once we have the .changes file, the build script just issues the appropriate command to include the result in the archive:

$ reprepro -C main include precise-staging \
>      wackadoodle_1.4-3~precise0+dm4_amd64.changes

Happy hacking!

---

1. The gpg/ directory could be shared by several repositories.
2. We teached Debian Installer to work with our setup with an appropriate preseed file.
3. fpm-cookery is a convenient tool to write recipes for fpm, similar to Homebrew or a BSD port tree. It could be used to achieve the same goal.
4. sbuild is an alternative to pbuilder and is the official builder for both Debian and Ubuntu. Historically, pbuilder was more focused on developers needs.
5. For a Git snapshot, we use something like 1.4-git20130905+1-ae42dc1 which is a snapshot made after version 1.4 (use 0.0 if no version has ever been released) at the given date. The following 1 is to be able to package different snapshots at the same date while the hash is here in case you need to retrieve the exact snapshot.

Since my blog post about BTRFS in March [1] not much has changed for me. Until yesterday I was using 2.13 kernels on all my systems and dealing with the occasional kmail index file corruption problem. Yesterday my main workstation ran out of disk space and went read-only. I started a BTRFS balance which didn t seem to be doing any good because most of the space was actually in use so I deleted a bunch of snapshots. Then my X session aborted (some problem with KDE or the X server I ll never know as logs couldn t be written to disk). I rebooted the system and had kernel threads go into infinite loops with repeated messages about a lack of response for 22 seconds (I should have photographed the screen). When it got into that state the ALT-Fn keys to change a virtual console sometimes worked but nothing else worked the terminal usually didn t respond to input. To try and stop the kernel from entering an infinite loop on every boot that I used rootflags=skip_balance on the kernel command line to stop it from continuing the balance which made the system usable for a little longer, unfortunately the skip_balance mount option doesn t permanently apply, the kernel will keep trying to balance the filesystem on every mount until a btrfs balance cancel operation succeeds. But my attempts to cancel the balance always failed. When I booted my system with skip_balance it would sometimes free some space from the deleted snapshots, after two good runs I got to 17G free. But after that every time I rebooted it would report another Gig or two free (according to btrfs filesystem df ) and then hang without committing the changes to disk. I solved this problem by upgrading my USB rescue image to kernel 3.14 from Debian/Experimental and mounting the filesystem from the rescue image. After letting kernel 3.14 work on the filesystem for a while it was in a stage where I could use it with kernel 3.13 and then boot the system normally to upgrade it to kernel 3.14. I had a minor extra complication due to the fact that I was running apt-get dist-upgrade at the time the filesystem went read-only do the dpkg records of which packages were installed were a bit messed up. But that was easy to fix by running a diff against /var/lib/dpkg/info on a recent snapshot. In retrospect I should have copied from an old snapshot of the root filesystem, but I fixed the problems faster than I could think of better ways to fix them. When running a balance the system had a peak IO rate of about 30MB/s reads and 30MB/s writes. That compares to the maximum contiguous file IO speed of 260MB/s for reads and 320MB/s for writes. During that time it had about 50% CPU time used for my Q8400 quad-core CPU. So far the only tasks that I do regularly which have CPU speed as a significant bottleneck are BTRFS filesystem balancing and recoding MP4 files. Compiling hasn t been an issue because recently I haven t been compiling many programs that are particularly big. Lessons Learned I should photograph the screen regularly when doing things that won t be logged, those kernel error messages might have been useful to me or someone else. The fact that the only kernel that runs BTRFS the way I need comes from the Experimental repository in Debian stands in contrast to the recent kernel patch that stops describing BTRFS as experimental. While I have a high opinion of the people who provide support for the kernel in commercial distributions and their ability to back-port fixes from newer kernels I m concerned about their decision to support BTRFS. I m also dubious about whether we can offer BTRFS support in Debian/Jessie (the next version of Debian) without a significant warning. OTOH if you find yourself with a BTRFS system that isn t working well you could always hire me to fix it. I accept payment via Paypal, bank transfer, or Bitcoin. If you want to pay me in Grange then I assure you I will never forget about it. ;) I thought that I wouldn t have CPU speed issues when I started using the AMD64 architecture, for most tasks that s been the case. But for systems for which storage is important I ll look at getting faster CPUs because of BTRFS. Using faster CPUs for storage isn t that uncommon (I used to work for SGI and dealt with some significant CPU power used for file serving), but needing a fast quad-core CPU to drive a single SSD is a little disappointing. While recovery from file system corner cases isn t going to be particularly common it s something that you want completed quickly, for personal systems you want to be doing something else and for work systems you don t want down-time. The BTRFS problems with running out of disk space are really serious. It seems that even workstations used at home can t survive without monitoring. For any other filesystem used at home you can just let it get full and then delete stuff. Include rootflags=skip_balance in the boot loader configuration for every system with a BTRFS root filesystem and in the /etc/fstab for every non-root BTRFS filesystem. I haven t yet encountered a single situation where continuing the balance did any good or when it didn t do any harm.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/03/16/btrfs-march-2014/

Zoe had her first day back at Kindy this morning for Term 2. I couldn't believe how fast Term 1 flew by, and how little I felt I accomplished on a personal front. The two weeks of school holidays certainly put the brakes on trying to get anything much more done for myself, but Zoe and I had a great time. I was really happy with the variety of activities we were able to do, and it was nice that Zoe and Megan got to spend a reasonable amount of time together too. The weather cooperated for the majority of the time, which was the cherry on top. Zoe only had Kindergarten today this week, but Sarah has the week off, so she's going to be taking Zoe for the next couple of days, which is really convenient timing, as it'll give me time to recover from some minor surgery tomorrow without having to run around after her. I might also manage to finalise my US tax return. I'm hoping to catch a few movies with Anshu too, who also has the week off work. Zoe slept reasonably well last night. Two wake ups, but they were both quickly resolved, so we both got back to sleep quickly. I was absolutely exhausted last night, but felt positively chipper this morning. We biked to Kindergarten, and I decided to leave the trailer there to make things a bit easier for myself in the afternoon. I got home, and just felt like vegging on the couch. Then I remembered Anshu had the day off, so she came over and we hung out and had lunch. It was really nice to have a few hours during the day off. I biked back to Kindergarten, wondering if I'd have to deal with waking up Zoe from a nap, but she hadn't had a nap. We'd had a bit of a talk at breakfast about napping at Kindergarten, and I have no idea if it helped or not, but it meant we could make an orderly departure. Zoe wanted to participate in Megan's tennis class after Kindergarten, and they were down a kid, which made the warm up stuff not work so well, so the teacher was happy for Zoe to take part. I managed to extract her once the real nitty gritty of the class started. I did get a good opportunity to suss out place availability for term 3. We biked home, and I wanted to take my bike in for a service while I'm on lifting restrictions, so we drove over to Cannon Hill to drop it off. The Gold Cross bike shop has now merged into the Super Amart store, so Zoe wanted to look at everything on the way back out. We eventually emerged without buying anything. Next, we went over to Bunnings, because Zoe's been asking if we can grow some veggies and flowers from seed. That ended up being about an hour of trekking around the nursery section trying to find stuff. It was a good way to use up the afternoon. We made it out with a bag of potting mix and a few packets of seeds and a kit for growing stuff that requires a trellis. Unfortunately most of the climbing stuff (like tomatoes) are out of season now, so I'm not sure what we're going to be able to grow with the kit. We got back home, and I put dinner on and we watched a bit of TV together while it cooked. Bath time and bed time went really smoothly, as I think she was pretty tired. Here's hoping she sleeps well tonight.

Review: Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh

Publisher:	Touchstone
Copyright:	November 2013
ISBN:	1-4767-6459-X
Format:	Graphic novel
Pages:	373

It's fundamentally pointless to write this review. Some number of you have already heard of Hyperbole and a Half. Most of that group already own this book and are only reading this review so that you can remember how much fun you had reading it. But, even better, you could just stop reading this review and go read the book again. Some of you who have heard of Hyperbole and a Half didn't know that Allie Brosh had published a book. If that's you, you're probably not reading this review any more, since you're now at your favorite book seller buying a copy of the book, rendering the review somewhat pointless. For those of you who have not heard of Hyperbole and a Half, there's no need to read a review, because it's a blog. So, rather than reading this review, you can just follow that link and read it for yourself. If you find yourself laughing uncontrollably (and occasionally crying) and going "where can I get more of this?", well, there's a book. Which you could have also found out from the blog itself. Like I said, not much point. If you read the blog and don't particularly care for it, well, I greatly respect your position. The diversity of taste in the human race is what leads to our wonderful variety of culture, philosophy, and art, and I appreciate your substantial contribution to that diversity. However, you should now make a mental note to never trust my humor recommendations, and you shouldn't let this review change your mind. But, since I'm here, I may as well write a review anyway. Hyperbole and a Half is, as mentioned, a blog by Allie Brosh. Most of the posts are quite long and substantial and in the form of cartoons mixed with text, usually (but not always) telling some sort of story. The cartoon style is what is often called "MS Paint," meaning that it looks like something drawn in Microsoft Paint with its most basic tools. (Other examples of this style are the Oatmeal and Homestuck, although Brosh stays consistently with a rawer art style than either of those.) It looks extremely simple, like child drawings (and early childhood inspires much of Brosh's material), but once one gets used to it, one realizes that Brosh gets amazing expressiveness and character out of the art style. As an aside, yes, I am wholeheartedly recommending a book that is full of material about young children. Brosh is that good. The subtitle of this book is "unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened," and it's mostly based on (exaggerated) incidents that occurred in Brosh's life. Most of them are hilarious. Some of them are both hilarious and stunning psychological insights. She has an amazing knack for storytelling and for exaggerating just the right moments of the story, or summing up emotions in a wonderful turn of phrase or a picture. She's also amazingly good at telling embarrassing stories about herself in a way that makes you empathize rather than just cringe, and then come away feeling like you understand both her and yourself better. If you've wandered around the Internet much, you have probably run across the phrase "clean ALL the things!" and the corresponding picture. That's from Hyperbole and a Half (specifically, "This is Why I'll Never Be an Adult") and is included in this book (improved; see below). It's even better in context. But, beyond storytelling, the other thing Brosh is amazingly good at is capturing internal mental states and emotions in a way that the reader understands and those who have experienced the emotion immediately go "yes, THAT." The apex of this is her two-part post on depression, which is hands-down the best description of depression that I've ever read. That judgment has been echoed by multiple friends of mine with depression. And yes, both of those posts are included in the book as well, although you can also read them on the web. As you've probably noticed, this book is partly a collection of material that's freely available on the web. Unlike some web comics collections, it's not entirely a reprint collection; there are entirely new stories here (which for me was enough by itself to buy the book). Brosh's post on the book says that it's about 50% new material. But the ones that aren't original have been edited and improved, sometimes substantially. For example, I did a quick comparison of the book version with the web version of "This is Why I'll Never be an Adult" and found Brosh redrew all of the cartoons for the story. The book is also gorgeous, if you care about such things like I do: high quality paper, thick pages, vibrant colors, and a comfortable heft to the hardcover version. It's the sort of book that feels like it will survive for decades, which is good since I intend to re-read it for decades. Brosh has a lot of material on-line, so obviously only a small fraction made it into the book and there's more to discover on the blog. I can particularly recommend "The Alot is Better Than You at Everything" and "Boyfriend Doesn't Have Ebola. Probably.". The latter, which is mostly about creating a better pain scale, is my favorite from the blog that didn't make it into the book. And there are two more examples of the sort of thing that you'll getting here. So ends the probably pointless review. I absolutely adore Hyperbole and a Half. It is my favorite web comic, even surpassing XKCD, which is saying something. Even if there were no material, I would have bought this book in hardcover to support Brosh and to have a high-quality printing of the blog posts. The reworkings and improvements of the republished material and the brand new additions are just bonuses. But there's no need to take my word for it; the best possible advertisement for Brosh's work is on-line, from which you can easily determine if you'll enjoy this book as much as I did. Even the back cover and the inside flaps are awesome. Rating: 10 out of 10

I picked up a Panasonic BDT-230 a couple of months ago. Then I discovered that even though it appeared fairly straightforward to make it DVD region free (I have a large pile of PAL region 2 DVDs), the US models refuse to play back PAL content. We live in an era of software-defined functionality. While Panasonic could have designed a separate hardware SKU with a hard block on PAL output, that would seem like unnecessary expense. So, playing with the firmware seemed like a reasonable start.

Panasonic provide a nice download site for firmware updates, so I grabbed the most recent and set to work. Binwalk found a squashfs filesystem, which was a good sign. Less good was the block at the end of the firmware with "RSA" written around it in large letters. The simple approach of hacking the firmware, building a new image and flashing it to the device didn't appear likely to work.

Which left dealing with the installed software. The BDT-230 is based on a Mediatek chipset, and like most (all?) Mediatek systems runs a large binary called "bdpprog" that spawns about eleventy billion threads and does pretty much everything. Runnings strings over that showed, well, rather a lot, but most promisingly included a reference to "/mnt/sda1/vudu/vudu.sh". Other references to /mnt/sda1 made it pretty clear that it was the mount point for USB mass storage. There were a couple of other constraints that had to be satisfied, but soon attempting to run Vudu was actually setting a blank root password and launching telnetd.

/acfg/config_file_global.txt was the next stop. This is a set of tokens and values with useful looking names like "IDX_GB_PTT_COUNTRYCODE". I tried changing the values, but unfortunately made a poor guess - on next reboot, the player had reset itself to DVD region 5, Blu Ray region C and was talking to me in Russian. More inconveniently, the Vudu icon had vanished and I couldn't launch a shell any more.

But where there's one obvious mechanism for running arbitrary code, there's probably another. /usr/local/bin/browser.sh contained the wonderful line:

export LD_PRELOAD=/mnt/sda1/bbb/libSegFault.so

, so then it was just a matter of building a library that hooked open() and launched inetd and dropping that into the right place, and then opening the browser.

This time I set the country code correctly, rebooted and now I can actually watch Monkey Dust again. Hurrah! But, at the same time, concerning. This software has been written without any concern for security, and it listens on the network by default. If it took me this little time to find two entirely independent ways to run arbitrary code on the device, it doesn't seem like a stretch to believe that there are probably other vulnerabilities that can be exploited with less need for physical access.

The depressing part of this is that there's no reason to believe that Panasonic are especially bad here - especially since a large number of vendors are shipping much the same Mediatek code, and so probably have similar (if not identical) issues. The future is made up of network-connected appliances that are using your electricity to mine somebody else's Dogecoin. Our nightmarish dystopia may be stranger than expected.

comments

The new version of OpenStack is out, and I have just finished uploading it all into Debian Sid. With a total of 38 packages that I uploaded yesterday (which was exhausting!), most, if not all, were only moving from Experimental to Sid with only tiny updates, and this represents the achievement of 6 months of packaging work. The new feature list is impressive, and I would like to highlight some part of it:

• New Ironic bare metal service.
• New Designate DNS as a Service project.
• Trove (DB as a Service) graduated from incubation and should work well now.
• TripleO (OpenStack On OpenStack) is now fully in Debian, together with Tuskar and Tuskar-UI.
• OpenStack now has VXLAN support through the new version of OVS and kernel >= 3.13. This solves the scalability issues with GRE tunnels.

For the moment, I haven t packaged Sahara (eg: Hadoop as a service), but it might come later as a customer of us might require it. There s a lot less unit tests issues in the packages I uploaded to Sid: all SQLAlchemy issues have been dealt with. I wasn t confident with the Havana release that Sid / Testing would be a good environment for OpenStack, but this time with Icehouse, I think it should be much better. Please test this brand new release and report issues on the BTS. As always, the packages are available also as Wheezy backports through the usual channels (see the official install guide).

I've taken over "maintaining" DVswitch from Ben Hutchings a few years ago, since Ben realized he didn't have the time anymore to work on it well. After a number of years, I have to admit that I haven't done a very good job. Not becase I didn't want to work on it, but mainly because I don't have enough time to fix DVswitch against the numerous moving targets that it uses; the APIs of libav and of liblivemedia are fluent enough that just making sure everything remains compilable and in working order is quite a job. DVswitch is used by many people; DebConf, FOSDEM, and the CCC are just a few examples, but I know of at least three more. Most of these (apart from DebConf and FOSDEM) maintain local patches which I've been wanting to merge into the upstream version of dvswitch. However, my time is limited, and over the past few years I've not been able to get dvswitch into a state where I confidently felt I could upload it into Debian unstable for a release. One step we took in order to get that closer was to remove the liblivemedia dependency (which implied removing the support for RTSP sources). Unfortunately, the resulting situation wasn't good enough yet, since libav had changed API enough that current versions of DVswitch compiled against current versions of libav will segfault if you try to do anything useful. I must admit to myself that I don't have the time and/or skill set to maintain DVswitch on an acceptable level all by myself. So, this is a call for help: If you're using DVswitch for your conference and want to continue doing so, please talk to us. The first things we'll need to do:

• Massage the code back into working order (when compiled against current libav)
• Fix my buildbot instance so that my grand plan of having nightly build/test runs against libav master actually works.
• Merge patches from the suse and CCC people that look nice
• Properly release dvswitch 0.9 (or maybe 1.0?)
• Party!

See you there?

I ordered some alginate the other day, and it arrived yesterday, but we were out, so I had to pick it up from the post office this morning. Anshu and I picked it up before Zoe was dropped off. We had a couple of attempts at making some, but didn't quite get the ratios or the quantity right, and we were too slow, so we'll have to try again. The plan is to try and make a cast of Zoe's hand, since we were messing around with plaster of Paris recently. I've found a good Instructable to try and follow. Nana and her dragon boating team were competing in the Australian Dragon Boat Championships over Easter, and her first race was today. It also ended up that today was the best day to try and go and watch, so when she called to say her first race would be around noon, I quickly decided we should jump in the car and head up to Kawana Waters. We abandoned the alginate, and I slapped together a picnic lunch for Zoe and I, and we bid Anshu farewell and drove up. Zoe's fever seemed to break yesterday afternoon after Sarah picked her up, and she slept well, but despite all that, she napped in the car on the way up, which was highly unusual, but helped pass the time. She woke up when we arrived. I managed to get a car park not too far from the finish line, and we managed to find Nana, whose team was about the enter the marshaling area. Her boat was closest to the shore we were watching from, and her boat came second in their qualifying round for the 200 metre race, meaning they went straight through to the semi-finals. The semi-finals were going to be much later, and I wanted to capitalise on the fact that we were going to have to drive right past my Mum and Dad's place on the way home to try and see my sister and her family, since we missed them on Monday. We headed back after lunch and a little bit of splashing around in the lake, and ended up staying for dinner at Mum and Dad's. Zoe had a great time catching up with her cousin Emma, and fooling around with Grandpa and Uncle Michael. She got to bed a little bit late by the time we got home, but I'm hopeful she'll sleep well tonight.

Yesterday's release of RcppBDT 0.2.3 lead to an odd build error. If one used at the same time a 32-bit OS, a compiler as recent as g++ 4.7 and the Boost 1.54.0 headers (directly or via the BH package) then the file lexical_cast.hpp barked and failed to compile for lack of an 128-bit integer (which is not a surprise on a 32-bit OS). After looking at this for a bit, and looking at some related bug report, I came up with a simple fix (which I mentioned in an update to the RcppBDT 0.2.3 release post). Sleeping over it, and comparing to the Boost 1.55 file, showed that the hunch was right, and I have since made a new release 1.54.0-2 of the BH package which contains the fix.

Changes in version 1.54.0-2 (2014-04-14)

• Bug fix to lexical_cast.hpp which now uses the test for INT128 which the rest of Boost uses, consistent with Boost 1.55 too.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

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