Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppCCTZ 0.0.1
A new package! A couple of weeks ago folks at Google released CCTZ: a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. It requires only a proper C++11 compiler and the standard IANA time zone data base which standard Unix, Linux, OS X, ... computers tend to have in /usr/share/zoneinfo.
And as the world needs nothing more than additional date, time, or timezones libraries, I started to quickly create a basic R wrapper package. This stalled as the original version of CCTZ used an __int128 for extended precision. That is not only not portable, but also prohibits compilation on baby computers still running a 32 OS (such as my trusted X1 laptop merrily plugging along with 4 gb of ram under Linux). Hence I filed an issue ticket which, lo and behold, got resolved two days ago.
And so now we have a shiny new RcppCCTZ package on CRAN in a very basic version 0.0.1. It happily runs all the original examples from CCTZ as e.g. this one:
// from examples/hello.cc
//
// [[Rcpp::export]]
int helloMoon()
cctz::TimeZone syd;
if (!cctz::LoadTimeZone("Australia/Sydney", &syd)) return -1;
// Neil Armstrong first walks on the moon
const auto tp1 = cctz::MakeTime(1969, 7, 21, 12, 56, 0, syd);
const std::string s = cctz::Format("%F %T %z", tp1, syd);
Rcpp::Rcout << s << "\n";
cctz::TimeZone nyc;
cctz::LoadTimeZone("America/New_York", &nyc);
const auto tp2 = cctz::MakeTime(1969, 7, 20, 22, 56, 0, nyc);
return tp2 == tp1 ? 0 : 1;
R> library(RcppCCTZ)
R> helloMoon()
1969-07-21 12:56:00 +1000
[1] 0
R>This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
I think it s important that organizations as 
What happened in the 
Just in case someone else finds these useful, some bash functions I ve got into the habit of having in 
Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (
Eric Raymond, author of 
This post is intended to document some elements of workflow that I ve setup to manage videos produced for a MOOC, where different colleagues work collaboratively on a set of video sequences, in a remote way.
We are a team of several schools working on the same course, and we have an incremental process, so we need some collaboration over a quite long period of many remote authors, over a set of video sequences.
We re probably going to review some of the videos and make changes, so we need to monitor changes, and submit versions to colleagues on remote sites so they can criticize and get later edits. We may have more that one site doing video production. Thus we need to share videos along the flow of production, editing and revision of the course contents, in a way that is manageable by power users (we re all computer scientists, used to SVN or Git).
I ve decided to start an experiment with Git and 
The drawback is that we need manual intervention for starting the rsync, and also that we must make sure that the rsync target is ready to get a backup.
The target of the rsync on Linux is a git-annex clone using the default indirect mode, which handles the files as symlinks to the actual copies managed by git-annex inside the .git/ directory. But that ain t suitable to be compared to the origin of the rsync mirror which are plain files on the Windows computer.
We must then do a git-annex edit on the whole target of the rsync mirror before the rsync, so that the files are there as regular video files. This is costly, in terms of storage, and also copying time (our repo contains around 50 Gb, and the Linux host is a rather tiny laptop).
After the rsync, all the files need to be compared to the SHA256 known to git-annex so that only modified files are taken into account in the commit. We perform a git-annex add on the whole files (for new files having appeared at rsync time), and then a git-annex sync . That takes a lot of time, since all SHA256 computations are quite long for such a set of big files (the video rushes and edited videos are in HD).
So the process needs to be the following, on the target Linux host:
I would have preferred to have a working git-annex on windows, but that is a much more manageable process for me for now, and until we have more videos to handle in our repo that our Linux laptop can hold, we re quite safe.
Next steps will probably involve gardening the contents of the repo on the Linux host so we re only keeping copies of current files, and older copies are only kept on the 2 servers, in case of later need.
I hope this can be useful to others, and I d welcome suggestions on how to improve our process.
For the past few years all my important work has been stored in
git repositories. Thanks to the 
Long over due post
It s been a long time I haven t written here. And lots of things happened in the OpenStack planet. As a full time employee with the mission to package OpenStack in Debian, it feels like it is kind of my duty to tell everyone about what s going on.
Liberty is out, uploaded to Debian
Since my last post, OpenStack Liberty, the 12th release of OpenStack, was released. In late August, Debian was the first platform which included Liberty, as I proudly outran both RDO and Canonical. So I was the first to make the announcement that Liberty passed most of the Tempest tests with the beta 3 release of Liberty (the Beta 3 is always kind of the first pre-release, as this is when feature freeze happens). Though I never made the announcement that Liberty final was uploaded to Debian, it was done just a single day after the official release.
Before the release, all of Liberty was living in Debian Experimental. Following the upload of the final packages in Experimental, I uploaded all of it to Sid. This represented 102 packages, so it took me about 3 days to do it all.
Tokyo summit
I had the pleasure to be in Tokyo for the Mitaka summit. I was very pleased with the cross-project sessions during the first day. Lots of these sessions were very interesting for me. In fact, I wish I could have attended them all, but of course, I can t split myself in 3 to follow all of the 3 tracks.
Then there was the 2 sessions about Debian packaging on upstream OpenStack infra. The goal is to setup the OpenStack upstream infrastructure to allow packaging using Gerrit, and gating each git commit using the usual tools: building the package and checking there s no FTBFS, running checks like lintian, piuparts and such. I knew already the overview of what was needed to make it happen. What I didn t know was the implementation details, which I hoped we could figure out during the 1:30 slot. Unfortunately, this didn t happen as I expected, and we discussed more general things than I wished. I was told that just reading the docs from the infra team was enough, but in reality, it was not. What currently needs to happen is building a Debian based image, using disk-image-builder, which would include the usual tools to build packages: git-buildpackage, sbuild, and so on. I m still stuck at this stage, which would be trivial if I knew a bit more about how upstream infra works, since I already know how to setup all of that on a local machine.
I ve been told by Monty Tailor that he would help. Though he s always a very busy man, and to date, he still didn t find enough time to give me a hand. Nobody replied to my request for help in the openstack-dev list either. Hopefully, with a bit of insistence, someone will help.
Keystone migration to Testing (aka: Debian Stretch) blocked by python-repoze.who
Absolutely all of OpenStack Liberty, as of today, has migrated to Stretch. All? No. Keystone is blocked by a chain of dependency. Keystone depends on python-pysaml2, itself blocked by python-repoze.who. The later, I upgraded it to version 2.2. Though python-repoze.what depends on version <= 1.9, which is blocking the migration. Since python-repoze.who-plugins, python-repoze.what and python-repoze.what-plugins aren t used by any package anymore, I asked for them to be removed from Debian (see #805407). Until this request is processed by the FTP masters, Keystone, which is the most important piece of OpenStack (it does the authentication) will be blocked for migration to Stretch.
New OpenStack server packages available
On my presentation at Debconf 15, I quickly introduced new services which were released upstream. I have since packaged them all:
I have a 
There is a companion logrotate script, to avoid filling the file system:
And in some cases like Android Support Repository [not Library] I didn't even find the proper source code, only an old prebuilt.
Would you be interested in contributing, and would you recommend a structure that would promote Free, rebuilt Android *DK?
The legalese
Anti-fork clause:
The Debian Project includes many people, groups and teams with different goals, priorities and ways of doing things. 
Now you should see all the video sequence editor controls:
Setup the properties for your project
Click the context menu under the strip editor panel and change the panel to a Properties panel:
The video file we are playing with is 720p, so it seems reasonable to use 720p for the output too. Change that here:
The input file is 25fps so we need to use exactly the same frame rate for the output, otherwise you will either observe the video going at the wrong speed or there will be a conversion that is CPU intensive and degrades the quality. Also check that the resolution_percentage setting under the picture dimensions is 100%:
Now specify output to PNG files. Later we will combine them into a WebM file with a script. Specify the directory where the files will be placed and use the # placeholder to specify the number of digits to use to embed the frame number in the filename:
Now your basic rendering properties are set. When you want to generate the output file, come back to this panel and use the Animation button at the top.
Editing the video
Use the context menu to change the properties panel back to the strip view panel:
Add the video file:
and then right click the video strip (the lower strip) to highlight it and then add a transform strip:
Audio waveform
Right click the audio strip to highlight it and then go to the properties on the right hand side and click to show the waveform:
Rendering length
By default, Blender assumes you want to render 250 frames of output. Looking in the properties to the right of the audio or video strip you can see the actual number of frames. Put that value in the box at the bottom of the window where it says 250:
Enable AV-sync
Also at the bottom of the window is a control to enable AV-sync. If your audio and video are not in sync when you preview, you need to set this AV-sync option and also make sure you set the frame rate correctly in the properties:
Add the other sound strip
Now add the other sound file that was recorded using the lapel microphone:
Enable the waveform display for that sound strip too, this will allow you to align the sound strips precisely:
You will need to listen to the strips to make an estimate of the time difference. Use this estimate to set the "start frame" in the properties for your audio strip, it will be a negative value if the audio strip starts before the video. You can then zoom the strip panel to show about 3 to 5 seconds of sound and try to align the peaks. An easy way to do this is to look for applause at the end of the audio strips, the applause generates a large peak that is easily visible.
Once you have synced the audio, you can play the track and you should not be able to hear any echo. You can then silence the audio track from the camera by right clicking it, look in the properties to the right and change volume to 0.
Make any transforms you require
For example, to zoom in on the speaker, right click the transform strip (3rd from the bottom) and then in the panel on the right, click to enable "Uniform Scale" and then set the scale factor as required:
Render the video output to PNG
Click the context menu under the Curves panel and choose Properties again.
Click the Animation button to generate a sequence of PNG files for each frame.
Render the audio output
On the Properties panel, click the Audio button near the top. Choose a filename for the generated audio file.
Look on the bottom left-hand side of the window for the audio file settings, change it to the ogg container and Vorbis codec:
Ensure the filename has a .ogg extension
Now look at the top right-hand corner of the window for the Mixdown button. Click it and wait for Blender to generate the audio file.
Combine the PNG files and audio file into a WebM video file
You will need to have a few command line tools installed for manipulating the files from scripts. Install them using the package manager, for example, on a Debian or Ubuntu system:
