Search Results: "spa"

17 January 2016

Norbert Preining: Gaming: Portal Stories: Mel

The last days, after about 20 hours of gameplay, I have finally finished Portal Stories: Mel, the single player mod for Portal 2. After having played Portal and Portal 2, I have to say this one mod took be by surprise. I remember very well that, after having played through Portal 2 and found it to easy, I was pointed to Portal Stories: Mel in several comments, I thought Well, it cannot be that difficult! . I couldn t have been more wrong!
portal-stories-mel Portal Stories: Mel is really difficult, at least for me. I remember game sessions where I just started the game, looked at the configuration of the current riddle for 20min, and then quit the game without actually moving around an inch. This kind of logical riddles, paired with a certain element of action and speed, is exactly what I am enjoying.
portal-stories-mel-final It took me quite some time, and I have to admit, I had to cheat at some points during the game being stuck completely without an idea. Only the finish was a bit surprising surprisingly simple. The big boss at the end was not really worth it. Still, leaving the testing facilities at the end gave me some kind or relieve
portal-stories-mel-exit Considering that Portal Stories: Mel is something like a fan-art, developed by Prism Studios, a group made up of eight fans of the Portal games, this is a fantastic achievement. I really loved it, and I am deeply impressed by the ingenuity of the creators. Thanks!

15 January 2016

Ian Wienand: Australia, ipv6 and dd-wrt

It seems that other than Internode, no Australian ISP has any details at all about native IPv6 deployment. Locally I am on Optus HFC, which I believe has been sold to the NBN, who I believe have since discovered that it is not quite what they thought it was. i.e. I think they have more problems than rolling out IPv6 and I won't hold my breath. So the only other option is to use a tunnel of some sort, and it seems there is really only one option with local presence via SixXS. There are other options, notably He.net, but they do not have Australian tunnel-servers. SixXS is the only one I could find with a tunnel in Sydney. So first sign up for an account there. The process was rather painless and my tunnel was provided quickly. After getting this, I got dd-wrt configured and working on my Netgear WNDR3700 V4. Here's my terse guide, cobbled together from other bits and pieces I found. I'm presuming you have a recent dd-wrt build that includes the aiccu tool to create the tunnel, and are pretty familiar with logging into it, etc. Firstly, on dd-wrt make sure you have JFFS2 turned on for somewhere to install scripts. Go Administration, JFFS2 Support, Internal Flash Storage, Enabled. Next, add the aiccu config file to /jffs/etc/aiccu.conf
# AICCU Configuration
# Login information
username USERNAME
password PASSWORD
# Protocol and server listed on your tunnel
protocol tic
server tic.sixxs.net
# Interface names to use
ipv6_interface sixxs
# The tunnel_id to use
# (only required when there are multiple tunnels in the list)
#tunnel_id <your tunnel id>
# Be verbose?
verbose false
# Daemonize?
daemonize true
# Require TLS?
requiretls true
# Set default route?
defaultroute true
Now you can add a script to bring up the tunnel and interface to /jffs/config/sixxs.ipup (make sure you make it executable) where you replace your tunnel address in the ip commands.
# wait until time is synced
while [  date +%Y  -eq 1970 ]; do
sleep 5
done
# check if aiccu is already running
if [ -n " ps grep etc/aiccu grep -v grep " ]; then
aiccu stop
sleep 1
killall aiccu
fi
# start aiccu
sleep 3
aiccu start /jffs/etc/aiccu.conf
sleep 3
ip -6 addr add 2001:....:....:....::/64 dev br0
ip -6 route add 2001:....:....:....::/64 dev br0
sleep 5
#### BEGIN FIREWALL RULES ####
WAN_IF=sixxs
LAN_IF=br0
#flush tables
ip6tables -F
#define policy
ip6tables -P INPUT DROP
ip6tables -P FORWARD DROP
ip6tables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
# Input to the router
# Allow all loopback traffic
ip6tables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
#Allow unrestricted access on internal network
ip6tables -A INPUT -i $LAN_IF -j ACCEPT
#Allow traffic related to outgoing connections
ip6tables -A INPUT -i $WAN_IF -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
# for multicast ping replies from link-local addresses (these don't have an
# associated connection and would otherwise be marked INVALID)
ip6tables -A INPUT -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type echo-reply -s fe80::/10 -j ACCEPT
# Allow some useful ICMPv6 messages
ip6tables -A INPUT -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type destination-unreachable -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A INPUT -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type packet-too-big -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A INPUT -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type time-exceeded -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A INPUT -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type parameter-problem -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A INPUT -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type echo-request -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A INPUT -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type echo-reply -j ACCEPT
# Forwarding through from the internal network
# Allow unrestricted access out from the internal network
ip6tables -A FORWARD -i $LAN_IF -j ACCEPT
# Allow some useful ICMPv6 messages
ip6tables -A FORWARD -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type destination-unreachable -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A FORWARD -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type packet-too-big -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A FORWARD -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type time-exceeded -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A FORWARD -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type parameter-problem -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A FORWARD -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type echo-request -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A FORWARD -p icmpv6 --icmpv6-type echo-reply -j ACCEPT
#Allow traffic related to outgoing connections
ip6tables -A FORWARD -i $WAN_IF -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
Now you can reboot, or run the script, and it should bring the tunnel up and you should be correclty firewalled such that packets get out, but nobody can get in. Back to the web-interface, you can now enable IPv6 with Setup, IPV6, Enable. You leave "IPv6 Type" as Native IPv6 from ISP. Then I enabled Radvd and added a custom config in the text-box to get DNS working with google DNS on hosts with:
interface br0
 
AdvSendAdvert on;
prefix 2001:....:....:....::/64
  
  ;
 RDNSS 2001:4860:4860::8888 2001:4860:4860::8844
  
  ;
 ;
(again, replace the prefix with your own) That is pretty much it; at this point, you should have an IPv6 network and it's most likely that all your network devices will "just work" with it. I got full scores on the IPv6 test sites on a range of devices. Unfortunately, even a geographically close tunnel still really kills latency; compare these two traceroutes:
$ mtr -r -c 1 google.com
Start: Fri Jan 15 14:51:18 2016
HOST: jj                          Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
1.  -- 2001:....:....:....::      0.0%     1    1.4   1.4   1.4   1.4   0.0
2.  -- gw-163.syd-01.au.sixxs.ne  0.0%     1   12.0  12.0  12.0  12.0   0.0
3.  -- ausyd01.sixxs.net          0.0%     1   13.5  13.5  13.5  13.5   0.0
4.  -- sixxs.sydn01.occaid.net    0.0%     1   13.7  13.7  13.7  13.7   0.0
5.  -- 15169.syd.equinix.com      0.0%     1   11.5  11.5  11.5  11.5   0.0
6.  -- 2001:4860::1:0:8613        0.0%     1   14.1  14.1  14.1  14.1   0.0
7.  -- 2001:4860::8:0:79a0        0.0%     1  115.1 115.1 115.1 115.1   0.0
8.  -- 2001:4860::8:0:8877        0.0%     1  183.6 183.6 183.6 183.6   0.0
9.  -- 2001:4860::1:0:66d6        0.0%     1  196.6 196.6 196.6 196.6   0.0
10. -- 2001:4860:0:1::72d         0.0%     1  189.7 189.7 189.7 189.7   0.0
11. -- kul01s07-in-x09.1e100.net  0.0%     1  194.9 194.9 194.9 194.9   0.0
$ mtr -4 -r -c 1 google.com
Start: Fri Jan 15 14:51:46 2016
HOST: jj                          Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
1. -- gateway                    0.0%     1    1.3   1.3   1.3   1.3   0.0
2. -- 10.50.0.1                  0.0%     1   11.0  11.0  11.0  11.0   0.0
3. -- ???                       100.0     1    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
4. -- ???                       100.0     1    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
5. -- ???                       100.0     1    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
6. -- riv4-ge4-1.gw.optusnet.co  0.0%     1   12.1  12.1  12.1  12.1   0.0
7. -- 198.142.187.20             0.0%     1   10.4  10.4  10.4  10.4   0.0
When you watch what is actually using ipv6 (the ipvfoo plugin for Chrome is pretty cool, it shows you what requests are going where), it's mostly all just traffic to really big sites (Google/Google Analytics, Facebook, Youtube, etc) who have figured out IPv6. Since these are exactly the type of places that have made efforts to get caching as close as possible to you (Google's mirror servers are within Optus' network, for example) and so you're really shooting yourself in the foot going around it using an external tunnel. The other thing is that I'm often hitting IPv6 mirrors and downloading larger things for work stuff (distro updates, git clones, image downloads, etc) which is slower and wasting someone else's bandwith for really no benefit. So while it's pretty cool to have an IPv6 address (and a fun experiment) I think I'm going to turn it off. One positive was that after running with it for about a month, nothing has broken -- which suggests that most consumer level gear in a typical house (phones, laptops, TVs, smart-watches, etc) is either ready or ignores it gracefully. Bring on native IPv6!

14 January 2016

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Working as a paid LTS contributor

A Debian LTS logoWhile the details about how to join the set of paid contributors have always been public (here) we did not advertise this fact very much outside of the people already interested in LTS (and thus subscribed to debian-lts@lists.debian.org). But right now we would like to have a few more paid contributors on board and I m thus posting this call for volunteers. Who can apply? You need to meet those requirements: Even though Freexian is located in France and requires you to provide invoice in EUR, there are no conditions on your nationality or country of residence. For contributors outside of the Euro zone, Freexian is using Transferwise to pay them with minimal currency conversion costs (Paypal is also possible if nothing else works). The rate offered to paid contributors is the same for all (75 EUR/hour), it s based on a correct rate for independent contractors in western Europe. If the rate is very high for your own country, then be happy to be able to invoice Freexian at this rate and use this opportunity to work less (for money) and contribute more to Debian on your (now copious) free time. How does the work look like? If you apply, you will have to send us an SSH key so that you can have access to the internal git repository used for work. It contains a ledger file to track the hours funded by sponsors and how they have been dispatched to the various contributors. You can always know how many hours are assigned to you, how many can be invoiced, and so on. You will have to update it once a month to record the work you did (and indicate us where the report has been published). The repository also contains a README with many explanations about the workflow (how hours are dispatched, the delay you have to publish your report, etc) and a small helper script (./find-work) to match up the pending updates (registered in dla-needed.txt) with the popularity of the package among the sponsors. Now the work itself is relatively well documented in the LTS wiki. You will have to provide updates for packages that need an update. You have some freedom in selecting the packages but at some point you will have to work on packages that you don t know that are written in a language that you have almost not used. So you must be able to go out of your comfort zone and still do a good work. You must also be able to multi-task because in some cases you will get stuck on a particular update and you will have to seek help from the upstream developer (or from the Debian package maintainer). Don t expect to be able to do all your work hours in a single run thus don t wait until the last days of the month. Start early and dispatch your work hours over the month. From time to time, you will also have to handle the LTS frontdesk for one week. During this week, you need to spend a bit of time every day to triage the new CVE, to respond to questions on the mailing list, and to sponsor updates prepared by volunteers who do not have upload rights. Questions? Ask your questions in the comments and I will update this section with your questions and our answers. What if I have no prior experience with security updates? Start getting some experience. The LTS and security teams are open for anyone to join. Read their documentation and provide some updates that other contributors can sponsor. Before accepting you as paid contributor, we generally ask you to prepare one or two DLA on your free time just to make sure that you know the workflow and that you are up to the task. What if I have only X hours available for paid LTS work? In the git repository there s a file where you document how many work hours you can handle. You might get less than this amount, but we generally never assign less than 8 hours (to make sure that you can handle one complicated update from start to end, or your possible week of LTS frontdesk). You can adjust it each month or even opt-out if you are not available for whatever reason. But once you have been assigned work hours, it s important to actually do the work that you requested! How do I apply? Get in touch with me (as documented).

One comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Vincent Sanders: Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.

I think Maxwell was probably right, certainly the unit of current Ampere gives his name to has been a concern of mine recently.

Regular readers may have possibly noticed my unhealthy obsession with single board computers. I have recently rehomed all the systems into my rack which threw up a small issue of powering them all. I had been using an ad-hoc selection of USB wall warts and adapters but this ended up needing nine mains sockets and short of purchasing a very expensive PDU for the rack would have needed a lot of space.

Additionally having nine separate convertors from mains AC to low voltage DC was consuming over 60Watts for 20W of load! The majority of these supplies were simply delivering 5V either via micro USB or DC barrel jack.

Initially I considered using a ten port powered USB hub but this seemed expensive as I was not going to use the data connections, it also had a limit of 5W per port and some of my systems could potentially use more power than that so I decided to build my own supply.

PSU module from ebay
A quick look on ebay revealed that a 150W (30A at 5V) switching supply could be had from a UK vendor for 9.99 which seemed about right. An enclosure, fused and switched IEC inlet, ammeter/voltmeter with shunt and suitable cables were acquired for another 15

Top view of the supply all wired up
A little careful drilling and cutting of the enclosure made openings for the inlets, cables and display. These were then wired together with crimped and insulated spade and ring connectors. I wanted this build to be safe and reliable so care was taken to get the neatest layout I could manage with good separation between the low and high voltage cabling.

Completed supply with all twelve outputs wired up
The result is a neat supply with twelve outputs which i can easily extend to eighteen if needed. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that even with twelve SBC connected generating 20W load the power drawn by the supply was 25W or about 80% efficiency instead of the 33% previously achieved.

The inbuilt meter allows me to easily see the load on the supply which so far has not risen above 5A even at peak draw, despite the cubitruck and BananaPi having spinning rust hard drives attached, so there is plenty of room for my SBC addiction to grow (I already pledged for a Pine64).

Supply installed in the rack with some of the SBC connected
Overall I am pleased with how this turned out and while there are no detailed design files for this project it should be easy to follow if you want to repeat it. One note of caution though, this project has mains wiring and while I am confident in my own capabilities dealing with potentially lethal voltages I cannot be responsible for anyone else so caveat emptor!

13 January 2016

Norbert Preining: Ian Buruma: Wages of Guilt

Since moving to Japan, I got more and more interested in history, especially the recent history of the 20th century. The book I just finished, Ian Buruma (Wiki, home page) Wages of Guilt Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Independent, NYRB), has been a revelation for me. As an Austrian living in Japan, I am experiencing the discrepancy between these two countries with respect to their treatment of war legacy practically daily, and many of my blog entries revolve around the topic of Japanese non-reconciliation.
Willy Brandt went down on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, after a functioning democracy had been established in the Federal Republic of Germany, not before. But Japan, shielded from the evil world, has grown into an Oskar Matzerath: opportunistic, stunted, and haunted by demons, which it tries to ignore by burying them in the sand, like Oskar s drum.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Clearing Up the Ruins
Buruma-Wages_of_Guilt The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma s book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.
This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Romance of the Ruins
Only thinking about giving a halfway full account of this book is something impossible for me. The sheer amount of information, both on the German and Japanese side, is impressive. His incredible background (studies of Chinese literature and Japanese movie!) and long years as journalist, editor, etc, enriches the book with facets normally not available: In particular his knowledge of both the German and Japanese movie history, and the reflection of history in movies, were complete new aspects for me (see my recent post (in Japanese)). The book is comprised of four parts: The first with the chapters War Against the West and Romance of the Ruins; the second with the chapters Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nanking; the third with History on Trial, Textbook Resistance, and Memorials, Museums, and Monuments; and the last part with A Normal Country, Two Normal Towns, and Clearing Up the Ruins. Let us look at the chapters in turn: The boook somehow left me with a bleak impression of Japanese post-war times as well as Japanese future. Having read other books about the political ignorance in Japan (Norma Field s In the realm of a dying emperor, or the Chibana history), Buruma s characterization of Japanese politics is striking. He couldn t foresee the recent changes in legislation pushed through by the Abe government actually breaking the constitution, or the rewriting of history currently going on with respect to comfort women and Nanking. But reading his statement about Article Nine of the constitution and looking at the changes in political attitude, I am scared about where Japan is heading to:
The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre. The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Nanking
While there are signs of resistance in the streets of Japan (Okinawa and the Hanako bay, the demonstrations against secrecy law and reversion of the constitution), we are still to see a change influenced by the people in a country ruled and distributed by oligarchs. I don t think there will be another Nanking Massacre in the near future, but Buruma s books shows that we are heading back to a nationalistic regime similar to pre-war times, just covered with a democratic veil to distract critics.
I close with several other quotes from the book that caught my attention: In the preface and introduction:
[ ] mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.
The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany.
In Romance of the Ruins:
The point of all this is that Ikeda s promise of riches was the final stage of what came to be known as the reverse course, the turn away from a leftist, pacifist, neutral Japan a Japan that would never again be involved in any wars, that would resist any form of imperialism, that had, in short, turned its back for good on its bloody past. The Double Your Incomes policy was a deliberate ploy to draw public attention away from constitutional issues.
In Hiroshima:
The citizens of Hiroshima were indeed victims, primarily of their own military rulers. But when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an Aggressors Corner was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.
The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the flow of history .
In Nanking, by the governmental pseudo-historian Tanaka:
Unlike in Europe or China, writes Tanaka, you won t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan. This is because the Japanese have a different sense of values from the Chinese or the Westerners.
In History on Trial:
In 1950, Becker wrote that few things have done more to hinder true historical self-knowledge in Germany than the war crimes trials. He stuck to this belief. Becker must be taken seriously, for he is not a right-wing apologist for the Nazi past, but an eminent liberal.
There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a military campaign, not a planned genocide of a people that included the country s own citizens. And besides, those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as logs ) carried out by Unit 731 in Manchuria, were passed over during the Tokyo trial. The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731 of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors responsible were allowed to go free in exchange for their data.
Some Japanese have suggested that they should have conducted their own war crimes trials. The historian Hata Ikuhiko thought the Japanese leaders should have been tried according to existing Japanese laws, either in military or in civil courts. The Japanese judges, he believed, might well have been more severe than the Allied tribunal in Tokyo. And the consequences would have been healthier. If found guilty, the spirits of the defendants would not have ended up being enshrined at Yasukuni. The Tokyo trial, he said, purified the crimes of the accused and turned them into martyrs. If they had been tried in domestic courts, there is a good chance the real criminals would have been flushed out.
After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.
Emperor Hirohito was not Hitler; Hitler was no mere Shrine. But the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hider s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.
Emperor Hirohito, the shadowy figure who changed after the war from navy uniforms to gray suits, was not personally comparable to Hitler, but his psychological role was remarkably similar.
In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history. For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.
In Memorials, Museums, and Monuments:
If one disregards, for a moment, the differences in style between Shinto and Christianity, the Yasukuni Shrine, with its relics, its sacred ground, its bronze paeans to noble sacrifice, is not so very different from many European memorials after World War I. By and large, World War II memorials in Europe and the United States (though not the Soviet Union) no longer glorify the sacrifice of the fallen soldier. The sacrificial cult and the romantic elevation of war to a higher spiritual plane no longer seemed appropriate after Auschwitz. The Christian knight, bearing the cross of king and country, was not resurrected. But in Japan, where the war was still truly a war (not a Holocaust), and the symbolism still redolent of religious exultation, such shrines as Yasukuni still carry the torch of nineteenth-century nationalism. Hence the image of the nation owing its restoration to the sacrifice of fallen soldiers.
In A Normal Country:
The mayor received a letter from a Shinto priest in which the priest pointed out that it was un-Japanese to demand any more moral responsibility from the emperor than he had already taken. Had the emperor not demonstrated his deep sorrow every year, on the anniversary of Japan s surrender? Besides, he wrote, it was wrong to have spoken about the emperor in such a manner, even as the entire nation was deeply worried about his health. Then he came to the main point: It is a common error among Christians and people with Western inclinations, including so-called intellectuals, to fail to grasp that Western societies and Japanese society are based on fundamentally different religious concepts . . . Forgetting this premise, they attempt to place a Western structure on a Japanese foundation. I think this kind of mistake explains the demand for the emperor to bear full responsibility.
In Two Normal Towns:
The bust of the man caught my attention, but not because it was in any way unusual; such busts of prominent local figures can be seen everywhere in Japan. This one, however, was particularly grandiose. Smiling across the yard, with a look of deep satisfaction over his many achievements, was Hatazawa Kyoichi. His various functions and titles were inscribed below his bust. He had been an important provincial bureaucrat, a pillar of the sumo wrestling establishment, a member of various Olympic committees, and the recipient of some of the highest honors in Japan. The song engraved on the smooth stone was composed in praise of his rich life. There was just one small gap in Hatazawa s life story as related on his monument: the years from 1941 to 1945 were missing. Yet he had not been idle then, for he was the man in charge of labor at the Hanaoka mines.
In Clearing Up the Ruins:
But the question in American minds was understandable: could one trust a nation whose official spokesmen still refused to admit that their country had been responsible for starting a war? In these Japanese evasions there was something of the petulant child, stamping its foot, shouting that it had done nothing wrong, because everybody did it.
Japan seems at times not so much a nation of twelve-year-olds, to repeat General MacArthur s phrase, as a nation of people longing to be twelve-year-olds, or even younger, to be at that golden age when everything was secure and responsibility and conformity were not yet required.
For General MacArthur was right: in 1945, the Japanese people were political children. Until then, they had been forced into a position of complete submission to a state run by authoritarian bureaucrats and military men, and to a religious cult whose high priest was also formally chief of the armed forces and supreme monarch of the empire.
I saw Jew S ss that same year, at a screening for students of the film academy in Berlin. This showing, too, was followed by a discussion. The students, mostly from western Germany, but some from the east, were in their early twenties. They were dressed in the international uniform of jeans, anoraks, and work shirts. The professor was a man in his forties, a 68er named Karsten Witte. He began the discussion by saying that he wanted the students to concentrate on the aesthetics of the film more than the story. To describe the propaganda, he said, would simply be banal: We all know the what, so let s talk about the how. I thought of my fellow students at the film school in Tokyo more than fifteen years before. How many of them knew the what of the Japanese war in Asia.

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In December, 113.50 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation We lost our first silver sponsor (Gandi.net, they prefer to give the same amount of money to Debian directly) and another sponsor reduced his sponsorship level. While this won t show in the hours dispatched in January, we will do a small jump backwards in February (unless we get new sponsors replacing those in the next 3 weeks). This is a bit unfortunate as we are rather looking at reinforcing the amount of sponsorship we get as we approach Wheezy LTS and we will need more support to properly support virtualization related packages and other packages that were formerly excluded from Squeeze LTS. Can you convince your company and help us reach our second goal? In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month. It looks like that having about 20 packages needing an update is the normal situation and that we can t really get further down given the time required to process some updates (sometimes we wait until the upstream authors provides a patch, and so on). Thanks to our sponsors We got one new bronze sponsor but he s not listed (he did not fill the form where we request their permission to be listed).

2 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

12 January 2016

Gunnar Wolf: Readying up for the second "Embedded Linux" diploma course

I am happy to share here a project I was a part of during last year, that ended up being a complete success and now stands to be repeated: The diploma course on embedded Linux, taught at Facultad de Ingenier a, UNAM, where I'm teaching my regular classes as well. Back in November, we held the graduation for our first 10 students. This photo shows only seven, as the remaining three have already relocated to Guadalajara, where they were hired by Continental, a company that promoted the creation of this specialization program. After this first excercise, we went over the program and made some adequations; future generations will have a shorter and more focused program (240 instead of 288 hours, leaving out several topics that were not deemed related to the topic or were thoroughly understood by students to begin with); we intend to start the semester-long course in early February. I will soon update here with the full program and promotional material, as soon as I receive it. update (01-19): You can download the promotional information, or go to an (unofficial) URL with the full information. We are close to starting the program, so hurry! I am specially glad that this course is taught by people I admire and recognize, and a very interesting mix between long-time academic and stemming from my free-software-related friends: From the academic side, Facultad de Ingenier a's professors Laura Sandoval, Karen S enz and Oscar Valdez, and from the free-software side, Sandino Araico, Iv n Chavero, C sar Y ez and Gabriel Salda a (and myself on both camps, of course )
AttachmentSize
OT401_nota.jpg75.82 KB
Linux Embebido - Folleto.pdf455.32 KB

Russell Coker: Sociological Images 2015

3 men 1 women on lift sign The above sign was at the Melbourne Docks in December 2014 when I was returning from a cruise. I have no idea why there are 3 men and 1 woman on the sign (and a dock worker was also surprised when I explained why I was photographing it). I wonder whether a sign that had 3 women and 1 man would ever have been installed or not noticed if it was installed. rules for asking questions at LCA2015 At the start of the first day of LCA 2015 the above was displayed at the keynote as a flow-chart for whether someone should ask a question at a lecture. Given that the first real item in the list is that a question should fit in a tweet I think it was inspired by my blog post about the length of conference questions [1]. Astronomy Miniconf suggestions for delegates At the introduction to the Astronomy Miniconf the above slide was displayed. In addition to referencing the flow-chart for asking questions it recommends dimming laptop screens (among other things). sign saying men to the left because women are always right The above sign was at a restaurant in Auckland in January 2015. I thought that sort of sexist joke went out of fashion a few decades ago. gendered nerf weaponary The above photo is from a Melbourne department store in February 2015. Why gender a nerf gun? That just doesn t make sense. Also it appeared that the only nerf crossbow was the purple/pink one, is a crossbow considered feminine nowadays? Picture of Angela appropriating Native American clothing The above picture is a screen-shot of one of the Talking Angela series of Android games from March. Appropriating the traditional clothing of marginalised groups is a bad thing. People of Native American heritage who want to wear their traditional clothing face discrimination when they do so, when white people play dress-up in clothing that is a parody of Native American style it s really offensive. The site Racialicious.com has a tag for articles about appropriation [2]. The above was in a library advertising an Ebook reader. In this case they didn t even have pointlessly gendered products they just had pointlessly gendered adverts for the same product. They also perpetuate the myth that only girls read vampire books and only boys read about space. Also why is the girl lying down to read while the boy is sitting up? Above is an Advent calendar on sale in a petrol station. Having end of year holiday presents that have nothing to do with religious festivals makes sense. But Advent is a religious observance. I think this would be a better candidate for war on Christmas paranoia than a coffee cup of the wrong colour. The above photo is of boys and girls pipette suckers. Pointlessly gendered recreational products like Nerf guns is one thing, but I think that doing it to scientific equipment is a bigger problem. Are scientists going to stop work if they can t find a pipette sucker of the desired gender? Is worrying about this going to distract them from their research (really bad if working with infectious or carcinogenic solutions). The Integra advertising claims to be doing this to promote breast cancer research which is also bogus. Here is a Sociological Images article about the problems of using pink to market breast cancer research [3] and the Sociological Images post about pinkwashing (boobies against breast cancer) is also worth reading [4]. As an aside I made a mistake in putting a pipette sucker over the woman s chest in that picture. The way that Integra portreyed her chest is relevant to analysis of this advert. But unfortunately I didn t photograph that. Here is a link to my sociological images post from 2014 [5].

11 January 2016

Norbert Preining: 10 years TeX Live in Debian

I recently dug through my history of involvement with TeX (Live), and found out that in January there are a lot of anniversaries I should celebrate: 14 years ago I started building binaries for TeX Live, 11 years ago I proposed the packaging TeX Live for Debian, 10 years ago the TeX Live packages entered Debian. There are other things to celebrate next year (2017), namely the 10 year anniversary of the (not so new anymore) infrastructure in short tlmgr of TeX Live packaging, but this will come later. In this blog post I want to concentrate on my involvement in TeX Live and Debian. TeX Live/Debian Those of you not interested in boring and melancholic look-back onto history can safely skip reading this one. For those a bit interested in the history of TeX in Debian, please read on. Debian releases and TeX systems The TeX system of choice has been for long years teTeX, curated by Thomas Esser. Digging through the Debian Archive and combining it with changelog entries as well as personal experiences since I joined Debian, here is a time line of TeX in Debian, all to my best knowledge.
Date Version Name teTeX/TeX Live Maintainers
1993-96 <1 ? ? Christoph Martin
6/1996 1.1 Buzz ?
12/1996 1.2 Rec ?
6/1997 1.3 Bo teTeX 0.4
7/1998 2.0 Ham teTeX 0.9
3/1999 2.1 Slink teTeX 0.9.9N
8/2000 2.2 Potato teTeX 1.0
7/2002 3.0 Woody teTeX 1.0
6/2005 3.1 Sarge teTeX 2.0 Atsuhito Kohda
4/2007 4.0 Etch teTeX 3.0, TeX Live 2005 Frank K ster, NP
2/2009 5.0 Lenny TeX Live 2007 NP
2/2011 6.0 Squeeze TeX Live 2009
5/2013 7.0 Whezzy TeX Live 2012
4/2015 8.0 Jessie TeX Live 2014
??? ??? Stretch TeX Live 2015
The history of TeX in Debian is thus split more or less in 10 years teTeX, and 10 years TeX Live. While I cannot check back to the origins, my guesses are that already in the very first releases (te)TeX was included. The first release I can confirm (via the Debian archive) shipping teTeX is the release Bo (June 1997). Maintainership during the first 10 years showed some fluctuation: The first years/releases (till about 2002) were dominated by Christoph Martin with Adrian Bunk and few others, who did most packaging work on teTeX version 1. After this Atsuhito Kohda with help from Hilmar Preusse and some people brought teTeX up to version 2, and from 2004 to 2007 Frank K ster, again with help of Hilmar Preusse and some other, took over most of the work on teTeX. Other names appearing throughout the changelog are (incomplete list) Julian Gilbey, Ralf Stubner, LaMont Jones, and C.M Connelly (and many more bug-reporters and fixers). Looking at the above table I have to mention the incredible amount of work that both Atsuhito Kohda and Frank K ster have put into the teTeX packages, and many of their contributions have been carried over into the TeX Live packages. While there haven t been many releases during their maintainership, their work has inspired and supported the packaging of TeX Live to a huge extend. Start of TeX Live I got involved in TeX Live back in 2002 when I started building binaries for the alpha-linux architecture. I can t remember when I first had the idea to package TeX Live for Debian, but here is a time line from my first email to the Debian Developers mailing list concerning TeX Live, to the first accepted upload:
Date Subject/Link Comment
2005-01-11 binaries for different architectures in debian packages The first question concerning packaging TeX Live, about including pre-built binaries
2005-01-25 Debian-TeXlive Proposal II A better proposal, but still including pre-built binaries
2005-05-17 Proposal for a tex-base package Proposal for tex-base, later tex-common, as basis for both teTeX and TeX live packages
2015-06-10 Bug#312897: ITP: texlive ITP bug for TeX Live
2005-09-17 Re: Take over of texinfo/info packages Taking over texinfo which was somehow orphaned started here
2005-11-28 Re: texlive-basic_2005-1_i386.changes REJECTED My answer to the rejection by ftp-master of the first upload. This email sparked a long discussion about packaging and helped improve the naming of packages (but not really the packaging itself).
2006-01-12 Upload of TeX Live 2005-1 to Debian The first successful upload
2006-01-22 Accepted texlive-base 2005-1 (source all) TeX Live packages accepted into Debian/experimental
One can see from the first emails that at that time I didn t have any idea about Debian packaging and proposed to ship the binaries built within the TeX Live system on Debian. What followed was first a long discussion about whether there is any need for just another TeX system. The then maintainer Frank K ster took a clear stance in favor of including TeX Live, and after several rounds of proposals, tests, rejections and improvements, the first successful upload of TeX Live packages to Debian/experimental happened on 12 January 2006, so exactly 10 years ago. Packaging Right from the beginning I used a meta-packaging approach. That is, instead of working directly with the source packages, I wrote (Perl) scripts that generated the source packages from a set of directives. There were several reasons why I choose to introduce this extra layer: Till now I am not 100% sure whether it was the best idea, but the scripts remain in place till now, only adapted to the new packaging paradigm in TeX Live (without xml) and adding new functionality. This allows me to just kick off one script that does do all the work, including building .orig.tar.gz, source packages, binary packages. For those interested to follow the frantic activity during the first years, there is a file CHANGES.packaging which for the years from 2005 to 2011 documents very extensively the changes I made in these years. I don t want to count the hours the went into all this  Development over the years TeX Live 2005 was just another TeX system but not the preferred one in Debian Etch and beyond. But then in May 2006, Thomas Esser announced the end of development of teTeX, which cleared the path for TeX Live as main TeX system in Debian (and the world!). The next release of Debian, Lenny (1/2009), already carried only TeX Live. Unfortunately it was only TeX Live 2007 and not 2008, mostly due to me having been involved in rewriting the upstream infrastructure based on Debian package files instead of the notorious xml files. This took quite a lot of attention and time from Debian away to upstream development, but this will be discussed in a different post. Similarly, the release of TeX Live included in Debian Squeeze (released 2/2011) was only TeX Live 2009 (instead of 2010), but since then (Wheezy and Jessie) the releases of TeX Live in Debian were always the latest released ones. Current status Since about 2013 I am trying to keep a regular schedule of new TeX Live packages every month. These helps me to keep up with the changes in upstream packaging and reduces the load of packaging a new release of TeX Live. It also bring to users of unstable and testing a very up-to-date TeX system, where packages at most lack 1 month of behind the TeX Live net updates. Future As most of the readers here know, besides caring for TeX (Live) and related packages in Debian, I am also responsible for the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr) and most of upstream s infrastructure including network distribution. Thus, my (spare, outside work) time needs to be distributed between all these projects (and some others) which leaves less and less time for Debian packaging. Fortunately the packaging is in a state that making regular updates once a month is less of a burden, since most steps are automatized. What is still a bit of a struggle is adapting the binary package (src:texlive-bin) to new releases. But also this has become simpler due to less invasive changes over the years. All in all, I don t have many plans for TeX Live in Debian besides keeping the current system running as it is. Search for and advise to future maintainers and collaborators I would be more than happy if new collaborators appear, with fresh ideas and some spare time. Unfortunately, my experience over these 10 years with people showing up and proposing changes (anyone remembers the guy proposing a complete rewrite in ML or so?) is that nobody really wants to invest time and energy, but search for quick solutions. This is not something that will work with a package like TeX Live, sized of several gigabyte (the biggest in the Debian archive), and complicated inner workings. I advise everyone being interested in helping to package TeX Live for Debian, to first install normal TeX Live from TUG, get used to what actions happen during updates (format rebuilds, hyphenation patters, map file updates). One does not need to have a perfect understanding of what exactly happens down there in the guts (I didn t have in the beginning, either), but if you want to help packaging and never heard about what format dumps or map files are, then this might be a slight obstacle. Conclusion TeX Live is the only TeX system in wide use across lots of architectures and operating systems, and the only comparable system, MikTeX, is Windows specific (also there are traces of ports to Unix). Backed by all the big user groups of TeX, TeX Live will remain the prime choice for the foreseeable future, and thus also TeX Live in Debian.

Carl Chenet: Extend your Twitter network with Retweet

Retweet is self-hosted app coded in Python 3 allowing to retweet all the statuses from a given Twitter account to another one. Lots of filters can be used to retweet only tweets matching given criterias. Retweet 0.8 is available on the PyPI repository and is already in the official Debian unstable repository. Retweet is in production already for Le Journal Du hacker , a French FOSS community website to share and relay news and LinuxJobs.fr , a job board for the French-speaking FOSS community. logo-journal-du-hacker linuxjobs-horizontale The new features of the 0.8 allow Retweet to manage the tweets given how old they are, retweeting only if : Retweet is extensively documented, have a look at the official documentation to understand how to install it, configure it and use it. What about you? does Retweet allow you to develop your Twitter account? Let your comments in this article.

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo: GNU on Smartphones (part II)

Some time ago, I wrote how to get GNU on a smartphone. This is going to be a long discussion on why and how we should work on more operating systems for more devices. On Android So, why should we bother if we already have Android, some might ask? If it's just because of some binary blobs, one could just use Replicant, right? Well, one of the problems is that Android development is done in hiding, and pushed downstream when a new version is launched. There is no community behind that anyone can join. Replicant ends up either following it or staying behind. It could do a fork and have its own innovations. And I am all for it. But the lack of manpower for supporting devices and keeping up with the latest versions and security fixes already takes most of the time for the one or two developers involved. Also, Android has a huge modularity problem, that I will discuss further below. But it's hard to replace many components in the system, unless you replace them all. And that also causes the problem that applications can hardly share extra components. I would rather see Debian running on my devices and supporting good environments and frameworks for all kinds of devices, like phones, tablets, TVs, cars, etc. It's developed by a community I can join, it allows a diverse set of frameworks and environments, and it's much easier to replace single components on such a system. On Copyleft Hardware I get it. Hardware is not free or libre. Its design is. I love the concept of copyleft hardware, where one applies the copyleft principles to a hardware design. Also, there is the concept of Hardware that Respects Your Freedom, that is, one that allows you to use it with only free software. Note that RYF hardware is not necessarily copyleft hardware. In fact, most of the time, the original vendor has not helped at all, and it required reverse engineering efforts by other people to be able to run free software on those systems. My point here is that we should not prevent people from running free software on hardware that does not RYF or that is not copyleft. We should continue the efforts of reverse engineering and of pushing hardware vendors to not only ship free software for their hardware, but also release their design under free licenses. But in the meantime, we need to make free software flourish in the plethora of devices on the hands of so many people around the world. On Diversity I won't go into details on this post about two things. One topic I love is retrocomputing and how Linux supported so many devices, and how many free or quasi-free operating systems ran on so many of them in the past. I could mention ucLinux, Familiar, PDAs, Palmtops, Motorolas, etc. But I will leave it to another time and go from Openmoko and Maemo forward. The other topic is application scalability. Even Debian with so many software available does not ship all free software there is available. And it doesn't support all third-party services out there. How can we solve that? It has to do with platforms, protocols, open protocols, etc. I will not go into that today. Because I believe that either way, it's healthy for our society to have diversity. I believe we should have other operating systems available for our devices. Even if application developers will not develop for all of them. That is already the case today. There are other ways to fix that, when that needs fixing. Sometimes, it's sufficient that you can have your own operating system on your device, that you can customize it, enhance it and share it with friends. And also, that would allow for innovation. It would make possible that some other operating system would have enough market share on some other niche. Other than Android and iOS, for example. But that requires that we can support that operating system on different devices. And that is the scalability that I want to talk about. How to support more devices with less effort. Options But before I go into that, let me write more about the alternatives we have out there. And some of the history around it. Openmoko Openmoko developed a set of devices that had some free design. And it has some free operating systems running on top. The community developed a lot of their own as well. Debian could (still can) run on it. There is SHR, which uses FSO, a mobile middleware based on D-Bus. It even spawned other devices to be developed, like GTA04, a successor board, that can be shipped inside a Neo Freerunner case. Maemo, Moblin, Meego and Tizen I remember the announcement of Nokia N770. During FISL in 2005, I even criticized a lot, because it shipped with proprietary drivers. And applications. But it was the first time we heard of Maemo. It was based on Debian and GNOME. The GNOME Mobile initiative was born from that, I believe, but died later on. But with the launch of N900, and later events, like the merge of Moblin with Maemo, to create Meego, we all had an operating system that was based on community developed components, that had some community participation, and was much more like the systems we were used to. You could run gcc on N900. You could install Das U-Boot and have other operating systems running there. But Nokia has gone a different path. Intel has started Tizen with Samsung. There is so much legacy there, that could still be developed upon. I am just sad that Jolla decided to put proprietary layers on top of that, to create SailfishOS. But we still have Mer, Nemo. But it looks like Cordia is gone. At least, (http://cordiahd.org) seems to have been registered by a domain seller. Not to forget, Neo900, a project to upgrade the board, in the same vein as GTA04. FirefoxOS and Ubuntu What can I say about FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Phone? In summary, I think we need more than Web, and Canonical has a history of not being too community oriented as we'd like. I won't go too much here in what I think about the Web as a platform. But I think we need a system that has more options for platforms. I haven't participated in projects directed by Mozilla either, so I can't say much about that. Ubuntu Phone should be a system more like what we are used to. But Canonical is going to set the directions to the project, it's not a community project. Nonetheless, I think they add to the diversity, and users should be able to try them, or their free parts or versions. But there are challenges there, that I think need to be discussed. So, both of these systems are based on Android. They don't use Dalvik or the application framework. But they use what is below that, which means device drivers in userspaces, like RIL, for the modem drivers, and EGL, for graphics drivers. The reason they do that is to build on top of all the existing vendor support for Android. If a SOC and phone vendor already supports Android, there should be not much needed to do to support FirefoxOS or Ubuntu Phone. In practice, this has not benefited the users or the projects. Porting should be as simple as getting a generic FirefoxOS or Ubuntu Phone image and run it on top of your Android or CyanogenMod port. Porting usually requires doing all the same work as porting Android. Even though one should be able to take advantage of existing ports, it still requires doing a lot of integration work and building an entire image, most of the time, including the upper layers, that should be equal in all devices. This process should require at most creating a new image based on other images and loading it on the device. I will discuss more about this below. I can't forget to mention the Matchstick TV project. It is based on FirefoxOS. I think it would have much more changes to succeed if it was easier for testers to have images available for all of their gadgets capable of running some form of Android. Replicant And then we have Replicant. It has a lot of the problems Android has. Even so, it's a tremendously important project. First, it offers a free version of Android, removing all proprietary pieces. This is very good for the community. But more than that, it tries to free the devices beyond that. What the project has been done is reverse engineer some of the pieces, mostly the modem drivers. That allows other projects to build upon that work, and support those modems. Without that, there is no telephony or celullar data available on any of these devices. Not without proprietary software, that is. They also have been working on free bootloaders, which is another important step for a completely free system. Next steps There are many challenges here, but I believe we should work on a set of steps that make it more palatable and produce intermediary results that can be used by users and other projects. One of the goals should be good modularity. The ability to replace some pieces with the least trouble necessary. The update of a single framework library should be just a package install, instead of building the entire framework again. If there is ABI breakage, users should still be able to have access to binaries (and accompanying source code) and only need to update the library and its reverse dependencies. If one layer does not have these properties, at least it should be possible to update this big chunk without interfering with the other layers. One example is FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Phone. Even if there is a big image with all system userspace and middleware, the porting, install and upgrade process should allow the user to keep the applications and to leverage porting already done by similar projects. Heck, these two projects should be able to share porting efforts without any trouble. So what follows is a quick discussion on Android builds, then suggestions on how to approach some of the challenges. On Android build The big problem with Android build is its non-modularity. You need to build the world and more to get a single image in the end. Instead of packages that could be built independently, that generated modular package images, that could be bundled in a single system image. Better yet would be the ability to pick only those components that matter. Certainly, portability would be just as interesting, being able to build certain components on top a GNU system with GNU libc. At times, it seems like this is done by design, to make it difficult for "fragmentation" and competition. Basically, making it difficult to exercise the freedom to modify the software and share your modifications with others. Imagine the possibilities of being able to: There are some dangers in promoting the use of Android like this. Since it promotes proprietary drivers, relying on such layers instead of better community oriented layers means giving an advantage to the first. So, the best plan would be to replace those layers, when they are used, for things like ofono and Wayland, for example. But, in the meantime, making it easier for users to experiment with FirefoxOS, Ubuntu Phone, Matchstick TV, Replicant on other devices, without resorting to building the entire Android system, would be a very nice thing. It is possible that there are some challenges with respect to API and ABI. That these layers are too intermingled that some changes present in one port would prevent FirefoxOS to run on top of it without changes in either of the layers. I can't confirm that is the case, but can't deny the possibility. Rooting One of the challenges we have that may have trouble in scaling is rooting devices. Unfortunately, most of the devices are owned by the vendor or carrier, not the user. The user is prevented from replacing software components in the system, by removing its permissions from replacing most of the files in the filesystem, or writing to block devices, or change boot parameters or write to the storage devices. Fortunately, there are many documents, guides, howtos, and whatnots out there instructing on how to root a lot of devices. In some cases, it depends on software bugs that can be patched by the users as instructed by vendors. Certainly, favoring devices that are built to allow rooting, hacking, etc, is a good thing. But we should still help those users out there who do not have such devices, and allow them to run free software on them. Booting Then, comes booting, which is a large discussion on its own, and also related to rooting, or how to allow users to replace their software. First, we have the topic of bootloaders, which are usually not free, and embedded in the chip, not on external storage. So, there are those pieces of the bootloader which we can replace more easily and those that we are not, because they would require changing a piece of ROM, for example. Das U-Boot would be one of the preferred options for a system. It supports a lot of hardware platforms out there, a lot of storage devices and filesystems, network booting, USB and serial booting, and a lot of other things. Porting is not an easy task, but it is possible. Meanwhile, using the bootloaders that ship with the system, when possible, would allow a path where other pieces of the system would be free. One of the challenges here is building single images that could boot everywhere. The lack of a single ARM boot environment is a curse and a blessing. It makes it hard to have this single boot image, but, on the other hand, it has allowed so much of the information for such systems to be free, to be embedded in copyleft software, instead of having blobs executed by our free systems, like ACPI encourages. Device trees have pushed this portability issue from the kernel to the bootloaders. Possibily encouraging vendors to now hide and copyright this information in the form of proprietary device trees. But it has made it easier for single images. In practice, we still need to see a lot of devices out there supporting this single kernel scenario. And this mechanism only brings us the possibility of a single kernel. We still need to ship bootable images that have pieces of bootloaders that are not as portable. This has caused lots of operating systems out there to be built for a single board. Or to support just a small set of boards. I struggle with the concept. Why are we not able to mix device-specific pieces with generic pieces and get a resulting image that will boot on our choice of board? Why does every project need to do all the porting work again, repeating the efforts? Or have one entier ISO image for every supported board? Check how Geexbox does it, for an example. Fortunately, I see Debian going in a good direction. Here, one can see how it instructs the user to combine a system-dependent part with a system-independent part. Installation Which brings us to the installation challenge. We should make this easy and also customizable by the user. Every project might have its own method, and that is part of the diversity that we should allow. The great challenge here is handling rooting and booting for the user. But it's also possible to leave that as separate efforts, as it would be nice to have good installers as we have in the desktop and server environments. Linux Linux is one of the most ported kernels out there. Of course, it would be healthy to the diversity I propose that other kernels and systems out there should work on those mobile devices. NetBSD, for example, has a reputation of being very portable and ported to many platforms. And GNU runs on many of them, either together with the original systems, or as the main system on top of other kernels, as proven by the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port, which uses GNU libc. But, though I would love to see HURD running directly on those devices, Linux and its derivatives are already running on them. Easier to tackle is to get Linux-libre running on those systems. But though this looks like one of the easier tasks at hand, it is not. If you run a derivative version from Linux, provided by the vendor, things should go smooth. But most of the time, the vendor does not provide patches upstream, and leave their fork to rot, if you are lucky, in the earlier 3.x series. And some times, there is not even source code available. There are vendors out there who do not respect the GPL and that is one of the reasons why GPL enforcement is important. I take this opportunity to call attention to the work of Software Freedom Conservancy and its current efforts to raise funds to continue their work. Running an existing binary version of Linux on your device with a free userspace is part of the strategy of replacing pieces one at a time while allowing for good diversity and reaching more users. Drivers Then we have the matter of drivers. And in this case, it's not only Linux drivers, but drivers running in userspace. Though others exist, there are two important and common cases, which are modem and graphics drivers, both of which are usually provided by Android frameworks, and that other systems try to leverage, instead of using alternatives that are more community friendly. In the case of modem drivers, Android uses its RIL. Besides not using a Radio or Modem at all, there are two strategies for free versions. One is using free versions of the drivers for RIL. That's what Replicant does, because, well, it uses the other Android subsystems after all. The other one is using a system that is developed by the community. ofono is one that, even though it's an Intel iniative, looks more community governed or open to community participation than any Android subsystem ever was. As for Graphics, Canonical even built its Mir project with the goal of being able to use Android GPU drivers. Luckily, there has been a lot of reverse engineering efforts out there for a lot of those GPUs shipped with ARM SoCs. Then, we can use Mesa, Wayland and X.org. Other option, until then, is just using a framebuffer driver, possibly one that does not need any initialization, depending on one done by the bootloader, for example. Middleware and Shells Plasma Active, that I just found out now is Plasma Mobile, looks like a great system. Built by folks behind KDE, we can expect great freedom to come from it. Unfortunately, it suffers from what we have been discussing here, which is lack of good device support, or shipping images that run on top of single devices, without leveraging the porting that has come before of other systems. Fortunately, that is just what I want to accomplish with this effort. FSO, that I mentioned before, is a good middleware, that we should try to run on top of these devices. Running GNOME or Unity shell, and use rpm or deb based systems, that's all part of the plan on diversity. You could use systemd, or System V init systems, whatever gives you the kicks. It's not an easy task, since there are so many new things on these new kinds of devices. Besides touch, there is telephony, which as I mentioned, would be a good task for ofono. As for TV sets or dongles, I would love to see OpenFlint, created by the Matchstick TV guys, flourish out there and allow me to flint stuff from my mobile phone running Debian into my TV dongle running Debian. Project So, is there a project out there you can start contributing to? Well, I pointed out a lot of them. All of them make part of this plan. Contributing to reverse engineering GPUs, or to Plasma Mobile, ofono, GNOME, Linux-libre, bootloaders, Debian, and so many other projects. My plans are to contribute in the scope of Debian and make sure it works well on top of semi-liberated devices, and make sure there is a nice user interface and good applications when using either GNOME or Plasma. Integrating ofono is a good next step, but I am running ahead of myself. Right now, I don't think there is need for an integrated effort. If you think otherwise, please let me know. If you are doing something in this direction, I would love to know. Paul Wise reminded me to point out to the Debian Mobile, where I will probably contribute any documentation and other relevant results. Thanks There are some many people to thank, but I would like to remember Ian Murdock, who created Debian, one of the projects who inspires me the most. I think the best way to handle his passing is to celebrate what he has helped create, and move forward, taking more free software to more people in an easy and modular way. I have been wanting to write something like this for a long time, so I thank Chris Webber for inspiring me on doing it.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.12.3: Keep rollin'

The third update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R earlier today, and has been pushed to Debian. It follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, and the 0.12.2 release in November making it the seventh release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. This release is somewhat more of a maintenance release addressing a number of small bugs and nuisances without adding any new features. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 553 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by more than fourty packages from the last release in November. Once again, we have new first-time contributors. Kazuki Fukui corrected an issue he encountered when having CLion re-formatted some code for him. Joshua Pritikin corrected a constructor initialization. Of course, we also had several pull reports from regular contributors -- see below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.
Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.3 (2016-01-10)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Const iterators now CharacterVector now behave like regular iterators (PR #404 by Dan fixing #362).
    • Math operators between matrix and scalars type have been added (PR #406 by Qiang fixing #365).
    • A missing std::hash function interface for Rcpp::String has been addded (PR #408 by Qiang fixing #84).
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • Avoid invalid function names when generating C++ interfaces (PR #403 by JJ fixing #402).
    • Insert additional space around & in function interface (PR #400 by Kazuki Fukui fixing #278).
  • Changes in Rcpp Modules:
    • The copy constructor now initialized the base class (PR #411 by Joshua Pritikin fixing #410)
  • Changes in Rcpp Repository:
    • Added a file Contributing.md providing some points to potential contributors (PR #414 closing issue #413)
Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

10 January 2016

Carl Chenet: Feed2tweet 0.2: power of the command line sending your Feed RSS to Twitter

Feed2tweet is a self-hosted Python app to send you RSS feed to Twitter. A long descriptions about why and how to use it is available in my last post about it. Feed2tweet is in production for Le Journal du hacker, a French Hacker News-style FOSS website. logo-journal-du-hacker Feed2tweet 0.2 brings a lot of new command line options, contributed by Antoine Beaupr @theanarcat. Taking a short extract of the Feed2tweet 0.2 changelog: Lots of issues from the previous project was also fixed. Using Feed2tweet? Send us bug reports/feature requests/push requests/comments about it!

Vasudev Kamath: Managing Virtual Network Devices with systemd-networkd

I've been using bridge networking and tap networking for containers and virtual machines on my system. Configuration for bridge network which I use to connect containers was configured using /etc/network/interfaces file as shown below.
auto natbr0
iface natbr0 inet static
   address 172.16.10.1
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   pre-up brctl addbr natbr0
   post-down brctl delbr natbr0
   post-down sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=0
   post-down sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=0
   post-up sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
   post-up sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
   post-up iptables -A POSTROUTING -t mangle -p udp --dport bootpc -s 172.16.0.0/16 -j CHECKSUM --checksum-fill
   pre-down iptables -D POSTROUTING -t mangle -p udp --dport bootpc -s 172.16.0.0/16 -j CHECKSUM --checksum-fill
Basically I setup masquerading and IP forwarding when network comes up using this, so all my containers and virtual machines can access internet. This can be simply done using systemd-networkd with couple of lines, yes couple of lines. For this to work first you need to enable systemd-networkd.
systemctl enable systemd-networkd.service
Now I need to write 2 configuration file for the above bridge interface under /etc/systemd/network. One file is natbr0.netdev which configures the bridge and the natbr0.network which configures IP address and other stuff for the bridge interface.
#natbr0.netdev
[NetDev]
Description=Bridge interface for containers/vms
Name=natbr0
Kind=bridge
#natbr0.network
[Match]
Name=natbr0
[Network]
Description=IP configuration for natbr0
Address=172.16.10.1/16
IPForward=yes
IPMasquerade=yes
The IPForward in above configuration is actually redundant, when I set IPMasquerade it automatically enables IPForward. So these configuration is equivalent of what I did in my interfaces file. It also avoids me doing additional iptables usage to add masquerading rules. This pretty much simplifies handling of virtual network devices. There are many other things which can you do with systemd-networkd, like running a DHCPServer on the interface and many other things. I suggest you to read manual pages on systemd.network(5) and systemd.netdev(5). systemd-networkd allows you configure all type of virtual networking devices and actual network interfaces. I've not myself used it to handle actual network interfaces yet.

Juliana Louback: NLP: Viterbi Named-Entity Tagger

During my MSc program, I was lucky to squeeze into Michael Collin s NLP class. We used his Coursera course as part of the program, which I d highly recommend. Recently I decided to review my NLP studies and I believe the best way to learn or relearn a subject is to teach it. This is one in a series of 4 posts with a walk-through of the algorithms we implemented during the course. I ll provide links to my code hosted on Github. Disclaimer: Before taking this NLP course, the only thing I knew about Python was that it s the one without curly brackets . I learned Python on the go while implementing these algorithms. So if I did anything against Python code conventions or flat-out heinous, I apologize and thank you in advance for your understanding. Feel free to write and let me know.

The Concept To quote Wikipedia, Named-entity recognition (I ve always known it as tagging) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify elements in text into predefined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quanitites, monetary values, percentages, etc. For example, the algorithm receives as input some text Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975. and outputs Bill Gates[person] founded Microsoft[organization] in 1975[date]. Off the top of my head, some useful applications are document matching (ex. a document containing Gates[person] may not be on the same topic as one containing gates[object]) and query searches. I m sure there are lots more, if you check out Collin s Coursera course he may discuss this in greater depth.

The Requirements Development data: The file ner_dev.dat provided by prof. Michael Collins has a series of sentences separated by an empty line, one word per line. Training data: The file ner_train.dat provided by prof. Michael Collins has a series of sentences separated by an empty line, one word and tag per line, speparated by a space. Word-tag count data: The file ner.counts has the format [count] [type of tag] [label] [word]. The tags used are RARE, O, I-MISC, I-PER, I-ORG, I-LOC, B-MISC, B-PER, B-ORG, B-LOC. The tag O means it s not an NE. This file is generated by count_freqs.py, a script provided by prof. Michael Collins. Run count_freqs.py on the training data ner_train.dat

The Algorithm Python code: viterbi.py Usage: python viterbi.py ner.counts ngram.counts [input_file] > [output_file] Summary: The Viterbi algorithm finds the maximum probability path for a series of observations, based on emission and transition probabilities. In a Markov Process, emission is the probability of an output given a state and transition is the probability of transitioning to the state given the previous states. In our case, the emission parameter e(x y) = the probability of the word being x given you attributed tag y. If your training data had 100 counts of person tags, one of which is the word London (I know a guy who named his kid London), e( London person ) = 0.01. Now with 50 counts of location tags, 5 of which are London , e( London location ) = 0.1 which clearly trumps 0.01. The transition parameter q(yi yi-1, yi-2) = the probability of putting tag y in position i given it s two previous tags. This is calculated by Count(trigram)/Count(bigram). For each word in the development data, he Viterbi algorithm will associate a score for a word-tag combo based on the emission and transition parameters it obtained from the training data. It does this for every possible tag and sees which is more likely. Clearly this won t be 100% correct as natural language is unpredictable, but you should get pretty high accuracy. Optional Preprocessing Re-label words in training data with frequency < 5 as RARE - This isn t required, but useful. Re-run count_freqs.py if used. Python code: label_rare.py Usage: python label_rare.py [input_file] Pseudocode:
  1. Uses Python Counter to obtain word counts in [input_file]; removes all word-count pairs with count < 5, store remaining pairs in a dictionary named rare_words.
  2. Iterates through each line in [input file], checks if word is in rare words dictionary, if so, replaces word with RARE.
Step 1. Get Count(y) and Count(x~y) Python code: emission_counts.py Pseudocode:
  1. Iterate through each line in ner.counts file and store each word-label-count combo in a dictionary count_xy and update the dictionary of count_y. For example count_xy[Peter][I-PER] returns the number of times the word Peter was labeled I-PER in the training data and count_y[I-PER] the total number of I-PER tags. The dictionary count_y contains 8 items, one for each label ( RARE , O, I-MISC, I-PER, I-ORG, I-LOC, B-MISC, B-PER, B-ORG, B-LOC);
  2. Return count_xy, count_y
Step 2. Get bigram and trigram counts Python code: transition_counts.py Pseudocode:
  1. Iterate through each line in the n-gram_counts file
  2. If the line contains 2-GRAM add an item to the bigram_counts dictionary using the bigram (two space-separated labels following the tag type 2-gram ) as key, count as value. This dictionary will contain Count(yi-2,yi-1).
  3. If the line contains 3-GRAM , add an item to the trigram_counts dictionary using the trigram as key, count as value. This dictionary will contain Count(yi-2, yi-1, yi).
  4. Return dictionaries of bigram and trigram counts.
Step 3. Viterbi (For each line in the [input_file]):
  1. If the word was seen in training data (present in the count_xy dictionary), for each of the possible labels for the word:
  2. Calculate emission = count_xy[word][label] / float(count_y[label]
  3. Calculate transition = trigram_counts[trigram])/float(bigram_counts[bigram] Note: yi-2 = *, yi-1 = * for the first round
  4. Set probability = emission x transition
  5. Update max(probability) and arg max if needed. 2 If the word was not seen in the training data:
  6. Calculate emission = count xy[RARE][label] / float(count y[label].
  7. Calculate q(yi yi-1, yi-2) = trigram counts[trigram])/float(bigram counts[bigram]. Note: yi-2 = , yi-1 = for the first round
  8. Set probability = emission transition
  9. Update max(probability) if needed, arg max = RARE
  10. Write arg max and log(max(probability)) to output file.
  11. Update yi-2, yi-1.
  12. Update yi-2, yi-1.
Evaluation Prof. Michael Collins provided an evaluation script eval_ne_tagger.py to verify the output of your Viterbi implementation. Usage: python eval_ne_tagger.py ner_dev.key [output_file]

9 January 2016

Norbert Preining: Kobo firmware 3.19.5761 mega update (KSM, nickel patch, ssh, fonts)

Since 3.18.0 there have been two new firmwares for the Kobo eInk devices. For the very recently released firmware release 3.19.5761 I have updated my collection of patches and features. As with previous mega-package, I prepared updates for all three hardwares, Mark4 (Glo), Mark5 (Aura), and Mark6 (GloHD), but only the one for Mark6 is tested by myself. Kobo Logo Changes since last release: Included patches from the Metazoa firmware patches: Custom reading footer style, My 15 line spacing values, Custom left & right margins, Brightness fine control, Search in Library by default, Custom page refresh options (1,2,3, ,12), Fix three KePub fullScreenReading bugs, Always display chapter name on navigation menu. Other things that are included are as usual: koreader, pbchess, coolreader, the ssh part of kobohack, and some side-loaded fonts. For details on the respective parts please see the previous post Download Mark6 Kobo GloHD firmware: Kobo 3.19.5761 for GloHD Mega update: Kobo-3.19.5761-combined/Mark6/KoboRoot.tgz Mark5 Aura firmware: Kobo 3.19.5761 for Aura Mega update: Kobo-3.19.5761-combined/Mark5/KoboRoot.tgz Mark4 Kobo Glo, Aura HD firmware: Kobo 3.19.5761 for Glo and AuraHD Mega update: Kobo-3.19.5761-combined/Mark4/KoboRoot.tgz Enjoy.

Iain R. Learmonth: Trust

This is not a new world, this is simply an extension of the old one. I'm not going to write here about sweeping changes that are happening now, but changes that have been taking place in plain sight for many decades. No one has flipped a switch, only tweaked and tuned variables here and there to lead us down this path. I'd like to reflect on where we are now but there is no way I could describe how it is we got here, the journey was far too complex and filled with ommissions, half-truths and outright lies. It's likely we will never know what has brought us here. I live in Scotland, a country that is a part of the United Kingdom and a member of the European Union. We have a Scottish Government, although certain matters are still handled by the UK Government. The European Government also handles some matters and these can take effect across the entire European Union. I do not feel that I can hold trust in any of these bodies anymore. The European Convention on Human Rights was, for me at least, a beacon of hope. A series of fundamental rights guaranteed to be upheld for every person within the European Union. A series of fundamental rights that has been ignored by governments repeatedly: This is not an exhaustive list, just select cross-sections of our recent history. It is important to remember that in each of these cases, it took a citizen to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. These rights were violated by the UK government until the actions were challenged, the legislation that allowed them was currently enacted into UK law without regard for the ECHR. It should also be noted that the ban on prisoners voting is still in effect in the UK. We've learnt that the ECHR is not an effective safeguard against the abuse of powers by government. The UK government also sees the Human Rights Act as a problem, although at least scrapping it has been delayed for now. Much of these breaches of human rights are justified by the government as in the interest of the runaway train known as "national security". I have recently had direct contact with one aspect of this during my journey home from 32c3. You can read about my experiences with airport security here and here. My experiences at these airports angered me for a number of reasons. The first of which was that I was asked to expose my genitals as part of the routine screening, which I do not believe to be proportionate at all. At Luton, I was at the point where I was intending to leave the airport and take the train instead before I was allowed to excercise my right to opt-out of the nude body scanner. Since these incidents, I have conducted some research into these scanners and started an article on the Open Rights Group wiki. While the security officer at Luton had tried to tell me that the radio waves used could not penetrate clothing, they in fact can and this is the entire purpose of them. While the security officer at Luton told me that the machines did not generate an image, they are in fact doing exactly that, even if that image is processed by computer vision algorithms as opposed to being viewed by a human reviewer. A leaflet by the Department for Transport, made available on the Aberdeen Airport website, also states that no image is created, and yet this is exactly how the scanners work. I have never seen this leaflet printed and available in the airport itself, although I admit I do not fly regularly and may have missed it. That said, it does not provide a true representation of the scan process and I would go as far to say it contains an outright lie. In a document published by the UK Government titled "Response to the consultation on the use of security scanners in an aviation security environment", they state:
"nearly all passengers, if they fully understand the procedures, would be unlikely to opt for [the alternative of a private search]"
Even with this display of confidence that they believe the public are happy with the invasion of privacy brought by the security scanners, they have still chosen to not fully inform the public in the way in which the scanner operates. It is the lies that anger me the most. We claim to live in a democracy and you cannot have a democracy without transparency. It is not too late for the Government to earn back my trust, but for now, they haven't given me good reason to believe anything they produce. If you have read this article and you would like to support efforts for change in the United Kingdom, please consider joining the Open Rights Group and perhaps getting involved in their work.

8 January 2016

Norbert Preining: WordPress 4.4 and older themes how to break backward compatibility

Since quite some time I was wondering why my blog suddenly does not display a title in the browser bar. Hmm, Of course I thought I broke something, but it turned out that this is a feature of a recent WordPress update. Mentioned in a blog entry on the development or should I say, hidden there so that nobody knows about it the changes stirred quite some reactions, not the least because a lot, if not all older themes, are suddenly broken. Congratulations WordPress developer to this great move. wordpress-breaks-themes So what has happened? Many themes use the wp_title function to ship out title tags. After a short period of deprecation WordPress developers instantiated the function, but in a way that it doesn t work with older themes. Perfect. To quote from the kind of annoucement:
This latest change makes the new API (almost) feature complete and theme authors are discouraged from using wp_title() in the future. If it was decided to add a UI to let users choose the make up of their document title, or another improvement to how title generation works, we now have a forward compatible way to handle these things. To upgrade themes from using wp_title() to declaring theme support for core s title-tag without breaking backwards compatibility with WordPress 4.0 and older, theme authors can check if the callback function exists and add a shiv in case it does not:
Well, thanks for putting this well hidden in a development blog. Furthermore, one needs to read the following code quite carefully, otherwise one overlooks that it is necessary to delete the calls to wp_title. Fortunately, on blog of the Theme Review Team the this post was found, which explains what has to be done: Indeed, that worked. Since I am already a child theme the changes were minimal, once one found them. Coming from a TeX world, things like backward compatibility in other products always strike me as funny

Carl Chenet: My Free Activities in December 2015

I was quite busy in December 2015, especially with my new Python projects related to automatize Twitter actions. Have a look at my Github home for more information ! 1. Personal projects 2. Journal du hacker That s all folks! See you next month!

Norbert Preining: Fighting with IPv6

During the last weeks I finally got my hands dirty with IPv6. A comment on my blog and an email informed me that my server (hosting this blog) is not reachable via IPv6, albeit it has an IPv6 address. That said, I tried to get that running and fell into several holes, due to firewalls, my home provider not doing IPv6, and not the least due to my own ignorance of IPv6. ipv6-pain Fortunately, with the help of some good souls and the technical support I finally got IPv6 connectivity on both my server, as well as at home, up. Server So my server is still running wheezy, which is a bit old, but upgrading with lots of hand-installed stuff is a bit a pain. The network interface was configured via a static IPv4 address, and no traces of IPv6 for now. Simple minded as I am, I assumed that this is the problem and started playing around with all kind of IPv6 configurations in the interfaces file, from using dhcp, and static configuration. The static configuration somehow worked out, but I never got a proper default route set. So I was really puzzled. In addition, at home I don t have IPv6, my provider is not distributing IPv6, so I couldn t test it (but on this a bit later). Fortunately, the good soul from the Netherland Filip B., did a lot of testing and also send permanent suggestions and analysis of the IPv6 situation, I am very much indebted to him. Anyway, his last advice about the problem with the default route was contacting the technical support of my provider, who within a very short time sent me an answer which made it clear to me: My firewall was blocking some ports that are necessary for IPv6 route autonegotiation. As firewall I use ferm, kind of a meta iptables language. In my server s setup the firewall blocks most of the ip traffic outside the expected servers, as well as does rate limit checks on ssh connections (those script kiddies). And while I have had some of the icmpv6 types allowed, it seemed that was insufficient. The solution at the end was to open icmpv6-type s 1-4, 133-137, 141, 142, 148, 149, as well as 130-132 from link-local adresses (fe80::/10). After having changed my ferm.conf, even removing everything related to IPv6 from the interfaces file and rebooting finally provided the server with an IPv6 address and a proper route. Wow, first step done. For Apache, fortunately I am doing already wildcard definitions, so no change was necessary and voil , the server is reachable via IPv6. Home As already mentioned, my provider at home does not provide IPv6 addresses. In addition, the DNS server of the provider is also very, well, peculiar about resolving IPv6 (i.e., AAAA records). Trying to get the AAAA record for ipv6.google.com works without a problem:
$ host -t AAAA ipv6.google.com
ipv6.google.com is an alias for ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4002:803::1003
but trying this with my own server, or for that matter any other server, resulted in no answer (preining.info has no AAAA record). Well, that didn t help. Despite these problems, I tried to get an IPv6 address via 6-in-4 tunneling (tunnelbroker), but that didn t work either, probably due to some reverse lookup and the fact that between the world and me there is a cable modem and a wlan router that all on top of the slightly funny infrastructure here in Japan, where you have to rent lines from NTT, but use a different company as Internet provider. I finally found the solution that worked for me, and that is installing miredo, available in Debian. Installation of the package, and starting the miredo service with systemctl start miredo (or /etc/init.d/miredo start) gave me in an instant a working IPv6 connectivity. ping6 worked on IPv6 addresses. Still, I couldn t fix the DNS lookup problem, so for the time being I have added IPv6 addresses for my own server in /etc/hosts, and by using the SixOrNot Firefox plugin I can actually check that it works. Conclusion It is 2016, and we are still far from end-to-end IPv6, and I have to admit that also my IPv6 knowledge is quite meager, and that I only recently have started to grasp some understanding. The good point was that Debian wheezy already works out of the box with IPv6 (if one is not as clumsy as me and blocks the necessary ports), including web servers and mail servers. I have also contacted my provider (AsahiNet) in the hope that they can update their DNS server, and learned that they are planning to roll out IPv6 addresses in the near future whatever that might mean in Japan, maybe next century?

Next.

Previous.