Once upon a time I wrote a piece of software for scheduling the classes available to a college. There was a bug in the scheduler: Students who happened to be named 'Steve Kemp' had a significantly higher chance (>=80% IIRC) of being placed in lessons where the class makeup was more than 50% female. This bug was never fixed. Which was nice, because I spent several hours both implementing and disguising this feature. I'm was a bad coder when I was a teenager. These days I'm still a bad coder, but in different ways.

I have used LaTeX and latex-beamer for pretty much my entire life of document and presentation production, i. e. since about my 9th school grade. I ve always found the LaTeX syntax a bit clumsy, but with good enough editor shortcuts to insert e. g. \begin itemize \item...\end itemize with just two keystrokes, it has been good enough for me. A few months ago a friend of mine pointed out pandoc to me, which is just simply awesome. It can convert between a million document formats, but most importantly take Markdown and spit out LaTeX, or directly PDF (through an intermediate step of building a LaTeX document and calling pdftex). It also has a template for beamer. Documents now look soo much more readable and are easier to write! And you can always directly write LaTeX commands without any fuss, so that you can use markdown for the structure/headings/enumerations/etc., and LaTeX for formulax, XYTex and the other goodies. That s how it should always should have been! So last night I finally sat down and created a vim config for it:

"-- pandoc Markdown+LaTeX -------------------------------------------
function s:MDSettings()
    inoremap <buffer> <Leader>n \note[item] <Esc>i
    noremap <buffer> <Leader>b :! pandoc -t beamer % -o %<.pdf<CR><CR>
    noremap <buffer> <Leader>l :! pandoc -t latex % -o %<.pdf<CR>
    noremap <buffer> <Leader>v :! evince %<.pdf 2>&1 >/dev/null &<CR><CR>
    " adjust syntax highlighting for LaTeX parts
    "   inline formulas:
    syntax region Statement oneline matchgroup=Delimiter start="\$" end="\$"
    "   environments:
    syntax region Statement matchgroup=Delimiter start="\\begin .* " end="\\end .* " contains=Statement
    "   commands:
    syntax region Statement matchgroup=Delimiter start=" " end=" " contains=Statement
endfunction
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.md setfiletype markdown
autocmd FileType markdown :call <SID>MDSettings()

That gives me good enough (with some quirks) highlighting without trying to interpret TeX stuff as Markdown, and shortcuts for calling pandoc and evince. Improvements appreciated!

You've installed apt-transport-tor to help prevent targeted attacks on your system. Great! Now you want to build Debian packages using cowbuilder, and you notice these are still using plain HTTP. If you're willing to fetch the first few packages without using apt-transport-tor, this is as easy as:

• Add 'EXTRAPACKAGES="apt-transport-tor"' to your pbuilderrc.
• Run 'cowbuilder --update'
• Set 'MIRRORSITE=tor+http://http.debian.net/debian' in pbuilderrc.
• Run 'cowbuilder --update' again.

Now any future builds should fetch build-dependencies over Tor. Unfortunately, creating a base.cow from scratch is more problematic. Neither 'debootstrap' nor 'cdebootstrap' actually rely on apt acquire methods to download files - they look at the URL scheme themselves to work out where to fetch from. I think it's a design point that they shouldn't need apt, anyway, so that you can debootstrap on non-Debian systems. I don't have a good solution beyond using some other means to route these requests over Tor.

Recently I was updating my dotfiles, because I wanted to ensure that media-players were "always on top", when launched, as this suits the way I work. For many years I've used devilspie to script the placement of new windows, and once I googled a recipe I managed to achieve my aim. However during the course of my googling I discovered that devilspie is unmaintained, and has been replaced by something using Lua - something I like. I'm surprised I hadn't realized that the project was dead, although I've always hated the configuration syntax it is something that I've used on a constant basis since I found it. Unfortunately the replacement, despite using Lua, and despite being functional just didn't seem to gell with me. So I figured "How hard could it be?". In the past I've written softare which iterated over all (visible) windows, and obviously I'm no stranger to writing Lua bindings. However I did run into a snag. My initial implementation did two things:

• Find all windows.
• For each window invoke a lua script-file.

This worked. This worked well. This worked too well. The problem I ran into was that if I wrote something like "Move window 'emacs' to desktop 2" that action would be applied, over and over again. So if I launched emacs, and then manually moved the window to desktop3 it would jump back! In short I needed to add a "stop()" function, which would cause further actions against a given window to cease. (By keeping a linked list of windows-to-ignore, and avoiding processing them.) The code did work, but it felt wrong to have an ever-growing linked-list of processed windows. So I figured I'd look at the alternative - the original devilspie used libwnck to operate. That library allows you to nominate a callback to be executed every time a new window is created. If you apply your magic only on a window-create event - well you don't need to bother caching prior-windows. So in conclusion :

• devilspie is dead.
• there is a devils2pie2 project.
• I wrote kpie

I think my code is better than devilspie2 because it is smaller, simpler, and does things more neatly - for example instead of a function to get geometry and another to set it, I use one. (e.g. "xy()" returns the position of a window, but xy(3,3) sets it.). kpie also allows you to run as a one-off job, and using the simple primitives I wrote a file to dump your windows, and their size/placement, which looks like this:

shelob ~/git/kpie $ ./kpie --single ./samples/dump.lua
-- Screen width : 1920
-- Screen height: 1080
..
if ( ( window_title() == "Buddy List" ) and
     ( window_class() == "Pidgin" ) and
     ( window_application() == "Pidgin" ) ) then
     xy(1536,24 )
     size(384,1032 )
     workspace(2)
end
if ( ( window_title() == "feeds" ) and
     ( window_class() == "Pidgin" ) and
     ( window_application() == "Pidgin" ) ) then
     xy(1,24 )
     size(1536,1032 )
     workspace(2)
end
..

As you can see that has dumped all my windows, along with their current state. This allows a simple starting-point - Configure your windows the way you want them, then dump them to a script file. Re-run that script file and your windows will be set back the way they were! (Obviously there might be tweaks required.) I used that starting-point to define a simple recipe for configuring pidgin, which is more flexible than what I ever had with pidgin, and suits my tastes. Bug-reports welcome.

Today we finished the talk selection process. We are very grateful to everyone who decided to submit talks and events for DebConf14. If you have submitted an event, please check your email :). If you have not received any confirmation regarding your talk status, please contact us on talks@debconf.org During the selection process, we bore in mind the number of talk slots during the conference, as well as maintaining a balance among the different submitted topics. We are pleased to announce that we have received a total of 115 events, of which 80 have been approved (69%). Approval means your event will be scheduled during the conference and you will have video coverage. The list of approved talks can be found on the following link: https://summit.debconf.org/debconf14/all/ If you got an email telling your talk have being approved, and your talk is not listed, don t panic. Check the status on summit, and make sure to select a track, if you have some track suggestions please mail us and tell us about it. This year, we expect to also have a sort of unconference schedule. This will take place during the designated hacking time . During that time the talks rooms will be empty, and ad hoc meetings can be scheduled on-site while we are in the Conference. The method for booking a room for your ad hoc meeting will be decided and announced later, but is expected to be flexible (i.e: open scheduling board / 1 day or less in advance booking), Please don t abuse the system: bear in mind the space will be limited, and only book your event if you gather enough people to work on your idea. Please make sure to read the email regarding your talk. :) and prepare yourself. Time is ticking and we will be happy to meet you in Portland.

Every now and then I decide I'll try and sort out my VoIP setup. And then I give up. Today I tried again. I really didn't think I was aiming that high. I thought I'd start by making my email address work as a SIP address. Seems reasonable, right? I threw in the extra constraints of wanting some security (so TLS, not UDP) and a soft client that would work on my laptop (I have a Grandstream hardphone and would like an Android client as well, but I figure those are the easy cases while the "I have my laptop and I want to remain connected" case is a bit trickier). I had a suitable Internet connected VM, access to control my DNS fully (so I can do SRV records) and time to read whatever HOWTOs required. And oh my ghod the state of the art is appalling. Let's start with getting a SIP server up and running. I went with repro which seemed to be a reasonably well recommended SIP server to register against. And mostly getting it up and running and registering against it is fine. Until you try and make a TLS SIP call through it (to a sip5060.net test address). Problem the first; the StartCom free SSL certs are not suitable because they don't advertise TLS Client. So I switch to CACert. And then I get bitten by the whole question about whether the common name on the cert should be the server name, or the domain name on the SIP address (it's the domain name on the SIP address apparently, though that might make your SIP client complain). That gets the SIP side working. Of course RTP is harder. repro looks like it's doing the right thing. The audio never happens. I capitulate at this point, and install Lumicall on my phone. That registers correctly and I can call the sip:test.time@sip5060.net test number and hear the time. So the server is functioning, it's the client that's a problem. I try the following (Debian/testing):

• jitsi - Registers fine, seems to lack any sort of TURN/STUN support.
• ekiga - No sign of TLS registration support.
• twinkle - Not in testing. A recompile leads to no sign of an actual client starting up when executed.
• sflphone - Fails to start (Debian bug #745695).
• Empathy - Fails to connect. Doesn't show any useful debug.
• linphone - No TLS connect (Debian bug #743494).

I'm bored at this point. Can I "dial" my debian.org SIP address from Lumicall? Of course not; I get a "Codecs incompatible" (SIP 488 Not Acceptable Here) response. I have no idea what that means. I seem to have all of the options on Lumicall enabled. Is it a NAT thing? A codec thing? Did I sacrifice the wrong colour of goat? At some point during this process I get a Skype call from some friends, which I answer. Up comes a video call with them, their newborn, perfect audio, and no hassle. I have a conversation with them that doesn't involve me cursing technology at all. And then I go back to fighting with SIP. Gunnar makes the comment about Skype creating a VoIP solution 10 years ago when none was to be found. I believe they're still the market leader. It just works. I'm running the Linux client, and they're maintaining it (a little behind the curve, but close enough), and it works for text chat, voice chat and video calls. I've spent half a day trying to get a Free equivalent working and failing. I need something that works behind NAT, because it's highly likely when I'm on the move that's going to be the case. I want something that lets my laptop be the client, because I don't want to rely on my mobile phone. I want my email address to also be my VoIP address. I want some security (hell, I'm not even insisting on SRTP, though I'd like to). And the state of the Open VoIP stack just continues to make me embarrassed. I haven't given up yet, but I'd appreciate some pointers. And Skype, if you're hiring, drop me a line. ;)

A couple weeks ago I was contacted by Yehuda Korotkin through one of the Debian mailing lists. Yehuda is a tech professor at one of Israel s leading colleges for women. He proposed a video conference to present the open source community to his class and explain how they can contribute to open source projects. I volunteered to participate and last Monday (July 14th 2014) we had our virtual meeting, which I hope was the first of many. Shauna G. also participated from Boston, making it a Israel - USA - Brazil meetup. Pretty impressive, eh? The conference was hosted on Google Hangouts, the video is available for viewing here. Run time is around 2.5 hours so to save you time I ve kindly posted a summary of the conference! To be frank, I look ghastly half the time so I d much prefer that you read this post. First there was a Q&A period which was more of a discussion panel, followed by a hands-on session where the girls made their first contribution to an open source project. Here s the gist of it: Q&A

• What is open source [software]? Software that allows free access to its source code (ergo open ), permitting analysis and any modifications to the original code. All these permissions are contained in a license included in the software. Note that the term open source is now applied to a lot of things other than software, and I assume there s a different definition for those cases.
• Who is the community behind open source software? Shauna pointed out that there are many kinds of projects and many kinds of communities backing them. As an example of a for-profit model, Shauna cited RedHat that offers Linux (an open source OS) for free and profits from support services. Some projects are supported by NGO s (example: Center for Open Science) with a specific objective, a series of other projects are volunteer-based or are the result of a hobby project. The contributors vary accordingly, they are not only programmers but also people with a non-technical background. In sum, there s a lot of variety in the open source community as a whole, details of sturcture vary case to case.
• Why is it important that women get involved in technology? Men and women are different because of a series of reasons, among them our biological composition, influences of society and life experiences. Technology is for everyone, male or female and we need to be able to design products that will suit everyone well. If the development team is comprised of only one sex or another, it s likely that factors will be overlooked or ignored and as a result not a democratic experience. Shauna gave some examples of this, such as a voice-powered location search software that could easily identify stereotypically male keywords but not many of interest to females. In addition to this, it s known that there is a severe workforce deficiency in the tech industry. One proposed solution is to encourage more women to follow a career in tech. The argument is based on the assumption that any boy who is remotely interested in tech has a high likelihood of studying tech, but not every girl. Often girls are not encouraged to stuy STEM-related topics and in many places tech is considered inappropriate for women. I ve read that tech companies engineering team is 12% female and 88% male. That number is consistent with the stats of female college grads for STEM majors. I think boys who love tech will keep getting into tech, but there are a lot of girls who could be great engineers if they only gave it a shot. Women should be encouraged to pursue a tech career not only so they ll get to work in such an incredible field but also so they can help assuage the gap in supply and demand present in the tech workforce today.
• Why is open source important? We don t always get everything we want/need from off-the-shelf software. The great thing about open source is that you are free to tweak the at will and add whatever features you d like. Sometimes there are even more important necessities, such as security requirements. With open source you don t need to just take the manufacturers word that the code is bullet proof; open it and check it out yourself. Another factor that increases the value of open source is its stability. As Linus Torvalds said, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow . With so many developers opening, studying and testing the code, bugs are quickly identified and removed. The fact that open source software is free doesn t reflect negatively on the quality; to the contrary, plenty of open source software is the best that s out there.
• Why its important contribute to open source? To start, it s not written anywhere that you have to contribute. That said, it sure is nice if you do. I think there are two main reasons why people contribute. One is they want to give back to the open source community. The other is they want to add some missing detail, feature or entire product. Of course, usually if you need something, someone else does as well, then by supplying your own need you end up helping many people out on the way. But one thing that I think applies especially to students is it s a great way to gain experience. You have to fit in some practical learning along with all that theory and one can only be so enthusiastic about the CS projects done in school that are usually discarded at the end of the semester. By contributing to an open source project, you are doing something that s real and that people will actually use. You also have access to an incredible network of mentors who are real pros and more than willing to help you out. Maybe I ve just been lucky, but they are really nice people who won t snicker if you ask a stupid question. Well, maybe they do. But I haven t seen it happen and I m the queen of stupid questions. Many times this is their pet project, so they re thrilled to have your contribution. Another great thing is that you can choose what you want to work with. It s easy to find a tech internship out there, what s not easy is finding an interesting internship. You might work with something you dislike or (gasp) end up just bringing people coffee. But we do that stuff cause we need the work experience. With open source you have a huge array of projects you can work on, one of them is certain to suit your interests.
• How to become a contributor? When using an open source software, you might notice things you d like to change, or actual bugs. Let the development team know about it and be sure to also let them know if you think you can figure out the fix. And if that hasn t happened yet, try exploring Github s open source repositories and check out the Issues option (upper right corner). There s usually a list of bugs or wishlist features that you just might be the man/woman for.

Hands on For the practical part of our conference, Yehuda s students contributed to Jscommunicator s Issue #5 which requests i18n support for major languages. JSCommunicator is a SIP communication tool developed in HTML and JavaScript, currently supporting audio/video calls and SIP SIMPLE instant messaging. First we set up Github in their local machines and forked the Jscommunicator repo. We learned the basic git commands needed to push changes to their remote repositories and to create a pull requests. This is explained in further detail here. At the end of the conference with nearly an hour overtime due to my tendency to be overly verbose, Yehuda s class made their first contribution with a Hebrew translation for Jscommunicator! All in all, it was great to virtually meet Yehuda and his epic students who all seemed very clever engineers. I m looking forward to our next meetup once I gain some time-management skills.

My job exposes me to a large variety of computing systems and I regularly use Mac, Windows and Linux desktops. My main desktop environment at home and work has been Debian GNU/Linux for over 10 years. However every now and then I take a little "holiday" and use something else for a few weeks. Often I'm spurred on by some niggle or other on the GNOME desktop, or burn-out with whatever the current contentious issue of the moment is in Debian. Usually I switched to Windows and I used it as an excuse to play some computer games. Last November I had just such an excuse to take a holiday but this time I opted to go for Mac. I had a back-log of Mac issues to investigate at work anyway. I haven't looked back. It appears I have switched for good. I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but I couldn't quite get the words right. I doubted I could express my frustrations in a constructive, helpful way, even if I think that my experiences are useful and my discoveries valuable, perhaps I would put them across in a way that seemed inciteful rather than insightful. I wasn't sure anyone cared. Certainly the GNOME community doesn't seem interested in feedback. I turns out that one person that doesn't care is me: I didn't realise just how broken the F/OSS desktop is. The straw that broke the camel's back was the file manager replacing type-ahead find with a search but (to seemlessly switch metaphor) it turns out I'd been cut a thousand times already. I'm not just on the other side of the fence, I'm several fields away. Sometimes community people write about their concerns with whether they're going in the right direction, or how to tell the difference between legitimate complaints, trolls and whiners. When I look at conferences now, the sea of Thinkpads was replaced with a sea of Apple Macs a long time ago now, and the Thinkpads haven't come back. I'd suggest: don't worry about the whiners. Worry about the leavers. What does this mean for my Debian involvement? Well, you can't help but have noticed that I've done very little this year. I've written nearly exclusively about music so far. the good news is: I still regularly use Debian, and I still intend to stay involved, just not on the desktop. I'm essentially only maintaining two packages now, lhasa and squishyball. I might pick up a few more (possibly archivemail if the situation doesn't improve) but I'm happy with a low package load; I'd like to make sure the ones I do maintain are maintained well. The sum of all my Debian efforts this year have been to get these two (or three) ship-shape. I have a bunch of other things I'd like to achieve in Debian which are not packages, and a larger package load would just distract from them. (We really are too package-oriented in Debian).

So I've recently posted a few links on Twitter, and I see followers clicking them. But also I see random hits. Tonight I posted a link to http://transient.email/, a domain I use for "anonymous" emailing, specifically to see which bots hit the URL. Within two minutes I had 15 visitors the first few of which were:

IP	User-Agent	Request
199.16.156.124	Twitterbot/1.0;	GET /robots.txt
199.16.156.126	Twitterbot/1.0;	GET /robots.txt
54.246.137.243	python-requests/1.2.3 CPython/2.7.2+ Linux/3.0.0-16-virtual	HEAD /
74.112.131.243	Mozilla/5.0 ();	GET /
50.18.102.132	Google-HTTP-Java-Client/1.17.0-rc (gzip)	HEAD /
50.18.102.132	Google-HTTP-Java-Client/1.17.0-rc (gzip)	HEAD /
199.16.156.125	Twitterbot/1.0;	GET /robots.txt
185.20.4.143	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TweetmemeBot/3.0; +http://tweetmeme.com/)	GET /
23.227.176.34	MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com	GET /
74.6.254.127	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp);	GET /robots.txt

So what jumps out? The twitterbot makes several requests for /robots.txt, but never actually fetches the page itself which is interesting because there is indeed a prohibition in the supplied /robots.txt file. A surprise was that both Google and Yahoo seem to follow Twitter links in almost real-time. Though the Yahoo site parsed and honoured /robots.txt the Google spider seemed to only make HEAD requests - and never actually look for the content or the robots file. In addition to this a bunch of hosts from the Amazon EC2 space made requests, which was perhaps not a surprise. Some automated processing, and classification, no doubt. Anyway beer. It's been a rough weekend.

Review: Neptune's Brood, by Charles Stross

Series:	Freyaverse #2
Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	July 2013
ISBN:	1-101-62453-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	325

Neptune's Brood is set in the same universe as Saturn's Children, but I wouldn't call it a sequel. It takes place considerably later, after substantial expansion of the robot civilization to the stars, and features entirely different characters (or, if there was overlap, I didn't notice). It also represents a significant shift in tone: while Saturn's Children is clearly a Heinlein pastiche and parody, Neptune's Brood takes its space opera more seriously. There is some situational humor assault auditors, for example but this book is played mostly straight, and I detected little or no Heinlein. This is Stross fleshing out his own space opera concept. This being Stross, that concept is not exactly conventional. This is a space opera about economics. Specifically, it's a space opera about interstellar economics, a debt pyramid, and a very interesting remapping of the continual growth requirements of capitalism to the outward expansion of colonization. The first-person protagonist comes from a "family" (as in Saturn's Children, the concept exists but involves rather more aggressive control of the instantiated "children") of bankers, but she is a forensic accountant and historian who specializes in analysis of financial scams. As you might expect, this is a significant clue about the plot. Neptune's Brood opens with Krina in search of her sister. She is supposed to be an itinerant scholar, moving throughout colonized space to spend some time with various scattered sisters, spreading knowledge and expanding her own. But it's clear from the start of the book that something else is going on, even before an assassin with Krina's face appears on her trail. Unfortunately, it takes roughly a third of the book to learn just what is happening beneath the surface, and most of that time is spent in a pointless interlude on a flying cathedral run by religious fanatics. The religion is a callback to Saturn's Children: robots who are trying to spread original humanity (the Fragiles) to the stars. This mostly doesn't go well, and is going particularly poorly for the ship that Krina works for passage on. But this is a brief gag that I thought went on much too long. The plot happens to Krina for this first section of the book rather than the other way around, little of lasting significance other than some character introductions occurs, and the Church itself, while playing a minor role in the later plot, is not worth the amount of attention that it gets. The best parts of the early book are the interludes in which Krina explains major world concepts to the reader. These are absolutely blatant infodumping, and I'm not sure how Stross gets away with them, but somehow he does, at least for me. They remind me of some of his blog posts, except tighter and fit into an interesting larger structure. Thankfully, once Krina finally arrives on Shin-Tethys, the plot improves considerably. There was a specific moment for me when the book became interesting: when Krina finds her sib's quarters in Shin-Tethys and analyzes what she finds there. It's the first significant thing in the book that she does rather than have done to her or thrust upon her, and she's a much better character when she's making decisions. This is also about the point where Stross starts fully explaining slow money, which is key to both the economics and the plot, and the plot starts to unwind its various mysteries and identify the motives of the players. Even then, Krina suffers from a lack of agency. Only at rare intervals does she get a chance to affect the story. Most of what she did of relevance to this book she did in the past, and while those descriptions of the backstory are interesting, they don't entirely make up for a passive protagonist. Thankfully, the other characters are varied and interesting enough, and the political machinations and cascading revelations captivating enough, that the last part of the book was very satisfying even with Krina on for the ride. This is a Stross novel, so it's full of two-dollar technical words mixed with technobabble. However, it shares with Saturn's Children the recasting of robots as the norm and fleshy humans as the exception, which means much of the technobabble is a straight substitution for our normal babble about meaty bodies and often works as an alienation technique. That makes it a bit more tolerable for me, although I still wished Stross would turn down the manic vocabulary in places. This bothers some people more than others; if you had no trouble with Accelerando, Neptune's Brood will pose no problems. I don't think the first section of this book was successful, but I liked the rest well enough to recommend it. If you like your space opera with a heavy dose of economics, a realistic attitude towards deep space exploration without faster-than-light technology, and a realistic perspective on the hostility of alien planets to Earth life, Neptune's Brood is a good choice. And any book that quotes David Graeber's Debt, and whose author has clearly paid attention to its contents, wins bonus points from me. Rating: 8 out of 10

2014 and it s still annoyingly hard to find a reasonable GPG key management system for personal use All I want is to keep the key material isolated from any Internet connected host, without requiring me to jump through major inconvenience every time I want to use the key. An HSM/Smartcard of some sort is an obvious choice, but they all suck in their own ways:
* FSFE smartcard it s a smartcard, requires a reader, which are generally not particular portable compared to a USB stick.
* Yubikey Neo restricted to 2048 bits, doesn t allow imports of primary keys (only subkeys), so you either generate on device and have no backup, or maintain some off-device primary key with only subkeys on the Neo, negating the main benefits of it in the first place.
* Smartcard HSM similar problems to the Neo, plus not really supported by GPG well (needs 2.0 with specific supporting module version requirements).
* Cryptostick made by some Germans, sounds potentially great, but perpetually out of stock. Which leaves basically only the roll your own dm-crypt+LUKS usb stick approach. It obviously works well, and is what I currently use, but it s a bunch of effort to maintain, particularly if you decide, as I have, that the master key material can never touch a machine with a network connection. The implication is that you now need to keep an airgapped machine around, and maintain a set of subkeys that are OK for use on network connected machines to avoid going mad playing sneakernet for every package upload. The ideal device would be a USB form factor, supporting import of 4096 bit keys, across all GPG capabilities, but with all crypto ops happening on-device, so the key material never leaves the stick once imported. Ideally also cheap enough (e.g. ~100ish currency units) that I can acquire two for redundancy. As far as I can tell, such a device does not exist on this planet. It s almost enough to make a man give up on Debian and go live a life of peace and solitude with the remaining 99.9% of the world who don t know or care about this overly complicated mess of encryption we ve wrought for ourselves. end rant.

I put out the call for nominations for the 2014 Software in the Public Interest (SPI) Board election last week. At this point I haven't yet received any nominations, so I'm mentioning it here in the hope of a slightly wider audience. Possibly not the most helpful as I would hope readers who are interested in SPI are already reading spi-announce. There are 3 positions open this election and it would be good to see a bit more diversity in candidates this year. Nominations are open until the end of Tuesday July 13th. The primary hard and fast time commitment a board member needs to make is to attend the monthly IRC board meetings, which are conducted publicly via IRC (#spi on the OFTC network). These take place at 20:00 UTC on the second Thursday of every month. More details, including all past agendas and minutes, can be found at http://spi-inc.org/meetings/. Most of the rest of the board communication is carried out via various mailing lists. The ideal candidate will have an existing involvement in the Free and Open Source community, though this need not be with a project affiliated with SPI. Software in the Public Interest (SPI, http://www.spi-inc.org/) is a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. We see it as our role to handle things like holding domain names and/or trademarks, and processing donations for free and open source projects, allowing them to concentrate on actual development. Examples of projects that SPI helps includes Debian, LibreOffice, OFTC and PostgreSQL. A full list can be found at http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/.

When I first started using computers a word processor was a program that edited text. The most common and affordable printers were dot-matrix and people who wanted good quality printing used daisy wheel printers. Text from a word processor was sent to a printer a letter at a time. The options for fancy printing were bold and italic (for dot-matrix), underlines, and the use of spaces to justify text. It really wasn t much good if you wanted to include pictures, graphs, or tables. But if you just wanted to write some text it worked really well. When you were editing text it was typical that the entire screen (25 rows of 80 columns) would be filled with the text you were writing. Some word processors used 2 or 3 lines at the top or bottom of the screen to display status information. Some time after that desktop publishing (DTP) programs became available. Initially most people had no interest in them because of the lack of suitable printers, the early LASER printers were very expensive and the graphics mode of dot matrix printers was slow to print and gave fairly low quality. Printing graphics on a cheap dot matrix printer using the thin continuous paper usually resulted in damaging the paper a bad result that wasn t worth the effort. When LASER and Inkjet printers started to become common word processing programs started getting many more features and basically took over from desktop publishing programs. This made them slower and more cumbersome to use. For example Star Office/OpenOffice/LibreOffice has distinguished itself by remaining equally slow as it transitioned from running on an OS/2 system with 16M of RAM in the early 90 s to a Linux system with 256M of RAM in the late 90 s to a Linux system with 1G of RAM in more recent times. It s nice that with the development of PCs that have AMD64 CPUs and 4G+ of RAM we have finally managed to increase PC power faster than LibreOffice can consume it. But it would be nicer if they could optimise for the common cases. LibreOffice isn t the only culprit, it seems that every word processor that has been in continual development for that period of time has had the same feature bloat. The DTP features that made word processing programs so much slower also required more menus to control them. So instead of just having text on the screen with maybe a couple of lines for status we have a menu bar at the top followed by a couple of lines of toolbars , then a line showing how much width of the screen is used for margins. At the bottom of the screen there s a search bar and a status bar. Screen Layout By definition the operation of a DTP program will be based around the size of the paper to be used. The default for this is A4 (or Letter in the US) in a portrait layout (higher than it is wide). The cheapest (and therefore most common) monitors in use are designed for displaying wide-screen 16:9 ratio movies. So we have images of A4 paper with a width:height ratio of 0.707:1 displayed on a wide-screen monitor with a 1.777:1 ratio. This means that only about 40% of the screen space would be used if you don t zoom in (but if you zoom in then you can t see many rows of text on the screen). One of the stupid ways this is used is by companies that send around word processing documents when plain text files would do, so everyone who reads the document uses a small portion of the screen space and a large portion of the email bandwidth. Note that this problem of wasted screen space isn t specific to DTP programs. When I use the Google Keep website [1] to edit notes on my PC they take up a small fraction of the screen space (about 1/3 screen width and 80% screen height) for no good reason. Keep displays about 70 characters per line and 36 lines per page. Really every program that allows editing moderate amounts of text should allow more than 80 characters per line if the screen is large enough and as many lines as fit on the screen. One way to alleviate the screen waste on DTP programs is to use a landscape layout for the paper. This is something that all modern printers support (AFAIK the only printers you can buy nowadays are LASER and ink-jet and it s just a big image that gets sent to the printer). I tried to do this with LibreOffice but couldn t figure out how. I m sure that someone will comment and tell me I m stupid for missing it, but I think that when someone with my experience of computers can t easily figure out how to perform what should be a simple task then it s unreasonably difficult for the vast majority of computer users who just want to print a document. When trying to work out how to use landscape layout in LibreOffice I discovered the Web Layout option in the View menu which allows all the screen space to be used for text (apart from the menu bar, tool bars, etc). That also means that there are no page breaks! That means I can use LibreOffice to just write text, take advantage of the spelling and grammar correcting features, and only have screen space wasted by the tool bars and menus etc. I never worked out how to get Google Docs to use a landscape document or a single webpage view. That s especially disappointing given that the proportion of documents that are printed from Google Docs is probably much lower than most word processing or DTP programs. What I Want What I d like to have is a word processing program that s suitable for writing draft blog posts and magazine articles. For blog posts most of the formatting is done by the blog software and for magazine articles the editorial policy demands plain text in most situations, so there s no possible benefit of DTP features. The ability to edit a document on an Android phone and on a Linux PC is a good feature. While the size of a phone screen limits what can be done it does allow jotting down ideas and correcting mistakes. I previously wrote about using Google Keep on a phone for lecture notes [2]. It seems that the practical ability of Keep to edit notes on a PC is about limited to the notes for a 45 minute lecture. So while Keep works well for that task it won t do well for anything bigger unless Google make some changes. Google Docs is quite good for editing medium size documents on a phone if you use the Android app. Given the limitations of the device size and input capabilities it works really well. But it s not much good for use on a PC. I ve seen a positive review of One Note from Microsoft [3]. But apart from the fact that it s from Microsoft (with all the issues that involves) there s the issue of requiring another account. Using an Android phone requires a Gmail account (in practice for almost all possible uses if not in theory) so there s no need to get an extra account for Google Keep or Docs. What would be ideal is an Android editor that could talk to a cloud service that I run (maybe using WebDAV) and which could use the same data as a Linux-X11 application. Any suggestions?

• [1] http://keep.google.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/04/19/phone-based-lectures/
• [3] http://www.onenote.com/

It should be no news that PayPal have made an habit of opposing to projects that fight for the respect of freedom and democracy by cutting their funds. Anyway, they have just provided us another example of such an abuse, against the ProtonMail project.ProtonMail is a secure email service project, similar to the defunct Lavabit service, with characteristics that should allow it a greater resistance to external pressure: it is based in Switzerland (which has specific privacy laws and with a strong democratic control) and developed by CERN and MIT researchers. Well, it seems that this project was not appreciated by some organization, for which PayPal is just a puppet. Long story short, PayPal cut ProtonMail's funds without prior warning nor real explanation. When pressed to explain themselves, they eventually asked them if their email encryption project was approved by the government (which one, by the way?)! As I said in introduction, this is not really a surprise, but it remind us that PayPal's major position is a threat to freedom and democracy as they still behave as enemies of these values (or as collaborator to known harmful organization, which is close enough) and that no project should rely on them. Fortunately, ProtonMail does not.,

We currently use completely different methods and tools of building test beds and running tests for Debian vs. Click packages, for normal uploads vs. CI airline landings vs. upstream project merge proposal testing, and keep lots of knowledge about Click package test metadata external and not easily accessible/discoverable. Today I released autopkgtest 3.0 (and 3.0.1 with a few minor updates) which is a major milestone in unifying how we run package tests both locally and in production CI. The goals of this are:

• Keep all test metadata, such as test dependencies, commands to run the test etc., in the project/package source itself instead of external. We have had that for a long time for Debian packages with DEP-8 and debian/tests/control, but not yet for Ubuntu s Click packages.
• Use the same tools for Debian and Click packages to simplify what developers have to know about and to reduce the amount of test infrastructure code to maintain.
• Use the exact same testbeds and test runners in production CI than what developers use locally, so that you can reproduce and investigate failures.
• Re-use the existing autopkgtest capabilities for using various kinds of testbeds, and conversely, making all new testbed types immediately available to all package formats.
• Stop putting tests into the Ubuntu archive as packages (such as mediaplayer-app-autopilot). This just adds packaging and archive space overhead and also makes updating tests a lot harder and taking longer than it should.

So, let s dive into the new features! New runner: adt-virt-ssh We want to run tests on real hardware such as a laptop of a particular brand with a particular graphics card, or an Ubuntu phone. We also want to restructure our current CI machinery to run tests on a real OpenStack cloud and gradually get rid of our hand-maintained QA lab with its test machines. While these use cases seem rather different, they both have in common that there is an already existing machine which is pretty much only accessible with ssh. Once you have an ssh connection, they look pretty much the same, you just need different initial setup (like fiddling with adb, calling nova boot, etc.) to prepare them. So the new adt-virt-ssh runner factorizes all the common bits such as communicating with adt-run, auto-detecting sudo availability, doing SSH connection sharing etc., and delegates the target specific bits to a setup script . E. g. we could specify --setup-script ssh-setup-nova or --setup-script ssh-setup-adb which would then get called with open at the appropriate time by adt-run; it calls the nova commands to create a VM, or run a few adb commands to install/start ssh and install the public key. Then autopkgtest does its thing, and eventually calls the script with cleanup again. The actual protocol is a bit more involved (see manpage), but that s the general idea. autopkgtest now ships readymade scripts for these two use cases. So you could e. g. run the libpng tests in a temporary cloud VM:

# if you don't have one, create it with "nova keypair-create"
$ nova keypair-list
[...]
  pitti   9f:31:cf:78:50:4f:42:04:7a:87:d7:2a:75:5e:46:56  
# find a suitable image
$ nova image-list 
[...]
  ca2e362c-62c9-4c0d-82a6-5d6a37fcb251   Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS (amd64 20140607.1) - Partner Image                           ACTIVE    
$ nova flavor-list 
[...]
  100   standard.xsmall    1024        10     10                 1       1.0           N/A        
# now run the tests: please be patient, this takes a few mins!
$ adt-run libpng --setup-commands="apt-get update" --- ssh -s /usr/share/autopkgtest/ssh-setup/nova -- \
   -f standard.xsmall -i ca2e362c-62c9-4c0d-82a6-5d6a37fcb251 -k pitti
[...]
adt-run [16:23:16]: test build:  - - - - - - - - - - results - - - - - - - - - -
build                PASS
adt-run: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ tests done.

Please see man adt-virt-ssh for details how to use it and how to write setup scripts. There is also a commented /usr/share/autopkgtest/ssh-setup/SKELETON template for writing your own for your use cases. You can also not use any setup script and just specify user and host name as options, but please remember that the ssh runner cannot clean up after itself, so never use this on important machines which you can t reset/reinstall! Test dependency installation without apt/root Ubuntu phones with system images have a read-only file system where you can t install test dependencies with apt. A similar case is using the null runner without root. When apt-get install is not available, autopkgtest now has a reduced fallback mode: it downloads the required test dependencies, unpacks them into a temporary directory, and runs the tests with $PATH, $PYTHONPATH, $GI_TYPELIB_PATH, etc. pointing to the unpacked temp dir. Of course this only works for packages which are relocatable in that way, i. e. libraries, Python modules, or command line tools; it will totally fail for things which look for config files, plugins etc. in hardcoded directory paths. But it s good enough for the purposes of Click package testing such as installing autopilot, libautopilot-qt etc. Click package support autopkgtest now recognizes click source directories and *.click package arguments, and introduces a new test metadata specification syntax in a click package manifest. This is similar in spirit and capabilities to DEP-8 debian/tests/control, except that it s using JSON:

    "x-test":  
        "unit": "tests/unittests",
        "smoke":  
            "path": "tests/smoketest",
            "depends": ["shunit2", "moreutils"],
            "restrictions": ["allow-stderr"]
         ,
        "another":  
            "command": "echo hello > /tmp/world.txt"
         
     

For convenience, there is also some magic to make running autopilot tests particularly simple. E. g. our existing click packages usually specify something like

    "x-test":  
        "autopilot": "ubuntu_calculator_app"
     

which is enough to do what I mean , i. e. implicitly add the autopilot test depends and run autopilot with the specified test module name. You can specify your own dependencies and/or commands, and restrictions etc., of course. So with this, and the previous support for non-apt test dependencies and the ssh runner, we can put all this together to run the tests for e. g. the Ubuntu calculator app on the phone:

$ bzr branch lp:ubuntu-calculator-app
# built straight from that branch; TODO: where is the official" download URL?
$ wget http://people.canonical.com/~pitti/tmp/com.ubuntu.calculator_1.3.283_all.click
$ adt-run ubuntu-calculator-app/ com.ubuntu.calculator_1.3.283_all.click --- \
      ssh -s /usr/share/autopkgtest/ssh-setup/adb
[..]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/adt-run.KfY5bG/tree/tests/autopilot/ubuntu_calculator_app/tests/test_simple_page.py", line 93, in test_divide_with_infinity_length_result_number
    self._assert_result("0.33333333")
  File "/tmp/adt-run.KfY5bG/tree/tests/autopilot/ubuntu_calculator_app/tests/test_simple_page.py", line 63, in _assert_result
    self.main_view.get_result, Eventually(Equals(expected_result)))
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/testtools/testcase.py", line 406, in assertThat
    raise mismatch_error
testtools.matchers._impl.MismatchError: After 10.0 seconds test failed: '0.33333333' != '0.3'
Ran 33 tests in 295.586s
FAILED (failures=1)

Note that the current adb ssh setup script deals with some things like applying the autopilot click AppArmor hooks and disabling screen dimming, but it does not do the first-time setup (connecting to network, doing the gesture intro) and unlocking the screen. These are still on the TODO list, but I need to find out how to do these properly. Help appreciated! Click app tests in schroot/containers But, that s not the only thing you can do! autopkgtest has all these other runners, so why not try and run them in a schroot or container? To emulate the environment of an Ubuntu Touch session I wrote a --setup-commands script:

adt-run --setup-commands /usr/share/autopkgtest/setup-commands/ubuntu-touch-session \
    ubuntu-calculator-app/ com.ubuntu.calculator_1.3.283_all.click --- schroot utopic

This will actually work in the sense of running (and succeeding) the autopilot tests, but it will fail due to a lot of libust[11345/11358]: Error: Error opening shm /lttng-ust-wait... warnings on stderr. I don t know what these mean, just that I also see them on the phone itself occasionally. I also wrote another setup-commands script which emulates read-only apt , so that you can test the unpack only fallback. So you could prepare a container with click and the App framework preinstalled (so that it doesn t always take ages to install them), starting from a standard adt-build-lxc container:

$ sudo lxc-clone -o adt-utopic -n click
$ sudo lxc-start -n click
  # run "sudo apt-get install click ubuntu-sdk-libs ubuntu-app-launch-tools" there
  # then "sudo powerdown"
# current apparmor profile doesn't allow remounting something read-only
$ echo "lxc.aa_profile = unconfined"   sudo tee -a /var/lib/lxc/click/config

Now that container has enough stuff preinstalled to be reasonably fast to set up, and the remaining test dependencies (mostly autopilot) work fine with the unpack/$*_PATH fallback:

$ adt-run --setup-commands /usr/share/autopkgtest/setup-commands/ubuntu-touch-session \
          --setup-commands /usr/share/autopkgtest/setup-commands/ro-apt \
          ubuntu-calculator-app/ com.ubuntu.calculator_1.3.283_all.click \
          --- lxc -es click

This will successfully run all the tests, and provided you have apt-cacher-ng installed, it only takes a few seconds to set up. This might be a nice thing to do on merge proposals, if you don t have an actual phone at hand, or don t want to clutter it up. autopkgtest 3.0.1 will be available in Utopic tomorrow (through autosyncs). If you can t wait to try it out, download it from my people.c.c page . Feedback appreciated!

Review: Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

Series:	Imperial Radch #1
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	2013
ISBN:	0-316-24662-X
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	416

As Ancillary Justice opens, Breq is on an icy planet trying to track down a person who has gone rather thoroughly to ground. As her search continues, the reader slowly learns the context of that search, which is only the latest step of a long and quixotic exercise in private determination. She was set on her path by events twenty years previous, told in interleaved flashbacks, that have left her greatly diminished and thrust outside of any of the context of her over thousand years of life. Breq was Justice of Toren, a starship and AI that possessed thousands of ancillaries, human bodies slaved to her mind. Now only this one remains, and nothing exists of her former life other than this goal. It's always hard to write a review of a book that I loved this much. I want to find some way to grab the reader and shake them and say "you have to read this!" without giving away any of the delicious details. That's particularly difficult with Ancillary Justice, since one of the delights of this book is the slow unfolding of not only the plot but the background and motivations behind the plot. There is so much beneath the surface of Breq's methodical intent, and discovering all the nuances is utterly delightful. This is also a book that is very deeply concerned with identity, and which does one of the best jobs I've seen in science fiction of showing a non-human first-person protagonist: close enough to human to permit identification and comprehension, but far enough away for delightful sparks of unexpected insight or thought-provoking difference. Breq is a ship, and AIs are central to this story, so the comparison that comes immediately to mind is with Iain M. Banks. Leckie's role for ship AIs is much different than the structure of Banks's Culture, but I think this is still an apt comparison. Like Banks, Leckie is writing large-scale space opera dominated by a meddling empire that follows some familiar human patterns but not others. Banks's Culture takes a less direct approach with its meddling; the Radch has a more Roman attitude towards preventative conquest and citizenship. But both deal with large-scale issues of politics, culture, and conquest. Both also write excellent AIs, but I think Leckie is more successful than Banks at giving her AIs inhuman properties and creating a sense of eerie alienness that sometimes fades almost entirely and sometimes comes sharply to the surface. The first-person perspective helps considerably there. But where Ancillary Justice truly shined for me is in the interpersonal relationships, and in the insight they provided into character and motive. At the start of the book, Breq finds a drug addict dying in the cold and rescues her, bringing her along on her search for lack of a better option. Breq's relationship with Seivarden is complex, difficult for both of them, badly asymmetric at the start, and develops into something brilliant. At the start of the book, Seivarden is easy to dislike, and Breq's tone is refreshingly bracing and forthright. But through the course of the book Seivarden grows into something much more, in a way that I found both believable and incredibly compelling. And Leckie does this without falling into any of the typical relationship patterns, without introducing artificial romance (or, indeed, any romance at all, which is an excellent choice here), and without compromising the personalities of either character. It's masterfully done. One of the most amazing things about this book to me is that it's a first novel. I never would have guessed that from reading it. It's beautifully paced, the characterization is deep and compelling, and Leckie avoids any sign of the typical first-novel problem of stuffing the book with too much Stuff. Ancillary Justice is a capable and confident novel that builds a compelling world and even more compelling characters. I liked it more than I like most of the Culture novels, which is saying quite a lot, but Leckie offers much of the same scope with deeper and more personal characterization and a tighter plot. I haven't yet remarked on one aspect of this book that every other review seems to remark on: its treatment of gender. The Radch do not recognize or care about gender distinctions, and therefore Breq struggles throughout the book with proper gender labeling in much the same way that a native English speaker tends to struggle with grammatical gender when learning a Romance language, except with more social consequences. Leckie has chosen to represent this in the novel by having Breq refer to everyone uniformly as "she." This has its pluses and minuses: it still supports a binary gender concept where a gender-neutral pronoun might not, but given all the negative reaction this book got just for using "she," a gender-neutral pronoun might be a bridge too far for a lot of readers. I thought it created a nice bit of alienation, a way of forcing the reader to look at gender markers from the outside and a way to point out how arbitrary many of them are. It was also interesting to see how surprised I was at various points in the book when it became obvious that some person Breq had been calling "she" in the first-person narration turned out, from story context, to probably be male. That said, I think this part of the book is overblown in reviews. It's often the first thing people mention, but while it was a nice side bit of world-building, I don't think it's that central to the story. I'm particularly baffled by the handful of people who complained about it, since it's not intrusive and it quickly fades into the background apart from occasional necessary shifts of mental image. (It does create the impression of a world containing only women, but I found that a nice change from the more common impression in space opera of a world containing only men.) Ancillary Justice has already won the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards and tied for the BSFA award for best novel, and I'm happy to report that it deserves all of those. I haven't yet read all of the other Hugo nominees, but it's hard to imagine a world in which it won't top my ballot. This is a fantastic novel, by far the best thing I've read so far this year. I'm delighted that it's the first book of a trilogy, since I'm not done with either the world or the characters yet, but it stands well on its own and reaches a satisfying conclusion. I recommend it to everyone, but particularly to anyone who likes Banks, intelligent ships, or who is looking for thoughtful and complex space opera. Followed by Ancillary Sword. Rating: 10 out of 10

Russ Albery wrote an insightful blog post about trust, computer security, and training programmers [1]. He makes a good case that social problems in our community decrease the availability of skilled people to write and audit security code. The Lawfare blog has an insightful article by Dan Geer about Heartbleed as a Metaphor [2]. He makes some good points about security and design, ways of potentially solving some flaws and problems with the various solutions. Eben Moglen wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the way that the NSA spying is a direct threat to democracy [3] The TED blog has an interesting interview with Kitra Cahana about her work living with and photographing nomads in the US [4]. I was surprised to learn that there s an active nomad community in the US based on the culture that started in the Great Depression. Apparently people are using Youtube to learn about nomad culture before joining. Dave Johnson wrote an interesting Salon article about why CEOs make 300* as much money as workers [5]. Note that actually contributing to the financial success of the company is not one of the reasons. Maia Szalavitz wrote an interesting Slate article about Autism and Anorexia [6]. Apparently some people on the Autism Spectrum are mis-diagnosed with Anorexia due to food intolerance. Groups of four professors have applied for the job of president and vice-chancellor of the University of Alberta [7]. While it was a joke to apply in that way, 1/4 of the university president s salary is greater than the salary of a professor and the university would get a team of 4 people to do the job so it would really make sense to hire them. Of course the university could just pay a more reasonable salary for the president and hire an extra 3 professors. But the same argument applies for lots of highly paid jobs. Is a CEO who gets paid $10M per annim really going to do a better job than a team of 100 people who are paid $100K? Joel on Software wrote an insightful article explaining why hiring 1/200 applicants doesn t mean you hire the top 0.5% of workers [8]. He suggests that the best employees almost never apply through regular channels so an intern program is the only way to get a chance of hiring the best people. Chaotic Idealism has an interesting article on some of the bogus claims about autism and violence [9]. Salon has an interesting articleby Lindsay Abrams about the way the food industry in the US lobbies for laws to prevent employees from reporting animal cruelty or contamination of the food supply and how drones will now be used for investigative journalism [10]. Jacobin Mag has an interesting article by Geoff Shullenberger about the Voluntariat , the people who volunteer their time to help commercial organisations [11]. I don t object to people voluntarily helping companies, but when they are exploited or when the company also requires voluntary help from the government it becomes a problem. We need some legislation about this. Laura Hudson wrote an insightful article about how Riot Games solved their online abuse problem [12]. There are ideas in this that can apply to all online communities. Matt LeMay wrote an interesting article for Medium titled What (Else) Can Men Do? Grow The Fuck Up [13]. It s a general commentary on the treatment of women in geek communities (and most other places). Foz Meadows wrote an insightful analysis of the attempts of bigots to influence science-fiction [14]. If I had more spare time I d read some of the books by bigoted authors on the Sad Puppy Slate (from a library of course) and see if they lack talent in the same way that Orson Scott Card does. Racialicious has an interesting article by Phenderson Djeli Clark about the horrible racism and bigotry of H.P. Lovecraft [15]. I have only read two HP Lovecraft stories, one was mediocre and the other (The Horroe at Red Hook) was quite poor largely due to his inability to write about non-white people. Grace Wyler wrote an insightful article for Vice magazine about the right-wing terrorists in the US killing cops [16]. Paul Rosenberg wrote an interesting and amusing (for people outside the US) article about the gun crazies in the US [17]. Maybe the gun crazies should have a loaded assault rifles and tequila party to follow up on their gun appreciation day . A US TV show made a 4 minute clip of some of the stupid things that Tony Abbott has done [18]. Tony is almost as stupid as Dubya.

• [1] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2014-04/003.html
• [2] http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/04/heartbleed-as-metaphor/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/kcocf7o
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/kysyz77
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/qyt9qf8
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/m95dv8q
• [7] http://tinyurl.com/ka27qyg
• [8] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
• [9] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/134561.html
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/nv3ygzm
• [11] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-rise-of-the-voluntariat/
• [12] http://www.wired.com/2014/05/fighting-online-harassment/
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/phrq937
• [14] http://tinyurl.com/kye63mw
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/me2aj5a
• [16] http://www.vice.com/read/whats-behind-all-the-right-wing-cop-shootings
• [17] http://tinyurl.com/pynqmls
• [18] http://tinyurl.com/khkav88

Vangelis' soundtrack for the movie Blade Runner is one of my favourite film soundtracks. Its troubled history is reasonably well documented on Wikipedia . At the time of writing, that article doesn't mention the recent 2013 reissue which was remastered and released on Vinyl, and possibly SACD too. Last year I spotted this record and bought it for a friend's birthday. In the year since I've eventually gave into temptation and bought another copy for myself. This was a little unfortunate in terms of timing as my record player has been packed away for two months pending a house move. I did manage to test it out on a Numark PT-01 but it really needs a proper setup to do it justice. In the mean time, one can watch a video of someone else's copy playing: In related news, I've recently enjoyed the BBC's adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as part of their "Dangerous Visions" series. Much like the film, the play elides a lot of material from the book; including Deckard's wife and (more sadly) the entire Buster Friendly / Mercer side-story. However it retains the second police station, which (to me) was the key, classic Dick "What-the..." moment in the novel.