Like I wrote before, we at Collabora have been working on improving WebKitGTK+ performance for customer projects, such as Apertis. We took the opportunity brought by recent improvements to WebKitGTK+ and GTK+ itself to make the final leg of drawing contents to screen as efficient as possible. And then we went on investigating why so much CPU was still being used in some of our test cases. The first weird thing we noticed is performance was actually degraded on Wayland compared to running under X11. After some investigation we found a lot of time was being spent inside GTK+, painting the window s background. Here s the thing: the problem only showed under Wayland because in that case GTK+ is responsible for painting the window decorations, whereas in the X11 case the window manager does it. That means all of that expensive blurring and rendering of shadows fell on GTK+ s lap. During the web engines hackfest, a couple of months ago, I delved deeper into the problem and noticed, with Carlos Garcia s help, that it was even worse when HiDPI displays were thrown into the mix. The scaling made things unbearably slower. You might also be wondering why would painting of window decorations be such a problem, anyway? They should only be repainted when a window changes size or state anyway, which should be pretty rare, right? Right, that is one of the reasons why we had to make it fast, though: the resizing experience was pretty terrible. But we ll get back to that later. So I dug into that, made a few tries at understanding the issue and came up with a patch showing how applying the blur was being way too expensive. After a bit of discussion with our own Pekka Paalanen and Benjamin Otte we found the root cause: a fast path was not being hit by pixman due to the difference in scale factors on the shadow mask and the target surface. We made the shadow mask scale the same as the surface s and voil , sane performance. I keep talking about this being a performance problem, but how bad was it? In the following video you can see how huge the impact in performance of this problem was on my very recent laptop with a HiDPI display. The video starts with an Epiphany window running with a patched GTK+ showing a nice demo the WebKit folks cooked for CSS animations and 3D transforms. After a few seconds I quickly alt-tab to the version running with unpatched GTK+ I made the window the exact size and position of the other one, so that it is under the same conditions and the difference can be seen more easily. It is massive. Yes, all of that slow down was caused by repainting window shadows! OK, so that solved the problem for HiDPI displays, made resizing saner, great! But why is GTK+ repainting the window even if only the contents are changing, anyway? Well, that turned out to be an off-by-one bug in the code that checks whether the invalidated area includes part of the window decorations. If the area being changed spanned the whole window width, say, it would always cause the shadows to be repainted. By fixing that, we now avoid all of the shadow drawing code when we are running full-window animations such as the CSS poster circle or gtk3-demo s pixbufs demo. As you can see in the video below, the gtk3-demo running with the patched GTK+ (the one on the right) is using a lot less CPU and has smoother animation than the one running with the unpatched GTK+ (left). Pretty much all of the overhead caused by window decorations is gone in the patched version. It is still using quite a bit of CPU to animate those pixbufs, though, so some work still remains. Also, the overhead added to integrate cairo and GL rendering in GTK+ is pretty significant in the WebKitGTK+ CSS animation case. Hopefully that ll get much better from GTK+ 4 onwards.

This is an extension of part 1 which I shared few days ago. This would be a longish one so please bear. First of all somebody emailed me this link so in the future a layover at Doha Airport will be a bit expensive from before, approx INR 700/- added to the ticket costs Moving on, Let me share an experience I shared one of the last few days I had while I was in Cape Town I had booked a place near Long Street, Cape Town using Bernelle s help. What I had not known at that time that near Long Street there are free walking tours every couple of hours. I took part in all the tours and those were nice experiences. Where they start the walk, there was the gentleman pictured above. I was amazed by this gentleman s rich voice. He strummed lot of classics from the 60 s, 70 s till the 90 s . I had two coffees and thought I was at a premium rock concert. It was a bitter-sweet experience for me because I could see that he has such prodigious talent and still he had to struggle to survive to make ends meet. I did my 2 bit but wish I could have done something more. Side note Before I forget there is one trick of feh which I use to view images without it getting very high-resolution (especially on my low-end systems) [shirish@debian] - [/run/user/1000/gvfs/mtp:host=%5Busb%3A001%2C006%5D/Card/DCIM/Camera] - [4621]
[$] feh -g 1350x1000 .
This actually makes it far far easier to traverse through the 1000 odd photos of the trip that I have in my personal archive without doing any sort of conversion methodology. Btw, it took me time but finally was able to create an album at gallery.debconf.org . Haven t been able to upload photos as came across an error which I have shared at https://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20161113.215659.fce58823.en.html Moving on, here s the funny story/experience I wanted to share What happened was this. This is from the Doha Airport. I had seen big buggies (ones similar to golf carts) which was ferrying people from end of the concourse to the other. I had been walking the whole day and even with the horizontal escalators and everything, it takes a toll. I was half-tired, half-sleepy and saw a buggy stationed. From behind it looked like the buggies I had seen. As there was no place to park my behind there, I entered into the buggy and sat there. Around 15-20 minutes later a Doha cop in another buggy came to me and asked me if something had happened ? I had no clue what he was talking about. He told/shared/asked me in friendly tone whether I had committed a crime or wanted to report a crime. When I replied in negative to both, he asked then why I was sitting there. I replied it was for stretching my legs and it was the buggy which was being used to transport people from A. to B. He gently told me I had entered into the wrong one and it was actually a cop buggy. I couldn t believe it. He did go his own way as he saw I was dead-tired. After 10-15 minutes, half-believingly I came out of the buggy and to my shock the gentleman was right. There was nothing to do but solder on to find a spot in this big airport. I shared this with few friends and family and managed to elicit few laughs hence sharing. The somewhat sad one was I had met a couple with a baby. Now as shared before, Most Airports including the Doha Airport is Air-Conditioned/Climate-Controlled and is probably in mid-20 s so it was more than cold for me. The couples with the baby were from Asian sub-continent. From their clothes and the way they were, they were not very well off. I do remember them sharing that they had a death in the family and hence were going. I didn t know at that point in time that there was something called bereavement fares and if they were able to take opportunity of those tickets. But this is besides the point . The issue was that their baby had been running a high-fever and the A/C was making matters worse. I had seen a pharmacy but no clinic in the airport. It was much later I came across http://dohahamadairport.com/airport-guide/facilities-services/medical-emergencies but as can be seen on the web-page it doesn t tell whether the services are chargeable or not. I assume it would be paid, although in some of the developed/industrialized countries it is rumoured not to be for simple ailments such as the baby was going through. Have no idea if that s true or not. I also don t know how it equates with travel insurance as well as most travel insurance is also supposed to help you in situations like these. I was concerned as it was a baby and babies as all know are very very fragile. If anybody has an idea or had similar experience would like to know specifically related to International Airport environment as it has transit issues unlike in domestic airports where I don t think it would be a bit more easy. Now coming to my own inadequacies/lack of foresight which I had mentioned I will share, I had asked/queried and got to lead a Debian-installation workshop on the Open Debian Day. I had done a few earlier and had installed it a few times on my system and for my friends, relatives and some clients. The only bad experiences I had were to do with UEFI but even those in the jessie releases had got resolved quite a bit, so was pretty confident. The day before the Installfest was to happen, Mensah Nyarko Yaa Dufie (one full name) of Ghana approached me to install Debian on her system. I had some older version of the Debian DVD either 8.1 or 8.3 and had known that 8.5 had been released just a few days back. Had seen pretty fast internet (as far as downloading Debian DVD) is concerned hence asked her to wait a bit while I downloaded the newest image. I sha256summed it to make sure that the image was bit-to-bit perfect. Now I hadn t bought a pen drive/disk from India as I was under the impression that in such conferences, pen drives should not be an issue. I had asked Bernelle privately before via e-mail as well and she had assured me that some pen-drives would be available. She gave me a handful of HP pen drives. The pen drives as we came know during our usage were somewhat flaky. It would pop out/lose connection even with the slightest nudge to the lappy. Somehow I was able to transfer the image to the usb disk. As people say hindsight is 50:50 maybe it was not such a smart move on my part to download the big DVD image and maybe I should have got the netinstall iso . Be careful, the link I have just shared is of the old version, if you have good web link and want to try the newest stable netinstall head to cdimage.debian.org . Apart from that goof-up I dunno (still) of anyway to know if a copy from an .iso image to usb was successful or not and did it do correctly I did the following command sudo dd if=/path_to/debian-dvd.iso of=/dev/usb-mount-point which is usually /dev/sdb on all of my systems . Her system was a brand new HP (don t remember the model details) which she had bought just a few weeks/months before debconf. We tried a few times but it failed at installing the boot-loader stage. I asked Ritesh Raj Saraff (a friend and DD) and while he had some ideas, none of them worked. Ritesh later pointed out Steve McIntyre and shared he is part of the Debian-Installer team. At that point in time, I had no clue who Steve McIntyre was otherwise I probably would not have approached him. He quickly acquiesced to my request and shared that he would be there for the workshop. With load of my mind little bit, I apologized to mensah and asked her to be at the workshop the following day. I had no clue what was wrong at this point in time, whether it was the iso image in the usb disk or a UEFI issue. This also wasn t good for my confidence but as somebody from the Debian-Installer team was there, I was somewhat relaxed. Next day, some more people came for the Installfest. While I had made 2-3 copies, clearly it was not enough as more people came. I was in a frenzy and asked Deven Bansod, Keerthana Krishnan, Prabaharan Jaminy (the whole GSOC and Outreachy attendees) to volunteer to help out in making more iso images on usb disks. I introduced mensah to Steve McIntyre and we tried 2-3 times to get debian installed on the system but it didn t move from the same place. Ritesh shared that dd had a memory leak and hence cat was a better way to do it. So we did

$ cat debian.iso > /dev/sdb and soon other machines had debian sporting on their desktops. But mensa s lappy wouldn t get move from the boot-loader stage. Suddenly Steve had the bright idea (light bulb moment) that maybe the .iso is corrupted/usb disk is bad or something is incomplete. We started on another usb disk. Now this is where I have a query While I don t want to compare, in Ubuntu there was an image self-checking mechanism where probably behind the scenes (backend) the checksums published in a file are compared with checksums generated by apps. which are on the .iso image. While it does extend your time, the end result is you know if there is some issue on the decompressed image on the usb disk. AFAIK we don t have anything similar. The only two things I know is the wiki page and of course the various checksums of the image as shared at http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/8.6.0/amd64/iso-cd/ or http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/8.6.0/amd64/iso-dvd/ If anybody knows of any movement or a bug in the BTS which I can follow for the above issue please let me know. This time Steve was able to install it without any issues. I asked him whether he had to make some specific FAT/Ex-FAT/NTFS partitions as some new UEFI-based lappies need one or more but he replied in the negative. While mensa did get her debian install, the GUI didn t come while command-prompt was available. Then Steve added backports to the sources.list, got the new kernel, new Intel/Nvidia drivers (think it was one of those hybrid models IIRC) and she was able to boot into GNOME-Debian. I didn t saw any bug-reports about checksumming state of the applications before installation but did couple of reports about badblocks support and memory checking and from action on both bug-reports it is also need of the hour (although the earlier one has been marked as won t fix :(). In this whole thing, I liked/appreciated the way Steve handled things, I intuitively understood/knew that he wasn t just part of the Debian-installer team but someone better. I can t explain it but it was there. A little investigation in the evening and it turned out that he had been Debian Project Leader for two consecutive years (2008 and 2009) . In hindsight it probably was a good thing I didn t know that before otherwise I probably wouldn t have interacted with him and it would have been my loss. To have been the DPL and still being so humble while technically being so proficient, I was amazed and didn t know what to make of it. Here i.e. in India, if somebody wins even the mohalla elections (neighbourhood elections) the person carries a big chip on her/is shoulder not just till he is on the seat but even beyond, and here was an example of a previous DPL asking time from one of the developers in a video if it s possible in the next couple of days. Lastly,last week have able to report 2 bugs upstream. The first one is of youtube-dl . It s somewhat complicated hence will not go there atm. The second and more surprising one was from nano our esteemed text-editor- Hopefully the bug will be fixed once a new version comes.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #buggy, #cop, #Debconf16, #doha airport, #Installfest, #nano, #singer, #youtube-dl, travel

Since some time everybody (read developer) want to run his new microservice stacks in containers. I can understand that building and testing an application is important for developers.
One of the benefits of containers is, that developer (in theory) can put their new version of applications into production on their own. This is the point where operations is affected and operations needs to evaluate, if that might evolve into better workflow. For yolo^WdevOps people there are some challenges that needs to be solved, or at least mitigated, when things needs to be done in large(r) scale.

• Which Orchestration Engine should be considered?
• How to provide persistent (shared) storage?
• How to update the base image(s) the apps are build upon and to test/deploy them?

Orchestration Engine Running Docker, which is actual the most preferred container solution, on a single host with docker command line client is something you can do, but there you leave the gap between dev and ops.

UI For Docker Since some time there is UI For Docker available for visualizing and managing containers on a single docker node. It's pretty awesome and the best feature so far is the Container Network view, which also shows the linked container.

Portainer Portainer is pretty new and it can be deployed as easy as UI For Docker. But the (first) great advantage: it can handle Docker Swarm. Beside that it has many other great features.

Rancher Rancher describes themselves as 'container management platform' that 'supports and manages all of your Kubernetes, Mesos, and Swarm clusters'. This is great because this are all of the relevant docker cluster orchestrations at the market actually. For the use cases, we are facing, Kubernetes and Mesos seems both like bloated beasts. Usman Ismail has written a really good comparison of Orchestration Engine options which goes into details.

Docker Swarm As there is actually no clear defacto standard/winner of the (container) orchestration wars, I would prevent to be in a vendor lock-in situation (yet). Docker swarm seems to be evolving and is getting more nice features other competitors doesn't provide.
Due the native integration into the docker framework and great community I believe Docker Swarm will be the Docker Orchestration of the choice on the long run. This should be supported by Rancher 1.2 which is not released yet.
From this point of view it looks very reasonable that Docker Swarm in combination with Rancher (1.2) might be a good strategy to maintain your container farms in the future. If you think to put Docker Swarm into production in the actual state, I recommend to read Docker swarm mode: What to know before going live on production by Panjamapong Sermsawatsri.

Persistent Storage While it is a best practice to use data volume container these days, providing persistent storage across multiple hosts for shared volumes seems to be tricky. In theory you can mount a shared-storage volume as a data volume and there are several volume plugins which supports shared storage. For example you can use the convoy plugin which gives you:

• thin provisioned volumes
• snapshots of volumes
• backup of snapshots
• restore volumes

As backend you can use:

• Device Mapper
• Virtual File System(VFS)/Network File System(NFS)
• Amazon Elastic Block Store(EBS)

The good thing is, that convoy is integrated into Rancher. For more information I suggest to read Setting Up Shared Volumes with Convoy-NFS, which also mentions some limitations. If you want test Persistent Storage Service, Rancher provides some documentation. Actually I did not evaluate shared-storage volumes yet, but I don't see a solution I would love to use in production (at least on-premise) without strong downsides. But maybe things will go further and there might be a great solution for this caveats in the future.

Keeping base images up-to-date Since some time there are many projects that tries to detect security problems in your container images in several ways.
Beside general security considerations you need to deal somehow with issues in your base images that you build your applications on. Of course, even if you know you have a security issue in your application image, you need to fix it, which depends on the way how you based your application upon.

Ways to base your application image

• You can build your application image entire from scratch, which leaves all the work to your development team and I wouldn't recommend it that way.
• You also can create one (or more) intermediate image(s) that will be used by your development team.
• The development team might ground their work on images in public available or private (for example the one bundled to your gitlab CI/CD solution) registries.

Whats the struggle with the base image? If you are using images being not (well) maintained by other people, you have to wait for them to fix your base image. Using external images might also lead into trust problems (can you trust those people in general?).
In an ideal world, your developers have always fresh base images with fixed security issues. This can probably be done by rebuilding every intermediate image periodically or when the base image changes.

Paradigm change Anyway, if you have a new application image available (with no known security issues), you need to deploy it to production. This is summarized by Jason McKay in his article Docker Security: How to Monitor and Patch Containers in the Cloud:

To implement a patch, update the base image and then rebuild the application image. This will require systems and development teams to work closely together.

So patching security issues in the container world changes workflow significant. In the old world operation teams mostly rolled security fixes for the base systems independent from development teams.
Now hitting containers the production area this might change things significant.

Bringing updated images to production Imagine your development team doesn't work steady on a project, cause the product owner consider it feature complete. The base image is provided (in some way) consistently without security issues. The application image is build on top of that automatically on every update of the base image.
How do you push in such a scenario the security fixes to production? From my point of view you have two choices:

• Let the development team require to test the resulting application image and put it into production
• Push the new application image without review by the development team into production

The first scenario might lead into a significant delay until the fixes hit production created by the probably infrequent work of the development team. The latter one brings your security fixes early to production by the notable higher risk to break your application. This risk can be reduced by implementing massive tests into CI/CD pipelines by the development team. Rolling updates provided by Docker Swarm might also reduce the risk of ending with a broken application. When you are implementing an update process of your (application) images to production, you should consider Watchtower that provides Automatic Updates for Docker Containers.

Conclusion Not being a product owner or the operations part of an application that is facing a widely adopted usage that would compensate the actual tradeoffs we are still facing I tend not to move large scale production projects into a container environment.
This means not that this might be a bad idea for others, but I'd like to sort out some of the caveats before. I'm still interested to put smaller projects into production, being not scared to reimplement or move them on a new stack.
For smaller projects with a small number of hosts Portainer looks not bad as well as Rancher with the Cattle orchestration engine if you just want to manage a couple of nodes. Things are going to be interesting if Rancher 1.2 supports Docker swarm cluster out of the box. Let's see what the future will bring us to the container world and how to make a great stack out of it.

Update I suggest to read Docker in Production: A History of Failure and the answer Docker in Production: A retort to understand the actual challenges when running Docker in larger scale production environments.

I m at an airport, about to board the first of three flights across the world, from timezone +8 to timezone -8. I ll be in transit 27 hours to get to Seattle, Washington state. I m leaving my wife and two young children behind. My work has given me a days worth of leave under the Corporate Social Responsibility program, and I m taking three days annual leave, to do this. 27 hours each way in transit, for 3 days on the ground. Why? Backstory I started playing in technology as a kid in the 1980s; my first PC was a clone (as they were called) 286 running MS-DOS. It was clunky, and the most I could do to extend it was to write batch scripts. As a child I had no funds for commercial compilers, no network connections (this was pre Internet in Australia), no access to documentation, and no idea where to start programming properly. It was a closed world. I hit university in the summer of 1994 to study Computer Science and French. I d heard of Linux, and soon found myself installing the Linux distributions of the day. The Freedom of the licensing, the encouragement to use, modify, share, was in stark contrast to the world of consumer PCs of the late 1980 s. It was there at the UCC at UWA I discovered Debian. Some of the kind network/system admins at the University maintained a Debian mirror on the campus LAN, updated regularly and always online. It was fast, and more importantly, free for me to access. Back in the 1990s, bandwidth in Australia was incredibly expensive. The vast distances of the country mean that bandwidth was scarce. Telcos were in races to put fiber between Perth and the Eastern States, and without that in place, IP connectivity was constrained, and thus costly. Over many long days and nights I huddled down, learning window managers, protocols, programming and scripting languages. I became a system/network administrator, web developer, dev ops engineer, etc. My official degree workload, algorithmic complexity, protocol stacks, were interesting, but fiddling with Linux based implementations was practical. Volunteer After years of consuming the output of Debian and running many services with it I decided to put my hand up and volunteer as a Debian Developer: it was time to give back. I had benefited from Debian, and I saw others benefit from it as well. As the 2000 s started, I had my PGP key in the Debian key ring. I had adopted a package and was maintaining it load balancing Apache web servers. The web was yet to expand to the traffic levels you see today; most web sites were served from one physical web server. Site Reliability Engineering was a term not yet dreamed of. What became more apparent was the applicability of Linux, Open Source, and in my line-of-sight Debian to a wider community beyond myself and my university peers. Debain was being used to revive recycled computers that were being donated to charities; in some cases, unable to transfer commercial software licenses with the hardware that was no longer required by organisations that had upgraded. It appeared that Debian was being used as a baseline above which society in general had access to fundamental capability of computing and network services. The removal of subscriptions, registrations, and the encouragement of distribution meant this occurred at rates that could never be tracked, and more importantly, the consensus was that it should not be automatically tracked. The privacy of the user is paramount more important than some statistics for the Developer to ponder. When the Bosnia-Herzegovina war ended in 1995, I recall an email from academics there, having found some connectivity, writing to ask if they would be able to use Debian as part of their re-deployment of services for the Tertiary institutions in the region. This was an unnecessary request as Debian GNU/Linux is freely available, but it was a reminder that, for the country to have tried to procure commercial solutions at that time would have been difficult. Instead, those that could do the task just got on with it. There s been many similar project where the grass-roots organisations non profits, NGOs, and even just loose collectives of individuals have turned to Linux, Open Source, and sometimes Debian to solve their problems. Many fine projects have been established to make technology accessible to all, regardless of race, gender, nationality, class, or any other label society has used to divide humans. Big hat tip to Humanitarian Open Street Map, Serval Project. I ve always loved Debian s position on being the Universal operating system. Its vast range of packages and wide range of computing architectures supported means that quite often a litmus test of is project X a good project? was met with is it packaged for Debian? . That wide range of architectures has meant that administrators of systems had fewer surprises and a faster adoption cycle when changing platforms, such as the switch from x86 32 bit to x86 64 bit. Enter the Cloud I first laid eyes on the AWS Cloud in 2008. It was nothing like the rich environment you see today. The first thing I looked for was my favourite operating system, so that what I already knew and was familiar with was available in this environment to minimise the learning curve. However there were no official images, which was disconcerting. In 2012 I joined AWS as an employee. Living in Australia they hired me into the field sales team as a Solution Architect a sort of pre-sales tech with a customer focused depth in security. It was a wonderful opportunity, and I learnt a great deal. It also made sense (to me, at least) to do something about getting Debian s images blessed. It turned out, that I had to almost define what that was: images endorsed by a Debian Developer, handed to the AWS Marketplace team. And so since 2013 I have done so, keeping track of Debian s releases across the AWS regions, collaborating with other Debian folk on other cloud platforms to attempt a unified approach to generating and maintaining these images. This included (for a stint) generating them into the AWS GovCloud Region, and still into the AWS China (Beijing) Region the other side of the so-called Great Firewall of China. So why the trip? We ve had focus groups at the Debconf (Debian conference) around the world, but its often difficult to get the right group of people in the same rooms at the same time. So the proposal was to hold a focused Debian Cloud Sprint. Google was good enough to host this, for all the volunteers across all the cloud providers. Furthermore, donated funds were found to secure the travel for a set of people to attend who otherwise could not. I was lucky enough to be given a flight. So here I am, in the terminal in Australia: my kids are tucked up in bed, dreaming of the candy they just collected for Halloween. It will be a draining week I am sure, but if it helps set and improve the state of Debian then its worth it.

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. I'm quite slow in processing the hosting requests, but when I do that, I process them in a batch and add several projects at once. This time, the newly hosted projects include:

• JaMuz - Music management tool
• World-Weather - An Android app that uses the Open Weather Map API
• GNUSim8085 - A graphical simulator, assembler and debugger for the Intel 8085 microprocesso
• Commons Mobile App - Upload pictures from Android to Wikimedia Commons
• Debian Edu Documentation
• Duplicati - Store securely encrypted backups on cloud storage services

Filed under: Debian English SUSE Weblate 0 comments

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. I'm quite slow in processing the hosting requests, but when I do that, I process them in a batch and add several projects at once. This time, the newly hosted projects include:

• JaMuz - Music management tool
• World-Weather - An Android app that uses the Open Weather Map API
• GNUSim8085 - A graphical simulator, assembler and debugger for the Intel 8085 microprocesso
• Commons Mobile App - Upload pictures from Android to Wikimedia Commons
• Debian Edu Documentation
• Duplicati - Store securely encrypted backups on cloud storage services

Filed under: Debian English SUSE Weblate 0 comments

Earlier this week, I finally got my new machine that came with my new position at the University of Pennsylvania: A shiny Thinkpad T460s that now replaces my T430s. (Yes, there is a pattern. It continues with T400 and T41p.) I decided to re-install my Debian system from scratch and copy over only the home directory a bit of purification does not hurt. This blog post contains some random notes that might be useful to someone or alternative where I hope someone can tell me how to fix and improve things.

Installation The installation (using debian-installer from a USB drive) went mostly smooth, including LVM on an encrypted partition. Unfortunately, it did not set up grub correctly for the UEFI system to boot, so I had to jump through some hoops (using the grub on the USB drive to manually boot into the installed system, and installing grub-efi from there) until the system actually came up.

High-resolution display This laptop has a 2560 1440 high resolution display. Modern desktop environments like GNOME supposedly handle that quite nicely, but for reasons explained in an earlier post, I do not use a desktop envrionment but have a minimalistic setup based on Xmonad. I managed to get a decent setup now, by turning lots of manual knobs:

• For the linux console, setting

  FONTFACE="Terminus"
  FONTSIZE="12x24"

  in /etc/default/console-setup yielded good results.
• For the few GTK-2 applications that I am still running, I set

  gtk-font-name="Sans 16"

  in ~/.gtkrc-2.0. Similarly, for GTK-3 I have

  [Settings]
  gtk-font-name = Sans 16

  in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini.
• Programs like gnome-terminal, Evolution and hexchat refer to the System default document font and System default monospace font . I remember that it was possible to configure these in the GNOME control center, but I could not find any way of configuring these using command line tools, so I resorted to manually setting the font for these. With the help from Alexandre Franke I figured out that the magic incarnation here is:

  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name 'Monospace 16'
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface document-font-name 'Serif 16'
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Sans 16'

• Firefox seemed to have picked up these settings for the UI, so that was good. To make web pages readable, I set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.5 in about:config.
• GVim has set guifont=Monospace\ 16 in ~/.vimrc. The toolbar is tiny, but I hardly use it anyways.
• Setting the font of Xmonad prompts requires the sytax

  , font = "xft:Sans:size=16"

  Speaking about Xmonad prompts: Check out the XMonad.Prompt.Unicode module that I have been using for years and recently submitted upstream.
• I launch Chromium (or rather the desktop applications that I use that happen to be Chrome apps) with the parameter --force-device-scale-factor=1.5.
• Libreoffice seems to be best configured by running xrandr --dpi 194 before hand. This seems also to be read by Firefox, doubling the effect of the font size in the gtk settings, which is annoying. Luckily I do not work with Libreoffice often, so for now I ll just set that manually when needed.

I am not quite satisfied. I have the impression that the 16 point size font, e.g. in Evolution, is not really pretty, so I am happy to take suggestions here. I found the ArchWiki page on HiDPI very useful here.

Trackpoint and Touchpad One reason for me to sticking with Thinkpads is their trackpoint, which I use exclusively. In previous models, I disabled the touchpad in the BIOS, but this did not seem to have an effect here, so I added the following section to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        Option "ignore" "on"
EndSection

At one point I left out the MatchProduct line, disabling all input in the X server. Had to boot into recovery mode to fix that. Unfortunately, there is something wrong with the trackpoint and the buttons: When I am moving the trackpoint (and maybe if there is actual load on the machine), mouse button press and release events sometimes get lost. This is quite annoying I try to open a folder in Evolution and accidentially move it. I installed the latest Kernel from Debian experimental (4.8.0-rc8), but it did not help. I filed a bug report against libinput although I am not fully sure that that s the culprit. Update: According to Benjamin Tissoires it is a known firmware bug and the appropriate people are working on a work-around. Until then I am advised to keep my palm of the touchpad. Also, I found the trackpoint too slow. I am not sure if it is simply because of the large resolution of the screen, or because some movement events are also swallowed. For now, I simply changed the speed by writing

SUBSYSTEM=="serio", DRIVERS=="psmouse", ATTRS speed ="120"

to /etc/udev/rules.d/10-trackpoint.rules.

Brightness control The system would not automatically react to pressing Fn-F5 and Fn-F6, which are the keys to adjust the brightness. I am unsure about how and by what software component it should be handled, but the solution that I found was to set

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "card0"
        Driver      "intel"
        Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
        BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

so that the command line tool xbacklight would work, and then use Xmonad keybinds to perform the action, just as I already do for sound control:

    , ((0, xF86XK_Sleep),       spawn "dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.UPower /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend")
    , ((0, xF86XK_AudioMute), spawn "ponymix toggle")
    , ((0, 0x1008ffb2  - xF86XK_AudioMicMute - ), spawn "ponymix --source toggle")
    , ((0, xF86XK_AudioRaiseVolume), spawn "ponymix increase 5")
    , ((0, xF86XK_AudioLowerVolume), spawn "ponymix decrease 5")
    , ((shiftMask, xF86XK_AudioRaiseVolume), spawn "ponymix increase 5 --max-volume 200")
    , ((shiftMask, xF86XK_AudioLowerVolume), spawn "ponymix decrease 5")
    , ((0, xF86XK_MonBrightnessUp), spawn "xbacklight +10")
    , ((0, xF86XK_MonBrightnessDown), spawn "xbacklight -10")

The T460s does not actually have a sleep button, that line is a reminiscence from my T430s. I suspend the machine by pressing the power button now, thanks to HandlePowerKey=suspend in /etc/systemd/logind.conf.

Profile Weirdness Something strange happend to my environment variables after the move. It is clearly not hardware related, but I simply cannot explain what has changed: All relevant files in /etc look similar enough. I use ~/.profile to extend the PATH and set some other variables. Previously, these settings were in effect in my whole X session, which is started by lightdm with auto-login, followed by xmonad-session. I could find no better way to fix that than stating . ~/.profile early in my ~/.xmonad/xmonad-session-rc. Very strange.

Last we heard from our fearless hero, Neovim, it was just entering the NEW queue. Well, a few days later it landed in experimental and 8 months, to the day, since then it is now in Stretch. Enjoy the fish!

Every year since 2010 the Whitley Bay Film Festival has put on a programme of movies in my home town, often with some quirk or gimmick. A few years back we watched "Dawn Of The Dead" in a shopping centre the last act was interrupted by a fake film-reel break, then a load of zombies emerged from the shops. Sometime after that, we saw "The Graduate" within a Church as part of their annual "Secret Cinema" showing. Other famous stunts (which I personally did not witness) include a screening of Jaws on the beach and John Carpenter's "The Fog" in Whitley Bay Lighthouse.

Massive thanks to Hunter North Recruitment for sponsoring Metropolis https://t.co/mphzHPCQ6O @snattaz pic.twitter.com/S9MNQmeLWZ Whitley Film Fest (@wbayfilmfest) August 14, 2016

This year I only went to one showing, Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Two twists this time: it was being shown in The Rendezvous Cafe, an Art-Deco themed building on the sea front; the whole film was accompanied by a live, improvised synthesizer jam by a group of friends and synth/sound enthusiasts who branded themselves "The Mediators" for the evening.

Metropolis live soundtrack preparations at the Rendezvous Cafe. Doors open 19.30 #metropolis pic.twitter.com/AdAqNVdEdx Whitley Film Fest (@wbayfilmfest) August 14, 2016

I've been meaning to watch Metropolis for a long time (I've got the Blu-Ray still sat in the shrink-wrap) and it was great to see the newly restored version, but the live synth accompaniment was what really made the night special for me. They used a bunch of equipment, most notably a set of Korg Volcas. The soundtrack varied in style and intensity to suit the scenes, with the various under-city scenes backed by a pumping, industrial-style improvisation which sounded quite excellent. I've had an interest in playing with synthesisers and making music for years, but haven't put the time in to do it properly. I left newly inspired and energised to finally try to make the time to explore it.

I bought a laptop with only SSD drives a while ago and based on a limited amount of reading, added the "discard" option to my /etc/fstab file for all partitions and happily went on my way expecting to avoid the performance degradation problems that happen on SSD cards without this setting). Yesterday, after a several month ordeal, I finally installed SSD drives in one of May First/People Link's servers and started doing more research to find the best way to set things up. I was quite surprised to learn that my change in /etc/fstab accomplished nothing. Well, not entirely true, my /boot partition was still getting empty sectors reported to the SSD card. Since my filesystem is on top of LVM and LVM is on top of an encrypted disk, those messages from the files system to the disk were not getting through. I learned that when I tried to run the fstrim command on one of the partitions and received the message that the disk didn't support it. Since my /boot partition is not in LVM or encrypted, it worked on /boot. I then made the necessary changes to /etc/lvm/lvm.conf and /etc/crypttab, restarted and... same result. Then I ran update-initramfs -u and rebooted and now fstrim works. I decided to remove the discard option from /etc/fstab and will set a cron job to run fstrim periodically. Also, I learned of some security implications of using trim on an encrypted disk which don't seem to outweigh the benefits.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 28 and Saturday September 3 2016: Media coverage Antonio Terceiro blogged about testing build reprodubility with debrepro . GSoC and Outreachy updates The next round is being planned now: see their page with a timeline and participating organizations listing. Maybe you want to participate this time? Then please reach out to us as soon as possible! Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following packages have addressed reproducibility issues in other packages:

• ruby-ronn/0.7.3-5 by Antonio Terceiro, original patch by Chris Lamb.

The following updated packages have become reproducible in our current test setup after being fixed:

• check-all-the-things/2016.09.03 by Paul Wise, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• e2fsprogs/1.43.2-2 by Theodore Y. Ts'o.
• gnupg1/1.4.21-1 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, #834755 by Chris Lamb.
• gnupg2/2.1.15-2 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• inform6-compiler/6.33-2 by Ben Finney.
• libhat-trie/0.0~git25f9e946-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• mrd6/0.9.6-13 by Thomas Preud'homme, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• safecat/1.13-3 by Teemu Hukkanen, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• shibboleth-sp2/2.6.0+dfsg1-1 by Ferenc W gner.
• sweethome3d-furniture-editor/1.15-2 by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• traceroute/1:2.1.0-2 by Laszlo Boszormenyi, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• wise/2.4.1-19 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• xmltooling/1.6.0-2 by Ferenc W gner.

The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out yet. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.)

• comitup/0.5-1 by David Steele.
• dita-ot/1.5.3-2 by Mathieu Malaterre.
• dput/0.10.2 by Ben Finney.
• gnome-settings-daemon/3.21.90-2 by Michael Biebl.
• libkf5kipi/4:16.08.0-1 by Pino Toscano.
• libmpc/2:0.1~r475-2 by James Cowgill.
• taurus/4.0.1+dfsg-1 by Picca Fr d ric-Emmanuel.
• tcpwatch-httpproxy/1.3.1-2 by Toni Mueller.

The following 4 packages were not changed, but have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies:

• djangorestframework
• roarplaylistd
• zope-maildrophost
• zope-replacesupport

Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• amanda/1:3.3.9-1 by Jose M Calhariz.
• dispcalgui/3.1.6.0-2 by Christian Marillat, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fastqtl/2.184+dfsg-4 by Dylan A ssi.
• grass/7.0.5~rc1-1~exp1 by Bas Couwenberg.
• kdevplatform/5.0-1 by Pino Toscano, original patch by Scarlett Clark.
• leveldb/1.19-1 by Alessio Treglia.
• libdevel-cover-perl/1.23-2 by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• linux/4.7.2-1 by Ben Hutchings, #830268 by Reiner Herrmann.
• lmms/1.1.3-4 by Javier Serrano.
• mayavi2/4.4.3-2.2 by Anton Gladky.
• opensaml2/2.6.0-2 by Ferenc W gner.
• perl/5.22.2-4 by Dominic Hargreaves, original patch and original patch by Chris Lamb.
• radare2/0.10.5+dfsg-1 by Sebastian Reichel, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• splint/3.1.2.dfsg1-3 by Rapha l Hertzog, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #835673 filed against dacs by Chris Lamb.
• #835805 filed against dh-python by Chris Lamb.
• #835985 filed against nmh by Chris Lamb.
• #836609 filed against nostalgy by Chris Lamb.
• #835807 filed against pygtksourceview by Chris Lamb.
• #836004 filed against python-gflags by Chris Lamb.
• #835816 filed against rt-extension-customfieldsonupdate by Chris Lamb.
• #835834 filed against ruby-compass by Chris Lamb.
• #836605 filed against torque by Chris Lamb.
• #833176 filed against trafficserver by Reiner Herrmann.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 706 package reviews have been added, 22 have been updated and 16 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 5 issue types have been added:

• timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_ocamldoc
• timestamp_in_enc_files_added_by_texlive_fontinst
• cython_captures_build_path
• timestamps_in_perllocal_pod_manpages_generated_by_perl_extutils_mm_unix
• uname_output_in_python_debugging_symbols_caused_by_sysconfig_getplatform

1 issue type has been updated:

• timestamp_in_enc_files_added_by_texlive_fontinst

Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by:

• Chris Lamb (8)
• Lucas Nussbaum (3)

diffoscope development diffoscope development on the next version (60) continued in git, taking in contributions from:

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Better and more thorough testing
  • Improvements to packaging
  • Improvements to the ppu comparator

strip-nondeterminism development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.023-2~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports. A new version of strip-nondeterminism 0.024-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Improve code quality of zip, jar, ar, png processors
• AYANOKOUZI, Ryuunosuke:
  • Preserve file attribute information of target file (#836075)

Holger added jobs on jenkins.debian.net to run testsuites on every commit. There is one job for the master branch and one for the other branches. disorderfs development Holger added jobs on jenkins.debian.net to run testsuites on every commit. There is one job for the master branch and one for the other branches. tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: We now vary the GECOS records of the two build users. Thanks to Paul Wise for providing the patch. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

The seventh update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp just arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R as well as in Debian. This 0.12.7 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, and the 0.12.6 release in July --- making it the eleventh release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. Keeping with the established pattern, this is again more of a maintenance release which addresses small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features. One issue that got to a few people was our casual use of NORET in the definition of Rcpp::stop(). We had (ahem) overlooked that NORET is only defined by R 3.2.0 or later, and several folks trying to build on older releases of R (why?) got bitten. Well, at least we have a new record for most frequently reported bug ... Kidding aside, this is now fixed. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 759 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by well over fifty packages since the last release in mid-July! We are once again fortunate to have a number of pull request, from first-timers to regulars. James "coatless" Balamuta in particular relentlessly pushed for better documentation and cleanup of numerous dangling issue tickets. Artem Klevtsov also contributed again. Qiang, Kevin and I also got some changes in for the Rcpp Core team. More details are again below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.7 (2016-09-04)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • The NORET macro is now defined if it was not already defined by R itself (Kevin fixing issue #512).
  • Environment functions get() & find() now accept a Symbol (James Balamuta in #513 addressing issue #326).
  • Several uses of Rf_eval were replaced by the preferred Rcpp::Rcpp_eval (Qiang in PR #523 closing #498).
  • Improved Autogeneration Warning for RcppExports (James Balamuta in #528 addressing issue #526).
  • Fixed invalid C++ prefix identifiers in auto-generated code (James Balamuta in #528 and #531 addressing issue #387; Simon Dirmeier in #548).
  • String constructors now set default UTF-8 encoding (Qiang Kou in #529 fixing #263).
  • Add variadic variants of the RCPP_RETURN_VECTOR and RCPP_RETURN_MATRIX macro when C++11 compiler used (Artem Klevtsov in #537 fixing #38).
• Changes in Rcpp build system
  • Travis CI is now driven via run.sh from our fork, and deploys all packages as .deb binaries using our PPA where needed (Dirk in #540 addressing issue #517).
• Changes in Rcpp unit tests
  • New unit tests for random number generators the R namespace which call the standalone Rmath library. (James Balamuta in #514 addressing issue #28).
• Changes in Rcpp Examples:
  • Examples that used cxxfunction() from the inline package have been rewritten to use either sourceCpp() or cppFunction() (James Balamuta in #541, #535, #534, and #532 addressing issue #56).

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.

I bought a new phone. After my experiences with signal and the helpful comments readers gave regarding the ability to run android and signal without Google Play using microg I thought I would give it a shot. Since microg reports that signature spoofing is required and comes out-of-the-box with omnirom I thought I'd aim for installing omnirom's version of Android 6 (marshmallow) after years of using cyanomgenmod's version of Android. The Nexus line of phones seemed well-supported by omnirom in particular (and the alternative ROM community in general) so I bought a Nexus 5x. I carefully followed the directions for installing omnirom however when it came time to boot into omnirom, I just got the boot sequence animation over and over again. Frustrated, I decided to go back to cyanogenmod and see if I could use one of the microg recommended methods for getting signature spoofing to work. The easiest seemed to be Needle by moosd but alas no such luck with Marshmallow. Someone else forked the code and might fix it one day. I then spent too much time trying to understand what xposed is before I gave up understanding it and just tried to install it (woops, looks like the installer page is out of date so instead I followed sketchy instructions from a forum thread). Well, to make a long story short it resulted in a boot loop. So, I decided to return to omnirom. After reading some vague references to omnirom and supersu, I decided to flash both of them together and voila, it worked! Next, I decided to enable full disk encryption. Not so fast. After clicking through the screens and hitting the final confirmation, my phone rebooted and spent the next 5 hours showing me the omnirom boot animation. Somehow, powering down and starting again resulted in a working machine, but no disk encryption. After much web searching, guessing and trial and error, I fixed the problem by clicking on the SuperSU option to "Full unroot" the device (I pressed "no" when prompted to attempt to restore stock image). Then I rebooted and followed the directions to encrypt the device. And it worked! Hooray! I had to reboot and re-flash the supersu to regain su privileges. All was great. The first root action I decided to take was to install the cryptfs program from f-droid because using the same password to decrypt your device as you use to unlock the screen seems either tedious or insecure. That process didn't work so well. I got a message saying: use this command from a root shell before you reboot: vdc cryptfs changepw <password>. I followed the advice, carefully typing in my 12 character password which includes numbers and letters. Then, I happily did what I expected to be my last reboot when, to my horror, I was prompted to decrypt my disk with ... a numeric-only keypad. That wasn't going to work. At this point I had already spent 5 days and about 8 hours on this project. Sigh. So, I started over. Guess what? It only took me 25 minutes but, it seems that cryptfs is broken. Even with a numeric password it fails. Ok, I guess I need a long pin to unlock my phone. This time it only took my 15 minutes to wipe and re-install everything. There are only two positive things I can think of:

• TWRP, which provides the recovery image, is really great. Everytime something went wrong I booted into the TWRP recovery image and could fix anything.
• I'm starting to get used to the error on startup warning me that "Your device is corrupt. It can't be trusted and may not work properly." It's a good thing to remember about all digital devices.

p.s. I haven't even tried to install microg yet... which was the whole point.

A Few Useful Mental Tools from Richard Feynman [archive]

These tricks show Feynman taking the method of thought he learned in pure science and applying it to the more mundane topics most of us have to deal with every day.

Pasta [archive]

A comprehensive introduction to pasta, to keep at hand in case I meet someone who has little familiarity with it.

MPTP: One Designer Drug and Serendipity [archive]

Abstract: Through an unlikely series of coincidences and fortunate accidents, the development of Parkinson s disease in several illicit drug users was traced to their use of a meperidine analog contaminated with 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP). The discovery of a chemical capable of producing animal models of the disease has revitalized research efforts and resulted in important new information. The serendipitous finding also prompted consideration of what changes seem advisable if designer drugs are to be dealt with more efficaciously.

The Debunking Handbook: now freely available for download

The Debunking Handbook, a guide to debunking misinformation, is now freely available to download. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there's no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths.

Faulty neon light jams radio appliances [archive]

An apparent interference source began plaguing wireless vehicle key fobs, cell phones, and other wireless electronics. Key fob owners found they could not open or start their vehicles remotely until their vehicles were towed at least a block away, nor were they able to call for help on their cell phones when problems occurred

Calvin & Muad'Dib

Calvin & Hobbes with text taken from Frank Herbert's Dune. It's been around since 2013 and I consistently found it moving and deep.

When Birds Attack - Bike Helmet Hacks [archive]

Australian magpies attacking cyclists has propted several creative adaptations, including attaching an afro wig to the bike helmet.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Worked on nsntrace, a userspace tool to perform network traces on processes using kernel namespaces:
  • Overhauled error handling to ensure the return code of the wrapped process is returned to the surrounding environment. (#10).
  • Permit the -u argument to also accept uids as well as usernames. (#16).
  • Always kill the (hard-looping) udp_send utility, even on test failures. (#13).
  • Updated configure.ac to look for iptables in /sbin & /usr/sbin (#11) and to raise an error if pcap.h is missing (#15).
  • Drop bashisms in #!/bin/sh script (#14) and ignore the generated manpage in the Git repository (#12).
• Independently discovered an regression in the Django web development framework where field__isnull=False filters were not working with some foreign keys, resulting in extending the testsuite and release documentation. (#7104).
• Proposed a change to django-enumfield (a custom field for type-safe constants) to ensure passing a string type to Enum.get returned None on error to match the documentation. (#36).
• Fixed an issue in the Mopidy music player's podcast extension where the testsuite was failing tests in extreme timezones. (#40).
• Proposed changes to make various upstream's reproducible:
  • botan, a crypto/TLS library for C++11. (#587).
  • cookiecutter, a project template generator, removing nondeterministic keyword arguments from appearing in the documentation. (#800).
  • pyicu, a Python wraper for the IBM Unicode library. (#27).
• Integrated a number of issues raised by @piotr1212 to python-fadvise, my Python interface to posix_fadvise(2), where the API was not being applied to open file descriptors (#1) and moving the .so to a module directory (#2).
• Various improvements to try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content-aware diff utility, including introducing an HTTP API (#21), updating the SSL certificate and correcting a logic issue where errors in diffoscope itself were not being detected correctly (b0ff49). Continued thanks to Bytemark for sponsoring the hardware.
• Fixed a bug in django-slack, my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility, correcting an EncodeError exception under Python 3 (#53) and updated the minimum required version of Django to 1.7 (#54).
• Various updates to tickle-me-email, my Getting Things Done-inspired email toolbox, to also match / in IMAP's LIST separators (#6) and to encode the folder list as UTF-7 (#7). Thanks to @resiak.
• Clarified the documentation for travis.debian.net my hosted script to easily test and build Debian packages on the Travis CI continuous integration platform regarding how to integrate with Github (#20).

---

A new upstream release 3.2.9 of Eigen is now reflected in a new RcppEigen release 0.3.2.9.0 which got onto CRAN late yesterday and is now going into Debian. Once again, Yixuan Qiu did the heavy lifting of merging upstream (and two local twists we need to keep around). Another change is by James "coatless" Balamuta who added a row exporter. The NEWS file entry follows.

Changes in RcppEigen version 0.3.2.9.0 (2016-08-20)

• Updated to version 3.2.9 of Eigen (PR #37 by Yixuan closing #36 from Bob Carpenter of the Stan team)
• An exporter for RowVectorX was added (thanks to PR #32 by James Balamuta)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

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

For the last few years I have been periodically testing out apertium and today I did again and was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the english-spanish and spanish-english translations (and also their nifty web site translator). So, I dusted off some of my geeky code to make it easier to use and continue testing. For starters...

    sudo apt-get install apertium-en-es xclip coreutils

Then, I added the following to my .muttrc file:

    macro pager <F2> "<enter-command>set pipe_decode<enter><pipe-entry> sed '1,/^$/d'   apertium es-en   less<enter><enter-command>unset pipe_decode<enter>" "translate from spanish"

If you press F2 while reading a message in spanish it will print out the English translation. If you use vim, you can create ~/.vim/plugins/apertium.vim with:

    function s:Translate()
        silent !clear
        execute "! apertium en-es " . bufname("%") . "   tee >(xclip)"
    endfunction
    command Translate :call <SID>Translate()

Then, you can type the command: :Translate And it will display the English to Spanish translation of the file you are editing and copy the translation into your clip board so you can paste it into your document.

Three months of coding is about to end.It has officially begun on May 23rd and we are getting near to the final submission deadline on August 15th.

You can checkout my Debian wiki page to know more about myself.

I have worked on improving voice, video and chat communication (Real Time Communication) with free software, one of the RTC project for Debian.

My mentors are Iain.R.Learmonth and Daniel Pocock.Both of them were dedicative and I could learn many new things from them within these three months.I have contacted my mentors through personal mail, Debian outreach mailing lists and IRC(#debian-data and #debian-soc). They were very responsive to my queries. Thank you Iain and Daniel for improving and enlightening me.

My initial task is e-mail mining. I have to allow the client to login to the mail using IMAP, extracts the To , From and CC headers of every email message in the folder and then scan for the phone numbers, SIP addresses, XMPP addresses in the body of the message.These extracted details should be written in the CSV file also.The extracted phone numbers, SIP addresses, XMPP addresses and ham call signs should be made into a click able link using Flask.

I have also attended DebConf-16 (conference of Debian developers, contributors and users) in Cape Town in the middle of three months (Form July 2nd to July 9th).I gave a talk on my progressing GSoC project.I have learnt many new things about Debian, their projects and their packages apart form my GSoC project.I have met Debian developers, contribuors and some of the fellow GSoC students.

I have written previous blog posts related to GSoC-2016 in the following links.

GSoC-Journey till Mid term

Weekly Report for GSoC16-week 1 and week2

Weekly Report for GSoC16-Community bonding period

Weekly reports sent to Debian-outreach list.

• Weeks 1 & 2 report
• Weeks 3 & 4 report
• Week-5 report
• Week-6 report
• Week-7 report
• Week-8 report
• Week-9 report
• Week-10 report
• Week-11 report
• Week-12 report

Email-Mining is the repository I have created on GitHub to work on my project.

I have divided the tasks and coded individually to combine together.Snippet folder in the file contains the code for each tasks.

Following are the commits I have made in the repository.

https://github.com/Jaminy/Email-Mining/commits/master My tasks have been extended to add a gravatar on the page listing details for each email address, maintain a counter for each hour of the day in the scraper for each mail, show a list of other people that have been involved in email conversations and make the contact information on the detail pages machine readable. https://github.com/Jaminy/Email-Mining/issues

My mentor suggested me to work on at least three issues before final submission.I have worked on each of them individually in the snippet folder except the last one.I will be working on it after GSoC.

Mailmine.py script contains the final code which combines all snippets into one.

Three pull requests are to be merged after the confirmation from my mentor.

These are the abstract about what I have done within these three months.

It was an amazing and thrilling coding ride.

Stay tuned for the elaborated blog posts with DebConf experience and many more.

I don't quite remember when I read John Goerzen's post about teaching a 4 year old to use the linux command line with audio on planet Debian. According to the byline it was published nearly 2 years before Noam was born, but I seem to remember reading it in the weeks after his birth when I was both thrilled at the prospect of teaching my kid to use the command line and, in my sleepless stupor, not entirely convinced he would ever be old enough. Well, the time came this morning. He found an old USB key board and discovered that a green light came on when he plugged it in. He was happily hitting the keys when Meredith suggested we turn on the monitor and open a program so he could see the letters appear on the screen and try to spell his name. After 10 minutes in Libre Office I remembered John's blog and was inspired to start writing a bash script in my head (I would have to stop the fun with Libre Office to write it so the pressure was on...). In the end it was only a few minutes and I came up with:

#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]; do
  read -p "What shall I say? "
  espeak "$REPLY"
done

It was a hit. He said what he wanted to hear and hit the keys, my job was to spell for him. Oh, also: he discovered key combinations that did things that were unsurprising to me (like taking the screen grab above) and also things that I'm still scratching my head about (like causing a prompt on the screen that said: "Downloading shockwave plugin." No thanks. And, how did he do that?