Search Results: "spa"

6 August 2015

Christoph Egger: unbreaking tt-rss

TinyTiny-RSS has some nice failure modes. And upstream support forums aren't really helpfull so when you search for your current problem, chances are that there is one mention of it on the web, in the forum, and the only thing happening there is people making fun of the reporter. Anyway. This installation has seen lots of error messages from the updater in the last several months: 
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
And, more recently, the android app stopped working with ERROR:JSON Parse failed.. Turns out both things are related. First thing I noticed was changing preferences in the web panel stopped working until you use the reset to Defaults option and then changed settings. Plugging wireshark in between showed what was going on (Note: API was displayed as enabled in Preferences/Preferences): 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2015 11:00:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/json
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.43
Content-Language: auto
Set-Cookie: [...]
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Api-Content-Length: 234
ea


Warning:  Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ENABLE_API_ACCESS (owner: 2) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108

 "seq":0,"status":1,"content": "error":"API_DISABLED" 
0
Solution for fixing the Android app (and the logspam on the way as well) seems to be to reset the preferences and then configure tt-rss again (In the webapp, not in the android thing!). Also silences tt-rss update_daemon as well, yay! One last thing: someone out there who wants to explain to me how to fix 
Fatal error: Query INSERT INTO ttrss_enclosures
                                                        (content_url, content_type, title, duration, post_id, width, height) VALUES
                                                        ('https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/e6d6ceb7764252af8da058e30cd8cb5f?s=96&d=identicon&r=G', '', '', '', '0', 0, 0) failed: ERROR:  insert or update on table "ttrss_enclosures" violates foreign key constraint "ttrss_enclosures_post_id_fkey"
DETAIL:  Key (post_id)=(0) is not present in table "ttrss_entries". in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/pgsql.php on line 46

Norbert Preining: Upgrading my eReader Kobo GloHD

After long time of dear service, I have decided to exchange my Kobo Glo to a new device, the Kob GloHD. The reasons are simple: higher resolution, better reading quality.
kobo-glohd-1 While the photos are not showing these details, the quality of the screen is definitely much better I have now read a few hours with the new device, both Japanese and English books, and the crispness of the letters has definitely improved. Very nice. Together with the new device came a new firmware, only released in Japan, 3.16.10. Of course it can be found on MobileRead. As with previous version, I will prepare a MegaPack containing nickel patches, ssh, custom dicts, etc etc, please wait a bit longer until KSM compatibility with the new firmware is perfect again. Talking of dictionaries: The new version brings a few more dicts, especially there are now two English-Japanese dictionaries, and a much more complete Japanese dictionary.
kobo-glohd-dictlist Unfortunately, as before, there is no Japanese-English dictionary. Till now I have used Tshering s excellent Japanese dictionary which was enriched with English definitions. But the new version brought a new dictionary that is much more complete:
kobo-glohd-dicsearch I have already a script ready that enriches this new big dictionary automatically with definitions from the Edict project, so everyone can now update his own dictionary easily. I will write a blog entry about this soon. That s it for the moment, back to reading. I love the new device, and will surely post many articles about it in the future!

5 August 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.5.300.4.0

armadillo image A new Armadillo release 5.300.4 was prepared by Conrad the other day, and we prepared a new corresponding RcppArmadillo release 0.5.300.4.0 which is now on CRAN and in way into Debian. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. This release brings a considerable amount of new code extending support for sparse matrices, support for Schur decompositions, and much more as shown in the extract from NEWS file:
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.300.4 (2015-08-03)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo 5.300.4 ("Plutocrazy Incorporated")
    • added generalised Schur decomposition: qz()
    • added .has_inf() and .has_nan()
    • expanded interp1() to handle out-of-domain locations
    • expanded sparse matrix class with .set_imag() and .set_real()
    • expanded imag(), real() and conj() to handle sparse matrices
    • expanded diagmat(), reshape() and resize() to handle sparse matrices
    • faster sparse sum()
    • faster row-wise sum(), mean(), min(), max()
    • updated physical constants to NIST 2014 CODATA values
    • fixes for handling sparse submatrix views
    • Armadillo can make use of GPUs by linking with NVIDIA NVBLAS (a GPU-accelerated implementation of BLAS), or by linking with AMD ACML (which can use GPUs via OpenCL)
  • Added importFrom statements for R functions not from base
  • Added explicit Rcpp::sourceCpp() reference as well
  • Updated one formatting detail in vignette to please TeXlive2015
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. 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.

Antonio Terceiro: Elixir in Debian, MiniDebconf at FISL, and Debian CI updates

In June I started keeping track of my Debian activities, and this is my July update. Elixir in Debian Elixir is a functional language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine. If features imutable data structures, interesting concurrency primitives, and everything else that Erlang does, but with a syntax inspired by Ruby what makes it much more aproachable in my opinion. Those interested in Elixir for Debian are encouraged to hang around in #debian-elixir on the OFTC IRC servers. There are still a lot of things to figure out, for example how packaging Elixir libraries and applications is going to work. MiniDebconf at FISL, and beyond I helped organize a MiniDebconf at this year s FISL, in Porto Alegre on the 10th of July. The whole program was targetted at getting more people to participate in Debian, so there were talks about translation, packaging, and a few other more specific topics. I myself gave two talks: one about Debian basics, What is Debian, and how it works , and second one on packaging the free software web , which I will also give at Debconf15 later this month. The recordings are available (all talks in Portuguese) at the Debian video archive thanks to Holger Levsen. We are also organizing a new MiniDebconf in October as part of the Latinoware schedule. Ruby We are in the middle of a transition to switch to Ruby 2.2 as default in Debian unstable, and we are almost there. The Ruby transition is now on hold while GCC 5 one is going on, but will be picked up as soon as were are done with GCC 5. ruby-defaults has been uploaded to experimental for those that want to try having Ruby 2.2 as default before that change hits unstable. I myself have been using Ruby 2.2 as default for several weeks without any problem so far, including using vagrant on a daily basis and doing all my development on sid with it. I started taking notes about Ruby interpreter transitions work to make sure that knowledge is registered. I have uploaded minor security updates of both ruby2.1 and ruby2.2 to unstable. They both reached testing earlier today. I have also fixed another bug in redmine, which I hope to get into stable as well as soon as possible. gem2deb has seen several improvements through versions 0.19, 0.20, 0.20.1 and 0.20.2. I have updated a few packages: Two NEW packages, ruby-rack-contrib and ruby-grape-logging ,were ACCEPTED into the Debian archive. Kudos to the ftp-master team who are doing an awesome job reviewing new packages really fast. Debian Continuous Integration This month I have made good progress with the changes needed to make debci work as a distributed system with one master/scheduler node and as many worker nodes (running tests) as possible. While doing my tests, I have submitted a patch to lxc and updated autodep8 in unstable. At some point I plan to upload both autodep8 and autopkgtest to jessie-backports. Sponsoring I have sponsored a few packages:

3 August 2015

Jamie McClelland: Docker: evil spawn or useful tool

There are plenty of criticisms of docker, the system for building a container-based virtual machine running just a single application. I've read many of them have have consistently been either in agreement or at least amused. The most relevant criticism is about the basic approach of building single-application virtual machines. To understand this criticism, let's remember - in traditional application deployment there are at least three distinct jobs: These three groups have lived in happy tension for years. Now we have containers. The problem with containers is that suddenly the system administrators are out entirely and the distribution developers' role may have been dramatically minimized or circumvented altogether. Meanwhile, the application developer is both liberated from any constraints imposed by either the system administrator or the distribution developers (hooray!) but is also sadled with the enormous responsibilities of these two roles - which may not be apparent to the application developer at first. I have practically no distribution developer experience and have considerable experience as a system administrator and an application developer. And, it took me months to sort through how to properly develop and deploy an application using docker in a way that I thought was responsible and secure. I started by learning about how docker wants you to deploy images - by downloading them from their shared regisry. As I mentioned, I have very little experience in the realm of distribution development, but I at least know enough about Debian to know that a lot of time and thought has gone into cryptographically verifying packages that I install, which apparently is not done at all with Docker images. Is that obvious to everyone using Docker?? Fortunately, you can work around this problem by creating your own base image which is trivially easy. So, now I build all images, from scratch, locally. That helps put Debian developers back into the mix. Next, I started looking at Docker Files that I could use to construct my images and discovered something else troubling. Take, for example, the official nginx Docker image. It is based on Debian Jessie (hooray - our distribution developers are in the mix!). However, it then proceeds to install nginx from the nginx repository, not the debian repository. Well, I guess if you are nginx you want to have full control, but still, the Debian developers version of nginx has been vetted to ensure it works with Debian Jessie, so you are really losing something here. So... my next break from Docker convention is to use all Debian packages in my Docker files. Once my images were built and my application was tested and running, I was done, right? Wrong. Well, I would have been done if I didn't care about upgrading my systems, backing up my data or running cron jobs. Remember those things? Those are things that distribution developers and system administrators have been perfecting for decades. And, they are not trivial. I then built a series of scripts to help alert me when a image I am using has updates (you can't just use cron-apt any more since cron isn't running in your container) and help me update the image and deploy it to all my applications (which involves restarting the application). Backing up data is a whole different can of worms - sometimes involving interacting with your container (if it's a database container, you have to launch a database dump) or simply copying files from the host, assuming you got the right Docker volume strategy (which took me days to fully understand). Lastly, I had to run a cron job from the host that then runs whatever commands are needed on each of my containers. This was complicated. In the end, was it worth it? Yes, I think so. However, not because it was simple, which seems to be the Docker mantra. I think it's worth it because I can run 100 instances of my application using significantly less resources than when I was using full virtualization and because I can more easily and flexibly adjust the resource allocation. However, check in with me in a year and I'll probably have a different opinion.

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 14 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes akira submitted a patch to make cdbs export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. She uploded a package with the enhancement to the experimental reproducible repository. Packages fixed The following 15 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: dracut, editorconfig-core, elasticsearch, fish, libftdi1, liblouisxml, mk-configure, nanoc, octave-bim, octave-data-smoothing, octave-financial, octave-ga, octave-missing-functions, octave-secs1d, octave-splines, valgrind. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: In contrib, Dmitry Smirnov improved libdvd-pkg with 1.3.99-1-1. Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Four armhf build hosts were provided by Vagrant Cascadian and have been configured to be used by jenkins.debian.net. Work on including armhf builds in the reproducible.debian.net webpages has begun. So far the repository comparison page just shows us which armhf binary packages are currently missing in our repo. (h01ger) The scheduler has been changed to re-schedule more packages from stretch than sid, as the gcc5 transition has started This mostly affects build log age. (h01ger) A new depwait status has been introduced for packages which can't be built because of missing build dependencies. (Mattia Rizzolo) debbindiff development Finally, on August 31st, Lunar released debbindiff 27 containing a complete overhaul of the code for the comparison stage. The new architecture is more versatile and extensible while minimizing code duplication. libarchive is now used to handle cpio archives and iso9660 images through the newly packaged python-libarchive-c. This should also help support a couple other archive formats in the future. Symlinks and devices are now properly compared. Text files are compared as Unicode after being decoded, and encoding differences are reported. Support for Sqlite3 and Mono/.NET executables has been added. Thanks to Valentin Lorentz, the test suite should now run on more systems. A small defiency in unquashfs has been identified in the process. A long standing optimization is now performed on Debian package: based on the content of the md5sums control file, we skip comparing files with matching hashes. This makes debbindiff usable on packages with many files. Fuzzy-matching is now performed for files in the same container (like a tarball) to handle renames. Also, for Debian .changes, listed files are now compared without looking the embedded version number. This makes debbindiff a lot more useful when comparing different versions of the same package. Based on the rearchitecturing work has been done to allow parallel processing. The branch now seems to work most of the time. More test needs to be done before it can be merged. The current fuzzy-matching algorithm, ssdeep, has showed disappointing results. One important use case is being able to properly compare debug symbols. Their path is made using the Build ID. As this identifier is made with a checksum of the binary content, finding things like CPP macros is much easier when a diff of the debug symbols is available. Good news is that TLSH, another fuzzy-matching algorithm, has been tested with much better results. A package is waiting in NEW and the code is ready for it to become available. A follow-up release 28 was made on August 2nd fixing content label used for gzip2, bzip2 and xz files and an error on text files only differing in their encoding. It also contains a small code improvement on how comments on Difference object are handled. This is the last release name debbindiff. A new name has been chosen to better reflect that it is not a Debian specific tool. Stay tuned! Documentation update Valentin Lorentz updated the patch submission template to suggest to write the kind of issue in the bug subject. Small progress have been made on the Reproducible Builds HOWTO while preparing the related CCCamp15 talk. Package reviews 235 obsolete reviews have been removed, 47 added and 113 updated this week. 42 reports for packages failing to build from source have been made by Chris West (Faux). New issue added this week: haskell_devscripts_locale_substvars. Misc. Valentin Lorentz wrote a script to report packages tested as unreproducible installed on a system. We encourage everyone to run it on their systems and give feedback!

Matthew Palmer: How not to report abuse

This is the entire complaint that was received:
We are an IT security company from Spain. We have detected sensitive information belonging to Banesco Banco Universal, C.A. clientes. As authorized representative in the resolution of IT security incidents affecting Banesco Banco Universal, C.A., we demand the deletion of the content related to Banesco Banco Universal, C.A, clients. This content violates the law about electronic crime in Venezuela (see Ley Especial sobre Delitos Inform ticos de Venezuela , Chapter III, Articles 20 y 23).
Note the complete lack of any information regarding what URLs, or even which site(s), they consider to be problematic. Nope, just delete all our stuff! and a wave of the against the law somewhere! stick.

2 August 2015

Carl Chenet: My Free activities in July 2015

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter or Diaspora*diaspora-banner Here are the details of my Free activities in July 2015. Carl Chenet s projects: Patchs: Debian bug reports: Other bug reports: Feature requests:

Benjamin Mako Hill: Understanding Hydroplane Races for the New Seattleite

It s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. EllstromManufacturingHydroplaneIn my social circle, I m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! most people seem more puzzled than interested. I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites. Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines! The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn t bad. miss_thriftwayAlthough the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals. In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I m no follower of motorsports in general, I ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on. It s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

Benjamin Mako Hill: Understanding Hydroplane Races for the New Seattleite

It s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. EllstromManufacturingHydroplaneIn my social circle, I m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! most people seem more puzzled than interested. I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites. Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines! The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn t bad. miss_thriftwayAlthough the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals. In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I m no follower of motorsports in general, I ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on. It s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

1 August 2015

Steve McIntyre: Justifying 32-bit UEFI on 64-bit Intel hardware, and tracking broken UEFI implementations

You might have seen some of the posts I've written in the last few months about adding support in Debian for so-called Mixed-EFI systems like the Intel Bay Trail: a 64-bit processor shipped with a 32-bit EFI implementation. I've finally seen a public justification from Intel evangelist Brian Richardson as to why these systems are crippled^Wconfigured this way, and it's nice to see our guesses confirmed. The reason is simply cost - like most consumer PCs shipped today, they come with Windows. In terms of system design, it's cheaper to just include the limited memory and storage needed for 32-bit Windows. 64-bit Windows takes a lot more storage in particular. And on modern systems 32-bit Windows can only boot using 32-bit UEFI. Fair enough... However, Brian goes on to state some more things that are simply out of date, saying that "Linux support for UEFI IA32 is still an unanswered question". Ummm, Brian: we've got working 32-bit x86 UEFI support in our standard Jessie (and newer) installation images already, and they work just fine on CD/DVD or USB stick. We've even gone one stage further than anybody else (thus far!) in adding easy support for running a full 64-bit Linux system on top of those 32-bit UEFI implementations. I say "thus far" here because all the work here here is Free Software. Other folks added the support in Linux for making a 64-bit kernel work with a 32-bit UEFI; I added code in Linux to expose some of the details to userspace, and code in Grub to work with it. My changes have gone upstream already, so I'd expect to see other distros like Fedora or Ubuntu also using them soon.

Russ Allbery: Review: The Pyramid Waltz

Review: The Pyramid Waltz, by Barbara Ann Wright
Series: Katya and Starbride #1
Publisher: Bold Strokes
Copyright: September 2012
ISBN: 1-60282-792-3
Format: Kindle
Pages: 264
Princess Katya Nar Umbriel is publicly a bored, womanizing, and difficult daughter to the rulers of Farraday. It's all an act, though, with the full knowledge of her parents. As the second child, she's the leader of the Order of Vestra: the equivalent of the Secret Service, devoted to protecting the royal family and, by extension, the kingdom, particularly against magical attacks. Starbride is new to court and entirely out of place. From a northern neighboring country, and far more comfortable in practical clothing than the frilled court dresses that her mother wants her to wear, she has been sent to court to make contacts. Her people are getting the bad side of various trade contracts and desperately need some political maneuvering space of their own. Starbride's best hope for this is to study law in the palace library when she can manage to avoid the other courtiers. But then she and Katya stumble across each other, outside of the roles they're playing, and might have an opportunity for a deeper connection. One that neither of them want to entangle in their personal worries. This is the last of a set of books I picked up while looking for lesbian romance with fantasy or science fiction elements. On the romance front, it's one of the better entries in that set. Both Katya and Starbride are likeable, in large part due to their mutual exasperation with the trappings of the court. (Making the protagonists more serious, thoughtful, and intelligent than the surrounding characters is an old trick, but it works.) Wright has a good ear for banter, particularly the kind when two people of good will are carefully feeling each other out. And despite Katya's need to keep a deep secret from Starbride for some of the book, The Pyramid Waltz mostly avoids irritating communication failures as a plot driver. The fantasy portion and the plot drivers, alas, are weaker. The world building is not exactly bad, but it's just not that interesting. There are a couple of moderately good ideas, in the form of pyramid magic and secret (and dangerous) magical powers that run in the royal family, but they're not well-developed. Pyramid magic turns out to look much like any other generic fantasy magic system, with training scenes that could have come from a Valdemar or Wheel of Time novel (and without as much dramatic tension). And the royal family's secret, while better-developed and integral to the plot, still felt rather generic and one-sided. Maybe that's something Wright develops better in future novels in this series, but that was another problem: the ending of The Pyramid Waltz was rather weak. Partly, I think, this is because the cast is too large and not well-developed. I cared about Katya and Starbird, and to a lesser extent their servants and one of the Order members. (Wright has a moderately interesting bit of worldbuilding about how servants work in Starbride's culture, which I wish we'd seen more of.) But there are a bunch of other Order of Vesta members, Katya's family, and various other bits of history and hinted world views, none of which seemed to get much depth. The ending climax involved a lot of revelations and twists that primarily concerned characters I didn't care about. It lost something in the process. This book is clearly set up for a sequel. There is an ending, but it's not entirely satisfying. Unfortunately, despite liking Katya and Starbird a lot, the rest of the story wasn't compelling enough to make me want to buy it, particularly since the series apparently goes through another three books before reaching a real ending. I enjoyed parts of this book, particularly Katya and Starbird feeling each other out and discovering similarities in their outlook. Katya teasing Starbird, and Starbird teasing herself, over her mother's choice of her clothing was probably the best part. It's not bad for what it's trying to do, but I think it's a bit too generic and not satisfying enough to really recommend. Followed by For Want of a Fiend. Rating: 6 out of 10

31 July 2015

Scott Kitterman: Plasma 5 (KDE) In Testing

A few days ago, fellow Qt/KDE team member Lisandro gave an update on the situation with migration to Plasma 5 in Debian Testing (AKA Stretch). It s changed again. All of Plasma 5 is now in Testing. The upgrade probably won t be entirely smooth, which we ll work on that after the gcc5 transition is done, but it will be much better than the half KDE4 SC half Kf5/Plasma 5 situation we ve had for the last several days. The issues with starting kwin should be resolved once users upgrade to Plasma 5. To use the current kwin with KDE SC 4, you will need to add a symlink from /usr/bin/kwin to /usr/bin/kwin_x11. That will be included in the next upload after gcc5. Systemsettings and plasma-nm now work. In my initial testing, I didn t see anything major that was broken. One user reported an issue with sddm starting automatically, but it worked fine for me. During the upgrade you should get a debconf prompt asking if you want to use kdm or sddm. Pick sddm. When I tried to dist-upgrade, apt wanted to remove task-kde-desktop. I let it remove it and some other packages and then in a second step did apt-get install task-kde-desktop. That pulled it back in successfully along with adding and removing a reasonably large stack of packages. Obviously we need to make that work better before Stretch is released, but as long as you don t restart KDE in between those two steps it should be fine. Lastely, I used apt-get autoremove to clear out a lot of no longer needed KDE4 things (when it asks if you want to stop the running kdm, say no). Here are a few notes on terminology and what I understand of the future plans: What used to be called KDE is now three different things (in part because KDE is now the community of people, not the software): KDE Frameworks 5 (Kf5): This is a group of several dozen small libraries that as a group, roughly equate to what used to be kdelibs. Plasma (Workspaces) 5: This is the desktop that we ve just transitioned to. Applications: These are a mix of kdelibs and Kf5 based applications. Currently in Testing there are some of both and this will evolve over time based on upstream development. As an example, the Kf5 based version of konsole is in Unstable and should transition to Testing shortly. Finally, thanks to Maximiliano Curia (maxy on IRC) for doing virtually all of the packaging of Kf5, Plasma 5, and applications. He did the heavy lifting, the rest of us just nibbled around the edges to keep it moving towards testing.

27 July 2015

Andrew Cater: Bye SPARC - for now

So it looks as if it's the end for the Debian SPARC port that is primarily 32 bit, for now at least. Too little available modern hardware, too few porters and an upstream hardware provider emotionally tied to significant licensing and support agreements.

If 64 bit SPARC hardware were more available, I'd be interested again. SPARC has given me two of my favourite moments in Debian. I helped a colleague to duplicate existing software and move architecture from Intel to SPARC mainly by copying across the list of packages.

It also allowed me in ?? 1999 / 2000 ?? to take a SPARC 20 to London Olympia to a Linux Expo where one of the principal sponsors was Sun. They laughed on their stand when I set up older hardware with minimal memory but were not so amused when I demonstrated Debian, full X Window environment and KDE successfully.

Michael Stapelberg: dh-make-golang: creating Debian packages from Go packages

Recently, the pkg-go team has been quite busy, uploading dozens of Go library packages in order to be able to package gcsfuse (a user-space file system for interacting with Google Cloud Storage) and InfluxDB (an open-source distributed time series database). Packaging Go library packages (!) is a fairly repetitive process, so before starting my work on the dependencies for gcsfuse, I started writing a tool called dh-make-golang. Just like dh-make itself, the goal is to automatically create (almost) an entire Debian package. As I worked my way through the dependencies of gcsfuse, I refined how the tool works, and now I believe it s good enough for a first release. To demonstrate how the tool works, let s assume we want to package the Go library github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit: 
midna /tmp $ dh-make-golang github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
2015/07/25 18:25:39 Downloading "github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit/..."
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Determining upstream version number
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Package version is "0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c"
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Determining dependencies
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Packaging successfully created in /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Resolve all TODOs in itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt, then email it out:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     sendmail -t -f < itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Resolve all the TODOs in debian/, find them using:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     grep -r TODO debian
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 To build the package, commit the packaging and use gbp buildpackage:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     git add debian && git commit -a -m 'Initial packaging'
2015/07/25 18:25:55     gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 To create the packaging git repository on alioth, use:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     ssh git.debian.org "/git/pkg-go/setup-repository golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 'Packaging for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit'"
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Once you are happy with your packaging, push it to alioth using:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream
The ITP is often the most labor-intensive part of the packaging process, because any number of auto-detected values might be wrong: the repository owner might not be the Upstream Author , the repository might not have a short description, the long description might need some adjustments or the license might not be auto-detected. 
midna /tmp $ cat itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
From: "Michael Stapelberg" <stapelberg AT debian.org>
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: ITP: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit -- Go package for rate limiting
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg AT debian.org>
* Package name    : golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
  Version         : 0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
  Upstream Author : Aaron Jacobs
* URL             : https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
* License         : Apache-2.0
  Programming Lang: Go
  Description     : Go package for rate limiting
 GoDoc (https://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit)
 .
 This package contains code for dealing with rate limiting. See the
 reference (http://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit) for more info.
TODO: perhaps reasoning
midna /tmp $
After filling in all the TODOs in the file, let s mail it out and get a sense of what else still needs to be done: 
midna /tmp $ sendmail -t -f < itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
midna /tmp $ cd golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ grep -r TODO debian
debian/changelog:  * Initial release (Closes: TODO) 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $
After filling in these TODOs as well, let s have a final look at what we re about to build: 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ head -100 debian/**/*
==> debian/changelog <==                            
golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit (0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1) unstable; urgency=medium
  * Initial release (Closes: #793646)
 -- Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>  Sat, 25 Jul 2015 23:26:34 +0200
==> debian/compat <==
9
==> debian/control <==
Source: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
Section: devel
Priority: extra
Maintainer: pkg-go <pkg-go-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Uploaders: Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9),
               dh-golang,
               golang-go,
               golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-oglematchers-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-ogletest-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-syncutil-dev,
               golang-golang-x-net-dev
Standards-Version: 3.9.6
Homepage: https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
Vcs-Browser: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git;a=summary
Vcs-Git: git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
Package: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev
Architecture: all
Depends: $ shlibs:Depends ,
         $ misc:Depends ,
         golang-go,
         golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-oglematchers-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-ogletest-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-syncutil-dev,
         golang-golang-x-net-dev
Built-Using: $ misc:Built-Using 
Description: Go package for rate limiting
 This package contains code for dealing with rate limiting. See the
 reference (http://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit) for more info.
==> debian/copyright <==
Format: http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
Upstream-Name: ratelimit
Source: https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
Files: *
Copyright: 2015 Aaron Jacobs
License: Apache-2.0
Files: debian/*
Copyright: 2015 Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>
License: Apache-2.0
Comment: Debian packaging is licensed under the same terms as upstream
License: Apache-2.0
 Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 You may obtain a copy of the License at
 .
 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 .
 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 limitations under the License.
 .
 On Debian systems, the complete text of the Apache version 2.0 license
 can be found in "/usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0".
==> debian/gbp.conf <==
[DEFAULT]
pristine-tar = True
==> debian/rules <==
#!/usr/bin/make -f
export DH_GOPKG := github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
%:
	dh $@ --buildsystem=golang --with=golang
==> debian/source <==
head: error reading  debian/source : Is a directory
==> debian/source/format <==
3.0 (quilt)
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $
Okay, then. Let s give it a shot and see if it builds: 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git add debian && git commit -a -m 'Initial packaging'
[master 48f4c25] Initial packaging                                                      
 7 files changed, 75 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 debian/changelog
 create mode 100644 debian/compat
 create mode 100644 debian/control
 create mode 100644 debian/copyright
 create mode 100644 debian/gbp.conf
 create mode 100755 debian/rules
 create mode 100644 debian/source/format
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder
[ ]
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ lintian ../golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
I: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit source: debian-watch-file-is-missing
P: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev: no-upstream-changelog
I: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev: extended-description-is-probably-too-short
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $
This package just built (as it should!), but occasionally one might need to disable a test and file an upstream bug about it. So, let s push this package to pkg-go and upload it: 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ ssh git.debian.org "/git/pkg-go/setup-repository golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 'Packaging for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit'"
Initialized empty shared Git repository in /srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git/
HEAD is now at ea6b1c5 add mrconfig for dh-make-golang
[master c5be5a1] add mrconfig for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
To /git/pkg-go/meta.git
   ea6b1c5..c5be5a1  master -> master
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream
Counting objects: 31, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (25/25), done.
Writing objects: 100% (31/31), 18.38 KiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Total 31 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master
 * [new branch]      pristine-tar -> pristine-tar
 * [new branch]      upstream -> upstream
 * [new tag]         upstream/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c -> upstream/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ cd ..
midna /tmp $ debsign golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
[ ]
midna /tmp $ dput golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes   
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit using ftp to ftp-master (host: ftp.upload.debian.org; directory: /pub/UploadQueue/)
[ ]
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1.dsc
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c.orig.tar.bz2
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1.debian.tar.xz
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_all.deb
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
midna /tmp $ cd golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git tag debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
 * [new tag]         debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1 -> debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $
Thanks for reading this far, and I hope dh-make-golang makes your life a tiny bit easier. As dh-make-golang just entered Debian unstable, you can install it using apt-get install dh-make-golang. If you have any feedback, I m eager to hear it.

26 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 12 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Eric Dorlan uploaded automake-1.15/1:1.15-2 which makes the output of mdate-sh deterministic. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-8 which now honors SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Chris Lamb submitted a patch to dh-python to make the order of the generated maintainer scripts deterministic. Chris also offered a fix for a source of non-determinism in dpkg-shlibdeps when packages have alternative dependencies. Dhole provided a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to gettext. Packages fixed The following 78 packages became reproducible in our setup due to changes in their build dependencies: chemical-mime-data, clojure-contrib, cobertura-maven-plugin, cpm, davical, debian-security-support, dfc, diction, dvdwizard, galternatives, gentlyweb-utils, gifticlib, gmtkbabel, gnuplot-mode, gplanarity, gpodder, gtg-trace, gyoto, highlight.js, htp, ibus-table, impressive, jags, jansi-native, jnr-constants, jthread, jwm, khronos-api, latex-coffee-stains, latex-make, latex2rtf, latexdiff, libcrcutil, libdc0, libdc1394-22, libidn2-0, libint, libjava-jdbc-clojure, libkryo-java, libphone-ui-shr, libpicocontainer-java, libraw1394, librostlab-blast, librostlab, libshevek, libstxxl, libtools-logging-clojure, libtools-macro-clojure, litl, londonlaw, ltsp, macsyfinder, mapnik, maven-compiler-plugin, mc, microdc2, miniupnpd, monajat, navit, pdmenu, pirl, plm, scikit-learn, snp-sites, sra-sdk, sunpinyin, tilda, vdr-plugin-dvd, vdr-plugin-epgsearch, vdr-plugin-remote, vdr-plugin-spider, vdr-plugin-streamdev, vdr-plugin-sudoku, vdr-plugin-xineliboutput, veromix, voxbo, xaos, xbae. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net The statistics on the main page of reproducible.debian.net are now updated every five minutes. A random unreviewed package is suggested in the look at a package form on every build. (h01ger) A new package set based new on the Core Internet Infrastructure census has been added. (h01ger) Testing of FreeBSD has started, though no results yet. More details have been posted to the freebsd-hackers mailing list. The build is run on a new virtual machine running FreeBSD 10.1 with 3 cores and 6 GB of RAM, also sponsored by Profitbricks. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released version 0.009 of strip-nondeterminism. The new version will strip locales from Javadoc, include the name of files causing errors, and ignore unhandled (but rare) zip64 archives. debbindiff development Lunar continued its major refactoring to enhance code reuse and pave the way to fuzzy-matching and parallel processing. Most file comparators have now been converted to the new class hierarchy. In order to support for archive formats, work has started on packaging Python bindings for libarchive. While getting support for more archive formats with a common interface is very nice, libarchive is a stream oriented library and might have bad performance with how debbindiff currently works. Time will tell if better solutions need to be found. Documentation update Lunar started a Reproducible builds HOWTO intended to explain the different aspects of making software build reproducibly to the different audiences that might have to get involved like software authors, producers of binary packages, and distributors. Package reviews 17 obsolete reviews have been removed, 212 added and 46 updated this week. 15 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been reported by Chris West (Faux), and Mattia Rizzolo. Presentations Lunar presented Debian efforts and some recipes on making software build reproducibly at Libre Software Meeting 2015. Slides and a video recording are available. Misc. h01ger, dkg, and Lunar attended a Core Infrastructure Initiative meeting. The progress and tools mode for the Debian efforts were shown. Several discussions also helped getting a better understanding of the needs of other free software projects regarding reproducible builds. The idea of a global append only log, similar to the logs used for Certificate Transparency, came up on multiple occasions. Using such append only logs for keeping records of sources and build results has gotten the name Binary Transparency Logs . They would at least help identifying a compromised software signing key. Whether the benefits in using such logs justify the costs need more research.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppZiggurat 0.1.3: Faster Random Normal Draws

ziggurats After a slight hiatus since the last release in early 2014, we are delighted to announce a new release of RcppZiggurat which is now on the CRAN network for R. The RcppZiggurat package updates the code for the Ziggurat generator which provides very fast draws from a Normal distribution. The package provides a simple C++ wrapper class for the generator improving on the very basic macros, and permits comparison among several existing Ziggurat implementations. This can be seen in the figure where Ziggurat from this package dominates accessing the implementations from the GSL, QuantLib and Gretl---all of which are still way faster than the default Normal generator in R (which is of course of higher code complexity). This release contains a few internal cleanups relative to the last release. It was triggered by a very helpful email from Brian Ripley who notices compiler warnings on the Solaris platform due to my incorrect use of on integer variables. The NEWS file entry below lists all changes.
Changes in version 0.1.3 (2015-07-25)
  • Use the SHR3 generator for the default implementation just like Leong et al do, making our default implementation identical to theirs (but 32- and 64-bit compatible)
  • Switched generators from float to double ensuring that results are identical on 32- and 64-bit platforms
  • Simplified builds with respect to GSL use via the RcppGSL package; added a seed setter for the GSL variant
  • Corrected use of fabs() to abs() on integer variables, with a grateful nod to Brian Ripley for the hint (based on CRAN checks on the beloved Slowlaris machines)
  • Accelerated Travis CI tests by relying exclusively on r-cran-* packages from the PPAs by Michael Rutter and myself
  • Updated DESCRIPTION and NAMESPACE according to current best practices, and R-devel CMD check --as-cran checks
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is on the RcppZiggurat 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.

25 July 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.12.0: Now with more Big Data!

big-data image A new release 0.12.0 of Rcpp arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R this morning, and I also pushed a Debian package upload. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 423 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further. Note that this is 60 more packages since the last release in May! Also, BioConductor adds another 57 packages, and casual searches on GitHub suggests many more. And according to Andrie De Vries, Rcpp has now page rank of one on CRAN as well! And with this release, Rcpp also becomes ready for Big Data, or, as they call it in Texas, Data. Thanks to a lot of work and several pull requests by Qiang Kou, support for R_xlen_t has been added. That means we can now do stunts like 
R> library(Rcpp)
R> big <- 2^31-1
R> bigM <- rep(NA, big)
R> bigM2 <- c(bigM, bigM)
R> cppFunction("double getSz(LogicalVector x)   return x.length();  ")
R> getSz(bigM)
[1] 2147483647
R> getSz(bigM2)
[1] 4294967294
R>
where prior versions of Rcpp would just have said 
> getSz(bigM2)
Error in getSz(bigM2) :
  long vectors not supported yet: ../../src/include/Rinlinedfuns.h:137
>
which is clearly not Texas-style. Another wellcome change, also thanks to Qiang Kou, adds encoding support for strings. A lot of other things got polished. We are still improving exception handling as we still get the odd curveballs in a corner cases. Matt Dziubinski corrected the var() computation to use the proper two-pass method and added better support for lambda functions in Sugar expression using sapply(), Qiang Kou added more pull requests mostly for string initialization, and Romain added a pull request which made data frame creation a little more robust, and JJ was his usual self in tirelessly looking after all aspects of Rcpp Attributes. As always, you can follow the development via the GitHub repo and particularly the Issue tickets and Pull Requests. And any discussions, questions, ... regarding Rcpp are always welcome at the rcpp-devel mailing list. Last but not least, we are also extremely pleased to annouce that Qiang Kou has joined us in the Rcpp-Core team. We are looking forward to a lot more awesome! See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.
Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.0 (2015-07-24)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Rcpp_eval() no longer uses R_ToplevelExec when evaluating R expressions; this should resolve errors where calling handlers (e.g. through suppressMessages()) were not properly respected.
    • All internal length variables have been changed from R_len_t to R_xlen_t to support vectors longer than 2^31-1 elements (via pull request 303 by Qiang Kou).
    • The sugar function sapply now supports lambda functions (addressing issue 213 thanks to Matt Dziubinski)
    • The var sugar function now uses a more robust two-pass method, supports complex numbers, with new unit tests added (via pull request 320 by Matt Dziubinski)
    • String constructors now allow encodings (via pull request 310 by Qiang Kou)
    • String objects are preserving the underlying SEXP objects better, and are more careful about initializations (via pull requests 322 and 329 by Qiang Kou)
    • DataFrame constructors are now a little more careful (via pull request 301 by Romain Francois)
    • For R 3.2.0 or newer, Rf_installChar() is used instead of Rf_install(CHAR()) (via pull request 332).
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • Use more robust method of ensuring unique paths for generated shared libraries.
    • The evalCpp function now also supports the plugins argument.
    • Correctly handle signature termination characters (' ' or ';') contained in quotes.
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • The Rcpp-FAQ vignette was once again updated with respect to OS X issues and Fortran libraries needed for e.g. RcppArmadillo.
    • The included Rcpp.bib bibtex file (which is also used by other Rcpp* packages) was updated with respect to its CRAN references.
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.

Sandro Tosi: DICOM viewer and converter in Debian

DICOM is a standard for your RX/CT/MRI scans and the format most of the times your result will be given to you, along with Win/MacOS viewers, but what about Debian? the best I could find is Ginkgo CADx (package ginkgocadx).

If you want to convert those DICOM files into images you can use convert (I dont know why I was surprised to find out imagemagik can handle it).

PS: here a description of the format.

23 July 2015

Daniel Pocock: Unpaid work training Google's spam filters

This week, there has been increased discussion about the pain of spam filtering by large companies, especially Google. It started with Google's announcement that they are offering a service for email senders to know if their messages are wrongly classified as spam. Two particular things caught my attention: the statement that less than 0.05% of genuine email goes to the spam folder by mistake and the statement that this new tool to understand misclassification is only available to "help qualified high-volume senders". From there, discussion has proceeded with Linus Torvalds blogging about his own experience of Google misclassifying patches from Linux contributors as spam and that has been widely reported in places like Slashdot and The Register. Personally, I've observed much the same thing from the other perspective. While Torvalds complains that he isn't receiving email, I've observed that my own emails are not always received when the recipient is a Gmail address. It seems that Google expects their users work a little bit every day going through every message in the spam folder and explicitly clicking the "Not Spam" button: so that Google can improve their proprietary algorithms for classifying mail. If you just read or reply to a message in the folder without clicking the button, or if you don't do this for every message, including mailing list posts and other trivial notifications that are not actually spam, more important messages from the same senders will also continue to be misclassified. If you are not willing to volunteer your time to do this, or if you are simply one of those people who has better things to do, Google's Gmail service is going to have a corrosive effect on your relationships. A few months ago, we visited Australia and I sent emails to many people who I wanted to catch up with, including invitations to a family event. Some people received the emails in their inboxes yet other people didn't see them because the systems at Google (and other companies, notably Hotmail) put them in a spam folder. The rate at which this appeared to happen was definitely higher than the 0.05% quoted in the Google article above. Maybe the Google spam filters noticed that I haven't sent email to some members of the extended family for a long time and this triggered the spam algorithm? Yet it was at that very moment that we were visiting Australia that email needs to work reliably with that type of contact as we don't fly out there every year. A little bit earlier in the year, I was corresponding with a few students who were applying for Google Summer of Code. Some of them also observed the same thing, they sent me an email and didn't receive my response until they were looking in their spam folder a few days later. Last year I know a GSoC mentor who lost track of a student for over a week because of Google silently discarding chat messages, so it appears Google has not just shot themselves in the foot, they managed to shoot their foot twice. What is remarkable is that in both cases, the email problems and the XMPP problems, Google doesn't send any error back to the sender so that they know their message didn't get through. Instead, it is silently discarded or left in a spam folder. This is the most corrosive form of communication problem as more time can pass before anybody realizes that something went wrong. After it happens a few times, people lose a lot of confidence in the technology itself and try other means of communication which may be more expensive, more synchronous and time intensive or less private. When I discussed these issues with friends, some people replied by telling me I should send them things through Facebook or WhatsApp, but each of those services has a higher privacy cost and there are also many other people who don't use either of those services. This tends to fragment communications even more as people who use Facebook end up communicating with other people who use Facebook and excluding all the people who don't have time for Facebook. On top of that, it creates more tedious effort going to three or four different places to check for messages. Despite all of this, the suggestion that Google's only response is to build a service to "help qualified high-volume senders" get their messages through leaves me feeling that things will get worse before they start to get better. There is no mention in the Google announcement about what they will offer to help the average person eliminate these problems, other than to stop using Gmail or spend unpaid time meticulously training the Google spam filter and hoping everybody else does the same thing. Some more observations on the issue Many spam filtering programs used in corporate networks, such as SpamAssassin, add headers to each email to suggest why it was classified as spam. Google's systems don't appear to give any such feedback to their users or message senders though, just a very basic set of recommendations for running a mail server. Many chat protocols work with an explicit opt-in. Before you can exchange messages with somebody, you must add each other to your buddy lists. Once you do this, virtually all messages get through without filtering. Could this concept be adapted to email, maybe giving users a summary of messages from people they don't have in their contact list and asking them to explicitly accept or reject each contact? If a message spends more than a week in the spam folder and Google detects that the user isn't ever looking in the spam folder, should Google send a bounce message back to the sender to indicate that Google refused to deliver it to the inbox? I've personally heard that misclassification occurs with mailing list posts as well as private messages.

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