Review: Fukushima, by David Lochbaum, et al.

Author:	David Lochbaum
Author:	Edwin Lyman
Author:	Susan Q. Stranahan
Author:	Union of Concerned Scientists
Publisher:	The New Press
Copyright:	2014
ISBN:	1-59558-927-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	320

This is a very interesting book, and I can recommend it, but there are two things you should be aware of up-front. The packaging does not necessarily make clear what expectations you should have of it going in. First, the subtitle (The Story of a Nuclear Disaster) should have appended to it And Its Implications for US Nuclear Power Policy. This book is very concerned with the impact of the Fukushima disaster on US policy and nuclear regulation, to the point where I think more than half of the book is about US agencies, nuclear regulatory history, and US reaction. There's nothing wrong with that, of course: the US should take a hard look at its own nuclear energy policy given the events at Fukushima, and it's a worthy topic for a book. But if you go into this book expecting a broader perspective, you will be disappointed. For example, I think the fact that France has a lot of nuclear power was mentioned maybe twice in the whole book, and French reaction was never discussed at all. There is a very detailed examination of exactly what happened at Fukushima (more on that in a moment), but most of the policy implications are examined purely from a US perspective. Even Japanese nuclear policy gets somewhat short shrift. Second, note that the fourth listed co-author is the Union of Concerned Scientists. For those not familiar with US environmental groups, the UCS has a reputation as an anti-nuclear advocacy organization. I don't think that's entirely fair; I think the UCS's position on nuclear power is better summarized as holding that it is theoretically possible to run a nuclear power plant safely, but the actual US nuclear power industry is not very close to that standard, and it would require much tighter regulation and more investment in safety systems to reach that standard. But be aware that the authors of this book have a clear position on the adequacy of current nuclear power safety standards, namely that they aren't. And they don't try to conceal that position in this book. Personally, I prefer authors to be open about their perspective in books like this, but your mileage may vary. There, disclaimers out of the way. I bought this book for a specific reason: I had followed some of the news coverage at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, and then (like many people, I suspect) lost track of the final outcome as the story fell out of the news and I started ignoring people who didn't understand how large the Pacific Ocean is. Now that we've had the benefit of several years of analysis and thoughtful reconstruction of events, I wanted to know what had actually happened. I'm happy to say that this book delivers quite well on that front. Roughly the first half of the book is a detailed blow-by-blow description of exactly what happened at Fukushima, at least as well as we've been able to reconstruct, told as an engrossing and dramatic narrative. There may be a little too much interleaving of reactions within the US government, which I suspect will particularly annoy non-US readers, but the level of factual detail is excellent, clear, and well-explained. What I wasn't expecting, but was pleasantly surprised by, is that it's also a great story. There's tension, conflict, heroism, hard choices, and moral quandries, and the authors do a great job conveying factual information while still giving the reader the sense of being in the middle of the unfolding drama. They resist the urge to disclose all the results of later analysis in the middle of the story, which may provide a slightly less clear view of the disaster, but which makes the telling far more compelling. I usually read non-fiction more slowly than fiction, but Fukushima dragged me in. I found myself grabbing moments to read just another few pages. Unfortunately, this is only about half the book. The other half is a mix of other things that won't have as broad of appeal: an analysis of the challenges of US nuclear regulation, a history of the US nuclear power industry, and a presentation of the authors' opinions about the best path forward for regulation of nuclear power in the US. Since I'm a US citizen and resident with an interest in both nuclear power and regulation of nuclear power in my country, I found this interesting, if not as engrossing as the rest of the book. But it felt a bit oddly tacked on, and I think it's a stretch to say that it's part of the story of Fukushima. The authors try to draw that link by presenting the Japanese nuclear power industry as heavily influenced by their US counterparts, and their regulatory problems as similar to the problems in the US, but there is nowhere near enough detail about Japanese regulatory practices here to support that conclusion. I think the largest weakness, and the most obvious gap, in this book is the lack of detailed analysis of the history and players in the Japanese nuclear regulatory environment. This is an odd miss. If one is concerned about regulatory inadequacy, Japanese government policy is far more obviously part of the story of Fukushima than US policy. I can only speculate that the authors had inside sources for the US policy discussions but not for the Japanese policy discussions (and, sadly, fall back on painting with a rather broad brush and making unsupported generalizations about Japanese regulatory approaches in a few spots). The result feels like two partly-unrelated books stacked and partly shuffled together. So, there are parts of Fukushima that are rather disappointing, particularly for non-US readers. But I still recommend it as a great detailed history of the actual incident and a summary of what we now think happened. That summary is unfortunately sketchy and still very unclear, but I don't think that's the fault of the authors. The inside of a nuclear power plant during a meltdown is a very difficult environment to measure or analyze, and there's a lot of data that we will probably never have. Some details may never be known. But what we do know, and how that knowledge unfolded, is told very well. This is the only book-length treatment on Fukushima I've read, so I can't compare it against other books on the same topic. But it satisfied my curiousity nicely. If you have a similar curiosity, I recommend this book to your attention, although be aware of its approach and its US-centric analysis going in so that you're not surprised by a mismatch of expectations. Rating: 8 out of 10

Friday the 13th was my day. In so many different ways. I received a package which was addressed to Rhonda D'Vine with a special hoodie in it. The person at the post office desk asked me whether it was for my partner, my response was a (cowardly) "no, it's my pseudonym" but that settled any further questions and I got my package. Later I received an email which made me hyper happy (but which I can't share right now, potentially later). In the evening there was the WortMacht FemSlam (WordMight FemSlam) poetry slam to which the host asked me to attend just the day before. I was hyper nervous about it. The room was fully packed, there were even quite some people who didn't have a place to sit and were standing at the side. I presented Mermaids because I wasn't able to write anything new on the topic. One would think I am attached enough to the poem by now to not be nervous about it, but it was the environment that made my legs shake like hell while presenting. Gladly I hope it wasn't possible to see it enough under my skirt, but given that it was the first time that I presented it in my home town instead of the "anonymous" internet made me extra anxious. In the end I ended up in place 5 of 7 attendees, which I consider a success given that it was the only text presented in English and not in typical poetry slam style.
(Small addition to the last part: I've been yesterday to the Free Hugs Vienna event at the Schloss Sch nbrunn, and one of the people I hugged told me I know you, I've seen you at the FemSlam!. That was extra sweet. :)) I'm happy that I was notified about the FemSlam on such short notice, it was a great experience. So today's entry goes out to the host of that event. This is about Yasmo. One can just be envious about what she already accomplished in her still young life. And she is definitely someone to watch out for in the years to come. I have to excuse to my readers who don't understand German yet again, but I'll get back to something English next time, I promise. :)

• Kein Platz f r Zweifel: The title track from her last album.
• Wer hat Angst vorm wei en Mann: Most straight-to-the-point line of the lyrics is Wie kann es sein, dass es immer noch diesen Jolly-Buntstift gibt, der "Hautfarbe" hei t?" (How is it possible that there is still this jolly crayon called "colour of the skin"?)
• Wo kommst du her?: Not a song but one of her great slam poetry texts that I love since I first heard it.

Like always, enjoy!

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I have just released version 1.9 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian. Due to the freeze of Debian for the jessie release, I've not uploaded this version to Debian yet (not experimental and not backports). This is the first Obnam release since May 13, 2014, 313 days ago. That's a long time. I make no excuses: Obnam is a hobby project, which I work on when I have the time and energy. The past year has been very /interesting/ year for me, in all sorts of stressful ways: I've changed jobs, moved to another country, and dealt with the loss of a close relative. Because of this, I've not been able to spend as much time on Obnam as I'd like. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what has happened to Obnam during this time. There's been a lot of things, actually. My plans for Obnam next are mainly centered around performance. This will require developing a new repository format, to allow things that are not possible with the current format. For example, the current format stores each data chunk in its own file in the repository, and that is quite wasteful when live data files (and therefore their chunks) are quite small. As preparation for this work, the silly-looking "simple" format has been added, mostly to make sure the internal code infrastructure is ready to support multiple repository formats in the same Obnam version. Those interested in discussing ways to make Obnam fast should join the obnam-dev mailing list. Version 1.9, released 2015-03-22 New features:

• James Vasile changed Obnam so it can backup an individual file, instead of an entire directory.
• James Vasile added the --include option to Obnam, allowing one to include files that would otherwise be excluded (see --exclude).
• Carlo Teubner changed obnam fsck to remove unused chunks, if the --fsck-fix or --fsck-rm-unused settings are used. He also made it not check for unused chunks when it's useless to do so, because of various --fsck-skip settings are used.
• A start of a French translation of the manual by pedrito2.
• Ian Cambell provided a new Obnam command, obnam kdirstat, which makes the KDE k4dirstat utility be able to show graphically which parts of a backup generation use most space.
• Lars Wirzenius added the simple repository format, which is for demonstration only. It is much too simplistic to be used for real.

Minor changes:

• The manual page and obnam --help are now clearer that the --root setting and command line arguments to obnam backup can be SFTP URLs. Thanks to Simone Piccardi for reporting the issue.
• David Fries filled in the displayed file permission mode bits.
• Grammar and typo fixes for the obnam.1 manual page, from Jean Jordaan.
• Tom Chiverton suggested a clarification to the manual page for "obnam mount" to say that each generation is a subdirectory.
• David Fries changed restore to set the group ownership if possible even when not root. No warnings are issued if the attempt fails.
• Jan Niggemann added a little to the German translation of the Obnam manual.
• Lars Wirzenius added the path to the error message about a missing chunk (R43272X).
• Lars Wirzenius made the message at the end of a backup report more statistics about transfers during the backup.

Bug fixes:

• The Obnam SFTP plugin would loop infinitely if it lost the connection to the SSH server while creating a temporary file. Itamar Turner-Trauring provided a fix for this.
• Will Dyson fixed a bug about locking while removing checkpoint generations.
• Michel Alexandre Salim fixed a Python 2.6 compatibility problem in the unit tests (use of assertRaises as a context manager).
• Lars Kruse fixed a bug with backing up of overlapping backup roots (e.g., / and /boot), given a test case by Adrien Clerc.
• Thomas Eschenbacher fixed a bug in the format 6 repository code that would crash when there is an obscure problem and a B-tree code can't be found in the tree.
• Tom Chiverton pointed out that the manual page was using "obnam restore" instead of "obnam mount" in an example for "obnam mount".
• The yarn test suite now runs FUSE tests (obnam mount) when fusermount is available, rather than checking for membership in the group fuse. The latter is a Debianism (fixed in Debian jessie).
• Thomas Waldmann noticed that obnam verify didn't notice that a file had new data, when the modification time was the same. Obnam now notices this.
• Thomas Waldmann fixed many typos and minor bugs in the source code.
• Laurence Perkins reported that the Tahoe-LAFS SFTP server returned some stat fields as None. Fixed to change those to be 0 instead.
• Lars Wirzenius fixed double-downloading of chunks during restores.

One of fresh additions to Debian, that is showing Debian's commitment to diversity in all fields is Laura Arjona Reina. A helpful hand on channels and a great flux of FLOSS energy she brings with herself. Although applied for non-packaging Debian Developer status, Laura does recognize that there are still some technical aspects what must grasp on. Her dedication to FLOSS and trying to solve some of its issues is astonishing, as this woman is doing a lot of self-hosting and system administration. Yes, you read it right - she does all of that and still applied for non-packaging Debian Developer. She is perfect example how FLOSS enhances humans in many ways. Hello Laura. Who are you? I am Laura Arjona, I work as IT assistant at Technic University of Madrid, I am married and I have a son, and I use and promote free (libre) software both at job and at home and with friends. I have a nice time contributing in Debian and other FLOSS projects but I always want to do more than what I manage to actually do (I hope I can improve that, as time goes by... and maybe when I get retired I am the SuperLArjona that you wrote about!). What parts of FLOSS community are you engaged? I use Debian, and CyanogenMod + F-Droid in my phone. I coordinate the translation of the Debian website into Spanish, help with FSFE website translation too, and translate some other free software (GNU MediaGoblin, F-Droid, Android apps that I use, web services that we use at work...). I use and promote some free social networks: pump.io, GNU Social, and XMPP. My work/friends environment is mostly Windows/Android so I try to find/promote libre software replacements or interesting applications for them. I give free FLOSS stickers to everybody showing interest for libre software, and a nice Debian sticker if they finally install it in their computers. Setup of your main machine? My machine is a humble Compaq Mini 110C laptop (32bits, Atom N270@1.60GHz, 1GB RAM) and I have Debian Jessie (future-stable ATM) with xfce on it. I'm not tied to particular tools, for example I use Mousepad for editing here in my xfce, Kate in my desktop at work, nano in the server. The only "tuning" that I always do is to set a dark background for terminals and text editors, but I don't even switch to a desktop dark theme... (BTW I love Jessie's theme, "Lines"!). I know there are awesome pieces of software out there (hey emacs-org-mode!), but I just don't have fun having to learn them by myself (no LUG near, I'm afraid...). Some memorable moments from Debian conferences? I've only been at Barcelona MiniDebConf Women 2014 and it was great. It was memorable that I promoted the keysigning for that MiniDebConf, and came home with lots of signatures and papers to verify and sign... and then I was not remembering my GPG main key passphrase! so I hid under my desk for two months, and then, decided to start again (created a new key and tried to meet some Debian people in Madrid...). So I guess I should go to some (Mini)DebConf again. You are currently involved in process of becoming non-packaging Debian Developer - what made you take that step? I began translating in 2011, and since then, I enjoyed contributing in Debian (women, l10n-es, website, publicity). I'm quite regular with the translation work, and applying for DD is a plan to 'force' myself to find chunks of time to contribute more in the other areas too. I also believe that applying I may help other people to also apply or get more involved or become more visible. So here I am. Although you applied for non-packaging Debian Developer you recognize that there is still a technical learning curve in Debian even for that - what are the technical aspects a non-Developer should grasp? Well, I suppose it depends on the area you are contributing. In Publicity you find repositories in git (bits.debian.org), and subversion (Debian Project News). The website uses CVS (www.debian.org)... So you need the basics of 3 different version control systems to commit your changes (or send them to the mailing list and wait somebody to commit them). We use a mail robot to coordinate the translation work, so you need to write the subject with a certain format, and some people complains when somebody send mail in HTML (plain text is preferred). There are some other tools such as IRC and GPG that I began using just for contributing to Debian. Once that you learn them a bit and you learn how Debian works, you understand they are the great tools and you get in love (hey meetbot and KGB! hey i18n.debian.org!), but I wonder how people with no technical background, or even Computer Engineering students nowadays, accostumed to instant messaging in the mobile, fancy web interfaces and so on, look at these tools and just don't even try. How do you see future of Debian development? I don't know, Debian is huge... Some areas in which I hope we, as a community, find the way to work more: packaging (or help configuring) web applications or network services, provide LTS support, and keep on improving outreach/diversity. What are your future plans in Debian, what would you like to work on? In the Spanish team area, my plan is to go on translating the website, jump more often into translating package descriptions too, and help first-time-contributors to keep themselves involved. In the website and publicity teams, I hope I manage to put some weekly time to help with pending tasks/bugs, and serve as liaison with the other areas in which I'm involved (women, l10n, contributors...). If I become DD, I would like to create/adopt some data sources for contributors.debian.org, or convince people to do it I'm not sure if I will be able to attend DebConf some year; meanwhile, at least, I'll continue trying to help with the blog and promotion (as -publicity-team member). Why should developers and users join Debian community? What makes Debian a great and happy place? For using it: the desktop experience has improved very much in the last years, there's a clear separation between free and non-free software so the Debian users always know where are we, and there is wide documentation (in English, at least. Probably in other languages too). For getting involved: I like very much that you can lurk what almost everybody does: just join some mailing lists or IRC channels, the Debian people work in the open. So you know a bit where are you jumping in. Later you learn that everything is easier than what was looking from the outside, because you make friends and with friends everything is better.
Contributions made to Debian have many chances to reach a very wide community: Debian users, upstream projects, and the hundreds of derivatives. It's a quite horizontal, decentralized organization (that has its downsides too, but I can live with them). Is there something you would change in FLOSS ecosystem? We need much more internationalization and localization efforts. People don't need English for using libre software nowadays in their desktop, it's one of our big strenghts, but they definitely need English for using libre software for Android, or solving problems with the libre software they use in your computers/devices, or to contribute to any community. I think we need more local groups for user support/outreach, more libre-software-based translation tools and online services (replacements for Google Translator, for Transifex...),and more internationalization and localization efforts (manuals, websites... not only the software itself). If we work hard in this area, we'll gain much more users and much more contributors. Why does privacy matter to you? I have a son, at our family we interchange photos, and sometimes I have private conversations using the smartphone, mail or other internet services. I want to have the chance that the day that I (or my family) need privacy, we can have it easily. And I want that the people that really need privacy today, have proper tools at their hand. So I try to use PGP, selfhost my multimedia website, use decentralized, free software based networks and XMPP mobile apps... to help those projects to thrive. I try do my part of the network effect! You are being upset with rise of Github - why is that and what would change would you like to see? I totally agree with Mako's essay "Free software needs free tools". Yes, many nonfree web services are easier and have better features right now, but the key is that only dogfooding can change that, the same like changed it with the GNU/Linux desktop and Open/LibreOffice for example...
I would like to see more people trying to selfhost, use and promote libre software based forges, so in addition to avoid vendor lock in and win consistency in our discourse, we polish the available tools and eventually win the battle also in the technical side. You are hosting yours own instances of Mediagoblin - as it is not officially packaged in Debian yet, how do you manage it and how would you encourage others to do it? I followed the MediaGoblin documentation for its last stable release, and hanged on the IRC channel when in doubts/problems. It was not so hard, because it's well documented for Debian systems, and most of the dependencies are already packaged (in stable and testing). MediaGoblin is in its way to stretch too (thanks simonft and the rest of people working on this!). I'm documenting my adventures with selfhosting in [my blog (http://larjona.wordpress.com), but I need to write more often, and put more time in my small server (now I try to selfhost my git projects with cgit, and I want to setup an XMPP server and Etherpad Lite too). You are trying to resolve with self-hosting personal issues with services such as WhatsUp and other non-free parts of our everyday lives- what issues are you hitting on during your way and how do you resolve them? "#iloveemail", but people don't love it anymore, it seems... I've researched a bit about instant messaging to try to propose alternatives to WhatsApp to my family and friends. It seems Conversations with a community XMPP server where to create multi user chat rooms can be a replacement, so my plan is to try during this year. Meanwhile, I've setup the MediaGoblin site so I upload the photos there instead of sending them with the phone, and for the 1-to-1 chat I try to move people to Kontalk (instant messaging, GPG, photos, voice notes...). For the videocalls, I promote Jitsi or just point people to meet.jit.si/FancyNameofChatRoom. I have account and owndrive.com and will try to host Owncloud too. We'll see what happens. You are interested in radio shows - what drives you into that field and will we see soon any podcasts from Laura? I like to talk and I'm not a shy person, so the few times that in any of my social groups there was a chance to "talk in the radio", I volunteered and enjoyed. This has been, in my life, 6 or 7 times (in Spanish, talking about social activism or politics. No records, though!). Some months ago the people of "El Binario" invited me to talk at "findenegro" about pump.io and free networks (in Spanish), I accepted and had a very nice time (audios in my mediagoblin). I wish I have more free time to listen to podcasts and maybe to join some other people to participate in a program in a regular basis. OTOH, my son asks for a tale almost each day... I follow one of Gianni Rodari "The grammar of fantasy"'s approach: take some day-to-day facts and add something unexpected and crazy, and tailor a short story. Maybe I could record them and publish in my MediaGoblin... Of course their literary quality is not even near to Gianni Rodari's but people that listened to them when I was storytelling (in the metro, my mother at home, some friends...) say they are fun and interesting. Who knows!

Yesterday I was hacking on some Ruby code and getting a weird error which I thought was caused by mutually recursive require statements (i.e. A requires B, and B requires A). Later I realized that this is not an issue in Ruby, since the intepreter keeps track of what has already been required and will not enter a loop. But during the investigation I came up with something that turned out to be useful. rrg will read the source code of a Ruby project and generate a graph based on the require statements in the code; nodes represent the source files and an arrow from A to B means that A contains a require B statement. From the README:

Just run rrg at the root of your project. rrg will parse the code inside lib/, and generate a graph description in the Graphviz format. You can pipe the output to Graphviz directly, or store it in a file and process it to generate an image.

If you call rrgv instead, it will automatically process the graph with Graphviz, generate a PNG image, and open it.

Let s see some examples. First the classical analysing itself example, the require graph for rrg itself: Not very interesting, since all of the logic is currently in the main binary and not on library code. But 1) when I do the refactorings I want to, there will be more library code and 2) while writing this I implemented also parsing scripts in bin/. Now chake which is a slightly larger project: An even larger (but still not that big) project, gem2deb: Note that these visualizations may not be accurate representations of the actual source code. In Ruby, nothing stops one from implementing class A::B in lib/x/y.rb, but most reasonable code will make sure that filenames and the classes namespaces actually match. If you are working on a sane codebase, though, visualizing graphs like this helps understand the general structure of the code and perceive possible improvements. The gem2deb graph gave me some ideas already and I didn t even paid much attention to it yet.

Notice: There were several requests for me to more elaborate on my path to Debian and impact on life so here it is. It's going to be a bit long so anyone who isn't interested in my personal Debian journey should skip it. :) In 2007. I enrolled into Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (at first at Department of Industrial Management and later transfered to Department of Mechatronics - this was possible because first 3 semesters are same for both departments). By the end of same year I was finishing my tasks (consisting primarily of calculations, some small graphical designs and write-ups) when famous virus, called by users "RECYCLER", sent my Windows XP machine into oblivion. Not only it took control over machine and just spawned so many processes that system would crash itself, it actually deleted all from hard-disk before it killed the system entirely. I raged - my month old work, full of precise calculations and a lot of design details, was just gone. I started cursing which was always continued with weeping: "Why isn't there an OS that can whithstand all of viruses, even if it looks like old DOS!". At that time, my roommate was my cousin who had used Kubuntu in past and currently was having SUSE dual-booted on his laptop. He called me over, started talking about this thing called Linux and how it's different but de facto has no viruses. Well, show me this Linux and my thought was, it's probably so ancient and not used that it probably looks like from pre Windows 3.1 era, but when SUSE booted up it had so much more beautiful UI look (it was KDE, and compared to XP it looked like the most professional OS ever). So I was thrilled, installed openSUSE, found some rough edges (I knew immediately that my work with professional CAD systems will not be possible on Linux machines) but overall I was bought. After that he even talked to me about distros. Wait, WTF distros?! So, he showed me distrowatch.com. I was amazed. There is not only a better OS then Windows - there where dozens, hundreds of them. After some poking around I installed Debian KDE - and it felt great, working better then openSUSE but now I was as most newbies, on fire to try more distros. So I was going around with Fedora, Mandriva, CentOS, Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS and in beginning of 2008 I stumbled upon Debian docs which where talking about GNU and GNU Manifesto. To be clear, I was always as a high-school kid very much attached to idea of freedom but started loosing faith by faculty time (Internet was still not taking too much of time here, youth still spent most of the day outside). So the GNU Manifesto was really a big thing for me and Debian is a social bastion of freedom. Debian (now with GNOME2) was being installed on my machine. As all that hackerdom in Debian was around I started trying to dig up some code. I never ever read a book on coding (until this day I still didn't start and finish one) so after a few days I decided to code tetris in C++ with thought that I will finish it in two days at most (the feeling that you are powerful and very bright person) - I ended it after one month in much pain. So instead I learned about keeping Debian system going on, and exploring some new packages. I got thrilled over radiotray, slimvolley (even held a tournament in my dorm room), started helping on #debian, was very active in conversation with others about Debian and even installed it on few laptops (I became de facto technical support for users of those laptops :D ). Then came 2010 which with negative flow that came in second half of 2009, started to crush me badly. I was promised to go to Norway, getting my studies on robotics and professor lied (that same professor is still on faculty even after he was caught in big corruption scandal over buying robots - he bought 15 years old robots from UK, although he got money from Norway to buy new ones). My relationship came to hard end and had big emotional impact on me. I fell a year on faculty. My father stopped financing me and stopped talking to me. My depression came back. Alcohol took over me. I was drunk every day just not to feel anything. Then came the end of 2010, I somehow got to the information that DebConf will be in Banja Luka. WHAT?! DebConf in city where I live. I got into #debconf and in December 2010/January 2011 I became part of the famous "local local organizers". I was still getting hammered by alcohol but at least I was getting out of depression. IIRC I met Holger and Moray in May, had a great day (a drop of rakia that was too much for all of us) and by their way of behaving there was something strange. Beatiful but strange. Both were sending unique energy of liberty although I am not sure they were aware of it. Later, during DebConf I felt that energy from almost all Debian people, which I can't explain. I don't feel it today - not because it's not there, it's because I think I integrated so much into Debian community that it's now a natural feeling which people here, that are close to me are saying that they feel it when I talk about Debian. DebConf time in Banja Luka was awesome - firstly I met Phil Hands and Andrew McMillan which were a crazy team, local local team was working hard (I even threw up during the work in Banski Dvor because of all heat and probably not much of sleep due to excitement), met also crazy Mexican Gunnar (aren't all Mexicans crazy?), played Mao (never again, thank you), was hanging around smart but crazy people (love all) from which I must notice Nattie (a bastion of positive energy), Christian Perrier (which had coordinated our Serbian translation effort), Steve Langasek (which asked me to find physiotherapist for his co-worker Mathias Klose, IIRC), Zach (not at all important guy at that time), Luca Capello (who gifted me a swirl on my birthday) and so many others that this would be a post for itself just naming them. During DebConf it was also a bit of hard time - my grandfather died on 6th July and I couldn't attend the funeral so I was still having that sadness in my heart, and Darjan Prtic, a local team member that came from Vienna, committed suicide on my birthday (23 July). But DebConf as conference was great, but more importantly the Debian community felt like a family and Meike Reichle told me that it was. The night it finished, me and Vedran Novakovic cried. A lot. Even days after, I was getting up in the morning having the feeling I need something to do for DebConf. After a long time I felt alive. By the end of year, I adopted package from Clint Adams and Moray became my sponsor. In last quarter of 2011 and beginning of 2012, I (as part of LUG) held talks about Linux, had Linux installation in Computer Center for the first time ever, and installed Debian on more machines. Now fast forwarding with some details - I was also on DebConf13 in Switzerland, met some great new friends such as Tincho and Santiago (and many many more), Santiago was also my roommate in Portland on the previous DebConf. In Switzerland I had really great and awesome time. Year 2014 - I was also at DebConf14, maintain a bit more packages and have applied for DD, met some new friends among which I must put out Apollon Oikonomopoulos and Costas Drogos which friendship is already deep for such a short time and I already know that they are life-long friends. Also thanks to Steve Langasek, because without his help I wouldn't be in Portland with my family and he also gave me Arduino. :) 2015. - I am currently at my village residence, have a 5 years of working experince as developer due to Debian and still a lot to go, learn and do but my love towards Debian community is by magnitude bigger then when I thought I love it at most. I am also going through my personal evolution and people from Debian showed me to fight for what you care, so I plan to do so. I can't write all and name all the people that I met, and believe me when I say that I remember most and all of you impacted my life for which I am eternally grateful. Debian, and it's community effect literally saved my life, spring new energy into me and changed me for better. Debian social impact is far bigger then technical, and when you know that Debian is a bastion of technical excellence - you can maybe picture the greatness of Debian. Some of greatest minds are in Debian but most important isn't the sheer amount of knowledge but the enormous empathy. I just hope I can in future show to more people what Debian is and to find all lost souls as me to give them the hope, to show them that we can make world a better place and that everyone is capable to live and do what they love. P.S. I am still hoping and waiting to see Bdale writing a book about Debian's history to this day - in which I think many of us would admire the work done by project members, laugh about many situations and have fun reading a book about project that was having nothing to do but fail and yet it stands stronger then ever with roots deep into our minds.

Several improvements have been made to UDD s Bug Search and Maintainer Dashboard recently. On the Maintainer Dashboard side, the main new feature is a QA checks table that provides an overview of results from lintian, reproducible builds, piuparts, and ci.debian.net. Check the dashboard for the Ruby team for an example. Also, thanks to Daniel Pocock, the TODO items can now be exported as iCalendar tasks. Bugs Search now has much better JSON and YAML outputs. It s probably a good start if you want to do some data-mining on bugs. Packages can now be selected using the same form as the Maintainer Dashboard s one, which makes it easy to build your own personal bug list, and will suppress the need for some of the team-specific listings. Many bugs have been fixed too. More generally, thanks to the work of Christophe Siraut, the code is much better now, with a clean separation of the data analysis logic and the rendering sides that will make future improvements easier. As the reminder, it s quite easy to hack on UDD (even if you are not a DD). Please report bugs, including about additional features you would like to see!

My good friend Felipe Esquivel is driving a crowdfunded project: the first part of the "Natura" short film. I urge every reader of my blog to support Felipe's work! Felipe, the director for this project, is a very talented Chilean-Mexican animator. He has produced short animated films such as A duel and One fine day. Not only that: It might be interesting for my blog's readers that a good deal of the work of Cham n Animation's work (of course, I am not qualified to state that "all of" their work But it might well be the case) is done using Free Software, specifically, using Blender. So, people: Go look at their work. And try to be part of their work!

0. Who are you and what is your history with Debian Project? I guess this part is well covered in my platform. 1. What is your most proud moment as Debian Developer? I am pretty proud of having been part of the few who implemented the first automatic dependency resolver for OCaml programs and libraries in Debian packages. It was really the first one in the OCaml community and we were quite proud of it. But that was done before I become a Debian Developer. As a DD, I have to admit I am quite proud to be part of the Release Team. It is a fantastic team where there is so much to do. Helping the team means something to me, and I invested a considerable amount of time (a few months) working on reviewing patches for Squeeze and helping to get it ready by our standards. My best moment was Squeeze's release, my first Debian release as Release Team member. 2. In your opinion what is the strongest part of Debian Project? I am not sure we can identify one single strength of the Debian project. But, when I think about your question, I remember something I've heard many times: Debian is about people . I have to admit that I didn't realize it myself until I heard it for the first time and I completely share the idea! For me, all the technical side of the project comes after the community. With time, I think we managed to build a strong community. Many contributors became friends with time. We are seeing many Developers having babies and bringing them to Debian events. I find that really amazing. 3. And what is the weakest part of Debian Project? Our strength is somehow also our weakness. We are humans and make mistakes. We have feelings and some discussions get heated sometimes. It is not easy to keep everyone calm and focused. We have seen the damage that was caused to our core community last year with all the flamewars. Many people lost their motivation and we have seen some of them stepping down. We are also having troubles on-boarding new contributors, which is a problem today because some teams are under-staffed and could become an even bigger issue on the longer term. 4. How do you intend to resolve the weakest part? An effort has already been made on this front. We can mention the introduction of the Code of Conduct and the diversity statement, for example. Both are important and make us a more welcoming and caring community. In my platform, I mentioned some ideas about recruitment and change management. I believe that both sides will help us to get a stronger community. Moreover, a DPL should act as a mediator to help some situation get through. This is one of the DPL tasks that is not formally identified and is usually under-estimated. 5. DPL term lasts for one year - what would you challenge during that term and what have you learned from previous DPL's? Personally, the main thing I have learned from past DPLs is that communication is very important. A DPL should dedicate time to communicate about ongoing actions and achievements. It is also important to remind a few things even if it may sound repetitive or trivial:

• Why such action/subject is important.
• What actions have been tried/done in the past.
• What progress has been made since last time.
• What is possibly the next step.

If the communication is only about listing some actions, many people will miss its essence and its goals. It is even more important when we know that some actions may take years (thus, several DPL terms) to complete. If I am elected as DPL, I'd really like to help the project to publish a roadmap. I think it is very important to set goals to the project to better explain our philosophy and approach in the Free Software world. This may also help to attract new contributors which may be interested by one or some items. Of course, I will not work on that subject only. I invite you to read the rest of my platform to see the other ideas. 6. What motivates you to work in Debian and run for DPL? Many many things. And more importantly, many many people As many of us, I like programming and socializing. It feels nice to be part of such a big project and where you can do many different things. I contribute to Debian because I find it fun and let me meet people I will not have been able to meet elsewhere. In my platform, I tried to identify ideas I'd like to see implemented, or at least started. Since Debian is a do-ocracy, I thought I could try to get them implemented by myself. I think that those ideas are important for the Debian community and will help us moving forward. Running for DPL is also another way of contributing to Debian and I'd feel honored to represent Debian.

0. Who are you and what's your history with Debian Project? I'm a little mouse behind a keyboard, going by the nickname "algernon". I used to be a lot of things: a flaming youth, an application manager, package maintainer, upstream, ftp-assistant, a student, a mentor, a hacker. In the end, however, I am but a simple, albeit sometimes crazy person. I did a number of things within Debian - mostly small and marginal things, mind you. With a little break, I've been here for over a decade, and am planning to stay for at least another. 1. What's your most proud moment as Debian Developer? At last year's LinuxTag, I was wandering around a stand where they sold Raspberry Pis (with cases and other accessories). I had a nice chat with one of the staffers there, inquired about the price (including the case, of course), and a few other things. He asked a few things back: what I'll be using it for, and so on. After it turned out that I'm a Debian Developer, and syslog-ng hacker, he went to the back, and emerged a few minutes later with a boxed up Pi, and gave it to me as a gift, for working on Debian. This was an incredibly touching moment, in many, many ways. 2. In your opinion what is the strongest part of Debian Project? That's hard to say, to be honest. There are a good number of things Debian is incredibly strong at, and it would be hard to arbitrarily pick one. Quality, responsibility, safety, predictability are all areas we are very good at. But those are the qualities of the OS. As a project, we are remarkably well organised, given the volunteer & distributed nature of the project. 3. And what is the weakest part of Debian Project? While we can resolve and work with technical issues in a reasonable manner, the project as a whole is rather lacking in all other areas. To grow beyond being the creators of the Universal OS, we, as a project, need to pursue goals beyond the OS. Being part of GSoC and Outreachy are great steps forward. But we still have a lot of internal issues that need to be resolved. Areas such as innovation, team work, where we're in dire need of improvement. 4. How do you intend to resolve the weakest part? As explained in my platform, my primary goal is to remove roadblocks. The DPL can do very little alone, his time and powers are better spent on enabling those who have the required skills and desires, to pursue those. 5. DPL term lasts for one year - what would you challenge during that term and what have you learned from previous DPL's? The most valuable thing I learned from past DPLs is that the expectations are sky-high, yet, a significant portion of what the DPL does is very different than what I imagined in past years. I'd like to challenge the status quo of the DPL being a nearly full-time job. 6. What motivates you to work in Debian and run for DPL? I'm in it for the fame and glory, of course! And because my Tamagotchi told me to. But on a more serious tone, my main motivation to work on Debian is because contributing makes me happy. It satisfies my hunger for doing useful work. Debian is - in my opinion - the perfect platform to give back to the wider Free Software community. Similarly, my motivation to run for DPL is to allow Debian to be a stronger member of that greater

0. Who are you and what's your history with Debian Project? My name's Neil, I've been involved with Debian for over 10 years now. I've held a variety of roles, from the SPI board, writing policy and secure testing team, to being one of the Release Managers for Squeeze and Wheezy. 1. What's your most proud moment as Debian Developer? Probably the release of Squeeze, my first as RM. It was the end of a great effort to get the release out. I particularly remember at the end of DebConf 10 in New York going to the local Disney store and buying every single small squeeze plush toy they had, so I could send a thank you gift to the rest of the release team! Another perhaps was when I first got my Debian kilt. 2. In your opinion what is the strongest part of Debian Project? I think this is our social contract. It guides us, and is what we all agree on. This is our promise to ourselves, to the wider open source community and to our users. 3. And what is the weakest part of Debian Project? At a push, I'd say it's the variety of packages we have in the archive. I'm not sure it's weakness, but it's certainly a challenge. It becomes exponentially harder to ensure that everything integrates well as you add more packages. To have made it do so this far is quite impressive. 4. How do you intend to resolve the weakest part? Well, see the section in my platform on PPAs, and modernising our build and infrastructure system Wouldn't it be great if you could stage a package against all of stable, testing and unstable, and see what fails to build and where, with live build logs on all architectures? 5. DPL term lasts for one year - what would you challenge during that term and what have you learned from previous DPL's? I think my primary role as DPL for 2015 would be to get a great start of development for Stretch. The start of a new release cycle is the exact time to implement wide changes that are potentially disruptive. Every couple of years we seem to relax after the release, rather than get geared up for the next one, and then time passes, and plans slip, and before we know it, the freeze is fast approaching. If we start planning /now/, then we can hopefully enter the freeze with fewer RC bugs, which should be great news for everyone! For the second part, I've talked to a lot of the previous DPLs, and worked with them in one role or another. The main thing I was told was that I shouldn't try and do everything I planned on. It's hard work, and all sorts of things pop up that derail your original plans. 6. What motivates you to work in Debian and run for DPL? The people involved. I've met and worked with some of my greatest friends due to the project. The work, dedication and commitment of those over the years is outstanding. Most of these people are still with us, and unfortunately, a few are not. Whenever I'm feeling disheartened or annoyed, usually due to a giant flame-war then I simply remember that what we're doing is truly remarkable, and the effort that everyone has put in over the years isn't something that should be taken for granted.

Earlier today, I posted a mail to debian-devel about how approximately 25 RC bugs affecting Jessie have been unblocked. As mentioned, I planned to age some of them. The expected result is that about 18 of them will migrate tonight and the remaining 7 of them will migrate tomorrow night. After that, there are no more RC bugs waiting for the RT to unblock them! The only remaining item on the list is cgmanager, for which we are requesting a t-p-u (maintainer already contacted about it). If you want a release sooner, please have a look at the list of remaining RC bugs or/and start testing upgrades. In other news, the glibc regression got fixed. The new version of glibc has already been approved by us. It is now waiting for the debian-installer team to testing it and approve it.
Filed under: Debian, Release-Team

My Lenovo x220, which I've owned for almost four years now (I remember fetching it from the supplier shortly before driving off to Banja Luka), was getting somewhat worn out. The keyboard and the screen had both been replaced at some point already, and the wwan interface had given up as well. The case was all cracked, and the NIC connector wasn't doing very well anymore either; there have been a few cases of me trying to configure the wireless network at a customer, but this being harder than it needs to be because the NIC will only work if I put in the network cable just so, and someone dropped a piece of paper onto the cable. In other words, it was time for a new one. At first I wanted to buy a Lenovo x250, but then I noticed that the Fujitsu came with an i7 4712MQ, which I liked (as today it is still quite exceptional for an ultrabook to have a quadcore processor). Fujitsu also claims up to 9 hours of battery life, but it's not clear to me whether this is supposed to be the case with the default battery only. They also have a battery for the modular bay, which I bought as well (to replace the optical drive whic I sometimes use, but only rarely), and on top of that it came with a free port replicator. Not all is well, however. In the x220, getting the WWAN interface to work involved some creative use of chat against /dev/ttyACM0 wherein I issue a few AT commands to put the WWAN interface into a particular mode, and from then on the WWAN interface is just a regular Ethernet interface on which I can do DHCP. The new laptop has a "Sierra Wireless, Inc." WWAN interface (USB id 1199:9041) which annoyingly doesn't seem to expose the ttyACM (or similar) devices, and I'm not sure what to use instead. Just trying to do DHCP doesn't work -- yes, I tried. Unfortunately, the keyboard isn't very good; it's of the bubble gum type, and I keep getting annoyed at it not picking up my keystrokes all the time. When I'm at home or at my main customer, I have a Das Keyboard Ultimate S (3rd (customer) and 4th (home) generation), so it's only a problem when I'm not at home, but it's still extremely annoying. There is a "backlight" function in that keyboard, but that's not something I think I'll ever use (hint: "das keyboard ultimate s"). The display can't do more than 1366x768, which is completely and utterly wrong for a computer -- but it's the same thing as my x220, so it's not really a regression. The "brightness" ACPI keys don't seem to work. I may have to fiddle with some ACPI settings at some point, I suppose, but it's not a major problem. When I plugged it in, I noticed that fdpowermon ignored the second battery. I had originally written fdpowermon with support for such a second battery, but as my x220 had only one, I never tested it. Apparently there was a bug, but that's been fixed now -- at least in unstable. On the good side of the equation, it has three USB3 ports in the laptop, and four in the port replicator, with no USB2; this is a major leap forwards from the one USB3 and six USB2 in the x220. A positive surprise was the CCID smartcard reader that I somehow missed while reading the specs, but which -- given my current major customer, is very welcome, indeed. Update: After having used it a few days, there were a few minor annoyances:

• Audio didn't work whenever I plugged the laptop to its port replicator and used the external screen. It took me a while to figure out that the default ALSA card (i.e., card 0) is the HDMI output, whereas card 1 is the PCH output, and that since I'm using the DVI port and analog audio, I hear nothing. To fix, create a .asoundrc containing:

    pcm.!default  
      type hw
      card 1
     
    ctl.!default  
      type hw
      card 1
     
  

• Backlight didn't work. My .config/awesome/rc.lua now contains the following lines:

    awful.key(   , "XF86MonBrightnessDown", function() awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -dec 5") end),
    awful.key(   , "XF86MonBrightnessUp", function() awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -inc 5") end),
    awful.key(  modkey  , "XF86MonBrightnessDown", function() awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -set 1") end),
    awful.key(  modkey  , "XF86MonBrightnessUp", function() awful.util.spawn("xbacklight -set 100") end),
  

  The lines with "modkey" allow me to go to "brightness max" or "brightness min" in one go, rather than have to hit fn+f6 or fn+f7 repeatedly, which is a useful extra.
• It was suggested to me that ModemManager might be able to figure out how to enable the WWAN modem. The good news is that it detects the modem, and mmcli should have a way to enable things. The bad news is that mmcli -m 0 -e just comes back with "error: couldn't enable the modem: 'timed out'" (partially translated into Dutch). I haven't had the time to look into this much yet, but it seems to be another one of those dbus complications. To be continued, I'm sure.

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ApologyAs a twisted turn of fate, I need to start my platform with an apology. Last year, I withdrew my nomination, because my life turned upside down, and the effects of that are still felt today, and will continue to have a considerable footprint for the rest of my life. But this is not what I want to apologise for! I want to apologise because my nomination, my platform, and my plans are rather uncommon - or so I believe. Unlike past Project Leaders, if elected, I will not have as much time to travel, as some of them. Nor will I have the resources to do all the things one may expect from a Project Leader. But - as you'll read later - I consider this both the biggest weakness and the greatest strength of my platform.Furthermore, I will not be available from the second half of the voting period until after the new Project Leader's term starts: I'll be getting married, and will enjoy a nice honeymoon, and as such, my email will remain unread from the 9th of April until we're back on the 21st of April.On the mouse behind the keyboardMy name is Gergely Nagy, or algernon, for those of you who may know me by my online presence. I used to be a lot of things: a flaming youth, an application manager, package maintainer, upstream, ftp-assistant, a student, a mentor, a hacker. In the end, however, I am but a simple, albeit sometimes crazy person. I imagine, a lot of people reading this will not know me, and that is actually not only fine, but in my case, desirable.The Role of the Project LeaderThe role of the Project Leader, what people perceive about the role, and what is actually done by one single person changed dramatically over time. In some ways for the better, some ways for the worse. It should be sufficiently clear by now that if we combine all the things past Project Leaders have done, and what people expect the Project Leader to do, then not even all the time in the world would be enough to accomplish everything. On the other hand, we should not cut the responsibilities back to constitution-granted ones only.There has been some discussion about this very topic on debian-project@, back in February, with excellent observations by both past Project Leaders and the current one. I encourage my dear readers to stop reading this platform now, and read at least Lucas's mail. I'll be right here when you get back.Back? Good.You may notice that unlike in previous years, I do not have a Grand Vision, not in the same sense at least. No matter what I envision, however noble that vision may be, it is not the Project Leader's job to save the world, so to say. While I still believe that we have serious problems with motivation, inspiration and innovation within the project, the Project Leader is the wrong person to try and solve these issues with.Apart from the constitutionally required responsibilities, the primary purpose of the Project Leader in my opinion, is to be an enabler: the Project Leader is not a front runner to lead the herd to victory, but a gentle shepherd to make them happy.HappyThere are many ways to make people happy. One such way is to enable them to pursue their passion - and not just enable them, but encourage and fuel that passion, too! -, to remove barriers, to empower them, or in a lot of cases, to include them in the first place. My vision is a project that is greater than just an amazing distribution. More than a role model for technical excellence. I want to do away with territorial pissings (with which I don't mean to imply that this would be the general atmosphere within the project - far from it!), and would rather see a warm, welcoming culture within the project - the kind of "I'm home!" feeling I had at the DebConfs I had the privilege to attend -, on public and private media alike.That is the vision I have, but I can't do it. At best, I can hope to enable people much better at the these things to do what needs to be done. I wish to take the burden of administration, bureaucracy off their shoulders, so they can focus on what they do best. I feel that this is the most important part of being a Project Leader: to enable the project to grow. And this is why I feel that most of you not knowing my name is an advantage here: When you look at a beautiful flower, you admire the flower itself, rarely the gardener.In the endI wish to be the Project Leader no one remembers. I'd rather see people remember all the great things the Project - as a whole - accomplished, for there are many. My purpose is to let You pursue your passion, which in turn enables even more people to pursue their happiness, and allows the greater Free Software community to bask in the warm glow of accomplished dreams.

Slow start today; I was pretty exhausted after yesterday and last night's work. Somehow though, I got past the burn and made major progress today. All the complex movement of both the player and the scroll is finished now, and all that remains is to write interesting spells, and a system for learning spells, and to balance out the game difficulty.

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I haven't quite said what Scroll is about yet, let's fix that: In Scroll, you're a bookworm that's stuck on a scroll. You have to dodge between words and use spells to make your way down the page as the scroll is read. Go too slow and you'll get wound up in the scroll and crushed. The character is multiple chars in size (size is the worm's only stat), and the worm interacts with the scroll in lots of ways, like swallowing letters, or diving through a hole to the other side of the scroll. While it can swallow some letters, if it gets too full, it can't move forward anymore, so letters are mostly consumed to be used as spell components. I think that I will manage to get away without adding any kind of monsters to the game; the scroll (and whoever is reading it) is the antagonist. As I'm writing this very post, I'm imagining the worm wending its way through my paragraphs. This dual experience of text, where you're both reading its content and hyper-aware of its form, is probably the main thing I wanted to explore in writing Scroll. As to the text that fills the scroll, it's broadly procedurally generated, in what I hope are unusual and repeatedly surprising (and amusing) ways. I'm not showing any screenshots of the real text, because I don't want to give that surprise away. But, the other thing about Scroll is that it's scroll, a completely usable (if rather difficult..) Unix pager!