Search Results: "reg"

17 August 2014

Francesca Ciceri: Adventures in Mozillaland #4

Yet another update from my internship at Mozilla, as part of the OPW. An online triage workshop One of the most interesting thing I've done during the last weeks has been to held an online Bug Triage Workshop on the #testday channel at irc.mozilla.org.
That was a first time for me: I had been a moderator for a series of training sessions on IRC organized by Debian Women, but never a "speaker".
The experience turned out to be a good one: creating the material for the workshop had me basically summarize (not too much, I'm way too verbose!) all what I've learned in this past months about triaging in Mozilla, and speaking of it on IRC was a sort of challenge to my usual shyness. And I was so very lucky that a participant was able to reproduce the bug I picked as example, thus confirming it! How cool is that? ;) The workshop was about the very basics of triaging for Firefox, and we mostly focused on a simplified lifecycle of bugs, a guided tour of bugzilla (including the quicksearch and the advanced one, the list view, the individual bug view) and an explanation of the workflow of the triager. I still have my notes, and I plan to upload them to the wiki, sooner or later. I'm pretty satisfied of the outcome: the only regret is that the promoting wasn't enough, so we have few participants.
Will try to promote it better next time! :) about:crashes Another thing that had me quite busy in the last weeks was to learn more about crashes and stability in general.
If you are unfortunate enough to experience a crash with Firefox, you're probably familiar with the Mozilla Crash Reporter dialog box asking you to submit the crash report. But how does it works? From the client-side, Mozilla uses Breakpad as set of libraries for crash reporting. The Mozilla specific implementation adds to that a crash-reporting UI, a server to collect and process crash reported data (and particularly to convert raw dumps into readable stack traces) and a web interface, Socorro to view and parse crash reports. Curious about your crashes? The about:crashes page will show you a list of the submitted and unsubmitted crash reports. (And by the way, try to type about:about in the location bar, to find all the super-secret about pages!) For the submitted ones clicking on the CrashID will take you to the crash report on crash-stats, the website where the reports are stored and analyzed. The individual crash report page on crash-stats is awesome: it shows you the reported bug numbers if any bug summaries match the crash signature, as well as many other information. If crash-stats does not show a bug number, you really should file one! The CrashKill team works on these reports tracking the general stability of the various channels, triaging the top crashes, ensuring that the crash bugs have enough information and are reproducible and actionable by the devs.
The crash-stats site is a mine of information: take a look at the Top Crashes for Firefox 34.0a1.
If you click on a individual crash, you will see lots of details about it: just on the first tab ("Signature Summary") you can find a breakdown of the crashes by OS, by graphic vendors or chips or even by uptime range.
A very useful one is the number of crashes per install, so that you know how widespread is the crashing for that particular signature. You can also check the comments the users have submitted with the crash report, on the "Comments" tab. One and Done tasks review Last week I helped the awesome group of One and Done developers, doing some reviewing of the tasks pages. One and Done is a brilliant idea to help people contribute to the QA Mozilla teams.
It's a website proposing the user a series of tasks of different difficulty and on different topics to contribute to Mozilla. Each task is self-contained and can last few minutes or be a bit more challenging. The team has worked hard on developing it and they have definitely done an awesome job! :) I'm not a coding person, so I just know that they're using Django for it, but if you are interested in all the dirty details take a look at the project repository. My job has been only to check all the existent tasks and verify that the description and instruction are correct, that the task is properly tagged and so on. My impression is that this an awesome tool, well written and well thought with a lot of potential for helping people in their first steps into Mozilla. Something that other projects should definitely imitate (cough Debian cough). What's next? Next week I'll be back on working on bugs. I kind of love bugs, I have to admit it. And not squashing them: not being a coder make me less of a violent person toward digital insects. Herding them is enough for me. I'm feeling extremely non-violent toward bugs. I'll try to help Liz with the Test Plan for Firefox 34, on the triaging/verifying bugs part.
I'll also try to triage/reproduce some accessibility bugs (thanks Mario for the suggestion!).

16 August 2014

Ian Donnelly: How-To: Integrate elektra-merge Into a Debian Package

Hi Everybody, So I already explained that we decided to go in a new direction and patch ucf to allow automatic configuration file merging with any custom command. Today I wanted to explain how to use ucf s new three-way-merge-command functionality in
conjunction with Elektra in order to ultilize Elektra s powerful tools in order to allow automatic three-way merges of your package s configuration during upgrades in a way that is more reliable than a diff3 merge. This guide assumes that you are fimilar with ucf already and are just trying to impliment the --three-way-merge-command option using Elektra. The addition of the --three-way-merge-command option was a part of my Google Summer of Code Project. This option takes the form:

--three-way-merge-command command [New File] [Destination]

Where command is the command you would like to use for the merge. New File and Destination are the same as always. We added a new script to Elektra called elektra-merge for use with this new option in ucf. This script acts as a liaison between ucf and Elektra, allowing a regular ucf command to run a kdb merge even though ucf commands only pass New File and Destination whereas kdb merge requires ourpath, theirpath, basepath, and resultpath. Since ucf already performs a three-way merge, it keeps track of all the necessary files to do so, even though it only takes in New File and Destination. In order to use elektra-merge, the current configuration file must be mounted to KDB to serve as ours in the merge. The script automatically mounts theirs, base, and result using the kdb remount command in order to use the same backend as ours (since all versions of the same file should use the same backend anyway) and this way users don t need to worry about specifying the backend for each version of the file. Then the script attempts a merge on the newly mounted KeySets. Once this is finished, either on success or not, the script finishes by unmouting all but our copy of the file to cleanup KDB. Then, if the merge was successful ucf will replace ours with the result providing the package with an automatically merged configuration which will also be updated in KDB itself. Additionally, we added two other scripts, elektra-mount and elektra-umount which act as simple wrappers for kdb mount and kdb umount. That work identically but are more script friendly The full command to use elektra-merge to perform a three-way merge on a file managed by ucf is:

ucf --three-way --threeway-merge-command elektra-merge [New File] [Destination]

Thats it! As described above, elektra-merge is smart enough to run the whole merge off of the information from that command and utilizes the new kdb remount command to do so. Integrating elektra-merge into a package that already uses ucf is very easy! In postinst you should have a line similar to:

ucf [New File] [Destination]

or perhaps:

ucf --three-way [New File] [Destination]
 All you must do is in postinst, when run with the configure option you must mount the config file to Elektra:

kdb elektra-mount [New File] [Mounting Destination] [Backend]
 Next, you must update the line containing ucf with the options --three-way and --threeway-merge-command like so:

ucf --three-way --threeway-merge-command elektra-merge [New File] [Destination]
 Then, in your postrm script, during a purge, you must umount the config file before deleting it:

kdb lektra-umount [Name]
 That s it! With those small changes you can use Elektra to perform automatic three-way merges on any files that your package uses ucf to handle! I just wanted to show a quick example, below is a diff representing the changes we made to the samba-common package in order to allow automatic configuration merging for smb.conf using Elektra. We chose this package because it already
uses ucf to handle smb.conf but it frequently requires users to manually merge changes across versions. Here is the patch showing what we changed:

diff samba_orig/samba-3.6.6/debian/samba-common.postinst samba/samba-3.6.6/debian/samba-common.postinst
92c92,93
< ucf --three-way --debconf-ok "$NEWFILE" "$CONFIG"
---
> kdb elektra-mount "$CONFIG" system/samba/smb ini
> ucf --three-way --threeway-merge-command elektra-merge --debconf-ok "$NEWFILE" "$CONFIG"
Only in samba/samba-3.6.6/debian/: samba-common.postinst~
diff samba_orig/samba-3.6.6/debian/samba-common.postrm samba/samba-3.6.6/debian/samba-common.postrm
4a5
> kdb elektra-umount system/samba/smb
 As you can see, all we had to do was add the line to mount smb.conf during install, update the ucf command to include the new --threeway-merge-command option, and unmount system/samba/smb during a purge. It really is that easy! Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

Daniel Pocock: WebRTC: what works, what doesn't

With the release of the latest rtc.debian.org portal update, there are numerous improvements but there are still some known problems too. The good news is that if you have a web browser, you can probably make successful WebRTC calls from one developer to another without any need to install or configure anything else. The bad news is that not every permutation of browser and client will work. Here I list some of the limitations so people won't waste time on them. The SIP proxy supports any SIP client Just about any SIP client can connect to the proxy server and register. This does not mean that every client will be able to call each other. Generally speaking, modern WebRTC clients will be able to call each other. Standalone softphones or deskphones will call each other. Calling from a normal softphone or deskphone to a WebRTC browser, or vice-versa, will not work though. Some softphones, like Jitsi, have implemented most of the protocols to communicate with WebRTC but they are yet to put the finishing touches on it. Chat should just work for any combination of clients The new WebRTC frontend supports SIP chat messaging. There is no presence or buddy list support yet. You can even use a tool like sipsak to accept or send SIP chats from a script. Chat works for any client new or old. Although a WebRTC user can't call a softphone user, for example, they can send chats to each other. WebRTC support in Iceweasel 24 on wheezy systems is very limited On a wheezy system, the most recent Iceweasel update is version 24.7. This version supports most of WebRTC but does not support TURN relay servers to help you out of a NAT network. If you call between two wheezy machines on the same NAT network it will work. If the call has to traverse a NAT boundary it will not work. Wheezy users need to either download a newer Firefox version or use Chromium. JsSIP doesn't handle ICE elegantly Internet Connectivity Establishment (ICE, RFC 5245) is meant to prevent calls from being answered with missing audio or video streams. ICE is a mandatory part of WebRTC. When correctly implemented, the JavaScript application will exchange ICE candidates and run the connectivity checks before alerting anybody that a call is ringing. If the checks fail (for example, with Iceweasel 24 and NAT), the caller should be told the call can't be made and the callee shouldn't be disturbed at all. JsSIP is not operating in this manner though. It alerts the callee before telling the browser to start the connectivity checks. Then it even waits for the callee to answer. Only then does it tell the browser to start checking connectivity. This is not a fault with the ICE standard or the browser, it is an implementation problem. Therefore, until this is fully fixed, people may still see some calls that appear to answer but don't have any media stream. After this is fixed, such calls really will be a thing of the past. Debian RTC testing is more than just a pipe dream Although these glitches are not ideal for end users, there is a clear roadmap to resolve them. There are also a growing collection of workarounds to minimize the inconvenience. For example, JSCommunicator has a hack to detect when somebody is using Iceweasel 24 and just refuse to make the call. See the option require_relay_candidate in the config.js settings file. This also ensures that it will refuse to make a call if the TURN server is offline. Better to give the user a clear error than a call without any audio or video stream. require_relay_candidate is enabled on freephonebox.net because it makes life easier for end users. It is not enabled on rtc.debian.org because some DDs may be willing to tolerate this issue when testing on a local LAN. To find out more about practical integration of WebRTC into free software solutions, consider coming to my talk at xTupleCon in October.

14 August 2014

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2014/13 - 2014/33

perl 5.20 got uploaded to debian unstable a few minutes ago; be prepared for some glitches when upgrading sid machines/chroots in the next days, while all 557 reverse dependencies are rebuilt via binNMUs. how does this relate to this blog post's title? it does, since during the last weeks I was mostly trying to help with the preparation of this transition. & we managed to fix quite a few bugs while they were not bumped to serious yet, otherwise the list below would be a bit longer :) anyway, here are the the RC bugs I've worked on in the last 20 or so weeks: p.s.: & now, go & enjoy the new perl 5.20 features :)

13 August 2014

Daniel Pocock: WebRTC in CRM/ERP solutions at xTupleCon 2014

In October this year I'll be visiting the US and Canada for some conferences and a wedding. The first event will be xTupleCon 2014 in Norfolk, Virginia. xTuple make the popular open source accounting and CRM suite PostBooks. The event kicks off with a keynote from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on the evening of October 14. On October 16 I'll be making a presentation about how JSCommunicator makes it easy to add click-to-call real-time communications (RTC) to any other web-based product without requiring any browser plugins or third party softphones. Juliana Louback has been busy extending JSCommunicator as part of her Google Summer of Code project. When finished, we hope to quickly roll out the latest version of JSCommunicator to other sites including rtc.debian.org, the WebRTC portal for the Debian Developer community. Juliana has also started working on wrapping JSCommunicator into a module for the new xTuple / PostBooks web-based CRM. Versatility is one of the main goals of the JSCommunicator project and it will be exciting to demonstrate this in action at xTupleCon. xTupleCon discounts for developers xTuple has advised that they will offer a discount to other open source developers and contributers who wish to attend any part of their event. For details, please contact xTuple directly through this form. Please note it is getting close to their deadline for registration and discounted hotel bookings. Potential WebRTC / JavaScript meet-up in Norfolk area For those who don't or can't attend xTupleCon there has been some informal discussion about a small WebRTC-hacking event at some time on 15 or 16 October. Please email me privately if you may be interested.

11 August 2014

Cyril Brulebois: Mark a mail as read across maildirs

Problem Discussions are sometimes started by mailing a few different mailing lists so that all relevant parties have a chance to be aware of a new topic. It s all nice when people can agree on a single venue to send their replies to, but that doesn t happen every time. Case in point, I m getting 5 copies of a bunch of mails, through the following debian-* lists: accessibility, boot, cd, devel, project. Needless to say: Reading, or marking a given mail as read once per maildir rapidly becomes a burden. Solution I know some people use a duplicate killer at procmail time (hello gregor) but I d rather keep all mails in their relevant maildirs. So here s mark-read-everywhere.pl which seems to do the job just fine for my particular setup: all maildirs below ~/mails/* with the usual cur, new, tmp subdirectories. Basically, given a mail piped from mutt, compute a hash on various headers, look at all new mails (new subdirectories), and mark the matching ones as read (move to the nearby cur subdirectories, and change suffix from , to ,S). Mutt key binding (where X is short for cross post): 
macro index X "<pipe-message>~/bin/mark-as-read-everywhere.pl<enter>"
This isn t pretty or bulletproof but it already started saving time! Now to wonder: was it worth the time to automate that?

Juliana Louback: JSCommunicator - Setup and Architecture

Preface During Google Summer of Code 2014, I got to work on the Debian WebRTC portal under the mentorship of Daniel Pocock. Now I had every intention of meticulously documenting my progress at each step of development in this blog, but I was a bit late in getting the blog up and running. I ll now be publishing a series of posts to recap all I ve done during GSoC. Better late than never. Intro JSCommunicator is a SIP communication tool developed in HTML and JavaScript. The code was designed to make integrating JSCommunicator with a website or web app as simple as possible. It s quite easy, really. However, I do think a more detailed explanation on how to set things up and a guide to the JSCommunicator architecture could be of use, particularly for those wanting to modify the code in any way. Setup To begin, please fork the JSCommunicator repo. If you are new to git, feel free to follow the steps in section Setup and Clone in this post. If you read the README file (which you always should), you ll see that JSCommunicator needs a SIP proxy that supports SIP over Websockets transport. Some options are: I didn t find a tutorial for Kamailio setup, I did find one for repro setup. And bonus, here you have a great tutorial on how to setup and configure your SIP proxy AND your TURN server. In your project s root directory, you ll see a file named config-sample.js. Make a copy of that file named config.js. The config-sample.js file has comments that are very instructive. In sum, the only thing you have to modify is the turn_servers property and the websocket property. In my case, debrtc.org was the domain registered for testing my project, so my config file has: 
turn_servers: [
	  server:"turn:debrtc.org"       
],
Note that unlike the sample, I didn t set a username and password so SIP credentials will be used. Now fill in the websocket property here we use sip5060.net. 
websocket:  
    servers: 'wss://ws.sip5060.net',
    connection_recovery_min_interval: 2,
    connection_recovery_max_interval: 30,
   ,
I m pretty sure you can set the connection_recovery properties to whatever you like. Everything else is optional. If you set the user property, specifically display_name and uri, that will be used to fill in the Login form and takes preference over any Remember me data. If you also set sip_auth_password, JSCommunicator will automatically log in. All the other properties are for other optional functionalities and are well explained. You ll need some third-party javascript that is not included in the JSCommunicator git repo. Namely jQuery version 1.4 or higher and ArbiterJS version 1.0. Download jQuery here and ArbiterJS here and place the .js files in your project s root directory. Do make sure that you are including the correct filename in your html file. For example, in phone-dev.shtml, a file named jquery.js is included. The file you downloaded will likely have version numbers in it s file name. So rename the downloaded file or change the content of src in your includes. This is uber trivial, but I ve made the mistake several times. You ll also need JsSIP.js which can be downloaded here. Same naming care must be taken as is the case for jQuery and ArbiterJS. The recently added Instant Messaging component and some of the new features need jQuery-UI - so far version 1.11.* is known to work. From the downloaded .zip all you need is the jquery-ui-...js file and the jquery-ui-...css file, also to be placed in the project s root directory. If you ll be using the internationalization support you ll also need jquery.i18n.properties.js. To try out JSCommunicator, deploy the website locally by copying your project directory to the apache document root directory (provided you are using apache, which is a good idea.). You ll likely have to restart your server before this works. Now the demo .shtml pages only have a header with all the necessary includes, then a Server Side Include for the body of the page, with all the JSCommunicator html. The html content is in the file jscommunicator.inc. You can enable SSI on apache, OR you can simply copy and paste the content of jscommunicator.inc into phone-dev.shmtl. Start up apache, open a browser and navigate to localhost/jscommunicator/phone-dev.shmtl and you should see: jscommunicatorRaw Actually, pending updates to JSCommunicator, you should see a brand new UI! But all the core stuff will be the same. Architecture Disclaimer: I m explaining my view of the JSCommunicator architecture, which currently may not be 100% correct. But so far it s been enough for me to make my modifications and additions to the code, so it could be of use. One I get a JSCommunicator Founding Father s stamp of approval, I ll be sure to confirm the accuracy. Now to explain how the JSCommunicator code interacts, the use of each code item is described, ignoring all the html and css which will vary according to how you choose to use JSCommunicator. I m also not going to explain jQuery which is a dependency but not specific to WebRTC. The core JSCommunicator code is the following: Each of these files will be presented in what I hope is an intuitive order. The next three files could be considered utils : These two are where the magic happens: Now for some extras: Third party code: Here s a diagram of sorts to help you visualize how the code interacts: jscommArch In sum, 1 - JSCommUI.js handles what is displayed in the UI and feeds data to JSCommManager.js; 2 - JSCommManager.js actually does stuff, feeding data to be displayed to JSCommUI.js; 3 - JSCommManager.js calls functions from the three utils , parseuri.js, webrtc-check.js and jssip-helpher.js which organizes the data from config.js; 4 - JSCommManager.js initializes a SIP User Agent based on the implementation in Arbiter.js. When making any changes to JSCommunicator, you will likely only be working with JSCommUI.js and JSCommManager.js.

Juliana Louback: JSCommunicator - Setup and Architecture

Preface During Google Summer of Code 2014, I got to work on the Debian WebRTC portal under the mentorship of Daniel Pocock. Now I had every intention of meticulously documenting my progress at each step of development in this blog, but I was a bit late in getting the blog up and running. I ll now be publishing a series of posts to recap all I ve done during GSoC. Better late than never. Intro JSCommunicator is a SIP communication tool developed in HTML and JavaScript. The code was designed to make integrating JSCommunicator with a website or web app as simple as possible. It s quite easy, really. However, I do think a more detailed explanation on how to set things up and a guide to the JSCommunicator architecture could be of use, particularly for those wanting to modify the code in any way. Setup To begin, please fork the JSCommunicator repo. If you are new to git, feel free to follow the steps in section Setup and Clone in this post. If you read the README file (which you always should), you ll see that JSCommunicator needs a SIP proxy that supports SIP over Websockets transport. Some options are: I didn t find a tutorial for Kamailio setup, I did find one for repro setup. And bonus, here you have a great tutorial on how to setup and configure your SIP proxy AND your TURN server. In your project s root directory, you ll see a file named config-sample.js. Make a copy of that file named config.js. The config-sample.js file has comments that are very instructive. In sum, the only thing you have to modify is the turn_servers property and the websocket property. In my case, debrtc.org was the domain registered for testing my project, so my config file has: 
turn_servers: [
	  server:"turn:debrtc.org"       
],
Note that unlike the sample, I didn t set a username and password so SIP credentials will be used. Now fill in the websocket property here we use sip5060.net. 
websocket:  
    servers: 'wss://ws.sip5060.net',
    connection_recovery_min_interval: 2,
    connection_recovery_max_interval: 30,
   ,
I m pretty sure you can set the connection_recovery properties to whatever you like. Everything else is optional. If you set the user property, specifically display_name and uri, that will be used to fill in the Login form and takes preference over any Remember me data. If you also set sip_auth_password, JSCommunicator will automatically log in. All the other properties are for other optional functionalities and are well explained. You ll need some third-party javascript that is not included in the JSCommunicator git repo. Namely jQuery version 1.4 or higher and ArbiterJS version 1.0. Download jQuery here and ArbiterJS here and place the .js files in your project s root directory. Do make sure that you are including the correct filename in your html file. For example, in phone-dev.shtml, a file named jquery.js is included. The file you downloaded will likely have version numbers in it s file name. So rename the downloaded file or change the content of src in your includes. This is uber trivial, but I ve made the mistake several times. You ll also need JsSIP.js which can be downloaded here. Same naming care must be taken as is the case for jQuery and ArbiterJS. The recently added Instant Messaging component and some of the new features need jQuery-UI - so far version 1.11.* is known to work. From the downloaded .zip all you need is the jquery-ui-...js file and the jquery-ui-...css file, also to be placed in the project s root directory. If you ll be using the internationalization support you ll also need jquery.i18n.properties.js. To try out JSCommunicator, deploy the website locally by copying your project directory to the apache document root directory (provided you are using apache, which is a good idea.). You ll likely have to restart your server before this works. Now the demo .shtml pages only have a header with all the necessary includes, then a Server Side Include for the body of the page, with all the JSCommunicator html. The html content is in the file jscommunicator.inc. You can enable SSI on apache, OR you can simply copy and paste the content of jscommunicator.inc into phone-dev.shmtl. Start up apache, open a browser and navigate to localhost/jscommunicator/phone-dev.shmtl and you should see: jscommunicatorRaw Actually, pending updates to JSCommunicator, you should see a brand new UI! But all the core stuff will be the same. Architecture Disclaimer: I m explaining my view of the JSCommunicator architecture, which currently may not be 100% correct. But so far it s been enough for me to make my modifications and additions to the code, so it could be of use. One I get a JSCommunicator Founding Father s stamp of approval, I ll be sure to confirm the accuracy. Now to explain how the JSCommunicator code interacts, the use of each code item is described, ignoring all the html and css which will vary according to how you choose to use JSCommunicator. I m also not going to explain jQuery which is a dependency but not specific to WebRTC. The core JSCommunicator code is the following: Each of these files will be presented in what I hope is an intuitive order. The next three files could be considered utils : These two are where the magic happens: Now for some extras: Third party code: Here s a diagram of sorts to help you visualize how the code interacts: jscommArch In sum, 1 - JSCommUI.js handles what is displayed in the UI and feeds data to JSCommManager.js; 2 - JSCommManager.js actually does stuff, feeding data to be displayed to JSCommUI.js; 3 - JSCommManager.js calls functions from the three utils , parseuri.js, webrtc-check.js and jssip-helpher.js which organizes the data from config.js; 4 - JSCommManager.js initializes a SIP User Agent based on the implementation in Arbiter.js. When making any changes to JSCommunicator, you will likely only be working with JSCommUI.js and JSCommManager.js.

10 August 2014

Ian Wienand: Finding out if you're a Rackspace instance

Different hosting providers do things slightly differently, so it's sometimes handy to be able to figure out where you are. Rackspace is based on Xen and their provided images should include the xenstore-ls command available. xenstore-ls vm-data will give you a handy provider and even region fields to let you know where you are. 
function is_rackspace  
  if [ ! -f /usr/bin/xenstore-ls ]; then
      return 1
  fi
  /usr/bin/xenstore-ls vm-data   grep -q "Rackspace"
 
if is_rackspace; then
  echo "I am on Rackspace"
fi
Other reading about how this works:

Cyril Brulebois: Why is my package blocked?

A bit of history: A while ago udeb-producing packages were getting frozen on a regular fashion, when a d-i release was about to be cut. While I wasn t looking at the time, I can easily understand the reasons behind that: d-i is built upon many components, it takes some time to make sure it s basically in shape for a release, and it s very annoying when a regression sneaks in right before the installation images get built. I took over d-i release maintenance in May 2012 and only a few uploads happened before the wheezy freeze. I was only discovering the job at the time, and I basically released whatever was in testing then. The freeze began right after that (end of June), so I started double checking things affecting d-i (in addition to or instead of the review performed by other release team members), and unblocking packages when changes seemed safe, or once they were tested. A few uploads happened after the wheezy release and there s already a Jessie Alpha 1 release. I was about to release Jessie Beta 1 after some fair bits of testing, a debian-installer upload, and the only remaining bits were: building installation images (hello Steve), and of course communication (mail announce and website update). Unfortunately a new upstream release reached testing in the meanwhile, breaking the installer in several ways. I ll give details below, of course not because I want to point finger at the maintainer, but to illustrate the ramifications that a single package s migrating to testing can induce. Since I d like to avoid such experience in the future, I ll probably reintroduce the old method and freeze all udeb-producing packages during next d-i releases. So you know why it might happen. Your next question might be: What to do when your package is getting caught in that net? . In that case, please get in touch with both debian-release@ and debian-boot@ asking for an unblock. I ll then review your particular package, and either let it migrate to testing, or delay it until after the release. Update: official announcement.

9 August 2014

Russell Coker: Being Obviously Wrong About Autism

I m watching a Louis Theroux documentary about Autism (here s the link to the BBC web site [1]). The main thing that strikes me so far (after watching 7.5 minutes of it) is the bad design of the DLC-Warren school for Autistic kids in New Jersey [2]. A significant portion of people on the Autism Spectrum have problems with noisy environments, whether most Autistic people have problems with noise depends on what degree of discomfort is considered a problem. But I think it s reasonable to assume that the majority of kids on the Autism Spectrum will behave better in a quiet environment. So any environment that is noisy will cause more difficult behavior in most Autistic kids and the kids who don t have problems with the noise will have problems with the way the other kids act. Any environment that is more prone to noise pollution than is strictly necessary is hostile to most people on the Autism Spectrum and all groups of Autistic people. The school that is featured in the start of the documentary is obviously wrong in this regard. For starters I haven t seen any carpet anywhere. Carpeted floors are slightly more expensive than lino but the cost isn t significant in terms of the cost of running a special school (such schools are expensive by private-school standards). But carpet makes a significant difference to ambient noise. Most of the footage from that school included obvious echos even though they had an opportunity to film when there was the least disruption presumably noise pollution would be a lot worse when a class finished. It s not difficult to install carpet in all indoor areas in a school. It s also not difficult to install rubber floors in all outdoor areas in a school (it seems that most schools are doing this already in play areas for safety reasons). For a small amount of money spent on installing and maintaining noise absorbing floor surfaces the school could achieve better educational results. The next step would be to install noise absorbing ceiling tiles and wallpaper, that might be a little more expensive to install but it would be cheap to maintain. I think that the hallways in a school for Autistic kids should be as quiet as the lobby of a 5 star hotel. I don t believe that there is any technical difficulty in achieving that goal, making a school look as good as an expensive hotel would be expensive but giving it the same acoustic properties wouldn t be difficult or expensive. How do people even manage to be so wrong about such things? Do they never seek any advice from any adult on the Autism Spectrum about how to run their school? Do they avoid doing any of the most basic Google searches for how to create a good environment for Autistic people? Do they just not care at all and create an environment that looks good to NTs? If they are just trying to impress NTs then why don t they have enough pride to care that people like me will know how bad they are? These aren t just rhetorical questions, I d like to know what s wrong with those people that makes them do their jobs in such an amazingly bad way.
Related posts:
  1. Autism and a Child Beauty Contest Fenella Wagener wrote an article for the Herald Sun about...
  2. Autism, Food, etc James Purser wrote Stop Using Autism to Push Your Own...
  3. Communication Shutdown and Autism The AEIOU Foundation The AEIOU Foundation [1] is a support...

8 August 2014

Ian Donnelly: The Line Plug-In

Hi Everybody, As you may have noticed I wrote a new plug-in for Elektra called line . I used it for a lot of examples in my tutorial, How-To: Write a Plug-In. The line plug-in is a very simple storage plug-in for Elektra. This plug-in stores files into the Elektra Key Database creating a new Key for each line and setting the string value of the Key to the string value of the line of that file. So if we have a file called hello.txt :

Hello
World!

And we mount it to kdb like so: kdb mount ~/line.txt system/hello_line line. The output of kdb ls system/hello_line the output would be:

system/hello_line/#1
system/hello_line/#2

With the getString values of #1 and #2 being Hello and World! respectively. If this seems like a very simple plug-in, that s because it is. Obviously, this plug-in isn t a great showcase for the robustness of Elektra, any data structure could store a file line by line relatively easy, so why did we add a line plug-in at all? The answer is that we included a line plug-in to allow any line-based file to use functions of Elektra, particularly the new Merge function. My Google Summer of Code project is to allow for automatic three-way merge of Debian conffiles during package upgrades as opposed to the current prompt and manual merging a user must do if a conffile is edited. Using Elektra and the new mergecode we can mount a conffile with the best plug-in for it, (the ini plug-in for Samba s smb.conf for instance) and that allows for a very powerful merging ability with a lot more success than a simple diff merge. However, there are a lot of conffiles that don t use any particular standard (such as ini, xml, or JSON) to store data. That is where the line plug-in comes in. We can still mount these files using the line plug-in and attempt a merge. Of course it is much more likely to have conflicts, and this type of merge is still susceptible to many of the same flaws as regular file merges (such as not being able to detect when a line has been moved), but it simple cases, the merge may succeed which would reduce the overall number of times a user would be prompted during an upgrade. Basically, I wrote a line plug-in for Elektra as a fallback for conffile merges when we can t mount the conffile in any more meaningful way. While merges using KeySets that were mounted using line are more likely to fail than other, more specialized plug-ins, there are cases that these merges will succeed and the user will not have to deal with a confusing prompt. The whole point of my Google Summer of Code project is to make upgrading packages and dealing with conffiles much smoother and easier than it is now by including a three-way mere and this line plug-in will help with this goal. Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

7 August 2014

Jordi Mallach: A pile of reasons why GNOME should be Debian jessie s default desktop environment

GNOME has, for some reason or another, always been the default desktop environment in Debian since the installer is able to install a full desktop environment by default. Release after release, Debian has been shipping different versions of GNOME, first based on the venerable 1.2/1.4 series, then moving to the time-based GNOME 2.x series, and finally to the newly designed 3.4 series for the last stable release, Debian 7 wheezy . During the final stages of wheezy s development, it was pointed out that the first install CD image would not longer hold all of the required packages to install a full GNOME desktop environment. There was lots of discussion surrounding this bug or fact, and there were two major reactions to it. The Debian GNOME team rebuilt some key packages so they would be compressed using xz instead of gzip, saving the few megabytes that were needed to squeeze everything in the first CD. In parallel, the tasksel maintainer decided switching to Xfce as default desktop was another obvious fix. This change, unannounced and two days before the freeze, was very contested and spurred the usual massive debian-devel threads. In the end, and after a few default desktop flip flops, it was agreed that GNOME would remain as the default for the already frozen wheezy release, and this issue would be revisited later on during jessie s development. And indeed, some months ago, Xfce was again reinstated as Debian s default desktop for jessie as announced: 
Change default desktop to xfce.
This will be re-evaluated before jessie is frozen. The evaluation will
start around the point of DebConf (August 2014). If at that point gnome
looks like a better choice, it ll go back as the default.
Some criteria for that choice will include:
* Popcon numbers for gnome on jessie. If gnome installations continue to
  rise fast enough despite xfce being the default (compared with, say
  kde installations), then we ll know that users prefer gnome.
  Currently we have no data about how many users would choose gnome when
  it s not the default. Part of the reason for switching to xfce now
  is to get such data.
* The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind.
* How well the UI works for both new and existing users. Gnome 3
  seems to be adding back many gnome 2 features that existing users
  expect, as well as making some available via addons. If it feels
  comfortable to gnome 2 (and xfce) users, that would go a long way
  toward switching back to it as the default. Meanwhile, Gnome 3 is also
  breaking new ground in its interface; if the interface seems more
  welcoming to new users, or works better on mobile devices, etc, that
  would again point toward switching back.
* Whatever size constraints exist for CD or other images at the time.
--
Hello to all the tech journalists out there. This is pretty boring.
Why don t you write a story about monads instead?
Joey Hess in dfca406eb694e0ac00ea04b12fc912237e01c9b5.
Suffice to say that the Debian GNOME team participants have never been thrilled about how the whole issue is being handled, and we ve been wondering if we should be doing anything about it, or just move along and enjoy the smaller amount of bug reports against GNOME packages that this change would bring us, if it finally made it through to the final release. During our real life meet-ups in FOSDEM and the systemd+GNOME sprint in Antwerp, most members of the team did feel Debian would not be delivering a graphical environment with the polish we think our users deserve, and decided we at least should try to convince the rest of the Debian project and our users that Debian will be best suited by shipping GNOME 3.12 by default. Power users, of course, can and know how to get around this default and install KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE or whatever other choice they have. For the average user, though, we think we should be shipping GNOME by default, and tasksel should revert the above commit again. Some of our reasons are: In short, we think defaulting to GNOME is the best option for the Debian release, and in contrast, shipping Xfce as the default desktop could mean delivering a desktop experience that has some incomplete or rough edges, and not on par with Debian quality standards for a stable release. We believe tasksel should again revert the change and be uploaded as soon as possible, in order to get people testing images with GNOME the sooner the better, with the freeze only two months away. We would also like that in the future, changes of this nature will not be announced in a git commit log, but widely discussed in debian-project and the other usual development/decision channels, like the change of init system happened recently. We will, whichever the final decision is, continue to package GNOME with great care to ensure our users get the best possible desktop experience Debian can offer.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 250 CRAN packages

Rcpp growth
Rcpp reached a nice round milestone yesterday: 250 packages on CRAN now depend on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo declarations). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp over time. Or at least since I started to write down some usage numbers: first informally, then via a script. Also displayed is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using it. Rcpp cleared the four per-cent hurdle just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. 250 is a pretty impressive, and rather humbling, number. From everybody behind Rcpp, I would like to say a heartfelt Thank You! to all the users and of course contributors.

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

6 August 2014

Chris Lamb: Strava Enhancement Suite update

https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/chrome_web_store.png I've been told I don't blog about my projects often enough, so here's a feature update on my Chrome Extension that adds various improvements to the Strava.com fitness tracker. All the features are optional and can be individually enabled in the options panel.

Repeated segments This adds aggregate data (fastest, slowest, average, etc.) when segments are repeated within an activity. It's particularly useful for laps or like this Everesting attempt hill repeats: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/repeated_segments3.png

Leaderboard default Changes the default leaderboard away from "Overall" when viewing a segment effort. The most rewarding training often comes from comparing your own past performances rather than those of others, so viewing your own results by default can make more sense. You can select any of Men, Women, I'm Following or My Results: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/leaderboard_default.png

Hide feed entries Hides various entry types in the activity feed that can get annoying. You currently have the option of hiding challenges, route creations, goals created or club memberships: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/hide_challenge_feed_entries.png

Variability Index Calculates a Variability Index (VI) from the weighted average power and the average power, an indication of how "smooth" a ride was. Required a power meter. A VI of 1.0 would mean a ride was paced "perfectly", with very few surges of effort: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/variability_index.png

Infinite scroll Automatically loads more dashboard entries when reaching the bottom, saving a tedious click on the "More" button: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/infinite_scroll.png

Running TSS Estimates a run's Training Stress Score (TSS) from its Grade Adjusted Pace distribution, a measure of that workout's duration and intensity relative to the athletes's capability, providing an insight into correct recovery time and overall training load over time: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/running_tss.png

Hide "find friends" Hides social networking buttons, including invitations to invite or find further friends: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/hide_invite_friends.png

"Enter" posts comment Immediately posts comment when pressing Enter/Return key in the edit box rather than adding a newline: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/comment_post_on_enter.png

Compare running Changes the default sport for the "Side by Side comparison" module to running when viewing athlete profiles: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/side_by_side_running.png

Running cadence Shows running cadence by default in the elevation profile: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/running_cadence.png

Running heart rate Shows running heart rate by default in elevation profile: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/running_heart_rate.png

Estimated FTP Selects "Show Estimated FTP" by default on the Power Curve page: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/estimated_ftp.png

Standard Google map Prefer the "Standard" Google map over the "Terrain" view: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/standard_google_map.png

Let me know if you have any comments, suggestions or if you have any other feedback. If you find this software useful, please consider donating via Paypal to support further development. You can also view the source and contribute directly on GitHub. https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/strava/chrome_web_store.png

5 August 2014

Francesca Ciceri: Just Rockin' and Rollin'!

[Warning: quite a bit of pics in this post] [Edit: changed the post title, while I love the music, the actual lyrics of "Shake Rattle and Roll" made me facepalm. Ronnie Dawson's song is better :)] Last weekend I've been in Senigallia for the 15th edition of Summer Jamboree.
It was my first time there, and it was epic. Really.
If you are into roots music and early rock'n'roll and/or into vintage 40s and 50s clothes, go there.
You won't regret it! (You have time until August 10th, hurry up!) If you follow my identi.ca account (whooo! shameless plug!), you may know that I love music in general and Blues, Jazz and Rockabilly in particular.
If you read my blog, you may know that I make clothes - particularly reproductions of 50s and retro clothes.
So, it's not much of a surprise that going to the Summer Jamboree has been a mindblowing experience to me.
What surprised me it's that I've felt the very same wonder of my first Debconf: the amazing feeling that you are not alone, there are other people like you out there, who love the same things you love, who are silly about the same little details (yes, I equally despise historically innacurate pin up shoes and non free software), who dance - metaphorically and not - at your same beat.
Same wonder I felt when I first read some authors - Orwell and David Foster Wallace, just to mention a couple - or when I first delved in anarchist thinkers.
By nature I'm not much of a social person, and I tend to live and love alone. But that sense of being part of something, to find like-minded people always blows me away. I'm not much of a blog writer, so I won't probably be able to give you a good impression of the awesomness of it.
But hey, watch me trying. The Vintage Market I spent most of the morning travelling by train to reach Senigallia (and met the most beautiful French girl ever in the process, who sketched me in her notebook because, hey!, I was already in full Rockabilly gear).
The hotel was pretty close to the station, and to the part of the city where the festival was taking place, so I spent a couple of hours sleeping, then started the adventure.
The festival takes place mostly near the Rocca Roveresca, a beautiful fifteenth century castle, and on its gardens, but the all the other venues are in walking distance.
All around the Rocca there is a market with vintage clothes, records, shoes, retro jewelry. A special mention for two fantastic dressmakers: Laura of Bloody Edith Atelier from Rome and Debora of The Black Pinafore from Sarzana. I bought just a piece from each of them, but I was able to do that only with a huge amount of self restraint. Guitars! Tattoos! Yes, I may have spent a bit drooling on the Gibson Cherry Red, and I tried (without amp, though) that beautiful orange Gretsch Electromatic. guitars! And Greg Gregory of the Travel Ink Tattoo Studio from UK was there, with his shiny Airstream. The airstream of Travel Ink Tattoo I also spent a while among the records in the Bear Family Records booth. They are a Germany based independent record label specialised in reissues of country and 50s rock'n'roll. Couldn't resist, and I bought a beautiful Sun Records' tshirt. Just Rockin' and Rollin'. Aka: dance time After that, it was time to dance. I missed the dance camp of the afternoon, but the DJ sets were fantastic, all 40s and 50s stuff, and I fell in love with Lindy Hop and Boogie Woogie, and well, obviously, Jive. I could have spent hours watching the people dancing, and clumsily trying the most basic moves myself. people dancing more dancers People And the people, did I mention the people?
They were cosplaying the 40s and 50s so wonderfully I couldn't help but take some photos (and find a new fetish of mine: men in 40s clothes. Sexy as hell). For instance, Angelo Di Liberto, artistic director of the festival with the beautiful burlesque artist Grace Hall. Angelo Di Liberto and Grace Hall Or the amazingly dressed German couple I met in via Carducci. A beautifully dressed couple And this couple too, was pretty cool. And another very in-character couple The Prettiest Smile award goes to these lovely ladies! Smiling lovely ladies Cars Who knows me, can tell that I don't love cars.
They stink, they are noisy, they are big.
But these ones where shiny and looked beautiful. Oldtimer cars Also, the black Cadillac had the terrible effect on me of putting "Santa Claus is Back in Town" in my head (or, more precisely, Elvis tomcatting his way through the song, singing "Got no sleigh with reindeer / No sack on my back / You're gonna see me comin' in a big black Cadillac"). the big black cadillac cadillac detail Music! Sadly, I missed Stray Cat's Slim Jim Phantom but I was just in time for Ben E. King.
It was lovely: backed by the house band (The Good Fellas), he sang a lot of old Drifters hits, from On Broadway to Save the Last Dance for Me to - obviously - the great Stand By Me. Then a bit of hillbilly country, with Shorty Tom and the Longshots, a French combo consisting of a double bass, a rhythm guitar and a steel guitar. Shorty Tom and the Longshots And, well, more dancing: the dj sets on the three stages went on until 3 am. Day 2 The next morning I took advantage of the early opening of Rocca Roveresca to visit it. The Rocca itself is beautiful and very well maintained, and hosts various exhibitions.
"Marilyn In White" shows the incredible photos taken by George Barris on the set of "The Seven Year Itch" as well as some taken in 1962. Beautiful, really, especially the series on the beach. photos from the exhibition But the ones moving me were the pics from "Buddy Holly, The Day The Music Dies": a collection of photos taken by Bill Francis during the (sadly brief) career of Buddy Holly from the very beginnings to his death. After that, it was time to come back to year 2014, but really I felt like I've walked for a while in another decade and planet. And the cool thing is that I could enjoy the great 40s and 50s music and dances (and clothes!) without the horrible stereotypes and cultural norms of the time period. A total win. :) So, ehm, that's it. I'm a bit sad to be back, and to cheer myself up I'm already planning to attend Wanda Jackson gig in Aarburg (CH) next month.
And take Lindy Hop and Boogie lessons, obviously.

Steve Kemp: Free (orange) SMS alerts

In the past I used to pay for an email->SMS gateway, which was used to alert me about some urgent things. That was nice because it was bi-directional, and at one point I could restart particular services via sending SMS messages. These days I get it for free, and for my own reference here is how you get to receive free SMS alerts via Orange, which is my mobile phone company. If you don't use Orange/EE this will probably not help you. The first step is to register an Orange email-account, which can be done here: Once you've done that you'll have an email address of the form example@orange.net, which is kinda-sorta linked to your mobile number. You'll sign in and be shown something that looks like webmail from the early 90s. The thing that makes this interesting is that you can look in the left-hand menu and see a link called "SMS Alerts". Visit it. That will let you do things like set the number of SMSs you wish to receive a month (I chose "1000"), and the hours during which delivery will be made (I chose "All the time"). Anyway if you go through this dance you'll end up with an email address example@orange.net, and when an email arrives at that destination an SMS will be sent to your phone. The content of the SMS will be the subject of the mail, truncated if necessary, so you can send a hello message to yourself like this: 
echo "nop"   mail -s "Hello, urgent message is present" username@orange.net
Delivery seems pretty reliable, and I've scheduled the mailbox to be purged every week, to avoid it getting full:
Hostnamepop.orange.net
UsernameYour mobile number
PasswordYour password
If you wished to send mail from this you can use smtp.orange.net, but I pity the fool who used their mobile phone company for their primary email address.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: BH release 1.54.0-3

A new release of our BH package providing Boost headers for use by R is now on the CRAN mirrors. max-heap image This release is the third based on Boost 1.54.0. At the request of the maintainer of the recent added RcppMLPACK package, it adds the Boost.Heap library. Boost.Heap implements priority queues which extend beyond the corresponding (and somewhat simpler) class in the STL. Key features of the Boost.Heap priority queues are mutability, iterators, ability to merge, stable sort, and comparison. No other changes were made.
Changes in version 1.54.0-3 (2014-08-03)
  • Added Boost Heap library which will be needed by the next version of RcppMLPACK
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

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

3 August 2014

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Introducing sanitizers 0.1.0

A new package sanitizers is now on CRAN. It provides test cases for Address Sanitizers, and Undefined Behaviour Sanitizers. These are two recent features of both g++ and clang++, and described in the Checking Memory Access section of the Writing R Extension manual. I set up a new web page for the sanitizers package which illustrates their use case via pre-built Docker images, similar to what I presented at the end of my useR! 2014 keynote a few weeks ago. So instead of repeating this over here, I invite you to read the detailed discussion on the sanitizers 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.

1 August 2014

Gunnar Wolf: Wow. Just rejected an editorial offer...

Yes, I've been bragging about the Operating Systems book all over... Today, a colleague handed me a phone call from somebody at Editorial Patria, a well known educational editorial in Mexico. They are looking for material similar to what I wrote, but need the material to be enfocado a competencias Focused on skills, a pedagogic fashion. I was more than interested, of course. As it currently stands, I am very happy that our book is being used already at three universities in three countries (by the different authors) and have heard other people saying they would recommend it, and of course I'm interested in making our work have as big an impact as possible. Of course, we'd have to modify several aspects of the book to cater to the skills focus... But it would be great to have the book available at commercial bookstores. After all, university editions are never as widely circulated as commercial ones. I had just one hard request to accept this: Our work must be distributed under a free licensing. Explicitly allow book photocopies and electronic distribution (didn't get into the "and modification" part, but I would eventually get there ;-) ) And... Of course, the negotiation immediately fell down. Editorials, this person says, live from selling individual books. She says she was turned down by another university professor and for another subject this same week. So, yes, I took the opportunity to explain things as I (and the people that think as I do Fortunately, not so few) see them. Yes, of course, editorials have to make a living. But text books are often photocopied as it is. Who buys a book? Whoever needs it. On one hand, if somebody will be using a book throughout a semester and it's reasonably priced (say, up to 3 cost of photocopies), they will probably buy it because it just works better (it is more comfortable to use and nicer to read). If a teacher likes the explanation for a particular topic, it should be completely legal for him to distribute photocopies (or digital copies) of the specific material And quite probably, among the students, more than one will end up appreciating the material enough to go look for the book in the library. And, as I have done throughout my life, if I read (in copies, electronically or in a library) a book I like... Quite probably I will go buy it. So... Of course, she insisted it was against their corporate policy. I insisted on my explanation. I hope they meet many stubborn teachers refusing to distribute books under a non-free licensing. I hope I contributed to making a dent in an industry that must change. Yes, a very very small dent, but one that helps them break free from their obsolete mindset ;-) (But yes, I don't know how long I will regret not being part of their very nice catalog of science and engineering books) ;-) )

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