edd@max:~/git$ R CMD build drat
* checking for file  drat/DESCRIPTION  ... OK
* preparing  drat :
* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
* checking for LF line-endings in source and make files
* checking for empty or unneeded directories
* building  drat_0.0.1.1.tar.gz 
edd@max:~/git$ 

edd@max:~/git$ r -e 'drat:::insert("drat_0.0.1.1.tar.gz")'
edd@max:~/git$ 

edd@max:~/git/drat(gh-pages)$ git status
On branch gh-pages
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/gh-pages'.
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
        modified:   src/contrib/PACKAGES
        modified:   src/contrib/PACKAGES.gz
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        src/contrib/drat_0.0.1.1.tar.gz
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
edd@max:~/git/drat(gh-pages)$

## add RStudio CRAN mirror
drat:::add("CRAN", "http://cran.rstudio.com")
## add Dirk's drat
drat:::add("eddelbuettel")

edd@max:~/git$ r -e'print(options("repos"))'
$repos
                                 CRAN                          eddelbuettel 
            "http://cran.rstudio.com" "http://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat/" 
edd@max:~/git$ 

edd@max:~/git$ r -e 'update.packages(ask=FALSE, lib.loc="/usr/local/lib/R/site-library")'                                                                                                                            
trying URL 'http://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat/src/contrib/drat_0.0.1.1.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/octet-stream' length 5829 bytes
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 5829 bytes
* installing *source* package  drat  ...
** R
** inst
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** testing if installed package can be loaded
* DONE (drat)
The downloaded source packages are in
         /tmp/downloaded_packages 
edd@max:~/git$

Why I am migrating away from Drupal because it is basically impossible to
upgrade my blog from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Or if it is, I'll have to
redo the whole freaking thing again when Drupal 8 comes along. And frankly, I don't really need Drupal to run a blog. A blog was
originally a really simple thing: a web blog. A set of articles
written on the corner of a table. Now with Drupal, I can add
ecommerce, a photo gallery and whatnot to my blog, but why would I do
that? and why does it need to be a dynamic CMS at all, if I get so
little comments? So I'm switching to ikiwiki, for the following reason:

• no upgrades necessary: well, not exactly true, i still need to
  upgrade ikiwiki, but that's covered by the Debian package
  maintenance and I only have one patch to it, and there's no data migration! (the last such migration in ikiwiki was in 2009 and was fully supported)
• offline editing: this is a a big thing for me: i can just note
  things down and push them when I get back online
• one place for everything: this blog is where I keep my notes, it's
  getting annoying to have to keep track of two places for that stuff
• future-proof: extracting content from ikiwiki is amazingly
  simple. every page is a single markdown-formatted file. that's it.

Migrating will mean abandoning the
barlow theme, which was
seeing a declining usage anyways.

What So what should be exported exactly. There's a bunch of crap in the old
blog that i don't want: users, caches, logs, "modules", and the list
goes on. Maybe it's better to create a list of what I need to extract:

• nodes
  • title ([[ikiwiki/directive/meta]] title and guid tags, guid to avoid flooding aggregators)
  • body (need to check for "break comments")
  • nid (for future reference?)
  • tags (should be added as \[[!tag foo bar baz]] at the bottom)
  • URL (to keep old addresses)
  • published date ([[ikiwiki/directive/meta]] date directive)
  • modification date ([[ikiwiki/directive/meta]] updated directive)
  • revisions?
  • attached files
• menus
  • RSS feed
  • contact
  • search
• comments
  • author name
  • date
  • title
  • content
• attached files
  • thumbnails
  • links
• tags
  • each tag should have its own RSS feed and latest posts displayed

When Some time before summer 2015.

Who Well me, who else. You probably really don't care about that, so let'S
get to the meat of it.

How How to perform this migration... There are multiple paths:

• MySQL commandline: extracting data using the commandline mysql tool (drush sqlq ...)
• Views export: extracting "standard format" dumps from Drupal and
  parse it (JSON, XML, CSV?)

Both approaches had issues, and I found a third way: talk directly to
mysql and generate the files directly, in a Python script. But first,
here are the two previous approaches I know of.

MySQL commandline LeLutin switched using MySQL requests,
although he doesn't specify how content itself was migrated. Comments
importing is done with that script:

echo "select n.title, concat('  [[!comment  format=mdwn  username=\"', c.name, '\"  ip=\"', c.hostname, '\"  subject=\"', c.subject, '\"  date=\"', FROM_UNIXTIME(c.created), '\"  content=\"\"\" ', b.comment_body_value, ' \"\"\"]]') from node n, comment c, field_data_comment_body b where n.nid=c.nid and c.cid=b.entity_id;"   drush sqlc   tail -n +2   while read line; do if [ -z "$i" ]; then i=0; fi; title=$(echo "$line"   sed -e 's/[    ]\+ .*//' -e 's/ /_/g' -e 's/[:(),?/+]//g'); body=$(echo "$line"   sed 's/[^ ]*  //'); mkdir -p ~/comments/$title; echo -e "$body" > ~/comments/$title/comment_$i._comment; i=$((i+1)); done

Kind of ugly, but beats what i had before (which was "nothing"). I do think it is the good direction to take, to simply talk to the
MySQL database, maybe with a native Python script. I know the Drupal
database schema pretty well (still! this is D6 after all) and it's
simple enough that this should just work.

Views export [[!img 2015-02-03-233846_1440x900_scrot.png class="align-right" size="300x" align="center" alt="screenshot of views 2.x"]] mvc recommended views data export on Lelutin's
blog. Unfortunately, my experience with the views export interface has
been somewhat mediocre so far. Yet another reason why I don't like
using Drupal anymore is this kind of obtuse dialogs: I clicked through those for about an hour to get JSON output that
turned out to be provided by views bonus instead of
views_data_export. And confusingly enough, the path and
format_name fields are null in the JSON output
(whyyy!?). views_data_export unfortunately only supports XML,
which seems hardly better than SQL for structured data, especially
considering I am going to write a script for the conversion anyways. Basically, it doesn't seem like any amount of views mangling will
provide me with what i need. Nevertheless, here's the [[failed-export-view.txt]] that I was able to
come up with, may it be useful for future freedom fighters.

Python script I ended up making a fairly simple Python script to talk directly to
the MySQL database. The script exports only nodes and comments, and nothing else. It makes
a bunch of assumptions about the structure of the site, and is
probably only going to work if your site is a simple blog like mine,
but could probably be improved significantly to encompass larger and
more complex datasets. History is not preserved so no interaction is
performed with git.

Generating dump First, I imported the MySQL dump file on my local mysql server for easier
development. It is 13.9MiO!!

mysql -e 'CREATE DATABASE anarcatblogbak;'
ssh aegir.koumbit.net "cd anarcat.koumbit.org ; drush sql-dump"   pv   mysql anarcatblogbak

I decided to not import revisions. The majority (70%) of the content has
1 or 2 revisions, and those with two revisions are likely just when
the node was actually published, with minor changes. ~80% have 3
revisions or less, 90% have 5 or less, 95% 8 or less, and 98% 10 or
less. Only 5 articles have more than 10 revisions, with two having the
maximum of 15 revisions. Those stats were generated with:

SELECT title,count(vid) FROM anarcatblogbak.node_revisions group
by nid;

Then throwing the output in a CSV spreadsheet (thanks to
mysql-workbench for the easy export), adding a column numbering the
rows (B1=1,B2=B1+1), another for generating percentages
(C1=B1/count(B$2:B$218)) and generating a simple graph with
that. There were probably ways of doing that more cleanly with R,
and I broke my promise to never use a spreadsheet again, but then
again it was Gnumeric and it's just to get a rough idea. There are 196 articles to import, with 251 comments, which means an
average of 1.15 comment per article (not much!). Unpublished articles
(5!) are completely ignored. Summaries are also not imported as such (break comments are
ignored) because ikiwiki doesn't support post summaries.

Calling the conversion script The script is in [[drupal2ikiwiki.py]]. It is called with:

./drupal2ikiwiki.py -u anarcatblogbak -d anarcatblogbak blog -vv

The -n and -l1 have been used for first tests as well. Use this
command to generate HTML from the result without having to commit and
push all:

ikiwiki --plugin meta --plugin tag --plugin comments --plugin inline  . ../anarc.at.html

More plugins are of course enabled in the blog, see the setup file for
more information, or just enable plugin as you want to unbreak
things. Use the --rebuild flag on subsequent runs. The actual
invocation I use is more something like:

ikiwiki --rebuild --no-usedirs --plugin inline --plugin calendar --plugin postsparkline --plugin meta --plugin tag --plugin comments --plugin sidebar  . ../anarc.at.html

I had problems with dates, but it turns out that I wasn't setting
dates in redirects... Instead of doing that, I started adding a
"redirection" tag that gets ignored by the main page.

Files and old URLs The script should keep the same URLs, as long as pathauto is enabled
on the site. Otherwise, some logic should be easy to add to point to
node/N. To redirect to the new blog, rewrite rules, on original blog, should
be as simple as:

Redirect / http://anarc.at/blog/

When we're sure:

Redirect permanent / http://anarc.at/blog/

Now, on the new blog, some magic needs to happen for files. Both
/files and /sites/anarcat.koumbit.org/files need to resolve
properly. We can't use symlinks because
ikiwiki drops symlinks on generation. So I'll just drop the files in /blog/files directly, the actual
migration is:

cp $DRUPAL/sites/anarcat.koumbit.org/files $IKIWIKI/blog/files
rm -r .htaccess css/ js/ tmp/ languages/
rm foo/bar # wtf was that.
rmdir *
sed -i 's#/sites/anarcat.koumbit.org/files/#/blog/files/#g' blog/*.mdwn
sed -i 's#http://anarcat.koumbit.org/blog/files/#/blog/files/#g' blog/*.mdwn
chmod -R -x blog/files
sudo chmod -R +X blog/files

A few pages to test images:

• http://anarcat.koumbit.org/node/157
• http://anarcat.koumbit.org/node/203

There are some pretty big files in there, 10-30MB MP3s - but those are
already in this wiki! so do not import them! Running fdupes on the result helps find oddities. The meta guid directive is used to keep the aggregators from finding
duplicate feed entries. I tested it with Liferea, but it may freak out
some other sites.

Remaining issues

• postsparkline and calendar archive disrespect meta(date)
• merge the files in /communication with the ones in /blog/files
  before import
• import non-published nodes
• check nodes with a format different than markdown (only a few 3=Full
HTML found so far)
• replace links to this wiki in blog posts with internal links

More progress information in [[the script drupal2ikiwiki.py]] itself.

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$ grep LOGIN /var/log/syslog.1  
   grep FAILED.*201.163.94.42 
   awk ' print $7 " " $8 ' 
   sort uniq -c

• the Squeeze LTS team might fix your package without telling the maintainers in advance nor directly: dak will send a mail as usual, but that might be the only notification you'll get. (Plus the DLA send out to the debian-lts-announce mailing list.)
• when we fix a package we will likely not push these changes into whatever VCS is used for packaging. So when you start working on an update (which is great), please check whether there has been an update before. (We don't do this because we are mean, but because we normally don't have commit access to your VCS...
• we totally appreciate help from maintainers and everybody else too. We just don't expect it, so we don't go and ask each time there is a DLA to be made. Please do support us & please do talk to us!

• DLA 139-1 for eglibc fixing CVE-2015-0235 also known as the "Ghost" vulnerability. The update itself was simple, testing needed some more attention but then there were also many many user requests asking about the update, and some were providing fixes too. And then many people were happy, though one person seriously complained at FOSDEM that the squeeze update was released full six hours after the wheezy update. I think I didn't really reply to that complaint, though obviously this person was right
• DLA 140-1 for rpm was quite straightforward to do, thanks to RedHat unsurprisingly providing patches for many rpm releases. There was just a lots of unfuzzying to do...
• DLA 141-1 for libksba had an easy to pick git commit in upstreams repo too, except that I had to disable the testsuite, but given the patch is 100% trivial I decided that was a safe thing to do.
• DLA 142-1 for privoxy was a bit more annoying, despite clearly available patches from the maintainers upload to sid: first, I had to convert them from quilt to dpatch format, then I found that 2 ouf 6 CVEs were not affecting the squeeze version as the code ain't present and then I spent almost an hour in total to find+fix 10 whitespace difference in 3 patches. At least there was one patch which needed some more serious changes

library(drat)
addRepo("eddelbuettel")

drat:::add("eddelbuettel")

library(drat)
insertPackage("foo_0.1.0.tar.gz")

drat:::insert("foo_0.1.0.tar.gz", "/opt/myWork/git")

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

$ hash -d -- -lldpd=/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd
$ echo ~-lldpd/README.md
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/README.md
$ head -n1 ~-lldpd/README.md
lldpd: implementation of IEEE 802.1ab (LLDP)

for link ($MARKPATH/*(N@))  
    hash -d -- -$ link:t =$ link:A 
 

$ pwd
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/src/lib
$ echo $ (%):-%~ 
~-lldpd/src/lib

bookmark()  
    if (( $# == 0 )); then
        # When no arguments are provided, just display existing
        # bookmarks
        for link in $MARKPATH/*(N@); do
            local markname="$fg[green]$ link:t $reset_color"
            local markpath="$fg[blue]$ link:A $reset_color"
            printf "%-30s -> %s\n" $markname $markpath
        done
    else
        # Otherwise, we may want to add a bookmark or delete an
        # existing one.
        local -a delete
        zparseopts -D d=delete
        if (( $+delete[1] )); then
            # With  -d , we delete an existing bookmark
            command rm $MARKPATH/$1
        else
            # Otherwise, add a bookmark to the current
            # directory. The first argument is the bookmark
            # name.  .  is special and means the bookmark should
            # be named after the current directory.
            local name=$1
            [ $name == "." ] && name=$ PWD:t 
            ln -s $PWD $MARKPATH/$name
        fi
    fi
 

Dynamic named directories Another (more complex) way to achieve the same thing is using dynamic named directories. I was initially using this solution but it is far more complex. This section is only here for historical reason. You can find the complete implementation in my GitHub repository. During file name expansion, a ~ followed by a string in square brackets is provided to the zsh_directory_name() function which will eventually reply with a directory name. This feature can be used to implement directory bookmarks:

$ cd ~[@lldpd]
$ pwd
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd
$ echo ~[@lldpd]/README.md
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/README.md
$ head -n1 ~[@lldpd]/README.md
lldpd: implementation of IEEE 802.1ab (LLDP)

Like for static named directories, because ~[@lldpd] is substituted during file name expansion, it is possible to use it in any command like a regular directory.

Basic implementation Bookmarks are still kept into a dedicated directory, $MARKPATH and are still symbolic links. Here is how the core feature is implemented:

_bookmark_directory_name()  
    emulate -L zsh #  
    setopt extendedglob
    case $1 in
        n)
            [ [ $2 != ( #b)"@"(?*) ]] && return 1 #  
            typeset -ga reply
            reply=($ $ :-$MARKPATH/$match[1] :A ) #  
            return 0
            ;;
        *)
            return 1
            ;;
    esac
    return 0
 
add-zsh-hook zsh_directory_name _bookmark_directory_name

zsh_directory_name() is a function accepting hooks²: instead of defining it directly, we define another function and register it as a hook with add-zsh-hook. The hook is expected to handle different situations. The first one is to be able to transform a dynamic name into a regular directory name. In this case, the first parameter of the function is n and the second one is the dynamic name. In , the call to emulate will restore the pristine behaviour of Zsh and also ensure that any option set in the scope of the function will not have an impact outside. The function can then be reused safely in another environment. In , we check that the dynamic name starts with @ followed by at least one character. Otherwise, we declare we don t know how to handle it. Another hook will get the chance to do something. (#b) is a globbing flag. It activates backreferences for parenthesised groups. When a match is found, it is stored as an array, $match. In , we build the reply. We could have just returned $MARKPATH/$match[1] but to hide the symbolic link mechanism, we use the A modifier to ask Zsh to resolve symbolic links if possible. Zsh allows nested substitutions. It is therefore possible to use modifiers and flags on anything. $ :-$MARKPATH/$match[1] is a common trick to turn $MARKPATH/$match[1] into a parameter substitution and be able to apply the A modifier on it.

Completion Zsh is also able to ask for completion of a dynamic directory name. In this case, the completion system calls the hook function with c as the first argument.

_bookmark_directory_name()  
    # [...]
    case $1 in
        c)
            # Completion
            local expl
            local -a dirs
            dirs=($MARKPATH/*(N@:t)) #  
            dirs=("@"$ ^dirs ) #  
            _wanted dynamic-dirs expl 'bookmarked directory' compadd -S\] -a dirs
            return
            ;;
        # [...]
    esac
    # [...]
 

First, in , we create a list of possible bookmarks. In *(N@:t), N@ is a glob qualifier. N allows us to not return nothing if there is no match (otherwise, we would get an error) while @ only returns symbolic links. t is a modifier which will remove all leading pathname components. This is equivalent to use basename or $ something##*/ in POSIX shells but it plays nice with glob expressions. In , we just add @ before each bookmark name. If we have b1, b2 and b3 as bookmarks, $ ^dirs expands to b1,b2,b3 and therefore "@"$ ^dirs expands to the (@b1 @b2 @b3) array. The result is then feeded into the completion system.

Prompt expansion Many people put the name of the current directory in their prompt. It would be nice to have the bookmark name instead of the full name when we are below a bookmarked directory. That s also possible!

$ pwd
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/src/lib
$ echo $ (%):-%~ 
~[@lldpd]/src/lib

The prompt expansion system calls the hook function with d as first argument and the file name to transform.

_bookmark_directory_name()  
    # [...]
    case $1 in
        d)
            local link slink
            local -A links
            for link ($MARKPATH/*(N@))  
                links[$  #link:A $'\0'$ link:A ]=$ link:t  #  
             
            for slink ($ (@On)$ (k)links )  
                link=$ slink#*$'\0'  #  
                if [ [ $2 = ( #b)($ link )( /*) ]]; then
                    typeset -ga reply
                    reply=("@"$ links[$slink]  $(( $  #match[1]  )) )
                    return 0
                fi
             
            return 1
            ;;
        # [...]
    esac
    # [...]
 

OK. This is some black Zsh wizardry. Feel free to skip the explanation. This is a bit complex because we want to substitute the most specific bookmark, hence the need to sort bookmarks by their target lengths. In , the associative array $links is created by iterating on each symbolic link ($link) in the $MARKPATH directory. The goal is to map a target directory with the matching bookmark name. However, we need to iterate on this map from the longest to the shortest key. To achieve that, we prepend each key with its length. Remember, $ link:A is the absolute path with symbolic links resolved. So, $ #link:A is the length of this path. We concatenate the length of the target directory with the target directory name and use $'\0' as a separator because this is the only safe character for this purpose. The result is mapped to the bookmark name. The second loop is an iteration on the keys of the associative array $links (thanks to the use of the k parameter flag in $ (k)links ). Those keys are turned into an array (@ parameter flag) and sorted numerically in descending order (On parameter flag). Since the keys are directory names prefixed by their lengths, the first match will be the longest one. In , we extract the directory name from the key by removing the length and the null character at the beginning. Then, we check if the extracted directory name matches the file name we have been provided. Again, (#b) just activates backreferences. With extended globbing, we can use the or operator, . So, when either the file name matches exactly the directory name or is somewhere deeper, we create the reply which is an array whose first member is the bookmark name and the second member is the untranslated part of the file name.

Easy typing Typing ~[@ is cumbersome. Hopefully, Zsh line editor can be extended with additional bindings. The following snippet will substitute @@ (if typed without a pause) by ~[@:

vbe-insert-bookmark()  
    emulate -L zsh
    LBUFFER=$ LBUFFER "~[@"
 
zle -N vbe-insert-bookmark
bindkey '@@' vbe-insert-bookmark

In combination with the autocd option and completion, it is quite easy to jump to a bookmarked directory.

---

1. For example:

   $ lldpd=/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd
   $ echo $lldpd/README.md
   /home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/README.md
   $ head -n1 $lldpd/README.md
   lldpd: implementation of IEEE 802.1ab (LLDP)
   

   The drawback is that you don t have a separate namespace for your bookmarks. You can still use a special prefix for that. Also, no prompt expansion.
2. Other functions accepting hooks are chpwd() or precmd().

# Automatically added by dh_installinit
if [ -x "/etc/init.d/keystone" ]; then
update-rc.d keystone defaults >/dev/null
fi
if [ -x "/etc/init.d/keystone" ]   [ -e "/etc/init/keystone.conf" ]; then
invoke-rc.d keystone start   true
fi
# End automatically added section
# Automatically added by dh_systemd_enable
# This will only remove masks created by d-s-h on package removal.
deb-systemd-helper unmask keystone.service >/dev/null   true
# was-enabled defaults to true, so new installations run enable.
if deb-systemd-helper --quiet was-enabled keystone.service; then
# Enables the unit on first installation, creates new
# symlinks on upgrades if the unit file has changed.
deb-systemd-helper enable keystone.service >/dev/null   true
else
# Update the statefile to add new symlinks (if any), which need to be
# cleaned up on purge. Also remove old symlinks.
deb-systemd-helper update-state keystone.service >/dev/null   true
fi
# End automatically added section

# Automatically added by dh_systemd_enable
# This will only remove masks created by d-s-h on package removal.
deb-systemd-helper unmask keystone.service >/dev/null   true
# was-enabled defaults to true, so new installations run enable.
if deb-systemd-helper --quiet was-enabled keystone.service; then
# Enables the unit on first installation, creates new
# symlinks on upgrades if the unit file has changed.
deb-systemd-helper enable keystone.service >/dev/null   true
else
# Update the statefile to add new symlinks (if any), which need to be
# cleaned up on purge. Also remove old symlinks.
deb-systemd-helper update-state keystone.service >/dev/null   true
fi
# End automatically added section
# Automatically added by dh_installinit
if [ -x "/etc/init.d/keystone" ]; then
update-rc.d keystone defaults >/dev/null
fi
if [ -x "/etc/init.d/keystone" ]   [ -e "/etc/init/keystone.conf" ]; then
invoke-rc.d keystone start   true
fi
# End automatically added section

< Faux> I have a command which emits a number. This number is heading towards zero. I want to know when it will arrive at zero, and how close to zero it has got.

eta2zero ()  
    A=$(eval $ @ )
    while [ $ A  -gt 0 ]
    do
        B=$(eval $ @ )
        printf %$(($ A  - $ B ))s
        A=$ B 
        sleep 1
    done   pv -s $ A  >/dev/null
 

$ rm -rf /big/path &
[1] 4895
$ eta2zero find /big/path \  wc -l
10 B 0:00:14 [   0 B/s] [================================>    ] 90% ETA 0:00:10

• A rescue system with /boot and / partitions, both in the 250 GB disk.
• A RAID 1 system of the two 1TB disks, setup in the BIOS of the machine (so the motherboard handles the RAID and the OS is focused in other things).
• Inside the Debian installer, I went to manual partition, then I put my /boot in the 250GB disk (yes, a 2nd /boot there), and then selected the 1TB disk (since the RAID was already made, it appeared a single 1TB disk) as physical device to be encrypted.
• After that, still in the Debian installer, I setup LVM there: configured a volume group, then, two volumes, one for / and the other one for swap.
• Then I saved the changes and go on installing my system.

• I m still not sure if this BIOS RAID ( Fake RAID ) is better than a software RAID or not. I suppose it s better since I delegate in the motherboard to do it, and leave the OS to care about other things (transcode my videos yeah!). But I don t know how to measure performance and which metrics and results should I expect. The disks (cheap disks) are a bit noisy (just a bit! or maybe it s the fan that it s very quiet! poor Laura, never saw/had a luxury machine like this one :)
• I had to install firmware-linux-nonfree in order to properly use the graphics card (Mobility Radeon HD 4225/4250). I have no graphical environment there, only a console, so I was not sure if installing the firmware or not (without the firmware, the letters of the console were bigger, but I just don t mind since I most of the time I log in remotely from my laptop). Then, two questions arised to my ignorant mind:
  1. Do I need the driver for better performance (aka is the graphics card used for rendering/transcoding/showing images and videos in my MediaGoblin site or just when it s needed to display them in local (and subsequently, never)?
  2. If I leave the system like that, and forget about the firmware warning at boot time, can the hardware be damaged by the default (free) driver? (for example, due to fan controlling malfunction or something like that).

• I noticed something strange in my setup. Sometimes, after a system reboot, cryptsetup was not accepting the password to unlock the encrypted disk. And believe me, I was typing it carefully. But when I completely shutdown the computer, unplug the cable, replug the cable, and start again, the password was accepted. The keyboard is USB and this machine does not accept other connection for the keyboard. The keyboard configuration, language and so, was all correct. No Non-ASCII symbols in my password. My password would need to press the same keys in a Spanish and an English keyboard.
• I thought that maybe something in my RAID was failing. I tried to disconnect one of the disks, and see if (1) the bug was solved (no) and (2) the RAID was working (yes). I made the same with the other disk. I was happy that I could reconstruct my RAID when plugging the disk again. But still I had the problem of the password.

Initial setup The first thing to do is to install the package if it's not already done:

apt-get install unattended-upgrades

and to answer yes to the automatic stable update question. If you don't see the question (because your debconf threshold is too low -- change it with dpkg-reconfigure debconf), you can always trigger the question manually:

dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades

Once you've got that installed, the configuration file you need to look at is /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades.

Whitelist matching criteria Looking at the unattended-upgrades source code, I found the list of things that can be used to match on in the whitelist:

• origin (shortcut: o)
• label (shortcut: l)
• archive (shortcut: a)
• suite (which is the same as archive)
• component (shortcut: c)
• site (no shortcut)

You can find the value for each of these fields in the appropriate _Release file under /var/lib/apt/lists/. Note that the value of site is the hostname of the package repository, also present in the first part these *_Release filenames (stable.packages.cloudmonitoring.rackspace.com in the example below). In my case, I was looking at the following inside /var/lib/apt/lists/stable.packages.cloudmonitoring.rackspace.com_debian-wheezy-x86%5f64_dists_cloudmonitoring_Release:

Origin: Rackspace
Codename: cloudmonitoring
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 18:58:49 UTC
Architectures: i386 amd64
Components: main
...

which means that, in addition to site, the only things I could match on were origin and component since there are no Suite or Label fields in the Release file. This is the line I ended up adding to my /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades:

 Unattended-Upgrade::Origins-Pattern  
         // Archive or Suite based matching:
         // Note that this will silently match a different release after
         // migration to the specified archive (e.g. testing becomes the
         // new stable).
 //      "o=Debian,a=stable";
 //      "o=Debian,a=stable-updates";
 //      "o=Debian,a=proposed-updates";
         "origin=Debian,archive=stable,label=Debian-Security";
         "origin=Debian,archive=oldstable,label=Debian-Security";
+        "origin=Rackspace,component=main";
  ;

Testing To ensure that the config is right and that unattended-upgrades will pick up rackspace-monitoring-agent the next time it runs, I used:

unattended-upgrade --dry-run --debug

which should output something like this:

Initial blacklisted packages: 
Starting unattended upgrades script
Allowed origins are: ['origin=Debian,archive=stable,label=Debian-Security', 'origin=Debian,archive=oldstable,label=Debian-Security', 'origin=Rackspace,component=main']
Checking: rackspace-monitoring-agent (["<Origin component:'main' archive:'' origin:'Rackspace' label:'' site:'stable.packages.cloudmonitoring.rackspace.com' isTrusted:True>"])
pkgs that look like they should be upgraded: rackspace-monitoring-agent
...
Option --dry-run given, *not* performing real actions
Packages that are upgraded: rackspace-monitoring-agent

Making sure that automatic updates are happening In order to make sure that all of this is working and that updates are actually happening, I always install apticron on all of the servers I maintain. It runs once a day and emails me a list of packages that need to be updated and it keeps doing that until the system is fully up-to-date. The only thing missing from this is getting a reminder whenever a package update (usually the kernel) requires a reboot to take effect. That's where the update-notifier-common package comes in. Because that package will add a hook that will create the /var/run/reboot-required file whenever a kernel update has been installed, all you need to do is create a cronjob like this in /etc/cron.daily/reboot-required:

#!/bin/sh
cat /var/run/reboot-required 2> /dev/null   true

assuming of course that you are already receiving emails sent to the root user (if not, add the appropriate alias in /etc/aliases and run newaliases).

• Lua-based maxmemory eviction scripts. (#2319) (This changeset was sponsored by an anonymous client.) Redis typically stores the entire data set in memory, using the operating system's virtual memory facilities if required. However, one can use Redis more like a cache or ring buffer by enabling a "maxmemory policy" where a RAM limit is set and then data is evicted when required based on a predefined algorithm. This change enables entirely custom control over exactly what data to remove from RAM when this maxmemory limit is reached. This is an advantage over the existing policies of, say, removing entire keys based on the existing TTL, Least Recently Used (LRU) or random eviction strategies as it permits bespoke behaviours based on application-specific requirements, crucially without maintaining a private fork of Redis. As an example behaviour of what is possible with this change, to remove the lowest ranked member of an arbitrary sorted set, you could load the following eviction policy script:

  local bestkey = nil
  local bestval = 0
  for s = 1, 5 do
     local key = redis.call("RANDOMKEY")
     local type_ = redis.call("TYPE", key)
     if type_.ok == "zset"
     then
         local tail = redis.call("ZRANGE", key, "0", "0", "WITHSCORES")
         local val = tonumber(tail[2])
         if not bestkey or val < bestval
         then
             bestkey = key
             bestval = val
         end
     end
  end
  if not bestkey
  then
      -- We couldn't find anything to remove, so return an error
      return false
  end
  redis.call("ZREMRANGEBYRANK", bestkey, "0", "0")
  return true
  

• TCP_FASTOPEN support. (#2307) The aim of TCP_FASTOPEN is to eliminate one roundtrip from a TCP conversation by allowing data to be included as part of the SYN segment that initiates the connection. (More info.)

• Support infinitely repeating commands in redis-cli. (#2297)

• Add --failfast option to testsuite runner. (#2290)

• Add a -q (quiet) argument to redis-cli. (#2305)

• Making some Redis Sentinel defaults a little saner. (#2292)

• Add run-parts(8) directories to be executed at various points in the daemon's lifecycle. (e427f8) This is especially useful for loading Lua scripts as they are not persisted across restarts.

• Split out Redis Sentinel into its own package. (#775414, 39f642) This makes it possible to run Sentinel sanely on Debian systems without bespoke scripts, etc.

• Ensure /etc/init.d/redis-server start idempotency with --oknodo (60b7dd) Idempotency in initscripts is especially important given the rise of configuration managment systems.

• Uploaded 3.0.0 RC2 to Debian experimental. (37ac55)

• Re-enabled the testsuite. (7b9ed1)

foo :: Property
foo = property "foo" $
    unlessM (liftIO $ doesFileExist "/etc/foo") $ do
        bar <- liftIO $ readFile "/etc/foo.template"
        ensureProperty $ setupFoo bar

data Property i where
    IProperty :: Desc -> ... -> Info -> Property HasInfo
    SProperty :: Desc -> ... -> Property NoInfo
data HasInfo
data NoInfo
ensureProperty :: Property NoInfo -> Propellor Result

requires :: Property i1 -> Property i2 -> Property ???

class Combine x y r where
    requires :: x -> y -> r

foo  requires  bar

   No instance for (Requires (Property HasInfo) (Property HasInfo) r0)
      arising from a use of  requires'
    The type variable  r0' is ambiguous
    Possible fix: add a type signature that fixes these type variable(s)
    Note: there is a potential instance available:
      instance Requires
                 (Property HasInfo) (Property HasInfo) (Property HasInfo)
        -- Defined at Propellor/Types.hs:167:10

class Combine x y where
    requires :: x -> y -> CombinedType x y

type family CInfo x y
type instance CInfo HasInfo HasInfo = HasInfo
type instance CInfo HasInfo NoInfo = HasInfo
type instance CInfo NoInfo HasInfo = HasInfo
type instance CInfo NoInfo NoInfo = NoInfo
type family CombinedType x y
type instance CombinedType (Property x) (Property y) = Property (CInfo x y)

before :: (IsProp x, Combines y x, IsProp (CombinedType y x)) => x -> y -> CombinedType y x
before x y = (y  requires  x)  describe  (propertyDesc x)
onChange
    :: (Combines (Property x) (Property y))
    => Property x
    => Property y
    => CombinedType (Property x) (Property y)
onChange = -- 6 lines of code omitted
fallback :: (Combines (Property p1) (Property p2)) => Property p1 -> Property p2 -> Property (CInfo p1 p2)
fallback = -- 4 lines of code omitted

propertyList "foos" $ props
    & foo
    & foobar
    ! oldfoo    

Changes in Rcpp version 0.11.4 (2015-01-20)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • The ListOf<T> class gains the .attr and .names methods common to other Rcpp vectors.
  • The [dpq]nbinom_mu() scalar functions are now available via the R:: namespace when R 3.1.2 or newer is used.
  • Add an additional test for AIX before attempting to include execinfo.h.
  • Rcpp::stop now supports improved printf-like syntax using the small tinyformat header-only library (following a similar implementation in Rcpp11)
  • Pairlist objects are now protected via an additional Shield<> as suggested by Martin Morgan on the rcpp-devel list.
  • Sorting is now prohibited at compile time for objects of type List, RawVector and ExpressionVector.
  • Vectors now have a Vector::const_iterator that is 'const correct' thanks to fix by Romain following a bug report in rcpp-devel by Martyn Plummer.
  • The mean() sugar function now uses a more robust two-pass method, and new unit tests for mean() were added at the same time.
  • The mean() and var() functions now support all core vector types.
  • The setequal() sugar function has been corrected via suggestion by Qiang Kou following a bug report by S ren H jsgaard.
  • The macros major, minor, and makedev no longer leak in from the (Linux) system header sys/sysmacros.h.
  • The push_front() string function was corrected.
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Only look for plugins in the package's namespace (rather than entire search path).
  • Also scan header files for definitions of functions to be considerd by Attributes.
  • Correct the regular expression for source files which are scanned.
• Changes in Rcpp unit tests
  • Added a new binary test which will load a pre-built package to ensure that the Application Binary Interface (ABI) did not change; this test will (mostly or) only run at Travis where we have reasonable control over the platform running the test and can provide a binary.
  • New unit tests for sugar functions mean, setequal and var were added as noted above.
• Changes in Rcpp Examples:
  • For the (old) examples ConvolveBenchmarks and OpenMP, the respective Makefile was renamed to GNUmakefile to please R CMD check as well as the CRAN Maintainers.

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

Phoblographer: It looks like many of these images have artificial lighting in them. What s your gear setup, and how do you introduce so much light into the scene from your car? Lever: About 9 months ago, I affixed a Mola beauty dish onto the roof rack of my 75 Volvo and juice it with a profoto bi-tube. This takes a bit of practice, as making a turn changes the light completely, which I always try to keep balanced. The Canon 5D3 with a 24mm f1.4 is set up on a tripod. The strobe has allowed me to capture more detail as well as creating a somewhat surreal feel to the sets.

Lev Rukhin http://www.levrukhin.com/

Pitchfork: The world has a difficult time with the female auteur. B: I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this I m not dissing him this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second. If whatever I m saying to you now helps women, I m up for saying it. For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. [Matmos ] Drew [Daniel] is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don t even listen to him. It really is strange.

When you ask someone to take a picture of you, technically, they are the photographer, and they own the copyright of your picture. ( ) All of a sudden, your backpacking adventure in Europe requires you to pack a stack of legal contracts. Now your exchange goes from Can you take a picture of us? to Can you take a picture of us, making sure that the church is on the top right corner, and also, I am going to need you to sign this paper .

Both Yi and Sheer recognize that the scientific method is valuable, with its emphasis on logic and reason, especially when dealing with data or engineering problems. But they believe this approach can sometimes be limiting. When I collaborate with people who have a strictly technical background, says Yi, the perspective I find most lacking is an understanding of what motivates people and how to balance multiple factors that are at work outside the realm of technology.

• It can use the Django templating system, rather than constructing messages "by hand" in views.py and models.py which violates abstraction layers and often requires unwieldy and ugly string manipulation routines that would be trivial inside a regular template.
• It can easily enabled and disabled in certain environments, preventing DRY violations by centralising logic to avoid sending messages in development, staging environments, etc.
• It can use other Django idioms such as a pluggable backend system for greater control over exactly how messages are transmitted to the Slack API (eg. sent asynchronously using your queuing system, avoiding slowing down clients).

from django_slack import slack_message
@login_required
def view(request, item_id):
    item = get_object_or_404(Item, pk=item_id)
    slack_message('items/viewed.slack',  
        'item': item,
        'user': request.user,
     )
    return render(request, 'items/view.html',  
        'item': item,
     )

 % extends django_slack % 
 % block text % 
  user.get_full_name   just viewed   item.title   (  item.content urlize  ).
 % endblock % 

 % block channel % 
#mychannel
 % endblock %