So last weekend I attended Devconf.cz in Brno and together with Dennis Gilmore gave a talk about Reproducible Builds and Fedora (Slides) which was fun and - I think - pretty well received. Then on the following Tuesday, so three days ago, after using Debian as the primary OS on my primary computer for more than two decades, I finally made the long anticipated switch and I must say, so far I'm really happy with my new environment, even though I'm not yet again using a tiled window manager (but instead Xfce), cannot yet do all the things I could do before and even have to reconfigure a VM twice and restart another to get back wireless network after suspend and resume So what have I done? Nothing too dramatic: I've switched to Qubes OS and now I'm running Debian jessie and stretch and Fedora and Whonix on my primary computer, just not as my primary OS IOW: hardware is basically software and while I want the red pill, who knows what's really inside the box? If you have no idea what I'm talking about, this intro about Qubes OS might be helpful. Or you dive directly into this six year old post, where Joanna Rutkowska described how she partitioned her digital life using Qubes. I'm not sure where this journey will lead me to, but I'm confident this is the right direction. And in case you wondered, I'll keep working on Debian, as far as I know now

Scratch is a block-based programming language created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group (LLK) at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch gives kids the power to use programming to create their own interactive animations and computer games. Since 2007, the online community that allows Scratch programmers to share, remix, and socialize around their projects has drawn more than 16 million users who have shared nearly 20 million projects and more than 100 million comments. It is one of the most popular ways for kids to learn programming and among the larger online communities for kids in general.

Front page of the Scratch online community (https://scratch.mit.edu) during the period covered by the dataset.

Since 2010, I have published a series of papers using quantitative data collected from the database behind the Scratch online community. As the source of data for many of my first quantitative and data scientific papers, it s not a major exaggeration to say that I have built my academic career on the dataset. I was able to do this work because I happened to be doing my masters in a research group that shared a physical space ( The Cube ) with LLK and because I was friends with Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez, who started in my masters cohort at the Media Lab. A year or so after we met, Andr s conceived of the Scratch online community and created the first version for his masters thesis project. Because I was at MIT and because I knew the right people, I was able to get added to the IRB protocols and jump through the hoops necessary to get access to the database. Over the years, Andr s and I have heard over and over, in conversation and in reviews of our papers, that we were privileged to have access to such a rich dataset. More than three years ago, Andr s and I began trying to figure out how we might broaden this access. Andr s had the idea of taking advantage of the launch of Scratch 2.0 in 2013 to focus on trying to release the first five years of Scratch 1.x online community data (March 2007 through March 2012) most of the period that the codebase he had written ran the site. After more work than I have put into any single research paper or project, Andr s and I have published a data descriptor in Nature s new journal Scientific Data. This means that the data is now accessible to other researchers. The data includes five years of detailed longitudinal data organized in 32 tables with information drawn from more than 1 million Scratch users, nearly 2 million Scratch projects, more than 10 million comments, more than 30 million visits to Scratch projects, and much more. The dataset includes metadata on user behavior as well the full source code for every project. Alongside the data is the source code for all of the software that ran the website and that users used to create the projects as well as the code used to produce the dataset we ve released. Releasing the dataset was a complicated process. First, we had navigate important ethical concerns about the the impact that a release of any data might have on Scratch s users. Toward that end, we worked closely with the Scratch team and the the ethics board at MIT to design a protocol for the release that balanced these risks with the benefit of a release. The most important features of our approach in this regard is that the dataset we re releasing is limited to only public data. Although the data is public, we understand that computational access to data is different in important ways to access via a browser or API. As a result, we re requiring anybody interested in the data to tell us who they are and agree to a detailed usage agreement. The Scratch team will vet these applicants. Although we re worried that this creates a barrier to access, we think this approach strikes a reasonable balance. Beyond the the social and ethical issues, creating the dataset was an enormous task. Andr s and I spent Sunday afternoons over much of the last three years going column-by-column through the MySQL database that ran Scratch. We looked through the source code and the version control system to figure out how the data was created. We spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out which columns and rows were public. Most of our work went into creating detailed codebooks and documentation that we hope makes the process of using this data much easier for others (the data descriptor is just a brief overview of what s available). Serializing some of the larger tables took days of computer time. In this process, we had a huge amount of help from many others including an enormous amount of time and support from Mitch Resnick, Natalie Rusk, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Berg at MIT as well as from many other on the Scratch Team. We also had an enormous amount of feedback from a group of a couple dozen researchers who tested the release as well as others who helped us work through through the technical, social, and ethical challenges. The National Science Foundation funded both my work on the project and the creation of Scratch itself. Because access to data has been limited, there has been less research on Scratch than the importance of the system warrants. We hope our work will change this. We can imagine studies using the dataset by scholars in communication, computer science, education, sociology, network science, and beyond. We re hoping that by opening up this dataset to others, scholars with different interests, different questions, and in different fields can benefit in the way that Andr s and I have. I suspect that there are other careers waiting to be made with this dataset and I m excited by the prospect of watching those careers develop. You can find out more about the dataset, and how to apply for access, by reading the data descriptor on Nature s website.

It's that time of the year :-) And FOSDEM is fun. But this year I won't be going; there was a scheduling conflict, and I didn't really have anything new to present (although I probably could have shifted around priorities to get something). But FOSDEM 2017 also means there's a year since FOSDEM 2016, where I presented Nageru, my live video mixer. And that's been a pretty busy year, so I thought I'd do a live cap from high up above. First of all, Nageru has actually been used in production we did Solskogen and Fyrrom, and both gave invaluable input. Then there have been some non-public events, which have also been useful. The Nageru that's in git right now is evolved considerably from the 1.0.0 that was released last year. diffstat shows 19660 insertions and 3543 deletions; that's counting about 2500 lines of vendored headers, though. Even though I like deleting code much more than adding it, the doubling (from ~10k to ~20k lines) represents a significant amount of new features: 1.1.x added support for non-Intel GPUs. 1.2.x added support for DeckLink input cards (through Blackmagic's proprietary drivers), greatly increasing hardware support, and did a bunch of small UI changes. 1.3.x added x264 support that's strong enough that Nageru has really displaced VLC as my go-to tool for just video-signal-to-H.264-conversion (even though it feels overkill), and also added hotplug support. 1.4.x added multichannel audio support including support for MIDI controllers, and also a disk space indicator (because when you run out of disk during production without understanding that's what happens, it really sucks), and brought extensive end-user documentation. And 1.5.x, in development right now, will add HDMI/SDI output, which, like all the previous changes, requires various rearchitecting and fixing. Of course, there are lots of things that haven't changed as well; the basic UI remains the same, including the way the theme (governing the look-and-feel of the finished video stream) works. The basic design has proved sound, and I don't think I would change a lot if I were to design something like 1.0.0 again. As a small free software project, you have to pick your battles, and I'm certainly glad I didn't start out doing something like network support (or a distributed architecture in general, really). So what's for the next year of Nageru? It's hard to say, and it will definitely depend on the concrete needs of events. A hot candidate (since I might happen to need it) is chroma keying, although good keying is hard to get right and this needs some research. There's also been some discussion around other concrete features, but I won't name them until a firm commitment has been made; priorities can shift around, and it's important to stay flexible. So, enjoy FOSDEM! Perhaps I'll return with a talk in 2018. In the meantime, I'll preparing the stream for the 2017 edition of Fyrrom, and I know for sure there will be more events, more features and more experiences to be had. And, inevitably, more bugs. :-)

While the main focus of QSoas is the processing of experimental data, it also features commands to generate (calculate) datasets. The command generate-buffer creates a dataset of equally spaced points (you can change their number using the option /samples) between to limiting values, as below:

QSoas> generate-buffer -2 2

By default, the values are taken equal to . However, generate-buffer also takes an optional formula to directly set the values:

QSoas> generate-buffer -10 10 sin(x)

From version 2.0, it is possible to generate several datasets in a row using the /number option, and to color them using the /style option (but only since version 2.1). Each dataset is generated according to the formula, and number is a special number that starts at 0 and increases by 1 for each dataset. Here's what I used to generate the picture on the right:

QSoas> generate-buffer -2 2 sin(PI*x)**(number+1) /number=30 /style=red-to-blue

About QSoasQSoas is an open source data analysis program that focuses on flexibility and powerful fitting capacities. It is described in Fourmond, Anal. Chem., 2016, 88 (10), pp 5050 5052.

I was reading a thread on phoronix where a student was sharing that it is or can be expensive to get even a used laptop and he shared his predicament and was hammered a bit for it to some going to the extent of questioning his life-choices. While I m not a student it still triggered something in me. I am not dirt poor but neither am I insanely rich. The same questions he has, similar questions I have had. While in his case he is probably in his early to late 20 s, I am pushing 40. Most of the money I make goes in for everyday purchases, veggies, house-rent, electricity, landline, broadband and cell phone bills. What little is left is most of the time kept for a rainy day as there is no Government pension. From what I have heard and read on the web, in the west specifically in the States, if I buy a used laptop, I usually get a 6 months 1 year warranty . Here, while you could get a used laptop for around INR 10k there is no warranty/guarantee, so I never get into that. It s buyer s beware all the time. For people who like/want FOSS or specifically something like Free DOS (like me), I had to wait for almost 6 years to get a model I was happy with, with the specs. I was ok with. Was really lucky enough to get a Thinkpad T440 with 8 GB of RAM for around INR 80k/- with Free DOS. The specs T440 Core I 5 (4300) / Dos (NEW MODEL) 20B7A1SD00 Intel Core i5 4300M (2.5 GHz / 3 MB / 5 GT/s) / Intel QM87 Chipset / Integrated 802.11 n WIFI LAN + Bluetooth 4.0 / 8GB DDR III Memory (2 DIMM SLOT) / 500 GB SATA HDD @ 7200 RPM / 14.0 HDy / FPR / Dos / 2 USB , VGA Port , RJ 45 Port /GB LAN /Track Point with 5 button Glass Touch Pad /Stereo Speakers with Dolby Enhanced Audio / 6 Cell Battery /Approx 2.14KG/ While it is/was actually pretty expensive but then wanted something which can take a beating, deal with all the heat, noise and dust (specifically where I live, right in the middle of the city). The reason I used the word lucky is that now there is no model in the T-series range which has FreeDOS on it. Of course, I hopefully will use it for another 4-5 years at the very least depending on how much it cooperates with me, I have heard that Thinkpads function for a long period of time even in dusty environments so banking on that. What probably pissed me is the condensing note in the comment, how does he know what pressures an another individual might be in. It s almost like saying You are refugee because you made a wrong life choice or something to that effect which again is stupid. I actually feel/felt embarrassed to bring this up as I truly am lucky to be safe, secure, have food on the table, am able to sleep on a bed at night, have a workstation AND a laptop, have somewhat of a sound mind and a body which is able to move around without any hassles. Add to that, incredibly as it may sound, was also able to see another country for a few days In relation to people being persecuted and having to run off to save their own lives or even people living on the streets, I am actually living in luxury. While I can t go through life feeling guilty for all the good things that have happened with me, I do feel disgusted when I see some people put blinding statements like that. One of the biggest reasons that GNU/Linux and Debian in particular gelled with me was that it s incredibly flexible and generous. Nobody tells me which packages I should or shouldn t have. I do right things, good, I do something wrong, an opportunity to learn and hopefully learn from my mistakes. In either case, one of the most forgiving kind of system to learn and hack on. While speaking of mistakes, could somebody look at #849684 . It almost feels like a tennis match going between the maintainers concerned. While I don t have the technical skills to ascertain who s right and who is not, it would be nice if some cooler heads can make sense and see if a way could be found out. Can somebody help ?
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #debian, #Life Choices, #Thinkpad440, laptop

Debian LTS November marked the 21st month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 8 hours allocated which I used for:

• the first half of a LTS front desk week
• updating icedove 45.6.0 resulting in DLA-782-1 fixing 8 CVEs
• releasing DLA-783-1 for XEN, the actual update was provided by credativ
• testing the bind9 update prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
• fixing 8 CVEs in imagemagick resulting in DLA-807-1.
• work on recent qemu CVEs

Other Debian stuff

• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.10 to 0.8.12.1 to experimental and unstable fixing (among other things) a long standing bug when using multiple tarballs with filters and pristine-tar as well as making generated orig tarballs reproducible so one gets identical tarballs even without pristine-tar.
• Ran a gbp import-dsc of unstable and filed bugs for cases where pristine-tar would not import the package. Started to look into git-apply errors.

Some other Free Software activites

• libplanfahr: switched the example to python3 and made it parse arguments without date as "today":

  $ ./run python examples/trip-query.py --when=21:00 Essen Gelsenkirchen
  Loaded provider de_db
  Start: Essen Hbf
  End: Gelsenkirchen Hbf
  Trip #1
         Start:     Essen Hbf
         Departure: 2017-02-02 21:18
         Delay:     0
         End:       Gelsenkirchen Hbf
         Arrival:   2017-02-02 21:26
         Delay:     0
         Switches:  0
  Trip #2
         Start:     Essen Hbf
         Departure: 2017-02-02 21:22
         Delay:     0
         End:       Gelsenkirchen Hbf
         Arrival:   2017-02-02 21:33
         Delay:     0
         Switches:  0
  Trip #3
         Start:     Essen Hbf
         Departure: 2017-02-02 21:44
         Delay:     0
         End:       Gelsenkirchen Hbf
         Arrival:   2017-02-02 21:52
         Delay:     0
         Switches:  0
  

• Proposed a workaround to rbvmomi to massively speedup cloning under certain conditions when using CachedOVFDeployer
• Proposed a fix to unbreak ansible's zypper module on first installations
• Made ausroller use git-buildpackage from pypi on non Debian based distros
• Made further progess on the Merkur board clones

Working with Date, Calendar, SimpleDateFormat in Android. As I mentioned In my last blog, I would talk about how I used Calendar and Date classes for the user to designate silent mode by setting time constraints and weekdays, in Lumicall. Date class to used to interpret dates as year, month, day, hour, minute, and second values. I had to compare whether the current time falls between Start Time and End Time specified by the user. So that, silent mode can be enabled within that time frame. I used Calendar Class to get the current hour in 24-Hour format and minute.

 Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance();
 int hour = now.get(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY);  
 int minute = now.get(Calendar.MINUTE);

Now, Since the user enters the Time in EditText Widgets, the values were retrieved as strings.
String hhStart, mmStart, hhEnd, mmEnd store these values from Edit text widgets.
To interpret these strings as a representation of a date and time, we need to parse it A Date class object s format looks like-

Since, I was only interested in fetching the HH:MM values, i.e the fourth field in the format, To set and compare only the HH:MM values, Android provides lovely, SimpleDateFormat class to access the particular value we want in the Date object.
To access the year, use letter Y
To access the time zone, use letter z
To access the Hour and minute, we use letter H and m.

SimpleDateFormat simpleDateFormat= new SimpleDateFormat( HH:mm , Locale.ENGLISH);
Date currentTime = parseDate(hour + ":" + minute)
Date timeCompareOne = parseDate(hhStart + : +mmStart);  
Date timeCompareTwo = parseDate(hhEnd + : +mmEnd);

Rest everything in the date object are values set by default. Eg, Year 1970. Which we din t set / access , hence did not change. To check if the start time is before the current time. And the endtime is after the current time,

if(timeCompareOne.before(currentTime) && timeCompareTwo.after(currentTime))
 
Switch on the silent mode;
 

Added a try catch block to handle the exception which will arise if the SimpleDateFormat.parse method is unable to parse the given Java String.

public Date parseDate(String date)  
  
try 
   
return inputParser.parse(date);
  
catch (java.text.ParseException e)  
   
return new Date(0);  
   
 

Comparing Time? Done!
Now to check whether the selected weekday in the checkboxes matches the current week day,

Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(); 
int day = calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK); 

If it s sunday, value returned by calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) is 1, if monday, 2 and so on..
Weekdays compared too! Thanks for reading,
U

Changes

• gitk: colour of remote refs
• https-everywhere: Update Debian rules
• check-all-the-things: release, security fix, reset terminal modes, allow running removed checkers, regression fix (quote fix), TODO items (for deep-text-corrector, sblint, decopy, Coala Bear & dangerous Python checks)
• devscripts: fix grep-excuses warning
• autorevision: build correctness, tarball reproducibility (due to gzip & AUTHORS.txt)
• whowatch: parameter correctness (for NULL, int), spelling/grammar/typos, https, remove dead links & restore terminal status on exit
• spelling dictionaries:
  • codespell: recod, undefuned, normaly, uner, buid, stength, privide, decstiption(s), revrese, lightweigh, multible, asbtraction, resulution, meatadata, seriuos, transalte, interractive, timestan, partiton, databas, claculate, patern, substiution, freee, operatation(s), ambigous, clasified, coypright, previlege, gental, bacup & detction
  • lintian: recod, undefuned, uner, buid, stength, privide, dimentional, decstiption(s), revrese, lightweigh, asbtraction, resulution, FTBS, meatadata, seriuos, transalte, interractive, timestan, partiton, databas, claculate, patern, substiution, freee, operatation(s), previlege, gental, bacup & detction
• Debian timeline: latest bug milestones
• Debian bits: FOSDEM draft fixes
• Planet Debian derivatives: add Netrunner & update BlankOn logo
• Debian buildd website: plain text logs (1 2 3)
• Debian uscan multi-redirector: add github package.json/cmake checker & remove gitorious
• Debian packages website: update manual pages patch to use https, merge patches (1 2)
• Debian website: fix security Makefiles for DLAs (for 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014), derivatives (wording/formatting fixes 1, 2), build by default), link fixes (for CD brokenness, stability, gitweb to cgit)
• Debian wiki pages: AlejandroRios, ChrootOnAndroid, CopyrightReviewTools, CrossCompiling, CrossGrading, DebianBootstrap, DebianDay, (2017), DebianEvents (Asia, oc) DebianScience, DebianWiki/Browsing, dedup.debian.net, Derivatives/Census (AstraLinux, BlankOn, Netrunner, SalentOS, SerbianLinux, Symbiosis, Template), EmbeddedCodeCopies, ExternalEntities, Fonts, fr/GraphicsCard, fr/Intel HD Graphics, FrontPage, gobby.debian.org, HP/ProLiant, Ideas, InstallingDebianOn, TurrisOmnia (1 2), InterWikiMap, josch/notes, LVM, Merchandise/BoFDebConf10, Mobile (1 2), NewArchiveSections, PaulWise/InterestingSoftware, PortTemplate, ppc64el, PressCoverage2017, PressCoverage, redmine, ReproducibleBuilds/History, Services/Debian Packages, SponsorChecklist, Sprints (2017/DebianMed2017 (1 2)), SystemBuildTools, systemd, Teams/Dpkg/FAQ, ThisWeekInDebian, WhyDebian, Year
• File Formats wiki pages: ACE, File_identification_software, File_command
• Debian package uploads: autorevision 1.20-1, check-all-the-things 2017.01.15 & openchange 1:2.2-6+deb8u1

Issues

• Security migration for check-all-the-things
• GPL violations due to embedded copies of Liberation Fonts in emscripten, freedink, gargoyle-free, gcstar, manaplus, minetest, pcs & zygrib
• Outdated embedded unicode-data copies in boost1.62 & boost1.63
• Crash in liferea
• Regression in coreutils date
• Missing conffile removal in dnssec-trigger & xtightvncviewer
• gitorious redirector usage in fgrun & spectacle
• Annoying issues in hexchat autorejoin, totem & a podcast & gdb messages
• Cosmetic issues in parcimonie menu, gitk colours & aptitude debtags
• Features in duck, apt-file, needrestart, packages.debian.org & aptitude
• An already implemented feature in needrestart

Review

• Spam: report spam in 6 Debian bugs, 132 Debian mails and one LWN comment
• Patches: point out extraneous whitespace changes in a codespell PR
• Debian packages: reviewed and sponsored fsprotect 1.0.7
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month, feedback on InstallDebianWithoutLiveCD article
• Debian screenshots:
  • Approved screenshots of ngraph-gtk lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings kalgebra qtile patat toilet sagemath (2) w3c-markup-validator pentobi pentobi-kde-thumbnailer zygrib (2) sauerbraten kmail aiscm (5) codeblocks lxqt libreoffice-help-es inkscape synaptic thunar gimp midori filezilla libreoffice pluma qupzilla gnome-2048 simplescreenrecorder gerbv keepassx gcstar confclerk onionshare blockout2 subuser dosbox zsnes dosemu lmarbles klickety geda-gattrib katomic kiki-the-nano-bot freedm frogatto (2)
  • Approved removal of screenshots: seaview screenshot contained advertising, mupen64plus/mupen64plus-audio-all were weird screenshots with multiple OS windows overlaid & mkgmap was a screenshot of the OSM wiki instead of the software
  • Rejected screenshots: gccgo looked like a Thai mobile phone screenshot, python-stem was a screenshot for OPENDIME USB, seaview was downloaded from elsewhere and not an authentic screenshot & fbreader contained non-free ebook contents

Administration

• Debian: reboot 1 non-responsive VM, redirect 2 users to support channels, redirect 1 contributor to xkb upstream, redirect 1 potential contributor, redirect 1 bug reporter to mirror team, ping 7 folks about restarting processes with upgraded libs, manually restart the sectracker process due to upgraded libs, restart the package tracker process due to upgraded libs, investigate failures connecting to the XMPP service, investigate /dev/shm issue on abel.d.o, clean up after rename of the fedmsg group.
• Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
• Debian packages: deploy 2 contributions to the live server
• Debian wiki: unblacklist 1 IP address, whitelist 10 email addresses, disable 18 accounts with bouncing email, update email for 2 accounts with bouncing email, reported 1 Debian member as MIA, redirect 1 user to support channels, add 4 domains to the whitelist.
• Reproducible builds: rescheduled Debian pyxplot:amd64/unstable for themill.
• Openmoko: security updates & reboots.

Debian derivatives

• Send the annual activity ping mail.
• Happy new year messages on IRC, forward to the list.
• Note that SerbianLinux does not provide source packages.
• Expand URL shortener on SerbianLinux page.
• Invite PelicanHPC, Netrunner, DietPi, Hamara Linux (on IRC), BitKey to the census.
• Add research publications link to the census template
• Fix Symbiosis sources.list
• Enquired about SalentOS downtime
• Fixed and removed some 404 BlankOn links (blog, English homepage)
• Fixed changes to AstraLinux sources.list
• Welcome Netrunner to the census

Sponsors I renewed my support of Software Freedom Conservancy. The openchange 1:2.2-6+deb8u1 upload was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Almost all traces of the snow are gone. After a very dry December, January was an awesome month. Lots of snow, even in the city, that held for (I think) three weeks very rare for Z rich. This happened because the temperature never went above -5 C, even during the day proper winter for the city! It was awesome to bike in these conditions. At first fresh snow (best! but slow), then packed snow, it never actually became dangerous ice. And then, at the end of last week, temperatures started climbing. First near zero, then 1-2 C above, then it finally started going warm (above freezing even during the night). And the snow started melting a bit, then more, and then it started raining. And it rained for three days. The worst thing, seeing snow being rained upon. Dirty grey snow, slowly melting away I don't like this picture. At least now the snow is gone, and the streets are almost dry, and we can look to either some more snow (I wish ) or spring. I'd rather take -2 C global average temperatures than +2 C. I'm not sure what -5 would mean, but compared to no winter

Review: A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers

Series:	Wayfarers #2
Publisher:	Harper Voyager
Copyright:	October 2016
ISBN:	0-06-256942-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	384

A Closed and Common Orbit has two threads, one that takes place twenty years in the past and one that happens simultaneously with the very end of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. That second part is the motivating plot thread, but it's unfortunately impossible to talk about in any depth without seriously spoiling the previous book. You could otherwise read them out of order, but I think the previous book is too good to spoil, so you want to carefully avoid reading any descriptions of this book until after you've read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Per my normal review policy, I'm going to try to avoid spoilers, but just about everything about half of this book would give away spoilers if you're paying attention. So you may want to just go read the other book before reading this review. (It's excellent!) The part that I can safely say is that half this book is about Pepper, her partner Blue, Pepper's store and Blue's art, and her attempt to help a friend find a place and a sense of identity that she'd never asked for or expected, while keeping a very dangerous secret. That friend starts somewhat passive, but one of the things I liked the most about this story is that Pepper is neither always right in her advice nor always wrong. Sidra is wrong about some of the limitations that she thinks she has and some of the things she thinks she wants, but she's also right about other things where Pepper is wrong. She has a complicated, careful, and courageous journey. The best part of this book for me, though, was the other half, told in alternating chapters with Sidra's story. This is Pepper's own backstory, which is rather awful (although Chambers does avoid being too graphic about the most horrible parts), but is also an amazing story of someone finding her own power, her own skills, and her own identity. And building a relationship that's something quite special. At first, this seems only vaguely related to Sidra's story and the other half of the book, but they both come together in a way that's both heartbreaking and wonderful. I found this story particularly wonderful because one of my favorite SF tropes is sentient computers or sentient ships, which play a significant role in Pepper's backstory. And one of my favorite characters to read about is the technician who can cobble together fixes to things and who is always finding something to repair. Pepper is a delight, her story explains so much about how she became the person she is (and adds so much emotional heft to it), and she has a relentless, practical determination that I loved reading about. A Closed and Common Orbit doesn't have the sprawling cast of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. The story is tightly focused on five characters. I think I liked that even better than the previous book, even when I was finding Sidra a bit too passive and not as interesting. Chambers's characters have so much depth, thoughtfulness, and basic decency, while still being uniquely themselves, that I feel like I could read about them for months and keep uncovering new, interesting facets. I particularly loved the occasional excerpts from the chat system where Pepper hangs out (and would have loved about three times more of them). Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time in chat, Chambers got the tone just about perfect. Just about the only complaint I have about this book is that I thought the ending was too abrupt. It's so important, the climax of Pepper's story and a hugely significant piece of character development, and I wanted more than the short scene and aftermath we got. I really wanted to spend some time feeling with the characters, savoring the emotional release. Another three or four pages would have been greatly appreciated. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was a happy surprise in 2015. A Closed and Common Orbit is fully as good, if not better. If you liked the previous book, you will definitely want to read this. I pre-ordered it and then read it within months after it was released, something that I almost never do. I can hardly wait to read whatever Chambers writes next. Rating: 9 out of 10

I got a new computer and wondered... How can I test it? One of those innocent questions that brings hours and hours of work and questionning...

A new desktop: Intel NUC devices After reading up on Jeff Atwood's blog and especially his article on the scooter computer, I have discovered a whole range of small computers that could answer my need for a faster machine in my office at a low price tag and without taking up too much of my precious desk space. After what now seems like a too short review I ended up buying a new Intel NUC device from NCIX.com, along with 16GB of RAM and an amazing 500GB M.2 hard drive for around 750$. I am very happy with the machine. It's very quiet and takes up zero space on my desk as I was able to screw it to the back of my screen. You can see my review of the hardware compatibility and installation report in the Debian wiki. I wish I had taken more time to review the possible alternatives - for example I found out about the amazing Airtop PC recently and, although that specific brand is a bit too expensive, the space of small computers is far and wide and deserves a more thorough review than just finding the NUC by accident while shopping for laptops on System76.com...

Reviving the Stressant project But this, and Atwood's Is Your Computer Stable? article, got me thinking about how to test new computers. It's one thing to build a machine and fire it up, but how do you know everything is actually really working? It is common practice to do a basic stress test or burn-in when you get a new machine in the industry - how do you proceed with such tests? Back in the days when I was working at Koumbit, I wrote a tool exactly for that purpose called Stressant. Since I am the main author of the project and I didn't see much activity on it since I left, I felt it would be a good idea to bring it under my personal wing again, and I have therefore moved it to my Gitlab where I hope to bring it back to life. Parts of the project's rationale are explained in an "Intent To Package" the "breakin" tool (Debian bug #707178), which, after closer examination, ended up turning into a complete rewrite. The homepage has a bit more information about how the tool works and its objectives, but generally, the idea is to have a live CD or USB stick that you can just plugin into a machine to run a battery of automated tests (memtest86, bonnie++, stress-ng and disk wiping, for example) or allow for interactive rescue missions on broken machines. At Koumbit, we had Debirf-based live images that we could boot off the network fairly easily that we would use for various purposes, although nothing was automated yet. The tool is based on Debian, but since it starts from boot, it should be runnable on any computer. I was able to bring the project back to life, to a certain extent, by switching to vmdebootstrap instead of debirf for builds, but that removed netboot support. Also, I hope that Gitlab could provide with an autobuilder for the images, but unfortunately there's a bug in Docker that makes it impossible to mount loop images in Docker images (which makes it impossible to build Docker in Docker, apparently).

Should I start yet another project? So there's still a lot of work to do in this project to get it off the ground. I am still a bit hesitant in getting into this, however, for a few reasons:

1. It's yet another volunteer job - which I am trying to reduce for health and obvious economic reasons. That's a purely personal reason and there isn't much you can do about it.
2. I am not sure the project is useful. It's one thing to build a tool that can do basic tests on a machine - I can probably just build an live image for myself that will do everything I need - it's another completely different thing to build something that will scale to multiple machines and be useful for more various use cases and users.

(A variation of #1 is how everything and everyone is moving to the cloud. It's become a common argument that you shouldn't run your own metal these days, and we seem to be fighting an uphill economic battle when we run our own datacenters, rack or even physical servers these days. I still think it's essential to have some connexion to metal to be autonomous in our communications, but I'm worried that focusing on such a project is another of my precious dead entreprises... ) Part #2 is obviously where you people come in. Here's a few questions I'd like to have feedback on:

1. (How) do you perform stress-testing of your machines before putting them in production (or when you find issues you suspect to be hardware-related)?
2. Would a tool like breakin or stressant be useful in your environment?
3. Which tools do you use now for such purposes?
4. Would you contribute to such a project? How?
5. Do you think there is room for such a project in the existing ecology of projects) or should I contribute to an existing project?

Any feedback here would be, of course, greatly appreciated.

manpages.debian.org launched The debmans package I had so lovingly worked on last month is now officially abandoned. It turns out that another developer, Michael Stapelberg wrote his own implementation from scratch, called debiman. Both software share a similar design: they are both static site generators that parse an existing archive and call another tool to convert manpages into HTML. We even both settled on the same converter (mdoc). But while I wrote debmans in Python, debiman is written in Go. debiman also seems much faster, being written with concurrency in mind from the start. Finally, debiman is more feature complete: it properly deals with conflicting packages, localization and all sorts redirections. Heck, it even has a pretty logo, how can I compete? While debmans was written first and was in the process of being deployed, I had to give it up. It was a frustrating experience because I felt I wasted a lot of time working on software that ended up being discarded, especially because I put so much work on it, creating extensive documentation, an almost complete test suite and even filing a detailed core infrastructure best practices report In the end, I think that was the right choice: debiman seemed clearly superior and the best tool should win. Plus, it meant less work for me: Michael and Javier (the previous manpages.debian.org maintainer) did all the work of putting the site online. I also learned a lot about the CII best practices program, flask, click and, ultimately, the Go programming language itself, which I'll refer to as Golang for brievity. debiman definitely brought Golang into the spotlight for me. I had looked at Go before, but it seemed to be yet another language. But seeing Michael beat me to rebuilding the service really made me look at it again more seriously. While I really appreciate Python and I will probably still use it as my language of choice for GUI work and smaller scripts, but for daemons, network programs and servers, I will seriously consider Golang in the future. The site is now online at https://manpages.debian.org/. I even got credited in the about page which makes up for the disappointment.

Wallabako downloads Wallabag articles on my Kobo e-reader This obviously brings me to the latest project I worked on, Wallabako, my first Golang program ever. Wallabako is basically a client for the Wallabag application, which is a free software "read it later" service, an alternative to the likes of Pocket, Pinboard or Evernote. Back in April, I had looked downloading my "unread articles" into my new ebook reader, going through convoluted ways like implementing OPDS support into Wallabag, which turned out to be too difficult. Instead, I used this as an opportunity to learn Golang. After reading the quite readable golang specification over the weekend, I found the language to be quite elegant and simple, yet very powerful. Golang feels like C, but built with concurrency and memory (and to a certain extent, type) safety in mind, along with a novel approach to OO programming. The fact that everything can be compiled in one neat little static binary was also a key feature in selecting golang for this project, as I do not have much control over the platform my E-Reader is running: it is a Linux machine running under the ARM architecture, but beyond that, there isn't much available. I couldn't afford to ship a Python interpreter in there and while there are solutions there like pyinstaller, I felt that it may be so easy to deploy on ARM. The borg team had trouble building a ARM binary, restoring to tricks like building on a Raspberry PI or inside an emulator. In comparison, the native go compiler supports cross-compilation out of the box through a simple environment variable. So far Wallabako works amazingly well: when I "bag" a new article in Wallabag, either from my phone or my web browser, it will show up on my ebook reader then next time I open the wifi. I still need to "tap" the screen to fake the insertion of the USB cable, but we're working on automating that. I also need to make the installation of the software much easier and improve the documentation, because so far it's unlikely that someone unfamiliar with Kobo hardware hacking will be able to install it.

Other work According to Github, I filed a bunch of bugs all over the place (25 issues in 16 repositories), sent patches everywhere (13 pull requests in 6 repositories), and tried to fix everythin (created 38 commits in 7 repositories). Note that excludes most of my work, which happens on Gitlab. January was still a very busy month, especially considering I had an accident which kept me mostly offline for about a week. Here are some details on specific projects.

Stressant and a new computer I revived the stressant project and got a new computer. This is be covered in a separate article.

Linkchecker forked After much discussions, it was decided to fork the linkchecker project, which now lives in its own organization. I still have to write community guidelines and figure out the best way to maintain a stable branch, but I am hopeful that the community will pick up the project as multiple people volunteer to co-maintain the project. There has already been pull requests and issues reported, so that's a good sign.

Feed2tweet refresh I re-rolled my pull requests to the feed2tweet project: last time they were closed before I had time to rebase them. The author was okay with me re-submitting them, but he hasn't commented, reviewed or merged the patches yet so I am worried they will be dropped again. At that point, I would more likely rewrite this from scratch than try to collaborate with someone that is clearly not interested in doing so...

Debian uploads

• calibre 2.75.1 backport - thanks to Nicholas Steeves for finding out about the security issues as well!
• dnsdiag 1.4.0 - sponsored, in NEW, now in unstable!
• monkeysign 2.2.3 - a quick bugfix release to ship a good version in stretch, now finally with GnuPG 2.x support!
• pepper 0.3.3-3 - just regular package maintenance
• tty-clock 2.3 - new upstream release, also got access to the upstream project
• tuptime 3.3.1 - sponsored

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 10th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. I took two months off last summer, which means it's actually been a year of work on the LTS project. This month I worked on a few issues, but they were big issues, so they took a lot of time. I have done a lot of work trying to backport the heading sanitization patches for CVE-2016-8743. The full report explain all the gritty details, but I ran out of time and couldn't upload the final version either. The issue mostly affects Apache servers in proxy configurations so it's not so severe as to warrant an immediate upload anyways. A lot of my time was spent battling the tiff package. The report mentions fixes for 15 CVEs and I uploaded the result in the DLA-795-1 advisory. I also worked on a small update to graphics magic for CVE-2016-9830 that is still pending because the issue is minor and we're waiting for more to pile up. See the full report for details. Finally, there was a small discussion surrounding tools to use when building and testing update to LTS packages. The resulting conversation was interesting, but it showed that we have a big documentation problem in the Debian project. There are a lot of tools, and the documentation is old and distributed everywhere. Every time I want to contribute something to the documentation, I never know where to start or go. This is why I wrote a separate debian development guide instead of contributing to existing documentation...

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS I was allocated 10 hours to work on security updates for Debian 7 Wheezy. During this time I did the following:

• I reviewed multiple CVE affecting ntp and opted to mark them no-dsa (just like what has been done for jessie).
• I pinged upstream authors of jbig2dec (here) and XML::Twig (by private email) where the upstream report had not gotten any upstream reply yet.
• I asked on oss-security for more details about CVE-2016-9584 because it was not clear whether it had already been reported upstream. Turns out that it was. I then updated the security tracker accordingly.
• Once I got a reply on jbig2dec, I started to backport the patch pointed out by upstream, it was hard work. When I was done, I had also received by private email the fuzzed file at the origin of the report unfortunately that file did not trigger the same problem with the old jbig2dec version in wheezy. That said valgrind still identified read outside of allocated memory. At this point I had a closer look at the git history only to discover that the last 3 years of work consisted mainly of security fixes for similar cases that were never reported to CVE. I thus opened a discussion about how to handle this situation.
• Matthias Geerdsen reported in #852610 a regression in libtiff4. I confirmed the problem and spent multiple hours to come up with a fix. The patch that introduced the regression was Debian-specific as upstream did not fix those issues yet. I released a fixed package in DLA-610-2.

Debian packaging With the deep freeze approaching, I made some last-minute updates:

• schroot 1.6.10-3 fixing some long-standing issues with the way bind mounts are shared (#761435) and other important fixes.
• live-boot 1:20170112 to fix a failure when booting on a FAT filesystem and other small fixes.
• live-config 5.20170112 merging useful patches from the BTS.
• I finished the update of hashcat 3.30 with its new private library and fixed RC bug #851497 at the same time. The work was initiated by fellow members of the pkg-security team.

Misc work Sponsorship. I sponsored a new asciidoc upload demoting a dependency into a recommends (#850301). I sponsored a new upstream version of dolibarr. Discussions. I seconded quite a few changes prepared by Russ Allbery on debian-policy. I helped Scott Kitterman with #849584 about a misunderstanding of how the postfix service files are supposed to work. I discussed in #849913 about a regression in building of cross-compilers, and made a patch to avoid the problem. In the end, Guillem developed a better fix. Bugs. I investigated #850236 where a django test failed during the first week after each leap year. I filed #853224 on desktop-base about multiple small problems in the maintainer scripts. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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

• Created github-sync, a tool to mirror arbitrary repositories onto GitHub.
• Submitted two pull requests to the word-wrap Chrome browser extension that adds the ability to wrap text via the right-click context menu:
  • Support dynamically-added <textarea> elements in "rich" Javascript applications such as mail clients, etc. (#2)
  • Avoid an error message if no "editable" has been selected yet. (#1)
• Submitted a pull request to wordwarvi (a "retro-styled old school side-scrolling shooter") to ensure the build is reproducible. (#5)
• Filed a pull request with the yard Ruby documentation tool to ensure the generated output is reproducible. (#1048)
• Made some improvements to travis.debian.net, my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds on every code change:
  • Merged a pull request from Evgeni Golov to allow for skipped tests. (#39)
  • Add logging when running autopkgtests. (commit)
• Merged a pull request from jwilk for python-fadvise my Python interface to the posix_fadvise(2) interface to predeclare an pattern for accessing data. (#6)
• Filed an issue against the redis key-value database regarding build failures on non-x86 architectures. (#3768)

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As children use digital media to learn and socialize, others are collecting and analyzing data about these activities. In school and at play, these children find that they are the subjects of data science. As believers in the power of data analysis, we believe that this approach falls short of data science s potential to promote innovation, learning, and power. Motivated by this fact, we have been working over the last three years as part of a team at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Washington to design and build a system that attempts to support an alternative vision: children as data scientists. The system we have built is described in a new paper Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists that will be published in the proceedings of CHI 2017. Our system is built on top of Scratch, a visual, block-based programming language designed for children and youth. Scratch is also an online community with over 15 million registered members who share their Scratch projects, remix each others work, have conversations, provide feedback, bookmark or love projects they like, follow other users, and more. Over the last decade, researchers including us have used the Scratch online community s database to study the youth using Scratch. With Scratch Community Blocks, we attempt to put the power to programmatically analyze these data into the hands of the users themselves. To do so, our new system adds a set of new programming primitives (blocks) to Scratch so that users can access public data from the Scratch website from inside Scratch. Blocks in the new system gives users access to project and user metadata, information about social interaction, and data about what types of code are used in projects. The full palette of blocks to access different categories of data is shown below.

Project metadata

User metadata

Site-wide statistics

The new blocks allow users to programmatically access, filter, and analyze data about their own participation in the community. For example, with the simple script below, we can find whether we have followers in Scratch who report themselves to be from Spain, and what their usernames are. In designing the system, we had two primary motivations. First, we wanted to support avenues through which children can engage in curiosity-driven, creative explorations of public Scratch data. Second, we wanted to foster self-reflection with data. As children looked back upon their own participation and coding activity in Scratch through the project they and their peers made, we wanted them to reflect on their own behavior and learning in ways that shaped their future behavior and promoted exploration. After designing and building the system over 2014 and 2015, we invited a group of active Scratch users to beta test the system in early 2016. Over four months, 700 users created more than 1,600 projects. The diversity and depth of users creativity with the new blocks surprised us. Children created projects that gave the viewer of the project a personalized doughnut-chart visualization of their coding vocabulary on Scratch, rendered the viewer s number of followers as scoops of ice-cream on a cone, attempted to find whether love-its for projects are more common on Scratch than favorites , and told users how talkative they were by counting the cumulative string-length of project titles and descriptions. We found that children, rather than making canonical visualizations such as pie-charts or bar-graphs, frequently made information representations that spoke to their own identities and aesthetic sensibilities. A 13-year-old girl had made a virtual doll dress-up game where the player s ability to buy virtual clothes and accessories for the doll was determined by the level of their activity in the Scratch community. When we asked about her motivation for making such a project, she said:

I was trying to think of something that somebody hadn t done yet, and I didn t see that. And also I really like to do art on Scratch and that was a good opportunity to use that and mix the two [art and data] together.

We also found at least some evidence that the system supported self-reflection with data. For example, after seeing a project that showed its viewers a visualization of their past coding vocabulary, a 15-year-old realized that he does not do much programming with the pen-related primitives in Scratch, and wrote in a comment, epic! looks like we need to use more pen blocks. :D.

Doughnut visualization

Ice-cream visualization

Data-driven doll dress up

Additionally, we noted that that as children made and interacted with projects made with Scratch Community Blocks, they started to critically think about the implications of data collection and analysis. These conversations are the subject of another paper (also being published in CHI 2017). In a 1971 article called Teaching Children to be Mathematicians vs. Teaching About Mathematics , Seymour Papert argued for the need for children doing mathematics vs. learning about it. He showed how Logo, the programming language he was developing at that time with his colleagues, could offer children a space to use and engage with mathematical ideas in creative and personally motivated ways. This, he argued, enabled children to go beyond knowing about mathematics to doing mathematics, as a mathematician would. Scratch Community Blocks has not yet been launched for all Scratch users and has several important limitations we discuss in the paper. That said, we feel that the projects created by children in our the beta test demonstrate the real potential for children to do data science, and not just know about it, provide data for it, and to have their behavior nudged and shaped by it.

Starting with OpenSSH 7.2, a new restrict option for authorized_keys lines has become available. It sets all available restrictions that the current OpenSSH version can do (like no-agent-forwarding, no-x11-forwarding etc). One can individually turn on those features again by corresponding new options. This saves one from sorrows when a new capability of OpenSSH is introduced through an update which is enabled by default, since one has to remember that restricted authorized_keys lines are in unse and then to manually add the restrictions. On the downside, Debian jessie and CentOS 7 don t have a recent enough OpenSSH. So we ll have to continue worrying about new features being inadvertendly enabled for a while. P.S.: Yes, I haven t blogged about Linux and Debian in English in a while.

Statutory warning It s a long read. I start by sharing I regret, I did not hold onto the Budget and Economics 101 blog post for one more day. I had been holding/thinking on to it for almost couple of weeks before posting, if I had just waited a day more, I would have been able to share an Indian Express story . While I thought that the work for the budget starts around 3 months before the budget, I came to learn from that article that it takes 6 months. As can be seen in the article, it is somewhat of a wasted opportunity, part of it probably due to the Government (irrespective of any political party, dynasty etc.) mismanagement. What has not been stated in the article is what I had shared earlier, reading between the lines, it seems that the Government isn t able to trust what it hears from its advisers and man on the street. Unlike Chanakya and many wise people before him who are credited with advising about good governance, that a good king is one who goes out in disguise, learns how his/er subjects are surviving, seeing what ills them and taking or even not taking corrective steps after seeing the problem from various angles. Of course it s easier said then done, though lot of Indian kings did try and ran successful provinces. There were also some who were more interested in gambling, women and threw/frittered away their kingdoms. The 6-month things while not being said in the Express article is probably more about checking and re-checking figures and sources to make sure they are able to read whatever pattern the various Big Businesses, Industry, Social Welfare schemes and people are saying I guess. And unless mass digitalization as well as overhaul of procedures, Right to Information (RTI) happens, don t see any improvement in the way the information is collected, interpreted and shared with the public at large. It would also require people who are able to figure out how things work sharing the inferences (right or wrong) through various media so there is discussion about figures and policy-making. Such researchers and their findings are sadly missing in Indian public discourses and only found in glossy coffee table books :(. One of the most basic question for instance is, How much of any policy should be based on facts and figures and how much giving fillip to products and services needed in short to medium term ? Also how much morality should play a part in Public Policy ? Surprisingly, or probably not, most Indian budgets are populist by nature with some scientific basis but most of the times there is no dialog about how the FM came to some conclusion or Policy-making. I am guessing a huge part of that has also to do with basic illiteracy as well as Economic and Financial Illiteracy. Just to share a well-known world-over example, one of the policies where the Government of India has been somewhat lethargic is wired broadband penetration. As have shared umpteen times, while superficially broadband penetration is happening, most of the penetration is the unreliable and more expensive mobile broadband penetration. While this may come as a shock to many of the users of technology, BSNL, a Government company who provides broadband for almost 70-80% of the ADSL wired broadband subscribers gives 50:1 contention ratio to its customers. One can now understand the pathetic speeds along with very old copper wiring (20 odd years) on which the network is running. The idea/idiom of running network using duct-tape seems pretty apt in here Now, the Government couple of years ago introduced FFTH Fiber-to-the-home but because the charges are so high, it s not going anywhere. The Government could say 10% discount in your Income Tax rates if you get FFTH. This would force people to get FFTH and would also force BSNL to clean up its act. It has been documented that a percentage increase in broadband equals a similar percentage rise in GDP. Having higher speeds of broadband would mean better quality of streaming video as well as all sorts of remote teaching and sharing of ideas which will give a lot of fillip to all sorts of IT peripherals in short, medium and long-term as well. Not to mention, all the software that will be invented/coded to take benefit of all that speed. Although, realistically speaking I am cynical that the Government would bring something like this Moving on Another interesting story which I had shared was a bit about World History Now the Economist sort of confirmed how things are in Pakistan. What is and was interesting that the article is made by a politically left-leaning magazine which is for globalization, business among other things . So, there seem to be only three options, either I and the magazine are correct or we both are reading it wrong. The third and last option is that the United States realize that Pakistan can no longer be trusted as Pakistan is siding more and more with Chinese and Russians, hence the article. Atlhough it seems a somewhat far-fetched idea as I don t see the magazine getting any brownie points with President Trump. Unless, The Economist becomes more hawkish, more right-wingish due to the new establishment. I can t claim to have any major political understanding or expertise but it does seem that Pakistan is losing friends. Even UAE have been cautiously building bridges with us. Now how this will play out in the medium to long-term depends much on the personal equations of the two heads of state, happenings in geopolitics around the world and the two countries, decisions they take, it is a welcome opportunity as far they (the Saudis) have funds they want to invest and India can use those investments to make new infrastructure. Now, I need a bit of help of Java and VCS (Version control system) experts . There is a small game project called Mars-Sim. I asked probably a few more questions than I should have and the result was that I was made a member of the game team even though I had shared with them that I m a non-coder. I think such a game is important as it s foss. Both the game itself is foss as well as its build-tools with a basic wiki. Such a game would be useful not only to Debian but all free software distributions. Journeying into the game Unfortunately, the game as it is currently, doesn t work with openjdk8 but private conversations with the devs. have shared they will work on getting it to work on OpenJDK 9 which though is sometime away. Now as it is a game, I knew it would have multiple multimedia assets. It took me quite sometime to figure out where most of the multimedia assets are. I was shocked to find that there aren t any tool/s in Debian as well a GNU/Linux to know about types of content is there inside a directory and its sub-directories. I framed it in a query and found a script as an answer . I renamed the script to file-extension-information.sh (for lack of imagination of better name). After that, I downloaded a snapshot of the head of the project from https://sourceforge.net/p/mars-sim/code/HEAD/tree/ where it shows a link to download the snapshot. https://sourceforge.net/code-snapshots/svn/m/ma/mars-sim/code/mars-sim-code-3847-trunk.zip unzipped it and then ran the script on it [$] bash file-extension-information.sh mars-sim-code-3846-trunk
theme: 1770
dtd: 31915
py: 10815
project: 5627
JPG: 762476
fxml: 59490
vm: 876
dat: 15841044
java: 13052271
store: 1343
gitignore: 8
jpg: 3473416
md: 5156
lua: 57
gz: 1447
desktop: 281
wav: 83278
1: 2340
css: 323739
frag: 471
svg: 8948591
launch: 9404
index: 11520
iml: 27186
png: 3268773
json: 1217
ttf: 2861016
vert: 712
ogg: 12394801
prefs: 11541
properties: 186731
gradle: 611
classpath: 8538
pro: 687
groovy: 2711
form: 5780
txt: 50274
xml: 794365
js: 1465072
dll: 2268672
html: 1676452
gif: 38399
sum: 23040
(none): 1124
jsx: 32070 It gave me some idea of what sort of file were under the repository. I do wish the script defaulted to showing file-sizes in KB if not MB to better assess how the directory is made up but not a big loss . The above listing told me that at the very least theme, JPG, dat, wav, png, ogg and lastly gif files. For lack of better tools and to get an overview of where those multimedia assets used ncdu [shirish@debian] - [~/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk] - [10210]
[$] ncdu mars-sim/ --- /home/shirish/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk/mars-sim --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
46.2 MiB [##########] /mars-sim-ui
15.2 MiB [### ] /mars-sim-mapdata
8.3 MiB [# ] /mars-sim-core
2.1 MiB [ ] /mars-sim-service
500.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-main
188.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-android
72.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-network
16.0 KiB [ ] pom.xml
12.0 KiB [ ] /.settings
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.store
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.iml
4.0 KiB [ ] .project
I found that all the media is distributed randomly and posted a ticket about it. As I m not even a java newbie, could somebody look at mokun s comment and help out please ? On the same project, there has been talk of migrating to github.com Now whatever little I know of git, it makes a copy of the whole repository under .git/ folder/directory so having multimedia assets under git is a bad, bad idea, as each multimedia binary format file would be unique and no possibility of diff. between two binary files even though they may be the same file with some addition or subtraction from earlier version. I did file a question but am unhappy with the answers given. Can anybody give some definitive answers if they have been able to do how I am proposing , if yes, how did they go about it ? And lastly America was founded by immigrants. Everybody knows the story about American Indians, the originals of the land were over-powered by the European settlers. So any claim, then and now that immigration did not help United States is just a lie. This came due to a conversation on #debconf by andrewsh

[18:37:06] I d be more than happy myself to apply for an US tourist not transit visa when I really need it, as a transit visa isn t really useful, is just as costly as a tourist visa, and nearly as difficult to get as a tourist visa
[18:37:40] I m not entirely sure I wish to transit through the US in its Trumplandia incarnation either
[18:38:07] likely to be more difficult and unfun

FWIW I am in complete agreement with Andrew s assessment of how it might be with foreigners. It has been on my mind and thoughts for quite some time although andrewsh put it eloquently. But as always I m getting ahead of myself. The conversation is because debconf this year would be in Canada. For many a cheap flight, one of the likely layovers/stopover can be the United States. I actually would have gone one step further, even if it was cheap transit visa, it would equally be unfun as it would discriminate. About couple of years back, a friend of mine while explaining what visa is, put it rather succinctly the visa officer looks at only 3 things a. Your financial position something which tells that you can take care of your financial needs if things go south b. You are not looking to settle there unlawfully c. You are not a criminal. While costs do matter, what is disturbing more is the form of extremism being displayed therein. While Indians from the South Asian continent in US have been largely successful, love to be in peace (one-off incidents do and will happen anywhere) if I had to take a transit or tourist visa in this atmosphere, it would leave a bad taste in the mouth. When one of my best friends is a Muslim, 20% of the population in India is made of Muslims and 99% of the time both of us co-exist in peace I simply can t take any alternative ideology. Even in Freakonomics 2.0 the authors when they shared that it s less than 0.1 percent of Muslims who are engaged in terrorist activities, if they were even 1 percent than all the world s armed forces couldn t fight them and couldn t keep anyone safe. Which simply means that 99.99% of even all Muslims are good. This resonates strongly with me for number of reasons. One of my uncles in early to late 80 s had an opportunity for work to visit Russia for official work. He went there and there were Secret Police after him all the time. While he didn t know it, I later read it, that it was SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) when all and any foreigners came visiting the country, and not just foreigners, they had spies for their own citizens. Russka a book I read several years ago explained the paranoia beautifully. While U.S. in those days was a more welcoming place for him. I am thankful as well as find it strange that Canada and States have such different visa procedures. While Canada would simply look at the above things, probably discreetly inquire about you if you have been a bad boy/girl in any way and then make a decision which is fine. For United States, even for a transit visa I probably would have to go to Interview where my world view would probably be in conflict with the current American world view. Interestingly, while I was looking at conversations on the web and one thing that is missing there is that nobody has talked about intelligence community. What Mr. Trump is saying in not so many words is that our intelligence even with all the e-mails we monitor and everything we do, we still can t catch you. It almost seems like giving a back-handed compliment to the extremists saying you do a better job than our intelligence community. This doesn t mean that States doesn t have interesting things to give to the world, Star Trek conventions, Grand Canyon (which probably would require me more than a month or more to explore even a little part), NASA, Intel, AMD, SpaceX, CES (when it s held) and LPC (Linux Plumber s conference where whose who come to think of roadmap for GNU/Linux). What I wouldn t give to be a fly in the wall when LPC, CES happens in the States. What I actually found very interesting is that in the current Canadian Government, if what I read and heard is true, then Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada made 50 of his cabinet female. Just like in the article, studies even in Indian parliament have shown that when women are in power, questions about social justice, equality, common good get asked and policies made. If I do get the opportunity to be part of debconf, I would like to see, hear, watch, learn how the women cabinet is doing things. I am assuming that reporting and analysis standards of whatever decisions are more transparent and more people are engaged in the political process to know what their elected representatives are doing. One another interesting point I came to know is that Canada is home to bicycling paths. While I stopped bicycling years ago as it has been becoming more and more dangerous to bicycle here in Pune as there is no demarcation for cyclists, I am sure lot of Canadians must be using this opportunity fully. Lastly, on the debconf preparation stage, things have started becoming a bit more urgent and hectic. From a monthly IRC meet, it has now become a weekly meet. Both the wiki and the website are slowly taking up shape. http://deb.li/dc17kbp is a nice way to know/see progress of the activities happening . One important decision that would be taken today is where people would stay during debconf. There are options between on-site and two places around the venue, one 1.9 km around, the other 5 km. mark. Each has its own good and bad points. It would be interesting to see which place gets selected and why.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #budget, #Canada, #debconf organization, #discrimination, #Equal Opportunity, #Fiber, #svn, #United States, #Version Control, Broadband, Git, Pakistan, Subversion

I recently setup a music server on my home server using the Music Player Daemon, a cross-platform free software project which has been around for a long time.

Basic setup Start by installing the server and the client package:

apt install mpd mpc

then open /etc/mpd.conf and set these:

music_directory    "/path/to/music/"
bind_to_address    "192.168.1.2"
bind_to_address    "/run/mpd/socket"
zeroconf_enabled   "yes"
password           "Password1"

before replacing the alsa output:

audio_output  
   type    "alsa"
   name    "My ALSA Device"
 

with a pulseaudio one:

audio_output  
   type    "pulse"
   name    "Pulseaudio Output"
 

In order for the automatic detection (zeroconf) of your music server to work, you need to prevent systemd from creating the network socket:

systemctl stop mpd.service
systemctl stop mpd.socket
systemctl disable mpd.socket

otherwise you'll see this in /var/log/mpd/mpd.log:

zeroconf: No global port, disabling zeroconf

Once all of that is in place, start the mpd daemon:

systemctl start mpd.service

and create an index of your music files:

MPD_HOST=Password1@/run/mpd/socket mpc update

while watching the logs to notice any files that the mpd user doesn't have access to:

tail -f /var/log/mpd/mpd.log

Enhancements I also added the following in /etc/logcheck/ignore.server.d/local-mpd to silence unnecessary log messages in logcheck emails:

^\w 3  [ :0-9] 11  [._[:alnum:]-]+ systemd\[1\]: Started Music Player Daemon.$
^\w 3  [ :0-9] 11  [._[:alnum:]-]+ systemd\[1\]: Stopped Music Player Daemon.$
^\w 3  [ :0-9] 11  [._[:alnum:]-]+ systemd\[1\]: Stopping Music Player Daemon...$

and created a cronjob in /etc/cron.d/mpd-francois to update the database daily and stop the music automatically in the evening:

# Refresh DB once a day
5 1 * * *  mpd  MPD_HOST=Password1@/run/mpd/socket /usr/bin/mpc --quiet update
# Think of the neighbours
0 22 * * 0-4  mpd  MPD_HOST=Password1@/run/mpd/socket /usr/bin/mpc --quiet stop
0 23 * * 5-6  mpd  MPD_HOST=Password1@/run/mpd/socket /usr/bin/mpc --quiet stop

Clients To let anybody on the local network connect, I opened port 6600 on the firewall (/etc/network/iptables.up.rules since I'm using Debian's iptables-apply):

-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.0/24 -p tcp --dport 6600 -j ACCEPT

Then I looked at the long list of clients on the mpd wiki.

Desktop The official website suggests two clients which are available in Debian and Ubuntu:

• Ario (apt install ario)
• GNOME Music Player Client (apt install gmpc gmpc-plugins)

Both of them work well, but haven't had a release since 2011, even though there is some activity in 2013 and 2015 in their respective source control repositories. Ario has a simpler user interface but gmpc has cover art download working out of the box, which is why I might stick with it. In both cases, it is possible to configure a polipo proxy so that any external resources are fetched via Tor.

Android On Android, I got these two to work:

• M.A.L.P. (requires Android 5 or later)
• MPDroid

I picked M.A.L.P. since it includes a nice widget for the homescreen.

iOS On iOS, these are the most promising clients I found:

• MPDRemote (free software, not on the AppStore)
• MPDluxe (proprietary, sold on the AppStore)

since MPoD and MPaD don't appear to be available on the AppStore anymore.