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Monday morning, 1:45AM. Laura and I walk into the boys room. We turn on the light. Nothing happens. (They re sound sleepers.) Boys, it s time to get up to go get on the train! Four eyes pop open. Yay! Oh I m so excited! And then, Meow! (They enjoy playing with their stuffed cats that Laura got them for Christmas.) Before long, it was out the door to the train station. We even had time to stop at a donut shop along the way. We climbed into our family bedroom (a sleeping car room on Amtrak specifically designed for families of four), and as the train started to move, the excitement of what was going on crept in. Yes, it s 2:42AM, but these are two happy boys:

Jacob and Oliver love trains, and this was the beginning of a 3-day train trip from Newton to Seattle that would take us through Kansas, Colorado, the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, Arizona, Los Angeles, up the California coast, through the Cascades, and on to Seattle. Whew! Here we are later that morning before breakfast:

Here s our train at a station stop in La Junta, CO:

And at the beautiful small mountain town of Raton, NM:

Some of the passing scenery in New Mexico:

Through it all, we found many things to pass the time. I don t think anybody was bored. I took the boys exploring the train several times we d walk from one end to the other and see what all was there. There was always the dining car for our meals, the lounge car for watching the passing scenery, and on the Coast Starlight, the Pacific Parlor Car. Here we are getting ready for breakfast one morning.

Getting to select meals and order in the train restaurant was a big deal for the boys.

Laura brought one of her origami books, which even managed to pull the boys away from the passing scenery in the lounge car for quite some time.

Origami is serious business:

They had some fun wrapping themselves around my feet and challenging me to move. And were delighted when I could move even though they were trying to weight me down!

Several games of Uno were played, but even those sometimes couldn t compete with the passing scenery:

The Coast Starlight features the Pacific Parlor Car, which was built over 50 years ago for the Santa Fe Hi-Level trains. They ve been updated; the upper level is a lounge and small restaurant, and the lower level has been turned into a small theater. They show movies in there twice a day, but most of the time, the place is empty. A great place to go with little boys to run around and play games.

The boys and I sort of invented a new game: roadrunner and coyote, loosely based on the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Jacob and Oliver would be roadrunners, running around and yelling MEEP MEEP! Meanwhile, I was the coyote, who would try to catch them even briefly succeeding sometimes but ultimately fail in some hilarious way. It burned a lot of energy. And, of course, the parlor car was good for scenery-watching too:

We were right along the Pacific Ocean for several hours sometimes there would be a highway or a town between us and the beach, but usually there was nothing at all between us and the coast. It was beautiful to watch the jagged coastline go by, to gaze out onto the ocean, watching the birds apparently so beautiful that I didn t even think to take some photos. Laura s parents live in California, and took a connecting train. I had arranged for them to have a sleeping car room near ours, so for the last day of the trip, we had a group of 6. Here are the boys with their grandparents at lunch Wednesday:

We stepped off the train in Seattle into beautiful King Street Station.

Our first day in Seattle was a quiet day of not too much. Laura s relatives live near Lake Washington, so we went out there to play. The boys enjoyed gathering black rocks along the shore.

We went blackberry picking after that filled up buckets for a cobbler. The next day, we rode the Seattle Monorail. The boys have been talking about this for months a kind of train they ve never been on. That was the biggest thing in their minds that they were waiting for. They got to ride in the very front, by the operator.

Nice view from up there.

We walked through the Pike Market I hadn t been in such a large and crowded place like that since I was in Guadalajara:

At the Seattle Aquarium, we all had a great time checking out all the exhibits. The please touch one was a particular hit.

Walking underneath the salmon tank was fun too. We spent a couple of days doing things closer to downtown. Laura s cousin works at MOHAI, the Museum of History and Industry, so we spent a morning there. The boys particularly enjoyed the old periscope mounted to the top of the building, and the exhibit on chocolate (of course!)

They love any kind of transportation, so of course we had to get a ride on the Seattle Streetcar that comes by MOHAI.

All weekend long, we had been noticing the seaplanes taking off from Lake Washington and Lake Union (near MOHAI). So finally I decided to investigate, and one morning while Laura was doing things with her cousin, the boys and I took a short seaplane ride from one lake to another, and then rode every method of transportation we could except for ferries (we did that the next day). Here is our Kenmore Air plane:

The view of Lake Washington from 1000 feet was beautiful:

I think we got a better view than the Space Needle, and it probably cost about the same anyhow.

After splashdown, we took the streetcar to a place where we could eat lunch right by the monorail tracks. Then we rode the monorail again. Then we caught a train (it went underground a bit so it was a subway to them!) and rode it a few blocks. There is even scenery underground, it seems.

We rode a bus back, and saved one last adventure for the next day: a ferry to Bainbridge Island.

Laura and I even got some time to ourselves to go have lunch at an amazing Greek restaurant to celebrate a year since we got engaged. It s amazing to think that, by now, it s only a few months until our wedding anniversary too! There are many special memories of the weekend I could mention visiting with Laura s family, watching the boys play with her uncle s pipe organ (it s in his house!), watching the boys play with their grandparents, having all six of us on the train for a day, flying paper airplanes off the balcony, enjoying the cool breeze on the ferry and the beautiful mountains behind the lake. One of my favorites is waking up to high-pitched Meow? Meow meow meow! Wake up, brother! sorts of sounds. There was so much cat-play on the trip, and it was cute to hear. I have the feeling we won t hear things like that much more. So many times on the trip I heard, Oh dad, I am so excited! I never get tired of hearing that. And, of course, I was excited, too.

I m writing this blog post on the plane from Portland towards Europe (which I now can!), using the remaining battery live after having watched one of the DebConf talks that I missed. (It was the systemd talk, which was good and interesting, but maybe I should have watched one of the power management talks, as my battery is running down faster than it should be, I believe.) I mostly enjoyed this year s DebConf. I must admit that I did not come very prepared: I had neither something urgent to hack on, nor important things to discuss with the other attendees, so in a way I had a slow start. I also felt a bit out of touch with the project, both personally and technically: In previous DebConfs, I had more interest in many different corners of the project, and also came with more naive enthusiasm. After more than 10 years in the project, I see a few things more realistic and also more relaxed, and don t react on Wouldn t it be cool to have crazy idea very easily any more. And then I mostly focus on Haskell packaging (and related tooling, which sometimes is also relevant and useful to others) these days, which is not very interesting to most others. But in the end I did get to do some useful hacking, heard a few interesting talks and even got a bit excited: I created a new tool to schedule binNMUs for Haskell packages which is quite generic (configured by just a regular expression), so that it can and will be used by the OCaml team as well, and who knows who else will start using hash-based virtual ABI packages in the future... It runs via a cron job on people.debian.org to produce output for Haskell and for OCaml, based on data pulled via HTTP. If you are a Debian developer and want up-to-date results, log into wuiet.debian.org and run ~nomeata/binNMUs --sql; it then uses the projectb and wanna-build databases directly. Thanks to the ftp team for opening up incoming.debian.org, by the way! Unsurprisingly, I also held a talk on Haskell and Debian (slides available). I talked a bit too long and we had too little time for discussion, but in any case not all discussion would have fitted in 45 minutes. The question of which packages from Hackage should be added to Debian and which not is still undecided (which means we carry on packaging what we happen to want in Debian for whatever reason). I guess the better our tooling gets (see the next section), the more easily we can support more and more packages. I am quite excited by and supportive of Enrico s agenda to remove boilerplate data from the debian/ directories and relying on autodebianization tools. We have such a tool for Haskell package, cabal-debian, but it is unofficial, i.e. neither created by us nor fully endorsed. I want to change that, so I got in touch with the upstream maintainer and we want to get it into shape for producing perfect Debian packages, if the upstream provided meta data is perfect. I d like to see the Debian Haskell Group to follows Enrico s plan to its extreme conclusion, and this way drive innovation in Debian in general. We ll see how that goes. Besides all the technical program I enjoyed the obligatory games of Mao and Werewolves. I also got to dance! On Saturday night, I found a small but welcoming Swing-In-The-Park event where I could dance a few steps of Lindy Hop. And on Tuesday night, Vagrant Cascadian took us (well, three of us) to a blues dancing night, which I greatly enjoyed: The style was so improvisation-friendly that despite having missed the introduction and never having danced Blues before I could jump right in. And in contrast to social dances in Germany, where it is often announced that the girls are also invited to ask the boys, but then it is still mostly the boys who have to ask, here I took only half a minute of standing at the side until I got asked to dance. In retrospect I should have skipped the HP reception and went there directly... I m not heading home at the moment, but will travel directly to G teborg to attend ICFP 2014. I hope the (usually worse) west-to-east jet lag will not prevent me from enjoying that as much as I could.

If you ve noticed your chrome/chromium on Linux having problems since you upgraded to somewhere around version 35/36, you re not alone. Thankfully, it s relatively easy to workaround. It will hit people who keep their browser open for a long time, or who have lots of tabs (or if you re like me, and do both). To tell if you re suffering from this particular problem, crack open your ~/.xsession-errors file (or wherever your system logs stdout/stderr from programs running under X), and look for lines that look like this:

[22161:22185:0830/124533:ERROR:shared_memory_posix.cc(231)]
Creating shared memory in /dev/shm/.org.chromium.Chromium.gFTQSy
failed: Too many open files

And

[22161:22185:0830/124601:ERROR:host_shared_bitmap_manager.cc(122)]
Cannot create shared memory buffer

If you see those errors, congratulations! The rest of this blog post will be of use to you. There s probably a myriad of bugs open about this problem, but the one I found was #367037: Shared memory-related tab crash. It turns out there s a file handle leak in the chromium codebase somewhere, relating to shared memory handling. There s no fix available, but the workaround is quite simple: increase the number of files that processes are allowed to have open. System-wide, you can do this by creating a file /etc/security/limits.d/local-nofile.conf, containing this line:

* - nofile 65535

You could also edit /etc/security/limits.conf to contain the same line, if you were so inclined. Note that this will only take effect next time you login, or perhaps even only when you restart X (or, at worst, your entire machine). This doesn t help you if you ve got Chromium already open and you d like to stop it from crashing Right Now (perhaps restarting your machine would be a terrible hardship, causing you to lose your hard-won uptime record), then you can use a magical tool called prlimit. The prlimit syscall is available if you re running a Linux 2.6.36 or later kernel, and running at least glibc 2.13. You ll have a prlimit command line program if you ve got util-linux 2.21 or later. If not, you can use the example source code in the prlimit(2) manpage, changing RLIMIT_CPU to RLIMIT_NOFILE, and then running it like this:

prlimit <PID> 65535 65535

The <PID> argument is taken from the first number in the log messages from .xsession-errors in the example above, it s 22161. And now, you can go back to using your tabs as ersatz bookmarks, like I do.

My recently accepted Licentiate Thesis, which I posted about a couple of days ago, is now available in JyX. Here is the abstract again for reference: Kaijanaho, Antti-Juhani
The extent of empirical evidence that could inform evidence-based design of programming languages. A systematic mapping study.
Jyv skyl : University of Jyv skyl , 2014, 243 p.
(Jyv skyl Licentiate Theses in Computing,
ISSN 1795-9713; 18)
ISBN 978-951-39-5790-2 (nid.)
ISBN 978-951-39-5791-9 (PDF)
Finnish summary Background: Programming language design is not usually informed by empirical studies. In other fields similar problems have inspired an evidence-based paradigm of practice. Central to it are secondary studies summarizing and consolidating the research literature. Aims: This systematic mapping study looks for empirical research that could inform evidence-based design of programming languages. Method: Manual and keyword-based searches were performed, as was a single round of snowballing. There were 2056 potentially relevant publications, of which 180 were selected for inclusion, because they reported empirical evidence on the efficacy of potential design decisions and were published on or before 2012. A thematic synthesis was created. Results: Included studies span four decades, but activity has been sparse until the last five years or so. The form of conditional statements and loops, as well as the choice between static and dynamic typing have all been studied empirically for efficacy in at least five studies each. Error proneness, programming comprehension, and human effort are the most common forms of efficacy studied. Experimenting with programmer participants is the most popular method. Conclusions: There clearly are language design decisions for which empirical evidence regarding efficacy exists; they may be of some use to language designers, and several of them may be ripe for systematic reviewing. There is concern that the lack of interest generated by studies in this topic area until the recent surge of activity may indicate serious issues in their research approach. Keywords: programming languages, programming language design, evidence-based paradigm, efficacy, research methods, systematic mapping study, thematic synthesis

Since its very early days subunit has had a single model you run a process, it outputs test results. This works great, except when it doesn t. On the up side, you have a one way pipeline there s no interactivity needed, which makes it very very easy to write a subunit backend that e.g. testr can use. On the downside, there s no interactivity, which means that anytime you want to do something with those tests, a new process is needed and thats sometimes quite expensive particularly in test suites with 10 s of thousands of tests.Now, for use in the development edit-execute loop, this is arguably ok, because one needs to load the new tests into memory anyway; but wouldn t it be nice if tools like testr that run tests for you didn t have to decide upfront exactly how they were going to run. If instead they could get things running straight away and then give progressively larger and larger units of work to be run, without forcing a new process (and thus new discovery directory walking and importing) ? Secondly, testr has an inconsistent interface if testr is letting a user debug things to testr through to child workers in a chain, it needs to use something structured (e.g. subunit) and route stdin to the actual worker, but the final testr needs to unwrap everything this is needlessly complex. Lastly, for some languages at least, its possibly to dynamically pick up new code at runtime so a simple inotify loop and we could avoid new-process (and more importantly complete-enumeration) *entirely*, leading to very fast edit-test cycles. So, in this blog post I m really running this idea up the flagpole, and trying to sketch out the interface and hopefully get feedback on it. Taking subunit.run as an example process to do this to:

There should be an option to change from one-shot to server mode
In server mode, it will listen for commands somewhere (lets say stdin)
On startup it might eager load the available tests
One command would be list-tests which would enumerate all the tests to its output channel (which is stdout today so lets stay with that for now)
Another would be run-tests, which would take a set of test ids, and then filter-and-run just those ids from the available tests, output, as it does today, going to stdout. Passing somewhat large sets of test ids in may be desirable, because some test runners perform fixture optimisations (e.g. bringing up DB servers or web servers) and test-at-a-time is pretty much worst case for that sort of environment.
Another would be be std-in a command providing a packet of stdin used for interacting with debuggers

So that seems pretty approachable to me we don t even need an async loop in there, as long as we re willing to patch select etc (for the stdin handling in some environments like Twisted). If we don t want to monkey patch like that, we ll need to make stdin a socketpair, and have an event loop running to shepard bytes from the real stdin to the one we let the rest of Python have. What about that nirvana above? If we assume inotify support, then list_tests (and run_tests) can just consult a changed-file list and reload those modules before continuing. Reloading them just-in-time would be likely to create havoc I think reloading only when synchronised with test completion makes a great deal of sense. Would such a test server make sense in other languages? What about e.g. testtools.run vs subunit.run such a server wouldn t want to use subunit, but perhaps a regular CLI UI would be nice

Many package maintainers need to decide when to upload a new version to Debian. Should the upload be done only after the official release, or is there a place for uploads during the development process. In the latter case there s a need to balance between the benefit of early testing and feedback with the stability and not completely breaking user s environment (and package relationships) too often. With the coming PHP 5.6.0 release, Debian kept being on the cutting edge. Thanks to Ond ej, the new version was available in experimental since alpha1 and in unstable/testing since beta3. Considering the timing of the PHP release related to the Debian freeze, I m happy we started early, and did the transition to PHP 5.6 a few months ago. But just following the development releases (betas ,RCs) isn t enough. Both Ond ej and myself are part of the PHP community, and know the planned timelines, current status and what are the critical points. Such knowledge was very useful this week, when we new 5.6.0 was pending finale tagging before release (after RC4). This made take the report of Debian bug #759381: php5: TLS connections broken in 5.6.0 RC4 seriously and contact the release managers. First it was a heads up and then a real problem. After a quick discussion (both private mails by me and on github by Ond ej), the relevant commit was reverted by the release managers (Julien Pauli & Ferenc Kovacs), and 5.6.0 was retagged. The issue will get more checks towards 5.6.1 without any time pressure. Although 5.6.0 isn t in production for anyone (yet), and like any major release can have issues, the close connectivity between everyone saved complaints from the PHP users and ecosystem. I don t imagine the issue been sorted so quickly 16 hours later. This is also due to the bug been reported on difference between two close release (regression in RC4 comparing to RC3). To close the loop, if we ve uploaded 5.6.0 only after the release, the report would be regression between 5.5.x and 5.6.0, which is obviously much harder to pinpoint. So, I m not sure I have a good answer for the question in the beginning of the post, but for this case our policy proved itself.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, PHP

This year I mentored two students doing work in support of Debian and free software (as well as those I mentored for Ganglia). Both of them are presenting details about their work at DebConf 14 today. While Juliana's work has been widely publicised already, mainly due to the fact it is accessible to every individual DD, Andrew's work is also quite significant and creates many possibilities to advance awareness of free software. The Java project that is not just about Java Andrew's project is about recursively building Java dependencies from third party repositories such as the Maven Central Repository. It matches up well with the wonderful new maven-debian-helper tool in Debian and will help us to fill out /usr/share/maven-repo on every Debian system. Firstly, this is not just about Java. On a practical level, some aspects of the project are useful for many other purposes. One of those is the aim of scanning a repository for non-free artifacts, making a Git mirror or clone containing a dfsg branch for generating repackaged upstream source and then testing to see if it still builds. Then there is the principle of software freedom. The Maven Central repository now requires that people publish a sources JAR and license metadata with each binary artifact they upload. They do not, however, demand that the sources JAR be complete or that the binary can be built by somebody else using the published sources. The license data must be specified but it does not appeared to be verified in the same way as packages inspected by Debian's legendary FTP masters. Thanks to the transitive dependency magic of Maven, it is quite possible that many Java applications that are officially promoted as free software can't trace the source code of every dependency or build plugin. Many organizations are starting to become more alarmed about the risk that they are dependent upon some rogue dependency. Maybe they will be hit with a lawsuit from a vendor stating that his plugin was only free for the first 3 months. Maybe some binary dependency JAR contains a nasty trojan for harvesting data about their corporate network. People familiar with the principles of software freedom are in the perfect position to address these concerns and Andrew's work helps us build a cleaner alternative. It obviously can't rebuild every JAR for the very reason that some of them are not really free - however, it does give the opportunity to build a heat-map of trouble spots and also create a fast track to packaging for those heirarchies of JARs that are truly free. Making WebRTC accessible to more people Juliana set out to update rtc.debian.org and this involved working on JSCommunicator, the HTML5/JavaScript softphone based on WebRTC. People attending the session today or participating remotely are advised to set up your RTC / VoIP password at db.debian.org well in advance so the server will allow you to log in and try it during the session. It can take 30 minutes or so for the passwords to be replicated to the SIP proxy and TURN server. Please also check my previous comments about what works and what doesn't and in particular, please be aware that Iceweasel / Firefox 24 on wheezy is not suitable unless you are on the same LAN as the person you are calling.

This year I started to widen up my research; and one data source of interest was text because of the lack of structure in it, that makes it often challenging. One of the data sources that everybody seems to use is Twitter: it has a nice API, and few restrictions on using it (except on resharing data). By default, you can get a 1% random sample from all tweets, which is more than enough for many use cases.

We've had some exciting results which a colleague of mine will be presenting tomorrow (Tuesday, Research 22: Topic Modeling) at the KDD 2014 conference:

SigniTrend: Scalable Detection of Emerging Topics in Textual Streams by Hashed Significance Thresholds
Erich Schubert, Michael Weiler, Hans-Peter Kriegel
20th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

You can also explore some (static!) results online at signi-trend.appspot.com

In our experiments, the "news" data set was more interesting. But after some work, we were able to get reasonable results out of Twitter as well. As you can see from the online demo, most of these fall into pop culture: celebrity deaths, sports, hip-hop. Not much that would change our live; and even less that wasn't before captured by traditional media.

The focus of this post is on the preprocessing needed for getting good results from Twitter. Because it is much easier to get bad results!

The first thing you need to realize about Twitter is that due to the media attention/hype it gets, it is full of spam. I'm pretty sure the engineers at Twitter already try to reduce spam; block hosts and fraud apps. But a lot of the trending topics we discovered were nothing but spam.

Retweets - the "like" of Twitter - are an easy source to see what is popular, but are not very interesting if you want to analyze text. They just reiterate the exact same text (except for a "RT " prefix) than earlier tweets. We found results to be more interesting if we removed retweets. Our theory is that retweeting requires much less effort than writing a real tweet; and things that are trending "with effort" are more interesting than those that were just liked.

Teenie spam. If you ever searched for a teenie idol on Twitter, say this guy I hadn't heard of before, but who has 3.88 million followers on Twitter, and search for Tweets addressed to him, you will get millions over millions of results. Many of these tweets look like this:

@5SOS @Luke5SOS @Ashton5SOS @Michael5SOS @Calum5SOS CAN YOU FOLLOW M ? It would mean the world to me! Make my dream come true! x804 Chantal (@Chantal_San22) 25. August 2014

Now if you look at this tweet, there is this odd "x804" at the end. This is to defeat a simple spam filter by Twitter. Because this user did not tweet this just once: instead it is common amongst teenie to spam their idols with follow requests by the dozen. Probably using some JavaScript hack, or third party Twitter client. Occassionally, you see hundreds of such tweets, each sent within a few seconds of the previous one. If you get a 1% sample of these, you still get a few then...

Even worse (for data analysis) than teenie spammers are commercial spammers and wannabe "hackers" that exercise their "sk1llz" by spamming Twitter. To get a sample of such spam, just search for weight loss on Twitter. There is plenty of fresh spam there, usually consisting of some text pretending to be news, and an anonymized link (there is no need to use an URL shortener such as bit.ly on Twitter, since Twitter has its own URL shortener t.co; and you'll end up with double-shortened URLs). And the hacker spam is even worse (e.g. #alvianbencifa) as he seems to have trojaned hundreds of users, and his advertisement seems to be a nonexistant hash tag, which he tries to get into Twitters "trending topics".

And then there are the bots. Plenty of bots spam Twitter with their analysis of trending topics, reinforcing the trending topics. In my opinion, bots such as trending topics indonesia are useless. No wonder there are only 280 followers. And of the trending topics reported, most of them seem to be spam topics...

Bottom line: if you plan on analyzing Twitter data, spend considerable time on preprocessing to filter out spam of various kind. For example, we remove singletons and digits, then feed the data through a duplicate detector. We end up discarding 20%-25% of Tweets. But we still get some of the spam, such as that hackers spam.

All in all, real data is just messy. People posting there have an agenda that might be opposite to yours. And if someone (or some company) promises you wonders from "Big data" and "Twitter", you better have them demonstrate their use first, before buying their services. Don't trust visions of what could be possible, because the first rule of data analysis is: Garbage in, garbage out.

Yesterday I received my official diploma for the degree of Licentiate of Philosophy. The degree lies between a Master s degree and a doctorate, and is not required; it consists of the coursework required for a doctorate, and a Licentiate Thesis, in which the student demonstrates good conversance with the field of research and the capability of independently and critically applying scientific research methods (official translation of the Government decree on university degrees 794/2004, Section 23 Paragraph 2). The title and abstract of my Licentiate Thesis follow:

Kaijanaho, Antti-Juhani
The extent of empirical evidence that could inform evidence-based design of programming languages. A systematic mapping study.
Jyv skyl : University of Jyv skyl , 2014, 243 p.
(Jyv skyl Licentiate Theses in Computing,
ISSN 1795-9713; 18)
ISBN 978-951-39-5790-2 (nid.)
ISBN 978-951-39-5791-9 (PDF)
Finnish summary Background: Programming language design is not usually informed by empirical studies. In other fields similar problems have inspired an evidence-based paradigm of practice. Central to it are secondary studies summarizing and consolidating the research literature. Aims: This systematic mapping study looks for empirical research that could inform evidence-based design of programming languages. Method: Manual and keyword-based searches were performed, as was a single round of snowballing. There were 2056 potentially relevant publications, of which 180 were selected for inclusion, because they reported empirical evidence on the efficacy of potential design decisions and were published on or before 2012. A thematic synthesis was created. Results: Included studies span four decades, but activity has been sparse until the last five years or so. The form of conditional statements and loops, as well as the choice between static and dynamic typing have all been studied empirically for efficacy in at least five studies each. Error proneness, programming comprehension, and human effort are the most common forms of efficacy studied. Experimenting with programmer participants is the most popular method. Conclusions: There clearly are language design decisions for which empirical evidence regarding efficacy exists; they may be of some use to language designers, and several of them may be ripe for systematic reviewing. There is concern that the lack of interest generated by studies in this topic area until the recent surge of activity may indicate serious issues in their research approach. Keywords: programming languages, programming language design, evidence-based paradigm, efficacy, research methods, systematic mapping study, thematic synthesis

A Licentiate Thesis is assessed by two examiners, usually drawn from outside of the home university; they write (either jointly or separately) a substantiated statement about the thesis, in which they suggest a grade. The final grade is almost always the one suggested by the examiners. I was very fortunate to have such prominent scientists as Dr. Stefan Hanenberg and Prof. Stein Krogdahl as the examiners of my thesis. They recommended, and I received, the grade very good (4 on a scale of 1 5). The thesis has been ~~accepted for publication~~ published in our faculty s licentiate thesis series and ~~will in due course appear~~ has appeared in our university s electronic database (along with a very small number of printed copies). ~~In the mean time, if anyone wants an electronic preprint, send me email at antti-juhani.kaijanaho@jyu.fi.~~

Figure 1 of the thesis: an overview of the mapping process

As you can imagine, the last couple of months in the spring were very stressful for me, as I pressed on to submit this thesis. After submission, it took me nearly two months to recover (which certain people who emailed me on Planet Haskell business during that period certainly noticed). It represents the fruit of almost four years of work (way more than normally is taken to complete a Licentiate Thesis, but never mind that), as I designed this study in Fall 2010.

Figure 8 of the thesis: Core studies per publication year

Recently, I have been writing in my blog a series of posts in which I have been trying to clear my head about certain foundational issues that irritated me during the writing of the thesis. The thesis contains some of that, but that part of it is not very strong, as my examiners put it, for various reasons. The posts have been a deliberately non-academic attempt to shape the thoughts into words, to see what they look like fixed into a tangible form. (If you go read them, be warned: many of them are deliberately provocative, and many of them are intended as tentative in fact if not in phrasing; the series also is very incomplete at this time.) I closed my previous post, the latest post in that series, as follows:

In fact, the whole of 20th Century philosophy of science is a big pile of failed attempts to explain science; not one explanation is fully satisfactory. [...] Most scientists enjoy not pondering it, for it s a bit like being a cartoon character: so long as you don t look down, you can walk on air.

I wrote my Master s Thesis (PDF) in 2002. It was about the formal method called B ; but I took a lot of time and pages to examine the history and content of formal logic. My supervisor was, understandably, exasperated, but I did receive the highest possible grade for it (which I never have fully accepted I deserved). The main reason for that digression: I looked down, and I just had to go poke the bridge I was standing on to make sure I was not, in fact, walking on air. In the many years since, I ve taken a lot of time to study foundations, first of mathematics, and more recently of science. It is one reason it took me about eight years to come up with a doable doctoral project (and I am still amazed that my department kept employing me; but I suppose they like my teaching, as do I). The other reason was, it took me that long to realize how to study the design of programming languages without going where everyone has gone before. Debian people, if any are still reading, may find it interesting that I found significant use for the dctrl-tools toolset I have been writing for Debian for about fifteen years: I stored my data collection as a big pile of dctrl-format files. I ended up making some changes to the existing tools (I should upload the new version soon, I suppose), and I wrote another toolset (unfortunately one that is not general purpose, like the dctrl-tools are) in the process. For the Haskell people, I mainly have an apology for not attending to Planet Haskell duties in the summer; but I am back in business now. I also note, somewhat to my regret, that I found very few studies dealing with Haskell. I just checked; I mention Haskell several times in the background chapter, but it is not mentioned in the results chapter (because there were not studies worthy of special notice). I am already working on extending this work into a doctoral thesis. I expect, and hope, to complete that one faster.

After a bit more than 9 years, I am replacing Serendipity, which as been hosting my blog, by a self-made static solution. This means that when you are reading this, my server no longer has to execute some rather large body of untyped code to produce the bytes sent to you. Instead, that happens once in a while on my laptop, and they are stored as static files on the server. I hope to get a little performance boost from this, so that my site can more easily hold up to being mentioned on hackernews. I also do not want to worry about security issues in Serendipity static files are not hacked. Of course there are down-sides to having a static blog. The editing is a bit more annoying: I need to use my laptop (previously I could post from anywhere) and I edit text files instead of using a JavaScript-based WYSIWYG editor (but I was slightly annoyed by that as well). But most importantly your readers cannot comment on static pages. There are cloud-based solutions that integrate commenting via JavaScript on your static pages, but I decided to go for something even more low-level: You can comment by writing an e-mail to me, and I ll put your comment on the page. This has the nice benefit of solving the blog comment spam problem. The actual implementation of the blog is rather masochistic, as my web page runs on one of these weird obfuscated languages (XSLT). Previously, it contained of XSLT stylesheets producing makefiles calling XSLT sheets. Now it is a bit more-self-contained, with one XSLT stylesheet writing out all the various html and rss files. I managed to import all my old posts and comments thanks to this script by Michael Hamann (I had played around with this some months ago and just spend what seemed to be an hour to me to find this script again) and a small Haskell script. Old URLs are rewritten (using mod_rewrite) to the new paths, but feed readers might still be confused by this. This opens the door to a long due re-design of my webpage. But not today...

I've mentored a number of students in 2013 and 2014 for Debian and Ganglia and most of the companies I've worked with have run internships and graduate programs from time to time. GSoC 2014 has just finished and with all the excitement, many students are already asking what they can do to prepare and be selected in 2015. My own observation is that the more time the organization has to get to know the student, the more confident they can be selecting that student. Furthermore, the more time that the student has spent getting to know the free software community, the more easily they can complete GSoC. Here I present a list of things that students can do to maximize their chance of selection and career opportunities at the same time. These tips are useful for people applying for GSoC itself and related programs such as GNOME's Outreach Program for Women or graduate placements in companies. Disclaimers There is no guarantee that Google will run the program again in 2015 or any future year. There is no guarantee that any organization or mentor (including myself) will be involved until the official list of organizations is published by Google.

Do not follow the advice of web sites that invite you to send pizza or anything else of value to prospective mentors. Following the steps in this page doesn't guarantee selection. That said, people who do follow these steps are much more likely to be considered and interviewed than somebody who hasn't done any of the things in this list. Understand what free software really is You may hear terms like free software and open source software used interchangeably. They don't mean exactly the same thing and many people use the term free software for the wrong things. Not all open source projects meet the definition of free software. Those that don't, usually as a result of deficiencies in their licenses, are fundamentally incompatible with the majority of software that does use genuinely free licenses. Google Summer of Code is about both writing and publishing your code and it is also about community. It is fundamental that you know the basics of licensing and how to choose a free license that empowers the community to collaborate on your code well after GSoC has finished. Please review the definition of free software early on and come back and review it from time to time. The The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation have excellent resources to help you understand what a free software license is and how it works to maximize community collaboration. Don't look for shortcuts There is no shortcut to GSoC selection and there is no shortcut to GSoC completion. The student stipend (USD $5,500 in 2014) is not paid to students unless they complete a minimum amount of valid code. This means that even if a student did find some shortcut to selection, it is unlikely they would be paid without completing meaningful work. If you are the right candidate for GSoC, you will not need a shortcut anyway. Are you the sort of person who can't leave a coding problem until you really feel it is fixed, even if you keep going all night? Have you ever woken up in the night with a dream about writing code still in your head? Do you become irritated by tedious or repetitive tasks and often think of ways to write code to eliminate such tasks? Does your family get cross with you because you take your laptop to Christmas dinner or some other significant occasion and start coding? If some of these statements summarize the way you think or feel you are probably a natural fit for GSoC. An opportunity money can't buy The GSoC stipend will not make you rich. It is intended to make sure you have enough money to survive through the summer and focus on your project. Professional developers make this much money in a week in leading business centers like New York, London and Singapore. When you get to that stage in 3-5 years, you will not even be thinking about exactly how much you made during internships. GSoC gives you an edge over other internships because it involves publicly promoting your work. Many companies still try to hide the potential of their best recruits for fear they will be poached or that they will be able to demand higher salaries. Everything you complete in GSoC is intended to be published and you get full credit for it. Imagine a young musician getting the opportunity to perform on the main stage at a rock festival. This is how the free software community works. It is a meritocracy and there is nobody to hold you back.

Having a portfolio of free software that you have created or collaborated on and a wide network of professional contacts that you develop before, during and after GSoC will continue to pay you back for years to come. While other graduates are being screened through group interviews and testing days run by employers, people with a track record in a free software project often find they go straight to the final interview round. Register your domain name and make a permanent email address Free software is all about community and collaboration. Register your own domain name as this will become a focal point for your work and for people to get to know you as you become part of the community. This is sound advice for anybody working in IT, not just programmers. It gives the impression that you are confident and have a long term interest in a technology career. Choosing the provider: as a minimum, you want a provider that offers DNS management, static web site hosting, email forwarding and XMPP services all linked to your domain. You do not need to choose the provider that is linked to your internet connection at home and that is often not the best choice anyway. The XMPP foundation maintains a list of providers known to support XMPP. Create an email address within your domain name. The most basic domain hosting providers will let you forward the email address to a webmail or university email account of your choice. Configure your webmail to send replies using your personalized email address in the From header. Update your ~/.gitconfig file to use your personalized email address in your Git commits. Create a web site and blog Start writing a blog. Host it using your domain name. Some people blog every day, other people just blog once every two or three months. Create links from your web site to your other profiles, such as a Github profile page. This helps reinforce the pages/profiles that are genuinely related to you and avoid confusion with the pages of other developers. Many mentors are keen to see their students writing a weekly report on a blog during GSoC so starting a blog now gives you a head start. Mentors look at blogs during the selection process to try and gain insight into which topics a student is most suitable for. Create a profile on Github Github is one of the most widely used software development web sites. Github makes it quick and easy for you to publish your work and collaborate on the work of other people. Create an account today and get in the habbit of forking other projects, improving them, committing your changes and pushing the work back into your Github account. Github will quickly build a profile of your commits and this allows mentors to see and understand your interests and your strengths. In your Github profile, add a link to your web site/blog and make sure the email address you are using for Git commits (in the ~/.gitconfig file) is based on your personal domain. Start using PGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the industry standard in protecting your identity online. All serious free software projects use PGP to sign tags in Git, to sign official emails and to sign official release files. The most common way to start using PGP is with the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) utility. It is installed by the package manager on most Linux systems. When you create your own PGP key, use the email address involving your domain name. This is the most permanent and stable solution. Print your key fingerprint using the gpg-key2ps command, it is in the signing-party package on most Linux systems. Keep copies of the fingerprint slips with you.

This is what my own PGP fingerprint slip looks like. You can also print the key fingerprint on a business card for a more professional look. Using PGP, it is recommend that you sign any important messages you send but you do not have to encrypt the messages you send, especially if some of the people you send messages to (like family and friends) do not yet have the PGP software to decrypt them. If using the Thunderbird (Icedove) email client from Mozilla, you can easily send signed messages and validate the messages you receive using the Enigmail plugin. Get your PGP key signed Once you have a PGP key, you will need to find other developers to sign it. For people I mentor personally in GSoC, I'm keen to see that you try and find another Debian Developer in your area to sign your key as early as possible. Free software events Try and find all the free software events in your area in the months between now and the end of the next Google Summer of Code season. Aim to attend at least two of them before GSoC. Look closely at the schedules and find out about the individual speakers, the companies and the free software projects that are participating. For events that span more than one day, find out about the dinners, pub nights and other social parts of the event. Try and identify people who will attend the event who have been GSoC mentors or who intend to be. Contact them before the event, if you are keen to work on something in their domain they may be able to make time to discuss it with you in person. Take your PGP fingerprint slips. Even if you don't participate in a formal key-signing party at the event, you will still find some developers to sign your PGP key individually. You must take a photo ID document (such as your passport) for the other developer to check the name on your fingerprint but you do not give them a copy of the ID document. Events come in all shapes and sizes. FOSDEM is an example of one of the bigger events in Europe, linux.conf.au is a similarly large event in Australia. There are many, many more local events such as the Debian France mini-DebConf in Lyon, 2015. Many events are either free or free for students but please check carefully if there is a requirement to register before attending. On your blog, discuss which events you are attending and which sessions interest you. Write a blog during or after the event too, including photos.

Quantcast generously hosted the Ganglia community meeting in San Francisco, October 2013. We had a wild time in their offices with mini-scooters, burgers, beers and the Ganglia book. That's me on the pink mini-scooter and Bernard Li, one of the other Ganglia GSoC 2014 admins is on the right. Install Linux GSoC is fundamentally about free software. Linux is to free software what a tree is to the forest. Using Linux every day on your personal computer dramatically increases your ability to interact with the free software community and increases the number of potential GSoC projects that you can participate in. This is not to say that people using Mac OS or Windows are unwelcome. I have worked with some great developers who were not Linux users. Linux gives you an edge though and the best time to gain that edge is now, while you are a student and well before you apply for GSoC. If you must run Windows for some applications used in your course, it will run just fine in a virtual machine using Virtual Box, a free software solution for desktop virtualization. Use Linux as the primary operating system. Here are links to download ISO DVD (and CD) images for some of the main Linux distributions:

If you are nervous about getting started with Linux, install it on a spare PC or in a virtual machine before you install it on your main PC or laptop. Linux is much less demanding on the hardware than Windows so you can easily run it on a machine that is 5-10 years old. Having just 4GB of RAM and 20GB of hard disk is usually more than enough for a basic graphical desktop environment although having better hardware makes it faster. Your experiences installing and running Linux, especially if it requires some special effort to make it work with some of your hardware, make interesting topics for your blog. Decide which technologies you know best Personally, I have mentored students working with C, C++, Java, Python and JavaScript/HTML5. In a GSoC program, you will typically do most of your work in just one of these languages. From the outset, decide which language you will focus on and do everything you can to improve your competence with that language. For example, if you have already used Java in most of your course, plan on using Java in GSoC and make sure you read Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch. Decide which themes appeal to you Find a topic that has long-term appeal for you. Maybe the topic relates to your course or maybe you already know what type of company you would like to work in. Here is a list of some topics and some of the relevant software projects:

System administration, servers and networking: consider projects involving monitoring, automation, packaging. Ganglia is a great community to get involved with and you will encounter the Ganglia software in many large companies and academic/research networks. Contributing to a Linux distribution like Debian or Fedora packaging is another great way to get into system administration.
Desktop and user interface: consider projects involving window managers and desktop tools or adding to the user interface of just about any other software.
Big data and data science: this can apply to just about any other theme. For example, data science techniques are frequently used now to improve system administration.
Business and accounting: consider accounting, CRM and ERP software.
Finance and trading: consider projects like R, market data software like OpenMAMA and connectivity software (Apache Camel)
Real-time communication (RTC), VoIP, webcam and chat: look at the JSCommunicator or the Jitsi project
Web (JavaScript, HTML5): look at the JSCommunicator

Before the GSoC application process begins, you should aim to learn as much as possible about the theme you prefer and also gain practical experience using the software relating to that theme. For example, if you are attracted to the business and accounting theme, install the PostBooks suite and get to know it. Maybe you know somebody who runs a small business: help them to upgrade to PostBooks and use it to prepare some reports. Make something Make some small project, less than two week's work, to demonstrate your skills. It is important to make something that somebody will use for a practical purpose, this will help you gain experience communicating with other users through Github. For an example, see the servlet Juliana Louback created for fixing phone numbers in December 2013. It has since been used as part of the Lumicall web site and Juliana was selected for a GSoC 2014 project with Debian. There is no better way to demonstrate to a prospective mentor that you are ready for GSoC than by completing and publishing some small project like this yourself. If you don't have any immediate project ideas, many developers will also be able to give you tips on small projects like this that you can attempt, just come and ask us on one of the mailing lists. Ideally, the project will be something that you would use anyway even if you do not end up participating in GSoC. Such projects are the most motivating and rewarding and usually end up becoming an example of your best work. To continue the example of somebody with a preference for business and accounting software, a small project you might create is a plugin or extension for PostBooks. Getting to know prospective mentors Many web sites provide useful information about the developers who contribute to free software projects. Some of these developers may be willing to be a GSoC mentor. For example, look through some of the following:

Planet / Blog aggregation sites: these sites all have links to the blogs of many developers. They are useful sources of information about events and also finding out who works on what.
Developer profile pages. Many projects publish a page about each developer and the packages, modules or other components he/she is responsible for. Look through these lists for areas of mutual interest.
- my package list in Debian
- my package list in Fedora
Developer github profiles. Github makes it easy to see what projects a developer has contributed to. To see many of my own projects, browse through the history at my own Github profile

Getting on the mentor's shortlist Once you have identified projects that are interesting to you and developers who work on those projects, it is important to get yourself on the developer's shortlist. Basically, the shortlist is a list of all students who the developer believes can complete the project. If I feel that a student is unlikely to complete a project or if I don't have enough information to judge a student's probability of success, that student will not be on my shortlist. If I don't have any student on my shortlist, then a project will not go ahead at all. If there are multiple students on the shortlist, then I will be looking more closely at each of them to try and work out who is the best match. One way to get a developer's attention is to look at bug reports they have created. Github makes it easy to see complaints or bug reports they have made about their own projects or other projects they depend on. Another way to do this is to search through their code for strings like FIXME and TODO. Projects with standalone bug trackers like the Debian bug tracker also provide an easy way to search for bug reports that a specific person has created or commented on. Once you find some relevant bug reports, email the developer. Ask if anybody else is working on those issues. Try and start with an issue that is particularly easy and where the solution is interesting for you. This will help you learn to compile and test the program before you try to fix any more complicated bugs. It may even be something you can work on as part of your academic program. Find successful projects from the previous year Contact organizations and ask them which GSoC projects were most successful. In many organizations, you can find the past students' project plans and their final reports published on the web. Read through the plans submitted by the students who were chosen. Then read through the final reports by the same students and see how they compare to the original plans. Start building your project proposal now Don't wait for the application period to begin. Start writing a project proposal now. When writing a proposal, it is important to include several things:

Think big: what is the goal at the end of the project? Does your work help the greater good in some way, such as increasing the market share of Linux on the desktop?
Details: what are specific challenges? What tools will you use?
Time management: what will you do each week? Are there weeks where you will not work on GSoC due to vacation or other events? These things are permitted but they must be in your plan if you know them in advance. If an accident or death in the family cut a week out of your GSoC project, which work would you skip and would your project still be useful without that? Having two weeks of flexible time in your plan makes it more resilient against interruptions.
Communication: are you on mailing lists, IRC and XMPP chat? Will you make a weekly report on your blog?
Users: who will benefit from your work?
Testing: who will test and validate your work throughout the project? Ideally, this should involve more than just the mentor.

If your project plan is good enough, could you put it on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site? This is a good test of whether or not a project is going to be supported by a GSoC mentor. Learn about packaging and distributing software Packaging is a vital part of the free software lifecycle. It is very easy to upload a project to Github but it takes more effort to have it become an official package in systems like Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Packaging and the communities around Linux distributions help you reach out to users of your software and get valuable feedback and new contributors. This boosts the impact of your work. To start with, you may want to help the maintainer of an existing package. Debian packaging teams are existing communities that work in a team and welcome new contributors. The Debian Mentors initiative is another great starting place. In the Fedora world, the place to start may be in one of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Think from the mentor's perspective After the application deadline, mentors have just 2 or 3 weeks to choose the students. This is actually not a lot of time to be certain if a particular student is capable of completing a project. If the student has a published history of free software activity, the mentor feels a lot more confident about choosing the student. Some mentors have more than one good student while other mentors receive no applications from capable students. In this situation, it is very common for mentors to send each other details of students who may be suitable. Once again, if a student has a good Github profile and a blog, it is much easier for mentors to try and match that student with another project.

Conclusion Getting into the world of software engineering is much like joining any other profession or even joining a new hobby or sporting activity. If you run, you probably have various types of shoe and a running watch and you may even spend a couple of nights at the track each week. If you enjoy playing a musical instrument, you probably have a collection of sheet music, accessories for your instrument and you may even aspire to build a recording studio in your garage (or you probably know somebody else who already did that). The things listed on this page will not just help you walk the walk and talk the talk of a software developer, they will put you on a track to being one of the leaders. If you look over the profiles of other software developers on the Internet, you will find they are doing most of the things on this page already. Even if you are not selected for GSoC at all or decide not to apply, working through the steps on this page will help you clarify your own ideas about your career and help you make new friends in the software engineering community.

A lecture at LCA 2011 which included some inappropriate slides was followed by long discussions on mailing lists. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in two lists [1]. One of the noteworthy incidents in the mailing list discussion concerned Ted Ts o (an influential member of the Linux community) debating the definition of rape. My main point on that issue in Feb 2011 was that it s insensitive to needlessly debate the statistics. Recently Valerie Aurora wrote about another aspect of this on The Ada Initiative blog [2] and on her personal blog. Some of her significant points are that conference harassment doesn t end when the conference ends (it can continue on mailing lists etc), that good people shouldn t do nothing when bad things happen, and that free speech doesn t mean freedom from consequences or the freedom to use private resources (such as conference mailing lists) without restriction. Craig Sanders wrote a very misguided post about the Ted Ts o situation [3]. One of the many things wrong with his post is his statement I m particularly disgusted by the men who intervene way too early without an explicit invitation or request for help or a clear need such as an immediate threat of violence in womens issues . I believe that as a general rule when any group of people are involved in causing a problem they should be involved in fixing it. So when we have problems that are broadly based around men treating women badly the prime responsibility should be upon men to fix them. It seems very clear that no matter what scope is chosen for fixing the problems (whether it be lobbying for new legislation, sociological research, blogging, or directly discussing issues with people to change their attitudes) women are doing considerably more than half the work. I believe that this is an indication that overall men are failing. Asking for Help I don t believe that members of minority groups should have to ask for help. Asking isn t easy, having someone spontaneously offer help because it s the right thing to do can be a lot easier to accept psychologically than having to beg for help. There is a book named Women Don t Ask which has a page on the geek feminism Wiki [4]. I think the fact that so many women relate to a book named Women Don t Ask is an indication that we shouldn t expect women to ask directly, particularly in times of stress. The Wiki page notes a criticism of the book that some specific requests are framed as complaining , so I think we should consider a complaint from a woman as a direct request to do something. The geek feminism blog has an article titled How To Exclude Women Without Really Trying which covers many aspects of one incident [5]. Near the end of the article is a direct call for men to be involved in dealing with such problems. The geek feminism Wiki has a page on Allies which includes Even a blog post helps [6]. It seems clear from public web sites run by women that women really want men to be involved. Finally when I get blog comments and private email from women who thank me for my posts I take it as an implied request to do more of the same. One thing that we really don t want is to have men wait and do nothing until there is an immediate threat of violence. There are two massive problems with that plan, one is that being saved from a violent situation isn t a fun experience, the other is that an immediate threat of violence is most likely to happen when there is no-one around to intervene. Men Don t Listen to Women Rebecca Solnit wrote an article about being ignored by men titled Men Explain Things to Me [7]. When discussing women s issues the term Mansplaining is often used for that sort of thing, the geek feminism Wiki has some background [8]. It seems obvious that the men who have the greatest need to be taught some things related to women s issues are the ones who are least likely to listen to women. This implies that other men have to teach them. Craig says that women need space to discover and practice their own strength and their own voices . I think that the best way to achieve that goal is to listen when women speak. Of course that doesn t preclude speaking as well, just listen first, listen carefully, and listen more than you speak. Craig claims that when men like me and Matthew Garrett comment on such issues we are making women s spaces more comfortable, more palatable, for men . From all the discussion on this it seems quite obvious that what would make things more comfortable for men would be for the issue to never be discussed at all. It seems to me that two of the ways of making such discussions uncomfortable for most men are to discuss sexual assault and to discuss what should be done when you have a friend who treats women in a way that you don t like. Matthew has covered both of those so it seems that he s doing a good job of making men uncomfortable I think that this is a good thing, a discussion that is comfortable and palatable for the people in power is not going to be any good for the people who aren t in power. The Voting Aspect It seems to me that when certain issues are discussed we have a social process that is some form of vote. If one person complains then they are portrayed as crazy. When other people agree with the complaint then their comments are marginalised to try and preserve the narrative of one crazy person. It seems that in the case of the discussion about Rape Apology and LCA2011 most men who comment regard it as one person (either Valeria Aurora or Matthew Garrett) causing a dispute. There is even some commentary which references my blog post about Rape Apology [9] but somehow manages to ignore me when it comes to counting more than one person agreeing with Valerie. For reference David Zanetti was the first person to use the term apologist for rapists in connection with the LCA 2011 discussion [10]. So we have a count of at least three men already. These same patterns always happen so making a comment in support makes a difference. It doesn t have to be insightful, long, or well written, merely I agree and a link to a web page will help. Note that a blog post is much better than a comment in this regard, comments are much like conversation while a blog post is a stronger commitment to a position. I don t believe that the majority is necessarily correct. But an opinion which is supported by too small a minority isn t going to be considered much by most people. The Cost of Commenting The Internet is a hostile environment, when you comment on a contentious issue there will be people who demonstrate their disagreement in uncivilised and even criminal ways. S. E. Smith wrote an informative post for Tiger Beatdown about the terrorism that feminist bloggers face [11]. I believe that men face fewer threats than women when they write about such things and the threats are less credible. I don t believe that any of the men who have threatened me have the ability to carry out their threats but I expect that many women who receive such threats will consider them to be credible. The difference in the frequency and nature of the terrorism (and there is no other word for what S. E. Smith describes) experienced by men and women gives a vastly different cost to commenting. So when men fail to address issues related to the behavior of other men that isn t helping women in any way. It s imposing a significant cost on women for covering issues which could be addressed by men for minimal cost. It s interesting to note that there are men who consider themselves to be brave because they write things which will cause women to criticise them or even accuse them of misogyny. I think that the women who write about such issues even though they will receive threats of significant violence are the brave ones. Not Being Patronising Craig raises the issue of not being patronising, which is of course very important. I think that the first thing to do to avoid being perceived as patronising in a blog post is to cite adequate references. I ve spent a lot of time reading what women have written about such issues and cited the articles that seem most useful in describing the issues. I m sure that some women will disagree with my choice of references and some will disagree with some of my conclusions, but I think that most women will appreciate that I read what women write (it seems that most men don t). It seems to me that a significant part of feminism is about women not having men tell them what to do. So when men offer advice on how to go about feminist advocacy it s likely to be taken badly. It s not just that women don t want advice from men, but that advice from men is usually wrong. There are patterns in communication which mean that the effective strategies for women communicating with men are different from the effective strategies for men communicating with men (see my previous section on men not listening to women). Also there s a common trend of men offering simplistic advice on how to solve problems, one thing to keep in mind is that any problem which affects many people and is easy to solve has probably been solved a long time ago. Often when social issues are discussed there is some background in the life experience of the people involved. For example Rookie Mag has an article about the street harassment women face which includes many disturbing anecdotes (some of which concern primary school students) [12]. Obviously anyone who has lived through that sort of thing (which means most women) will instinctively understand some issues related to threatening sexual behavior that I can t easily understand even when I spend some time considering the matter. So there will be things which don t immediately appear to be serious problems to me but which are interpreted very differently by women. The non-patronising approach to such things is to accept the concerns women express as legitimate, to try to understand them, and not to argue about it. For example the issue that Valerie recently raised wasn t something that seemed significant when I first read the email in question, but I carefully considered it when I saw her posts explaining the issue and what she wrote makes sense to me. I don t think it s possible for a man to make a useful comment on any issue related to the treatment of women without consulting multiple women first. I suggest a pre-requisite for any man who wants to write any sort of long article about the treatment of women is to have conversations with multiple women who have relevant knowledge. I ve had some long discussions with more than a few women who are involved with the FOSS community. This has given me a reasonable understanding of some of the issues (I won t claim to be any sort of expert). I think that if you just go and imagine things about a group of people who have a significantly different life-experience then you will be wrong in many ways and often offensively wrong. Just reading isn t enough, you need to have conversations with multiple people so that they can point out the things you don t understand. This isn t any sort of comprehensive list of ways to avoid being patronising, but it s a few things which seem like common mistakes. Anne Onne wrote a detailed post advising men who want to comment on feminist blogs etc [13], most of it applies to any situation where men comment on women s issues.

Recently I've been getting annoyed with the Debian Administration website; too often it would be slower than it should be considering the resources behind it. As a brief recap I have six nodes:

1 x MySQL Database - The only MySQL database I personally manage these days.
4 x Web Nodes.
1 x Misc server.

The misc server is designed to display events. There is a node.js listener which receives UDP messages and stores them in a rotating buffer. The messages might contain things like "User bob logged in", "Slaughter ran", etc. It's a neat hack which gives a good feeling of what is going on cluster-wide. I need to rationalize that code - but there's a very simple predecessor posted on github for the curious. Anyway enough diversions, the database is tuned, and "small". The misc server is almost entirely irrelevent, non-public, and not explicitly advertised. So what do the web nodes run? Well they run a lot. Potentially. Each web node has four services configured:

Apache 2.x - All nodes.
uCarp - All nodes.
Pound - Master node.
Varnish - Master node.

Apache runs the main site, listening on *:8080. One of the nodes will be special and will claim a virtual IP provided via ucarp. The virtual IP is actually the end-point visitors hit, meaning we have:

Master Host	Other hosts
Running: Apache. Pound. Varnish	Running: Apache.

Pound is configured to listen on the virtual IP and perform SSL termination. That means that incoming requests get proxied from "vip:443 -> vip:80". Varnish listens on "vip:80" and proxies to the back-end apache instances. The end result should be high availability. In the typical case all four servers are alive, and all is well. If one server dies, and it is not the master, then it will simply be dropped as a valid back-end. If a single server dies and it is the master then a new one will appear, thanks to the magic of ucarp, and the remaining three will be used as expected. I'm sure there is a pathological case when all four hosts die, and at that point the site will be down, but that's something that should be atypical. Yes, I am prone to over-engineering. The site doesn't have any availability requirements that justify this setup, but it is good to experiment and learn things. So, with this setup in mind, with incoming requests (on average) being divided at random onto one of four hosts, why is the damn thing so slow? We'll come back to that in the next post. (Good news though; I fixed it ;)

I still consider myself a newbie teacher. I'm just starting my fourth semester. And yes, I really enjoy it. Now, how did I come to teaching? Well, my training has been mostly on stages for different conferences. More technical, more social, whatever I have been giving ~10 talks a year for ~15 years, and I must have learnt something from that. Some good things, some bad habits. When giving presentations, a most usual technique is to prepare a set of slides to follow/support the ideas. And yes, that's what I did for my classes: Since my first semester, I prepared a nice set of slides, thematically split in 17 files, with ~30 to ~110 pages each (yes, huge variation). Given the course spans 32 classes (72 hours, 2 hours per class), each slide lasts for about two classes. But, yes, this tends to make the class much less dynamic, much more scripted, rigid, and... Boring. From my feedback, I understand the students don't think I am a bad teacher, but still, I want to improve! So, today I was to give the introduction to memory management. Easy topic, with few diagrams and numbers, mostly talking about the intuitive parts of a set of functions. I started scribbling and shortening the main points on a piece of paper (yes, the one on the picture). I am sure I can get down to more reduction But this does feel like an improvement! The class was quite successful. I didn't present the 100% of the material (which is one of the reasons I cling to my presentations I don't want to skip important material), and at some point I do feel I was a bit going in circles. However, Operating Systems is a very intuitive subject, and getting the students to sketch by themselves the answers that describe the working of real operating systems was a very pleasant experience! Of course, when I use my slides I do try to make it as interactive and collaborative as possible. But it is often unfeasible when I'm following a script. Today I was able to go around with the group's questions, find my way back to the outline I prepared. I don't think I'll completely abandon my slides, specially for some subjects which include many diagrams or pictures. But I'll try to have this alternative closer to my mind.

Debian LTS - impressions and thoughts from my first month involvement About LTS - we want feedback and more companies supporting it financially Squeeze LTS, and even more Debian LTS, is a pretty young project, started in May 2014, so it's still a bit unclear where exactly we'll be going

One purpose of this post is to spread some information about the initiative and invite you to tell us what you think about it or what your needs are. LTS stands for "Long Term Support" and the goal of the project is to extend the security support for Squeeze (aka the current oldstable distribution) by two years. If it weren't for Squeeze LTS, the security support for it would have been stopped in May 2014 (=one year after the release of the current stable distribution), which for many is a too short timespan after it's release in February 2011. It's an experiment, we hope that there will be a similar Wheezy LTS initiative in future, but the future is unwritten and things will change based on our experiences and your needs. If you have feedback on the direction LTS should take (or anything else LTS related), please comment on the lts mailing list. For immediate feedback there is also the #debian-lts IRC channel. Another quite pragmatic way to express your needs is to read more about how to financially contribute to LTS and then doing exactly that - and unsurprisingly we are prioritizing the updates based on the needs expressed from our paying customers. My LTS work in July 2014 So, "somehow" I started working for money on Debian LTS in July, which means there were 10h I got paid, and probably another 10h where I did LTS related work unpaid. I used those to release four updates for squeeze-lts (linux-2.6, file, munin and reportbug) fixing 22 CVEs in total. The unpaid work was mostly spent on unsuccessfully working on security updates and on adding support for LTS to the security team tracker, which I improved but couldn't fully address and which I haven't properly shared / committed yet... but at least I have a local instance of the tracker now, which - for LTS - is more useful than the .debian.org one. Hopefully during DebConf14 we'll manage to fix the tracker for good. Without success I've looked at libtasn1-3 (where the first fixes applied easily but then the code had changed too much from what was in squeeze compared to the available patches that I gave up) and libxstream-java (which is at version 1.3, while patches exist for upstream branches 1.4 and 2.x, but those need newer java to build and maybe if I'll spend two more hours I'll can get it build and then I'll have to find a useful test case, which looked quite difficult on a brief look.. so maybe I give up on libxstream-java too.... OTOH, if you use it and can do some testing, please do tell me. Working on all these updates turned out to be more team work than expected and a lot of work involving code (which I did expect), and often code which I'd normally not look at... similarily with tools: one has to deal with tools one doesnt like, eg I had to install cdbs... :-)

And as I usually like challenges, this has actually been a lot of fun! Though it's also pretty cool to use common best practices, easy and understandable workflows. I love README.Source (or better yet, when it's not needed). And while git is of course really really great, it's still very desirable if your package builds twice (=many times) in a row, without resetting it via git. Some more observations The first 16 updates (until July 19th) didn't have a DLA ID, until I suggested to introduce them and insisted until we agreed. So now we agreed to put the DLA ID in the subject of the announcement mails and there is also some tool support for generating the templates/mails, but enforcing proper subjects is not done, as silent bounces are useless (and non silent ones can be abused too easily). I'm not really happy about this, but who is happy with the way email works today? And I agree, it's not the end of the world if an LTS announcement is done without a proper ID, but it looks unprofessional and could be avoided, but we have more important work to do. But one day we should automate this better. Another detail I'm not entirely happy is the policy/current decision that "almost everything is fine to upload if deemed sensible by the uploader" (which is everyone in the Debian upload keyring(s)). In discussions before actually having the archive some people suggested the desire to upload new upstream versions too (eg newer kernels, iceweasel or other software to keep running a squeeze desktop in the modern world were discussed). I sincerely hope for most intrusive new upstream versions squeeze-(sloppy-)backports is used instead, and squeeze-lts rather not. Luckily so far all uploads were (IMHO) sensible and so, right now, I will just say that I hope it will stay this way. And it's true, one also has to install these upgrades in the first place. But people do that blindly all the time... So by design/desire currently there is no gatekeeping mechanism whatsover (no NEW, no proposed updates), except that only some selected "few" can upload. What is uploaded (and signed correctly), gets pushed to archive, buildds and the mirrors, and hopefully maybe someone will send an announcement. So far this has worked remarkedly well - and it's also the way the Debian Security team works, as I'm told. Looking at this from a process quality / automatisation perspective, all this manual and errorprone labour seems very strange to me. ;-)

And then there is another thing: as already mentioned, the people working paid hours for this, are prioritizing their work based on customer requests. So we did two updates (python-scipy and file), which are not fixed in wheezy yet. I think this is unfortunate and while I could probably prepare the wheezy DSA for file, I don't really want to join the Security Team... or maybe I want/should join the Security Team and be a seldomly active member (eg fixing file in wheezy now....) A note related to this: out of those 37 uploads done until today, 16 were done by those two people being paid, while the other 21 uploads were done by 10 volunteers (or at least not paid by Debian LTS). It will be interesting to see how this statistics evolves over time. Last, but not least, there is also this can of worms (aka: the discussion) about paying people to work on Debian... I do agree it's work we didnt find volunteers for and I also see how the (financial side of the) setup is done outside of Debian (and well too, btw!), but... then we also use Debian ressources like buildds, the archive itself and official mailing lists. Also I'm currently biased in this discussion, as I directly (and happily) profit from it. I'm mentioning this here, because I believe it's important we discuss this and come to both good and practical conclusions. FWIW, we have also discussed this on the list, feel free to search the archives for it. To bring this post to an end: for those attending DebConf14 (directly or thanks to some ninjas), there will be an event about LTS in Portland, though I'm not sure yet what I will have to talk about what hasn't been already covered here :-)

But this probably means that will be a good opportunity for you to do lots of talking instead! I'm curious what you will have to say! Thanks for reading this far. I think I can promise that my next LTS report will be shorter :-D

For a while, I've been wanting to set up configuration management for my home network. With half a dozen servers, a VPS and a workstation it is not big, but large enough to make it annoying to manually log into each machine for network-wide changes. Most of the servers I have are low-end ARM machines, each responsible for a couple of tasks. Most of my machines run Debian or something derived from Debian. Oh, and I'm a member of the declarative school of configuration management.

Propellor Propellor caught my eye earlier this year. Unlike some other configuration management tools, it doesn't come with its own custom language but it is written in Haskell, which I am already familiar with. It's also fairly simple, declarative, and seems to do most of the handful of things that I need. Propellor is essentially a Haskell application that you customize for your site. It works very similar to e.g. xmonad, where you write a bit of Haskell code for configuration which uses the upstream library code. When you run the application it takes your code and builds a binary from your code and the upstream libraries. Each host on which Propellor is used keeps a clone of the site-local Propellor git repository in /usr/local/propellor. Every time propellor runs (either because of a manual "spin", or from a cronjob it can set up for you), it fetches updates from the main site-local git repository, compiles the Haskell application and runs it.

Setup Propellor was surprisingly easy to set up. Running propellor creates a clone of the upstream repository under ~/.propellor with a README file and some example configuration. I copied config-simple.hs to config.hs, updated it to reflect one of my hosts and within a few minutes I had a basic working propellor setup. You can use ./propellor <host> to trigger a run on a remote host. At the moment I have propellor working for some basic things - having certain Debian packages installed, a specific network configuration, mail setup, basic Kerberos configuration and certain SSH options set. This took surprisingly little time to set up, and it's been great being able to take full advantage of Haskell. Propellor comes with convenience functions for dealing with some commonly used packages, such as Apt, SSH and Postfix. For a lot of the other packages, you'll have to roll your own for now. I've written some extra code to make Propellor deal with Kerberos keytabs and Dovecot, which I hope to submit upstream. I don't have a lot of experience with other Free Software configuration management tools such as Puppet and Chef, but for my use case Propellor works very well. The main disadvantage of propellor for me so far is that it needs to build itself on each machine it runs on. This is fine for my workstation and high-end servers, but it is somewhat more problematic on e.g. my Raspberry Pi's. Compilation takes a while, and the Haskell compiler and libraries it needs amount to 500Mb worth of disk space on the tiny root partition. In order to work with Propellor, some Haskell knowledge is required. The Haskell in the configuration file is reasonably easy to understand if you keep it simple, but once the compiler spits out error messages then I suspect you'll have a hard time without any Haskell knowledge. Propellor relies on having a central repository with the configuration that it can pull from as root. Unlike Joey, I am wary of publishing the configuration of my home network and I don't have a highly available local git server setup.

Now that I've had my solar generation system for a little while, I thought I'd write a follow up post on how it's all going. Energex came out a week ago last Saturday and swapped my electricity meter over for a new digital one that measures grid consumption and excess energy exported. Prior to that point, it was quite fun to watch the old analog meter going backwards. I took a few readings after the system was installed, through to when the analog meter was disconnected, and the meter had a value 26 kWh lower than when I started. I've really liked how the excess energy generated during the day has effectively masked any relatively small overnight power consumption. Now that I have the new digital meter things are less exciting. It has a meter measuring how much power I'm buying from the grid, and how much excess power I'm exporting back to the grid. So far, I've bought 32 kWh and exported 53 kWh excess energy. Ideally I want to minimise the excess because what I get paid for it is about a third of what I have to pay to buy it from the grid. The trick is to try and shift around my consumption as much as possible to the daylight hours so that I'm using it rather than exporting it. On a good day, it seems I'm generating about 10 kWh of energy. I'm still impatiently waiting for PowerOne to release their WiFi data logger card. Then I'm hoping I can set up something automated to submit my daily production to PVOutput for added geekery.

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

Firstly, thanks to all who responded to my previous rant. It turns out exactly what I wanted does exist in the form of a ID-000 format smartcard combined with a USB reader. Perfect. No idea why I couldn t find that on my own prior to ranting, but very happy to have found it now. Secondly, now that I ve got my keys and management practices in order, it is time to begin transitioning to my new key. Click this link to find the properly signed, full transition statement. I m not going to paste the full statement into this post, but my new key is:

pub   4096R/A48F065A 2014-07-27 [expires: 2016-07-26]
      Key fingerprint = DBB7 64A1 797D 2E21 C799  3CD7 A628 CB5F A48F 065A
uid                  Matthew Brown <matt @mattb.net.nz>
uid                  Matthew Brown <mattb @debian.org>
sub   4096R/1937883F 2014-07-27 [expires: 2016-07-26]

If you signed my old key, I d very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.

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



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

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



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

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



ucf [New File] [Destination]

or perhaps:



ucf --three-way [New File] [Destination]

All you must do is in postinst, when run with the configure option you must mount the config file to Elektra:



kdb elektra-mount [New File] [Mounting Destination] [Backend]

Next, you must update the line containing ucf with the options --three-way and --threeway-merge-command like so:



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

Then, in your postrm script, during a purge, you must umount the config file before deleting it:



kdb lektra-umount [Name]

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



diff samba_orig/samba-3.6.6/debian/samba-common.postinst samba/samba-3.6.6/debian/samba-common.postinst

92c92,93

< ucf --three-way --debconf-ok "$NEWFILE" "$CONFIG"

---

> kdb elektra-mount "$CONFIG" system/samba/smb ini

> ucf --three-way --threeway-merge-command elektra-merge --debconf-ok "$NEWFILE" "$CONFIG"

Only in samba/samba-3.6.6/debian/: samba-common.postinst~

diff samba_orig/samba-3.6.6/debian/samba-common.postrm samba/samba-3.6.6/debian/samba-common.postrm

4a5

> kdb elektra-umount system/samba/smb

As you can see, all we had to do was add the line to mount smb.conf during install, update the ucf command to include the new --threeway-merge-command option, and unmount system/samba/smb during a purge. It really is that easy! Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

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