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

Hi Everybody! I am very proud to inform you all that Elektra has just shipped a new release, version 0.8.7, with many great features and fixes! First of all, I want to let you all know that a lot of work from my Google Summer of Code Project has made its way into this release. Elektra now includes support for a three way merge of KeySets! A special and sincere thanks goes out to Felix Berlakovich for helping me test this new merge feature and adding some great features to allow for different merge strategies and dealing with meta keys. You can try out the new merge features using the kdb merge command or by using the Elektra API. There is still work to be done with Merging and improving documentation (also look for some posts on this blog soon about the feature). Additionally, thanks to Felix, we have technical previews for some new plug-ins. The new plug-ins are keytometa and ini. In short the keytometa plugin allows to convert normal keys to meta keys during the get operation and reverting this conversion during the set operation. The ini plugin is basically a rewrite of the simpleini plugin and makes use of the inih library. Also there have been many improvements made to the glob plug-in. He even found some time to add a new script for bash tab completion which is located under scripts/kdb-bash-completion. To use it on debian just copy it to /etc/bash_completion.d/ and make sure it is executable. Moreover, we fixed a lot of things with this newest release. Pino Toscano has been working on fixing up the Debian packages for Elektra but he has also fixed many other things along the way including fixing a lot of spelling errors, simplifying the RPATH setting, improvements to respecting $HOME and $TMPDIR, and improvements to some test cases. The kdb tool now does a better job of checking for subfolders that aren t allow and it now makes sure to output warnings before errors so errors can more easily be seen. We have also improved some tests for kdb tool and some plugins as well as fixed compiler warnings on clang and gcc 4.9. We also made some fixes to kdb import and export for some storage plugins and fixed some bugs so that kdb run_all now works flawlessly. There have also been a few tweaks to the API for this release, specifically in the C++ bindings. There is now a delMeta() function for C++. The reason for this is that contrary to the C API, calling

key.setMeta("metaname", NULL)

does not delete the metadata, but stores the value 0 . Additionally, we changed the arguments for isBelow, isDirectBelow, and isBelowSame for the C++ binding to be easier to understand and be more natural to use. Before this change, the C++ binding closely mirrored the C API which lead to an unintuitive behaviour. Before the change the API did the following:

Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config )) == false
Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config/key/below/deeper )) == true

That is because the first argument in the C API is the object itself in the C++ API.
The attribute of being below the key in question (the object) refers to the second key in the C API.
While this makes some sense for the C API, it definitely does not for the C++ API. Now the API behaves as follows (as intuitively expected):

Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config )) == true
Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config/key/below/deeper )) == false

We even had time for a bunch of documentation changes. We now have a tutorial for contextual values to GitHub so developers can start using contextual values with Elektra. We also included a specification for metadata and a better specification for contracts. There is even a little bit of extra news to share. We now use GitHub for active development of Elektra. We have adopted its issue tracker for issues. Also, now pull requests automatically get built by the server to see if the merge would brake the build and whether it passes all the tests. We are also in the process of updating a lot of our documentation and READMEs to use Markdown so they can be viewed easily on GitHub. Also, Raffael Pancheri has been making really great progress on a qt-gui for Elektra. There is still work to be done but it looks great and is coming along nicely. You can download the release now from Markus site: http://www.markus-raab.org/ftp/elektra/releases/elektra-0.8.7.tar.gz size: 1566800
md5sum: 4996df62942791373b192c793d912b4c
sha1: 00887cc8edb3dea1bc110f69ea64f6b700c29402
sha256: 698ebd41d540eb0c6427c17c13a6a0f03eef94655fbd40655c9b42d612ea1c9b Also there are packages already ready for some distributions:

• Fedora
• Gentoo
• Arch Linux

There is a lot of ongoing work to fix the Debian packages and I will post about it on this blog when they are good to go! Enjoy the new release!
-Ian S. Donnelly

Review: Parasite, by Mira Grant

Series:	Parasitology #1
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	October 2013
ISBN:	0-316-21893-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	504

It's 2027, and a company named Symbogen has revolutionized medicine and health. They manufacture a genetically-engineered parasite based on a tapeworm that can stabilize and protect the health of just about anyone. It can synthesize medication, fix chronic medical problems, and be adapted to different conditions. (Yes, I know biological systems don't work this way. That's not going to be the only suspension of disbelief problem.) This has made Symbogen one of the most powerful corporations in the country, aided by the skill at marketing and self-promotion shown by one of the founders. Sal, the protagonist of the novel, is one of Symbogen's most famous success stories. Sally was the victim of a horrible car crash that put her into an apparently irreversible coma. But as her family was debating whether to turn off life support, she woke up. She had no memory of her previous life at all, and had to relearn fine motor control, reading, and many other skills. She was essentially a new person. But she was alive; her symbiont had saved her. When the story proper starts, Sal is still a ward of her parents. She has generally adult skills despite still struggling with reading, but she still has occasional attacks and is under intensive monitoring by Symbogen. That means periodic mandatory appointments with Symbogen, which she hates, but she's otherwise started building a life for herself: a job in an animal shelter, an interest in exotic predatory plants, and, most notably, a boyfriend. There are things about her life she doesn't like, and she wants to be free of Symbogen, but she doesn't have a bad life. But then a mysterious illness begins sweeping through the population, causing people to go blank, apparently lose their minds, and then start attacking those near them. Some of you have doubtless already figured out the key plot revelation. It's not hard; even if you didn't from the summary, you will probably figure it out shortly into the book. And therein lies a large problem with this novel: it's hopelessly predictable. Creepy evil corporation that supposedly has your best interests at heart, check. Plucky mad scientist opposition who understands exactly what's going on, check. Well-meaning but heavy-handed government agents who try to get involved but mostly make everything worse, check. (Although it's unusual to have those agents as part of the protagonist's family, and I thought that added some additional depth.) Mostly clueless protagonist sucked into the plot and becoming critical to its resolution, check. Very few readers are going to be surprised by this story. This is not, by itself, a fatal flaw. Predictable story structures can carry satisfying variations, or introduce the reader to enjoyable characters. And I think Grant manages both here. Seanan McGuire, both as herself and under her Mira Grant pseudonym, tends to write damaged and struggling characters. Both her Newsflesh and October Daye series feature protagonists that have been hurt badly, but are coping and muddling through in their own ways. In Parasite, I think she takes a more daring and intriguing approach: a protagonist that other people in the story perceive as damaged and struggling, but who actually isn't. Sal is not a badly injured Sally, and she's quite a bit healthier than those around her think she is. Her thought processes don't work quite the same as those around her, but that's not because she's hurt. That's because she's a different person. This makes Parasite partly a novel about identity, about Sal claiming ownership of her own life. Grant drags this out longer than I wish she had, but I liked the idea. In Sal, she strikes a good balance between gratitude and genuine affection for her family and the need to become her own person unconstrained by other people's expectations. As with the Newsflesh series, Grant uses quotes and excerpts from interviews to fill in the world background: a few at the start of each chapter, and more around each part boundary. I like this technique, and Grant uses it well. By the end of the book, the Rolling Stone interview with the head of Symbogen has added a lot of insight into how Symbogen manages its public relations. Grant also throws in a few of her trademark dangerously off-beat characters: hyper-competent, wise-cracking, but eerily skewed. I loved those in Blackout and I loved Tansy and Dr. Cale here. (Adam was much less successful.) A whole book from Tansy's perspective wouldn't work, since she needs Sal as a straight woman, but I thought she stole every scene she was in. However, I agree wholeheartedly with Tansy on another point: Sal is remarkably, irritatingly dim about what is apparently intended to be the critical revelation of the book. I won't state it outright; given its significant presence in the final scene, apparently it is intended to be a spoiler. But I figured it out about 50 pages into the book. Grant telegraphs this revelation heavily, and Tansy considers it painfully obvious (with quite a bit of justification). But Sal doesn't figure it out for the entire book, ignores all the signs, and is apparently willfully blind. In a book written from the first-person perspective by an otherwise-reliable narrator, this is highly annoying. It significantly undermined my enjoyment of the book. I spent much of the novel ahead of the narrator in my understanding of the plot and waiting, in vain, for her to get on with it already. That unfortunately makes Parasite a mixed bag. I really liked many of the characters, and I think Grant did some interesting things with family dynamics and with claiming one's own identity. But this is undermined by a very predictable plot, the protagonist deciding to be dumber than a sack of hammers about a critical plot point, and some rather dubious world logic. (For example, why is Sal terrified of bad driving? It makes sense as a post-traumatic stress reaction... except it's a critical point to her characterization that she never went through that stress.) Sometimes I wanted to like this book and sometimes I wanted to shake it, and sometimes I felt both reactions at the same time. I like Grant's writing and characterization well enough that I will probably read the sequel, but this is more like the later books in the Newsflesh series than it is like the spectacular Feed. Worth reading, at least for me, but it could have been better. Rating: 7 out of 10

About torbrowser-launcher in all current Debian distros plus some thoughts and scripts for running it more securely So, torbrowser-launcher 0.1.2-1 is now in sid (only that version has the script examples discussed below), and 0.1.1-2(~bpo70+1) are in jessie and wheezy-backports. Originally Jacob Appelbaum packaged torbrowser-launcher, then Ulrike Uhlig stepped in and fixed some major bugs, I sponsored her uploads and somehow the idea emerged to team maintain the package, so pkg-anonymity-tools was founded. So far it's only used for having a mailing list which is used for the Maintainer: field of the torbrowser-launcher package. But we invite all maintainers of anonymity related packages to join the team! Currently there ain't even a Debian teams wiki page about it (it would be great if YOU could fix that!), so that will probably be the next thing that will happen. As for version control we intend to use the collab-maint project on alioth. So joining the team is not done by joining the alioth project (technically you can do this, but it's rather pointless), but rather by putting the pkg-anonymity-tools mailing list into the Maintainer: field of your package (and you and other people into the Uploaders: field) and subscribing to that very mailing list. Once more packages are maintained that way we'll need to see whether we'll need more mailing lists (eg one specific for commit notifications) or if we rely on client side filtering only or what else should be done. The example scripts (available in /usr/share/doc/torbrowser-launcher/examples in the package from sid or in git) show how to run torbrowser-launcher, confined with AppArmor, in Xephyr (a virtual Xserver running on another Xserver) as another user. This, using AppArmor and Xephyr, shall have two effects:

• the browser process (and it's subprocesses) can - thanks to AppArmor confinement - only access a tiny part of the filesystem
• the real Xserver is not exposed to the browser application, so hopefully that application cannot exploit bugs to grab keyboard input from other applications.

Does that really help? Feedback welcome. Full quote of /usr/share/doc/torbrowser-launcher/examples/README:

torbrowser-launcher launcher scripts
====================================
These scripts are intended to run torbrowser-launcher (and thus torbrowser) as
another user in an Xephyr window server running inside your normal Xorg
session.
They assume the following packages are installed:
- torbrowser-launcher
- apparmor
- xserver-xephyr, awesome
- sudo, slay, psmisc
AppArmor should be enabled, but doesn't have to. I followed the HowTo from
https://wiki.debian.org/AppArmor, which can be summed up as just adding one
parameter to the kernel to enable it, followed by a reboot.
Using Apparmor has the advantage that the browser process cannot most of the
filesystem, eg saving downloads only works in ~/.torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Desktop/
On wheezy, I'm using backports for torbrowser-launcher and apparmor.
The scripts assume they have been copied to /usr/local/bin/ and that there is
a user called "foo" (for running the actuall torbrowser(-launcher) process,
and that the current user has sudo rights for the following commands:
- sudo -i -u foo /usr/local/bin/tbb-l-wrapper
- sudo slay foo
There are two scripts, tbb-in-xephyr and tbb-l-wrapper. Only tbb-in-xephyr is
to be called directly and will result in torbrowser running in Xephyr.
Known problems:
---------------
- dbus is not started, so some input methods won't work. (Personally I don't
  want/need dbus though, so I'm awaiting a solution to
  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10014)
- not everybody likes awesome as the window manager being used ;)
Ideas, questions and ToDo:
--------------------------
- maybe all of this functionality could be integrated into.
  torbrowser-launcher itself, just writing this in shell was so easy.
- or for the time being, merge these two scripts into one, doing both,
  depending on how its called. Also make them run from everywhere.
- run this in an unprivileged LXC container, which is also apparmor confined.
- (when) does this double confinement make sense?
- use a more sensible named default user (instead of foo).
- there should really be an option, so torbrowser-launcher doesn't detach
  itself, so that this "while;ps fax grep" hack can go away.
- ship an usable sudoers.d example too.
- support for more users / instances
Feedback welcome, especially accompanied by patches! 

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (548.59 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Distro Tracker Now that tracker.debian.org is live, people reported bugs (on the new tracker.debian.org pseudo-package that I requested) faster than I could fix them. Still I spent many, many hours on this project, reviewing submitted patches (thanks to Christophe Siraut, Joseph Herlant, Dimitri John Ledkov, Vincent Bernat, James McCoy, Andrew Starr-Bochicchio who all submitted some patches!), fixing bugs, making sure the code works with Django 1.7, and started the same with Python 3. I added a tox.ini so that I can easily run the test suite in all 4 supported environments (created by tox as virtualenv with the combinations of Django 1.6/1.7 and Python 2.7/3.4). Over the month, the git repository has seen 73 commits, we fixed 16 bugs and other issues that were only reported over IRC in #debian-qa. With the help of Enrico Zini and Martin Zobel, we enabled the possibility to login via sso.debian.org (Debian s official SSO) so that Debian developers don t even have to explicitly create their account. As usual more help is needed and I ll gladly answer your questions and review your patches. Misc packaging work Publican. I pushed a new upstream release of publican and dropped a useless build-dependency that was plagued by a difficult to fix RC bug (#749357 for the curious, I tried to investigate but it needs major work for make 4.x compatibility). GNOME 3.12. With gnome-shell 3.12 hitting unstable, I had to update gnome-shell-timer (and filed an upstream ticket at the same time), a GNOME Shell extension to start some run-down counters. Django 1.7. I packaged python-django 1.7 release candidate 1 in experimental (found a small bug, submitted a ticket with a patch that got quickly merged) and filed 85 bugs against all the reverse dependencies to ask their maintainers to test their package with Django 1.7 (that we want to upload before the freeze obviously). We identified a pain point in upgrade for packages using South and tried to discuss it with upstream, but after closer investigation, none of the packages are really affected. But the problem can hit administrators of non-packaged Django applications. Misc stuff. I filed a few bugs (#754282 against git-import-orig uscan, #756319 against wnpp to see if someone would be willing to package loomio), reviewed an updated package for django-ratelimit in #755611, made a non-maintainer upload of mairix (without prior notice) to update the package to a new upstream release and bring it to modern packaging norms (Mako failed to make an upload in 4 years so I just went ahead and did what I would have done if it were mine). Kali work resulting in Debian contributions Kali wants to switch from being based on stable to being based on testing so I did try to setup britney to manage a new kali-rolling repository and encountered some problems that I reported to debian-release. Niels Thykier has been very helpful and even managed to improve britney thanks to the very specific problem that the kali setup triggered. Since we use reprepro, I did write some Python wrapper to transform the HeidiResult file in a set of reprepro commands but at the same time I filed #756399 to request proper support of heidi files in reprepro. While analyzing britney s excuses file, I also noticed that the Kali mirrors contains many source packages that are useless because they only concern architectures that we don t host (and I filed #756523 against reprepro). While trying to build a live image of kali-rolling, I noticed that libdb5.1 and db5.1-util were still marked as priority standard when in fact Debian already switched to db5.3 and thus should only be optional (I filed #756623 against ftp.debian.org). When doing some upgrade tests from kali (wheezy based) to kali-rolling (jessie based) I noticed some problems that were also affecting Debian Jessie. I filed #756629 against libfile-fcntllock-perl (with a patch), and also #756618 against texlive-base (missing Replaces header). I also pinged Colin Watson on #734946 because I got a spurious base-passwd prompt during upgrade (that was triggered because schroot copied my unstable s /etc/passwd file in the kali chroot and the package noticed a difference on the shell of all system users). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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

I wrote a BTRFS status report yesterday commenting on the uneventful use of BTRFS recently [1]. Early this morning the server that stores my email (which had 93 days uptime) had a filesystem related problem. The root filesystem became read-only and then the kernel message log filled with unrelated messages so there was no record of the problem. I m now considering setting up rsyslogd to log the kernel messages to a tmpfs filesystem to cover such problems in future. As RAM is so cheap it wouldn t matter if a few megs of RAM were wasted by that in normal operation if it allowed me to extract useful data when something goes really wrong. It s really annoying to have a system in a state where I can login as root but not find out what went wrong. After that I tried 2 kernels in the 3.14 series, both of which had kernel BUG assertions related to Xen networking and failed to network correctly, I filed Debian Bug #756714. Fortunately they at least had enough uptime for me to run a filesystem scrub which reported no errors. Then I reverted to kernel 3.13.10 but the reboot to apply that kernel change failed. Systemd was unable to umount the root filesystem (maybe because of a problem with Xen) and then hung the system instead of rebooting, I filed Debian Bug #756725. I believe that if asked to reboot a system there is no benefit in hanging the system with no user space processes accessible. Here are some useful things that systemd could have done:

1. Just reboot without umounting (like reboot -nf does).
2. Pause for some reasonable amount of time to give the sysadmin a possibility of seeing the error and then rebooting.
3. Go back to a regular runlevel, starting daemons like sshd.
4. Offer a login prompt to allow the sysadmin to login as root and diagnose the problem.

Options 1, 2, and 3 would have saved me a bit of driving. Option 4 would have allowed me to at least diagnose the problem (which might be worth the drive). Having a system on the other side of the city which has no remote console access just hang after a reboot command is not useful, it would be near the top of the list of things I don t want to happen in that situation. The best thing I can say about systemd s operation in this regard is that it didn t make the server catch fire. Now all I really know is that 3.14 kernels won t work for my server, 3.13 will cause problems that no-one can diagnose due to lack of data, and I m now going to wait for it to fail again. As an aside the server has ECC RAM and it s hardware is known to be good, so I m sure that BTRFS is at fault.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/07/31/btrfs-status-july-2014/

My last BTRFS status report was in April [1], it wasn t the most positive report with data corruption and system hangs. Hacker News has a brief discussion of BTRFS which includes the statement Russell Coker s reports of his experiences with BTRFS give me the screaming heebie-jeebies, no matter how up-beat and positive he stays about it [2] (that s one of my favorite comments about my blog). Since April things have worked better. Linux kernel 3.14 solves the worst problems I had with 3.13 and it s generally doing everything I want it to do. I now have cron jobs making snapshots as often as I wish (as frequently as every 15 minutes on some systems), automatically removing snapshots (removing 500+ snapshots at once doesn t hang the system), balancing, and scrubbing. The fact that I can now expect that a filesystem balance (which is a type of defragment operation for BTRFS that frees some chunks ) from a cron job and expect the system not to hang means that I haven t run out of metadata chunk space. I expect that running out of metadata space can still cause filesystem deadlocks given a lack of reports on the BTRFS mailing list of fixes in that regard, but as long as balance works well we can work around that. My main workstation now has 35 days of uptime and my home server has 90 days of uptime. Also the server that stores my email now has 93 days uptime even though it s running Linux kernel 3.13.10. I am rather nervous about the server running 3.13.10 because in my experience every kernel before 3.14.1 had BTRFS problems that would cause system hangs. I don t want a server that s an hour s drive away to hang The server that runs my email is using kernel 3.13.10 because when I briefly tried a 3.14 kernel it didn t work reliably with the Xen kernel 4.1 from Debian/Wheezy and I had a choice of using the Xen kernel 4.3 from Debian/Unstable to match the Linux kernel or use an earlier Linux kernel. I have a couple of Xen servers running Debian/Unstable for test purposes which are working well so I may upgrade my mail server to the latest Xen and Linux kernels from Unstable in the near future. But for the moment I m just not doing many snapshots and never running a filesystem scrub on that server. Scrubbing In kernel 3.14 scrub is working reliably for me and I have cron jobs to scrub filesystems on every system running that kernel. So far I ve never seen it report an error on a system that matters to me but I expect that it will happen eventually. The paper An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack from the University of Wisconsin (based on NetApp data) [3] shows that nearline disks (IE any disks I can afford) have an incidence of checksum errors (occasions when the disk returns bad data but claims it to be good) of about 0.42%. There are 18 disks running in systems I personally care about (as opposed to systems where I am paid to care) so with a 0.42% probability of a disk experiencing data corruption per year that would give a 7.3% probability of having such corruption on one disk in any year and a greater than 50% chance that it s already happened over the last 10 years. Of the 18 disks in question 15 are currently running BTRFS. Of the 15 running BTRFS 10 are scrubbed regularly (the other 5 are systems that don t run 24*7 and the system running kernel 3.13.10). Newer Kernels The discussion on the BTRFS mailing list about kernel 3.15 is mostly about hangs. This is correlated with some changes to improve performance so I presume that it has exposed race conditions. Based on those discussions I haven t felt inclined to run a 3.15 kernel. As the developers already have some good bug reports I don t think that I could provide any benefit by doing more testing at this time. I think that there would be no benefit to me personally or the Linux community in testing 3.15. I don t have a personal interest in RAID-5 or RAID-6. The only systems I run that have more data than will fit on a RAID-1 array of cheap SATA disks are ones that I am paid to run and they are running ZFS. So the ongoing development of RAID-5 and RAID-6 code isn t an incentive for me to run newer kernels. Eventually I ll test out RAID-6 code, but at the moment I don t think they need more bug reports in this area. I don t have a great personal interest in filesystem performance at this time. There are some serious BTRFS performance issues. One problem is that a filesystem balance and subtree removal seem to take excessive amounts of CPU time. Another is that there isn t much support for balancing IO to multiple devices (in RAID-1 every process has all it s read requests sent to one device). For large-scale use of a filesystem these are significant problems. But when you have basic requirements (such as a mail server for dozens of users or a personal workstation with a quad-core CPU and fast SSD storage) it doesn t make much difference. Currently all of my systems which use BTRFS have storage hardware that exceeds the system performance requirements by such a large margin that nothing other than installing Debian packages can slow the system down. So while there are performance improvements in newer versions of the BTRFS kernel code that isn t an incentive for me to upgrade. It s just been announced that Debian/Jessie will use Linux 3.16, so I guess I ll have to test that a bit for the benefit of Debian users. I am concerned that 3.16 won t be stable enough for typical users at the time that Jessie is released.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/04/26/btrfs-status-april-2014/
• [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830970
• [3] http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/corruption-fast08.html

The complete and free out of the box software solution for schools, Debian Edu / Skolelinux, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust the setup. I managed to interview him this summer. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I haven't worked for 30 years in this job. 30 years ago I started to support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only works with Windows . :-( In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use Windows 98, 2000, XP, , 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist, psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to work with the documentations of our patients. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project? Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in his school (Gymnasium Harsewinkel). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their computer skills in optional lessons. I'm spending 4-6 hours a week with this job. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? The independence. First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software. Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are working reliable. We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the terminal server. In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? Teachers and pupils are Windows users. <Irony on> And Linux isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. <Irony off> They don't realize the stability of the system. Which free software do you use daily? Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba, Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu) Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.

This is time again for my annual report about the number of developers per country. This is now the sixth edition of this report. Former editions:

• July 2013
• June 2012
• June 2011
• August 2010
• October 2009

So, here we are with the July 2014 version, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million population for each country.

Act: number of active developers
Dev: total number of developers
A/M: number of active devels per million pop.
D/M: number of devels per million pop.
2009: rank in 2009
2010: rank in 2010
2011: rank in 2011 (June)
2012: rank in 2012 (June)
2013: rank in 2012 (July)
2014: rank now

Code	Name	Population	Act Dev	Dev	Act/Million	Dev/Million	2009	2010	June 2011	June 2012	July 2013	July 2014
fi	Finland	5259250	19	31	3,61	5,89	1	1	1	1	1	1
ie	Ireland	4670976	13	17	2,78	3,64	13	9	6	2	2	2
nz	New Zealand	4331600	11	15	2,54	3,46	4	3	5	7	7	3	*
mq	Martinique	396404	1	1	2,52	2,52			3	4	4	4
se	Sweden	9088728	22	37	2,42	4,07	3	6	7	5	5	5
ch	Switzerland	7870134	19	29	2,41	3,68	2	2	2	3	3	6	*
no	Norway	4973029	11	14	2,21	2,82	5	4	4	6	6	7	*
at	Austria	8217280	18	29	2,19	3,53	6	8	10	10	10	8	*
de	Germany	81471834	164	235	2,01	2,88	7	7	9	9	8	9	*
lu	Luxemburg	503302	1	1	1,99	1,99	8	5	8	8	9	10	*
fr	France	65350000	101	131	1,55	2	12	12	11	11	11	11
au	Australia	22607571	32	60	1,42	2,65	9	10	12	12	12	12
be	Belgium	11071483	14	17	1,26	1,54	10	11	13	13	13	13
uk	United-Kingdom	62698362	77	118	1,23	1,88	14	14	14	14	14	14
nl	Netherlands	16728091	18	40	1,08	2,39	11	13	15	15	15	15
ca	Canada	33476688	34	63	1,02	1,88	15	15	17	16	16	16
dk	Denmark	5529888	5	10	0,9	1,81	17	17	16	17	17	17
es	Spain	46754784	34	56	0,73	1,2	16	16	19	18	18	18
it	Italy	59464644	36	52	0,61	0,87	23	22	22	19	19	19
hu	Hungary	10076062	6	12	0,6	1,19	18	25	26	20	24	20	*
cz	Czech Rep	10190213	6	6	0,59	0,59	21	20	21	21	20	21	*
us	USA	313232044	175	382	0,56	1,22	19	21	25	24	22	22
il	Israel	7740900	4	6	0,52	0,78	24	24	24	25	23	23
hr	Croatia	4290612	2	2	0,47	0,47	20	18	18	26	25	24	*
lv	Latvia	2204708	1	1	0,45	0,45	26	26	27	27	26	25	*
bg	Bulgaria	7364570	3	3	0,41	0,41	25	23	23	23	27	26	*
sg	Singapore	5183700	2	2	0,39	0,39				33	33	27	*
uy	Uruguay	3477778	1	2	0,29	0,58	22	27	28	28	28	28
pl	Poland	38441588	11	15	0,29	0,39	29	29	30	30	30	29	*
jp	Japan	127078679	36	52	0,28	0,41	30	28	29	29	29	30	*
lt	Lithuania	3535547	1	1	0,28	0,28	28	19	20	22	21	31	*
gr	Greece	10787690	3	4	0,28	0,37	33	38	34	35	35	32	*
cr	Costa Rica	4301712	1	1	0,23	0,23	31	30	31	31	31	33	*
by	Belarus	9577552	2	2	0,21	0,21	35	36	39	39	32	34	*
ar	Argentina	40677348	8	10	0,2	0,25	34	33	35	32	37	35	*
pt	Portugal	10561614	2	4	0,19	0,38	27	32	32	34	34	36	*
sk	Slovakia	5477038	1	1	0,18	0,18	32	31	33	36	36	37	*
rs	Serbia	7186862	1	1	0,14	0,14					38	38
tw	Taiwan	23040040	3	3	0,13	0,13	37	34	37	37	39	39
br	Brazil	192376496	18	21	0,09	0,11	36	35	38	38	40	40
cu	Cuba	11241161	1	1	0,09	0,09		38	41	41	41	41
co	Colombia	45566856	4	5	0,09	0,11	41	44	46	47	46	42	*
kr	South Korea	48754657	4	6	0,08	0,12	39	39	42	42	42	43	*
gt	Guatemala	13824463	1	1	0,07	0,07					43	44	*
ec	Ecuador	15007343	1	1	0,07	0,07		40	43	43	45	45
cl	Chile	16746491	1	2	0,06	0,12	42	41	44	44	47	46	*
za	South Africa	50590000	3	10	0,06	0,2	38	48	48	48	48	47	*
ru	Russia	143030106	8	9	0,06	0,06	43	42	47	45	49	48	*
mg	Madagascar	21281844	1	1	0,05	0,05	44	37	40	40	50	49	*
ro	Romania	21904551	1	2	0,05	0,09	45	43	45	46	51	50	*
ve	Venezuela	28047938	1	1	0,04	0,04	40	45	50	49	44	51	*
my	Malaysia	28250000	1	1	0,04	0,04			49	50	52	52
pe	Peru	29907003	1	1	0,03	0,03	46	46	51	51	53	53
tr	Turkey	74724269	2	2	0,03	0,03	47	47	52	52	54	54
ua	Ukraine	45134707	1	1	0,02	0,02	48	53	58	59	55	55
th	Thailand	66720153	1	2	0,01	0,03	50	50	54	54	56	56
eg	Egypt	80081093	1	3	0,01	0,04	51	51	55	55	57	57
mx	Mexico	112336538	1	1	0,01	0,01	49	49	53	53	58	58
cn	China	1344413526	10	14	0,01	0,01	53	53	57	56	59	59
in	India	1210193422	8	9	0,01	0,01	52	52	56	57	60	60
sv	El Salvador	7066403	0	1	0	0,14			36	58	61	61
			969	1561	62,08%

A few interesting facts:

• New Zealand bumps from rank 7 to rank 3, thanks to one new active developer
• Switzerland loses one developer and goes donw to rank 6
• Norway also slightly goes down by losing one developer
• With two more developers, Austria climbs up to rank 8 and overtakes Germany...;-)
• Hungary climbs a little bit by gaining one developer
• Singapore doubles its number of developers from 1 to 2 and bumps from 33 to 27
• One rank up too for Poland that gained one developer
• Down to rank 31 for Lithuania by losing one developer
• Up to rank 32 for Greece with 4 developers instead of 3
• Argentina goes up by havign two more developers (it lost 2 last year)
• Up from 46 to 42 for Colombia by winning one more developer
• One more developer and Russia climps from 49 to 48
• One less for Venezuela that has only one developer left...:-(
• No new country this year. Less movement towards "the universal OS"?
• We have 12 more active Debian developers and 26 more developers overall. Less progression than last year
• The ratio of active developers increases is nearly stable though slightly decreasing

Finally I find the mood to do this, a process which started 5 years ago in DebConf 9 at C ceres by following Ana's post, of course with my preferred options and my name, not like some other ;-).

Said that, dear reader, if you have signed my old key:

1024D/C9B55DAC 2005-01-19 [expires: 2015-10-01]
Key fingerprint = CFB7 C779 6BAE E81C 3E05  7172 2C04 5542 C9B5 5DAC

And want to sign my "new" and stronger key:

4096R/DE5BCCA6 2009-07-29
Key fingerprint = 43BC 364B 16DF 0C20 5EBD  7592 1F0F 0A88 DE5B CCA6

You're welcome to do so :-)

The new key is signed with the old, and the old key is still valid, and will probably be until expiration date next year. Don't forget to gpg --recv-keys DE5BCCA6 to get the new key and gpg --refresh-keys C9B55DAC to refresh the old (otherwise it may look expired).

Debian's Keyring Team has already processed my request to add the new key, so all should keep working smoothly. Kudos to them!

start-stop-daemon is the classic tool on Debian and derived distributions to manage system background processes. A typical invokation from an initscript is as follows: The basic operation is that it will first check whether /usr/sbin/daemon is not running and, if not, execute /usr/sbin/daemon -c /etc/daemon.cfg -p /var/run/daemon.pid. This process then has the responsibility to daemonise itself and write the resulting process ID to /var/run/daemon.pid. start-stop-daemon then waits until /var/run/daemon.pid has been created as the test of whether the service has actually started, raising an error if that doesn't happen. (In practice, the locations of all these files are parameterised to prevent DRY violations.)

This is time again for my annual report about the number of developers per country. This is now the sixth edition of this report. Former editions:

• July 2013
• June 2012
• June 2011
• August 2010
• October 2009

So, here we are with the July 2014 version, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million population for each country.

Act: number of active developers
Dev: total number of developers
A/M: number of active devels per million pop.
D/M: number of devels per million pop.
2009: rank in 2009
2010: rank in 2010
2011: rank in 2011 (June)
2012: rank in 2012 (June)
2013: rank in 2012 (July)
2014: rank now

Code	Name	Population	Act Dev	Dev	Act/Million	Dev/Million	2009	2010	June 2011	June 2012	July 2013	July 2014
fi	Finland	5259250	19	31	3,61	5,89	1	1	1	1	1	1
ie	Ireland	4670976	13	17	2,78	3,64	13	9	6	2	2	2
nz	New Zealand	4331600	11	15	2,54	3,46	4	3	5	7	7	3	*
mq	Martinique	396404	1	1	2,52	2,52			3	4	4	4
se	Sweden	9088728	22	37	2,42	4,07	3	6	7	5	5	5
ch	Switzerland	7870134	19	29	2,41	3,68	2	2	2	3	3	6	*
no	Norway	4973029	11	14	2,21	2,82	5	4	4	6	6	7	*
at	Austria	8217280	18	29	2,19	3,53	6	8	10	10	10	8	*
de	Germany	81471834	164	235	2,01	2,88	7	7	9	9	8	9	*
lu	Luxemburg	503302	1	1	1,99	1,99	8	5	8	8	9	10	*
fr	France	65350000	101	131	1,55	2	12	12	11	11	11	11
au	Australia	22607571	32	60	1,42	2,65	9	10	12	12	12	12
be	Belgium	11071483	14	17	1,26	1,54	10	11	13	13	13	13
uk	United-Kingdom	62698362	77	118	1,23	1,88	14	14	14	14	14	14
nl	Netherlands	16728091	18	40	1,08	2,39	11	13	15	15	15	15
ca	Canada	33476688	34	63	1,02	1,88	15	15	17	16	16	16
dk	Denmark	5529888	5	10	0,9	1,81	17	17	16	17	17	17
es	Spain	46754784	34	56	0,73	1,2	16	16	19	18	18	18
it	Italy	59464644	36	52	0,61	0,87	23	22	22	19	19	19
hu	Hungary	10076062	6	12	0,6	1,19	18	25	26	20	24	20	*
cz	Czech Rep	10190213	6	6	0,59	0,59	21	20	21	21	20	21	*
us	USA	313232044	175	382	0,56	1,22	19	21	25	24	22	22
il	Israel	7740900	4	6	0,52	0,78	24	24	24	25	23	23
hr	Croatia	4290612	2	2	0,47	0,47	20	18	18	26	25	24	*
lv	Latvia	2204708	1	1	0,45	0,45	26	26	27	27	26	25	*
bg	Bulgaria	7364570	3	3	0,41	0,41	25	23	23	23	27	26	*
sg	Singapore	5183700	2	2	0,39	0,39				33	33	27	*
uy	Uruguay	3477778	1	2	0,29	0,58	22	27	28	28	28	28
pl	Poland	38441588	11	15	0,29	0,39	29	29	30	30	30	29	*
jp	Japan	127078679	36	52	0,28	0,41	30	28	29	29	29	30	*
lt	Lithuania	3535547	1	1	0,28	0,28	28	19	20	22	21	31	*
gr	Greece	10787690	3	4	0,28	0,37	33	38	34	35	35	32	*
cr	Costa Rica	4301712	1	1	0,23	0,23	31	30	31	31	31	33	*
by	Belarus	9577552	2	2	0,21	0,21	35	36	39	39	32	34	*
ar	Argentina	40677348	8	10	0,2	0,25	34	33	35	32	37	35	*
pt	Portugal	10561614	2	4	0,19	0,38	27	32	32	34	34	36	*
sk	Slovakia	5477038	1	1	0,18	0,18	32	31	33	36	36	37	*
rs	Serbia	7186862	1	1	0,14	0,14					38	38
tw	Taiwan	23040040	3	3	0,13	0,13	37	34	37	37	39	39
br	Brazil	192376496	18	21	0,09	0,11	36	35	38	38	40	40
cu	Cuba	11241161	1	1	0,09	0,09		38	41	41	41	41
co	Colombia	45566856	4	5	0,09	0,11	41	44	46	47	46	42	*
kr	South Korea	48754657	4	6	0,08	0,12	39	39	42	42	42	43	*
gt	Guatemala	13824463	1	1	0,07	0,07					43	44	*
ec	Ecuador	15007343	1	1	0,07	0,07		40	43	43	45	45
cl	Chile	16746491	1	2	0,06	0,12	42	41	44	44	47	46	*
za	South Africa	50590000	3	10	0,06	0,2	38	48	48	48	48	47	*
ru	Russia	143030106	8	9	0,06	0,06	43	42	47	45	49	48	*
mg	Madagascar	21281844	1	1	0,05	0,05	44	37	40	40	50	49	*
ro	Romania	21904551	1	2	0,05	0,09	45	43	45	46	51	50	*
ve	Venezuela	28047938	1	1	0,04	0,04	40	45	50	49	44	51	*
my	Malaysia	28250000	1	1	0,04	0,04			49	50	52	52
pe	Peru	29907003	1	1	0,03	0,03	46	46	51	51	53	53
tr	Turkey	74724269	2	2	0,03	0,03	47	47	52	52	54	54
ua	Ukraine	45134707	1	1	0,02	0,02	48	53	58	59	55	55
th	Thailand	66720153	1	2	0,01	0,03	50	50	54	54	56	56
eg	Egypt	80081093	1	3	0,01	0,04	51	51	55	55	57	57
mx	Mexico	112336538	1	1	0,01	0,01	49	49	53	53	58	58
cn	China	1344413526	10	14	0,01	0,01	53	53	57	56	59	59
in	India	1210193422	8	9	0,01	0,01	52	52	56	57	60	60
sv	El Salvador	7066403	0	1	0	0,14			36	58	61	61
			969	1561	62,08%

A few interesting facts:

• New Zealand bumps from rank 7 to rank 3, thanks to one new active developer
• Switzerland loses one developer and goes donw to rank 6
• Norway also slightly goes down by losing one developer
• With two more developers, Austria climbs up to rank 8 and overtakes Germany...;-)
• Hungary climbs a little bit by gaining one developer
• Singapore doubles its number of developers from 1 to 2 and bumps from 33 to 27
• One rank up too for Poland that gained one developer
• Down to rank 31 for Lithuania by losing one developer
• Up to rank 32 for Greece with 4 developers instead of 3
• Argentina goes up by havign two more developers (it lost 2 last year)
• Up from 46 to 42 for Colombia by winning one more developer
• One more developer and Russia climps from 49 to 48
• One less for Venezuela that has only one developer left...:-(
• No new country this year. Less movement towards "the universal OS"?
• We have 12 more active Debian developers and 26 more developers overall. Less progression than last year
• The ratio of active developers increases is nearly stable though slightly decreasing

xTuple is in my opinion incredibly well designed; the code is clean and the architecture ahderent to a standardized structure. All this makes working with xTuple software quite a breeze. I wanted to integrate JSCommunicator into the web-based xTuple version. JSCommunicator is a SIP communication tool, so my first step was to create an extension for the SIP account data. Luckily for me, the xTuple development team published an awesome tutorial for writing an xTuple extension. xTuple cleverly uses model based business objects for the various features available. This makes customizing xTuple very straightforward. I used the tutorial mentioned above for writing my extension, but soon noticed my goals were a little different. A SIP account has 3 data fields, these being the SIP URI, the account password and an optional display name. xTuple currently has a business object in the core code for a User Account and it would make a lot more sense to simply add my 3 fields to this existing business object rather than create another business object. The tutorial very clearly shows how to extend a business object with another business object, but not how to extend a business object with only new fields (not a whole new object). Now maybe I m just a whole lot slower than most people, but I had a ridiculously had time figuring this out. Mind you, this is because I m slow, because the xTuple documentation and code is understandable and as self-explanatory as it gets. I think it just takes a bit to get used to. Either way, I thought this just might be useful to others so here is how I went about it. Setup First you ll have to set up your xTuple development environment and fork the xtuple and xtuple-extesions repositories as shown in this handy tutorial. A footnote I d like to add is please verify that your version of Vagrant (and anything else you install) is the one listed in the tutorial. I think I spent like two entire days or more on a wild goose (bug) chase trying to set up my environment when the cause of all the errors was that I somehow installed an older version of Vagrant - 1.5.4 instead of 1.6.3. Please don t make the same mistake I did. Actually if for some reason you get the following error when you try using node: chances are, you have the wrong version. That s what happened to me. The Vagrant Virtual Development Environment automatically installs and configures everything you need, it s ready to go. So if you find yourself installing and updating and apt-gets and etc, you probably did something wrong. Coding So by now we should have the Vagrant Virtual Development Environment set up and the web app up and running and accessible at localhost:8443. So far so good. Disclaimer: You will note that much of this is similar - or rather, nearly identical - to xTuple s tutorial but there are some small but important differences and a few observations I think might be useful. Other Disclaimer: I m describing how I did it, which may or may not be up to snuff . Works for me though. Schema First let s make a schema for the table we will create with the new custom fields. Be sure to create the correct directory stucture, aka /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/<YOUR EXTENSION NAME>/database/source or in my case /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/database/source, and create the file create_sa_schema.sql, sa is the name of my schema. This file will contain the following lines: Of course, feel free to replace sa with your schema name of choice. All the code described here can be found in my xtuple-extensions fork, on the sip_ext branch. Table We ll create a table containing your custom fields and a link to an existing table - the table for the existing business object you want to extend. If you re wondering why make a whole new table for a few extra fields, here s a good explanation, the case in question is adding fields to the Contact business object. You need to first figure out what table you want to link to. This might not be uber easy. I think the best way to go about it is to look at the ORMs. The xTuple ORMs are a JSON mapping between the SQL tables and the object-oriented world above the database, they re .json files found at path/to/xtuple/node_modules/xtuple/enyo-client/database/orm/models for the core business objects and at path/to/xtuplenyo-client/extensions/source/<EXTENSION NAME>/database/orm/models for exension business objects. I ll give two examples. If you look at contact.json you will see that the Contact business object refers to the table cntct . Look for the type : Contact on the line above, so we know it s the Contact business object. In my case, I wanted to extend the UserAccount and UserAccountRelation business objects, so check out user_account.json. The table listed for UserAccount is xt.usrinfo and the table listed for UserAccountRelation is xt.usrlite. A closer look at the sql files for these tables (usrinfo.sql and usrlite.sql) revealed that usrinfo is in fact a view and usrlite is A light weight table of user information used to avoid punishingly heavy queries on the public usr view . I chose to refer to xt.usrlite - that or I received error messages when trying the other table names. Now I ll make the file /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/database/source/usrlitesip.sql, to create a table with my custom fields plus the link to the urslite table. Don t quote me on this, but I m under the impression that this is the norm for naming the sql file joining tables: the name of the table you are referring to ( usrlite in this case) and your extension s name. Content of usrlitesip.sql: Breaking it down, line 1 creates the table named usrlitesip (no duh), line 2 is for the primary key (self-explanatory). You can then add any columns you like, just be sure to add one that references the table you want to link to. I checked usrlite.sql and saw the primary key is usr_username, be sure to use the primary key of the table you are referencing. You can check what you made by executing the .sql files like so: After which you will see the table with the columns you created if you enter: Now create the file /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/database/source/manifest.js to put the files together and in the right order. It should contain: I think the name has to be the same you named your extension directory as in /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/<YOUR EXTENSION NAME>. I think the comment can be anything you like and you want your loadOrder to be high so it s the last thing installed (as it s an add on.) So far we are doing exactly what s instructed in the xTuple tutorial. It s repetitive, but I think you can never have too many examples to compare to. In databaseScripts you will list the two .sql files you just created for the schema and the table, plus another file to be made in the same directory named register.sql. I m not sure why you have to make the register.sql or even if you indeed have to. If you leave the file empty, there will be a build error, so put a ; in the register.sql or remove the line register.sql from manifest.js as I think for now we are good without it. Now let s update the database with our new extension: That last command should display a table with a list of extensions; the ones already in xtuple like crm and billing and some others plus your new extension, in this case sip_account . When you run build_app.js you ll probably see a message along the lines of <Extension name> has no client code, not building client code and that s fine because yeah, we haven t worked on the client code yet. ORM Here s where things start getting different. So ORMs link your object to an SQL table. But we DON T want to make a new business object, we want to extend an existing business object, so the ORM we will make will be a little different than the xTuple tutorial. Steve Hackbarth kindly explained this new business object/existing business object ORM concept here. First we ll create the directory /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/database/orm/ext, according to xTuple convention. ORMs for new business objects would be put in /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/database/orm/models. Now we ll create the .json file /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/database/orm/ext/user_account.jscon for our ORM. Once again, don t quote me on this, but I think the name of the file should be the name of the business object you are extending, as is done in the turorial example extending the Contact object. In our case, UserAccount is defined in user_account.json and that s what I named my extension ORM too. Here s what you should place in it: Note the context is my extension name, because the context + nameSpace + type combo has to be unique. We already have a UserAccount and UserAccountRelation object in the XM namespace in the xtuple context in the original user_account.json, now we will have a UserAccount and UserAccountRelation object in the XM namespace in the sip_account conext. What else is important? Note that isExtension is true on lines 7 and 47 and the relations item contains the column of the foreign key we referenced. This is something you might want to verify: column (lines 12 and 52) is the name of the attribute on your table. When we made a reference to the primary key usr_usrname from the xt.usrlite table we named that column usrlitesip_usr_usrname. But the inverse is the attribute name associated with the original sql column in the original ORM. Did I lose you? I had a lot of trouble with this silly thing. In the original ORM that created a new UserAccount business object, the primary key attribute is named username , as can be seen here. That is what should be used for the inverse value. Not the sql column name (usr_username) but the object attribute name (username). I m emphasizing this because I made that mistake and if I can spare you the pain I will. If we rebuild our extension everything should come along nicely, but you won t see any changes just yet in the web app because we haven t created the client code. Client Create the directory /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client which is where we ll keep all the client code. Extend Workspace View I want the fields I added to show up on the form to create a new User Account, so I need to extend the view for the User Account workspace. I ll start by creating a directory /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/views and in it creating a file named workspace.js containing this code: So I m initializing my workspace and creating an array of items to add (append) to view XV.UserAccountWorkspace. The first item is this onyx.GroupboxHeader which is a pretty divider for my new form fields, the kind you find in the web app at Setup > User Accounts, like Overview . I have no idea what other options there are for container other than mainGroup , so let s stick to that. I ll explain content: _sipAccount .loc() in a bit. Next I created three input fields of the XV.InputWidget kind. This also confused me a bit as there are different kinds of input to be used, like dropdowns and checkboxes. The only advice I can give is snoop around the webapp, find an input you like and look up the corresponding workspace.js file to see what was used. What we just did is (should be) enough for the new fields to show up on the User Account form. But before we see things change, we have to package the client. Create the file /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/views/package.js. This file is needed to package groups of files and indicates the order the files should be loaded (for more on that, see this). For now, all the file will contain is: You also need to package the views directory containing workspace.js, so create the file Create the file /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/package.js and in it show that the directory views and its contents must be part of the higher level package: I like to think of it as a box full of smaller boxes. This will sound terrible, but apparently you also need to create the file /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/core.js containing this line: I don t know why. As soon as I find out I ll be sure to inform you. As we ve added a file to the client directory, be sure to update /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/package.js so it included the new file: Translations Remember _sipAccount .loc() in our workspace.js file? xTuple has great internationalization support and it s easy to use. Just create the directory and file /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/en/strings.js and in it put key-value pairs for labels and their translation, like this: So far I included all the labels I used in my Sip Account form. If you write the wrong label (key) or forget to include a corresponding key-value pair in strings.js, xTuple will simply name your lable _lableName , underscore and all. Now build your extension and start up the server: If the server is already running, just stop it and restart it to reflect your changes. Now if you go to Setup > User Accounts and click the + button, you should see a nice little addition to the form with a Sip Account divider and three new fields. Nice, eh? Extend Parameters Currently you can search your User Accounts list using any of the User Account fields. It would be nice to be able to search with the Sip account fields we added as well. To do that, let s create the directory /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/widgets and there create the file parameter.js to extend XV.UserAccountListParameters. One again, you ll have to look this up. In the xTuple code you ll find the application s parameter.js in /path/to/xtuple/enyo-client/application/source/widgets. Search for the business object you are extending (for example, XV.UserAccount) and look for some combination of the business object name and Parameters . If there s more than one, try different ones. Not a very refined method, but it worked for me. Here s the content of our parameter.js: Node that I didn t include a search field for the password attribute for obvious reasons. Now once again, we package this new code addition by creating a /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/widgets/package.js file: We also have to update /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/package.js: Rebuild the extension (and restart the server) and go to Setup > User Accounts. Press the magnifying glass button on the upper left side of the screen and you ll see many options for filtering the User Accounts, among them the SIP Uri and Display Name. Extend List View You might want your new fields to show up on the list of User Accounts. There s a bit of an issue here because unlike what we did in workspace.js and parameter.js, we can t append new things to the list of UserAccounts with the funciton XV.appendExtension(args). First I tried overwriting the original UserAccountList, which works but it s far from ideal as this could result in a loss of data from the core implementation. After some discussion with the xTuple dev community, now there s a better alternative: Create the file /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/views/list.js and add the following: To understand what I m doing, check out the XV.UserAccountList implementation in /path/to/xtuple/enyo-client/application/source/views/list.js the entire highlighted part. What we are doing is extending XV.UserAccountList through prototype-chaining ; this is how inheritance works with Enyo. In line 1 we create a prototype and in line 4 we inherit the features including original components array which the list is based on. We then create an additional component immitating the setup shown in XV.UserAccountList: An XV.ListColumn containing an XV.ListAttr, which should be placed in the XV.ListItem components array as is done with the existing columns (refer to implementation). Components can or should (?) have names which are used to access said components. You d refer to a specific component by the this.$.componentName hash. The components in XV.UserAccountList don t have names, so Enyo automatically names them (apparently) based on the kind name, for example something of the kind ListItem is named listItem. I found this at random after a lot of trial and error and it s not a bullet proof solution. Can be bettered. It s strange because if you encapsulate that code with as is done with parameter.js and workspace.js (and in the xTuple tutorial you are supposed to do that with a new business object), it doesn t work. I have no idea why. This might be wrong or against xTuple coding norms; I will find out and update this post ASAP. But it does work this way. * shrugs * That said, as we ve created the list.js file, we need to ad it to our package by editing /path/to/xtuple-extensions/source/sip_account/client/views/package.js: That s all. Rebuild the app and restart your server and when you select Setup > User Accounts in the web app you should see the Sip URI displayed on the User Accounts that have the Sip Account data. Add a new User Account to try this out.

Major desktop environments such as Xfce or KDE have a built-in computer suspend feature, but when you use a lighter alternative, things are a bit more complicated, because basically: only root can suspend the computer. There used to be a standard solution to that, using a D-Bus call to a running daemon upowerd. With recent updates, that solution first stopped working for obscure reasons, but it could still be configured back to be usable. With newer updates, it stopped working again, but this time it seems it is gone for good:

$ dbus-send --system --print-reply \
            --dest='org.freedesktop.UPower' \
            /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "Suspend" with
signature "" on interface "org.freedesktop.UPower" doesn't exist

The reason seems to be that upowerd is not running, because it no longer provides an init script, only a systemd service. So, if you do not use systemd, you are left with one simple and stable solution: defining a sudo rule to start the suspend or hibernation process as root. In /etc/sudoers.d/power:

%powerdev ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-suspend, \
                        /usr/sbin/pm-suspend-hybrid, \
                        /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate

That allows members of the powderdev group to run sudo pm-suspend, sudo pm-suspend-hybrid and sudo pm-hibernate, which can be used with a key binding manager such as your window manager's or xbindkeys. Simple, efficient, and contrary to all that ever-changing GizmoKit and whatsitd stuff, it has worked and will keep working for years.

Yet another update from my internship at Mozilla, as part of the OPW. A brief one, this time, sorry. Bugs, Bugs, Bugs, Bacon and Bugs I've continued with my triaging/verifying work and I feel now pretty confident when working on a bug.
On the other hand, I think I've learned more or less what was to be learned here, so I must think (and ask my mentor) where to go from now on.
Maybe focus on a specific Component?
Or steadily work on a specific channel for both triaging/poking and verifying?
Or try my hand at patches?
Not sure, yet. Also, I'd like to point out that, while working on bug triaging, the developer's answers on the bug report are really important.
Comments like this help me as a triager to learn something new, and be a better triager for that component.
I do realize that developers cannot always take the time to put in comments basic information on how to better debug their component/product, but trust me: this will make you happy on the long run.
A wiki page with basic information on how debug problems for your component is also a good idea, as long as that page is easy to find ;). So, big shout-out for MattN for a very useful comment! Community After much delaying, we finally managed to pick a date for the Bug Triage Workshop: it will be on July 25th. The workshop will be an online session focused on what is triaging, why is important, how to reproduce bugs and what information ask to the reporter to make a bug report the most complete and useful possible.
We will do it in two different time slots, to accomodate various timezones, and it will be held on #testday on irc.mozilla.org.
Take a look at the official announcement and subscribe on the event's etherpad! See you on Friday! :)

With electricity prices in Australia seeming to be only going up, and solar being surprisingly cheap, I decided it was a no-brainer to invest in a solar installation to reduce my ongoing electricity bills. It also paves the way for getting an electric car in the future. I'm also a greenie, so having some renewable energy happening gives me the warm and fuzzies. So today I got solar installed. I've gone for a 2 kWh system, consisting of 8 250 watt Seraphim panels (I'm not entirely sure which model) and an Aurora UNO-2.0-I-OUTD inverter. It was totally a case of decision fatigue when it came to shopping around. Everyone claims the particular panels they want to sell at the best. It's pretty much impossible to make a decent assessment of their claims. In the end, I went with the Seraphim panels because they scored well on the PHOTON tests. That said, I've had other solar companies tell me the PHOTON tests aren't indicative of Australian conditions. It's hard to know who to believe. In the end, I chose Seraphim because of the PHOTON test results, and they're also apparently one of the few panels that pass the Thresher test, which tests for durability. The harder choice was the inverter. I'm told that yield varies wildly by inverter, and narrowed it down to Aurora or SunnyBoy. Jason's got a SunnyBoy, and the appeal with it was that it supported Bluetooth for data gathering, although I don't much care for the aesthetics of it. Then I learned that there was a WiFi card coming out soon for the Aurora inverter, and that struck me as better than Bluetooth, so I went with the Aurora inverter. I discovered at the eleventh hour that the model of Aurora inverter that was going to be supplied wasn't supported by the WiFi card, but was able to switch models to the one that was. I'm glad I did, because the newer model looks really nice on the wall. The whole system was up at running just in time to catch the setting sun, so I'm looking forward to seeing it in action tomorrow. Apparently the next step is Energex has to come out to replace my analog power meter with a digital one. I'm grateful that I was able to get Body Corporate approval to use some of the roof. Being on the top floor helped make the installation more feasible too, I think.