"Take, for example, the opening to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries: 'The twelve men congragated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met.' This is emphatically not the same as starting a novel with 'So there they were: a dozen men in the Crown Hotel, all together in the smoking-lounge, looking like they'd only met there by chance.' Yes, the explicit narrative data conveyed in the two are the same, but just as you wouldn't be happy with your publisher simply producing a sort of casual paraphrase of your writing and publishing that under your name, so your foreign-language publishers are hiring people to write exactly the same book as the one you've written. (Except for all the words, obviously.) Sound difficult? The reality is harder still. Every language is different. There's no single word in one language that maps perfectly onto a word in another - not one. And every language has things it can do, and things it can't."

[...]

"Once the contract is signed, the translator takes a deep breath and dives in. Their job is two-fold, and simple: they read you, then they write you.
They read you with more care than anybody else will, more demandigly, more inquiringly. Yes, your editor might take a moment to consider your punctuation if it doesn't work and needs rethinking, but translators have to think hard about it even - or especially - if it does."

A beautiful piece on translators: "The curious condition of being a translator" by Daniel Hahn via Paula G es on GV-Authors mailing list.

Today, I've replaced server SSL certificates with new ones issues by GlobalSign. These should not suffer of same trust problems as CACert one used so far (especially after CACert root certificate being removed from Debian). While doing this, I had to use SNI on server to be able to decide which SSL certificate it should use. This should work for any decent browser, but I guess your scripts might have problems, but I hope this will be rare. Anyway if you will face some issues because of this, please let me know. Other than that I've also tweaked SSL setup to follow current best practice, what could also cause troubles to some ancient clients, but I hope these are non existing in this case :-). See Qualys SSL report for more details. Anyway thanks to GlobalSign free SSL certificates for open source projects you can use hosted Weblate without any SSL warnings. PS: Similar change (just without SNI) has happened last week on phpMyAdmin web servers as well.

Filed under: English phpMyAdmin Weblate 3 comments Flattr this!

This post was an April Fools' Day joke. In accordance with its constitution, the Debian Project has just elected Javier Merino Cacho as Debian Project Leader. More than 80% of voters put him as their first choice (or equal first) on their ballot papers. Javier's large majority over his opponents shows how his inspiring vision for the future of the Debian project is largely shared by the other developers. Lucas Nussbaum and Neil McGovern also gained a lot of support from Debian project members, both coming many votes ahead of the None of the above ballot choice. Javier has been a Debian Developer since February 2012 and, among other packages, works on keeping the mercurial package under control, as mercury is very poisonous for trouts. After it was announced that he had won this year's election, Javier said: I'm flattered by the trust that Debian members have put in me. One of the main points in my platform is to remove the "Debian is old and boring" image. In order to change that, my first action as DPL is to encourage all Debian Project Members to wear a clown red nose in public. Among others, the main points from his platform are mainly related to improve the communication style in mailing lists through an innovative filter called aponygisator, to make Debian less "old and boring", as well as solve technical issues among developers with barehanded fights. Betting on the fights will be not only allowed but encouraged for fundraising reasons. Javier also contemplated the use of misleading talk titles such as The use of cannabis in contemporary ages: a practical approach and Real Madrid vs Barcelona to lure new users and contributors to Debian events. Javier's platform was collaboratively written by a team of communication experts and high profile Debian contributors during the last DebConf. It has since evolved thanks to the help of many other contributors.

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 9
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	112

Due to various other life priorities, it's been quite a while since I read this magazine. Let's see if I can remember the contents well enough to review it properly. The editorial this issue was about the Readers' Awards. Vaguely interesting, but Williams didn't have much to add beyond announcing the winners. I'm very happy to see Rusch's "Becoming One with the Ghosts" win best novella, though. The Silverberg column was more interesting: some musings and pop history about the Japanese convention of a retired emperor and how that fit into national politics. Di Filippo's book review column is all about short story collections, continuing the trend of Di Filippo mostly being interested in things I don't care about. "The Observation Post" by Allen M. Steele: A bit of alternate history set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but with airships. The protagonist was a radioman aboard a blimp that was patrolling the ocean for Russian vessels sailing to Cuba. A storm forces them down on an island, resulting in an encounter with some claimed tourists who may be Russian spies. The SFnal twist is unlikely to come as much surprise to an experienced reader, and the barb at the end of the story suffers from the same problem. I appreciate the ethical dilemma, but I've also seen it in lots of stories and have a hard time getting fully invested in another version of it. But the story is otherwise competently written. (6) "D.O.C.S." by Neal Barrett, Jr.: Everyone has an author or two that they just don't get. Barrett is one of mine, although this story is a bit less surreal than most of his. I'm fairly sure it's an odd twist on the "death panel" conspiracy theory given a fantastic twist, but it's not entirely forthright about what's going on. Possibly of more interest to those who like Barrett better. (5) "Danilo" by Carol Emshwiller: Emshwiller's stories are always distinctive and not quite like anyone else's, involving odd outsiders and their attempts to make sense of their world. This one involves, as is common, an out-of-the-way village. Lewella claims that she's going to be married to a stranger from the north. No one believes her, although they give her bridal gifts anyway, and then one day she takes her gifts and leaves. The protagonist follows her, to look after her. The rest of the story walks the boundary that Emshwiller often walks, leaving the reader unsure whether the characters are in touch with some deeper reality or insane and suffering, but the ending is even more ambiguous than normal and, at least for me, entirely unsatisfying. (4) "Shadow Angel" by Erick Melton: This is another retread of an old SF idea. This time, it's that piloting through hyperspace involves alternate modes of consciousness and has profound effects on the pilot. The risk of this sort of story is that it turns hallucinatory and a bit incoherent, and I think that happened here. I like the world-building; the glimmers of future politics and trade and the way he weaves alternate timelines into the story caught my interest. But the story wasn't quite coherent enough (although part of this may be reviewing it quite some time after I originally read it). Promising, but not clear, and without quite enough agency for the protagonist. (6) "The Odor of Sanctity" by Ian Creasey: I found this story more memorable. The conceit is that a future society has developed technology that allows the capture and replay of scents, which has created a huge market for special scent experiences and the triggering of memories. The story is set in the Philippines and revolves around a Catholic priest who takes the mission to the poor seriously. He's dying, and several people wonder if it is possible to capture the mythical odor of scantity: the sweet scent said to follow the death of a saint rather than the normal odor of human death. Creasey handles this idea well, blending postulated future technology, the practical and cynical world of the poor streets, and a balance between mystical belief and practical skepticism. Nothing in the story is that surprising, but I was happy with the eventual resolution. (7) "Grandma Said" by R. Neube: This story's protagonist is a cleanser on a frontier planet made extremely dangerous by a virulent alien fungus. It is almost always fatal and very difficult to eradicate. Vic's job is to completely sanitize anything that had been in contact with a victim and maintain the other rules of strict quarantine required to keep the fungal infection from spreading uncontrolled. Nuebe weaves world-building together with Vic's background and adds a twist in the form of deeply unhealthy responses to the constant stress of living near death. Well told, if a bit disturbing. (7) "Stalker" by Robert Reed: Reed has a knack for fascinating and disturbing stories, and this is an excellent example of the type. The protagonist is a manufactured companion who is completely devoted to its owner. Their commercial name is Adorers, but everyone calls them Stalkers. In this case, the protagonist's owner is a serial rapist and murderer; given that, and given how good Reed is at writing these sorts of stories, you can probably imagine how chilling it is. As usual, there is a sharp barb in the ending, and not the one I was expecting. Good if you can handle the graphic violence and disturbing subject material. (7) "Burning Bibles" by Alan Wall: This is an interesting twist on the spy thriller. A three-letter agency in charge of investigating possible terrorist plots becomes suspicious after a warehouse of Bibles burns in mysterious circumstances. The agent they send in is a deaf-mute with special powers of intuition. This prompted some eye-rolling, and there's a lot of magic disability powers here to annoy, but it's played mostly straight after that introduction. The rest is a fairly conventional spy story, despite special empathic powers, but it's one I enjoyed and thought was fairly well-written. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

The scene: early one morning as the sun has just started to rise. Jacob and Oliver, ages 7 and 4, are the first people to wake up in the house their grandparents in California, where the four of us are visiting for the first time as a family. They have a conversation and decide that would be a good to go find a mystery. They decide to take their flashlights pink and blue, matching each boy s favorite color and slowly, but not very quietly, open their bedroom door and creep out. Brother, you forgot your flashlight! says Oliver. Oh, thanks brother! I ll get it! says Jacob. Meanwhile, Laura s mom wakes up, and notices two boys with flashlights creeping through the living room. Pretty soon they reach the kitchen, open the dishwasher, spy a suspicious-looking bowl, and decide that they have found the mystery a clean bowl! Or, at least that s the story that I pieced together based on what a 4-year-old and the grandma he awakened told me. We were on our first family trip to the Fresno, California area, to visit Laura s parents Jacob and Oliver s new grandparents. They ve played together before, but as this was our first visit to their place, there was quite the excitement. The boys had flown before, but it was several years ago and neither of them remember it well, so they were excited about that, too. The night before, Jacob woke up to tell me Dad, I am too excited to sleep. I think I will go downstairs and watch some TV. He didn t get too far with that plan. But he was excited. We went through security at the laid-back Wichita airport (where the TSA agents smile and there are often no security lines at all). We found our gate with enough time to grab lunch, which we did. The boys and I then did what we often do to kill time: explore. We explored the terminal, watching carpet-layers cut out carpet for the jetway, watching the construction of the new Terminal 3 out the window. And, of course, watching airplanes take off and land from the terminal s large windows. Finally it was our turn to board, and we all got on the plane: Jacob and Oliver with their backpacks of on-board activites, Laura and me with the rest of our carryon luggage, for the short trip to Denver. Jacob and Oliver s noses were pressed against the windows. Or, well, Jacob s was. Oliver s window was a little too high for him, but he was thrilled anyhow. They delighted in the airplane snacks, and the fact that they were allowed to drink pop on the plane. We packed books and some new art supplies for them (colored post-its, pages from a train-themed page-a-day calendar, a notebook, and a set of colored pens really seemed to do the trick.) We had a choice of 35 minutes or 4 hours between flights in Denver, and I had chosen 4 hours, thinking that would be a lot less stressful with boys. And it was. We found a nice corner of the mezzanine to sit for awhile they did art projects and played a game with Laura. Then I took them exploring Denver. We rode the moving sidewalks up and down the terminal, took a train ride to another terminal and back, ate supper all together, and flew to Fresno. We had stopped in the Wichita airport to buy them each a souvenir airplane, and these came out often during the rest of the trip. They enjoyed the mockups of the sequoias in Fresno Yosemite International Airport, enjoyed their beds and their room at the house, and did actually manage to fall asleep eventually. We had a few days there, where they played in a park, with bubbles on the patio, or croquet in the yard (I even discovered Jacob happily using the cast his broken arm is in as a hammer to pound the hoops into the ground!) There are a lot of miniatures in the house, and the boys enjoyed exploring the dollhouses and especially the N-gauge model train. Jacob enjoyed it so much he asked me to record a video of him playing with the trains. Evenings often brought book-reading, from the many children s books in the house. At home, Laura and I and both boys often scrunch onto an oversized chair and read a book and sing a song (one I make up on whatever topic they choose). Over there, we often had Laura, Jacob, Oliver, Laura s mom, and me scrunched up somewhere while the boys heard a story read to them by their grandma. That happened plenty of times other than bedtime, too. (Or Jacob would take his favorite books and read them to himself.) Laura s parents organized a reception Sunday for us, for the people from that area that couldn t make it to our wedding. Jacob and Oliver, predictably, had fun playing and even talked to some of the adults. The adults that didn t ask Jacob about his cast, anyhow (he dislikes talking about it). The boys discovered a live mic at the church where the reception was, and do I detect two future pastors in our midst? We had a great time at Laura s uncle and aunt s place. The boys were happy to discover an orange tree in their backyard, a tetherball post not far away, and an uncle ready to give them a demonstration of a swimming pool vacuum cleaner or sit at the piano with them. Jacob s favorite part, though, was when the hamburger buns his great uncle were toasting were left on the grill during the prayer before the meal, got a bit scorched, and the uncle remarked with a chuckle that I guess the Lord was tired of listening to me drone on! Jacob loved his meal, and cackled at the thought of a prayer causing buns to get scorched. But their highlight was the visit to the sequoias at Kings Canyon National Park the next day. The excitement had been building for that day all weekend. On the way out, we stopped at a fruit stand and bought some delicious strawberries the fresh, juicy, sweet and tasty kind that are red all the way through. We continued up through the foothills, stopping periodically to get out and stretch, look at the sights, take some photos, or borrow grandpa s binoculars. I knew we d be traveling in two cars, so I had the thought to pack some 2-way radios before we left. I gave one to the boys and one to the grandparents. All weekend long, whenever the six of us went somewhere, the boys (and especially Jacob) would give directions to the car that was following. Turn right! The light is green! Catch up, you re going too slow! So all the way into the mountains, Jacob would send back instructions on what to do. We saw Grant Grove, home to the worlds third-largest tree (267ft/81m tall and 3000 years old). It s quite the impressive tree the trunk s diameter near the ground is 29ft or almost 9m. As we walked the trails, their speed kept increasing as they were hunting for the tree tunnel I had told them about a tree that fell centuries ago and had been hollowed out to make a home. That trunk was easily 8ft or more in diameter, and I could stand up completely in places. We found it, to much delight from the boys So this is what it s like to be inside a tree! Our trip home brought a delay in Denver and a missed flight, which excited the boys when I told them now we get to eat supper in the airport! I wonder how long that tactic will work But Jacob was also excited because the plane we were put on in the end was bigger than the one we were scheduled on, so that was another piece of excitement. We got home, and I carried two sleeping boys in from the car, upstairs, tucked them in, pulled off their shoes, and put their favorite stuffed animals in their arms. They were happy to be home, and with memories to treasure for a long time.

Wow, I cannot believe it has already been 2 weeks from MiniDebConf Barcelona.
It has been the first Debian event (and free software conference) that I have attended in person, and I took the opportunity to get more involved, giving a talk about translations together with Francesca Ciceri, and two lightning talks about two free software projects that I use and love and I d like to see them packaged for Debian: Pump.io and GNU MediaGoblin (videos coming soon). I also somehow-promoted Keysigning during the conference (well, in fact, I just sent some two emails to the mailing list before, and printed stickers with May I sign your key? slogan so we could keysign easily in the freetime between talks). The people I ve met some people in person, who I was following in the Debian mailing lists and identi.ca for long time (years, in some cases \o/). It has been amazing to meet Francesca Ciceri and Enrico Zini, since their blogposts and vision about Debian diversity skills have influenced very much in my involvement in Debian. It has been very important to me to be able to say THANK YOU to Tiago from the Debian video team (sorry Holger, I couldn t manage to meet you face to face), because I have learned so many things watching videos from Debconfs! Videos helped me to feel that I m part of the community, even when I cannot attend to the events, by following the streaming and being able to recognize the faces of the people and the work they do in Debian. I ve met many Debian Women, of course. I m so fan of all of them! I m enjoying a welcoming and diverse community thanks to many of them that worked since many years ago to make Debian what it is now, and faced bitter moments too. I cannot say that I engaged in many deep conversations (well, maybe some 2 or 3, and me mostly listening), but the most important thing that I keep from them was simply being there , watching and listening, enjoying the voices of the experience like Ana and Miriam, and the freshness and joy of Tassia, Solveig and Elena, for example. I ve tried to be welcoming too, I m not a newbie anymore as new people come to the group :) New projects (and renewing forces for other) Debian contributors I wanted to get more involved in the Debian contributors project and it has been a perfect opportunity to understand better all what I had read and watched about it before going to Barcelona. My plan is, apart of doing promotion as with all the projects that I use and love, to try to get translator work credited via Debian Contributors. That means to hack the l10n bot that now gathers info from the mailing lists to build the coordination pages for translators. It shouldn t be difficult to make it send that info to contributors.debian.org site, but I ll try to understand how it works and propose an elegant patch. No idea about Perl, btw, but anyway, it s a good excuse to start learning. Mediagoblin and pump.io packaging I m not sure I can help on this, but I ll keep an eye in the evolution of the Debian packaging of GNU MediaGoblin and the Pumpiverse software. I ll give moral support, at least, to the people actually working on that :) Website and Publicity team After Solveig s talk about bug triaging I ve been thinking about some bugs that I reviewed in the Website and Publicity team, and I think I should make a new round on the pending bugs to close them if they don t apply anymore, or to try to push a bit more towards a solution, if I can. Tails website translation Tails is a Debian derivative preconfigured to work out-of-the-box with privacy and anonymity features, since uses the Tor network for all the outgoing and ingoing connections.
Solveig proposed me to join the Spanish translators team at Tails. I just joined the translators mailing list, in order to help translating the Tails website into Spanish (the software is already translated, under the Tor Project). This is a new challenge from the translation point of view, since they work with PO files. And now, what? Well, first, I ll try to clean a bit my TODO list, mainly about translations, and other things not related to Debian. From now on until summer, I ll keep an eye and a hand on all the projects in which I am involved, and also I ll try to keep on engaging with the community via pump.io, the mailing lists, and IRC channels. Next summer, if I can put in order my GPG keys (long story), I ll try to join the Debian New Member process. If not, I ll try to get new keys and some signs, and then I ll apply. OTOH, thanks to the end of Windows XP support, it seems that some people are willing to migrate to any GNU/Linux distribution, and of course I m recommending Debian. Expect some blog posts about these migrations (wow, I should migrate some servers that still run Squeeze too ) and my new role of Debian help desk at job, if finally some people decide to migrate. I have gathered Debian stickers to proudly give to anyone that installs Debian in their computer!
Filed under: Events, My experiences and opinion, Videos Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, English, Free Software, libre software, MediaGoblin, Moving into free software, pump.io, translations

First of all, let me say this: Barcelona MiniDebconf was awesome. So the most important part of this post is a very big thank you to the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors and attendees. Now, down to business. Day 0 Day 0 was a day of travelling, more or less: the Italian Cabal (me, Enrico, Elena and Diego) left in the early morning from Varese (where we had an epic Munchkin Apocalypse game the night before), and we travelled by car across Liguria and France and finally reached Barcelona in the evening. (Boring! Even more if you don't drive. I hate long trips by car) We reached Barcelona in time for the pre-registration event at Falstaff Bar, eat a great Falafel and hugged lots of people. Day 1 To me the highlight of Day 1 was to finally meet in person Laura Arjona, Spanish translator, publicity volunteer, pump.io and mediagoblin contributor. We had decided to have a workshop together about translations and we spent the morning more or less tweaking our presentation and chatting :). So, save for Elena's talk on 3d printing in Debian ("The Universal OS: now making tabletop games and cookie cutters!" -- which was great!) I missed all the talks in the morning. But thanks to the always amazing videoteam, I'll be able to watch them later, when the recordings will be published :). For me, the best talk of the day - well, no, actually of the conference! - was that afternoon: Ana Isabel Carvalho told us about the Libre Graphics Magazine project. Libre Graphics Magazine is a well written and designed magazine at the crossroad between Free Software tools and ideals and graphic arts and design. A crossroad not very much frequented, I'd say. But then, maybe I'm wrong: it's not that graphic artists don't use Free Software tools, it's more like the one who do are invisible.

This is one purpose of a Libre Graphics Magazine: to serve as a catalyst for discussion, to build a home for the users of Libre Graphics software, standards and methods. In such a magazine, we may unite all our previously disparate successes, all the successes which have, until now, stood alone as small examples, disjointed from the larger community. We have the opportunity to elevate the discourse around Libre Graphics as a professionally viable option, to raise previously unmentioned issues and to push forward the conception of just what Libre Graphics can produce.

If you are even only vagued interested in typefaces, fonts, design and graphic art take a look at the magazine: it's CC-BY-SA licensed and you can download it for free, or buy a paper copy (which is amazing, really!). And it's not just about graphic arts: if you skim over the titles of the issues, you can find that they've talked about things like "Localisation/Internationalization", "Use Cases and Affordances" and, my favourite, "Gendering F/LOSS". On a similar topic, Siri's talk about "Why aren't more designers using Debian or working for Debian?" tried to shed a light on the difficult relationship between Free Software tools and graphic artists. These are the voices we need to listen to if we want to bring more graphic artists to Debian, and $deity knows that Debian needs them a lot :). After Solveig's talk about bug triaging and Miriam's one on packaging, it was time for the l10n workshop. I think it went well: we tried to briefly explain the translation workflow in Debian, and to translate together with the audience a po-debconf message. It wasn't maybe enough to complete and submit a translation, but hopefully it gave the audience an idea about how to do it. The day ended with a party for Debian Women 10th anniversary. And the cake wasn't a lie, beside being very good. Day 2 This, I'll remember as "the day I exited my comfort zone". Ok, I'm making a bit of fuss about it, but it was my first talk in English all alone. I spoke about the non-uploading DD process and how to keep your (and others') sanity in a big community project (slides here). I think it's very important to remind people that not all DDs are coding persons. And you don't need to be a developer to love Debian, contribute to it and become an official member of the project. But writing this presentation was for me also the occasion to take stock of my experience in Debian so far: in that talk slipped many of my demons, as impostor syndrome or overcommitment. But all the things I said are more or less, common sense - nothing new! - and lesson learned on the road: it's been now 2 years as DD and 4 as contributor. I'm pretty sure it's thanks to the special conditions of this conference (only speakers identifying themselves as female, a safe and very friendly environment) that I had the courage to give a talk. So the conference was a complete success on that regard, too. In the afternoon I was able to do one of the things I love: videoteam duty. Though I convinced Riccio to switch roles and to give me the camera: my experience in directing during last DebConf left me a bit scarred. Special mention for Laura speaking of pump.io and MediaGoblin and Solveig of Tails during the "Lightning Talks" and the people from LelaCoders during the "Bits from Local Communities" session. The Day(s) after: a Debian Contributors hackathon In my experience a measure of a conference's success is the burst of activity in pet projects just afterwards. In this, also, Barcelona MiniConf was a success: during the weekend, Enrico, Laura and I had the chance to talk together about Debian Contributors and make some plans.
So, as soon as we got in Italy again, I took possession of Enrico's couch for a couple of days and we did a little bit of hacking on Contributors. For my part, I mostly worked in trying to add more data sources to the site: my (not so) secret agenda is to map most of the non-coding contributions. That basically means: translators, publicity editors, event organizers and volunteers, etc. Being in the same room as Enrico, gave me the chance to ask him how to add data sources and to test the existing code (we spot a little problem in the prototype for svn repository mining he made a while ago). At the end of the hackathon, I had managed to:

• add the debconfsubs project to the data sources
• add bits.debian.org to the data sources
• add publicity svn repo to the data sources
• clean up the wiki todo list
• ask penta debconf admins about adding debconf volunteers to contributors

Please note that if you have contributed to one of the repo above and you are not listed there, it means that the automatic recognition of your email address didn't work. We still need to implement a manual interface for the recognition of email addresses: patches are very much welcome! Meanwhile Enrico:

• Implemented showing the log of all changes involving a person in the personal page
• Implemented visibility settings in the personal page
• Redone data aggregation, so that it can be computed after each setting change and after each data submission
• Implemented editing one's own display name
• Autofill people's display names from Debian and Alioth user full name information
• Read Debian and Alioth email forwarding fields to auto-associate more contributions to people
• Show activity of teams, not only of people
• Main contributors.debian.org page only shows the last year, with pagination for the previous ones
• Added some statistics to the Site status page
• New version of dc-tool, with fixed svn data source and quiet operation by default
• Auto-associate OpenPGP key fingerprints using Debian's LDAP
• Drafted about/privacy page

If you care about recognition of diverse contributions in Debian, help us: read the project todo list and subscribe to the low traffic mailing list or browse the project Git repository.

Continuing with my tendency to vent about stuff, today I want to talk about telephony. Since a few years ago, I need to use different VoIP providers to keep in touch with friends and family, in different parts of the world. So, I have a DID in Argentina (bought trough the excellent DIDWW), and another one in Ireland (which came for free when I was using BlueFace for call termination). I also have a service to handle outbound calls (FlowRoute), but it is not necessarily the only one I use, as cost and quality of Internet calls vary wildly. I have also used several Betamax providers, the aforementioned BlueFace, tried Netelip, etc. This results in having soft-phones installed in my mobile devices and laptop, and a hardware SIP phone that I carry around; all of them having configurations for at least 3 different providers. This does not lead to hilarity. In light of this, it's been a long time since I want to set up my own SIP router to be able to handle all of this, and be able to register to a single SIP proxy that will handle all the complexity. Last Friday, the Irish DID decided to stop working. It turns out, that since I don't have my own setup, I was using that provider as a kind of hub, with their provided voicemail, and terminating the Argentinian DID there. So the damage was big. This made me spend way too many hours during the weekend trying to set up some SIP solution. And I am not pleased.

Asterisk First, I went with the old and known Asterisk. The default installation in Debian puts 95 configuration files in /etc/asterisk, which you are supposed to review and adjust. Yes, you've read correctly: ninety-five different configuration files. None of them having anything close to a sensible explanation of their syntax or function. Also, not a remote hint of consistency. I could not find any configuration helper in the Debian archive, just hundreds of PHP-based projects scattered around the web. All the started guides I've found only guided you for the most basic tasks, but did not give you a way to have a functioning system. Needless to say, after a short time I grew tired of this, and decided to try something else.

Way too many options After this, I have spent an inordinate amount of hours, just trying to comprehend the difference between the gazillion different VoIP systems out there, I am still struggling to see that. Even if I understand that X is not a PBX, I don't exactly need a PBX, and most products deliver at least some of the features I need. It seems none of them makes a good job of just explaining what you can or can't do with their software. Documentation is awful in all the projects I researched. When it is there at all, it is incomplete, maybe super detailed at points, but in most cases, there is just no big picture view of the system to just start understanding how things work, and how to find your way. Sadly, not even the distros seems to be able to put a list of "recommended VoIP software for different needs".

Yate Finally, I've found YATE (Yet Another Telephony Engine). It seemed promising: not too bloated, fairly extensible, and scriptable in a few languages! Sadly, after many hours, it turned out to be a fiasco. The documentation seems decent, until you realise there are many key details left out. Basic information about how a call is handled cannot be found anywhere. Using the scripting power, I was able to find out at least the variables that were available, but that was not enough. I found a mailing list (with the worst archive reader I've seen in ages), where people made the very same questions I have, and nobody has replied. In years. So here I am, stuck with not being able to tell if a call is coming from a random host on the internet, or one of my DIDs, or one of the authenticated clients. I guess I will have to start from scratch with Yet Another (Another) Telephony Engine.

Zoe slept really well last night, and had a good breakfast of porridge this morning. We biked to Kindergarten for the first time in ages, as it wasn't raining. Drop off went nice and smoothly. I can't believe this is the last week of term 1 already. Today was an exceptional day, because Sarah had the day off, and picked up Zoe from Kindergarten instead of me. As tonight Zoe is with her, I got about 3 extra hours up my sleeve. The house was a bit of a mess, I decided to switch today with my Wednesday "clean the house day" and use the extra time to do a more thorough clean. Part way through that, an acquaintance, who recently separated from his wife, dropped by for a chat. We ended up chatting for about 3 hours, so I dialed back my cleaning to something more standard. My business debit card arrived in the mail today. It was exciting to see something with my name and my company name on it. I've scheduled a bank transfer to fund my business with the first loan I'll be making to it, so it'll have some cash as of the start of second quarter. All I need now is the cheque book to arrive, and I can go pay the patent lawyer a visit. I had contemplated going for a run tonight before my yoga class, but I ended up faffing around with trying to fix the song order on the USB stick that has all of Zoe's music on it. The new head unit isn't playing one album in the right order, and it's phenomenally annoying. To this end, I discovered fatsort, which is a godsend. Yoga was in the new studio tonight for the first time. I'm really happy that my teacher is growing her business. The new studio is even closer to home than the old one, which is lovely.

Review: Sundiver, by David Brin

Series:	Uplift #1
Publisher:	Bantam
Copyright:	February 1980
Printing:	September 1995
ISBN:	0-553-26982-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	340

Sundiver is the first book of Brin's Uplift series, which I think it's fair to say are the books that made his reputation as an author. It's less well-known than the later sequels Startide Rising and The Uplift War for reasons that I'll get into in a moment. This was a re-read; I've read the first Uplift series before (and Startide Rising separately before that), but not in many years, and I wanted to re-read them and review them. I haven't finished doing that yet, several months after I re-read Sundiver, largely because this book wasn't as enjoyable as I remembered. The Uplift series is set in a heavily populated galaxy with a multitude of alien races. It follows the SF alien life pattern where the galaxy was well-populated and fully developed long before humans discovered it. The Earth is a relatively obscure backwater, and humans are expected to adopt to and follow the rules and restrictions that the other races had long-since established. This primarily means a complex and very formal system of caste and patronage: species brought to sapience by the technology of their patrons are expected to serve their patron races for millennia, and one's status in the galaxy is determined by the length of those patronage chains and the number of species one has fostered in turn. As is typical for stories of this sort, humans break the rules in unexpected ways. They have no known patrons, having apparently evolved sapience entirely on their own (although the galactic races are quite dubious of this theory). And they have uplifted two species to sapience (chimpanzees and dolphins) before their discovery by the rest of galactic civilization, although in fairly primitive ways and not properly by galactic standards. Set against this background, Sundiver is a science fiction puzzle story of a fairly old style. The protagonist, Jacob Demwa, is a scientific investigator who retired after a tragedy that killed his love. He's recruited out of that retirement and into this plot by an alien who is sympathetic to humans. A human exploration mission into the chromosphere of the Sun, treated as ridiculous by most of the galactics since the shared Library Institute certainly contains more information about stars than human technology could possibly uncover, has found strange and apparently sapient creatures living there: flocks of cattle-like creatures that are apparently being herded. There is no reference to such star-dwellers in the Library, which raises the possibility that humans have discovered something novel. That would be quite a coup against the galactics. But after the destruction of one of the solar exploration ships, it starts looking like these creatures are hostile. Jacob reminded me of a mix between a Larry Niven short story protagonist, working through the practical impact of a physics puzzle, and Isaac Asimov's Elijah Baley. What exactly is going on, both scientifically and politically, remains unclear for nearly the entire book. Both Jacob and the reader are constantly forming and then discarding hypotheses as events overtake them. The stakes are more interesting than a lot of science fiction novels: rather than survival or war, the stakes are prestige, influence, and status, with subtle but possibly vital effects on what position humans will take among the other species of the galaxy. All this sounds promising, and is why I remembered this book fondly. Unfortunately, re-reading it was a disappointing experience on several fronts. First, the characterization varies between trite and stereotyped. The aliens suffer from the standard alien characterization problem: each of them is an exemplar of their species, and all of the aliens feel like archetypes. While there are some twists in the inter-alien politics, one never gets a sense of the aliens as varied and complex societies in their own right. The humans are more varied, but that primarily means varieties of irritating. The worst is Peter LaRoque, a journalist who is set up as a villain of the story, and who is such an unremitting and over-the-top stereotype of everything possibly bad about journalists (and French people) that every scene containing him felt like someone scraping fingernails on a chalkboard. The other characters are a bit better, but not by much. Jacob himself has a bizarre, semi-mystical psychological problem from trauma that seems to give his amoral subconscious a life of its own. Brin appears to be setting this up to have major plot significance, but it never made any sense to me, didn't matter much in the end, and seems to mostly be an excuse for Jacob's hypercompetence. Sundiver's treatment of female characters also annoyed me enough to be worth a mention. The primary female character, Helene, is clearly intended to be a strong character with her own agency (she's both station commander and a starship captain), and Brin makes a lot of the humans switching to different words than male and female as a sign of a more egalitarian future. But this all feels skin-deep. The inevitable romance is all about Helene's attractiveness and ability to listen to Jacob, her logic is described as unscientific, and I got more and more annoyed by her portrayal as the book went along. She's not entirely without agency in the story, but she's much closer to a damsel in distress than the independent character Brin appeared to be trying for. It's hard to shake the feeling that she's being persistently belittled by the story. But this is a scientific puzzle story more than a mystery; characterization would be nice, but isn't strictly required. On re-read, the part of Sundiver that annoyed me the most was how much of a letdown the plot resolution was. I'm going to avoid any specific spoilers here, but I found the ending of both quite disappointing and a sign of the major problem with this series as a whole. The setup over-promises and Brin fails to deliver, a pattern that will repeat itself in this series. We get tantalizing hints of a new solar species, of revelations about the past of humanity, of deep galactic politics, and of vast knowledge contained in the Library that humans don't yet have access to. We get superficial archetypes for characters, politics that seem more like the bickering of children, plot twists that persistently take the story in more mundane and less interesting directions, and a sense of wonder, or lack thereof, that feels more like a Scooby Doo story than what I expect from science fiction. Some of the plot twists are unexpected and almost add some interest to the story, but don't make enough sense in the context of the story to be satisfying. And, of course, there's an climactic action sequence involving physical combat, as is required of all good Star Trek (original series) episodes. (I was waiting for Jacob's shirt to fall off.) The problem I have always had with Brin as a writer is that his ideas are far better than his ability to write characters and plots. In the hands of a better author, the Uplift universe background has so much potential. And I think Brin is a better author a few years later; my recollection is that both Startide Rising and The Uplift War do a better job of delivering on their promises. But Sundiver is deservedly forgettable. The good ideas rarely go anywhere beyond the obvious, the characters are irritating and often don't make sense, and the story is disappointing. I can't say I'm sorry to have read it, since my memory edited it down into a much better story, but I can only recommend it as background for later, better books. Rating: 4 out of 10

Although there wasn't too many comments on my what would you pay for? post I did get some mails. I was reminded about this via Mario Langs post, which echoed a couple of private mails I received. Despite being something that I take for granted, perhaps because my hosting comes from the Bytemark, people do seem willing to pay money for DNS hosting. Which is odd. I mean you could do it very very very cheaply if you had just four virtual machines. You can get complex and be geo-fancy, and you could use anycast on a small AS, but really? You could just deploy four virtual machines0 to provide a.ns, b.ns, c.ns, d.ns, and be better than 90% of DNS hosters out there. The thing that many people mentioned was Git-backed, or Git-based DNS. Which would be trivial if you used tinydns, and no much harder if you used bind. I suspect I'm "not allowed" to do DNS-things for a while, due to my contract with Dyn, but it might be worth checking... ObRandom: Beat me to it. Register gitdns.io, or similar, and configure hooks from github to compile tinydns records. In other news I started documenting early thoughts about my caching reverse proxy, which has now got a name stockpile. I wrote some stub code using node.js, and although it was functional it soon became callback hell:

• Is this resource cachable?
• Does this thing exist in the cache already?
• Should we return the server's response to the client, archive to memcached, or do both?

Expressing the rules neatly is also a challenge. I want the server core to be simple and the configuration to be something like:

is_cachable ( vhost, source, request, backened )
 
    /**
     * If the file is static, then it is cachable.
     */
    if ( request.url.match( /\.(jpg png txt html? gif)$/i ) )  
        return true;
     
    /**
     * If there is a cookie then the answer is false.
     */
    if ( request.has_cookie? )   return false ;  
    /**
     * If the server is alive we'll now pass the remainder through it
     * if not then we'll serve from the cache.
     */
    if ( backend.alive? )  
        return false;
     
    else  
        return true;
     
 

I can see there is value in judging the cachability based on the server response, but I plan to ignore that except for "Expires:", "Etag", etc ,etc) Anyway callback hell does make me want to reexamine the existing C/C++ libraries out there. Because I think I could do better.

With the release of GNOME-Software 3.12, it s also time for another update about what is going on behind the scenes of Appstream, the project providing all the data needed to make software-centers work. So here is the long overdue update If you have attended my FOSDEM talk or seen the slides, you know about the concept of component metadata to describe (almost) all software components which make up a Linux system, as well as their public interfaces they provide for users and other software to access. This metadata specification was originally designed as part of the Listaller project for use with the 3rd-party software installer.
But we already have the Appstream specification, which describes applications available on a distribution. And technically, applications are nothing but specialized components.
When I was asked about extending the Appstream spec with fonts and codecs, I decided to give up the Listaller components concept and merge it with the Appstream project, effectively creating a single source of metadata for all software in distributions. Appstream and components were separate, because Appstream was designed just for application metadata shown in software-centers, while component-metadata was more technical and not user-visible. This separation, however, did not reflect reality. Software centers want to show things components were designed for (codecs, fonts, ), and application meta-information also can contain technical items not shown in a software-center, but useful for other functionality (e.g. for mimehandler finding). So, if you like clear naming of things (like I do), you can now think of the upcoming Appstream release 0.6 as Appstream not being a stream of application metadata, but rather metadata provided for use in applications. Extending Appstream with components has a number of benefits:
First of all, users will soon get systems which are able to automatically install missing firmware, codecs, fonts and even libraries or Python-modules. This happens in a distro-agnostic way, so any application can request installations of missing components through Appstream and PackageKit without having to care about distribution details. For distributors, you will get more information about the software upstream provides: Which public interfaces does it make available? What is the upstream s homepage? Summary? Short release-descriptions? Exposed library symbols? etc. This data was available before, of course, but we made it machine-readable and standardized now. This will also allow us to match software across distributions quickly, allowing efficient exchange of patches between distributions, and answering questions upstream has like in which distribuions is my software available, and in which version? . Tracking upstream software is also easier now. Last but not least, the metadata format gives upstreams a small say in how their software gets packaged (= how it gets split / if there is a metapackage depending on the split parts). For upstream authors, it is much easier to maintain just a few Appstream XML metafiles, instead of adding a Listaller component file as well (which was not XML). Most data for creating the metainfo files is already available, some can even be filled in automatically by the build-system. With all the advantages this new system has comes a small disadvantage: These changes broke the backwards-compatibility of the Appstream spec, so to use Appstream data in version 0.6 or higher, you need to adjust your parsers. But of course you are using a library to access the data anyway, which already does that for you GNOME-Software 3.12 has almost complete support for the new (but still not released) Appstream 0.6 spec through it s libappstream-glib library. The libappstream library in Appstream s Git branch will get 0.6 support as well very soon. The only thing you need to do is adjust your code for the new library version, which broke it s API as well due to a rewrite in C (I hope that we can provide language bindings again very soon).
Soon, there will also be a Qt library for accessing Appstream, since some people expressed a demand for it (and working with GObject in Qt C++ code always feels a litle bit odd).
The 0.6 specification is still being fine-tuned to iron out some issues which might come up and mainly to improve the documentation and adjust all tools. It will be released in 2-3 weeks, and bring not only components support, but also lots of other small improvements and additions for better description of applications/components. In some cases, tag names have changed to have less ambiguous names. Thanks to Richard Hughes for helping with the spec our discussions about the Appstream spec are highly productive and in the end lead to a better specification. Also, the new 0.6 specification includes many extensions used in GNOME-Software by default now, which makes it easier for other distributions to provide them for GS. The current draft for the Appstream 0.6 specifications can be found here. Some details might still change before the final release. As soon as the spec is final, there will be a ML announcement for distributors as well (watch the XDG distributions list), so there is enough time for distributors to future-proof their Appstream distro-data generators (I will also describe the changes more detailed then). If you are confused now about the whole components stuff: Fear not! I will do some more detailed posts in a few weeks explaining upstream projects how to provide metadata properly (after the 0.6 release). I will also finish the wiki page for Appstream AppData in KDE projects, where we can then use 0.6-style data in KDE right away.

Today was another wet day. Sarah dropped Zoe around in the morning, and she watched a little bit of TV before we drove to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class. My cycling fitness is going to go completely to hell. Zoe's really taken to her teacher, Patrick. The classes have pretty much been just Zoe and I on Friday's, with the occasional other kids, and so she's formed a pretty close relationship with her teacher. The last few weeks, Zoe's really liked to help Patrick set up and tidy up the space before and after the classes. She loves to tell Patrick about what's been going on in her life. It's really sweet to watch. Today there was another 3 year old boy, but he was much less focused than Zoe. I will miss the classes, because I've seen real self-defense value in what they've been teaching. For proper comparison, I should see tae kwon do clases as well, but currently I'd be pretty happy with what I've seen taught in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I can see the practical application of it. We're going to go watch Patrick compete in May, and I'm looking forward to seeing some adult-level stuff. Megan's Dad was looking for something to do with his kids, so I suggested we meet at Lollipops Playland & Cafe in Cannon Hill after BJJ class. We were a bit late in getting there, mostly because Zoe wanted to hang around after class for a bit, but we got there eventually, and Zoe and Megan had a great time. We stayed for lunch and the girls played a bit more. It's the first time I've used a play cafe since coming back to Australia, and I found it almost overwhelmingly loud and busy. These places must love it when it rains. It was nice that Zoe's at an age now where she can go off and play on her own. Having Megan there was a great help in that regard, but the girls did keep losing each other, although that wasn't a big problem for either of them. While we were at the play cafe, I received an email saying that the Kindergarten working bee for tomorrow had been canceled on account of the wet weather, so that's opened up our Saturday significantly. After that, we headed down to Bunkers to place the order for the bunk bed I want to get Zoe for her birthday. I'd expected with all the morning's activities, for her to pass out in the car immediately, but surprisingly she lasted the distance, and had a great time sampling all the different bunk beds at the store. Even on the way back home, it took her a little while to fall asleep, so I extended the car ride by driving around the Port of Brisbane to see how much there was to see that might be interesting for Zoe when she's awake. After that, we went to the car wash to get the car cleaned, because it's been a while. Zoe had a babyccino and we sorted through the DreamWorks cards we'd traded with Megan that morning. It was time for dinner after the car wash, so we headed home, and Zoe watched some TV while I prepared dinner. At bath time, I realised that we hadn't had time to do anything for Science Friday. Yesterday at Bunnings I bought a roll of clear tubing for the heck of it, so we made a siphon in the bath. Zoe thought the tube was great fun, and had a good time blowing bubbles in the bath with it. Tomorrow we'll have to use some bubble bath for added entertainment. Bedtime went smoothly enough.

There is a rather infamous multilingualisation bug in almost every screen reader I have ever used. As a german native speaker, I usually set my operating system user interface language to german. However, since I do a lot of technical work, I frequently end up on english websites. But if I temporarily switch my speech synthesis language to english, certain user interface elements and key names are not translated! So the screen reader continues to say "Eingabe" or "Leertaste", but with an english accent! I consider this behaviour hilarious, especially in 21st century. To demonstrate how hilarious it actually is, I have made a little browser audio game. Voice snippets have been contributed by my girlfriend. A natural voice is still a lot better than sampled speech synthesizers, and sounds more fun as we think. The idea is simple: Angela will announce a key name, and you are supposed to hit it on the keyboard as fast as possible. After a round of 50 guesses (time to answer will decrease with every guess) a final score will be announced. I usually don't write any JavaScript. I still managed to hack this up (with a little help from Simon) in roughly 2 hours of browsing Stackoverflow. The game is here. The code is on GitHub. If you have any problems getting this to work, please let me know or send a pull request. I'd like to get it working at least on iOS as well (after all, it is the touch device platform with best accessibility support currently), however, I could not get mobile safari to behave. So patches to enable use on touch devices are welcome. It should be simple, just add a few buttons which call the pressed function with the appropriate character as parameter. However, I tried, and something is fishy regarding window.setTimeout since it does not behave the same way as if you use it with Firefox. Oh, and my favourite key name is "Runt Glamour Zoo" :-) Now, this was funny. But it is also very sad. If you play this game, remember that blind and visually impaired computer users really have to cope with such accented pronounciations on a daily basis. We grew used to it, but if I take a step backward, it's really unacceptable that we still have to cope with this daily. And this is the simple part of the bug, since it is only dealing with key labels, which are internal to the system. It gets much worse if you want your screen reader to automatically switch to the correct synthesis language. Language detection is apparently not good enough to be implemented, at least that's what they tell me. And if the document (HTML) specifies a language, it's wrong in more than 50% of the cases. This is a disaster. Come to think of it, that is probably a reason why I prefer braille over speech. With braille, this problem goes away completely.

My late biological maternal grandmother ("Nana"), remarried late in her life to a long-time friend named Bryce. I was probably an early teenager. He was a nice guy, and I kept in loose contact with him after my Nana passed away. After my Nana passed away, he moved out of the retirement home he'd been living in with my Nana, and in with one of his sons. Sometime before I moved back to Australia, in ailing physical health, he moved from his son's place into Masonic Care's aged-care hostel in Sandgate. He turned 90 last year. Mentally, he's doing pretty good. Physically, he's very wobbly on his legs. He's had a few falls, which was the main catalyst for moving from his son's place to the aged-care hostel. Other than that, he's in pretty good physical health though. I remember the first time I visited him in the hostel. After I left, I wept uncontrollably. Here was a man who was literally just waiting out the rest of his life in a small cupboard of a room. I was appalled at how small the room was, and the fact that he was just sitting around waiting to die really upset me. I've visited him a few times since I've been back. I've taken him over to my parent's place when I've taken Zoe to visit them, just so he gets out. I should say that I'm sure his own family do spend some time with him, so it's not like he's spending all his time rotting in this place, but probably still a fair chunk of it. Growing old sucks. Yesterday, when the weather forecast for today was looking like it was going to be pretty wet and miserable, I decided I'd use the day to take Zoe to Underwater World (which I've since learned has rebranded it self as "Sea Life: Mooloolaba". I had the presence of mind to call up Bryce yesterday to see if he'd like to join us today. We had to pass in his general direction to get up there, so it wasn't particularly out of my way. He informed me that he was now in a wheelchair, which I thought was fine for this excursion. So this morning, after we got ourselves going, we stopped at Sandgate to pick up Bryce, and made it to Underwater World by about 10am. I was a bit leery of the drive, because from home, it was another 30 minutes on top of the drive to Wet and Wild, and 15 minutes on top of the drive to Sea World, so I wasn't sure how Zoe would take that length car trip. It turned out that she took it pretty well. She started getting a bit restless in the last 30 minutes, but it was manageable. I was a little apprehensive about how wrangling Zoe and looking after a frail 90 year old in a wheelchair was going to work out. It turned out it worked out just fine. I could leave Bryce wherever he was, if I had to chase after Zoe, and Zoe quite liked helping push the wheelchair around. Towards the end of the day, when she got tired, I could just pop her in Bryce's lap, and push the pair of them around. It was a really good outing. I have only vague memories of visiting the place in my childhood, and it's become significantly better since then. Zoe really enjoyed going through the glass tunnels under the main ocean exhibit. We did several laps of that. We were fortunate enough to catch the sting ray feeding almost immediately upon arrival, and we also saw the seal show and made the otter feeding. The place was more focused on salt water aquatic life, hence the name, but there was also some freshwater exhibits. I never thought that much of the Monterey Aquarium, much preferring the California Academy of Science's aquariums, especially in terms of drive time accessibility. If you ignore the freshwater/salt water diversity, I think Sea Life is even better than the California Academy of Sciences. We left at about 2pm, and after a lot of hunting around, tracked down the photo they took when we entered, and then drove home closer to 3pm. To my surprise, Zoe didn't fall asleep immediately, but she did fall asleep on the way back to Bryce's place. She woke up to say goodbye to him, and then we drove home, stopping off in the Valley to check my post office box along the way, and arrived back home about 15 minutes before Sarah arrived to pick her up. It ended up being a very full day. Bryce really enjoyed himself, and I felt really happy that I was able to relatively easily brighten up his day. I've resolved to try another such outing again, I just need to figure out what to do. I thought I'd try for a 10km run, but it started to rain at the 4km mark. I was also not feeling particularly confident about lasting the distance, so I decided to just turn it into a 5km run instead.

Kerberos is a great protocol for single sign-on authentication. It's supported by many protocols, allowing you to not have to enter a password to each and every one of them; instead, the protocols behind the scenes (not "just" Kerberos, but also the things that embed tickets, such as GSSAPI, or the things that embed GSSAPI, such as SASL or SPNEGO) use your ticket-granting-ticket to ask for security credentials for the service you're trying to use, magic happens, and you're authenticated. I blogged about kerberos before (even if it was ages ago); since then, I've not only used it on my own systems, but also on the systems of various customers. One thing I've learned in that time, however, is that most web application developers have a bad case of NIHilism when it comes to authentication. Most webservers that I've seen have a wide range of methods to do authentication in the webserver through various means, including things like certificate-based authentication, one-time password modules, and, yes, kerberos. Yet almost no webapp out there will look at the magic variables that those webservers set to explain we're authenticated, instead reinventing the wheel through webforms and other various stupid means. Sigh. So, that means, no kerberos authentication for webapps. Worse, if the application has no way to pass on authentication to something external, that means users will now have to learn another password: one for Kerberos, one for the webapp. And, probably, one for this other webapp, too -- because once you add one webapp, people expect you to add more of them. Well, mostly. In some cases, webapps do have ways to externalize authentication. In most cases this means "store passwords in a database", or "try authenticating against this other service here". When "this other service here" is an IMAP server, then all you need to do is make sure cleartext authentication on the IMAP server eventually ends up trying to authenticate against the Kerberos server, and you're all set. When "this other service here" is an LDAP server, however, you're out of luck. Right? It turns out that no, you're not. I recently learned that OpenLDAP can, in fact, check "simple" bind requests by checking some other service, and that this other service can be a Kerberos realm. Doing so is called "Pass-through authentication" in the OpenLDAP documentation, and this is how you do it:

• Add a "userPassword" attribute to the user who will authenticate, with a value of the form " SASL principal@KERBEROS.REALM". That is, take the user's principal name, tack " SASL " in front of it, and put that in the userPassword attribute.
• Make sure you have saslauthd installed and running, with the kerberos5 mechanism active. In Debian, that means you have to install sasl2-bin, and edit /etc/default/saslauthd, so it has the variable START set to yes (yuck), and the variable MECHANISMS set to kerberos5.
• Create a file /etc/ldap/sasl/slapd.conf, and add the following contents:

mech_list: plain
pwcheck_method: saslauthd

This directs the SASL libraries, loaded by slapd, to talk to saslauthd when trying to authenticate some SASL things - Make sure slapd has the correct permissions to access the saslauthd unix domain socket. On Debian, that means you need to add the "openldap" user to the "sasl" group:

 adduser openldap sasl 

(obviously that won't be active until the next slapd restart) And that's it; if you now try a simple bind against the LDAP directory, and enter your Kerberos password, you should be in. If it doesn't work, try running "testsaslauthd"; if that works, it means the error is in your slapd configuration. If it doesn't, then the problem is in saslauthd. Some notes:

• this is not the same thing as using Kerberos authentication for LDAP. OpenLDAP has the ability to allow SASL binds for LDAP, which is way more interesting (since it allows authentication to actually be done by Kerberos rather than by "entering a password"); instead, with this method, it is possible to verify a password for a simple bind against a Kerberos password.
• Since this can't use hashed passwords, this method is inherently insecure. Only use it if all else fails, and for the love of $DEITY, at least make sure all the network connections which are going to contain such passwords are encrypted with SSL or TLS or similar. Otherwise, everyone who can sniff anything on your network will learn all the Kerberos passwords, which is a very very bad thing.

Oh, and if you're a webapp developer: please please please make it easy for me to use an external authentication mechanism. This isn't hard; all you need is a separate page that will read the magic variables (probably REMOTE_USER if you're using apache), set a session variable or whatever, and then redirect to your normal "we've just logged in" page. ikiwiki gets this right; you can too! (for added bonus points, have some way to declare a mapping from REMOTE_USER values to internal, readable, usernames, but it's not too crucial)

I used to host my internet infrastructure at Hurricane Electric. It all started in october 1998 with POP3/SMTP, HTTP and DNS. In the coming years, I began to host all services except DNS on my own. But I kept using he.net for its DNS management interface. It was dead simple, and therefore accessible. All they had was a basic textarea with BIND alike configuration in it. I could log in to their admin interface and change my DNS records as desired. A few years ago, they auto-upgraded my account to their new shiny DNS panel, which, surprise surprise, is no longer accessible with a simple text browser. After a bit of bitching with support, they ended up downgrading my account back to the old functionality, so I was happy again. However, as you might guess, last time I needed to change a DNS record, I found that the DNS panel has been ugpraded yet again and is again no longer accessible to me. So it was time to leave the sinking ship. But I needed to find an accessible DNS hosting service. Not an easy task, given that everyone seems to do more or less the same thing these days.

Further improvements to the shared infrastructure I use for my various packages. This release adds new Autoconf macros for detecting SQLite. These use the same strategy that I used for libevent, and which I'm slowly adopting for all libraries that support pkg-config. pkg-config is tried first if available, and unless the Autoconf flags to point to particular install paths for the library are given. Autoconf then falls back on manual probing. Also in this release are all the changes to the Perl support modules for test programs and the various generic Perl tests to implement the change that I started in the last Term::ANSIColor release: using the Lancaster Consensus environment variables to control whether tests run when they don't directly test package functionality, and skipping a lot more tests for the average end user who doesn't really care if, say, the POD syntax is correct or all the supporting Perl scripts past strictness checks. You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.

I ve just been given an Armourdillo Hybrid case for the Nexus 5 [1] to review. The above pictures show the back of the case, the front of the case, the stand, and the front of the case with the screen blank. When I first photographed the case the camera focused on a reflection of the window, I include that picture for amusement and to demonstrate how reflective the phone screen is. This case is very hard, the green plastic is the soft inner layer which is still harder than the plastic in a typical gel case . The black part is polycarbonate which is very hard and also a little slippery. The case is designed with lots of bumps for grip (a little like the sole of a running shoe) so it s not likely to slip out of your hand. But the polycarbonate slides easily on plastic surfaces such as the dash of a car. It s fortunate that modern cars have lots of cup holders that can be used for holding a phone. I haven t dropped the phone since getting the new case, but I expect that the combination of a hard outer shell and a slightly softer inner shell (to cushion the impact) will protect it well. All the edges of the case extend above the screen so dropping the phone face down on a hard flat surface shouldn t cause any damage. The black part has a stand for propping the phone on it s side to watch a movie. The stand is very solid and is in the ideal position for use on soft surfaces such as a doona or pillow for watching TV in bed. Appearance This case is mostly designed to protect the phone and the bumps that are used for grip detract from the appearance IMHO. I think that the Ringke Fusion case for my Nexus 4 [2] looks much better, it s a trade-off between appearance and functionality. My main criteria for this case were good protection (better than a gel case) and small size (not one of the heavy waterproof cases). It was a bonus to get a green case for the Enlightened team in Ingress. NB Armourdillo also offers a blue case for the Resistance team in Ingress as well as other colors. MobileZap also have a number of other cases for the Nexus 5 [3].

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/k8sy7ry
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/08/13/nexus-4-ringke-fusion-case/
• [3] http://www.mobilezap.com.au/34606/google/nexus-5/covers.htm

For years, I've used a gmail account to subscribe to public mailing lists because it was convenient, it had excellent spam filtering and since the lists were already available on google-indexed public archive I felt that there was no real privacy issue.
I already have a local copy of every message in the account, in case I lose access to it for some random reason, and my real contacts already know and use my other email address(es), so I'm not really worried about continuing to use gmail for this kind of traffic.

When I started contributing to Debian I also used that email address, because I was already subscribed to a few mailing lists under it, and it was going to end up being used on the BTS and other spam-attracting public places like that, but I was less happy with the choice.

Lately, however, gmail's spam filters have started to behave oddly, with lots of false positives including a number of messages from @debian.org addresses, and this basically removes the main reason why I was using gmail in the first place, so I'm seriously considering dropping it also for publicly indicized communications.

My first step, right before leaving for Barcelona was to create a couple other email addresses, one for mailing lists and the other for debian-related work, and add them to my gpg/OpenPGP key, so that any new signature on them from the conf would also include the new UIDs.

If you've received a badly signed message (thanks heirloom mailix for mangling stuff :) ) followed by an hopefully correctly signed one where I was asking you to sign new UIDs, and you were wondering, this is the reason.

Now that the new UIDs have been signed by a few DDs I'm going to start using the new address in Debian: I believe I have changed it everywhere I needed to, except for the maintainer/uploader field for my packages, where it will change on their next uploads.

As for mailing lists, I still don't know how to proceed: I could proceed in a systematic way, but I'm lazy and I will probably just change a few main subscriptions, use the new address for new subscriptions and then migrate the rest a few at a time, unless some other event happens and I'll have to hurriedly migrate everything or risk losing important messages. Even in the latter case, I don't need any information that is only stored on google's servers, so I won't will panic just a bit :)

Now, where did I put that documentation about xmpp servers?