Search Results: "ron"

18 January 2015

Jonathan Wiltshire: Alcester BSP, day three

We have had a rather more successful weekend then I feared, as you can see from our log on the wiki page. Steve reproduced and wrote patches for several installer/bootloader bugs, and Neil and I spent significant time in a maze of twist zope packages (we have managed to provide more diagnostics on the bug, even if we couldn t resolve it). Ben and Adam have ploughed through a mixture of bugs and maintenance work. I wrongly assumed we would only be able to touch a handful of bugs, since they are now mostly quite difficult, so it was rather pleasant to recap our progress this evening and see that it s not all bad after all.
Alcester BSP, day three is a post from: jwiltshire.org.uk Flattr

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2014/51-2015/03

I have to admit that I was a bit lazy when it comes to working on RC bugs in the last weeks. here's my not-so-stellar summary:

Mark Brown: Heating the Internet of Things

Internet of Things seems to be trendy these days, people like the shiny apps for controlling things and typically there are claims that the devices will perform better than their predecessors by offloading things to the cloud but this makes some people worry that there are potential security issues and it s not always clear that internet usage is actually delivering benefits over something local. One of the more widely deployed applications is smart thermostats for central heating which is something I ve been playing with. I m using Tado, there s also at least Nest and Hive who do similar things, all relying on being connected to the internet for operation. The main thing I ve noticed has been that the temperature regulation in my flat is better, my previous thermostat allowed the temperature to vary by a couple of degrees around the target temperature in winter which got noticeable, with this the temperature generally seems to vary by a fraction of a degree at most. That does use the internet connection to get the temperature outside, though I m fairly sure that most of this is just a better algorithm (the thermostat monitors how quickly the flat heats up when heating and uses this when to turn off rather than waiting for the temperature to hit the target then seeing it rise further as the radiators cool down) and performance would still be substantially improved without it. The other thing that these systems deliver which does benefit much more from the internet connection is that it s easy to control them remotely. This in turn makes it a lot easier to do things like turn the heating off when it s not needed you can do it remotely, and you can turn the heating back on without being in the flat so that you don t need to remember to turn it off before you leave or come home to a cold building. The smarter ones do this automatically based on location detection from smartphones so you don t need to think about it. For example, when I started this post this I was sitting in a coffee shop so the heating had been turned off based on me taking my phone with me and as a result the temperature gone had down a bit. By the time I got home the flat was back up to normal temperature all without any meaningful intervention or visible difference on my part. This is particularly attractive for me given that I work from home I can t easily set a schedule to turn the heating off during the day like someone who works in an office so the heating would be on a lot of the time. Tado and Nest will to varying extents try to do this automatically, I don t know about Hive. The Tado one at least works very well, I can t speak to the others. I ve not had a bill for a full winter yet but I m fairly sure looking at the meter that between the two features I m saving a substantial amount of energy (and hence money and/or the environment depending on what you care about) and I m also seeing a more constant temperature within the flat, my guess would be that most of the saving is coming from the heating being turned off when I leave the flat. For me at least this means that having the thermostat internet connected is worthwhile.

Andreas Metzler: Another new toy

Given that snow is yet a little bit sparse for snowboarding and the weather could be improved on I have made myself a late christmas present: Torggler TS 120 Tourenrodel Spezial It is a rather sporty rodel (Torggler TS 120 Tourenrodel Spezial 2014/15, 9kg weight, with fast (non stainless) "racing rails" and 22 angle of the runners) but not a competition model. I wish I had bought this years ago. It is a lot more comfortable than a classic sled ("Davoser Schlitten"), since one is sitting in instead of on top of the sled somehow like in a hammock. Being able to steer without putting a foot into the snow has the nice side effect that the snow stays on the ground instead of ending up in my face. Obviously it is also faster which is a huge improvement even for recreational riding, since it makes the difference between riding the sledge or pulling it on flattish stretches. Strongly recommended. FWIW I ordered this via rodelfuehrer.de (they started with a guidebook of luge tracks, which translates to "Rodelf hrer"), where I would happily order again.

Chris Lamb: Adjusting a backing track with SoX

Earlier today I came across some classical sheet music that included a "playalong" CD, just like a regular recording except it omits the solo cello part. After a quick listen it became clear there were two problems: SoX, the "Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs", can easily adjust the latter, but to remedy the former it must be provided with a dimensionless "cent" unit ie. 1/100th of a semitone rather than the 442Hz and 440Hz reference frequencies. First, we calculate the cent difference with: https://d1icoid1cnixnp.cloudfront.net/yadt/blog.Image/image/original/24.jpeg Next, we rip the material from the CD: 
$ sudo apt-get install ripit flac
[..]
$ ripit --coder 2 --eject --nointeraction
[..]
And finally we adjust the tempo and pitch: 
$ apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-mp3
[..]
$ sox 01.flac 01.mp3 pitch -7.85 tempo 1.00 # (Tuning notes)
$ sox 02.flac 02.mp3 pitch -7.85 tempo 0.95 # Too fast!
$ sox 03.flac 03.mp3 pitch -7.85 tempo 1.01 # Close..
$ sox 04.flac 04.mp3 pitch -7.85 tempo 1.03 # Too slow!
(I'm converting to MP3 at the same time it'll be more convenient on my phone.)

17 January 2015

Guido G nther: krb5-auth-dialog 3.15.4

To keep up with GNOMEs schedule I've released krb5-auth-dialog 3.15.4. The changes of 3.15.1 and 3.15.4 include among updated translations, the replacement of deprecated GTK+ widgets, minor UI cleanups and bug fixes a header bar fix that makes us only use header bar buttons iff the desktop environment has them enabled: krb5-auth-dialog with header bar krb5-auth-dialog without header bar This makes krb5-auth-dialog better ingtegrated into other desktops again thanks to mclasen's awesome work. This blog is flattr enabled.

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Link Pack #03

What s that? The third edition of Link Pack of course!
Playing with Power (7 minutes, Vimeo)
A super awesome story about a stop motion animator that turned a Nintendo Power Glove into the perfect animation tool. It s a fun, inspiring video :-). I love the Power Glove, it s so bad. The Power Glove Angry Video Game Nerd Episode 14 (12 minutes, YouTube)
On the topic of the Power Glove, here s the now classic Angry Video Game Nerd video about it. James Rolfe is funny. Ship Your Enemies Glitter
A rising star in the internet business landscape. You pay them $9.99 and they send an envelope full of glitter to your worst enemy. They promise it will jump into everything, as usual. Damn you glitter. A Guide to Practical Contentment
Be happy with what you have, but understand why:
( ) if you start in this place of fixing what s wrong with you, you keep looking for what else is wrong with you, what else you need to improve. So maybe now feel like you don t have enough muscles, or six pack abs, or you think your calves don t look good, or if it s not about your body, you ll find something else. So it s this never-ending cycle for your entire life. You never reach it. If you start with a place of wanting to improve yourself and feeling stuck, even if you re constantly successful and improving, you re always looking for happiness from external sources. You don t find the happiness from within, so you look to other things.
The Comments Section For Every Video Where Someone Does A Pushup
Comments. From YouTube. Enough said.
These are dips. Not pushups. In the entire history of the world, no one has ever successfully performed a pushup. They re all just dips. STOP DRIVING WITH YOUR HIPS. IF YOU RE DOING A PUSHUP CORRECTLY, YOUR HIPS SHOULD CEASE TO EXIST. You could do 100 pushups like this and it wouldn t improve your strength at all. You re just bending your arms.
Self-Taught Chinese Street Photographer Tao Liu Has an Eye for Peculiar Moments
This Chinese photog uses his lunch break to snap interesting street photography. Funny selection by PetaPixel, his Flickr page has even more stuff. Even more in his photoblog.
From https://www.flickr.com/photos/58083590@N05/14613273495/By Liu Tao. https://www.flickr.com/photos/58083590@N05/14613273495/
Enrique Castro-Mendivil s Agua Dulce photo set
Another interesting photo link. This time it s the most popular beach in Lima, with most people coming from low income neighborhoods, it shows how fragmented the city is.
By Enrique Castro-Mendivil. http://www.castromendivilphoto.com/index.php/component/content/article/11-work/69-agua-dulceBy Enrique Castro-Mendivil. http://www.castromendivilphoto.com/index.php/component/content/article/11-work/69-agua-dulce
Also on Link Pack

16 January 2015

Rhonda D'Vine: Polygons

I stumbled upon this site thanks to Helga: Parable of the Polygons. On the site you can interactively find out how harmless choices can make a harmful world. I found it quite eye opening. And what most catched me but isn't part of the site is that only unhappy polygons are willing to move. Those who are just ok with their neighbourhood but not really happy about it aren't willing to move. Which made me try it out in my own way: Trying to create the most diverse possible environment by temporarily making as many polygons unhappy to find out if it's possible to make as many polygons happy in the long run as possible. ... which is actually part of the way I see my own life. I always sort-of tried to confront people to think. I mean, it's not that common that you see a by-the-looks male person wearing a skirt. And ... since I moved out in July into a small intermediate flat and thus a new neighbourhood, I found the confidence (in parts also to be attributed to the confidence built up at these fine feministic conferences) to walk my hometown in a skirt. Only on some few occations, when meeting up with friends, mostly at evening/night, but it was always a nice experience. And I only felt once uncomfortable to be honest, when there was a probably right-winged skinhead at the subway station. Too many other people around, so I tried to avoid eye contact, but it didn't feel good. Diversity is something that society needs. In all aspects. Also within the Debian project. I believe strongly in that there can't be much of innovation and moving forward if all people do think the same direction. That only means that potential alternative paths won't even get considered, and potentially get lost. That's one of the core parts of what makes the Free Software community lively and useful. People try different approaches, and in the end there will be adopters of what they believe is the better project. Projects pop up every now and then, others starve because of loss of interest, users not picking it up, developers spending their time on other stuff, and that's absolutely fine too. There is always something to be learned even from those situations. Speaking of diversity, there is this protest going on later today because the boss of a cafe here in Vienna considered it a good idea to kick out a lesbian couple because they kissed each other for greeting and told them that they don't have a place for their "otherness" in her traditional viennese cafe and they rather should take it to a brothel. She excused yesterday for her tone that she used, she said she should have been more relaxed as the CEO of that cafe. Which literally means that she only exused for the tone she used in her role, but not at all for the message she transported. So meh, hope there will be many people at the protest. Yes, there is some anti discrimination law around, but that only covers the workplace, and not service areas. Welcome to Austria.
On the upside, court striked down ban on same-sex couple adoption just the other day. Hopefully there is still hope for this country. :)

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Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s fifth report about Debian Long Term Support

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In December 46 work hours have been equally split among 4 paid contributors (note that Thorsten and Rapha l have actually spent more hours because they took over some hours that Holger did not do over the former months). Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation Compared to last month, the number of paid work hours has almost not increased (we are at 48 hours per month). We still have a couple of new sponsors in the pipe but with the new year they did not complete the process yet. Hopefully next month will see a noticeable increase. As usual, we are looking for more sponsors to reach our our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. Those of you who are struggling to spend money in the last quarter due to budget overrun, now is a good time to see if you want to include Debian LTS support in your 2015 budget! In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation looks similar to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 30 packages awaiting an update (3 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 56 affected packages in total. We do not manage to clear the backlog but it s not getting significantly worse either. Thanks to our sponsors

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15 January 2015

Junichi Uekawa: Opposite to strong typing.

Opposite to strong typing. Maybe weak typing is too discriminatory, we should call it typing challenged. Like: sqlite is a typing challenged language.

Lunar: 80%

Unfortunately I could not go on stage at the 31st Chaos Communication Congress to present reproducible builds in Debian alongside Mike Perry from the Tor Project and Seth Schoen from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I've tried to make it up for it, though and we have made amazing progress. Wiki reorganization What was a massive and frightening wiki page now looks really more welcoming: Screenshot of ReproducibleBuilds on Debian wiki Depending on what one is looking for, it should be much easier to find. There's now a high-level status overview given on the landing page, maintainers can learn how to make their packages reproducible, enthusiasts can more easily find what can help the project, and we have even started writing some history. .buildinfo for all packages New year's eve saw me hacking Perl to write dpkg-genbuildinfo. Similar to dpkg-genchanges, it's run by dpkg-buildpackage to produce .buildinfo control files. This is where the build environment, and hash of source and binary packages are recorded. This script, integrated with dpkg, replace the previous debhelper interim solution written by Niko Tyni. We used to fix mtimes in control.tar and data.tar using a specific addition to debhelper named dh_fixmtimes. To better support the ALWAYS_EXCLUDE environment variable and for pragramtic reasons, we moved the process in dh_builddeb. Both changes were quickly pushed to our continuous integration platform. Before, only packages using dh would create a .buildinfo and thus eventually be considered reproducible. With these modifications, many more packages had their chance and this shows: Growing amount of packages considered reproducible Yes, with our experimental toolchain we are now at more than eighty percent! That's more than 17200 source packages! srebuild Another big item on the todo-list was crossed over by Johannes Schauer. srebuild is a wrapper around sbuild:
Given a .buildinfo file, it first finds a timestamp of Debian Sid from snapshot.debian.org which contains the requested packages in their exact versions. It then runs sbuild with the right architecture as given by the .buildinfo file and the right base system to upgrade from, as given by the version of the base-files package version in the .buildinfo file. Using two hooks it will install the right package versions and verify that the installed packages are in the right version before the build starts.
Understanding problems Over 1700 packages have now been reviewed to understand why build results could not be reproduced on our experimental platform. The variations between the two builds are currently limited to time and file ordering, but this still has uncovered many problems. There are still toolchain fixes to be made (more than 180 packages for the PHP registry) which can make many packages reproducible at once, but others like C pre-processor macros will require many individual changes. debbindiff, the main tool used to understand differences, has gained support for .udeb, TrueType and OpenType fonts, PNG and PDF files. It's less likely to crash on problems with encoding or external tool. But most importantly for large package, it has been made a lot faster, thanks to Reiner Herrmann and Helmut Grohne. Helmut has also been able to spot cross-compilation issues by using debbindiff! Targeting our efforts It gives warm fuzzy feelings to hit the 80% mark, but it would be a bit irrelevant if this would not concern packages that matter. Thankfully, Holger worked on producing statistics for more specific package sets. Mattia Rizzolo has also done great work to improve the scripts generating the various pages visible on reproducible.debian.net. All essential and build-esential packages, except gcc and bash, are considered reproducible or have patches ready. After some lengthy builds, I also managed to come up with a patch to make linux build reproducibly. Miscellaneous After my initial attempt to modify r-base to remove a timestamp in R packages, Dirk Eddelbuettel discussed the issue with upstream and came up with a better patch. The latter has already been merged upstream! Dirk's solution is to allow timestamps to be set using an external environment variable. This is also how I modified FontForge to make it possible to reproduce fonts. Identifiers generated by xsltproc have also been an issue. After reviewing my initial patch, Andrew Awyer came up with a much nicer solution. Its potential performance implications need to be evaluated before submission, though. Chris West has been working on packages built with Maven amongst other things. PDF generated by GhostScript, another painful source of troubles, is being worked on by Peter De Wachter. Holger got X.509 certificates signed by the CA cartel for jenkins.debian.net and reproducible.debian.net. No more scary security messages now. Let's hope next year we will be able to get certificates through Let's Encrypt! Let's make a difference together As you can imagine with all that happened in the past weeks, the #debian-reproducible IRC channel has been a cool place to hang out. It's very energizing to get together and share contributions, exchange tips and discuss hardest points. Mandatory quote: 
* h01ger is very happy to see again and again how this is a nice
         learning circle...! i've learned a whole lot here too... in
         just 3 months... and its going on...!
Reproducible builds are not going to change anything for most of our users. They simply don't care how they get software on their computer. But they care to get the right software without having to worry about it. That's our responsibility, as developers. Enabling users to trust their software is important and a major contribution, we as Debian, can make to the wider free software movement. Once Jessie is released, we should make a collective effort to make reproducible builds an highlight of our next release.

Noah Meyerhans: Spamassassin updates

If you're running Spamassassin on Debian or Ubuntu, have you enabled automatic rule updates? If not, why not? If possible, you should enable this feature. It should be as simple as setting "CRON=1" in /etc/default/spamassassin. If you choose not to enable this feature, I'd really like to hear why. In particular, I'm thinking about changing the default behavior of the Spamassassin packages such that automatic rule updates are enabled, and I'd like to know if (and why) anybody opposes this. Spamassassin hasn't been providing rules as part of the upstream package for some time. In Debian, we include a snapshot of the ruleset from an essentially arbitrary point in time in our packages. We do this so Spamassassin will work "out of the box" on Debian systems. People who install spamassassin from source must download rules using spamassassin's updates channel. The typical way to use this service is to use cron or something similar to periodically check for rule changes via this service. This allows the anti-spam community to quickly adapt to changes in spammer tactics, and for you to actually benefit from their work by taking advantage of their newer, presumably more accurate, rules. It also allows for quick reaction to issues such as the one described in bug 738872 and 774768. If we do change the default, there are a couple of possible approaches we could take. The simplest would be to simply change the default value of the CRON variable in /etc/default/spamassassin. Perhaps a cleaner approach would be to provide a "spamassassin-autoupdates" package that would simply provide the cron job and a simple wrapper program to perform the updates. The Spamassassin package would then specify a Recommends relationship with this package, thus providing the default enabled behavior while still providing a clear and simple mechanism to disable it.

13 January 2015

Simon Josefsson: Replicant 4.2 0003 on I9300

The Replicant project released version 4.2 0003 recently. I have been using Replicant on a Samsung SIII (I9300) for around 14 months now. Since I have blogged about issues with NFC and Wifi earlier, I wanted to give a status update after upgrading to 0003. I m happy to report that my NFC issue has been resolved in 0003 (the way I suggested; reverting the patch). My issues with Wifi has been improved in 0003, with my merge request being accepted. What follows below is a standalone explanation of what works and what doesn t, as a superset of similar things discussed in my earlier blog posts. What works out of the box: Audio, Telephony, SMS, Data (GSM/3G), Back Camera, NFC. 2D Graphics is somewhat slow compared to stock ROM, but I m using it daily and can live with that so it isn t too onerus. Stability is fine, similar to other Android device I m used to. Video playback does not work (due to non-free media decoders?), which is not a serious problem for me but still likely the biggest outstanding issue except for freedom concerns. 3D graphics apparently doesn t work, and I believe it is what prevents Firefox from working properly (it crashes). I m having one annoying but strange problem with telephony: when calling one person I get scrambled audio around 75% of the time. I can still hear what the other person is saying, but can barely make anything out of it. This only happens over 3G, so my workaround when calling that person is to switch to 2G before and switch back after. I talk with plenty other people, and have never had this problem with anyone else, and it has never happened when she talks with anyone else but me. If anyone has suggestion on how to debug this, I m all ears. Important apps to get through daily life for me includes K9Mail (email), DAVDroid (for ownCloud CalDav/CardDAV), CalDav Sync Adapter (for Google Calendars), Conversations (XMPP/Jabber chat), FDroid (for apps), ownCloud (auto-uploading my photos), SMS Backup+, Xabber (different XMPP/Jabber accounts), Yubico Authenticator, MuPDF and oandbackup. A couple of other apps I find useful are AdAway (remove web ads), AndStatus, Calendar Widget, NewsBlur and ownCloud News Reader (RSS readers), Tinfoil for Facebook, Twidere (I find its UI somewhat nicer than AndStatus s), and c:geo. A number of things requires non-free components. As I discussed in my initial writeup from when I started using Replicant I don t like this, but I m accepting it temporarily. The list of issues that can be fixed by adding non-free components include the front camera, Bluetooth, GPS, and Wifi. After flashing the Replicant ROM image that I built (using the fine build instructions), I m using the following script to add the missing non-free files from Cyanogenmod. 
# Download Cyanogenmod 10.1.3 (Android 4.2-based) binaries:
# wget http://download.cyanogenmod.org/get/jenkins/42508/cm-10.1.3-i9300.zip
# echo "073a464a9f5129c490502c77374495c38a25ba790c10e27f51b43845baeba6bf  cm-10.1.3-i9300.zip"   sha256sum -c 
# unzip cm-10.1.3-i9300.zip
adb root
adb remount
adb shell mkdir /system/vendor/firmware
adb shell chmod 755 /system/vendor/firmware
# Front Camera
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/vendor/firmware/fimc_is_fw.bin /system/vendor/firmware/fimc_is_fw.bin
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/vendor/firmware/setfile.bin /system/vendor/firmware/setfile.bin
adb shell chmod 644 /system/vendor/firmware/fimc_is_fw.bin /system/vendor/firmware/setfile.bin
# Bluetooth
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/bin/bcm4334.hcd /system/vendor/firmware/
adb shell chmod 644 /system/vendor/firmware/bcm4334*.hcd
# GPS
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/bin/gpsd /system/bin/gpsd
adb shell chmod 755 /system/bin/gpsd
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/lib/hw/gps.exynos4.so /system/lib/hw/gps.exynos4.so
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/lib/libsecril-client.so /system/lib/libsecril-client.so
adb shell chmod 644 /system/lib/hw/gps.exynos4.so /system/lib/libsecril-client.so
# Wifi
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_apsta.bin_b1 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_apsta.bin_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_mfg.bin_b0 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_mfg.bin_b1 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_mfg.bin_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_p2p.bin_b0 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_p2p.bin_b1 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_p2p.bin_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_sta.bin_b0 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_sta.bin_b1 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/bcmdhd_sta.bin_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_mfg.txt /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_mfg.txt_murata /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_mfg.txt_murata_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_mfg.txt_semcosh /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt_murata /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt_murata_b2 /system/vendor/firmware/
adb push cm-10.1.3-i9300/system/etc/wifi/nvram_net.txt_semcosh /system/vendor/firmware/
I hope this helps others switch to a better phone environment!

Jonathan McDowell: Tracking a ship around the world

I moved back from the California Bay Area to Belfast a while back and for various reasons it looks like I m going to be here a while, so it made sense to have my belongings shipped over here. They haven t quite arrived yet, and I ll do another post about that process once they have, but I ve been doing various tweets prefixed with [shipping] during the process. Various people I ve spoken to (some who should know me better) thought this was happening manually. It wasn t. If you care about how it was done, read on. I d been given details of the ship carrying my container, and searching for that turned up the excellent MarineTraffic which let me see the current location of the ship. Turns out ships broadcast their location using AIS and anyone with a receiver can see the info. Very cool, and I spent some time having a look at various bits of shipping around the UK out of interest. I also found the ship s itinerary which give me some idea of where it would be calling and when. Step one was to start recording this data; it was time sensitive and I wanted to be able to see historical data. I took the easy route and set up a cron job to poll the location and itinerary on an hourly basis, and store the results. That meant I had the data over time, if my parsing turned out to miss something I could easily correct it, and that I wasn t hammering Marine Traffic while writing the parsing code. Next I wanted to parse the results, store them in a more manageable format than the HTML, and alert me when the ship docked somewhere or set off again. I ve been trying to learn more Python rather than doing my default action of turning to Perl for these things, and this seemed like a simple enough project to try out. Beautiful Soup seemed to turn up top for HTML parsing in Python, so that formed the basis. Throwing the info into a database so I could do queries felt like the right move so I used SQLite - if this had been more than a one off I d have considered looking at PostgreSQL and its GIS support. Finally Tweepy made it very easy to tweet from Python in about 4 lines of code. The whole thing weighed in at only 175 lines of code, mostly around pulling the info out of the HTML and then a little to deal with checking for state changes against the current status and the last piece of info in the database. The pieces of information I chose to store were the time of the update (i.e. when the ship sent it, not when my script ran), reported area, reported state, the position + course, reported origin, reported destination and eta. The fact this is all in a database makes it very easy to do a few queries on the data. How fast did the ship go? 
sqlite> SELECT MAX(speed) FROM status;
MAX(speed)
21.9
What areas did it report? 
sqlite> SELECT area FROM status GROUP BY area;
area
-
Atlantic North
California
Caribbean Sea
Celtic Sea
English Channel
Hudson River
Pacific North
Panama Canal
What statuses did we see? 
sqlite> SELECT status FROM status GROUP BY status;
status
At Anchor
Moored
Stopped
Underway
Underway using Engine
Finally having hourly data lets me draw a map of where the ship went. The data isn t complete, because the free AIS info depends on the ship being close enough to a receiving station. That means there were a few days in the North Atlantic without updates, for example. However there s enough to give a good idea of just how well traveled my belongings are, and it gave me an excuse to play with OpenLayers.
(Apologies if the zoom buttons aren t working for you here; I think I need to kick the CSS in some manner I haven t quite figured out yet.)

12 January 2015

Daniel Pocock: Lumicall: big steps forward, help needed

I've recently made more updates to Lumicall, the free, open source and secure alternative to Viber and Skype. Here are some of the highlights:
  • The dialing popup is now optional, so if you want to call your friends with Lumicall / SIP but they don't want to see the popup when making calls themselves, you can disable the popup on their phone.
  • The dialer popup now shows results asynchronously so you can dial more quickly
  • SIP SIMPLE messaging is now supported, Lumicall is now taking on WhatsApp
  • Various bugs in the preferences/settings have been fixed and adding SIP accounts is now easier
  • Dialing with a TURN relay is now much more reliable
  • It is now possible to redial SIP calls in the call history without seeing the nasty Android bug / popup telling you that you don't have Internet calling configured
F-Droid not updated yet F-Droid is not yet carrying the latest version. The F-Droid team may need assistance as they appear to be reviewing a lot of the third-party dependencies used by apps they distribute to make sure the full stack is 100% free software. If people want to continue having the option to get Lumicall and other free software through F-Droid instead of Google Play then helping the F-Droid community is the number one way you can help Lumicall. Other ways you can help, even without coding You don't have to be a developer to help with Lumicall. Taking on Viber, Skype and now WhatsApp as well may not sound easy. It isn't. Your help could make the difference though. Here are some of the things that need assistance:
  • Helping to get it on Wikipedia, they keep deleting the page while happily hosting pages about similar products like Sipdroid and CSipSimple
  • Helping get the latest dependencies and Lumicall version into F-Droid
  • UI design ideas
  • Web site assistance
  • Documentation and screenshots, e.g. for use with Asterisk and FreeSWITCH and various SIP proxies
  • Translation
  • Messaging: to be the default SMS app on an Android device, Lumicall would need a full messaging UI and the ability to replace all functions of the default SMS app. Can anybody identify any other free software that does this and is modular enough to share the relevant code with Lumicall?
  • ZRTP: can you help improve the ZRTP stack used by Lumicall?
Try SIP SIMPLE messaging When composing a message to a Lumicall user, the SIP address is written sip:number @sip5060.net. E.g. if the number is +442071234567 then the SIP address to use when calling or composing a message is sip:+442071234567 @sip5060.net Debian Developers should be able to interact with Lumicall users from rtc.debian.org using the SIP over WebSocket messaging. Getting the latest Lumicall It is available from:

Chris Lamb: Giant's Causeway puzzle

https://d1icoid1cnixnp.cloudfront.net/yadt/blog.Image/image/original/23.jpeg Over Christmas I found the above puzzle at my parent's house. I don't know if it has a name but it seemed apt to name it after The Giant's Causeway. The idea is that you swap and/or rotate the outer tiles until the colours at the edges match. The center tile is fixed, or at least I assume it is as the wooden edges are deliberately less rounded. Of course, solving it manually would be boring so here's a dumb brute force solution. I actually admire how inefficient and stupid it is... 
import itertools
class Tile(list):
    def __getitem__(self, x):
        return super(Tile, self).__getitem__(x % len(self))
    def rotate(self, x):
        return Tile(self[x:] + self[:x])
COLOURS = ('YELLOW', 'WHITE', 'BLACK', 'RED', 'GREEN', 'BLUE')
YELLOW, WHITE, BLACK, RED, GREEN, BLUE = range(len(COLOURS))
TILES = (
    Tile((WHITE, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, BLACK, GREEN)),
    Tile((RED, BLUE, BLACK, YELLOW, GREEN, WHITE)),
    Tile((WHITE, BLACK, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, RED)),
    Tile((WHITE, BLUE, GREEN, YELLOW, BLACK, RED)),
    Tile((GREEN, BLUE, BLACK, YELLOW, RED, WHITE)),
    Tile((RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLACK, BLUE, WHITE)),
)
CENTER = Tile((WHITE, BLACK, RED, GREEN, BLUE, YELLOW))
def pairwise(it):
    a, b = itertools.tee(it)
    next(b, None)
    return itertools.izip(a, b)
def validate(xs):
    for idx, x in enumerate(xs):
        if x[idx + 3] != CENTER[idx]:
            raise ValueError("Tile does not match center")
    for idx, (a, b) in enumerate(pairwise(xs)):
        if a[idx + 2] != b[idx + 5]:
            raise ValueError("Tile does not match previous anticlockwise tile")
    return xs
def find_solution():
    # For all possible tile permutations..
    for xs in itertools.permutations(TILES):
        # ... try all possible rotations
        for ys in itertools.product(range(len(COLOURS)), repeat=len(COLOURS)):
            try:
                return validate([x.rotate(y) for x, y in zip(xs, ys)])
            except ValueError:
                pass
    raise ValueError("Could not find a solution.")
for x in find_solution():
    print ', '.join(COLOURS[y] for y in x)
This prints (after 5 minutes!): 
$ python giants.py
GREEN, BLUE, RED, WHITE, BLACK, YELLOW
WHITE, BLUE, GREEN, YELLOW, BLACK, RED
YELLOW, GREEN, BLACK, BLUE, WHITE, RED
GREEN, WHITE, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, BLACK
RED, BLUE, BLACK, YELLOW, GREEN, WHITE
BLUE, BLACK, YELLOW, RED, WHITE, GREEN
python giants.py  269.08s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 4:29.36 total
UPDATE: Seems like this puzzle is called "Circus Seven". Now to dust off my Prolog...

11 January 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: rfoaas 0.1.1

A brand new and shiny version of rfoaas is now on CRAN. The rfoaas package provides an interface for R to the most excellent FOAAS service--which provides a modern, scalable and RESTful web service for the frequent need to tell someone to f$#@ off. There are two (internal) changes of merit in this version. First off, as FOAAS was refactored upstream, we are now forced to supply an accept: text/plain http request header. Which, sadly enough, is not something the url() function in R can do---so we brought in more cavalry and now depend on the httr package by Hadley, and use its GET() method. A second change is that we added a (simple but effective enough) regression test which simply calls all foaas entry points available throug rfoaas, and compares this to the anticipated result. To run it, you need to set an environment variable RunFOAASTests=yes as eg out Travis script does. Finally, we aligned the version number with upstream to signal that we cover all available entry points of that version. As usual, CRANberries provides a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker.

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

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Practical contentment and art

I was browsing Eric Kim s street photography blog, when I stumbled across one article about the well-known Gear Acquisition Syndrome that plagues enthusiast photographers. Gear Acquisition Syndrome is the obsession that enthusiasts tend to have for new gear, new gadgets, new stuff, as an excuse for not developing their skills or taking action. You can recognize it by phrases like: If only I had that new gear, I would be better at what I do I can t do that project until I buy this gear My super expensive camera is not good for that, I need an even more expensive one (etc). The article, How to Be Grateful For What You Have is a funny and well argued look on why photographers, or artists in general, can get lost in what they don t have, instead of what they have. The article is a recommended read in itself and delivers the point whether you are into photography or not. That said, inside the article I found three nice links worth noting: The Tiny Collective
A group of photographers that use only their phones as their camera. It s inspiring to see a specific, curated, selection of images made with phones. It definitely makes you wonder why would you need anything but a phone to make great images (answer: phones work great, even old ones). A Guide to Practical Contentment
One of the most simple and effective messages about contentment that I have read. It s not about not wanting things or settling for whatever . It s all about taking a step back and realizing that life is not about absolutes. If you are not a billionaire, that doesn t mean you have failed in life. Perhaps you are just a millionaire, and that s fine :).
( ) if you start in this place of fixing what s wrong with you, you keep looking for what else is wrong with you, what else you need to improve. So maybe now feel like you don t have enough muscles, or six pack abs, or you think your calves don t look good, or if it s not about your body, you ll find something else. So it s this never-ending cycle for your entire life. You never reach it. If you start with a place of wanting to improve yourself and feeling stuck, even if you re constantly successful and improving, you re always looking for happiness from external sources. You don t find the happiness from within, so you look to other things. If you re externally looking for happiness, it s easy to get too into food, or shopping, or partying, or overwork, to try to be happy. If instead, you can find contentment within and not need external sources of happiness, then you ll have a reliable source of happiness.
So, instead of looking at sources of external happiness, why don t you look into sources of internal happiness? It s one of the hardest things to learn how to do, but I m personally slowly getting there. It s life changing. Bonus points: quotes on simplification and minimalism
For extra credit, here are some interesting quotes on the above topics, note that as every internet quote page it might be filled with false quotes. I happen to like the one attributed to Donald Horban, who apparently doesn t exist outside quote pages in the internet. Maybe that s the biggest minimalism? Not existing?
We don t need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.
Anyway, take these with a grain of salt, and just read them as interesting phrases. Just take it easy :).

9 January 2015

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Link Pack #02

First sequel to my Link Pack series (I ll remove the quotes when it s LP#05): Link Pack #01. This time I m going for fewer articles, to try to keep things less overwhelming. There s no special theme, and I m actually leaving out some nice things I read recently. On the plus side, that means I have good material for a Link Pack #03. Also, I m gonna stick with Link Pack as a name, because it s good enough :-).
A Teenager s View on Social Media: Written by an actual teen
A well thought and realistic take on how social media is being used nowadays by teenagers. I have seen the patterns the author describes, and actually follow many of them. Does that mean I m still a teenager? It s interesting that the messaging and group-messaging part of the article is very US centric, or at least very US centric from my point of view. WhatsApp is the default messenger application south of the states, and fills the role of somewhere you can chat with people without having to give them your full personal information , that is, a place where you can chat with someone without running out of SMS and without adding them on Facebook (which would open them to stalk your whole profile and other friends). Some carriers in South Am rica offer unlimited plans for specific applications like WhatsApp. What Would Jesus Buy? (2007) Full movie
Reverend Billy Talen from the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel is trying to prevent the Shopocalypse from happening. It s an entertaining story of a group of funny guys and girls trying to share a message with comedy (that means A+ on my list). Simple and independent, a nice film. 13 Nutrition Lies That Made The World Sick And Fat
A pet peeve of mine. Nutrition is not really that complicated, but unfortunately there are a lot of myths that make people take really bad decisions. If you only read one thing in 2014 2015, read this.
Bottom Line: The low-fat, high-carb diet recommended by the mainstream nutrition organizations is a miserable failure and has been repeatedly proven to be ineffective. ( ) Bottom Line: Low-carb diets are the easiest, healthiest and most effective way to lose weight and reverse metabolic disease. It is pretty much a scientific fact at this point.
GM s hit and run: How a lawyer, mechanic, and engineer blew open the worst auto scandal in history
Cars are so complex nowadays, and dependent on electronics, that I m honestly afraid of them. I have made software for many years and I know how hard, impossible, it is to get things perfect . I can t imagine how hard it is for something so critical as brakes, steering wheels, etc. Even cameras can t get focus right some times, and it s been many many years.
Countless articles have been written about General Motors and its massive recalls earlier this year. What hasn t been fully told is how GM might have gotten away with multiple counts of consumercide were it not for the efforts of three men: a Georgia lawyer, a Mississippi mechanic, and a Florida engineer. ( ) Brooke Melton needn t have died that night. She was killed by a corporation s callous disregard for the safety of its customers, made worse by a regulatory agency reluctant to regulate.
The Long Game: Part 1 and The Long Game: Part 2
Two very short (less than 5 minutes) video essays about how notable people in the story of creativity are always celebrated without mentioning the boring years when they were nothing but losers. It s a fun little video, worth a watch for the idea and the interesting editing. It feels like someone really wanted to create these.

8 January 2015

Russell Coker: Conference Suggestions

LCA 2015 is next week so it seems like a good time to offer some suggestions for other delegates based on observations of past LCAs. There s nothing LCA specific about the advice, but everything is based on events that happened at past LCAs. Don t Oppose a Lecture Question time at the end of a lecture isn t the time to demonstrate that you oppose everything about the lecture. Discussion time between talks at a mini-conf isn t a time to demonstrate that you oppose the entire mini-conf. If you think a lecture or mini-conf is entirely wrong then you shouldn t attend. The conference organisers decide which lectures and mini-confs are worthy of inclusion and the large number of people who attend the conference are signalling their support for the judgement of the conference organisers. The people who attend the lectures and mini-confs in question want to learn about the topics in question and people who object should be silent. If someone gives a lecture about technology which appears to have a flaw then it might be OK to ask one single question about how that issue is resolved, apart from that the lecture hall is for the lecturer to describe their vision. The worst example of this was between talks at the Haecksen mini-conf last year when an elderly man tried at great length to convince me that everything about feminism is wrong. I m not sure to what degree the Haecksen mini-conf is supposed to be a feminist event, but I think it s quite obviously connected to feminism which is of course was why he wanted to pull that stunt. After he discovered that I was not going to be convinced and that I wasn t at all interested in the discussion he went to the front of the room to make a sexist joke and left. Consider Your Share of Conference Resources I ve previously written about the length of conference questions [1]. Question time after a lecture is a resource that is shared among all delegates. Consider whether you are asking more questions than the other delegates and whether the questions are adding benefit to other people. If not then send email to the speaker or talk to them after their lecture. Note that good questions can add significant value to the experience of most delegates. For example when a lecturer appears to be having difficulty in describing their ideas to the audience then good questions can make a real difference, but it takes significant skill to ask such questions. Dorm Walls Are Thin LCA is one of many conferences that is typically held at a university with dorm rooms offered for delegates. Dorm rooms tend to have thinner walls than hotel rooms so it s good to avoid needless noise at night. If one of your devices is going to make sounds at night please check the volume settings before you start it. At one LCA I was startled at about 2AM but the sound of a very loud porn video from a nearby dorm room, the volume was reduced within a few seconds, but it s difficult to get to sleep quickly after that sort of surprise. If you set an alarm then try to avoid waking other people. If you set an early alarm and then just get up then other people will get back to sleep, but pressing snooze repeatedly for several hours (as has been done in the past) is anti-social. Generally I think that an alarm should be at a low volume unless it is set for less than an hour before the first lecture in which case waking people in other dorm rooms might be doing them a favor. Phones in Lectures Do I need to write about this? Apparently I do because people keep doing it! Phones can be easily turned to vibrate mode, most people who I ve observed taking calls in LCA lectures have managed this but it s worth noting for those who don t. There are very few good reasons for actually taking a call when in a lecture. If the hospital calls to tell you that they have found a matching organ donor then it s a good reason to take the call, but I can t think of any other good example. Many LCA delegates do system administration work and get calls at all times of the day and night when servers have problems. But that isn t an excuse for having a conversation in the middle of the lecture hall while the lecture is in progress (as has been done). If you press the green button on a phone you can then walk out of the lecture hall before talking, it s expected that mobile phone calls sometimes have signal problems at the start of the call so no-one is going to be particularly surprised if it takes 10 seconds before you say hello. As an aside, I think that the requirement for not disturbing other people depends on the number of people who are there to be disturbed. In tutorials there are fewer people and the requirements for avoiding phone calls are less strict. In BoFs the requirements are less strict again. But the above is based on behaviour I ve witnessed in mini-confs and main lectures. Smoking It is the responsibility of people who consume substances to ensure that their actions don t affect others. For smokers that means smoking far enough away from lecture halls that it s possible for other delegates to attend the lecture without breathing in smoke. Don t smoke in the lecture halls or near the doorways. Also using an e-cigarette is still smoking, don t do it in a lecture hall. Photography Unwanted photography can be harassment. I don t think there s a need to ask for permission to photograp people who harass others or break the law. But photographing people who break the social agreement as to what should be done in a lecture probably isn t. At a previous LCA a man wanted to ask so many questions at a keynote lecture that he had a page of written notes (seriously), that was obviously outside the expected range of behaviour but probably didn t justify the many people who photographed him. A Final Note I don t think that LCA is in any way different from other conferences in this regard. Also I don t think that there s much that conference organisers can or should do about such things.
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