Goodbye Barnes & Noble I've read books on electronic devices for many years now; the convenience of having a huge library with me while traveling makes up for the lower quality of the presentation. I've read books on a selection of Palm devices, an old OpenInkpot compatible ereader, my phone and, most recently, on my Kobo Aura. To get reading material, I've used a variety of sources, including the venerable Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, directly from authors like Cory Doctorow and even our local Multnomah County Public Library. I like to have books in epub format; it's a published standard, based on HTML and CSS. My recent devices have all happily supported that, and it allows for editing when I feel the need to correct typos or formatting problems. Purchasing Books When I wanted to actually purchase a book, I bought from Barnes & Noble; they have a good selection, and reasonable automatic recommendations. According to their web site, since I started shopping there, I've purchased 51 books. I can't tell how much I've spent, but probably in excess of $500. Not knowing which device I'd be reading on at any one time, and liking to have the assurance of ongoing access to my library, I would always download the epub files to my laptop and then transfer them to whichever device I wanted to read on. This ensured that my books would be available even when I didn't have a network connection (as happened yesterday during a wind storm which cut the power to the DSLAM which connects me to the internet). I'd created a simple shell script which captured the file after it was downloaded on my laptop and prepared it for my reader. A bit of browser configuration and it really was as simple as clicking the 'download' button to get a book onto both my laptop and my reading device. Barnes & Noble Disables Downloading I was traveling in Bordeaux a couple of weeks ago and wanted to get the latest volume in a series I was reading. My library didn't have it available, and so I decided that it was worth a few dollars to purchase it for the flight home. After clicking through the Barnes & Noble store, I was ready to download the book so that I could transfer it to my reader. Going to 'My Library', I found my new purchases but the usual 'Download' button was missing. I was a bit surprised as I'd purchased and downloaded the previous volume just before leaving without any troubles. At first, I assumed there was some kind of region restriction on the distribution of this book. I'm familiar with that from DVD region locking of movies, and supposed that the same could be done with books for some reason. However, after setting up a VPN back to home and browsing through that (to ensure that my browser would appear with an Oregon address), the download button was still not present. The unhelpful Barnes & Noble representative that I accessed through the 'help' button disclosed that the 'download' "feature" had been disabled for "security" reasons. Not really having any alternative, I requested a refund for the new book. Barnes & Noble Loses a Customer With no way to actually use ebooks purchased through the Barnes & Noble store, I won't be spending any more money with them. I'm not sure how that helps their "security" issues, although if they lose enough customers and they close their doors, I guess that would make them about as secure as imaginable. Kobo Makes a Sale Having purchased a Kobo Aura, it had built-in access to their book store, which made it easy to download the book that I wanted. Then, I simply connected my reader to my laptop and copied the file over for safe keeping. Buying Books under Linux After I got home, I had to figure out how to get Adobe Digital Editions installed on my laptop. Fortunately, I discovered that version 2.0.1 runs fine under wine. Now, purchasing books can be done with my laptop (a vastly superior browsing experience). The .acsm file can be dragged straight from the iceweasel download menu to Adobe Digital Editions, which happily downloads the actual .epub file and makes it available for transferring to my reader. Of course, now that I've got Adobe Digital Editions working, I can also get digitally restricted books from all over the net, greatly expanding my options for purchasing (or borrowing) books. It's a bit less convenient, and requires that I run an icky Windows binary under wine, but at least I have choices, which is some consolation.

I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just sent out this announcement:

The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
installation instructions are available, including detailed
instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
of at least 5 characters!
 [1] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie >
Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
mostly in Germany and Norway.
About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
===============================
Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa , a comfortable
Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
environment.
 [2] <URL: http://www.skolelinux.org/ >
 [3] <URL: http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html >
Full release notes and manual
=============================
Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
available, see the manual translation overview[5].
 [4] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features >
 [5] <URL: http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ >
Where to get it
---------------
To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
 * ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
 * http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
 * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
===============================================================================
Installation changes
--------------------
 * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
Software updates
----------------
Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
 * Linux kernel 3.16.x
 * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
   LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
   choose one of the others see manual.)
 * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38 
 * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
 * GOsa 2.7.4
 * LTSP 5.5.4
 * CUPS print system 1.7.5
 * new boot framework: systemd
 * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07 
 * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
 * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
 * golearn 0.9
 * tuxpaint 0.9.22
 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
 * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
   installation.
 * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
   notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
 [6] <URL: http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes >
 [7] <URL: http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual >
Fixed bugs
----------
 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
   DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
   information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
 * and many others.
Documentation and translation updates
------------------------------------- 
 * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
   Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
   Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
Other changes
-------------
 * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
   server takes more time.
 * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
   doesn't work.
Regressions / known problems
----------------------------
 * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
   exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
   and Debian bug #762103).
 * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
   #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
 * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
   work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
   Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
See the status page[8] for the complete list.
 [8] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie >
How to report bugs
------------------
<URL: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs >
About Debian
============
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
operating system.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
mail to press@debian.org.
 [9] <URL: http://www.debian.org/ >

I've taught my laptop to wake up at 7:30 in the morning. When it does, it will run whatever's in my ~/bin/goodmorning script. Then, if the lid is still closed, it will go back to sleep again. So, it's a programmable alarm clock that doesn't need the laptop to be left turned on to work. But it doesn't have to make noise and wake me up (I rarely want to be woken up by an alarm; the sun coming in the window is a much nicer method). It can handle other tasks like downloading my email, before I wake up. When I'm at home and on dialup, this tends to take an hour in the morning, so it's nice to let it happen before I get up. This took some time to figure out, but it's surprisingly simple. Besides ~/bin/goodmorning, which can be any program/script, I needed just two files to configure systemd to do this. /etc/systemd/system/goodmorning.timer

[Unit]
Description=good morning
[Timer]
Unit=goodmorning.service
OnCalendar=*-*-* 7:30
WakeSystem=true
Persistent=false
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

/etc/systemd/system/goodmorning.service

[Unit]
Description=good morning
RefuseManualStart=true
RefuseManualStop=true
ConditionACPower=true
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/systemd-inhibit --what=handle-lid-switch --why=goodmorning /bin/su joey -c "/usr/bin/timeout 45m /home/joey/bin/goodmorning"

installation After installing those files, run (as root): systemctl enable goodmorning.timer; systemctl start goodmorning.timer Then, you'll also need to edit /etc/systemd/logind.conf, and set LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited=no -- this overrides the default, which is not to let systemd-inhibit block sleep on lid close. almost too easy I don't think this would be anywhere near as easy to do without systemd, logind, etc. Especially the handling of waking the system at the right time, and the behavior around lid sleep inhibiting. The WakeSystem=true relies on some hardware support for waking from sleep; my laptop supported it with no trouble but I don't know how broadly available that is. Also, notice the ConditionACPower=true, which I added once I realized I don't want the job to run if I forgot to leave the laptop plugged in overnight. Technically, it will still wake up when on battery power, but then it should go right back to sleep. Quite a lot of nice peices of systemd all working together here! xfce workaround If using xfce, xfce4-power-manager takes over handling of lid close from systemd, and currently prevents the system from going back to sleep if the lid is still closed when goodmorning finishes. Happily, there is an easy workaround; this configures xfce to not override the lid switch behavior: xfconf-query -c xfce4-power-manager -n -p /xfce4-power-manager/logind-handle-lid-switch -t bool -s true Other desktop environments may have similar issues. why not a per-user unit? It would perhaps be better to use the per-user systemd, not the system wide one. Then I could change the time the alarm runs without using root. What's prevented me from doing this is that systemd-inhibit uses policykit, and policykit prevents it from being used in this situation. It's a lot easier to run it as root and use su, than it is to reconfigure policykit.

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE, LXQt, Windows, Mac OS X, software development for the desktop, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop). Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of development with Qt on Wayland over X11/Mir; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2014 schedule might give you some inspiration. Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects)
• Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
• Short bio (with photo)
• Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

The deadline for submissions is December 7th 2014. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of January 31st-February 1st 2015 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, February 1st 2015. Please use the following website to submit your proposals: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM15 (you do not need to create a new Pentabarf account if you already have one from past years). You can also join the devroom s mailing list, which is the official communication channel for the DevRoom: desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org (subscription page for the mailing list) The Desktops DevRoom 2015 Organization Team

Probably only of interest to California residents. Time again for the general election voting. This is probably too late to be helpful for a lot of people voting permanent absentee, but may as well write this down anyway. (Hm, I apparently didn't do this in 2012.) Propositions: Proposition 1: YES. Now is one of the best times in history to borrow money for infrastructure improvements, and our water infrastructure in the state can certainly use it. Proposition 2: YES. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this, since I hate passing complex legislation like this via proposition, but this already went through the legislature. It would be dumb for the federal government, which can more easily borrow money, but given how the finances of state governments work in the US, this sort of rainy day fund is probably prudent. This one seems reasonably well-designed, and the opposition is panic about a secondary effect on how school reserves are managed that can be changed with later legislative action and which is rather unconvincing. Proposition 45: YES. I can't get very enthused about yet more bandaids on top of our completely broken health care system, but forcing insurance companies to justify rate increases results in some public pressure against profit-taking by insurance companies. Single payer is what we actually need, but this might be mildly helpful. Plus, the argument against is more incoherent nonsense. So, I'm voting yes, but I don't think it's important and I won't mind if it loses. Proposition 46: NO. There are a lot of things that we should do about preventable medical errors, starting with funding our health care system properly, testing drugs properly, and investing in proper inspections and medical licensing investigations. Drug testing doctors is not among those things. This is a well-meaning but horrible idea pushed by a victim's advocacy group that won't do anything to improve our health care system. The fear-mongering of the opponents about malpractice lawsuits is a bit much, but there are essentially no positive benefits here. Proposition 47: YES. Requires that misdemeanor crimes actually be misdemeanors, rather than giving prosecutors discretion to charge them as felonies if the person charged happens to be black-- er, I mean, if the prosecutor doesn't like them for some reason. Obviously a good idea on all fronts: stop over-charging crimes, stop giving prosecutors discretion to choose the impact of laws on particular people (since they rarely use it appropriately), and further try to decriminalize our completely worthless "war on drugs." Proposition 48: YES. I'm opposed to the Indian gaming system in general, but this proposition appears to be a rather cynical attempt to block new casino development by tribes that already have casinos. My general feeling is that if we're going to have casinos, they should generally be legal; the bizarre system where each casino is subject to public approval seems designed to create political cronyism. State offices: I'm not going to comment on the partisan offices, since no one interesting survived the primaries. Across the board, it's basically the Democratic incumbants against various Republicans. The state Republican party in California is dominated by science denialists, Randian objectivists, and people who think the solution to all problems is ensuring rich people don't pay taxes, so it takes rather a lot to get me to vote for any of them. At the moment, the Democrats are doing a reasonably good job running the state, so while I'd vote for challengers from the left against several of them, given the boring candidate slate, I'm just voting Democrat down the line. California has a system that requires voter approval for various state judicial offices. In general, I don't agree with voter approval for judges, since voters are rarely in a position to make reasonable choices about justices. Since there's a Democratic administration in power at the moment, these are probably the best judges that we're going to get (the few I've heard of are good choices), and I don't think the yes/no approval voting is useful anyway. So I'm voting to approve across the board. Superintendent of Public Instruction: Tom Torlakson. I'm not a huge fan of Torlakson, but Tuck is a Harvard MBA who ran charter schools and then a school privatization initiative. Everyone always claims that they want to reduce bureaucracy and empower teachers, but Tuck has a past track record of trying to do so by taking public education private, something that I am passionately opposed to. So Torlakson it is. Local measures: Measure B: YES. Increases the local hotel tax and uses it for local infrastructure. I'm generally in favor of raising taxes, and the amount certainly won't be significant in the ridiculous Palo Alto hotel market. The arguments against feature one of my favorite stupid right-wing talking points: the tax is unfair because it isn't earmarked to benefit the people paying it. Measure C: YES. Reasonable, small reform of the local utility tax, opposed by the Libertarian Party and "taxpayer associations" using an "all taxation is theft" argument. What's not to like? Measure D: NO. Reduces the size of the city council for no clear reason. The stated reasons are saving money (not credible given how little money is involved) and making city meetings not take as long. I'm going to need something better than that to vote for this. Local offices: Judge of the Superior Court, Office #24: Matthew S. Harris. I'm making one exception for my normal rule against voting for former prosecutors for judges because the incumbant, Diane Ritchie, is apparently a train wreck. All it takes is a quick Google search to reveal multiple news stories about strange behavior, clear conflicts of interest, and other serious problems, including a rebuke by the local bar association. Even if not all of that information is true, judges should be above reproach, or at least farther above reproach than this. Palo Alto City Council: I have an agenda here: I think housing density is about the best thing that the local community could support. Housing density enables better mass transit options, makes housing more affordable and brings more housing under possible rent control, and simply makes more sense given the cost of housing in the area. A lot of the city council members run on low-density or anti-growth platforms; I vote against those and for people who support development. And, of course, I'll filter out candidates who believe stupid things, like claiming a minimum wage is un-American (Seelam-Sea Reddy). The best seem to be Greg Scharff, A.C. Johnston, Nancy Shepherd, Cory Wolbach, and Wayne Douglass. Palo Alto Unified School District: The Democratic party has endorsed four out of the five candidates, so it probably doesn't matter too much. Gina Dalma and Ken Dauber sound like the best of the candidates to me, so I will probably vote for them. Santa Clara Valley Water District #7: I voted for Brian Schmidt last time, and I don't see a reason to change my mind. His opponent is a Silicon Valley millionaire who is spending a surprisingly large amount of money on this race and is involved with a business that sells software to water boards, which raises some eyebrows.

I have just made an eleventh hour upload of tuxpaint, tuxpaint-config and tuxpaint-stamps. With luck, this will make it in time for the Nov. 5 Jessie freeze deadline so it goes in as an unassisted migration. Coming soon to a mirror near you!

Even though the Wikipedia defines gamer as someone who partakes in interactive gaming, such as (predominantly) video games or board games , this doesn t really gets close to that term means socially at the moment. Going back to Wikipedia, we find that the video game subculture is a form of new media subculture that has been influenced by video games , so it might be quite accurate to define gamers as members of that subculture. You will find that most of the uses of the term gamer in the social networks and in the blogosphere refer to that. Please notice that, even though it is quite likely that most of the gamers play video games, the other way round does not need to be true and, in fact, it isn t. Not everyone who plays video games belongs to the video game subculture, shares their point of view, their values and aesthetics, or even know about it. Kind of like what happens with the word hacker . Not everyone who hacks around with a computer belongs to the hacker subculture. Mostly everyone who has access to the technology plays video games now. From babies and kids to grandparents. And people play them in every possible technological system around, not only on video game consoles or personal computers, but alse on mobile phones, tablets, web browsers. And many of those people who use different kind of technologies to play video games are not gamers. Not in the sense of belonging to the video game subculture. It is important to acknowledge that: that the video game subculture does not have the monopoly over video games or the video game developing industry anymore. As you can imagine, all this rand doesn t come from nowhere. During the last months, we have been witnessing a fight between some conservative core members of the video game subculture and people who want to bring some fresh air into the sociocultural elements of that subculture. Namely, that women shouldn t be discriminated inside it. As every time that a women raises her voice to complain about anything in the Internet, they have been subjected to insults, attacks, rape and death threats, etc. I m talking about something called #GamerGate, and even though I m not going to get into it, I will provide some URLs in case someone might be interested. Please acknowledge that not all the points of view might be represented in this list (in fact, they are not, as I won t be promoting in my blog things that I severely disagree with), so search the web for more information if you want to get that.

• Gamergate: A Scandal Erupts in the Video-Game Community
• What death threats have to do with video games
• Why #Gamergaters Piss Me The F*** Off
• Actress Felicia Day Opens Up About GamerGate Fears, Has Her Private Details Exposed Minutes Later
• Felicia Day speaks candidly about #GamerGate, immediately gets attacked
• VGS- #GamerGate: Threats of Mass Shooting and Rape for Journalistic Integrity- Interview with Brianna Wu + Jennifer Allaway
• Gamergate can t stop being about harassment
• Brianna Wu and the human cost of Gamergate: every woman I know in the industry is scared
• Rape and death threats are terrorizing female gamers. Why haven t men in tech spoken out?
• Why GamerGate Can t Continue
• The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read
• Gamergate s anti-woman agenda made clear: Actor Felicia Day threatened for speaking up
• Gloria Steinem: Gamergate is making the web especially hostile and dangerous
• #GamerGate Has Finally Made My Head Explode
• Gamergate Should Stop Lying to Journalists and Itself
• #GamerGate: the misogynist movement blighting the video games industry
• #Gamergate is really about terrorism: Why Bill Maher should be vilifying the gaming community, too
• Women Are Being Driven Offline : Feminist Anita Sarkeesian Terrorized for Critique of Video Games
• The Hashtags and Death Threats Behind #GamerGate, Gaming s Latest Controversy
• Anita Sarkeesian on GamerGate: We Have a Problem and We re Going to Fix This
• Tropes vs Women in Video Games by Anita Sarkeesian
• Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency XOXO Festival (2014)
• Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows
• What Is #GamerGate and Why Are Women Being Threatened About Video Games?
• Gamergate: Female gamers and developers threatened with rape, murder as online row rages
• Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in GamerGate Campaign
• Gamergate: when outsiders become the oppressors
• The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It s Gamergate
• On GamerGate: A letter from the editor
• Pew Research about Online Harassment
• Pew Poll: People Believe Online Gaming is the Least Welcoming Space for Women
• Pew: Gaming Is Least Welcoming Online Space For Women
• A Narrative of #GamerGate and Examination of Claims of Collusion with 4chan
• The End of Gamers
• Nobody Wins the GamerGate Civil War
• A GamerGate recognition guide
• Visual timeline of the #GamerGate events

I ve never been a gamer myself, meaning part of the subculture I mentioned. At some point I was probably closer tho the core values they had then than I am now. In any case, video games have already consolidated themselves as an important part of current culture, entertainment, education and socialization, and are definitely here to stay. That will probably mean that the percentage of gamers (members of the video game subculture) will become smaller. as the number of non-gamer video game players keeps raising.

Debian participation in Italy's CAD68 committee (The initial policy change discussed in this document is a couple of years old now, but it took about the same time to be fully implemented, and AFAIK the role Debian played in it has not been documented yet.) In October 2012 the Italian government, led at the time by Mario Monti, did something rather innovative, at least for a country that is not usually ahead of its time in the area of information technology legislation. They decided to change the main law (the "CAD", for Codice dell'Amministrazione Digitale) that regulates the acquisition of software at all levels of the public administration (PA), giving an explicit preference to the acquisition of Free Software. The new formulation of article 68 of the CAD first lists some macro criteria (e.g., TCO, adherence to open standards, security support, etc.) that public administrations in Italy shall use as ranking criteria in software-related calls for tenders. Then, and this is the most important part, the article affirms that the acquisition of proprietary software solutions is permitted only if it is impossible to choose Free Software solutions instead; or, alternatively, to choose software solutions that have already being acquired (and paid for) by the PA in the past, reusing preexisting software. The combined effect of these two provisions is that all new software acquisitions by PAs in Italy will be Free Software, unless it is motivated in writing, challengable by a judge that it was impossible to do otherwise. Isn't it great? It is, except that such a law is not necessarily easy to adhere to in practice, especially for small public administrations (e.g., municipalities of a few hundred people, not uncommon in Italy) which might have very little clue about software in general, and even less so about Free Software. This is why the government also tasked the relevant Italian agency to provide guidelines on how to choose software in a way that conforms with the new formulation of article 68. The agency decided to form a committee to work on the guidelines (because you always need a committee, right? ). To my surprise, the call for participation to be part of the committee explicitly listed representatives of Free Software communities as privileged software stakeholders that they wanted to have on the committee kudos to the agency for that. (The Italian wording on the call was: Costituir titolo di preferenza rivestire un ruolo di [ ] referenti di community del software a codice sorgente aperto.) Therefore, after various prods by fellow European Free Software activists that were aware of the ongoing change in legislation, I applied to be a volunteer CAD68 committee member, got selected, and ended up working over a period of about 6 months (March-September 2013) to help the agency writing the new software acquisition guidelines. Logistically, it hasn't been entirely trivial, as the default meeting place was in Rome, I live in Paris, and the agency didn't really have a travel budget for committee members. That's why I've sought sponsorship from Debian, offering to represent Debian views within the committee; Lucas kindly agreed to my request. So what did I do on behalf of Debian as a committee member during those months? Most of my job has been some sort of consulting on how community-driven Free Software projects like Debian work, on how the software they produce can be relied upon and contributed to, and more generally on how the PA can productively interact with such projects. In particular, I've been happy to work on the related work section of the guidelines, ensuring they point to relevant documents such as the French government guidelines on how to adopt Free Software (AKA circulaire Ayrault). I've also drafted the guidelines section on Free Software directories, ensuring that important resources such as FSF's Free Software Directory are listed as starting points for PAs that looking for software solutions for specific needs. Another part of my job has been ensuring that the guidelines do not end up betraying the principle of Free Software preference that is embodied in article 68. A majority of committee members came from a Free Software background, so that might not seem a difficult goal to accomplish. But it is important to notice that: (a) the final editor of the guidelines is the agency itself, not the committee, so having a "pro-Free Software" majority within the committee doesn't mean much per se; and (b) lobbying from the "pro-proprietary software" camp did happen, as it is entirely natural in these cases. In this respect I'm happy with the result: I do believe that the software selection process recommended by the guidelines, finally published in January 2014, upholds the Free Software preference principle of article 68. I credit both the agency and the non-ambiguity of the law (on this specific point) for that result. All in all, this has been a positive experience for me. It has reaffirmed my belief that Debian is a respected, non-partisan political actor of the wider software/ICT ecosystem. This experience has also given me a chance to be part of country-level policy-making, which has been very instructive on how and why good ideas might take a while to come into effect and influence citizen lives. Speaking of which, I'm now looking forward to the first alleged violations of article 68 in Italy, and how they will be dealt with. Abundant popcorn will certainly be needed. Links & press If you want to know more about this topic, I've collected below links to resources that have documented, in various languages, the publication of the CAD68 guidelines.

• official material:
  • announcement (it) by the agency
  • guidelines (.pdf, it)
• press releases:
  • FSFE press release (en), also covered by LWN (en)
  • April press release (fr), also in english
• press/blog coverage:
  • on Joinup (en), European Commission blog dedicated to Free Software adoption in Europe, with comments by yours truly and Carlo Piana
  • on OpenSource.com (en), popular blog for FOSS-related topics
  • by Carlo Piana (it), fellow member of the CAD68 committee, representing KDE and FSFE
  • on Punto Informatico (it), popular Italian tech blog
  • on Apogeo online (it), blog of a popular Italian publisher of IT books
  • on Agenda Digitale EU (it), blog dedicated to digital innovation in the Italian PA
  • by Simone Aliprandi (en), lawyer who followed closely the work of CAD68 committee
• interviews:
  • on My Solution (it), by yours truly
  • radio interview (it) by yours truly for Caterpillar, RAI Radio 2

You only know two things about Docker. First, it uses Linux
containers. Second, the Internet won't shut up about it. -- attributed to Solomon Hykes, Docker CEO

So what is Docker? Docker is a relatively new open source application and service, which is seeing interest across a number of areas. It uses recent Linux kernel features (containers, namespaces) to shield processes. While its use (superficially) resembles that of virtual machines, it is much more lightweight as it operates at the level of a single process (rather than an emulation of an entire OS layer). This also allows it to start almost instantly, require very little resources and hence permits an order of magnitude more deployments per host than a virtual machine. Docker offers a standard interface to creation, distribution and deployment. The shipping container analogy is apt: just how shipping containers (via their standard size and "interface") allow global trade to prosper, Docker is aiming for nothing less for deployment. A Dockerfile provides a concise, extensible, and executable description of the computational environment. Docker software then builds a Docker image from the Dockerfile. Docker images are analogous to virtual machine images, but smaller and built in discrete, extensible and reuseable layers. Images can be distributed and run on any machine that has Docker software installed---including Windows, OS X and of course Linux. Running instances are called Docker containers. A single machine can run hundreds of such containers, including multiple containers running the same image. There are many good tutorials and introductory materials on Docker on the web. The official online tutorial is a good place to start; this post can not go into more detail in order to remain short and introductory.

So what is Rocker? At its core, Rocker is a project for running R using Docker containers. We provide a collection of Dockerfiles and pre-built Docker images that can be used and extended for many purposes. Rocker is the the name of our GitHub repository contained with the Rocker-Org GitHub organization. Rocker is also the name the account under which the automated builds at Docker provide containers ready for download.

Current Rocker Status

Core Rocker Containers The Rocker project develops the following containers in the core Rocker repository

• r-base provides a base R container to build from
• r-devel provides the basic R container, as well as a complete R-devel build based on current SVN sources of R
• rstudio provides the base R container as well an RStudio Server instance

We have settled on these three core images after earlier work in repositories such as docker-debian-r and docker-ubuntu-r.

Rocker Use Case Containers Within the Rocker-org organization on GitHub, we are also working on

• Hadleyverse which extends the rstudio container with a number of Hadley packages
• rOpenSci which extends hadleyverse with a number of rOpenSci packages
• r-devel-san provides an R-devel build for "Sanitizer" run-time diagnostics via a properly instrumented version of R-devel via a recent compiler build
• rocker-versioned aims to provided containers with 'versioned' previous R releases and matching packages

Other repositories will probably be added as new needs and opportunities are identified.

Deprecation The Rocker effort supersedes and replaces earlier work by Dirk (in the docker-debian-r and docker-ubuntu-r GitHub repositories) and Carl. Please use the Rocker GitHub repo and Rocker Containers from Docker.com going forward.

Next Steps We intend to follow-up with more posts detailing usage of both the source Dockerfiles and binary containers on different platforms. Rocker containers are fully functional. We invite you to take them for a spin. Bug reports, comments, and suggestions are welcome; we suggest you use the GitHub issue tracker.

Acknowledgments We are very appreciative of all comments received by early adopters and testers. We also would like to thank RStudio for allowing us the redistribution of their RStudio Server binary. Published concurrently at rOpenSci blog and Dirk's blog.

Authors Dirk Eddelbuettel and Carl Boettiger

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

This brief announcement was released yesterday to the debian-devel-announce mailing list. Ciao! The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the Wheezy release, and have some interesting news to share for the Jessie release. Here we give you a brief update on what work has been done and work that is still ongoing. Let s see what s cooking for Jessie then. Frameworks and libraries Support for many new media formats and codecs. The codec library libavcodec, which is used by popular media playback applications including vlc, mpv, totem (using gstreamer1.0-libav), xine, and many more, has been updated to the latest upstream release version 11 provided by Libav. This provides Debian users with HEVC playback, a native Opus decoder, Matroska 3D support, Apple ProRes, and much more. Please see libav s changelog for a full list of functionality additions and updates. libebur128 libebur128 is a free implementation of the European Broadcasting Union Loudness Recommendation (EBU R128), which is essentially an alternative to ReplayGain. The library can be used to analyze audio perceived loudness and subsequentially normalize the volume during playback. libltc libltc provides functionalities to encode and decode Linear (or Longitudinal) Timecode (LTC) from/to SMPTE data timecode. libva libva and the driver for Intel GPUs has been updated to the 1.4.0 release. Support for new GPUs has been added. libva now also supports Wayland. Pure Data A number of new additional libraries (externals) will appear in Jessie, including (among others) Eric Lyon s fftease and lyonpotpourrie, Thomas Musil s iemlib, the pdstring library for string manipulation and pd-lua that allows to write Pd-objects in the popular lua scripting language. JACK and LADI LASH Audio Session Handler was abandoned upstream a long time ago in favor of the new session management system, called ladish (LADI Session Handler). ladish allows users to run many JACK applications at once and save/restore their configuration with few mouse clicks. The current status of the integration between the session handler and JACK may be summarized as follows:

• ladish provides the backend;
• laditools contains a number of useful graphical tools to tune the session management system s whole configuration (including JACK);
• gladish provides a easy-to-use graphical interface for the session handler.

Note that ladish uses the D-Bus interface to the jack daemon, therefore only Jessie s jackd2 provides support for and also cooperates fine with it. Plugins: LV2 and LADSPA Debian Jessie will bring the newest 1.10.0 version of the LV2 technology. Most changes affect the packaging of new plugins and extensions, a brief list of packaging guidelines is now available.
A number of new plugins and development tools too have been made available during the Jessie development cycle: LV2 Toolkit LVTK provides libraries that wrap the LV2 C API and extensions into easy to use C++ classes. The original work for this was mostly done by Lars Luthman in lv2-c++-tools. Vee One Suite The whole suite by Rui Nuno Capela is now available in Jessie, and consists of three components:

• drumkv1: old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer
• samplv1: polyphonic sampler
• synthv1: analog-style 4-oscillator substractive synthesizer

All three are provided in both forms of LV2 plugins and stand-alone JACK client. JACK session, JACK MIDI, and ALSA MIDI are supported too. x42-plugins and zam-plugins LV2 bundles containing many audio plugins for high quality processing. Fomp Fomp is an LV2 port of the MCP, VCO, FIL, and WAH plugins by Fons Adriaensen. Some other components have been upgraded to more recent upstream versions:

• ab2gate: 1.1.7
• calf: 0.0.19+git20140915+5de5da28
• eq10q: 2.0~beta5.1
• NASPRO: 0.5.1

We ve packaged ste-plugins, Fons Adriaensen s new stereo LADSPA plugins bundle. A major upgrade of frei0r, namely the standard collection for the minimalistic plugin API for video effects, will be available in Jessie. New multimedia applications Advene Advene (Annotate Digital Video, Exchange on the NEt) is a flexible video
annotation application. Ardour3 The new generation of the popular digital audio workstation will make its very first appearance in Debian Jessie. Cantata Qt4 front-end for the MPD daemon. Csound Csound for jessie will feature the new major series 6, with the improved IDE CsoundQT. This new csound supports improved array data type handling, multi-core rendering and debugging features. din DIN Is Noise is a musical instrument and audio synthesizer that supports JACK audio output, MIDI, OSC, and IRC bot as input sources. It could be extended and customized with Tcl scripts too. dvd-slideshow dvd-slideshow consists of a suite of command line tools which come in handy to make slideshows from collections of pictures. Documentation is provided and available in /usr/share/doc/dvd-slideshow/ . dvdwizard DVDwizard can fully automate the creation of DVD-Video filesystem. It supports graphical menus, chapters, multiple titlesets and multi-language streams. It supports both PAL and NTSC video modes too. flowblade Flowblade is a video editor like the popular KDenlive based on the MLT engine, but more lightweight and with some difference in editing concepts. forked-daapd Forked-daapd switched to a new, active upstream again dropping Grand Central Dispatch in favor of libevent. The switch fixed several bugs and made forked-daapd available on all release architectures instead of shipping only on amd64 and i386. Now nothing prevents you from setting up a music streaming (DAAP/DACP) server on your favorite home server no matter if it is based on mips, arm or x86! harvid HTTP Ardour Video Daemon decodes still images from movie files and serves them via HTTP. It provides frame-accurate decoding and is main use-case is to act as backend and second level cache for rendering the
videotimeline in Ardour. Groove Basin Groove Basin is a music player server with a web-based user interface inspired by Amarok 1.4. It runs on a server optionally connected to speakers. Guests can control the music player by connecting with a laptop, tablet, or smart phone. Further, users can stream their music libraries remotely.
It comes with a fast, responsive web interface that supports keyboard shortcuts and drag drop. It also provides the ability to upload songs, download songs, and import songs by URL, including YouTube URLs. Groove Basin supports Dynamic Mode which automatically queues random songs, favoring songs that have not been queued recently.
It automatically performs ReplayGain scanning on every song using the EBU R128 loudness standard, and automatically switches between track and album mode. Groove Basin supports the MPD protocol, which means it is compatible with MPD clients. There is also a more powerful Groove Basin protocol which you can use if the MPD protocol does not meet your needs. HandBrake HandBrake, a versatile video transcoder, is now available for Jessie. It could convert video from nearly any format to a wide range of commonly supported codecs. jack-midi-clock New jackd midiclock utility made by Robin Gareus. laborejo Laborejo, Esperanto for Workshop , is used to craft music through notation. It is a LilyPond GUI frontend, a MIDI creator and a tool collection to inspire and help music composers. mpv mpv is a movie player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. The project focuses mainly on modern systems and encourages developer activity. As such, large portions of outdated code originating from MPlayer have been removed, and many new features and improvements have been added. Note that, although there are still some similarities to its predecessors, mpv should be considered a completely different program (e.g. lacking compatibility with both mplayer and mplayer2 in terms of command-line arguments and configuration). smtube SMTube is a stand-alone graphical video browser and player, which makes YouTube s videos browsing, playing, and download such a piece of cake.
It has so many features that, we are sure, will make YouTube lovers very, very happy. sonic-visualiser Sonic Visualiser Application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files. SoundScapeRenderer SoundScapeRenderer (aka SSR) is a (rather) easy to use render engine for spatial audio, that provides a number of different rendering algorithms, ranging from binaural (headphone) playback via wave field synthesis to higher-order ambisonics. Videotrans videotrans is a set of scripts that allow its user to reformat existing movies into the VOB format that is used on DVDs. XBMC XBMC has been partially rebranded as XBMC from Debian to make it clear that it is changed to conform to Debian s Policy. The latest stable release, 13.2 Gotham will be part of Jessie making Debian a good choice for HTPC-s. zita-bls1 Binaural stereo signals converter made by Fons Adriaensen zita-mu1 Stereo monitoring organiser for jackd made by Fons Adriaensen zita-njbridge Jack clients to transmit multichannel audio over a local IP network made by Fons Adriaensen radium-compressor Radium Compressor is the system compressor of the Radium suite. It is provided in the form of stand-alone JACK application. Multimedia Tasks With Jessie we are shipping a set of multimedia related tasks.
They include package lists for doing several multimedia related tasks. If you are interested in defining new tasks, or tweaking the current, existing ones, we are very much interested in hearing from you. Upgraded applications and libraries

• Aeolus: 0.9.0
• Aliki: 0.3.0
• Ams: 2.1.1
• amsynth: 1.4.2
• Audacious: 3.5.2
• Audacity: 2.0.5
• Audio File Library: 0.3.6
• Blender: 2.72b
• Bristol: 0.60.11f
• C* Audio Plugin Suite: 0.9.23
• Cecilia: 5.0.9
• cmus: 2.5.0
• DeVeDe: 3.23.0-13-gbfd73f3
• DRC: 3.2.1
• EasyTag: 2.2.2
• ebumeter: 0.2.0
• faustworks: 0.5
• ffDiaporama: 1.5
• ffms: 2.20
• gmusicbrowser: 1.1.13
• Hydrogen: 0.9.6.1
• IDJC: 0.8.14
• jack-tools: 20131226
• LiVES: 2.2.6
• mhWaveEdit: 1.4.23
• Mixxx: 1.11.0
• mp3fs: 0.91
• MusE: 2.1.2
• Petri-Foo: 0.1.87
• PHASEX: 0.14.97
• QjackCtl: 0.3.12
• Qtractor: 0.6.3
• rtaudio: 4.1.1
• Rosegarden: 14.02
• rtmidi: 2.1.0
• SoundTouch: 1.8.0
• stk: 4.4.4
• streamtuner2: 2.1.3
• SuperCollider: 3.6.6
• Synfig Studio: 0.64.1
• TerminatorX: 3.90
• tsdecrypt: 10.0
• Vamp Plugins SDK: 2.5
• VLC: Jessie will release with the 2.2.x series of VLC
• XCFA: 4.3.8
• xwax: 1.5
• xjadeo: 0.8.0
• x264: 0.142.2431+gita5831aa
• zynaddsubfx: 2.4.3

What s not going to be in Jessie With the aim to improve the overall quality of the multimedia software available in Debian, we have dropped a number of packages which were abandoned upstream:

• beast
• flumotion
• jack-rack
• jokosher
• lv2fil (suggested replacement for users is eq10q or calf eq)
• phat
• plotmm
• specimen (suggested replacement for users is petri-foo fork of specimen)
• zynjacku (suggested replacement for users is jalv)

We ve also dropped mplayer, presently nobody seems interested in maintaining it.
The suggested replacements for users are mplayer2 or mpv. Whilst the former is mostly compatible with mplayer in terms of command-line arguments and configuration (and adds a few new features too), the latter adds a lot of new features and improvements, and it is actively maintained upstream. Please note that although the mencoder package is no longer available anymore, avconv and mpv do provide encoding functionality. For more information see avconv s manual page and documentation, and mpv s encoding documentation. Broken functionalities rtkit under systemd is broken at the moment. Activity statistics More information about team s activity are available. Where to reach us The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers AT lists.alioth.debian.org for packaging related topics, or at debian-multimedia AT lists.debian.org for user and more general discussion.
We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC. Cheers! Alessio Treglia
on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

First, read these slides. Done? Good.

(Edit: Just to clarify - these are not my slides. They're from a presentation Jerome Petazzoni gave at Linuxcon NA earlier this year)

Hypervisors present a smaller attack surface than containers. This is somewhat mitigated in containers by using seccomp, selinux and restricting capabilities in order to reduce the number of kernel entry points that untrusted code can touch, but even so there is simply a greater quantity of privileged code available to untrusted apps in a container environment when compared to a hypervisor environment[1].

Does this mean containers provide reduced security? That's an arguable point. In the event of a new kernel vulnerability, container-based deployments merely need to upgrade the kernel on the host and restart all the containers. Full VMs need to upgrade the kernel in each individual image, which takes longer and may be delayed due to the additional disruption. In the event of a flaw in some remotely accessible code running in your image, an attacker's ability to cause further damage may be restricted by the existing seccomp and capabilities configuration in a container. They may be able to escalate to a more privileged user in a full VM.

I'm not really compelled by either of these arguments. Both argue that the security of your container is improved, but in almost all cases exploiting these vulnerabilities would require that an attacker already be able to run arbitrary code in your container. Many container deployments are task-specific rather than running a full system, and in that case your attacker is already able to compromise pretty much everything within the container. The argument's stronger in the Virtual Private Server case, but there you're trading that off against losing some other security features - sure, you're deploying seccomp, but you can't use selinux inside your container, because the policy isn't per-namespace[2].

So that seems like kind of a wash - there's maybe marginal increases in practical security for certain kinds of deployment, and perhaps marginal decreases for others. We end up coming back to the attack surface, and it seems inevitable that that's always going to be larger in container environments. The question is, does it matter? If the larger attack surface still only results in one more vulnerability per thousand years, you probably don't care. The aim isn't to get containers to the same level of security as hypervisors, it's to get them close enough that the difference doesn't matter.

I don't think we're there yet. Searching the kernel for bugs triggered by Trinity shows plenty of cases where the kernel screws up from unprivileged input[3]. A sufficiently strong seccomp policy plus tight restrictions on the ability of a container to touch /proc, /sys and /dev helps a lot here, but it's not full coverage. The presentation I linked to at the top of this post suggests using the grsec patches - these will tend to mitigate several (but not all) kernel vulnerabilities, but there's tradeoffs in (a) ease of management (having to build your own kernels) and (b) performance (several of the grsec options reduce performance).

But this isn't intended as a complaint. Or, rather, it is, just not about security. I suspect containers can be made sufficiently secure that the attack surface size doesn't matter. But who's going to do that work? As mentioned, modern container deployment tools make use of a number of kernel security features. But there's been something of a dearth of contributions from the companies who sell container-based services. Meaningful work here would include things like:

• Strong auditing and aggressive fuzzing of containers under realistic configurations
  
• Support for meaningful nesting of Linux Security Modules in namespaces
  
• Introspection of container state and (more difficult) the host OS itself in order to identify compromises

These aren't easy jobs, but they're important, and I'm hoping that the lack of obvious development in areas like this is merely a symptom of the youth of the technology rather than a lack of meaningful desire to make things better. But until things improve, it's going to be far too easy to write containers off as a "convenient, cheap, secure: choose two" tradeoff. That's not a winning strategy.

[1] Companies using hypervisors! Audit your qemu setup to ensure that you're not providing more emulated hardware than necessary to your guests. If you're using KVM, ensure that you're using sVirt (either selinux or apparmor backed) in order to restrict qemu's privileges.
[2] There's apparently some support for loading per-namespace Apparmor policies, but that means that the process is no longer confined by the sVirt policy
[3] To be fair, last time I ran Trinity under Docker under a VM, it ended up killing my host. Glass houses, etc.

comments

If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate and various options for each email address. This take a while for every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative, the listadmin program. It allow you to check lists for new messages to moderate in a fraction of a second. Here is a test run on two lists I recently took over:

% time listadmin xiph
fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
real    0m1.709s
user    0m0.232s
sys     0m0.012s
%

In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin program. If you install the listadmin package from Debian and create a file ~/.listadmin.ini with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:

username username@example.org
spamlevel 23
default discard
discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
password secret
adminurl https:// domain /mailman/admindb/ list 
mailman-list@lists.example.com
password hidden
other-list@otherserver.example.org

There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to learn the details. If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:

PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin

If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your email. Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free software. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b. Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in configuration example. Also, I've been told that the PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone. Not sure why.

I know I've been very quiet here lately. That's due to a variety of reasons, but mostly because settling in to a new job is taking nearly all of my attention and time. When that's combined with getting obsessed with watching the League of Legends world championships, it means no real time for writing things. I've had lots of time for reading things, though, and have a lot of book reviews that I need to write. So, of course, I felt like buying more books. Elizabeth Bear One-Eyed Jack (sff)
Steven Brust Hawk (sff)
Kenneth T. Jackson Crabgrass Frontier (non-fiction)
Ann Leckie Ancillary Sword (sff)
Scott Lynch Republic of Thieves (sff)
Randall Munroe What If? (non-fiction)
Sarah Tolmie The Stone Boatmen (sff)
Jeffrey Toobin The Oath (non-fiction) I'm pretty excited about everything in this shipment, but particularly the new Vlad Taltos novel from Brust and the sequel to Ancillary Justice (probably the best novel that I've read so far this year). And of course there's What If?.

Migrating my diary system to some new server. I took the chance to migrate my system from CVS-based system to Git-based system. It no longer relies on a chain of CVS commit hooks, and now I have a makefile to publish. I also took the chance to rewrite my 15 year old elisp so that I can use UTF-8 instead of a mix of ISO-2022-JP and EUC-JP. Dusting off some old code. No test exists, what could go wrong!

I ve previously covered running LAVA on ARM devices, now that the packages are in Debian. I ve also covered setting up the home lab, including the difficulty in obtaining the PDU and relying on another machine to provide USB serial converters with inherent problems of needing power to keep the same devices assigned to the same ser2net ports. There have been ideas about how to improve the situation. Conferences are a prime example setting up a demo involving LAVA means bringing a range of equipment, separate power bricks, separate network switches (with power bricks), a device of some kind to connect up the USB serial converters (and power brick) and then the LAVA server (with SATA drive and power brick) that is without the actual devices and their cables and power. Each of those power cables tend to be a metre long, with networking and serial, it quickly becomes a cable spaghetti. Ideas around this also have application inside larger deployments, so the hardware would need to daisy-chain to provide services to a rack full of test devices. The objective is a single case providing network, power and serial connectivity to a number of test devices over a single power input and network uplink. Naturally, with a strong free software and open development bias, the unit will be Open Hardware running Debian, albeit with a custom Beaglebone Linux kernel. It s a Test Automation Controller, so we re using the name OpenTAC. Progress Open hardware ARM device running Debian to automate tests on 4 to 8 devices, initially aimed at LAVA support for Linaro engineers. Power distribution, serial console, network and optional GPIO extensions. The design involves:

• A Beaglebone Black (revC)
  • USB hotplug support required, certainly during development.
• Custom PCB connected as a Beaglebone Cape, designed by Andy Simpkins.
• Base board provides 4 channels:
  • 5V Power delivered over USB
  • Ethernet standard Cat5, no LEDs
  • Serial connectivity
    • RS232
    • UART
  • GPIO
• Internal gigabit network switch
• Space for a board like a CubieTruck (with SATA drive) to act as LAVA server
• Daughter board:
  • Same basic design as the base board, providing another 4 channels, equivalent to the base channels. When the daughter board is fitted, a second network switch would be added instead of the CubieTruck.
• Power consumption measurement per channel
  • queries made via the Beaglebone Black over arbitrary time periods, including during the test itself.
• The GPIO lines can be used to work around issues with development boards under test, including closing connections which may be required to get a device to reboot automatically, without manual intervention.
• Serial connections to test devices can be isolated during device power-cycles this allows for devices which pull power over the serial connection. (These are typically hardware design issues but the devices still need to be tested until the boards can be modified or replaced.)
• Thermal control, individual fan control via the Beaglebone Black.
• 1U case rackable or used alone on the desk of developers.
• Software design:
  • lavapdu backend module for PDU control (opentac.py) & opentac daemon on the BBB
    • telnet opentac-01 3225
  • ser2net for serial console control
    • telnet opentac-01 4000

The initial schematics are now complete and undergoing design review. A lot of work remains

Finally I was able to do the enormous paperwork (no, it is not that much) to switch my old 1024D key to a new 4096R one. I was a bit afraid that there might be something bad happening, but my fear was without any reason. After the RT bug was closed, I could upload and sent signed emails to mailing lists. So thanks alot to everyone involved.

old key, 0xD362B62A54B99890
pub   1024D/54B99890 2008-07-23
      Key fingerprint = 36E2 EDDE C21F EC8F 77B8  7436 D362 B62A 54B9 9890
uid                  Thorsten Alteholz (...)
sub   4096g/622D94A8 2008-07-23
new key, 0xA459EC6715B0705F
pub   4096R/0xA459EC6715B0705F 2014-02-03
  Schl.-Fingerabdruck = C74F 6AC9 E933 B306 7F52  F33F A459 EC67 15B0 705F
uid                 [ uneing.] Thorsten Alteholz (...)
sub   4096R/0xAE861AE7F39DF730 2014-02-03
  Schl.-Fingerabdruck = B8E7 6074 5FF4 C707 1C77  870C AE86 1AE7 F39D F730
sub   4096R/0x96FCAC0D387B5847 2014-02-03
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I m on my way home from D sseldorf where I attended the LinuxCon Europe and Linux Plumber conferences. I was quite surprised how huge LinuxCon was, there were about 1.500 people there! Certainly much more than last year in New Orleans. Containers (in both LXC and docker flavors) are the Big Thing everybody talks about and works with these days; there was hardly a presentation where these weren t mentioned at all, and (what felt like) half of the presentations were either how to improve these, or how to use these technologies to solve problems. For example, some people/companies really take LXC to the max and try to do everything in them including tasks which in the past you had only considered full VMs for, like untrusted third-party tenants. For example there was an interesting talk how to secure networking for containers, and pretty much everyone uses docker or LXC now to deploy workloads, run CI tests. There are projects like fleet which manage systemd jobs across an entire cluster of containers (distributed task scheduler) or like project-builder.org which auto-build packages from each commit of projects. Another common topic is the trend towards building/shipping complete (r/o) system images, atomic updates and all that goodness. The central thing here was certainly Stateless systems, factory reset, and golden images which analyzed the common requirements and proposed how to implement this with various package systems and scenarios. In my opinion this is certainly the way to go, as our current solution on Ubuntu Touch (i. e. Ubuntu s system-image) is far too limited and static yet, it doesn t extend to desktops/servers/cloud workloads at all. It s also a lot of work to implement this properly, so it s certainly understandable that we took that shortcut for prototyping and the relatively limited Touch phone environment. On Plumbers my main occupations were mostly the highly interesting LXC track to see what s coming in the container world, and the systemd hackfest. On the latter I was again mostly listening (after all, I m still learning most of the internals there..) and was able to work on some cleanups and improvements like getting rid of some of Debian s patches and properly run the test suite. It was also great to sync up again with David Zeuthen about the future of udisks and some particular proposed new features. Looks like I m the de-facto maintainer now, so I ll need to spend some time soon to review/include/clean up some much requested little features and some fixes. All in all a great week to meet some fellows of the FOSS world a gain, getting to know a lot of new interesting people and projects, and re-learning to drink beer in the evening (I hardly drink any at home :-P). If you are interested you can also see my raw notes, but beware that there are mostly just scribbling. Now, off to next week s Canonical meeting in Washington, DC!

After a long time a new irssi upstream release hit the archive. While the most notable change in 0.8.16 was DNSSEC DANE support which is enabled (for linux, src:dnsval has issues to get compiled on kFreeBSD), the most visible change in 0.8.17 was addition of support for both 256 colors and truecolor. While the former can be used directly, for the later you have to explicitly switch the setting colors_ansi_24bit to on. A terminal support it is needed for that though. To test the 256 color support, your terminal has to support it, your TERM environment variable has to be properly set, and you can test it with the newly added /cubes alias. If you have an existing configuration, look at the Testing new Irssi wiki page which helps you get that alias amongst giving other useful tipps, too. The package currently only lives in unstable, but once it did flow over to testing I will update it in wheezy-backports, too. Enjoy!

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