The second day of TUG 2016 was again full of interesting talks spanning from user experiences to highly technical details about astrological chart drawing, and graphical user interfaces to TikZ to the invited talk by Robert Bringhurst on the Palatino family of fonts. With all these interesting things there is only one thing to compain I cannot get out of the dark basement and enjoy the city After a evening full of sake and a good night s sleep we were ready to dive into the second day of TUG. Kaveh Bazargan A graphical user interface for TikZ The opening speaker of Day 2 was Kaveh. He first gave us a quick run-down on what he is doing for business and what challenges publishers are facing in these times. After that he introduced us to his new development of a command line graphical user interface for TikZ. I wrote command line on purpose, because the editing operations are short commands issued on a kind of command line, which will give an immediate graphical feedback. Basic of the technique is a simplified TikZ-like meta language that is not only easy to write, but also easy to parse. While the amount of supported commands and features of TikZ is still quite small, I think the basic idea is a good one, and there is a good potential in it. Matthew Skala Astrological charts with horoscop and starfont Next up was Matthew who introduced us to the involved task of typesetting astrological charts. He included comparisons with various commercial and open source solutions, where Matthew of course, but me too, felt that his charts came of quite well! As an extra bonus we got some charts of famous singers, as well as the TUG 2016 horoscope. David Tulett Development of an e-textbook using LaTeX and PStricks David reported on his project to develop an e-textbook on decision modeling (lots of math!) using LaTeX and PStricks. His e-book is of course a PDF. There were a lot of very welcoming feedback free (CC-BY-NC-ND) textbooks for sciences are rare and we need more of them. Christian Gagn An Emacs-based writing workflow inspired by TeX and WEB, targeting the Web Christian s talk turned around editing and publishing using org-mode of Emacs and the various levels of macros one can use in this setup. He finished with a largely incomprehensible vision of a future equational logic based notation mode. I have used equational logic in my day-in-day-out job, and I am not completely convinced that this is a good approach for typesetting and publishing but who knows, I am looking forward to a more logic-based approach! Barbara Beeton, Frank Mittelbach In memoriam: Sebastian Rahtz (1955-2016) Frank recalled Sebastian s many contribution to a huge variety of fields, and recalled our much missed colleague with many photos and anecdotes. Jim Hefferon A LaTeX reference manual Jim reported about the current state of a LaTeX reference manual, which tries to provide a documentation orthogonally to the many introduction and user guides available, by providing a straight down-to-earth reference manual with all the technical bells and whistles necessary. As I had to write myself a reference manual for a computer language, it was very interested to see how they dealt with many of the same problems I am facing. Arthur Reutenauer, Mojca Miklavec Hyphenation past and future: hyph-utf8 and patgen Arthur reports about the current statue of the hyphenation pattern project, and in particular the license and usage hell they recently came into with large cooperations simply grabbing the patterns without proper attribution. In a second part he gave a rough sketch of his shot at a reimplementation of patgen. Unfortunately he wrote in rather unreadable hand-writing on a flip-chart, which made only the first line audience to actually see what he was writing. Federico Garcia-De Castro TeXcel? As an artist organizing large festivals Federico has to fight with financial planning and reports. He seemed not content with the abilities of the usual suspects, so he developed a way to do Excel like book-keeping in TeX. Nice idea, I hope I can use that system for the next conference I have to organize! Jennifer Claudio A brief reflection on TeX and end-user needs Last speaker in the morning session was Jennifer who gave us a new and end-user s view onto the TeX environment, and the respective needs. These kind of talks are a very much welcomed contrast to technical talks and hopefully all of us developers take home some of her suggestions. Sungmin Kim, Jaeyoung Choi, Geunho Jeong MFCONFIG: Metafont plug-in module for the Freetype rasterizer Jaeyoung reported about an impressive project to make Metafont fonts available to fontconfig and thus windowing systems. He also explained their development of a new font format Stemfont, which is a Metafont-like system that can work also for CJK fonts, and which they envisage to be built into all kind of mobile devices. Michael Sharpe New font offerings Cochineal, Nimbus15 and LibertinusT1Math Michael reports about his last font projects. The first two being extensions of the half-made half-butchered rereleased URW fonts, as well as his first (?) math font project. I talked to him over lunch one day, and asked him how many man-days he need for these fonts, and his answer was speaking a lot: For the really messed up new URW fonts, like Cochineal, he guessed about 5 man-months of work, while other fonts only needed a few days. I think we all can be deeply thankful to all the work he is investing into all these font projects. Robert Bringhurst The evolution of the Palatino tribe The second invited talk was Robert Bringhurst, famous for his wide contributions to typpography, book culture in general, as well as poetry. He gave a quick historic overview on the development of the Palatino tribe of fonts, with lots of beautiful photos. I was really looking forward to Robert s talk, and my expectations were extremely high. And unfortunately I must say I was quite disappointed. Maybe it is his style of presentation, but the feeling he transfered to me (the audience?) was that he was going through a necessary medical check, not much enjoying the presentation. Also, the content itself was not really full of his own ideas or thoughts, but a rather superficial listing of historical facts. Of course, a person like Robert Bringhurst is so full of anecdotes and background knowledge still was a great pleasure to listen and lots of things to learn, I only hoped for a bit more enthusiasm. TUG Annual General Meeting The afternoon session finished with the TUG Annual General Meeting, reports will be sent out soon to all TUG members. Herbert Schulz Optional workshop: TeXShop tips & tricks After the AGM, Herbert from MacTeX and TeXShop gave an on-the-spot workshop on TeXShop. Since I am not a Mac user, I skipped on that.

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Another late afternoon program consisted of an excursion to Eliot s bookshop, where many of us stacked up on great books. This time again I skipped and took a nap. In the evening we had a rather interesting informal dinner in the food court of some building, where only two shops were open and all of us lined up in front of the Japanese Curry shop, and then gulped down from plastic boxes. Hmm, not my style I have to say, not even for informal dinner. But at least I could meet up with a colleague from Debian and get some gpg key signing done. And of course, talking to all kind of people around. The last step for me was in the pub opposite the hotel, with beer and whiskey/scotch selected by specialists in the field.

I have a long overdue blog entry about what happened in recent times. People that follow my tweets did catch some things. Most noteworthy there was the Trans*Inter*Congress in Munich at the start of May. It was an absolute blast. I met so many nice and great people, talked and experienced so many great things there that I'm still having a great motivational push from it every time I think back. It was also the time when I realized that I in fact do have body dysphoria even though I thought I'm fine with my body in general: Being tall is a huge issue for me. Realizing that I have a huge issue (yes, pun intended) with my length was quite relieving, even though it doesn't make it go away. It's something that makes passing and transitioning for me harder. I'm well aware that there are tall women, and that there are dedicated shops for lengthy women, but that's not the only thing that I have trouble with. What bothers me most is what people read into tall people: that they are always someone they can lean on for comfort, that tall people are always considered to be self confident and standing up for themselves (another pun, I know ... my bad). And while I'm fine with people coming to me for leaning on to, I rarely get the chance to do so myself. And people don't even consider it. When I was there in Munich, talking with another great (... pun?) trans woman who was as tall as me I finally had the possibility to just rest my head on her shoulder and finally feel the comfort I need just as much as everyone else out there, too. Probably that's also the reason why I'm so touchy and do go Free Hugging as often as possible. But being tall also means that you are usually only the big spoon when cuddling up. Having a small mental breakdown because of realizing that didn't change the feeling directly but definitely helped with looking for what I could change to fix that for myself. Then, at the end of may, the movie FtWTF - female to what the fuck came to cinema. It's a documentary about six people who got assigned female at birth. And it's absolutely charming, and has great food for thoughts in it. If you ever get the chance to watch it you definitely should. And then came debconf16 in Capetown. The flight to there was canceled and we had to get rebooked. The first offer was to go through Dubai, and gladly a colleague did point out to the person behind the desk that that wouldn't be safe for myself and thus out of scope. In the end we managed to get to Capetown quite nice, and even though it was winter when the sun was shining it was quite nice. Besides the cold nights that is. Or being stuck on the way up to table mountain because a colleague had cramps in his lags and we had to call mountain rescue. Gladly the night was clear, and when the mountain rescue finally got us to top and it was night already we had one of the nicest views from up there most people probably never will experience. And then ... I got invited to a trans meetup in Capetown. I was both excited and nervous about it, what to expect there. But it was simply great. The group there was simply outstandingly great. The host gave update information on progress on clinical support within south Africa, from what I took with me is that there is only one clinic there for SRS which manages only two people a year which is simply ... yuck. Guess you can guess how many years (yes, decades) the waiting line is ... I was blown away though by the diversity of the group, on so many levels, most notably on the age spectrum. It was a charm to meet you all there! If you ever stop by in Capetown and you are part of the LGBTIQ community, make sure you get in contact with the Triangle Project. But, about the real reason to write this entry: I was approached at Debconf by at least two people who asked me what I thought about creating an LGBTIQA+ group within Debian, and if I'd like to push for that. Actually I think it would be a good idea to have some sort of exchange between people on the queer spectrum (and I hope I don't offend anyone with just saying queer for LGBTIQA+ people). Given that I'm quite outspoken people approach me every now and then so I'm aware that there is a fair amount of people that would fall into that category. On the other hand some of them wouldn't want to have it publicly known because it shouldn't matter and isn't really the business of others. So I'm uncertain. If we follow that path I guess something that is closed or at least offers the possibility to have a closed communication would be needed to not out someone by just joining in the discussion. It's was easier with Debian Women where it was (somewhat) clear that male participants are allies supporting the cause and not considered being women themselves, but often enough (mostly cis hetero male) people are afraid to join a dedicated LGBTIQA+ group because they have the fear of having their identity judged. These things should be considered before creating such a place so that people can feel comfortable when joining and know what to expect beforehand. For the time being I created #debian-diversity on irc.debian.org to discuss how to move forward. Please bear in mind that even the channel name is up for discussion. Acronyms might not be the way to go in my opinion, just read back up the discussion that lead to the Diversity Statement of Debian where the original approach was to start listing groups for inclusiveness but it was quickly clear that it can get outdated too easily. I am willing to be part of that effort, but right now I have some personal things to deal which eat up a fair amount of my time. My kid starts school in September (yes, it's that long already, time flies ...). And it looks like I'll have to move a second time in the near future: I'll have to leave my current flat by the end of the year and the Que[e]rbau I'm moving into won't be ready by that time to host me yet ... F*ck. :(

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The first day of the real conference started with an excellent overview of what one can do with TeX, spanning from traditional scientific journal styles to generating router configuration for cruising ships.
All this was crowned with an invited talk my Kevin Larson from Microsoft s typography department on how to support reading comprehension. Pavneet Aurora Opening: Passport to the TeX canvas Pavneet, our never-sleeping host and master of organization, opened the conference with a very philosophical introduction, touching upon a wide range of topics ranging from Microsoft, Twitter to the beauty of books, pages, and type. I think at some point he even mentioned TeX, but I can t remember for sure. His words put up a very nice and all-inclusive stage, a community that is open to all kind of influences with any disregard or prejudice. Let us hope that is reflects reality. Thanks Pavneet. Geoffrey Poore Advances in PythonTeX Our first regular talk was by Geoffrey reporting on recent advances in PythonTeX, a package that allows including python code in your TeX document. Starting with an introduction to PythonTeX, Geoggrey reports about an improved verbatim environment, fvextra, which patches fancyvrb, and improved interaction between tikz and PythonTeX. As I am a heavy user of listings for my teaching on algebraic specification languages, I will surely take a look at this package and see how it compares to listings. Stefan Kottwitz TeX in industry I: Programming Cisco network switches using TeX Next was Stefan from Lufthansa Industry Solutions, who reported first about his working environment, Cruise Ships with a very demanding IT infrastructure he has to design and implement. Then he introduced us to his way of generating IP configurations for all the devices using TeX. The reason he chose this method is that it allows him to generate at the same time proper documentation. It was surprising for me to hear that by using TeX he could far more efficiently and quicker produce well designed and easily accessible documentation, which helped both the company as well as made the clients happy! Stefan Kottwitz TeX in industry II: Designing converged network solutions After a coffee break, Stefan continued his exploration into industrial usage of TeX, this time about using tikz to generate graphics representing the network topology on the ships. Boris Veytsman Making ACM LaTeX styles Next up was Boris which brought us back to traditional realms of TeX when he guided us into the abyss of ACM LaTeX styles he tried to maintain for some time, until he plunged into a complete rewrite of the styles. Frank Mittelbach Alice goes floating global optimized pagination including picture placements The last talk before lunch (probably a strategic placement, otherwise Frank would continue for hours and hours) was Frank on global optimization of page breaks. Frank showed us what can and can not be done with current LaTeX, and how to play around with global optimization of pagination, using Alice in Wonderland as running example. We can only hope that his package is soon available in an easily consumable version to play around. Thai lunch Pavneet has organized three different lunch-styles for the three days of the conference, today s was Thai with spring rools, fried noodles, one kind of very interesting orange noodles, and chicken something. Michael Doob baseball rules summary After lunch Michael gave us an accessible explanation of the most arcane rules a game can have the baseball rules by using pseudo code. I think the total number of loc needed to explain the overall rules would fill more pages than the New York phonebook, so I am deeply impressed by all those who can understand these rules. Some of us even wandered off in the late afternoon to see a match with life explanations of Michael. Amartyo Banerjee, S.K. Venkatesan A Telegram bot for printing LaTeX files Next up was Amartyo who showed a Telegram (as in messenger application) bot running on a Raspberry Pi, that receives (La)TeX files and sends back compiled PDF files. While it is not ready for consumption (If you sneeze the bot will crash!), it looks like a promising application. Furthermore, it is nice to see how open APIs (like Telegram) can spur development of useful tools, while closed APIs (including threatening users, like WhatApp) hinders it. Norbert Preining Security improvements in the TeX Live Manager and installer Next up was my own talk about beefing up the security of TeX Live by providing integrity and authenticity checks via GnuPG, a feature that has been introduced with the recent release of TeX Live 2016. The following discussion gave me several good idea on how to further improve security and usability. Arthur Reutenauer -The TeX Live M sub-project (and open discussion) Arthur presented the TeX Live M (where the M stands supposedly for Mojca, who couldn t attend unfortunately) project: Their aim is to provide a curated and quality verified sub-part of TeX Live that is sufficiently complete for many applications, and easier for distributors and packagers. We had a lively discussion after Arthur s short presentation, mostly about why TeX Live does not have a on-the-fly installation like MikTeX. I insisted that this is already possible, using the tex-on-the-fly package which uses the mktextex infrastructure, but also caution against using it by default due to delays induced by repeatably reading the TeX Live database. I think this is a worth-while project for someone interested in learning the internals of TeX Live, but I am not sure whether I want to invest time into this feature. Another discussion point was about a testing infrastructure, which I am currently working on. This is in fact high on my list, to have some automatic minimal functionality testing a LaTeX package should at least load! Kevin Larson Reading between the lines: Improving comprehension for students Having a guest from Microsoft is rather rare in our quite Unix-centered environment, so big thanks to Pavneet again for setting up this contact, and big thanks to Kevin for coming. Kevin gave us a profound introduction to reading disabilities and how to improve reading comprehension. Starting with an excursion into what makes a font readable and how Microsoft develops optimally readable fonts, he than turned to reading disabilities like dyslexia, and how markup of text can increase students comprehension rate. He also toppled my long-term believe that dyslexia is connected to the similar shape of letters which are somehow visually malprocessed this was the scientific status from the 1920ies till the 70ies, but since then all researchers have abandoned this interpretation and dyslexia is now linked to problems linking shape to phonems. Kevin did an excellent job with a slightly difficult audience some people picking about grammer differences between British and US English and permanently derailing the discussion, and even more the high percentage of typographically somehow specially tasted participants. After the talk I had a lengthy discussion with Kevin about if/how this research can be carried over to non-Roman writing systems, in particular Kanji/Hanzi based writing systems, where dyslexia shows itself probably in different context. Kevin also mentioned that they want to add interword space to Chinese to help learners of Chinese (children, foreigners) to better parse, and studies showed that this helps a lot in comprehension. On a meta-level, this talk bracketed with the morning introduction by Pavneet, describing an open environment with stimulus back and forth in all directions. I am very happy that Kevin took the pain to come in his tight schedule, and I hope that the future will bring better cooperation at the end we are all working somehow on the same front only the the tools differ.

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After the closing of the session, one part of our group went off to the baseball match, while another group dived into a Japanese-style Izakaya where we managed to kill huge amounts of sake and quite an amount of food. The photo shows me after the first bottle of sake, while just seeping on an intermediate small amount of genshu (kind of strong undiluted sake) before continuing to the next bottle. An interesting and stimulating first day of TUG, and I am sure that everyone was looking forward to day 2.

The second pre-conference day was dedicated to books and beers, with a visit to an exquisite print studio, and a beer tasting session at one of the craft breweries in Canada. In addition we could grab a view into the Canadian lifestyle by visiting Pavneet s beautiful house in the countryside, as well as enjoying traditional style pastries from a bakery.
In short, a perfect combination for us typography and beer savvy freaks! This morning we had somehow an early start from the hotel. Soon the bus left downtown Toronto and entered countryside Ontario, large landscapes filled with huge (for my Japanese feeling) estates and houses, separated by fields, forests and wild landscape. Very beautiful and inviting to live there. On our way to the printing workshop we stopped at Pavneet s house for a very short visit of the exterior, which includes mathematics in the bricking. According to Pavneet, his kids hate to see math on the wall I would be proud to have it.
A bit further on we entered into Erin, where the Porcupine s Quill is located. A small building along the street, one could easily oversee that rare jewel! In addition considering that according to the owners, Google Maps has a bad error which would lead you to a completely different location. This printing workshop, led by Tim and Elke Inkster, is producing books in a traditional style using an old Heidelberg Offset printing machine.
Elke introduced us to the sewing of folded signatures together with a lovely old sewing machine. It was the first time I actually saw one in action.
Tim, the head master of the printing shop, first entertained us with stories about Chinese publishers visiting them in the old cold-war times, before diving into explanations of the actual machines around, like the Heidelberg offset printing machine.
In the back of the basement of the little studio there is also a huge folding machine, which cuts up the big signatures of 16 pages and folds them into bundles. An impressive example of tricky engineering.
Due to the small size of the printing studio, our groups were actually split into two groups, and while the other group got its guided tour, we grabbed coffee and traditional cookies and pastries from the nearby Holtom s bakery. Loads of nice pastries with various filling, my favorite being the slightly salty cherry pie, and above all the rhubarb-raspberry pie.
To my absolute astonishment I also found there a Viennese Kaisersemmel , called Kaiser bun here, but keeping the shape and the idea (but unfortunately not the crispy cracky quality of the original in Vienna). Of course I got two of them, together with a nice jam from the region, and enjoyed these Viennese breakfast the next day morning.
Leaving the Quill we headed for a lunch in a nice pizzeria (I got Pizza Toscana) which also served excellent local beer how would I like to have something like this over in Japan! Our last stop on this excursion was Stone Hammer Brewery, ne of the most famous craft breweries in Canada.
Although they wont win a prize for typography (besides one page of a coaster there that carried a nice pun), their beers are exquisite. We got five different beers to taste, plus extensive explanations on brewing methods and differences. Now I finally understand why most of the new craft breweries in Japan are making Ales: Ales don t need a long process and are ready for sale in rather short time, compared to e.g. lagers.)
Also at the Stone Hammer Brewery I spotted this very nice poster on the wall of the toilet. And I cannot agree more, everything can easily be discussed over a good beer it calms down aversions, makes even the worst enemies friends, and is healthy for both the mind and body. Filled with excellent beer, some of us (notably an unnamed US TeXnician and politician), stacked up on beers to carry home. I was very tempted to get a huge batch, but putting cans into an airplane seems to be not the optimal idea. Since we are talking cans, I was surprised to hear that many craft beer brewers nowadays prefer cans due to their better protection of the beer from light and oxygen, both killers of good beer. Before leaving we took a last look at the Periodic Table of Beer Types, which left me in awe about how much I don t know and I probably never will know. In particular, I heard the first time of a Vienna style beer Vienna is not really famous for beer, better to say, it is infamous. So maybe this is a different Vienna than my home town that is meant here.
Another two hour bus ride brought us back to Toronto, where we met with other participants at the reception in a restaurant of Mediterranean cuisine, where I could enjoy for the first time in years a good Tahina and Humus. All around another excellent day, now I only would like to have two days of holidays, guess I need to relax in the lectures starting from tomorrow.

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I think my demands for a terminal emulator are pretty basic but none the less I run into trouble every now and then. This time it was a new laptop and starting from scratch with an empty $HOME and the current Debian/testing instead of good old Jessie. For the last four or five years I've been a happy user of gnome-terminal, configured a mono space font, a light grey background with black text color, create new tabs with Ctrl-n, navigate the tabs with Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right, show no menubar, select URLs with double click. Suited me well with my similarly configured awesome window manager, where I navigate with Mod4-Left and Mod4-Right between the desktops on the local screen and only activate a handful of the many default tiling modes. While I could get back most of my settings, somehow all cited gconf kung-foo to reconfigure the URL selection pattern in gnome-terminal failed, and copy&pasting URLs from the terminal was a pain in the ass. Long story short I now followed the advice of a coworker to just use the xfce4-terminal. That still required a few tweaks to get back to do what I want it to do. To edit the keybindings you've to know that you've to use the GTK way and edit them within in the menu while selecting the menu entry. But you've to allow that first (why oh why?):

echo "gtk-can-change-accels=1" >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Fair enough that is documented. Changing the keybinding generates fancy things in ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/accels.scm in case you plan to hand edit a few more of them. I also edited a few things in ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/terminalrc:

MiscAlwaysShowTabs=TRUE
MiscMenubarDefault=FALSE

So I guess I can remove gnome-terminal for now and stay with another GTK2 application. Doesn't feel that good but well at least it works.

This years TUG is held in Toronto, Canada, and our incredible host Pavneet has managed to put together an busy program of excursions and events around the real conference. The -1st day (yeah, you read right, the minus-first day), that is two days before the actual conference starts, was dedicated to an excursion to enjoying wines at the wine estate Ch teau des Charmes, followed by a visit to the Niagara falls.
What should I say, if the first thing after getting out of the bus is a good wine, then there is nothing to go wrong I arrived in Toronto already two days earlier in the late afternoon, and spend Friday relaxing, recovering from the long flight, walking the city a bit, trying to fix my cold, and simply going slowly. Saturday morning we met already at a comfortable 10am in the morning (still to early for me, due to jet lag and a slightly late evening before), but the first 2h of bus drive allowed us to relax. Our first stop was the Ch teau des Charmes, and impressive building surrounded by vineyards. We were immediately handed over to a sandwich lunch with white, red, and ice wine. Good start! And although the breakfast wasn t that long time ago, the delicious sandwiches (at least the vegetarian ones I tried) were good foundation for the wine. After having refilled our energy reserves, we are ready to start our tour. Our guide, very, if not over, enthusiastic, explains us that practically everything related to wine in Canada has been started at this Ch teau from the current owner the Ch teau system where farmer and wine producer are the same, import of European grapes, winter protection methods, wine making I was close to forgetting our Roman and Greek ancestors. At least she admitted that the Ice wine was brought over by an Austrian but perfection was done here, were the controls of the government are much stricter than anywhere else hmmm, somehow I cannot completely believe all this narrative, but at least it is enjoyable. So now that we know all about the history, we dive into the production process area, and the barrel space, always accompanied with extensive comments and (self-)praise. After this exhaustive and exhausting round, we are guided back to the patio to taste another three different wines, a white (bit too warm, not so much my taste), a rose (very good), and a red made from a new grape variety that has mutated first here on the Ch teau (interesting). As I didn t have enough, I tried to get something out of the big containers directly, but without success! Happy and content, and after passing through the shopping area, we are boarding the bus to continue direction of the Niagara Falls. Passing by at quite some nice houses of definitely quite rich people (although Pavneet told me that houses in Toronto are far more expensive than those here how can someone afford this?), we first have a view onto the lower Niagara river. A bit further one we are let out to see huge whirlpools in the river, where boat tours are bringing sightseers on a rough ride ride into the pool. Only a slight bit further on we finally reach the Niagara falls, with the great view onto the American falls in full power, and the Horseshoe Falls further up. We immediately boarded a boat tour making a short trip to the Horseshoe Fall. Lining up with hundreds and hundreds of other spectators, we prepare for the splash with red rain wear (the US side uses blue, not that any side would rescue a wrong person and create an illegal immigrant!). The trip passes first under the American Falls and continues right into the mist that fills all the area in the middle of the Horseshoe falls. Spectacular impression with walls of water falling down on both sidess. Returned from the splash and having dried our feet, we walk along the ridge to see the Horseshoe falls from close up. The amount of water falling down these falls is incredible, and so is the erosion that creates the brown foam on the water down in the pool, made up from pulverized limestone. Blessed as we were, the sun was laughing all the day and we got a nice rainbow right in the fall. The surroundings of the fall are less impressive Disney land? Horror cabinet? Jodel bar? A wild mixture of amusement park style locations squeezed together and overly full with people as if enjoying the nature itself would not be enough. All immersed by ever blasting loudspeaker music. The only plus point I could find in this encampment of forced happiness was a local craft beer brewer where one could taste 8 different beers I made it only to four, though. Finally night was falling in and we moved down to the falls again to enjoy the illumination of the falls. After this wonderful finish we boarded the bus and back to Toronto, where we arrived around mid-night. A long but very pleasurable Day Minus One! Further photos can be seen at the gallery TUG 2016 Day Minus One.

J'ai gagn le Tour de Crosstown 2016! Everyone knows that today the finish line for Le Tour de France was crossed on Les Champs- lys es in Paris... And if you haven't seen some of the videos I highly recommend checking out the onboard camera views and the landscapes! Quel beau pays I'm happy to let you know that today I won the Tour de Crosstown 2016 which is the cycling competition at Lifetime Crosstown inspired by and concurrent to Le Tour de France. There were about twenty cyclists competing to see who could earn the most points -- by attending cycling class bien s r. I earned the maillot jaune with 23 points and my next closest competitor had 16 points (with the peloton far behind). But that's just part of the story.


For some time I've been coming to Life Time Fitness at Crosstown for yoga (in Josefina's class) and playing racquetball with my friend David. The cycling studio is right next to the racquetball courts and there's been a class on Saturday's at the same time we usually play. I told David that it looked like fun and he said, having tried it, that it is fun (and a big workout). In early June David got busy and then had an injury that has kept him off the court ever since. So one Saturday morning I decided to try cycling. I borrowed a heart rate monitor (but had no idea what it was for) and tried to bike along in my regular gym shorts, shoes and a t-shirt. Despite being a cycling newbie I was immediately captured by Alison's music and enthusiasm. She's dancing on her bike and you can't help but lock in the beat. Of course that's just after she tells you to dial up the resistance... and the sweat just pours out! I admit that workout hit me pretty hard, but I had to come back and try the 5:45 am Wednesday EDGE cycle class (gulp). Despite what sounds like a crazy impossible time to get out and on a bike it actually works out super well. This plan requires one to up-level one's organization and after the workout I can assure you that you're fully awake and charged for the day! Soon I invested in my own heart rate monitor. Then I realized it would work so much better if I had a metabolic assessment to tune my aerobic and anaerobic training zones. While I signed up for the assessment I decided to work with May as my personal trainer. In addition to helping me with my upper body (complementing the cycling) May is a nutritionist and has helped me dial in this critical facet of training. Even though I'm still working to tune my diet around my workouts, I've already learned a lot by using My Fitness Pal and, most importantly, I have a whole new attitude about food. Pour les curieux, la nutritioniste maison s'est absent e en France pendant le mois de juillet. Soon I would invest in bike shoes, jerseys and shorts and begin to push myself into the proper zones during workouts and fuel my body properly afterwords. All these changes have led to dramatic weight loss \o/ A few of you know that the past two years have involved a lot of personal hardship. Upon reflection I have come to appreciate that things in my life that I can actually control are a massive opportunity. I decided that fixing my exercise and nutrition were the opportunities I want to focus on. A note for for my Debian friends... I'm sorry to have missed you in Cape Town, but I hope to join you in Montr al next year. So when the Tour de Crosstown started in July I decided this was the time for me to get serious. I want to thank all the instructors for the great workouts (and for all the calories I've left on the bike): Alison, Kristine, Olivia, Tasha, and Caroline! The result of my lifestyle changes are hard to describe.. I feel an amazing amount of energy every day. The impact of prior back injury is now almost non-existent. And what range of motion I hadn't recovered from the previous summer's being "washing machined" by a 3 meter wave while body surfing at the beach in Hossegor is now fully working. Now I'm thinking it's time to treat myself to a new bike I'm looking at large touring frames and am currently thinking of the Surly Disc Trucker. In terms of bike shops I've had a good experience with One on One and Grand Performance has come highly recommended. If anyone has suggestions for bikes, bike features, or good shops please let me know! I would encourage everyone here in Minneapolis to join me as guest for a Wed morning 5:45am EDGE cycle class. I'm betting you'll have as much fun as a I do.. and I guarantee you will sweat! The challenge in waking up will pay off handsomely in making you energized for the whole day. Let's bike allons-y!

The second Armadillo release of the 7.* series came out a few weeks ago: version 7.200.2. And RcppArmadillo version 0.7.200.2.0 is now on CRAN and uploaded to Debian. This followed the usual thorough reverse-dependecy checking of by now over 240 packages using it. For once, I let it simmer a little preparing only a package update via the GitHub repo without preparing a CRAN upload to lower the update frequency a little. Seeing that Conrad has started to release 7.300.0 tarballs, the time for a (final) 7.200.2 upload was now right. Just like the previous, it now requires a recent enough compiler. As g++ is so common, we explicitly test for version 4.6 or newer. So if you happen to be on an older RHEL or CentOS release, you may need to get yourself a more modern compiler. R on Windows is now at 4.9.3 which is decent (yet stable) choice; the 4.8 series of g++ will also do. For reference, the current LTS of Ubuntu is at 5.4.0, and we have g++ 6.1 available in Debian testing. This new upstream release adds new indexing helpers, additional return codes on some matrix transformations, increased speed for compound expressions via vectorise, corrects some LAPACK feature detections (affecting principally complex number use under OS X), and a rewritten sample() function thanks to James Balamuta. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. Changes in this release (and the preceding GitHub-only release 0.7.200.1.0 are as follows:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.200.2.0 (2016-07-22)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.200.2
• The sampling extension was rewritten to use Armadillo vector types instead of Rcpp types (PR #101 by James Balamuta)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.200.1.0 (2016-06-06)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.200.1
  • added .index_min() and .index_max()
  • expanded ind2sub() to handle vectors of indices
  • expanded sub2ind() to handle matrix of subscripts
  • expanded expmat(), logmat() and sqrtmat() to optionally return a bool indicating success
  • faster handling of compound expressions by vectorise()
• The configure code now (once again) sets the values for the LAPACK feature #define correctly.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

seems I've neglected both my blog & my RC bug fixing activities in the last months. anyway, since I still keep track of RC bugs I worked on, I thought I might as well publish the list:

• #798023 src:cssutils: "cssutils: FTBFS with Python 3.5"
  sponsor NMU by Chris Knadle, upload to DELAYED/2
• #800303 src:libipc-signal-perl: "libipc-signal-perl: Please migrate a supported debhelper compat level"
  bump debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/5
• #808331 src:libpgplot-perl: "libpgplot-perl: needs manual rebuild for Perl 5.22 transition"
  manually build+upload packages (pkg-perl)
• #809056 src:xca: "xca: FTBFS due to CPPFLAGS containing spaces"
  sponsor NMU by Chris Knadle, upload to DELAYED/5
• #810017 src:psi4: "psi4: FTBFS with perl 5.22"
  propose a patch
• #810707 src:libdbd-sqlite3-perl: "libdbd-sqlite3-perl: FTBFS: t/virtual_table/21_perldata_charinfo.t (Wstat: 512 Tests: 4 Failed: 1)"
  investigate a bit (pkg-perl)
• #810710 src:libdata-objectdriver-perl: "libdata-objectdriver-perl: FTBFS: t/02-basic.t (Wstat: 256 Tests: 67 Failed: 1)"
  add patch to handle sqlite 3.10 in test suite's version comparison (pkg-perl)
• #810900 libanyevent-rabbitmq-perl: "libanyevent-rabbitmq-perl: Can't locate object method "bind_exchange" via package "AnyEvent::RabbitMQ::Channel""
  add info, versioned close (pkg-perl)
• #810910 libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: "libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: FTBFS: test failures with newer libmath-bigint-perl"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #810912 libx11-xcb-perl: "libx11-xcb-perl: missing dependency on libxs-object-magic-perl"
  update dependencies (pkg-perl)
• #813420 src:libnet-server-mail-perl: "libnet-server-mail-perl: FTBFS: error: Can't call method "peerhost" on an undefined value at t/starttls.t line 78."
  close, as the underlying problem is fixed (pkg-perl)
• #814730 src:libmath-mpfr-perl: "libmath-mpfr-perl: FTBFS on most architectures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #815775 zeroc-ice: "Build-Depends on unavailable packages mono-gmcs libmono2.0-cil"
  sponsor NMU by Chris Knadle, upload to DELAYED/2
• #816527 src:libtest-file-contents-perl: "libtest-file-contents-perl: FTBFS with Text::Diff 1.44"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #816638 mhonarc: "mhonarc: fails to run with perl5.22"
  propose a patch in the BTS
• #817528 src:libemail-foldertype-perl: "libemail-foldertype-perl: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #817529 src:libimage-base-bundle-perl: "libimage-base-bundle-perl: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #817530 src:liberror-perl: "liberror-perl: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #817531 src:libimage-info-perl: "libimage-info-perl: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #817647 src:randomplay: "randomplay: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #818924 libjson-webtoken-perl: "libjson-webtoken-perl: missing dependency on libmodule-runtime-perl"
  add missing (build) dependency (pkg-perl)
• #819787 libdbix-class-schema-loader-perl: "libdbix-class-schema-loader-perl: FTBFS: t/10_01sqlite_common.t failure"
  close bug, works again with recent sqlite3 (pkg-perl)
• #821412 libnet-rblclient-perl: "libnet-rblclient-perl: Net::DNS 1.01 breaks Net::RBLClient"
  add patch (pkg-perl)
• #823310 libnanomsg-raw-perl: "libnanomsg-raw-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  add patch from upstream git repo (pkg-perl)
• #824046 src:libtkx-perl: "libtkx-perl: FTBFS: Tcl error 'Foo at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.22/Tcl.pm line 585.\n' while invoking scalar result call"
  first investigation (pkg-perl)
• #824143 libperinci-sub-normalize-perl: "libperinci-sub-normalize-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Sah/Schema/Rinci.pm in @INC"
  upload new upstream version (pkg-perl)
• #825366 src:libdist-zilla-plugin-ourpkgversion-perl: "libdist-zilla-plugin-ourpkgversion-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Path/Class.pm in @INC"
  add missing dependency (pkg-perl)
• #825424 libdist-zilla-plugin-test-podspelling-perl: "libdist-zilla-plugin-test-podspelling-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Path/Class.pm in @INC"
  first triaging, forward upstream, import new release (pkg-perl)
• #825608 libnet-jifty-perl: "libnet-jifty-perl: FTBFS: t/006-uploads.t failure"
  triaging, mark unreproducible (pkg-perl)
• #825629 src:libgd-perl: "libgd-perl: FTBFS: Could not find gdlib-config in the search path. "
  first triaging, forward upstream (pkg-perl)
• #829064 libparse-debianchangelog-perl: "libparse-debianchangelog-perl: FTBFS with new tidy version"
  patch TML template (pkg-perl)
• #829066 libparse-plainconfig-perl: "FTBFS: Can't modify constant item in scalar assignment"
  new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #829176 src:libapache-htpasswd-perl: "libapache-htpasswd-perl: FTBFS: dh_clean: Please specify the compatibility level in debian/compat"
  add debian/compat, upload to DELAYED/2
• #829409 src:libhtml-tidy-perl: "libhtml-tidy-perl: FTBFS: Failed 7/21 test programs. 8/69 subtests failed."
  apply patches from Simon McVittie (pkg-perl)
• #829668 libparse-debianchangelog-perl: "libparse-debianchangelog-perl: FTBFS: Failed test 'Output of dpkg_str equal to output of dpkg-parsechangelog'"
  add patch for compatibility with new dpkg (pkg-perl)
• #829746 src:license-reconcile: "license-reconcile: FTBFS: Failed 7/30 test programs. 11/180 subtests failed."
  versioned close, already fixed in latest upload (pkg-perl)
• #830275 src:libgravatar-url-perl: "libgravatar-url-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  skip test which needs internet access (pkg-perl)
• #830324 src:libhttp-async-perl: "libhttp-async-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  add patch to skip tests with DNS queries (pkg-perl)
• #830354 src:libhttp-proxy-perl: "libhttp-proxy-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  skip tests which need internet access (pkg-perl)
• #830355 src:libanyevent-http-perl: "libanyevent-http-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  skip tests which need internet access (pkg-perl)
• #830356 src:libhttp-oai-perl: "libhttp-oai-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  add patch to skip tests with DNS queries (pkg-perl)
• #830476 src:libpoe-component-client-http-perl: "libpoe-component-client-http-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  update existing patch (pkg-perl)
• #831233 src:libmongodb-perl: "libmongodb-perl: build hangs with sbuild and libeatmydata"
  lower severity (pkg-perl)
• #832361 src:libmousex-getopt-perl: "libmousex-getopt-perl: FTBFS: Failed 2/22 test programs. 2/356 subtests failed."
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)

Review: The Run of His Life, by Jeffrey Toobin

Publisher:	Random House
Copyright:	1996, 1997
Printing:	2015
ISBN:	0-307-82916-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	498

The O.J. Simpson trial needs little introduction to anyone who lived through it in the United States, but a brief summary for those who didn't. O.J. Simpson is a Hall of Fame football player and one of the best running backs to ever play the game. He's also black, which is very relevant much of what later happened. After he retired from professional play, he became a television football commentator and a spokesperson for various companies (particularly Hertz, a car rental business). In 1994, he was arrested for the murder of two people: his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman (a friend of Nicole's). The arrest happened after a bizarre low-speed police chase across Los Angeles in a white Bronco that was broadcast live on network television. The media turned the resulting criminal trial into a reality TV show, with live cable television broadcasts of all of the court proceedings. After nearly a full year of trial (with the jury sequestered for nine months more on that later), a mostly black jury returned a verdict of not guilty after a mere four hours of deliberation. Following the criminal trial, in an extremely unusual legal proceeding, Simpson was found civilly liable for Ron Goldman's death in a lawsuit brought by his family. Bizarre events surrounding the case continued long afterwards. A book titled If I Did It (with "if" in very tiny letters on the cover) was published, ghost-written but allegedly with Simpson's input and cooperation, and was widely considered a confession. Another legal judgment let the Goldman family get all the profits from that book's publication. In an unrelated (but also bizarre) incident in Las Vegas, Simpson was later arrested for kidnapping and armed robbery and is currently in prison until at least 2017. It is almost impossible to have lived through the O.J. Simpson trial in the United States and not have formed some opinion on it. I was in college and without a TV set at the time, and even I watched some of the live trial coverage. Reactions to the trial were extremely racially polarized, as you might have guessed. A lot of black people believed at the time that Simpson was innocent (probably fewer now, given subsequent events). A lot of white people thought he was obviously guilty and was let off by a black jury for racial reasons. My personal opinion, prior to reading this book, was a common "third way" among white liberals: Simpson almost certainly committed the murders, but the racist Los Angeles police department decided to frame him for a crime that he did commit by trying to make the evidence stronger. That's a legitimate reason in the US justice system for finding someone innocent: the state has an obligation to follow correct procedure and treat the defendant fairly in order to get a conviction. I have a strong bias towards trusting juries; frequently, it seems that the media second-guesses the outcome of a case that makes perfect sense as soon as you see all the information the jury had (or didn't have). Toobin's book changed my mind. Perhaps because I wasn't watching all of the coverage, I was greatly underestimating the level of incompetence and bad decision-making by everyone involved: the prosecution, the defense, the police, the jury, and the judge. This court case was a disaster from start to finish; no one involved comes away looking good. Simpson was clearly guilty given the evidence presented, but the case was so badly mishandled that it gave the jury room to reach the wrong verdict. (It's telling that, in the far better managed subsequent civil case, the jury had no trouble reaching a guilty verdict.) The Run of His Life is a very detailed examination of the entire Simpson case, from the night of the murder through the end of the trial and (in an epilogue) the civil case. Toobin was himself involved in the media firestorm, breaking some early news of the defense's decision to focus on race in The New Yorker and then involved throughout the trial as a legal analyst, and he makes it clear when he becomes part of the story. But despite that, this book felt objective to me. There are tons of direct quotes, lots of clear description of the evidence, underlying interviews with many of the people involved to source statements in the book, and a comprehensive approach to the facts. I think Toobin is a bit baffled by the black reaction to the case, and that felt like a gap in the comprehensiveness and the one place where he might be accused of falling back on stereotypes and easy judgments. But other than hole, Toobin applies his criticism even-handedly and devastatingly to all parties. I won't go into all the details of how Toobin changed my mind. It was a cumulative effect across the whole book, and if you're curious, I do recommend reading it. A lot was the detailed discussion of the forensic evidence, which was undermined for the jury at trial but looks very solid outside the hothouse of the case. But there is one critical piece that I would hope would be handled differently today, twenty years later, than it was by the prosecutors in that case: Simpson's history of domestic violence against Nicole. With what we now know about patterns of domestic abuse, the escalation to murder looks entirely unsurprising. And that history of domestic abuse was exceedingly well-documented: multiple external witnesses, police reports, and one actual prior conviction for spousal abuse (for which Simpson did "community service" that was basically a joke). The prosecution did a very poor job of establishing this history and the jury discounted it. That was a huge mistake by both parties. I'll mention one other critical collection of facts that Toobin explains well and that contradicted my previous impression of the case: the relationship between Simpson and the police. Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter, the routine abuse of black Americans by the police is more widely known. At the time of the murders, it was less recognized among white Americans, although black Americans certainly knew about it. But even in 1994, the Los Angeles police department was notorious as one of the most corrupt and racist big-city police departments in the United States. This is the police department that beat Rodney King. Mark Fuhrman, one of the police officers involved in the case (although not that significantly, despite his role at the trial), was clearly racist and had no business being a police officer. It was therefore entirely believable that these people would have decided to frame a black man for a murder he actually committed. What Toobin argues, quite persuasively and with quite a lot of evidence, is that this analysis may make sense given the racial tensions in Los Angeles but ignores another critical characteristic of Los Angeles politics, namely a deference to celebrity. Prior to this trial, O.J. Simpson largely followed the path of many black athletes who become broadly popular in white America: underplaying race and focusing on his personal celebrity and connections. (Toobin records a quote from Simpson earlier in his life that perfectly captures this approach: "I'm not black, I'm O.J.") Simpson spent more time with white businessmen than the black inhabitants of central Los Angeles. And, more to the point, the police treated him as a celebrity, not as a black man. Toobin takes some time to chronicle the remarkable history of deference and familiarity that the police showed Simpson. He regularly invited police officers to his house for parties. The police had a long history of largely ignoring or downplaying his abuse of his wife, including not arresting him in situations that clearly seemed to call for that, showing a remarkable amount of deference to his side of the story, not pursuing clear violations of the court judgment after his one conviction for spousal abuse, and never showing much inclination to believe or protect Nicole. Even on the night of the murder, they started following a standard playbook for giving a celebrity advance warning of investigations that might involve them before the news media found out about them. It seems clear, given the evidence that Toobin collected, that the racist Los Angeles police didn't focus that animus at Simpson, a wealthy celebrity living in Brentwood. He wasn't a black man in their eyes; he was a rich Hall of Fame football player and a friend. This obviously raises the question of how the jury could return an innocent verdict. Toobin provides plenty of material to analyze that question from multiple angles in his detailed account of the case, but I can tell you my conclusion: Judge Lance Ito did a horrifically incompetent job of managing the case. He let the lawyers wander all over the case, interacted bizarrely with the media coverage (and was part of letting the media turn it into a daytime drama), was not crisp or clear about his standards of evidence and admissibility, and, perhaps worst of all, let the case meander on at incredible length. With a fully sequestered jury allowed only brief conjugal visits and no media contact (not even bookstore shopping!). Quite a lot of anger was focused on the jury after the acquittal, and I do think they reached the wrong conclusion and had all the information they would have needed to reach the correct one. But Toobin touches on something that I think would be very hard to comprehend without having lived through it. The jury and alternate pool essentially lived in prison for nine months, with guards and very strict rules about contact with the outside world, in a country where compensation for jury duty is almost nonexistent. There were a lot of other factors behind their decision, including racial tensions and the sheer pressure from judging a celebrity case about which everyone has an opinion, but I think it's nearly impossible to underestimate the psychological tension and stress from being locked up with random other people under armed guard for three quarters of a year. It's hard for jury members to do an exhaustive and careful deliberation in a typical trial that takes a week and doesn't involve sequestration. People want to get back to their lives and families. I can only imagine the state I would be in after nine months of this, or how poor psychological shape I would be in to make a careful and considered decision. Similarly, for those who condemned the jury for profiting via books and media appearances after the trial, the current compensation for jurors is $15 per day (not hour). I believe at the time it was around $5 per day. There are a few employers who will pay full salary for the entire jury service, but only a few; many cap the length at a few weeks, and some employers treat all jury duty as unpaid leave. The only legal requirement for employers in the United States is that employees that serve on a jury have their job held for them to return to, but compensation is pathetic, not tied to minimum wage, and employers do not have to supplement it. I'm much less inclined to blame the jurors than the system that badly mistreated them. As you can probably tell from the length of this review, I found The Run of His Life fascinating. If I had followed the whole saga more closely at the time, this may have been old material, but I think my vague impressions and patchwork of assumptions were more typical than not among people who were around for the trial but didn't invest a lot of effort into following it. If you are like me, and you have any interest in the case or the details of how the US criminal justice system works, this is a fascinating case study, and Toobin does a great job with it. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

A masterpiece of modern Japanese literature: Yukio Mishima ( ) The Temple of the Golden Pavilion ( ). The fictional story about the very real arson attack that destroyed the Golden Pavilion in 1950.
A bit different treatise on beauty and ugliness!

How shall I put it? Beauty yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one s tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence, finally [ ] the tooth extracted. Then, as one looks at the small, dirty, brown, blood-stained tooth lying in one s hand, one s thoughts are likely to be as follows: Is this it?

Mizoguchi, a stutterer, is from young years on taken by a near mystical imagination of the Golden Pavilion, influence by his father who considers it the most beautiful object in the world. After his father s death he moves to Kyoto and becomes acolyte in the temple. He develops a friendship with Kashiwagi, who uses his clubfeet to make women feel sorry for him and make them fall in love with his clubfeet, as he puts it. Kashiwagi also puts Mizoguchi onto the first tracks of amorous experiences, but Mizoguchi invariably turns out to be impotent but not due to his stuttering, but due to the image of the Golden Pavilion appearing in the essential moment and destroying every chance.

Yes, this was really the coast of the Sea of Japan! Here was the source of all my unhappiness, of all my gloomy thoughts, the origin of all my ugliness and all my strength. It was a wild sea.

Mizoguchi is getting more and more mentally about his relation with the head monk, neglects his studies, and after a stark reprimand he escapes to the north coast, from where he is brought back by police to the temple. He decides to burn down the Golden Pavilion, which has taken more and more command of his thinking and doing. He carries out the deed with the aim to burn himself in the top floor, but escapes in the last second to retreat into the hills to watch the spectacle.

---

Closely based on the true story of the arsonist of the Golden Pavilion, whom Mishima even visited in prison, the book is a treatise about beauty and ugly.

At his trial he [the real arsonist] said: I hate myself, my evil, ugly, stammering self. Yet he also said that he did not in any way regret having burned down the Kinkakuji.
Nancy Wilson Ross in the preface

Mishima is master in showing these two extremes by contrasting the refined qualities of Japanese culture flower arrangement, playing the shakuhachi, with immediate outburst of contrasting behavior: cold and brutal recklessness. Take for example the scene were Kashiwagi is arranging flowers, stolen by Mizoguchi from the temple grounds, while Mizoguchi is playing the flute. They also discuss koans and various interpretations. Enters the Ikebana teacher, and mistress of Kashiwagi. She congratulates Kashiwagi to his excellent arrangement, which he answers coldly by quitting their relationship, both as teacher as well as mistress, and telling her not to see him again in a formal style. She, still ceremonially kneeling, suddenly destroys the flower arrangement, only to be beaten and thrown out by Kashiwagi. And the beauty and harmony has turned to ugliness and hate in seconds. Beauty and Ugliness, two sides of the same medal, or inherently the same, because it is only up to the point of view. Mishima ingeniously plays with this duality, and leads us through the slow and painful development of Mizoguchi to the bitter end, which finally gives him freedom, freedom from the force of beauty. Sometimes seeing how our society is obsessed with beauty I cannot get rid of the feeling that there are far more Mizoguchis at heart.

I recently had to setup some Linux workstations with 802.1x authentication (described as Ethernet authentication ) to connect to a smart switch. The most useful web site I found was the Ubuntu help site about 802.1x Authentication [1]. But it didn t describe exactly what I needed so I m writing a more concise explanation. The first thing to note is that the authentication mechanism works the same way as 802.11 wireless authentication, so it s a good idea to have the wpasupplicant package installed on all laptops just in case you need to connect to such a network. The first step is to create a wpa_supplicant config file, I named mine /etc/wpa_supplicant_SITE.conf. The file needs contents like the following:

network= 
 key_mgmt=IEEE8021X
 eap=PEAP
 identity="USERNAME"
 anonymous_identity="USERNAME"
 password="PASS"
 phase1="auth=MD5"
 phase2="auth=CHAP password=PASS"
 eapol_flags=0
 

The first difference between what I use and the Ubuntu example is that I m using eap=PEAP , that is an issue of the way the network is configured, whoever runs your switch can tell you the correct settings for that. The next difference is that I m using auth=CHAP and the Ubuntu example has auth=PAP . The difference between those protocols is that CHAP has a challenge-response and PAP just has the password sent (maybe encrypted) over the network. If whoever runs the network says that they don t store unhashed passwords or makes any similar claim then they are almost certainly using CHAP. Change USERNAME and PASS to your user name and password. wpa_supplicant -c /etc/wpa_supplicant_SITE.conf -D wired -i eth0 The above command can be used to test the operation of wpa_supplicant.

Successfully initialized wpa_supplicant
eth0: Associated with 00:01:02:03:04:05
eth0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-STARTED EAP authentication started
eth0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PROPOSED-METHOD vendor=0 method=25
TLS: Unsupported Phase2 EAP method 'CHAP'
eth0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-METHOD EAP vendor 0 method 25 (PEAP) selected
eth0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=0 subject=''
eth0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=0 subject=''
EAP-MSCHAPV2: Authentication succeeded
EAP-TLV: TLV Result - Success - EAP-TLV/Phase2 Completed
eth0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-SUCCESS EAP authentication completed successfully
eth0: CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:01:02:03:04:05 completed [id=0 id_str=]

Above is the output of a successful test with wpa_supplicant. I replaced the MAC of the switch with 00:01:02:03:04:05. Strangely it doesn t like CHAP but is automatically selecting MSCHAPV2 and working, maybe anything other than PAP would do.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
  wpa-driver wired
  wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant_SITE.conf

Above is a snippet of /etc/network/interfaces that works with this configuration.

• [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Network802.1xAuthentication

It has been often said that you should continually try new things in life so that a. Unlike the fish you do not mistake the pond to be the sea. b. You see other people, other types and ways of living and being which you normally won t in your day-to-day existence. With both of those as mantras I decided to take a leap into the unknown. I was unsure both about the visa process as well as the travel bit as I was traveling to an unknown place and although I had done some research about the place I was unsure about the authenticity of whatever is/was shared on the web. During the whole journey both to and fro, I couldn t sleep a wink. The Doha airport is huge. There are 5 Concourses, A, B , C, D, E and around 30+ gates in each Concourse. The ambition of the small state is something to be reckoned with. Almost 95% of the blue workers in the entire airport were of Asian sub-continent. While the Qatari Rial is 19 times stronger to us, the workers I suspect are worse-off than people doing similar things back home. Add to that the sharia law, even for all the money in the world, I wouldn t want to settle therein. Anyways, during the journey, a small surprise awaited me, Ritesh Raj Saraff, a DD was also traveling to Debconf. We bumped into each other while going to see the Doha City, courtesy Al-Hamad International Airport. I would probably share a bit more about Doha and my experiences with the city in upcoming posts. Cut to Cape Town, South Africa, we landed in the city half an hour after our scheduled time and then we sped along to University of Cape Town (UCT) which was to become our home for the next 13 odd days. The first few days were a whirlwind as there were new people to meet, old people whom I knew only as an e-mail id or an IRC nickname turned out to be real people and you have to try to articulate yourself in English, which is not a native language of mine. During Debcamp I was fortunate to be able visit some of the places and the wiki page had a lot of places which I knew I wouldn t be able to complete unless I had 15 days unlimited time and money to go around so didn t even try. I had gone with few goals in mind :- a. Do some documentation of the event In this I failed completely as just the walk from the venue to where the talks were energy-draining for me. Apart from that, you get swept in meeting new people and talking about one of million topics in Debian which interest you or the other person and while they are fulfilling, it is and was both physically and emotionally draining for me (in a good way). Bernelle (one of the organizers) had warned us of this phenomenon but you disregard it as you know you have a limited time-frame in which to meet and greet people and it is all a over-whelming experience. b. Another goal was to meet my Indian brethren who had left the country around 60~100 years mostly as slaves of East India company In this I was partially successful. I met a couple of beautiful ladies who had either a father or a mother who was Indian while the other was of African heritage. It seemed in them a yearning to know the culture but from what little they had, only Bollywood and Indian cuisine was what they could make of Indian culture. One of the girls, ummm women to be more truer, shared a somewhat grim tale. She had both an African boyfriend as well as Indian boyfriend in her life and in both cases, she was rejected by the boy s parents because she wasn t pure enough. This was deja vu all over again as the same thing can be seen here happening in casteism so there wasn t any advice I could give but just nod in empathy. What was sort of relevation was when their parents or grandparents came, the name and surnames were thrown off and the surname was just the place from where they belong. From the discussions it emerged that there were also lot of cases of forced conversions to Christianity during that era as well as temptations of a better life. As shared, this goal succeeded partially, as I was actually interested in their parents or grand-parents to know the events that shaped the Indian diaspora over there. While the children know only of today, yester-years could only be known by those people who made the unwilling perilous journey to Africa. I had also wanted to know more about Gandhiji s role in that era but alas, that part of history would have to wait for another day as I guess, both those goals would only have met had I visited Durban but that was not to be. I had applied for one talk My Experience with Debian and one workshop for Installation of Debian on systems. The My Experience with Debian was aimed at newbies and I had thought of using show-and-tell to share the differences between proprietary Operating Systems and a FOSS distribution such as Debian. I was going to take simple things such as changelogs, apt-listbugs, real-time knowledge of updates and upgrades as well as /etc/apt/sources.list to share both the versatility of the Debian desktop and real improvements than what proprietary Operating Systems had to offer. But I found myself engaging with Debian Developers (DD s) rather than the newbies so had to change the orientation and fundamentals of the talk on the fly. I knew or suspected rather that the old idea would not work as it would just be repeating to the choir. With that in the back of mind, and the idea that perhaps they would not be so aware of the politics and events which happened in India over the last couple of decades, I tried to share what little I was able to recollect what little I was able to remember about those times. Apart from that, I was also highly conscious that I had been given just the before lunch slot aka You are in the way of my lunch slot. So I knew I had to speak my piece as quickly as possible being as clear as can be. Later, I did get feedback that I was fast and seeing it through couple of times, do agree that I could have done a better job. What s done is done and the only thing I could do to salvage it a bit is to make a presentation which I am sharing as below. my_experience_with_debian Would be nice if somebody could come up with a lighter template for presentations. For reference the template I have taken it from is shared at https://wiki.debian.org/Presentations . Some pictures from the presentation. You can find the video at http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/My_Experience_with_Debian.webm This is by no means the end of the Debconf16 experience, but actually the starting. I hope to share more of my thoughts, ideas and get as much feedback from all the wonderful people I met during Debconf.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Debconf16, Doha, My talk, Qatar

I just published the videos from Solskogen 2016 on Youtube; you can find them all in this playlist. The are basically exactly what was being sent out on the live stream, frame for frame, except that the audio for the live shader compos has been remastered, and of course a lot of dead time has been cut out (the stream was sending over several days, but most of the time, only the information loop from the bigscreen). YouTube doesn't really support the variable 50/60 Hz frame rate we've been using well as far as I can tell, but mostly it seems to go to some 60 Hz upconversion, which is okay enough, because the rest of your setup most likely isn't free-framerate anyway. Solskogen is interesting in that we're trying to do a high-quality stream with essentially zero money allocated to it; where something like Debconf can use 2500 for renting and transporting equipment (granted, for two or three rooms and not our single stream), we're largely dependent on personal equipment as well as borrowing things here and there. (I think we borrowed stuff from more or less ten distinct places.) Furthermore, we're nowhere near the situation of two cameras, a laptop, perhaps a few microphones ; not only do you expect to run full 1080p60 to the bigscreen and switch between that and information slides for each production, but an Amiga 500 doesn't really have an HDMI port, and Commodore 64 delivers an infamously broken 50.12 Hz signal that you really need to deal with carefully if you want it to not look like crap. These two factors together lead to a rather eclectic setup; here, visualized beautifully from my ASCII art by ditaa: Of course, for me, the really interesting part here is near the end of the chain, with Nageru, my live video mixer, doing the stream mixing and encoding. (There's also Cubemap, the video reflector, but honestly, I never worry about that anymore. Serving 150 simultaneous clients is just not something to write home about anymore; the only adjustment I would want to make would probably be some WebSockets support to be able to deal with iOS without having to use a secondary HLS stream.) Of course, to make things even more complicated, the live shader compo needs two different inputs (the two coders' laptops) live on the bigscreen, which was done with two video capture cards, text chroma-keyed on top from Chroma, and OBS, because the guy controlling the bigscreen has different preferences from me. I would take his screen in as a dirty feed and then put my own stuff around it, like this: (Unfortunately, I forgot to take a screenshot of Nageru itself during this run.) Solskogen was the first time I'd really used Nageru in production, and despite super-extensive testing, there's always something that can go wrong. And indeed there was: First of all, we discovered that the local Internet line was reduced from 30/10 to 5/0.5 (which is, frankly, unusable for streaming video), and after we'd half-way fixed that (we got it to 25/4 or so by prodding the ISP, of which we could reserve about 2 for video demoscene content is really hard to encode, so I'd prefer a lot more) Nageru started crashing. It wasn't even crashes I understood anything of. Generally it seemed like the NVIDIA drivers were returning GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY on things like creating mipmaps; it's logical that they'd be allocating memory, but we had 6 GB of GPU memory and 16 GB of CPU memory, and lots of it was free. (The PC we used for encoding was much, much faster than what you need to run Nageru smoothly, so we had plenty of CPU power left to run x264 in, although you can of course always want more.) It seemed to be mostly related to zoom transitions, so I generally avoided those and ran that night's compos in a more static fashion. It wasn't until later that night (or morning, if you will) that I actually understood the bug (through the godsend of the NVX_gpu_memory_info extension, which gave me enough information about the GPU memory state that I understood I wasn't leaking GPU memory at all); I had set Nageru to lock all of its memory used in RAM, so that it would never ever get swapped out and lose frames for that reason. I had set the limit for lockable RAM based on my test setup, with 4 GB of RAM, but this setup had much more RAM, a 1080p60 input (which uses more RAM, of course) and a second camera, all of which I hadn't been able to test before, since I simply didn't have the hardware available. So I wasn't hitting the available RAM, but I was hitting the amount of RAM that Linux was willing to lock into memory for me, and at that point, it'd rather return errors on memory allocations (including the allocations the driver needed to make for its texture memory backings) than to violate the never swap contract. Once I fixed this (by simply increasing the amount of lockable memory in limits.conf), everything was rock-stable, just like it should be, and I could turn my attention to the actual production. Often during compos, I don't really need the mixing power of Nageru (it just shows a single input, albeit scaled using high-quality Lanczos3 scaling on the GPU to get it down from 1080p60 to 720p60), but since entries come in using different sound levels (I wanted the stream to conform to EBU R128, which it generally did) and different platforms expect different audio work (e.g., you wouldn't put a compressor on an MP3 track that was already mastered, but we did that on e.g. SID tracks since they have nearly zero ability to control the overall volume), there was a fair bit of manual audio tweaking during some of the compos. That, and of course, the live 50/60 Hz switches were a lot of fun: If an Amiga entry was coming up, we'd 1. fade to a camera, 2. fade in an overlay saying we were switching to 50 Hz so have patience, 3. set the camera as master clock (because the bigscreen's clock is going to go away soon), 4. change the scaler from 60 Hz to 50 Hz (takes two clicks and a bit of waiting), 5. change the scaler input in Nageru from 1080p60 to 1080p50, 6. steps 3,2,1 in reverse. Next time, I'll try to make that slightly smoother, especially as the lack of audio during the switch (it comes in on the bigscreen SDI feed) tended to confuse viewers. So, well, that was a lot of fun, and it certainly validated that you can do a pretty complicated real-life stream with Nageru. I have a long list of small tweaks I want to make, though; nothing beats actual experience when it comes to improving processes. :-)

I'm glad to announce that we have the current release of Theano (0.8.2) in Debian unstable now, it's on its way into the testing branch and the Debian derivatives, heading for Debian 9. The Debian package is maintained in behalf of the Debian Science Team. We have a binary package with the modules in the Python 2.7 import path (python-theano), if you want or need to stick to that branch a little longer (as a matter of fact, in the current popcon stats it's the most installed package), and a package running on the default Python 3 version (python3-theano). The comprehensive documentation is available for offline usage in another binary package (theano-doc). Although Theano builds its extensions on run time and therefore all binary packages contain the same code, the source package generates arch specific packages¹ for the reason that the exhaustive test suite could run over all the architectures to detect if there are problems somewhere (#824116). what's this? In a nutshell, Theano is a computer algebra system (CAS) and expression compiler, which is implemented in Python as a library. It is named after a Classical Greek female mathematician and it's developed at the LISA lab (located at MILA, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) at the Universit de Montr al. Theano tightly integrates multi-dimensional arrays (N-dimensional, ND-array) from NumPy (numpy.ndarray), which are broadly used in Scientific Python for the representation of numeric data. It features a declarative Python based language with symbolic operations for the functional definition of mathematical expressions, which allows to create functions that compute values for them. Internally the expressions are represented as directed graphs with nodes for variables and operations. The internal compiler then optimizes those graphs for stability and speed and then generates high-performance native machine code to evaluate resp. compute these mathematical expressions². One of the main features of Theano is that it's capable to compute also on GPU processors (graphical processor unit), like on custom graphic cards (e.g. the developers are using a GeForce GTX Titan X for benchmarks). Today's GPUs became very powerful parallel floating point devices which can be employed also for scientific computations instead of 3D video games³. The acronym "GPGPU" (general purpose graphical processor unit) refers to special cards like NVIDIA's Tesla⁴, which could be used alike (more on that below). Thus, Theano is a high-performance number cruncher with an own computing engine which could be used for large-scale scientific computations. If you haven't came across Theano as a Pythonistic professional mathematician, it's also one of the most prevalent frameworks for implementing deep learning applications (training multi-layered, "deep" artificial neural networks, DNN) around⁵, and has been developed with a focus on machine learning from the ground up. There are several higher level user interfaces build in the top of Theano (for DNN, Keras, Lasagne, Blocks, and others, or for Python probalistic programming, PyMC3). I'll seek for some of them also becoming available in Debian, too. helper scripts Both binary packages ship three convenience scripts, theano-cache, theano-test, and theano-nose. Instead of them being copied into /usr/bin, which would result into a binaries-have-conflict violation, the scripts are to be found in /usr/share/python-theano (python3-theano respectively), so that both module packages of Theano can be installed at the same time. The scripts could be run directly from these folders, e.g. do $ python /usr/share/python-theano/theano-nose to achieve that. If you're going to heavy use them, you could add the directory of the flavour you prefer (Python 2 or Python 3) to the $PATH environment variable manually by either typing e.g. $ export PATH=/usr/share/python-theano:$PATH on the prompt, or save that line into ~/.bashrc. Manpages aren't available for these little helper scripts⁶, but you could always get info on what they do and which arguments they accept by invoking them with the -h (for theano-nose) resp. help flag (for theano-cache). running the tests On some occasions you might want to run the testsuite of the installed library, like to check over if everything runs fine on your GPU hardware. There are two different ways to run the tests (anyway you need to have python ,3 -nose installed). One is, you could launch the test suite by doing $ python -c 'import theano; theano.test() (or the same with python3 to test the other flavour), that's the same what the helper script theano-test does. However, by doing it that way some particular tests might fail by raising errors also for the group of known failures. Known failures are excluded from being errors if you run the tests by theano-nose, which is a wrapper around nosetests, so this might be always the better choice. You can run this convenience script with the option --theano on the installed library, or from the source package root, which you could pull by $ sudo apt-get source theano (there you have also the option to use bin/theano-nose). The script accept options for nosetests, so you might run it with -v to increase verbosity. For the tests the configuration switch config.device must be set to cpu. This will also include the GPU tests when a proper accessible device is detected, so that's a little misleading in the sense of it doesn't mean "run everything on the CPU". You're on the safe side if you run it always like this: $ THEANO_FLAGS=device=cpu theano-nose, if you've set config.device to gpu in your ~/.theanorc. Depending on the available hardware and the used BLAS implementation (see below) it could take quite a long time to run the whole test suite through, on the Core-i5 in my laptop that takes around an hour even excluded the GPU related tests (which perform pretty fast, though). Theano features a couple of switches to manipulate the default configuration for optimization and compilation. There is a rivalry between optimization and compilation costs against performance of the test suite, and it turned out the test suite performs a quicker with lesser graph optimization. There are two different switches available to control config.optimizer, the fast_run toggles maximal optimization, while fast_compile runs only a minimal set of graph optimization features. These settings are used by the general mode switches for config.mode, which is either FAST_RUN by default, or FAST_COMPILE. The default mode FAST_RUN (optimizer=fast_run, linker=cvm) needs around 72 minutes on my lower mid-level machine (on un-optimized BLAS). To set mode=FAST_COMPILE (optimizer=fast_compile, linker=py) brings some boost for the performance of the test suite because it runs the whole suite in 46 minutes. The downside of that is that C code compilation is disabled in this mode by using the linker py, and also the GPU related tests are not included. I've played around with using the optimizer fast_compile with some of the other linkers (c py and cvm, and their versions without garbage collection) as alternative to FAST_COMPILE with minimal optimization but also machine code compilation incl. GPU testing. But to my experience, fast_compile without another than the linker py results in some new errors and failures of some tests on amd64, and this might the case also on other architectures, too. By the way, another useful feature is DebugMode for config.mode, which verifies the correctness of all optimizations and compares the C to Python results. If you want to have detailed info on the configuration settings of Theano, do $ python -c 'import theano; print theano.config' less, and check out the chapter config in the library documentation in the documentation. cache maintenance Theano isn't a JIT (just-in-time) compiler like Numba, which generates native machine code in the memory and executes it immediately, but it saves the generated native machine code into compiledirs. The reason for doing it that way is quite practical like the docs explain, the persistent cache on disk makes it possible to avoid generating code for the same operation, and to avoid compiling again when different operations generate the same code. The compiledirs by default are located within $(HOME)/.theano/. After some time the folder becomes quite large, and might look something like this: If the used Python version changed like in this example you might to want to purge obsolete cache. For working with the cache resp. the compiledirs, the helper theano-cache comes in handy. If you invoke it without any arguments the current cache location is put out like ~/.theano/compiledir_Linux-4.5--amd64-x86_64-with-debian-stretch-sid--2.7.12-64 (the script is run from /usr/share/python-theano). So, the compiledirs for the old Python versions in this example (11+ and 12rc1) can be removed to free the space they occupy. All compiledirs resp. cache directories meaning the whole cache could be erased by $ theano-cache basecompiledir purge, the effect is the same as by performing $ rm -rf ~/.theano. You might want to do that e.g. if you're using different hardware, like when you got yourself another graphics card. Or habitual from time to time when the compiledirs fill up so much that it slows down processing with the harddisk being very busy all the time, if you don't have an SSD drive available. For example, the disk space of build chroots carrying (mainly) the tests completely compiled through on default Python 2 and Python 3 consumes around 1.3 GB (see here). BLAS implementations Theano needs a level 3 implementation of BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) for operations between vectors (one-dimensional mathematical objects) and matrices (two-dimensional objects) carried out on the CPU. NumPy is already build on BLAS and pulls the standard implementation (libblas3, soure package: lapack), but Theano links directly to it instead of using NumPy as intermediate layer to reduce the computational overhead. For this, Theano needs development headers and the binary packages pull libblas-dev by default, if any other development package of another BLAS implementation (like OpenBLAS or ATLAS) isn't already installed, or pulled with them (providing the virtual package libblas.so). The linker flags could be manipulated directly through the configuration switch config.blas.ldflags, which is by default set to -L/usr/lib -lblas -lblas. By the way, if you set it to an empty value, Theano falls back to using BLAS through NumPy, if you want to have that for some reason. On Debian, there is a very convenient way to switch between BLAS implementations by the alternatives mechanism. If you have several alternative implementations installed at the same time, you can switch from one to another easily by just doing: The implementations are performing differently on different hardware, so you might want to take the time to compare which one does it best on your processor (the other packages are libatlas-base-dev and libopenblas-dev), and choose that to optimize your system. If you want to squeeze out all which is in there for carrying out Theano's computations on the CPU, another option is to compile an optimized version of a BLAS library especially for your processor. I'm going to write another blog posting on this issue. The binary packages of Theano ship the script check_blas.py to check over how well a BLAS implementation performs with it, and if everything works right. That script is located in the misc subfolder of the library, you could locate it by doing $ dpkg -L python-theano grep check_blas (or for the package python3-theano accordingly), and run it with the Python interpreter. By default the scripts puts out a lot of info like a huge perfomance comparison reference table, the current setting of blas.ldflags, the compiledir, the setting of floatX, OS information, the GCC version, the current NumPy config towards BLAS, NumPy location and version, if Theano linked directly or has used the NumPy binding, and finally and most important, the execution time. If just the execution time for quick perfomance comparisons is needed this script could be invoked with -q. Theano on CUDA The function compiler of Theano works with alternative backends to carry out the computations, like the ones for graphics cards. Currently, there are two different backends for GPU processing available, one docks onto NVIDIA's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology⁷, and another one for libgpuarray, which is also developed by the Theano developers in parallel. The libgpuarray library is an interesting alternative for Theano, it's a GPU tensor (multi-dimensional mathematical object) array written in C with Python bindings based on Cython, which has the advantage of running also on OpenCL⁸. OpenCL, unlike CUDA⁹, is full free software, vendor neutral and overcomes the limitation of the CUDA toolkit being only available for amd64 and the ppc64el port (see here). I've opened an ITP on libgpuarray and we'll see if and how this works out. Another reason for it would be great to have it available is that it looks like CUDA currently runs into problems with GCC 6¹⁰. More on that, soon. Here's a litle checklist for setting up your CUDA device so that you don't have to experience something like this: hardware check For running Theano on CUDA you need an NVIDIA graphics card which is capable of doing that. You can recheck if your device is supported by CUDA here. When the hardware isn't too old (CUDA support started with GeForce 8 and Quadro X series) or too strange I think it isn't working only in exceptional cases. You can check your model and if the device is present in the system on the bare hardware level by doing this: If a line like this doesn't get returned, your device most probably is broken, or not properly connected (ouch). If rev ff appears at the end of the line that means the device is off meaning powered down. This might be happening if you have a laptop with Optimus graphics hardware, and the related drivers have switched off the unoccupied device to safe energy¹¹. kernel module Running CUDA applications requires the proprietary NVIDIA driver kernel module to be loaded into the kernel and working. If you haven't already installed it for another purpose, the NVIDIA driver and the CUDA toolkit are both in the non-free section of the Debian archive, which is not enabled by default. To get non-free packages you have to add non-free (and it's better to do so, also contrib) to your package source in /etc/apt/sources.list, which might then look like this: After doing that, perform $ apt-cache update to update the package lists, and there you go with the non-free packages. The headers of the running kernel are needed to compile modules, you can get them together with the NVIDIA kernel module package by running: DKMS will then build the NVIDIA module for the kernel and does some other things on the system. When the installation has finished, it's generally advised to reboot the system completely. troubleshooting If you have problems with the CUDA device, it's advised to verify if the following things concerning the NVIDIA driver resp. kernel module are in order: blacklist nouveau Check if the default Nouveau kernel module driver (which blocks the NVIDIA module) for some reason still gets loaded by doing $ lsmod grep nouveau. If nothing gets returned, that's right. If it's still in the kernel, just add blacklist nouveau to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, and update the booting ramdisk with sudo update-initramfs -u afterwards. Then reboot once more, this shouldn't be the case then anymore. rebuild kernel module To fix it when the module haven't been properly compiled for some reason you could trigger a rebuild of the NVIDIA kernel module with $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms. When you're about to send your hardware in to repair because everything looks all right but the device just isn't working, that really could help (own experience). After the rebuild of the module or modules (if you have a few kernel packages installed) has completed, you could recheck if the module really is available by running: It should be something similiar to this when everything is all right. reload kernel module When there are problems with the GPU, maybe the kernel module isn't properly loaded. You could recheck if the module has been properly loaded by doing The kernel module could be loaded resp. reloaded with $ sudo nvidia-modprobe (that tool is from the package nvidia-modprobe). unsupported graphics card Be sure that you graphics cards is supported by the current driver kernel module. If you have bought new hardware, that's quite possible to come out being a problem. You can get the version of the current NVIDIA driver with: Then, google the version number like nvidia 352.79, this should get you onto an official driver download page like this. There, check for what's to be found under "Supported Products". I you're stuck with that there are two options, to wait until the driver in Debian got updated, or replace it with the latest driver package from NVIDIA. That's possible to do, but something more for experienced users. occupied graphics card The CUDA driver cannot work while the graphical interface is busy like by processing the graphical display of your X.Org server. Which kernel driver actually is used to process the desktop could be examined by this command:¹² This example shows that the rendering of the desktop is performed by the graphical device of the Intel CPU, which is just like it's needed for running CUDA applications on your NVIDIA graphics card, if you don't have another one. nvidia-cuda-toolkit With the Debian package of the CUDA toolkit everything pretty much runs out of the box for Theano. Just install it with apt-get, and you're ready to go, the CUDA backend is the default one. Pycuda is also a suggested dependency of the binary packages, it could be pulled together with the CUDA toolkit. The up-to-date CUDA release 7.5 is of course available, with that you have Maxwell architecture support so that you can run Theano on e.g. a GeForce GTX Titan X with 6,2 TFLOPS on single precision¹³ at an affordable price. CUDA 8¹⁴ is around the corner with support for the new Pascal architecture¹⁵. Like the GeForce GTX 1080 high-end gaming graphics card already has 8,23 TFLOPS¹⁶. When it comes to professional GPGPU hardware like the Tesla P100 there is much more computational power available, scalable by multiplication of cores resp. cards up to genuine little supercomputers which fit on a desk, like the DGX-1¹⁷. Theano can use multiple GPUs for calculations to work with highly scaled hardware, I'll write another blog post on this issue. Theano on the GPU It's not difficult to run Theano on the GPU. Only single precision floating point numbers (float32) are supported on the GPU, but that is sufficient for deep learning applications. Theano uses double precision floats (float64) by default, so you have to set the configuration variable config.floatX to float32, like written on above, either with the THEANO_FLAGS environment variable or better in your .theanorc file, if you're going to use the GPU a lot. Switching to the GPU actually happens with the config.device configuration variable, which must be set to either gpu or gpu0, gpu1 etc., to choose a particular one if multiple devices are available. Here's is a little test script check1.py, it's taken from the docs and slightly altered. You can run that script either with python or python3 (there was a single test failure on the Python 3 package, so the Python 2 library might be a little more stable currently). For comparison, here's an example on how it perfoms on my hardware, one time on the CPU, one more time on the GPU: If you got a result like this you're ready to go with Theano on Debian, training computer vision classifiers or whatever you want to do with it. I'll write more on for what Theano could be used, soon.

DebConf 16 in Capetown/South Africa was fantastic for many reasons. My Capetown/South Africa/Culture/Flight related lessons:

• Avoid flying on Sundays (especially in/from Austria where plenty of hotlines are closed on Sundays or at least not open when you need them)
• Actually turn back your seat on the flight when trying to sleep and not forget that this option exists *cough*
• While UCT claims to take energy saving quite serious (e.g. turn off the lights mentioned at many places around the campus), several toilets flush all their water, even when trying to do just small business and also two big lights in front of a main building seem to be shining all day long for no apparent reason
• There doesn t seem to be a standard for the side of hot vs. cold water-taps
• Soap pieces and towels on several toilets
• For pedestrians there s just a very short time of green at the traffic lights (~2-3 seconds), then red blinking lights show that you can continue walking across the street (but *should* not start walking) until it s fully red again (but not many people seem to care about the rules anyway :))
• Warning lights of cars are used for saying thanks (compared to hand waving in e.g. Austria)
• The 40km/h speed limit signs on the roads seem to be showing the recommended minimum speed :-)
• There are many speed bumps on the roads
• Geese quacking past 11:00 p.m. close to a sleeping room are something I m also not used to :-)
• Announced downtimes for the Internet connection are something I m not used to
• WLAN in the dorms of UCT as well as in any other place I went to at UCT worked excellent (measured ~22-26 Mbs downstream in my room, around 26Mbs in the hacklab) (kudos!)
• WLAN is available even on top of the Table Mountain (WLAN working and being free without any registration)
• Number26 credit card is great to withdraw money from ATMs without any extra fees from common credit card companies (except for the fee the ATM itself charges but displays ahead on-site anyway)
• Splitwise is a nice way to share expenses on the road, especially with its mobile app and the money beaming using the Number26 mobile app

My technical lessons from DebConf16:

• ran into way too many yak-shaving situations, some of them might warrant separate blog posts
• finally got my hands on gbp-pq (manage quilt patches on patch queue branches in git): very nice to be able to work with plain git and then get patches for your changes, also having upstream patches (like cherry-picks) inside debian/patches/ and the debian specific changes inside debian/patches/debian/ is a lovely idea, this can be easily achieved via Gbp-Pq: Topic debian with gbp s pq and is used e.g. in pkg-systemd, thanks to Michael Biebl for the hint and helping hand
• David Bremner s gitpkg/git-debcherry is something to also be aware of (thanks for the reminder, gregoa)
• autorevision: extracts revision metadata from your VCS repository (thanks to pabs)
• blhc: build log hardening check
• Guido s gbp skills exchange session reminded me once again that I should use gbp import-dsc download $URL_TO_DSC more often
• sources.debian.net features specific copyright + patches sections (thanks, Matthieu Caneill)
• dpkg-mergechangelogs(1) for 3-way merge of debian/changelog files (thanks, buxy)
• meta-git from pkg-perl is always worth a closer look
• ifupdown2 (its current version is also available in jessie-backports!) has some nice features, like ifquery running $interface to get the life configuration of a network interface, json support ( ifquery format=json ) and makotemplates support to generate configuration for plenty of interfaces

BTW, thanks to the video team the recordings from the sessions are available online.

For some time now, I ve been running OpenWRT on an RT-N66U device. I initially set that because I had previously been using my Debian-based file/VM server as a firewall, and this had some downsides: every time I wanted to reboot that, Internet for the whole house was down; shorewall took a fair bit of care and feeding; etc. I ve been having indications that all is not well with OpenWRT or the N66U in the last few days, and some long-term annoyances prompted me to search out a different solution. I figured I could buy an embedded x86 device, slap Debian on it, and be set. The device I wound up purchasing happened to have pfsense preinstalled, so I thought I d give it a try. As expected, with hardware like that to work with, it was a lot more capable than OpenWRT and had more features. However, I encountered a number of surprising issues. The biggest annoyance was that the system wouldn t allow me to set up a static DHCP entry with the same IP for multiple MAC addresses. This is a very simple configuration in the underlying DHCP server, and OpenWRT permitted it without issue. It is quite useful so my laptop has the same IP whether connected by wifi or Ethernet, and I have used it for years with no issue. Googling it a bit turned up some rather arrogant pfsense people saying that this is broken and poor design, and that your wired and wireless networks should be on different VLANs anyhow. They also said just give it the same hostname for the different IPs but it rejects this too. Sigh. I discovered, however, that downloading the pfsense backup XML file, editing the IP within, and re-uploading it gets me what I want with no ill effects! So then I went to set up DNS. I tried to enable the DNS Forwarder , but it wouldn t let me do that while the DNS Resolver was still active. Digging in just a bit, it appears that the DNS Forwarder and DNS Resolver both provide forwarding and resolution features; they just have different underlying implementations. This is not clear at all in the interface. Next stop: traffic shaping. Since I use VOIP for work, this is vitally important for me. I dove in, and found a list of XML filenames for wizards: one for Dedicated Links and another for Multiple Lan/Wan . Hmmm. Some Googling again turned up that everyone suggests using the Multiple Lan/Wan wizard. Fine. I set it up, and notice that when I start an upload, my download performance absolutely tanks. Some investigation shows that outbound ACKs aren t being handled properly. The wizard had created a qACK queue, but neglected to create a packet match rule for it, so ACKs were not being dealt with appropriately. Fixed that with a rule of my own design, and now downloads are working better again. I also needed to boost the bandwidth allocated to qACK (setting it to 25% seemed to do the trick). Then there was the firewall rules. The interface section is first-match-wins, whereas the floating section is last-match-wins. This is rather non-obvious. Getting past all the interface glitches, however, the system looks powerful, solid, and well-engineered under the hood, and fairly easy to manage.

As was posted a couple of weeks ago, the latest version of KDEPIM has been uploaded to unstable.

All packages are now uploaded and built and we believe this version is ready to be more broadly tested.

If you run unstable but have refrained from installing the kdepim packages up to now, we would appreciate it if you go ahead and install them now, reporting any issues that you may find.

Given that this is a big update that includes quite a number of plugins and libraries, it's strongly recommended that you restart your KDE session after updating the packages.

Happy hacking,

The Debian Qt/KDE Team.

Note lun jul 18 08:58:53 ART 2016: Link fixed and s/KDE/KDEPIM/.

So, I've been sick. Quite sick, as for the past ~2 weeks I wasn't able to bike, run, work or do much beside watch movies, look at photos and play some light games (ARPGs rule in this case, all you need to do is keep the left mouse button pressed). It was supposed to be only a light viral infection, but it took longer to clear out than I expected, probably due to it happening right after my dental procedure (and possibly me wanting to restart exercise too soon, to fast). Not fun, it felt like the thing that refills your energy/mana bar in games broke. I simply didn't feel restored, despite sleeping a lot; 2-3 naps per day sound good as long as they are restorative, if they're not, sleeping is just a chore. The funny thing is that recovery happened so slow, that when I finally had energy it took me by surprise. It was like oh, wait, I can actually stand and walk without feeling dizzy! Wohoo! As such, yesterday was a glorious Saturday I was therefore able to walk a bit outside the house this weekend and feel like having a normal cold, not like being under a cursed: -4 vitality spell. I expect the final symptoms to clear out soon, and that I can very slowly start doing some light exercise again. Not tomorrow, though In the meantime, I'm sharing a picture from earlier this year that I found while looking through my stash. Was walking in the forest in Pontresina on a beatiful sunny day, when a sudden gust of wind caused a lot of the snow on the trees to fly around and make it look a bit magical (photo is unprocessed beside conversion from raw to jpeg, this is how it was straight out of the camera): Why a winter photo? Because that's exactly how cold I felt the previous weekend: 30 C outside, but I was going to the doctor in jeans and hoodie and cap, shivering