org-mutt with org-mode >= 8 Thanks to Don I just remembered that I haven't yet announced org-mutt support for org-mode >= 8. Let's catch up! Since a few weeks I've been aware of the fact that my mutt/org-mode glue, AKA org-mutt, was no longer working with org-mode >= 8, due to the ditching of org-remember in favor of org-capture. Allegedly, org-capture should have been backward compatible, but it clearly is not. Before I had time to fix it myself, Mako came to my rescue and submitted a patch (now accepted) that does the needed porting. Free Software is truly amazing, isn't it? I've just updated the canonical org-mutt blog post, so that the documentation in there is up to date again. If you're using org-mutt, I suggest to refer to the Git repository as the canonical location for future updates, if any. Thanks Don, thanks Mako!

I use org mode extensively, and had added Zack's workflow for integrating mutt with org mode to my ~/.emacs some time ago. However, I've been annoyed that refiling closes the org-capture frame before refiling finishes. The following trivial modification to Zack's code (which I previously modified to work with org-mode >= 0.8) waits to close the frame until you've finished refiling.

 (require 'org-protocol)
 (add-hook 'org-capture-mode-hook 'delete-other-windows)
 (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
 (defadvice org-capture-finalize (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
   "Delete frame at remember finalization"
   (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
          (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
 (defadvice org-capture-refile (around delete-frame-after-refile activate)
   "Delete frame at remember refile"
   (if my-org-protocol-flag
       (progn
         (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
         ad-do-it
         (delete-frame))
     ad-do-it)
   )
 (defadvice org-capture-kill (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
   "Delete frame at remember abort"
   (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
          (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
 (defadvice org-protocol-capture (before set-org-protocol-flag activate)
   (setq my-org-protocol-flag t))

Now, the frame automatically disappears after you refile it, keeping my refile.org clean.

According to its charter, the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board exists "to advise The Linux Foundation Board of Directors (Board) and the management of The Linux Foundation (Management) on matters related to supporting the technical agenda of The Linux Foundation". It consists of 10 members, with 5 seats up for election each year. Elections take place at an event at Kernel Summit, but are also open to attendees of whichever conference is colocated with the Kernel Summit that year. The election announcement is emailed to the Linux kernel list and tech-board-discuss, a mostly moribund list that springs into life once a year for election announcements.

This arrangement seemed odd to me even back in 2007. Back then the Linux Foundation was already sponsoring development of certain non-kernel components, and now that list is even larger. While nominally open to all, nominations for the TAB tend to end up being people actively involved in the kernel community. That's probably better than people limited to any other single technical community (kernel developers tend to end up dealing with bugs from a fairly wide range of projects, so they're not entirely unaware of what other people have to deal with), but it still seems suboptimal. The current membership is mostly limited to people who spend little to no time working with userspace developers, let alone anyone active in other Linux Foundation projects. I don't think this is a good thing

So, after several years of considering it, I'm finally standing for the TAB. I've been an active developer at most levels of the Linux stack, from the kernel through to desktop environments. I've worked closely with distributions. I've even worked closely with firmware developers. I'm not intimately involved in any of the other Linux Foundation projects, but I have experience that allows me to better understand their needs and motivations than I'd have from having spent my entire life living in the kernel. Being on the TAB would make it easier to ensure that these projects are represented in a meaningful way.

Of the other people who I know are standing (and this list may well grow longer), I'm inclined to vote for:

• Greg Kroah Hartman - while we've disagreed on a range of points, Greg's worked closely with userspace developers and even represents the Linux Foundation on the UEFI Forum. He's able to provide a wide range of expertise to the TAB and it benefits from that.
  
• Jon Corbet - Jon's work on LWN should need no introduction. He's done an amazing job of keeping track of a range of technical developments across the entire Linux community, so is uniquely well suited to making sure that a range of opinions is represented.
  
• Sarah Sharp - Sarah's certainly primarily a kernel developer, but she's been the loudest voice calling for the kernel community to spend some time thinking about whether it's as welcoming as it could be. Increasing the diversity of the kernel community allows us to hear a wider range of technical viewpoints, which benefits both the kernel and everything that depends on it.

The election is currently scheduled to be National Museum in Edinburgh on the evening of the 23rd of October. If you're attending Linuxcon or one of the colocated events, please do come along and vote.

(Updated to correct a typo)

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Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter The new version of Brebis Chevillette 0.7 was published two days ago. Brebis is a fully automated backup checker. Brebis does not create backups. It only performs controls on them. Brebis is able to detect a corrupted archive compressed with different formats, automatically checking the integrity of your archives and lots of parameters of the files inside these archives or inside a tree of files and provide detailed reports if unexpected states are detected. Check out the list of the supported features. What s new? The main features of this new version are:

• new option -G or gen-full to generate from you archive (or from your tree of files) the configuration file and the list of files you need to run Brebis.
• new parameter target to check the target of a link

Complete example of installing, configuring and running Brebis How to install from your package manager Brebis is available in Debian, FreeBSD, Archlinux and Frugalware. Use your favorite package manager to install it. How to install from the sources

# wget http://brebisproject.org/attachments/download/8/brebis-0.7.tar.gz
# tar zxvf brebis-0.7.tar.gz && cd brebis-0.7
# python3.3 setup.py install --install-scripts=/usr/bin
# mkdir /etc/brebis

What you need before running brebis Our goal is to check on a regular basis the archive /backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz. Brebis needs two files in order to correctly run: a configuration file with general parameters and the list of files with all their parameters. Don t be afraid, both of theses files will be generated by Brebis with the following command:

# brebis -G /backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz
# ls /backups/
monthly-backup.tar.gz monthly-backup.conf monthly-backup.list

All the files inside your archives have been detected and their names and parameters (uid, gid, mode, md5, ) have been written in the file monthly-backup.list. More information about those files. How to configure Brebis Lets save /backups/monthly-backup.list in /etc/brebis: # mv /backups/monthly-backup.list /etc/brebis For /backups/monthly-backup.conf, we just modify the files_list parameters:

[main]
name=monthly-backup
type=archive
path=/backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz
files_list=/etc/brebis/monthly-backup.list

We also save monthly-backup.conf in /etc/brebis: # mv /backups/monthly-backup.conf /etc/brebis Use Brebis Using Brebis is as simple as: # brebis -c /etc/brebis/ -l /var/log/brebis.log If there is not any difference between the current state of your backup and your list of file, the logfile /var/log/brebis.log will be empty. If any difference happens, they will be reported in /var/log/brebis.log. Show time. I m modifying the md5 hash sum of a file in /etc/brebis/monthly-backup.list, during the next run of brebis, I get the following content in brebis.log:

WARNING:root:1 file with unexpected hash while checking
/backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz:
WARNING:root:toto/titi hash is ce4f8cacd8fc702bdd03531b9447818b.
Should have been ce4f8cacd8fc702bdd03531b94478184.

As you can read, Brebis reports a difference between what was expected and what it checks. Now it s easy to do the same for any backup you want to check on a regular basis. Just add something like the next line in /etc/crontab: 01 00 * * * root brebis -c /etc/brebis/ -l /var/log/brebis.log A brebis run will happen every day at midnight to check your backup. Every configuration files in the directory /etc/brebis/ will be inspected. Feedback about Brebis We at the Brebis Project welcome any feedback about Brebis. Feel free to subscribe to the Brebis-users mailing list, by Twitter or email me directly at carl.chenet@brebisproject.org

Official website: http://www.brebisproject.org
Mailing-list: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brebis-users

The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of these. :) Via Debian Project News for 2013-10-14 I came across the Outreach Program for Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered to match any donation done to Debian earmarked for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and hope you will to. :) And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to create video documentaries about the excessive spying on every Internet user that take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I've already donated. Are you next? For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a statement under the heading Bloggers United for Open Access for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the Norwegian government. So far 499 signatures. I hope you will sign it too.

Hacker News is a fairly influential link aggregation site, with stories submitted and voted on by users. As explained in the FAQ, the ranking of stories is roughly determined by the number of votes divided by a function of the time since submission. It's not a huge traffic driver (my personal experience of stories on the front page is on the order of 30,000 hits), but it's notable because the demographic tends to include a more technically literate and influential set of readers than most other sites. The discussion that ensues from technical posts often includes meaningful feedback from domain experts. Stories that appear there are likely to be noted by technology workers, especially in the Silicon Valley startup field[1].

That rather specific demographic appears to correlate with other traits. There's a rather more techno-libertarian bias on Hacker News than on most general discussion forums, which is consistent with the startup-oriented culture that it springs from - the desire to provide disruptive solutions to real world problems tends to collide with existing regulatory frameworks, so it's unsurprising that a belief in individual rights and small government would overlap with US startup culture. There's a leaning towards the use of web technologies rather than traditional client applications, which matches what people are doing in the rest of the world. And there's more enthusiasm for liberal open-source licenses over Copyleft licenses, which makes sense in a web-focused environment (as I wrote about here).

Now, personally I'm a big-government, client-app, Copyleft kind of person, but for the most part I don't think the above is actively dangerous. It's inevitable that political views will vary, we'll probably continue to cycle between thick and thin clients for generations and nobody's ever going to demonstrably prove that one licensing model deserves to win over another. But what is important is that the ongoing debates between these opinions be driven by facts, and that it remain obvious that these disagreements exist. As far as technical (and even political) discussion goes, Hacker News doesn't seem to
have a problem with that. Disagreeing with the orthodoxy is tolerated.


This seems less true when it comes to social issues. When a posting discussing the myth of the natural born programmer[2] hit the front page, the top rated comment is Paul Graham[3] off-handedly discounting the conclusions drawn. The original story linked to a review of peer-reviewed scientific research. Graham simply discounts it on the basis of his preconceptions. Shortly afterwards, the story plummeted off the front page, now surrounded by stories posted around the same time but with much lower scores.

How does this happen? There's two publicised methods which can result in stories dropping down the order. Users with high karma scores (either via submitting popular stories or writing popular comments) are able to flag submissions, and if enough do so then a negative weighting is applied to the story. There's also a flamewar detector, a heuristic that attempts to detect contentious subjects and pushes them off the front page.

The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

This isn't healthy. We don't improve the state of the software industry by hiding stories that expose conflicts. Flamewars don't solve problems, but without them we'd be entirely unaware of how much of a victim blaming mentality exists amongst our peers. It's true that conflict may reinforce preconceptions, causing people to dig in as they defend their beliefs. However, the absence of conflict does nothing to counteract that. If you're never exposed to opinions you disagree with, you'll never question your existing beliefs.

Hacker News is a privately run site and nobody's under any obligation to change how they choose to run it. But the focus on avoiding conflict to such an extent that controversial stories receive less exposure than ones that fit people's existing beliefs doesn't enhance our community. If we want to be able to use technology as an instrument of beneficial change to society as a whole, we benefit from building a diverse and welcoming community and questioning our preconceptions. Building a social echo chamber risks marginalising us from the rest of society, gradually becoming ignored and irrelevant as our self-reinforcing opinions drift ever further away from the mainstream. It doesn't help anybody.

[1] During the batch of interviews I did last year, two separate interviewers both mentioned a story they'd read on Hacker News that turned out to have been written by me. I'm not saying that that's what determined a hire/don't hire decision, but it seems likely that it helped.
[2] The article in question discusses the pervasive idea that some people are inherently good programmers. It turns out that perpetuating the idea that some people are just born good at a particular skill actually discourages others from even trying to learn it, even those who are just as capable.
[3] One of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and creator of Hacker News.

(Edited to fix a footnote reference)

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So, I've changed jobs, I now work for the incredibly awesome Mythic Beasts, So far it's been great, we've hit a few problems, we've made sane plans, and we're moving forwards and making things easier to manage long term. I've mostly been involved with debugging mac-mini boot problems, and getting them working with (as far as possible) stock kernels, rather than our previous set of custom compiled kernels, so that it's easier to upgrade later, and so that we're not having to maintain a whole set of patches that we shouldn't need to! We're also starting to package our own software that we use internally so that actually deploying new servers is becoming a lot easier, and configuration of our previous packages is now (mostly) handled by debconf, meaning that actually setting up backups is becoming much easier. We've also changed out main backup strategy from using a (slightly flaky) openvpn connection with loopback mounted ext3 filesystems to using rsync with the --fake-super option - the only thing that we've found slightly wrong with this so far is that --fake-super can't reconcile symlinks (it uses user level xattr to store the origional permissions, and with symlinks this doesn't work, because, apparently, symlinks should store user xattr attrbutes!). We also offer ipv6 for all our dedicated and vps customers, as per the mythic blog - and our 2 authoritative name servers are both v6 enabled. We're working towards making all of our core services available over both ipv4 and ipv6, and we should be there soon. It's fantastic to work for a company that has the technical knowledge and no-shit stance that Mythic Beasts has, we will hold our hands up if we do something wrong, and we'll tell you exactly what happened, why, and what we're doing to stop it from happening again. So, 1 month in, and I'm absolutely loving working for them, and I've been a customer of theirs since black cat networks sold their domain name side to them, and shortly afterwards bluelinux sold their virtual servers service to them. Our new VDS lite service is reasonably priced, and well spec'd. I thoroughly recommend our services, and obviously, we actually use our own vds service to provide some of our services - so it's as important to us that it keeps working as it is for our customers. Wow, so that was a very salesy post. Erm, next time, back to whinging about authors not having written the books I'm waiting for yet! :)

(With apologies to Penny Arcade I m probably the last person on earth to realise this, but the RACK_ENV environment variable (and the -E option to rackup) isn t intended for consumption by anything other than Rack itself. If you want to indicate what sort of environment your application should run in, you re going to have to do it via some other means. Why is this? Because the interpretation that Rack applies to the value of RACK_ENV that you set makes no sense whatsoever outside of Rack. Valid options are development , deployment , and none . If you follow the usual Rails convention of naming your environments development , test , and production (and maybe staging if you re feeling adventurous), then in any environment other than development , you re not going to be telling Rack anything it understands. As I said, I may be the last person on earth to have worked this out, but I doubt it. There are plenty of bug reports and WTF? blog posts and Stack Overflow questions that appear to stem from people misunderstanding the purpose of RACK_ENV. Sadly, the Rack documentation is very quiet on the whole topic, and the only place that mentions how the environment is interpreted is in the comments for Rack::Server.new and that doesn t tie that environment to the -E option or RACK_ENV environment variable. At any rate, the take away is simple: unless you want Rack to pre-configure a bundle of middleware for you, RACK_ENV or rackup -E is not the configuration variable you re looking for. Use something else to tell your app how it s supposed to work.

No, I still haven't written the generic Perl bindings for Kerberos that I really want to write (although I have made a bit more forward progress in writing the beginnings of some of the add-ons to Config::AutoConf that I would need in order to do so). This is just another bug-fix release for our remctl backend for doing kadmin actions. Most of the fixes this time are around password changes. kadmin-remctl does password changes by running kpasswd under Expect, but its timeouts weren't long enough for our production environment under some conditions (particularly when propagating passwords into Active Directory). This release both fixes that and clears up some Perl warnings if we still hit timeouts. It also recognizes the new form of Heimdal kpasswd prompts in the upcoming 1.6 release and stops mapping password quality errors to more generic error messages. (I'm fixing that problem in krb5-strength instead.) Also in this release, the Heimdal backend has been improved to use get rather than list to check whether a principal exists (not sure why it was ever using list), and to check the existence of a principal before enabling or disabling so that it can produce better error messages. You can get the latest release from the kadmin-remctl distribution page.

Review: 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	0-316-19280-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	563

Swan Er Hong is a native of Mercury, granddaughter of one of the most influential women in the solar system. Alex, known as the Lion of Mercury, has just died as the story opens, and Swan is mourning. But she's also discovering that something else has been going on, something that Alex had not confided in her. Something that involves an inspector from the asteroids, a scientist from Titan, and a message Alex left in the event of her death, asking Swan to convey something personally to another scientist on Io. And then Mercury is attacked and the situation becomes much more complicated. 2312 is, like most Robinson novels, built on top of monumental world-building. The date is given away by the title; the setting is a solar system full of terraforming, habitats, and explosive human colonization. There are human settlements on every world that could possibly sustain them, including a terraformed Mars and a vast in-progress terraforming project on Venus. Mercury, Song's home, supports the city known as Terminator, a shielded habitat that travels around the planet on rails, pushed forward by the thermal expansion of metal at sunrise. Humans have scattered across the solar system and changed everything they've touched, even the asteroids. Many of those have been repurposed as long-haul shuttles: self-contained habitats on carefully-designed routes on which people live for months or years until they get to their destinations. Parts of this book are gorgeous. One of Robinson's strengths is creating images of the vastness of space, science, and human endeavor that feel plausible and inspiring at the same time. The setting of 2312 frees him to go wild with mega construction projects, and he takes full advantage. Parts of the book inspire the same sense of awe as the Hoover Dam or the Great Wall of China, transplanted into space and backed with neat scientific ideas to ponder. (Even if the more skeptical will note certain human habitation hazards, such as prolonged weightlessness and radiation, are mostly hand-waved away.) Unusually for a Robinson novel, 2312 also features an interesting and vibrant protagonist. Usually I can barely remember Robinson's protagonists five minutes after I finish the book, but Swan is so impulsive, erratic, and emotionally intense that I doubt I'll forget her. Her past is stuffed with outrageous risks and intense creativity: having songbird neurons transplanted into her brain, ingesting extraterrestrial bacteria, designing habitats in the asteroid belt, and creating art on the plains of Mercury. As the story gets underway, she meets the oversized and mellow Wahram; at first, she finds him boring, but then they're thrown together by one of the best set pieces of the book, and both they and the reader discover they work well together. Wahram serves as a straight man and as a stand-in for the reader's opinion, showing Swan all the more clearly in contrast. All this sounds quite promising. Unfortunately, what makes 2312 an ambitious failure rather than an excellent story is the story part. Robinson has built an amazing world, but he doesn't seem to know what to do with it. His economy, at least outside of Earth (and more on that in a moment), is essentially post-scarcity. Few of the characters we meet seem to have any concept of fiscal or practical limitation. They head across the solar system on a moment's notice, take vacations in habitats, or head to favorite spots for the view. It felt like Robinson was trying to write a Culture story. Unlike Banks, however, he struggles with generating a plot. 2312 is, in structure, a murder mystery. The characters witness a crime, survive it, and then intend to investigate it, and the crime appears to grow and link to fault lines in their society. This could have worked, but it has two problems: their society is only barely coherent enough for the reader to perceive the potential fault lines, and Robinson seems to have no idea how to construct a mystery plot. There is no sense of coherence to Swan and Wahram's approach, no sense of a gathering of clues, and very little sense of drama. All of the plot revelations are either dropped in Swan's lap by another character at a convenient moment or generated by Swan refusing to take the plot of the book seriously. The characters do essentially no meaningful investigation on-camera and show almost no investment in the outcome of the plot. When the climax comes, it's all weirdly forgettable. There are also large sections of the book that appear to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, and that's where the unfortunate interval on Earth comes in. Robinson takes advantage of the scenes on Earth to do a bit of alienation and shows how foreign and strange and stifling Earth feels to someone who grew up outside of its atmosphere. Parts of this work, but he puts the plot on hold to do it. And parts of it do not work at all. The most glaring example is Swan and Wahram's bizarre bit of attempted charity in Africa, which comes across as stunningly high-handed and arrogant. This could be in character, particularly for Swan (who is not long on empathy), but, if so, the book doesn't signal to the reader that it should be read that way. Instead, there are some side (or snide) comments that seem to indicate Robinson knows nothing about the economic arc of Africa from the past twenty years. And when their absurd, botched, condescending charity plan fails for all the obvious reasons, the characters, and apparently the novel, throw up their hands and write Earth off as a stagnant lost cause that can't accept the imposition of a good idea and go back to the plot, never apparently caring about Earth again. Almost as frustrating is the way that these interludes are tied back into the story, which is usually through Swan getting ridiculously lucky on her random encounter rolls. It felt like whenever Robinson needed to make progress in the plot, Swan would just accidentally run into exactly the right person or situation to bring up the next plot point or to have some investigation make sense. (Not that Swan usually figured this out. Normally, the inspector explains it to her.) The author's finger was planted so firmly on the scales that it destroyed my suspension of disbelief and made a mockery of the idea that the characters were actually investigating anything. 2312 is built around a skeleton of a plot, but the lack of engagement with it, the lack of tension and emotion, the way the next developments are generally narrated to the protagonists and the reader, and the repeated use of random encounters to steer it left me without much reason to care. Robinson tries a few twists, but since the story never felt committed to its plot anyway, those twists feel less like planned complications and more like another random veer in the road. It didn't help that the final outcome was more prosaic and forgettable than the book had been implying it would be. There is a lot to like here. I'm very pleased to see Robinson finally write a memorable protagonist, and he's very good at both world-building and set pieces. But it needed a plot, and it needed a more coherent and complete cultural backdrop for its characters. Without both, it fell back into the typical Robinson trap: gorgeous moments separated by a whole lot of boring, and an overall impression of a construction tour rather than a story. There are bits of it I loved and still remember, particularly Song and Wahram in the tunnels of Mercury (which is possibly the best extended characterization Robinson has ever written). But the book as a whole is a mess, and I can't recommend wading through it for the good parts. Rating: 5 out of 10

Just a few more recently-released books that I had to pick up. Sheila Bair Bull by the Horns (non-fiction)
Elizabeth Bear Book of Iron (sff)
Steven Brust & Skyler White The Incrementalists (sff)
J.M. Coetzee The Childhood of Jesus (mainstream)
Elizabeth Wein Rose Under Fire (mainstream)
Walter Jon Williams Knight Moves (sff) Time to get back into the reading habit. That's the plan for the next couple of weeks.

As I mentioned earlier, the information in the documents released by Edward Snowden show a clear pattern of corporate and government abuse of the information networks that are now deeply intertwined with the lives of many people all over the world. Surveillance is a power dynamic where the party doing the spying has power over the party being surveilled. The surveillance state that results when one party has "Global Cryptologic Dominance" is a seriously bad outcome. The old saw goes "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". In this case, the stated goal of my government appears to be absolute power in this domain, with no constraint on the inevitable corruption. If you are a supporter of any sort of a just social contract (e.g. International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance), the situation should be deeply disturbing. One of the major sub-threads in this discussion is how the NSA and their allies have actively tampered with and weakened the cryptographic infrastructure that everyone relies on for authenticated and confidential communications on the 'net. This kind of malicious work puts everyone's communication at risk, not only those people who the NSA counts among their "targets" (and the NSA's "target" selection methods are themselves fraught with serious problems). The US government is supposed to take pride in the checks and balances that keep absolute power out of any one particular branch. One of the latest attempts to simulate "checks and balances" was the President's creation of a "Review Group" to oversee the current malefactors. The review group then asked for public comment. A group of technologists (including myself) submitted a comment demanding that the review group provide concrete technical details to independent technologists. Without knowing the specifics of how the various surveillance mechanisms operate, the public in general can't make informed assessments about what they should consider to be personally safe. And lack of detailed technical knowledge also makes it much harder to mount an effective political or legal opposition to the global surveillance state (e.g. consider the terrible Clapper v. Amnesty International decision, where plaintiffs were denied standing to sue the Director of National Intelligence because they could not demonstrate that they were being surveilled). It's also worth noting that the advocates for global surveillance do not themselves want to be surveilled, and that (for example) the NSA has tried to obscure as much of their operations as possible, by over-classifying documents, and making spurious claims of "national security". This is where the surveillance power dynamic is most baldly in play, and many parts of the US government intelligence and military apparatus has a long history of acting in bad faith to obscure its activities. The people who have been operating these surveillance systems should be ashamed of their work, and those who have been overseeing the operation of these systems should be ashamed of themselves. We need to better understand the scope of the damage done to our global infrastructure so we can repair it if we have any hope of avoiding a complete surveillance state in the future. Getting the technical details of these compromises in the hands of the public is one step on the path toward a healthier society. PostscriptLest I be accused of optimism, let me make clear that fixing the technical harms is necessary, but not sufficient; even if our technical infrastructure had not been deliberately damaged, or if we manage to repair it and stop people from damaging it again, far too many people still regularly accept ubiquitous private (corporate) surveillance. Private surveillance organizations (like Facebook and Google) are too often in a position where their business interests are at odds with their users' interests, and powerful adversaries can use a surveillance organization as a lever against weaker parties. But helping people to improve their own data sovereignty and to avoid subjecting their friends and allies to private surveillance is a discussion for a separate post, i think.Tags: cryptography, nsa

Announcement After a very long work, over the course of 4 months, I have finished packaging the first RC1 of OpenStack. This comes on time, just 9 days before the official Havana release. Please do try this RC1 before the official 2013.2, code name Havana, is released, and hopefully uploaded to Debian. All of the packages are available from Debian Experimental, keeping Grizzly in Sid. However, there is also some private repositories that I maintain, holding Wheezy backports: deb http://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main The first repository holds the packages maintained within the Alioth group. These are built directly from my Jenkins machine, on each git push. The 2nd repository is holding backports from Sid to Wheezy for the packages that I don t actively maintain (though a lot of them are in the Python module team, in which I do a lot of packaging and updates as well). A few numbers A few numbers about this now. I had to work on 145 source packages: at least backport them to Wheezy, and push them in the GPLHost archive repository above. This generates 360 binary packages. Out of these, I maintain 77 source packages within the Alioth OpenStack group, generating 209 .deb files. That s a lot of stuff to deal with (and I feel sometimes a bit dizzy about it). While OpenStack is a big jigsaw puzzle to solve for the users, it is even more for someone who has to deal with all the (sometimes buried in the the code) Python dependencies. I hope others will come and join me in this packaging effort, since over the time, there s more and more work to be done, as the project grows. Note that most of the work is unfortunately done on packaging (and updating) the Python dependencies, working on the packages themselves is done last, at the end of the cycle. Other things not packaged (yet) Before the release (and the forthcoming Hongkong summit on the 5th of November), I hope to be able to finish packaging TripleO. TripleO is in fact OpenStack on OpenStack, which works with nova-baremetal. I have no idea how to test or install this, though it sounds like a lot of fun. There are 6 source packages that need to be done. Also, pending on the FTP masters NEW queue, is Trove: Database as a Service. I hope this one can get through soon. There is, also, Marconi, which is an incubated project for a new message queuing service, which probably will replace RabbitMQ (I m not sure yet what it does, and I will be happy to hear about it at the summit). Lastly, there s Ironic, which will at some point, replace nova-baremetal. That is, it does cloud computing over bare metal, without virtualization. All of these new projects are still in an incubation stage, and are not part of the official release yet. Though, I have learned over the course of this past year, that with OpenStack, it s never early enough to start the packaging work. Thanks to my sponsor! Please note that all of this wouldn t be possible without eNovance sponsoring my packaging work. A big up to all of them for supporting and loving Debian! You guys rox. Also a special thanks to Mehdi / Sileth, for his work testing everything with the Tempest functional tests and the CI platform.

A new version of the code behind http.debian.net was deployed a few days ago. It has proved to be far more stable, faster, and scalable compared to the previous mod_perl-based deployment.

There were a couple of glitches during the earlier roll-out for IPv6 users, fixed thanks to the reports by Cyril Brulebois, Michael Stapelberg and Robert Drake.

What's behind?
The redirector is now a plack application (with no middlewere) running under the Starman server with an apache fronted. Requests are processed faster than before and there mod_perl-induced system overload is finally gone.

The redirector is now easier to test and develop. Deploying the live instance is not yet fully streamlined, but it has seen a lot of improvement. Some important changes to the way the redirector works are already on their way to see the light and I am going to be announcing them when they do. Fork the repository and hack a few changes, contributions are welcome :)

It's probably time to move it under debian.org, and finish making it the default everywhere. It's even made its way into the installation manual.

This is a rather huge release of my password strength checking package for Heimdal and MIT Kerberos KDCs, incorporating quite a bit of new work as well as some substantial restructuring. The largest change is that MIT Kerberos is now fully supported, not just with provided patches, thanks to work by Greg Hudson and MIT. The package can now build plugins for either MIT or Heimdal, as well as an external password quality program for Heimdal (the preferred method for that implementation). Alongside that change, the plugin installation path has changed to fit the layout of MIT plugins (as well as I understand it). This version also now supports password dictionaries other than CrackLib. You can generate a CDB dictionary from a wordlist using a utility included in the package and use it instead of or as a supplement to CrackLib. This dictionary lookup uses a much simpler set of permutations (the password as given plus removing some leading and trailing characters), providing a simpler approach suitable for much larger dictionaries. (CrackLib does a lot of transformations before dictionary lookup that are dubious, such as ignoring case and punctuation.) Also in this release are new configuration options to control additional checks: minimum password length (independent of whatever length CrackLib requires), requiring at least one non-alphabetic character, and rejecting non-ASCII or non-printable characters. The latter isn't to make the password stronger, but to prevent user frustration since those characters often can't be reliably entered in different situations and can result in an unreproducible password, particularly since Kerberos doesn't define a password normalization. In support of these changes, and to make testing easier, the plugin can be configured without a dictionary of any kind, or with any combination of CDB and CrackLib dictionaries. The checks for passwords based on principals are now more comprehensive, checking not only the local part but also each component of the principal with leading or trailing digits. Since many sites put their institution name in the Kerberos realm, this will also check for passwords based on the institution name. There are also some fixes to the internal CrackLib implementation, in case it is used instead of the system CrackLib, to better handle long passwords by scaling the test for simplistic passwords. You can get the latest release from the krb5-strength distribution page.

Quite a bit of work has gone into ctioga2 since my last post. Among the most interesting features, ctioga2 now features:

• full windows support, including proper file types associations
• fill syntax as powerful as gnuplot's
• an impulses plot style
• unclipped plot elements along with full control of the curves depth: in front of axes, behind background lines...
• control of symbol size through a Z axis

The latter feature proved actually instrumental in a research project under way in my lab (which is why I wrote it in the first place). It is demonstrated in the image above, made using this code.I've also started the gnuplot versus ctioga2 gallery I was speaking about in my last post, where I try to reproduce most of gnuplot's examples using ctioga2; it can be found here. While I don't like so much the look of the gnuplot graphs, and I try to keep the look of ctioga2's as close as possible to that look, it proved invaluable in detecting small bugs, fixing small glitches and providing inspiration for new features.In the meantime, my todo-list for ctioga2 doesn't seem to get any smaller. Let's hope I'll implement them fast enough ! Keep posted...

and thanks for all the sigs Bandwagoning just a bit, and only a few days past the 3-year anniversary of my 4096R GPG key, I've finally got my acts together and revoked my old 1024D GPG key. If you haven't yet switched to a GPG key stronger than 1024D, you definitely should.
Think of the kittens.

I m using GNU Screen daily for definitely more than a decade and I became maintainer of Debian s screen package nearly exactly two years ago. Nevertheless it still happens occassionally that I discover features yet unknown to me. Recently I had one of these moments again: I looked for a specific line in the long output of a command which has run inside a Screen session. For that I entered Screen s copy mode with Ctrl-A [ and scrolled around with arrow keys and page-up and -down keys. But didn t find it. I thought, it would be cool if I can search for the string I m looking for. Intu tively I typed /, the search string and pressed enter. And it worked! It jumped to the next occurrence of that string. Of course I immediately had to check if tmux has such a feature, too. And it indeed has, but it seems to be a less sophisticated implementation:

Feature	Key-binding in GNU Screen	Key-binding in Tmux
Switch into copy/scroll mode (needed for the remainder)	Ctrl-A [	Ctrl-B [
Search for string once, forward	/ + string + Enter	Ctrl-S + string + Enter
Search for string once, backward	? + string + Enter	Ctrl-R + string + Enter
Search for string again, forward	/ Enter	Ctrl-S Enter
Search for string again, backward	? Enter	Ctrl-R Enter
Incremental search for string, forward	Ctrl-S + string	-
Incremental search for string, backward	Ctrl-R + string	-
(Incremental) search for next occurrence, forward	Ctrl-S again	-
(Incremental) search for next occurrence, backward	Ctrl-R again	-

Being able to do incremental search like with GNU Emacs gave me yet another reason for continuing to use Screen and not to switch Tmux. ;-)

I wish I had known about that quote from Michael Graves before now. I would have perhaps had an answer to some recent visitors to makespace.

There are regular scheduled visits to makespace where people can come and view our facilities, and perhaps start the process of becoming a member if they decide they like what they see.

However, we sometimes get people who just turn up at the door. If a member feels charitable they may choose to give a short tour rather than just turn the person away. I happened to be in one Friday afternoon recently varnishing a folding chair when two such people rang the doorbell. There were few other members about and because watching varnish dry was dull I decided to be helpful and do a quick tour.

I explained that they really ought to return for a scheduled event for a proper tour, gave the obligatory minimal safety briefing, and showed them the workshops and tools. During the tour it was mentioned they were attending a certain local higher education establishment and were interested in makespace as an inexpensive studio.

Before they left I was asked what I was working on. I explained that I had been creating stools and chairs from plywood. At this point the conversation took a somewhat surreal turn, one of them asked, well more demanded, who my principle influence had been in designing with plywood.

When I said that I had mainly worked from a couple of Google image searches they were aghast and became quite belligerent. They both insisted I must have done proper research and my work was obviously influenced by Charles and Ray Eames and Arne Jacobsen and surely I intended to cite my influences in my design documents.

My admission that I had never even heard the names before and had no design documents seemed to lead to a distinctly condescending tone as they explained that all modern plywood design stemmed from a small number of early 20th century designers and any competent designers research would have revealed that.

At this point in proceedings I was becoming a bit put out that my good deed of showing off the workshop had not gone unpunished. I politely explained that I designed simply by generating a requirement in my head, maybe an internet search to see what others had done, measuring real things to get dimensions and then a great deal of trial and error.

I was then abruptly informed that my "design process was completely invalid and there were well established ways to design furniture correctly and therefore my entire design was invalid" and that I was wasting time and material. I thanked them for their opinion and showed them out, safe and well before anyone gets any ideas.

I put the whole incident out of my mind until I finished writing up the final folding chair post the other day. It struck me that perhaps I had been unknowingly influenced by these designers. It was certainly true I had generated ideas from the hundreds of images my searches had revealed.

I did some research and it turns out that from the 1930s to the 1950s there were a string of designers using plywood in novel ways from the butterfly stool by Sori Yanagi through formed curvy chairs by Alvar Aalto and eero saarinen.

While these designers produced some wonderfully iconic and contemporary furniture I think that after reviewing my initial notes that two more modern designers Christian Desile and Leo Salom probably influenced me more directly. Though I did not reference their designs beyond seeing the images along with hundreds of others, certainly nothing was directly copied.

And there in lies an often repeated observation: no one creates anything without being influenced by their environment. The entire creative process of several billion ape descendants (or Golgafrincham telephone sanitisers if you prefer) is based on the simple process of copying, combining and transforming what is around us.

I must accept that certain individuals at points in history have introduced radical improvements in their field, people like Socrates Galileo Leonardo Newton Einstein. However, even these outstanding examples were enlightened enough to acknowledge those that came before. Newtons quotation "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" pretty much sums it up.

In my case I am privileged enough to live in a time where my environment has grown to the size of the world thanks to the internet. My influences, and therefore what I create, is that much richer but at the same time it means that my influence on others is similarly diminished.

I have joined the maker community because I want to create. The act of creation teaches me new skills in a physical, practical way and additionally I get to exercise my mind using new techniques or sometimes things I had forgotten I already knew. I view this as an extension of my previous Open Source software work, adding a physical component to a previously purely mental pursuit.

But importantly I like that my creations might provide inspiration for someone else. To improve those chances in the wider world I force myself to follow a few basic rules:

Release

Possibly one of the hardest things for any project. I carefully avoided the word finish here because my experience leads me to the conclusion that I always want to improve my designs.

But it is important to get to a point in a project where you can say "that is good enough to share", this is more common in software but it really applies to any project.

Share

If your aim here is to improve your society with your contribution sharing your designs and information is important. I think there is nothing better than someone else taking one of your designs and using it and perhaps improving on it, remember that is what you probably did in one way or another better to make it less hard for that to happen.

Ensure your design files are appropriately licensed and they are readily accessible. I personally lean towards the more generally accessible open source licences like MIT but the decision is ultimately yours.

Licencing is important, especially in the current copyright happy society. I know it sounds dull and no one takes that seriously, right? Sorry, but yes they do and it is better for you to be clear from the start, especially if there is a software component to your project. Oh one personal plea, use an existing well known licence, the world simply does not need another one!

Write about it

The blog posts about the things I have made sometimes take almost as much time as the creation. The clear recording on my thoughts in written and photographic form often gives me more inspiration for improvements or other projects.

If someone else gets pleasure from the telling then that can only be good. If you do not do this then your voice cannot be heard and you wasted an opportunity to motivate others.

Feedback

If you do manage to get feedback on your creation, read it. You may disagree or not be interested for the current project but the feedback process is important. In software this often manifests as bug reports, in more physical projects this often becomes forum or blog comments.

Just remember that you need a thick skin for this, the most vocal members of any society are the minority with inflammatory opinion, the silent majority are by definition absent but there is still useful feedback out there.

Create again

By this I simply mean that once you are satisfied yourself on a project move on to the next. This may sound a little obvious but once you have some creative momentum it is much easier to keep going project to project than in you leave time between.

Also do not have too many projects ongoing, by all means have a couple so you do not get stuck waiting for materials or workshop time but more than three and four and you will never be able to release any of them.

Those students were perhaps somewhat misguided in how they stated their opinions, but they are correct that in the world in which we find ourselves we are all influenced. Though contrary to received wisdom those influences are more likely to be from the internet and our peers in the global maker society than historical artists.

I just received an USB headset from Plantronics. Since it has a keypad on it, with buttons to mute the microphone and to adjust the volume, it appears as both a sound card and a keyboard. Problem: that keyboard sends a mouse ButtonPress 1 (yes, a mouse button event, do not ask me how that is materially and logically possible) when the microphone is muted, and only sends the corresponding ButtonRelease 1 when it is unmuted. As a result, the pointer behaves as if the mouse button was pressed continuously, rendering the desktop quite unusable.This situation has been the object of many discussions and bug reports. All of them always suggest the same solution: making X.Org ignore the keyboard associated to the headset, with an important side effect: volume adjustment will no longer be possible using the headset buttons. Microphone muting will still be available though, since it is implemented directly in the headset. There is a better solution however: remap the mouse button 1 of that keyboard (yes, the idea that a keyboard has mouse buttons is quite funny) to disable it. To do that temporarily:

 $ # Get the identifier of the Plantronics keyboard
$ xinput --list
  Virtual core pointer            id=2  [master pointer  (3)]
      Logitech USB Optical Mouse  id=10 [slave  pointer  (2)]
  Virtual core keyboard           id=3  [master keyboard (2)]
      Power Button                id=6  [slave  keyboard (3)]
      Logitech USB Keyboard       id=8  [slave  keyboard (3)]
      Plantronics .Audio 400 DSP  id=11 [slave  keyboard (3)]
$ # Remap its mouse button 1 to 0 (disable)
$ xinput --set-button-map 11 0

And to do it permanently, create a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/plantronics.conf and restart X.Org:

 Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Plantronics"
    MatchVendor "Plantronics"
    Option "ButtonMapping" "0"
EndSection

This way, the mouse button 1 events from the headset keyboard are ignored, while all the other events it generates, that is KeyPress/KeyRelease XF86AudioLowerVolume and XF86AudioRaiseVolume, are not.