Today I ran a hands-on training session on configuring a MTA with Postfix and Dovecot for LUV. I gave each student a virtual machine running Debian/Jessie with full Internet access and instructions on how to configure it as a basic mail server. Here is a slightly modified set of instructions that anyone can do on their own system. Today I learned that documentation that includes passwords on a command-line should have quotes around the password, one student used a semi-colon character in his password which caused some confusion (it s the command separator character in BASH). I also discovered that trying to just tell users which virtual server to login to is prone to errors, in future I ll print out a list of user-names and passwords for virtual servers and tear off one for each student so there s no possibility of 2 users logging in to the same system. I gave each student a sub-domain of unixapropos.com (a zone that I use for various random sysadmin type things). I have changed the instructions to use example.com which is the official address for testing things (or you could use any zone that you use). The test VMs that I setup had a user named auser , the documentation assumes this account name. You could change auser to something else if you wish. Below are all the instructions for anyone who wants to try it at home or setup virtual machines and run their own training session. Basic MTA Configuration

1. Run apt-get install postfix to install Postfix, select Internet Site for the type of mail configuration and enter the domain name you selected for the mail name.
2. The main Postfix configuration file is /etc/postfix/main.cf. Change the myhostname setting to the fully qualified name of the system, something like mta.example.com.
   You can edit /etc/postfix/main.cf with vi (or any other editor) or use the postconf command to change it, eg postconf -e myhostname=mta.example.com .
3. Add home_mailbox=Maildir/ to the Postfix configuration to make it deliver to a Maildir spool in the user s home directory.
4. Restart Postfix to apply the changes.
5. Run apt-get install swaks libnet-ssleay-perl to install swaks (a SMTP test tool).
6. Test delivery by running the command swaks -f auser@example.com -t auser@example.com -s localhost . Note that swaks displays the SMTP data so you can see exactly what happens and if something goes wrong you will see everything about the error.
7. Inspect /var/log/mail.log to see the messages about the delivery. View the message which is in ~auser/Maildir/new.
8. When other students get to this stage run the same swaks command but with the -t changed to the address in their domain, check the mail.log to see that the messages were transferred and view the mail with less to see the received lines. If you do this on your own specify a recipient address that s a regular email address of yours (EG a Gmail account).

Basic Pop/IMAP Configuration

1. Run apt-get install dovecot-pop3d dovecot-imapd to install Dovecot POP and IMAP servers.
   Run netstat -tln to see the ports that have daemons listening on them, observe that ports 110 and 143 are in use.
2. Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf and change mail_location to maildir:~/Maildir . Then restart Dovecot.
3. Run the command nc localhost 110 to connect to POP, then run the following commands to get capabilities, login, and retrieve mail:
   user auser
   pass WHATEVERYOUMADEIT
   capa
   list
   retr 1
   quit
4. Run the command nc localhost 143 to connect to IMAP, then run the following commands to list capabilities, login, and logout:
   a capability
   b login auser WHATEVERYOUMADEIT
   c logout
5. For the above commands make note of the capabilities, we will refer to that later.

Now you have a basically functional mail server on the Internet! POP/IMAP Over SSL To avoid password sniffing we need to use SSL. To do it properly requires obtaining a signed key for a DNS address but we can do the technical work with the snakeoil certificate that is generated by Debian.

1. Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf and change ssl = no to ssl = required . Then add the following 2 lines:
   ssl_cert = </etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
   ssl_key = </etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
2. 1. Run netstat -tln and note that ports 993 and 995 are not in use.
   2. Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf and uncomment the following lines:
      port = 993
      ssl = yes
      port = 995
      ssl = yes
   3. Restart Dovecot, run netstat -tln and note that ports 993 and 995 are in use.
3. Run nc localhost 110 and nc localhost 143 as before, note that the capabilities have changed to include STLS/STARTTLS respectively.
4. Run gnutls-cli --tofu 127.0.0.1 -p 993 to connect to the server via IMAPS and gnutls-cli --tofu 127.0.0.1 -p 995 to connect via POP3S. The --tofu option means to Trust On First Use , it stores the public key in ~/.gnutls and checks it the next time you connect. This allows you to safely use a snakeoil certificate if all apps can securely get a copy of the key.

Postfix SSL

1. Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and add the following 4 lines:
   smtpd_tls_received_header = yes
   smtpd_tls_loglevel = 1
   smtp_tls_loglevel = 1
   smtp_tls_security_level = may
   Then restart Postfix. This makes Postfix log TLS summary messages to syslog and in the Received header. It also permits Postfix to send with TLS.
2. Run nc localhost 25 to connect to your SMTP port and then enter the following commands:
   ehlo test
   quit
   Note that the response to the EHLO command includes 250-STARTTLS, this is because Postfix was configured with the Snakeoil certificate by default.
3. Run gnutls-cli --tofu 127.0.0.1 -p 25 -s and enter the following commands:
   ehlo test
   starttls
   ^D
   After the CTRL-D gnutls-cli will establish a SSL connection.
4. Run swaks -tls -f auser@example.com -t auser@example.com -s localhost to send a message with SSL encryption. Note that swaks doesn t verify the key.
5. Try using swaks to send messages to other servers with SSL encryption. Gmail is one example of a mail server that supports SSL which can be used, run swaks -tls -f auser@example.com -t YOURADDRESS@gmail.com to send TLS (encapsulated SSL) mail to Gmail via swaks. Also run swaks -tls -f auser@example.com -t YOURADDRESS@gmail.com -s localhost to send via your new mail server (which should log that it was a TLS connection from swaks and a TLS connection to Gmail).

SASL SASL is the system of SMTP authentication for mail relaying. It is needed to permit devices without fixed IP addresses to send mail through a server. The easiest way of configuring Postfix SASL is to have Dovecot provide it s authentication data to Postfix. Among other things if you change Dovecot to authenticate in another way you won t need to make any matching changes to Postfix.

1. Run mkdir -p /var/spool/postfix/var/spool and ln -s ../.. /var/spool/postfix/var/spool/postfix , this allows parts of Postfix to work with the same configuration regardless of whether they are running in a chroot.
2. Add the following to /etc/postfix/main.cf and restart Postfix:
   smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
   smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot
   smtpd_sasl_path = /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
   broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes
   smtpd_sasl_authenticated_header = yes
3. Edit /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf, uncomment the following lines, and then restart Dovecot:
   unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
   mode = 0666
   
4. Edit /etc/postfix/master.cf, uncomment the line for the submission service, and restart Postfix. This makes Postfix listen on port 587 which is allowed through most firewalls.
5. From another system (IE not the virtual machine you are working on) run swaks -tls -f auser@example.com -t YOURADDRESS@gmail.com -s YOURSERVER and note that the message is rejected with Relay access denied .
6. Now run swaks -tls --auth-user auser --auth-password WHATEVER -f auser@example.com -t YOURREALADDRESS -s YOURSERVER and observe that the mail is delivered (subject to anti-spam measures at the recipient).
Configuring a MUA If every part of the previous 3 sections is complete then you should be able to setup your favourite MUA. Use auser as the user-name for SMTP and IMAP, mail.example.com for the SMTP/IMAP server and it should just work! Of course you need to use the same DNS server for your MUA to have this just work. But another possibility for testing is to have the MUA talk to the server by IP address not by name.
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I rarely watched TV online when I was located in the UK, but now I've moved to Finland with appalling local TV choices it has become more common. The biggest problem with trying to watch BBC's iPlayer, and similar services, is the location restrictions. Not a huge problem though:

• Rent a virtual machine.
• Configure an OpenVPN server on it.
• Connect from $current-country to it.

The next part is the harder one - making your traffic pass over the VPN. If you were simple you'd just say "Send everything over the VPN". But that would slow down local traffic, so instead you have to use trickery. My approach was just to run a series of routing additions, similar to this (except I did it in the openvpn configuration, via pushed-routes):

ip -4 route add .... dev tun0

This works, but it is a pain as you have to add more and more routes. The simpler solution which I switched to after a while was just configuring mitmproxy on the remote OpenVPN end-point, and then configuring that in the browser. With that in use all your traffic goes over the VPN link, if you enable the proxy in your browser, but nothing else will. I've got a network device on-order, which will let me watch netflix, etc, from my TV, and I'm lead to believe this won't let you setup proxies, or similar, to avoid region-bypass. It occurs to me that I can configure my router to give out bogus DNS responses - if the device asks for "iplayer.bbc.com" it can return 10.10.10.10 - which is the remote host running the proxy. I imagine this will be nice and simple, and thought I was being clever:

• Remote OpenVPN server.
• MITM proxy on remote VPN-host
  • Which is basically a transparent HTTP/HTTPS proxy.
• Route traffic to it via DNS.
  • e.g. For any DNS request, if it ends in .co.uk return 10.10.10.10.

Because I can handle DNS-magic on the router I can essentially spoof my location for all the devices on the internal LAN, which is a good thing. Anyway I was reasonably pleased with the idea of using DNS to route traffic over the VPN, in combination with a transparent proxy. I was even going to blog about it, and say "Hey! This is a cool idea I've never heard of before". Instead I did a quick google(.fi) and discovered that there are companies offering this as a service. They don't mention the proxying bit, but it's clearly what they're doing - for example OverPlay's SmartDNS. So in conclusion I can keep my current setup, or I can use the income I receive from DNS hosting to pay for SmartDNS, or other DNS-based location-fakers. Regardless. DNS. VPN. Good combination. Try it if you get bored.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September, 71.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Ben Hutchings did 9 hours (out of the 14.5 hours that he had allocated, he will catch up in October).
• Guido G nther did 8 hours.
• Mike Gabriel did 16 hours (8 assigned + 8 remaining from month before).
• Rapha l Hertzog did 8 hours.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 14.5 hours.
• Scott Kitterman did nothing out of the 4 hours allocated. He will catch up in October.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.50 hours.

Evolution of the situation October is back to the highest level of funding with 85.5 hours funded. The late sponsors have all caught up now. And next month will again rise to a new record with multiple sponsors having joined up. So far we already have two new silver sponsors (Universit Jean Monnet de Saint- tienne and Univention GmbH) and a new bronze sponsor (Entr ouvert). Many thanks to them! With those sponsors we crossed the 50% mark that was our first objective. \o/ But we still need more support to reach our second goal of funding the equivalent of a full time position. That said the increased level of support already allows us to do a better job in some areas that have been neglected : I asked the paid contributors to work towards providing mysql-5.5 in squeeze since version 5.1 is no longer supported by Oracle. We need beta testers to test the upgrade, see this message on the mailling list. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 15 packages awaiting an update (3 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 23 affected packages in total (7 less than last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 16 months already)
• Blablacar (for 15 months already)
• Linode LLC (for 5 months already)
• Silver sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 16 months already)
• Domeneshop AS (for 15 months already)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 15 months already)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 13 months already)
• Gandi SAS (for 10 months already)
• University of Luxembourg (for 7 months already)
• Rentabiliweb Group (for 5 months already)
• Univention GmbH
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne
• Bronze sponsors:
• Offensive Security (for 16 months already)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 16 months already)
• Evolix (for 15 months already)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 15 months already)
• MyTux (for 15 months already)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 13 months already)
• Intevation GmbH (for 12 months already)
• Daevel SARL (for 11 months already)
• FOSSter (for 11 months already)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 10 months already)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 10 months already)
• Gree, Inc. (for 9 months already)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 9 months already)
• NUMLOG (for 9 months already)
• WinGo AG (for 8 months already)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 5 months already)
• Sig-I/O
• Entr ouvert

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Review: Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie

Series:	Imperial Radch #3
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	October 2015
ISBN:	0-316-24668-9
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	330

This is the third book of the series that starts with Ancillary Justice. Please don't read it out of order. The three books form a rare thing in SF: a trilogy with a clear start and a clear ending. They're ideally read fairly close together so that you can remember the people involved. By the end of Ancillary Sword, Leckie had apparently resolved most of the plot in the Athoek system, although the Ghost Gate and broader imperial turmoil still lurked. I was expecting this novel to be another change of scene, and probably a broadening of the scope into the more sweeping events set off by earlier books. That's not what Ancillary Mercy is at all. Leckie caught me by surprise early, and the book kept not going in the direction I was expecting. And the result is brilliant. It's obviously difficult to talk about this in detail, since there's no way I'm going to spoil this or any of the previous books. This is some of the best SF I've ever read, and I want anyone who's not read the series yet to have the full experience. What I will say is that there was a lot of character growth left, including in some places that I thought would remain setting-mandated blind spots. Leckie tackles some very tricky themes, ones that are hard to do well because of how thoroughly the ground has already been explored, and still manages to find an original take and an even more original tone. And remains true to Breq's characterization throughout, including one critical scene that's masterful in its heart-breaking understatedness. Breq's flat affect is both very difficult and incredibly rewarding as a first-person protagonist. If I had to call out one thing that makes this series so special to me, it's the way that Leckie puts the reader in the middle of a restrained and very careful culture, centers the book on a character with a very unusual relationship to emotion, nearly completely avoids outward displays of feeling, treats emotions primarily as data to be weighed with other information, and yet provides just the right amount of subtle clues and external reflection to show just how central emotion is to everything that happens. This is an incredibly difficult balancing act, much harder than an openly emotional book (let alone the tough-guy cliches that military SF is normally full of), and it makes the occasional pay-offs so rewarding. I think some people might find Ancillary Mercy too understated, but I thought it was note-perfect throughout. And the ending was spectacular. For those who are less enamored of Breq and more interested in the plot, don't worry: we do get some resolution to most of the loose threads. There's clearly potential in this universe for more stories (and apparently more books coming!), but this trilogy comes to a definite end. If I had to quibble, I'd say that a few bits of the plot are too convenient: the resolution would have been impossible without one very critical mistake at the start of the second book, and there's at least one perfectly-timed accident. But Leckie's most critical plot resolution tool was properly hung on the wall in the last book and used perfectly. It's hard to manage a satisfying resolution to a twisty political conflict between very sharp antagonists; for me, at least, Leckie pulls it off. Looking back on the whole series, I find it striking how much more satisfying and believable Leckie's military culture is for her setting than those I normally read. I think we're too often given far-future military stories that are full of impulsive drama, high emotion, and physical feats. But in a world of starships and space stations, advanced computers, careful and systematized roles, and precise engineering, that's not realistic. While there is some physical violence required, problems in that world are more likely to look like operational computer problems than gladiatorial problems. That means the required tools are careful and fast analytical skills, quick iterative decision-making, and precise execution, not physical toughness and grit. In that world, adrenaline is at best useless and often your enemy. Leckie's world of tea sets and emotional control is partly driven by other world-building factors, but, particularly in this book, I was struck by how well-adapted it is to a military where calm decisions and efficient follow-through are far more important than adrenaline-driven courage. The emotion is absolutely there, but the catharsis doesn't come through bloody battles or feats of physicality. Again, so tricky to pull off, since it plays against the expectations we bring as readers to a war story, but I found it so much more satisfying when written well. I also love that this series is not about saving the world, at least in any direct sense. It is about justice, and ethics, and about standing up for what's right, but it's just as much about identity, about how to choose and define one's ethics, and how to make the most of the small number of decisions one gets to make. Everyone in this world is operating under sharp constraints: culture, ability, available alliances, physical limitations, and particularly the role into which they were cast. Huge things happen in this series, but not from the dramatic, order-overturning action of Chosen Ones. Rather, change is created by individuals who find small points of leverage and definition, and who make quiet, critical decisions to become better people than they were. I adore this series, and particularly this conclusion, beyond all rational measure. I'm sure that won't be universal, just as other readers weren't as enamored as I was of the direction Leckie went in Ancillary Sword. But this was a series conclusion that I was not expecting at all, that kept surprising me right up to the climax, and was exactly the conclusion that I wanted. If you liked the previous books, and particularly if you liked Ancillary Sword but thought Breq was a bit too much in control of the plot and a bit too able to make things go her way, I think you'll love Ancillary Mercy. This is simply the best SF series I've read in a long time. Rating: 10 out of 10

Earlier today, Josh sent the text below in this message to the R-SIG-Finance list as the very first heads-up concerning the 2016 edition of our successful R/Finance series. We are once again very excited about our conference, thrilled about upcoming keynotes (some of which are confirmed and some of which are in the works), and hope that many R / Finance users will not only join us in Chicago in May 2016 -- but also submit an exciting proposal. So read on below, and see you in Chicago in May!

Note: 2015/10/16: I need to add some links but I won t delay this more, posting now, will edit later. Summer ended long time ago, but believe me, I m still catching up with all the things that I began in June/July, all the things I left in August when I went holidays, and more things that appeared in August and September. This is a long overdue post, I hope you bear with me for waiting so long, and writing (now) so long too! June In June, I was 100% sure that I would not attend DebConf15 (well, I was 98% sure until then), and when the new Outreach Sponsorship grants were announced, I decided to write some mails to several Debian contributors, so they consider applying for the grant and attend DebConf (and maybe trigger some i18n/l10n meeting ). They kindly declined, and I understood their reasons, but also wondered what would have happened if the proposal would have come from somebody more official instead of a random contributor that they don t know. I also hoped that lots of other Debianites also write to newbies or not-yet-DD-contributors or non-packaging contributors to invite them to DebConf, and I hoped that they had better luck than me in convincing them :) July In July I usually work hard preparing the computer labs for next academic year at my workplace in the University, but I also have more free time in the long afternoons and evenings, since I don t sleep much, and there is not much to do outside with the summer hot. So I used that month to go on contributing to DebConf publicity and think a bit more about Debian and the other free software communities. I didn t put much time in advancing my selfhosting (no SSL yet in *.larjona.net! booooo!) but I decided to deep my toe in Sandstorm.io, and try to selfhost an instance ( http://lacaja.larjona.net ) and try Etherpad inside Sandstorm (since I failed in deploying Etherpad by myself in my jessie+nginx+postgres box). Sandstorm worked, and Etherpad was packaged in Sandstorm so it worked too; and I have my free-software-base pads now for writing and share. So I joined #sandstorm IRC channel since then, and there I learnt that Asheesh Laroia (who works in Sandstorm.io and is also a Debian Developer and was going to give a talk about Sandstorm.io in DebConf15) was offering mentorship for people wanting to learn Sandstorm packaging, and his proposal was to begin packaging Framadate. I also failed in selfhosting Dudle (prepared for Apache + FastCGI, couldn t make it work in my Nginx), so Asheesh s proposal looked suitable for me. We talked and decided to invest the rest of July and first days of August in learning to package Framadate. I learned a lot, but couldn t finish the task. I encountered many issues (setting my dev environment, and later trying to package), and we solved some of them but my time ran out. I posted my work in the list, and I hope that my feedback on the documentation and the issues I encountered helped Asheesh and the Sandstorm community. Framadate is packaged in Sandstorm.io now, Drew Fisher packaged it, not sure if my stuff was useful or not (it s been useful for me, for learning, at least). I ll talk more about Sandstorm.io in a future blog post updating on my selfhosting adventures. What I liked most was the kind of proposal of mentoring that Asheesh made. It was very detailed in every aspect: the task, the things you need to accomplish it, details about his availability for mentorship I try to be welcoming in the teams in which I participate, but the fact is that I fail in actually mentor, maybe because of not making specific proposals to people (until now, I was like Hi, newcomer! Go read this, this and this, and try for yourself any task you feel you like it, and come back if you have issues , la Debian ). This, plus the thoughts about my mails in June for diversity outreach in DebConf, made me feel the need of having a team where people willing to welcome newcomers share tricks and procedures, write together more specific proposals, and follow up the newcomers experiences in a regular way. I talked with Enrico Zini and we wrote down some notes for a Welcome Team in Debian; he said he would spread the word during DebCamp/DebConf and we would see what people thinks about it. August August came, and the day before going on holidays I was really tired: too much luggage to prepare, too many hours in front of the computer, and the usual stress of traveling; and I took the bad decision of signing some GPG keys of several Debianites that I met in July. I say bad decision because the lack of sleep showed its black magic and I accidentally deleted my secring.gpg file. I knew I had a backup but I didn t have too much time to invest and I didn t want to mess it with the backup too, and my laptop was going to stay at home, powered off, during the whole month, so I just went on holidays and left the GPG issue for later. The day after, meanwhile I was waiting in the airport for my boarding time, I received a mail accepting me as Debian Developer. Wow!! Really, I was not expecting that the process was already finished, I had interchanged several mails with my Application Manager (who happens to be the current DPL!) and I thought that his summer could be quite packed of Debian/DebConf work and my process could wait a bit. So it was a very happy news and very motivating after one month (July) full of free software work. On the other side, I was a bit scared: what type of Debian Developer are you, larjona, not capable to sign some GPG keys without breaking your setup?! but I answered myself well, I m the type of Debian Developer that has backups :) and then, with that mixed feelings of excitement and impostor syndrome, I took my plane and went on holidays, not expecting to touch any computer until the end of the month. August is probably the month in the year when I have more free time (holidays), but less time to dedicate to free software. I devote most of the month to visit family and stay with them, with no internet connection available or no free time to look at the mailbox or social networks or IRC But DebCamp and DebConf15 were happening during my holidays. And this DebConf15 was the first one in which I participated in the organization, and the first one in which I felt more than being a consumer of Debian videos . I could not follow the streamings, my only internet-capable device was my Android 2.x phone, but when I had wifi I fetched the mail, and during the nights, while everybody else was sleeping and I was laying on the terrace, below the sky full of stars, I could read batches of hundred of mails from debconf-discuss mailing list. And I could get some feeling from DebConf life, because I learned about the ad-hoc BoFs and discussions, the morning bike rides and swimming proposals, and the dancing classes, the i18m/l10n meeting, and many other things. I could answer some mail from time to time, and I also knew that a fellow Debianite from Madrid was going to bring me some stickers, maybe a t-shirt, and shake hands in my name to some persons. September and October September was about finishing reading all the mails and try to answer the pending ones, and preparing my computer to use my new Debian identity (and stop using larjona-guest). I still have some things to do, pending technical work, and some mails that I should have answered and I ve forgotten, for sure (if you sent me a mail that needs answer or would be fine that I answer (even if it was months ago!), please resend or ping me). I recovered my secring.gpg but and just now I added larjona@debian.org to the ID in my GPG key, but didn t signed the pending keys again (sorry dkg and holger! will catch up there soon). My subkeys expired and I m trying to find out how to proceed (they are in my FSFE SmartCard) :/ About the Debian teams, I ve resumed my work in publicity team (this year I ll try to be more involved, in Debian Project News in particular), partially in the website team, and recently I ve finished catching up with the Spanish translation of the website. I ve also joined the DebConf team again (for DebConf16, no matter I probably won t attend) and documented the Publicity task for DebConf, and I try to engage the mailing list and the IRC meetings. I finally could have time to watch some DebConf15 videos and Andreas Tille s talk ( Creating a more inviting environment for newcomers New experiences from MoM, SoB, Teammetrics ) helped me to step ahead in welcoming people with more useful stuff than Hi, newcomer! Go read this (general URLs), try for yourself whatever you like . I have made specific proposals for two people. In mid September I accepted an interview about Debian for a podcast with quite a lot audience (in Spanish), in which I explained the idea of the Welcome Team and offered myself as first-contact. Since then, two more people have contacted me and I have offered specific tasks I think are suitable for them. I also try to be more available in the IRC and offer some time spans for new contributors to DebConf to explain the git setup, the wiki, and all this stuff that looks more complicated than what it is. And I think that s all. My Debianite friend kindly brought me some stickers and a DebConf t-shirt, plus the organization t-shirt that the team gave me as present for my contributions in DebConf15. Neil McGovern kindly sent me a certificate of my new Debian Developer status (thanks!!), and it s posted in my wall at work. Here you are a photo! (Note: my wall is full of stickers and pieces of papers with things I need, things I like and things I use to explain my work (sometimes sarcastically/ironically ). Maybe some day I ll make a blog post about that!) I feel very proud and happy. Still, a lot of things to learn and work to do, but my intentions are: to keep on progressing (sometimes fast, sometimes slowly), never give up, and enjoy the multiple flowers I find in my way :) Thanks everybody! October and future Some other ideas/plans for the future (the ones I didn t say yet):

• Try to catch up with Debian Contributors development/news, adopt some data source (www.debian.org?), try to create some new data source (about translators, for example).
• Clean spam in the archive lists (now that I am DD I may help in not only Mark as spam , but actually remove the spam from the archive)
• Help in the review/updates of the Debian website (ongoing: /users; future: children-distros/derivatives, /partners).
• Try to get more involved in the Debian i18n team, at least in the part of internationalizing the Debian infrastructure (make translatable via PO files/templates many texts that used repetitively in the Debian website, for example) and in welcoming new members in translation teams or helping the weak ones (although I don t know many languages, the workflow and tools are common, so I think I could help new translators at least to get hands on the matter).
• Maybe some short screencasts/videos about the Debian infrastructure, for newcomers? (mailing lists, IRC, wiki, Alioth )

Comments? If you want to comment you can use this pump.io thread.
Filed under: My experiences and opinion, News Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, Developer motivations, encryption, English, Free Software, gpg, libre software

Review: Firebird, by Jack McDevitt

Series:	Alex Benedict #6
Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	November 2011
Printing:	October 2012
ISBN:	1-937007-80-4
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	357

Firebird is the sixth book in the Alex Benedict series about an antique hunter in the far future (albeit a far future that looks exactly like 1960s suburbia, but with spaceships). This is a very episodic series, though, and I don't think it would be hurt much by starting in the middle. There are references to earlier investigations, but they're fleeting, and I often didn't map them to remembered plots even though I've read the whole series to this point. The investigation in this book starts with the heir to an estate coming to Alex to sell some of the possessions of a physicist. Chase (Alex's assistant, and here, as in the last few books, the viewpoint character) doesn't even recognize the name, but Alex does: Christopher Robin disappeared forty-one years earlier, under circumstances that were never fully explained. He was also (and unusually for a physicist) interested in strange and marginal ideas: dark energy, new drive technology, parallel universes one could potentially cross into, and similar fringe concepts. The normal pattern of this series is that Alex will hear about some mystery, be unable to restrain his curiosity, and start poking around, usually turning up things that people would rather he didn't. It takes a while for that to happen here; instead, the story starts with Alex playing up popular interest in Robin's ideas in a rather mercenary attempt to increase the value of the estate. He stumbles into more mystery mostly by accident. Eventually he can't resist the allure of a revealed link between Christopher Robin and sightings of mysterious disappearing starships and the normal pattern kicks in, but he spends rather more of the book than normal being flippant and slightly unethical. I didn't much like the shift in tone. Alex is a lot harder to like this book, and not just for his business practices. His tone towards Chase also moves past the slightly superior smugness that's common to many books of this type (think Nero Wolfe) and well into condescending ass. Some of this may be intentional, as McDevitt uses this book to bring out a bit more of Alex and Chase's past and has some story reasons for making Alex less of a saint. But some of it feels accidental, or unnoticed, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. As with a lot of McDevitt, the actual mystery is slow, a bit scattered, and has a fair number of blind alleys. That property makes these books feel more like real investigations, but it works better when the characters are fully engaged in the investigation and are communicating a bit better than they are here. The plot also gets entangled in a subplot about a planet full of abandoned AIs, and while that was moderately interesting, it felt like an extended digression with dubious relevance to the main plot. McDevitt occasionally has trouble with plot focus, and I think I noticed more this time because the characters weren't as fun to spend time with. The end of Firebird was up to the usual standards of this series, albeit surprisingly traumatic. The rest of the book, though, felt markedly weaker. Alex decided to be obnoxious and play into his (previously mostly inaccurate) public perception as a money and glory hound. Chase seemed too flippant, uninterested, and a bit too much of a foil instead of a partner. And the plot felt like two different story ideas awkwardly smushed together. I think this was the weakest of the series to date. Hopefully the next book, which looks to be more of a direct sequel to this one, will improve. Followed by Coming Home. Rating: 6 out of 10

There are some things that I didn't mention in my sort-of quickly written entry about DebConf15. So first things first. When I received the mail about the room allocation I was at first confused. I was put into a room with other ladies, which I didn't expect. Granted, two of the other three names were people that knew me since a while, but it still felt like a mistake might have happened. But after a while I realized what has happened: It wasn't a mistake, it was intentional, I was finally recognized as woman for the room allocation too, which made me extremely happy. I was just just concerned about the third person who would be in our room who doesn't know me yet and whether it would make them feel uncomfortable. In the end, that was no trouble at all. I felt so empowered and more accepted than ever in this community. And when finally being on-site there another thing happened with me. I started to use the women's restroom. Up to now I usually had the feeling of "it's fine for me to use the male one, and I don't want other women to feel uncomfortable", but somehow, with a skirt on, it in the end made me feeling uncomfortable. Additionally, there were only three times in total when I used the male toilet (and one was on the boat for the daytrip), and every single time of it I felt extremely uncomfortable with it, like others might think I'm just faking it. It at least in my mind doesn't help with accepting me as female when I go to the male restroom. And it's not a Good choice! as a woman did put it during the conference dinner when there was a longer queue infront of the male restroom. It's not so much of a choice over here. But I give her the doubt of not knowing how important these little steps became to me over time. Totally unrelated to the restroom question but interestingly featuring it a fair bit I was made aware of the Assigned Male cartoon. I instantly fell in love with it, and in case you want to enlighten yourself a bit more about how some things you might say or do get received by trans people, be very much invited to read it. Sophie is currently on European tour with her book, unfortunately Vienna/Austria doesn't seem to be part of europe in that respect so I hope someone will be able to visit one of her stations to pick up a book for me ... And then there was also a small inofficial Nail Polish BoF going on at DebConf. I left it on my fingers for the next two weeks, totally in love with it. Unfortunately the nail polish I got for myself after DebConf had a rather big brush so I wasn't able to work on it, I failed miserably. ... which brings me to the empowerment that DebConf meant for me this year, and the time since. Given that I left the nail polish on I even took the comfort in being myself to go to work in my skirt on a more regular basis. Also, a very nice friend did visit me and we went lipstick shopping. I loved the color she chose, even though in the meantime it isn't visible enough for me and I guess I'll get another one rather sooner than later. Also, about what I mentioned in my last blog post was that my name change within the Debian project was granted. A quick update on that is that also now my GPG key got replaced. I guess it's finally time for me to write a gpg transition statement, even though I don't follow those myself. I still prefer meeting up with people face-to-face for signing their new keys. But given that it's called a transition statement makes it more appealing to me on that grounds. :) And I got invited to a local podcast show. Actually I know the person who does the podcast since several years already, he's also part of the local free software community who attends various events, and he does a podcast since several years now called Biertaucher (named after cooling the beer in a fountain). It is held in German language, so if you don't understand German you might want to skip these links.
In the first episode that I joined in I talked about DebConf. Afterwards we were sitting together and talking about that they would like to have more social topics too, not just technical things. So we took that chance and talked in Biertaucher #221 about Polyamory, which was a quite interesting experience. The host intentionally asked questions coming from a quite ignorant point of view, but it went nice. We were three poly people sharing our views and insight how it works for us.
Then there was Biertaucher #223 where it was just me and one of the hosts. We didn't had much to talk about from the past week, so we agreed to talk about Transgender in the end. Granted, it's mostly my personal story, but I guess I got some important topics addressed in a useful way. And, after getting my name changed in Debian, I thought about what it might take to get my name changed officially, too (as if it could get more official than using it throughout my work environment, both payed and voluntary, but ...). I covered that in the podcast, but mostly it is either quite expensive or requires me to change my gender in the register of births, which require a lot of other hassles that include psychiatry. Or, settle for a so-called "gender neutral" name as first name, which both doesn't sound very convincing somehow ... Only time can tell I guess. Guess that's enough for now, if I forgot something I might come back to it. :) One last note: I consider the Debian project a very welcoming one, and that can only work for a fair amount of people if the tone is right. So yes, I wholeheartly agree with the Code of Conduct. And I'm very disappointed to see that there are still people in the project that are advocating for a freedom of expression, so to say. Respectful communication with each other is a must in a bigger community to make it work, not something that might be a nice to have, and calling someone names and ridiculing them for stating that is absolutely not acceptable. I encourage those people to watch How to Throughly Offend and Insult People in Open Source presentation (or at least read the slides) that Gina Likins gave earlier this year. It might give them an idea why it's important to communicate respectful with each other, and that includes banning degrading terms like "SJW" from your vocabulary because it actually speaks a lot more about your own attitude than about the one of the person you use it for.

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What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper/9.20151004 which exports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when running dh_auto_* (patch by Dhole). dh now also calls dh_strip_nondeterminism during build (patch by Andrew Ayer). The only remaining change regarding reproducibility in the custom debhelper is related to mtimes in data.tar which might be fixed directly in dpkg instead.
• Niels Thykier made another upload of debhelper/9.20151005 the next day to sort Build IDs added by dh_strip in control files.

Scott Kitterman fixed an issue with non-deterministic Depends generated by dh-python identified by Santiago Vila and Chris Lamb. Lunar updated the patch against dpkg which makes the order of files in control.tar.gz deterministic using the new --sort=name option available in GNU Tar 1.28. josch released sbuild version 0.66.0-1 with several fixes and improvements. The most notable one for reproducible builds is the new --build-path option and $build_path configuration variable added by akira which allows to explicitly chose a given build path. Reiner Herrmann wrote a new patch for dh-systemd to sort the list of unit files in the generated maintainer scripts. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aoeui, apron, camlmix, cudf, findlib, glpk-java, hawtjni, haxe, java-atk-wrapper, llvm-py, misery, mtasc, ocamldsort, optcomp, spamoracle. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• classified-ads/0.08-1 uploaded by Antti J rvinen, fix merged upstream, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• criu/1.7-3 uploaded by Salvatore Bonaccorso, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• doomsday/1.15.4-1 by Michael Gilbert.
• ejabberd/15.07-1~exp1 by Philipp Huebner.
• libxbean-java/4.4-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• markdown/1.0.1-8 uploaded by Matt Kraai, original patches by Chris Lamb (#776925) and akira (#793701).
• nedit/1:5.6a-3 by Paul Gevers.
• nvidia-settings/340.93-1 uploaded by Andreas Beckmann, original patch by Lunar.
• ocaml/4.02.3-2 by St phane Glondu.
• polygen/1.0.6.ds2-14 uploaded by Mehdi Dogguy, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• stsci.distutils/0.3.7-4 by Aurelien Jarno.
• vdr/2.2.0-4 by Tobias Grimm.
• vdr-plugin-xineliboutput/1.1.0+cvs20150907-3 by Tobias Grimm.
• w3c-markup-validator/1.3+dfsg-3 by Santiago Vila.
• xcolorsel/1.1a-19 by Santiago Vila.
• xmoto/0.5.11+dfsg-3 by Stephen Kitt.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• ognl/2.7.3-6 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• enblend-enfuse/4.1.4+dfsg-2 by Andreas Metzler.

Untested

• nvidia-xconfig/340.93-1 by Andreas Beckmann.
• nvidia-settings-legacy-304xx/304.128-1 by Andreas Beckmann.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #801212 on unicode-data by Esa Peuha: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.

reproducible.debian.net ProfitBricks once again increased their support for reproducible builds in Debian and in other free software projects by adding 58 new cores and 138 GiB of RAM to the already existing setup. Two new amd64 build nodes and 16 new amd64 build jobs have been added which doubles the build capacity per day and allows us to spot many kind of problems earlier. The size of the tmpfs where builds are performed has also been increased from 70 to 200 GiB on all amd64 build nodes. Huge thanks! When examining a package, a link now points to a table listing all previous recorded tests for the same package. (Mattia) The menu on the package pages has also been improved. (h01ger) Packages in the depwait state are now rescheduled automatically after five days. (h01ger) Links to documentation and other projects being tested have been made more visible on the landing page. (h01ger) To reduce noise on the team IRC channel five different types of notifications have been turned into mail notifications. The remaining ones have been shortened and the status changes have been limited to unstable and experimental. (h01ger) Maintainer notifications about status changes in a package will only be sent out once per day, and not on each status change. (h01ger) diffoscope development Some more experiments of concurrent processing have been made. None were good and reliable enough to be shared, though. Package reviews 48 reviews have been removed, 189 added and 23 updated this week. 9 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger met with Levente Polyak to discuss testing Arch Linux on Debian continuous test system with an easily extensible framework. The idea is to also allow testing of other distributions, and provide a nice package based view like the one for Debian.

Review: Magic's Price, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Last Herald Mage #3
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	July 1990
ISBN:	0-88677-426-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	351

Magic's Price is the conclusion of the Last Herald Mage trilogy (Lackey is from an era of fantasy in which trilogies stopped at three books), but those books are widely spaced and mostly stand alone. You might miss some context around Vanyel's personal life and the politics of the kingdom, but there's a lot of somewhat-awkward in-line summary, so you could read these books out of order if you wanted to. As with the previous two, this is a re-read of a book I've read several times before, but not for more than fifteen years. This is the book that finally introduces Stefan. On this re-read, that surprised me I thought of him as a large part of Vanyel's overall arc but he's only in the third book. He is, of course, key to the grand conclusion of Vanyel's story, beginning as the Bard who has the ability to blunt the pain of the badly-suffering king of Valdemar and then becoming more than that to Van. It's also a book about Vanyel trying desperately to hold things together as the country falls on hard times and far too much weight is put on his shoulders. And a book about a climactic fight against an arch-villain (awkwardly and retroactively inserted). And Vanyel coming to terms with his own foresight. It's a book about rather a lot of things, and therein lies a problem. I thought Magic's Promise had a better story than Magic's Pawn, but both had reasonably coherent stories and some internal flow. Magic's Price has three or four interwoven stories and some odd stops and starts. This is still early in Lackey's writing career (three years after her first novel), and I don't think she was entirely successful in what she was trying to do. The climaxes of the different stories don't quite line up and don't get enough separate attention, leaving a book that lacks clear dramatic shape, an engrossing build-up, or a satisfying climax. The biggest problem I had is that the main threat is not adequately supported. The story is building towards a rather drastic conclusion, one that has been foreshadowed from early in the series, but the threat that creates that conclusion comes out of nowhere. Lackey tries to tie it back to events from earlier in the series, and maybe it was planned all along, but there's little concrete support and no build-up. It feels like a retcon. And the key character in that threat receives almost no characterization whatsoever. I'm a bit grateful for that, since Lackey tends towards total evil in her villains, but to have the cause of all the drama in this story be a complete cipher takes a lot out of the story. (Also, I truly could have done without the rape.) The other irritation is that Vanyel spends quite a lot of the book being a jackass. This is another occasional problem with Lackey's books: her love stories, at least in her early books, involve a bit too much of people being stupid at each other. But I hadn't remembered just how much Van jerked Stef around and treated him miserably, straight to the end of the book. Love is a bit too ordained and imbued with magical powers in Valdemar, which is lucky for Vanyel: extensive plot support is required to explain why Stef didn't find someone else who was less of an ass. In the real world, when someone insists they have no emotional space for you, the correct reaction is "gotcha, have a nice life" and finding someone else to spend time with. This gets partly sorted out in the end, but I didn't find the reconciliation entirely believable, and certainly not fair to Stef. (And the age difference is just a little creepy, although thankfully Lackey doesn't put much focus on that.) On my first read of the Valdemar corpus, this was the book during which I started getting interested in the lore and politics of this universe. There's much more of that to come, thankfully, as I think it's my favorite part of the series. At this point in her writing career, Lackey is getting better at avoiding infodumps and making her magic system interesting. The politics is still a bit black and white, but the Tayledras are a lot of fun (and increasingly less like elves, even if that's the obvious initial inspiration), and the areas beyond Valdemar are developing some more coherence. The conclusion loses a lot from the lack of build-up and emotional support, but it still adds an interesting bit of magical history that will be important later. I wish I'd enjoyed Magic's Price more on re-read, but it was much spottier and more exasperating than I had remembered. That said, it certainly has its moments, particularly around the lore. This is the first book where one starts to realize just how powerful the Companions are, and just how much they're capable of that they're not showing. When I first read it, I loved it. Now, the flaws are too obvious, and Vanyel's behavior is too irritating, for me to unreservedly recommend it, but Magic's Price, and the whole trilogy, is important for building the lore of later books. When I get to Elspeth's part of the series, the politics and magical system will be developed at much greater length. Next, though, my favorite stories in this universe: Tarma and Kethry. Rating: 6 out of 10

We got pretty good feedback on Gnocchi so far, even if we only had little. Recently, in order to have a better feeling of where we were at, we wanted to know how fast (or slow) Gnocchi was. The early benchmarks that some of the Mirantis engineers ran last year showed pretty good signs. But a year later, it was time to get real numbers and have a good understanding of Gnocchi capacity. Benchmark tools The first thing I realized when starting that process, is that we were lacking of tools to run benchmarks. Therefore I started to write some benchmark tools in python-gnocchiclient, which provides a command line tool to interrogate Gnocchi. I added a few basic commands to measure metric performance, such as:
The command line tool supports the --verbose switch to have detailed progress report on the benchmark progression. So far it supports metric operations only, but that's the most interesting part of Gnocchi. Spinning up some hardware I got a couple of bare metal servers to test Gnocchi on. I dedicated the first one to Gnocchi, and used the second one as the benchmark client, plugged on the same network. Each server is made of 2 Intel Xeon E5-2609 v3 (12 cores in total) and 32 GB of RAM. That provides a lot of CPU to handle requests in parallel. Then I simply performed a basic RHEL 7 installation and ran devstack to spin up an installation of Gnocchi based on the master branch, disabling all of the others OpenStack components. I then tweaked the Apache httpd configuration to use the worker MPM and increased the maximum number of clients that can sent request simultaneously. I configured Gnocchi to use the PostsgreSQL indexer, as it's the recommended one, and the file storage driver, based on Carbonara (Gnocchi own storage engine). That means files were stored locally rather than in Ceph or Swift. Using the file driver is less scalable (you have to run on only one node or uses a technology like NFS to share the files), but it was good enough for this benchmark and to have some numbers and profiling the beast. The OpenStack Keystone authentication middleware was not enabled in this setup, as it would add some delay validating the authentication token. Metric CRUD operations Metric creation is pretty fast. I managed to attain 1500 metric/s created pretty easily. Deletion is now asynchronous, which means it's faster than in Gnocchi 1.2, but it's still slower than creation: 300 metric/s can be deleted. That does not sound like a huge issue since metric deletion is actually barely used in production. Retrieving metric information is also pretty fast and goes up to 800 metric/s. It'd be easy to achieve very higher throughput for this one, as it'd be easy to cache, but we didn't feel the need to implement it so far. Another important thing is that all of these numbers are constant and barely depends on the number of the metric already managed by Gnocchi.

Operation	Details	Rate
Create metric	Created 100k metrics in 77 seconds	1300 metric/s
Delete metric	Deleted 100k metrics in 190 seconds	524 metric/s
Show metric	Show a metric 100k times in 149 seconds	670 metric/s

Sending and getting measures Pushing measures into metrics is one of the hottest topic. Starting with Gnocchi 1.1, the measures pushed are treated asynchronously, which makes it much faster to push new measures. Getting new numbers on that feature was pretty interesting. The number of metric per second you can push depends on the batch size, meaning the number of actual measurements you send per call. The naive approach is to push 1 measure per call, and in that case, Gnocchi is able to handle around 600 measures/s. With a batch containing 100 measures, the number of calls per second goes down to 450, but since you push 100 measures each time, that means 45k measures per second pushed into Gnocchi! I've pushed the test further, inspired by the recent blog post of InfluxDB claiming to achieve 300k points per second with their new engine. I ran the same benchmark on the hardware I had, which is roughly two times smaller than the one they used. I achieved to push Gnocchi to a little more than 120k measurement per second. If I had same hardware as they used, I could interpolate the results to achieve almost 250k measures/s pushed. Obviously, you can't strictly compare Gnocchi and InfluxDB since they are not doing exactly the same thing, but it still looks way better than what I expected. Using smaller batch sizes of 1k or 2k improve the throughput further to around 125k measures/s.

Operation	Details	Rate
Push metric 5k	Push 5M measures with batch of 5k measures in 40 seconds	122k measures/s
Push metric 4k	Push 5M measures with batch of 4k measures in 40 seconds	125k measures/s
Push metric 3k	Push 5M measures with batch of 3k measures in 40 seconds	123k measures/s
Push metric 2k	Push 5M measures with batch of 2k measures in 41 seconds	121k measures/s
Push metric 1k	Push 5M measures with batch of 1k measures in 44 seconds	113k measures/s
Push metric 500	Push 5M measures with batch of 500 measures in 51 seconds	98k measures/s
Push metric 100	Push 5M measures with batch of 100 measures in 112 seconds	45k measures/s
Push metric 10	Push 5M measures with batch of 10 measures in 852 seconds	6k measures/s
Push metric 1	Push 500k measures with batch of 1 measure in 800 seconds	624 measures/s
Get measures	Push 43k measures of 1 metric	260k measures/s

What about getting measures? Well, it's actually pretty fast too. Retrieving a metric with 1 month of data with 1 minute interval (that's 43k points) takes less than 2 second. Though it's actually slower than what I expected. The reason seems to be that the JSON is 2 MB big and encoding it takes a lot of time for Python. I'll investigate that. Another point I discovered, is that by default Gnocchi returns all the datapoints for each granularities available for the asked period, which might double the size of the returned data for nothing if you don't need it. It'll be easy to add an option to the API to only retrieve what you need though! Once benchmarked, that meant I was able to retrieve 6 metric/s per second, which translates to around 260k measures/s. Metricd speed New measures that are pushed into Gnocchi are processed asynchronously by the gnocchi-metricd daemon. When doing the benchmarks above, I ran into a very interesting issue: sending 10k measures on a metric would make gnocchi-metricd uses up to 2 GB RAM and 120 % CPU for more than 10 minutes. After further investigation, I found that the naive approach we used to resample datapoints in Carbonara using Pandas was causing that. I reported a bug on Pandas and the upstream author was kind enough to provide a nice workaround, that I sent as a pull request to Pandas documentation. I wrote a fix for Gnocchi based on that, and started using it. Computing the standard aggregation methods set (std, count, 95pct, min, max, sum, median, mean) for 10k batches of 1 measure (worst case scenario) for one metric with 10k measures now takes only 20 seconds and uses 100 MB of RAM 45 faster. That means that in normal operations, where only a few new measures are processed, the operation of updating a metric only takes a few milliseconds. Awesome! Comparison with Ceilometer For comparison sake, I've quickly run some read operations benchmark in Ceilometer. I've fed it with one month of samples for 100 instances polled every minute. That represents roughly 4.3M samples injected, and that took a while almost 1 hour whereas it would have taken less than a minute in Gnocchi. Then I tried to retrieve some statistics in the same way that we provide them in Gnocchi, which mean aggregating them over a period of 60 seconds over a month.

Operation	Details	Rate
Read metric SQL	Read measures for 1 metric	2min 58s
Read metric MongoDB	Read measures for 1 metric	28s
Read metric Gnocchi	Read measures for 1 metric	2s

Obviously, Ceilometer is very slow. It has to look into 4M of samples to compute and return the result, which takes a lot of time. Whereas Gnocchi just has to fetch a file and pass it over. That also means that the more samples you have (so the more time you collect data and the more resources you have), slower Ceilometer will become. This is not a problem with Gnocchi, as I emphasized when I started designing it. Most Gnocchi operations are O(log R) where R is the number of metrics or resources, whereas most Ceilometer operations are O(log S) where S is the number of samples (measures). Since is R millions of time smaller than S, Gnocchi gets to be much faster. And what's even more interesting, is that Gnocchi is entirely scalable horizontally. Adding more Gnocchi servers (for the API and its background processing worker metricd) will multiply Gnocchi performances by the number of servers added. Improvements There are several things to improve in Gnocchi, such as splitting Carbonara archives to make them more efficient, especially from drivers such as Ceph and Swift. It's already on my plate, and I'm looking forwarding to working on that! And if you have any questions, feel free to shoot them in the comment section.

On the recently reviewed album International Sad Hits Vol 1 I wrote that Kim Doo Soo was the great surprise of the CD for me. So I went ahead and bought (not that easy, import from US!) one of his most recommended album, the Free Spirit. Sad songs, full of melancholy, speaking of desperation, isolation, destroyed love. The music and singing is simple, mainly based on guitar and voice only, at times harmonica, strings and others are added. In contrast to the Crying Philosopher Tomokawa Kazuki, the songs are all very melodic and easy to listen, but still carrying a strong impact. After listening to these songs, the melodies wander around my brain resonating again and again, like (mis)guiding lights in a dark forest. All the songs are in Korean, but fortunately the accompanying booklet carries a Japanese translation for the Korean incapables like me. In the future I will provide some translations into English, since I believe that this artist should be more known outside this small area. While a friend of mine said I don t like (bimbokusai) music, I have to say I enjoy reading through the sad stories while listening to this special music.

This is the 2002 fourth album by Korea s true cult folk/singer-songwriter hero, Kim Doo Soo. Kim Doo Soo is perhaps the deepest and most introspective of Korea s acid folk singers. Legends surround his songs political oppression, alcoholism, suicide, a 10-year period of mountain seclusion. [ ] On Free Spirit he mines productive veins of profound melancholy, animistic nature, and unfathomable, hermetic affection. These songs are couched in a veil of gorgeous, still melodicism, Kim s quavering vocals and guitar shaded with subtle accordion, cello, organ and harmonica. A reflective and unearthly masterpiece.
Forced Exposure

To this I cannot add anything more eloquent! The songs on this CD are as follows, the English translation is taken from Kim Doo Soo s official web page.

1. (Wild flower)
2. (Boat for the shore)
3. (Butterfly)
4. (Sweetbrier)
5. (Bohemian)
6. (Dawn rain)
7. 19 Blues (Blues of 19th street)
8. (Mountain)
9. (As time goes by)
10. Romantic Horizon
11. ( ) (Reminiscence)
12. (Evening river)
13. ( ) (Bohemian poetry)
14. , (Dandelion, dandelion)

My favorites under these songs are Boat for the shore ( You aren t coming any more onto a wild sea I am leaving ), Bohemian ( I m going to the shores of emptiness, my free spirit flows down the river probably his most famous song, assumed to be responsible for his retreat to the mountains), Dawn rain (A lovely song, and the only one without Japanese translation! Very strange.), Mountain ( Mountains Mountains my dream, mountains ). But I can recommend each and every song on this CD. To close this short review, if you are interested in something else but the usual happy-pappy KPop or JPop or USPop, and are searching for inspiring and songs with Tiefgang (deep meaning, as we say it in German), give this special artist a try! Some links concerning Kim Doo Soo that might be useful:

• Official Web site
• Kim Doo Soo Live Information for Japan
• A review of Kim Doo Soo s Bohemian at KPopStarz
• Kim Doo Soo at Psychedelic Folk with short reviews of his albums
• (in Russian) Biography of Kim Doo Soo on svyazalamuzyka

I m currently on the way home, returning from a four-day workshop for high school students; ages 13 to 20, grade 9 to 13. My goal was to teach them something about proofs and logic, in a ambitiously formal and abstract way. For this workshop, I created a computer program called The Incredible Proof Machine that allows the kids to explore creating a proof, by placing blocks on a canvas and drawing connections between them (see my previous blog post for an introduction). Subtracting time spent on on breaks, organizational stuff, the time the student needed to prepare a final presentation, I think we were working for a total of 14 hours, during which we covered propositional logic. I generally let the students explore and try to solve the tasks of one session mostly on their own, followed by a common discussion of what they have just done, what it means why it makes sense etc. The sessions were: assumptions and conclusions in general, with conjunction; implication; disjunction; falsum and tertium non datur. We also briefly discussed paper proofs with the student: how they look, and how they relate to the Proof Machine proofs. We had some lecture notes that we handed out pice-wise after each session. The sections were mildly¹ password-protected to avoid that the quicker students would work ahead, thus keeping the group together. One or two of the 13 students were doing very well and eventually, I gave them the passwords to the predicate logic section and let them work them on them on their own. The quickest managed to solve almost all of these as well, but (as far I as I can tell) without a deeper understanding of the quantifiers, and more a mechanical intuition. As expected, the students were able to solve most of the exercises, even when a proper understanding of the logical semantics was not yet fully developed. This was by design: I believe that this way it was more motivating and encouraging, as they could make it work , compared to a more traditional approach of first throwing a lot of theory at them and then expecting them to apply it. This was confirmed by their feedback after the workshop. I was happy with my implementation. The students immediately could work with it with very few hick-ups, and only one minor bug occurred², which I could fix on the spot. Having everything run on in the browser was a big plus, given that we had no stable internet connection for everyone: Once the Incredible Proof Machine was loaded, the student could continue to work offline. Personally, I find that the UI is occasionally too sluggish, especially on the weaker laptops, but it seems that the students did not seem to mind. Some students tried to connect outputs with outputs or inputs with inputs and the visualization did make it clearly visible that such a link is not actually connected to the block. The predicate logic part is a bit less convincing, with e.g. scoping of local constants not easily understood. I would say that this part would work better if some explanation is given before the students start working on the more involved rules. Our room was equipped with a smartboard, and I was delighted when I found out, mostly by accident, that I could actually use my finger to drag the blocks of the proof and to draw connections. This not only gave me a Minority Report -like feeling, but also meant that it was much easier for the students to follow my explanations when they could just watch my hand, instead of trying to locate the mouse pointer on a regular projector. I m generally doubtful whether such fancy technological toys are useful in the class room, but in this case at least I liked it. The ability to scribble anywhere on the screen was occasionally a plus as well. All in all I believe the Proof Machine was a useful tool, and I am sure that without it, it would have been tricky to have students voluntarily spend 14 hours on such a relatively dry and abstract topic. Given the amount of work that went into the development, I hope that this will not be the last occasion where it is put to good use. So if you have to teach formal logic and natural deduction-style proofs, you are welcome to use the Incredible Proof Machine to get your students excited. It is purely static, i.e. needs no special server-side infrastructure, and you can define your own logic (i.e. proof rules), sessions and tasks. Also, there are a few interesting way in which the Proof Machine could be extended. In particular, I d like it to be able to generate a normal , natural-language proof from a given proof even if it will sound a bit mechanical and then use hover-highlight effects to relate the formulas and sentences in the text proof to the connections and blocks in the graphical proof. Contributions are welcome!

When uploading a new library package which changes its API/behavior in a subtle way, typically you will only hear about the downstream breakage after you ve uploaded the new library package (via bug reports telling you that your package FTBFS, fails to build from source). I prefer quality-assurance to happen proactively rather than reactively whenever possible, so I set out to write a tool which automates the rebuild of reverse-build-dependencies, i.e. all packages whose build process could be affected by the package one is about to upload. The result is a tool called ratt, which is short for Rebuild All The Things! . It injects the newly-built Debian package you provide it, figures out all the reverse-build-dependencies, invokes sbuild for all of them, and finally presents you with a list of packages that failed to build. To demonstrate how the tool works, let s assume we want to upload a new version of the Go library github.com/jacobsa/gcloud. To keep this example brief, we don t actually do anything to the package but bump its version number:

midna /tmp $ debcheckout golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev
declared git repository at git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud.git
git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud.git golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev ...
Cloning into 'golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev'...
remote: Counting objects: 84, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (73/73), done.
remote: Total 84 (delta 19), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (84/84), 87.70 KiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (19/19), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
midna /tmp $ cd golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev $ dch -i -m 'dummy new version'
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev $ git commit -a -m 'dummy new version'
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev $ gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder
[ ]

So far, so good. Now let s invoke ratt to rebuild all reverse-build-dependencies:

midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev $ ratt golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud_0.0\~git20150709-2_amd64.changes         
2015/08/16 11:48:41 Loading changes file "golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud_0.0~git20150709-2_amd64.changes"
2015/08/16 11:48:41  - 1 binary packages: golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev
2015/08/16 11:48:41  - corresponding .debs (will be injected when building):
2015/08/16 11:48:41     golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev_0.0~git20150709-2_all.deb
2015/08/16 11:48:41 Loading sources index "/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.ch.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_contrib_source_Sources"
2015/08/16 11:48:41 Loading sources index "/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.ch.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_source_Sources"
2015/08/16 11:48:43 Loading sources index "/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.ch.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_non-free_source_Sources"
2015/08/16 11:48:43 Building golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1 (commandline: [sbuild --arch-all --dist=sid --nolog golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1 --extra-package=golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev_0.0~git20150709-2_all.deb])
2015/08/16 11:49:19 Build results:
2015/08/16 11:49:19 PASSED: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1

Thanks for reading this far, and I hope ratt makes your life a tiny bit easier. As ratt just entered Debian unstable, you can install it using apt-get install ratt. If you have any feedback, I m eager to hear it.

The definition of thick-skinned in different dictionaries ranges from not easily offended to largely unaffected by the needs and feelings of other people; insensitive , going through able to ignore personal criticism , ability to withstand criticism and show no signs of any criticism you may receive getting to you , an insensitive nature or impervious to criticism . It essentially describes an emotionally detached attitude regarding one s social environment, the capacity or ignoring or minimizing the effects of others criticism and the priorization of the protection of one s current state over the capacity of empathizing and taking into account what others may say that don t conform to one s current way of thinking. It is essentially setting up barriers against whatever others may do that might provoke any kind of crisis or change in you. There are a few underlying assumptions in the use of this term as a something good to have, when it comes to interactions with your own community: In the first place, it assumes that your own community is essentially hostile to you, and you will have to be constantly in guard against them. It assumes that it is better to set up barriers against the influence of others within your own comunity, because in fact your own peers are out there essentially to hurt you. Or, at least, they do not care a damn about you. In second place, it assumes that changes are wrong, that personal evolution is wrong, and that the more insensitive you are to your peer s opinions, the best, because they really have nothing to contribute to help you grow as a person. I m smart; you re dumb. I m big; you re little. I m right; you re wrong; And there s nothing you can do about it. (from the film Matilda). Matilda s dad is in fact the first reference that comes to my mind when we re talking about really thick skin. When the main recommendation when the level of aggressiveness within a community is that someone has to make their skin thicker, they are assuming that a bullying environment will help the results. This is nothing new. It s the same theoretical base that you can see in hazing and in other activities involving harassment, abuse or humiliation in college, when initiating a person into some groups. It s supposed to build character, to make someone closer to the alpha male stereotype and, in essence, make us better men (yes, I am using the word men on purpose, because insensitiveness is not usually seen as a positive trait in females). The assumption is that a community with a hard environment and individuals prepared for the war is more effective than a more civilized one. Luckily, that s not the point of view of most members of the Debian Community, and many other Free/Open Source projects. The Code of Conduct is very explicit when it says that a community in which people feel threatened is not a healthy community , and that is good. The Debian Project welcomes and encourages participation by everyone (Diversity Statement), including those with a thin skin, and I m happy about that. There are still a lot of things to improve, of course, but I have the feeling that -despite the occasional complains that having to be respectful to others take the fun away- we re moving in the right direction. The best tip I can give you on thickening your skin = don t. That is, don t thicken your skin. Having a thin skin means you re letting the world in, you re letting what s out there affect what s in you. It means you re connected. You re open. You re considerate and you ll consider it whatever it might be. Having a thin skin may be dangerous, sure, because you might take in so much that you pop, like that blueberry girl from Willy Wonka. But life is dangerous. A thick skin protects you from everything, but it also protects you from everything from the gentle touches of life, from the subtle emotions of others, the deep connections, the meaningful interactions. (Top Ten Tips on how to Thicken your Skin).

I will join Lars and Tincho in stating this, and presenting a version contrary to what Norbert portraits. I am very glad and very proud that the community I am most involved in, the Debian project, has kept its core identity over the years, at least for the slightly-over-a-decade I have been involved in it. And I am very glad and very proud that being less aggressive, more welcoming and in general more respectful to each other does not counter this. When I joined Debian, part of the mantra chants we had is that in order to join a Free Software project you had to grow a thick skin, as sooner or later we'd all be exposed to flamefests. But, yes, the median age of the DD was way lower back then I don't have the data at hand, but IIRC I have always been close to our median. Which means we are all growing old and grumpy. But old and wiser. A very successful, important and dear subproject to many of us is the Debian Women Project. Its original aim was, as the name shows, to try to reduce the imbalance between men and women participants in Debian IIRC back in 2004 we had 3 female DDs, and >950 male DDs. Soon, the project started morphing into pushing all of Debian to be less hostile, more open to contributions from any- and everyone (as today our diversity statement reads). And yes, we are still a long, long, long way from reaching equality. But we have done great steps. And not just WRT women, but all of the different minorities, as well as to diverging opinions within our community. Many people don't enjoy us abiding by a code of conduct; I also find it irritating sometimes to have to abide by certain codes if we mostly know each other and know we won't be offended by a given comment... Or will we? So, being more open and more welcoming also means being more civil. I cannot get myself to agree with Linus' quote, when he says that respect is not just given to everybody but must be earned. We should always start, and I enjoy feeling that in Debian this is becoming the norm, by granting respect to everybody And not losing it, even if things get out of hand. Thick skins are not good for communication.

Swirlone

While I was sewing the small swirl plushie http://blog.zouish.org/posts/swirl_how_to/ for the Racoon http://social.gl-como.it/display/3e3ce0df1855db8250aae3a718529027 I thought that it would have been nice to have a bigger one, and I already had enough felt for it, so here it comes.

http://social.gl-como.it/photo/99335297f698a6692c32e47fbdaded5e.jpg

Completely random sheet of A4 paper included for size comparison.

And now comes the hard part: to draw the pattern I enlarged the official swirl fit onto A3 and pdfposter-ed it to print it, then roughly followed the outline in pencil to get something cuttable. The problem is that this doesn't fit into the scanner, so publishing the sources is going to involve some manual work that I've been postponing because of lazyness O:)

They will be available. promise! Before the Release! (not necessarily Jessie, but...)

P.S. -one is the italian suffix for "big".

@Debian

Much has been written around the internet about this geeky kernel maintainer Sarah Sharp who left kernel development. I have now spent two hours reading through lkml posts, and want to summarize a few mails from the long thread, since most of the usual news sites just rewrap the original blog of hers without adding any background. The whole thread evolved out call for stable kernel review by Greg Kroah-Hartman where he complained about too many patches that are not actually in rc1 before going into stable: from where it developed into a typical Linus rant on people flagging crap for stable, followed by some jokes: and Ingo Molnar giving advice to Greg KH: with Greg KH taking a funny position in answering: Up to now a pretty decent and normal thread with some jokes and poking, nobody minded, and reading through it I had a good time. The thread continues with a discussion on requirements what to submit to stable, and some side threads on particular commits. And then, out of the blue, Social Justice Warrior (SJW) Sarah Sharp pops in with a very important contribution: Onto which Linus answers in a great way: On goes Sarah, gearing up in her SJW mode and starting to rant: Linus himself made clear what he thinks of her: It is easy to verify what Linus said, by reading the above two links and the answers of the maintainers, both agreed that it was their failure and were sorry. (Mauro s answer, Rafael s answer) It is just the geeky SJW that was not even attacked (who would dare to attack a woman nowadays?). The overall reaction to her by the maintainers can be exemplified by Thomas Gleixner s post: What follows is a nearly endless discussion with Sarah meandering around, changing permanently her opinion what is acceptable. Linus tried to explain to her in simple words, without success, she continues to rant around. Here arguments are so weak I had nothing but good laugh: Fortunately, she was immediately corrected and Ingo Molnar wrote an excellent refutation (starting another funny thread) of all her emails, statements, accusations (all of the email is a good read): (He retracted that last statement, though I don t see a reason for it) Last but not least, let us return to her blog post, where she states herself that: and she made lots of use of it, I counted at least 10 instances. She seems to remove or fart fart fart any comment that is not in line with her opinion. Further evidence is provided by this post on lkml. Everyone is free to have his own opinion (sorry, his/her), and I am free to form my own opinion on Sarah Sharp by just simply reading the facts. I am more than happy that one more SJW has left Linux development, as the proliferation of cleaning of speech from any personality has taken too far a grip. Coming to my home-base in Debian, unfortunately there is no one in the position and the state of mind of Linus, so we are suffering the same stupidities imposed by social justice worriers and some brainless feminists (no, don t get me wrong, these are two independent attributes. I do NOT state that feminism is brainless) that Linus and the maintainer crew was able to fend of this time. I finish with my favorite post from that thread, by Steven Rosted (from whom I also stole the above image!): Post Scriptum (after a bike ride) The last point by Linus is what I criticize most on Debian nowdays, it has become a sterilized over-governed entity, where most fun is gone. Making fun is practically forbidden, since there is the slight chance that some minority somewhere on this planet might feel hurt, and by this we are breaking the CoC. Emotions are restricted to the Happy happy how nice we are and how good we are level of US and also Japanese self-reenforcement society. Post Post Scriptum I just read Sarah Sharp s post on What makes a good community? , and without giving a full account or review, I am just pi**ed by the usage of the word microaggressions I can only recommend everyone to read this article and this article to get a feeling how bs the idea of microaggressions has taken over academia and obviously not only academia. Post³ Scriptum I am happy to see Lars Wirzenius, Gunnar Wolf, and Mart n Ferrari opposing my view. I agree with them that my comments concerning Debian are not mainstream in Debian something that is not very surprising, though, and I think it is great that they have fun in Debian, like many other contributors. Post⁴ Scriptum Although nobody will read this, here is a great response from a female developer: Nothing to add here!