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14 November 2015

Daniel Pocock: Migrating data from Windows phones

Many of the people who have bought Windows phones seek relief sooner or later. Sometimes this comes about due to peer pressure or the feeling of isolation, in other cases it is the frustration of the user interface or the realization that they can't run cool apps like Lumicall. Frequently, the user has been given the phone as a complimentary upgrade when extending a contract without perceiving the time, effort and potential cost involved in getting their data out of the phone, especially if they never owned a smartphone before. When a Windows phone user does decide to cut their losses, they are usually looking to a friend or colleague with technical expertise to help them out. Personally, I'm not sure that anybody I would regard as an IT expert has ever had a Windows phone though, meaning that many experts are probably also going to be scratching their heads when somebody asks them for help. Therefore, I've put together this brief guide to help deal with these phones more expediently when they are encountered. The Windows phones have really bad support for things like CalDAV and WebDAV so don't get your hopes up about using such methods to backup the data to any arbitrary server. Searching online you can find some hacks that involve creating a Google or iCloud account in the phone and then modifying the advanced settings to send the data to an arbitrary server. These techniques vary a lot between specific versions of the Windows Phone OS and so the techniques I've described below are probably easier. Identify the Windows Live / Hotmail account The user may not remember or realize that a Microsoft account was created when they first obtained the phone. It may have been created for them by the phone, a friend or the salesperson in the phone shop. Look in the settings (Accounts) to find the account ID / email address. If the user hasn't been using this account, they may not recognize it and probably won't know the password for it. It is essential to try and obtain (or reset) the password before going any further, so start with the password recovery process. Microsoft may insist on sending a password reset email to some other email address that the user has previously provided or linked to their phone. Extracting data from the phone In many cases, the easiest way to extract the data is to download it from Microsoft live.com rather than extracting it from the phone. Even if the user doesn't realize it, the data is probably all replicated in live.com and so there is no further loss of privacy by logging in there to extract it. Set up an IMAP mail client An IMAP client will be used to download the user's emails (from the live.com account they may never have used) and SMS. Install Mozilla Thunderbird (IceDove on Debian), GNOME Evolution or a similar program on the user's PC. Configure the IMAP mail client to connect to the live.com account. Some clients, like Thunderbird, will automatically set up all the server details when you enter the live.com account ID. For manual account setup, the details here may help. Email backup If the user was not using the live.com account ID for email correspondence, there may not be a lot of mail in it. There may be some billing receipts or other things that are worth keeping though. Create a new folder (or set of folders) in the user's preferred email account and drag and drop the messages from the live.com Inbox to the new folder(s). SMS backup SMS backup can also be done through live.com. It is slightly more complicated than email backup, but similar.
  • In the live.com Outlook email index page, look for the settings button and click Manage Categories.
  • Enable the Contacts and Photos categories with a tick in each of them.
  • Go back to the main Inbox page and look for the categories section on the bottom left-hand side of the screen, under the folder list. Click the Contacts category.
  • The page may now appear blank. That is normal.
  • On the top right-hand corner of the page, click the Arrange menu and choose Conversation.
  • All the SMS messages should now appear on the screen.
  • Under the mail folders list on the left-hand side of the page, click to create a new folder with a name like SMS.
  • Select all the SMS messages and look for the option to move them to a folder. Send them to the SMS folder you created.
  • Now use the IMAP mail client to locate the SMS folder and copy everything from there to a new folder in the user's preferred mail server or local disk.
Contacts backup On the top left-hand corner of the live.com email page, there is a chooser to select other live.com applications. Select People. You should now see a list of all the user's contacts. Look for the option to export them to Outlook and other programs. This will export them as a CSV file. You can now import the CSV file into another application. GNOME Evolution has an import wizard with an option for Outlook file format. To load the contacts into a WebDAV address book, such as DAViCal, configure the address book in Evolution and then select it as the destination when running the CSV import wizard. WARNING: beware of using the Mozilla Thunderbird address book with contact data from mobile devices and other sources. It can't handle more than two email addresses per contact and this can lead to silent data loss if contacts are not fully saved. Calendar backup Now go to the live.com application chooser again and select the calendar application. Microsoft provides instructions to extract the calendar, summarised here:
  • Look for the Share button at the top somewhere and click it.
  • On the left-hand side of the page, click Get a link
  • On the right-hand side, choose Show event details to ensure you get a full calendar and then click Create underneath it.
  • Look for the link with a webcals prefix. If you are downloading with a tool like wget, change the scheme prefix to https. Fetch the file from this link and save it with an ics extension.
  • Inspect the ics calendar file to make sure it looks like real iCalendar data.
You can now import the ics file into another application. GNOME Evolution has an import wizard with an option for iCalendar file format. To load the calendar entries into a CalDAV server, such as DAViCal, configure the calendar server in Evolution and then select it as the destination when running the import wizard. Backup the user's photos, videos and other data files Hopefully you will be able to do this step without going through live.com. Try enabling the MTP or PTP mode in the phone and attach it to the computer using the USB cable. Hopefully the computer will recognize it in at least one of those modes. Use the computer's file manager or another tool to simply backup the entire directory structure. Reset the phone to factory defaults Once the user has their hands on a real phone, it is likely they will never want to look at that Windows phone again. It is time to erase the Windows phone, there is no going back. Go to the Settings and About and tap the factory reset option. It is important to do this before obliterating the live.com account, otherwise there are scenarios where you could be locked out of the phone and unable to erase it. Erasing may take some time. The phone will reboot and then display an animation of some gears spinning around for a few minutes and then reboot again. Wait for it to completely erase. Permanently close the Microsoft live.com account Keeping track of multiple accounts and other services is tedious and frustrating for most people, especially with services that try to force the user to receive email in different places. You can help eliminate user fatigue by helping them permanently close the live.com account so they never have to worry about it again. Follow the instructions on the Microsoft site. At some point it will suggest certain actions you should take before closing the account, most can be ignored. One thing you should do is remove the link between the live.com account ID and the phone. It is a good idea to do this as otherwise you may have problems erasing the device, if you haven't already done so. Before completely closing the account, also verify that the factory reset of the phone completed successfully. Dispose of the Windows phone safely If you can identify any faults with the phone, the user may be able to return it under the terms of the warranty. Some phone companies may allow the user to exchange it for something more desirable when it fails under warranty. It may be tempting to sell the phone to a complete stranger on eBay or install a custom ROM on it. In practice, neither option may be worth the time and effort involved. You may be tempted to put it beyond use so nobody else will suffer with it, but please try to do so in a way that is respectful of the environment. Putting the data into a new phone Prepare the new phone with a suitable ROM such as Replicant or Cyanogenmod. Install the F-Droid app on the new phone. From F-droid, install the DAVdroid app. DAVdroid will allow you to quickly sync the new phone against any arbitrary CalDAV and WebDAV server to populate it with the user's calendar and contact / address book data. Now is a good time to install other interesting apps like Lumicall, Conversations and K-9 Mail.

Juliana Louback: PaperTrail - Powered by IBM Watson

On the final semester of my MSc program at Columbia SEAS, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a seminar course taught by Alfio Gliozzo entitled Q&A with IBM Watson. A significant part of the course is dedicated to learning how to leverage the services and resources available on the Watson Developer Cloud. This post describes the course project my team developed, the PaperTrail application.

Project Proposal Create an application to assist in the development of future academic papers. Based on a paper s initial proposal, Paper Trail predicts publications to be used as references or acknowledgement of prior art and provides a trend analysis of major topics and methods. The objective is to speed the discovery of relevant papers early in the research process, and allow for early assessment of the depth of prior research concerning the initial proposal.

Meet the Team Wesley Bruning, Software Engineer, MSc. in Computer Science Xavier Gonzalez, Industrial Engineer, MSc. in Data Science Juliana Louback, Software Engineer, MSc. in Computer Science Aaron Zakem, Patent Attorney, MSc. in Computer Science

Prior Art A significant amount of attention has been given to this topic over the past few decades. The table below shows the work the team deemed most relevant due to recency, accuracy and similarity of functionality. priorArt The variation in accuracy displayed is a result of experimentation with different dataset sizes and algorithm variations. More information and details can be found in the prior art report. The main differential of PaperTrail is providing a form of access to the citation prediciton and trend analysis algorithm. With the exception of the project by McNee et al., these algorithmns aren t currently available for general use. The application on researchindex.net is open to use but its objective is to rank publications and authors for given topics.

Algorithm Citation Prediction: PaperTrail builds on the work done by Wolski s team in Fall 2014. This algorithmn builds a reference graph used to define research communities, with an associated vector of topic scores generated by an LDA model. The papers in each research community are then ranked by importance within the community with a custom ranking algorithm. When a target document is given to algorithm as input, the LDA model is used to generate a vector of topics that are present in the document. The communities with the most similar topic vectors are selected and the publications within these communities with highest rank and greatest similarity to the input document are recommended as references. A more detailed description can be found here. Trend Analysis: Initially, the idea was to use the AlchemyData News API to obtain statistics pertaining to the amount of publications on a given topic over time. However, with the exception of buzz-words (i.e. big data ), many more specialized topics appeared very infrequently in news articles, if at all. This isn t entirely surprising given the target audience of PaperTrail. As a work around, we use the Alchemy Language API to extract keywords from the abstracts in the dataset, in addition to relevance scores. The PaperTrail database could then be queried for entry counts for a given year and keyword to provide an indication of publication trends in academia. Note that the Alchemy Language API extracts multiple-word keywords as well as single words.

Data To maintain consistency with Wolski s project, we are using the DBLP data as made available on aminer.org. The DBLP-Citation-network V5 dataset contains 1,572,277 entries; we are limited to the use of entries that contain both abstracts and citations, bringing the dataset size down to 265,865 entries.

Architecture A high-level visualization of the project architecture is displayed below. Before launching PaperTrail, it s necessary to train Wolski s algorithm offline. Currently any documentation with regard to the performance of said algorithm is unavailable; the PaperTrail project will include an evaluation phase and report the findings made. The PaperTrail app and database will be hosted on the Bluemix Platform. ptArchitecture

Status Report Phases completed:
  • Project design
  • Prior art research
  • Data cleansing
  • Development and deployment of an alpha version of the PaperTrail app
Phases under development:
  • Algorithm training and evaluation
  • Keyword extraction
  • MapReduce of publication frequency by year and topic
  • Data visualization component

Craig Small: Mixing pysnmp and stdin

Depending on the application, sometimes you want to have some socket operations going (such as loading a website) and have stdin being read. There are plenty of examples for this in python which usually boil down to making stdin behave like a socket and mixing it into the list of sockets select() cares about. A while ago I asked an email list could I have pysnmp use a different socket map so I could add my own sockets in (UDP, TCP and a zmq to name a few) and the Ilya the author of pysnmp explained how pysnmp can use a foreign socket map. This sample code below is merely an mixture of Ilya s example code and the way stdin gets mixed into the fold. I have also updated to the high-level pysnmp API which explains the slight differences in the calls. 
  1. from time import time
  2. import sys
  3. import asyncore
  4. from pysnmp.hlapi import asyncore as snmpAC
  5. from pysnmp.carrier.asynsock.dispatch import AsynsockDispatcher
  6.  
  7.  
  8. class CmdlineClient(asyncore.file_dispatcher):
  9.     def handle_read(self):
  10.     buf = self.recv(1024)
  11.     print "you said  ".format(buf)
  12.  
  13.  
  14. def myCallback(snmpEngine, sendRequestHandle, errorIndication,
  15.                errorStatus, errorIndex, varBinds, cbCtx):
  16.     print "myCallback!!"
  17.     if errorIndication:
  18.         print(errorIndication)
  19.         return
  20.     if errorStatus:
  21.         print('%s at %s' % (errorStatus.prettyPrint(),
  22.               errorIndex and varBinds[int(errorIndex)-1] or '?')
  23.              )
  24.         return
  25.  
  26.     for oid, val in varBinds:
  27.     if val is None:
  28.         print(oid.prettyPrint())
  29.     else:
  30.         print('%s = %s' % (oid.prettyPrint(), val.prettyPrint()))
  31.  
  32. sharedSocketMap =   
  33. transportDispatcher = AsynsockDispatcher()
  34. transportDispatcher.setSocketMap(sharedSocketMap)
  35. snmpEngine = snmpAC.SnmpEngine()
  36. snmpEngine.registerTransportDispatcher(transportDispatcher)
  37. sharedSocketMap[sys.stdin] = CmdlineClient(sys.stdin)
  38.  
  39. snmpAC.getCmd(
  40.     snmpEngine,
  41.     snmpAC.CommunityData('public'),
  42.     snmpAC.UdpTransportTarget(('127.0.0.1', 161)),
  43.     snmpAC.ContextData(),
  44.     snmpAC.ObjectType(
  45.         snmpAC.ObjectIdentity('SNMPv2-MIB', 'sysDescr', 0)),
  46.     cbFun=myCallback)
  47.  
  48. while True:
  49.     asyncore.poll(timeout=0.5, map=sharedSocketMap)
  50.     if transportDispatcher.jobsArePending() or transportDispatcher.transportsAreWorking():
  51.         transportDispatcher.handleTimerTick(time())
Some interesting lines from the above code: With all this I can handle keyboard presses and network traffic, such as a simple SNMP poll.

13 November 2015

Daniel Pocock: How much video RAM for a 4k monitor?

I previously wrote about my experience moving to a 4K monitor. I've been relatively happy with it except for one thing: I found that 1GB video RAM simply isn't sufficient for a stable system. This wasn't immediately obvious as it appeared to work in the beginning, but over time I've observed that it was not sufficient. I'm not using it for gaming or 3D rendering. My typical desktop involves several virtual workspaces with terminal windows, web browsers, a mail client, IRC and Eclipse. Sometimes I use vlc for playing media files. Using the nvidia-settings tool, I observed that the Used Dedicated memory statistic would frequently reach the maximum, 1024MB. On a few occasions, X crashed with errors indicating it was out of memory. After observing these problems, I put another card with 4GB video RAM into the system and I've observed it using between 1024 MB and 1300 MB at any one time. This leaves me feeling that people with only basic expectations for their desktop should aim for at least 2GB video RAM for 4k. That said, I've continued to enjoy many benefits of computing with a 4K monitor. In addition to those mentioned in my previous blog, here are some things that were easier for me with 4K:
  • Using gitk to look through many commits on the master branch of reSIProcate and cherry-pick some things to the resiprocate-1.9 branch. gitk only used half the screen and I was able to use the right hand side of the screen to look at the code in an editor in more detail.
  • Simultaneously monitoring logs from two Android devices running Lumicall and a repro SIP proxy server in three terminal windows arranged side by side, up to 125 lines of text in each.
  • Using WebRTC sites in the Mozilla browser while having a browser console window, source code and SIP proxy logs all open at the same time, none of them overlapping.
You can do much of this with a pair of monitors, but there is something quite nice about doing it all on a single 4K screen.

Daniel Pocock: Building teams around SIP and XMPP in Debian and Fedora

I've recently started a discussion on the Fedora devel mailing list about building a team to collaborate on RTC services (SIP, XMPP, TURN and WebRTC) for the Fedora community. We already started a similar team within Debian. This isn't only for developers or package maintainers and virtually anybody with a keen interest in free software can help. Testing different softphones and putting screenshots on the wiki can help a lot (the Debian wiki already provides some examples). The FedRTC.org site is not intended to be an advertisement for my web design skills and anybody with expertise in design would be very welcome to contribute. Teamwork in this endeavor can provide many benefits:
  • Sharing knowledge about RTC, for use within our communities and also for other communities using the free and open technology
  • Engaging with collaborators who are not involved in packaging teams, for example, the Debian RTC team has also had interest from upstream developers who are not on other Debian or Fedora mailing lists
  • Minimizing the effort required by the system administrators (the DSA team in Debian or Infrastructure team in Fedora) by triaging user problems and planning and testing any proposed changes.
  • Freeing up developer time to work on new features, such as the exciting work I'm doing on telepathy-resiprocate.
There are also many opportunities for project work that go beyond traditional packaging responsibilities. Wouldn't it be interesting to find ways to integrate the publish/subscribe capabilities of SIP and XMPP with the Fedmsg infrastructure? Bringing XMPP to FedoraProject.org We recently launched XMPP for debian.org and it would not be hard to replicate for FedoraProject.org users. Sure, some people are happy running their own XMPP servers. There are just as many people who prefer to focus on development and have something like XMPP provided for them. With the strong emphasis on building a roster/buddy-list, XMPP can also help to facilitate long-term engagement in the community and users may identify more closely with the project. I haven't offered XMPP on the FedRTC.org trial service because it would be inconvenient for people to migrate buddy lists to the FedoraProject.org domain when the service is officially adopted. Collaboration across communities There are various other places where we can share knowledge between teams in different communities and people are invited to participate. The Free-RTC mailing list is a great place to discuss free RTC strategies and initiatives. The XMPP operators mailing list provides a forum to discuss operational issues in the XMPP space, such as keeping out the spammers. Would you like to participate? Please consider joining some of the mailing lists I've mentioned, replying to the thread on the Fedora devel mailing list, volunteering for the Debian RTC team or emailing me personally.

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September, 85.50 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation November crossed a new record with 114.5 hours funded. This is mainly thanks to our first Platinum sponsor: TOSHIBA (through Toshiba Software Development Vietnam). They don t know yet if they can sponsor us in the long term (they hope so), but it s still a nice news as we jumped from 50% to 65% of the objective of the equivalent of a full-time position with a single new sponsor. Currently no change is expected for next month as we don t have any other new sponsor in the process of joining us. We still need more support to be able to support all the packages we could not afford to support during the squeeze cycle. We are currently discussing which package we can or cannot support on the LTS list, see the thread Unsupported packages for Wheezy LTS for the current situation. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 21 packages awaiting an update (6 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 23 affected packages in total (exactly like last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

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12 November 2015

Carl Chenet: db2twitter 0.2 released

db2twitter 0.2 was just released! If you missed my last post about it, db2twitter automatically extracts fields from your database, use them to feed a template of tweet and send the tweet. db2twitter is developed by and run for LinuxJobs.fr, the job board of th french-speaking Free Software and Opensource community. banner-linuxjobs-small The main new feature allows to send tweets only during authorized days/hours with the following content in your db2twitter.ini file : 
[timer]
days=mon-fri,
hours=0-11,14-17,
Given the fact db2twitter will mostly be launched via cron, it allows sending tweets detected since the last db2twitter run during user-defined hours. And that s cool! db2twitter is coded in Python 3.4, uses SQlAlchemy (see supported database types) and Tweepy. The official documentation is available on readthedocs.

11 November 2015

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in October 2015

October 2015 has been mainly dedicated to contracted/payed work. Only a few issues I could address during the last month: Arctica Project While having a week off from work, I managed to get Arctica Greeter to build on non-Ubuntu systems. The issue was very simple. The build crashed during the test suite run and it was caused by the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable not being set in my clean build environment. Furthermore, I added various more session type icons to Arctica Greeter (XFCE, LXDE, MATE, OpenBox, TWM, Default X11 Session, etc.) and also rebased the Arctica Greeter code base against all recent commits found in Unity Greeter for Ubuntu 15.10 / upcoming 16.04. Together with Ulrich Sibiller, I continued our work on the new Xinerama implementation for the remote X11 server nxagent (used as x2goagent in X2Go). However, this is unfortunately still work in progress, because various theoretical monitor layout issues became evident that require being handled in the new code before it can get merged into nx-libs's current 3.6.x branch. Also, I managed to do some little work on https://arctica-project.org, the still too rudimentary project homepage. read more

10 November 2015

John Goerzen: Wow. I did that!

It s now official: I m a pilot. This has been one of the most challenging, and also most rewarding, journeys I ve been on. It had its moments of struggle, moments of joy, moments of poetry. I wrote about the poetry of flying at night recently. Here is the story of my first landing on a grass runway, a few months ago. Grass
Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,
The breezes so balmy and light,
That I would not exchange my home on the range
For all of the cities so bright. John A. Lomax
We are used to seeing planes in these massive palaces of infrastructure we call airports. We have huge parking garages, giant terminals, security lines hundreds of people deep, baggage carts, jetways, video screens, restaurants, and miles and miles of concrete. But most of the world s airports are not like that. A pilot of a small plane gets to see the big airports, sure, but we also get to use the smaller airports hidden in plain sight to most. Have you ever taken off from a strip of grass? As I told my flight instructor when I tried it for the first time, I know this will work, but somehow I will still be amazed if it actually does. I took off from a strip of grass not long ago. The airport there had one paved runway, and the rest were grass. Short runways, narrow runways, grass runways. No lights. No paint. No signs. No trucks, no jetways, nothing massive. In fact, no people. Just a mowed path and a couple of yellow or white markers. I taxied down the grass runway, being careful to never let the plane s wheels stop moving lest the nose gear get stuck in a pothole. I felt all the bumps in the ground as we moved. End of runway. Turn the plane around. A little bit of flap for more lift, full throttle, mind the centerline imaginary centerline, this time. It starts picking up speed, slower than usual, bump bump bump. Those buildings at the end of the runway are staring me down. More speed, and suddenly the runway feels smooth; it has enough lift to keep from falling into every bump. Then we lift off just a touch; I carefully keep the plane down until we pick up enough speed to ascend farther, then up we go. I keep a watchful eye on those buildings straight ahead and that water tower just slightly off to the one side. We climb over a lake as I watch that water tower pass safely below and to the side of the plane. It had worked, and I had a smile of amazement. With a half mile of grass, you really can go anywhere. Many times I had driven within half a mile of that runway, but never seen it. Never wondered where people go after using it. Never realizing that, although it s a 45-minute drive from my house, it s really pretty close. Never understanding that where people go after taking off from that runway is everywhere .

Daniel Pocock: Aggregating tasks from multiple issue trackers

After my experiments with the iCalendar format at the beginning of 2015, including Bugzilla feeds from Fedora and reSIProcate, aggregating tasks from the Debian Maintainer Dashboard, Github issue lists and even unresolved Nagios alerts, I decided this was fertile ground for a GSoC student. In my initial experiments, I tried using the Mozilla Lightning plugin (Iceowl-extension on Debian/Ubuntu) and GNOME Evolution's task manager. Setting up the different feeds in these clients is not hard, but they have some rough edges. For example, Mozilla Lightning doesn't tell you if a feed is not responding, this can be troublesome if the Nagios server goes down, no alerts are visible, so you assume all is fine. To take things further, Iain Learmonth and I proposed a GSoC project for a student to experiment with the concept. Harsh Daftary from Mumbai, India was selected to work on it. Over the summer, he developed a web application to pull together issue, task and calendar feeds from different sources and render them as a single web page. Harsh presented his work at DebConf15 in Heidelberg, Germany, the video is available here. The source code is in a Github repository. The code is currently running as a service at horizon.debian.net although it is not specific to Debian and is probably helpful for any developer who works with more than one issue tracker.

Norbert Preining: Music check: Google versus Apple Is that all? You can do better, Google!

Ok, I have been an iPhone user since I moved to Japan and got my first smart-phone ever. First a 3s, then a 4s, then a 5s that I dropped into the toilet, so I switched the SIM back into the 4s to have a working phone. Furthermore, I am a heavy music listener and used iTunes Radio for 3 months. Since I am planning to change phones to an Android phone (being fed up with Apple s super-closed environment), I tried out Google Music Plus for about 3 months, too. Here is my verict Google Music is a big pain, far from iTunes in comfort and user friendliness. music-check-google-vs-apple My move to Android is not very much in danger. General description of the service In principle, iTunes Radio and Google Music Subscription do the same things: There are slight differences, that often create confusion, especially with Apple s services: If you are only signed in, you can listen to music stations and can skip some music (limited), but you cannot listen to arbitrary songs from the whole Apple Music library. Then there is another service from Apple, called iTunes Match, that only allows you to upload your music library to the cloud, but other than that again only listening to normal radio stations. Google Music is much simpler, there are only two options: By default it is free to have your music (up to 25000 songs) in the cloud, but if you want to listen to radio stations or any other music in the Google music store, you need a subscription. Prizes and features overview:
Apple Google
No subscription iTunes Match iTunes Radio No subscription With subscription
Prize 0 25$/year 10$/month 0 10$/month
(early access 8$)
Cloud space 0 100000 25000
Extra service Radio stations Radio stations Radio/all music Nothing Radio/all music
Music on the go the application Let us first consider the applications provided to listen to music on your smart phone: Apple Music can of course only be used on Apple devices, and uses the built-in Music application. Start up time is about a few seconds after a cold boot (all on my 4s), and music streaming starts with hardly any delay. Responsiveness is good, and the user interface is clear and easy. Google s application is available on iOS and Android. I have tested the latest version on iOS, but it is a pain in the butt: Managing your library Here iTunes is the way to go, bit of a pain when using Linux, but there are other reasons I have a Windows installation in parallel, so I don t mind to boot now and then into Windows. iTunes gives you very powerful tools to change all kind of data. Google gives you a few options: Use your iTunes library in this case all your playlists and ratings (but see later) are also uploaded. I am not sure what happens if I retag a song in iTunes, or change anything else in there. I guess the song will not be re-uploaded, but who knows for sure. Furthermore, you can edit your library via the web interface, but this is rather poor. Searching your library Over times your library grows and there are hundreds if not thousands of artists. So you want to search them. The natural way would be to scroll to the first letter of the artist you are searching, and then look it up. Well, that works perfectly in both Apple s and Google s application unless you are having artists written in some strange script like Japanese or Korean. iTunes allows you to set a field called something like Artist name for sorting , which allows me to put for example or into the artist field, and into the sort field Tomokawa Kazuki and Kim Doo Soo . This way I find the artists in the correct place. Google on the other hand uses simple Unicode order sorting how could you do that? This is simply plain wrong, and everyone should know that by now. Japanese people will never be able to find anything in their list. And in contrast to Goole Contacts Google Music does not support phonetic name fields (similar to the order sort artist) for artists. What I had to do now is to rename all the artists to include first the phonetic name, followed by the proper name, like in Tomokawa Kazuki ( ) . Something I strongly detest! Radio stations I might have a slightly peculiar music taste, but the radio stations mixed by Google are simply a pain. The reason is easy to explain: I live in Japan, and so what Google does is mixing about 80% of J-Pop into the radio, all those happy yodeling girlies I really dislike (see my Anti J-Pop campaign for alternatives yes, they do exist also in Japan!). iTunes radio is here more relaxed it seems. I appreciate Google s trial to cater to local (dis)taste, but besides voting down each and every song I hear I don t see any other option. And honestly, I cannot go through all this voting down without dying from pain inflicted by J-Pop. Other than this, the two radio stations are probably more or less the same but as I said, due to the local colorit it is hard to compare. Rating Ohhh, what a dire point. So there you have you well curated iTunes library with 5-star ratings. I used the ratings in a way that those songs I like get 1 star, those I even like more get 2 stars, and my absolute favorites got 5 stars. I didn t do any negative ratings. iTunes/iOS Music app allows you to easily adjust rating, and they are synced between devices. All as you would expect. Now for Google they did have a 5-star rating system at some time, but:
Thank you for your feedback. We ve decided to remove the 5-star Rating lab. This decision wasn t made lightly, but Thumbs Up/Down is integral for the future vision for Play Music and will be a central design point for our future releases. Please note that we ll continue to store your ratings that you ve set via the star lab or via iTunes, and we ll translate them to thumbs up/down (1-2 stars = thumbs down, 4-5 stars = thumbs up).
Here we go with the move to a new design they threw away the 5-star system, without any reason but integral for future vision rubbish sales speak. Besides being a very very poor rating system to have only an up and down (good-bad-don t care), the translation from my rating system to the thumbs up-down is just plain wrong. <rant>
Why on earth is the current movement to reduce functionality and rob users of control? Gnome 3 is the prime example of how we stupiditize users by taken any freedom from them in the name of simple design. Google now does the same. I am so sick of getting patronized this way, so Gnome3 was completely banished from my computer and replaced by Cinnamon, which uses the same (good) underlying technique, but takes users seriously!
</rant> Overall verdict As much as I would like to see Google Music a valid alternative to iTunes, by now it makes the impression of a quickly hacked together rotten piece of code that tries to get a share of the market without providing equivalent service. Google is using its market presence and convenience to convert people, not features and quality. I can only hope that this changes in the future. That still leaves me with the question move to Android or remain with iOS

9 November 2015

Ben Armstrong: The passing of Debian Live

Debian Live has passed on. And it has done so in not happy circumstances. (You can search the list archives for more if you are confused.) I have reposted here my response to this one thread because it s all I really want to say, after all of the years of working with the team. I d like to add as a postscript, that while the focus of this article was to remain positive in the face of Daniel s announcement of the closure of his project, that event has left a lot of users confused about the status of live support in Debian going forward. Read my posts here and here addressing that confusion.
On 09/11/15 12:47 PM, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> So long, and thanks for all the fish[7].
>
> Daniel
>
> [7] http://live.debian.net/project/downstream/ Enough bitter words have been said. I don t want to add any more. So: I m proud. Indeed, that long list of downstreams does speak to the impact you ve had in inspiring and equipping people to make their own live images. I m proud to have been a small part of this project. I m thankful. I m thankful that I was able to, through this project, contribute to something for a while that had a positive impact on many people, and made Debian more awesome. I remember the good times. I remember fondly the good times we had in the project s heyday. I certainly found your enthusiasm and vision for the project, Daniel, personally inspiring. It motivated me to contribute. Debconf10 was a highlight among those experiences, but also I had many good times and made many friendships online, too. I m sad. I m sad, because although I made some attempts to liaise between Debian Live and the CD and Installer teams, I don t feel I did an effective job there, and that contributed to the situation we now find ourselves in. If I did you or the project injury in trying to fulfill that role, please forgive me. I m hopeful. I m hopeful that whichever way we all go from here, that the bitterness will not be forever. That we ll heal. That we ll have learned. That we ll move on to accomplish new things, bigger and better things. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Debian Live team. Ben
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Jonathan McDowell: The Joy of Recruiters

Last week Simon retweeted a link to Don t Feed the Beast the Great Tech Recruiter Infestation. Which reminded me I d been meaning to comment on my own experiences from earlier in the year. I don t entertain the same level of bile as displayed in the post, but I do have a significant level of disappointment in the recruitment industry. I had conversations with 3 different agencies, all of whom were geographically relevant. One contacted me, the other 2 (one I d dealt with before, one that was recommended to me) I contacted myself. All managed to fail to communicate with any level of acceptability. The agency hat contacted me eventually went quiet, after having asked if they could put my CV forward for a role and pushing very hard about when I could interview. The contact in the agency I d dealt with before replied to say I was being passed to someone else who would get in contact. Who of course didn t. And the final agency, who had been recommended, passed me between 3 different people, said they were confident they could find me something, and then went dark except for signing me up to their generic jobs list which failed to have anything of relevance on it. As it happens my availability and skill set were not conducive to results at that point in time, so my beef isn t with the inability to find a role. Instead it s with the poor levels of communication presented by an industry which seems, to me, to have communication as part of the core value it should be offering. If anyone had said at the start Look, it s going to be tricky, we ll see what we can do or Look, that s not what we really deal in, we can t help , that would have been fine. I m fine with explanations. I get really miffed when I m just left hanging. I d love to be able to say I ll never deal with a recruiter again, but the fact of the matter is they do serve a purpose. There s only so far a company can get with word of mouth recruitment; eventually that network of personal connections from existing employees who are considering moving dries up. Advertising might get you some more people, but it can also result in people who are hugely inappropriate for the role. From the company point of view recruiters nominally fulfil 2 roles. Firstly they connect the prospective employer with a potentially wider base of candidates. Secondly they should be able to do some sort of, at least basic, filtering of whether a candidate is appropriate for a role. From the candidate point of view the recruiter hopefully has a better knowledge of what roles are out there. However the incentives to please each side are hugely unbalanced. The candidate isn t paying the recruiter. If you re not paying for it, you re the product may be bandied around too often, but I believe this is one of the instances where it s very applicable. A recruiter is paid by their ability to deliver viable candidates to prospective employers. The delivery of these candidates is the service. Whether or not the candidate is happy with the job is irrelevant beyond them staying long enough that the placement fee can be claimed. The lengthy commercial relationship is ideally between the company and the recruitment agency, not the candidate and the agency. A recruiter wants to be able to say Look at the fine candidate I provided last time, you should always come to me first in future . There s a certain element of wanting the candidate to come back if/when they are looking for a new role, but it s not a primary concern. It is notable that the recommendations I d received were from people who had been on the hiring side of things. The recruiter has a vested interest in keeping the employer happy, in the hope of a sustained relationship. There is little motivation for keeping the candidate happy, as long as you don t manage to scare them off. And, in fact, if you scare some off, who cares? A recruiter doesn t get paid for providing the best possible candidate. Or indeed a candidate who will fully engage with the role. All they re required to provide is a hire-able candidate who takes the role. I m not sure what the resolution is to this. Word of mouth only scales so far for both employer and candidate. Many of the big job websites seem to be full of recruiters rather than real employers. And I m sure there are some decent recruiters out there doing a good job, keeping both sides happy and earning their significant cut. I m sad to say I can t foresee any big change any time soon. [Note I m not currently looking for employment.] [No recruitment agencies were harmed in the writing of this post. I have deliberately tried to avoid outing anyone in particular.]

Mike Gabriel: Making appindicators available for non-Ubuntu platforms

As many (Debianic) people possibly know, the appindicator support (libindicator, libappindicator, etc.) in Debian is very weak and outdated. Various native indicators (e.g. indicator-* packages , where * is "datetime", "sound", "session", etc.) are missing or unmaintained in Debian and neither is the indicator-application service available (a service that allows other applications e.g., like the nm-applet tool to dock to the indicator area of the desktop's panel bar). Furthermore, no recent appindicator related uploads have been seen in Debian (last seen uploads are from 2013). I recently e-mailed with Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, one of the Ayatana Packaging team members, about the current Debian status of indicator packages specifically and Ayatana packages [1] in general. The below information summarizes (I hope) what I got from the mail exchange: read more

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 28 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Chris Lamb filled a bug on python-setuptools with a patch to make the generated requires.txt files reproducible. The patch has been forwarded upstream. Chris also understood why the she-bang in some Python scripts kept being undeterministic: setuptools as called by dh-python could skip re-installing the scripts if the build had been too fast (under one second). #804339 offers a patch fixing the issue by passing --force to setup.py install. #804141 reported on gettext asks for support of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in gettextize. Santiago Vila pointed out that it doesn't felt appropriate as gettextize is supposed to be an interactive tool. The problem reported seems to be in avahi build system instead. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: celestia, dsdo, fonts-taml-tscu, fte, hkgerman, ifrench-gut, ispell-czech, maven-assembly-plugin, maven-project-info-reports-plugin, python-avro, ruby-compass, signond, thepeg, wagon2, xjdic. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Chris Lamb closed a wrongly reopened bug against haskell-devscripts that was actually a problem in haddock. reproducible.debian.net FreeBSD tests are now run for three branches: master, stable/10, release/10.2.0. (h01ger) diffoscope development Support has been added for Free Pascal unit files (.ppc). (Paul Gevers) The homepage is now available using HTTPS, thanks to Let's Encrypt!. Work has been done to be able to publish diffoscope on the Python Package Index (also known as PyPI): the tlsh module is now optional, compatibility with python-magic has been added, and the fallback code to handle RPM has been fixed. Documentation update Reiner Herrmann, Paul Gevers, Niko Tyni, opi, and Dhole offered various fixes and wording improvements to the reproducible-builds.org. A mailing-list is now available to receive change notifications. NixOS, Guix, and Baserock are featured as projects working on reproducible builds. Package reviews 70 reviews have been removed, 74 added and 17 updated this week. Chris Lamb opened 22 new fail to build from source bugs. New issues this week: randomness_in_ocaml_provides, randomness_in_qdoc_page_id, randomness_in_python_setuptools_requires_txt, gettext_creates_ChangeLog_files_and_entries_with_current_date. Misc. h01ger and Chris Lamb presented Beyond reproducible builds at the MiniDebConf in Cambridge on November 8th. They gave an overview of where we stand and the changes in user tools, infrastructure, and development practices that we might want to see happening. Feedback on these thoughts are welcome. Slides are already available, and the video should be online soon. At the same event, a meeting happened with some members of the release team to discuss the best strategy regarding releases and reproducibility. Minutes have been posted on the Debian reproducible-builds mailing-list.

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, October 2015

For my 11th month working on Debian LTS, I carried over 5.5 hours from September and was assigned another 13.5 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked 14 of a possible 19 hours. As I mentioned in the report for September, I uploaded binutils and issued DLA-324-1 early in October. I fixed a few security issues in the kernel, uploaded and issued DLA-325-1. I had some email discussions about long-term support of the Linux kernel with Willy Tarreau (Linux 2.6.32 maintainer) and Greg Kroah-Hartman (overall stable maintainer). Greg normally selects one version per year to maintain as a 'longterm' branch for 2 years, after which he may hand it over to another maintainer. A few upstream versions have received long-term support entirely from another developer. We were in agreement that it's desirable to have fewer of these branches with more developers and distributions contributing to each, but didn't come to a conclusion about how to coordinate this. The topic came up again at the Kernel Summit, and Greg then agreed to select the first kernel version of each calendar year, starting with Linux 4.4 (expected in January). This doesn't fit well with Debian's current release schedule, but I mean to discuss with the release team whether the freeze date can be set to allow inclusion of 2017's LTS kernel. I spent another week in the 'front desk' role, where I triaged new security issues for squeeze. There was a mixture of serious and trivial, old and new (not affecting squeeze) issues. The many ntp issues announced in October were fixed in unstable by a new upstream release. I spent a long time digging out the specific commits that fixed them and comparing with the older version in squeeze. Several of the issues had been introduced in ntp 4.2.7 or 4.2.8 and therefore didn't affect squeeze (or the newer stable releases). Of the fixes that were needed, most applied with minimal changes. Having prepared an update, I asked the ntp maintainer, Kurt Roeckx, to review my work. (The package has a limited test suite and none of the fixes added new tests.) Following this review he added a few more patches, uploaded and issued DLA-335-1. MySQL 5.1, as shipped in squeeze, no longer receives security support from upstream, and the security fixes they do issue are mixed with other changes that make it impractical to backport them. The LTS team is planning to backport the mysql-5.5 package to squeeze while avoiding conflicts with the binaries built from mysql-5.1. Santiago Ruano Rinc n has prepared a backport and I spent some time reviewing this, but haven't yet sent my review comments.

Daniel Pocock: debian.org RTC: announcing XMPP, SIP presence and more

Announced 7 November 2015 on the debian-devel-announce mailing list. The Debian Project now has an XMPP service available to all Debian Developers. Your Debian.org email identity can be used as your XMPP address. The SIP service has also been upgraded and now supports presence. SIP and XMPP presence, rosters and messaging are not currently integrated. The Lumicall app has been improved to enable rapid setup for Debian.org SIP users. This announcement concludes the maintenance window on the RTC services. All services are now running on jessie (using packages from jessie-backports). XMPP and SIP enable a whole new world of real-time multimedia communications possibilities: video/webcam, VoIP, chat messaging, desktop sharing and distributed, federated communication are the most common use cases. Details about how to get started and get support are explained in the User Guide in the Debian wiki. As it is a wiki, you are completely welcome to help it evolve. Several of the people involved in the RTC team were also at the Cambridge mini-DebConf (7-8 November). The password for all these real time communication services can be set via the LDAP control panel. Please note that this password needs to be different to any of your other existing debian.org passwords. Please use a strong password and please keep it secure. Some of the infrastructure, like the TURN server, is shared by clients of both SIP and XMPP. Please configure your XMPP and SIP clients to use the TURN server for audio or video streaming to work most reliably through NAT. A key feature of both our XMPP and SIP services is that they support federated inter-connectivity with other domains. Please try it. The FedRTC service for Fedora developers is one example of another SIP service that supports federation. For details of how it works and how we establish trust between domains, please see the RTC Quick Start Guide. Please reach out to other communities you are involved with and help them consider enabling SIP and XMPP federation of their own communities/domains: as Metcalfe's law suggests, each extra person or community who embraces open standards like SIP and XMPP has far more than just an incremental impact on the value of these standards and makes them more pervasive. If you are keen to support and collaborate on the wider use of Free RTC technology, please consider joining the Free RTC mailing list sponsored by FSF Europe. There will also be a dedicated debian-rtc list for discussion of these technologies within Debian and derivatives. This service has been made possible by the efforts of the DSA team in the original SIP+WebRTC project and the more recent jessie upgrades and XMPP project. Real-time communications systems have specific expectations for network latency, connectivity, authentication schemes and various other things. Therefore, it is a great endorsement of the caliber of the team and the quality of the systems they have in place that they have been able to host this largely within their existing framework for Debian services. Feedback from the DSA team has also been helpful in improving the upstream software and packaging to make them convenient for system administrators everywhere. Special thanks to Peter Palfrader and Luca Filipozzi from the DSA team, Matthew Wild from the Prosody XMPP server project, Scott Godin from the reSIProcate project, Juliana Louback for her contributions to JSCommunicator during GSoC 2014, Iain Learmonth for helping get the RTC team up and running, Enrico Tassi, Sergei Golovan and Victor Seva for the Prosody and prosody-modules packaging and also the Debian backports team, especially Alexander Wirt, helping us ensure that rapidly evolving packages like those used in RTC are available on a stable Debian system.

Vasudev Kamath: Taming systemd-nspawn for running containers

I've been trying to run containers using systemd-nspawn for quite some time. I was always bumping to one or other dead end. This is not systemd-nspawn's fault, rather my impatience stopping me from reading manual pages properly lack of good tutorial like article available online. Compared to this LXC has a quite a lot of good tutorials and howto's available online. This article is my effort to create a notes putting all required information in one place.
Creating a Debian Base Install First step is to have a minimal Debian system some where on your hard disk. This can be easily done using debootsrap. I wrote a custom script to avoid reading manual every time I want to run debootstrap. Parts of this script (mostly packages and the root password generation) is stolen from lxc-debian template provided by lxc package. 
#!/bin/sh
set -e
set -x
usage ()  
    echo "$ 0##/*  [options] <suite> <target> [<mirror>]"
    echo "Bootstrap rootfs for Debian"
    echo
    cat <<EOF
    --arch         set the architecture to install
    --root-passwd  set the root password for bootstrapped rootfs
    EOF
 
# copied from the lxc-debian template
packages=ifupdown,\
locales,\
libui-dialog-perl,\
dialog,\
isc-dhcp-client,\
netbase,\
net-tools,\
iproute,\
openssh-server,\
dbus
if [ $(id -u) -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "You must be root to execute this command"
    exit 2
fi
if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
   usage $0
fi
while true; do
    case "$1" in
        --root-passwd --root-passwd=?*)
            if [ "$1" = "--root-passwd" -a -n "$2" ]; then
                ROOT_PASSWD="$2"
                shift 2
            elif [ "$1" != "$ 1#--root-passwd= " ]; then
                ROOT_PASSWD="$ 1#--root-passwd= "
                shift 1
            else
                # copied from lxc-debian template
                ROOT_PASSWD="$(dd if=/dev/urandom bs=6 count=1 2>/dev/null base64)"
                ECHO_PASSWD="yes"
            fi
            ;;
        --arch --arch=?*)
            if [ "$1" = "--arch" -a -n "$2" ]; then
                ARCHITECTURE="$2"
                shift 2
            elif [ "$1" != "$ 1#--arch= " ]; then
                ARCHITECTURE="$ 1#--arch= "
                shift 1
            else
                ARCHITECTURE="$(dpkg-architecture -q DEB_HOST_ARCH)"
            fi
            ;;
        *)
            break
            ;;
    esac
done
release="$1"
target="$2"
if [ -z "$1" ]   [ -z "$2" ]; then
    echo "You must specify suite and target"
    exit 1
fi
if [ -n "$3" ]; then
    MIRROR="$3"
fi
MIRROR=$ MIRROR:-http://httpredir.debian.org/debian 
echo "Downloading Debian $release ..."
debootstrap --verbose --variant=minbase --arch=$ARCHITECTURE \
             --include=$packages \
             "$release" "$target" "$MIRROR"
if [ -n "$ROOT_PASSWD" ]; then
    echo "root:$ROOT_PASSWD"   chroot "$target" chpasswd
    echo "Root password is '$ROOT_PASSWRD', please change!"
fi
It just gets my needs done, if you don't like it feel free to modify or use debootstrap directly. !NB Please install dbus package in the minimal base install, otherwise you will not be able to control the container using machinectl
Manually Running Container and then persisting it Next we need to run the container manually. This is done by using following command. 
systemd-nspawn -bD   /path/to/container --network-veth \
     --network-bridge=natbr0 --machine=Machinename
--machine option is not mandatory, if not specified systemd-nspawn will take the directory name as machine name, and if you have characters like - in the directory name it translates to hexcode x2d and controlling container with name becomes difficult. --network-veth specifies the systemd-nspawn to enable virtual ethernet based networking and --network-bridge tells the bridge interface on host system to be used by systemd-nspawn. These options together constitutes private networking for container. If not specified container can use host systems interface there by removing network isolation of container. Once you run this command container comes up. You can now run machinectl to control the container. Container can be persisted using following command 
machinectl enable container-name
This will create a symbolic link of /lib/systemd/system/systemd-nspawn@service to /etc/systemd/system/machine.target.wants/. This allows you to start or stop container using machinectl or systemctl command. Only catch here is your base install should be in /var/lib/machines/. What I do in my case is create a symbolic link from my base container to /var/lib/machines/container-name. !NB Note that symbolic link name under /var/lib/machines should be same as the container name you gave using --machine switch or the directory name if you didn't specify --machine
Persisting Container Networking We did persist the container in above step, but this doesn't persist the networking options we provided in command line. systemd-nspawn@.service provides following command to invoke container. 
ExecStart=/usr/bin/systemd-nspawn --quiet --keep-unit --boot --link-journal=try-guest --network-veth --settings=override --machine=%I
To persist the bridge networking configuration we did in command line, we need the help of systemd-networkd. So first we need to enable the systemd-networkd.service on both container and the host system. 
systemctl enable systemd-networkd.service
Now inside the container, interfaces will be named as hostN. Depending on how many interfaces we have N increments. In our example case we had single interface, hence it will named as host0. By default network interfaces will be down inside container, hence systemd-networkd is needed to put it up. We put the following in /etc/systemd/network/host0.network file inside the container. 
[Match]
Name=host0
[Network]
Description=Container wired interface host0
DHCP=yes
And in the host system we just configure the bridge interface using systemd-nspawn. I put following in natbr0.netdev in /etc/systemd/network/ 
[NetDev]
Description=Bridge natbr0
Name=natbr0
Kind=bridge
In my case I already had configured the bridge using /etc/network/interfaces file for lxc. I think its not really needed to use systemd-networkd in this case. Since systemd-networkd doesn't do anything if network / virtual device is already present I safely put above configuration and enabled systemd-networkd. Just for the notes here is my natbr0 configuration in interfaces file. 
auto natbr0
iface natbr0 inet static
   address 172.16.10.1
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   pre-up brctl addbr natbr0
   post-down brctl delbr natbr0
   post-down sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=0
   post-down sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=0
   post-up sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
   post-up sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
   post-up iptables -A POSTROUTING -t mangle -p udp --dport bootpc -s 172.16.0.0/16 -j CHECKSUM --checksum-fill
   pre-down iptables -D POSTROUTING -t mangle -p udp --dport bootpc -s 172.16.0.0/16 -j CHECKSUM --checksum-fill
Once this is done just reload the systemd-networkd and make sure you have dnsmasq or any other DHCP server running in your system. Now the last part is to tell systemd-nspawn to use the bridge networking interface we have defined. This is done using container-name.nspawn file. Put this file under /etc/systemd/nspawn folder. 
[Exec]
Boot=on
[Files]
Bind=/home/vasudev/Documents/Python/upstream/apt-offline/
[Network]
VirtualEthernet=yes
Bridge=natbr0
Here you can specify networking, and files mounting section of the container. For full list please refer the systemd.nspawn manual page. Now all this is done you can happily do 
machinectl start container-name
#or
systemctl start systemd-nspawn@container-name
Resource Control Now all things said and done, one last part remains. Yes what is the point if we can't control how much resource does the container use. Atleast it is more important for me, because I use old and bit low powered laptop. Systemd provides way to control the resource using Control interface. To see all the the interfaces exposed by systemd please refer systemd.resource-control manual page. The way to control the resource is using systemctl. Once container starts running we can run following command. 
systemctl set-property container-name CPUShares=200 CPUQuota=30% MemoryLimit=500M
The manual page does say that these things can be put under [Slice] section of unit files. Now I don't have clear idea if this can be put under .nspawn files or not. For the sake of persisting the container I manually wrote the service file for container by copying systemd-nspawn@.service and adding [Slice] section. But if I don't know how to find out if this had any effect or not. If some one knows about this please share your suggestions to me and I will update this section with your provided information.
Conclussion All in all I like systemd-nspawn a lot. I use it to run container for development of apt-offline. I previously used lxc where all can be controlled using a single config file. But I feel systemd-nspawn is more tightly integrated with system than lxc. There is definitely more in systemd-nspawn than I've currently figured out. Only thing is its not as popular as other alternatives and definitely lacks good howto documentation.For now only way out is dig the manual pages, scratch your head, pull your hair out and figure out new possibilities in systemd-nspawn. ;-)

8 November 2015

Andrew Cater: MiniDebconf 2015 ARM, Cambridge - ARM, Cambridge 1640 - final wrap-up - thanks to all

Two days worth of sprints - lots of hugely good work done.

Two days worth of open days with talks - lots of interest, feedback, chatting out of earshot in the breakout rooms.

Two days worth of monetary and other input from all the sponsors: ARM, Codethink, Cosworth, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Collabora - PRICELESS

Sociableness in pubs and so on overnight

Thanks also to Steve and Jo McIntyre for a houseful of guests and to all on front desk

And also lastly, again to ARM, as in all these posts because of this great venue and for the small army of ARM pass holders who have let us in and out of doors all this time.

Daniel Pocock: Problems observed during Cambridge mini-DebConf RTC demo

A few problems were observed during the demo of RTC services at the Cambridge mini-DebConf yesterday. As it turns out, many of them are already documented and solutions are available for some of them. Multiple concurrent SIP registrations I had made some test calls on Friday using rtc.debian.org and I still had the site open in another tab in another browser window. When people tried to call me during the demo, both tabs were actually ringing but only one was visible. When a SIP client registers, the SIP registration server sends it a list of all other concurrent registrations in the response message. We simply need to extend JSCommunicator to inspect the response message and give some visual feedback about other concurrent registrations. Issue #69. SIP also provides a mechanism to clear concurrent registrations and that could be made available with a button or configuration option too (Issue #9). Callee hears ringing before connectivity checks completed The second issue during the WebRTC demo was that the callee (myself) was alerted about the call before the ICE checks had been performed. The optimal procedure to provide a slick user experience is to run the connectivity checks before alerting the callee. If the connectivity checks fail, the callee should never be alerted with a ringing sound and would never know somebody had tried to call. The caller would be told that the call was unable to be attempted and encouraged to consider trying again on another wifi network. RFC 5245 recommends that connectivity checks should be done first but it is not mandatory. One reason this is problematic with WebRTC is the need to display the pop-up asking the user for permission to share their microphone and webcam: the popup must appear before connectivity checks can commence. This has been discussed in the JsSIP issue tracker. Non-WebRTC softphones, such as Lumicall, do the connectivity checks before alerting the callee. Dealing with UDP blocking It appears the corporate wifi network in the venue was blocking the UDP packets so the connectivity checks could never complete, not even using a TURN server to relay the packets. People trying to use the service on home wifi networks, in small offices and mobile tethering should not have this problem as these services generally permit UDP by default. Some corporate networks, student accommodation and wifi networks in some larger hotels have blocked UDP and in these cases, additional effort must be made to get through the firewall. The TURN server we are running for rtc.debian.org also supports a TLS transport but it simply isn't configured yet. At the time we originally launched the WebRTC service in 2013, the browsers didn't support TURN over TLS at all but now they do. This is probably the biggest problem encountered during the demo but it does not require any code change to resolve this, just configuration, so a solution is well within reach. During the demo, we worked around the issue by turning off the wifi on my laptop and using tethering with a 4G mobile network. All the calls made successfully during the demo used the tethering solution. Add a connectivity check timeout The ICE connectivity checks appeared to keep running for a long time. Usually, if UDP is not blocked, the ICE checks would complete in less than two seconds. Therefore, the JavaScript needs to set a timeout between two and five seconds when it starts the checks and give the user a helpful warning about their network problems if the timeout is exceeded. Issue #73 in JSCommunicator. While these lengthy connectivity checks appear disappointing, it is worth remembering that this is an improvement over the first generation of softphones: none of them made these checks at all, they would simply tell the user the call had been answered but audio and video would only be working in one direction or not at all. Microphone issues One of the users calling into the demo, Juliana, was visible on the screen but we couldn't hear her. This was a local audio hardware issue with her laptop or headset. It would be useful if the JavaScript could provide visual feedback when it detects a voice (issue #74) and even better, integrating with the sound settings so that the user can see if the microphone is muted or the gain is very low (issue #75). Thanks to participants in the demo I'd like to thank all the participants in the demo, including Juliana Louback who called us from New York, Laura Arjona who called us from Madrid, Daniel Silverstone who called from about three meters away in the front row and Iain Learmonth who helped co-ordinate the test calls over IRC. Thanks are also due to Steve McIntyre, the local Debian community, ARM and the other sponsors for making another mini-DebConf in the UK this year.

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