Long story short, a fast solution for the issue with EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID is
to remove libraspberrypi-dev from your sysroot and do a full rebuild. There
will be some changes to the configure results, so please review them - if
they are relevant for you - before proceeding with your work.
That got me unstuck! dpkg --purge libraspberrypi-dev in the sysroot, and
we're back in the game.
While Qt5's build has proven extremely fragile, I was surprised that some
customization from Raspberry Pi hadn't yet broken something.
In the end, they didn't disappoint.
More i386 issues
The run now stops with a new 32bit issue related to v8 snapshots:
qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/release$/usr/bin/g++-pie-Wl,--fatal-warnings-Wl,--build-id=sha1-fPIC-Wl,-z,noexecstack-Wl,-z,relro-Wl,-z,now-Wl,-z,defs-Wl,--as-needed-m32-pie-Wl,--disable-new-dtags-Wl,-O2-Wl,--gc-sections-o"v8_snapshot/mksnapshot"-Wl,--start-group@"v8_snapshot/mksnapshot.rsp"-Wl,--end-group-ldl-lpthread-lrt-lz/usr/bin/ld:skippingincompatible//usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so when searching for -lz/usr/bin/ld:skippingincompatible//usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.a when searching for -lz/usr/bin/ld:cannotfind-lzcollect2:error:ldreturned1exitstatus
Attempted solution: apt install zlib1g-dev:i386.
Alternative solution (untried): configure Qt5 with -no-webengine-v8-snapshot.
It builds!
Installation paths
Now it tries to install files into debian/tmp/home/build/sysroot/opt/qt5custom-armhf/.
I realise that I now need to package the sysroot itself, both as a build-dependency
of the Qt5 cross-compiler, and as a runtime dependency of the built cross-builder.
Conclusion
The current work in progress, patches, and all, is at
https://github.com/Truelite/qt5custom/tree/master/debian-cross-qtwebengine
It blows my mind how ridiculously broken is the Qt5 cross-compiler build, for a
use case that, looking at how many people are trying, seems to be one of the
main ones for the cross-builder.
We encourage our community to celebrate around the world the 27th Debian
anniversary with organized DebianDay events. This year due to the COVID-19
pandemic we cannot organize in-person events, so we ask instead that contributors,
developers, teams, groups, maintainers, and users promote The Debian Project and Debian
activities online on August 16th (and/or 15th).
Communities can organize a full schedule of online activities throughout the day.
These activities can include talks, workshops, active participation with
contributions such as translations assistance or editing, debates, BoFs, and
all of this in your local language using tools such as Jitsi for capturing
audio and video from presenters for later streaming to YouTube.
If you are not aware of any local community organizing a full event or you don't
want to join one, you can solo design your own activity using OBS and
stream it to YouTube. You can watch an OBS tutorial here.
Don't forget to record your activity as it will be a nice idea to upload it
to Peertube later.
Please add your event/activity on the DebianDay wiki page and let us know about
and advertise it on Debian micronews. To share it, you have several options:
Follow the steps listed here for Debian Developers.
Contact us using IRC in channel #debian-publicity on the OFTC network, and ask us there.
Send a mail to debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
and ask for your item to be included in micronews. This is a publicly archived list.
I worked with the CD release team over the weekend for the final release of Debian Stretch. One problem: we have media images which we cannot test because the team does not have the hardware. I asked questions on the debian-cd mailing list about the future of these and various other .iso images.
Could we replace some DVDs and larger files with smaller jigdo files so that people can download files to build the DVD locally?
People asked me:
How do you actually use jigdo to produce a usable media image?
What advantages does jigdo bring over just downloading a large .iso image?
Why jigdo?
Downloading large files on a slow or lossy link is difficult.
Downloading large (several GB) files via http can be unreliable.
Jigdo can be quicker than trying to download one large file and failing.
There are few CD mirrors worldwide: jigdo can use a local Debian mirror.
The transport mechanism is http - no need for a particular port to be opened.
Using jigdo
Jigdo uses information from a template file to reconstruct an .iso file by downloading Debian packages from a mirror. The image is checksummed and verified at the end of the complete download. if the download is interrupted, you can import the previously downloaded part of the file.
It's a command line application - the GUI never really happened - but it is fairly easy to use. apt install jigdo-file then find the .jigdo file and .template files that you need for the image from a CD mirror: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/jigdo-cd/
If you only have this file, jigdo-lite will download the template later but you can save the template in the same directory and save time. The jigdo file is only 25k or so and the template is 4.6M rather than 336M. I copied them into my home directory to build there. The process does not need root permissions.
Run the command jigdo-lite This prompts you for a .jigdo file to use. By default, this uses http to fetch the file from a distant webserver.
(If the files are local, you can use the file:/// syntax.For example: file:///home/amacater/debian-10.4.0-amd64-netinst.jigdo)
jigdo-lite then reads the .jigdo file and outputs some information about the .iso
It offers the chance to reload any failed download, then prompts for a mirror name. The download pulls in small numbers of files at a time, saves to a temporary directory and will checksum the eventual .iso file.
This will work for any larger file including the 16GB .iso distributed only as a .jigdo
For i386 and AMD, the images are bootable when copied to a USB stick. Use dd to write them and verify the copy.
Plug in a USB that can be overwritten.
Use dmesg as root to work out which device this is.
Change to the directory in which you have your .iso image.
Write the image to the stick in 4M blocks and display progress with the syntax of the command below (all one line if wrapped).
I haven't made any substantive progress on my Amiga floppy recovery
project for a while, but I felt like some retail therapy a few days
ago so I bought a rotary encoder and OLED display for the Gotek floppy disk
emulator along with a 3D-printed mount for them. I'm pleased with the results!
The rather undescriptive "DSKA0001" in the picture is a result of my floppy
image naming scheme: the display is capable of much more useful labels such
as "Lemmings", "Deluxe Paint IV", etc.
The Gotek and all the new bits can now be moved inside the Amiga A500's
chassis.
I noticed an odd effect, that reminds me of screen ghosting on old CRT
monitors, when my laptop screen is locked:
Those faint white vertical lines one can see, are actually window borders, and
the lock screen is leaking contents of my unlocked desktop! Here is the same
screen, unlocked:
However, moving the windows around does not reflect on the ghost image on top
of the lock screen: reshuffling windows then locking, produces always the same
ghost image. The white border reflects where the window has been at some time
in the past.
The lock screen does not seem to be responsible, either: dragging a solid
colored window on the laptop screen has the same effect:
But taking a screenshot of it does not show the time traveling ghost windows:
This is happening on two different laptops, an HP EliteBook x360 G1, and a
Lenovo ThinkPad X240, one that I've been using since 3 years, one that I've
been using since a week, and whose only thing in common is a 1920x1080 IPS
screen and an Intel GPU.
I have no idea where to start debugging this. Please reach out to me at
enrico@debian.org if any of this makes sense to you.
Update: Jim Paris pointed me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_persistence
which looks pretty much like what is happening here.
Jim Paris also pointed out that a black background doesn't show the ghosting.
I changed the lock screen background by editing /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf
and adding background=#000000 to the [greeter] section, to limit
information leakage through ghosting in the lock screen.
I had a draft of this article for about two months, but never really managed to polish and finalize it, partially due to some nasty hacks needed down the road. Thankfully, one of my wishes was heard and I had now the chance to revisit the post and try a few things out. Sadly, my wish was granted only partially and the result is still not beautiful, but read yourself ;-)
UPDATE: I've published a follow up post on building documentation for Ansible Collections using antsibull, as my wish was now fully granted.
As part of my day job, I am maintaining the Foreman Ansible Modules - a collection of modules to interact with Foreman and its plugins (most notably Katello). We've been maintaining this collection (as in set of modules) since 2017, so much longer than collections (as in Ansible Collections) existed, but the introduction of Ansible Collections allowed us to provide a much easier and supported way to distribute the modules to our users.
Now users usually want two things: features and documentation. Features are easy, we already have plenty of them. But documentation was a bit cumbersome: we had documentation inside the modules, so you could read it via ansible-doc on the command line if you had the collection installed, but we wanted to provide online readable and versioned documentation too - something the users are used to from the official Ansible documentation.
Building HTML from Ansible modules
Ansible modules contain documentation in form of YAML blocks documenting the parameters, examples and return values of the module. The Ansible documentation site is built using Sphinx from reStructuredText. As the modules don't contain reStructuredText, Ansible hashad a tool to generate it from the documentation YAML: build-ansible.py document-plugins. The tool and the accompanying libraries are not part of the Ansible distribution - they just live in the hacking directory. To run them we need a git checkout of Ansible and source hacking/env-setup to set PYTHONPATH and a few other variables correctly for Ansible to run directly from that checkout.
It would be nice if that'd be a feature of ansible-doc, but while it isn't, we need to have a full Ansible git checkout to be able to continue.The tool has been recently split out into an own repository/distribution: antsibull. However it was also a bit redesigned to be easier to use (good!), and my hack to abuse it to build documentation for out-of-tree modules doesn't work anymore (bad!). There is an issue open for collections support, so I hope to be able to switch to antsibull soon.
Anyways, back to the original hack.
As we're using documentation fragments, we need to tell the tool to look for these, because otherwise we'd get errors about not found fragments.
We're passing ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATHS so that the tool can find the correct, namespaced documentation fragments there.
We also need to provide --module-dir pointing at the actual modules we want to build documentation for.
Ideally, when antsibull supports collections, this will become antsibull-docs collection without any need to have an Ansible checkout, sourcing env-setup or pass tons of paths.
Until then we have a Makefile that clones Ansible, runs the above command and then calls Sphinx (which provides a nice Makefile for building) to generate HTML from the reStructuredText.
You can find our slightly modified templates and themes in our git repository in the docs directory.
Publishing HTML documentation for Ansible Modules
Now that we have a way to build the documentation, let's also automate publishing, because nothing is worse than out-of-date documentation!
We're using GitHub and GitHub Actions for that, but you can achieve the same with GitLab, TravisCI or Jenkins.
First, we need a trigger. As we want always up-to-date documentation for the main branch where all the development happens and also documentation for all stable releases that are tagged (we use vX.Y.Z for the tags), we can do something like this:
Now that we have a trigger, we define the job steps that get executed:
steps:-name:Check out the codeuses:actions/checkout@v2-name:Set up Pythonuses:actions/setup-python@v2with:python-version:"3.7"-name:Install dependenciesrun:make doc-setup-name:Build docsrun:make doc
At this point we will have the docs built by make doc in the docs/_build/html directory, but not published anywhere yet.
As we're using GitHub anyways, we can also use GitHub Pages to host the result.
Configure git to have a proper author name and email, as otherwise you get ugly history and maybe even failing commits
Fetch all branch names, as the checkout action by default doesn't do this.
Setup Python, Sphinx, Ansible etc.
Build the documentation as described above.
Switch to the gh-pages branch from the commit that triggered the workflow.
Remove any existing documentation for this tag/branch ($GITHUB_REF contains the name which triggered the workflow) if it exists already.
Move the previously built documentation from the Sphinx output directory to a directory named after the current target.
Generate a simple index of all available documentation versions.
Commit all changes, but don't fail if there is nothing to commit.
Push to the gh-pages branch which will trigger a GitHub Pages deployment.
Pretty sure this won't win any beauty contest for scripting and automation, but it gets the job done and nobody on the team has to remember to update the documentation anymore.
You can see the results on theforeman.org or directly on GitHub.
Azure Kubernetes Service provides a nice way to set up Kubernetes
cluster in the cloud. It s quite practical as AKS is setup by default
with a rich monitoring and reporting environment. By default, all
container logs are collected, CPU and disk data are gathered.
I used AKS to setup a cluster for my first client as a
freelance. Everything was nice until my client asked me why logs
collection was as expensive as the computer resources.
Ouch
My first reflex was to reduce the amount of logs produced by all our
containers, i.e. start logging at warn level instead of info
level. This reduced the amount of logs quite a lot.
But this did not reduce the cost of collecting logs, which looks like
to a be a common issue.
Thanks to the documentation provided by Microsoft, I was able to find
that ContainerInventory data table was responsible of more than 60%
of our logging costs.
What is ContainerInventory ? It s a facility to monitor the content
of all environment variables from all containers.
Wait What ?
Should we be worried about our database credentials which are, legacy
oblige, stored in environment variables ?
Unfortunately, the query shown below confirmed that, yes, we should:
the logs aggregated by Azure contains the database credentials of my
client.
ContainerInventory
where TimeGenerated > ago(1h)
Having credentials collected in logs is lackluster from a security
point of view.
And we don t need it because our environment variables do not change.
Well, it s now time to fix these issues.
We re going to:
disable the collection of environment variables in Azure, which
will reduce cost and plug the potential credential leak
renew all DB credentials, because the previous credentials can be
considered as compromised (The renewal of our DB passwords is quite
easy with the script I provided to my client)
pass credentials with files instead of environment variables.
In summary, the service provided by Azure is still nice, but beware of
the default configuration which may contain surprises.
I m a freelance, available for hire. The https://code-straight.fr site
describes how I can help your projects.
All the best
Sorry for not being on blog for sometime, the last few months have been brutal. While I am externally ok, because of the lockdown I sensed major hearing loss. First, I thought it may be a hallucination or something but as it persisted for days, I got myself checked and found out that I got 80% hearing loss in my right ear. How and why I don t know. Is this NIHL or some other kind of hearing loss is yet to be ascertained. I do live what is and used to be one of the busiest roads in the city, now for last few months not so much. On top of it, you have various other noises.
Tinnitus
I also experienced Tinnitus which again I perceived to be a hallucination but found it s not. I have no clue if my eiplepsy has anything to do with hearing loss or both are different. I did discover that while today we know that something like Tinnitus exists, just 10-15 years back, people might mistake it for madness. In a way it is madness because you are constantly hearing sound, music etc. 24 7 , that is enough to drive anybody mad.
During this brief period, did learn what an Otoscope is . I did get audiometry tests done but need to get at least a second or if possible also a third opinion but those will have to wait as the audio clinics are about 8-10 kms. away. In the open-close-open-close environment just makes it impossible to figure out the time, date and get it done. After that is done then probably get a hearing device, probably a Siemens Signia hearing aid. The hearing aids are damn expensive, almost 50k per piece and they probably have a lifetime of about 5-6 years, so it s a bit of a expensive proposition. I also need a second or/and third opinion on the audiometry profile so I know things are correct. All of these things are gonna take time.
Pandemic Situation in India and Testing
Coincidentally, was talking to couple of people about this. It is sad to see that we have the third highest number of covid cases at 1/10th the tests we are doing vis-a-vis U.S.A. According to statistical site ourworldindata , we seem to be testing 0.22 per thousand people compared to 2.28 people per thousand done by United States. Sadly it doesn t give the breakup of the tests, from what I read the PCR tests are better than the antibody tests, a primer shares the difference between the two tests. IIRC, the antibody tests are far cheaper than the swab tests but swab tests are far more accurate as it looks for the virus s genetic material (RNA) . Anyways coming to the numbers, U.S. has a population of roughly 35 crores taking a little bit liberty from numbers given at popclock . India meanwhile has 135 crore or almost four times the population of U.S. and the amount of testing done is 1/10th as shared above. Just goes to share where the GOI priorities lie . We are running out of beds, ventilators and whatever else there is. Whatever resources are there are being used for covid patients and they are being charged a bomb. I have couple of hospitals near my place and the cost of a bed in an isolation ward is upward of INR 100k and if you need a ventilator then add another 50k . And in moment of rarity, the differences between charges of private and public are zero. Meaning there is immense profiteering happening it seems in the medical world. Heck, even the Govt. is on the act where they are charging 18% GST on sanitizers. If this is not looting then I dunno what is.
Example of Medical Bills people have to pay.
China, Nepal & Diplomacy
While everybody today knows how China has intruded and captured quite a part of Ladakh, this wasn t the case when they started in April. That time Ajai Shukla had shared this with the top defence personnel but nothing came of it. Then on May 30th he broke/shared the news with the rest of the world and was immediately branded anti-national, person on Chinese payroll and what not. This is when he and Pravin Sawnhey of Force Magazine had both been warning of the same from last year itself. Pravin, has a youtube channel and had been warning India against Chinese intentions from 2015 and even before that. He had warned repeatedly that our obsession with the Pakistan border meant that we were taking eyes of the border with China which spans almost 2300 odd kms. going all the way to Arunachal Pradesh. A good map which shows the conflict can be found at dw.com which I am sharing/reproducing below India-China Border Areas Copyright DW.com 2020
Note:- I am sharing a neutral party s rendering of the border disputes or somebody who doesn t have much at stake as the two countries have so that things could be looked at little objectively.
The Prime Minister on the other hand, made the comment which made galvanising a made-up word into verb . It means to go without coming in. In fact, several news sites shared the statement told by the Prime Minister and the majority of people were shocked. In fact, there had been reports that he gave the current CDS, General Rawat, a person of his own choosing, a peace of his mind. But what lead to this confrontation in the first place ? I think many pieces are part of that puzzle, one of the pieces are surely the cutting of defense budget for the last 6 years, Even this year, if you look at the budget slashes done in the earlier part of the year when he shared how HAL had to raise loans from the market to pay salaries of its own people. Later he shared how the Govt. was planning to slash the defence budget. Interestingly, he had also shared some of the reasons which reaffirm that it is the only the Govt. which can solve some of the issues/conundrum
First, it must recognize that our firms competing for global orders are up against rivals that are being supported by their home governments with tax and export incentives and infrastructure that almost invariably surpasses India s. Our government must provide its aerospace firms with a level playing field, if not a competitive advantage. The greatest deterrent to growth our companies face is the high cost of capital and lack of access to funds. In several cases, Indian MSMEs have had to turn down offers to build components and assemblies for global OEM supply chains simply because the cost of capital to create the shop floor and train the personnel was too high. This resulted in a loss of business and a missed opportunity for creating jobs and skills. To overcome this, the government could create a sector specific A&D Fund to provide low cost capital quickly to enable our MSMEs to grab fleeting business opportunities. Ajai Shukla, blogpost 13th March 2020 .
And then reporting on 11th May 2020 itself, CDS Gen. Rawat himself commented on saving the budget, they were in poor taste but still he shared what he thought about it. So, at the end of it one part of the story. The other part of the story probably lies in India s relations with its neighbors and lack of numbers in diplomats and diplomacy. So let me cover both the things one by one .
Diplomats, lack of numbers and hence the hands we are dealth with
When Mr. Modi started his first term, he used the term Maximum Governance, Minimum Government but sadly cut those places where it indeed needs more people, one of which is diplomacy. A slightly dated 2012 article/opinion shared writes that India needs to engage with the rest of the world and do with higher number. Cut to 2020 and the numbers more or less remain the same . What Mr. Modi tried to do is instead of using diplomats, he tried to use his charm and hugopolicy for lack of a better term. 6 years later, here we are. After 200 trips abroad, not a single trade agreement to show what he done. I could go on but both time and energy are not on my side hence now switching to Nepal
Nepal, once friend, now enemy ?
Nepal had been a friend of India for 70 odd years, what changed in the last few years that it changed from friend to enemy ? There had been two incidents in recent memory that changed the status quo. The first is the 2015 Nepal blockade . Now one could argue it either way but the truth is that Nepal understood that it is heavily dependent on India hence as any sovereign country would do in its interest it also started courting China for imports so there is some balance.
The second one though is one of our own making. On December 16, 2014 RBI allowed Nepali citizens to have cash upto INR 25,000/- . Then in 2016 when demonetization was announced, they said that people could exchange only upto INR 4,500/- which was far below the limit shared above. And btw, before people start blaming just RBI for the decision, FEMA decisions are taken jointly by the finance ministry (FE) as well as ministry of external affairs (MEA) . So without them knowing the decision could not have been taken when announcing it. The result of lowering of demonetization is what made Nepal move more into Chinese hands and this has been shared by number of people in numerous articles in different websites. The wire interview with the vice-chairman of Niti Ayog is pretty interesting. The argument that Nepal show give an estimate of how much old money is there falls flat when in demonetization itself, it was thought of that around 30-40% was black money and would not be returned but by RBI s own admissions all 99.3% of the money was returned. Perhaps they should have consulted Prof. Arun Kumar of JNU who has extensivelywritten and studied the topic before doing that fool-hardy step. It is the reason that since then, an economy which was searing at 9% has been contracting ever since, I could give a dozen articles stating that, but for the moment, just one will suffice. The slowing economy and the sharp divisions between people based on either outlook, religion or whatever also encouraged China to attack us. This year is not good for India. The only thing I hope Indians and people all over do is just maintain physical distances, masks and somehow survive till middle of next year without getting infected when probably most of the vaccine candidates have been trialed, results are in and we have a ready vaccine. I do hope that at least for once, ICMR shares data even after the vaccine is approved, whichever vaccine. Till later.
Ren Carmille (8 January 1886 25 January 1945) was a French humanitarian, civil servant, and member of the French Resistance. During World War II, Carmille saved tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied France. In his capacity at the government's Demographics Department, Carmille sabotaged the Nazi census of France, saving tens of thousands of Jewish people from death camps.
Gino Strada (born Luigi Strada; 21 April 1948) is an Italian war surgeon and founder of Emergency, a UN-recognized international non-governmental organization.
Il morbo di K una malattia inventata nel 1943, durante la Seconda guerra mondiale, da Adriano Ossicini insieme al dottor Giovanni Borromeo per salvare alcuni italiani di religione ebraica dalle persecuzioni nazifasciste a Roma.[1][2][3][4]
This is mostly a test-suite fix for my Perl module to automate creation
and verification of detached signatures.
The 1.00 release of PGP::Sign added support for GnuPG v2 and changed the
default to assume that gpg is GnuPG v2, but this isn't the case on some
older operating systems (particularly non-Linux ones). That in turn
caused chaos for automated testing.
This release fixes the test suite to detect when gpg is GnuPG v1 and run
the test suite accordingly, trying to exercise as much of the module as
possible in that case. It also fixes a few issues found by
Perl::Critic::Freenode.
You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the
PGP::Sign distribution page.
By now everyone must have seen the versions of comedy shows with the laugh track edited out. The removal of the laughter doesn't just reveal the artificial nature of television and how it conscripts the viewer into laughing along; by subverting key conversational conventions, it reveals some of the myriad and subtle ways humans communicate with one another:
Although the show's conversation is ostensibly between two people, the viewer serves as a silent third actor through which they and therefore we are meant to laugh along with. Then, when this third character is forcibly muted, viewers not only have to endure the stilted gaps, they also sense an uncanny loss of familiarity by losing their 'own' part in the script.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in other art forms. In Garfield Minus Garfield, the forced negative spaces that these pauses introduce are discomfiting, almost to the level of performance art:
But when the technique is applied to other TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory, it is unsettling in entirely different ways, exposing the dysfunctional relationships and the adorkable mysogny at the heart of the show:
Once you start to look for it, the ur-elements of the audience, response and timing in the way we communicate are everywhere, from the gaps we leave so that others instinctively know when you have finished speaking, to the myriad of ways you can edit a film. These components are always present, it is only when one of them is taken away that they become more apparent. Today, the small delays added by videoconferencing adds an uncanny awkwardness to many of our everyday interactions too. It is said that "comedy is tragedy plus timing", so it is unsurprising that Zoom's undermining of timing leads, by this simple calculus of human interactions, to feelings of... tragedy.
Leaving aside the usual comments about Pavlovian conditioning and the shows that are the exceptions, complaints against canned laughter are the domain of the pub bore. I will therefore only add two brief remarks. First, rather than being cynically added to artificially inflate the lack of 'real' comedy, laugh tracks were initially added to replicate the live audience of existing shows. In other words, without a laugh track, these new shows might have ironically appeared almost as eerie as the fan edits cited above are today.
Secondly, although laugh tracks are described as "false", this is not entirely correct. After all, someone did actually laugh, even if it was for an entirey different joke. In his Simulacra and Simulation, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard might have poetically identified canned laughter as a "reflection of a profound reality", rather than an outright falsehood. One day, when this laughter becomes entirely algorithmically generated, Baudrillard would describe it as "an order of sorcery", placing it metaphysically on the same level as the entirely pumpkin-free Pumpkin Spiced Latte.
For a variety of reasons I recently decided to try interacting with various social media platforms in new ways. One way of loosening my addiction to this pornography of the amygdala was to hide the number of replies, 'likes' and related numbers:
The effect of installing this extension was immediate. I caught my eyes darting to where the numbers had been and realised I had been subconsciously looking for the input and perhaps even the outright validation of the masses. To be sure, these numbers can be relevant and sometimes useful, but they do implicitly involve delegating part of your responsibility of thinking for yourself to the vox populi, or the Greek chorus of the 21st century.
Like many of you reading this, I am sure I told myself that the number of 'likes' has no bearing on whether I should agree with something, but hiding the numbers reveals much of this might have been a convenient fiction; as an entire century of discoveries in behavioural economics has demonstrated, all the pleasingly-satisfying arguments for rational free-market economics stand no chance against our inherent buggy mammalian brains.
Tying a few things together, when attempting to doomscroll through social media without these numbers, I realised that social media without the scorecard of engagement is almost exactly like watching these shows without the laugh track.
Without the number of 'retweets', the lazy prompts to remind you exactly when, how and for how much to respond are removed, and replaced with the same stilted silences of those edited scenes from Friends. At times, the existential loneliness of Garfield Minus Garfield creeps in too, and there is more than enough of the dysfunctional, validation-seeking and parasocial 'conversations' of The Big Bang Theory. Most of all, the whole exercise permits a certain level of detached, critical analysis, allowing one to observe that the platforms often feel like a pre-written script with your 'friends' cast as actors, all perpetuated on the heady fumes of rows INSERT-ed into a database on the other side of the world.
I'm not quite sure how this will affect my usage of the platforms, and any time spent away from these sites may mean fewer online connections at a time when we all need them the most. But as the Karal Marling, professor at the University of Minnesota wrote about artificial audiences: "Let me be the laugh track."
And we're getting a lot closer. Last edits to the wiki for the testing page. Tests marked as passed. There are a bunch of architectures where the media images are still to be built and the source media will still need to be written as well.
It's been a really good (and fairly long day). I'm very glad indeed that I'm not staying up until the bitter end. It's always fun - I'm also very glad that, as it panned out, we didn't end up also doing the next Buster point release this weekend - it would have been a massive workload.
So Stretch passes to LTS, Jessie has passed to ELTS - and we go onwards and upwards to the next point release - and then, in due course, to Bullseye when it's ready (probably the first quarter of next year?).
As ever, thanks due to all involved - the folks behind the scenes who maintain cdimage.debian.org, to Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy and schweer. Done for about a fortnight or so until the next Buster release.
The last of the tests for the basic .iso images are finishing. Live image testing is starting. Lots from RattusRattus, Isy, Sledge and schweer besides myself. New this time round is an experiment in videoconference linking which has made this whole experience much more human in lockdown - and means I'm missing Cambridge.
Two questions that have come up as we've been going through. There are images made for Intel-based mac that were first made for Jessie or so: there are also images for S390X. These can't be tested because none of the testers have the hardware. Nobody has yet recorded issues with them but it could be that nobody has ever used them recently or has reported problems
If nobody is bothered with these: they are prime candidates for removal prior to Bullseye.
A new version 0.1.3 of the tint package arrived at CRAN today. It corrects some features for html output, notably margin notes and references. It also contains a new example for inline references.
The full list of changes is below.
Changes in tint version 0.1.3 (2020-07-18)
A new minimal demo was added showing inline references (Dirk addressing #42).
Code for margin notes and reference in html mode was updated with thanks to tufte (Dirk in #43 and #44 addressing #40).
The README.md was updated with a new 'See Also' section and a new badge.
A new version of drat arrived on CRAN today. This is a follow-up release to 0.1.7 from a week ago. It contains a quick follow-up by Felix Ernst to correct on of the tests which misbehaved under the old release of R still being tested at CRAN.
drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code.
As your mother told you: Friends don t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Rolled-up releases it is. drat is easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works.
The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:
Changes in drat version 0.1.8 (2020-07-18)
The archive pruning test code was corrected for r-oldrel (Felix Ernst in #105 fixing #104).
Laptop Mode Tools 1.74
Laptop Mode Tools version 1.74 has been released. This release includes important bug fixes, some defaults settings updated to current driver support in Linux and support for devices with nouveau based nVIDIA cards.
A filtered list of changes is mentioned below. For the full log, please refer to the git repository
1.74 - Sat Jul 18 19:10:40 IST 2020
* With 4.15+ kernels, Linux Intel SATA has a better link power
saving policy, med_power_with_dipm, which should be the recommended
one to use
* Disable defaults for syslog logging
* Initialize LM_VERBOSE with default to disabled
* Merge pull request #157 from rickysarraf/nouveau
* Add power saving module for nouveau cards
* Disable ethernet module by default
* Add board-specific folder and documentation
* Add execute bit on module radeon-dpm
* Drop unlock because there is no lock acquired
Resources
Source tarball, Feodra/SUSE RPM Packages available at project s release page
Debian packages will be available soon in Unstable.
Description: Tools for Power Savings based on battery/AC status
Laptop mode is a Linux kernel feature that allows your laptop to save
considerable power, by allowing the hard drive to spin down for longer
periods of time. This package contains the userland scripts that are
needed to enable laptop mode.
.
It includes support for automatically enabling laptop mode when the
computer is working on batteries. It also supports various other power
management features, such as starting and stopping daemons depending on
power mode, automatically hibernating if battery levels are too low, and
adjusting terminal blanking and X11 screen blanking
.
laptop-mode-tools uses the Linux kernel's Laptop Mode feature and thus
is also used on Desktops and Servers to conserve power
Just checking in. Debian "Jessie" == oldoldstable == Debian 8 was the previous Debian Long Term Support release. Debian LTS seeks to provide support for Debian releases for five years. LTS support for Jessie ended on 30th June 2020.
A limited subset of Jessie will now move to ELTS - Extended Long Term Support and another two years projected support.
Neither LTS nor ELTS are supported any longer by the main Debian folks: instead, they are supported on a commercial basis by a group of Debian volunteers and companies, coordinated by a company led by Raphael Hertzog.
Debian releases are fully supported by the Debian project for two years after the release of the next version. Today is the final release of Stretch by Debian to incorporate security fixes and so on up to the handover to LTS.
if you are currently running Stretch: you do not need the new CD images. Apt / apt-get update will supply you the updates up until today. Hereafter, Stretch will be supported only as LTS - see LTS
Background
So apparently there's this pandemic thing, which means I'm teaching
"Alternate Delivery" courses now. These are just like online courses,
except possibly more synchronous, definitely less polished, and the
tuition money doesn't go to the College of Extended Learning. I figure
I'll need to manage share videos, and our learning management system,
in the immortal words of Marie Kondo, does not bring me joy. This has
caused me to revisit the problem of sharing large files in an
ikiwiki based site (like the one you are reading).
My goto solution for large file management is
git-annex. The last time I looked
at this (a decade ago or so?), I was blocked by git-annex using
symlinks and ikiwiki ignoring them for security related reasons.
Since then two things changed which made things relatively easy.
I started using the rsync_command ikiwiki option to deploy my
site.
git-annex went through several design iterations for allowing
non-symlink access to large files.
TL;DR
In my ikiwiki config
# attempt to hardlink source files? (optimisation for large files)
hardlink =>1,
In my ikiwiki git repo
$ git annex init
$ git annex add foo.jpg
$ git commit -m&aposadd big photo&apos
$ git annex adjust --unlock # look ikiwiki, no symlinks
$ ikiwiki --setup ~/.config/ikiwiki/client # rebuild my local copy, for review
$ ikiwiki --setup /home/bremner/.config/ikiwiki/rsync.setup --refresh # deploy
Last week at the lab I received a data dump: a gzip-compressed tarball with lots
of images in it. The images are all uncompressed .pgm, with the whole tarball
weighing in at ~ 1TB. I tried to extract it, and after chugging all day, it ran
out of disk space. Added more disk, tried again: out of space again. Just
getting a listing of the archive contents (tar tvfz) took something like 8
hours.
Clearly this is unreasonable. I made an executive decision to use .jpg files
instead: I'd take the small image quality hit for the massive gains in storage
efficiency. But the tarball has .pgm and just extracting the thing is
challenging. So I'm now extracting the archive, and converting all the .pgm
images to .jpg as soon as they hit disk. How? Glad you asked!
I'm running two parallel terminal sessions (I'm using screen, but you can do
whatever you like).
Session 1
< archive.tar.gz unpigz -p20 tar xv
Here I'm just extracting the archive to disk normally. Using unpigz instead of
plain, old tar to get parallelization.
This is the secret sauce. I'm using inotifywait to tell me when any file is
closed for writing in a subdirectory of PATH. Then I mawk it to only tell me
when .pgm files are done being written, then I convert them to .jpg, and
delete the .pgm when that's done. I'm using GNU Parallel to parallelize the
image conversion. Otherwise the image conversion doesn't keep up.
This is going to take at least all day, but I'm reasonably confident that it
will actually finish successfully, and I can then actually do stuff with the
data.
This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order
to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi.
The previous rounds of attempts ended in one issue too many to investigate in
the allocated hourly budget.
Andreas Gruber wrote:
We encourage our community to celebrate around the world the 27th Debian
anniversary with organized 
Those faint white vertical lines one can see, are actually window borders, and
the lock screen is leaking contents of my unlocked desktop! Here is the same
screen, unlocked:
However, moving the windows around does not reflect on the ghost image on top
of the lock screen: reshuffling windows then locking, produces always the same
ghost image. The white border reflects where the window has been at some time
in the past.
The lock screen does not seem to be responsible, either: dragging a solid
colored window on the laptop screen has the same effect:
But taking a screenshot of it does not show the time traveling ghost windows:
This is happening on two different laptops, an HP EliteBook x360 G1, and a
Lenovo ThinkPad X240, one that I've been using since 3 years, one that I've
been using since a week, and whose only thing in common is a 1920x1080 IPS
screen and an Intel GPU.
I have no idea where to start debugging this. Please reach out to me at
enrico@debian.org if any of this makes sense to you.
Update: Jim Paris pointed me to 
I used AKS to setup a cluster for my first client as a
Ouch 
My first reflex was to reduce the amount of logs produced by all our
Should we be worried about our database credentials which are, legacy
And we don t need it because our environment variables do not change.
Well, it s now time to fix these issues. 
We re going to:
Sorry for not being on blog for sometime, the last few months have been brutal. While I am externally ok, because of the lockdown I sensed major hearing loss. First, I thought it may be a hallucination or something but as it persisted for days, I got myself checked and found out that I got 80% hearing loss in my right ear. How and why I don t know. Is this 
Example of Medical Bills people have to pay. 
India-China Border Areas Copyright DW.com 2020 
By now everyone must have seen the versions of comedy shows with the laugh track edited out. The removal of the laughter doesn't just reveal the artificial nature of television and how it conscripts the viewer into laughing along; by subverting key conversational conventions, it reveals some of the myriad and subtle ways humans communicate with one another:
A new version 0.1.3 of the 
A new version of 
