One project I've worked on at Nebula is a Python module for remote configuration of server hardware. You can find it here, but there's a few caveats:

1. It's not hugely well tested on a wide range of hardware
2. The interface is not yet guaranteed to be stable
3. You'll also need this module if you want to deal with IBM (well, Lenovo now) servers
4. The IBM support is based on reverse engineering rather than documentation, so who really knows how good it is

There's documentation in the README, and I'm sorry for the API being kind of awful (it suffers rather heavily from me writing Python while knowing basically no Python). Still, it ought to work. I'm interested in hearing from anybody with problems, anybody who's interested in getting it on Pypi and anybody who's willing to add support for new HP systems.

comments

Work around Google evil .ics feeds I've happily been using 2015/akonadi-install for my calendars, and yesterday I added an .ics feed export from Google, as a URL file source. It is a link in the form: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/person%40gmail.com/private-12341234123412341234123412341234/basic.ics After doing that, I noticed that the fan in my laptop was on more often than usual, and I noticed that akonadi-server and postgres were running very often, and doing quite a lot of processing. The evil I investigated and realised that Google seems to be doing everything they can to make their ical feeds hard to sync against efficiently. This is the list of what I have observed Gmail doing to an unchanged ical feed:

• Date: headers in HTTP replies are always now
• If-Modified-Since: is not supported
• DTSTAMP of each element is always now
• VTIMEZONE entries appear in random order
• ORGANIZER CN entries randomly change between full name and plus.google.com user ID
• ATTENDEE entries randomly change between having a CN or not having it
• TRIGGER entries change spontaneously
• CREATED entries change spontaneously

This causes akonadi to download and reprocess the entire ical feed at every single poll, and I can't blame akonadi for doing it. In fact, Google is saying that there is a feed with several years worth of daily appointments that all keep being changed all the time. The work-around As a work-around, I have configured the akonadi source to point at a local file on disk, and I have written a script to update the file only if the .ics feed has actually changed. Have a look at the script: I consider it far from trivial, since it needs to do a partial parsing of the .ics feed to throw away all the nondeterminism that Google pollutes it with. The setup The script needs to be run periodically, and I used it as an opportunity to try systemd user timers:

    $ cat ~/.config/systemd/user/update-ical-feeds.timer
    [Unit]
    Description=Updates ical feeds every hour
    # Only run when on AC power
    ConditionACPower=yes
    [Timer]
    # Run every hour
    OnActiveSec=1h
    # Run a minute after boot
    OnBootSec=1m
    Unit=update-ical-feeds.service
    $ cat ~/.config/systemd/user/update-ical-feeds.service
    [Unit]
    Description=Update ICal feeds
    [Service]
    # Use oneshot to prevent two updates being run in case the previous one
    # runs for more time than the timer interval
    Type=oneshot
    ExecStart=/home/enrico/tmp/calendars/update
    $ systemctl --user start update-ical-feeds.timer
    $ systemctl --user list-timers
    NEXT                         LEFT       LAST                         PASSED UNIT                    ACTIVATES
    Wed 2015-03-25 22:19:54 CET  59min left Wed 2015-03-25 21:19:54 CET  2s ago update-ical-feeds.timer update-ical-feeds.service
    1 timers listed.
    Pass --all to see loaded but inactive timers, too.

To reload the configuration after editing: systemctl --user daemon-reload. Further investigation I wonder if ConditionACPower needs to be in the .timer or in the .service, since there is a [Unit] section is in both. Update: I have been told it can be in the .timer. I also wonder if there is a way to have the timer trigger only when online. There is a network-online.target and I do not know if it is applicable. I also do not know how to ask systemd if all the preconditions are currently met for a .service/.timer to run. Finally, I especially wonder if it is worth hoping that Google will ever make their .ics feeds play nicely with calendar clients.

TSDgeos had a good idea: Lazyweb travel recommodations. So, dear lazyweb: What are things to do or to avoid in Hongkong and Shenzhen if you have one and a half week of holiday before and after work duties? Any hidden gems to look at? What electronic markets are good? Should I take a boat trip around the waters of Hongkong? If you have any decent yet affordable sleeping options for 2-3 nights in Hongkong, that would also be interesting as my "proper" hotel stay does not start immediately. Not much in ways of comfort is needed as long as I have a safe place to lock my belongings. In somewhat related news, this Friday's bug report stats may be early or late as I will be on a plane towards China on Friday.

I follow a few blog aggregators (or "planets") and it's always a struggle to keep up with the amount of posts that some of these get. The best strategy I have found so far to is to filter them so that I remove the blogs I am not interested in, which is why I wrote PlanetFilter.

Other options In my opinion, the first step in starting a new free software project should be to look for a reason not to do it So I started by looking for another approach and by asking people around me how they dealt with the firehoses that are Planet Debian and Planet Mozilla. It seems like a lot of people choose to "randomly sample" planet feeds and only read a fraction of the posts that are sent through there. Personally however, I find there are a lot of authors whose posts I never want to miss so this option doesn't work for me. A better option that other people have suggested is to avoid subscribing to the planet feeds, but rather to subscribe to each of the author feeds separately and prune them as you go. Unfortunately, this whitelist approach is a high maintenance one since planets constantly add and remove feeds. I decided that I wanted to follow a blacklist approach instead.

PlanetFilter PlanetFilter is a local application that you can configure to fetch your favorite planets and filter the posts you see. If you get it via Debian or Ubuntu, it comes with a cronjob that looks at all configuration files in /etc/planetfilter.d/ and outputs filtered feeds in /var/cache/planetfilter/. You can either:

• add file:///var/cache/planetfilter/planetname.xml to your local feed reader
• serve it locally (e.g. http://localhost/planetname.xml) using a webserver, or
• host it on a server somewhere on the Internet.

The software will fetch new posts every hour and overwrite the local copy of each feed. A basic configuration file looks like this:

[feed]
url = http://planet.debian.org/atom.xml
[blacklist]

Filters There are currently two ways of filtering posts out. The main one is by author name:

[blacklist]
authors =
  Alice Jones
  John Doe

and the other one is by title:

[blacklist]
titles =
  This week in review
  Wednesday meeting for

In both cases, if a blog entry contains one of the blacklisted authors or titles, it will be discarded from the generated feed.

Tor support Since blog updates happen asynchronously in the background, they can work very well over Tor. In order to set that up in the Debian version of planetfilter:

1. Install the tor and polipo packages.
2. Set the following in /etc/polipo/config:

    proxyAddress = "127.0.0.1"
    proxyPort = 8008
    allowedClients = 127.0.0.1
    allowedPorts = 1-65535
    proxyName = "localhost"
    cacheIsShared = false
    socksParentProxy = "localhost:9050"
    socksProxyType = socks5
    chunkHighMark = 67108864
    diskCacheRoot = ""
    localDocumentRoot = ""
    disableLocalInterface = true
    disableConfiguration = true
    dnsQueryIPv6 = no
    dnsUseGethostbyname = yes
    disableVia = true
    censoredHeaders = from,accept-language,x-pad,link
    censorReferer = maybe
   

3. Tell planetfilter to use the polipo proxy by adding the following to /etc/default/planetfilter:

    export http_proxy="localhost:8008"
    export https_proxy="localhost:8008"
   

Bugs and suggestions The source code is available on repo.or.cz. I've been using this for over a month and it's been working quite well for me. If you give it a go and run into any problems, please file a bug! I'm also interested in any suggestions you may have.

I wrote last month about buying a new laptop and I still haven t made a decision. One reason for this is because Dell doesn t seem to be shipping the E7250. Some online shops claim to be able to deliver it, but aren t clear on what configuration it has and I really don t want to end up with Dell Wifi. Another issue has been the graphic issues with the Broadwell GPU (see the comment section of my last post). It seems unlikely that this will be fixed in time for Debian Jessie. I really want a stable OS on this machine, as it will be a work-horse and not a toy machine. I haven t made up my mind whether the graphics issue is a deal-breaker for me. Meanwhile, a couple of more sub-1.5kg (sub-3.3lbs) Broadwell i7 s have hit the market. Some of these models were suggested in comments to my last post. I have decided that the 5500U CPU would also be acceptable to me, because some newer laptops doesn t come with the 5600U. The difference is that the 5500U is a bit slower (say 5-10%) and lacks vPro, which I have no need for and mostly consider a security risk. I m not aware of any other feature differences. Since the last round, I have tightened my weight requirement to be sub-1.4kg (sub-3lbs), which excludes some recently introduced models, and actually excludes most of the models I looked at before (X250, X1 Carbon, HP 1040/810). Since I m leaning towards the E7250, with the X250 as a reliable fallback option, I wanted to cut down on the number of further models to consider. Weigth is a simple distinguisher. The 1.4-1.5kg (3-3.3lbs) models I am aware that of that is excluded are the Asus Zenbook UX303LN, the HP Spectre X360, and the Acer TravelMate P645. The Acer Aspire S7-393 (1.3kg) and Toshiba Kira-107 (1.26kg) would have been options if they had RJ45 ports. They may be interesting to consider for others. The new models I am aware of are below. I m including the E7250 and X250 for comparison, since they are my preferred choices from the first round. A column for maximum RAM is added too, since this may be a deciding factor for me. Higher weigth is with touch screens.

Toshiba Z30-B	1.2-1.34kg	16GB	13.3	1920 1080
Fujitsu Lifebook S935	1.24-1.36kg	12GB	13.3	1920 1080
HP EliteBook 820 G2	1.34-1.52kg	16GB	12.5	1920 1080
Dell Latitude E7250	1.25kg	8/16GB?	12.5	1366 768
Lenovo X250	1.42kg	8GB	12.5	1366 768

It appears unclear whether the E7250 is memory upgradeable, some sites say max 8GB some say max 16GB. The X250 and 820 has DisplayPort, the S935 and Z30-B has HDMI, and the E7250 has both DisplayPort/HDMI. The E7250 does not have VGA which the rest has. All of them have 3 USB 3.0 ports except for X250 that only has 2 ports. The E7250 and 820 claims NFC support, but Debian support is not given. Interestingly, all of them have a smartcard reader. All support SDXC memory cards. The S935 has an interesting modular bay which can actually fit a CD reader or an additional battery. There is a detailed QuickSpec PDF for the HP 820 G2, haven t found similar detailed information for the other models. It mentions support for Ubuntu, which is nice. Comparing these laptops is really just academic until I have decided what to think about the Broadwell GPU issues. It may be that I ll go back to a fourth-gen i7 laptop, and then I ll probably pick a cheap reliable machine such as the X240.

The Debian Project will celebrate its 22nd birthday during DebConf15 in Heidelberg in August 2015. At this age, it s unsurprising that children of Debian contributors have attended our developer conference for several years. Going with the times, we would like to work further towards making DebConf15 a child-friendly (parents-friendly) conference. The conference venue is far away from traffic, self-contained, and there is a dedicated children s play room. There are green areas around, and the Heidelberg Zoo is literally within sight of the venue. We haven t yet discussed deals with them, but we could. In short: if you d like to attend DebConf, but you are yet unsure what to do with your children bring your kids along! The hostel has a number of 3 and 4 bed-rooms with en-suite bathrooms, plus a good supply of cots available for the very little ones. We will allocate such rooms to families exclusively for your privacy (subject to availability, so please register yourself ASAP, and include a note about your kids). We are maintaining answers to commonly-asked questions on the wiki. Please let us know if anything is missing, and feel free to update the page yourself. We would also like to explore additional possibilities to make it easier for parents to participate in the conference. At the moment, we re still scouting for ideas and there are already a number of promising leads. To help us figure out what we d best offer, we need to know about the demand. If you are planning to bring your children, or if you re thinking about it, please drop a short note with number and ages and any other relevant information to kids@debconf.org. Your mail will be read by a few parents involved in the organisation of DebConf15 and we will obviously keep your data private. We also created a (publicly archived) mailing list to discuss options and keep people updated on our plans. Please subscribe yourself to the list, if interested, and feel free to write to debconf-kids@lists.debian.org with any questions or ideas you might have.

Review: Fukushima, by David Lochbaum, et al.

Author:	David Lochbaum
Author:	Edwin Lyman
Author:	Susan Q. Stranahan
Author:	Union of Concerned Scientists
Publisher:	The New Press
Copyright:	2014
ISBN:	1-59558-927-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	320

This is a very interesting book, and I can recommend it, but there are two things you should be aware of up-front. The packaging does not necessarily make clear what expectations you should have of it going in. First, the subtitle (The Story of a Nuclear Disaster) should have appended to it And Its Implications for US Nuclear Power Policy. This book is very concerned with the impact of the Fukushima disaster on US policy and nuclear regulation, to the point where I think more than half of the book is about US agencies, nuclear regulatory history, and US reaction. There's nothing wrong with that, of course: the US should take a hard look at its own nuclear energy policy given the events at Fukushima, and it's a worthy topic for a book. But if you go into this book expecting a broader perspective, you will be disappointed. For example, I think the fact that France has a lot of nuclear power was mentioned maybe twice in the whole book, and French reaction was never discussed at all. There is a very detailed examination of exactly what happened at Fukushima (more on that in a moment), but most of the policy implications are examined purely from a US perspective. Even Japanese nuclear policy gets somewhat short shrift. Second, note that the fourth listed co-author is the Union of Concerned Scientists. For those not familiar with US environmental groups, the UCS has a reputation as an anti-nuclear advocacy organization. I don't think that's entirely fair; I think the UCS's position on nuclear power is better summarized as holding that it is theoretically possible to run a nuclear power plant safely, but the actual US nuclear power industry is not very close to that standard, and it would require much tighter regulation and more investment in safety systems to reach that standard. But be aware that the authors of this book have a clear position on the adequacy of current nuclear power safety standards, namely that they aren't. And they don't try to conceal that position in this book. Personally, I prefer authors to be open about their perspective in books like this, but your mileage may vary. There, disclaimers out of the way. I bought this book for a specific reason: I had followed some of the news coverage at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, and then (like many people, I suspect) lost track of the final outcome as the story fell out of the news and I started ignoring people who didn't understand how large the Pacific Ocean is. Now that we've had the benefit of several years of analysis and thoughtful reconstruction of events, I wanted to know what had actually happened. I'm happy to say that this book delivers quite well on that front. Roughly the first half of the book is a detailed blow-by-blow description of exactly what happened at Fukushima, at least as well as we've been able to reconstruct, told as an engrossing and dramatic narrative. There may be a little too much interleaving of reactions within the US government, which I suspect will particularly annoy non-US readers, but the level of factual detail is excellent, clear, and well-explained. What I wasn't expecting, but was pleasantly surprised by, is that it's also a great story. There's tension, conflict, heroism, hard choices, and moral quandries, and the authors do a great job conveying factual information while still giving the reader the sense of being in the middle of the unfolding drama. They resist the urge to disclose all the results of later analysis in the middle of the story, which may provide a slightly less clear view of the disaster, but which makes the telling far more compelling. I usually read non-fiction more slowly than fiction, but Fukushima dragged me in. I found myself grabbing moments to read just another few pages. Unfortunately, this is only about half the book. The other half is a mix of other things that won't have as broad of appeal: an analysis of the challenges of US nuclear regulation, a history of the US nuclear power industry, and a presentation of the authors' opinions about the best path forward for regulation of nuclear power in the US. Since I'm a US citizen and resident with an interest in both nuclear power and regulation of nuclear power in my country, I found this interesting, if not as engrossing as the rest of the book. But it felt a bit oddly tacked on, and I think it's a stretch to say that it's part of the story of Fukushima. The authors try to draw that link by presenting the Japanese nuclear power industry as heavily influenced by their US counterparts, and their regulatory problems as similar to the problems in the US, but there is nowhere near enough detail about Japanese regulatory practices here to support that conclusion. I think the largest weakness, and the most obvious gap, in this book is the lack of detailed analysis of the history and players in the Japanese nuclear regulatory environment. This is an odd miss. If one is concerned about regulatory inadequacy, Japanese government policy is far more obviously part of the story of Fukushima than US policy. I can only speculate that the authors had inside sources for the US policy discussions but not for the Japanese policy discussions (and, sadly, fall back on painting with a rather broad brush and making unsupported generalizations about Japanese regulatory approaches in a few spots). The result feels like two partly-unrelated books stacked and partly shuffled together. So, there are parts of Fukushima that are rather disappointing, particularly for non-US readers. But I still recommend it as a great detailed history of the actual incident and a summary of what we now think happened. That summary is unfortunately sketchy and still very unclear, but I don't think that's the fault of the authors. The inside of a nuclear power plant during a meltdown is a very difficult environment to measure or analyze, and there's a lot of data that we will probably never have. Some details may never be known. But what we do know, and how that knowledge unfolded, is told very well. This is the only book-length treatment on Fukushima I've read, so I can't compare it against other books on the same topic. But it satisfied my curiousity nicely. If you have a similar curiosity, I recommend this book to your attention, although be aware of its approach and its US-centric analysis going in so that you're not surprised by a mismatch of expectations. Rating: 8 out of 10

I haven't blogged anything in months and figured that now might be a good time to get around that. Here it goes:
Free Software
While I occasionally upgrade the packaging of the software I maintain at Debian to keep up with best practices, my activity downsizing goes on. Simply put: I never had any ambition to become a Debian Developer. My involvement has always remained pragmatic and mostly from the perspective of packaging software that I found useful. Even then, my motivation for doing that keeps on dwindling into nothingness, because key pieces of software keep on breaking, whenever someone upstream decides to reinvent the wheel.
For instance, GNOME no longer works at all on Geode chipsets and it barely works on Nouveau chipsets. This happened as soon as GNOME 3.14 was uploaded into unstable, right before the freeze started. Then again, I wouldn't jump to a conclusion that GNOME itself might be at fault, since Plymouth also stopped working on the same two video platforms at the same time. For all we know, this could be caused by some changes in the X.Org server code. Bugs were filed, additional information was provided, but no fix has taken place.
Given how Geode and Nouveau represent 80% of my hardware investment (my Intel laptop being the sole exception), it essentially means that the upcoming Debian "stable" is useless for me. Now try and remain motivated, even just as a mere Free Software end-user. At this point, I'm done.
Politics
Finland is holding national elections this April. I still have no idea who I'll vote for this time. The guy I voted for last time has become a career politician with an inflated ego and zero connection to the average Finn's aspirations and worries. Meanwhile, two friends are standing as candidates: one who is a razor-sharp fact finder and who is a proven pragmatic decision-maker, but whose values are slightly off with mine, and one whose actions come straight from the heart but whose concept of today's Finnish reality leaves a lot to be desired.
National Defence
There's been a lot of recent articles about how former hardware and locations of the Finnish defence forces and border guards have been sold, often for peanuts, to Russian interests. In some cases, we're only talking about buildings formerly used for on-site staff accommodations. In other cases, former patrol boats and navy harbours changed hands. Now, to top it all, it appears that our north-western neighbour, Norway, has sold a former submarine base to German investors who, in turn, leased it to you guessed it Russian interests.
Looking at Russian actions in Ukraine, I cannot help but feel great concern that strategic locations are falling into potentially dangerous hands. Just seeing the picture of a former navy harbour with a handful of patrol boats on standby, right on the Finnish coastline, half-way between Helsinki and Turku, was a sobering experience. While the whole idea of shooting at people even invading armies gives me the creeps, at this point, I cannot help but start pondering whether defending this country might in fact be an occupation worth training for.
Employment
It has now been 6 years since I held my last dayjob. Since then, the only thing I've found is an unpaid training in the national bureaucracy. I've also freelanced as an actor and model, but that barely brought me pocket change, if even that. Seeing my face on posters advertising a movie I participated in last year was indeed nice, getting some media attention in connection to that too, but it hasn't lead to additional gigs. As far as I can tell, this was just my Warholian 15 minutes of fame.
However, there's a larger issue at stake. Newspapers recently published an employment statistics map for Nordic countries and the truth couldn't be more bleak: while Norway and Sweden's employment figures are nearly spotless for almost every province, those of Finland are save for a couple of mildly successful provinces outright catastrophic. Given this and despite feeling relatively happy living in Finland and having developed a will to defend this country from an eventual Russian assault, I've come to the conclusion that I would be better off going West, with a strong preference for Norway.
Now, the main question is, doing what? 6 years later, I have strong doubts that I would be remotely considered for any high-tech job. Besides, come to think of it, I wouldn't want any new office job. Off the top of my head, my idea of a cool job that would allow me to stay physically fit would be working as a tourist guide in Lapland. However, if Norway is anything like Finland, someone probably needs a dozen of permits of all sorts (first aid certification, C or even D class driving license, college degree in tourism, etc.) that I cannot afford. What then?

Now I'm back to Linux on the Desktop for my dayjob, I was slightly nervous about checking out the state of the art for Linux music players; an area I've never felt the Linux desktop was very strong on. However for the time being I've largely side-stepped the issue by listening to BBC 6 Music for most of the day. For better or worse, I scrobble, and somebody has written a neat web app for scrobbling along to radio stations. When I want to listen to something different for a change, I've been trying out a trial of Google Play Music, for which somebody has written a Chrome extension to scrobble. On the rare occasions I listen to local music, I'm using VLC. Google Play Music seems pretty good, but I'm not getting a lot from my trial because 6 Music is generally fantastic. Scrobbling 6 Music has revealed a bit of a disconnect for how I use last.fm, and how website thinks you should use it. Within a day or two, my "music compability" with 6 Music was (predictably) "SUPER". Looking at my "Top artists", right near the top are 6 Music's current playlist favourites Courtney Barnett and Nadine Shah, who I can (at least) recall the songs that have been played; just below them are Young Fathers, who I cannot. A little lower are Hot Chip and Slaves: both artists who have current singles out which I enjoyed for a while, but the relentless BBC playlist policy is overdoing them and I'm inclined to switch over when they come on now. If I listen to a whole album in a given week, then the artist will likely (and rightly) be sat at the top of "last 7 days"; if I don't, then it could be something I can't even remember listening to.

I have just released version 1.9 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian. Due to the freeze of Debian for the jessie release, I've not uploaded this version to Debian yet (not experimental and not backports). This is the first Obnam release since May 13, 2014, 313 days ago. That's a long time. I make no excuses: Obnam is a hobby project, which I work on when I have the time and energy. The past year has been very /interesting/ year for me, in all sorts of stressful ways: I've changed jobs, moved to another country, and dealt with the loss of a close relative. Because of this, I've not been able to spend as much time on Obnam as I'd like. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what has happened to Obnam during this time. There's been a lot of things, actually. My plans for Obnam next are mainly centered around performance. This will require developing a new repository format, to allow things that are not possible with the current format. For example, the current format stores each data chunk in its own file in the repository, and that is quite wasteful when live data files (and therefore their chunks) are quite small. As preparation for this work, the silly-looking "simple" format has been added, mostly to make sure the internal code infrastructure is ready to support multiple repository formats in the same Obnam version. Those interested in discussing ways to make Obnam fast should join the obnam-dev mailing list. Version 1.9, released 2015-03-22 New features:

• James Vasile changed Obnam so it can backup an individual file, instead of an entire directory.
• James Vasile added the --include option to Obnam, allowing one to include files that would otherwise be excluded (see --exclude).
• Carlo Teubner changed obnam fsck to remove unused chunks, if the --fsck-fix or --fsck-rm-unused settings are used. He also made it not check for unused chunks when it's useless to do so, because of various --fsck-skip settings are used.
• A start of a French translation of the manual by pedrito2.
• Ian Cambell provided a new Obnam command, obnam kdirstat, which makes the KDE k4dirstat utility be able to show graphically which parts of a backup generation use most space.
• Lars Wirzenius added the simple repository format, which is for demonstration only. It is much too simplistic to be used for real.

Minor changes:

• The manual page and obnam --help are now clearer that the --root setting and command line arguments to obnam backup can be SFTP URLs. Thanks to Simone Piccardi for reporting the issue.
• David Fries filled in the displayed file permission mode bits.
• Grammar and typo fixes for the obnam.1 manual page, from Jean Jordaan.
• Tom Chiverton suggested a clarification to the manual page for "obnam mount" to say that each generation is a subdirectory.
• David Fries changed restore to set the group ownership if possible even when not root. No warnings are issued if the attempt fails.
• Jan Niggemann added a little to the German translation of the Obnam manual.
• Lars Wirzenius added the path to the error message about a missing chunk (R43272X).
• Lars Wirzenius made the message at the end of a backup report more statistics about transfers during the backup.

Bug fixes:

• The Obnam SFTP plugin would loop infinitely if it lost the connection to the SSH server while creating a temporary file. Itamar Turner-Trauring provided a fix for this.
• Will Dyson fixed a bug about locking while removing checkpoint generations.
• Michel Alexandre Salim fixed a Python 2.6 compatibility problem in the unit tests (use of assertRaises as a context manager).
• Lars Kruse fixed a bug with backing up of overlapping backup roots (e.g., / and /boot), given a test case by Adrien Clerc.
• Thomas Eschenbacher fixed a bug in the format 6 repository code that would crash when there is an obscure problem and a B-tree code can't be found in the tree.
• Tom Chiverton pointed out that the manual page was using "obnam restore" instead of "obnam mount" in an example for "obnam mount".
• The yarn test suite now runs FUSE tests (obnam mount) when fusermount is available, rather than checking for membership in the group fuse. The latter is a Debianism (fixed in Debian jessie).
• Thomas Waldmann noticed that obnam verify didn't notice that a file had new data, when the modification time was the same. Obnam now notices this.
• Thomas Waldmann fixed many typos and minor bugs in the source code.
• Laurence Perkins reported that the Tahoe-LAFS SFTP server returned some stat fields as None. Fixed to change those to be 0 instead.
• Lars Wirzenius fixed double-downloading of chunks during restores.

Every year, Debian organizes a DPL election. Around end of March, one waits for the beginning of the DPL campaign. Everyone can ask questions to nominated candidates on debian-vote. This year, and for the first time, I nominated myself as a candidate for the 2015 DPL election. You can read my platform here.

Over the past few years, I've followed DPL campaigns on debian-vote reading questions and replies from candidates. It didn't seem easy to keep up with flood of questions and find the right wording while replying. Intuitively, you may think that a question is the first mail of every thread and replies follow... but, not at all :-) Questions can be asked in any mail. So candidates have to read every single mail posted to the list :-) The campaign ends within a week (or so) and it is still time to ask more questions.

Following discussions on debian-vote is a very good opportunity for newcomers to understand, for example, how Debian works and where help is needed. It is also a good place to see what are the main current issues (as perceived by contributors) and read a list of proposals to fix them. I invite anyone interested in Debian in reading debian-vote's archives.

While preparing my platform, I've also realized how much writing down thoughts and ideas was important. It really helps to put things into perspective and re-evaluate priorities. It may sound obvious but I think we are not used to do this often. I really recommend everyone to do this as an exercise, and for any perimeter (personal, team, project-wide, ...).

Last but not least, I'd like to thank all those who helped me to polish my platform and to prepare my candidacy. I am sure they will recognize themselves :-) (whatever the outcome of the election may be)

One of fresh additions to Debian, that is showing Debian's commitment to diversity in all fields is Laura Arjona Reina. A helpful hand on channels and a great flux of FLOSS energy she brings with herself. Although applied for non-packaging Debian Developer status, Laura does recognize that there are still some technical aspects what must grasp on. Her dedication to FLOSS and trying to solve some of its issues is astonishing, as this woman is doing a lot of self-hosting and system administration. Yes, you read it right - she does all of that and still applied for non-packaging Debian Developer. She is perfect example how FLOSS enhances humans in many ways. Hello Laura. Who are you? I am Laura Arjona, I work as IT assistant at Technic University of Madrid, I am married and I have a son, and I use and promote free (libre) software both at job and at home and with friends. I have a nice time contributing in Debian and other FLOSS projects but I always want to do more than what I manage to actually do (I hope I can improve that, as time goes by... and maybe when I get retired I am the SuperLArjona that you wrote about!). What parts of FLOSS community are you engaged? I use Debian, and CyanogenMod + F-Droid in my phone. I coordinate the translation of the Debian website into Spanish, help with FSFE website translation too, and translate some other free software (GNU MediaGoblin, F-Droid, Android apps that I use, web services that we use at work...). I use and promote some free social networks: pump.io, GNU Social, and XMPP. My work/friends environment is mostly Windows/Android so I try to find/promote libre software replacements or interesting applications for them. I give free FLOSS stickers to everybody showing interest for libre software, and a nice Debian sticker if they finally install it in their computers. Setup of your main machine? My machine is a humble Compaq Mini 110C laptop (32bits, Atom N270@1.60GHz, 1GB RAM) and I have Debian Jessie (future-stable ATM) with xfce on it. I'm not tied to particular tools, for example I use Mousepad for editing here in my xfce, Kate in my desktop at work, nano in the server. The only "tuning" that I always do is to set a dark background for terminals and text editors, but I don't even switch to a desktop dark theme... (BTW I love Jessie's theme, "Lines"!). I know there are awesome pieces of software out there (hey emacs-org-mode!), but I just don't have fun having to learn them by myself (no LUG near, I'm afraid...). Some memorable moments from Debian conferences? I've only been at Barcelona MiniDebConf Women 2014 and it was great. It was memorable that I promoted the keysigning for that MiniDebConf, and came home with lots of signatures and papers to verify and sign... and then I was not remembering my GPG main key passphrase! so I hid under my desk for two months, and then, decided to start again (created a new key and tried to meet some Debian people in Madrid...). So I guess I should go to some (Mini)DebConf again. You are currently involved in process of becoming non-packaging Debian Developer - what made you take that step? I began translating in 2011, and since then, I enjoyed contributing in Debian (women, l10n-es, website, publicity). I'm quite regular with the translation work, and applying for DD is a plan to 'force' myself to find chunks of time to contribute more in the other areas too. I also believe that applying I may help other people to also apply or get more involved or become more visible. So here I am. Although you applied for non-packaging Debian Developer you recognize that there is still a technical learning curve in Debian even for that - what are the technical aspects a non-Developer should grasp? Well, I suppose it depends on the area you are contributing. In Publicity you find repositories in git (bits.debian.org), and subversion (Debian Project News). The website uses CVS (www.debian.org)... So you need the basics of 3 different version control systems to commit your changes (or send them to the mailing list and wait somebody to commit them). We use a mail robot to coordinate the translation work, so you need to write the subject with a certain format, and some people complains when somebody send mail in HTML (plain text is preferred). There are some other tools such as IRC and GPG that I began using just for contributing to Debian. Once that you learn them a bit and you learn how Debian works, you understand they are the great tools and you get in love (hey meetbot and KGB! hey i18n.debian.org!), but I wonder how people with no technical background, or even Computer Engineering students nowadays, accostumed to instant messaging in the mobile, fancy web interfaces and so on, look at these tools and just don't even try. How do you see future of Debian development? I don't know, Debian is huge... Some areas in which I hope we, as a community, find the way to work more: packaging (or help configuring) web applications or network services, provide LTS support, and keep on improving outreach/diversity. What are your future plans in Debian, what would you like to work on? In the Spanish team area, my plan is to go on translating the website, jump more often into translating package descriptions too, and help first-time-contributors to keep themselves involved. In the website and publicity teams, I hope I manage to put some weekly time to help with pending tasks/bugs, and serve as liaison with the other areas in which I'm involved (women, l10n, contributors...). If I become DD, I would like to create/adopt some data sources for contributors.debian.org, or convince people to do it I'm not sure if I will be able to attend DebConf some year; meanwhile, at least, I'll continue trying to help with the blog and promotion (as -publicity-team member). Why should developers and users join Debian community? What makes Debian a great and happy place? For using it: the desktop experience has improved very much in the last years, there's a clear separation between free and non-free software so the Debian users always know where are we, and there is wide documentation (in English, at least. Probably in other languages too). For getting involved: I like very much that you can lurk what almost everybody does: just join some mailing lists or IRC channels, the Debian people work in the open. So you know a bit where are you jumping in. Later you learn that everything is easier than what was looking from the outside, because you make friends and with friends everything is better.
Contributions made to Debian have many chances to reach a very wide community: Debian users, upstream projects, and the hundreds of derivatives. It's a quite horizontal, decentralized organization (that has its downsides too, but I can live with them). Is there something you would change in FLOSS ecosystem? We need much more internationalization and localization efforts. People don't need English for using libre software nowadays in their desktop, it's one of our big strenghts, but they definitely need English for using libre software for Android, or solving problems with the libre software they use in your computers/devices, or to contribute to any community. I think we need more local groups for user support/outreach, more libre-software-based translation tools and online services (replacements for Google Translator, for Transifex...),and more internationalization and localization efforts (manuals, websites... not only the software itself). If we work hard in this area, we'll gain much more users and much more contributors. Why does privacy matter to you? I have a son, at our family we interchange photos, and sometimes I have private conversations using the smartphone, mail or other internet services. I want to have the chance that the day that I (or my family) need privacy, we can have it easily. And I want that the people that really need privacy today, have proper tools at their hand. So I try to use PGP, selfhost my multimedia website, use decentralized, free software based networks and XMPP mobile apps... to help those projects to thrive. I try do my part of the network effect! You are being upset with rise of Github - why is that and what would change would you like to see? I totally agree with Mako's essay "Free software needs free tools". Yes, many nonfree web services are easier and have better features right now, but the key is that only dogfooding can change that, the same like changed it with the GNU/Linux desktop and Open/LibreOffice for example...
I would like to see more people trying to selfhost, use and promote libre software based forges, so in addition to avoid vendor lock in and win consistency in our discourse, we polish the available tools and eventually win the battle also in the technical side. You are hosting yours own instances of Mediagoblin - as it is not officially packaged in Debian yet, how do you manage it and how would you encourage others to do it? I followed the MediaGoblin documentation for its last stable release, and hanged on the IRC channel when in doubts/problems. It was not so hard, because it's well documented for Debian systems, and most of the dependencies are already packaged (in stable and testing). MediaGoblin is in its way to stretch too (thanks simonft and the rest of people working on this!). I'm documenting my adventures with selfhosting in [my blog (http://larjona.wordpress.com), but I need to write more often, and put more time in my small server (now I try to selfhost my git projects with cgit, and I want to setup an XMPP server and Etherpad Lite too). You are trying to resolve with self-hosting personal issues with services such as WhatsUp and other non-free parts of our everyday lives- what issues are you hitting on during your way and how do you resolve them? "#iloveemail", but people don't love it anymore, it seems... I've researched a bit about instant messaging to try to propose alternatives to WhatsApp to my family and friends. It seems Conversations with a community XMPP server where to create multi user chat rooms can be a replacement, so my plan is to try during this year. Meanwhile, I've setup the MediaGoblin site so I upload the photos there instead of sending them with the phone, and for the 1-to-1 chat I try to move people to Kontalk (instant messaging, GPG, photos, voice notes...). For the videocalls, I promote Jitsi or just point people to meet.jit.si/FancyNameofChatRoom. I have account and owndrive.com and will try to host Owncloud too. We'll see what happens. You are interested in radio shows - what drives you into that field and will we see soon any podcasts from Laura? I like to talk and I'm not a shy person, so the few times that in any of my social groups there was a chance to "talk in the radio", I volunteered and enjoyed. This has been, in my life, 6 or 7 times (in Spanish, talking about social activism or politics. No records, though!). Some months ago the people of "El Binario" invited me to talk at "findenegro" about pump.io and free networks (in Spanish), I accepted and had a very nice time (audios in my mediagoblin). I wish I have more free time to listen to podcasts and maybe to join some other people to participate in a program in a regular basis. OTOH, my son asks for a tale almost each day... I follow one of Gianni Rodari "The grammar of fantasy"'s approach: take some day-to-day facts and add something unexpected and crazy, and tailor a short story. Maybe I could record them and publish in my MediaGoblin... Of course their literary quality is not even near to Gianni Rodari's but people that listened to them when I was storytelling (in the metro, my mother at home, some friends...) say they are fun and interesting. Who knows!

Yesterday I was hacking on some Ruby code and getting a weird error which I thought was caused by mutually recursive require statements (i.e. A requires B, and B requires A). Later I realized that this is not an issue in Ruby, since the intepreter keeps track of what has already been required and will not enter a loop. But during the investigation I came up with something that turned out to be useful. rrg will read the source code of a Ruby project and generate a graph based on the require statements in the code; nodes represent the source files and an arrow from A to B means that A contains a require B statement. From the README:

Just run rrg at the root of your project. rrg will parse the code inside lib/, and generate a graph description in the Graphviz format. You can pipe the output to Graphviz directly, or store it in a file and process it to generate an image.

If you call rrgv instead, it will automatically process the graph with Graphviz, generate a PNG image, and open it.

Let s see some examples. First the classical analysing itself example, the require graph for rrg itself: Not very interesting, since all of the logic is currently in the main binary and not on library code. But 1) when I do the refactorings I want to, there will be more library code and 2) while writing this I implemented also parsing scripts in bin/. Now chake which is a slightly larger project: An even larger (but still not that big) project, gem2deb: Note that these visualizations may not be accurate representations of the actual source code. In Ruby, nothing stops one from implementing class A::B in lib/x/y.rb, but most reasonable code will make sure that filenames and the classes namespaces actually match. If you are working on a sane codebase, though, visualizing graphs like this helps understand the general structure of the code and perceive possible improvements. The gem2deb graph gave me some ideas already and I didn t even paid much attention to it yet.

Notice: There were several requests for me to more elaborate on my path to Debian and impact on life so here it is. It's going to be a bit long so anyone who isn't interested in my personal Debian journey should skip it. :) In 2007. I enrolled into Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (at first at Department of Industrial Management and later transfered to Department of Mechatronics - this was possible because first 3 semesters are same for both departments). By the end of same year I was finishing my tasks (consisting primarily of calculations, some small graphical designs and write-ups) when famous virus, called by users "RECYCLER", sent my Windows XP machine into oblivion. Not only it took control over machine and just spawned so many processes that system would crash itself, it actually deleted all from hard-disk before it killed the system entirely. I raged - my month old work, full of precise calculations and a lot of design details, was just gone. I started cursing which was always continued with weeping: "Why isn't there an OS that can whithstand all of viruses, even if it looks like old DOS!". At that time, my roommate was my cousin who had used Kubuntu in past and currently was having SUSE dual-booted on his laptop. He called me over, started talking about this thing called Linux and how it's different but de facto has no viruses. Well, show me this Linux and my thought was, it's probably so ancient and not used that it probably looks like from pre Windows 3.1 era, but when SUSE booted up it had so much more beautiful UI look (it was KDE, and compared to XP it looked like the most professional OS ever). So I was thrilled, installed openSUSE, found some rough edges (I knew immediately that my work with professional CAD systems will not be possible on Linux machines) but overall I was bought. After that he even talked to me about distros. Wait, WTF distros?! So, he showed me distrowatch.com. I was amazed. There is not only a better OS then Windows - there where dozens, hundreds of them. After some poking around I installed Debian KDE - and it felt great, working better then openSUSE but now I was as most newbies, on fire to try more distros. So I was going around with Fedora, Mandriva, CentOS, Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS and in beginning of 2008 I stumbled upon Debian docs which where talking about GNU and GNU Manifesto. To be clear, I was always as a high-school kid very much attached to idea of freedom but started loosing faith by faculty time (Internet was still not taking too much of time here, youth still spent most of the day outside). So the GNU Manifesto was really a big thing for me and Debian is a social bastion of freedom. Debian (now with GNOME2) was being installed on my machine. As all that hackerdom in Debian was around I started trying to dig up some code. I never ever read a book on coding (until this day I still didn't start and finish one) so after a few days I decided to code tetris in C++ with thought that I will finish it in two days at most (the feeling that you are powerful and very bright person) - I ended it after one month in much pain. So instead I learned about keeping Debian system going on, and exploring some new packages. I got thrilled over radiotray, slimvolley (even held a tournament in my dorm room), started helping on #debian, was very active in conversation with others about Debian and even installed it on few laptops (I became de facto technical support for users of those laptops :D ). Then came 2010 which with negative flow that came in second half of 2009, started to crush me badly. I was promised to go to Norway, getting my studies on robotics and professor lied (that same professor is still on faculty even after he was caught in big corruption scandal over buying robots - he bought 15 years old robots from UK, although he got money from Norway to buy new ones). My relationship came to hard end and had big emotional impact on me. I fell a year on faculty. My father stopped financing me and stopped talking to me. My depression came back. Alcohol took over me. I was drunk every day just not to feel anything. Then came the end of 2010, I somehow got to the information that DebConf will be in Banja Luka. WHAT?! DebConf in city where I live. I got into #debconf and in December 2010/January 2011 I became part of the famous "local local organizers". I was still getting hammered by alcohol but at least I was getting out of depression. IIRC I met Holger and Moray in May, had a great day (a drop of rakia that was too much for all of us) and by their way of behaving there was something strange. Beatiful but strange. Both were sending unique energy of liberty although I am not sure they were aware of it. Later, during DebConf I felt that energy from almost all Debian people, which I can't explain. I don't feel it today - not because it's not there, it's because I think I integrated so much into Debian community that it's now a natural feeling which people here, that are close to me are saying that they feel it when I talk about Debian. DebConf time in Banja Luka was awesome - firstly I met Phil Hands and Andrew McMillan which were a crazy team, local local team was working hard (I even threw up during the work in Banski Dvor because of all heat and probably not much of sleep due to excitement), met also crazy Mexican Gunnar (aren't all Mexicans crazy?), played Mao (never again, thank you), was hanging around smart but crazy people (love all) from which I must notice Nattie (a bastion of positive energy), Christian Perrier (which had coordinated our Serbian translation effort), Steve Langasek (which asked me to find physiotherapist for his co-worker Mathias Klose, IIRC), Zach (not at all important guy at that time), Luca Capello (who gifted me a swirl on my birthday) and so many others that this would be a post for itself just naming them. During DebConf it was also a bit of hard time - my grandfather died on 6th July and I couldn't attend the funeral so I was still having that sadness in my heart, and Darjan Prtic, a local team member that came from Vienna, committed suicide on my birthday (23 July). But DebConf as conference was great, but more importantly the Debian community felt like a family and Meike Reichle told me that it was. The night it finished, me and Vedran Novakovic cried. A lot. Even days after, I was getting up in the morning having the feeling I need something to do for DebConf. After a long time I felt alive. By the end of year, I adopted package from Clint Adams and Moray became my sponsor. In last quarter of 2011 and beginning of 2012, I (as part of LUG) held talks about Linux, had Linux installation in Computer Center for the first time ever, and installed Debian on more machines. Now fast forwarding with some details - I was also on DebConf13 in Switzerland, met some great new friends such as Tincho and Santiago (and many many more), Santiago was also my roommate in Portland on the previous DebConf. In Switzerland I had really great and awesome time. Year 2014 - I was also at DebConf14, maintain a bit more packages and have applied for DD, met some new friends among which I must put out Apollon Oikonomopoulos and Costas Drogos which friendship is already deep for such a short time and I already know that they are life-long friends. Also thanks to Steve Langasek, because without his help I wouldn't be in Portland with my family and he also gave me Arduino. :) 2015. - I am currently at my village residence, have a 5 years of working experince as developer due to Debian and still a lot to go, learn and do but my love towards Debian community is by magnitude bigger then when I thought I love it at most. I am also going through my personal evolution and people from Debian showed me to fight for what you care, so I plan to do so. I can't write all and name all the people that I met, and believe me when I say that I remember most and all of you impacted my life for which I am eternally grateful. Debian, and it's community effect literally saved my life, spring new energy into me and changed me for better. Debian social impact is far bigger then technical, and when you know that Debian is a bastion of technical excellence - you can maybe picture the greatness of Debian. Some of greatest minds are in Debian but most important isn't the sheer amount of knowledge but the enormous empathy. I just hope I can in future show to more people what Debian is and to find all lost souls as me to give them the hope, to show them that we can make world a better place and that everyone is capable to live and do what they love. P.S. I am still hoping and waiting to see Bdale writing a book about Debian's history to this day - in which I think many of us would admire the work done by project members, laugh about many situations and have fun reading a book about project that was having nothing to do but fail and yet it stands stronger then ever with roots deep into our minds.

Several improvements have been made to UDD s Bug Search and Maintainer Dashboard recently. On the Maintainer Dashboard side, the main new feature is a QA checks table that provides an overview of results from lintian, reproducible builds, piuparts, and ci.debian.net. Check the dashboard for the Ruby team for an example. Also, thanks to Daniel Pocock, the TODO items can now be exported as iCalendar tasks. Bugs Search now has much better JSON and YAML outputs. It s probably a good start if you want to do some data-mining on bugs. Packages can now be selected using the same form as the Maintainer Dashboard s one, which makes it easy to build your own personal bug list, and will suppress the need for some of the team-specific listings. Many bugs have been fixed too. More generally, thanks to the work of Christophe Siraut, the code is much better now, with a clean separation of the data analysis logic and the rendering sides that will make future improvements easier. As the reminder, it s quite easy to hack on UDD (even if you are not a DD). Please report bugs, including about additional features you would like to see!

I've run OpenWRT on my home router for a long time, and these days I maintain a couple of packages for the project. In order to make most efficient use of the hardware resources on my router, I run a custom build of the OpenWRT firmware with some default features removed and others added. For example, I install bind and ipsec-tools, while I disable the web UI in order to save space. There are quite a few packages required for the OpenWRT build process. I don't necessarily want all of these packages installed on my main machine, nor do I want to maintain a VM for the build environment. So I investigated using Docker for this. Starting from a base jessie image, which I created using the Docker debootstrap wrapper, the first step was to construct a Dockerfile containing instructions on how to set up the build environment and create a non-root user to perform the build:

FROM jessie:latest
MAINTAINER Noah Meyerhans <frodo@morgul.net>
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && apt-get -y install \
asciidoc bash bc binutils bzip2 fastjar flex git-core g++ gcc
util-linux gawk libgtk2.0-dev intltool jikespg zlib1g-dev make \
genisoimage libncurses5-dev libssl-dev patch perl-modules \
python2.7-dev rsync ruby sdcc unzip wget gettext xsltproc \
libboost1.55-dev libxml-parser-perl libusb-dev bin86 bcc sharutils \
subversion
RUN adduser --disabled-password --uid 1000 --gecos "Docker Builder,,," builder

And we generate a docker image based on this Dockerfile per the docker build documentation. At this point, we've got a basic image that does what we want. To initialize the build environment (download package sources, etc), I might run: docker run -v ~/src/openwrt:/src/openwrt -u builder -t -i jessie/openwrt sh -c "cd /src/openwrt/openwrt && scripts/feeds update -a" Or configure the system: docker run -v ~/src/openwrt:/src/openwrt -u builder -t -i jessie/openwrt make -C /src/openwrt/openwrt menuconfig And finally, build the OpenWRT image itself: docker run -v ~/src/openwrt:/src/openwrt -u builder -t -i jessie/openwrt make -C /src/openwrt/openwrt -j3 The -v ~/src/openwrt:/src/openwrt flags tell docker to bind mount my ~/src/openwrt directory (which I'd previously cloned using git) to /src/openwrt inside the running container. Without this, one might be tempted to clone the git repo directly into the container at runtime, but the changes to non-bind-mount filesystems are lost when the container terminates. This could be suitable for an autobuild environment, in which the sources are cloned at the start of the build and any generated artifacts are archived externally at the end, but it isn't suitable for a dev environment where I might be making and testing small changes at a relatively high frequency. The -u builder flags tell docker to run the given commands as the builder user inside the container. Recall that builder was created with UID 1000 in the Dockerfile. Since I'm storing the source and artifacts in a bind-mounted directory, all saved files will be created with this UID. Since UID 1000 happens to be my UID on my laptop, this is fine. Any files created by builder inside the container will be owned by me outside the container. However, this container should not have to rely on a user with a given UID running it! I'm not sure what the right way to approach this problem is within Docker. It may be that someone using my image should create their own derivative image that creates a user with the appropriate UID (creation of this derivative image is a cheap operation in Docker). Alternatively, whatever Docker init system is used could start as root, add a new user with a specific UID, and execute the build commands as that new user. Neither of these seems as clean as it could be, though. In general, Docker seems quite useful for such a build environment. It's easy to set up, and it makes it very easy to generate and share a common collection of packages and configuration. Because images are self-contained, I can reclaim a bunch of disk space by simple executing "docker rmi".

Since 2009, I am persuing a personal programming project. As I am not a professional programmer, I have spent quite a lot of that time exploring options. I have thrown out about three or four prototype implementations already. My last implementation seems to contain enough accumulated wisdom to be actually useful. I am far from finished, but the path I am walking now seems relatively sound. So, what is this project about? I have set myself a rather ambitious goal: I am trying to implement a two-way bridge between visual music notation and braille music code. It is called BMC (Braille Music Compiler). My problem: I am, as some of you might remember, 100% blind. So I am trying to write a translator between something I will never see directly, and its counterpart representation in a tactile encoding I had to learn from scratch to be able to work on this project. Braille music code is probably the most cryptic thing I have ever tried to learn. It basically is a method to represent a 2-dimensional structure like staff-notation as a stream of characters encoded in 6-dot braille. As the goal above states, I am ultimately trying to implement a converter that works both ways. One of my prototypes already implemented reading digital staff notation (MusicXML) and transcribing it to Braille. However, to be able to actually understand all the concepts involved, I ended up starting from the other end of the spectrum with my new implementation: parsing braille music code and emitting digital staff notation (LilyPond and MusicXML). This is a rather unique feature, since while there is commercial (and very expensive) software out there to convert MusicXML to braille music code, there is, as far as I know, no system that allows to input un-annotated braille music code and have it automatically converted to sighted music notation. So the current state of things is, that we are able to read certain braille music code formats, and output either reformatted (to new line-width) braille music code, LilyPond or MusicXML. The ultimate goal is to also implement a MusicXML reader, and convert the data to something that can be output as braille music code. While the initial description might not sound very hard, there are a lot of complications arising from how braille music code works, which make this quite a programming challenge. For one, braille music note and rest values are ambigious. A braille music note or rest that looks like a whole can mean a whole or 16th. A braille music note or rest that looks like a half can mean a half or a 32nd. And so on. So each braille music code value can have two meanings. The actual value can be caluclated with a recursive algorithm that I have worked out from scratch over the years. The original implementation was inspired by Samuel Thibault (thanks!) and has since then evolved into something that does what we need, while trying to do that very fast. Most input documents can be processed in almost no time, however, time signatures with a value > 1 (such as 12/8) tend to make the number of possible choices exploed quite heavily. I have found so far one piece from J.S. Bach (BWV988 Variation 3) which takes about 1.5s on my 3GHz AMD (and the code is already using several CPU cores). Additionally, braille music code supports a form of "micro"-repetitions which are not present in visual staff notation which effectively allow certain musical patterns to be compressed if represented in braille. Another algorithmically interesting part of BMC that I have started to taclke just recently is the linebreaking problem. Braille music code has some peculiar rules when it comes to breaking a measure of musical material into several lines. I ended up adapting Donald E. Knuth's algorithm from Breaking Paragraphs into Lines for fixed-width text. In other words, I am ignoring the stretch/shrink factors, while making use of different penalty values to find the perfect solution for the problem of breaking a paragraph of braille music code into several lines. One thing that I have learnt from my perivous prototype (which was apparently useful enough to already acquire some users) is that it is not enough to just transcribe one format to another. I ultimately want to store meta information about the braille that is presented to the user such that I can implement interactive querying and editing features. Braille music code is complicated, and one of the original motivations to work on software to deal with it was to ease the learning curve. A user of BMC should be able to ask the system for a description of a character at a certain position. The user interface (not implemented yet) should allow to play a certain note interactively, or play the measure under the cursor, or play the whole document, and if possible, have the cursor scroll along while playback plays notes. These features are not implemented in BMC yet, but they have been impleemnted in the previous prototype and their usefulness is apparent. Also, when viewing a MusicXML document in braille music code, certain non-structural changes like adding/removing fingering annotations should be possible while preserving unhandled features of the original MusicXML document. This also has been implemented in the previous prototype, and is a goal for BMC.

We re now calling for proposals for DebConf15. Proposals are accepted from now until 15 June 2015. To submit an event, go to the Propose an Event page once you are registered for the conference. The DebConf Content Team will decide on a first round of submissions in May, so be sure to submit your proposal soon if you need it to be accepted by then, e.g. for sponsorship requests. The current, non-exhaustive list of proposed topics is:

• Debian Packaging, Policy, and Infrastructure
• Security, Safety, and Hacking
• Debian System Administration, Automation and Orchestration
• Containers and Cloud Computing with Debian
• Debian Success Stories
• Debian in the Social, Ethical, Legal, and Political Context
• Blends, Subprojects, Derivatives, and Projects using Debian
• Embedded Debian and Hardware-Level Systems

For all further information, please see the Proposals page of the DebConf15 website.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In February, 58 work hours have been equally split among 4 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Ben Hutchings
• Holger Levsen (though he did only 9h out of the 14.5h allocated, he will have to catch up in March)
• Rapha l Hertzog
• Thorsten Alteholz

Evolution of the situation During the last month, we gained 3 paid work hours: we re now at 61 hours per month sponsored by 28 organizations and we have one supplementary sponsor in the pipe that should bring 4 more hours. The increase is not very quick but seems to be steady. Hopefully at some point, we will have enough resources to do a more exhaustive job. For now, the paid contributors handle in priority the most popular packages used by the sponsors and there are some packages in the end of the queue which have open security issues for months already (example: CVE-2012-6685 on libnokogiri-ruby). So, as usual, we are looking for more sponsors. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation looks a little bit worse than last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 40 packages awaiting an update (3 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 58 affected packages in total (5 less than last month). We are getting a bit more effective with CVE triage. A logo for the LTS project? Every time that I write an LTS report, I remember that it would be nice if my LTS related articles could feature a nice picture/logo that reminds people of the LTS team/initiative. Is there anyone up for the challenge of creating that logo? Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors of the month are in bold.

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
• AD&D David Ayers IntarS Austria
• Blablacar
• Domeneshop AS
• Evolix
• Gandi SAS
• Trollweb Solutions
• Universit Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
• Bitfolk LTD
• Daevel SARL
• FOSSter
• Freeside Internet Service
• Gree, Inc.
• Greenbone Networks GmbH
• Intevation GmbH
• Linuxhotel GmbH
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH
• MyTux
• NUMLOG
• Nantes M tropole
• Offensive Security
• Seznam.cz, a.s.
• WinGo AG

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I'm using grub version 2.02~beta2-2. I want to make a USB stick that's capable of booting Intel architecture EFI machines, both 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (ia32). I'm starting from a USB stick which is attached to a running debian system as /dev/sdX. I have nothing that i care about on that USB stick, and all data on it will be destroyed by this process. I'm also going to try to make it bootable for traditional Intel BIOS machines, since that seems handy.I'm documenting what I did here, in case it's useful to other people. Set up the USB stick's partition table:

parted /dev/sdX -- mktable gpt
parted /dev/sdX -- mkpart biosgrub fat32 1MiB 4MiB
parted /dev/sdX -- mkpart efi fat32 4MiB -1
parted /dev/sdX -- set 1 bios_grub on
parted /dev/sdX -- set 2 esp on

After this, my 1GiB USB stick looks like:

0 root@foo:~# parted /dev/sdX -- print
Model:  USB FLASH DRIVE (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdX: 1032MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 
Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name      Flags
 1      1049kB  4194kB  3146kB  fat32        biosgrub  bios_grub
 2      4194kB  1031MB  1027MB               efi       boot, esp
0 root@foo:~# 

make a filesystem and mount it temporarily at /mnt:

mkfs -t vfat -n GRUB /dev/sdX2
mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt

ensure we have the binaries needed, and add three grub targets for the different platforms:

apt install grub-efi-ia32-bin grub-efi-amd64-bin grub-pc-bin grub2-common
grub-install --removable --no-nvram --no-uefi-secure-boot \
     --efi-directory=/mnt --boot-directory=/mnt \
     --target=i386-efi
grub-install --removable --no-nvram --no-uefi-secure-boot \
     --efi-directory=/mnt --boot-directory=/mnt \
     --target=x86_64-efi
grub-install --removable --boot-directory=/mnt \
     --target=i386-pc /dev/sdX

At this point, you should add anything else you want to /mnt here! For example:

• a kernel and initramfs from your own computer
• debian-installer ISOs
• firmware blobs for that annoying proprietary device
• BIOS updates
• debirf images
• grub-invaders
• ...

And don't forget to cleanup:

umount /mnt
sync

Tags: bios, efi, grub, tip