Search Results: "ed"

20 July 2020

Dominique Dumont: Security gotcha with log collection on Azure Kubernetes cluster.

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:
  1. disable the collection of environment variables in Azure, which
    will reduce cost and plug the potential credential leak
  2. 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)
  3. 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

Shirish Agarwal: Hearing loss, pandemic, lockdown

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 extensively written 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.

19 July 2020

Enrico Zini: More notable people

Ren Carmille - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-07-20
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 - Wikipedia
health people archive.org
2020-07-20
Gino Strada (born Luigi Strada; 21 April 1948) is an Italian war surgeon and founder of Emergency, a UN-recognized international non-governmental organization.
Morbo di K - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-07-20
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]
Gino Bartali - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-07-20
Stage races

Russ Allbery: PGP::Sign 1.01

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.

18 July 2020

Chris Lamb: The comedy is over

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."

Andrew Cater: Debian Stretch release 9.13 - testing of images now complete 202007181950 or so

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.

I will try to blog on other things, honest :)

Andrew Cater: Debian Stretch 9.13 release - blog post 2 - testing of basic .iso images ongoing as at 202007181655

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.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: tint 0.1.3: Fixes for html mode, new demo

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.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the tint page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.1.8: Minor test fix

drat user 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).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Laptop Mode Tools 1.74

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

What is Laptop Mode Tools 
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

Andrew Cater: Debian "Stretch" 9.13 release preparations ongoing

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


David Bremner: git-annex and ikiwiki, not as hard as I expected

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.
  1. I started using the rsync_command ikiwiki option to deploy my site.
  2. 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
You can see the result at photo

Dima Kogan: Converting images while extracting a tarball

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.

Session 2 
inotifywait -r PATH -e close_write -m   mawk -Winteractive '/pgm$/   print $1$3  '   parallel -v -j10 'convert   -quality 96  . .jpg && rm  '
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.

Abhijith PA: Workstation setup

Workstation Hello, Recently I ve seen lot of people sharing about their home office setup. I thought why don t I do something similar. Not to beat FOMO, but in future when I revisit this blog, it will be lovely to understand that I had some cool stuffs. There are people who went deep down in the ocean to lay cables for me to have a remote job and I am thankful to them. Being remote my home is my office. On my work table I have a Samsung R439 laptop. I ve blogged about it earlier. New addition is that it have another 4GB RAM, a total of 6GB and 120GB SSD. I run Debian testing on it. Laptop is placed on a stand. Dell MS116 as external mouse always connected to it. I also use an external keyboard from fingers. The keys are very stiff so I don t recommend this to anyone. The only reason I took this keyboard that it is in my budget and have a backlit, which I needed most. I have a Micromax MM215FH76 21 inch monitor as my secondary display which stacked up on couple of old books to adjust the height with laptop stand. Everything is ok with this monitor except that it don t have a HDMI point and stand is very weak. I use i3wm and this small script help me to manage my monitor arrangement. 
# samsung r439
xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1366x768 --pos 1920x312 --rotate normal --output DP1 --off --output HDMI1 --off --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 0x0 --rotate normal --output VIRTUAL1 --off
# thinkpad t430s
#xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1600x900 --pos 1920x180 --rotate normal --output DP1 --off --output DP2 --off --output DP3 --off --output HDMI1 --off --output HDMI2 --off --output HDMI3 --off --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 0x0 --rotate normal --output VIRTUAL1 --off
i3-msg workspace 2, move workspace to left
i3-msg workspace 4, move workspace to left
i3-msg workspace 6, move workspace to left
I also have another Viewsonic monitor 19 inch, it started to show some lines and unpleasant colors. Thus moved back to shelf. I have an orange pi zero plus 2 running Armbian which serve as my emby media server. I don t own any webcam or quality headset at the moment. I have a boat, and Mi, headphones. My laptop inbuilt webcam is horrible, so for my video conferencing need I use jitsi app on my mobile device.

Abhijith PA: Workstation setup

Workstation Hello, Recently I ve seen lot of people sharing about their home office setup. I thought why don t I do something similar. Not to beat FOMO, but in future when I revisit this blog, it will be lovely to understand that I had some cool stuffs. There are people who went deep down in the ocean to lay cables for me to have a remote job and I am thankful to them. Being remote my home is my office. On my work table I have a Samsung R439 laptop. I ve blogged about it earlier. New addition is that it have another 4GB RAM, a total of 6GB and 120GB SSD. I run Debian testing on it. Laptop is placed on a stand. Dell MS116 as external mouse always connected to it. I also use an external keyboard from fingers. The keys are very stiff so I don t recommend this to anyone. The only reason I took this keyboard that it is in my budget and have a backlit, which I needed most. I have a Micromax MM215FH76 21 inch monitor as my secondary display which stacked up on couple of old books to adjust the height with laptop stand. Everything is ok with this monitor except that it don t have a HDMI point and stand is very weak. I use i3wm and this small script help me to manage my monitor arrangement. 
# samsung r439
xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1366x768 --pos 1920x312 --rotate normal --output DP1 --off --output HDMI1 --off --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 0x0 --rotate normal --output VIRTUAL1 --off
# thinkpad t430s
#xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1600x900 --pos 1920x180 --rotate normal --output DP1 --off --output DP2 --off --output DP3 --off --output HDMI1 --off --output HDMI2 --off --output HDMI3 --off --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 0x0 --rotate normal --output VIRTUAL1 --off
i3-msg workspace 2, move workspace to left
i3-msg workspace 4, move workspace to left
i3-msg workspace 6, move workspace to left
I also have another Viewsonic monitor 19 inch, it started to show some lines and unpleasant colors. Thus moved back to shelf. I have an orange pi zero plus 2 running Armbian which serve as my emby media server. I don t own any webcam or quality headset at the moment. I have a boat, and Mi, headphones. My laptop inbuilt webcam is horrible, so for my video conferencing need I use jitsi app on my mobile device.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 152 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 152. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Bug fixes:
  - Don't require zipnote(1) to determine differences in a .zip file as we
    can use libarchive directly.
* Reporting improvements:
  - Don't emit "javap not found in path" if it is available in the path but
    it did not result in any actual difference.
  - Fix "... not available in path" messages when looking for Java
    decompilers; we were using the Python class name (eg. "<class
    'diffoscope.comparators.java.Javap'>") over the actual command we looked
    for (eg. "javap").
* Code improvements:
  - Replace some simple usages of str.format with f-strings.
  - Tidy inline imports in diffoscope.logging.
  - In the RData comparator, always explicitly return a None value in the
    failure cases as we return a non-None value in the "success" one.
[ Jean-Romain Garnier ]
* Improve output of side-by-side diffs, detecting added lines better.
  (MR: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!64)
* Allow passing file with list of arguments to ArgumentParser (eg.
  "diffoscope @args.txt"). (MR: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!62)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

17 July 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.9.900.2.0

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 757 other packages on CRAN. Conrad just released a new minor upstream version 9.900.2 of Armadillo which we packaged and tested as usual first as a release candidate build and then as the release. As usual, logs from reverse-depends runs are in the rcpp-logs repo. All changes in the new release are noted below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.900.2.0 (2020-07-17)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.900.2 (Nocturnal Misbehaviour)
    • In sort(), fixes for inconsistencies between checks applied to matrix and vector expressions
    • In sort(), remove unnecessary copying when applied in-place to vectors function when applied in-place to vectors

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Sven Hoexter: Debian and exFAT

As some might have noticed we now have Linux 5.7 in Debian/unstable and subsequently the in kernel exFAT implementation created by Samsung available. Thus we now have two exFAT implementations, the exfat fuse driver and the Linux based one. Since some comments and mails I received showed minor confusions, especially around the available tooling, it might help to clarify a bit what is required when. Using the Samsung Linux Kernel Implementation Probably the most common use case is that you just want to use the in kernel implementation. Easy, install a Linux 5.7 kernel package for your architecture and either remove the exfat-fuse package or make sure you've version 1.3.0-2 or later installed. Then you can just run mount /dev/sdX /mnt and everything should be fine. Your result will look something like this: 
$ mount grep sdb
/dev/sdb on /mnt type exfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,iocharset=utf8,errors=remount-ro
In the past this basic mount invocation utilized the mount.exfat helper, which was just a symlink to the helper which is shipped as /sbin/mount.exfat-fuse. The link was dropped from the package in 1.3.0-2. If you're running a not so standard setup, and would like to keep an older version of exfat-fuse installed you must invoke mount -i to prevent mount from loading any helper to mount the filesystem. See also man 8 mount. For those who care, mstone@ and myself had a brief discussion about this issue in #963752, which quickly brought me to the conclusion that it's in the best interest of a majority of users to just drop the symlink from the package. Sticking to the Fuse Driver If you would like to stick to the fuse driver you can of course just do it. I plan to continue to maintain all packages for the moment. Just keep the exfat-fuse package installed and use the mount.exfat-fuse helper directly. E.g. 
$ sudo mount.exfat-fuse /dev/sdb /mnt
FUSE exfat 1.3.0
$ mount grep sdb
/dev/sdb on /mnt type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
In case this is something you would like to make permanent, I would recommend that you create yourself a mount.exfat symlink pointing at the mount.exfat-fuse helper. mkfs and fsck - exfat-utils vs exfatprogs Beside of the filesystem access itself we now also have two implementations of tooling, which support filesystem creation, fscking and label adjustment. The older one is exfat-utils by the creator of the fuse driver, which is also part of Debian since the fuse driver was packaged in 2012. New in Debian is the exfatprogs package written by the Samsung engineers. And here the situation starts to get a bit more complicated. Both packages ship a mkfs.exfat and fsck.exfat tool, so we can not co-install them. In the end both packages declare a conflict with each other at the moment. As outlined in this thread I do not plan to overcomplicate the situation by using the alternatives system. I do feel strongly that this would just create more confusion without a real benefit. Since the tools do not have matching cli options, that could also cause additional issues and confusion. I plan to keep that as is, at least for the bullseye release. Afterwards it's possible, depending on how the usage evolves, to drop the mkfs.exfat and fsck.exfat from exfat-utils, they are in fact again only symlinks. pain point might be tools interfacing with the differing implementations. Currently I see only three reverse depedencies, so that should be manageable to consolidate if required. Last but not least it might be relevant to mention that the exfat-utils package also contains a dumpexfat tool which could be helpful if you're more into forensics, or looking into other lower level analysis of an exFAT filsystem. Thus there is a bit of an interest to have those tools co-installed in some - I would say - niche cases. buster-backports Well if you use buster with a backports kernel you're a bit on your own. In case you want to keep the fuse driver installed, but would still like to mount, e.g. for testing, with the kernel exFAT driver, you must use mount -i. I do not plan any uploads to buster-backports. If you need a mkfs.exfat on buster, I would recommend to just use the one from exfat-utils for now. It has been good enough for the past years, should not get sour before the bullseye release, which ships exfatprogs for you. Kudos My sincere kudos go to:

16 July 2020

Dima Kogan: Visualizing a broken internet connection

We've all seen our ISPs crap out periodically. Things feel slow, we then go ping some server, and see lost packets or slow response times. When bitching to the ISP it's useful to have evidence so you can clearly explain exactly how they are fucking up. This happened to me again last week, so I wrote a quick oneliner to do the visualization. Here it is: 
( echo '# i dt'; ping 8.8.8.8   perl -ne 'BEGIN   $ =1  next if /PING/; s/.*seq=([0-9]+).*time=([0-9]+).*/\1 \2/ && print')   tee /tmp/ping.vnl   vnl-filter --stream -p i,dt,di='diff(i)'   vnl-filter --stream --has di   feedgnuplot  --domain --stream --with 'linespoints pt 7 palette' --tuplesizeall 3 --ymin 0 --set 'cbrange [1:]' --xlabel "ping index" --ylabel "Response time (ms)" --title "ping 8.8.8.8 response times. Consecutive indices shown as colors"
You run that, and you get a realtime-updating plot of ping times and missed packets. The one-liner also logs the data to a file, so the saved data can be re-visualized. Showing what happens on my currently-working internet connection: 
< /tmp/ping.vnl vnl-filter -p i,dt,di='diff(i)'   vnl-filter --has di   feedgnuplot  --domain --with 'linespoints pt 7 palette' --tuplesizeall 3 --ymin 0 --set 'cbrange [1:]' --xlabel "ping index" --ylabel "Response time (ms)" --title "ping 8.8.8.8 response times. Consecutive indices shown as colors" --hardcopy /tmp/isp-good.svg
good.svg
On a broken network it looks like this (I edited the log to show the kind of broken-ness I was seeing earlier):
bad.svg
The x axis is the ping index. The y axis is the response time. Misses responses are shows as gaps in the points and also as colors, for legibility. As usual, this uses the vnlog and feedgnuplot tools, so 
sudo apt install feedgnuplot vnlog
if you want to try this

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam Sprint Report -- DebConf20@Home

DebConf20 starts in about 5 weeks, and as always, the DebConf Videoteam is working hard to make sure it'll be a success. As such, we held a sprint from July 9th to 13th to work on our new infrastructure. A remote sprint certainly ain't as fun as an in-person one, but we nonetheless managed to enjoy ourselves. Many thanks to those who participated, namely: We also wish to extend our thanks to Thomas Goirand and Infomaniak for providing us with virtual machines to experiment on and host the video infrastructure for DebConf20. Advice for presenters For DebConf20, we strongly encourage presenters to record their talks in advance and send us the resulting video. We understand this is more work, but we think it'll make for a more agreeable conference for everyone. Video conferencing is still pretty wonky and there is nothing worse than a talk ruined by a flaky internet connection or hardware failures. As such, if you are giving a talk at DebConf this year, we are asking you to read and follow our guide on how to record your presentation. Fear not: we are not getting rid of the Q&A period at the end of talks. Attendees will ask their questions either on IRC or on a collaborative pad and the Talkmeister will relay them to the speaker once the pre-recorded video has finished playing. New infrastructure, who dis? Organising a virtual DebConf implies migrating from our battle-tested on-premise workflow to a completely new remote one. One of the major changes this means for us is the addition of Jitsi Meet to our infrastructure. We normally have 3 different video sources in a room: two cameras and a slides grabber. With the new online workflow, directors will be able to play pre-recorded videos as a source, will get a feed from a Jitsi room and will see the audience questions as a third source. This might seem simple at first, but is in fact a very major change to our workflow and required a lot of work to implement. 
               == On-premise ==                                          == Online ==
                                                      
              Camera 1                                                 Jitsi
                                                                          
                 v                 ---> Frontend                         v                 ---> Frontend
                                                                                            
    Slides -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend         Questions -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend
                                                                                            
                 ^                 ---> Frontend                         ^                 ---> Frontend
                                                                          
              Camera 2                                           Pre-recorded video
In our tests, playing back pre-recorded videos to voctomix worked well, but was sometimes unreliable due to inconsistent encoding settings. Presenters will thus upload their pre-recorded talks to SReview so we can make sure there aren't any obvious errors. Videos will then be re-encoded to ensure a consistent encoding and to normalise audio levels. This process will also let us stitch the Q&As at the end of the pre-recorded videos more easily prior to publication. Reducing the stream latency One of the pitfalls of the streaming infrastructure we have been using since 2016 is high video latency. In a worst case scenario, remote attendees could get up to 45 seconds of latency, making participation in events like BoFs arduous. In preparation for DebConf20, we added a new way to stream our talks: RTMP. Attendees will thus have the option of using either an HLS stream with higher latency or an RTMP stream with lower latency. Here is a comparative table that can help you decide between the two protocols:
HLS RTMP
Pros
  • Can be watched from a browser
  • Auto-selects a stream encoding
  • Single URL to remember
  • Lower latency (~5s)
Cons
  • Higher latency (up to 45s)
  • Requires a dedicated video player (VLC, mpv)
  • Specific URLs for each encoding setting
Live mixing from home with VoctoWeb Since DebConf16, we have been using voctomix, a live video mixer developed by the CCC VOC. voctomix is conveniently divided in two: voctocore is the backend server while voctogui is a GTK+ UI frontend directors can use to live-mix. Although voctogui can connect to a remote server, it was primarily designed to run either on the same machine as voctocore or on the same LAN. Trying to use voctogui from a machine at home to connect to a voctocore running in a datacenter proved unreliable, especially for high-latency and low bandwidth connections. Inspired by the setup FOSDEM uses, we instead decided to go with a web frontend for voctocore. We initially used FOSDEM's code as a proof of concept, but quickly reimplemented it in Python, a language we are more familiar with as a team. Compared to the FOSDEM PHP implementation, voctoweb implements A / B source selection (akin to voctogui) as well as audio control, two very useful features. In the following screen captures, you can see the old PHP UI on the left and the new shiny Python one on the right. The old PHP voctowebThe new Python3 voctoweb Voctoweb is still under development and is likely to change quite a bit until DebConf20. Still, the current version seems to works well enough to be used in production if you ever need to. Python GeoIP redirector We run multiple geographically-distributed streaming frontend servers to minimize the load on our streaming backend and to reduce overall latency. Although users can connect to the frontends directly, we typically point them to live.debconf.org and redirect connections to the nearest server. Sadly, 6 months ago MaxMind decided to change the licence on their GeoLite2 database and left us scrambling. To fix this annoying issue, Stefano Rivera wrote a Python program that uses the new database and reworked our ansible frontend server role. Since the new database cannot be redistributed freely, you'll have to get a (free) license key from MaxMind if you to use this role. Ansible & CI improvements Infrastructure as code is a living process and needs constant care to fix bugs, follow changes in DSL and to implement new features. All that to say a large part of the sprint was spent making our ansible roles and continuous integration setup more reliable, less buggy and more featureful. All in all, we merged 26 separate ansible-related merge request during the sprint! As always, if you are good with ansible and wish to help, we accept merge requests on our ansible repository :)

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