This is a fairly self-indulgent post, sorry! Encouraged by Evgeni, Michael and others, given I'm spending a lot more time at my desk in my home office, here's a picture of it: Near enough everything in the study is a work in progress. The KALLAX behind my desk is a recent addition (under duress) because we have nowhere else to put it. Sadly I can't see it going away any time soon. On the up-side, since Christmas I've had my record player and collection in and on top of it, so I can listen to records whilst working. The arm chair is a recent move from another room. It's a nice place to take some work calls, serving as a change of scene, and I hope to add a reading light sometime. The desk chair is some Ikea model I can't recall, which is sufficient, and just fits into the desk cavity. (I'm fairly sure my Aeron, inaccessible elsewhere, would not fit.) I've had this old mahogany, leather-topped desk since I was a teenager and it's a blessing and a curse. Mostly a blessing: It's a lovely big desk. The main drawback is it's very much not height adjustable. At the back is a custom made, full-width monitor stand/shelf, a recent gift produced to specification by my Dad, a retired carpenter. On the top: my work Thinkpad T470s laptop, geared more towards portable than powerful (my normal preference), although for the forseeable future it's going to remain in the exact same place; an Ikea desk lamp (I can't recall the model); a 27" 4K LG monitor, the cheapest such I could find when I bought it; an old LCD Analog TV, fantastic for vintage consoles and the like. Underneath: An Alesis Micron 2 octave analog-modelling synthesizer; various hubs and similar things; My Amiga 500. Like Evgeni, my normal keyboard is a ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint. I've been using different generations of these styles of keyboards for a long time now, initially because I loved the trackpoint pointer. I'm very curious about trying out mechanical keyboards, as I have very fond memories of my first IBM Model M buckled-spring keyboard, but I haven't dipped my toes into that money-trap just yet. The Thinkpad keyboard is rubber-dome, but it's a good one. Wedged between the right-hand bookcases are a stack of IT-related things: new printer; deprecated printer; old/spare/play laptops, docks and chargers; managed network switch; NAS.

I released version 2.3 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. There are three notable changes with this release:

1. Performance has significantly improved. One large, real-world test case has gone from around 160 seconds to 33 seconds. A smaller test case has gone from 11 seconds to ~3.5 seconds.
2. The documentation is available online now (via Read the Docs).
3. The repository has moved to the beancount GitHub organization.

Here are the changes in 2.3:

• Improve speed of ledger2beancount significantly
• Improve parsing of postings for accuracy and speed
• Improve support for inline math
• Handle lots without cost
• Fix parsing of lot notes followed by a virtual price
• Add support for lot value expressions
• Make parsing of numbers more strict
• Fix behaviour of dates without year
• Accept default ledger date formats without configuration
• Fix implicit conversions with negative prices
• Convert implicit conversions in a more idiomatic way
• Avoid introducing trailing whitespace with hledger input
• Fix loading of config file
• Skip ledger directive import
• Convert documentation to mkdocs

Thanks to Colin Dean for some feedback. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for prompting me into investigating performance issues (and thanks to the developers of the Devel::NYTProf profiler). You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 149. This version includes the following changes: You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

A very exciting RcppSimdJson release with the updated upstream simdjson release 0.4.0 as well as a first set of new JSON parsing functions just hit CRAN. RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is faster than CPU speed as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle use per byte parsed; see the video of the recent talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (which was also voted best talk). The very recent 0.4.0 release further improves the already impressive speed. And this release brings a first set of actually user-facing functions thanks to Brendan which put in a series of PRs! The full NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.6 (2020-06-25)

• Created C++ integer-handling utilities for safe downcasting and integer return (Brendan in #16 closing #13).
• New JSON functions .deserialize_json and .load_json (Brendan in #16, #17, #20, #21).
• Upgrade Travis CI to 'bionic', extract package and version from DESCRIPTION (Dirk in #23).
• Upgraded to simdjson 0.4.0 (Dirk in #25 closing #24).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. 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.

The Bulwark has an interesting article on why they can t Reopen America [1]. I wonder how many changes will be long term. According to the Wikipedia List of Epidemics [2] Covid-19 so far hasn t had a high death toll when compared to other pandemics of the last 100 years. People s reactions to this vary from doing nothing to significant isolation, the question is what changes in attitudes will be significant enough to change society. Transport One thing that has been happening recently is a transition in transport. It s obvious that we need to reduce CO2 and while electric cars will address the transport part of the problem in the long term changing to electric public transport is the cheaper and faster way to do it in the short term. Before Covid-19 the peak hour public transport in my city was ridiculously overcrowded, having people unable to board trams due to overcrowding was really common. If the economy returns to it s previous state then I predict less people on public transport, more traffic jams, and many more cars idling and polluting the atmosphere. Can we have mass public transport that doesn t give a significant disease risk? Maybe if we had significantly more trains and trams and better ventilation with more airflow designed to suck contaminated air out. But that would require significant engineering work to design new trams, trains, and buses as well as expense in refitting or replacing old ones. Uber and similar companies have been taking over from taxi companies, one major feature of those companies is that the vehicles are not dedicated as taxis. Dedicated taxis could easily be designed to reduce the spread of disease, the famed Black Cab AKA Hackney Carriage [3] design in the UK has a separate compartment for passengers with little air flow to/from the driver compartment. It would be easy to design such taxis to have entirely separate airflow and if setup to only take EFTPOS and credit card payment could avoid all contact between the driver and passengers. I would prefer to have a Hackney Carriage design of vehicle instead of a regular taxi or Uber. Autonomous cars have been shown to basically work. There are some concerns about safety issues as there are currently corner cases that car computers don t handle as well as people, but of course there are also things computers do better than people. Having an autonomous taxi would be a benefit for anyone who wants to avoid other people. Maybe approval could be rushed through for autonomous cars that are limited to 40Km/h (the maximum collision speed at which a pedestrian is unlikely to die), in central city areas and inner suburbs you aren t likely to drive much faster than that anyway. Car share services have been becoming popular, for many people they are significantly cheaper than owning a car due to the costs of regular maintenance, insurance, and depreciation. As the full costs of car ownership aren t obvious people may focus on the disease risk and keep buying cars. Passenger jets are ridiculously cheap. But this relies on the airline companies being able to consistently fill the planes. If they were to add measures to reduce cross contamination between passengers which slightly reduces the capacity of planes then they need to increase ticket prices accordingly which then reduces demand. If passengers are just scared of flying in close proximity and they can t fill planes then they will have to increase prices which again reduces demand and could lead to a death spiral. If in the long term there aren t enough passengers to sustain the current number of planes in service then airline companies will have significant financial problems, planes are expensive assets that are expected to last for a long time, if they can t use them all and can t sell them then airline companies will go bankrupt. It s not reasonable to expect that the same number of people will be travelling internationally for years (if ever). Due to relying on economies of scale to provide low prices I don t think it s possible to keep prices the same no matter what they do. A new economic balance of flights costing 2-3 times more than we are used to while having significantly less passengers seems likely. Governments need to spend significant amounts of money to improve trains to take over from flights that are cancelled or too expensive. Entertainment The article on The Bulwark mentions Las Vegas as a city that will be hurt a lot by reductions in travel and crowds, the same thing will happen to tourist regions all around the world. Australia has a significant tourist industry that will be hurt a lot. But the mention of Las Vegas makes me wonder what will happen to the gambling in general. Will people avoid casinos and play poker with friends and relatives at home? It seems that small stakes poker games among friends will be much less socially damaging than casinos, will this be good for society? The article also mentions cinemas which have been on the way out since the video rental stores all closed down. There s lots of prime real estate used for cinemas and little potential for them to make enough money to cover the rent. Should we just assume that most uses of cinemas will be replaced by Netflix and other streaming services? What about teenage dates, will kissing in the back rows of cinemas be replaced by Netflix and chill ? What will happen to all the prime real estate used by cinemas? Professional sporting matches have been played for a TV-only audience during the pandemic. There s no reason that they couldn t make a return to live stadium audiences when there is a vaccine for the disease or the disease has been extinguished by social distancing. But I wonder if some fans will start to appreciate the merits of small groups watching large TVs and not want to go back to stadiums, can this change the typical behaviour of groups? Restaurants and cafes are going to do really badly. I previously wrote about my experience running an Internet Cafe and why reopening businesses soon is a bad idea [4]. The question is how long this will go for and whether social norms about personal space will change things. If in the long term people expect 25% more space in a cafe or restaurant that s enough to make a significant impact on profitability for many small businesses. When I was young the standard thing was for people to have dinner at friends homes. Meeting friends for dinner at a restaurant was uncommon. Recently it seemed to be the most common practice for people to meet friends at a restaurant. There are real benefits to meeting at a restaurant in terms of effort and location. Maybe meeting friends at their home for a delivered dinner will become a common compromise, avoiding the effort of cooking while avoiding the extra expense and disease risk of eating out. Food delivery services will do well in the long term, it s one of the few industry segments which might do better after the pandemic than before. Work Many companies are discovering the benefits of teleworking, getting it going effectively has required investing in faster Internet connections and hardware for employees. When we have a vaccine the equipment needed for teleworking will still be there and we will have a discussion about whether it should be used on a more routine basis. When employees spend more than 2 hours per day travelling to and from work (which is very common for people who work in major cities) that will obviously limit the amount of time per day that they can spend working. For the more enthusiastic permanent employees there seems to be a benefit to the employer to allow working from home. It s obvious that some portion of the companies that were forced to try teleworking will find it effective enough to continue in some degree. One company that I work for has quit their coworking space in part because they were concerned that the coworking company might go bankrupt due to the pandemic. They seem to have become a 100% work from home company for the office part of the work (only on site installation and stock management is done at corporate locations). Companies running coworking spaces and other shared offices will suffer first as their clients have short term leases. But all companies renting out office space in major cities will suffer due to teleworking. I wonder how this will affect the companies providing services to the office workers, the cafes and restaurants etc. Will there end up being so much unused space in central city areas that it s not worth converting the city cinemas into useful space? There s been a lot of news about Zoom and similar technologies. Lots of other companies are trying to get into that business. One thing that isn t getting much notice is remote access technologies for desktop support. If the IT people can t visit your desk because you are working from home then they need to be able to remotely access it to fix things. When people make working from home a large part of their work time the issue of who owns peripherals and how they are tracked will get interesting. In a previous blog post I suggested that keyboards and mice not be treated as assets [5]. But what about monitors, 4G/Wifi access points, etc? Some people have suggested that there will be business sectors benefiting from the pandemic, such as telecoms and e-commerce. If you have a bunch of people forced to stay home who aren t broke (IE a large portion of the middle class in Australia) they will probably order delivery of stuff for entertainment. But in the long term e-commerce seems unlikely to change much, people will spend less due to economic uncertainty so while they may shift some purchasing to e-commerce apart from home delivery of groceries e-commerce probably won t go up overall. Generally telecoms won t gain anything from teleworking, the Internet access you need for good Netflix viewing is generally greater than that needed for good video-conferencing. Money I previously wrote about a Basic Income for Australia [6]. One of the most cited reasons for a Basic Income is to deal with robots replacing people. Now we are at the start of what could be a long term economic contraction caused by the pandemic which could reduce the scale of the economy by a similar degree while also improving the economic case for a robotic workforce. We should implement a Universal Basic Income now. I previously wrote about the make-work jobs and how we could optimise society to achieve the worthwhile things with less work [7]. My ideas about optimising public transport and using more car share services may not work so well after the pandemic, but the rest should work well. Business There are a number of big companies that are not aiming for profitability in the short term. WeWork and Uber are well documented examples. Some of those companies will hopefully go bankrupt and make room for more responsible companies. The co-working thing was always a precarious business. The companies renting out office space usually did so on a monthly basis as flexibility was one of their selling points, but they presumably rented buildings on an annual basis. As the profit margins weren t particularly high having to pay rent on mostly empty buildings for a few months will hurt them badly. The long term trend in co-working spaces might be some sort of collaborative arrangement between the people who run them and the landlords similar to the way some of the hotel chains have profit sharing agreements with land owners to avoid both the capital outlay for buying land and the risk involved in renting. Also city hotels are very well equipped to run office space, they have the staff and the procedures for running such a business, most hotels also make significant profits from conventions and conferences. The way the economy has been working in first world countries has been about being as competitive as possible. Just in time delivery to avoid using storage space and machines to package things in exactly the way that customers need and no more machines than needed for regular capacity. This means that there s no spare capacity when things go wrong. A few years ago a company making bolts for the car industry went bankrupt because the car companies forced the prices down, then car manufacture stopped due to lack of bolts this could have been a wake up call but was ignored. Now we have had problems with toilet paper shortages due to it being packaged in wholesale quantities for offices and schools not retail quantities for home use. Food was destroyed because it was created for restaurant packaging and couldn t be packaged for home use in a reasonable amount of time. Farmer s markets alleviate some of the problems with packaging food etc. But they aren t a good option when there s a pandemic as disease risk makes them less appealing to customers and therefore less profitable for vendors. Religion Many religious groups have supported social distancing. Could this be the start of more decentralised religion? Maybe have people read the holy book of their religion and pray at home instead of being programmed at church? We can always hope.

• [1] https://thebulwark.com/we-cannot-reopen-america/
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
• [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackney_carriage
• [4] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2020/05/06/about-reopening-businesses/
• [5] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2020/05/10/it-asset-management/
• [6] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/12/08/basic-income-australia/
• [7] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/03/08/less-work/

I have been convinced by the arguments that it's not nice to keep using the word master for the default git branch. Regardless of the etymology (which is unclear), some people say they have negative associations for this word, Changing this upstream in git is complicated on a technical level and, sadly, contested. But git is flexible enough that I can make this change in my own repositories. Doing so is not even so difficult. So: Announcement I intend to rename master to trunk in all repositories owned by my personal hat. To avoid making things very complicated for myself I will just delete refs/heads/master when I make this change. So there may be a little disruption to downstreams. I intend make this change everywhere eventually. But rather than front-loading the effort, I'm going to do this to repositories as I come across them anyway. That will allow me to update all the docs references, any automation, etc., at a point when I have those things in mind anyway. Also, doing it this way will allow me to focus my effort on the most active projects, and avoids me committing to a sudden large pile of fiddly clerical work. But: if you have an interest in any repository in particular that you want updated, please let me know so I can prioritise it. Bikeshed Why "trunk"? "Main" has been suggested elswewhere, and it is often a good replacement for "master" (for example, we can talk very sensibly about a disk's Main Boot Record, MBR). But "main" isn't quite right for the VCS case; for example a "main" branch ought to have better quality than is typical for the primary development branch. Conversely, there is much precedent for "trunk". "Trunk" was used to refer to this concept by at least SVN, CVS, RCS and CSSC (and therefore probably SCCS) - at least in the documentation, although in some of these cases the command line API didn't have a name for it. So "trunk" it is. Aside: two other words - passlist, blocklist People are (finally!) starting to replace "blacklist" and "whitelist". Seriously, why has it taken everyone this long? I have been using "blocklist" and "passlist" for these concepts for some time. They are drop-in replacements. I have also heard "allowlist" and "denylist" suggested, but they are cumbersome and cacophonous. Also "allow" and "deny" seem to more strongly imply an access control function than merely "pass" and "block", and the usefulness of passlists and blocklists extends well beyond access control: protocol compatibility and ABI filtering are a couple of other use cases.

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Here is the daily/weekly cronjob I put together over the years to perform MythTV-related maintenance tasks on my backend server. The first part performs a database backup:

5 1 * * *  mythtv  /usr/share/mythtv/mythconverg_backup.pl

which I previously configured by putting the following in /home/mythtv/.mythtv/backuprc:

DBBackupDirectory=/var/backups/mythtv

and creating a new directory for it:

mkdir /var/backups/mythtv
chown mythtv:mythtv /var/backups/mythtv

The second part of /etc/cron.d/mythtv-maintenance runs a contrib script to optimize the database tables:

10 1 * * *  mythtv  /usr/bin/chronic /usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/maintenance/optimize_mythdb.pl

once a day. It requires the libmythtv-perl and libxml-simple-perl packages to be installed on Debian-based systems. It is quickly followed by a check of the recordings and automatic repair of the seektable (when possible):

20 1 * * *  mythtv  /usr/bin/chronic /usr/bin/mythutil --checkrecordings --fixseektable

Next, I force a scan of the music and video databases to pick up anything new that may have been added externally via NFS mounts:

30 1 * * *  mythtv  /usr/bin/mythutil --quiet --scanvideos
31 1 * * *  mythtv  /usr/bin/mythutil --quiet --scanmusic

Finally, I defragment the XFS partition for two hours every day except Friday:

45 1 * * 1-4,6-7  root  /usr/sbin/xfs_fsr

and resync the RAID-1 arrays once a week to ensure that they stay consistent and error-free:

15 3 * * 2  root  /usr/local/sbin/raid_parity_check md0
15 3 * * 4  root  /usr/local/sbin/raid_parity_check md2

using a trivial script. In addition to that cronjob, I also have smartmontools run daily short and weekly long SMART tests via this blurb in /etc/smartd.conf:

/dev/sda -a -d ata -o on -S on -s (S/../.././04 L/../../6/05)
/dev/sdb -a -d ata -o on -S on -s (S/../.././04 L/../../6/05)

If there are any other automated maintenance tasks you do on your MythTV server, please leave a comment!

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In May, 198 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 18.0h (out of 14h assigned and 4h from April).
• Anton Gladky gave back the assigned 10h and declared himself inactive.
• Ben Hutchings did 19.75h (out of 17.25h assigned and 2.5h from April).
• Brian May did 10h (out of 10h assigned).
• Chris Lamb did 17.25h (out of 17.25h assigned).
• Dylan A ssi gave back the assigned 6h and declared himself inactive.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not manage to work LTS in May and now reported 5h work in April (out of 17.25h assigned plus 46h from April), thus is carrying over 58.25h for June.
• Markus Koschany did 25.0h (out of 17.25h assigned and 56h from April), thus carrying over 48.25h to June.
• Mike Gabriel did 14.50h (out of 8h assigned and 6.5h from April).
• Ola Lundqvist did 11.5h (out of 12h assigned and 7h from April), thus carrying over 7.5h to June.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 17.25h (out of 17.25h assigned).
• Sylvain Beucler did 17.25h (out of 17.25h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 17.25h (out of 17.25h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 17.25h (out of 17.25h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In May 2020 we had our second (virtual) contributors meeting on IRC, Logs and minutes are available online. Then we also moved our ToDo from the Debian wiki to the issue tracker on salsa.debian.org.
Sadly three contributors went inactive in May: Adrian Bunk, Anton Gladky and Dylan A ssi. And while there are currently still enough active contributors to shoulder the existing work, we like to use this opportunity that we are always looking for new contributors. Please mail Holger if you are interested.
Finally, we like to remind you for a last time, that the end of Jessie LTS is coming in less than a month!
In case you missed it (or missed to act), please read this post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years. If you expect to have Debian 8 servers/devices running after June 30th 2020, and would like to have security updates for them, please get in touch with Freexian. The security tracker currently lists 6 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 30 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold. With the upcoming start of Jessie ELTS, we are welcoming a few new sponsors and others should join soon.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 57 months)
• GitHub (for 47 months)
• Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 25 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• Blablacar (for 72 months)
• Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 68 months)
• Linode (for 62 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 51 months)
• Plat Home (for 50 months)
• University of Oxford (for 7 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• The Positive Internet Company (for 73 months)
• Domeneshop AS (for 72 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 66 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 58 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 58 months)
• Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 52 months)
• Exonet B.V. (for 41 months)
• Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 36 months)
• CINECA (for 25 months)
• Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 19 months)
• Cloudways Ltd (for 8 months)
• Dinahosting SL (for 6 months)
• Platform.sh
• Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG
• Bronze sponsors:
• Evolix (for 73 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 73 months)
• MyTux (for 72 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 70 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 69 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 68 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 67 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 67 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 66 months)
• NUMLOG (for 66 months)
• WinGo AG (for 65 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 62 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 59 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 57 months)
• Adfinis AG (for 54 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 49 months)
• Tesorion (for 49 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 48 months)
• Bearstech (for 40 months)
• LiHAS (for 40 months)
• People Doc (for 36 months)
• Catalyst IT Ltd (for 35 months)
• Supagro (for 30 months)
• Demarcq SAS (for 29 months)
• Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 15 months)
• TouchWeb SAS (for 7 months)
• SPiN AG (for 3 months)

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I recently moved house, and the new building has a Doorbird to act as a doorbell and open the entrance gate for people. There's a documented local control API (no cloud dependency!) and a Home Assistant integration, so this seemed pretty straightforward.

Unfortunately not. The Doorbird is on separate network that's shared across the building, provided by Monkeybrains. We're also a Monkeybrains customer, so our network connection is plugged into the same router and antenna as the Doorbird one. And, as is common, there's port isolation between the networks in order to avoid leakage of information between customers. Rather perversely, we are the only people with an internet connection who are unable to ping my doorbell.

I spent most of the past few weeks digging myself out from under a pile of boxes, but we'd finally reached the point where spending some time figuring out a solution to this seemed reasonable. I spent a while playing with port forwarding, but that wasn't ideal - the only server I run is in the UK, and having packets round trip almost 11,000 miles so I could speak to something a few metres away seemed like a bad plan. Then I tried tethering an old Android device with a data-only SIM, which worked fine but only in one direction (I could see what the doorbell could see, but I couldn't get notifications that someone had pushed a button, which was kind of the point here).

So I went with the obvious solution - I added a wifi access point to the doorbell network, and my home automation machine now exists on two networks simultaneously (nmcli device modify wlan0 ipv4.never-default true is the magic for "ignore the gateway that the DHCP server gives you" if you want to avoid this), and I could now do link local service discovery to find the doorbell if it changed addresses after a power cut or anything. And then, like magic, everything worked - I got notifications from the doorbell when someone hit our button.

But knowing that an event occurred without actually doing something in response seems fairly unhelpful. I have a bunch of Chromecast targets around the house (a mixture of Google Home devices and Chromecast Audios), so just pushing a message to them seemed like the easiest approach. Home Assistant has a text to speech integration that can call out to various services to turn some text into a sample, and then push that to a media player on the local network. You can group multiple Chromecast audio sinks into a group that then presents as a separate device on the network, so I could then write an automation to push audio to the speaker group in response to the button being pressed.

That's nice, but it'd also be nice to do something in response. The Doorbird exposes API control of the gate latch, and Home Assistant exposes that as a switch. I'm using Home Assistant's Google Assistant integration to expose devices Home Assistant knows about to voice control. Which means when I get a house-wide notification that someone's at the door I can just ask Google to open the door for them.

So. Someone pushes the doorbell. That sends a signal to a machine that's bridged onto that network via an access point. That machine then sends a protobuf command to speakers on a separate network, asking them to stream a sample it's providing. Those speakers call back to that machine, grab the sample and play it. At this point, multiple speakers in the house say "Someone is at the door". I then say "Hey Google, activate the front gate" - the device I'm closest to picks this up and sends it to Google, where something turns my speech back into text. It then looks at my home structure data and realises that the "Front Gate" device is associated with my Home Assistant integration. It then calls out to the home automation machine that received the notification in the first place, asking it to trigger the front gate relay. That device calls out to the Doorbird and asks it to open the gate. And now I have functionality equivalent to a doorbell that completes a circuit and rings a bell inside my home, and a button inside my home that completes a circuit and opens the gate, except it involves two networks inside my building, callouts to the cloud, at least 7 devices inside my home that are running Linux and I really don't want to know how many computational cycles.

The future is wonderful.

(I work for Google. I do not work on any of the products described in this post. Please god do not ask me how to integrate your IoT into any of this)

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For some years I ve had SquirrelMail running on one of my servers for the people who like such things. It seems that the upstream support for SquirrelMail has ended (according to the SquirrelMail Wikipedia page there will be no new releases just Subversion updates to fix bugs). One problem with SquirrelMail that seems unlikely to get fixed is the lack of support for base64 encoded From and Subject fields which are becoming increasingly popular nowadays as people who s names don t fit US-ASCII are encoding them in their preferred manner. I ve recently installed Roundcube to provide an alternative. Of course one of the few important users of webmail didn t like it (apparently it doesn t display well on a recent Samsung Galaxy Note), so now I have to support two webmail systems. Below is a little Perl script to convert a SquirrelMail abook file into the csv format used for importing a RoundCube contact list.

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "First Name,Last Name,Display Name,E-mail Address\n";
while(<STDIN>)
 
  chomp;
  my @fields = split(/\ /, $_);
  printf("%s,%s,%s %s,%s\n", $fields[1], $fields[2], $fields[0], $fields[4], $fields[3]);
 

Welcome to the 27th post in the rationally regularized R revelations series, or R⁴ for short. This is a edited / updated version of yesterday s T^4 post #7 as it really fits the R⁴ series as well as it fits the T⁴ series. A new video in both our T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys is also a video in the R^4 series as it revisits a topic previously covered in the latter: how to (more easily) get (binary) packages onto your Ubuntu system. In fact, we show it in three different ways.

The slides are here. This repo at GitHub support the series: use it to open issues for comments, criticism, suggestions, or feedback. Thanks to I aki Ucar who followed up on twitter with a Fedora version. We exchanged some more message, and concluded that complete comparison (from an empty Ubuntu or Fedora container) to a full system takes about the same time on either system. 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.

Demonstrating virtualisation on the new Apple to be powered by Apple silicon and ARM. Parallels virtualisation: Linux gets mentioned - two clear shots, one of Debian 9 and one of Debian 10. That's good publicity, any which way you cut it, with a worldwide tech audience hanging on every word from the presenters.

Now - developer hardware is due out this week - Apple A12 chip inside Mac mini format. Can we run Debian natively there?

Italianization (Italian: Italianizzazione; Croatian: talijanizacija; Slovene: poitaljan evanje; German: Italianisierung; Greek: ) is the spread of Italian culture and language, either by integration or assimilation.[1][2]

In 1919, at the time of its annexation, the middle part of the County of Tyrol which is today called South Tyrol (in Italian Alto Adige) was inhabited by almost 90% German speakers.[1] Under the 1939 South Tyrol Option Agreement, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini determined the status of the German and Ladin (Rhaeto-Romanic) ethnic groups living in the region. They could emigrate to Germany, or stay in Italy and accept their complete Italianization. As a consequence of this, the society of South Tyrol was deeply riven. Those who wanted to stay, the so-called Dableiber, were condemned as traitors while those who left (Optanten) were defamed as Nazis. Because of the outbreak of World War II, this agreement was never fully implemented. Illegal Katakombenschulen ("Catacomb schools") were set up to teach children the German language.

The Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige (Italian for Reference Work of Place Names of Alto Adige) is a list of Italianized toponyms for mostly German place names in South Tyrol (Alto Adige in Italian) which was published in 1916 by the Royal Italian Geographic Society (Reale Societ Geografica Italiana). The list was called the Prontuario in short and later formed an important part of the Italianization campaign initiated by the fascist regime, as it became the basis for the official place and district names in the Italian-annexed southern part of the County of Tyrol.

Ettore Tolomei (16 August 1865, in Rovereto 25 May 1952, in Rome) was an Italian nationalist and fascist. He was designated a Member of the Italian Senate in 1923, and ennobled as Conte della Vetta in 1937.

The South Tyrol Option Agreement (German: Option in S dtirol; Italian: Opzioni in Alto Adige) was an agreement in effect between 1939 and 1943, when the native German speaking people in South Tyrol and three communes in the province of Belluno were given the option of either emigrating to neighboring Nazi Germany (of which Austria was a part after the 1938 Anschluss) or remaining in Fascist Italy and being forcibly integrated into the mainstream Italian culture, losing their language and cultural heritage. Over 80% opted to move to Germany.

A new video in both our T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys is also a video in the R^4 series as it revisits a topic previously covered in the latter: how to (more easily) get (binary) packages onto your Ubuntu system. In fact, we show it in three different ways.

The slides are here. This repo at GitHub support the series: use it to open issues for comments, criticism, suggestions, or feedback. 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.

Limesurvey is an online survey tool. It is very powerful and commonly used in academic environments because it is Free Software (GPLv2+), allows for local installations protecting the data of participants and allowing to comply with data protection regulations. This also means there are typically no load-balanced multi-server szenarios with HA databases. But simple VMs where Limesurvey runs and needs upgrading in place. There's an LTS branch (currently 3.x) and a stable branch (currently 4.x). There's also a 2.06 LTS branch that is restricted to paying customers. The main developers behind Limesurvey offer many services from template design to custom development to support to hosting ("Cloud", "Limesurvey Pro"). Unfortunately they also charge for easy updates called "ComfortUpdate" (currently 39 for three months) and the manual process is made a bit cumbersome to make the "ComfortUpdate" offer more attractive. Due to Limesurvey being an old code base and UI elements not being clearly separated, most serious use cases will end up patching files and symlinking logos around template directories. That conflicts a bit with the opaque "ComfortUpdate" process where you push a button and then magic happens. Or you have downtime and a recovery case while surveys are running. If you do not intend to use the "ComfortUpdate" offering, you can prevent Limesurvey from connecting to http://comfortupdate.limesurvey.org daily by adding the updatable stanza as in line 14 to limesurvey/application/config/config.php: The comma on line 13 is placed like that in the current default limesurvey config.php, don't let yourself get confused. Every item in a php array must end with a comma. It can be on the next line. The basic principle of low risk, near-zero downtime, in-place upgrades is:

1. Create a diff between the current release and the target release
2. Inspect the diff
3. Make backups of the application webroot
4. Patch a copy of the application in-place
5. (optional) stop the web server
6. Make a backup of the production database
7. Move the patched application to the production webroot
8. (if 5) Start the webserver
9. Upgrade the database (if needed)
10. Check the application

So, in detail: Continue reading "Upgrading Limesurvey with (near) zero downtime"

The world is on fire. I know many of you are either my parents friends or here for the free software thoughts, but rather than listen to me, I want you to listed to Black voices in these fields. If you re not Black, it s your job to educate yourself on issues that affect Black people all over the world and the way systems are designed to benefit White Supremacy. It is our job to acknowledge that racism is a problem whether it appears as White Supremacy, Colonialism, or something as seemingly banal as pay gaps. We must make space for Black voices. We must make space for Black Women. We must make space for Black trans lives. We must do this in technology. We must build equity. We must listen. I know I have a platform. It s one I value highly because I ve worked so hard for the past twelve years to build it against sexist attitudes in my field (and the world). However, it is time for me to use that platform for the voices of others. Please pay attention to Black voices in tech and FOSS. Do not just expect them to explain diversity and inclusion, but go to them for their expertise. Pay them respectful salaries. Mentor Black youth and Black people who want to be involved. Volunteer or donate to groups like Black Girls Code, The Last Mile, and Resilient Coders. If you re looking for mentorship, especially around things like writing, speaking, community organizing, or getting your career going in open source, don t hesitate to reach out to me. Mentorship can be a lasting relationship, or a brief exchange around a specific issue of event. If I can t help you, I ll try to connect you to someone who can. We cannot build the techno-utopia unless everyone is involved.

Release 0.3.8 of RcppGSL is now getting onto CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using the Rcpp package. Peter Carbonetto let us know in issue #25 that the included example now showed linker errors on (everybody s favourite CRAN platform) Slowlaris. Kidding aside, the added compiler variety really has benefits because we were indeed missing a good handful or two of inline statements in the headers which our good friends g++ and clang++ apparently let us get away with. This has been fixed, and a little bit of the usual package polish and cleanup has been added; see the list of detailed changes below.

Changes in version 0.3.8 (2020-06-21)

• A few missing inline statements were added to the headers fixing a (genuine) error that was seen only on Solaris (Dirk).
• The nice colNorm example is now in a file by itself, the previous versions are off in a new file colNorm_old.cpp (Dirk).
• The README.me now sports two new badges (Dirk).
• Travis CI was updated to 'bionic' and R 4.0 (Dirk).

Special thanks also to CRAN for a super-smooth and fully automated processing of a package with both compiled code and two handful of reverse dependencies. Courtesy of CRANberries, a summary of changes to the most recent release is also available. More information is on the RcppGSL page. Questions, comments etc should go to the issue tickets at the GitHub repo. 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.

I just went through a debugging exercise that was so ridiculous, I just had to write it up. Some of this probably should go into a bug report instead of a rant, but I'm tired. And clearly I don't care anymore. OK, so I'm doing computer vision work. OpenCV has been providing basic functions in this area, so I have been using them for a while. Just for really, really basic stuff, like projection. The C API was kinda weird, and their error handling is a bit ridiculous (if you give it arguments it doesn't like, it asserts!), but it has been working fine for a while. At some point (around OpenCV 3.0) somebody over there decided that they didn't like their C API, and that this was now a C++ library. Except the docs still documented the C API, and the website said it supported C, and the code wasn't actually removed. They just kinda stopped testing it and thinking about it. So it would mostly continue to work, except some poor saps would see weird failures; like this and this, for instance. OpenCV 3.2 was the last version where it was mostly possible to keep using the old C code, even when compiling without optimizations. So I was doing that for years. So now, in 2020, Debian is finally shipping a version of OpenCV that definitively does not work with the old code, so I had to do something. Over time I stopped using everything about OpenCV, except a few cvProjectPoints2() calls. So I decided to just write a small C++ shim to call the new version of that function, expose that with =extern "C"= to the rest of my world, and I'd be done. And normally I would be, but this is OpenCV we're talking about. I wrote the shim, and it didn't work. The code built and ran, but the results were wrong. After some pointless debugging, I boiled the problem down to this test program: This is as trivial as it gets. I project one point through a pinhole camera, and print out the right answer (that I can easily compute, since this is trivial), and what OpenCV reports:

$ g++ -I/usr/include/opencv4 -o tst tst.cc -lopencv_calib3d -lopencv_core && ./tst
manually-projected no-distortion: 1100.000000 1200.000000
opencv says: 444.000000 555.000000

Well that's no good. The answer is wrong, but it looks like it didn't even write anything into the output array. Since this is supposed to be a thin shim to C code, I want this thing to be filling in C arrays, which is what I'm doing here: This is how the C API has worked forever, and their C++ API works the same way, I thought. Nothing barfed, not at build time, or run time. Fine. So I went to figure this out. In the true spirit of C++, the new API is inscrutable. I'm passing in cv::Mat, but the API wants cv::InputArray for some arguments and cv::OutputArray for others. Clearly cv::Mat can be coerced into either of those types (and that's what you're supposed to do), but the details are not meant to be understood. You can read the snazzy C++-style documentation. Clicking on "OutputArray" in the doxygen gets you here. Then I guess you're supposed to click on "_OutputArray", and you get here. Understand what's going on now? Me neither. Stepping through the code revealed the problem. cv::projectPoints() looks like this: I.e. they're allocating a new data buffer for the output, and giving it back to me via the OutputArray object. This object already had a buffer, and that's where I was expecting the output to go. Instead it went to the brand-new buffer I didn't want. Issues:

• The OutputArray object knows it already has a buffer, and they could just use it instead of allocating a new one
• If for some reason my buffer smells bad, they could complain to tell me they're ignoring it to save me the trouble of debugging, and then bitching about it on the internet
• I think dynamic memory allocation smells bad
• Doing it this way means the new function isn't a drop-in replacement for the old function

Well that's just super. I can call the C++ function, copy the data into the place it's supposed to go to, and then deallocate the extra buffer. Or I can pull out the meat of the function I want into my project, and then I can drop the OpenCV dependency entirely. Clearly that's the way to go. So I go poking back into their code to grab what I need, and here's what I see: Looks familiar? It should. Because this is the original C-API function they replaced. So in their quest to move to C++, they left the original code intact, C API and everything, un-exposed it so you couldn't call it anymore, and made a new, shitty C++ wrapper for people to call instead. CvMat is still there. I have no words. Yes, this is a massive library, and maybe other parts of it indeed did make some sort of non-token transition, but this thing is ridiculous. In the end, here's the function I ended up with (licensed as OpenCV; see the comment) This does only the stuff I need: projection only (no geometric transformation), and gradients in respect to the point coordinates and distortions only. Gradients in respect to fxy and cxy are trivial, and I don't bother reporting them. So now I don't compile or link against OpenCV, my code builds and runs on Debian/sid and (surprisingly) it runs much faster than before. Apparently there was a lot of pointless overhead happening. Alright. Rant over.