I have just made an eleventh hour upload of tuxpaint, tuxpaint-config and tuxpaint-stamps. With luck, this will make it in time for the Nov. 5 Jessie freeze deadline so it goes in as an unassisted migration. Coming soon to a mirror near you!
Even though the Wikipedia defines gamer as someone who partakes in interactive gaming, such as (predominantly) video games or board games , this doesn t really gets close to that term means socially at the moment. Going back to Wikipedia, we find that the video game subculture is a form of new media subculture that has been influenced by video games , so it might be quite accurate to define gamers as members of that subculture. You will find that most of the uses of the term gamer in the social networks and in the blogosphere refer to that. Please notice that, even though it is quite likely that most of the gamers play video games, the other way round does not need to be true and, in fact, it isn t. Not everyone who plays video games belongs to the video game subculture, shares their point of view, their values and aesthetics, or even know about it. Kind of like what happens with the word hacker . Not everyone who hacks around with a computer belongs to the hacker subculture.
Mostly everyone who has access to the technology plays video games now. From babies and kids to grandparents. And people play them in every possible technological system around, not only on video game consoles or personal computers, but alse on mobile phones, tablets, web browsers. And many of those people who use different kind of technologies to play video games are not gamers. Not in the sense of belonging to the video game subculture. It is important to acknowledge that: that the video game subculture does not have the monopoly over video games or the video game developing industry anymore.
As you can imagine, all this rand doesn t come from nowhere. During the last months, we have been witnessing a fight between some conservative core members of the video game subculture and people who want to bring some fresh air into the sociocultural elements of that subculture. Namely, that women shouldn t be discriminated inside it. As every time that a women raises her voice to complain about anything in the Internet, they have been subjected to insults, attacks, rape and death threats, etc. I m talking about something called #GamerGate, and even though I m not going to get into it, I will provide some URLs in case someone might be interested. Please acknowledge that not all the points of view might be represented in this list (in fact, they are not, as I won t be promoting in my blog things that I severely disagree with), so search the web for more information if you want to get that.
About a month ago, I received an upstream
bugreport that the nbd-server
wouldn't build on Solaris and its derivatives. This was because
nbd-server uses the d_type field of struct dirent, which is widely
implemented (in Linux and FreeBSD, at least), but not part of POSIX and
therefore not implemented on Solaris (which tends to be more
conservative about implementing new features).
The bug reporter pointed towards a blog
post
by a Solaris user who had written something he calls "adirent", meant to
work around the issue by implementing something that would wrap
readdir() so that it would inject a stat() call when needed. While
that approach works, it seems a bit strange to add a function which
wraps readdir to become portable. After all, readdir() does not
always return the file type in d_type, not even on systems that do
implement it. One example in which this is true is XFS; if one runs
readdir() on a directory on an XFS filesystem, then everything will
have DT_UNKNOWN as its filetype, indicating that you need to run
stat() after all.
As such, I think a better approach is to use that fact so that things
will just work on systems where d_type isn't available. The GNU
autotools even have a test for it (AC_STRUCT_DIRENT_D_TYPE), which
makes things easier. In the case of NBD, I've added that to
configure.ac, and then added a touch of preprocessor magic to reuse the
infrastructure for dealing with DT_UNKNOWN which is already there:
#ifdef HAVE_STRUCT_DIRENT_D_TYPE
#define NBD_D_TYPE de->d_type
#else
#define NBD_D_TYPE 0
#define DT_UKNOWN 0
#define DT_REG 1
#endif
opendir(), readdir(), ...)
switch(NBD_D_TYPE)
case DT_UNKNOWN:
stat(), figure out if it is a file...)
case DT_REG:
default:
DT_UNKNOWN code path could receive some more
testing.
).
To my surprise, the call for participation to be part of the
committee explicitly listed representatives of Free Software
communities as privileged software stakeholders that they wanted to
have on the committee kudos to the agency for that. (The
Italian wording on the call was: Costituir titolo di preferenza rivestire un ruolo di [ ] referenti di community del software a codice sorgente aperto.) Therefore, after various prods by fellow European Free Software activists that were aware of the ongoing change in legislation, I applied to be a volunteer CAD68 committee member, got selected, and ended up working over a period of about 6 months (March-September 2013) to help the agency writing the new software acquisition guidelines. Logistically, it hasn't been entirely trivial, as the default meeting place was in Rome, I live in Paris, and the agency didn't really have a travel budget for committee members. That's why I've sought sponsorship from Debian, offering to represent Debian views within the committee; Lucas kindly agreed to my request. So what did I do on behalf of Debian as a committee member during those months? Most of my job has been some sort of consulting on how community-driven Free Software projects like Debian work, on how the software they produce can be relied upon and contributed to, and more generally on how the PA can productively interact with such projects. In particular, I've been happy to work on the related work section of the guidelines, ensuring they point to relevant documents such as the French government guidelines on how to adopt Free Software (AKA circulaire Ayrault). I've also drafted the guidelines section on Free Software directories, ensuring that important resources such as FSF's Free Software Directory are listed as starting points for PAs that looking for software solutions for specific needs. Another part of my job has been ensuring that the guidelines do not end up betraying the principle of Free Software preference that is embodied in article 68. A majority of committee members came from a Free Software background, so that might not seem a difficult goal to accomplish. But it is important to notice that: (a) the final editor of the guidelines is the agency itself, not the committee, so having a "pro-Free Software" majority within the committee doesn't mean much per se; and (b) lobbying from the "pro-proprietary software" camp did happen, as it is entirely natural in these cases. In this respect I'm happy with the result: I do believe that the software selection process recommended by the guidelines, finally published in January 2014, upholds the Free Software preference principle of article 68. I credit both the agency and the non-ambiguity of the law (on this specific point) for that result. All in all, this has been a positive experience for me. It has reaffirmed my belief that Debian is a respected, non-partisan political actor of the wider software/ICT ecosystem. This experience has also given me a chance to be part of country-level policy-making, which has been very instructive on how and why good ideas might take a while to come into effect and influence citizen lives. Speaking of which, I'm now looking forward to the first alleged violations of article 68 in Italy, and how they will be dealt with. Abundant popcorn will certainly be needed. Links & press If you want to know more about this topic, I've collected below links to resources that have documented, in various languages, the publication of the CAD68 guidelines.
You only know two things about Docker. First, it uses Linux
containers. Second, the Internet won't shut up about it. -- attributed to Solomon Hykes, Docker CEO
At its core, Rocker is a project for running R using Docker containers. We provide a collection of Dockerfiles and pre-built Docker images that can be used and extended for many purposes.
Rocker is the the name of our GitHub repository contained with the Rocker-Org GitHub organization.
Rocker is also the name the account under which the automated builds at Docker provide containers ready for download.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
This brief announcement was released yesterday to the debian-devel-announce mailing list.
Ciao!
The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the Wheezy release, and have some interesting news to share for the Jessie release. Here we give you a brief update on what work has been done and work that is still ongoing.
Let s see what s cooking for Jessie then.
Frameworks and libraries
Support for many new media formats and codecs.
The codec library libavcodec, which is used by popular media playback applications including vlc, mpv, totem (using gstreamer1.0-libav), xine, and many more, has been updated to the latest upstream release version 11 provided by Libav. This provides Debian users with HEVC playback, a native Opus decoder, Matroska 3D support, Apple ProRes, and much more. Please see libav s changelog for a full list of functionality additions and updates.
libebur128
libebur128 is a free implementation of the European Broadcasting Union Loudness Recommendation (EBU R128), which is essentially an alternative to ReplayGain. The library can be used to analyze audio perceived loudness and subsequentially normalize the volume during playback.
libltc
libltc provides functionalities to encode and decode Linear (or Longitudinal) Timecode (LTC) from/to SMPTE data timecode.
libva
libva and the driver for Intel GPUs has been updated to the 1.4.0 release. Support for new GPUs has been added. libva now also supports Wayland.
Pure Data
A number of new additional libraries (externals) will appear in Jessie, including (among others) Eric Lyon s fftease and lyonpotpourrie, Thomas Musil s iemlib, the pdstring library for string manipulation and pd-lua that allows to write Pd-objects in the popular lua scripting language.
JACK and LADI
LASH Audio Session Handler was abandoned upstream a long time ago in favor of the new session management system, called ladish (LADI Session Handler). ladish allows users to run many JACK applications at once and save/restore their configuration with few mouse clicks.
The current status of the integration between the session handler and JACK may be summarized as follows:
-dbc.in coords.tsv.gz -db.index tree.spatial.rstarvariants.rstar.RStarTreeFactory -pagefile.pagesize 500 -spatial.bulkstrategy SortTileRecursiveBulkSplit -time -algorithm clustering.optics.OPTICSXi -opticsxi.xi 0.01 -algorithm.distancefunction geo.LngLatDistanceFunction -optics.epsilon 5000.0 -optics.minpts 1000 -resulthandler KMLOutputHandler -out /tmp/out.kmzand the total runtime for 23 million points on a single core was about 29 hours. The indexes helped a lot: less than 10000 distances were computed per point, instead of 23 million - the expected speedup over a non-indexed approach is 2400.
First, read these slides. Done? Good.In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin program. If you install the listadmin package from Debian and create a file ~/.listadmin.ini with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:% time listadmin xiph fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue real 0m1.709s user 0m0.232s sys 0m0.012s %
There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to learn the details. If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:username username@example.org spamlevel 23 default discard discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list." password secret adminurl https:// domain /mailman/admindb/ list mailman-list@lists.example.com password hidden other-list@otherserver.example.org
If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your email. Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free software. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b. Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in configuration example. Also, I've been told that the PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone. Not sure why.PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
This is an update of my previous attempt at summarizing this discussion. As I proposed one of the amendments, you should not blindly trust me, of course. :-)
First, let s address two FAQ:
What is the impact on jessie? Package: systemd-sysv Pin: release o=Debian Pin-Priority: -1from the documentation, a priority less than 0 disallows the package from being installed. systemd-sysv is the package that would enable systemd as your default init (/sbin/init).
This is just a quick announce: Debian packages for Juno are out. In fact, they were ready the day of the release, on the 16th of October. I uploaded it all (to Experimental) the same day, literally a few hours after the final released was git tagged. But I had no time to announce it.
This week-end, I took the time to do an Ubuntu Trusty port, which I also publish (it s just a mater of rebuilding all, and it should work out of the box). Here are the backports repositories. For Wheezy:
deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian juno-backports main
deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian juno main
For trusty:
deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian trusty-juno-backports main
But of course, everything is also available directly in Debian. Since Sid/Jessie contains OpenStack Icehouse (which has more chance to receive long enough security support), and it will be like this until Jessie is released. So I have uploaded all of Juno into Debian Experimental. This shows on the OpenStack qa page (you may also notice that the team is nearly reaching 200 packages though am planning to off-load some of that to the Python module team, when the migration to Git will be finished). On the QA page, you may also see that I uploaded all of the last Icehouse point release to Sid, and that all packages migrated to Jessie. There s only a few minor issues with some Python modules which I fixed, that haven t migrated to Jessie yet.
I can already tell that all packages can be installed without an issue, and that I know Horizon at least works as expected. But I didn t have time to test it all just yet. I m currently working on doing even more installation automation at the package level (by providing some OVS bridging init script and such, to make it more easy to run Tempest functional testing). I ll post more about this when it s ready.
The biggest part of this HackWeek will be spent on Weblate. The major task is to complete new UI for it. There have been already some blog posts about that here, so regular readers of my blog already know it is using Twitter Bootstrap.
Today it has reached point where I think it's good enough for wider testing and I've deployed it at Hosted Weblate (see Weblate website for conditions for getting hosting there).
I expect there will be some rough edges, so don't hesitate to report any issues, so that I can quickly fix them.
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I ve previously covered running LAVA on ARM devices, now that the packages are in Debian. I ve also covered setting up the home lab, including the difficulty in obtaining the PDU and relying on another machine to provide USB serial converters with inherent problems of needing power to keep the same devices assigned to the same ser2net ports.
There have been ideas about how to improve the situation. Conferences are a prime example setting up a demo involving LAVA means bringing a range of equipment, separate power bricks, separate network switches (with power bricks), a device of some kind to connect up the USB serial converters (and power brick) and then the LAVA server (with SATA drive and power brick) that is without the actual devices and their cables and power. Each of those power cables tend to be a metre long, with networking and serial, it quickly becomes a cable spaghetti.
Ideas around this also have application inside larger deployments, so the hardware would need to daisy-chain to provide services to a rack full of test devices.
The objective is a single case providing network, power and serial connectivity to a number of test devices over a single power input and network uplink. Naturally, with a strong free software and open development bias, the unit will be Open Hardware running Debian, albeit with a custom Beaglebone Linux kernel. It s a Test Automation Controller, so we re using the name OpenTAC.
Progress
Open hardware ARM device running Debian to automate tests on 4 to 8 devices, initially aimed at LAVA support for Linaro engineers. Power distribution, serial console, network and optional GPIO extensions.
The design involves:
telnet opentac-01 3225telnet opentac-01 4000 
A new maintenance release of littler is available now.
The main change are a few updates and extensions to the examples provided along with littler. Several of those continue to make use of the wonderful docopt package by Edwin de Jonge. Carl Boettiger and I are making good use of these littler examples, particularly to install directly from CRAN or GitHub, in our Rocker builds of R for Docker (about which we should have a bit more to blog soon too).
Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page.
The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package has gone to the incoming queue at Debian; Michael Rutter will probably have new Ubuntu binaries at CRAN in a few days too.
Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at 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.
Pictures from the CDSW sessions in Spring 2014
Yesterday I managed to get the last ticket from the waitinglist for the premiere of Trans Gender Moves. It is a play about the lives of three people: A transman, a transwoman and an intersexual person. They tell stories from their life, their process of finding their own identity over time. With in parts amusing anecdotes and ones that gets you thinking I can just wholeheartly encourage you to watch it if you have the chance to. It will still be shown the next few days, potentially extending depending on the requests for tickets, from what I've been told by one of the actors.
The most funny moment for me though was when I was talking with one of the actors about that it really touched me that I was told that one of them will be moving into into the same building I will be moving into in two year's time. Unfortunately that will be delayed a bit because they found me thinks field hamster or the likes in the ground and have to wait until spring for them to move. :/
Two days ago, Drupal announced version 7.32 was available. This version fixes a particularly nasty bug, allowing a SQL injection at any stage of interaction (that means, previous to the authentication taking place).
As soon as I could, I prepared and uploaded Debian packages for this So if you run a Debian-provided Drupal installation, update now. The updated versions are:
sudo dpkg --force-depends -i google-earth-stable_current_i386.deb
Next.