It's that time of the year :-) And FOSDEM is fun. But this year I won't be going; there was a scheduling conflict, and I didn't really have anything new to present (although I probably could have shifted around priorities to get something). But FOSDEM 2017 also means there's a year since FOSDEM 2016, where I presented Nageru, my live video mixer. And that's been a pretty busy year, so I thought I'd do a live cap from high up above. First of all, Nageru has actually been used in production we did Solskogen and Fyrrom, and both gave invaluable input. Then there have been some non-public events, which have also been useful. The Nageru that's in git right now is evolved considerably from the 1.0.0 that was released last year. diffstat shows 19660 insertions and 3543 deletions; that's counting about 2500 lines of vendored headers, though. Even though I like deleting code much more than adding it, the doubling (from ~10k to ~20k lines) represents a significant amount of new features: 1.1.x added support for non-Intel GPUs. 1.2.x added support for DeckLink input cards (through Blackmagic's proprietary drivers), greatly increasing hardware support, and did a bunch of small UI changes. 1.3.x added x264 support that's strong enough that Nageru has really displaced VLC as my go-to tool for just video-signal-to-H.264-conversion (even though it feels overkill), and also added hotplug support. 1.4.x added multichannel audio support including support for MIDI controllers, and also a disk space indicator (because when you run out of disk during production without understanding that's what happens, it really sucks), and brought extensive end-user documentation. And 1.5.x, in development right now, will add HDMI/SDI output, which, like all the previous changes, requires various rearchitecting and fixing. Of course, there are lots of things that haven't changed as well; the basic UI remains the same, including the way the theme (governing the look-and-feel of the finished video stream) works. The basic design has proved sound, and I don't think I would change a lot if I were to design something like 1.0.0 again. As a small free software project, you have to pick your battles, and I'm certainly glad I didn't start out doing something like network support (or a distributed architecture in general, really). So what's for the next year of Nageru? It's hard to say, and it will definitely depend on the concrete needs of events. A hot candidate (since I might happen to need it) is chroma keying, although good keying is hard to get right and this needs some research. There's also been some discussion around other concrete features, but I won't name them until a firm commitment has been made; priorities can shift around, and it's important to stay flexible. So, enjoy FOSDEM! Perhaps I'll return with a talk in 2018. In the meantime, I'll preparing the stream for the 2017 edition of Fyrrom, and I know for sure there will be more events, more features and more experiences to be had. And, inevitably, more bugs. :-)

The past few days I've been doing more arduino-work. In between dying of sleep-exhaustion. One thing that always annoyed me was that I had to hard-code my WiFi credentials in my projects, with code like this:

//
// Connect to the SCOTLAND network
//
WiFi.mode(WIFI_STA);
WiFi.hostname("tram-clock");
WiFi.begin("SCOTLAND", "highlander1");
//
// Attempt to connect - TODO: Timeout on failure
//
while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED)
    delay(500);
//
// Now we're connected show the local IP address.
//
lcd.print("WiFi connected  ");
lcd.print(WiFi.localIP());

Whilst looking at another project I found a great solution though. There is a library called WiFiManager which behaves perfectly:

• If you've stored connection details it will connect to the local WiFI network using those, automatically.
• If you've not saved previous connection details it will instead configure the device to work as an Access Point
  • You can then connect to that access point and see a list of local WiFi networks.
  • Choose the appropriate one from the list, enter your password, and these details are saved for the future.
  • The device will then reset, join the network via your saved choices and acquire an IP via DHCP as you'd expect.

The code for this is beautifully simple:

//
// Connect to WiFI with saved credentials, if any.
//
// Otherwise work as an access-point, named TRAM-TIMES, and
// let the user fill out their details.
//
WiFiManager wifiManager;
wifiManager.autoConnect("TRAM-TIMES");

This means my current project, which continues to revolve around tram-times, is so very much more user-friendly. It is a product you could package and take to a friends house, not a project you have to recompile to tweak. For that reason, user-niceness, I reworked the on-board HTTP status-page to use bootstrap, be themed, and look nicer. Other than being housed in a horrid case the project actually looks like a product. Not one I'd buy, but neither one I'm ashamed of sharing.

I still remember vividly my first visit to Europe, back in 2010. I had just barely gotten off a plane in Hamburg and on to a bus to Lubeck, and struck up a conversation with a friendly, well-educated German classical musician next to me. We soon started to discuss politics and religion. Over the course of the conversation, in response to his questions, I explained I had twice voted against George W. Bush, that I opposed the war in Iraq for many reasons, that I did thought there was an ethical imperative to work to defeat climate change, that I viewed health care as an important ethical and religious issue, that I thought evolution was well-established, and that I am a Christian. Finally, without any hint of insult intended, and rather a lot of surprise written all over his face, he said: Wow. You re an American, and a Christian, and you re so . normal! This, it seems to me, has a lot to do with Trump. Ouch It felt like a punch to the gut. The day after the election, having known that a man that appeared to stand for everything that honorable people are against won the election, like people all around the world, I was trying to make sense of how could this happen? As I ve watched since, as he stacks government with wealthy cronies with records nearly as colorful as his own, it is easy to feel even more depressed. Based on how Trump spoke and acted, it would be easy to conclude that the deplorables won the day that he was elected by a contingent of sexists or racists ascendent in power. But that would be too simple an explanation. This is, after all, the same country that elected Barack Obama twice. There are a many people that voted twice for a black man, and then for Trump. Why? Racism, while doubtless a factor, can t explain it all. How Trump could happen Russ Allbery made some excellent points recently:

[Many Americans are] hurt, and they re scared, and they feel like a lot of the United States just slammed the door in their faces. The status quo is not working for people. Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances. Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I m part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too. The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country.

Russ is, of course, right. The Democrats have been either complicit in policies damaging to many, or ineffective in preventing them. They have often appeared unconcerned with the plight of people outside cities (even if that wasn t really the case). And it goes deeper. When s the last time you visited Kansas? I live in Kansas. The nearest paved road is about a 3-mile drive from my home. The nearest town, population 600, is a 6-mile drive. My governor whom I did not vote for cut taxes on the wealthy so much that our excellent local schools have been struggling for years. But my community is amazing, full of loving and caring people, the sort of people who you know you ll be living with for 40 years, and so you make sure you get along well with. I have visited tourist sites in Berlin, enjoyed an opera and a Broadway show in New York, taken a train across the country to Portland, explored San Francisco. I ve enjoyed all of them. Many rural people do get out and experience the world. I have been in so many conversations where I try to explain where I live to people that simply cannot fathom it. I have explained how the 18 acres I own is a very small amount where I am. How, yes, I do actually have electricity and Internet. How a bad traffic day is one where I have to wait for three cars to go past before turning onto the paved road. How I occasionally find a bull in my front yard, how I can walk a quarter mile and be at the creek on the edge of my property, how I can get to an airport faster than most New Yorkers and my kids can walk out the front door and play in a spot more peaceful than Central Park, and how all this is way cheaper than a studio apartment in a bad part of San Francisco. It is rare indeed to see visitors actually traveling to Kansas as a destination. People have no concept of the fact that my mechanic would drop everything and help me get my broken-down car to the shop for no charge, that any number of neighbors or uncles would bring a tractor and come plow the snow off my 1/4-mile driveway out of sheer kindness, that people around here really care for each other in a way you don t see in a city. There are people that I know see politics way differently than me, but I know them to be good people. They would also do anything for a person in need, no matter who they are. I may find the people that they vote for to be repugnant, but I cannot say I ve looked this person in the eyes and they are nothing but deplorable. And so, people in rural areas feel misunderstood. And they are right. Some perspectives on Trump As I ve said, I do find Trump to be deplorable, but not everyone that voted for him is. How, then, do people wind up voting for him? The New Yorker had an excellent story about a man named Mark Frisbie, owner of a welding and fab shop. The recession had been hard on his business. His wife s day-care center also closed. Health care was hard to find, and the long, slow decline had spanned politicians of every stripe. Mark and his wife supposedly did everything they were supposed to: they worked hard, were honest, were entrepreneurial, and yet he had lost his business, his family house, his health coverage, everything. He doesn t want a handout. He wants to be able to earn a living. Asked who he d vote for, he said, Is none of the above an option? The Washington Post had another insightful article, about a professor from Madison, WI interviewing people in rural areas. She said people would often say: All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody s listening to us. Nobody s paying attention, nobody s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them. She pushed back, hard, on the idea that Trump supporters are ignorant, and added that liberals that push that line of thinking are only making the problem worse. I would agree; seeing all the talk about universities dis-inviting speakers that don t hew to certain political views doesn t help either. A related article talks about the lack of empathy for Trump voters. And then we have a more recent CNN article: Where Tump support and Obamacare use soar together, explaining in great detail how it can be logical for someone to be on Obamacare but not like it. We can all argue that the Republicans may have as much to do with that as anything, but the problem exists. And finally, a US News article makes this point:

His supporters realize he s a joke. They do not care. They know he s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who ve long ignored their interests. When you re earning $32,000 a year and haven t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price. According to the Republican Party, the biggest threat to rural America was Islamic terrorism. According to the Democratic Party it was gun violence. In reality it was prescription drug abuse and neither party noticed until it was too late.

Are we leaving people out? All this reminded me of reading about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist and something of the father of modern computing, writing about his feelings of trepidation about sharing with his university colleagues that he was working on a project related to the Bible. I am concerned about the complaints about the PC culture , because I think it is good that people aren t making racist or anti-semitic jokes in public anymore. But, as some of these articles point out, in many circles, making fun of Christians and conservatives is still one of the accepted targets. Does that really help anything? (And as a Christian that is liberal, have all of you that aren t Christians so quickly forgotten how churches like the Episcopals blazed the way for marriage equality many years ago already?) But they don t get a free pass I have found a few things, however, absolutely scary. One was an article from December showing that Trump voters actually changed their views on Russia after Trump became the nominee. Another one from just today was a study on how people reacted when showed inauguration crowd photos. NPR ran a story today as well, on how Trump is treating journalists like China does. Chilling stuff indeed. Conclusion So where does this leave us? Heading into uncertain times, for sure, but perhaps just maybe with a greater understanding of our neighbors. Perhaps we will all be able to see past the rhetoric and polarization, and understand that there is something, well, normal about each other. Doing that is going to be the only way we can really take our country back.

Beware, this would be slightly longish. Debian Contributions In the last couple of weeks, was lucky to put up a patch against debian-policy which had been bothering me for a long-long time. The problem statement is simple, man-pages historically were made by software engineers for software-engineers. The idea, probably then was you give the user some idea of what the software does and the rest the software engineer would garner from reading the source-code. But over period of time, the audience has changed. While there are still software engineers who use GNU/Linux for the technical excellence, the man-pages have not kept up with this new audience who perhaps are either not technically so sound that or they do not want to take the trouble to reading the source-code to understand how things flow. An example or examples in a man-page gives us (the lesser mortals) some insight as how the command works, how the logic flows. A good example of a man-page is the ufw man-page

EXAMPLES
Deny all access to port 53: ufw deny 53 Allow all access to tcp port 80: ufw allow 80/tcp Allow all access from RFC1918 networks to this host: ufw allow from 10.0.0.0/8
ufw allow from 172.16.0.0/12
ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/16 Deny access to udp port 514 from host 1.2.3.4: ufw deny proto udp from 1.2.3.4 to any port 514 Allow access to udp 1.2.3.4 port 5469 from 1.2.3.5 port 5469: ufw allow proto udp from 1.2.3.5 port 5469 to 1.2.3.4 port 5469

Now if we had man-pages like the above which give examples, then the user at least can try to accomplish whatever s/he is trying to do. I truly believe not having examples in a man-page kills 50% of your audience and people who could potentially use your tool. Personal wishlist The only thing (and this might be my failure) is we need a good way to search through a man-page. The only way I know is using / and try to give a pattern. Lots of times it fails because I, the user doesn t know the exact keyword which the documenter was using. What would be nice, great if we do have some sort of parser where I tell it, $this is what I m looking for and the parser tries the pattern + all its synonyms and whatever seems to be most relevant passage from the content, in this case a manpage it tells me. It would make my life a lot easier while at the same time force people to document more and more. I dunno if there has been any research or study of the relationship between good documentation and popularity of a program. I know there are lots of different tiny bits which make or break a program, one of which would definitely be documentation and in that a man-page IF it s a command-line tool. A query on Quora gives some indication https://www.quora.com/How-comprehensible-do-you-find-Unix-Linux-Man-pages although the low response rate tells its own story. there have been projects like man2html and man2pdf and others which try to make the content more accessible to people who are not used to the man-page interface but till you don t have Examples the other things can work only so far. Also if anybody talks about X project which claims to solve this problem they will have to fight manpages who have been around like forever. As can be seen in the patch, did some rookie mistakes as can be seen. I also filed a lintian bug at the same time. Hope the patch does get merged at some point in debian-policy and then a check introduced in lintian in some future release. I do agree with anarcat s assertion that it should be at the level of the manpage missing level. I am no coder but finding 14,000 binary packages without a manpage left me both shocked and surprised. I came to know about manpage-alert from the devscripts package to know which all binary packages that have been installed but not have man-pages. I hope to contribute a manpage or two if I across a package I m somewhat comfortable with. I have made a beginning of sorts by running manpage alert and putting the output in a .txt file which I would grep through manually and see if something interesting jumps at me. The learning garnered from putting the patch to the debian package resulted in another patch but this time for an upstream project altogether. As can be seen all are just baby-steps that even a non-coder can take. Another couple of bugs I filed which were fixed were of a sim called unknown-horizons . A 2D realtime strategy simulation. I had filed three bugs, two of which were fixed in 2 days, the 3rd I hope is also fixed soonish. Lastly, I spent most of the week-end poring over packages who have left files in /etc/bash_completion.d/ . I spent almost 4-5 odd hours as each package in question as well as entries found in /etc/bash-completion.d/$filename I had to find which package it belonged to first

[$] dpkg -S /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt git: /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt
I know that dpkg-query also does the same
[$] dpkg-query -S /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt git: /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt
But I am used to plain dpkg although do know that dpkg-query can do lot more intimate searching in various ways than dpkg can. Once the package name was established, first simulate the purge [$] sudo aptitude -s purge git

[sudo] password for shirish:
The following packages will be REMOVED:
git p
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 29.5 MB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libgit-wrapper-perl : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-extras : Depends: git (>= 1.7.0) but it is not going to be installed
bup : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-remote-gcrypt : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-svn : Depends: git (> 1:2.11.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: git ( 1:2.11.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: git (= 1:1.8.1) but it is not going to be installed
git-core : Depends: git (> 1:1.7.0.2) but it is not going to be installed
The following actions will resolve these dependencies: Remove the following packages:
1) bup [0.29-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
2) fdroidserver [0.7.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
3) git-annex [6.20161012-1 (now, testing)]
4) git-core [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
5) git-extras [4.2.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
6) git-remote-gcrypt [1.0.1-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
7) git-repair [1.20151215-1 (now, unstable)]
8) git-svn [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
9) gitk [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
10) libgit-wrapper-perl [0.047-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
11) python3-git [2.1.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
12) svn2git [2.4.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)] Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
13) devscripts recommends libgit-wrapper-perl
14) dh-make-perl recommends git
15) fdroidserver recommends git
16) git-annex recommends git-remote-gcrypt (>= 0.20130908-6)
17) gplaycli recommends fdroidserver
18) python-rope recommends git-core Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] q
Abandoning all efforts to resolve these dependencies.
Abort.
Then I made a note of all the packages being affected, saw purging all of them wouldn t call others (the Package dependency Hell), made the purge and then reinstalled anew. The reason I did this is that many a times during upgrade, either during update/upgrade sometimes the correct action doesn t happen. To take the git s example itself, there were two files git-extras and git-prompt which were in /etc/bash_completion.d/ both of which were showing their source as git. Purging git and installing git afresh removed git-extras file and git-prompt is the only one remaining. While blogging about the package, did try to grep through changelog.Debian.gz and changelog.gz in git

[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/doc/git] - [10046]
[$] zless changelog.gz
and similarly

[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/doc/git] - [10046]
[$] zless changelog.Debian.gz
But failed to find any mention of the now gone git-extras. Doing this with all the packages took considerable time as didn t want to deal with any potential fallout later on. For instance, ufw (uncomplicated firewall) also had an entry in /etc/bash_completion.d/, hence before purging ufw, took backup of all the rules I have made, did a successful simulation

[$] sudo aptitude -s purge ufw gufw

The following packages will be REMOVED:
gufw p ufw p
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 4,224 kB will be freed. Note: Using 'Simulate' mode.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Would download/install/remove packages.
purged the packages, reinstalled it and then re-added all the rules. Doing it all for various sundry packages, had to do it manually as there is no one size fits all solution. A sensitive one was grub which still has an entry in /etc/bash_completion.d/grub. Doing it wrong could have resulted in a non-bootable situation. There are workarounds for that, but it would have taken quite a bit of time, energy, notes and bit of recall factor what I did the last time something like that happened. Doing it manually, being present meant I could do it rightly the first time. So, was it worth it It would be if the package maintainers do the needful and the remaining entries are moved out of /etc/bash_completion.d/ to /usr/share/bash-completions and some to my favourite /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/ for instance

[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions] - [10064]
[$] ll -h _youtube-dl -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.2K 2016-12-01 08:48 _youtube-dl But trying to get all or even major packages to use zsh-completions would be hard work and would take oodles of time and this concerns upstream stuff, also very much outside what I was sharing. World History Before, during and even after South-African experience, I was left wondering why India and South Africa, two countries who had similar histories at least the last couple of hundred years or more, the final result of Independence was so different for both the countries. It took me quite sometime to articulate that in a form of question , while the answers were interesting, from what little I know of India itself, if I were an Englishman I would never leave Hindustan . What the people answering failed to take into account was that in that era it was Hindustan or un-divided India. This map can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Indian_Empire_1909_Imperial_Gazetteer_of_India.jpg and is part of quite a few Indian articles. I would urge people to look at the map in-depth. Except for the Central India Agency and Central India Provinces, most of the other regions were quite comfortable weather-wise. Hence I can t help but feel the assertion that Britishers didn t like India (as to live here) slightly revolting. See the excerpt/take on Dale Kennedy s The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xv + 264 pp. . A look at the list of hill stations of divided India is enough to tell that there were lot of places which either were founded by the Britishers or they chose to live there. And this is not all, there are supposed to lot of beautiful places even in Pakistan, especially in North East Frontier, Swat for instance. While today it s infamous for Taliban and Islamic Terrorism, there was a time it was known for its beauty. Trivia After Everest, K2 is the smaller one although whatever I have read of people s accounts, most people who ascended all 14 8,000 metre peaks say K2 is technically more tougher than Everest and after Everest has the highest casualty rate. Also places like the disputed North half of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, Gilgit Baltistan, Extreme northern Punjab of Pakistan , Northern half of Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa province and Northern Balochistan all of these places would have been more than conducive to the Britishers as it is near to the British climate (snow and pleasant weather all year round). It really is a pity that Pakistan chose to become a terrorist state where it could have become one of the more toured places of Asia. I really feel nauseous and sad at the multiple chances that Pakistan frittered away, it could have been something else.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #bash-completion, #British Raj, #contributions, #debian, #debian-policy, #Debian-QA, #Hill Stations, #India Independance Movement, #lintian, #obsolete-conffiles, #unknown-horizons, #weather, #World History, adequate, Pakistan, tourism

With the release of Gitlab 8.15 it was announced that PostgreSQL needs to be upgraded. As I migrated from a source installation I used to have an external PostgreSQL database instead of using the one shiped with the omnibus package.
So I decided to do the data migration into the omnibus PostgreSQL database now which I skipped before. Let's have a look into the databases:

$ sudo -u postgres psql -d template1
psql (9.2.18)  
Type "help" for help.
gitlabhq_production=# \l  
                                             List of databases
         Name                  Owner         Encoding   Collate    Ctype           Access privileges
-----------------------+-------------------+----------+---------+---------+---------------------------------
 gitlabhq_production     git                 UTF8       C.UTF-8   C.UTF-8  
 gitlab_mattermost       git                 UTF8       C.UTF-8   C.UTF-8  
gitlabhq_production=# \q  

Dumping the databases and stop PostgreSQL. Maybe you need to adjust database names and users for your needs.

$ su postgres -c "pg_dump gitlabhq_production -f /tmp/gitlabhq_production.sql" && \
su postgres -c "pg_dump gitlab_mattermost -f /tmp/gitlab_mattermost.sql" && \  
/etc/init.d/postgresql stop

Activate PostgreSQL shipped with Gitlab Omnibus

$ sed -i "s/^postgresql\['enable'\] = false/#postgresql\['enable'\] = false/g" /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb && \
sed -i "s/^#mattermost\['enable'\] = true/mattermost\['enable'\] = true/" /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb && \  
gitlab-ctl reconfigure  

Testing if the connection to the databases works

$ su - git -c "psql --username=gitlab  --dbname=gitlabhq_production --host=/var/opt/gitlab/postgresql/"
psql (9.2.18)  
Type "help" for help.
gitlabhq_production=# \q  
$ su - git -c "psql --username=gitlab  --dbname=mattermost_production --host=/var/opt/gitlab/postgresql/"
psql (9.2.18)  
Type "help" for help.
mattermost_production=# \q  

Ensure pg_trgm extension is enabled

$ sudo gitlab-psql -d gitlabhq_production -c 'CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS "pg_trgm";'
$ sudo gitlab-psql -d mattermost_production -c 'CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS "pg_trgm";'

Adjust permissions in the database dumps. Indeed please verify that users and databases might need to be adjusted too.

$ sed -i "s/OWNER TO git;/OWNER TO gitlab;/" /tmp/gitlabhq_production.sql && \
sed -i "s/postgres;$/gitlab-psql;/" /tmp/gitlabhq_production.sql  
$ sed -i "s/OWNER TO git;/OWNER TO gitlab_mattermost;/" /tmp/gitlab_mattermost.sql && \
sed -i "s/postgres;$/gitlab-psql;/" /tmp/gitlab_mattermost.sql  

(Re)import the data

$ sudo gitlab-psql -d gitlabhq_production -f /tmp/gitlabhq_production.sql
$ sudo gitlab-psql -d gitlabhq_production -c 'REVOKE ALL ON SCHEMA public FROM "gitlab-psql";' && \
sudo gitlab-psql -d gitlabhq_production -c 'GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO "gitlab-psql";'  
$ sudo gitlab-psql -d mattermost_production -f /tmp/gitlab_mattermost.sql
$ sudo gitlab-psql -d mattermost_production -c 'REVOKE ALL ON SCHEMA public FROM "gitlab-psql";' && \
sudo gitlab-psql -d mattermost_production -c 'GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO "gitlab-psql";'  

Make use of the shipped PostgreSQL

$ sed -i "s/^gitlab_rails\['db_/#gitlab_rails\['db_/" /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb && \
sed -i "s/^mattermost\['sql_/#mattermost\['sql_/" /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb && \  
gitlab-ctl reconfigure  

Now you should be able to connect to all the Gitlab services again. Optionally remove the external database

apt-get remove postgresql postgresql-client postgresql-9.4 postgresql-client-9.4 postgresql-client-common postgresql-common  

Maybe you also want to purge the old database content

apt-get purge postgresql-9.4  

With the release of Gitlab 8.15 it was announced that PostgreSQL needs to be upgraded. As I migrated from a source installation I used to have an external PostgreSQL database instead of using the one shiped with the omnibus package.
So I decided to do the data migration into the omnibus PostgreSQL database now which I skipped before. Let's have a look into the databases:

$ sudo -u postgres psql -d template1
psql (9.2.18)  
Type "help" for help.
gitlabhq_production=# \l  
                                             List of databases
         Name                  Owner         Encoding   Collate    Ctype           Access privileges
-----------------------+-------------------+----------+---------+---------+---------------------------------
 gitlabhq_production     git                 UTF8       C.UTF-8   C.UTF-8  
 gitlab_mattermost       git                 UTF8       C.UTF-8   C.UTF-8  
gitlabhq_production=# \q  

Dumping the databases and stop PostgreSQL. Maybe you need to adjust database names and users for your needs.

$ su postgres -c "pg_dump gitlabhq_production -f /tmp/gitlabhq_production.sql" && \
su postgres -c "pg_dump gitlab_mattermost -f /tmp/gitlab_mattermost.sql" && \  
/etc/init.d/postgresql stop

Activate PostgreSQL shipped with Gitlab Omnibus

$ sed -i "s/^postgresql\['enable'\] = false/#postgresql\['enable'\] = false/g" /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb && \
sed -i "s/^#mattermost\['enable'\] = true/mattermost\['enable'\] = true/" /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb && \  
gitlab-ctl reconfigure  

Testing if the connection to the databases works

$ su - git -c "psql --username=gitlab  --dbname=gitlabhq_production --host=/var/opt/gitlab/postgresql/"
psql (9.2.18)  
Type "help" for help.
gitlabhq_production=# \q  
$ su - git -c "psql --username=gitlab  --dbname=mattermost_production --host=/var/opt/gitlab/postgresql/"
psql (9.2.18)  
Type "help" for help.
mattermost_production=# \q  

Ensure pg_trgm extension is enabled

$ sudo gitlab-psql -d gitlabhq_production -c 'CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS "pg_trgm";'
$ sudo gitlab-psql -d mattermost_production -c 'CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS "pg_trgm";'

Adjust permissions in the database dumps. Indeed please verify that users and databases might need to be adjusted too.

$ sed -i "s/OWNER TO git;/OWNER TO gitlab;/" /tmp/gitlabhq_production.sql && \
sed -i "s/postgres;$/gitlab-psql;/" /tmp/gitlabhq_production.sql  
$ sed -i "s/OWNER TO git;/OWNER TO gitlab_mattermost;/" /tmp/gitlab_mattermost.sql && \
sed -i "s/postgres;$/gitlab-psql;/" /tmp/gitlab_mattermost.sql  

(Re)import the data

$ sudo gitlab-psql -d gitlabhq_production -f /tmp/gitlabhq_production.sql
$ sudo gitlab-psql -d gitlabhq_production -c 'REVOKE ALL ON SCHEMA public FROM "gitlab-psql";' && \
sudo gitlab-psql -d gitlabhq_production -c 'GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO "gitlab-psql";'  
$ sudo gitlab-psql -d mattermost_production -f /tmp/gitlab_mattermost.sql
$ sudo gitlab-psql -d mattermost_production -c 'REVOKE ALL ON SCHEMA public FROM "gitlab-psql";' && \
sudo gitlab-psql -d mattermost_production -c 'GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO "gitlab-psql";'  

Make use of the shipped PostgreSQL

$ sed -i "s/^gitlab_rails\['db_/#gitlab_rails\['db_/" /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb && \
sed -i "s/^mattermost\['sql_/#mattermost\['sql_/" /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb && \  
gitlab-ctl reconfigure  

Now you should be able to connect to all the Gitlab services again. Optionally remove the external database

apt-get remove postgresql postgresql-client postgresql-9.4 postgresql-client-9.4 postgresql-client-common postgresql-common  

Maybe you also want to purge the old database content

apt-get purge postgresql-9.4  

Categories:

• Debian-Blog
• General
• KDE
• Computing
• Technology

Keywords:

• calibre
• gnome
• multitouch
• touchscreen
• tablet
• goldendict
• onboard

Like:

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In December, about 175 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 20.5 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated + 7 remaining hours).
• Balint Reczey did 10 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated, thus keeping 2.5 hours for January).
• Ben Hutchings did 10 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated + 2 hours remaining, thus keeping 5.5 extra hours for January).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 13.5 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 11 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated, thus keeping 2.5 extra hours for January).
• Guido G nther did 8 hours.
• Hugo Lefeuvre did 11 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated, thus keeping 2.5 extra hours for January).
• Jonas Meurer did 5.25 hours (out of 12 hours allocated, thus keeping 6.75 extra hours for January).
• Markus Koschany did 13.5 hours.
• Ola Lundqvist did 13.5 hours.
• Rapha l Hertzog did 10 hours.
• Roberto C. Sanchez did 13.5 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 13.5 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours did not increase but a new silver sponsor is in the process of joining. We are only missing another silver sponsor (or two to four bronze sponsors) to reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. The security tracker currently lists 31 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 27. The situation improved a little bit compared to last month. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 14 months)
• GitHub (for 5 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 30 months)
• Blablacar (for 29 months)
• Linode LLC (for 19 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 8 months)
• Plat Home (for 8 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 29 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 29 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 27 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 23 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 21 months)
• Dalenys (for 20 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 15 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 15 months)
• Sonus Networks (for 9 months)
• UR Communications BV (for 3 months)
• maxcluster GmbH (for 3 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 30 months)
• Evolix (for 30 months)
• Offensive Security (for 30 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 30 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 29 months)
• MyTux (for 29 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 27 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 26 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 25 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 24 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 24 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 23 months)
• NUMLOG (for 23 months)
• WinGo AG (for 22 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 19 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 16 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 14 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 11 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 6 months)
• Quarantainenet BV (for 6 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 5 months)
• RHX Srl (for 3 months)

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A friend of mine choose for $reasons to install the latest OpenSuSE 42.2 release as his new laptop operating system. It's been a while that I had contact with the SuSE Linux distribution. Must be around 12 years or so. The unsual part here is that I've to support a somewhat eccentric, but mostly ordinary user of computers. And to my surprise it's still hard to just plug in your existing stuff and expect it work. I've done so many dirty things to this installation in the last three days, my system egineering heart is bleeding. printing with a Canon Pixma iP100 printer This is a small portable Canon printer, about four years old. It provides a decent quality and its main strength is that it's small and really portable. Sadly the gutenprint driver just pushes through a blank page. No ink wasted on it at all. So the only reasonable other choice was a four year old binary rpm package provided by Canon. It has a file dependency on "libtiff.so.3" which is no longer available in recent GNU/Linux distributions. So I cheated and

- unpacked the tarball
- installed the rpm from the "packages" folder
zypper install cnijfilter-common-3.70-1.x86_64.rpm cnijfilter-ip100series-3.70-1.x86_64.rpm
... and choose to ignore the missing file dependency on libtiff.so.5.
ln -s /usr/lib64/libtiff.so /usr/lib64/libtiff.so.5
- re-ran the ./install.sh which registered the printer with cups and does whatever else
  magic is included in 1906 lines of shell.

To my surprise this driver still works and provides the expected quality. Though it's just a question of time until this setup will break. Be it an incompatible ABI change in libtiff or another lib in use by those Canon provided tools. QGIS and gdal with ECW support While the printer stuff is a rather common use case, having a map viewer for map files in the ECW format is the eccentric part. I found some hints on stackoverflow and subsequently https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/ECW that a non-free library is required and a specific build of gdal. Then QGIS should be able to work with ECW files. Lucky us there is at least a OpenSuSE repository for gdal and QGIS. So I did the following:

zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Application:/Geo/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/Application:Geo.repo
zypper install qgis

Then I had to download the non-free ECW SDK from http://download.hexagongeospatial.com/downloads/erdas-ecw-jp2-sdk-v5.3-%28linux%29 - you'll and up with a '.bin' installer file. The installation process left me with "ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0" folder in my $HOME. I moved that one to /opt. Next step is adding the library to the ldconfig search path.

echo "/opt/ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0/Desktop_Read-Only/lib/x64/release/" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ecw.conf; ldconfig

Now it was "just" about rebuild gdal with ECW support. So I downloaded the required source packages with "zypper source-install gdal", edited the spec somewhere in "/usr/src/" to make the following modifications

--with-ecw=/opt/ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0/Desktop_Read-Only

added to the "./configure" invocation. And somewhere at the top we had to relax the requirement that all installed files have to be referenced inside the package.

%define _unpackaged_files_terminate_build 0

As a last step I had to "rpmbuild -ba" the package and force the installation via zypper once more, because this time we have a file depedency on the libecw stuff and it's obviously not listed in the rpm database. Last but not least I tried to put the gdal build on hold with

zypper addlock gdal libgdal20

to ensure it's not removed on the next update. Other non-free tools Beside of those two issues I had to install a range of other non-free tools, but currently they work without further issues or modifications. One is Teamviewer (i686 multiarch rpm) and the other one is XnViewMP. XnView is also able to show ECW files, but only the smaller ones. It crashes on bigger ones but that's also the case on Windows. Then there is also (required by some Italian map related websites) the ugly Adobe Flash Plugin for Firefox, but that one is sadly still a widespread issue. We also tried to try out the nvidia graphic drivers but at the moment we could only get the build in Intel card to work. Usually the preferred solution from my point of view but sometimes we see rendering glitches and I'm not sure if it's the driver or something else. my personal take away I hate to admit it but it's nothing extraordinary that was requested here. But still it took me the better part of two evenings to figure everything out. And even now it's not properly integrated and doomed to fail any day due to various updates and changes in the surounding ecosystem. I've full sympathy for every average user that would give up after two hours of research and try&error on this journey. For the printer drivers I'm happy to blame Canon. The printer situation as a whole improved from my point of view during the last decade, but it's still a pain in the ass with the very short shelf life you usually see with consumer models. For the ECW case one could discuss if it would be legally possible and helpful to do ugly dlopen() stuff to dynamcially load the shared libs. But then again someone has to make his hands dirty during the build and discussions about the legal use of header files will be the next chapter (hello Oracle). It's just ugly. Actually I know too little about the world of image formats to judge if someone has a good reason to keep this format commercial or not. From my personal point of view it's not useful and maybe even morally wrong. Technically one could argue if it would make sense to keep a local copy of the gdal build in "/opt" and start QGIS with a modified library path to prefer the private gdal build. Not sure if that is any better. On the other hand there are evolving mechanism like flatpack that would ease the handling of such situations. Buth then again we would be catering non-free software. It feels a lot like giving up. While my private working environment is except for firmware blobs free, I now created for someone a real "FrankenSuSE" to satisfy his everyday needs. On the one hand we now have another mostly satisfied user of a mostly free operating system. On the other hand that was only possible by adding a vast amount of non-free software. For sure we did not win the war, I'm not even sure if we've won a single battle here. It's just frustrating to see what is required to get someone up and running. With my personal attitude towards open source software it even feels wrong to invest so much time into fiddling with non-free components. What is still missing We currently lack an image viewer that allows us to print only a selection of an image, which is useful to print parts of a map. That usually works with XnView on Windows but does not work with the Linux version at the moment. I also tried gwenview and geeqie and had the same issue. Not sure if it's maybe a bug in XnView or one of the Qt parts (gwenview is also Qt based). I did not research that yet. Update: I spent quite some time looking into open bug reports for geeqie and gwenview. Seems the feature to print only a section of an image is something new. I've created #374299 (gwenview) and #457 (geeqie). For XnView I expect it's a difference between XnViewMP (the portable version) and the Windows only XnView Classic. Needs to be clarified and it might be worth to try XnView Classic with wine. Maybe printing with wine via cups works, I found at least some results for it on the internet.

This is the second release of my new documentation generation system for my packages. It's still probably not of much interest to anyone other than me, particularly since the metadata format is still rapidly evolving so I've not documented it yet. But the templates are getting fleshed out and it's generating more and more of my package documentation, which will make releases much easier. This release adds generation of build and test instructions for my packages from templates and metadata, with some support for adding a bit of custom wording. It also offers a few new options for expanding license notices, and for annotating packages with additional bootstrap requirements. You can get the latest version from the DocKnot distribution page.

This is the second release of my new documentation generation system for my packages. It's still probably not of much interest to anyone other than me, particularly since the metadata format is still rapidly evolving so I've not documented it yet. But the templates are getting fleshed out and it's generating more and more of my package documentation, which will make releases much easier. This release adds generation of build and test instructions for my packages from templates and metadata, with some support for adding a bit of custom wording. It also offers a few new options for expanding license notices, and for annotating packages with additional bootstrap requirements. You can get the latest version from the DocKnot distribution page.

Some of the content may be NSFW. viewer discretion advised. I have had a life-long fascination with trains. One of my first memories was that of 5-7 year old, clutching my mother or grandmother s hand seeing the steam engine lumbering down whistling and smoking at the same time. I was both afraid and strangely drawn to the iron beast and the first time I knew and then slowly understood that if we come with luggage and the steam-engine comes, it means we are going to travel. I have travelled some, but there are lots to explore still and I do hope that I cover some more of it during my lifetime. The reason I am writing about trains is an article which caught my eye couple of days. Besides seeing the changing geography, the variety of food one can get on train and in stations is one of the primary reasons that Indians love to travel by trains. It is one place where you could have incredible conversations over cup of tea or favourite food and unlike air travel and the famed IFE (In-flight entertainment) people are actually pretty social even with all the gadgets. For those who are wondering, the author was travelling between Jamshedpur, Gujarat to Kolkatta, a train ride which has now gone on my bucket list for the delectable items the author has described To add to the above, it is still cheaper than air travel, although that is changing a bit as Indian Railways seeks to modernize Railways and make it into world-class bullet trains. Indian Railways has a long, rich culture and some of the most interesting nuggets you learn over time adds to the fascination of the Railways. For instance I m sharing this letter which I read first in book and then saw in the New Delhi Railway Museum. The letter I am sharing below was written by a certain Shri Okhil Chandra Sen to the Sahibganj Railway Office in year 1909, almost 38 years before India became independent. I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station. This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report! to papers. If it were not for Mr. Okhil Chandra Sen we would still be running with water bottle (improvement) and jeans/shorts/whatever (again improvement) while the possibility of falling over would always be omnipresent in a hurry. Now we do have toilets and some of the better trains even have Bio-toilets which should make things better as well.(/NSFW) For the plane bit, most of my flights have been domestic flying. Some of my most memorable flights is when flying from Mumbai on a clear sky overlooking the Queen s necklace, loving it and landing in Bangalore during mist or rain or both. Delhi is also good as airports go but nothing much adventurous about it. It was only with the experience of my first international flight, I realized the same feeling again, nervousness and sense of adventure as you meet new people. Nowadays every week I do try and broaden my horizon by seeking and learning a bit about International Travel. In this I came across an article on National Geographic site which also evoked similar feelings. While I can t go back to the past and even if I did (in distant past before I was born), I wouldn t want to improve my financial situation at all (as otherwise I would hit the Grandfather Paradox or/and the Butterfly effect (essentially saying there s no free lunch), it still makes you wonder about a time when people had lot more adventure and lot more moving parts. I do wish they had a much bigger snapshot of that plane so I could really see how people sat in the old aircraft. The low-resolution picture doesn t do justice to the poster and the idea of that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder for an implementation of Butterfly effect. The Grandfather Paradox has been seen plenty of times in fantasy movies like the Back to the Future, Planet of the Apes and many others so will not go there. For the average joe today, s/he has to navigate security,check bags, get her/imself processed through passport control, get boarding pass, get to the gate on-time, get to the aircraft via bridge or bus, get to the seat, somehow make it through the ascent and use your IFE and get snacks and meals till it s time to touch-down and re-do the whole drill again as many times you are connecting. I really admire Gunnar Wolf for the tenacity he showed for the x number of connections he made both ways. While leafing through the interweb today, came across an article . While you can slice and dice the report anyway you want, for me if ever I get a chance again for an International Travel, I would try to see I get a layover at these three airports in order of preference (this is on the basis that none of these airports need a transit visa for the activities shared) a. Changi International Airport It is supposed to have shower amenities, has a movie theatre (+1), free tour of the city (+1) and of course as many Indians do go to Singapore as a destination in itself would have multiple vegetarian options (+2) so would be nice if I need to layover. b. Zurich Airport (ZRH) For passengers with an extended layover, Zurich Airport offers bicycle and inline-skate rentals and excursions to the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne. From business-insider.com. While I m not much of a bicycle and inline-skating freak, if the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne is anything to the scale of Isiko Museum which I shared in a blog post sometime before, it would be worth by itself. I haven t tried to find the site but can imagine, for e.g. if it has a full-scale model of a submarine or train engine, either steam-engines or ones like SNCF or any of the other bullet-trains and early aircraft, it would just blow my mind. When you are talking about transport, there is so much science, business, logistics etc. that I m sure I ll overload with information, photos and any trinkets they have to buy. c. Central Japan International Airport (NGO) It has a 1,000-foot-long sky deck where passengers can watch ships sail into Nagoya Port. There s also a traditional Japanese bathhouse where you can have a relaxing soak while watching the sunset over the bay. BusinessInsider.com Not a bad place to be if you need a layover. Just sink yourself in the bathhouse and see the bay and ships coming in. Luxury indeed. Honourable mention d. Munich Airport (MUC) A nearby visitors park features mini golf and a display of historic aircraft. Business-Insider.com . Now this would have made my list but I guess one would need a Schengen visa to access the visitors park but then if you have that, then why just stay in the Airport itself, could travel through Europe itself and have a longish stop-over. So all in all, it s indeed a fascinating time to be alive, dreaming and just being. Till later. Update I had forgotten to share one more reason why I was writing this article. Although somewhat of a cynic, am hopeful that Pune metro happens. Also, if I had just waited a day, would have been able to add couple of wonderful articles that would make people wanderlust more
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Best Airports, #Central Japan International Airport, #Changi International Airport, #Food, #Loo, #Nostalgia, #NSFW, #Planes, #Steam Engine, #Trains, #Zurich Airport, Indian Railways, memories

I m interning for the PGP Clean Room Project, which aims to code best practices for using GnuPG into the workflow in order to make it easier for users to create and manage their keys. The live disc already contains code for partitioning and mounting the sd cards, and setting up a sample gpg.conf. For my first task, I decided to start building a basic TUI to gather the user s info and preferences for the primary and secondary encryption keys, as well as for additional subkeys and uids, and then create the keys based on the user s input. See the code on github. For the TUI, I decided on whiptail, a command line program that creates user-friendly dialogs. You can see what the whiptail script looks like so far here and run it to see what the TUI looks like. I also explored different ways to run the gpg2 commands non-interactively. One option is Unattended Key Generation using the batch option, however that doesn t allow for multiple subkeys or setting a different expiration date for the subkey than for the primary key. gpg2 --gen-key --batch gen-key-script or gpg2 --expert --full-gen-key --batch gen-key-script The command-fd and command-file options also allow you to bypass the interactive prompt: echo "uid 1\nprimary\nsave\n" gpg2 --command-fd 0 --status-fd 2 --edit-key 'Joe Tester' Newer versions of gpg2 simplify the creation of primary/subkeys and editing of keys with one liners such as: gpg2 --quick-gen-key 'User Name <user@example.com>' rsa4096 sign 3y gpg2 --quick-addkey <fingerprint> rsa2048 encrypt 1y gpg2 --quick-adduid <fingerprint> <primary-uid> <new-uid> Aside from making life easier for command line users, gpg 2.1.x also supports ECC keys and creates a revocation certificates by default.

I dunno if people heard or didn t hear about the demonetisation of INR 500 and INR 1000 which happened in India on 8th November 2016 with new currency designed in India of INR 2000 and INR 500. What they did was from that moment onwards, paper currency of INR 500 and INR 1000 notes were declared invalid except few places (Government Hospitals, Petrol Pumps, Booking of Air and Train tickets) . The reasons given were as a. End of corruption There is/was suspicion that there are people who have loads of unaccounted wealth which they keep in the form of Cash in hand, b. Charge against fake/duplicate currency There is/was suspicion that quite a bit of the money esp, high value notes such as INR 500 and INR 1000, so having made them illegal, people had to hand over cash to banks and fake money would go outside the system. c. Terror funding This is related with the above point. There is a popular theory/myth/fact that terrorists use fake money to buy people, arms and ammunition while further devaluing the value of INR against dollar and basket of other high-value currencies that Indian currency follows/bases itself on. Each of these theories/myths/facts has been contested. Every day we are seeing and reading reports of people being caught with new currency in absurd numbers while RBI , our central bank and Lender of Last Resort has had to play multiple roles such as policing along with the country s Income Tax Department as well as pumping in new notes of the NEW INR 2000/- and INR 500/- into ATM s and Bank branches around the country. Now while the above may seem to be reasonable, there have been multiple factors which has made the whole exercise less effective while implementing a. Banking reach While India does and can boast of somewhat good indicators of banking reach . But Quarter of these accounts were opened only in the last couple of years under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhana Yojana . There are quite a few limitations of such accounts. It is a good scheme as if you develop a good rapport with a bank and show good credit/debit understanding then there is possibility to move to normal full-fledged bank account. Almost all of these accounts had zero-balances till the demonetization move. Many of these accounts are suspected to have been conduits to convert black money to white as the Govt. had said it will not scrutinize small savings bank accounts. Also many bank accounts historically have laid dormant over the years. One of my first jobs was of a data entry operator in a bank and I used to see hundreds of bank accounts lying dormant for years together. This was in bank digitization in early 90s. Small Savings accounts would not be scrutinized if they bring upto INR 250000 while Jan Dhan accounts have an upper limit of only INR 50000 . Even then, it has lead to a huge surge in balances specifically in Zero balances account. What begs the question is if it is their hard-earned money why hadn t they deposited money before 8th November 2016. While I can t speak about them, I can certainly speak about myself. I hardly keep at the most INR INR 5/10K for medical emergencies in-house for number of years. Unless you are a businessman who has need of cash or have some function, nobody that I know would keep such amounts in their homes, simply for the possibility of theft in homes. So how did such people who are not able to open a full-fledged saving account get access to such large amounts? In most public sector banks, to have a full-fledged savings account the only requirements are a. Have INR 500 to 1000 as balance at all times.
b. Have permanent identity and residential proof
c. Two photographs
d. 2-3 people who are account holders who can act as guarantor. Of the above, b. and d. are probably sticking points for most migrants, while d. may be a sticking point for labourers, craftsman etc. hence the need for that specific scheme. Which leads to the natural suspicion that they may have been white-washing somebody s untaxed, unaccounted money which is being put into bank and made into legitimate white money. People do not have to file an Income Tax Return (ITR) unless they earn more than 250,000 in a single financial year. One good off-shot of the scheme though is the transparency gained about Bank Mitras b. Number of banks, quality of Bank services, number of people per bank at least in Nationalized Banks leaves much to be desired. We can t even try to compare with other BRIC countries, leave alone Germany. One another positive off-shoot has been the introduction of Mobile ATM Vans around the country. I had experienced such vans in Mumbai since ages, but not anywhere else. I do hope that both Bank Mitras as well as such Van Mobile ATMs happen more. There are huge swathes of people who are currently unbanked. Getting them into the banking infrastructure, getting them to *think* about taking rational financial decisions, i.e. saving and spending, different types of saving etc. should not make citizens and the banking systems more productive and efficient, but hopefully improves our GDP and make it more resilient to any outside financial shocks. c. Many bank websites have everything in English. That norm needs to change. I do have few queries though, one of the countries who is supposed to be a prominent supporter and user of cashless society is supposed to be Canada. Could any Canadians (also because debconf is going to happen in Canada in 2017) share how and if they had seen the Canadian banking system evolve in their country ? Also how much of Canada s economy is cashless i.e used to Electronic Money Transfer and other means (but not cash) and how much is cash, more in day-to-day usage and transactions. I am trying to get people s perspective rather than some website which may serve only raw numbers, although even that would be appreciable. Also what, if any charges/commission are paid to a Canadian bank for paying via card/electronic money transfer. I ask as India has reduced charges overall to 1% from 2% for making transactions upto INR 2000 in a day. There has also been recent talk of plastic notes instead of paper currency. Plastic notes are supposed to be more copy-proof and also will work for much longer time. They will not soil as paper notes do. How have countries been looking at Plastic currencies. I do suspect there would be issues while destroying plastic money vis-a-vis paper currencies. A sort of interesting discussion that I had with Bernelle before venturing into South Africa was asking her about monetary transactions in SA. She had replied that the highest denomination notes was 200 ZAR which is roughly equal to ( ZAR 200 x 5 = INR 1000) . What is/was interesting that Bernelle told me to be careful and as far as possible not to show 200 ZAR note, whereas in India, even the cheapest worker I have met, they have seen and used INR 1000 note. The context of the discussion was being safe in South Africa and doing transactions with people around as to what works. It would be curiouser to know how things work in Canada for instance ? Also has Canada or any other country have experimented with plastic notes. If yes, how has the experience been ? I would have to say this is in no way a definitive guide of the different impressions and repercussion that the decision and the way it s playing out even now. Another thing, while researching for the article there were lots of interesting knowledge, for e.g. the Big Mac Index and it s limitations which I didn t know how to integrate into the decision and Policy taken. I also came to know/saw that lots of Policy initiatives being taken by the current (NDA)Government is similar to initiatives taken elsewhere in the world.. Whether the Policy would be fruitful in getting the desired outcome or would it lead to more chaos and down-turn will know in next quarter only. It would be nice and interesting if people have observed something similar in their country s economic policies as well.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Bank Mitra, #Bank reach, #blackmoney, #debconf17, #Demonetisation, #fake currencies, #full-fledged savings account, #Jan Dhan scheme, #Moile ATM Van, #Plastic money, #Public Sector Banks (PSB), #Reserve Bank of India, Big Mac Index

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In October, about 150 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 4 hours (out of 11 hours allocated, thus keeping 7 extra hours for December).
• Balint Reczey did 11 hours.
• Ben Hutchings did 9 hours (out of 11 hours allocated, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
• Brian May did 11 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 11 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 11 hours.
• Guido G nther did 8 hours.
• Hugo Lefeuvre did 11 hours.
• Jonas Meurer did 12.75 hours (out of 11 hours allocated + 1.75 hours remaining).
• Markus Koschany did 11 hours.
• Ola Lundqvist did 11.75 hours (out of 11 hours allocated + 0.75 hours remaining).
• Rapha l Hertzog did 11 hours.
• Roberto C. Sanchez did 11 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 11 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours did not change this month and in fact we haven t had any new sponsor since September. We still need a couple of supplementary sponsors to reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. The security tracker currently lists 40 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 36. We don t seem to really catch up the small backlog. The reasons are not clear but I noticed that there are a few packages that take a lot of time due to the number of issues found with fuzzers. We also handle many issues that the security team ends up classifying as not worth an update because we add the package to dla-needed.txt before the security team has done its review and nobody checks afterwards. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 14 months)
• GitHub (for 5 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 30 months)
• Blablacar (for 29 months)
• Linode LLC (for 19 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 8 months)
• Plat Home (for 8 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 29 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 29 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 27 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 23 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 21 months)
• Dalenys (for 20 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 15 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 15 months)
• Sonus Networks (for 9 months)
• UR Communications BV (for 3 months)
• maxcluster GmbH (for 3 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 30 months)
• Evolix (for 30 months)
• Offensive Security (for 30 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 30 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 29 months)
• MyTux (for 29 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 27 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 26 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 25 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 24 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 24 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 23 months)
• NUMLOG (for 23 months)
• WinGo AG (for 22 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 19 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 16 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 14 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 11 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 6 months)
• Quarantainenet BV (for 6 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 5 months)
• RHX Srl (for 3 months)

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(image courtesy of XKCD) Last week I graduated with a Masters in Legal Science (now taught as an MLaw) from Queen s University Belfast. I m pleased to have achieved a Distinction, as well an award for Outstanding Achievement in the Dissertation (which was on the infringement of privacy by private organisations due to state mandated surveillance and retention laws - pretty topical given the unfortunate introduction of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016). However, as previously stated, I had made the decision that I was happier building things, and wanted to return to the world of technology. I talked to a bunch of interesting options, got to various stages in the hiring process with each of them, and happily accepted a role with Titan IC Systems which started at the beginning of September. Titan have produced a hardware accelerated regular expression processor (hence the XKCD reference); the RXP in its FPGA variant (what I get to play with) can handle pattern matching against 40Gb/s of traffic. Which is kinda interesting, as it lends itself to a whole range of applications from network scanning to data mining to, well, anything where you want to sift through a large amount of data checking against a large number of rules. However it s brand new technology for me to get up to speed with (plus getting back into a regular working pattern rather than academentia), and the combination of that and spending most of the summer post DebConf wrapping up the dissertation has meant I haven t had as much time to devote other things as I d have liked. However I ve a few side projects at various stages of completion and will try to manage more regular updates.

I think it stems from employing people who are capable of telling you what BGP stands for, he said. Watching my DevOps team in action is an infuriating mix of Damn, that's a slick CI/CD process you ve built, and What do you mean you don't know what the output of netstat means?

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In October, about 175 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 13 hours.
• Balint Reczey did 7 hours (out of 13 hours allocated + 4.5 remaining, the extra hours have been given back).
• Ben Hutchings did 13.75 hours (out of 13 hours allocated + 0.75 remaining).
• Brian May did 13 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 13 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 13 hours.
• Guido G nther did 9 hours (out of 8h allocated + 1h remaining).
• Hugo Lefeuvre did 12 hours.
• Jonas Meurer did 10.25 hours (out of 12 hours allocated, thus keeping 1.75 extra hours for November).
• Markus Koschany did 13 hours.
• Ola Lundqvist did 13.5 hours (out of 13 hours assigned + 1.25 remaining, thus keeping 0.75 extra hours).
• Rapha l Hertzog did 13 hours.
• Roberto C. Sanchez did 14.75 hours (out of 13h allocated + 1.75h remaining).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 13 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours did not change this month. We still need a couple of supplementary sponsors to reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. The security tracker currently lists 34 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 29. The situation improved slightly compared to last month. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 13 months)
• GitHub (for 4 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 29 months)
• Blablacar (for 28 months)
• Linode LLC (for 18 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 7 months)
• Plat Home (for 7 months)
• UR Communications BV
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 28 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 28 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 26 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 22 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 20 months)
• Dalenys (for 19 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 14 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 14 months)
• Sonus Networks (for 8 months)
• maxcluster GmbH
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 29 months)
• Evolix (for 29 months)
• Offensive Security (for 29 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 29 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 28 months)
• MyTux (for 28 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 26 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 25 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 24 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 23 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 23 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 22 months)
• NUMLOG (for 22 months)
• WinGo AG (for 21 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 18 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 15 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 13 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 10 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 5 months)
• Quarantainenet BV (for 5 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 4 months)
• RHX Srl

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It's been a while since I've done one of these. danah boyd It's Complicated (non-fiction)
Jeffrey A. Carver Eternity's End (sff)
Becky Chambers A Closed and Common Orbit (sff)
Stephen Deas The Adamantine Palace (sff)
Robert Heinlein The Green Hills of Earth / The Menace from Earth (sff)
Robert Heinlein Revolt in 2100 / Methuselah's Children (sff)
Marjorie M. Liu The Iron Hunt (sff)
Larry Niven The Ringworld Engineers (sff)
Don Norman The Design of Everyday Things (non-fiction)
Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (sff)
Jo Walton Necessity (sff)
Eileen Wilks Tempting Danger (sff) I picked up some extra used books since I was placing a book order to pick up Necessity anyway, and fleshed out my early Heinlein novels mostly out of curiousity. I've already reviewed The Design of Everyday Things, which I got from the work book club.

This year, Outreachy featured internships from organizations such as Debian, Fedora, GNOME, the Linux Kernel, Mozilla, Python, and Wikimedia, just to name a few. Each organization features mentored projects and in order to apply, applicants must contact the mentor, introduce themselves on the appropriate channels and make a small contribution to the project. After that, applicants might be required to fulfill additional tasks to demonstrate their abilities. Successful applicants will make quality contributions, communicate effectively with mentors, ask questions, fulfill tasks, help out their peers via mailing lists, and/or blog about their experience. One of the projects I applied to was the Clean Room for PGP and X.509 (PKI) Key Management. The project aims to create a Live Disc that enables users to create and manage their PGP keys easily and securely, using a text-based UI. I ve been a Debian user for about a year, but before applying to the project I didn t know much about GnuPG or public key encryption. Since then, I ve made some contributions and attended my first keysigning event in San Francisco featuring a lecture by Neal Walfield (more on that below). For my initial contribution, Daniel Pocock, the mentor for this project, asked that I write a script that lists the USB flash devices connected to the system and specifies which device the system booted from. Here s the bash script that I wrote, and that was enough to submit an application for Debian. My next task was to write a dns hook script for the dehydrated project, a shell client for signing certificates with Let s Encrypt (for free!). The script completes a dns challenge sent by the ACME-server by provisioning a TXT record for a given domain in order to prove ownership of the domain. I chose to write it in python and used the dnspython API. I posted my solution on github and there are many more here. At the lecture, Neal talked about good practices for key creation and management. Here are a few of those points:

• Don t store your master key locally
• Store your master key offline on a smartcard such as GnuK or NitroKey and store backups on a USB stick.
• Neal mentioned that the OpenPGP card is not open hardware and according to this recent post neither is the Yubikey
• To manage the key, use a dedicated offline computer such as a relatively cheap x40 or x60 Thinkpad (my two cents: use a Thinkpad like X200 or T400 flashed with Libreboot, which solves the proprietary firmware problem) and remove the wireless network card.
• Use Tails which wipes memory on shutdown.
• Use subkeys an encryption subkey is automatically created with gpg2 --gen-key. Create an additional signing subkey.
• Generate a secure passphrase for your master key using 5-12 words. Example: pipe after harm horse split seize radar bulb
  • Funny cartoon illustrating this concept
• Refresh your keys regularly for new preferences and revokation certificates. An alternative to gpg2 --refresh-keys is parcimonie, which uses tor and refreshes keys one at a time.
• Don t back up .gnupg/random_seed
• More OpenPGP Best Practices

See the slides for Neal s full presentation.