An oldie but goodie. I certainly enjoy watching students squirm their way into naming me.

Following to the email sent regarding the French law known as HADOPI (I blogged about it a few weeks ago), I had a meeting this afternoon with my local representative. This half an hour meeting allowed me to explain my fears regarding this firewall which could be set up on French citizens computers to enable them to prove their non-culpability (provided their computer runs a popular proprietary OS). My representative kindly listened to me and his assistant understood the situation very well. I was even impressed that they have worked a lot on this law before the meeting. They both proposed to raise this issue to Christine Albanel, the current French Minister for Culture and Communication, who is at the origin of this law. They agreed to say that this wouldn t be changed for the next lecture (planned for the end of the month), as this particular chapter was meant to be detailed in further texts. They also admitted that this law had little chance to be really applied as is, as they consider some aspects to be anti-constitutional - they hence think that the French Constitutional Council will prevent this law to be applied, at least as it is when writing this post.
My representative also admitted that this law was somewhat outdated (even if not yet voted!). Actually, this kind of law will ever be outdated I kindly thank my representative for his time and his frankness (even if on the bad side for this law, he was very open to my thoughts). Good to know France is still a real Democracy!

So in three weeks time, two once large Unix vendors are gone SGI on april 1st, and now Sun. SGI as a Unix vendor had been dead for years anyway, but still.

Today's announcement also kind of finalizes the answer to my wonderings last year. Sun somehow seems to have managed to send off MySQL into limbo, and it remains yet to be seen if Oracle would have any imperative to bring it back.

One thing I do find bothersome with the new situation is that at the moment I write this, the opensolaris.org website appears to be unreachable. Which might just be coincidence, but I do hope that neither Sun until the deal is finished or Oracle afterwards turn away from their current opensource backing positions.

Raphael Bauduin emailed me to say that he s organising an event for Profoss: (28 april in Brussels) will take a look at legal aspects of the use of FOSS in professional environments. http://www.profoss.eu/events It will bring interesting information for most ICT professionals, even for those specialised in FOSS, but if this is not for you, it might be of interest to people around you (your boss or colleagues), so don t hesitate to spread the information around you. There is problem with the current website: it requires javascript. An updated site without that problem will appear very soon . If you go to the event, I d love to hear how it goes - please leave a comment on this article!

Ok, here we go again. I do hope somebody, somewhere is finding these posts of some use. *g*

• Changeling: I ll confess I m not very fond of Angelina Jolie, and I watched this movie exclusively because it came from Clint Eastwood. I gave it 5/5, which may be a tad too much, but that s how I felt right after it finished. It s not a light movie, but I do think everybody should give it a try when they find themselves in the mood.
• One Fine Day: This romantic comedy doesn t have much of a high rating on IMDB, and maybe I m too fond of George Clooney myself, but it pleased me enormously. Thanks to Marc HE Brockschmidt for having recommended it to me in the first place, though probably you shouldn t bother if you can t stand the genre at all. Ah, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
• Sling Blade: I was left deeply in awe by this movie, and even more so when I found out the director, writer and main role are all the same person, Billy Bob Thornton. One of the things that pleased me the most was the ending, because I found it included a good share of food for thought, particularly regarding how the characters would get on with their lives afterwards, which is not shown. Again, not a light movie, I ll reckon.
• Sideways: I enjoyed this movie a lot, and I should watch it sometime again, because I think I didn t scratch it enough. Which is great, because it s rather difficult combining hilarity with reflection. Viva la escena in the fast food restaurant.
• Tiempos de az car: I ve comitted to watching some more Spanish films, and this one is the more remarkable of those I ve seen as of late. This is a bittersweet love story spawning more than 30 years, and has Ver nica Forqu and Charo L pez in wonderful supporting roles. I should watch more films of Charo L pez.

Isaac watched Love Actually recently, and I oooh ed quite a bit when he told me, because that movie has one of my favourite or should I say powerful scenes of all times for me, and recalling it brings me instant joy and often instant tears. I think these three (spoiling) minutes are so powerful because, albeit they are fully anticipated for the spectator, they come as a complete surprise to both protagonists (obviously to her, but also to him, given the dialog that takes place once she gets down the stairs; that tiny dialog is in fact the most powerful bit of it all).

Linux?

xmodmap has long been the only way to modify the keyboard map of the X server, short of the complex configuration daemon approaches used by the large desktop managers, like KDE and GNOME. But it has always been a hack: it modifies the X keyboard map and thus requires a baseline to work from, kind of like a patch needs the correct context to be applicable. Worse yet, xmodmap weirdness required me to invoke it twice to get the effect I wanted. When the recent upgrade to X.org 7.4 broke larger parts of my elaborate xmodmap configuration, I took the time to finally ditch xmodmap and implement my modifications as proper xkb configuration.

Background information I had tried before to use per-user xkb configuration, but could not find the answers I want. It was somewhat by chance that I found Doug Palmer s Unreliable Guide to XKB configuration at the same time that Julien Cristau and Matthew W. S. Bell provided me the necessary hints on the #xorg/irc.freenode.org IRC channel to get me started. The other resource worth mentioning is Ivan Pascal s collection of XKB documents, which were instrumental in my gaining an understanding of xkb. And just as I am writing this document, Debian s X Strike Force have published their Input Hotplug Guide, which is a nice complement to this very document you are reading right now, since it focuses on auto-configuration of xkb with HAL. The default xkb configuration comes with a lot of flexibility, and often you don t need anything else. But when you do, then this is how to do it:

Installing a new keyboard map The most basic way to install a new keyboard map is using xkbcomp, which can also be used to dump the currently installed map into a file. So, to get a bit of an idea of what we ll be dealing with, please run the following commands:

xkbcomp $DISPLAY xkb.dump
editor xkb.dump
xkbcomp xkb.dump $DISPLAY

The file is complex and large, and it completely went against my aesthetics to simply edit it to have xkb work according to my needs. I sought a way in which I could use as much as possible of the default configuration, and only place self-contained additional snippets in place to do the things I wanted done differently. setxkbmap and rule files Thus began my voyage into the domain of rule files. But before we dive into those, let s take a look at setxkbmap. Despite the trivial invocation of e.g. setxkbmap us to install a standard US-American keyboard map, the command also takes arguments. More specifically, it allows you to specify the following high-level parameters, which determine the sequence of events between key press and an application receiving a KeyPress event:

• Model: the keyboard model, which defines which keys are where
• Layout: the keyboard layout, which defines what the keys actually are
• Variant: slight variantions in the layout
• Options: configurable aspects of keyboard features and possibilities

Thus, with the following command line, I would select a US layout with international (dead) keys for my Thinkpad keyboard, and switch to an alternate symbol group with the windows keys (more on that later):

setxkbmap -model thinkpad -layout us -variant intl -option grp:win_switch

In many cases, between all combinations of the aforementioned parameters, this is all you ever need. But I wanted more. If you append -print to the above command, it will print the keymap it would install, rather than installing it:

% setxkbmap -model thinkpad -layout us -variant intl -option grp:win_switch -print
xkb_keymap  
  xkb_keycodes    include "evdev+aliases(qwerty)"        ;
  xkb_types       include "complete"     ;
  xkb_compat      include "complete"     ;
  xkb_symbols     include "pc+us(intl)+inet(evdev)+group(win_switch)"    ;
  xkb_geometry    include "thinkpad(us)"         ;
 ;

There are two things to note:

1. The -option grp:win_switch argument has been turned into an additional include group(win_switch) on the xkb_symbols line, just like the model, layout, and variant are responsible for other aspects in the output.
2. The output seems related to what xkbcomp dumped into the xkb.dump file we created earlier. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the dump file is simply a pre-processed version of the keyboard map, with include instructions exploded.

At this point, it became clear to me that this was the correct way forward, and I started to investigate those points in order. The translation from parameters to an xkb_keymap stanza by setxkbmap is actually governed by a rule file. A rule is nothing more than a set of criteria, and what setxkbmap should do in case they all match. On a Debian system, you can find this file in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev, and /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.lst is a listing of all available parameter values. The xkb_symbols include line in the above xkb_keymap output is the result of the following rules in the first file, which setxkbmap had matched (from top to bottom) and processed:

! model         layout              =       symbols
  [...]
  *             *                   =       pc+%l(%v)
! model                             =       symbols
  *                                 =       +inet(evdev)
! option                            =       symbols
  [...]
  grp:win_switch                    =       +group(win_switch)

It should now not be hard to deduce the xkb_symbols include line quoted above, starting from the setxkbmap command line. I ll reproduce both for you for convenience:

setxkbmap -model thinkpad -layout us -variant intl -option grp:win_switch
xkb_symbols     include "pc+us(intl)+inet(evdev)+group(win_switch)"    ;

A short note about the syntax here: group(win_switch) in the symbols column simply references the xkb_symbols stanza named win_switch in the symbols file group (/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/group). Thus, the rules file maps parameters to sets of snippets to include, and the output of setxkbmap applies those rules to create the xkb_keymap output, to be processed by xkbcomp (which setxkbmap invokes implicitly, unless the -print argument was given on invocation). It seems that for a criteria (option, model, layout, ) to be honoured, it has to appear in the corresponding listing file, evdev.lst in this case. There is also evdev.xml, but I couldn t figure out its role.

Attaching symbols to keys I ended up creating a symbols file of reasonable size, which I won t discuss here. Instead, let s solve the following two tasks for the purpose of this document:

1. Make the Win-Hyphen key combination generate an en dash ( ), and Win-Shift-Hyphen an em dash ( ).
2. Let the Caps Lock key generate Mod4, which can be used e.g. to control the window manager.

To approach these two tasks, let s create a symbols file in ~/.xkb/symbols/xkbtest and add two stanzas to it:

partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "dashes"  
  key <AE11>  
    symbols[Group2] = [ endash, emdash ]
   ;
 ;
partial modifier_keys
xkb_symbols "caps_mod4"  
  replace key <CAPS>  
    [ VoidSymbol, VoidSymbol ]
   ;
  modifier_map Mod4   <CAPS>  ;
 ;

Now let me explain these in turn:

1. We used the option grp:win_switch earlier, which told xkb that we would like to use the windows keys to switch to group 2. In the custom symbols file, we now simply define the symbols to be generated for each key, when the second group has been selected. Key <AE11> is the hyphen key. To find out the names of all the other keys on your keyboard, you can use the following command:

   xkbprint -label name $DISPLAY -   gv -orientation=seascape -
   
   

   I had to declare the stanza partial because it is not a complete keyboard map, but can only be used to augment/modify other maps. I also declared it alphanumeric_keys to tell xkb that I would be modifying alphanumeric keys inside it. If I also wanted to change modifier keys, I would also specify modifier_keys. The rest should be straight-forward. You can get the names of available symbols from keysymdef.h (/usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h on a Debian system, package x11proto-core-dev), stripping the XK_ prefix.
2. The second stanza replaces the Caps Lock key definition and prevents it from generating symbols (VoidSymbol). The important aspect of the second stanza is the modifier_map instruction, which causes the key to generate the Mod4 modifier event, which I can later use to bind key combinations for my window manager (awesome).

The easiest way to verify those changes is to put the setxkbmap -print output of the keyboard map you would like to use as a baseline into ~/.xkb/keymap/xkbtest, and append snippets to be included to the xkb_symbols line, e.g.:

"pc+us(intl)+inet(evdev)+group(win_switch)+xkbtest(dashes)+xkbtest(caps_mod4)"

When you try to load this keyboard map with xkbcomp, it will fail because it cannot find the xkbtest symbol definition file. You have to let the tool know where to look, by appending a path to its search list (note the use of $HOME instead of ~, which the shell would not expand):

xkbcomp -I$HOME/.xkb ~/.xkb/keymap/xkbtest $DISPLAY

You can use xev to verify the results, or just type Win-Hyphen into a terminal; does it produce ? By the way, I found xev much more useful for such purposes when invoked as follows (thanks to Penny for the idea):

xev   sed -ne '/^KeyPress/,/^$/p'

Unfortunately, xev does not give any indication of which modifier symbols are generated. I have found no other way to verify the outcome, other than to tell my window manager to do something in response to e.g. Mod4-Enter, reloaded it, and then tried it out.

Rules again, and why I did not use them in the end Once I got this far, I proceeded to add option-to-symbol-snippet mappings to the rules file, and added each option to the listing file too. A few bugs [[!debbugs 524512 desc=later]], I finally had setxkbmap spit out the right xkb_keymap and could install the new keyboard map with xkbcomp, like so:

setxkbmap -I$HOME/.xkb [...] -print   xkbcomp -I$HOME/xkb - :0

I wrote a small script to automatically do that at the start of the X session and could have gone to play outside, if it hadn t been for the itch I felt due to the entire rule file stored in my configuration. I certainly did not like that, but I could also not find a way to extend a rule file with additional rules. When I looked at the aforementioned script again, it suddenly became obvious that I was going a far longer path than I had to. Even though the rule system is powerful and allows me to e.g. automatically include symbol maps to remap keys on my Thinkpad, based on the keyboard model I configured, the benefit (if any) did not justify the additional complexity. In the end, I simplified the script that loads the keyboard map, and defined a default xkb_keymap, as well as one for the Thinkpad, wich I identify by its fully-qualified hostname. If a specific file is available for a given host, it is used. Otherwise, the script uses the default.

/tmp/lab announces the second Hacker Space Festival
(Paris, 26-30 June 2009) Hacker Space Festival 2009 Call For Proposals HSF2009 In 2008, we organized HSF[1] on the spot, as an ad-hoc meeting for
hackerspaces-related networks, technical and artistic research emerging
from them and social questionning arising from them. This sudden
experiment proved to be a huge success, as much as on the
self-organizing level as on the participants and meetings quality, as
well as the emotionally-charged ambient, the kind of which you make
fond memories. The 2008 edition generated a strong emulation in France, from its
historical role as the first official hack meeting there, and in Europe
with the subsequent creation of the Hacker Space Brussels[2], the
rapprochement with The Fiber in Amsterdam and the hackerspaces.org[3]
network. Initiatives of hackerspace openings in Grenoble or Lille, or
the upcoming FrHack[4] conference show an actual enthusiasm in the
French hackers community that was doomed to the underground not so
long ago. We salute these initiatives and their diversity! Soon enough, we wanted to reiterate the HSF experience : however, it
was out of the question to institutionalize this temporary autonomous
zone, nor make it an ersatz of the previous edition, nor even to wrap
it into an elite or underground aura. On the opposite, we ardently
desire; and especially to explore further, in all directions some
lesser known domains (see below) et foster meeting and sharing around
experiences at the confluence of art, technology and politics. The world financial crisis, the decay of democracy in Europe, the
obscurantism, paranoia and lack of culture presiding over legislation
(Internet and Reaction Err Creation Law[5][6]) seem a fertile
environment for the sensible development of new (social ) life forms.
Quick! Let s rest for a few days in jubilation and ecstasy to take a
deep breathe of freedom under the indelicate smells of the medicine
factory nearby! For if the public space is shrinking to oblivion, where any side-step
becomes suspect, and that, from an early age (deviant behavior
detection in nursery school), where moving without a mobile phone
becomes suspect (hello you Julien Coupat[7], a French political
prisoner in France!), there s a domain that the Leviathan would have a
lot of trouble to contain, and for a reason: that of sensitivity. Even
the desperate attempts of the State to block the free and premonitory
expression of sense (hello you Demeure du Chaos![8]) cannot do anything
against a loud laughter or a knowing glance, a sensual kiss or an
explosion of colors. Sensitivity, we could say, is what is left to a human being when she
has nothing anymore, and differenciates her from the body corporate or
the institution, that are, in essence, devoid of it. Therefore, Art
definitely remains the public space to share between humans, and only
between us. And if it the last one to share, we propose to explore it
and take it over during the upcoming edition of the Hacker Space
Festival, from the 26th to 30th of June, 2009 at Vitry sur Seine[9]. ========================================================================
Keynote Speakers: Sergey Grim and Larry Fake with Eric Schmoudt
Groogle Summer of Crode, Survivor style
VLC, I vote against you because you really fucked up when ========================================================================
== W A N T E D ========================================================= Focus on solutions rather than problems. * The Final (Hardware) Frontier: Open FPGA Cores, Reverse Engineering
* Designer Religions and Creative Beliefs Systems
* WiFiDoors & WiFi System-on-Chip controllers firmware hacking,
infection & backdooring
* Telecom Core Network Equipment Reverse Engineering: MSC, STP,
Switches,
* Algebraic Attacks and Modern Cryptography Attacks
* Autonomous, Parasitic and Viral Drones
* Enhanced or Infected Reality Swarms
* Auto-Builders / Self-Fabrication
* Embedded OS breakins stories & recipes
* Actualization rather than mere concepts
* FPGA & ASIC hacking / backdooring
* Cloud+Privacy+Open Source: O Brave New World?
* Explosion-Proof clothing
* Radio Appz & Hackz: Mesh @ RF Layer 1-3
* Database & Privacy
* Problematic & Ethical Open Source/Content Licenses
* Institutional Relationships: Lobbying or Licking?
* Non Lethal Protection (anti-taser vests?)
* Survival in the Age of the Ministry of Immigration and National
Identity
* Mental asylum improvised visit
* Open Source Legacy Media(TM) Production Solutions (TV, Radio, Press,
DRM)
* Gas Sensors & Environmental Benchmarking
* Building Hackerspaces Without Money
* Milsatcomm hacking: Military satellites shots, broken birds in the
sky
* Other research topics on security and insecurity
* Academics and Hackers
* Organics and Fermentation
* Clean Food in Tainted Environment
* Low Impact Energy & Recycling
* Media Sandwich: layers of crap makes good food?
* Deconstructing Carla Sarkozy
* Knitting DIY Factory (jazzy, eh?)
* Signs of life among industrial wasteland
* Hallucinogenic & Computing: Can you Code on Acid?
* Mesh Networking (Wireless BattleMesh Royal!)
* Legal Sabotage: When Democracy Needs You And anything that does not fit. ========================================================================
== P R O P O S E ======================================================= Send you contributions to HSF2009-CFP@lists.tmplab.org + Type of the proposal: 1. conference (45min. presentation + 10min. for questions)
2. workshop / demo (30min. 2 heures)
3. installation / performance (music, plastic, sound, video) Lightning talks can be proposed and organized until the last moment,
according to available space and schedule, in the form of BarCamps or
Blitz Conferences. + Required Information: * Title of the presentation
* Type (see above)
* Language : French or English
* Name of speaker(s)
* Affiliation (organization / company)
* Short biography
* Abstract (5 to 10 lines)
* Topics / Keywords
* Includes a demo? YES NO
* Release during the festival? YES NO
* Internet connection required? YES NO + Acceptable Formats * Open Document
* PDF
* Plain Text
* RTF + Agenda * beginning of proposals : now
* end of proposals : 01 May 2009
* selection notification : 07 May 2009
* publication of program : 15 May 2009 + Evaluation criteria for proposals: 1. Innovating Topic
2. Open Technology
3. Demonstration / Live Act
4. DIY Reproducibility
5. Fun Potential The Programming Committee resembles that of last year
See : http://hackerspace.net/committee ========================================================================
== V E N U E =========================================================== /tmp/lab
6 Bis rue Leon Geffroy
94400 Vitry sur Seine
France http://hackerspace.net/directions ========================================================================
== P A R T I C I P A T E =============================================== Email : http://lists.tmplab.org/listinfo.cgi/hsf2009-talk-tmplab.org
CFPmail: HSF2009-CFP@lists.tmplab.org
IRC : irc://irc.freenode.net/frlab
Jabber : xmpp:hsf2009@space.cepheide.org?join
Wiki : http://hackerspace.net/hsf2009 ========================================================================
== L I N K S =========================================================== The CFP is available online at http://hackerspace.net/cfp [1] http://hackerspace.net/hsf2008
[2] http://hsb.wikidot.com/
[3] http://hackerspaces.org/
[4] http://www.frhack.org/
[5] http://jaimelesautistes.fr/
[6] http://laquadrature.net/
[7] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Coupat
[8] http://www.demeureduchaos.org/
[9] http://hackerspace.net/
Philippe Langlois
Email: philippelanglois@free.fr
PGP Key: 8DAEE244

This conference looks like a blast. I am pretty much squirreling away for the summer to finish the first draft of my book now that I have a due date so I can t go to all these amazing events but I guess next time??

This is a continuation from before. Before I go plunging into writing code for a generic vcs-pkg implementation, I wanted to take a close look at my current, working, non-generic implementation: making sure that the generic implementation can support at least this one concrete work-flow will keep me grounded. One of the features of my home grown porcelain for building package has been that I use a fixed layout for all the packages I maintain. There is a top level directory for all working trees. Each package gets a sub-directory under this working area. And in each package sub-directory, are the upstream versions, the checked out VCS working directory, and anything else package related. With this layout, knowing the package name is enough to locate the working directory. This enable me to, for example, hack away at a package in Emacs, and when done, go to any open terminal window, and say stage_release kernel-package or tag_releases ucf without needing to know what the current directory is (usually, the packages working directory is several levels deep /usr/local/git/debian/make-dfsg/make-dfsg-3.91, for instance. However, this is less palatable for a generic tool imposing a directory structure layout is pretty heavy. And I guess I can always create a function called cdwd, or something, to take away the tedium of typing out long cd commands. Anyway, looking at my code, there is the information that the scripts seem to need in order to do their work.

• Staging area. This is where software to be built is exported (and this area is visible from my build virtual machine).
  • User specified (configuration)
• Working Area. This is the location where all my packaging work happens. Each package I work on has a sub-directory in here, and the working directories for each package live in the package sub-directory. Note: Should not be needed.
  • User specified.
• Working directory. This is the checked out tree from the VCS, and this is the place where we get the source tree from which the package can be built.
  • Since we know the location of the working are, if the package name is known, we can just look in the package s sub-directory in the working area.
    • For rpm based sources, look for the spec file
    • For Debian sources, locate debian/rules
  • If package name is not known, look for spec or debian/rules in the current directory, and parse either the spec file or debian/changelog.
  • If in a VCS directory, look for the base of the tree
    • tla tree-root
    • bzr info
    • git rev-parse --show cdup
    • hg root
    • You have to climb the tree for subversion
  • If you are in a debian directory, and changelog and rules files exist
  Then, look for the spec file or debian/rules in the base directory
• package name
  • User specified, on the command line
  • If in the working directory of the package, can be parsed from the spec or changelog files.
• upstream tar archive
  • Usually located in the parent directory of the working directory (the package specific sub-directory of the working area)
  • If pristine-tar is in use, given two trees (branches, commits. etc), namely:
    • a tree for upstream (default: the branch ~upstream~)
    • a tree for the delta (default: the branch ~pristine-tar~)
    The tree can be generated
  • Given an upstream tree (default: the branch ~upstream~), a tar archive can be generated, but is likely to be not bit-for-bit identical to the original tar archive.

So, if I do away with the whole working area layout convention, this can be reduced to just requiring the user to:

• Specify Staging area
• Call the script in the working directory (dpkg-buildpackage imposes this too).
• Either use pristine-tar or have the upstream tar archive in the parent directory of the working directory

Hmm. One user specified directory, where the results are dumped. I can live with that. However, gitpkg has a different concept: it works purely on the git objects, you feed it upto three tree objects, the first being the tree with sources to build, and the second and third trees being looked at only if the upstream tar archive can not be located, and passes the trees to pristine tar to re-construct the upstram tar. The package name and version are constructed after the source-tar archive is extracted to the staging area. I like the minimality of this. This is continued here.

For a research project, I'm looking for some real-world time series data. Time-series are an interesting thing to study, however it is hard to get access to interesting non-trivial real-world data.I was wondering if some people could contribute me some summarized web access data; no URLs or IP addresses.The data I'd like to get can best be explained by the preprocessing step:

...   perl -ne '/\[(\d+\/\w+\/\d 4 :\d\d):\d\d/
&& print $1."\n";'   sort   uniq -c

(Sorry if you aren't fluent in regexp - it extracts the date and hour out of an Apache default log file, nothing else. These lines are then summarized by counting their unique appearances.)That should produce 24 lines per day (one per hour), looking like this:

  count day-of-month/month/year:hour

It would be cool if you could send me some series for a couple of sites, if you happen to be in the position to provide this data. The data should cover at least a few weeks, the longer the better even up to a few years.Too small sites are however not very useful but might be too noisy (so probably not the personal home page of your mom). If you are providing a larger number of series, you are of course free to include them.I don't care much about what the site actually contains, I'd just ask you to give a tiny amount of meta information:

• Server timezone if not UTC
• Typical user timezone (if applicable, that mostly applies to 'regional' sites)
• Coarse classification of site (e.g. "product website", "web service", "search engine", "company site", "OSS software site" or something like that ...)
• Redistribution permission (if possible; most likely I'll only use data series where redistribution is allowed, since some conferences ask you kindly to provide such material)
• Your email address will be withheld, to increase anonymity of the data

Data use:The main project idea is to evaluate different distance metrics in their capability of separting the different data sources, assuming that there is some difference in the shape in these curves. A different problem can be constructed by breaking the series into chunks covering approximately a day and then trying do separate different days, starting hours of the series (or offset server timezone vs. user timezone) and/or weekdays from weekends.In our experiments, we've come to the conclusion that the experimental results are most interesting when there is a sufficient number of classes; so I'd like to get like 20 different interesting data series. At the same time, the series should be long enough, so I can break them into multiple chunks to have a reasonable number of 'sub-series' per class. If I have really long series, or e.g. series covering the same site but from multiple servers, I could even experiment with taking sample of different length from these sets.(Say I have series covering 2 years, that is ~17k samples, from 3 servers, then I can take 51 disjoint sub-series of length 1000, or 102 of length 500, ...)But it's obviously not possible for me to collect this data myself - I don't operate two dozen of such sites myself ...An extra project I've been considering some time is some peak prediction for web accesses. Say you're running some fast growing site, wouldn't it be useful to have a prediction when the number of accesses will likely hit some magical limit (and e.g. overload your server) so you can increase your capacity on time? Of course it would be more sensible to apply this prediction e.g. onto CPU usage, e.g. predicting when your system might hit 90% load average over a 5 minute window in regular operation. Network bandwidth and disk IO also come into mind. You get the idea.Please send them via email to erich.schubert AT gmail comThank you.[P.S. Already recieved the first series, thank you! I can take care of sorting myself, no need to worry about that. And yes, I'm aware that the series will probably all be quite similar - common computer usage patterns such as work hours - but that is common in real world data and part of the challenge. Separting apples from dinosaurs is not a challenge.]

Here is the tool for you.

Make your Wifi-open but not painfully slow (at Eyebeam)

I've previously mentioned my plans on redoing my blog. Well, I've settled down on some design issues already (posts will be stored as mini Atom feeds, which makes the generation of Atom feeds for the blog and categories trivial, and gives me maximum flexibility. I already have a working converter for my existing blog to Atom posts.)Generating static HTML pages from that will be easily possible using an XSTL transformation (for example), and I got the feedback that I could just use Google AppEngine for blog comments, so my actual blog could remain static-only (and thus much more secure and reliable). Any attack/spammer/bot can then only kill the comment functionality, not my own site.Which brings me to another design consideration: the editing widget. Either for the blog comment application, for writing my own blog entries (via a https protected script or whatever) or maybe for a small CMS I've been thinking about - having a reliable HTML in-browser editing widget is something I could use every now and then (well, I'm not doing much Web stuff anymore these days).Geniisoft has a good overview over in-browser (aka: Through The Web, TTW) editors. The top candidates seem to be:

• FCKeditor
• TinyMCE
• Xinha

I've heard before of FCKeditor and TinyMCE; I think I've been on the Xinha page before, too. However, comments on them have not always been good.To some extend they all seem to have (to some extend) feature creep which usually is a bad sign - most often this means that there are security issues in one or another module or plugin.TinyMCE for example has been described as "a bit of a pain" and "a tad clumsy" on the GSoC mailing list. I have had less fights with it than with the Debian Wikis (MoinMoin) markup language though.I'm not looking for anything as big as these - I just need an editor that allows for some basic formatting (bold etc., links) and that produces reasonable XHTML output. I'll be feeding the output through some custom cleanup script anyway, which will kill disallowed code. So I don't want any editor which allows the user to create code that will then be killed afterwards.Any personal experiences with any of these, or an important alternative that I might have missed (no PHP involved, please!) - email me (no comments on blog) at erich AT debian org.Update: I've received a couple of pointers. Please don't send me links to projects that are not actively maintained anymore - I don't want to care about having to fix bugs in the editor widget myself.One link I've received twice is actually quite impressive: WYMeditor. It doesn't try to look like a word processor, but actually is more of a semantic editor. Much more what I'm looking for than any of the others. I've also received a link to the Yahoo! UI Library Editor, which is quite clutter-free, but in the default setup at least very text-formatting oriented, not very semantic (that doesn't mean you couldn't change it that way, I guess you can). I was also pointed to Dojo, but that framework is totally feature creep (which also explains why it loads so slowly I guess), and the last time I looked at it's source code, I had some WTF moments - code quality at least outside of core doesn't seem to be very high (Yes, that code implements the "mod 7" operation using list shifts instead of a simple arithmetic operation).Looks like I'll give the first try to WYMeditor. Update #2: the code seems to be rather ... complex. I'm looking for something neat and clean; it doesn't need to bring along yet another XHTML schema and validator ... Maybe I should try one of the others first?

There are a lot of little git scripts and tools being written by a lot of people. Including a lot of tools written by people I have a lot of respect for. And yet, they are mostly useless for me. Take git-pkg. Can t use it. Does not work with git submodules. Then there is our nice, new, shiny, incredibly bodacious 3.0 (git) source format. Again, useless: does not cater to submodules. I like submodules. They are nice. They allow for projects to take upstream sources, add Debian packaging instructions, and put them into git. They allow you to stitch together disparate projects, with different authors, and different release schedules and goals, into a coherent, integrated, software project. Yes, I use git submodules for my Debian packaging. I think it is conceptually and practically the correct solution. Why submodules? Well, one of the first things I discovered was that most of the packaging for my packages was very similar but not identical. Unfortunately, the previous incarnation of my packages with a monolithic rules file in each ./debian/ directory, it was easy for the rules files in packages to get out of sync and there was no easy way to merge changes in the common portions an any sane automated fashion. The ./debian/ directories for all my packages package that they are instrumental in packaging. So, since I make the ./debian/ directories branches of the same project, it is far easier to package a new package, or to roll out a new feature when policy changes the same commit can be applied across all the branches, and thus all my source packages, easily. With a separate debian-dir project, I can separate the management of the packaging rules from the package code itself. Also, I have abstracted out the really common bits across all my packages into a ./debian.common directory, which is yet another project, and included in as a submodule in all the packages so there is a central place to change the common bits, without having to duplicate my efforts 30-odd times. Now people are complaining since they have no idea how to clone my package repositories, since apparently no one actually pays attention to a file called .gitmodules, and even when they do, they, and the tools they use, have no clue what to do with it. I am tired of sending emails with one off-cluebats, and I am building my own porcelain around something I hope to present as a generic vcs-pkg implementation soon. The firs step is a wrapper around git-clone, that understands git submodules. So, here is the browsable code (there is a link in there to the downloadable sources too). Complete with a built in man page. Takes the same arguments as git-clone, but with fewer options. Have fun.

django-dumpslow is a reusable Django application that logs requests that take a long time to execute and provides an tool to summarise the resulting data. Modelled on mysqldumpslow, django-dumpslow is intended as a tool to determine which parts of a project might benefit most from optimisation and to provide valuable empirical data. The tool groups requests that are similar by exploiting Django's ability to reverse URLs - requests that use the same view are not counted distinctly. Views can then be grouped by the total accumulated time spent by that view or simply by their raw frequency in the logs. An example output is:

$ ./manage.py dumpslow
View                                         Accumulated time
=============================================================
example.views.slow                                     92.88
/unknown (unreversible url)                            16.84

If the log entries contain timestamps then django-dumpslow can optionally limit queries by a user-defined interval. This can be useful for generating regular reports of slow pages, perhaps by regularly emailing the "top 10 worst pages" to a development mailing list. Source, tarballs, etc. Patches welcome.

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 15 April) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted, but a bit late, so there s another discussion about that going on behind the scenes. The frustrating thing is that fixing the announcements doesn t really need selling out to Google or anything complicated - simply using at on a server to schedule the email would work I know, because that s pretty much what I do at TTLLP for routine member emails. Only the secretary has posted any report at the time of writing and there are no discussion items. There are two sets of minutes up for approval, but one contains at least one error which I ve already described by email. Should be a short meeting, though. Once again (aren t Wednesday evenings awful for me?), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting. Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

Consider the following mod_rewrite configuration :

RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/FR/fr
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/common/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /FR/fr$1 [PT,L]

The need here, is to get anything that wouldn t begin with /FR/fr from $DOCROOT/FR/fr (through, possibly, any other module rules, which was important in the setup where these rules were), except if they begin with /common/ or is /favicon.ico. Depending on the requests pattern, reordering the RewriteConds can be better. Anyways, the case at hand was to massively duplicate this setup over different countries and languages. Basically, domain.fr/foo/bar would need to come from $DOCROOT/FR/fr/foo/bar, domain.co.uk/foo/bar from $DOCROOT/GB/en/foo/bar, while anydomain/common/foo/bar would come from $DOCROOT/common/foo/bar. In such a case, you have a lot of possible solutions, each of which has its pros and cons.

• Create a virtual host per domain, duplicating all the rules in each of them.
  

  <VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.fr
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/FR/fr
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/common/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /FR/fr$1 [PT,L]
</VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.co.uk
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/GB/en
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/common/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /GB/en$1 [PT,L]
</VirtualHost>
( )

  Pros: quite efficient for execution time. Cons: Doesn t scale very well for humans : a lot of virtual hosts and rewrite rules to maintain ; if the list of urls that don t need rewrite increases, all set of rules need to be updated.
• Put all the rewrite rules into a single virtual host, adding a condition on the SERVER_NAME:
  

  <VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.fr
ServerAlias domain.co.uk RewriteCond % SERVER_NAME =domain.fr
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/FR/fr
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/common/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /FR/fr$1 [PT,L] RewriteCond % SERVER_NAME =domain.co.uk
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/GB/en
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/common/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /GB/en$1 [PT,L] (...)
</VirtualHost>

  Pros: are there ?. Cons: Doesn t scale very well : a lot of rewrite rules to maintain ; rewrite rules being executed sequencially, the more domains there are, the more checks are done for the last domains ; if the list of urls that don t need rewrite increases, all set of rules need to be updated.
• Same as above, refactoring the common parts.
  

  <VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.fr
ServerAlias domain.co.uk RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI ^/common/ [OR]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI ^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule .* - [L] RewriteCond % SERVER_NAME =domain.fr
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/FR/fr
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /FR/fr$1 [PT,L] RewriteCond % SERVER_NAME =domain.co.uk
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/GB/en
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /GB/en$1 [PT,L] (...)
</VirtualHost>

  Pros: gives a canonical place for urls that don t need rewrite. Cons: Doesn t scale very well : a lot of rewrite rules to maintain ; rewrite rules being executed sequencially, the more domains there are, the more checks are done for the last domains.
• Use a RewriteMap.
  Pros: Scales better ; gives a canonical place for urls that don t need rewrite. Cons: a separate file to maintain ; can be tricky to setup.

The main problem with mod_rewrite is that there is no way to use variables or back references in the test patterns. In our case, we d like to be able to do something like this:

RewriteMap l10n txt:l10n.map # switch to dbm when necessary
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^$ l10n:% SERVER_NAME
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/common/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $ l10n:% SERVER_NAME $1 [PT,L]

Or

RewriteMap l10n txt:l10n.map # switch to dbm when necessary
RewriteCond $ l10n:% SERVER_NAME ^(.+)$
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^%1
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/common/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ %1$1 [PT,L]

The map file would have on each line a domain name followed by the corresponding url start (/FR/fr for domain.fr, etc.). Unfortunately, the above setup is not possible. A way around this lack of functionnality is to use some nice perl regexp trick.

RewriteMap l10n txt:l10n.map # switch to dbm when necessary
RewriteCond $ l10n:% SERVER_NAME ^(.+)$
RewriteCond %1% REQUEST_URI !^(.+)\1
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/common/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI !^/favicon.ico$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ %1$1 [PT,L]

As you can see, only the second RewriteCond differs. What we really want to test is whether the % REQUEST_URI begins with the proper url start or not. Let s say we re considering domain.fr and the map gave us /FR/fr. Following the first RewriteCond, %1 contains /FR/fr. At the second RewriteCond, if % REQUEST_URI begins with /FR/fr then %1% REQUEST_URI begins with /FR/fr/FR/fr. Otherwise, it will only begin with /FR/fr. What we can test, then, is whether this %1% REQUEST_URI aggregate contains a repeating pattern at its beginning. This is exactly what the perl regexp does: it captures at least one character at the beginning of the tested string (^(.+)), and wants to find this captured string again (\1). It is worth mentioning that this obviously falls flat when the url start itself contains a repeating pattern (e.g. /fr/fr instead of /FR/fr). As we want the RewriteRule to work only when our % REQUEST_URI does not begin with /FR/fr, we negate the regexp, which means nothing will actually be captured, such that %1 in the RewriteRule will still be the last captured text, from the very first RewriteCond. Note that if all the tested url starts are the same length and/or pattern, it may be worth changing the regexp to be more precise (and faster to match or not). Such as ^(/../..)\1 in our present case.

Item #1 Say you want to do something like take a quiz to tell you what Star Wars character you are, and have to result posted to your wall. It would make sense for Facebook to prompt you for authorization for the app to make a one-time post to your wall. But instead, they ask you for permission to pull your profile information, photos, your friends info, and other content that it requires to work. And we have no idea what this other content is. So yes, in order to be told that you most closely resemble Storm Trooper Extra #3, you must let the app developer have access to all your updates, your list of friends, your hometown, email address, whatever else only your close friends can see. Why can t Facebook make this a tad less invasive? Item #2 I also don t understand why people click Allow to these apps, having no idea just who is getting access to their information or what information they re getting. And Terah thinks I m being paranoid because I said that criminals probably are writing cute facebook apps ah well.

========================================================================
/tmp/lab announces the second Hacker Space Festival
(Paris, 26-30 June 2009)
======================================================================== Hacker Space Festival 2009 Call For Proposals HSF2009 In 2008, we organized HSF[1] on the spot, as an ad-hoc meeting for
hackerspaces-related networks, technical and artistic research emerging
from them and social questionning arising from them. This sudden
experiment proved to be a huge success, as much as on the
self-organizing level as on the participants and meetings quality, as
well as the emotionally-charged ambient, the kind of which you make
fond memories. The 2008 edition generated a strong emulation in France, from its
historical role as the first official hack meeting there, and in Europe
with the subsequent creation of the Hacker Space Brussels[2], the
rapprochement with The Fiber in Amsterdam and the hackerspaces.org[3]
network. Initiatives of hackerspace openings in Grenoble or Lille, or
the upcoming FrHack[4] conference show an actual enthusiasm in the
French hackers community that was doomed to the underground not so
long ago. We salute these initiatives and their diversity! Soon enough, we wanted to reiterate the HSF experience : however, it
was out of the question to institutionalize this temporary autonomous
zone, nor make it an ersatz of the previous edition, nor even to wrap
it into an elite or underground aura. On the opposite, we ardently
desire; and especially to explore further, in all directions some
lesser known domains (see below) et foster meeting and sharing around
experiences at the confluence of art, technology and politics. The world financial crisis, the decay of democracy in Europe, the
obscurantism, paranoia and lack of culture presiding over legislation
(Internet and Reaction Err Creation Law[5][6]) seem a fertile
environment for the sensible development of new (social ) life forms.
Quick! Let s rest for a few days in jubilation and ecstasy to take a
deep breathe of freedom under the indelicate smells of the medicine
factory nearby! For if the public space is shrinking to oblivion, where any side-step
becomes suspect, and that, from an early age (deviant behavior
detection in nursery school), where moving without a mobile phone
becomes suspect (hello you Julien Coupat[7], a French political
prisoner in France!), there s a domain that the Leviathan would have a
lot of trouble to contain, and for a reason: that of sensitivity. Even
the desperate attempts of the State to block the free and premonitory
expression of sense (hello you Demeure du Chaos![8]) cannot do anything
against a loud laughter or a knowing glance, a sensual kiss or an
explosion of colors. Sensitivity, we could say, is what is left to a human being when she
has nothing anymore, and differenciates her from the body corporate or
the institution, that are, in essence, devoid of it. Therefore, Art
definitely remains the public space to share between humans, and only
between us. And if it the last one to share, we propose to explore it
and take it over during the upcoming edition of the Hacker Space
Festival, from the 26th to 30th of June, 2009 at Vitry sur Seine[9]. ========================================================================
Keynote Speakers: Sergey Grim and Larry Fake with Eric Schmoudt
Groogle Summer of Crode, Survivor style
VLC, I vote against you because you really fucked up when ========================================================================
== W A N T E D ========================================================= Focus on solutions rather than problems. * The Final (Hardware) Frontier: Open FPGA Cores, Reverse Engineering
* Designer Religions and Creative Beliefs Systems
* WiFiDoors & WiFi System-on-Chip controllers firmware hacking,
infection & backdooring
* Telecom Core Network Equipment Reverse Engineering: MSC, STP,
Switches,
* Algebraic Attacks and Modern Cryptography Attacks
* Autonomous, Parasitic and Viral Drones
* Enhanced or Infected Reality Swarms
* Auto-Builders / Self-Fabrication
* Embedded OS breakins stories & recipes
* Actualization rather than mere concepts
* FPGA & ASIC hacking / backdooring
* Cloud+Privacy+Open Source: O Brave New World?
* Explosion-Proof clothing
* Radio Appz & Hackz: Mesh @ RF Layer 1-3
* Database & Privacy
* Problematic & Ethical Open Source/Content Licenses
* Institutional Relationships: Lobbying or Licking?
* Non Lethal Protection (anti-taser vests?)
* Survival in the Age of the Ministry of Immigration and National
Identity
* Mental asylum improvised visit
* Open Source Legacy Media(TM) Production Solutions (TV, Radio, Press,
DRM)
* Gas Sensors & Environmental Benchmarking
* Building Hackerspaces Without Money
* Milsatcomm hacking: Military satellites shots, broken birds in the
sky
* Other research topics on security and insecurity
* Academics and Hackers
* Organics and Fermentation
* Clean Food in Tainted Environment
* Low Impact Energy & Recycling
* Media Sandwich: layers of crap makes good food?
* Deconstructing Carla Sarkozy
* Knitting DIY Factory (jazzy, eh?)
* Signs of life among industrial wasteland
* Hallucinogenic & Computing: Can you Code on Acid?
* Mesh Networking (Wireless BattleMesh Royal!)
* Legal Sabotage: When Democracy Needs You And anything that does not fit. ========================================================================
== P R O P O S E ======================================================= Send you contributions to HSF2009-CFP@lists.tmplab.org + Type of the proposal: 1. conference (45min. presentation + 10min. for questions)
2. workshop / demo (30min. 2 heures)
3. installation / performance (music, plastic, sound, video) Lightning talks can be proposed and organized until the last moment,
according to available space and schedule, in the form of BarCamps or
Blitz Conferences. + Required Information: * Title of the presentation
* Type (see above)
* Language : French or English
* Name of speaker(s)
* Affiliation (organization / company)
* Short biography
* Abstract (5 to 10 lines)
* Topics / Keywords
* Includes a demo? YES NO
* Release during the festival? YES NO
* Internet connection required? YES NO + Acceptable Formats * Open Document
* PDF
* Plain Text
* RTF + Agenda * beginning of proposals : now
* end of proposals : 01 May 2009
* selection notification : 07 May 2009
* publication of program : 15 May 2009 + Evaluation criteria for proposals: 1. Innovating Topic
2. Open Technology
3. Demonstration / Live Act
4. DIY Reproducibility
5. Fun Potential The Programming Committee resembles that of last year
See : http://hackerspace.net/committee ========================================================================
== V E N U E =========================================================== /tmp/lab
6 Bis rue Leon Geffroy
94400 Vitry sur Seine
France http://hackerspace.net/directions ========================================================================
== P A R T I C I P A T E =============================================== Email : http://lists.tmplab.org/listinfo.cgi/hsf2009-talk-tmplab.org
CFPmail: HSF2009-CFP@lists.tmplab.org
IRC : irc://irc.freenode.net/frlab
Jabber : xmpp:hsf2009@space.cepheide.org?join
Wiki : http://hackerspace.net/hsf2009 ========================================================================
== L I N K S =========================================================== The CFP is available online at http://hackerspace.net/cfp [1] http://hackerspace.net/hsf2008
[2] http://hsb.wikidot.com/
[3] http://hackerspaces.org/
[4] http://www.frhack.org/
[5] http://jaimelesautistes.fr/
[6] http://laquadrature.net/
[7] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Coupat
[8] http://www.demeureduchaos.org/
[9] http://hackerspace.net/
Philippe Langlois
Email: philippelanglois@free.fr
PGP Key: 8DAEE244