20 months ago I started the LUV Hardware Library [1]. The aim of the project is to provide a repository of free spare parts for computers for the use of club members. People who have parts that are good but which they can t use can donate them and others who need such parts can take them. Some people have criticised my choice of the name Hardware Library because the word is associated with borrowing while with my Hardware Library it is expected that noone will return the item that they take. The Wikipedia page about libraries is worth reading, my interpretation of that is that the essential aspect of a library is that it is a public collection of items that are useful for study and that borrowing is just one thing that can be done. A book library could consist of a service of printing free books on demand (anyone could do this with access to The Gutenberg Project [2] and a printer) or of just making them available to download. Many libraries don t allow books to be borrowed, they just allow them to be studied and copied in the library. Also every general public library has reference items that can t be borrowed, it s typical for a library to have a full encyclopedia which is not available to be borrowed. Also with the Hardware Library people feel obliged to give something if they take something (as happens with a geocache), so there is an issue of returning something. My main aims with the Hardware Library were to save people money on parts and to help the environment by reducing the need to buy new computers when old ones can be upgraded and remain in service. My next aim was to help people learn about hardware by providing free parts, when a mistake has no financial cost people are more willing to experiment and will learn more. I believe that those aims have been achieved. More Successful Than Expected One thing that surprised me is the social aspect that developed. I had expected that most people would just find some parts that they need and not look at it again for some months. I had also anticipated that some people would poll the Hardware Library every month in the hope that a part they needed might appear. I didn t expect that people would look through it every month because they just like looking at old hardware. I also didn t expect groups of people to hang out by the Hardware Library to discuss various issues related to PC hardware and Linux. During the breaks in the main meeting the location of the Hardware Library often becomes a focus for discussions of various issues related to Linux and hardware. I think that this is really advancing the aims of LUV [3] and I think that members of other LUGs should experiment with similar projects. Starting this didn t require any special skill or authority. I just started bringing a briefcase full of parts to meetings and offering them to whoever was interested. Any member of any LUG can do the same. To start something like this you wouldn t even need a collection of parts, you could just bring a box and ask for donations.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/03/05/luv-hardware-library/
• [2] http://www.gutenberg.org/
• [3] http://luv.asn.au/

Review: Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg & Nell Scovell

Publisher:	Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright:	March 2013
ISBN:	0-385-34994-7
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	217

Lean In is normally listed as written only by Sheryl Sandberg, which is also what's on the dust jacket, but the inside cover says "with Nell Scovell." Given what that normally means for celebrity books, supported by comments in the acknowledgments, I'm listing it as co-written by Scovell. However, much of the book is written in the first person and is clearly meant to be Sandberg's voice, so I will mostly refer to Sandberg as the author for the rest of the review. I was unfair to this book. Lean In made quite a splash when it first came out, since the named author is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, a former vice president of Google, and one of the most prominent female executives in the business world. The subtitle is Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and the normal Internet summary was that it focused on how women could change their behavior to be more effective and successful in the business world. Throw in some ridiculous review hyperbole (one New York Times writer compared it to The Feminine Mystique, which is a bit like the comparison of every extruded fantasy product with The Lord of the Rings) and I was ready to hate this book. It's work advice from someone in a very privileged position, and it seemed to have a distinct whiff of victim-blaming. It's obvious, however, from the first few pages that Sandberg was very aware of this trap and had no intent of falling into it. This is hard: giving practical advice to women on how to navigate a sexist culture runs a severe risk of victim-blaming even with the best of intentions, particularly since part of the sexism of the culture is a pervasive impression that women aren't doing enough. But I think Lean In handles that about as well as one could while still writing a book focused on practical advice rather than revolutionary change. Sandberg is clear that many things women can do to help their careers shouldn't be necessary, and she takes some time, in each section, to talk about the shape of any structural unfairness that she's seen. What advice she offers here is clearly in the spirit of how to navigate a system that is unfair and unequal, but which can be navigated and can be made more fair by more women participating. This is a very practical book, with more in common with business self-help books than with feminist critiques. It's also a narrowly targeted book, not that you'd guess this from the number of copies it's sold and the sort of publicity it got. Lean In is advice to female executives about how to navigate the top levels of US business culture, with a strong eye for issues of feminism, gender-based double standards, and potential traps of self-sabotage. It offers a blend of encouragement, practical tips, and some forthright analysis that tries to bring to the surface internalized sexism and perceived barriers and limitations for female executives so that they can be addressed and hopefully overcome. It's not in any way a revolutionary book, either with respect to business culture or with respect to gender roles; rather, it's an open acknowledgment of a whole bunch of problems combined with practical advice for how to work around those problems until they can be solved. For the most part, it doesn't attempt to address how to solve the problems. There is nothing wrong with that as a focus for a book. Lean In has attracted a fair bit of criticism in some circles, but, after reading the book, I think a lot of that criticism is predicated on assuming different goals than this book actually has. Contrary to various glowing reviews, Lean In is not a book that's going to change the world; rather, it's a book that might help a narrow band of the population in a specific job and career path navigate problems of sexism and gender expectations and be more effective. Read in that light, it struck me as honest, open, considered, and well aware of its own limitations. Sandberg says repeatedly that many of the options she discusses simply aren't available to most women, and that women may not be in a position to be able to make the decisions she made. She's quite forthright about the limitations of her own experience and the limitations of the advice that she offers, and I think deserves full points for honesty. Similarly, when it comes to business culture, Lean In is not about changing that culture for the better. It's about navigating that culture as it exists. Here, I think Sandberg is less aware of the limitations of this perspective; there is far less acknowledgment in Lean In that executive culture may be inherently toxic as there is of the limitations that women face in business. But while Sandberg has an obvious blind spot, this is not a paean to overwork. It has some excellent advice about work-life balance, including the need to put strict limits on the amount of time one spends in the office and the necessity for someone to pick up substantial burdens in the home if one of the members of a household is going to pursue a business executive job. I was worried, going in, that Lean In would excuse, justify, or idealize the culture of exploitation so common with salaried jobs in the United States, but it really doesn't. As with feminism, it doesn't pick any deep fights, and those with a "kill it with fire" gut reaction towards US executive culture (such as myself) will find the bland acceptance of it irritating, but this is more of an issue with reader expectations than with the book. One should not expect a highway map to point out that trains are more efficient. So, I'm willing to stand up for Lean In to a degree. This is not a bad book. It's very readable, parts are quite interesting, and some of Sandberg's observations about the intersection of gender expectations and executive culture were worth hearing. I learned some things from it. But I think one should read it in full awareness of its limitations. This is a book of practical advice that will only be of direct use to 10% of the population, and which could be generalized with some effort to maybe 25%. It has little to say to women who are not in white-collar, professional jobs, and its applicability to women who aren't aiming for executive careers is a bit hazy. It's the kind of book that's full of anecdotes about how Sandberg got parking spots reserved for pregnant women at Google by talking to the founders about it, or about how to negotiate salary when offered an executive position, which are vaguely interesting but of dubious practical benefit to people who aren't offered jobs where salary and benefit negotiation is available. This isn't the fault of the book, but at times it is rather stunning how different (and how much more tractable) the world looks to someone with the wealth and personal connections that Sandberg has. (To her credit, Sandberg does seem to be aware of this and does acknowledge it.) If you are a female executive, or a male executive interested in developing your empathy and understanding of how institutional sexism affects your colleagues, I suspect Lean In would be quite helpful. If you're not, I think it's mostly a curiosity. But it's also well-written, well-organized, probably available in most libraries in the United States, and provides anecdotal data to help build a more complete picture of the concerns and experiences of female executives. Unless you're in the specific target audience, I'm not sure I'd recommend going out of your way to find it, but it's probably worth reading if it falls into your lap. Rating: 7 out of 10

The last few days I have been experimenting with the batman-adv mesh technology. I want to gain some experience to see if it will fit the Freedombox project, and together with my neighbors try to build a mesh network around the park where I live. Batman-adv is a layer 2 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch. My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv. So instead, I started playing with a Raspberry Pi, and tried to get it working as a mesh node. My idea is to use it to create a mesh node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh network. This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh. This in turn is useful for Android phones using the Serval Project voip client, allowing every one around the playground to phone and message each other for free. The reason is that Android phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted. But if they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to every client on the local network. To get this working, I've created a debian package meshfx-node and a script build-rpi-mesh-node to create the Raspberry Pi boot image. I'm using Debian Jessie (and not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available. Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now. Also, as Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit. I hope the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU support. To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:

% wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
    https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
% sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
% dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
%

Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node. At least it does for me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post about this mesh testing. The mesh node was not horribly expensive either. I bought everything over the counter in shops nearby. If I had ordered online from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:

Supplier	Model	NOK
Teknikkmagasinet	Raspberry Pi model B	349.90
Teknikkmagasinet	Raspberry Pi type B case	99.90
Lefdal	Jensen Air:Link 25150	295.-
Clas Ohlson	Kingston 16 GB SD card	199.-
Total cost		943.80

Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one play-node I use to develop the image building script. And some times I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it. I look forward to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give, and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)

I wrote the following as part of a post to an discussion forum (I can't remember which one), and people told me that they liked this information and said that others would profit from it if I posted it on my blog, which I now decided to post. The context: for homework of one MOOC, people were trying to download a large virtual machine image that was offered both via an official HTTP source, which was slow. A person volunteered that already had downloaded the image volunteered to create a bittorrent to help fellow students. Other students started saying that the bittorrent download was faster up to a certain point and, then, things slowed down a lot. Of course, they got faster to the point where lots of pieces were already well distributed and, then, only the everybody had already downloaded things and, then, only the seeder had the missing segments of the torrent. Then I commented with:

---

Depending on your bittorrent client, you can add the original HTTP download as a "Web seed" and, this way, your client will download both from the peers and also from the web to fill in parts that are not yet available. One such client is the Free (as in Freedom) qbittorrent, but I guess that others also have this option.

---

Soon after that, people started downloading things much faster.

OpenStack upstream was released today. Thanks to the release team and a big up to TTX for his work. By the time you read this, probably all of my uploads have reached your local Debian mirror. Please try Havana using either Sid from any Debian mirror, or using the Wheezy backports available here: deb http://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main
deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main Yes, you will need *both* repositories. This is unofficial, though these are the exact same packages as in Sid, just rebuilt for Wheezy. On the package side, here s what is new: - All packages who needs it can now be configured through debconf for the RabbitMQ settings. This is on top of what was already available for Grizzly, which is automated configuration for: keystone auth token, the database, the API endpoints and much more. (remember: this is fully optional, you can always use the non-interactive mode ) - All Quantum pluggin packages have been removed, and now everything is self-contained in the neutron-common package. The selection of which plugin to use is done directly using the core_plugin= directive in /etc/neutron/neutron.conf. This will also control the init.d script of neutron-server, so that it loads the corresponding ini file in /etc/neutron/plugins. The plugin selection is done through Debconf, so that users don t have to write the full path of the plugin class, which is (for most) very cryptic (am I the only one who thinks that writing neutron.plugins.openvswitch.ovs_neutron_plugin.OVSNeutronPluginV2 in a configuration file is user friendly?). - All of the package descriptions and Debconf templates have been reviewed by the Debian internationalization team, and most strings are translated in Czech, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese and Russian (sometimes even more) for almost all packages (thanks everyone!). I d like to publicly thanks eNovance for sponsoring my packaging work, and Mehdi Abaakouk for his work on our CI with the tempest tests. Happy Havana release testing,
Please report bugs through the Debian BTS.

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter The new version of Brebis Chevillette 0.7 was published two days ago. Brebis is a fully automated backup checker. Brebis does not create backups. It only performs controls on them. Brebis is able to detect a corrupted archive compressed with different formats, automatically checking the integrity of your archives and lots of parameters of the files inside these archives or inside a tree of files and provide detailed reports if unexpected states are detected. Check out the list of the supported features. What s new? The main features of this new version are:

• new option -G or gen-full to generate from you archive (or from your tree of files) the configuration file and the list of files you need to run Brebis.
• new parameter target to check the target of a link

Complete example of installing, configuring and running Brebis How to install from your package manager Brebis is available in Debian, FreeBSD, Archlinux and Frugalware. Use your favorite package manager to install it. How to install from the sources

# wget http://brebisproject.org/attachments/download/8/brebis-0.7.tar.gz
# tar zxvf brebis-0.7.tar.gz && cd brebis-0.7
# python3.3 setup.py install --install-scripts=/usr/bin
# mkdir /etc/brebis

What you need before running brebis Our goal is to check on a regular basis the archive /backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz. Brebis needs two files in order to correctly run: a configuration file with general parameters and the list of files with all their parameters. Don t be afraid, both of theses files will be generated by Brebis with the following command:

# brebis -G /backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz
# ls /backups/
monthly-backup.tar.gz monthly-backup.conf monthly-backup.list

All the files inside your archives have been detected and their names and parameters (uid, gid, mode, md5, ) have been written in the file monthly-backup.list. More information about those files. How to configure Brebis Lets save /backups/monthly-backup.list in /etc/brebis: # mv /backups/monthly-backup.list /etc/brebis For /backups/monthly-backup.conf, we just modify the files_list parameters:

[main]
name=monthly-backup
type=archive
path=/backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz
files_list=/etc/brebis/monthly-backup.list

We also save monthly-backup.conf in /etc/brebis: # mv /backups/monthly-backup.conf /etc/brebis Use Brebis Using Brebis is as simple as: # brebis -c /etc/brebis/ -l /var/log/brebis.log If there is not any difference between the current state of your backup and your list of file, the logfile /var/log/brebis.log will be empty. If any difference happens, they will be reported in /var/log/brebis.log. Show time. I m modifying the md5 hash sum of a file in /etc/brebis/monthly-backup.list, during the next run of brebis, I get the following content in brebis.log:

WARNING:root:1 file with unexpected hash while checking
/backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz:
WARNING:root:toto/titi hash is ce4f8cacd8fc702bdd03531b9447818b.
Should have been ce4f8cacd8fc702bdd03531b94478184.

As you can read, Brebis reports a difference between what was expected and what it checks. Now it s easy to do the same for any backup you want to check on a regular basis. Just add something like the next line in /etc/crontab: 01 00 * * * root brebis -c /etc/brebis/ -l /var/log/brebis.log A brebis run will happen every day at midnight to check your backup. Every configuration files in the directory /etc/brebis/ will be inspected. Feedback about Brebis We at the Brebis Project welcome any feedback about Brebis. Feel free to subscribe to the Brebis-users mailing list, by Twitter or email me directly at carl.chenet@brebisproject.org

Official website: http://www.brebisproject.org
Mailing-list: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brebis-users

The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of these. :) Via Debian Project News for 2013-10-14 I came across the Outreach Program for Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered to match any donation done to Debian earmarked for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and hope you will to. :) And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to create video documentaries about the excessive spying on every Internet user that take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I've already donated. Are you next? For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a statement under the heading Bloggers United for Open Access for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the Norwegian government. So far 499 signatures. I hope you will sign it too.

Hacker News is a fairly influential link aggregation site, with stories submitted and voted on by users. As explained in the FAQ, the ranking of stories is roughly determined by the number of votes divided by a function of the time since submission. It's not a huge traffic driver (my personal experience of stories on the front page is on the order of 30,000 hits), but it's notable because the demographic tends to include a more technically literate and influential set of readers than most other sites. The discussion that ensues from technical posts often includes meaningful feedback from domain experts. Stories that appear there are likely to be noted by technology workers, especially in the Silicon Valley startup field[1].

That rather specific demographic appears to correlate with other traits. There's a rather more techno-libertarian bias on Hacker News than on most general discussion forums, which is consistent with the startup-oriented culture that it springs from - the desire to provide disruptive solutions to real world problems tends to collide with existing regulatory frameworks, so it's unsurprising that a belief in individual rights and small government would overlap with US startup culture. There's a leaning towards the use of web technologies rather than traditional client applications, which matches what people are doing in the rest of the world. And there's more enthusiasm for liberal open-source licenses over Copyleft licenses, which makes sense in a web-focused environment (as I wrote about here).

Now, personally I'm a big-government, client-app, Copyleft kind of person, but for the most part I don't think the above is actively dangerous. It's inevitable that political views will vary, we'll probably continue to cycle between thick and thin clients for generations and nobody's ever going to demonstrably prove that one licensing model deserves to win over another. But what is important is that the ongoing debates between these opinions be driven by facts, and that it remain obvious that these disagreements exist. As far as technical (and even political) discussion goes, Hacker News doesn't seem to
have a problem with that. Disagreeing with the orthodoxy is tolerated.


This seems less true when it comes to social issues. When a posting discussing the myth of the natural born programmer[2] hit the front page, the top rated comment is Paul Graham[3] off-handedly discounting the conclusions drawn. The original story linked to a review of peer-reviewed scientific research. Graham simply discounts it on the basis of his preconceptions. Shortly afterwards, the story plummeted off the front page, now surrounded by stories posted around the same time but with much lower scores.

How does this happen? There's two publicised methods which can result in stories dropping down the order. Users with high karma scores (either via submitting popular stories or writing popular comments) are able to flag submissions, and if enough do so then a negative weighting is applied to the story. There's also a flamewar detector, a heuristic that attempts to detect contentious subjects and pushes them off the front page.

The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

This isn't healthy. We don't improve the state of the software industry by hiding stories that expose conflicts. Flamewars don't solve problems, but without them we'd be entirely unaware of how much of a victim blaming mentality exists amongst our peers. It's true that conflict may reinforce preconceptions, causing people to dig in as they defend their beliefs. However, the absence of conflict does nothing to counteract that. If you're never exposed to opinions you disagree with, you'll never question your existing beliefs.

Hacker News is a privately run site and nobody's under any obligation to change how they choose to run it. But the focus on avoiding conflict to such an extent that controversial stories receive less exposure than ones that fit people's existing beliefs doesn't enhance our community. If we want to be able to use technology as an instrument of beneficial change to society as a whole, we benefit from building a diverse and welcoming community and questioning our preconceptions. Building a social echo chamber risks marginalising us from the rest of society, gradually becoming ignored and irrelevant as our self-reinforcing opinions drift ever further away from the mainstream. It doesn't help anybody.

[1] During the batch of interviews I did last year, two separate interviewers both mentioned a story they'd read on Hacker News that turned out to have been written by me. I'm not saying that that's what determined a hire/don't hire decision, but it seems likely that it helped.
[2] The article in question discusses the pervasive idea that some people are inherently good programmers. It turns out that perpetuating the idea that some people are just born good at a particular skill actually discourages others from even trying to learn it, even those who are just as capable.
[3] One of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and creator of Hacker News.

(Edited to fix a footnote reference)

comments

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

"Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women - whether engineers, scientist, technologists or mathematicians - who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM". source

To celebrate, we asked to some of the "women behind Debian" to share their stories with us. Enjoy! Ana Guerrero Lopez (ana) Who are you? I'm a 30-something years old geek. I'm from Andalusia, Spain but live in France. What do you do in Debian? I work mostly on my packages, in sponsoring new people's packages and in this very blog you're reading now. I also maintain an unofficial Google+ page about Debian. At $PAID job, I work in an internal Debian distribution so from time to time, I get the opportunity to contribute back some of the stuff we do there. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I started using Debian around 2003 switching from Mandrake. I was a happy Debian user when the Debian Women project started in the summer 2004. When I saw the project announced, I asked myself why I wasn't contributing to Debian and the rest is history... in a couple of weeks it'll be my 7 years DD-versary! If for some reason you want a longer reply to this question, read here. Beatrice Who are you? I am a PhD student with a degree in Biology. I am a computer fan since my first C64 and I am a self-taught computer geek wanna-be. And I am a bug fan - not software bugs, real bugs :) What do you do in Debian? I work on translations - doing the translation work itself, but also reviewing other translators' work and helping in coordinating the translation effort. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I started using Linux because I liked the idea of an open source operative system based on collaboration and I began reviewing open source software translations. Since my first Linux system was Debian Potato and I sticked to Debian ever since, it only seemed natural to focus my translation work on Debian. Christine Caulfield Who are you? My name is Christine Caulfield. My day job is principal software engineer at Red Hat working on the cluster infrastructure components corosync & pacemaker. Outside computing I'm a musician and sound engineer. I play violin with lots of technology attached, and love avant garde music. What do you do in Debian? I'm not that active on Debian any more due to pressure of time, and maturity of the packages I work on. I currently maintain the, little-used, DECnet userspace packages and the, even less used I suspect, mopd bootloader. I used to maintain lvm2 for a while but dropped that a few years ago. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? My initial reasons for joining Debian were slightly selfish, to find a home for the DECnet project that I was heavily involved in at the time. I was a keep Debian user and people wanted a distribution where the software was easy to set up. DECnet is quite complicated for users to configure, being a totally independant networking stack to IP and so OS support is needed. Debian seemed like the logical place to make this happen. As mentioned above I got quite involved for a time and maintained other packages too. I picked up lvm2 because I was on the lvm2 dev team at work in Red Hat and as it was a new package at that time I seemed a logical choice. Elena Grandi (valhalla) Who are you? I'm a 30-something years old geek and Free Software enthusiast from Italy. What do you do in Debian? I'm currently maintaining a few packages (2 python modules and a python program) as a sponsored uploader; I'm also slowly looking around for other things to do (by preference technical, but not limited to packaging), with the aim to spend more time contributing to Debian. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? For a while I had being distro-hopping between "fun" distributions (the ones that break now and then) on the desktop while using Debian stable on the home server and in chroots. I was already doing marginal contributions to those distributions, where finding stuff that was missing was easy, but my perception as a stable user was that Debian was already working fine and probably didn't really need any help. Then I started to socialize on IRC with some DDs and DMs, and realized that my perception was superficial and that in reality there were dark holes in the depths of the archive where Evil festered and prospered and... ok, sorry, I got carried away :) Anyway, since I was actually using Debian more and more I decided to start contributing: I read documentation, I attended the useful IRC sessions on #debian-women and decided that it was probably best not to add new stuff, but look for things that I used and that needed help. Then nothing happened for a while, because finding stuff that doesn't work is hard (at least on my mostly textual systems). Then one day I was trying to write a python script that needed to verify gpg signed messages; it had to run on my Debian server, so I was trying to use python-pyme and its documentation was painful to use, while I remembered an earlier attempt using python-gnupg that was much more pythonic, but not available in Debian. In a fit of anger I decided to forgo all of my good intentions and actually add a new package: I checked the sources for problems, packaged, sent it to mentors@d-o, got reviews, fixed problems, resent and finally got sponsored and well, everything started. Francesca Ciceri (madamezou) Who are you? I'm Francesca, a 30-something Italian graduated in Social Sciences. What do you do in Debian? I'm a (non uploading) Debian Developer since 2011 and have been DPN editor, press officer, webmaster for www.debian.org and translator for the Italian l10n team. Recently, due to time constraints, I had to reduce my involvement and now only work on two things: writing/editing articles for bits.debian.org together with Ana Guerrero, and creating subtitles for the DebConf talks, in the DebConf Subs team. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? Basically thanks to the sudden abundance of free time - due to an health problem - and the desire to give something back to this wonderful operating system. After that, I found out that Debian is not only a great OS but also a very special community. Today, some of my dearest friends are people I met through Debian. :) Laura Arjona Who are you? I live in Madrid (Spain), and work as IT Assistant in the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). I'm married and I have a 4-years-old son. What do you do in Debian? In 2012 I started to clean spam and to translate Debian web pages into Spanish. I also follow the work of the web and publicity team, I hope I'll get more involved there too. And of course, I'm in Debian Women :) How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I'm using Debian at work since 2007 (servers), and in my desktops since 2010. I like very much that it is a community distro and I wanted to participate. I was already doing translations in other (small) free software projects, so I began here too. The Debian-Women list, the planet, and people in identi.ca helped me to learn a lot and feel part of the community even when I was not contributing yet. M nica Ram rez Arceda (monica) Who are you? My name is M nica Ram rez Arceda and I am an enthusiast of free software and sharing knowledge cultures: for me it's a kind of philosophy of life. I studied Maths a long time ago but ended up working as a developer for some years. Now I'm working as an IT teacher. What do you do in Debian? Debian is a huge project, so you can help in various scopes. Mainly, I work on packaging, fixing wnpp bug inconsistencies in BTS and helping in spam cleaning of the mailing lists. But I also enjoy doing some non-technical work from time to time: the project I am just now involved is organizing, with the rest of Debian Catalan community, a local team to propose Barcelona as the venue for a minidebconf where all the speakers will be women. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? In 2000 I discovered Free Software world and I fell deeply in love with its philosophy. Since then, I've been trying to do my best in different activities, like spreading the word, giving free courses, helping collectives and friends in technical stuff (from installing Debian to developing some helping apps for them)... but two years ago I was looking forward to join a free software project and I decided to try Debian, since it has been my first and only distro in my day-to-day life for about ten years. So, I wanted to give back Debian all what it had offered to me, but.... I thought I couldn't (hey, Debian is for real hackers, not for you little ant!), but I started to adopt some orphaned packages, do some QA uploads, fix some RC bugs, talk with some Debian Developers that helped me and encouraged me more than I expected, I traveled to my first Debconf... And one thing takes you to the other, and on March 2012 I became a DD. Now, I'm glad to see that everything that frightened me is not so scary :-)

As you know, I am not big on reviews, so you should disregard the remainder of this entry. I recently found myself in what is called a theatre complex , watching an adaptation of Moli re's Les Femmes savantes by Freyda Thomas, who is apparently famous for playing Alenis Grem on Deep Space Nine. Called The Learned Ladies, this translation to English manages to approximate some of the rhyme of the original, thereby making it unquestionably better than DS9. Also noteworthy is the all-female cast, cobbled together from two all-female theater groups. Elizabeth Neptune plays Chrysale, occasionally channeling the spirit of Jackie Gleason or bringing adorable ardor to such epic lines as Tea! I won't say anything about her eyes, but I will say something about her slippers. Sara Montgomery, as B lise, is delightfully crazy in her singing, dancing, costume changes, and other antics, which serve to transform this otherwise-completely-serious play into a comedy. I definitely won't say anything about her shoes. Madeleine Maby begins playing Philaminte well before the show starts. Spoiler alert: she sits on the stage, pretending to look through a telescope and make notes from before the house opens until right before the start of the first scene. I still feel exhausted by the thought of having to do that myself. L' pine is portrayed by Alyssa Lott, who also plays three minor roles. Her mastery of physical comedy is not wasted on this production. Marta Kuersten plays Clitandre opposite Sarah Brill's Henriette. While Marta's performance was quite good, she looks much better as a woman. I will not be saying this about everyone. Katie Honaker delivers visceral smarm and sleaze as Trissotin. Even her hairstyle is somehow evocative of contempt. Susan Finch plays Vadius and Le notaire. Susan was definitely most convincing as a man. Despite mutterings to the contrary, some suspension of disbelief was necessary for the other male roles, but not for Vadius, oh no. Finishing out the list we have Janna Emig as Martine, Francesca Day as Armande, and Kathryn Alexander as Ariste, with good performances, particularly in the second half. Even though it didn't have Coppertop from Strangers With Candy and a boy-band song-and-dance cover of To Be with You by Mr. Big, I recommend this play.

So, I've changed jobs, I now work for the incredibly awesome Mythic Beasts, So far it's been great, we've hit a few problems, we've made sane plans, and we're moving forwards and making things easier to manage long term. I've mostly been involved with debugging mac-mini boot problems, and getting them working with (as far as possible) stock kernels, rather than our previous set of custom compiled kernels, so that it's easier to upgrade later, and so that we're not having to maintain a whole set of patches that we shouldn't need to! We're also starting to package our own software that we use internally so that actually deploying new servers is becoming a lot easier, and configuration of our previous packages is now (mostly) handled by debconf, meaning that actually setting up backups is becoming much easier. We've also changed out main backup strategy from using a (slightly flaky) openvpn connection with loopback mounted ext3 filesystems to using rsync with the --fake-super option - the only thing that we've found slightly wrong with this so far is that --fake-super can't reconcile symlinks (it uses user level xattr to store the origional permissions, and with symlinks this doesn't work, because, apparently, symlinks should store user xattr attrbutes!). We also offer ipv6 for all our dedicated and vps customers, as per the mythic blog - and our 2 authoritative name servers are both v6 enabled. We're working towards making all of our core services available over both ipv4 and ipv6, and we should be there soon. It's fantastic to work for a company that has the technical knowledge and no-shit stance that Mythic Beasts has, we will hold our hands up if we do something wrong, and we'll tell you exactly what happened, why, and what we're doing to stop it from happening again. So, 1 month in, and I'm absolutely loving working for them, and I've been a customer of theirs since black cat networks sold their domain name side to them, and shortly afterwards bluelinux sold their virtual servers service to them. Our new VDS lite service is reasonably priced, and well spec'd. I thoroughly recommend our services, and obviously, we actually use our own vds service to provide some of our services - so it's as important to us that it keeps working as it is for our customers. Wow, so that was a very salesy post. Erm, next time, back to whinging about authors not having written the books I'm waiting for yet! :)

I try to have some guests every now and then to my Operating Systems class. The class is not as practical/interactive as I'd like, and having some people show the students how the subjects I teach are reflected in the real world is, I feel, very useful for them to understand the topics' importance. The past semester (the first one for me) I had three guests: Chema Serralde, talking about process scheduling and in particular on the importance of real time, from his perspective as a musician, Rolando Cedillo, talking about the early stages of the boot process, and C sar Y ez, giving a review of file systems. This semester, there have been two guests so far: Felipe Esquivel, who spoke about parallelism, and used renders with Blender to illustrate the speed gains and limitations (i.e. Amdahl's law), and this last Thursday, I invited again C sar Y ez. C sar spoke about process scheduling, first giving a quite thorough review of what had taken me at least three sessions to go through, and second, giving some in-depth review based on his experience with Haiku OS. What else was different this time? I told our coordinator in the faculty, and she invited the other teachers of the subject (and attended herself). So, instead of the usual ~25 students, we have ~40 people in the classroom. And one of them, Adolfo, recorded most of C sar's explanation. Yay! Of course, I asked Adolfo for a copy of his recording, and recoded it in a format more suitable for Web viewing. Here it is (almost 300MB, Ogg Video, ~95 minutes). I still have the original video file given to me, in an Apple-generated badly-compressed .mov, but at over 1.5GB, it's too much for a Web download. I will try to record future sessions, as they will surely be useful!

Hello Following Gabor s post, I ve updated the Debian package for libdevel-ptkdb-perl. This new package is now available in experimental repository. Why not in unstable ? This new version of ptkdb (or is it a fork ?) was heavily changed and needs to be tested more before being released to unstable. I will use it during my regular Perl activities. Nevertheless, I would welcome feedback on this new version to help decide when to upload to unstable. All the best
Tagged: debian, Perl

The recently released apt 0.9.12 contains a bunch of good stuff, bugfixes and cleanups. But there are two new feature I particularly like. The first is the new parameter with-new-pkgs for the upgrade
command:

# apt-get upgrade --with-new-pkgs

that will install new dependencies on the upgrade but never remove
packages. A typical use-case is a stable system that gets a kernel
with a new kernel ABI package. The second is show-progress for
install/remove/upgrade/dist-upgrade which will show inline progress
when dpkg is running to indicate the global progress.

# apt-get install --show-progress tea
...
Selecting previously unselected package tea-data.
(Reading database ... 380116 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking tea-data (from .../tea-data_33.1.0-1_all.deb) ...
Progress: [ 10%]
Progress: [ 20%]
Progress: [ 30%]
Selecting previously unselected package tea.
Unpacking tea (from .../tea_33.1.0-1_amd64.deb) ...
Progress: [ 40%]
Progress: [ 50%]
Progress: [ 60%]
Processing triggers for doc-base ...
Processing 2 added doc-base files...
Registering documents with scrollkeeper...
...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up tea-data (33.1.0-1) ...
Progress: [ 70%]
Progress: [ 80%]
Setting up tea (33.1.0-1) ...
Progress: [ 90%]
Progress: [100%]

For the install progress, there is also a new experimental option
Dpkg::Progress-Fancy . It will display a persistent progress status bar in the last terminal line. This works like this:

# apt-get -o Dpkg::Progress-Fancy=true install tea

This kind of information is obviously most useful on complex operations like big installs or (release) upgrades.

I'm moving all my git repositories from Gitorious and git.gitano.org.uk to my new Gitano instance at git.liw.fi. Gitano is a git server written by Daniel Silverstone, and it's wonderful. I will be converting my non-git repositories to git, on git.liw.fi, later on.

10th hackweek is over and I think it has been again great chance to hack on something. This year we even had better food supplies so interruptions from hacking were even less frequent. As you've might have already noticed, I was working on Weblate whole week and I think it worked pretty well and I've implemented all what I wanted. First of all, Weblate now supports login using lot of third party services (like GitHub, Facebook, Google, ...). This was achieved by using python-social-auth for that. It is quite new module for this, so hopefully it's API will stay stable enough to be usable in the long term. It was surprisingly easy to implement, though I've spent quite a lot of tweaking of the login and registration process to make it work according to my expectations. After doing this quite big change, I thought it's about time to restructure the documentation and document new features in it. I think it now covers all important things, but if you can't find something or some parts are hard to understand, just let me know, I'll fix it. Another quite big feature (though it won't be much visible in upcoming 1.8 release) is source string tracking. This is prerequisite for many features people have requested in Weblate's issue tracker, but these will have to wait for next releases. If you want to see some feature earlier, you can support it by money on Bountysource :-). Weblate can now also search in all strings, which might become handy if grepping over dozen of Git repositories is not your favorite game. And last but not least, I've implemented simple Captcha protection for new registrations as the demo server is full of bots who register there and do nothing afterward. Basically I think this makes Weblate 1.8 feature complete and I'd like to stabilize it in upcoming weeks to release. Right now it is deployed on the demo server, where you can play with it and discover bugs :-). Also it's now time to work on Weblate translations!

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Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several successful examples like Freifunk and Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (see wikipedia for a large list) around the globe. To give you an idea how it work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which can be seen from their dynamically updated node graph and map, where one can see how the mesh nodes automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing. There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway, and that is the main topic of this blog post. I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped to do it as part of my involvement with the NUUG member organisation community, and my recent involvement in the Freedombox project finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family when possible, given that most communication between people are between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the private communication of citizens, which have become more and more important over the years. So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space Hackeriet at Husmania. They seem to have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called the Oslo Freifunk project, but that effort is now dead and the people behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called meshfx. Unfortunately the wiki site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I came across this video where Hans J rgen Lysglimt interview the speakers about this talk (from youtube): I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols. There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool Serval project in Australia is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting that project (from youtube): According to the wikipedia page on Wireless mesh network there are around 70 competing schemes for routing packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software based community mesh networks. The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A good introduction is available from the Open Mesh project. These are the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:

Setting	Value
Protocol / kernel module	batman-adv
ESSID	meshfx@hackeriet
Channel / Frequency	11 / 2462
Cell ID	02:BA:00:00:00:01

The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from VillageTelco about "Information about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges! for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :) My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node, but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know. If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join us on IRC, either channel #oslohackerspace or #nuug on irc.freenode.net. While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research and Innovation called The reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks and elsewhere learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at Gr nerl kka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would be interested in a cooperation? Update 2013-10-12: I was just told by the Serval project developers that they no longer use batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based mesh system.

Review: 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	0-316-19280-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	563

Swan Er Hong is a native of Mercury, granddaughter of one of the most influential women in the solar system. Alex, known as the Lion of Mercury, has just died as the story opens, and Swan is mourning. But she's also discovering that something else has been going on, something that Alex had not confided in her. Something that involves an inspector from the asteroids, a scientist from Titan, and a message Alex left in the event of her death, asking Swan to convey something personally to another scientist on Io. And then Mercury is attacked and the situation becomes much more complicated. 2312 is, like most Robinson novels, built on top of monumental world-building. The date is given away by the title; the setting is a solar system full of terraforming, habitats, and explosive human colonization. There are human settlements on every world that could possibly sustain them, including a terraformed Mars and a vast in-progress terraforming project on Venus. Mercury, Song's home, supports the city known as Terminator, a shielded habitat that travels around the planet on rails, pushed forward by the thermal expansion of metal at sunrise. Humans have scattered across the solar system and changed everything they've touched, even the asteroids. Many of those have been repurposed as long-haul shuttles: self-contained habitats on carefully-designed routes on which people live for months or years until they get to their destinations. Parts of this book are gorgeous. One of Robinson's strengths is creating images of the vastness of space, science, and human endeavor that feel plausible and inspiring at the same time. The setting of 2312 frees him to go wild with mega construction projects, and he takes full advantage. Parts of the book inspire the same sense of awe as the Hoover Dam or the Great Wall of China, transplanted into space and backed with neat scientific ideas to ponder. (Even if the more skeptical will note certain human habitation hazards, such as prolonged weightlessness and radiation, are mostly hand-waved away.) Unusually for a Robinson novel, 2312 also features an interesting and vibrant protagonist. Usually I can barely remember Robinson's protagonists five minutes after I finish the book, but Swan is so impulsive, erratic, and emotionally intense that I doubt I'll forget her. Her past is stuffed with outrageous risks and intense creativity: having songbird neurons transplanted into her brain, ingesting extraterrestrial bacteria, designing habitats in the asteroid belt, and creating art on the plains of Mercury. As the story gets underway, she meets the oversized and mellow Wahram; at first, she finds him boring, but then they're thrown together by one of the best set pieces of the book, and both they and the reader discover they work well together. Wahram serves as a straight man and as a stand-in for the reader's opinion, showing Swan all the more clearly in contrast. All this sounds quite promising. Unfortunately, what makes 2312 an ambitious failure rather than an excellent story is the story part. Robinson has built an amazing world, but he doesn't seem to know what to do with it. His economy, at least outside of Earth (and more on that in a moment), is essentially post-scarcity. Few of the characters we meet seem to have any concept of fiscal or practical limitation. They head across the solar system on a moment's notice, take vacations in habitats, or head to favorite spots for the view. It felt like Robinson was trying to write a Culture story. Unlike Banks, however, he struggles with generating a plot. 2312 is, in structure, a murder mystery. The characters witness a crime, survive it, and then intend to investigate it, and the crime appears to grow and link to fault lines in their society. This could have worked, but it has two problems: their society is only barely coherent enough for the reader to perceive the potential fault lines, and Robinson seems to have no idea how to construct a mystery plot. There is no sense of coherence to Swan and Wahram's approach, no sense of a gathering of clues, and very little sense of drama. All of the plot revelations are either dropped in Swan's lap by another character at a convenient moment or generated by Swan refusing to take the plot of the book seriously. The characters do essentially no meaningful investigation on-camera and show almost no investment in the outcome of the plot. When the climax comes, it's all weirdly forgettable. There are also large sections of the book that appear to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, and that's where the unfortunate interval on Earth comes in. Robinson takes advantage of the scenes on Earth to do a bit of alienation and shows how foreign and strange and stifling Earth feels to someone who grew up outside of its atmosphere. Parts of this work, but he puts the plot on hold to do it. And parts of it do not work at all. The most glaring example is Swan and Wahram's bizarre bit of attempted charity in Africa, which comes across as stunningly high-handed and arrogant. This could be in character, particularly for Swan (who is not long on empathy), but, if so, the book doesn't signal to the reader that it should be read that way. Instead, there are some side (or snide) comments that seem to indicate Robinson knows nothing about the economic arc of Africa from the past twenty years. And when their absurd, botched, condescending charity plan fails for all the obvious reasons, the characters, and apparently the novel, throw up their hands and write Earth off as a stagnant lost cause that can't accept the imposition of a good idea and go back to the plot, never apparently caring about Earth again. Almost as frustrating is the way that these interludes are tied back into the story, which is usually through Swan getting ridiculously lucky on her random encounter rolls. It felt like whenever Robinson needed to make progress in the plot, Swan would just accidentally run into exactly the right person or situation to bring up the next plot point or to have some investigation make sense. (Not that Swan usually figured this out. Normally, the inspector explains it to her.) The author's finger was planted so firmly on the scales that it destroyed my suspension of disbelief and made a mockery of the idea that the characters were actually investigating anything. 2312 is built around a skeleton of a plot, but the lack of engagement with it, the lack of tension and emotion, the way the next developments are generally narrated to the protagonists and the reader, and the repeated use of random encounters to steer it left me without much reason to care. Robinson tries a few twists, but since the story never felt committed to its plot anyway, those twists feel less like planned complications and more like another random veer in the road. It didn't help that the final outcome was more prosaic and forgettable than the book had been implying it would be. There is a lot to like here. I'm very pleased to see Robinson finally write a memorable protagonist, and he's very good at both world-building and set pieces. But it needed a plot, and it needed a more coherent and complete cultural backdrop for its characters. Without both, it fell back into the typical Robinson trap: gorgeous moments separated by a whole lot of boring, and an overall impression of a construction tour rather than a story. There are bits of it I loved and still remember, particularly Song and Wahram in the tunnels of Mercury (which is possibly the best extended characterization Robinson has ever written). But the book as a whole is a mess, and I can't recommend wading through it for the good parts. Rating: 5 out of 10