Search Results: "spa"

22 February 2010

Tim Retout: Plugging the Debian GNOME bug weekend

This weekend I've been messing about with gstreamer pipelines so that I can spam the world with YouTube videos. Go me! Let's see if it shows up on Planet Debian. <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pjUUaAQaa8I&amp;hl=en_GB&amp;fs=1&amp;"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pjUUaAQaa8I&amp;hl=en_GB&amp;fs=1&amp;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></object> Next weekend I'll be teaching my brother how to triage Debian GNOME bugs. :)

21 February 2010

Steve Kemp: Let go of the handle.

I don't talk about SPAM publicly these days, for reasons that are probably self-explanatory. However this is just insane: Currently at 40+ SPAM mails and rising; all mails addressed to "postmaster@", rather than any past users of the domain. (I can see from http://archive.org that the domain was last active in 2008.) ObSubject: The Goonies

20 February 2010

John Goerzen: Is the Roman Emperor Still Your God?

In ancient Rome, the Imperial cult was the worship of the Roman emperor as a god. It came to be at roughly the same time as Christianity. In the cult of the emperor, Caesar was revered as a deity. According to Harvey Cox, This was what we might today call a civil religion it had its holidays, processions, and holy sites throughout the empire. Adherence to it was required of all of the emperor s subjects, wherever they lived and whatever other deities they also worshiped. It was the religious and ideological mucilage that held the far-flung empire together. Perhaps you see where this is going. There was a certain group that found the imperial cult, well, repugnant. They felt their own goals bringing their god s peace and justice to the world were incompatible with this sort of devotion to a human institution, and the very institution that had killed their leader at that. Their reaction went like this:
Regarding worship of the emperor, Christians responded with an unequivocal no. They claimed that Jesus Christ was God s kyrios ( anointed one in Greek), but since kyrios was one of the titles attributed to Caesar, they refused to participate in the imperial cult. They were willing to pray for the emperor and for his health, but they stubbornly refused to pray to him or offer ritual tribute. They recognized that one could not be a follower of Jesus while also honoring a rival to the loyalty their faith in him and his Kingdom required; therefore, not even one pinch of incense on the imperial altar. This defiance of the political religion of the empire, which led their critics to brand them subversive, landed many of them in arenas with salivating lions. Harvey Cox in The Future of Faith
Now, you may be wondering, why am I asking if anyone still worships the emperor of a long-extinct empire? I maintain that this practice is still alive and well, just under a different name. I have been interested in some of the debates about American institutions that choose to perform neither the national anthem nor the pledge of allegiance. Many of these institutions are Mennonite, and their reason for not participating in these two particular acts mirrors that of the early Christians refusing to worship Caesar: namely, their goal is to bring about God s peaceful and just kingdom on earth, and no country, no human institution at all, can ever command greater loyalty than that cause. Moreover, the American national anthem is a particularly violent one, celebrating the taking of life right there at the beginning. Not completely compatible with the ethics of a church trying to bring about a more peaceful world, right? It is from that basis that many Mennonites, and our institutions, do not perform the national anthem or say the pledge of allegiance. For myself, when the national anthem is being performed, I will stand out of respect for those around me for whom the moment is important, but I do not sing. I am deeply appreciative that the United States, like many other countries, makes it legal to do this. I am heartened by the fact that I do not risk a confrontation with the lions over my religious stance today. Goshen College, a Mennonite institution, recently decided to go back on a century of history (which goes back farther than the anthem itself, which was only adopted in 1931) and will now be performing the anthem, followed by a prayer, before select sporting events. And by so doing, they fail both to act in accordance with the way of Christ, and to be a patriot. They fail to act for peace and justice by playing an anthem that supports and glorifies war and violence. And they fail to be patriotic. Patriotism and nationalism are different things. It s easy to be nationalistic to get up there and sing a song that everyone wants you to sing. It is far more difficult to be patriotic. Being patriotic in the United States means using the freedoms we have to improve our country. Goshen ought to use its freedom to not observe the national anthem as a way to try to draw a line in the sand against violence, to suggest that our anthem fails to adequately recognize the character of the American people and who we want to be, and to suggest a better alternative. After all, those people who are venerated today as patriots anyone from Martin Luther to Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King stood up to their fallible human governments to seek positive change. Instead of a route both religious and patriotic, Goshen College has chosen one that is neither. I am deeply disappointed that 300 phone calls have apparently cowed their leadership. What have we come to when our ancestors braved the lions, and we give up our principles over the fear of bad publicity? Ah, Goshen, perhaps you are thinking that you could spare a few pinches of incense for Caesar after all?

18 February 2010

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: RC-Bug statistics for Squeeze, calendar week 7:

Note: Please see RC-Bug statistics for Squeeze, calendar week 7 for an explanation of the numbers.
Total:699+49
Affecting Squeeze:559+41
Squeeze-only:117+23
Unfixed bugs remaining in Squeeze:442+18
Of these 442 bugs...
... are pending36+4
... are patched:65+1
... are duplicates:47+-0
... are in Non-free or contrib:10+10
... are claimed by someone:14-3
... are fixed in the delayed queue:5-1
... are somehow marked as fixed:53+14
Or in other words:
Release critical bugs left in squeeze, when ignoring all these:
262 (+2 compared to previous week). With this release managers views, 472 (+48 compared to previous week) bugs remain to be fixed somehow before we can release. Some notes: So much for this week. Let's see, how the numbers evolve in the coming seven days...

Martin F. Krafft: Thank you, Catalyst!

Tomorrow, Penny and I head off back home, and two months of living in NZ come to an end. (did you hear that, pleaserobme.com?) Maybe I ll find the time to write about my impressions of living on this side of the planet, and being immersed in Kiwi culture while going after my daily routine and trying to work as much as I could. But there is one thing that should not wait: Thank you, Catalyst IT for giving us workspaces! For the better part of 6 weeks, you gave us our own room, monitors, keyboards, mice, and connectivity. And more than that: you welcomed us, let us participate in sessions, invited us to your parties, received our parcels, sent out letters, and generally provided us with a great environment to work. This was certainly well above what we had dreamed of. At times, I was forced to stay into the middle of the night 12 hours time difference with Europe is not always easy and spent waking hours in your building alone. Thank you for your trust! Catalyst is a fully New Zealand owned company who deliver critical open source business systems to some of NZ s largest organisations, and organisations worldwide. Catalyst was also a major enabler of LCA2010, and a sponsor of Kiwi Foo Camp, both events that I had the privilege to attend. Let me know when you re in my part of the world. ;) NP: The Mamaku Project: Karekare

17 February 2010

Martin F. Krafft: ACTA documents leaked

Shortly after I wrote my last article about ACTA and the lack of transparency, I was delighted to find out that a report of the recent negotiations in Mexico has been leaked. I find it a bit disconcerting that our politicians, who are theoretically supposed to represent our interests, are writing documents that can leak to the public, when they should have been available to the public from the start. The document and the coverpage are available for direct download. Michael Geist has a first analysis
A brief report from the European Commission authored by Pedro Velasco Martins (an EU negotiator) on the most recent round of ACTA negotiations in Guadalajara, Mexico has leaked, providing new information on the substance of the talks, how countries are addressing the transparency concerns, and plans for future negotiations. (read more )
NP: Dimmer: Degrees of Existence

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - issue 21

RCBW - #21 I've accumulated one more day of delay, but here is a full RCBW issue. Still, I've a nice good excuse for the extra delay: I've changed house in Paris, the new one is very small (a chambre de bonne), but also very comfortable. Without any further ado, here are this week's squashes: And here are the usual highlights:

15 February 2010

Sandro Tosi: Migrate a Git repo to a SVN one

We often see the opposite, convert a SVN repository into a Git one and try the breeze of a DVCS, but what if you want to convert a Git repo into a SVN one?

The process is not easy (and you need a "straight" Git repo: no merge, too complex branches and so), and the result is quite raw, but you're still able to convert the main part into SVN. Here are the steps:
  1. create an empty SVN repository: svn mkdir svn://path/to/repo/project/ trunk,branches,tags
  2. clone it in a Git repo: git svn clone svn://path/to/repo/project --stdlayout . This will create a project directory, empty except for the .git information directory; master is the default Git branch created by git-svn that maps SVN trunk.
  3. add the original Git repo as a remote: git remote add origin git://uri/to/git/repo/project.git
  4. fetch from it: git fetch origin
  5. create a local branch for the remote master: git checkout -b old_master origin/master . Note that master branch is already present, so we define another one.
  6. being on old_master we rebase this branch onto master: git rebase --onto master --root . Doing this, we have "moved" all our commits from old_master to master
  7. and push all the commits into the SVN repo: git svn dcommit
It's not that elegant, but it gets it done. I'd like to know if someone is aware of a better method, also to import tags and branches, that this process doesn't do.

Biella Coleman: Timing Life

The Chronicle recently published a piece that drew a lot of attention on the difficulties that female academics with kids face during the first 4-7 seven years of their job when academics are expected to do nothing but produce, produce, and produce and yet because they have produced children, they can t produce all that much writing. I don t share the author s predicament in that I don t have kids. But I have had to be an (often long-distance) caretaker for the last 8 years, 4 of which I spent considerable time in PR taking over my mom s caretaker s duties. Although when it comes to female academics and kids there is a lot that can (really must) be done to facilitate a career and motherhood, when it comes to taking care of my mom, being an academic has been an odd and mixed blessing, although it did require me to play with the system self-consciously or else it would have been an early academic death. When my mom was first falling pretty ill, I was wrapping up my dissertation. Though I was ready (on paper at least) to go on the market, I did not step foot in it. I knew that if I landed a job it would be the end of seeing my mom and since she only had a few years of capacity left, I decided to 1) apply only for one postdoctoral position (that had no teaching and was in NJ making it very easy to fly home frequently) 2) if I did not land it, I would return home to spend time with her, keep on writing but not graduate. If I had started a job right after my dissertation, I would have killed my chances of churning out articles, and worse, not have seen much of my mom. I was lucky enough to land this postdoctoral fellowship, which was a life savior. I was able to get a heck of a lot of work done that I would never ever would have been able to do my first two years of teaching (kids or no kids) and I spent many months in PR as well. I always encourage graduate students to apply for these positions because the payback is enormous (with the exception of fellowships that require a ton of teaching), even if the applications are really time consuming, more so than applying for jobs. Though rarely stated in such terms, the first few years of an academic position is not unlike medical residency. It takes a brutal amount of time, not only because of the sheer time you have to work but also because there is so much new to learn and so many different responsibilities to juggle. It is exhiliarting but draining, even disorienting. But there is one important difference from our medical school counterparts (aside from the blood and guts and gore :-)): their hell continues throughout the year, while our hell diminishes during the summer when classes end and writing is supposed to dominate your attention. Also since I am not required to be here once classes ended, I am able to leave NYC and spend it back home. I would simply not be able to do this with most any other full time job (unless it involved telecommunting) and for that I am grateful I landed the job I did. Academia, despite its rat race quality, has allowed me to visit my mom throughout the year and summer. Given the importance of summers for writing it seem that departments/universities can do a lot for female faculty simply by sponsoring or helping to pay for summer day care for two years, thus offsetting some of the costs and then providing them with the space needed to write/produce.This can accompany the policy that some, though not enough schools have, which is turning off your tenure clock for the year you are pregnant, and in some cases, even giving you leave. Thankfully at NYU you can stop your clock not just for pregnancy (which they now automatically do because when it was optional some female professors were not taking it!) but also for circumstances like mine. I was given a short tenure extension, which was not easy to ask for but it is important to do so. I am extremely grateful they have this policy. Something else partially unique about caring for a parent is the perspective it affords. Although it would be a lie to say I suffer no anxieties about my job, I find it hard to get embroiled in a lot of the petty politics of academia, a perspective that clings to me, especially after having to take care of someone with Alzheimers, and especially my mom who we nicknamed the Russian Terror for her turbulent (but really fun) personality. Sitting in front of your computer to write and think about some obscure academic topic feels not only easy after those experiences but a scamish sort of privilege. My mom is now in a nursing home and I no longer have to spend time taking care of her. Instead I visit and see her and get overwhelmingly sad when I do. In one month, it will be her 2 year anniversary in a nursing home and I still have not come to grips with the situation. It strikes me as obscene and unreasonably cruel that this illness can afflict a person for years, even a decade or more. Perhaps more than anything it is the sheer massive length and persistence of this illness that makes it so hard to bear. And I am sure my work for better or for worse has acted as an emotional refuge, where I drown myself in work that I love instead of drowning in the sorrow that I often feel, making what is a difficult job far easier.

Biella Coleman: Timing Life

The Chronicle recently published a piece that drew a lot of attention on the difficulties that female academics with kids face during the first 4-7 seven years of their job when academics are expected to do nothing but produce, produce, and produce and yet because they have produced children, they can t produce all that much writing. I don t share the author s predicament in that I don t have kids. But I have had to be an (often long-distance) caretaker for the last 8 years, 4 of which I spent considerable time in PR taking over my mom s caretaker s duties. Although when it comes to female academics and kids there is a lot that can (really must) be done to facilitate a career and motherhood, when it comes to taking care of my mom, being an academic has been an odd and mixed blessing, although it did require me to play with the system self-consciously or else it would have been an early academic death. When my mom was first falling pretty ill, I was wrapping up my dissertation. Though I was ready (on paper at least) to go on the market, I did not step foot in it. I knew that if I landed a job it would be the end of seeing my mom and since she only had a few years of capacity left, I decided to 1) apply only for one postdoctoral position (that had no teaching and was in NJ making it very easy to fly home frequently) 2) if I did not land it, I would return home to spend time with her, keep on writing but not graduate. If I had started a job right after my dissertation, I would have killed my chances of churning out articles, and worse, not have seen much of my mom. I was lucky enough to land this postdoctoral fellowship, which was a life savior. I was able to get a heck of a lot of work done that I would never ever would have been able to do my first two years of teaching (kids or no kids) and I spent many months in PR as well. I always encourage graduate students to apply for these positions because the payback is enormous (with the exception of fellowships that require a ton of teaching), even if the applications are really time consuming, more so than applying for jobs. Though rarely stated in such terms, the first few years of an academic position is not unlike medical residency. It takes a brutal amount of time, not only because of the sheer time you have to work but also because there is so much new to learn and so many different responsibilities to juggle. It is exhiliarting but draining, even disorienting. But there is one important difference from our medical school counterparts (aside from the blood and guts and gore :-)): their hell continues throughout the year, while our hell diminishes during the summer when classes end and writing is supposed to dominate your attention. Also since I am not required to be here once classes ended, I am able to leave NYC and spend it back home. I would simply not be able to do this with most any other full time job (unless it involved telecommunting) and for that I am grateful I landed the job I did. Academia, despite its rat race quality, has allowed me to visit my mom throughout the year and summer. Given the importance of summers for writing it seem that departments/universities can do a lot for female faculty simply by sponsoring or helping to pay for summer day care for two years, thus offsetting some of the costs and then providing them with the space needed to write/produce.This can accompany the policy that some, though not enough schools have, which is turning off your tenure clock for the year you are pregnant, and in some cases, even giving you leave. Thankfully at NYU you can stop your clock not just for pregnancy (which they now automatically do because when it was optional some female professors were not taking it!) but also for circumstances like mine. I was given a short tenure extension, which was not easy to ask for but it is important to do so. I am extremely grateful they have this policy. Something else partially unique about caring for a parent is the perspective it affords. Although it would be a lie to say I suffer no anxieties about my job, I find it hard to get embroiled in a lot of the petty politics of academia, a perspective that clings to me, especially after having to take care of someone with Alzheimers, and especially my mom who we nicknamed the Russian Terror for her turbulent (but really fun) personality. Sitting in front of your computer to write and think about some obscure academic topic feels not only easy after those experiences but a scamish sort of privilege. My mom is now in a nursing home and I no longer have to spend time taking care of her. Instead I visit and see her and get overwhelmingly sad when I do. In one month, it will be her 2 year anniversary in a nursing home and I still have not come to grips with the situation. It strikes me as obscene and unreasonably cruel that this illness can afflict a person for years, even a decade or more. Perhaps more than anything it is the sheer massive length and persistence of this illness that makes it so hard to bear. And I am sure my work for better or for worse has acted as an emotional refuge, where I drown myself in work that I love instead of drowning in the sorrow that I often feel, making what is a difficult job far easier.

Russell Coker: Links February 2010

Popular Mechanics has a good article about 911 [1]. Experts in all the relevant fields were consulted to debunk popular myths. It s an old article but I hadn t read it before and learned a lot. Former CIA analyst Raw McGovern and former FBI attorney/special agent Coleen Rowley, a colleague in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity wrote an interesting article titled Why Counter-Terrorism Is in Shambles [2]. Such sanity from people who are associated with the intelligence industry is unusual. Gizmodo has an amusing and informative poster about the true risks of airline travel post 911 [3]. Reuters has an interesting article about drug smugglers using Gulfstream and 727 aircraft to smuggle cocaine from South America to Africa [4]. They claim a link to al Quaeda, but such a link seems tenuous from the evidence provided, it does seem reasonable to claim that groups who claim affiliation to al Quaeda are involved in smuggling anyone can claim anything really. An 8yo boy is on the TSA terrorism watch list , he regularly gets frisked when traveling by air [5]. His mother had a security clearance to fly on Air Force 2 when Al Gore was the Vice President, any sane security system would look at the parents rather than an 8yo child children of that age aren t going to independently become terrorists. The Dallas Observer has an interesting article by Kimberly Thorpe about how to beat debt collectors [6]. Apparently most debt collectors break the law in some way and can be sued for damages with a typical settlement of $3,500. Some debtors are suing multiple debt collectors, after one debt collector is successfully sued the debt is passed to another collector who also breaks the law. What I really like about this is that the community of people who sue debt collectors keep the industry honest and protect the majority of the population who don t have the time or interest for engaging in law suits. Read Write Web has an informative article about SourceForge being forced to deny access to people in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria [7]. A problem for free software developers is that we often don t know the location of the people we collaborate with so it s best to be as open as possible. This means that the US is not a good place to host servers, probably some part of the EU would be better. Also this sort of thing makes the field of free software development less welcoming to US citizens. Did the congress people learn nothing in high-school? They should know that someone who starts a campaign of ostracism may end up being in the small group. Google is developing a new Native Client (NaCl) system that seems to be like Microsoft ActiveX [8]. I can t imagine this doing anything that couldn t be done with Java, it seems most likely to just marginalise the less popular platforms which isn t in the best interests of Google. Kevin Kelly of the Technium wrote an interesting post about 1000 true fans [9]. The concept is that if you are doing creative work you only need 1000 dedicated fans who buy everything you sell to make a living. If you make $20 per year from each of the 1000 fans and you will earn enough to live. Make $100 per year from each of the 1000 fans and you will be earning more money than most people. The updates show that artists who try this aren t having much success yet, but the Internet population is still increasing dramatically PaxStreamline offers an innovation in commercial air-conditioning, apparently a significant amount of electricity is wasted on heating the air after chilling it excessively to remove moisture [10]. So instead of cooling it they use a liquid dessicant to extract the moisture. Ben Schwartz explains why you should never create files in H.264 or MPEG formats, unless you have a special commercial license then you (and your viewers) will all be liable for patent infringement for any type of commercial use [11]. Note that storing the data on a web site with Google adverts counts as commercial use. I wonder if all those digital cameras and mobile phones that create MPEG videos have appropriate licenses, maybe uploading a file created on your phone breaches the patent. J. K. Rowling (author of Harry Potter) gave an inspiring speech for Harvard graduates [12]. I particularly liked the following reference to her work for Amnesty International Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid . Peter Eigen gave an interesting TED talk about the formation of Transparency International and the economic problems that are caused by corruption [13]. The Monthly Review has an interesting article about the failure of the US justice system [14]. The prison industrial complex has captured part of the US government, neo-liberalism is to blame. 59% of Americans agree that homosexuals ought to be able to serve in the U.S. military. But 70 percent believe that gays and lesbians ought to be able to serve in the military [15]. Apparently 11% of Americans think that gays and lesbians are better than homosexuals .

John Goerzen: Review: Linux IM Software

I ve been looking at instant messaging and chat software lately. Briefly stated, I connect to Jabber and IRC networks from at least three different computers. I don t like having to sign in and out on different machines. One of the nice features about Jabber (XMPP) is that I can have clients signing in from all over the place and it will automatically route messages to the active one. If the clients are smart enough, that is. Gajim I have been using Gajim as my primary chat client for some time now. It has a good feature set, but has had a history of being a bit buggy for me. It used to have issues when starting up: sometimes it would try to fire up two copies of itself. It still has a bug when being fired up from a terminal: if you run gajim & exit, it will simply die. You have to wait a few seconds to close the terminal you launched it from. It has also had issues with failing to reconnect properly after a dropped network connection and generating spurious resource already in use errors. Upgrades sometimes fix bugs, and sometimes introduce them. The latest one I ve been dealing with is its auto-idle support. Sometimes it will fail to recognize that I am back at the machine. Even weirder, sometimes it will set one of my accounts to available status, but not the other. So much for my complaints about Gajim; it also has some good sides. It has excellent multi-account support. You can have it present your multiple accounts as separate sections in the roster, or you can have them merged. Then, say, all your contacts in a group called Friends will be listed together, regardless of which account you use to contact them. The Jabber protocol (XMPP) permits you to connect from multiple clients. Each client specifies a numeric priority for its connection. When someone sends you a message, it will be sent to the connection with the highest priority. The obvious feature, then, is to lower your priority when you are away (or auto-away due to being idle), so that you always get IMs at the device you are actively using. Gajim supports this via letting you specify timeouts that get you into different away states, and using the advanced configuration editor, you can also set the priority that each state goes to. So, if Gajim actually recognized your idleness correctly, this would be great. I do also have AIM and MSN accounts which I use rarely. I run Jabber gateways to each of these on my server, so there is no need for me to use a multiprotocol client. That also is nice because then I can use a simple Jabber client on my phone, laptop, whatever and see all my contacts. Gajim does not support voice or video calls. Due to an apparent bug in Facebook, the latest Gajim release won t connect to Facebook servers, but there is a patch that claims to fix it. Psi Psi is another single-protocol Jabber client, and like Gajim, it runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Psi has a nicer GUI than Gajim, and is more stable. It is not quite as featureful, and one huge omission is that it doesn t support dropping priority on auto-away (though it, weirdly, does support a dropped priority when you manually set yourself away). Psi doesn t support account merging, so it always shows my contacts from one account separately from those from another. I like having the option in Gajim. There is a fork of Psi known variously as psi-dev or psi-plus or Psi+. It adds that missing priority feature and some others. Unfortunately, I ve had it crash on me several times. Not only that, but the documentation, wiki, bug tracker, everything is available only in Russian. That is not very helpful to me, unfortunately. Psi+ still doesn t support account merging. Both branches of Psi support media calling. Kopete Kopete is a KDE multiprotocol instant messenger client. I gave it only about 10 minutes of time because it is far from meeting my needs. It doesn t support adjustable priorities that I can tell. It also doesn t support XMPP service discovery, which is used to do things like establish links to other chat networks using a Jabber gateway. It also has no way to access ejabberd s send message to all online users feature (which can be accessed via service discovery), which I need in emergencies at work. It does offer multimedia calls, but that s about it. Update: A comment pointed out that Kopete can do service discovery, though it is in a very non-obvious place. However, it still can t adjust priority when auto-away, so I still can t use it. Pidgin Pidgin is a multiprotocol chat client. I have been avoiding it for years, with the legitimate fear that it was jack of all trades, master of none. Last I looked at it, it had the same limitations that Kopete does. But these days, it is more capable. It supports all those XMPP features. It supports priority dropping by default, and with a plugin, you can even configure all the priority levels just like with Gajim. It also has decent, though not excellent, IRC protocol support. Pidgin supports account merging and in fact, it doesn t support any other mode. You can, for instance, tell it that a given person on IRC is the same as a given Jabber ID. That works, but it s annoying because you have to manually do it on every machine you re running Pidgin on. Worse, they used to support a view without merged accounts, but don t anymore, and they think that s a feature. Pidgin does still miss some nifty features that Gajim and Psi both have. Both of those clients will not only tell you that someone is away, but if you hover over their name, tell you how long someone has been away. (Gajim says away since , while Pidgin shows last status at . Same data either way.) Pidgin has the data to show this, but doesn t. You can manually find it in the system log if you like, but unhelpfully, it s not on the log for an individual person. Also, the Jabber protocol supports notifications while in a chat: The contact is typing , paying attention to a conversation, or closed the chat window. Psi and Gajim have configurable support for these; you can send whatever notifications your privacy preferences say. Pidgin, alas, removed that option, and again they see this as a feature. Pidgin, as a result, makes me rather nervous. They keep removing useful features. What will they remove next? It is difficult to change colors in Pidgin. It follows the Gtk theme, and there is a special plugin that will override some, but not all, Gtk options. Empathy Empathy supports neither priority dropping when away nor service discovery, so it s not usable for me. Its feature set appears sparse in general, although it has a unique desktop sharing option. Update: this section added in response to a comment. On IRC I also use IRC, and have been using Xchat for that for quite some time now. I tried IRC in Pidgin. It has OK IRC support, but not great. It can automatically identify to nickserv, but it is under-documented and doesn t support multiple IRC servers for a given network. I ve started using xchat with the bip IRC proxy, which makes connecting from multiple machines easier.

William Pitcock: How to Fight Lazy For Sports

OLAHRAGA(getactivechallenge)-DALAM Everyone knows that exercise can heal the body. But why only a few people who routinely perform the activity? Ask yourself. The answer is, maybe you less motivated to do so. A survey ever conducted to find out why people rarely do sports. The survey involving 15,000 women from 25 countries showed that although nearly half of them know that exercise is very important for health, but less than 25 percent of it done. Why? More than two-thirds of respondents said that they would exercise more often if the gym was fun. So far, they consider it as a routine or demand to stay healthy so feel burdened. Although the facts say so, but it is unfortunate if people take sport as a less desirable activity. If you are not motivated to do the morning run, bike or fitness, try these few tips that may improve your mood for a workout without having to feel it as a demand or load. 1. Participate In A Club
Come in a club full of adventure and can arrange your sporting activity each week. Find information from friends or open the website that provides these facilities. 2. Involve Friends
If you are interested in joining a club, you can do sports with your friends or beloved. Sport activities together can evoke passion and spirit to not realize that you are really doing is exercise, not just recreation. 3. Try New Types
Trying something new will make you feel to have new experiences and unexpected. Make your muscles work with the new type of sport and do not usually very good for your body. 4. Make A Game
You would be very interested in an adventure or a game. Making sport like games is a good idea. Make activities as the game ran find treasure limited time, and you will feel more happy and challenged. 5. Back to Boyhood
Do you remember when as a child running around all day without feeling tired and bored? It feels good right? That s what you should do now. Create a day where you can be reunited with friends and do sports or play activities you usually do in childhood. Rollerblading in the park to play or jump rope can be very enjoyable. 6. Give Credits For Yourself
If you ve managed to do sports, try giving a gift to yourself. Watching the film series, enjoying a plate of spaghetti or relax at the spa can be temoat rewards you deserve for successfully achieving exercise goals. Most people who do not enjoy the sport has a very dense activity and also because they are not used to doing. But if once you find that it is a routine exercise that is enjoyable, you will begin to enjoy it. Without realizing it, you also have to do two things at once is fun, physical exercise and psychological. Good luck.

Russell Coker: Will Aliens be Alien?

The Telegraph has a silly article titled Aliens are likely to look and behave like us [1]. It s based on the ideas of Professor Simon Conway Morris [2] who is a big fan of evolutionary convergence. He seems to believe that humans evolved in a way that is close to optimal and that aliens would have to evolve in a similar manner. The article s claim that aliens will look and behave like us has three flaws, one is assuming that humans are the ideal form for space travel, another is the significant possibilities for vast objective differences between species, and the final one is the human tendency to regard small differences as being really significant. The Arrogance of Assuming that Humans are Ideal. It seems extremely arrogant to assume that humans have the ideal form for performing tasks that we have not yet performed such as traveling to another star system. To assume that it is certain that humans will colonise the stars is also extremely arrogant and foolish as well, I think that a significant amount of money should be devoted to existential risks that we face. People who believe that humans will inevitably colonise the stars (probably because God told them there s no other reason for such certainty) will tend to oppose taking prudent measures to reduce the probability of failure. We should also consider the possibility that a human society that colonises another star system at some future time might be so different from us that we regard them as alien. How Might Aliens be Different? It seems to me that one problem with the theory of convergent evolution (as applied to different planets) is that evolution doesn t seem to work in big steps. It seems to me that for an increasing portion of the jobs in our technological society there would be a benefit in having four arms and two legs, and maybe having more than four fingers on two of the hands. But evolving a bone structure that makes four arms useful is not a minor tweak so it seems unlikely to happen naturally we might be able to genetically modify humans to have four arms and two legs with some future technology. I can t believe that four limbs is the optimal number for every mammal, amphibian and reptile (apart from the legless ones), that two legs plus two wings is the optimal number for every bird, and that six legs is the optimal number for every insect. I also can t believe that two arms and two legs is the optimum number for every primate with the only significant difference in limbs being the primates that possess a prehensile tail. Evolution doesn t produce perfect creatures, what it does is to produce creatures that tend to be slightly fitter than their ancestors. So even if there was an optimal form for a species that develops interstellar-craft, there would be no reason to assume that humans have such a form even if we had developed interstellar travel. I think it s relatively safe to assume that aliens would have two eyes (stereoscopic vision is a significant advantage), but apart from that I don t think we can assume much about their appearance. For example I don t think that there s any inherent reason why creatures as intelligent as current humans could not evolve from octopuses 8 arms would be quite useful for operating machines. Aliens that spread beyond their own home planet don t have to be optimal for such tasks, they only need to become the dominant species on their planet, develop decent technology, and then want to leave their planet. A species that took 100,000 years to achieve what humans have achieved in the past 100 years might not be considered optimal but it might still be able to eventually launch interstellar craft. I don t think it s reasonable to assume that aliens would have to be as intelligent as humans to do that. But it does seem most likely that any aliens who manage to get here would be more intelligent than us. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has a really interesting analysis of how human history was determined by geography and the availability of plants and animals suitable for domestication. Part of the explanation for the apparent lack of intelligent aliens could be planets where the dominant species was stuck in a situation like that of the people of New Guinea, the lack of plants and animals suitable for domestication prevented their society from developing. A stone-age human civilisation could potentially be stable for millions of years. The article says Extra-terrestrials might not only resemble us but have our foibles, such as greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others resources . Well for starters a species that can displace all other contenders to become the dominant species in their planet would have to be capable of greed and violence. So that is probably correct but is not really going out on a limb. Physorg.com has a short article describing the benefits of sexual reproduction in terms of the rate of accumulation of harmful mutations [3]. So it seems that sexual reproduction is most likely among intelligent aliens. But I don t think that there is any reason to assume that aliens couldn t be hermaphrodites. The Telegraph article claims that Star Wars and Star Trek could be more accurate than they ever imagined in depicting alien life , but given that Star Trek has avoided homosexuality even when demanded by the plot it seems that whatever aliens do in the bedroom would be way outside the range of activities alluded to in Star Trek. It seems that almost all sci-fi has aliens that are less alien than a significant portion of the human population. I think it s safe to predict that if we should meet aliens they will not look like humans wearing cheap make-up or rubber suits that has more to do with the budgets assigned to movie studios than any claim to potential realism. It seems most likely that a society capable of developing space travel would need a great deal of training for it s young before they become self-sufficient. Species of animal that abandon their eggs and hope for the best seem unlikely to succeed in doing that. I think that this implies that a pair-bonded species that spends an extended amount of time raising their young is most likely to succeed. Perceptions of Aliens Vulcans are widely regarded as being on the Autism spectrum. So it seems that having some similarities in personality to about 1% of the human population is enough to convince most human viewers that the character in question is an alien. A Google search for such things just turns up many references to people on the Autism spectrum who feel like aliens which incidentally is the source of the alias ETBE [4] that I used for more than 10 years before being diagnosed as an Aspie. Star Trek aliens aren t actually very alien by human standards! Given the repeated demonstrations of the general human inability to recognise the psychological similarities in people from different countries or racial/ethnic/religious backgrounds it seems likely that few people would recognise aliens as being at all similar to us. As so many people are unable to recognise the fundamental similarities in people who happen to have a different skin color I can t imagine many people immediately regarding beings that look like octopuses as having human traits. Could an eusocial organism (such as bees or ants) develop space travel? It seems to me that most people wouldn t regard humans who act in a manner that resembles ants (such as the Borg Collective) as being like us . The possibility of an eusocial race evolved from humans is explored in Coalescent: A Novel (Destiny s Children, Bk. 1) by Stephen Baxter (and more briefly in the sequels). Probability The universe is a large place. Making a specific prediction about the first alien species that we might encounter might make some sense. But given the potentially billions of species that might be out there we should assume that some of the more improbable forms are represented. Claiming that anything in particular is impossible seems very rash. Also anyone who makes claims about what evolution should do seems to have missed the point. What evolution does is to give rise to species that tend to be a better fit for the environment. Different environments result in different creatures. We can try and predict what creatures might evolve, but we don t get to say that things should happen.

Mike Hommey: RC_buggy_arches = 0

(maybe) After the two updates in the previous post, I got further and eventually fixed the root of the remaining problems on ARM. It appears I got on the wrong track at the very beginning of the investigation. My first test was to disable the JIT compiler during the tests, and it didn t affect the result. I assumed from there that the JIT compiler was doing fine and wasn t involved. Which led me to believe the alignment of the stack at 32-bits word boundary instead of 64-bits was a standard behaviour. I turns out my first test itself was wrong, because I hadn t disabled the JIT compiler at all. You need to modify the runxpcshelltests.py script to disable the JIT, and not fiddle with the javascript.options.jit.chrome preference. The JIT compiler was misaligning the stack, and disassembling the generated code leading to broken behaviour revealed that it was doing so when setting up arguments on the stack for function calls. While I was afraid this would be difficult to fix without changing a lot of code, and first only disabled the JIT compiler, it turns out the way nanojit works by compiling the last instructions first did make it straightforward to fix. But ARM was not the only RC buggy architecture left after sparc and powerpc were fixed. MIPS remained. Alpha fails, too, but it is not a release architecture. Update: It appears hurd fails too, but like Alpha, it is not a release architecture. So, while I didn t want to wait 50 hours for a build, I managed to execute a failing test with the last xulrunner-1.9.1 packages that got built (before I enabled the test suite) under qemu. And I was able to track down the origin of the bug: the xpcom layer that translate function calls between languages doesn t fill arguments correctly when they are smaller than 32 bits. While the code is adapted to the mipsel case, which is little endian, it doesn t work on mips, which is big endian. I came up with a patch that should work, and which I hope won t break mipsel as a consequence. All that is left to do is to build and test the fix. I hope someone else will be able to do that for me. All in all except a 1.9.1.8 release this week with a lot less red on the buildd status page.

Christine Spang: a foray into emacs

This spring I'm taking a class that does all its programming assignments in MIT Scheme. The last time I had to write Scheme for class, we used PLT Scheme, and thus the DrScheme editor. This time, with that option out, I've decided to do the assignments in Emacs. It is, after all, an editor built out of lisp. I've used vim for the last five years or so. Some people ask me why this is so I do go to MIT after all, where Emacs was originally written. The answer to that is simply that Debian got to me first, and at the time at least, the people I knew there used vim. I've heard Emacs is good, but up until this point every time I've tried it I've thrown it down in frustration and then couldn't figure out how to exit the damn thing. This time I was more determined, and made it through the initial hump of being completely useless at the editor. Here are a few of my observations so far, after mucking around for a couple days over a period of about two weeks: I'm pretty sure at this point that I'm still trying to bend emacs into being vim with different keybindings instead of figuring out how emacs wants to be used. It's also difficult to compare and contrast between the two editors in that my .vimrc contains years of tweaks and customizations whereas my .emacs started out as a clean slate. There are two things I'm doing to try to mentally separate emacs from vim, to avoid my fingers' muscle memory from becoming confused:
  1. I'm always using emacs in an X window with dark-on-light text, whereas I always use vim in a terminal with light-on-dark text.
  2. I'm only writing scheme in emacs. No other languages so far.
I'm planning to keep working on these programming assignments in emacs, despite it being annoying slower than I would be in vim. Tips and pointers for improving my experience are welcome.

13 February 2010

Mike Hommey: When will Iceweasel 3.6 come ?

That is a question I hear more and more, and I felt it had to be answered publicly. Short answer: when it s ready. The current target for Squeeze is 3.5, for various reasons, but the main is that it shares the same Gecko version as Iceape (SeaMonkey) and Icedove (Thunderbird), which means that while the security team (or myself) will have to update these three for security updates, they will share patches. So 3.6 is less a priority than having 3.5 in shape for the release. Last week, I wrote on a mailing list post that I was expecting 3.6 to come this week. Well, that was before I discovered the sad reality about the state of the current version. But 3.6 is still on the radar. I already went through all the patches we apply on 1.9.1, and rebasing should now be straightforward. Most of the 3.5 failures have now also been addressed: sparc and powerpc were fixed first, and I am now (re-re-re -re)building on arm for, I hope, the last time. Unfortunately, mips is still missing, and without a porterbox, I can t do much. I tried, some time ago, in qemu, but there is no way I m going to wait 50 hours for a build again ; it was already painful on a real arm box (where it takes 90 minutes just to link libxul.so). Anyways, 2 patches stolen from upstream and 5 patches sent (or almost sent for the one currently under validation) later, we should be down to one release architecture failing instead of four. Which is already good. On the other hand, a new 3.5 upstream release, with security fixes, is planned for next tuesday, which means some time will have to be spent for stable updates, too. So, in the next few days, expect that I ll be working on stable security updates, then unstable updates, including the three architectures fix, and then work on 3.6 will continue. Which means we can hope for a 3.6 release in experimental by the end of next week, or the following one, in the worst case. Update: *sigh* 4 patches on arm is not enough :(. At least this time I think I m done with xptcinvoke and xptcstubs. Update:In the end, 2 patches and disabling the JIT compiler did the trick on arm. The 2 other patches were actually addressing bugs that only existed because the JIT is doing something wrong with the stack alignment.

11 February 2010

Robert Collins: Using UEC instead of EC2


So, we wanted to move a Hudson CI server at Canonical from using chroots to VM s (for better isolation and security), and there is this great product Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC basically Eucalyptus). To do this I needed to make some changes to the Hudson EC2 plugin and thats where the fun starts. While I focus on getting Hudson up and running with UEC in this post, folk generally interested in the differences between UEC and EC2, or getting a single-machine UEC instance up for testing should also find this useful. Firstly, getting a test UEC instance installed was a little tricky I only had one machine to deploy it on, and this is an unusual configuration. Nicely though, it all worked, once a few initial bugs and misconfiguration items got fixed up. I wrote up the crux of the outcome on the Ubuntu community help wiki. See 1 Physical system . The particular trap to watch out for seems to be that this configuration is not well tested, so the installation scripts have a hard time getting it right. I haven t tried to make it play nice with Network Manager in the loop, but I m pretty sure that that can be done via interface aliasing or something similar. Secondly I needed to find out what was different between EC2 and UEC (Note that I was running on Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) so things could be different in Lucid). I couldn t find a simple description of this, so this list may be incomplete:
  1. UEC runs an old version of the EC2 API. This is because it hasn t implemented everything in the new API versions yet.
  2. UEC defaults to port 8773, not port 80 (for both the EC2 and S3 API s)
  3. The EC2 and S3 API s are rooted differently: at AWS they are at /, for UEC they are at /services/Eucalyptus and /services/Walrus
  4. UEC doesn t supply a SSL API port as far as I can tell.
  5. DescribeImages has something wonky with it.
So the next step then is to modify the Hudson EC2 plugin to support these differences. Fortunately it is in Java, and the Java community has already updated the various libraries (jets3t and typica) to support UEC I just needed to write a UI for the differences and pass the info down the various code paths. Kohsuke has let me land this now even though it has an average UI (in rev 27366), and I m going to make the UI better now by consolidating all the little aspects into a couple of URL s. Folk comfortable with building their own .hpi can get this now by svn updating and rebuilding the ec2 plugin. We ve also filed another bug asking for a single API call to establish the endpoints, so that its even easier for users to set this up. Finally, and this isn t a UEC difference, I needed to modify the Hudson EC2 plugin to work with the ubuntu user rather than root, as Ubuntu AMI s ship with root disabled (as all Ubuntu installs do). I chose to have Hudson reenable root, rather than making everything work without root, because the current code paths assume they can scp things as root, so this was less disruptive. With all that done, its now possible to configure up a Hudson instance testing via UEC nodes. Here s how:
  1. Install UEC and make sure you can run up instances using euca-run-instances, ssh into them and that networking works for you. Make sure you have installed at least one image (EMI aka AMI) to run tests on. I used the vanilla in-store UEC Karmic images.
  2. Install Hudson and the EC2 plugin (you ll need to build your own until a new release (1.6) is made).
  3. Go to /configure and near the bottom click on Add a new cloud and choose Amazon EC2.
  4. Look in ~/.euca/eucarc, or in the zip file that the UEC admin web page lets you download, to get at your credentials. Fill in the Access Key and Secret Access key fields accordingly. You can put in the private key (UEC holds onto the public half) that you want to use, or (once the connection is fully setup) use the Generate Key button to have a dedicated Hudson key created. I like to use one that I can ssh into to look at a live node YMMV. (Or you could add a user and as many keys as you want in the init script more on that in a second).
  5. Click on Advanced, this will give you a bunch of details like EC2 Endpoint hostname . Fill these out.
  6. Sensible values for a default UEC install are: 8773 for both ports, /services/Eucalyptus and /services/Walrus for the base URLs, and SSL turned off. (Note that the online help tells you this as well).
  7. Set an instance cap, unless you truely have unlimited machines. E.g. 5, to run 5 VMs at a time.
  8. Click on Test Connection it should pretty much instantly say Success .
  9. Thats the Cloud itself configured, now we configure VM s that Hudson is willing to start. Click on Add right above the List of AMIs to be launched as slaves text.
  10. Fill out the AMI with your EMI e.g. emi-E027107D is the Ubuntu 9.10 image I used.
  11. for remote FS root, just put /hudson or something, unless you have a preseeded area (e.g. with a shared bzr repo or something) inside your image.
  12. For description describe the intent of the image e.g. DB test environment
  13. For the labels put one or more tags that you will use to tell test jobs they should run on this instance. They can be the same as labels on physical machines it will act as an overflow buffer. If no physical machines exist, a VM will be spawned when needed. For testing I put euca
  14. For the init script, its a little more complex. You need to configure up java so that hudson itself can run: 
    cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list << EOF
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-security multiverse
EOF
export http_proxy=http://192.168.1.1:8080/
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
apt-get update
echo "buildd shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 boolean true"   debconf-set-selections
apt-get install -y -f sun-java6-jre
    Note that I have included my local HTTP proxy there just remove that line if you don t have one.
  15. Click on Advanced, to get at the less-common options.
  16. For remote user, put ubuntu , and for root command prefix put sudo .
  17. For number of executors, you are essentially choosing the number of CPU s that the instance will request. E.g. putting 20 will ask for an extra-large high-cpu model machine when it deploys. This will then show up as 20 workers on the same machine.
  18. Click save :)
  19. Now, when you add a job a new option in the job configuration will appear tie this job to a node . Select one of the label(s) you put in for the AMI, and running the job will cause that instance to start up if its not already available.
Note that Hudson will try to use java from s3 if you don t install it, but that won t work right for a few reasons I ll be filing an issue in the Hudson tracker about it, as thats a bit of unusual structure in the existing code that I m happier leaving well enough alone :) .

Ana Beatriz Guerrero Lopez: DudesConf III \o/

The news is out (link in Spanish). We will have this year the third edition of the DudesConf a.k.a. the Spanish DebConf. Special thanks to GPUL for hosting us another year!

Joachim Breitner: Diploma Thesis Finished

Earlier today, I went to a local copy shop and had my diploma thesis printed. This afternoon, I will hand it in. The title is Loop subgroups of Fr and the images of their stabilizer subgroups in GLr( ) and discusses a group-theoretical result. I assume that very few readers care about the content of the thesis, but maybe some are interested in a few assorted LaTeX hints. I m also publishing the full TeX source code, maybe someone can make use of it. Less chatty varioref I m using the varioref package, in conjunction with the cleveref package. This provides a command \vref fig:S3S4l which will expand to, for example, to Figure 1 on page 11 . But if the referenced figure is actually on the current page, the next page, the previous page or the facing page (in two-side layouts), it will say so: Figure 1 on this page. This is very nice, but I assume that the reader of my thesis is able to find Figure 1 when it is visible, i.e. on the current or facing page. One can remove the referencing texts with the commands \def\reftextfaceafter , \def\reftextfacebefore and \def\reftextcurrent . But because varioref puts a space between Figure 1 and this text, we will get a superfluous space even before punctuation. The remedy is the command \unskip, which removes this space again. So I use in my preamble: 
\def\reftextfaceafter  \unskip %
\def\reftextfacebefore \unskip %
\def\reftextcurrent    \unskip %
Palatino and extra leading I chose the Palatino font for my thesis, using the mathpazo package. Various sources (such as the KOMA-Script manual) suggest to use 5% extra leading: 
\linespread 1.05
Counting figures independently from chapters I don t have too many figures and tables in my thesis, and I want them to be numbered simple 1, 2, ... By default, LaTeX would say 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, ... This can be fixed using the remreset package and these commands: 
\makeatletter
\@removefromreset figure chapter 
\renewcommand \thefigure \arabic figure 
\@removefromreset table chapter 
\renewcommand \thetable \arabic table 
\makeatother
No widows and club lines LaTeX already avoids these, but I wanted to get rid of them completely. This can be done with: 
% Disable single lines at the start of a paragraph (Schusterjungen)
\clubpenalty = 10000
% Disable single lines at the end of a paragraph (Hurenkinder)
\widowpenalty = 10000 \displaywidowpenalty = 1000
Struck table lines I had to typeset tables with some lines struck, and I could not find a ready command for that. I used the following definition, based on the code for \hline. Note that it probably does not adjust well to other font sizes and needs to be adjusted manually: 
\makeatletter
\def\stline %
  \noalign \vskip-.7em\vskip-\arrayrulewidth\hrule \@height \arrayrulewidth\vskip.7em 
\makeatother
Title page in one-sided layout According to the KOMA manual, the title page as set by LaTeX is not meant to be the cover of a publication, and therefore has to be set with the margins of a right page i.e. a larger right margin and a smaller left margin. But when printing cheaply, one often just put a transparent sheet on top of the print, so the title page is the cover. You can convince KOMA that you are right by using 
\KOMAoptions twoside=false 
\begin titlepage 
...
\end titlepage 
\KOMAoptions twoside=true
Not flushing the page for chapter heads LaTeX would put the list of algorithms on a new right page. I found this a waste of paper for my few algorithms, and preferred to put the list right after the table of contents. You can override the LaTeX behavior using: 
\tableofcontents
 
\let\cleardoublepage\relax  % book
\let\clearpage\relax  % report
\let\chapter\section
\listofalgorithms
This code also reduces the size of the heading to that of a section. The same trick also works with \chapter. Math in headings vs. PDF bookmarks LaTeX with the hyperref package creates nice PDF bookmarks from your chapter and section titles. Unfortunately, PDF bookmark names can only be plain strings, while the titles in the document might contain some math symbols. You can make both happy with \texorpdfstring: 
\section Stabilizer subgroups in \texorpdfstring $\GL_r(\Z/2\Z)$ GL\_r(Z/2Z)
Setting lines for the signature The diploma thesis contains a small note which I have to sign, saying that I created it on my own etc. Below that, I put two labeled lines for date and signature, using the tabbing environment: 
\begin tabbing 
\rule 4cm .4pt \hspace 1cm  \= \rule 7cm .4pt  \\
Ort, Datum \> Unterschrift
\end tabbing

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