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 :-)

Almost every time he got off the bus for the past month and a half, Jacob started his afternoon in the same way. Before toys, before his trains and his toy bus, before anything indoors, he went for our cats. Here he is, cradling his favorite, Tigger: Laura and I both grew up around cats. We had been talking about kittens, and shortly after we got engaged, one of my relatives offered us some free kittens. We went to his place one evening and selected two of them one calico and one tiger-colored. Since what is now my place will soon be our place, they came to live with me. Our cats were one of the first things we did to prepare for our lives together. Oliver wanted to name them some rather impractical sentence-long names ( The Cat Who Always Likes To Run ), so Laura and I suggested some names from one of their favorite books: Tigger and Roo. They both liked the names, but Oliver thought they should be called Tigger the Digger and Roo the Runner . Never mind that they were just 6 weeks old at the time, and not really old enough to either dig or run. Here s Oliver with Roo, the day after the kittens arrived here. I have always had outside cats, both because I m allergic to cats so I need them to be outside, and because they sometimes literally quiver with joy of being outdoors. Tigger and Roo often chased insects, wrestled with each other, ran up (and slowly came back down) trees, and just loved the outside. Sometimes, I have taken my laptop and wireless headset and work from the back porch. The kittens climb up my jeans, inspect the laptop, and once Roo even fell asleep on my lap at one of those times. Jacob has been particularly attached to Tigger, calling him my very best friend. When Jacob picks him up after school, Tigger often purrs while cradled in Jacob s arms, and Jacob comments that Tigger loves me. Oh dad, he knows I am his friend! The kittens have been growing, and becoming more and more comfortable with their home in the country. Whenever I go outside, it isn t long before there are two energetic kittens near my feet, running back and forth, sometimes being very difficult to avoid stepping on. I call and I see little heads looking at me, from up in a tree, or peeking out from the grain elevator door, or from under the grill. They stare for just a second, and then start running, sometimes comically crashing into something in their haste. Yesterday when I went to give them food, I called and no cats came. I was concerned, and walked around the yard, but at some point either they come or they don t. Yesterday afternoon, just after the bus dropped off Jacob, I discovered Tigger on the ground, motionless. Once Jacob was in the house, I went to investigate, and found Tigger was dead. As I was moving his body, I saw Roo was dead, too. Both apparently from some sort of sudden physical injury a bit mysterious, because neither of them were at a place where they had ever gone before. While all this was happening, I had to also think about how I was going to tell the boys about this. I tried to minimize what he could see, Jacob had caught an unavoidable glimpse of Tigger as we were walking back from the bus, but didn t know exactly what had happened. He waited in the house, and when I came back, asked me if Tigger was dead. I said he was. Jacob started crying, saying, Oh Dad, I am so sad , and reached up for a hug. I picked him up and held him, then sat down on the couch and let him curl up on my lap. I could quite honestly let him know he wasn t alone, telling him I am sad, too. Oliver arrived not long after, and he too was sad, though not as much as Jacob. Both boys pretty soon wanted to see them. I decided this was important for them for closure, and to understand, so while they waited in the house, I went back out to arrange the kittens to hide their faces, the part that looks most unnatural after they die. The boys and I walked out to where I put them, then I carried both of them the last few feet. We stood a little ways back close enough to see who was there, far enough to not get too much detail and they were both sniffling. I tried to put voice to the occasion, saying, Goodbye, Tigger and Roo. We love you. Oliver asked if they could hear us. I said No, but I told them what I felt like anyway. Jacob, through tears, said, Dad, maybe they are in heaven now. We went back inside. Jacob said, Oh dad, I am so sad. This is the saddest day of my life. My heart is breaking. Hearing a 7-year-old say that isn t exactly easy for a dad. Pretty soon he was thinking of sort of comfort activities to do, saying I think I would feel better if we did So they decided to watch a favorite TV program. Jacob asked if Laura knew yet, and when I said no, he got his take-charge voice and said, Dad, you will start the TV show for us. While we are watching, you will send Laura an email to tell her about Tigger and Roo. OK? What could I say, it wasn t a bad idea. Pretty soon both boys were talking and laughing. It was Big Truck Night last night, at a town about half an hour away. It s an annual event we were already planning to attend, where all sorts of Big Trucks firetrucks, school bus, combine, bucket truck, cement truck, etc show up and are open for kids to climb in and explore. It s always a highlight for them. They played and sang happily as we drove, excitedly opened and closed the big door on the school bus and yelled All Aboard! from the top of the combine. We ate dinner, and drove back home. When we got home, Jacob mentioned the cats again, in a sort of matter-of-fact way, and also wanted to make sure he knew Laura had got the message. A person never wakes up expecting to have to dump a bowl of un-eaten cat food, or to give an impromptu cat funeral for little boys. As it was happening, I wished they hadn t been around right then. But in retrospect, I am glad they were. They had been part of life for those kittens, and it is only right that they could be included in being part of death. They got visual closure this way, and will never wonder if the cats are coming back someday. They had a chance to say goodbye. Here is how I remember the kittens.

For a while I have been eyeing with the TI eZ430 Chronos watch, a slightly bulky sports watch that not only comes with a built-in thermometer, barometer and accelerometer, but also a freely programmable micro controller (from the TI MSP430 family hence the name). In addition it has a small radio chip included and can communicate wirelessly with the computer, or possibly other devices. All in all, a very geeky toy. A week ago I managed to buy one quite cheaply via eBay (30 including shipping). It took me a while to get an overview of the various resources about the device. Here is what I have learned.

• Hardware: I have the new edition (the included debug board and wireless access point are white). This means that I cannot update the software of the watch via the wireless connection, and it means that most software written for it does not support the new altimeter sensor (yet).
• Development: Debian is a very suitable development platform; the packages mspdebug and gcc-msp430 provide all I need to compile (make config && make) and upload (mspdebug rf2500 "prog ../foo.txt") new software.
• Code: Besides the original software that comes with the device (which supports the new hardware), there are two main lines of community-driven developments: OpenChronos and openchronos-ng. The former is (as the name suggests) older and maintained mostly by forks in various places. The latter is newer, its UI deviates further from the original software and seems to be slightly more active.
• Communication: Both of these have their own mailinglists (openchronos, where I did not get a reply yet, and ti-chronos-development, where my messages are still waiting for moderation). I found only one IRC channel, #openchronos on freenode, with similarly little activity.

After I found that out, I tried to hack a bit on the various software. The first issue I had (and still have) is that I cannot use the buttons of the device while it is attached to the debug board. They do work if forget to take out the battery, but supposedly that is bad for the battery. So my compile-upload-test-cycle becomes a compile-upload-detach-insert-battery-test-remove-battery-attach-cycle. I could not find out how to emulate button presses using mspdebug. Any suggestions are welcome. The other problem was the new altimeter hardware: Neither OpenChronos nor openchronos-ng support that yet. I originally planned to port the driver from the official software to a random OpenChronos fork when I read that Richard Rondu did that to openchronos-ng yet. I found the code in a month-old merge-request. I tried it, it worked, and I started to clean up the code a bit and add a variometer mode to it, e.g. displaying the current rate of climb my ultimate goal is to use this as a surprisingly cheap variometer for paragliding. After a day of hacking and quickly lifting the watch from the room floor to the room ceiling and back I believe that it works okish, although quite a few parameter can benefit from more tweaking: sample rate (currently 20Hz), length of history (currently 2s) and the linear regression method (currently simply the difference between the average of the samples of the current second with the samples of the last second). As always, patches welcome, the code is in my fork on sf.net.
Next to do would be to enable some buzzing noise depending on the rate of change; during flight I don t want to decipher a low-contract LCD screen. But it is questionable whether the buzzer is loud enough we ll see. I was also happy to hear that there are other zE430-hackers in Karlsruhe, one of them for example tries to make the alarm clock sleep-cycle-aware.

Review: Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed

Series:	Crescent Moon Kingdoms #1
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	January 2013
ISBN:	0-7564-0778-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	367

Doctor Adoulla Makhslood is the last ghul hunter in Dhamsawaat. He's an old man, and tired, and increasingly uncertain whether he wants to continue putting his life in danger to fight one more fight. But there are no replacements; his young and idealistic dervish apprentice, despite obvious skill, is too inexperienced and uninterested in the knowledge and investigation that makes Adoulla so good at what he does. So, when a young boy shows up on his doorstep, a survivor of a vicious ghul attack, he goes hunting once again. And both finds something much darker and stronger than he expected and meets an unexpected ally: a shape-shifting girl who is herself a survivor of something far worse than ghuls. Throne of the Crescent Moon is a first-novel fantasy that has made quite a splash, including a Hugo nomination (although I thought a win was unlikely, and I was right). One of the more interesting comments I've read about it was the observation by Jo Walton that if it had come out in 1980, it would have been an amazing, unusually wonderful, non-normative book. That it isn't is evidence of the changes in fantasy since then. The field has grown. As you might guess from the publisher's insistence on comparing it with The Arabian Nights, and from the names mentioned above, this book is set in an unspecified Middle Eastern culture and draws heavily from its mythology. It does not contain any western characters; the entire story is native to its region. The same is true of the mythology, which gave it a refreshing originality for me. And while I'm not the best one to judge, the presentation of that setting seemed free of the tint of the exotic. People live here, there are factions and multiple cultures, and the supernatural is a backdrop to most of the city. This would be very unusual decades ago. It's a bit less unusual now, and the story itself is a familiar ensemble fantasy, if refreshingly free of extended map exploration journeys. Ahmed brings together five characters with very different backgrounds and throws their varying talents at a problem. A few of those elements are a bit too familiar: female sexuality as a threat to male power is a world-building element that I could do without, for example. I also found the villain completely inadequate in its unidimensional evil (reinforced with a few more torture scenes than I needed to read), and even the attempted complication felt too predictable to me. Except for one touch of perspective, I'd call Throne of the Crescent Moon a competent, enjoyable, but somewhat forgettable fantasy novel, albeit one that's refreshingly concerned with a city instead of countrysides and travel. That touch is in the age of several of the protagonists. We get sections following several of the main characters in tight third person, but Adoulla is the first protagonist and the focus of much of the book. And Adoulla is neither young nor inexperienced, and is not going through the typical fantasy bildungsroman. He's old, experienced, a bit set in his ways, cranky, cantankerous, and deeply in love with his city. In tone, this shifts the story towards Star Wars as seen through the eyes of Obi-Wan Kenobi instead of Luke Skywalker. And that change I really liked, and would be happy to see become more common in fantasy. There was a bit of a downside for me in three of the five main characters being older. At times, Throne of the Crescent Moon has an elegiac tone, a feeling of life, power, and time slipping away and cultures and ways of life being lost. That's not my favorite thematic element. I tend to find it more depressing than I really want in my reading. But, here, the mature perspective more than makes up for some occasional negativity. I particularly liked how the older characters treated the likely budding young romance, which would have been the center of many books in this genre, with bemused detachment and playful encouragement without giving it more significance than it deserves. There's another romance that ends up being more significant, and which needs the weight of time and well-lived lives to become so. I don't think this book deserves a Hugo, but it is an enjoyable fantasy with some interesting characters and a refreshing perspective and setting. The villain really isn't adequate to the story, there's a bit too much torture for my liking, and I could have done without a few of the tropes, but it's a solid entry in its genre and a pleasant few hours of reading. And despite being advertised as the first of a series, it comes to a satisfying conclusion. Rating: 7 out of 10

It s a somewhat strange feeling to spend time fixing things that broke instead of implementing new things, but it s not like I m a creative guy anyway

• buildd.debian.org went down, but it s now up again thanks to the relevant admins. The CGI part mentioned by Philipp was fun to debug: the CGI worked when called from a shell, but not from Apache (with an apparently strange DNS resolution error). I suggested attaching it with strace, and the result was even stranger: a connection to nscd s socket was attempted but the DNS resolution through the network wasn t. A closer look revealed the nsswitch.conf file was read, and its configuration was OK, so what? Looking at libnss_dns.so.2, one could see the usual syscalls for library loading: open, read, fstat, mmap oh wait, mmap failed with ENOMEM (Cannot allocate memory). Tollef bumped the rlimits on the Apache side, and that was it.
• Linux kernel ABI bump notifications: they were acting weird since kernel people resumed uploading -trunk- kernels to experimental. That was identified a while ago, but since I like tested bugfixes, I actually did wait for it to happen; fixed in r68876.
• Of course, d-i s git repository was updated to bump the ABI from 3.10-2-* to 3.10-3-* accordingly.
• #722939 was reported against udev-udeb since depending on a deb library isn t a good thing when you re an udeb binary.
• Trying to look into d-i build failures earlier this month, I thought I managed to reproduce the issue, but that was just my misunderstanding the way apt works. Long story short, *InRelease and *Packages files are checked before they re put under lists/; modifying the contents isn t expected: the modification time is used to set the If-Modified-Since header when trying to fetch a new version from the server, and it s OK to get a 304 Not Modified in that case. As a side effect, that means the files can be hand-edited, for example because you need to work around the dependency bug mentioned above, and one will still get Hit lines for all those files. If something goes wrong, one can still rm the files and start over, but that looks like a large hammer. Let s see if the issue can get reproduced (and debugged!) later on.

For those last two points, the long term plan is:

• To check udeb installability automatically to catch such dependency issues as early as possible.
• To keep many more logs, so that one can still read the whole output a few weeks after the fact, and so that one can compare some logs to try and spot difference in a semi-automated fashion.

Hopefully getting this done this week (famous last words, eh?).

It seems I'm catching up with the pace of this course I'm following and that is compelling me to go back to posting on my blog, Arte y cultura en circulaci n: crear y compartir en tiempos digitales . This week's lesson is (again, in Spanish) Las fronteras del remix (the boundaries of remixes). An interesting text, open to everybody (regardless of whether you are signed up for the course or, I hope, whether time has passed since the course took place). And this week's homework is to find "our favorite" non-original work (I picked one among my favorite works And, yes, this is partly because I am part of the "club" of deniers of true originality: We cannot create anything without being part of a surrounding culture, without a common heritage and language with which we speak to our audience) and to find something about it, anything considered important or significative as to its antecedents. What do I like about this work, what grabs my attention. Do I consider it to be a true new creative work? Why? I am taking as an example Leo Masliah, an Uruguayan writer and musician (writer and interpreter). I have followed and enjoyed Masliah's work since 1996, and although by far I'm most familiar with his musical works, I have two books (a novel and a series of short stories). Among his facets, I most enjoy the acid, nihilistic/dadaistic streaks. I chose three of his songs to talk about I am linking to anonline resource where possible, but uploading the three songs to this blog to make his work better known, so that people understand what I talk about, and with my best intentions. Of course, if there is any request to remove the material, I will do it right away. I hope this can be seen as fair/academic use, although this blog is somewhat widely read.

La recuperaci n del unicornio

This song was in the first Masliah cassette I came across, Although musically it is an original work, the lyrics are a clear, almost line-by-line reply to the ever-repeated Unicornio song, by Silvio Rodr guez. This song (which I'm sure that every Spanish speaker reading this lines knows, like it or not It defines for me a good deal of Rodr guez hyper-sweetness and clicheness) has been analyzed over and over looking for a meaning. Silvio recorded this song in 1981, and by 1987 Masliah published this answer, mocking each of the lines.
So, this song can be seen as an original creation, as it contains no literal copy neither of the music nor of the lyrics of the original, but it cannot be understood without being familiar with Silvio's lost unicornio. It would just be an almost-dadaistic rant. But every person that has tasted Silvio Rodr guez cloying song will surely laugh with this one.

No necesitamos otro h roe Balderrama

I find this to be a very unique piece. It bonds together Argentinian folklore and USA pop.
Masliah sings the famous Argentinian song Zamba de Balderrama, (Castilla / Leguizam n), a song lamenting that the very popular bar and artist stage Balderrama, in Salta (North-Western corner of Argentina), seemed to be on the brink of closing. Of course, when Mart n, Constanza, Regina and me went to Balderrama in July 2010, the danger of closing this place had long been averted. And basically every Argentinian knows this song by heart.
The interesting part is that Masliah sings this song (as he presents it as the closing piece for one of his concerts) being short on time, and decides to present two acts together: Zamba de Balderrama and We don't need another hero, by Tina Turner, from the Mad Max soundtrack. So, of course, even if it's obvious that Masliah had to stretch bits to make them fit together, he achieved a very funny, interesting and unique blend of two completely unrelated works. He derives from one as well as from the other, but creates something unique and new.

Donna Lee

I was thinking what to write for this assignment , and had already chosen the two other songs. Yesterday, we were visiting our friends Octavio and Claudia, in Guanajuato, and I heard for the first time the original(?) version of Donna Lee, by Miles Davis (although often credited to Charlie Parker). That led me to remember Masliah's interpretation, in his Cl sicos album. This album is basically made up with similar excercises: Taking an instrumental piece, with Masliah singing over it. Some of the lyrics follow the story (i.e. the children stories), others just talk nonsense to illustrate a point (i.e. "La voz del medio", "the middle voice") follows the non-protagonist score trying not to grab much attention to the lyrics but to highlight the often ignored melody)... Donna Lee is just a fun excercise on following the melody asking what was in the head of the author that led him to invent such a strange, hard music.

Masliah is a great music performer, although often it seems he tries to hide it (i.e. by abusing the dissonances, ex-profeso singing off-key, etc), and a very funny and crazy author. Most of his works have a deep satirical tone, and it's common to find either simple winks or complete "borrowings" in a clear remix fashion, but nobody will doubt on the originality of his works.

Attachment	Size
07-Donna Lee.MP3	1.79 MB
16 No necesitamos otro h roe - Balderrama.mp3	3.49 MB
Leo Masl ah-La Recuperaci n Del Unicornio.mp3	1.87 MB

DebConf 13 report (by Andreas Tille) General impression I'm beginning my DebConf report in an unofficial "Scenic Hacklab" right at the edge of the lake in Yverdon. This is the right place to memorise the last days. When I started from this place cycling to Le Camp 12 days ago I was full of great expectations and what should I say - the reality has even beaten these. Once it comes about comparing DebConfs even if it is an unfair comparison due all the differences my secret long term favourite was Helsinki very closely followed by Argentina and also very closely followed by all the other great DebConfs I joined (and I joined all in Europe). Would Le Camp be able to beat it? The short answer is: Yes, it is now my favourite DebConf while I think I do not suffer from the last-Debconf-was-the-best-DebConf-syndrome (and I realised there are others thinking the same). As you might probably know I'm a bit addicted to swimming. While Helsinki had admittedly the better conditions I was at least able to fix the distance issue using my bicycle. (Hey, those Le Camp photographers did a great job in hiding the fact that you can not actually touch the lake right from the meadow of Le Camp.) Being able to have my bicycle at DebConf scored some extra points. However, the really great view of the lake, the inspiring "Scenic Hacklab" which was my favourite place has bumped DebConf13 at first place in my personal ranking. So it comes quite natural to say: "Kudos to the great organisation team!" They did a Swiss-like precise work and perfectly succeeded in hiding any problems (I assume there were some as always) from the attendees so everything went smooth, nice and shiny for the attendees. The local team was even precise in setting up great weather conditions for DebConf. While saying thanks to the local team I would like to also explicitly thank Luca Capello who has quite some share that this DebConf was possible at all (while I have to decrease my DebConf score one point because he was not really there - Luca to bad that you were not able to come full time!) Also thanks to Gunnar and Gannef who helped remotely (another score down because I were missing them this year as well). Even if it was my favourite DebConf I was not able to work down my todo list fully (which was not only uploading one package per day which I at least statistically fullfilled). But that's probably a general feature of todo lists anyway. One item was definitely done: Doing my daily swimming BoF. I actually was able to do the other parts of the triathlon which was skipped by Christian and have done in summary about 150km cycling with 3500m elevation and estimated 7-8km swimming (0m elevation ;-)). Considering the great view at sunrise over the lake I was not hating my "Senile bed escape" disease too much (I was every day waking up at sunset) - it was simply a great experience. I will never forget seeing water drips glimmering like gold inside the morning sun while seeing the Alps panorama in the distant. I hope I was able to help all interested swimmers with the DebConf Beach Map which was just a by-product of my activities in DebCamp. Speaking about OSM: I was astonished that the area was way less covered than I expected. Thanks to several DebConf attendees the situation became better and the map does not only show random trees in the wild but also the tracks leading to these. (Remark: It was no DebConf attendee who is responsible for plastering the map with single trees.) While I had my mapping focus basically close to the edge of the lake I was also able to even map my very own street. :-) I clearly remember one specific mapping tour when I was invited by the DPL: He convinced me to join him on a bicycle tour and since I was afraid to get fired I joined him instead to keep on hacking. Also Sorina was brave enough to join us on the tour and she did quite well. (Sorina, do you remember the agreement about your work on the installer? ;-)) Lucas described the tour as: going uphill on only asphalted roads. Sorina and me were witnessing the mighty DPL powers when we left the wood around Le Camp to reach the described road: The asphalt was just put onto the road - no doubt that it was done on the immediate demand of mighty DPL. :-) DebCamp time was flying like nose dive and a lot of known (and unknown) faces arrived at Le Camp. What I really liked a lot this year was that several really young children has pulled down the average age of DebConf attendees. I clearly remember all the discussion one year ago what to do about children. As always the issue was solved in a typical Debian way: Just do it and bring your children - they had obviously a great time as well. I think the youngest child was 2 months and the oldest "child" above 20. ;-) Actually Baptiste Perrier did great in making the C&W party a success and had obviously a nice time. (I wished my son would have been able to come as well but he needs to write his bachelor s thesis in physics. :-() It was nice to see the kids using all playing facilities and communicating with geeks. Also I would like to point out that even the very young attendees had their share at the success of DebConf: Just think of the three "bell ringing assistants" who helped me ringing the bells for lunch and dinner. I've got this cool job from Didier in the beginning of DebCamp. I must say having some real bells ringing is by far nicer than just the "lunch / dinner starts in 10 minutes" from IRC bot. The only thing I did not understand was that people did not considered ringing the bells at 8:00 for breakfast as a good idea. Regarding the food in general I would also like to send kudos to the kitchen: It was tasty, freshly prepared, regional food with a good change rate. I really liked this. Extra points for having the chance to sit outside when eating. Talks But lets have a look into the conference programme. I'd really recommend watching the videos of the talks Bits from the DPL (video) and Debian Cosmology (video). I considered both talks as entertaining and interesting. I also really hope that the effort Enrico Zini started in Debian Contributors (video) will be successful. I had some talks and BoFs myself starting with Why running a Blend (video) and I admit that (as usual) the number of attendees was quite low even if I think there is some proof (see below) that it is interesting for way more people who should consider working more "blendish" in their team. Do you know how to recruit one developer per year and relax the man power problem in your team? Feel free to watch the video. We have confirmation that ten DDs of our team have considered to join Debian only because Debian Med exists. Admittedly biology and medicine are really leaf topics inside the Debian universe. So if even this topic that has a very tiny share of the Debian users is able to attract this level of attention - how many more people could we win for multimedia, games, GIS and others? So if you feel you are quite overworked with your packaging and you have no time this is most probably wrong. The amount of time is basically a matter of priorities you set for your tasks. Try to put some higher priority onto using the just existing Blends tools I explained in my talk to attract more users and developers to your team and by doing so spread the workload over more people. It works, the prove was given in my main talk. So before you start working on a specific package you should wonder who else could have an even stronger interest to get this work done and provide him with some additional motivation and help to get the common goal done. The interesting thing is that my BoF about How to attract new developers for your team (video) - which was a simple report about some by-product of the Blends work - made it into the main talk room and got way more attention. For me this is the proof that the Blends concept itself is probably badly perceived as something like "a few outsiders are doing damn specific stuff which is not really interesting for anybody else" instead of what is really is: Smoothing the way from specific upstream applications to the end user via Debian. Once you see the video of this BoF you can observe how my friend Asheesh Laroia became more and more excited about the Blends concept and admitted what I said above: We should have more Blends for different fields. Funnily enough Asheesh asked me in his excitement to talk more about Blends. This would have been a really good suggestion ten years ago. At DebConf 3 in Oslo I had my very first talk about Blends (at this time under the name "Debian Internal Projects"). I continuously kept on talking about this (MiniDebConf Peking 2005, DebConf 5, Helsinki (video), DebConf 7, Edinburgh (video), DebConf 8, Mar del Plata (video), DebConf 9, C ceres (video), MiniDebConf Berlin 2010 (video in German), MiniDebConf Paris 2010 (not video recorded), DebConf 11, Banja Luka (video) ... and these are only (Mini)DebConfs my talks page is full of this topic) and every new year I try different ways to communicate the idea to my fellow Debianistas. I'm wondering how I could invent a title + abstract avoiding the term Blends, put "Git", "release" and "systemd versus upstart" in and being able to inform about Blends reasonably by not becoming to off topic with the abstract. I also registered the Debian Science round table. I admit we were lacking some input from remote via IRC which used to be quite helpful in the past. The attendees agreed upon the handling of citations in debian/upstream files which was invented by Debian Med team to create even stronger bounds to our upstream developers by giving their work extra reward and providing users with even better documentation (see my summary in Wiki). As usual I suggested to create some Debian Science offsprings like "Debian Astronomy", "Debian Electronics", "Debian Mathematics", "Debian Physics" etc. who could perfectly leave the Debian Science umbrella to get a more fine grained structure and a more focused team to enhance the contact to our users. Unfortunately there is nobody who volunteers to take over the lead for such Blends. I have given a short summary about this BoF on the Debian Science mailing list. In the Debian Med meeting I have given some status report. No other long term team members were attending DebConf and so I gave some kind of introduction for newcomers and interested people. I touched also the DebiChem topic which maintains some packages that are used by biologists frequently and so we have a good connection to this team. Finally I had registered three BoFs in Blends I'm actually not (or not yet) active part of. My motivation was to turn the ideas I have explained in my main talk into specific application inside these teams and helping them to implement the Blends framework. In the first BoF about Debian GIS I have shown the usual team metrics graphs to demonstrate, that the one packaging team Pkg-OSM is in danger to become MIA. There are only three persons doing actual uploads. Two of them were at DebConf but did not joined the BoF because they do not consider their contribution to Pkg-OSM as a major part of their general Debian work. I will contact the main contributor David Paleino about his opinion to move the packages step by step into maintenance of Debian GIS packaging team to try to overcome the split of two teams that are sharing a good amount of interest. At least if I might become an Uploader for one of the packages currently maintained by Pkg-OSM I will move this to pkg-grass-devel (which is the name of the packaging team of Debian GIS for historical reasons). The attendees of the BoF have considered this plan as sensible. Moreover I talked about my experiences with OSGeo Live - an Ubuntu derivative that tries to provide a full tool chain to work on GIS and OSM problems ... basically the same goal as Debian GIS has just provided by the OSGeo project. I'm lurking on OSGeo mailing list when I asked explicitly I've got the answer that they are working together with Debian GIS and are using common repository (which is IMHO the optimal way of cooperation). However, it seems that several protagonists of OSGeo Live are underestimating the resources provided by Debian. For instance there was a question about Java packaging issues but people were not aware about the existence of the debian-java mailing list. I was able to give an example how the Debian Med team managed to strengthen its ties to BioLinux that is also an Ubuntu derivative for biologists. At our first Debian Med sprint in 2011 we invited developers from BioLinux and reached a state where they are using the very same VCS on Alioth where we are maintaining our packages. At DebConf I was able to upload two packages where BioLinux developers did certain changes for enhancing the user experience. My "work" was just bumping the version number in changelog and so we did profit from the work of the BioLinux developers as well as they are profiting from our work. I plan to dive a bit more into Debian GIS and try to strengthen the connection to OSGeo Live a bit. The next BoF was the Debian Multimedia meeting. It was nice that the current leader of Ubuntu Studio Kaj Ailomaa joined the meeting. When I was explaining my ideas about cooperation with derivatives I repeated my detailed explanation about the relation with BioLinux. It seems every topic you could cover inside Debian has its related derivative. So to me it seems to be quite natural to work together with the developers of the derivative to join forces. I actually consider a Blend a derivative done the right way = inside Debian. The final work for the derivers that might be left for them is doing some shiny customising of backgrounds or something like this - but all the hard work could and should be done in common with the relevant Debian team. My dream is to raise such relevant teams inside Debian ... the Blends. Finally the last BoF of this series was the Debian Games meeting. As always I presented the team metrics graphs and the Debian Games team members who attended the BoF were quite interested. So it seems to be some unknown fact that team metrics are done for several teams in side Debian and so I repeat the link to it for those who are not yet aware of it. As a result of the BoF Debian Games team members agreed to put some more effort into maintaining their Blends tasks. Moreover Miriam Ruiz wants to put some effort into reviving Debian Jr. Regarding Debian Jr. there was an interesting talk about DouDouLinux - in case you might want to watch the video I'd recommend skipping the first 30min and rather watch the nice live demo. There was also an ad hoc BoF about Debian Jr scheduled to bring together all people interested into this cute project and Per Anderson volunteered to take over the lead. I have given a summary about this specific BoF at the Debian Jr list. For some other talks that I'd regard as remarkable for some reasons: I'd regard the talk "Debian-LAN" by Andreas Mundt as some hidden pearl because it did not got a lot of attention but after having seen the video I was quite impressed - specifically because it is also relevant for the Blends topic. Memories I also liked "Paths into Debian" by Moray Allan (and I was only able to enjoy the latter talks thanks to the great work of the video team!) because it also scratched the same topic I was concerned about in my mentoring talk. Related to this was in my opinion also "Women in Debian 2013" were we tried to find out reasons for the lack of woman compared to other projects and how to overcome this issue. Besides the talks I will probably never forget two specific moments that make DebConf so special. One of these moments is recorded on an image that clearly needs no words - just see Geert hovering over the grass. Another strong moment in my personal record was in the DebConf Newbies BoF "First time at DebConf" that unfortunately was not recorded but at least for this statement it would have been very great if we would have some reference better than personal memory. Aarsh Shah a GSoC student from India suddenly raised up and said: "Four months ago I was not even aware that Free Software exists. Now I'm here with so many people who are totally equal. If I will tell my mother at home that I was standing in the same queue where the Debian Project Leader was queuing up for food she will never believe me." He was totally excited about things we are regarding as normal. IMHO we should memorise moments like this that might be part of the key to success in cultures, where Debian is widely unknown and very rarely in use. Amongst these not scheduled great moments the scheduled day trip was also a great thing. I had a really hard time to decide what tour I might join but ended up in the "long distance walking (or should I say running) group". Inspired by the "running Bubulle" who was flashing between the walking groups we went uphill with 5.4km/h which was a nice exercise. Our destination the large cliff was an exciting landscape and I guess we all enjoyed the dinner organised by the "Trout cabal". ;-) So I had a hard time to leave Le Camp and tried hard to make sure my memories will remain as long as possible. Keeping some signs attached to my bicycle, conserving the "Scenic Hacklab" sign for my private "scenic hacklab @ home" was one part. I also have cut some branches of the Buxus sempervirens in Le Camp and have put them in my garden at home (where I create some hedgerow from places where I spent some great time). These will probably build a great part of the hedgerow ... Thanks for reading this longish report. Looking forward to see you all in Germany 2015 (or earlier) Andreas.

Review: Redshirts, by John Scalzi

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	June 2012
ISBN:	1-4299-6360-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	317

The next few reviews deserve a small apology in advance. Normally, I try to write reviews within a few weeks, or at most a month, after reading a book, while it's still fresh in my mind. This is particularly important since I read a lot and sometimes don't have a good memory for specific detail. But this summer has made it completely impossible to keep to any sort of regular writing schedule. As a result, this book, and the subjects of the next few reviews that follow, are books that I read four months ago and am reviewing from memory. Hopefully, I'll still get the details right. Ensign Andrew Dahl is one of the newest crew members of the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid. It's his first posting, just out of the Academy. He's one of five new ensigns, expecting a normal tour of duty (albeit with the pride of being on a capital ship of the fleet). But very shortly after arriving on the ship, Andrew and and the other new ensigns discover that something is very... strange. The casualty rate on the ship is surprisingly high (as foreshadowed in a prologue). The other crew members avoid the bridge crew, and particularly away missions, with startling effectiveness (and desperation). And things regularly happen on the ship that, for lack of a better description, simply make no sense. Redshirts starts off as a very obvious Star Trek parody. So obvious, in fact, that it's eyeroll-inducing. The prologue reads exactly like a section of a Star Trek episode written by a third-rate hack, leavened with some of the humor that readers of Scalzi's blog have come to expect. But it's obvious that Scalzi is doing this intentionally, and it doesn't take long before the subject of the book shifts. It's a Star Trek parody that functions much more like a Star Trek parody than any universe should, to the degree that it becomes obvious to the characters. And the characters, despite being straight from central casting, are clearly not expecting their universe to act that way and find this extremely strange. By far the best part of this book is the second quarter: the characters have been introduced, they're starting to figure out what's going on, and they have to do so while dodging away-team duty (or trying to survive it) and participating in the ridiculous plot contrivances that keep occurring. Scalzi mixes a feeling of serious consequences with wry humor and handles the mix deftly. I was both laughing and eagerly reading to see what comes next. The last half of the book, though, has problems. How many problems the reader perceives will, I think, depend on how hard one thinks about the situation Scalzi has set up, or how much one has thought about similar constructs in the past. But I'm afraid the setup does not survive serious scrutiny in ways that, for me at least, seriously damaged my ability to engage with the story. I'm going to avoid saying explicitly where Scalzi goes with this plot, since it is a spoiler (although it's commonly mentioned in discussions of this book on the Internet). But it happens to be an idea that some friends of mine and I pounded on for years in some of our role-playing scenarios, poking at the corners and implications, and subsequently gave up on because it doesn't work for storytelling. The idea is compelling, and on first glance seems like a great story seed. But it's too large. The problem with really big ideas with huge implications is that they can change the nature of a story so much that there's no longer any point of commonality for the reader and the entire nature of story falls apart. And I think that's what happens here. Scalzi handles the deeper implications of the concept by, essentially, ignoring them. He focuses on one narrow set of implications for one specific set of people, largely skips over any discussion of anything larger, and tries a pivot from wry humor (and a bit of slapstick) into serious emotional depth. For me, in part because I'm so familiar with the concept, none of this really worked. The implications of the discovery that drives this story are so much broader and so much more significant than the characters seem to admit that it threw me right out of the story. The ethical implications are absolutely paralyzing, to the point that I don't think you can write a coherent story about them, but ignoring them doesn't work either. It's the kind of discovery that requires action of some kind beyond the attempt by the characters to go back to what they consider a normal life, even if I have a hard time imagining what that action could be. To be fair, he does try to salvage this in the first epilogue, which is all about the implications of his idea and its effects. But it's still too small. That epilogue just barely touches on the implications on a single person, but if one thinks a bit longer, one starts coming up with more and more implications for all of society, for how we talk about story, for how we raise children, for nearly every form of creativity. Implications that involve nasty concepts like slavery and mind control and murder and the nature of consent in ways that are very difficult to avoid. I think Scalzi's attempts at serious emotional connection, including in the other two attached epilogues (which are perspective-shifting close focuses on some of the characters), also suffer from his world setup, but in a different way. The characters are simply too bland to sustain the level of emotional connection he's striving for. They're bland for a very specific reason that is entirely justified by the story that Scalzi is handling, and the implications of that for the primary protagonist were, I thought, one of the best-handled moments of the book. But they're still bland, which undermines the attempted pivot. All that being said, this is not a bad book. Parts of it, particularly the second quarter, are excellent. And even when I wasn't engaging with the characters, Scalzi's writing on a paragraph level is snappy and often quite funny. The first epilogue in particular is hilarious, even if I think it was too limited in the scope of implications that it considers and a bit too meta in where it goes with those implications. And the story is a fun romp, with drama and humor and tension and a fairly satisfying ending. Everyone's a bit too bland and earnest when Scalzi isn't being funny, but he's funny enough that I didn't mind that much. Despite the relatively low rating, I actually recommend this book. If you don't dive into the metaphysical implications, it's a lot of fun, and if you've thought a lot about this particular set of metaphysical implications, it's somewhat satisfying to argue with (and to internally point out all of the hard questions that Scalzi is skipping over). It's particularly fun if you've watched a lot of Star Trek, since Scalzi gets some of the absurdities note-perfect. But be aware that the character reactions to Scalzi's concept don't hold up to much scrutiny. Rating: 7 out of 10

I would probably not yet worthy of the admiration Emerson was alluding to but I do like to make things. As anyone who has read previous posts knows I have pretty much embraced the "do things, tell people" idea.

One small wrinkle is doing things needs somewhere to work. Since moving myself and the family to rented accommodation in Cambridge (swampy 3,500 year old English city, not the one in Massachusetts) I have been lacking space to do practical projects.

To fix this lack I have joined the cambridge makespace which, in addition to somewhere I can work gives me access to some tools I was previously unable to afford. The space gives practical training on the more complex machines (any tool can be dangerous if you do not use it correctly) which recently allowed my induction on the CNC router.

My instructor , Mark Mellors, who was good enough to give up some of his valuable making time to train me (and accidentally get his car stuck in a car park overnight by staying late) suggested that it was a good idea to have a design to try.

I decided to use this opportunity to actually create something useful (though now I re-read Marks message it did suggest a simple design...oopsy). I had been working at the electronics bench in previous weeks and been uncomfortable using the existing stools and chairs as they were either a bit high or unable to be adjusted high enough for the 80cm tall benches. I decided to design a 60cm tall stool for use at this workbench.

My initial idea was for a simple three leg stool, round top, three legs, how hard could it be? Initial research showed that showed that above 30cm the legs needed to be braced to each other. This is because the leg to seat joints simply cannot handle the stress caused by leverage which longer legs introduce.

I looked at the structure of several stools online and was initially drawn towards creating something like the IKEA Dalfred bar stool. It was discovered that the design would be easier to realise if it were made from sheet material which give a smaller challenge to a naive operator of a CNC router. Because of this simpler designs were researched and I eventually found a simple design I liked.

The design could not however be used directly as it was for imperial sized material which is not available in europe. I selected the QCAD open source CAD package and recaptured the design adjusting for the available 12mm plywood sheet material. This resulted in an imperial measurement design for metric materials.

Mark helped me transfer the DXF into the CAM software (vcarve pro 7, after I discovered the demo version of this software generates files which cannot be imported into the full edition!) and generate toolpaths for our machine. Once the toolpaths are saved to a USB stick (no modern conveniences like direct upload here) the job can be run on the machine.

Here I ran into reality, turns out that tolerances in imperial combined with lack of understanding how plywood reacts resulted in excessive play in the joints. This resulted in an unusable stool, which simply tried to rotate around its central axis and become flatpack. I had successfully turned 10 worth of plywood into some sawdust and a selection of useless shapes. On the other hand I did become competent with the router workflow so it was not a complete failure.

I was determined to make the design work so I decided to start from scratch with a similar design but entirely in metric. I performed some material research both online and practically (why yes i did spend an informative hour in several cambridge DIY shops with digital calipers, why do you ask?) it turns out that generally available 12mm thick plywood actually ranges between 11.9 and 12mm thick.

I did some test slot cuts of varying width and determined that the available stock can be "persuaded" to fit into a 11.8mm wide slot. This Interference fit joint is strong and removes the need for adhesive in most cases.

The sheet plywood material is readily available with a width of 1220mm and a height of 606mm (a full sheet is 2440mm long which is cut into four with a 4mm wide saw blade) so making the legs fit within a sheet and be close to the 60cm target should be possible.

I selected a suitable seat radius (175mm) and from that determined the minimal gap to the base ring with a 6mm end mill tool (20mm for two toolpaths and some separation) and hence the minimum suitable width of the base ring (50mm) giving a total radius of 245mm.

For the legs allowance was made for two joints of 30mm with 30mm separation between them the legs come out at 90mm width. If a 6mm space and a 6mm toolpath top and bottom of the sheet is accounted for a 582mm height (606 - 24) is available in which to fit the legs. The top of the leg which fits into the seat is 12mm tall leaving 570mm total leg height.

At this point I selected some arbitrary values for the leg positioning and angle (30mm from seat centre and 15 ) using a right angle triangle triganometry this produced a stool with a base of around 550mm or 100mm outside the radius of the seat. This seemed a pleasing shape and when the values for the holding ring were calculated it is at 104mm height which also seems to work out well.

This design was cut on the machine, lightly finished with some sandpaper and assembled. The legs slotted into the ring first and then the legs eased into the seat slots, the whole thing flipped and the seat hammered home onto the legs.

Success! It physically fit together and if you were brave enough you could sit on it. Unfortunately the plywood seemed to flex around the central axis of rotation in a rather alarming way, fine if you are under 70 kilos but not giving the impression of security most people want from their seating.

Ok, lets try with five legs instead of three (at least we can reuse the existing three legs)...nope still not good enough and another 10 gone.

The others in the space suggested a few ideas to improve matters and the one I selected was to use 18mm plywood instead of 12mm, this should improve rigidity. There was a brief pause in proceedings to discover 18mm sheet is actually 17.7mm and needs a 17.5mm slot to make the interference fit work.

A swift redesign later altering the seat radius, gap, ring width and leg height to accommodate the new material and we have version 4 and it works without caveat. Tested up to 150Kg load without trouble, there is a small amount of flex still but nothing that feels worrying.

I finished the stool by rounding the seat top edge with a ball bearing rounding bit in a manual router and applying a couple of coats of gloss acrylic varnish. Finished stool is now doing service at the space.

In conclusion the final design allows someone with a CNC router to create a useful 580mm high fixed stool for 7.50 in timber plus cutter wear and varnish so maybe 8.50 total.

You can actually get five legs and a seat/ring out of a 1220x606 sheet and with intelligent arrangement a single 1220x2440 sheet will probably yield five or possibly six stools in total

I am making the design files of the proven 18mm version available (heck they are all there...but you have been warned, none of the other solutions produce a satisfactory result) under the MIT licence so anyone can reproduce. More pretty pictures are also available.

FrOSCon is approaching, and all MirBSD developers will attend but why s there no MirBSD exhibit? The answer to that is a bit complex. First let s state that of course we will participate in the event as well as the Open Source world. We ll also be geocaching around the campus with other interested (mostly OSS) people (including those we won for this sport) and helping out other OSS projects we ve become attached to. MirOS BSD, the operating system, is a niche system. The conference on the other hand got younger and more mainstream. This means that almost all conference visitors do not belong to the target group of MirOS BSD which somewhat is an ancient solution : the most classical BSD around (NetBSD loses because they have rc.d and PAM and lack sendmail(8), sorry guys, your attempt at being not reformable doesn t count) and running on restricted hardware (such as my 486SLC with 12 MiB RAM) and exots (SPARCstation). It s viable even as developer workstation (if your hardware is supported otherwise just virtualise it) but its strength lies with SPARC support and embedded x86 . And being run as virtual machine: we re reportedly more stable and more performant than OpenBSD. MirBSD is not cut off from modern development and occasionally takes a questionable but justified choice (such as using 16-bit Unicode internally) or a weird-looking but beneficial one (such as OPTU encoding saving us locale(1) hassles) or even acts as technological pioneer (64-bit time_t on ILP32 platforms) or, at least, is faster than OpenBSD (newer GNU toolchain, things like that), but usually more conservatively, and yes, this is by design, not by lack of manpower, most of the time. The MirPorts Framework, while technically superiour in enough places, is something that just cannot happen without manpower. I (tg@) am still using it exclusively, continuing to update ports I use and occasionally creating new ones (mupdf is in the works!), but it s not something I d recommend someone (other than an Mac OSX user) to use on a n n-MirBSD system (Interix is not exactly thriving either, and the Interix support was only begun; other OSes are not widely tested). The MirBSD Korn Shell is probably the one thing I will be remembered for. But I have absolutely no idea how one would present it on a booth at such an exhibition. A talk is much more likely. So no on that front too. jupp, the editor which sucks less, is probably something that does deserve mainstream interest (especially considering Natureshadow is using it while teaching computing to kids) but probably more in a workshop setting. And booth space is precious enough in the FH so I think that d be unfair. All the other subprojects and side projects Benny and I have, such as mir c , josef stalin, FreeWRT, Lunix Ewe, Shellsnippets, the fonts, etc. are interesting but share few, if any, common ground. Again, this does not match the vast majority of visitors. While we probably should push a number of these more, but a booth isn t it here, either. MirOS Linux ( MirLinux ) and MirOS Windows are, despite otherwise-saying rumours called W*k*p*d*a, only premature ideas that will not really be worked on (though MirLinux concepts are found in mir c and stalin). As you can see, despite all developers having full-time dayjobs, The MirOS Project is far from being obsolete. We hope that our website visitors understand our reasons to not have an exhibition booth of our own (even if the SPARCstation makes for a way cool one, it s too heavy to lift all the time), and would like to point out that there are several other booths (commercial ones, as well as OSS ones such as AllBSD, Debian and (talking to) others) and other itineries we participate in. This year both Benny and I have been roped into helping out the conference itself, too (not exactly unvoluntarily though). The best way to talk to us is IRC during regular European geek hours (i.e. until way too late into the night which Americans should benefit from), semi-synchronously, or mailing lists. We sort of expect you to not be afraid to RTFM and look up acronyms you don t understand; The MirOS Project is not unfriendly but definitely not suited for your proverbial Aunt Tilly, newbies, desktop users, and people who aren t at least somewhat capable of using written English (this is by design).

The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows integration fixes . This is the release announcement: New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22 These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy". About Debian Edu and Skolelinux Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school network. Immediately after installation a school server running all services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa , a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment. This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze release. ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home directory. Software updates

• Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh work also without a attached tty.
• Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found' has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access required).

Other changes

• Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool needed for desktop=xfce installations.
• Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB stick ISO image.
• Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).
• Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.
• Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to cope with this.
• Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa .
• Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa to avoid empty password hashes.
• Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines from joining the Samba domain.

Known issues

• KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to not use the http proxy as it should.
• Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop (using the KDE configuration).

Where to get it To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .

The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2 To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .

The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119 How to report bugs http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs

This weekend I'm mostly alternating between reading, writing, and trying to avoid death by the plague.[*] I've switched Lumail to using a UTF-8 aware string library, which means we can now handle the obvious case:

--
-- Prove keybindings work.
--
keymap['global'][' '] = 'msg("UTF-8 rocks!")'

Similarly we can stuff input into the buffer:

--
-- Pretend the user typed ":msg ...\n"
--
stuff( ":msg('  is pie')\n" );

This transition was annoying to handle, but wasn't too difficult. There is only one more major update required, according to the development roadmap, which is to double check that UTF-8 output is correct. Otherwise I think I'm almost done. In the sense that I don't see anything obvious missing, barring things that won't ever happen such as mutt-style "tag" support. I've updated the online examples to include some nice code:

• A nice menu for viewing/opening attachments: view_attachments().
• A nice system for marking messages as read based upon their subjects: mark_read_by_pattern().

I can't claim to have many users, so far the development has been carried out by myself and approximately four other people. But that matters not. I genuinely believe this is a good client and it really suits the way that I handle (large volumes of) email:

• Show folders with unread mail.
• Quickly read it.

Allowing you to open multiple folders at once means you get a great view into your currently-unread mail, regardless of where procmail has placed it. The overriding feeling having "completed" the client is that Lua rocks. I'm torn between wanting to sleep some more, and wondering what other system/package/tool can be extended by Lua. As epiphanies go my on_idle() update takes some beating.

* - I do not have the black death, but I'm not well.

This DebConf is obviously quite special for me, being the DPL. It has really been great so far to talk to meet so many people, and especially to meet so many new Debian contributors or Developers. I m really happy to see that the next generation is ready! :) On Sunday, I delivered my Bits from the DPL talk. The video is available, and I ve finally uploaded the slides (working link here, it seems that Penta ate my slides). I hope you enjoyed it/will enjoy it!

A hectic day and now we use GMime for all MIME-fu. This has allowed me to decode headers correctly, setup MIME parts properly in outgoing mails with attachments, and cleanup the code-base. The next release of Lumail will contain basically just this change, as it is pretty drastic. But first I need to work out how to make binaries for Squeeze compiled against the back-ported version of gmime-2.6.x. (Previously we used libmimetic. Which was awesome in its way, but caused me some pain with RFC 2047 header-decoding.)

Choosing Embedded Processors for AltOS When Bdale and I started building rocketry hardware together, we had already picked out a target processor, the TI cc1111. We picked that chip almost entirely based on the digital transceiver that is built in to the chip, and not because we had any particular love for the 8051 microcontroller. At that time, I d seen people struggle with PIC processors, battle AVR to a draw and spend a lot of time trying to get various ARM processors running. So, the 8051 didn t seem all that far from normal, and the cc1111 implementation of it is pretty reasonable, including credible USB support and a built-in DMA engine. Since those early days, we ve gone on to build boards with a slightly wider range of processors:

• TI cc1111
• Atmel ATmega32U4
• Atmel ATiny85
• STMicroelectronics STM32L151/STM32L152
• NXP LPC11U14

Bdale thinks we should reduce the number of components we use to focus our efforts better. He s probably right, but I have to admit that I ve had way too much fun getting each of these chips running. I thought I d spend a bit of time describing our general process for selecting a new CPU.

• Free software. I m long past the age at which I trust hardware vendors to deliver credible binary software. If you want me to use your silicon, make sure the tools required to use it are all free software.
• Debian support required. Bdale and I do everything on Debian, so any processor we use needs to have tools that run under Debian. We re more than willing to package software for Debian, so if it s just generic Linux-compatible free software, that s fine.
• Built-in USB. Everything we build needs to talk to a computer for configuration and data download. Don t even think of asking me to attach another chip for USB support. Ok, so the ATtiny85 doesn t qualify here, and that project does use an external chip for USB which is connected to the ATtiny85 through an LED and phototransistor. I was excited when TI came out with the CC340 chips because the MSP430 is a much nicer CPU than the 8051. But, they still haven t added USB. If I m going to add another chip for USB, it ll be a CPU anyways, at which point I ll use a stand-alone RF chip.
• Cheap developer boards. TI sells a tiny little cc1111 developer board; STmicroelectronics and NXP both sell boards that include a programmer and a target CPU for prototyping software. And, there are a million Arduino clones with various Atmel processors on them. Cheap means I can buy them without thinking too hard; having a built-in programmer means that early OS development can be done without first having to figure out how to wire up a programmer.
• Probably 32 bits, probably an ARM. Yeah, the cc1111 and Atmel processors were fun to bring up, but I m pretty much over the 8-bit microcontroller now. ARM processors are far more sophisticated in terms of power management and built-in device capability, plus they re a ton faster at doing any math. The ATtiny85 remains an exception here; it s smaller than any ARM I can get, and so it s still useful for projects too small for an ARM.
• Available in small quantities from a reasonable on-line retailer like Digikey, Mouser or even Avnet Express. I d love to try out the new low-cost STM32L100 parts, but the only one available is the largest one in the 64LQFP package, and I really don t need that many pins for most products.

CC1111 involved a lot of software hacking The 8051 processor in the CC1111 is very well documented, including the two-wire debugging interface. What was missing was a canned solution for programming and debugging the chip from Debian. However, with sufficient motivation and accurate docs, I was able to create a programmer from a USB device with a couple of GPIOs and a lot of ugly software on Linux. That sufficed to get the USB stack limping along, at which point I wrote a much faster programmer that ran on the cc1111 itself and could program another cc1111. With that, I created an assembly-level debugger that could be hooked to the existing SDCC source level debugger and had a full source-level debugging environment for the 8051. This turned out to be way better than what I could get on the Atmel processors, where I ve got a program loader and a whole lot of printf debugging. STM has been great The STM32L-Discovery board has a standard STM debugging setup for the Cortex SWD interface right on the same board as a target CPU. That made for completely self-contained development, with no jumper wires (a first for me, for sure). There s free software, stlink which can talk over the debugger USB connection to drive the SWD interface. This is sufficient to flash and debug applications using GDB. Of course, GCC supports ARM quite well; the only hard part was figuring out what to do for a C library. I settled on pdclib, which is at least easy to understand, if not highly optimized for ARM. We ve built a ton of boards with the STM32L151 and STM32L152; at this point I m pretty darn comfortable with the architecture and our tool chain. Adventures with NXP The NXP LPC11U14 is a very different beast. I m using this because:

• It s small (5mm x 5mm)
• It s cheap ($1.48 q100)

The LPCXpresso board looks much like the STM32L-Discovery, with a debugger interface wired to the CPU directly on the board. However, I haven t found free software tools to drive this programmer; all I ve found are binary-only tools from NXP. No thanks. Fortunately, the LPC11U14 uses exactly the same SWD interface as the STM32L, so I was able to sever the link between the programmer and the target on the LPCXpresso board and hook the target to an ST-Link device (either the one on the STM32L-Discovery board, or the new stand-along programming dongle I bought). With that, I wrote an openocd script to talk to the LPC11U14 and was in business. What I found in the NXP processor was a bit disturbing though there s a mask ROM that contains a boot loader, which always runs when the chip starts, and a bunch of utility code, including the only documented interface to programming the flash memory. I cannot fathom why anyone thought this was a good idea I don t want a BIOS in my embedded CPU, thankyouverymuch; I d really like my code to be the first instructions executed by the CPU. And, any embedded developer is more than capable of programming flash using a register specification, and calling some random embedded code in ROM from the middle of my operating system is more than a bit scary. NXP could do two simple things to make me like their parts a whole lot more:

• Publish the programmer source code. The programming dongle is a tool for selling your silicon, not a separate revenue stream. Publish the source under a free software license (GPL recommended, of course). We ll take it, make it better, and ensure that you get the changes back to help your other customers. It s a win-win plan.
• Document the flash programming registers. Yeah, I could probably disassemble the mask-rom bits that are on the chip, but I have better things to do with my time. Heck, go wild and document any other hidden bits in the silicon. Again, we re embedded developers, we don t like magic hardware hidden from view any more than PC developers like the BIOS and SMM.

Right now, I m hoping the STM32L100C6 parts become available in small quantities so I can try them out; they promise to be as cheap as the LPC11U14, but are better supported by free software and offer more complete hardware documentation. Yeah, they re a bit larger; that will probably be annoying.

Fedora and Ubuntu both provide compact cloud images that are useful for spinning up small VM's quickly (much quicker than installing from a huge ISO or even net-install). Both these pages have single-click buttons to simply launch the VM's at Amazon, which is very cool. However, you may have reason to use them "offline" with a local KVM (outside of EC2 or OpenStack) for testing, or on a plane, etc. I didn't find a lot of information on this (although it is all available once you know what you're looking for). So here's my quick guide for the complete newbie. Firstly, download your image of choice and put it in /var/lib/libvirt/images. Open up virt-manager and you can create your new VM via "import existing image". You can try booting it, but the problem you'll hit is the images have no default password or way to log-in because, very sensibly, you're expected to inject that. Booting you'll see cloud-init attempting to contact 169.254.169.254 to collect the meta-data to initalize the VM; eventually it will time out and you're left at a login prompt you can't log in at. cloud-init does many things and is very flexible with lots of different plugins to initialise images in various ways. The particular one we're interested in is the No cloud plugin. This will look for data from a locally attached CD drive, which works very easily for this scenario. Now that you know that's what you're looking for, the instructions are fairly clear; I'll repeat them just for clarity. Firstly you want to create a minimal meta-data file that has a host-name and an instance-id:

$ cat meta-data
instance-id: iid-local01;
local-hostname: myhost;

Modifying the instance-id will signal to cloud-init that it should run again because something changed. This is also where you can put static IP address data; see the documentation. Secondly, create a user-data file that has the commands to enable password login; set a password, and inject your ssh public key so you can easily log-in:

$ cat user-data
#cloud-config
password: mypassword
ssh_pwauth: True
chpasswd:   expire: False  
ssh_authorized_keys:
  - ssh-rsa ... foo@foo.com (insert ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub here)

Note for new players: that #cloud-config isn't an optional comment, it's a directive. If you leave it out, you'll probably see a little something about Unhandled non-multipart userdata starting... and your changes won't apply. Insert those two into files into an iso:

$ genisoimage -output init.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock user-data meta-data

Then copy init.iso into /var/lib/libvirtd/images as well, and connect that as a virtual-cd drive to your virtual-machine created from the image. When you boot you should see some output as it injects your key. It should get an address via DHCP and then you should be able to log-in with fedora or ubuntu users. Then you can start getting more complicated with things like static addresses, package installations, running commands, etc by reading the documentation.

Doing code reviews is a great way to discover things that people might struggle to comprehend. While proof-reading OpenStack patches recently, I spotted that people were not using correctly the various decorators Python provides for methods. So here's my attempt at providing me a link to send them to in my next code reviews. :-) How methods work in Python A method is a function that is stored as a class attribute. You can declare and access such a function this way:
What Python tells you here, is that the attribute get_size of the class Pizza is a method that is unbound. What does this mean? We'll know as soon as we'll try to call it:
We can't call it because it's not bound to any instance of Pizza. And a method wants an instance as its first argument (in Python 2 it must be an instance of that class; in Python 3 it could be anything). Let's try to do that then:
It worked! We called the method with an instance as its first argument, so everything's fine. But you will agree with me if I say this is not a very handy way to call methods; we have to refer to the class each time we want to call a method. And if we don't know what class is our object, this is not going to work for very long. So what Python does for us, is that it binds all the methods from the class Pizza to any instance of this class. This means that the attribute get_size of an instance of Pizza is a bound method: a method for which the first argument will be the instance itself.
As expected, we don't have to provide any argument to get_size, since it's bound, its self argument is automatically set to our Pizza instance. Here's a even better proof of that:
Indeed, you don't even have to keep a reference to your Pizza object. Its method is bound to the object, so the method is sufficient to itself. But what if you wanted to know which object this bound method is bound to? Here's a little trick:
Obviously, we still have a reference to our object, and we can find it back if we want. In Python 3, the functions attached to a class are not considered as unbound method anymore, but as simple functions, that are bound to an object if required. So the principle stays the same, the model is just simplified.
Static methods Static methods are a special case of methods. Sometimes, you'll write code that belongs to a class, but that doesn't use the object itself at all. For example:
In such a case, writing mix_ingredients as a non-static method would work too, but it would provide it a self argument that would not be used. Here, the decorator @staticmethod buys us several things:

• Python doesn't have to instantiate a bound-method for each Pizza object we instiantiate. Bound methods are objects too, and creating them has a cost. Having a static method avoids that:

• It eases the readability of the code: seeing @staticmethod, we know that the method does not depend on the state of object itself;
• It allows us to override the mix_ingredients method in a subclass. If we used a function mix_ingredients defined at the top-level of our module, a class inheriting from Pizza wouln't be able to change the way we mix ingredients for our pizza without overriding cook itself.

Class methods Having said that, what are class methods? Class methods are methods that are not bound to an object, but to a class!
Whatever the way you use to access this method, it will be always bound to the class it is attached too, and its first argument will be the class itself (remember that classes are objects too). When to use this kind of methods? Well class methods are mostly useful for two types of methods:

• Factory methods, that are used to create an instance for a class using for example some sort of pre-processing. If we use a @staticmethod instead, we would have to hardcode the Pizza class name in our function, making any class inheriting from Pizza unable to use our factory for its own use.

• Static methods calling static methods: if you split a static methods in several static methods, you shouldn't hard-code the class name but use class methods. Using this way to declare ou method, the Pizza name is never directly referenced and inheritance and method overriding will work flawlessly

Abstract methods An abstract method is a method defined in a base class, but that may not provide any implementation. In Java, it would describe the methods of an interface. So the simplest way to write an abstract method in Python is:
Any class inheriting from Pizza should implement and override the get_radius method, otherwise an exception would be raised. This particular way of implementing abstract method has a drawback. If you write a class that inherits from Pizza and forget to implement get_radius, the error will only be raised when you'll try to use that method.
There's a way to triggers this way earlier, when the object is being instantiated, using the abc module that's provided with Python.
Using abc and its special class, as soon as you'll try to instantiate BasePizza or any class inheriting from it, you'll get a TypeError.
Mixing static, class and abstract methods When building classes and inheritances, the time will come where you will have to mix all these methods decorators. So here's some tips about it. Keep in mind that declaring a class as being abstract, doesn't freeze the prototype of that method. That means that it must be implemented, but i can be implemented with any argument list.
This is valid, since Calzone fulfil the interface requirement we defined for BasePizza objects. That means that we could also implement it as being a class or a static method, for example:
This is also correct and fulfil the contract we have with our abstract BasePizza class. The fact that the get_ingredients method don't need to know about the object to return result is an implementation detail, not a criteria to have our contract fulfilled. Therefore, you can't force an implementation of your abstract method to be a regular, class or static method, and arguably you shouldn't. Starting with Python 3 (this won't work as you would expect in Python 2, see issue5867), it's now possible to use the @staticmethod and @classmethod decorators on top of @abstractmethod:
Don't misread this: if you think this going to force your subclasses to implement get_ingredients as a class method, you are wrong. This simply implies that your implementation of get_ingredients in the BasePizza class is a class method. An implementation in an abstract method? Yes! In Python, contrary to methods in Java interfaces, you can have code in your abstract methods and call it via super():
In such a case, every pizza you will build by inheriting from BasePizza will have to override the get_ingredients method, but will be able to use the default mechanism to get the ingredient list by using super().

Last week, the second milestone of the Havana developement branch of Ceilometer has been released and is now available for testing and download. This means the first half of the OpenStack Havana development has passed! New features Ten blueprints have been implemented as you can see on the release page. I'm going to talk through some of them here, that are the most interesting for users. The Ceilometer API now returns all the samples sorted by timestamp. This blueprint is the first one implemented by Terri Yu, our OPW intern! In the same spirit, I've added the ability to limit the number of samples returned. On the alarming front, things evolved a lot. I've implemented the notifier system that will be used to run actions when alarms are triggered. To trigger these alarms, Eoghan Glynn (RedHat) worked on the alarm evaluation system that will use the Ceilometer API to check for alarm states. I've reworked the publisher system so it now uses URL formatted target for publication. That now allows to publish different meters to different target using the same publishing protocol (e.g. via UDP toward different hosts). Sandy Walsh (RackSpace) have been working on the StackTach like functionality and added the ability for the collector to optionally store the notification events received. Finally, Mehdi Abaakouk (eNovance) implemented a TTL system for the database, so you're now able to expire your data whenever you like. Bug fixes Thirty-five bugs were fixed, though most of them might not interest you so I won't elaborate too much on that. Go read the list if you are curious. Toward Havana 3 We now have 30 blueprints targeting the Ceilometer's third Havana milestone, with some of them are already started.I'll try to make sure we'll get there without too much trouble for the 6th September 2013. Stay tuned!