Search Results: "ron"

1 November 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in October 2024

Almost all of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Ansible I noticed that Ansible had fallen out of Debian testing due to autopkgtest failures. This seemed like a problem worth fixing: in common with many other people, we use Ansible for configuration management at Freexian, and it probably wouldn t make our sysadmins too happy if they upgraded to trixie after its release and found that Ansible was gone. The problems here were really just slogging through test failures in both the ansible-core and ansible packages, but their test suites are large and take a while to run so this took some time. I was able to contribute a few small fixes to various upstreams in the process: This should now get back into testing tomorrow. OpenSSH Martin- ric Racine reported that ssh-audit didn t list the ext-info-s feature as being available in Debian s OpenSSH 9.2 packaging in bookworm, contrary to what OpenSSH upstream said on their specifications page at the time. I spent some time looking into this and realized that upstream was mistakenly saying that implementations of ext-info-c and ext-info-s were added at the same time, while in fact ext-info-s was added rather later. ssh-audit now has clearer output, and the OpenSSH maintainers have corrected their specifications page. I looked into a report of an ssh failure in certain cases when using GSS-API key exchange (which is a Debian patch). Once again, having integration tests was a huge win here: the affected scenario is quite a fiddly one, but I was able to set it up in the test, and thereby make sure it doesn t regress in future. It still took me a couple of hours to get all the details right, but in the past this sort of thing took me much longer with a much lower degree of confidence that the fix was correct. On upstream s advice, I cherry-picked some key exchange fixes needed for big-endian architectures. Python team I packaged python-evalidate, needed for a new upstream version of buildbot. The Python 3.13 transition rolls on. I fixed problems related to it in htmlmin, humanfriendly, postgresfixture (contributed upstream), pylint, python-asyncssh (contributed upstream), python-oauthlib, python3-simpletal, quodlibet, zope.exceptions, and zope.interface. A trickier Python 3.13 issue involved the cgi module. Years ago I ported zope.publisher to the multipart module because cgi.FieldStorage was broken in some situations, and as a result I got a recommendation into Python s dead batteries PEP 594. Unfortunately there turns out to be a name conflict between multipart and python-multipart on PyPI; python-multipart upstream has been working to disentangle this, though we still need to work out what to do in Debian. All the same, I needed to fix python-wadllib and multipart seemed like the best fit; I contributed a port upstream and temporarily copied multipart into Debian s python-wadllib source package to allow its tests to pass. I ll come back and fix this properly once we sort out the multipart vs. python-multipart packaging. tzdata moved some timezone definitions to tzdata-legacy, which has broken a number of packages. I added tzdata-legacy build-dependencies to alembic and python-icalendar to deal with this in those packages, though there are still some other instances of this left. I tracked down an nltk regression that caused build failures in many other packages. I fixed Rust crate versioning issues in pydantic-core, python-bcrypt, and python-maturin (mostly fixed by Peter Michael Green and Jelmer Vernoo , but it needed a little extra work). I fixed other build failures in entrypoints, mayavi2, python-pyvmomi (mostly fixed by Alexandre Detiste, but it needed a little extra work), and python-testing.postgresql (ditto). I fixed python3-simpletal to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools. I fixed broken symlinks in python-treq. I removed (build-)depends on python3-pkg-resources from alembic, autopep8, buildbot, celery, flufl.enum, flufl.lock, python-public, python-wadllib (contributed upstream), pyvisa, routes, vulture, and zodbpickle (contributed upstream). I upgraded astroid, asyncpg (fixing a Python 3.13 failure and a build failure), buildbot (noticing an upstream test bug in the process), dnsdiag, frozenlist, netmiko (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), psycopg3, pydantic-settings, pylint, python-asyncssh, python-bleach, python-btrees, python-cytoolz, python-django-pgtrigger, python-django-test-migrations, python-gssapi, python-icalendar, python-json-log-formatter, python-pgbouncer, python-pkginfo, python-plumbum, python-stdlib-list, python-tokenize-rt, python-treq (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), python-typeguard, python-webargs (fixing a build failure), pyupgrade, pyvisa, pyvisa-py (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), toolz, twisted, vulture, waitress (fixing CVE-2024-49768 and CVE-2024-49769), wtf-peewee, wtforms, zodbpickle, zope.exceptions, zope.interface, zope.proxy, zope.security, and zope.testrunner to new upstream versions. I tried to fix a regression in python-scruffy, but I need testing feedback. I requested removal of python-testing.mysqld.

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities October 2024

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Sponsors All work was done on a volunteer basis.

Taavi V n nen: Custom domains on the Wikimedia Cloud VPS web proxy

The shared web proxy used on Wikimedia Cloud VPS now has technical support for using arbitrary domains (and not just wmcloud.org subdomains) in proxy names. I think this is a good example of how software slowly evolves over time as new requirements emerge, with each new addition building on top of the previous ones. According to the edit history on Wikitech, the web proxy service has its origins in 2012, although the current idea where you create a proxy and map it to a specific instance and port was only introduced a year later. (Before that, it just directly mapped the subdomain to the VPS instance with the same name). There were some smaller changes in the coming years like the migration to acme-chief for TLS certificate management, but the overall logic stayed very similar until 2020 when the wmcloud.org domain was introduced. That was implemented by adding a config option listing all possible domains, so future domain additions would be as simple as adding the new domain to that list in the configuration. Then the changes start becoming more frequent:

30 October 2024

Russell Coker: Links October 2024

Dacid Brin wrote an interesting article about AI ecosystems and how humans might work with machines on creative projects [1]. Also he s right about influencers being like funghi. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting post about DRM, coalitions, and cheating [2]. It seems that people like me who want trusted computing to secure their own computers don t fit well in any of the coalitions. The CHERI capability system for using extra hardware to validate jump addresses is an interesting advance in computer science [3]. The lecture is froim the seL4 Summit, this sort of advance in security goes well with a formally proven microkernel. I hope that this becomes a checkbox when ordering a custom RISC-V design. Bunnie wrote an insightful blog post about how the Mossad might have gone about implementing the exploding pager attack [4]. I guess we will see a lot more of this in future, it seems easy to do. Interesting blog post about Control Flow Integrity in the V8 engine of Chrome [5]. Interesting blog post about the new mseal() syscall which can be used by CFI among other things [6]. This is the Linux kernel documentation about the Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) Shadow Stack [7]. Unfortunately not enabled in Debian/Unstable yet. ARM added support for Branch Target Identification in version 8.5 of the architecture [8]. The CEO of Automatic has taken his dispute with WPEngine to an epic level, this video catalogues it, I wonder what is wrong with him [9]. NuShell is an interesting development in shell technology which runs on Linux and Windows [10]. Interesting article about making a computer game without coding using ML [11]. I doubt that it would be a good game, but maybe educational for kids. Krebs has an insightful article about location tracking by phones which is surprisingly accurate [12]. He has provided information on how to opt out of some of it on Android, but we need legislative action! Interesting YouTube video about how to make a 20kW microwave oven and what it can do [13]. Don t do this at home, or anywhere else! The Void editor is an interesting project, a fork of VSCode that supports DIRECT connections to LLM systems where you don t have their server acting as a middle-man and potentially snooping [14].
Related posts:
  1. Links August 2024 Bruce Schneier and Kim C rdova wrote an insightful article about...
  2. Links September 2024 CNA Insider has an insightful documentary series about Chinese illegal...
  3. Links June 2024 Modos Labs have released the design of an e-ink display...

Dirk Eddelbuettel: gcbd 0.2.7 on CRAN: More Mere Maintenance

Another pure maintenance release 0.2.7 of the gcbd package is now on CRAN. The gcbd proposes a benchmarking framework for LAPACK and BLAS operations (as the library can exchanged in a plug-and-play sense on suitable OSs) and records result in local database. Its original motivation was to also compare to GPU-based operations. However, as it is both challenging to keep CUDA working packages on CRAN providing the basic functionality appear to come and go so testing the GPU feature can be challenging. The main point of gcbd is now to actually demonstrate that yes indeed we can just swap BLAS/LAPACK libraries without any change to R, or R packages. The configure / rebuild R for xyz often seen with xyz being Goto or MKL is simply plain wrong: you really can just swap them (on proper operating systems, and R configs see the package vignette for more). But nomatter how often we aim to correct this record, it invariably raises its head another time. This release accommodates a CRAN change request as we were referencing the (now only suggested) package gputools. As hinted in the previous paragraph, it was once on CRAN but is not right now so we adjusted our reference. CRANberries also provides a diffstat report for the latest release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

28 October 2024

Thomas Lange: 30.000 FAIme jobs created in 7 years

The number of FAIme jobs has reached 30.000. Yeah!
At the end of this November the FAIme web service for building customized ISOs turns 7 years old. It had reached 10.000 jobs in March 2021 and 20.000 jobs were reached in June 2023. A nice increase of the usage. Here are some statistics for the jobs processed in 2024: Type of jobs
3% cloud image
11% live ISO
86% install ISO
Distribution
2% bullseye
8% trixie
12% ubuntu 24.04
78% bookworm
Misc Execution Times The cloud and live ISOs need more time for their creation because the FAIme server needs to unpack and install all packages. For the install ISO the packages are only downloaded. The amount of software packages also affects the build time. Every ISO is build in a VM on an old 6-core E5-1650 v2. Times given are calculated from the jobs of the past two weeks.
Job type Avg Max
install no desktop 1 min 2 min
install GNOME 2 min 5 min
The times for Ubuntu without and with desktop are one minute higher than those mentioned above.
Job type Avg Max
live no desktop 4 min 6 min
live GNOME 8 min 11 min
The times for cloud images are similar to live images. A New Feature For a few weeks now, the system has been showing the number of jobs ahead of you in the queue when you submit a job that cannot be processed immediately. The Next Milestone At the end of this years the FAI project will be 25 years old. If you have a success story of your FAI usage to share please post it to the linux-fai mailing list or send it to me. Do you know the FAI questionnaire ? A lot of reports are already available. Here's an overview what happened in the past 20 years in the FAI project. About FAIme FAIme is the service for building your own customized ISO via a web interface. You can create an installation or live ISO or a cloud image. Several Debian releases can be selected and also Ubuntu server or Ubuntu desktop installation ISOs can be customized. Multiple options are available like selecting a desktop and the language, adding your own package list, choosing a partition layout, adding a user, choosing a backports kernel, adding a postinst script and some more.

27 October 2024

Enrico Zini: Typing decorators for class members with optional arguments

This looks straightforward and is far from it. I expect tool support will improve in the future. Meanwhile, this blog post serves as a step by step explanation for what is going on in code that I'm about to push to my team.
Let's take this relatively straightforward python code. It has a function printing an int, and a decorator that makes it argument optional, taking it from a global default if missing: 
from unittest import mock
default = 42
def with_default(f):
    def wrapped(self, value=None):
        if value is None:
            value = default
        return f(self, value)
    return wrapped
class Fiddle:
    @with_default
    def print(self, value):
        print("Answer:", value)
fiddle = Fiddle()
fiddle.print(12)
fiddle.print()
def mocked(self, value=None):
    print("Mocked answer:", value)
with mock.patch.object(Fiddle, "print", autospec=True, side_effect=mocked):
    fiddle.print(12)
    fiddle.print()
It works nicely as expected: 
$ python3 test0.py
Answer: 12
Answer: 42
Mocked answer: 12
Mocked answer: None
It lacks functools.wraps and typing, though. Let's add them. Adding functools.wraps Adding a simple @functools.wraps, mock unexpectedly stops working: 
# python3 test1.py
Answer: 12
Answer: 42
Mocked answer: 12
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/enrico/lavori/freexian/tt/test1.py", line 42, in <module>
    fiddle.print()
  File "<string>", line 2, in print
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/unittest/mock.py", line 186, in checksig
    sig.bind(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/inspect.py", line 3211, in bind
    return self._bind(args, kwargs)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/inspect.py", line 3126, in _bind
    raise TypeError(msg) from None
TypeError: missing a required argument: 'value'
This is the new code, with explanations and a fix: 
# Introduce functools
import functools
from unittest import mock
default = 42
def with_default(f):
    @functools.wraps(f)
    def wrapped(self, value=None):
        if value is None:
            value = default
        return f(self, value)
    # Fix:
    # del wrapped.__wrapped__
    return wrapped
class Fiddle:
    @with_default
    def print(self, value):
        assert value is not None
        print("Answer:", value)
fiddle = Fiddle()
fiddle.print(12)
fiddle.print()
def mocked(self, value=None):
    print("Mocked answer:", value)
with mock.patch.object(Fiddle, "print", autospec=True, side_effect=mocked):
    fiddle.print(12)
    # mock's autospec uses inspect.getsignature, which follows __wrapped__ set
    # by functools.wraps, which points to a wrong signature: the idea that
    # value is optional is now lost
    fiddle.print()
Adding typing For simplicity, from now on let's change Fiddle.print to match its wrapped signature: 
      # Give up with making value not optional, to simplify things :(
      def print(self, value: int   None = None) -> None:
          assert value is not None
          print("Answer:", value)
Typing with ParamSpec 
# Introduce typing, try with ParamSpec
import functools
from typing import TYPE_CHECKING, ParamSpec, Callable
from unittest import mock
default = 42
P = ParamSpec("P")
def with_default(f: Callable[P, None]) -> Callable[P, None]:
    # Using ParamSpec we forward arguments, but we cannot use them!
    @functools.wraps(f)
    def wrapped(self, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        if value is None:
            value = default
        return f(self, value)
    return wrapped
class Fiddle:
    @with_default
    def print(self, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        assert value is not None
        print("Answer:", value)
mypy complains inside the wrapper, because while we forward arguments we don't constrain them, so we can't be sure there is a value in there: 
test2.py:17: error: Argument 2 has incompatible type "int"; expected "P.args"  [arg-type]
test2.py:19: error: Incompatible return value type (got "_Wrapped[P, None, [Any, int   None], None]", expected "Callable[P, None]")  [return-value]
test2.py:19: note: "_Wrapped[P, None, [Any, int   None], None].__call__" has type "Callable[[Arg(Any, 'self'), DefaultArg(int   None, 'value')], None]"
Typing with Callable We can use explicit Callable argument lists: 
# Introduce typing, try with Callable
import functools
from typing import TYPE_CHECKING, Callable, TypeVar
from unittest import mock
default = 42
A = TypeVar("A")
# Callable cannot represent the fact that the argument is optional, so now mypy
# complains if we try to omit it
def with_default(f: Callable[[A, int   None], None]) -> Callable[[A, int   None], None]:
    @functools.wraps(f)
    def wrapped(self: A, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        if value is None:
            value = default
        return f(self, value)
    return wrapped
class Fiddle:
    @with_default
    def print(self, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        assert value is not None
        print("Answer:", value)
if TYPE_CHECKING:
    reveal_type(Fiddle.print)
fiddle = Fiddle()
fiddle.print(12)
# !! Too few arguments for "print" of "Fiddle"  [call-arg]
fiddle.print()
def mocked(self, value=None):
    print("Mocked answer:", value)
with mock.patch.object(Fiddle, "print", autospec=True, side_effect=mocked):
    fiddle.print(12)
    fiddle.print()
Now mypy complains when we try to omit the optional argument, because Callable cannot represent optional arguments: 
test3.py:32: note: Revealed type is "def (test3.Fiddle, Union[builtins.int, None])"
test3.py:37: error: Too few arguments for "print" of "Fiddle"  [call-arg]
test3.py:46: error: Too few arguments for "print" of "Fiddle"  [call-arg]
typing's documentation says:
Callable cannot express complex signatures such as functions that take a variadic number of arguments, overloaded functions, or functions that have keyword-only parameters. However, these signatures can be expressed by defining a Protocol class with a call() method:
Let's do that! Typing with Protocol, take 1 
# Introduce typing, try with Protocol
import functools
from typing import TYPE_CHECKING, Protocol, TypeVar, Generic, cast
from unittest import mock
default = 42
A = TypeVar("A", contravariant=True)
class Printer(Protocol, Generic[A]):
    def __call__(_, self: A, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        ...
def with_default(f: Printer[A]) -> Printer[A]:
    @functools.wraps(f)
    def wrapped(self: A, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        if value is None:
            value = default
        return f(self, value)
    return cast(Printer, wrapped)
class Fiddle:
    # function has a __get__ method to generated bound versions of itself
    # the Printer protocol does not define it, so mypy is now unable to type
    # the bound method correctly
    @with_default
    def print(self, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        assert value is not None
        print("Answer:", value)
if TYPE_CHECKING:
    reveal_type(Fiddle.print)
fiddle = Fiddle()
# !! Argument 1 to "__call__" of "Printer" has incompatible type "int"; expected "Fiddle"
fiddle.print(12)
fiddle.print()
def mocked(self, value=None):
    print("Mocked answer:", value)
with mock.patch.object(Fiddle, "print", autospec=True, side_effect=mocked):
    fiddle.print(12)
    fiddle.print()
New mypy complaints: 
test4.py:41: error: Argument 1 to "__call__" of "Printer" has incompatible type "int"; expected "Fiddle"  [arg-type]
test4.py:42: error: Missing positional argument "self" in call to "__call__" of "Printer"  [call-arg]
test4.py:50: error: Argument 1 to "__call__" of "Printer" has incompatible type "int"; expected "Fiddle"  [arg-type]
test4.py:51: error: Missing positional argument "self" in call to "__call__" of "Printer"  [call-arg]
What happens with class methods, is that the function object has a __get__ method that generates a bound versions of itself. Our Printer protocol does not define it, so mypy is now unable to type the bound method correctly. Typing with Protocol, take 2 So... we add the function descriptor methos to our Protocol! A lot of this is taken from this discussion. 
# Introduce typing, try with Protocol, harder!
import functools
from typing import TYPE_CHECKING, Protocol, TypeVar, Generic, cast, overload, Union
from unittest import mock
default = 42
A = TypeVar("A", contravariant=True)
# We now produce typing for the whole function descriptor protocol
#
# See https://github.com/python/typing/discussions/1040
class BoundPrinter(Protocol):
    """Protocol typing for bound printer methods."""
    def __call__(_, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        """Bound signature."""
class Printer(Protocol, Generic[A]):
    """Protocol typing for printer methods."""
    # noqa annotations are overrides for flake8 being confused, giving either D418:
    # Function/ Method decorated with @overload shouldn't contain a docstring
    # or D105:
    # Missing docstring in magic method
    #
    # F841 is for vulture being confused:
    #   unused variable 'objtype' (100% confidence)
    @overload
    def __get__(  # noqa: D105
        self, obj: A, objtype: type[A]   None = None  # noqa: F841
    ) -> BoundPrinter:
        ...
    @overload
    def __get__(  # noqa: D105
        self, obj: None, objtype: type[A]   None = None  # noqa: F841
    ) -> "Printer[A]":
        ...
    def __get__(
        self, obj: A   None, objtype: type[A]   None = None  # noqa: F841
    ) -> Union[BoundPrinter, "Printer[A]"]:
        """Implement function descriptor protocol for class methods."""
    def __call__(_, self: A, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        """Unbound signature."""
def with_default(f: Printer[A]) -> Printer[A]:
    @functools.wraps(f)
    def wrapped(self: A, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        if value is None:
            value = default
        return f(self, value)
    return cast(Printer, wrapped)
class Fiddle:
    # function has a __get__ method to generated bound versions of itself
    # the Printer protocol does not define it, so mypy is now unable to type
    # the bound method correctly
    @with_default
    def print(self, value: int   None = None) -> None:
        assert value is not None
        print("Answer:", value)
fiddle = Fiddle()
fiddle.print(12)
fiddle.print()
def mocked(self, value=None):
    print("Mocked answer:", value)
with mock.patch.object(Fiddle, "print", autospec=True, side_effect=mocked):
    fiddle.print(12)
    fiddle.print()
It works! It's typed! And mypy is happy!

25 October 2024

Jonathan Dowland: Behringer Model-D (synths I didn't buy)

Whilst researching what synth to buy, I learned of the Behringer1 Model-D2: a 2018 clone of the 1970 Moog Minimoog, in a desktop form factor.
Behringer Model-D Behringer Model-D
In common with the original Minimoog, it's a monophonic analogue synth, featuring three audible oscillators3 , Moog's famous 12-ladder filter and a basic envelope generator. The model-d has lost the keyboard from the original and added some patch points for the different stages, enabling some slight re-routing of the audio components.
1970 Moog Minimoog 1970 Moog Minimoog
Since I was focussing on more fundamental, back-to-basics instruments, this was very appealing to me. I'm very curious to find out what's so compelling about the famous Moog sound. The relative lack of features feels like an advantage: less to master. The additional patch points makes it a little more flexible and offer a potential gateway into the world of modular synthesis. The Model-D is also very affordable: about 200 GBP. I'll never own a real Moog. For this to work, I would need to supplement it with some other equipment. I'd need a keyboard (or press the Micron into service as a controller); I would want some way of recording and overdubbing (same as with any synth). There are no post-mix effects on the Model-D, such as delay, reverb or chorus, so I may also want something to add those. What stopped me was partly the realisation that there was little chance that a perennial beginner, such as I, could eek anything novel out of a synthesiser design that's 54 years old. Perhaps that shouldn't matter, but it gave me pause. Whilst the Model-D has patch points, I don't have anything to connect to them, and I'm firmly wanting to avoid the Modular Synthesis money pit. The lack of effects, and polyphony could make it hard to live-sculpt a tone. I started characterizing the Model-D as the "heart" choice, but it seemed wise to instead go for a "head" choice. Maybe another day!
  1. There's a whole other blog post of material I could write about Behringer and their clones of classic synths, some long out of production, and others, not so much. But, I decided to skip on that for now.
  2. taken from the fact that the Minimoog was a productised version of Moog's fourth internal prototype, the model D.
  3. 2 oscillators is more common in modern synths

24 October 2024

Emmanuel Kasper: back to blogging and running a feed reader as a containerized systemd service

After reading about Jonathan McDowell feed reader install and the back to blogging initiative, I decided to install a feed reader to follow all those nice blog posts. With a feed reader you can compose your own feed of news based on blog posts, websites, mastodon toots. And then you are independant from ad oriented ranking algorithms of social networks. Since Jonathan used FreshRSS as a feed reader, I started with the same software. On a quick glance on its github page, it sounded like a good project:
  • active contributions
  • different channels for stable and latest version of the software
  • container images pointing to the stable release
  • support multiple databases for storage, including PostgreSQL
  • correct documentation mentioning security caveats
I prefer to do the container image installation using podman since:
  • upgrades from FreshRSS are easy to do and can be done separately from operating system upgrades
  • I do not mess my based operating system with php (subjective) and in case of a compromized freshrss, the freshrss/apache install would be still restrained to its own Linux namespaces, separated from the rest of the system.
Podman is image compatible with Docker as they both implement the OCI runtime specification, and have a nearly identical command line interface. This installation will be done on a Debian server, but should work too on any Linux distribution. Initial setup
  • start a container image based on the start command provided by the FreshRSS project. The podman command line is nearly identical to the docker command line, excepts that podman expects the fully qualified domain name associated with the container image, and I chose to run the freshrss container on the localhost interface only. I also use a defined version tag, because using the latest tag makes it complicated to track which exact ersion I have installed.
# podman pull docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1
# podman run --detach --restart unless-stopped --log-opt max-size=10m \
  --publish 127.0.0.1:8081:80 \
  --env TZ=Europe/Paris \
  --env 'CRON_MIN=1,31' \
  --volume freshrss_data:/var/www/FreshRSS/data \
  --volume freshrss_extensions:/var/www/FreshRSS/extensions \
  --name freshrss \
  docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1
  • verify where the podman volumes have been created. This is where the user data of freshrss will be stored.
# podman volume ls
# podman volume inspect freshrss_data
  • now that freshrss is installed, you can start its configuration wizard at localhost:8081. You should keep the default sqlite choice
  • finally after running the wizard, you can login again and add some feeds
  • verify that your config has been stored outside the container, and inside the volume (so that it will not be erased in case of upgrages)
# ls -l /var/lib/containers/storage/volumes/freshrss_data/_data/users/
  • verify the state of sqlite database
echo '.tables'  sqlite3  /var/lib/containers/storage/volumes/freshrss_data/_data/users/<your freshrss user>/db.sqlite 
category  entry     entrytag  entrytmp  feed      tag
Going with FreshRSS in Production Podman has this very nice feature that it can generate a systemd unit from a running container, and use systemd to start a container on boot. This is in contrary to docker where the docker daemon does the stop/start of containers on boot. I prefer the systemd approach as it treats containers the same way as other system services. Once the freshrss container is running we can generate a systemd unit of it with: 
# podman generate systemd --new --name freshrss   tee /etc/systemd/system/container-freshrss.service
Let s stop the container we started previously, and use systemd to manage it: 
# podman stop freshrss
# systemctl enable --now container-freshrss.service
We can verify that we have a listening socket on the localhost interface, on the source port 8081 
# systemctl status container-freshrss.service
  ...
# ss --listening --numeric --process '( sport = 8081 )'
Netid         State           Recv-Q          Send-Q                   Local Address:Port                   Peer Address:Port         Process         
tcp           LISTEN          0               4096                         127.0.0.1:8081                        0.0.0.0:*             users:(("conmon",pid=4464,fd=5))
Nota Bene: conmon (8) is the process managing the network namespace in which fresh-rss is running, hence it is displayed as the process owning the listening socket Exposing FreshRSS to the external world We have now a running service, but we need to make it reachable from the internet. The simplest, classical way, is to create a subdomain and a VirtualHost configured as a reverse proxy to access the service at 127.0.0.1:8081. Fortunately the FreshRSS authors have documented this setup in https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/tree/edge/Docker#alternative-reverse-proxy-using-apache and those steps are no different from a standard application behind a web reverse proxy. Upgrading freshrss container to a newer version A documentation showing how to install a piece of software is nothing when it does not show how to upgrade that said software. Installing is easy, upgrading is where the challenge is. Fortunately to the good stateless design of freshrss (everything is in the sqlite database, which is backed by a non-epheremal volume in our setup), switchting versions is a peace of cake. 
# podman pull docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.2
# systemctl stop container-freshrss.service
# sed -i 's,docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1,docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.2,' /etc/systemd/system/container-freshrss.service
# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl start container-freshrss.service
If you need to rollback, you just need to revert version numbers in the instruction above. Enjoy your own reader feed ! I will add the following feeds of blogs I like, let us see if I follow them better with a feed reader !

Valhalla's Things: Asemic Writing, a Zine

Posted on October 24, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms, madeof:bits, craft:zine
An open booklet with lines that look like some kind of cursive non-alphabetic script, framed by a border in the same script and four symbols in the corners. I have no idea either. The front of that booklet, with three lines of fake text in different sizes and a circle of the same. Happy Maladay1 to those who celebrate it, I guess.
A template on white paper with pencil lines where text is supposed to go. Multiple A4 sheet of tracing paper with fake text, plus an A6 sheet and a white A6 sheet with a stamp impression. If you care about the how, it started as china ink on tracing paper, with the help of a template (and a correction sheet for one page where I used the wrong line on the template). alt A rubber stamp was carved with the author s signature and stamped on white paper because the ink from the pad wasn t working well on tracing paper. Then everything was scanned (with the correction on top of the wrong page) asemic_zine_scans.tar. Imported in Inkscape and traced asemic_zine_svg.tar. Printed, cut in half, folded and stapled. The magenta lines weren t by design, but are there because my printer is currently2 cursed. And finally, asemic_zine.pdf was created, joining the pages together with pdfjam, for convenience in case somebody wants to download the full thing. All the .tar and .pdf downloads from this page are released under the WTFPL, or All Rites Reversed..
  1. it s still technically Maladay when I write this, even if by the time you ll get this it s probably the 6th of The Aftermath.
  2. I mean, all printers are always cursed, but at different times they can be cursed in different and novel ways.

23 October 2024

Jonathan Dowland: Arturia Microfreak

Arturia Microfreak. [ CC-BY-SA 4](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MicroFreak.jpg) Arturia Microfreak. CC-BY-SA 4
I nearly did, but ultimately I didn't buy an Arturia Microfreak. The Microfreak is a small form factor hybrid synth with a distinctive style. It's priced at the low end of the market and it is overflowing with features. It has a weird 2-octave keyboard which is a stylophone-style capacitive strip rather than weighted keys. It seems to have plenty of controls, but given the amount of features it has, much of that functionality is inevitably buried in menus. The important stuff is front and centre, though. The digital oscillators are routed through an analog filter. The Microfreak gained sampler functionality in a firmware update that surprised and delighted its owners.
I watched a load of videos about the Microfreak, but the above review from musician Stimming stuck in my mind because it made a comparison between the Microfreak and Teenage Engineering's OP-1.
The Teenage Engineering OP-1. The Teenage Engineering OP-1.
I'd been lusting after the OP-1 since it appeared in 2011: a pocket-sized1 music making machine with eleven synthesis engines, a sampler, and less conventional features such as an FM radio, a large colour OLED display, and a four track recorder. That last feature in particular was really appealing to me: I loved the idea of having an all-in-one machine to try and compose music. Even then, I was not keen on involving conventional computers in music making. Of course in many ways it is a very compromised machine. I never did buy a OP-1, and by now they've replaced it with a new model (the OP-1 field) that costs 50% more (but doesn't seem to do 50% more) I'm still not buying one. Framing the Microfreak in terms of the OP-1 made the penny drop for me. The Microfreak doesn't have the four-track functionality, but almost no synth has: I'm going to have to look at something external to provide that. But it might capture a similar sense of fun; it's something I could use on the sofa, in the spare room, on the train, during lunchbreaks at work, etc. On the other hand, I don't want to make the same mistake as with the Micron: too much functionality requiring some experience to understand what you want so you can go and find it in the menus. I also didn't get a chance to audition the unusual keyboard: there's only one music store carrying synths left in Newcastle and they didn't have one. So I didn't buy the Microfreak. Maybe one day in the future once I'm further down the road. Instead, I started to concentrate my search on more fundamental, back-to-basics instruments
  1. Big pockets, mind

21 October 2024

Sahil Dhiman: Free Software Mirrors in India

Last Updated on 15/11/2024. List of public mirrors in India. Location discovered basis personal knowledge, traces or GeoIP. Mirrors which aren t accessible outside their own ASN are excluded.

North India

East India

South India

West India

CDN (or behind one) Many thanks to Shrirang and Saswata for tips and corrections. Let me know if I m missing someone or something is amiss.

Russ Allbery: California general election

As usual with these every-two-year posts, probably of direct interest only to California residents. Maybe the more obscure things we're voting on will be a minor curiosity to people elsewhere. I'm a bit late this year, although not as late as last year, so a lot of people may have already voted, but I've been doing this for a while and wanted to keep it up. This post will only be about the ballot propositions. I don't have anything useful to say about the candidates that isn't hyper-local. I doubt anyone who has read my posts will be surprised by which candidates I'm voting for. As always with Calfornia ballot propositions, it's worth paying close attention to which propositions were put on the ballot by the legislature, usually because there's some state law requirement (often that I disagree with) that they be voted on by the public, and propositions that were put on the ballot by voter petition. The latter are often poorly written and have hidden problems. As a general rule of thumb, I tend to default to voting against propositions added by petition. This year, one can conveniently distinguish by number: the single-digit propositions were added by the legislature, and the two-digit ones were added by petition. Proposition 2: YES. Issue $10 billion in bonds for public school infrastructure improvements. I generally vote in favor of spending measures like this unless they have some obvious problem. The opposition argument is a deranged rant against immigrants and government debt and fails to point out actual problems. The opposition argument also claims this will result in higher property taxes and, seriously, if only that were true. That would make me even more strongly in favor of it. Proposition 3: YES. Enshrines the right to marriage without regard to sex or race into the California state constitution. This is already the law given US Supreme Court decisions, but fixing California state law is a long-overdue and obvious cleanup step. One of the quixotic things I would do if I were ever in government, which I will never be, would be to try to clean up the laws to make them match reality, repealing all of the dead clauses that were overturned by court decisions or are never enforced. I am in favor of all measures in this direction even when I don't agree with the direction of the change; here, as a bonus, I also strongly agree with the change. Proposition 4: YES. Issue $10 billion in bonds for infrastructure improvements to mitigate climate risk. This is basically the same argument as Proposition 2. The one drawback of this measure is that it's kind of a mixed grab bag of stuff and probably some of it should be supported out of the general budget rather than bonds, but I consider this a minor problem. We definitely need to ramp up climate risk mitigation efforts. Proposition 5: YES. Reduces the required super-majority to pass local bond measures for affordable housing from 67% to 55%. The fact that this requires a supermajority at all is absurd, California desperately needs to build more housing of any kind however we can, and publicly funded housing is an excellent idea. Proposition 6: YES. Eliminates "involuntary servitude" (in other words, "temporary" slavery) as a legally permissible punishment for crimes in the state of California. I'm one of the people who think the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution shouldn't have an exception for punishment for crimes, so obviously I'm in favor of this. This is one very, very tiny step towards improving the absolutely atrocious prison conditions in the state. Proposition 32: YES. Raises the minimum wage to $18 per hour from the current $16 per hour, over two years, and ties it to inflation. This is one of the rare petition-based propositions that I will vote in favor of because it's very straightforward, we clearly should be raising the minimum wage, and living in California is absurdly expensive because we refuse to build more housing (see Propositions 5 and 33). The opposition argument is the standard lie that a higher minimum wage will increase unemployment, which we know from numerous other natural experiments is simply not true. Proposition 33: NO. Repeals Costa-Hawkins, which prohibits local municipalities from enacting rent control on properties built after 1995. This one is going to split the progressive vote rather badly, I suspect. California has a housing crisis caused by not enough housing supply. It is not due to vacant housing, as much as some people would like you to believe that; the numbers just don't add up. There are way more people living here and wanting to live here than there is housing, so we need to build more housing. Rent control serves a valuable social function of providing stability to people who already have housing, but it doesn't help, and can hurt, the project of meeting actual housing demand. Rent control alone creates a two-tier system where people who have housing are protected but people who don't have housing have an even harder time getting housing than they do today. It's therefore quite consistent with the general NIMBY playbook of trying to protect the people who already have housing by making life harder for the people who do not, while keeping the housing supply essentially static. I am in favor of rent control in conjunction with real measures to increase the housing supply. I am therefore opposed to this proposition, which allows rent control without any effort to increase housing supply. I am quite certain that, if this passes, some municipalities will use it to make constructing new high-density housing incredibly difficult by requiring it all be rent-controlled low-income housing, thus cutting off the supply of multi-tenant market-rate housing entirely. This is already a common political goal in the part of California where I live. Local neighborhood groups advocate for exactly this routinely in local political fights. Give me a mandate for new construction that breaks local zoning obstructionism, including new market-rate housing to maintain a healthy lifecycle of housing aging into affordable housing as wealthy people move into new market-rate housing, and I will gladly support rent control measures as part of that package. But rent control on its own just allocates winners and losers without addressing the underlying problem. Proposition 34: NO. This is an excellent example of why I vote against petition propositions by default. This is a law designed to affect exactly one organization in the state of California: the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The reason for this targeting is disputed; one side claims it's because of the AHF support for Proposition 33, and another side claims it's because AHF is a slumlord abusing California state funding. I have no idea which side of this is true. I also don't care, because I am fundamentally opposed to writing laws this way. Laws should establish general, fair principles that are broadly applicable, not be written with bizarrely specific conditions (health care providers that operate multifamily housing) that will only be met by a single organization. This kind of nonsense creates bad legal codes and the legal equivalent of technical debt. Just don't do this. Proposition 35: YES. I am, reluctantly, voting in favor of this even though it is a petition proposition because it looks like a useful simplification and cleanup of state health care funding, makes an expiring tax permanent, and is supported by a very wide range of organizations that I generally trust to know what they're talking about. No opposition argument was filed, which I think is telling. Proposition 36: NO. I am resigned to voting down attempts to start new "war on drugs" nonsense for the rest of my life because the people who believe in this crap will never, ever, ever stop. This one has bonus shoplifting fear-mongering attached, something that touches on nasty local politics that have included large retail chains manipulating crime report statistics to give the impression that shoplifting is up dramatically. It's yet another round of the truly horrific California "three strikes" criminal penalty obsession, which completely misunderstands both the causes of crime and the (almost nonexistent) effectiveness of harsh punishment as deterrence.

20 October 2024

Bits from Debian: Ada Lovelace Day 2024 - Interview with some Women in Debian

Alt Ada Lovelace portrait Ada Lovelace Day was celebrated on October 8 in 2024, and on this occasion, to celebrate and raise awareness of the contributions of women to the STEM fields we interviewed some of the women in Debian. Here we share their thoughts, comments, and concerns with the hope of inspiring more women to become part of the Sciences, and of course, to work inside of Debian. This article was simulcasted to the debian-women mail list. Beatrice Torracca 1. Who are you? I am Beatrice, I am Italian. Internet technology and everything computer-related is just a hobby for me, not my line of work or the subject of my academic studies. I have too many interests and too little time. I would like to do lots of things and at the same time I am too Oblomovian to do any. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? As a user I started using newsgroups when I had my first dialup connection and there was always talk about this strange thing called Linux. Since moving from DR DOS to Windows was a shock for me, feeling like I lost the control of my machine, I tried Linux with Debian Potato and I never strayed away from Debian since then for my personal equipment. 3. How long have you been into Debian? Define "into". As a user... since Potato, too many years to count. As a contributor, a similar amount of time, since early 2000 I think. My first archived email about contributing to the translation of the description of Debian packages dates 2001. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? Yes!! I use testing. I have it on my desktop PC at home and I have it on my laptop. The desktop is where I have a local IMAP server that fetches all the mails of my email accounts, and where I sync and back up all my data. On both I do day-to-day stuff (from email to online banking, from shopping to taxes), all forms of entertainment, a bit of work if I have to work from home (GNU R for statistics, LibreOffice... the usual suspects). At work I am required to have another OS, sadly, but I am working on setting up a Debian Live system to use there too. Plus if at work we start doing bioinformatics there might be a Linux machine in our future... I will of course suggest and hope for a Debian system. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? This is a tough one. I am not sure. Maybe, more visibility for the women already in the Debian Project, and make the newcomers feel seen, valued and welcomed. A respectful and safe environment is key too, of course, but I think Debian made huge progress in that aspect with the Code of Conduct. I am a big fan of promoting diversity and inclusion; there is always room for improvement. Ileana Dumitrescu (ildumi) 1. Who are you? I am just a girl in the world who likes cats and packaging Free Software. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? I was tinkering with a computer running Debian a few years ago, and I decided to learn more about Free Software. After a search or two, I found Debian Women. 3. How long have you been into Debian? I started looking into contributing to Debian in 2021. After contacting Debian Women, I received a lot of information and helpful advice on different ways I could contribute, and I decided package maintenance was the best fit for me. I eventually became a Debian Maintainer in 2023, and I continue to maintain a few packages in my spare time. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? Yes, it is my favourite GNU/Linux operating system! I use it for email, chatting, browsing, packaging, etc. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? The mailing list for Debian Women may attract more participation if it is utilized more. It is where I started, and I imagine participation would increase if it is more engaging. Kathara Sasikumar (kathara) 1. Who are you? I'm Kathara Sasikumar, 22 years old and a recent Debian user turned Maintainer from India. I try to become a creative person through sketching or playing guitar chords, but it doesn't work! xD 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? When I first started college, I was that overly enthusiastic student who signed up for every club and volunteered for anything that crossed my path just like every other fresher. But then, the pandemic hit, and like many, I hit a low point. COVID depression was real, and I was feeling pretty down. Around this time, the FOSS Club at my college suddenly became more active. My friends, knowing I had a love for free software, pushed me to join the club. They thought it might help me lift my spirits and get out of the slump I was in. At first, I joined only out of peer pressure, but once I got involved, the club really took off. FOSS Club became more and more active during the pandemic, and I found myself spending more and more time with it. A year later, we had the opportunity to host a MiniDebConf at our college. Where I got to meet a lot of Debian developers and maintainers, attending their talks and talking with them gave me a wider perspective on Debian, and I loved the Debian philosophy. At that time, I had been distro hopping but never quite settled down. I occasionally used Debian but never stuck around. However, after the MiniDebConf, I found myself using Debian more consistently, and it truly connected with me. The community was incredibly warm and welcoming, which made all the difference. 3. How long have you been into Debian? Now, I've been using Debian as my daily driver for about a year. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? It has become my primary distro, and I use it every day for continuous learning and working on various software projects with free and open-source tools. Plus, I've recently become a Debian Maintainer (DM) and have taken on the responsibility of maintaining a few packages. I'm looking forward to contributing more to the Debian community Rhonda D'Vine (rhonda) 1. Who are you? My name is Rhonda, my pronouns are she/her, or per/pers. I'm 51 years old, working in IT. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? I was already looking into Linux because of university, first it was SuSE. And people played around with gtk. But when they packaged GNOME and it just didn't even install I looked for alternatives. A working colleague from back then gave me a CD of Debian. Though I couldn't install from it because Slink didn't recognize the pcmcia drive. I had to install it via floppy disks, but apart from that it was quite well done. And the early GNOME was working, so I never looked back. 3. How long have you been into Debian? Even before I was more involved, a colleague asked me whether I could help with translating the release documentation. That was my first contribution to Debian, for the slink release in early 1999. And I was using some other software before on my SuSE systems, and I wanted to continue to use them on Debian obviously. So that's how I got involved with packaging in Debian. But I continued to help with translation work, for a long period of time I was almost the only person active for the German part of the website. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? Being involved with Debian was a big part of the reason I got into my jobs since a long time now. I always worked with maintaining Debian (or Ubuntu) systems. Privately I run Debian on my laptop, with occasionally switching to Windows in dual boot when (rarely) needed. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? There are factors that we can't influence, like that a lot of women are pushed into care work because patriarchal structures work that way, and don't have the time nor energy to invest a lot into other things. But we could learn to appreciate smaller contributions better, and not focus so much on the quantity of contributions. When we look at longer discussions on mailing lists, those that write more mails actually don't contribute more to the discussion, they often repeat themselves without adding more substance. Through working on our own discussion patterns this could create a more welcoming environment for a lot of people. Sophie Brun (sophieb) 1. Who are you? I'm a 44 years old French woman. I'm married and I have 2 sons. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? In 2004 my boyfriend (now my husband) installed Debian on my personal computer to introduce me to Debian. I knew almost nothing about Open Source. During my engineering studies, a professor mentioned the existence of Linux, Red Hat in particular, but without giving any details. I learnt Debian by using and reading (in advance) The Debian Administrator's Handbook. 3. How long have you been into Debian? I've been a user since 2004. But I only started contributing to Debian in 2015: I had quit my job and I wanted to work on something more meaningful. That's why I joined my husband in Freexian, his company. Unlike most people I think, I started contributing to Debian for my work. I only became a DD in 2021 under gentle social pressure and when I felt confident enough. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? Of course I use Debian in my professional life for almost all the tasks: from administrative tasks to Debian packaging. I also use Debian in my personal life. I have very basic needs: Firefox, LibreOffice, GnuCash and Rhythmbox are the main applications I need. Sruthi Chandran (srud) 1. Who are you? A feminist, a librarian turned Free Software advocate and a Debian Developer. Part of Debian Outreach team and DebConf Committee. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? I got introduced to the free software world and Debian through my husband. I attended many Debian events with him. During one such event, out of curiosity, I participated in a Debian packaging workshop. Just after that I visited a Tibetan community in India and they mentioned that there was no proper Tibetan font in GNU/Linux. Tibetan font was my first package in Debian. 3. How long have you been into Debian? I have been contributing to Debian since 2016 and Debian Developer since 2019. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? I haven't used any other distro on my laptop since I got introduced to Debian. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? I was involved with actively mentoring newcomers to Debian since I started contributing myself. I specially work towards reducing the gender gap inside the Debian and Free Software community in general. In my experience, I believe that visibility of already existing women in the community will encourage more women to participate. Also I think we should reintroduce mentoring through debian-women. T ssia Cam es Ara jo (tassia) 1. Who are you? T ssia Cam es Ara jo, a Brazilian living in Canada. I'm a passionate learner who tries to push myself out of my comfort zone and always find something new to learn. I also love to mentor people on their learning journey. But I don't consider myself a typical geek. My challenge has always been to not get distracted by the next project before I finish the one I have in my hands. That said, I love being part of a community of geeks and feel empowered by it. I love Debian for its technical excellence, and it's always reassuring to know that someone is taking care of the things I don't like or can't do. When I'm not around computers, one of my favorite things is to feel the wind on my cheeks, usually while skating or riding a bike; I also love music, and I'm always singing a melody in my head. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? As a student, I was privileged to be introduced to FLOSS at the same time I was introduced to computer programming. My university could not afford to have labs in the usual proprietary software model, and what seemed like a limitation at the time turned out to be a great learning opportunity for me and my colleagues. I joined this student-led initiative to "liberate" our servers and build LTSP-based labs - where a single powerful computer could power a few dozen diskless thin clients. How revolutionary it was at the time! And what an achievement! From students to students, all using Debian. Most of that group became close friends; I've married one of them, and a few of them also found their way to Debian. 3. How long have you been into Debian? I first used Debian in 2001, but my first real connection with the community was attending DebConf 2004. Since then, going to DebConfs has become a habit. It is that moment in the year when I reconnect with the global community and my motivation to contribute is boosted. And you know, in 20 years I've seen people become parents, grandparents, children grow up; we've had our own child and had the pleasure of introducing him to the community; we've mourned the loss of friends and healed together. I'd say Debian is like family, but not the kind you get at random once you're born, Debian is my family by choice. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? These days I teach at Vanier College in Montr al. My favorite course to teach is UNIX, which I have the pleasure of teaching mostly using Debian. I try to inspire my students to discover Debian and other FLOSS projects, and we are happy to run a FLOSS club with participation from students, staff and alumni. I love to see these curious young minds put to the service of FLOSS. It is like recruiting soldiers for a good battle, and one that can change their lives, as it certainly did mine. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? I think the most effective way to inspire other women is to give visibility to active women in our community. Speaking at conferences, publishing content, being vocal about what we do so that other women can see us and see themselves in those positions in the future. It's not easy, and I don't like being in the spotlight. It took me a long time to get comfortable with public speaking, so I can understand the struggle of those who don't want to expose themselves. But I believe that this space of vulnerability can open the way to new connections. It can inspire trust and ultimately motivate our next generation. It's with this in mind that I publish these lines. Another point we can't neglect is that in Debian we work on a volunteer basis, and this in itself puts us at a great disadvantage. In our societies, women usually take a heavier load than their partners in terms of caretaking and other invisible tasks, so it is hard to afford the free time needed to volunteer. This is one of the reasons why I bring my son to the conferences I attend, and so far I have received all the support I need to attend DebConfs with him. It is a way to share the caregiving burden with our community - it takes a village to raise a child. Besides allowing us to participate, it also serves to show other women (and men) that you can have a family life and still contribute to Debian. My feeling is that we are not doing super well in terms of diversity in Debian at the moment, but that should not discourage us at all. That's the way it is now, but that doesn't mean it will always be that way. I feel like we go through cycles. I remember times when we had many more active female contributors, and I'm confident that we can improve our ratio again in the future. In the meantime, I just try to keep going, do my part, attract those I can, reassure those who are too scared to come closer. Debian is a wonderful community, it is a family, and of course a family cannot do without us, the women. These interviews were conducted via email exchanges in October, 2024. Thanks to all the wonderful women who participated in this interview. We really appreciate your contributions in Debian and to Free/Libre software.

Russell Coker: MG4 Review

In the past I haven t had a high opinion of MG cars, decades ago they were small and expensive and didn t seem to offer anything I wanted. As there s a conveniently located MG dealer I decided to try out an MG electric car and see if they are any good. I brought two friends along who are also interested in new technology. I went to the MG dealer without any preconceptions or much prior knowledge of the MG electric cars apart from having vaguely noticed that they were significantly cheaper than Teslas. I told the salesperson that I didn t have a model in mind and I just wanted to see what MG offers, so they offered me a test driver of a MG4 64 EXCITE . The MG web site isn t very good and doesn t give an indication of what this model costs, my recollection is that it s something like $40,000, the base model is advertised at $30,990. I m not particularly interested in paying for extras above the base model and the only really desirable feature that the Excite 64 offers over the Excite 51 is the extra range (the numbers 51 and 64 represent the battery capacity in KWh). The base model has a claimed range of 350KM which is more than I drive in a typical week, generally there are only about 4 days a year when I need to drive more than 300KM in a day and on those rare days I can spend a bit of time at a charging station without much inconvenience. The experience of driving an MG4 is not much different from other EVs I ve driven, the difference between that and the Genesis GV60 (which was advertised at $117,000) [1] isn t significant. The Genesis has some nice camera features giving views from all directions and showing a view of the side on the dash when you put your turn indicator on. Also some models of Genesis (not the one I test drove) have cameras instead of side mirrors. The MG4 lacks most of those cameras but has a very effective reversing camera which estimates the distance to an obstacle behind you in cm. Some of the MG electric cars have a sunroof or moonroof (sunroof that just opens to transparent glass not open to the air), the one I tested didn t have them and I didn t feel I was missing much. While a moonroof is a nice feature I probably won t want to pay as much extra as they will demand for it. The dash of the MG4 doesn t have any simulation of the old fashioned dash unlike the Genesis GV60 which had a display in the same location as is traditionally used which displays analogue instruments (except when the turn indicators are on). The MG4 has two tablets, a big one in the middle of the front for controlling heating/cooling and probably other things like the radio and a small one visible through the steering wheel which has the instruments. I didn t have to think about the instruments, they just did the job which is great. For second hand cars I looked at AutoTrader which seems to be the only Australian site for second hand cars that allows specifying electric as a search criteria [2]. For the EVs advertised on that site the cheapest are around $13,000 for cars about 10 years old and $21,000 for a 5yo LEAF. If you could only afford to spend $21,000 on a car then a 5yo LEAF would definitely be better than nothing, but when comparing a 5yo car for $21,000 and a new car for $31,000 the new car is the obvious choice if you can afford it. There was an Australian company importing used LEAFs and other EVs and selling them over the web for low prices, if they were still around and still selling LEAFs for $15,000 then that would make LEAF vs MG3 a difficult decision for me. But with the current prices for second hand LEAFs the decision is easy. When I enrolled for the test drive the dealer took my email address and sent me an automated message with details about the test drive and an email address to ask for more information. The email address they used bounced all mail, even from my gmail account. They had a contact form on their web site but that also doesn t get a response. MG really should periodically test their dealer s email addresses, they are probably losing sales because of this. On the same day I visited a Hyundai dealer to see what they had to offer. A salesman there said that the cheapest Hyundai was $60,000 and suggested that I go elsewhere if I am prepared to buy a lesser car to save money. I don t need to get negged by a car dealer and I really don t think there s much scope for a car to be significantly better than the MG3 while also not competing with the Genesis cars. Genesis is a Hyundai brand and their cars are very nice, but the prices are well outside the range I m prepared to pay. Next I have to try the BYD. From what I ve heard they are mostly selling somewhat expensive cars in Australia (a colleague recently got one which was about $60,000 which he is extremely happy with) but hopefully they have some of the cheaper ones available too. I don t want to flex on my neighbors, I just want a reliable and moderately comfortable car that doesn t cost too much.
Related posts:
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  2. review of Australian car web sites It seems that Toyota isn t alone in having non-functional web...
  3. Used Car Prices There is an interesting article in The Age about the...

16 October 2024

Sahil Dhiman: 25, A Quarter of a Century Later

25 the number says well into adulthood. Aviral pointed that I have already passed 33% mark in my life, which does hits different. I had to keep reminding myself about my upcoming birthday. It didn t felt like birthday month, week or the day itself. My writings took a long hiatus starting this past year. The first post came out in May and quite a few people asked about the break. Hiatus had its own reasons, but restarting became harder each passing day afterward. Preparations for DebConf24 helped push DebConf23 (first post this year) out of the door, after which things were more or less back on track on the writing front. Recently, I have picked the habit of reading monthly magazines. When I was a child, I used to fancy seeing all the magazines on stationary and bookshops and thought of getting many when I m older. Seems like that was the connection, and now I m heavily into monthly magazines and order many each month (including Hindi ones). They re fun short reads and cover a wide spectrum of topics. Travelling has become the new found love. I got the opportunity to visit a few new cities like Jaipur, Meerut, Seoul and Busan. My first international travel showed me how a society which cares about the people s overall wellbeing turns out to be. Going in foreign land, expanded the concept of everything for me. It showed the beauty of silence in public places. Also, re-visited Bengaluru, which felt good with its good weather and food. It has become almost become tradition to attend a few events. Jashn-e-Rekhta, DebConf, New Delhi World Book Fair, IndiaFOSS and FoECon. It s always great talking to new and old folks, sharing and learning about ideas. It s hard for an individual to learn, grow and understand the world in a silo. Like I keep on saying about Free Software projects, it s all about the people, it s always about the people. Good and interesting people keep the project going and growing. (Side Note - it s fine if a project goes. Things are not meant to last a perpetuity. Closing and moving on is fine). Similarly, I have been trying to attend Jaipur Literature Festival since a while but failing. Hopefully, I would this time around. Expanding my Free Software Mirror to India was a big highlight this year. The mirror project now has 3 nodes in India and 1 in Germany, serving almost 3-4 TB of mirror traffic daily. Increasing the number of Software mirrors in India was and still is one of my goals. Hit me up if you want to help or setup one yourself. It s not that hard now actually, projects that require more mirrors and hosting setup has already been figured out. One realization I would like to mention was to amplify/support people who re already doing (a better job) at it, rather than reinventing the wheel. A single person might not be able to change the world, but a bunch of people experimenting and trying to make a difference certainly would. Writing 25 was felt harder than all previous years. It was a traditional year with much internal growth due to experiencing different perspectives and travelling. To infinity and beyond!

15 October 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.13 on CRAN: Small Calendar Update

The thirteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page. This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.36 (made this week) and contains some minor updates to two calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.13 (2024-10-15)
  • Synchronized with QuantLib 1.36 released yesterday
  • Calendar updates for South Korea and Poland

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Iustin Pop: Optical media lifetime - one data point

Way back (more than 10 years ago) when I was doing DVD-based backups, I knew that normal DVDs/Blu-Rays are no long-term archival solutions, and that if I was real about doing optical media backups, I need to switch to M-Disc. I actually bought a (small stack) of M-Disc Blu-Rays, but never used them. I then switched to other backups solutions, and forgot about the whole topic. Until, this week, while sorting stuff, I happened upon a set of DVD backups from a range of years, and was very curious whether they are still readable after many years. And, to my surprise, there were no surprises! Went backward in time, and: I also found stack of dual-layer DVD+R from 2012-2014, some for sure Verbatim, and some unmarked (they were intended to be printed on), but likely Verbatim as well. All worked just fine. Just that, even at ~8GiB per disk, backing up raw photo files took way too many disks, even in 2014 . At this point I was happy that all 12+ DVDs I found, ranging from 10 to 14 years, are all good. Then I found a batch of 3 CDs! Here the results were mixed: I think the takeaway is that for all explicitly selected media - TDK, JVC and Verbatim - they hold for 10-20 years. Valid reads from summer 2003 is mind boggling for me, for (IIRC) organic media - not sure about the TDK metallic substrate. And when you just pick whatever ( Creation ), well, the results are mixed. Note that in all this, it was about CDs and DVDs. I have no idea how Blu-Rays behave, since I don t think I ever wrote a Blu-Ray. In any case, surprising to me, and makes me rethink a bit my backup options. Sizes from 25 to 100GB Blu-Rays are reasonable for most critical data. And they re WORM, as opposed to most LTO media, which is re-writable (and to some small extent, prone to accidental wiping). Now, I should check those M-Disks to see if they can still be written to, after 10 years

14 October 2024

Philipp Kern: Touch Notifications for YubiKeys

When setting up your YubiKey you have the option to require the user to touch the device to authorize an operation (be it signing, decrypting, or authenticating). While web browsers often provide clear prompts for this, other applications like SSH or GPG will not. Instead the operation will just hang without any visual indication that user input is required. The YubiKey itself will blink, but depending on where it is plugged in that is not very visible.
yubikey-touch-detector (fresh in unstable) solves this issue by providing a way for your desktop environment to signal the user that the device is waiting for a touch. It provides an event feed on a socket that other components can consume. It comes with libnotify support and there are some custom integrations for other environments.For GNOME and KDE libnotify support should be sufficient, however you still need to turn it on:
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/yubikey-touch-detector
$ sed -e 's/^YUBIKEY_TOUCH_DETECTOR_LIBNOTIFY=.*/YUBIKEY_TOUCH_DETECTOR_LIBNOTIFY=true/' \
  < /usr/share/doc/yubikey-touch-detector/examples/service.conf.example \
  > ~/.config/yubikey-touch-detector/service.conf
$ systemctl --user restart yubikey-touch-detector
I would still have preferred a more visible, more modal prompt. I guess that would be an exercise for another time, listening to the socket and presenting a window. But for now, desktop notifications will do for me.PS: I have not managed to get SSH's no-touch-required to work with YubiKey 4, while it works just fine with a YubiKey 5.

11 October 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In September, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 51.75h (out of 9.25h assigned and 55.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.0h to the next month.
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 10.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 20.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 23.0h (out of 26.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.5h (out of 22.25h assigned and 37.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 36.5h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 22.25h (out of 20.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 10.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 6.5h (out of 14.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 24.75h (out of 21.0h assigned and 3.75h from previous period).
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19.0h (out of 19.0h assigned).
  • Sean Whitton did 0.75h (out of 4.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 42.0h assigned and 18.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 44.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 17.0h (out of 7.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In September, we have released 52 DLAs. September marked the first full month of Debian 11 bullseye under the responsibility of the LTS Team and the team immediately got to work, publishing more than 4 dozen updates. Some notable updates include ruby2.7 (denial-of-service, information leak, and remote code execution), git (various arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities), firefox-esr (multiple issues), gnutls28 (information disclosure), thunderbird (multiple issues), cacti (cross site scripting and SQL injection), redis (unauthorized access, denial of service, and remote code execution), mariadb-10.5 (arbitrary code execution), cups (arbitrary code execution). Several LTS contributors have also contributed package updates which either resulted in a DSA (a Debian Security Announcement, which applies to Debian 12 bookworm) or in an upload that will be published at the next stable point release of Debian 12 bookworm. This list of packages includes cups, cups-filters, booth, nghttp2, puredata, python3.11, sqlite3, and wireshark. This sort of work, contributing fixes to newer Debian releases (and sometimes even to unstable), helps to ensure that upgrades from a release in the LTS phase of its lifecycle to a newer release do not expose users to vulnerabilities which have been closed in the older release. Looking beyond Debian, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s has worked with the upstream developers of apache2 to address regressions introduced upstream by some recent vulnerability fixes and he has also reached out to the community regarding a newly discovered security issue in the dompurify package. LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n has undertaken the work of triaging and reproducing nearly 4 dozen CVEs potentially affecting the freeimage package. The upstream development of freeimage appears to be dormant and some of the issues have languished for more than 5 years. It is unclear how much can be done without the aid of upstream, but we will do our best to provide as much help to the community as we can feasibly manage. Finally, it is sometimes necessary to limit or discontinue support for certain packages. The transition of a release from being under the responsibility of the Debian Security Team to that of the LTS Team is an occasion where we assess any pending decisions in this area and formalize them. Please see the announcement for a complete list of packages which have been designated as unsupported.

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