Search Results: "ag"

2 July 2016

Lior Kaplan: Implementing NATO s standards (STANAG)

I recently joined Linnovate, and while working on one of the open source projects the company produces, we needed to process video content according to NATO s standard agreement (STANAG) 4609: NATO Digital Motion Imagery Standard. Obviously we started with trying to find code already done, but we only found some implementation in Java, while our project is written in JavaScript. We decided to just implement the standard in the way most convenient to us, and later refactoring the project when more standards (STANAGs) will get implemented. So I m happy to introduce our new project: STANAG at https://github.com/linnovate/stanag , also available with NPM (see https://www.npmjs.com/package/stanag).
Filed under: Linnovate

Joey Hess: twenty years of free software -- part 6 moreutils

moreutils is a little love letter to the Unix Tools philosophy. It was interesting to try to find new tools as basic as cat and ls. With sponge and vidir and ifne and chronic and others, we managed to find several such tools. So, it was fun to work on moreutils, but it also ran into inherent problems with the Unix Tools philosophy. One is namespacing; there are only so many good short names for commands, and a command like parallel can easily collide with something else. And since Unix Tools have a bigger surface area than a pure function, my parallel is not going to be quite compatible with your parallel, even if they were developed with (erm) parallel intentions. Partly due to that problem, I have gotten pickier about adding new tools to moreutils as it's gotten older, and so there's a lot of suggested additions that I will probably never get to. And as my mention of pure functions suggests, I have kind of moved on from being a big fan of the Unix Tools philosophy. Unix tools are a decent approximation of pure functions for their time, but they are not really pure, and not typed at all, and not usefully namespaced, and this limits them. Next: twenty years of free software -- part 7 git-annex

Paul Tagliamonte: Hello, InfluxDB

Last week, I posted about python-sense, and API wrapper for the internal Sense API. I wrote this so that I could pull data about myself into my own databases, allowing me to use that information for myself. One way I'm doing this is by pulling my room data into an InfluxDB database, letting me run time series queries against my environmental data. 
#!/usr/bin/env python
from influxdb import InfluxDBClient
import json
import datetime as dt
from sense.service import Sense
api = Sense()
data = api.room_sensors(quantity=20)
def items(data):
    for flavor, series in data.items():
        for datum in reversed(series):
            value = datum['value']
            if value == -1:
                continue
            timezone = dt.timezone(dt.timedelta(
                seconds=datum['offset_millis'] / 1000,
            ))
            when = dt.datetime.fromtimestamp(
                datum['datetime'] / 1000,
            ).replace(tzinfo=timezone)
            yield flavor, when, value
client = InfluxDBClient(
    'url.to.host.here',
    443,
    'username',
    'password',
    'sense',
    ssl=True,
)
def series(data):
    for flavor, when, value in items(data):
        yield  
            "measurement": " ".format(flavor),
            "tags":  
                "user": "paultag"
             ,
            "time": when.isoformat(),
            "fields":  
                "value": value,
             
         
client.write_points(list(series(data)))
I'm able to run this on a cron, automatically loading data from the Sense API into my Influx database. I can then use that with something like Grafana, to check out what my room looks like over time.

Paul Wise: DebCamp16 day 8

Apply wget security update to mentors.debian.net. Poke the DebConf video team about archiving the one Debian & stuff podcast episode. Discuss exclusion, privilege & DebConf. Usual spam reporting. Review wiki RecentChanges. Fix some typos from RecentChanges. File Debian wishlist bug #829177 against bugs.debian.org. Mention the recent post about breaking Android full-disk encryption on the exploits Debian wiki page. Answer questions about recommended build configuration for chromium-bsu from the maintainer of it in FreeBSD. Mention that HTML SRI could help secure initial Debian downloads. File Debian bug #829199 against file and add workaround in derivatives census. Report broken boss-gnome source package to BOSSLinux folks on IRC. Delete and re-download Parsix apt folder to stop hash sum mismatches. File Debian minor/wishlist bugs #829209/#829211/#829212 against cypher-lint. Add a porterbox guest account for one of the RTC GSoC students. Extend the expiry of another guest account. Direct query about the excuses HTML to the release team. File Debian bug #829241 against fonts-play. Discuss accessibility, life, the universe and rakia.

Russ Allbery: Review: Ashes of Honor

Review: Ashes of Honor, by Seanan McGuire
Series: October Daye #6
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: September 2012
ISBN: 1-101-59480-2
Format: Kindle
Pages: 368
This is the sixth book in the October Daye series, contains payoffs for some relationships that have been building over the whole series, and involves entangled politics set up by previous books. It's not the place to start with the series. Ashes of Honor starts, as so many of Toby's books do, with a friend asking her for help. But this request is entirely unexpected, and the help needed comes as a complete surprise: a previously unknown changeling, who has disappeared. A changeling whose powers are completely out of control, and who poses a threat to reality itself. As Toby's cases go, this involves a lot fewer horrible things happening to her and a lot more faerie politics and maneuvering than usual. I appreciated that; I'm not as fond of the books that go deep into despair or desperation. It does involve Toby getting almost killed multiple times, but, due to earlier events of the series, that isn't quite as bad as it used to be. More focus on investigation and political maneuvering and less Toby braving her way through horrors works for me. Even more notably, this book marks Toby finally figuring out that she has friends and allies who are there to help, not just be obligations she feels overwhelmed by or aid that she's not allowed to accept. This was one of her most frustrating characteristics; it's a relief to see her finally relax. This opens the way not only for deeper friendships and more complex plots but also a relationship that I've been awaiting for the entire series, and it's as much fun as I was hoping it would be. Toby started the series rather messed up and unwilling to let anyone close. It was for understandable reasons, but I like her better when she realizes why people respect her. Toby's connections with the royalty of the Bay Area also allow McGuire to tell a political story that moves farther afield from the Shadowed Hills. First in One Salt Sea and now in Ashes of Honor we see more of local politics, more of the lore of McGuire's universe, and another dangerous queen. Toby is particularly fun when she's dangerously outflanking people with considerably more power than she has. At this point, you could call it a specialty. I thought McGuire's take on San Jose and the sort of person who would be in charge of its fae was on point. We also get more of the Luidaeg, which is always a good sign for a Toby novel, and more of Tybalt, who is entangled in a major subplot of the story. Next to Luidaeg, Tybalt is my favorite of Toby's friends, so this book is full of the things that make me happy. McGuire adds some more pieces to her transplanted Celtic mythology and some tantalizing hints of what the fae have left behind. I'm hoping we see more of that in future books. (I suspect that may be what this whole series is building up to.) The story doesn't have quite as much oomph as One Salt Sea, but it's still one of the best books in the series so far. If you've enjoyed the series up to this point, keep reading. Followed by Chimes at Midnight. Rating: 8 out of 10

1 July 2016

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2016

FTP assistant This month I marked 233 packages for accept and rejected 29. I also sent 11 emails to maintainers asking questions. Currently there are 33 packages in NEW and the minimum this week has been as low as 24 packages. Come on you fellow developers, where are your packages? I am sure you can do better :-) . Debian LTS This was my twenty-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 18.75h. This resulted in patches for 13 CVEs and the following uploads: I also looked at mxml and libstruts1.2-java and marked CVEs for these packages as no-dsa . I also reviewed a patch of Salvatore for an embargoed CVE of xerces-c. Last but not least I looked at the remaining two CVEs for asterisk, but was not really able to create working patches This month I called again for testing php5. Thanks a lot to Stefan and anybody else who sent in their reports! As there are already new CVEs for php5 available, I am afraid I need your support again in July This month I also had another term of frontdesk work and answered questions or looked for CVEs that are important for Wheezy LTS or could be ignored. Other stuff I made some progress with the Alljoyn framework. Up to now the following packages are available: Unfortunately as some of those modules still need to be released in current versions, there are some gaps. Anyway, the next uploads will include an XMPP connector, to basically bridge a local AllJoyn bus to a remote AllJoyn bus over XMPP. Further, with the lighting module, real lamps can be switched on and off and much more. Also the Home Appliances and Entertainment Service Framework seems to be interesting as well. In the Javascript world I uploaded some new packages and uploaded new versions for the following packages:

Joachim Breitner: When to reroll a six

This is a story about counter-intuitive probabilities and how a small bit of doubt turned out to be very justified. It begins with the game To Court the King (German: Um Krone und Kragen ). It is a nice game with dice and cards, where you start with a few dice, and use your dice rolls to buy additional cards, which give you extra dice or special powers to modify the dice that you rolled. You can actually roll your dice many times, but every time, you have to set aside at least one die, which you can no longer change or reroll, until eventually all dice have been set aside. A few years ago, I have played this game a lot, both online (on yucata.de) as well as in real life. It soon became apparent that it is almost always better to go for the cards that give you an extra die, instead of those that let you modify the dice. Intuitively, this is because every additional die allows you to re-roll your dice once more. I concluded that if I have a certain number of dice (say, n), and I want to have a sum as high as possible at the end, then it may make sense to reroll as many dice as possible, setting aside only those showing a 6 (because that is the best you can get) or, if there is no dice showing a 6, then a single die with the best score. Besides for small number of dice (2 or 3), where even a 4 or 5 is worth keeping, this seemed to be a simple, obvious and correct strategy to maximize the expected outcome of this simplified game. It is definitely simple and obvious. But some doubt that it was correct remained. Having one more die still in the game (i.e. not set aside) definitely improves your expected score, because you can reroll the dice more often. How large is this advantage? What if it ever exceeds 6 then it would make sense to reroll a 6. The thought was strange, but I could not dismiss it. So I did what one does these days if one has a question: I posed it on the mathematics site of StackExchange. That was January 2015, and nothing happened. I tried to answer it myself a month later, or at least work towards at an answer, and did that by brute force. Using a library for probabilistic calculations for Haskell I could write some code that simply calculated the various expected values of n dice for up to n = 9 (beyond that, my unoptimized code would take too long): 
1:  3.50000 (+3.50000)
2:  8.23611 (+4.73611)
3: 13.42490 (+5.18879)
4: 18.84364 (+5.41874)
5: 24.43605 (+5.59241)
6: 30.15198 (+5.71592)
7: 35.95216 (+5.80018)
8: 41.80969 (+5.85753)
9: 47.70676 (+5.89707)
Note that this calculation, although printed as floating point numbers, is performed using fractions of unbounded integers, so there are no rounding issues that could skew the result. The result supported the hypothesis that there is no point in rolling a 6 again: The value of an additional die grows and approaches 6 from beyond, but judging from these number is never going to reach it. Then again nothing happened. Until 14 month later, when some Byron Schmuland came along, found this an interesting puzzle, and set out a 500 point bounty to whoever solved this problem. This attracted a bit attention, and a few not very successful attempts at solving this. Eventually it reached twitter, where Roman Cheplyaka linked to it. Coincidally a day later some joriki came along, and he had a very good idea: Why not make our life easier and think about dice with less sides, and look at 3 instead of 6. This way, and using a more efficient implementation (but still properly using rationals), he could do a similar calculation for up to 50 dice. And it was very lucky that he went to 50, and not just 25, because up to 27, the results were very much as expected, approaching value of +3 from below. But then it surpassed +3 and became +3.000000008463403. In other words: If you have roll 28 dice, and you have exactly two dice showing a 3, then it gives you better expected score if you set aside only one 3, and not both of them. The advantage is minuscule, but that does not matter it is there. From then on, the results behaved strangely. Between 28 and 34, the additional value was larger than 3. Then, from 35 on again lower than 2. It oscillated. Something similar could be observed when the game is played with coins. Eventually, joriki improved his code and applied enough tricks so that he could solve it also for the 6-sided die: The difference of the expected value of 198 dice and having 199 dice is larger than 6 (by 10 21...)! The optimizations that allowed him to calculate these numbers in a reasonable amount of time unfortunately was to assume that my original hypothesis (never rerolling a 6 is optimal), which held until n < 199. But this meant that for n > 199, the code did not yield correct results. What is the rationale of the story? Don t trust common sense when it comes to statistics; don t judge a sequence just from a few initial numbers; if you have an interesting question, post it online and wait for 16 months.

Elena 'valhalla' Grandi: Busy/idle status indicator

Busy/idle status indicator




About one year ago, during my first http://debconf15.debconf.org/, I've felt the need for some way to tell people whether I was busy on my laptop doing stuff that required concentration or just passing some time between talks etc. and available for interruptions, socialization or context switches.

One easily available method of course would have been to ping me on IRC (and then probably go on chatting on it while being in the same room, of course :) ), but I wanted to try something that allowed for less planning and worked even in places with less connectivity.

My first idea was a base laptop sticker with two statuses and then a removable one used to cover the wrong status and point to the correct one, and I still think it would be nice, but having it printed is probably going to be somewhat expensive, so I shelved the project for the time being.

Immagine/foto

Lately, however, I've been playing with hexagonal stickers https://terinjokes.github.io/StickerConstructorSpec/ and decided to design something on this topic, whith the result in the figure above, with the hacking sticker being my first choice, and the concentrating alternative probably useful while surrounded by people who may misunderstand the term hacking .

While idly looking around for sticker printing prices I realized that it didn't necessarly have to be a sticker and started to consider alternatives.

One format I'm trying is inspired by "do not disturb" door signs: I've used some laminating pouches I already had around which are slightly bigger than credit-card format (but credit-card size would also work of course ) and cut a notch so that they can be attached to the open lid of a laptop.

Immagine/fotoImmagine/foto

They seem to fit well on my laptop lid, and apart from a bad tendency to attract every bit of lint in a radius of a few meters the form factor looks good. I'll try to use them at the next conference to see if they actually work for their intended purpose.

SVG sources (and a PDF) are available on my website http://www.trueelena.org/computers/projects/busy_idle_indicator.html under the CC-BY-SA license.

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in June 2016

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian packaging Django and Python. I uploaded Django 1.9.7 and filed an upstream ticket (#26755) for a failure seen in its DEP-8 tests. I packaged/sponsored python-django-modeltranslation and python-paypal. I opened a pull request on model-translation to fix failing tests in the Debian package build. I packaged a new python-django-jsonfield (1.0.0), filed a bug and discovered some regression in its PostgreSQL support. I helped on the upstream ticket and I have been granted commit rights. I used this opportunity to do some bug triage and push a few fixes. I also discussed the future of the module and ended up starting a discussion on Django s developer list about the possibility to add a JSONField to the core. CppUTest. I uploaded a new upstream version (3.8) with more than a year of work. I found out that make install does not install a required header so I opened a ticket with a patch. The package ended up not compiling on quite a few architectures so I opened a ticket and prepared a fix for some of those failures with the help of the upstream developers. I also added a DEP-8 tests after having uploaded a broken (untested) package systemd support in net-snmp and postfix. I worked on adding native systemd service units to net-snmp (#782243) and postfix (#715188). In both cases, the maintainers have not been very reactive so far so I uploaded my changes as delayed NMU. pkg-security team. The team that I started quietly a few months ago is now growing, both with new members and new packages. I created the required Teams/pkg-security wiki page. I sponsored xprobe, hydra, made an upload of medusa to merge Kali changes into Debian (and at the same time submitting the patch to upstream). fontconfig. After having read Jonathan McDowell s analysis of a bug that I experienced multiple times (and that many Kali users had too), I opened bug #828037 to get it fixed once for all. Unfortunately, nothing happened yet. DebConf 16 I spent some time to prepare the 2 talks and the BoF that I will give/manage in Cape Town next week: Distro Tracker I continued to mentor Vladimir Likic who managed to finish his first patch. He is now working on documentation for new contributors based on his recent experience. I enhanced the tox configuration to run tests with Django 1.8 LTS with fatal warnings (python -Werror) so as to ensure that I m not relying on any deprecated feature and so that I can be sure that the codebase will work on the next Django LTS release (1.11). Thanks to this, I did discover quite a few places where I have been using deprecated API and I fixed them all (the JSONField update to 1.0.0 I mentionned above was precisely to fix such a warning). I also fixed a few more issues with folded mail headers that you can t inject back in a new Message object and with messages lacking the subject field. All those have been caught through real (spam) email generating exceptions wich are then mailed to me. Kali related work I uploaded a new live-boot (5.20160608) to Debian to fix a bug where the boot process was blocking on some timeout. I forwarded a Kali bug against libatk-wrapper-java (#827741) which turned out to be an OpenJDK bug. I filed #827749 against reprepro to request a way to remove selected internal file references. This is required if you want to be able to make a file disappear and if that file is part of a snapshot that you want to keep despite this. But in truth, my real need is to be able to replace the .orig.tar.gz used by Kali by the orig.tar.gz used by Debian those conflicts break the mirroring/import script. Salt I have been using salt to deploy a new service, and I developed patches for a few issues in salt formulas. I also created a new letsencrypt-sh formula to manage TLS certificates with the letsencrypt.sh ACME client. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Paul Wise: DebCamp16 day 7

Usual spam reporting. Review wiki RecentChanges. Provide feedback for the staging site of the new codebase for screenshots.d.n. Redirect bugs-search.d.o complaint to the BTS maintainers. Point out pastebinit already supports fpaste.org. Polish chromium-bsu, make a new upstream release to fix Debian RC bug #822711. Upload screenshot of chromium-bsu menu. Notify chromium-bsu package maintainers in other distros (hug whohas). Avoid checking WAV files for spelling errors in cats. Make the old PTS download i18n data over https. File #829092 to get the per-package i18n data to use https for links. Point someone on mentors to the Debian PHP group wiki page.

30 June 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in June 2016

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
Debian My work in the Reproducible Builds project was covered in our weekly reports. (#58, #59 & #60)
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Extended the lts-cve-triage.py script to ignore packages that are not subject to Long Term Support.

  • Issued DLA 512-1 for mantis fixing an XSS vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 513-1 for nspr correcting a buffer overflow in a sprintf utility.
  • Issued DLA 515-1 for libav patching a memory corruption issue.
  • Issued DLA 524-1 for squidguard fixing a reflected cross-site scripting vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 525-1 for gimp correcting a use-after-free vulnerability in the channel and layer properties parsing process.
Uploads
  • redis (2:3.2.1-1) New upstream bugfix release, plus subsequent upload to the backports repository.
  • python-django (1.10~beta1-1) New upstream experimental release.
  • libfiu (0.94-5) Misc packaging updates.
RC bugs

I also filed 170 FTBFS bugs against a7xpg, acepack, android-platform-dalvik, android-platform-frameworks-base, android-platform-system-extras, android-platform-tools-base, apache-directory-api, aplpy, appstream-generator, arc-gui-clients, assertj-core, astroml, bamf, breathe, buildbot, cached-property, calf, celery-haystack, charmtimetracker, clapack, cmake, commons-javaflow, dataquay, dbi, django-celery, django-celery-transactions, django-classy-tags, django-compat, django-countries, django-floppyforms, django-hijack, django-localflavor, django-markupfield, django-model-utils, django-nose, django-pipeline, django-polymorphic, django-recurrence, django-sekizai, django-sitetree, django-stronghold, django-taggit, dune-functions, elementtidy, epic4-help, fcopulae, fextremes, fnonlinear, foreign, fort77, fregression, gap-alnuth, gcin, gdb-avr, ggcov, git-repair, glance, gnome-twitch, gnustep-gui, golang-github-audriusbutkevicius-go-nat-pmp, golang-github-gosimple-slug, gprbuild, grafana, grantlee5, graphite-api, guacamole-server, ido, jless, jodreports, jreen, kdeedu-data, kdewebdev, kwalify, libarray-refelem-perl, libdbusmenu, libdebian-package-html-perl, libdevice-modem-perl, libindicator, liblrdf, libmail-milter-perl, libopenraw, libvisca, linuxdcpp, lme4, marble, mgcv, mini-buildd, mu-cade, mvtnorm, nose, octave-epstk, onioncircuits, opencolorio, parsec47, phantomjs, php-guzzlehttp-ringphp, pjproject, pokerth, prayer, pyevolve, pyinfra, python-asdf, python-ceilometermiddleware, python-django-bootstrap-form, python-django-compressor, python-django-contact-form, python-django-debug-toolbar, python-django-extensions, python-django-feincms, python-django-formtools, python-django-jsonfield, python-django-mptt, python-django-openstack-auth, python-django-pyscss, python-django-registration, python-django-tagging, python-django-treebeard, python-geopandas, python-hdf5storage, python-hypothesis, python-jingo, python-libarchive-c, python-mhash, python-oauth2client, python-proliantutils, python-pytc, python-restless, python-tidylib, python-websockets, pyvows, qct, qgo, qmidinet, quodlibet, r-cran-gss, r-cran-runit, r-cran-sn, r-cran-stabledist, r-cran-xml, rgl, rglpk, rkt, rodbc, ruby-devise-two-factor, ruby-json-schema, ruby-puppet-syntax, ruby-rspec-puppet, ruby-state-machine, ruby-xmlparser, ryu, sbd, scanlogd, signond, slpvm, sogo, sphinx-argparse, squirrel3, sugar-jukebox-activity, sugar-log-activity, systemd, tiles, tkrplot, twill, ucommon, urca, v4l-utils, view3dscene, xqilla, youtube-dl & zope.interface.
FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 186 packages: akonadi4, alljoyn-core-1509, alljoyn-core-1604, alljoyn-gateway-1504, alljoyn-services-1504, alljoyn-services-1509, alljoyn-thin-client-1504, alljoyn-thin-client-1509, alljoyn-thin-client-1604, apertium-arg, apertium-arg-cat, apertium-eo-fr, apertium-es-it, apertium-eu-en, apertium-hbs, apertium-hin, apertium-isl, apertium-kaz, apertium-spa, apertium-spa-arg, apertium-tat, apertium-urd, arc-theme, argus-clients, ariba, beast-mcmc, binwalk, bottleneck, colorfultabs, dh-runit, django-modeltranslation, dq, dublin-traceroute, duktape, edk2, emacs-pdf-tools, eris, erlang-p1-oauth2, erlang-p1-sqlite3, erlang-p1-xmlrpc, faba-icon-theme, firefox-branding-iceweasel, golang-1.6, golang-defaults, golang-github-aelsabbahy-gonetstat, golang-github-howeyc-gopass, golang-github-oleiade-reflections, golang-websocket, google-android-m2repository-installer, googler, goto-chg-el, gr-radar, growl-for-linux, guvcview, haskell-open-browser, ipe, labplot, libalt-alien-ffi-system-perl, libanyevent-fcgi-perl, libcds-savot-java, libclass-ehierarchy-perl, libconfig-properties-perl, libffi-checklib-perl, libffi-platypus-perl, libhtml-element-library-perl, liblwp-authen-oauth2-perl, libmediawiki-dumpfile-perl, libmessage-passing-zeromq-perl, libmoosex-types-portnumber-perl, libmpack, libnet-ip-xs-perl, libperl-osnames-perl, libpodofo, libprogress-any-perl, libqtpas, librdkafka, libreoffice, libretro-beetle-pce-fast, libretro-beetle-psx, libretro-beetle-vb, libretro-beetle-wswan, libretro-bsnes-mercury, libretro-mupen64plus, libservicelog, libtemplate-plugin-datetime-perl, libtext-metaphone-perl, libtins, libzmq-ffi-perl, licensecheck, link-grammar, linux, linux-signed, lua-busted, magics++, mkalias, moka-icon-theme, neutron-vpnaas, newlisp, node-absolute-path, node-ejs, node-errs, node-has-flag, node-lodash-compat, node-strip-ansi, numba, numix-icon-theme, nvidia-graphics-drivers, nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-304xx, nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-340xx, obs-studio, opencv, pacapt, pgbackrest, postgis, powermock, primer3, profile-sync-daemon, pyeapi, pypandoc, pyssim, python-cutadapt, python-cymruwhois, python-fisx, python-formencode, python-hkdf, python-model-mommy, python-nanomsg, python-offtrac, python-social-auth, python-twiggy, python-vagrant, python-watcherclient, python-xkcd, pywps, r-bioc-deseq2, r-bioc-dnacopy, r-bioc-ensembldb, r-bioc-geneplotter, r-cran-adegenet, r-cran-adephylo, r-cran-distory, r-cran-fields, r-cran-future, r-cran-globals, r-cran-htmlwidgets, r-cran-listenv, r-cran-mlbench, r-cran-mlmrev, r-cran-pheatmap, r-cran-pscbs, r-cran-r.cache, refind, relatorio, reprotest, ring, ros-ros-comm, ruby-acts-as-tree, ruby-chronic-duration, ruby-flot-rails, ruby-numerizer, ruby-u2f, selenium-firefoxdriver, simgrid, skiboot, smtpping, snap-confine, snapd, sniffles, sollya, spin, subuser, superlu, swauth, swift-plugin-s3, syncthing, systemd-bootchart, tdiary-theme, texttable, tidy-html5, toxiproxy, twinkle, vmtk, wait-for-it, watcher, wcslib & xapian-core.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RMarkdown and Metropolis/Mtheme

Nick Tierney asked on Twitter about rmarkdown and metropolis about whether folks had used RMarkdown-driven LaTeX Beamer presentations. And the answer is a firm hell yeah. I have been using mtheme (and/or a local variant I called 'm2') as well as the newer (renamed) release mtheme for the last year or two for all my RMarkdown-based presentations as you can see from my presentations page. And earlier this year back I cleaned this up and wrote myself local Ubuntu packages which are here on Launchpad. I also have two GitHub repos for the underlying .deb package code: - the pkg-latex-metropolis package for the LaTeX part (which is also in TeXlive in an older version) - the pkg-fonts-fira for the underlying (free) font (and this sadly cannot build on launchpad as it needs a download step). To round things up, I now also created a public 'sample' repo on GitHub. It is complete for all but the custom per-presenteation header.tex that modifies colours, add local definitions etc as needed for each presentation. With that, Happy Canada Day (tomorrow, though) -- never felt better to be part of something Glorious and Free, and also free of Brexit, Drumpf and other nonsense.

Russell Coker: Coalitions

In Australia we are about to have a federal election, so we inevitably have a lot of stupid commentary and propaganda about politics. One thing that always annoys me is the claim that we shouldn t have small parties. We have two large parties, Liberal (right-wing, somewhat between the Democrats and Republicans in the US) and Labor which is somewhat similar to Democrats in the US. In the US the first past the post voting system means that votes for smaller parties usually don t affect the outcome. In Australia we have Instant Runoff Voting (sometimes known as The Australian Ballot ) which has the side effect of encouraging votes for small parties. The Liberal party almost never wins enough seats to make government on it s own, it forms a coalition with the National party. Election campaigns are often based on the term The Coalition being used to describe a Liberal-National coalition and the expected result if The Coalition wins the election is that the leader of the Liberal party will be Prime Minister and the leader of the National party will be the Deputy Prime Minister. Liberal party representatives and supporters often try to convince people that they shouldn t vote for small parties and that small parties are somehow undemocratic , seemingly unaware of the irony of advocating for The Coalition but opposing the idea of a coalition. If the Liberal and Labor parties wanted to form a coalition they could do so in any election where no party has a clear majority, and do it without even needing the National party. Some people claim that it s best to have the major parties take turns in having full control of the government without having to make a deal with smaller parties and independent candidates but that s obviously a bogus claim. The reason we have Labor allying with the Greens and independents is that the Liberal party opposes them at every turn and the Liberal party has a lot of unpalatable policies that make alliances difficult. One thing that would be a good development in Australian politics is to have the National party actually represent rural voters rather than big corporations. Liberal policies on mining are always opposed to the best interests of farmers and the Liberal policies on trade aren t much better. If The Coalition wins the election then the National party could insist on a better deal for farmers in exchange for their continued support of Liberal policies. If Labor wins more seats than The Coalition but not enough to win government directly then a National-Labor coalition is something that could work. I think that the traditional interest of Labor in representing workers and the National party in representing farmers have significant overlap. The people who whinge about a possible Green-Labor alliance should explain why they aren t advocating a National-Labor alliance. I think that the Labor party would rather make a deal with the National party, it s just a question of whether the National party is going to do what it takes to help farmers. They could make the position of Deputy Prime Minister part of the deal so the leader of the National party won t miss out.
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Steve Kemp: So I've been busy.

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via: 
gpg --verify msg.sig msg
However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith
The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

Steve Kemp: So I've been busy.

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via: 
gpg --verify msg.sig msg
However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith
The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

Steve Kemp: So I've been busy.

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via: 
gpg --verify msg.sig msg
However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith
The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

Sean Whitton: bucheontimestop

This summer I m living in a flat five minutes walk from Bucheon station, near Seoul. Today there is a threat of rain and it s very humid, which tends to make one feel that time has stopped: it s as if everyone and everything is waiting for the rain to fall before getting on with their lives. There are two other reasons why one might think that time has stopped. There is a household goods shop outside the station that has a poster up which says last day of business , but of course it says this every day. A few weeks ago it said last three days of business instead, but they must have decided that was starting to look implausible or something. They do various things to look like they re struggling to get rid of their wares. The other day they just piled everying up in a huge pile on the street outside the shop. They have a guy with a megaphone shouting all day about how cheap everything is in an urgent tone. The other reason to think time has stopped is that today s coffee in Starbucks is always the same coffee. On the little blackboard that all Starbucks branches have they have written: now brewing: hot: iced coffee blend. iced: iced coffee blend. Every time I order a cup of today s coffee I have to wait five minutes while they actually brew it because it seems like no-one else is ordering it. And it tastes exactly the same as yesterday s coffee.

29 June 2016

Paul Wise: DebCamp16 day 6

Redirect one person contacting the Debian sysadmin and web teams to Debian user support. Review wiki RecentChanges. Usual spam reporting. Check and fix a derivatives census issue. Suggest sending the titanpad maintainence issue to a wider audience. Update check-all-the-things and copyright review tools wiki page for licensecheck/devscripts split. Ask if debian-debug could be added to mirror.dc16.debconf.org. Discuss more about the devscripts/licensecheck split. Yesterday I grrred at Debian perl bug #588017 that causes vulnerabilities in check-all-the-things, tried to figure out the scope of the issue and workaround all of the issues I could find. (Perls are shiny and Check All The thingS can be abbreviated as cats) Today I confirmed with the reporter (Jakub Wilk) that the patch mitigates this. Release check-all-the-things to Debian unstable (finally!!). Discuss with the borg about syncing cats to Ubuntu. Notice autoconf/automake being installed as indirect cats build-deps (via debhelper/dh-autoreconf) and poke relevant folks about this. Answer question about alioth vs debian.org LDAP.

Gunnar Wolf: Batch of the Next Thing Co.'s C.H.I.P. computers on its way to DebConf!)

Hello world! I'm very happy to inform that the Next Thing Co. has shipped us a pack of 50 C.H.I.P. computers to be given away at DebConf! What is the C.H.I.P.? As their tagline says, it's the world's first US$9 computer. Further details:
https://nextthing.co/pages/chip
All in all, it's a nice small ARM single-board computer; I won't bore you on this mail with tons of specs; suffice to say they are probably the most open ARM system I've seen to date. So, I agreed with Richard, our contact at the company, I would distribute the machines among the DebConf speakers interested in one. Of course, not every DebConf speaker wants to fiddle with an adorable tiny piece of beautiful engineering, so I'm sure I'll have some spare computers to give out to other interested DebConf attendees. We are supposed to receive the C.H.I.P.s by Monday 4; if you want to track the package shipment, the DHL tracking number is 1209937606. Don't DDoS them too hard! So, please do mail me telling why do you want one, what your projects are with it. My conditions for this giveaway are: To sign up for yours, please mail gwolf+chip@gwolf.org - I will capture mail sent to that alias ONLY.

Wouter Verhelst: Debcamp NBD work

I had planned to do some work on NBD while here at debcamp. Here's a progress report:
Task Concept Code Tested
Change init script so it uses /etc/nbdtab rather than /etc/nbd-client for configuration
Change postinst so it converts existing /etc/nbd-client files to /etc/nbdtab
Change postinst so it generates /etc/nbdtab files from debconf
Create systemd unit for nbd based on /etc/nbdtab
Write STARTTLS support for client and/or server
The first four are needed to fix Debian bug #796633, of which "writing the systemd unit" was the one that seemed hardest. The good thing about debcamp, however, is that experts are aplenty (thanks Tollef), so that part's done now. What's left: If I manage to get all of the above to work and there's time left, I'll have a look at implementing STARTTLS support into nbd-client and nbd-server. A spec for that exists already, there's an alternative NBD implementation which has already implemented it, and preliminary patches exist for the reference implementation, so it's known to work; I just need to spend some time slapping the pieces together and making it work. Ah well. Good old debcamp.

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