Back in 2013 I proposed
a
way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice. I
suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
for name and address, but any format would work. I did not do
anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
something like it. It would make it possible to efficiently send
machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.
This was the background when I came across a proposal and
specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
Visma in Sweden called
UsingQR. Their PDF invoices contain
a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
get a more bogus entry). I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
to read. Normally this is all on one long line:
"vh":500.00,
"vm":0,
"vl":0,
"uqr":1,
"tp":1,
"nme":"Din Leverand r",
"cc":"NO",
"cid":"997912345 MVA",
"iref":"12300001",
"idt":"20151022",
"ddt":"20151105",
"due":2500.0000,
"cur":"NOK",
"pt":"BBAN",
"acc":"17202612345",
"bc":"BIENNOK1",
"adr":"0313 OSLO"
The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
format
specification (revision 2 from june 2014). The format seem to
have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
Norway.
Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
specification. Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
November to clarify. Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
usage limitations for the format. I urged her to make sure this was
explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
unfortunately this has not happened yet. So I guess if there is
submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so. At least
with patents, there is always
a
chance of getting sued...
I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this. Their plan was
to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular. I hope
they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
IETF is the correct place to
maintain such specification.
Update 2016-03-20: Via Twitter I became aware of
some comments
about this blog post that had several useful links and references to
similar systems. In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
information. More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
Short
Payment Descriptor. And in Germany, there is a system named
BezahlCode,
(
specification
v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF), which uses QR codes with
URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
provide the payment information. There is also the
ZUGFeRD
file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
not sure if it is done already. Last, in Bolivia there are reports
that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
format on invoices. I have not been able to track down a
specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
sets.
I am very very (very very very!) happy to confirm that...
This year, and after many years of not being able to, I will cross the Atlantic. To do this, I will take my favorite excuse: Attending DebConf!
So, yes, this image I am pasting here is as far as you can imagine from official promotional material. But, having bought my plane tickets, I have to start bragging about it ;-)
In case it is of use to others (at least, to people from my general geographic roundabouts), I searched for plane tickets straight from Mexico. I was accepting my lack of luck, facing an over-36-hour trip(!!) and at very high prices. Most routes were Mexico- central_europe -Arab Emirates-South Africa... Great for collecting frequent-flier miles, but terrible for anything else. Of course, requesting a more logical route (say, via Sao Paulo in Brazil) resulted in a price hike to over US$3500. Not good.
I found out that Mexico-Argentina tickets for that season were quite agreeable at US$800, so I booked our family vacation to visit the relatives, and will fly from there at US$1400. So, yes, in a 48-hr timespan I will do MEX-GRU-ROS, then (by land) Rosario to Buenos Aires, then AEP-GRU-JNB-CPT. But while I am at DebConf, Regina and the kids will be at home with the grandparents and family and friends. In the end, win-win with just an extra bit of jetlag for me ;-)
I *really* expect flights to be saner for USians, Europeans, and those coming from further far away. But we have grown to have many Latin Americans, and I hope we can all meet in CPT for the most intense weeks of the year!
See you all in South Africa!
More sandboxing
When working on untrusted code or data it's impossible to predict what
happens when one does a:
Debian folks at LibrePlanet
Happy hacking!
I'm going to loudly sing John Lennon's "Imagine" until 
This is a screenshot of the IPMI console, so it's not showing the full information of that kernel oops, but as you can see, there are most likely such parts involved like bridge, netif, xenvif and the physical igb NIC.
Here's another screenshot of a crash from this night:
Slightly different information, but still somehow network involved as you can see in the first line (net_rx_action).
So the big question is: is this a bug Xen or with my setup? I'm using xl toolstack, the xl.conf is basically the default, I think:
Some of you (
What happened in the 
Last night I got back from spending around 5 days in the Bay Area for
Spring Break. I stayed in a hostel in downtown SF for three nights
and then I stayed with a friend who is doing a PhD at Stanford. When
initially planning this trip my aim was just to visit somewhere
interesting on the west coast of the continental United States. I
chose the Bay Area because I wanted to get my PGP key signed by some
Debian Developers and that area has a high concentration of DDs, and
because I wanted to see my friend at Stanford. But in the end I liked
San Francisco a lot more than expected to and am very glad that I had an
opportunity to visit.
The first thing that I liked was how easy it seemed to be to find
people interested in the same kind of tech stuff that I am. I spent
my first afternoon in the city exploring the famous Mission district,
and at one point while sitting in the original Philz Coffee I found
that the person sitting next to me was running Debian on her laptop
and blogs about data privacy. We had an discussion about how viable
OpenPGP is as a component of a technically unsophisticated user s
attempts to stay safe online. Later that same day while riding the
subway train, someone next to me fired up Emacs on their laptop. And
over the course of my trip I met five Debian Developers doing all
sorts of different kinds of work both in and outside of Debian, and
some Debian users including one of Stanford s UNIX sysadmins. This is
a far cry from my day-to-day life down in the Sonoran Desert where new
releases of iOS are all anyone seems to be interested in.
Perhaps I should have expected this before my trip, but I think I had
assumed that most of the work being done in San Francisco was writing
web apps, so I was pleased to find people working on the same kind of
things that I am currently putting time into. And in saying the
above, I don t mean to demean the interests of the people around me in
Arizona for a moment (nor those writing web apps; I d like to learn
how to write good ones at some point). I m very grateful to be able
to discuss my philosophical interests with the other graduate
students. It s just that I miss being able to discuss tech stuff. I
guess you can t have everything you want!
One particular encouraging meeting I had was with a Debian Developer
employed by Google and working on Git. While my maths background sets
me up with the right thinking skills to write programs, I don t have
knowledge typically gained from an education in computer science that
enables one to work on the most interesting software. In particular,
low-level programming in C is something that I had thought it wouldn t
be possible for me to get started with. So it was encouraging to meet
the DD working on Git at Google because his situation was similar: his
undergraduate background is in maths and he was able to learn how to
code in C by himself and is now working on a exciting project at a
company that it is hard to get hired by. I don t mean that doing
exactly what he s doing is something that I aiming for, just that it
is very encouraging to know the field is more open to me than I had
thought. I was also reminded of how fortunate I am to have the
Internet to learn from and projects like Debian to get involved with.
Moving on from tech, I enjoyed the streets of San Francisco, and the
Stanford campus. San Francisco is fantastically multicultural though
with clear class and wealth divisions. A very few minutes walk from
the Twitter headquarters with its tech bros , as the maths PhD
students I met at Stanford call them, are legions of the un- and
barely-employed passing their time on the concrete. I enjoyed riding
one of the old cable cars through the aesthetically revealing and
stark combination of a west coast grid system on some very steep
hills. I was fortunate to be able to walk across the Golden Gate
Bridge on a perfectly clear and mist-free day.
Meeting people involved with Debian and meeting my old friend at
Stanford had me reflecting on and questioning my life in the desert
even more than usual. I try to remind myself that there is an end
date in sight and I will regret spending my time here just thinking
about leaving. I sometimes worry that I could easily find myself
moving to the big city London, San Francisco or elsewhere and
letting myself be carried by the imagined self-importance of that,
sidelining and procrastinating things that I should prize more highly.
I should remember that the world of writing software in big cities
isn t going away and my time in the desert is an opportunity to
prepare myself better for that, building my resistance to being swept
away by the tides of fashion.
About one month has passed and here is the usual updated of TeX Live packages for Debian, this time also with an update to biber to accompany the updated version of biblatex. This will be (probably) the last upload before TeX Live 2015 gets frozen in preparation for 2016. After the freeze there will be some time of piece, and updates will got to experimental with the new binaries.
From the list of updated and new packages I want to mention that biblatex has been updated together with biber, and most biblatex styles should already by updated to work with the new biblatex, too.
From the new packages one has in particular caught my attention: 
