[Warning: quite a bit of pics in this post] [Edit: changed the post title, while I love the music, the actual lyrics of "Shake Rattle and Roll" made me facepalm. Ronnie Dawson's song is better :)] Last weekend I've been in Senigallia for the 15th edition of Summer Jamboree.
It was my first time there, and it was epic. Really.
If you are into roots music and early rock'n'roll and/or into vintage 40s and 50s clothes, go there.
You won't regret it! (You have time until August 10th, hurry up!) If you follow my identi.ca account (whooo! shameless plug!), you may know that I love music in general and Blues, Jazz and Rockabilly in particular.
If you read my blog, you may know that I make clothes - particularly reproductions of 50s and retro clothes.
So, it's not much of a surprise that going to the Summer Jamboree has been a mindblowing experience to me.
What surprised me it's that I've felt the very same wonder of my first Debconf: the amazing feeling that you are not alone, there are other people like you out there, who love the same things you love, who are silly about the same little details (yes, I equally despise historically innacurate pin up shoes and non free software), who dance - metaphorically and not - at your same beat.
Same wonder I felt when I first read some authors - Orwell and David Foster Wallace, just to mention a couple - or when I first delved in anarchist thinkers.
By nature I'm not much of a social person, and I tend to live and love alone. But that sense of being part of something, to find like-minded people always blows me away. I'm not much of a blog writer, so I won't probably be able to give you a good impression of the awesomness of it.
But hey, watch me trying. The Vintage Market I spent most of the morning travelling by train to reach Senigallia (and met the most beautiful French girl ever in the process, who sketched me in her notebook because, hey!, I was already in full Rockabilly gear).
The hotel was pretty close to the station, and to the part of the city where the festival was taking place, so I spent a couple of hours sleeping, then started the adventure.
The festival takes place mostly near the Rocca Roveresca, a beautiful fifteenth century castle, and on its gardens, but the all the other venues are in walking distance.
All around the Rocca there is a market with vintage clothes, records, shoes, retro jewelry. A special mention for two fantastic dressmakers: Laura of Bloody Edith Atelier from Rome and Debora of The Black Pinafore from Sarzana. I bought just a piece from each of them, but I was able to do that only with a huge amount of self restraint. Guitars! Tattoos! Yes, I may have spent a bit drooling on the Gibson Cherry Red, and I tried (without amp, though) that beautiful orange Gretsch Electromatic. And Greg Gregory of the Travel Ink Tattoo Studio from UK was there, with his shiny Airstream. I also spent a while among the records in the Bear Family Records booth. They are a Germany based independent record label specialised in reissues of country and 50s rock'n'roll. Couldn't resist, and I bought a beautiful Sun Records' tshirt. Just Rockin' and Rollin'. Aka: dance time After that, it was time to dance. I missed the dance camp of the afternoon, but the DJ sets were fantastic, all 40s and 50s stuff, and I fell in love with Lindy Hop and Boogie Woogie, and well, obviously, Jive. I could have spent hours watching the people dancing, and clumsily trying the most basic moves myself. People And the people, did I mention the people?
They were cosplaying the 40s and 50s so wonderfully I couldn't help but take some photos (and find a new fetish of mine: men in 40s clothes. Sexy as hell). For instance, Angelo Di Liberto, artistic director of the festival with the beautiful burlesque artist Grace Hall. Or the amazingly dressed German couple I met in via Carducci. And this couple too, was pretty cool. The Prettiest Smile award goes to these lovely ladies! Cars Who knows me, can tell that I don't love cars.
They stink, they are noisy, they are big.
But these ones where shiny and looked beautiful. Also, the black Cadillac had the terrible effect on me of putting "Santa Claus is Back in Town" in my head (or, more precisely, Elvis tomcatting his way through the song, singing "Got no sleigh with reindeer / No sack on my back / You're gonna see me comin' in a big black Cadillac"). Music! Sadly, I missed Stray Cat's Slim Jim Phantom but I was just in time for Ben E. King.
It was lovely: backed by the house band (The Good Fellas), he sang a lot of old Drifters hits, from On Broadway to Save the Last Dance for Me to - obviously - the great Stand By Me. Then a bit of hillbilly country, with Shorty Tom and the Longshots, a French combo consisting of a double bass, a rhythm guitar and a steel guitar. And, well, more dancing: the dj sets on the three stages went on until 3 am. Day 2 The next morning I took advantage of the early opening of Rocca Roveresca to visit it. The Rocca itself is beautiful and very well maintained, and hosts various exhibitions.
"Marilyn In White" shows the incredible photos taken by George Barris on the set of "The Seven Year Itch" as well as some taken in 1962. Beautiful, really, especially the series on the beach. But the ones moving me were the pics from "Buddy Holly, The Day The Music Dies": a collection of photos taken by Bill Francis during the (sadly brief) career of Buddy Holly from the very beginnings to his death. After that, it was time to come back to year 2014, but really I felt like I've walked for a while in another decade and planet. And the cool thing is that I could enjoy the great 40s and 50s music and dances (and clothes!) without the horrible stereotypes and cultural norms of the time period. A total win. :) So, ehm, that's it. I'm a bit sad to be back, and to cheer myself up I'm already planning to attend Wanda Jackson gig in Aarburg (CH) next month.
And take Lindy Hop and Boogie lessons, obviously.

I stared at Noodles' Emptiness, where I found a short rant on the currently most used forms of communication. No, into the most socially-useful forms of communication. No, into what works best for him. And, as each person's experience is unique, I won't try to correct him Noodles knows himself much, much, much, much better than I do. But some people have wondered recently (i.e. at conferences I have been at) why I give such an atypical use to social networks (...a term which I still hold to be grossly misused, but that's a topic for a different rant...One that's been had too many times). So, although my blog is syndicated at Planet Debian, and I know a good deal of readers come from there, this post is targetted at the rest of the world population: Those that don't understand why many among us prefer other ways of communication. Noodles mentions seven forms of communication he uses, arguably sorted by their nowadayness, low to high: Phone call, text (SMS) message, email, IRC, Skype, Google Hangouts and Facebook messenger. Among those, I strongly dislike two: Phone call and Skype (or any voice-based service, FWIW). I do most of my communication while multitasking, usually at work. I enjoy the quasi-real-timeliness of IRC and the instant messengers, but much more, I like the ability to delay an answer for seconds or minutes without it breaking the rules of engagement. Second, if the ordering is based on what I found, the reason for my little rant should become obvious: We had kept a great job so far building interoperable technology.1 Up until now, you could say drop me a mail , and no matter if you had your mail with GMail and I insisted on self-hosting my gwolf.org, as long as our communications adhered to simple and basic standards, we would be perfectly able to communicate. Skype is a bit of a special case here: They did build a great solution, ~ten years ago, when decent-quality VoIP was nowhere to be found. They have kept their algorithm and mechanisms propietary, and deliberately don't operate with others. And, all in all, there is a case for them remaining closed. But Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger do piss me off. More the first than the second. Both arrived to the instant messenger scene long after the experimentation and early stages, so they both took Jabber / XMPP, a well tried and tested protocol made with interoperability and federability in mind. And... They closed it, so they can control their whole walled garden. So, yes, I do use them both Because in both there are many people which I value, and which I want to be in touch with. And no, I won't try to change the ways of everybody so they can talk with me on IRC. I'm an asshole, but everything has its limits! :) Of course, I can (still?) use them from my trusty old multiprotocol chat manager, Pidgin. And it's so much better to have one small program gobbling up moderate heaps of memory than to be connected to the Facebook site, spending much more memory and CPU cycles via Javascript in a Web browser. Bah. PS- Interestingly, he left out the face-to-face communication.I am quite an anchorite in my daily life, but I still think it's worth at least a mention ;-) So, Noodles: Thanks for the excuse to let me vent a rant ;-)

• 1. Interestingly, a counterexample came up on me. One I do not remember, but I have seen printed information that make me believe it: Back in the 1940s/1950s, Mexico (Mexico City only perhaps?) had two parallel phone networks. If I'm not mistaken, one was Ericsson and the other was AT&T. Businesses often gave you both of their numbers in their ads, because you could not call one network from the other. And now that seems so backwards and unbelievable!

This is the fourth post in a series of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) describing a secure alternative to applications like WhatsApp. I started with the following statement:

I believe it is possible to build a system with the simplicity and functionality of WhatsApp or Viber, which provides end-to-end encryption, is built on free software and open protocols, that supports federation and is almost decentralised, and that would allow interested companies to turn a profit without compromising any of these principles.

Now that most of the infrastructure has been described, in this post I will talk about the user-visible part: a mobile SIP client specially tailored for this architecture.

Features For Yakker to be successful, an application that is visually attractive and simple to use, while providing excellent call quality and stability, is critical. This idea is useless if only geeks adopt it: I want my parents to use it, I want my non-techie friends to use it. I want to tell them to switch from any of the other applications, not only because it is more secure, open and community-based, but also because it is better. For Android, there is already some excellent free applications that could be used as a starting point: Lumicall, CSipSimple and Linphone. I haven't tried it yet, but Linphone has a port to iOS too. Apart from the quality considerations, the following features must be added:

• Certificate creation and proper storage in the mobile device.
• An account creation wizard that interacts with the directory service and the account providers. Lumicall currently does something like this already, but only for their own ENUM and SIP server only.
• Proper DNSSEC validating resolver to securely get the callee's certificate and ENUM record.
• Optionally, use the directory service API to query records instead of DNS, to enhance privacy.
• Periodic verification of the user's own ENUM and certificate records in DNS.
• Use of those certificates to set up the SRTP stream, instead of unauthenticated encryption. Text messages must be encrypted in the same way, but included in the SIP message. SIPs encryption is not enough, as the proxies and service providers can read them.
• Integration with the system's address book.
• ENUM lookup, and SIP SRV lookup to detect phones with an associated SIP account.
• When the called party does not have a SIP account, the client must offer to call using the PSTN gateway at service provider, if it provides one, and to call using the GSM network. It needs to be fast and reliable, so people can use it as the default texting and calling application.
• Provide an interface to query account's balance, calling rates, and to buy credit. Possibly, offer this by opening a web browser, but negotiating authentication first, so the user does not need to enter an user name or password.
• Capabilities to migrate to a different service provider.
• A secure way to share the key pair with another trusted device.
• A way to import a key pair created by the user manually.

I am probably missing a bunch of other capabilities that need to be implemented. It is a lot of work. Some of these features would only be useful for participants of the Yakker network, but there are others that could be useful for every SIP user, and therefore, implemented first. For example, SIP accounts that are not associated with a phone number could publish certificates under the same domain, and have the client use them to have secure communications with legacy infrastructure.

Funding I am aware that this amount of work is not going to happen overnight. In fact, without a bunch of people from the community interested in the project, it is never going to happen. The good news is that I think that companies might be interested in investing in this. A company could create their own branded version of the client, and use advertisements or service provider preference (the provider the user gets unless they choose one manually) to generate income. As long as the code remains free, and the client is compatible with the whole system, there could many competing clients out there. Their own promotion schemes would work for the benefit of the whole system, by bringing more users.

Risks The biggest threat would be of one client monopolising the network, and then changing the protocols to make the system a walled garden. It has already happened with GTalk, so there is precedent for this. I don't think there is any way to stop a big company from doing this, but one strategy to mitigate the risk a bit would be to create a brand (Yakker or whatever this ends up being called) and have it managed by a trusted community organisation, which can revoke the right to use the brand when a party is not behaving.

Did I get your attention with the title? Good. In this post I will outline something that I have been thinking about for some months:

I believe it is possible to build a system with the simplicity and functionality of WhatsApp or Viber, which provides end-to-end encryption, is built on free software and open protocols, that supports federation and is almost decentralised, and that would allow interested companies to turn a profit without compromising any of these principles.

Introduction This is the first post of a series that I will be publishing in the next few days. Many parts of these posts will be technical, but I expect that the main concepts can be understood by a wider audience. What I am proposing seems like a bold statement, I know. Maybe there is some fatal flaw somewhere in my thinking, and that is why I am publishing this: I hope to get constructive feedback, and maybe get enough traction to start implementing it Real Soon Now . I have been thinking about this problem since February, when I discussed this extensively with friends at FOSDEM. I have already published a critique of Telegram, which had way more impact than I ever imagined, showing that there is people out there interested in this kind of stuff. The last posts about DNSSEC and DANE were part of my musings about this, too. There are many components that need to be built for this to happen. But more importantly, this can only be useful if it gains a critical mass. And that's why I think making this a viable business tool is very important. At the same time, that means I need to think extra carefully to make it impossible for any for-profit company to mutate this effort into Just Another Walled Garden. My goals for this architecture are:

• First and foremost, target the same people that nowadays is using a plethora of walled gardens for their instant communication needs. That is WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, Facebook messenger, etc.
• It must focus on mobile, that is what people care about, without forgetting about other use cases.
• Creating an account and placing the first call/text message should be as easy as it is currently with the competition.
• All communication must be encrypted end-to-end with public-key cryptography; nobody but the user has access to the private keys.
• Most components must be decentralised, and allow for competition.
• There should be as little trust as possible placed on any part of the system.
• Anybody can set up a compatible service provider and offer it to its users, while having full interoperability with other providers.
• Compatible services which are not part of the network must be able to interoperate.
• Contacting a person should happen even if they are not subscribed to the service. The client application must fall-back seamlessly to using interoperability gateways, PSTN termination, or the mobile network.
• Interoperability with the competition is desirable, but possibly is better left to be implemented by the client applications.

Components I have identified a few components needed for this to work, I will expand on each one later.

1. A flagship mobile application for Android and iOS, based on Lumicall or CSIPSimple, but with several important modifications.
2. One or many directory and authentication services, based on ENUM and DNSSEC. These are the most critical piece of this idea, and possibly must only be operated by community-governed non-profits.
3. One or many service providers, that offer simple account creation, registration, and optionally PSTN termination (which can be the main way of generating profit). An API needs to be defined for operations that are not part of the communications protocol, like account creation, credit purchasing, and balance querying.
4. A network governing charter, and a trusted non-profit organisation that oversees that any participating parties are following the charter. This organisation defines which directory services are to be trusted (and possibly operates one of them), and which service providers the client application can use to create accounts.

Key points Some of the issues that need to be solved are:

• How to handle and distribute public keys securely without the user understanding anything about security.
• How to make registration painless and password-free, while offering an acceptable level of security.
• How to fund development of the client application, and maintenance of the directory services.
• How to get companies interested in this, so them would bring users to the network.
• How to allow the user to migrate from one service provider to another, to improve competition.
• How to prevent any party from subverting the spirit of the network.
• How to make the client application work everywhere and have reasonably quality.

To be continued I think I have answers to most of these problems. I will elaborate in the next few days, stay tuned!

Footnotes The name is something I've chosen a name in less than 2 minutes, while starting this post, so probably is awful. The distributed part is only half true, as the directory services need to be centralised, but I think it's good enough. I am aware that Lumicall seems to be trying to build something similar. I only found about that recently, when I was thinking about this design. Sadly, I think it has several shortcomings, but it is definitely one of the building blocks of this project.

I'm moving. Well, not right here, right now. Rather less than two years. But I already know what my flat will look like and was able to influence that decision. And there will be more to influence, like what to do with common rooms in the builing, or what to put in the garden (voting for climbing facilities for my son of course!). It's this kind of co-housing project where you already know your neighbours beforehand and can find common grounds for decisions like that. The co-housing project I'm moving to is called Que[e]rbau. And it will be living up to its name. It is specificly aimed at people who live tolerance and acceptance, and also potentially live an sorta alternative lifestyle, defining their own identity; but not limited to those. There also will be conventional families living there who specificly don't want to raise their kids in a conservative environment. When I told about this plan to someone they asked me if I really want to do that. Their concerns were with respect to my son and if the house wouldn't become a target. I was puzzled at first, given that we have the Rainbow Parade, the Life Ball and most of all the Rosa Lila Villa since several years in Vienna and I'm not aware of any bigger disturbances it causes, rather the opposite. After thinking a while about it it sounded a bit for the wish of a Don't Ask Don't Tell environment. Recently there was this great documentary done by Vice on youtube about Young and Gay in Putin's Russia (watch all five parts of it, it's worth it). In the light of that I don't think hiding does improve the situation, rather the opposite. Not speaking about it doesn't improve acceptance. And actually, I was approached by at least one person during the Debian Women MiniDebconf about how brave I am considered. I'm not sure if it really is brave, I just don't want to lie to myself anymore, and I very rarely had troubles through that. The more open and natural you behave, the less confrontation area you leave left, and people notice that. Not totally unrelated to that, I created myself a new gpg key. It doesn't carry my official name anymore but just the name I prefer to be addressed with: Rhonda. It also carries a last name you might not have heard yet (it was adopted on the Discworld MUD several years ago, even before I wrote Mermaids; actually in connection with the person who partly triggered the poem), that's the reason I added a plain Rhonda UID to it for those who aren't aware of the last name. I will submit that key to keysigning parties from now on, and it of course is up to you if you feel comfortable with signing it.

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In 2011 I wrote a post that was inspired by the Sociological Images blog [1]. After some delay here I ve written another one. I plan to continue documenting such things. Playground In 2011 I photographed a plaque at Flagstaff Gardens in Melbourne. It shows a picture of the playground in 1918 with segregated boys and girls sections. It s interesting that the only difference between the two sections is that the boys have horizontal bars and a trapeze. Do they still have gender segregated playgrounds anywhere in Australia? If so what is the difference in the sections? Aborigines The Android game Paradise Island [2] has a feature where you are supposed to stop Aborigines from stealing, it plays on the old racist stereotypes about Aborigines which are used to hide the historical record that it s always been white people stealing from the people that they colonise. There is also another picture showing the grass skirts. Nowadays the vast majority of Aborigines don t wear such clothing, the only time they do is when doing some sort of historical presentation for tourists. I took those pictures in 2012, but apparently the game hasn t changed much since then. Lemonade Is lemonade a drink or a flavour? Most people at the party where I took the above photo regard lemonade as a drink and found the phrase Lemonade Flavoured Soft Drink strange when it was pointed out to them. Incidentally the drink on the right tastes a bit like the US version of lemonade (which is quite different from the Australian version). For US readers, the convention in Australia is that lemonade has no flavor of lemons. Not Sweet In 2012 an apple cider company made a huge advertising campaign featuring people who might be gender queer, above is a picture of a bus stop poster and there were also TV ads. The adverts gave no information at all about what the drink might taste like apart from not being as sweet as you think . So it s basically an advertising campaign with no substance other than a joke about people who don t conform to gender norms. Also it should be noted that some women naturally grow beards and have religious reasons for not shaving [3]. Episode 2 of the TV documentary series Am I Normal has an interesting interview of a woman with a beard. Revolution A violent political revolution is usually a bad thing, using such revolutions to advertise sugar drinks seems like a bad idea. But it seems particularly interesting to note the different attitudes to such things in various countries. In 2012 Schweppes in Australia ran a marketing campaign based on imagery related to a Communist revolution (the above photo was taken at Southern Cross station in Melbourne), I presume that Schweppes in the US didn t run that campaign. I wonder whether global media will stop such things, presumably that campaign has the potential to do more harm in the US than good in Australia. Racist Penis Size Joke at Southbank The above advert was in a free newspaper at Southbank in 2012. Mini Movers thought that this advert was a good idea and so did the management of Southbank who approved the advert for their paper. Australia is so racist that people don t even realise they are being racist.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/12/31/sociological-images/
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/7pnkvog
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/n9ugukc

We had some requests to get GHC (the Glasgow Haskell Compiler) up and running on two new Ubuntu architectures: arm64, added in 13.10, and ppc64el, added in 14.04. This has been something of a saga, and has involved rather more late-night hacking than is probably good for me. Book the First: Recalled to a life of strange build systems You might not know it from the sheer bulk of uploads I do sometimes, but I actually don't speak a word of Haskell and it's not very high up my list of things to learn. But I am a pretty experienced build engineer, and I enjoy porting things to new architectures: I'm firmly of the belief that breadth of architecture support is a good way to shake out certain categories of issues in code, that it's worth doing aggressively across an entire distribution, and that, even if you don't think you need something now, new requirements have a habit of coming along when you least expect them and you might as well be prepared in advance. Furthermore, it annoys me when we have excessive noise in our build failure and proposed-migration output and I often put bits and pieces of spare time into gardening miscellaneous problems there, and at one point there was a lot of Haskell stuff on the list and it got a bit annoying to have to keep sending patches rather than just fixing things myself, and ... well, I ended up as probably the only non-Haskell-programmer on the Debian Haskell team and found myself fixing problems there in my free time. Life is a bit weird sometimes. Bootstrapping packages on a new architecture is a bit of a black art that only a fairly small number of relatively bitter and twisted people know very much about. Doing it in Ubuntu is specifically painful because we've always forbidden direct binary uploads: all binaries have to come from a build daemon. Compilers in particular often tend to be written in the language they compile, and it's not uncommon for them to build-depend on themselves: that is, you need a previous version of the compiler to build the compiler, stretching back to the dawn of time where somebody put things together with a big magnet or something. So how do you get started on a new architecture? Well, what we do in this case is we construct a binary somehow (usually involving cross-compilation) and insert it as a build-dependency for a proper build in Launchpad. The ability to do this is restricted to a small group of Canonical employees, partly because it's very easy to make mistakes and partly because things like the classic "Reflections on Trusting Trust" are in the backs of our minds somewhere. We have an iron rule for our own sanity that the injected build-dependencies must themselves have been built from the unmodified source package in Ubuntu, although there can be source modifications further back in the chain. Fortunately, we don't need to do this very often, but it does mean that as somebody who can do it I feel an obligation to try and unblock other people where I can. As far as constructing those build-dependencies goes, sometimes we look for binaries built by other distributions (particularly Debian), and that's pretty straightforward. In this case, though, these two architectures are pretty new and the Debian ports are only just getting going, and as far as I can tell none of the other distributions with active arm64 or ppc64el ports (or trivial name variants) has got as far as porting GHC yet. Well, OK. This was somewhere around the Christmas holidays and I had some time. Muggins here cracks his knuckles and decides to have a go at bootstrapping it from scratch. It can't be that hard, right? Not to mention that it was a blocker for over 600 entries on that build failure list I mentioned, which is definitely enough to make me sit up and take notice; we'd even had the odd customer request for it. Several attempts later and I was starting to doubt my sanity, not least for trying in the first place. We ship GHC 7.6, and upgrading to 7.8 is not a project I'd like to tackle until the much more experienced Haskell folks in Debian have switched to it in unstable. The porting documentation for 7.6 has bitrotted more or less beyond usability, and the corresponding documentation for 7.8 really isn't backportable to 7.6. I tried building 7.8 for ppc64el anyway, picking that on the basis that we had quicker hardware for it and didn't seem likely to be particularly more arduous than arm64 (ho ho), and I even got to the point of having a cross-built stage2 compiler (stage1, in the cross-building case, is a GHC binary that runs on your starting architecture and generates code for your target architecture) that I could copy over to a ppc64el box and try to use as the base for a fully-native build, but it segfaulted incomprehensibly just after spawning any child process. Compilers tend to do rather a lot, especially when they're built to use GCC to generate object code, so this was a pretty serious problem, and it resisted analysis. I poked at it for a while but didn't get anywhere, and I had other things to do so declared it a write-off and gave up. Book the Second: The golden thread of progress In March, another mailing list conversation prodded me into finding a blog entry by Karel Gardas on building GHC for arm64. This was enough to be worth another look, and indeed it turned out that (with some help from Karel in private mail) I was able to cross-build a compiler that actually worked and could be used to run a fully-native build that also worked. Of course this was 7.8, since as I mentioned cross-building 7.6 is unrealistically difficult unless you're considerably more of an expert on GHC's labyrinthine build system than I am. OK, no problem, right? Getting a GHC at all is the hard bit, and 7.8 must be at least as capable as 7.6, so it should be able to build 7.6 easily enough ... Not so much. What I'd missed here was that compiler engineers generally only care very much about building the compiler with older versions of itself, and if the language in question has any kind of deprecation cycle then the compiler itself is likely to be behind on various things compared to more typical code since it has to be buildable with older versions. This means that the removal of some deprecated interfaces from 7.8 posed a problem, as did some changes in certain primops that had gained an associated compatibility layer in 7.8 but nobody had gone back to put the corresponding compatibility layer into 7.6. GHC supports running Haskell code through the C preprocessor, and there's a __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ definition with the compiler's version number, so this was just a slog tracking down changes in git and adding #ifdef-guarded code that coped with the newer compiler (remembering that stage1 will be built with 7.8 and stage2 with stage1, i.e. 7.6, from the same source tree). More inscrutably, GHC has its own packaging system called Cabal which is also used by the compiler build process to determine which subpackages to build and how to link them against each other, and some crucial subpackages weren't being built: it looked like it was stuck on picking versions from "stage0" (i.e. the initial compiler used as an input to the whole process) when it should have been building its own. Eventually I figured out that this was because GHC's use of its packaging system hadn't anticipated this case, and was selecting the higher version of the ghc package itself from stage0 rather than the version it was about to build for itself, and thus never actually tried to build most of the compiler. Editing ghc_stage1_DEPS in ghc/stage1/package-data.mk after its initial generation sorted this out. One late night building round and round in circles for a while until I had something stable, and a Debian source upload to add basic support for the architecture name (and other changes which were a bit over the top in retrospect: I didn't need to touch the embedded copy of libffi, as we build with the system one), and I was able to feed this all into Launchpad and watch the builders munch away very satisfyingly at the Haskell library stack for a while. This was all interesting, and finally all that work was actually paying off in terms of getting to watch a slew of several hundred build failures vanish from arm64 (the final count was something like 640, I think). The fly in the ointment was that ppc64el was still blocked, as the problem there wasn't building 7.6, it was getting a working 7.8. But now I really did have other much more urgent things to do, so I figured I just wouldn't get to this by release time and stuck it on the figurative shelf. Book the Third: The track of a bug Then, last Friday, I cleared out my urgent pile and thought I'd have another quick look. (I get a bit obsessive about things like this that smell of "interesting intellectual puzzle".) slyfox on the #ghc IRC channel gave me some general debugging advice and, particularly usefully, a reduced example program that I could use to debug just the process-spawning problem without having to wade through noise from running the rest of the compiler. I reproduced the same problem there, and then found that the program crashed earlier (in stg_ap_0_fast, part of the run-time system) if I compiled it with +RTS -Da -RTS. I nailed it down to a small enough region of assembly that I could see all of the assembly, the source code, and an intermediate representation or two from the compiler, and then started meditating on what makes ppc64el special. You see, the vast majority of porting bugs come down to what I might call gross properties of the architecture. You have things like whether it's 32-bit or 64-bit, big-endian or little-endian, whether char is signed or unsigned, that sort of thing. There's a big table on the Debian wiki that handily summarises most of the important ones. Sometimes you have to deal with distribution-specific things like whether GL or GLES is used; often, especially for new variants of existing architectures, you have to cope with foolish configure scripts that think they can guess certain things from the architecture name and get it wrong (assuming that powerpc* means big-endian, for instance). We often have to update config.guess and config.sub, and on ppc64el we have the additional hassle of updating libtool macros too. But I've done a lot of this stuff and I'd accounted for everything I could think of. ppc64el is actually a lot like amd64 in terms of many of these porting-relevant properties, and not even that far off arm64 which I'd just successfully ported GHC to, so I couldn't be dealing with anything particularly obvious. There was some hand-written assembly which certainly could have been problematic, but I'd carefully checked that this wasn't being used by the "unregisterised" (no specialised machine dependencies, so relatively easy to port but not well-optimised) build I was using. A problem around spawning processes suggested a problem with SIGCHLD handling, but I ruled that out by slowing down the first child process that it spawned and using strace to confirm that SIGSEGV was the first signal received. What on earth was the problem? From some painstaking gdb work, one thing I eventually noticed was that stg_ap_0_fast's local stack appeared to be being corrupted by a function call, specifically a call to the colourfully-named debugBelch. Now, when IBM's toolchain engineers were putting together ppc64el based on ppc64, they took the opportunity to fix a number of problems with their ABI: there's an OpenJDK bug with a handy list of references. One of the things I noticed there was that there were some stack allocation optimisations in the new ABI, which affected functions that don't call any vararg functions and don't call any functions that take enough parameters that some of them have to be passed on the stack rather than in registers. debugBelch takes varargs: hmm. Now, the calling code isn't quite in C as such, but in a related dialect called "Cmm", a variant of C-- (yes, minus), that GHC uses to help bridge the gap between the functional world and its code generation, and which is compiled down to C by GHC. When importing C functions into Cmm, GHC generates prototypes for them, but it doesn't do enough parsing to work out the true prototype; instead, they all just get something like extern StgFunPtr f(void);. In most architectures you can get away with this, because the arguments get passed in the usual calling convention anyway and it all works out, but on ppc64el this means that the caller doesn't generate enough stack space and then the callee tries to save its varargs onto the stack in an area that in fact belongs to the caller, and suddenly everything goes south. Things were starting to make sense. Now, debugBelch is only used in optional debugging code; but runInteractiveProcess (the function associated with the initial round of failures) takes no fewer than twelve arguments, plenty to force some of them onto the stack. I poked around the GCC patch for this ABI change a bit and determined that it only optimised away the stack allocation if it had a full prototype for all the callees, so I guessed that changing those prototypes to extern StgFunPtr f(); might work: it's still technically wrong, not least because omitting the parameter list is an obsolescent feature in C11, but it's at least just omitting information about the parameter list rather than actively lying about it. I tweaked that and ran the cross-build from scratch again. Lo and behold, suddenly I had a working compiler, and I could go through the same build-7.6-using-7.8 procedure as with arm64, much more quickly this time now that I knew what I was doing. One upstream bug, one Debian upload, and several bootstrapping builds later, and GHC was up and running on another architecture in Launchpad. Success! Epilogue There's still more to do. I gather there may be a Google Summer of Code project in Linaro to write proper native code generation for GHC on arm64: this would make things a good deal faster, but also enable GHCi (the interpreter) and Template Haskell, and thus clear quite a few more build failures. Since there's already native code generation for ppc64 in GHC, getting it going for ppc64el would probably only be a couple of days' work at this point. But these are niceties by comparison, and I'm more than happy with what I got working for 14.04. The upshot of all of this is that I may be the first non-Haskell-programmer to ever port GHC to two entirely new architectures. I'm not sure if I gain much from that personally aside from a lot of lost sleep and being considered extremely strange. It has, however, been by far the most challenging set of packages I've ported, and a fascinating trip through some odd corners of build systems and undefined behaviour that I don't normally need to touch.

My yoga teacher was out sick this morning. I had grand plans of instead biking to the pool and going for a swim, but when my alarm went off, and the weather outside was grey and miserable, having an extra half an hour lie in seemed more attractive. I think I made the right choice, because I felt like a million bucks today. I did all of the preparation to bake a batch of carrot and kale muffins before Zoe arrived, and we baked a batch as soon as she arrived and had them out of the oven in time to drive to Playgroup. I was expecting a larger crowd today on account of the wet weather, but it turned out quite the opposite. That said, Zoe still had a good time. There's really no other kids her age though, so it's still winding up as a "play with Dad in a different environment". My ABN came through yesterday, so after Playgroup we walked to the bank to give it to them and sort out a business credit card. Zoe was super well behaved while I did that, so we grabbed a fresh hot cross bun from Brumby's across the street afterwards. I needed some more stamps, so I figured we could just walk down to the post office down the other end of Oxford Street while we were there. That was slow going, but Zoe was enjoying walking with her umbrella in the rain. We got to the post office, and I discovered that postage is going up to 70 cents next week, and they couldn't sell be 70 cent stamps yet, and buying 60 cent stamps would be pointless after Monday, so I left empty handed. Zoe was eyeing off the umbrellas they had for sale in the post office. No sooner had we walked out of the post office and Zoe managed to walk all over her umbrella and totally destroy it. If I hadn't seen it happen, I'd have said she did it deliberately to get a new umbrella, but it really was an accident, so we had to turn around and buy one of the umbrellas from the post office. We made our way back down Oxford Street, and stopped in the boutique toy shop there. Zoe was particularly enthralled by the musical jewelery boxes, and really wanted one. I negotiated with her for it to be a birthday present, and got it gift wrapped. She seemed fine with the idea of not being able to have it until her birthday. We then made our way back to the car and drove home for a rather late lunch. I'm glad Zoe had the hot cross bun after the bank to keep her going, as she didn't seem to mind the late lunch at all. I made fritters with some left over corned beef, and then after we'd had lunch I thought we might as well get out of the house. Zoe's Kindergarten has a working bee on Saturday (I'm expecting it'll get canceled due to the wet weather, though). Incidentally, I have no idea where the "bee" in "working bee" comes from. Megan's Dad is Welsh, and I was lost for words when it came to explaining what a working bee was. Anyway, I wanted to get some gardening gloves, so we went to Bunnings. I managed to find some cute little kids ones as well, so Zoe can help. After Bunnings, we went to the pet shop to get some more cat litter. The pet shop seems to be a great source of entertainment for Zoe. She absolutely loved playing around with the hutches they had on display, and checking out all the fish, and the aquarium accessories. We eventually made it out of the pet shop, and we went around to the adjacent shopping mall in search of some craft supplies at some of the cheap shops there. It turns out the cheap shops are also a great source of entertainment. By the time we were done there, it was time to get home so Sarah could pick Zoe up, so we headed home. There was enough time for Zoe to watch a little bit of TV before Sarah arrived. So despite the weather, and no real plan for the day, we managed to completely fill the day, and Zoe had a great time. She seemed no worse for wear for powering through without a nap. There was a few small tantrums at Bunnings, but that mostly revolved around her tipping over her miniature shopping trolley.

We had a pretty busy day today. Sarah dropped Zoe off at around 8:30am. I reminded Zoe that she'd forgotten to give Sarah her crown that she'd made at Playgroup the previous day, so she gave that to her. After Sarah left, I let Zoe watch a little bit of TV while I finished getting myself organised. We drove to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class today, because I wanted to go directly to the Planetarium afterwards. Zoe's BFF Megan came to BJJ class today for a trial class. Zoe was very excited. Megan picked everything up really quickly, and the girls had a good time. She didn't want to wear her uniform today though. I managed to get out of her later that she felt it made her sweaty. I told her it was probably all the running around that made her sweaty, not the uniform. We went out for a coffee with Megan, her Dad and her little sister afterwards. We found a little take away shop around the corner. Not quite the place that did babyccinos unfortunately, so Megan's Dad very cleverly got a chocolate milk and split it three ways with the girls and called it a "milkshake". I've realised that for Science Friday, I've pretty much been doing solely chemistry so far, so I wanted to throw in a bit of astronomy this week. The Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium had just recently reopened after getting a spanky new projector because 1978 called and wanted theirs back. Unfortunately, they weren't showing Perfect Little Planet today, but the slightly more specific Black Holes: Journey into the Unknown. I wanted Zoe to see something in the auditorium, so I thought we'd give it a shot anyway. I think we got to the Planetarium at around 11am, and the next show was at 1:30pm, so we had a bit of a look around the foyer for a bit, which Zoe quite enjoyed. They had a life-size model of Neil Armstrong's spacesuit, and a scale model of a Saturn V rocket. Zoe quite enjoyed both of them. I'll have to dig up some Youtube footage of a Saturn V launch. We then headed over to the cafe in the adjacent Botantic Gardens, and had a reasonable lunch. After lunch we wandered around the Botanic Gardens to kill some time, so you could say that today's Science Friday also included a goodly amount of botany as well. We went into the Tropical Dome and looked at the fish in the lily pond, and toured the fern garden, before heading back. We timed it pretty well, and got back to the Planetarium with about 10 minutes to kill. I'd prepped Zoe for the presentation, and told her that she needed to keep quiet, and if we had to leave we wouldn't be able to go back in again, and she could whisper to me if she needed to. I have to say, she was so well behaved. She sat through the whole 45 minute presentation and the projected tour of the night sky. I guess the presentation was sufficiently visually interesting to hold her attention for the duration. There was certainly a lot of "wow" out of her. I was so proud of how she went that I had to go and buy her an ice cream as a reward. After that, we went for a drive around Mount Coot-tha. I pointed out the TV towers that we can see from our balcony, and then she fell asleep on the way home. She didn't wake up particularly happy from her late, short nap, when we got home, but once she got herself sorted out, we baked the cookies that we'd made yesterday. They came out very nicely indeed. Once they were all baked, we dropped off a dozen to Megan's place, and then came home to have dinner. Bedtime went pretty well. I hope she has a good night's sleep, as we have a big day tomorrow.

Today as it was raining and I couldn t do much gardening, psmisc version 22.21 was released. The files are located up on sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/psmisc/files/latest/download or at your favorite distro repository soon. Once again, thanks to all patch submitters, bug reports and translators for all their help in getting this out. Apologies to the translation teams for having two alpha versions. So what does psmisc 22.21 bring you? Amongst a lot of minor bug fixes it has:

• If you started a process and then spawned some threads and then decided to change the names of the threads, pstree would show the old name, it now shows the correct new name
• pstree has a new flag (-N) for namespace support, thanks Aristeu for the patches
• Previously fuser -M flag only worked if it was before -m, now it can be either order

The Debian psmisc package should be out in the next few hours.

This weekend I attended FOSDEM, as I did for the past 4 years. As always, it was a great experience, even if most of the talks I attended were not so interesting. One of the great things about these events, is to get together with other Free Software enthusiasts. One of them introduced me to the new kid on the block: Telegram. It is advertised as a free and secure replacement for WhatsApp, a mobile application I have been refusing to use for months, much to the anger of friends and family. People use WhatsApp because it saves them money to send SMS-like messages to other people. Which in my mind does not make much sense, as I can use email or XMPP for that same purpose, without having to enter just another walled garden. Sadly, people nowadays are using email less and less, and think that it is easier to send a Facebook message (it is not), and XMPP has became a de-facto walled garden since Google betrayed its users by dropping federation. WhatsApp has the advantage of having millions of users already inside their walled garden, like it happened with Facebook, MSN, or ICQ back in the day. Their success can possibly be attributed to the foolproof system it uses to discover contacts: it just sends your entire address book to their servers for matching against already registered users, which is in itself enough reason not to use it. So, when I was told of a secure, free and open alternative, I was eager to try it out. I started by opening their website to see what it was about. There, I found the first signs that something was wrong: no mention of licenses, almost no technical detail of how the protocol works, or how security is achieved. Still, my friend wanted to talk to me, so I rushed to install it and accept a laundry list of permissions in Android. That was a big mistake. The first thing the application did was to check my address book for contacts, without my permission or knowledge. I got greeted by being told that some of my contacts already have Telegram installed, and since then I keep getting notification that some more of my geek friends are installing it. So it is obvious that this company got all my records, breaking my privacy and security. This is enough for me to remove this piece of software from my phone, but it is not the end of the story. When checking it in more detail I found several other problems. The supposed "secret chat" cannot be possibly secure, as there is no verification of the remote party. It "just works", who cares if there is a man in the middle or not. Supposedly it employs a peer-to-peer connection, but I haven't verified that. On the other hand, the non-"secret" conversations are all routed to the main server. The client-to-server communication is supposedly encrypted, but it uses a home-made protocol (which everybody knows is a recipe for disaster), and the server has access to the cleartext of all your communications. Then, browsing the website, I've found that this "open" and "free" offer does not even have all the source code released. In particular, the server code is not public, nor you can set up your own server. Of course, it does not have federation, so even with the server code you wouldn't be able to talk with your friends. It all depends on two men funding and maintaining the project, so when the funds run out, one can only expect that all the users will be left in the dark. I think these arguments are enough to realise that Telegram is only marginally better than WhatsApp. It offers encryption at the transport layer, but you still are contributing to another walled garden, you are at the mercy of a company which does not have a funding plan, and the security practises range from weak to disturbing. In closing, if you are going to compromise your privacy, give away all your contacts' information, and rely on a single company to keep in touch with people, you might as well go and use what everybody else is using. Update: Even before submitting this post, I've found that some more qualified people has already dissected Telegram and concluded that it is basically snake oil. Please see this article. and proceed to uninstall Telegram.

Review: The Incrementalists, by Steven Brust & Skyler White

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	September 2013
ISBN:	0-7653-3422-4
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	304

The Incrementalists are a secret society that has been in continuous existence for forty thousand years. The members are immortal... sort of (more on that in a moment). They are extremely good at determining what signals, triggers, and actions have the most impact on people, and adept at using those triggers to influence people's behavior. And they're making the world better. Not in any huge, noticeable way, just a little bit, here and there. Incrementally. Brust and White completely had me with this concept. There are several SF novels about immortals, but (apart from the vampire subgenre) they mostly stay underground and find ways to survive without trying to change the surrounding human society. I love the idea of small, incremental changes, and I was looking forward to reading a book about how that would work. How do they choose what to do? How do they find the right place to push? What long-term goals would such an organization pursue, and what governance structure would they use? I'm still wondering about most of those things, sadly, since that isn't what this novel is about at all. I should be fair: a few of those questions hover in the background. There are some political arguments (that parallel arguments on Brust's blog), and a tiny bit about governance. But mostly this is a sort of romance, a fight over identity, and an extensive exploration of the mental "garden" that the Incrementalists use and build to hold their memories and share information with each other. The story revolves around two Incrementalists: Phil, who is one of the leaders and has one of the longest continuous identities of any of the group, and Renee, a new recruit by Phil who picks up the memories and capabilities (sort of) of the recently-deceased Incrementalist Celeste. Phil is the long-term insider, although a fairly laid-back one. Renee is the outsider, the one to which the story is happening at the beginning, who is taught how the Incrementalists' system works. The Incrementalists is told in alternating first-person viewpoint sections by Phil and Renee (making me wonder if the characters were each written by one of the authors). Once I got past my disappointment over this book not being quite what I wanted, the identity puzzles that Brust and White play with here caught my attention. The underlying "magic" of the Incrementalists is based on the "memory palace" concept of storing memories via visualizations, but takes it into something akin to personal alternate worlds. Their immortality isn't through physical immortality, but rather the ability to store their memories and personality in their garden, which is their term for the memory palace, and then have it imposed on someone else: a combination of reincarnation, mental takeover, and mental merging. This makes for complex interpersonal relationships and complex interactions between memory, belief, and identity, not to mention some major ethical issues, which come to a head in Phil and Renee's relationship and Celeste's lingering meddling. I think Brust and White are digging into some interesting questions of character here. There's a lot of emphasis in The Incrementalists on the ease with which people can be manipulated, and the Incrementalists themselves are far from immune. Choice and personal definition are both questionable concepts given how much influence other people have, how many vulnerabilities everyone carries with them, and how much one's opinions are governed by one's life history. That makes identity complex, and raises the question of whether one can truly define oneself. But, while all these ideas are raised, I think The Incrementalists dances around them more than engages them directly. It's similar to the background hook: yes, these people are slowly improving the world, and we see a little bit of that (and a little bit of them manipulating people for their own convenience), but the story doesn't fully engage with the idea. There's a romance, a few arguments, some tension, some world-building, but I don't feel like this book ever fully committed to any of them. One of the occasional failure modes of Brust for me is insufficient explanation and insufficient clarity, and I hit that here. My final impression of The Incrementalists is interesting, enjoyable, but vaguely disappointing. It's still a good story with some interesting characters and nice use of the memory palace concept, and I liked Renee throughout (although I think the development of the love story is disturbingly easy and a little weird). But I can't strongly recommend it, and I'm not sure if it's worth seeking out. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: The Death of Bees, by Lisa O'Donnell

Publisher:	HarperCollins
Copyright:	2012
Printing:	2013
ISBN:	0-06-220984-1
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	309

This is the first definite hit from my Powell's Indiespensable subscription, and a good example of why I subscribe. I never would have read or even heard of this book without it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Marnie and Nellie are sisters living in a housing estate in Glasgow's Maryhill district. Neither of their parents ever held regular jobs, although one does quickly learn their father had been earning money distributing drugs. The story opens, rather shockingly, with the death of both parents: their father smothered in his bed, and their mother, a day later, after refusing to notify anyone of their father's death, by hanging herself in the garden shed. In fear of being taken by social services and then separated, particularly given Nellie's unusual way of interacting with the world (she talks, and writes, like a woman in the 1950s trying to sound high-class), the girls bury both bodies in the back garden and tell everyone their parents just went on an unannounced trip without them. It wouldn't be the first time. Marnie is 15 and a year away from being legally an adult, at which point she can take custody of Nellie (who is 12) and keep them together. In the meantime, they just have to keep their parents' deaths secret and figure out how to keep food on the table and social services away. Their next-door neighbor is a formerly-closeted older gay man named Lennie who is known as the neighborhood pervert after he was arrested getting a blow job from an underage male prostitute. Both girls are quite understandably suspicious of him, but he's also the first person to notice that something is wrong and to start trying to help. The book is told in many short chapters, each written by one of Marnie, Nellie, or Lennie in their own voice. You might have guessed from the plot summary that this book needs a few warnings, but I want to emphasize that more. This is a book that opens with decaying corpses, including a few rather-too-vivid images from its transport and from Marnie's later (unnamed) post-traumatic stress. Marnie is quite sexually active, and both girls have had a nasty background full of things that I preferred not to think too much about. Most of the worst bits are only alluded to and are kept off-camera, but there's still quite a lot of background nastiness and desperation here. The Death of Bees is blunt and forthright to the point that it repeatedly made me cringe, and that sort of thing usually doesn't bother me in books. That said, this is not a horror novel, even though it contains horror. You could describe it as darkly comic, although none of the comedy is the sort that makes one laugh, except perhaps in startled surprise. The adjectives that come to mind are fierce, compassionate, empathetic, tough, and courageous. The author is completely on the side of the three protagonists, all of whom are deeply hurt in their own ways but all of whom are trying as hard as they can to support each other. I have rarely read a book that made me care as much about the characters. It's the kind of story that makes one want to passionately defend them, particularly once the one real villain, in the form of a do-gooding outsider, makes his appearance. And the reader and the author aren't alone. One of the things I loved about this book is that it doesn't artificially isolate the characters. Marnie has friends, and while Marnie doesn't always notice for Marnie, this is just her life, and many things of significance to the reader are just more of daily life for her this book is full of unexpected acts of small kindness. The surrounding characters are themselves all dealing with their own troubles and not in a great position to help anyone, and yet somehow they manage. Even Nellie, who has a great deal of difficulty interacting with other people her own age, gets unexpected help from people she thinks can't stand her. I think it's very telling that about the only character here who is entirely unsympathetic is the one who claims to be the most moral and virtuous. Unfortunately, from my perspective, this book has one major flaw: the ending. Thankfully, the ending isn't bad; if it were, it would have completely destroyed my enjoyment of the book. By the time one gets through this story, having something bad happen to these girls would break your heart. The ending does deliver the necessary catharsis, but it is far, far too short. O'Donnell builds up tension mercilessly, pushing the story down a path that's clearly desperately wrong for both of the girls, and doesn't let the story climax happen until about ten pages from the end. We get all of a page or two of denouement, and then the novel is over. I am, admittedly, a "Scouring of the Shire" sort of person. I like long denouements, particularly if I've gone through hell with the characters. I like getting to spend some happy time with them. But even for those who don't enjoy that as much as I do, I think this ending was too short. O'Donnell does an amazing job building sympathy and empathy throughout the story, and I didn't want to have to fill in all of the happily ever after from my own imagination. Maybe it would have been hard to do without getting too sentimental or without dulling some of the sharp edges of the story, but I would have really appreciated another ten pages. As is, it felt like the novel abruptly and unceremoniously dumped me out on the ground. But, that aside, this is an excellent character story. It's one that I would be careful about recommending; parts of it are extremely dark and nasty, and you have to take Marnie on her own terms for the story to work. But it's beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, and I'm very glad to have read it. Rating: 8 out of 10

I ve come up with some new favorites this season. The boys and Laura were around for all three, and I am happy to report there were many kitchen smiles over these! From-Scratch Hot Chocolate There s something about hot chocolate made from scratch, with chocolate melted into milk, instead of a powder stirred in. It takes quite a bit more time, and probably has more calories, but it is quite delicious. The key to a delicious result where milk is concerned is to take things slow and keep stirring. You don t want the chocolate to scorch at the bottom of the pan. Heating up the milk before the chocolate should help things mix in more easily as well.

• Begin with 3 cups milk and 1 cup heavy whipping cream. Heat slowly over moderate to low heat, stirring periodically. Once you see bubbles start to form around the edges, it is plenty hot (or even a bit more hot than it needs to be).
• Add one cup of semisweet chocolate chips, 1 teaspoon sugar, and 1/2 tsp vanilla extract.
• Stir constantly until all the chocolate is melted and well mixed. There will still be some small bits of chocolate within, but if it is all done slowly like this, the chocolate should be pretty well melted.

The basis for this recipe was here, and it called for 2 cups milk and 2 cups half-and-half. I trust my heavy whipping cream was fine! <grin> There are also some other variations on that site. This nearly made my little cast iron kettle overflow, so next time I made a 3/4 recipe. Hot Spiced Cider We put up a Christmas tree yesterday, so I thought hot spiced cider would be perfect for the occasion. I went searching for recipes, and many of them called for cloves (which have to be sifted out later or put in a spice bag). I wasn t going to have time to delay two boys from setting up a Christmas tree long enough for that, so I found this basic recipe to work well. However, I, as usual, made some modifications ;-)

• Warm 4 cups apple cider (not juice, as the recipe suggests) in a pot.
• Add 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• Add 1/4 tsp nutmeg or allspice (I used allspice because I was mysteriously out of nutmeg, but will probably use nutmeg next time)
• Add 1 tbsp brown sugar
• Stir constantly until sufficiently dissolved. Pour immediately before drinking, as the contents will tend to separate.

Mmmmm . yum . Turkey or Chicken Noodle Soup The annual what to do with all that leftover turkey quest strikes again. I like chicken noodle soup, so why not a turkey noodle soup done the same way? Here s what I used, roughly, in my large 6-quart cast iron cooking pot (aka Dutch oven ):

• 9 cups chicken/turkey broth. Your own if you have it, or the canned variety works. Or make your own with boullion if you have it.
• 2 chopped yellow onions. (I added half a chopped red onion as well because I had it sitting around. Nobody complained, but 2.5 onions was a little much.)
• 4 tsp fresh basil or 1 tsp dried basil
• 4 tsp fresh oregano or 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp beef bouillon
• 2 bay leaves
• 20 oz frozen mixed vegetables (I d probably add more than that next year; this wasn t quite enough)
• Plenty of wide egg noodles. The recipe I used called for 1 cup, which was laughably inadequate. I just dumped until it looked right, and then the package was almost empty so I dumped the rest in too.
• 4 cups cooked turkey or chicken, cubed (a kitchen scissors makes quick work of that)
• Two 14.5-oz cans diced tomatoes (do not drain)

Start with the broth, onion, basil, oregano, pepper, and bay leaf. Heat up the mixture and add the vegetables. Bring it to boiling, then add the uncooked noodles. Return to boiling, then reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 8 minutes. Add the turkey or chicken and diced tomatoes, and simmer until hot enough to serve. The nice thing about soups is that they freeze well and make great winter leftovers. This recipe makes quite a lot of soup; you may wish to halve it. This recipe was adapted from one in a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook.

It has become a tradition, that I'm going into Dolomites each October with friends using Pentax. This year the weather looked more like a winter than autumn, but still it was nice opportunity to take some mountain pictures. We've started near Passo Rolle: However our first night and morning was at Passo Valles: Inevitably we had to visit some places where we've been in past as well, so we went again to Passo Falzarego: Last morning was at Passo Gardena, though it should be last time we did this (we've said this last year as well):

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Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 8
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	112

The editorial this issue is about the Dell Magazines Award, so newsy without a lot of content (particularly since we don't get to read the winners). Silverberg's column is much more interesting, focusing on the complex rules of the honor code of the Albanian highlands and pointing out that there's more complexity and strangeness in things we can find on Earth than in a lot of science fiction. Even within the rules of real human cultures. James Patrick Kelly's column this issue is an interesting summary of what graduates of the Clarion writing workshop learned, in their own words. It's a nice barrage of quick writing tips, and an interesting view of what people take away from a writing workshop. The book review column this issue is Peter Heck's normal workman-like job. "The End of the Line" by Robert Silverberg: Someday, I really should read Lord Valentine's Castle. As you might guess from this comment, this is another Majipoor story. This one follows an official who is part of an advance party for the Coronal Lord, the ruler (of sorts). He's decided, as part of those duties, to take the opportunity to learn more about the aboriginal people of Majipoor: the somewhat mysterious metamorphs, or Piurivar. I'm not that familiar with the history of Majipoor, since all I've read is this story and one other, none of the novels. Apparently, knowing that the official in question is named Stiamot will place this story for more familiar readers. For the unfamiliar, such as myself, there's a lot of politics here and what's clearly background for a major event in the world, but as a standalone story it's a bit unsatisfying (and grim). It's not that clear why things had to turn out the way they did, and the characters seem largely without agency. It's well-written, but mostly a story for fans of the series, I think. (6) "Corn Teeth" by Melanie Tem: This is a tight third-person story about a human child raised by alien foster parents, and it's deeply disturbing. Not because of the fostering, which appears wonderful and loving, but because it's a train wreck sort of story: the reader can see the horrible coming and can't do anything about it (and it turns out even worse than one might expect). It's also a story built around failure of communication and failure of empathy, and has a monumentally depressing ending, the kind that leaves scars. I'm sure all of this is entirely intentional; it seems very well-written. But I really didn't want this much horrible misunderstanding and depressing hopelessness in my reading. (2) "Watch Bees" by Philip Brewer: I rather liked this story even if the protagonist is an awful person. The story is set in a future of bioengineered insects and hard economic times, and it features a man who is supposedly working his way from farm to farm to get back home. What he's actually after is more complicated and is closely related to the defense systems that keep intruders off of farms. You might guess some of the rest from the title. It's a story about understanding layered defense systems, and about economic warfare. I didn't care much for any of the characters, but the story is well-plotted and kept me interested in seeing what would happen next. (6) "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stones of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again" by Michael Swanwick: By Swanwick, so it's a little odd, but I found this story surprisingly moving and ambiguous. It's about an American of Irish descent, a trip to Ireland, and a love affair with a fierce Irish nationalist, all set against an SF background of an Earth conquered by benevolent aliens. It's angry, uncertain, fanatical, and realistic by turns, and left me with profound mixed feelings. I think it does a good job capturing in a brief story the emotional complexities of what it means to give onself to a cause. (7) "We Were Wonder Scouts" by Will Ludwigsen: This is a short and odd story about a variant of the Boy Scouts founded by a man who is a little too obsessed with the paranormal, and an outing in the woods that turns rather creepy. It's a type of story that I'm not very fond of: one that twists the delight of discovery into something dark and mundane. I suppose you could call it horror; it's more horror than fantasy, at least. Anyway, not my thing. (3) "Pairs" by Zachary Jernigan: This story, on the other hand, isn't as dark as it seems like it should be from the setup. Humans have been conquered and enslaved by more powerful alien races, and now human souls are a profitable business. The protagonist is a person who has been embodied in a spaceship, and who works with (and monitors) another largely insane embodied person as they work as couriers, carrying souls to their buyers. But neither of them are as fully under control as they might appear, which is the point of the story. There is no grand tale of redemption, and the price is high, but I found the psychological portrayal oddly satisfying and faintly hopeful, and I was intrigued by the world background. (7) "Paradise is a Walled Garden" by Lisa Goldstein: The cover story, this is by far the best story of the issue. It's steampunk, set in a world where Muslim civilization was not pressed back by Christianity and continues to thrive into the reign of Queen Elizabeth as, among other things, makers of automata. A girl has managed to get herself a job in a British factory by posing as a boy and is the first to sound the alarm when the automata that do most of the work go strangely (and violently) haywire. That leads to her being assigned to the subsequent delegation to Al-Andulus (Muslim Spain, if you're not familiar with that name from history). The protagonist is the best part of this story. She's thoughtful, resourceful, and delights in learning things, something that she's rarely had the opportunity to do. She's also utterly unintimidated. In Al-Andulus, she thrives, despite the contempt of the leader of the expedition and some dangerous intrigues around the source of the anomalous behavior. I won't spoil the ending, but it's a delight, leaving the reader with a lot of hope for her future. I also liked the portrayal of the Muslim world, which is engrossed in its own business and has its own advantages and disadvantages, but is at least open to and focused on learning and technological development. The contrast with the superstitious British delegation is both pointed and historically grounded in Muslim relations with Europe around the point of divergence of Goldstein's world. (8) Rating: 7 out of 10

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

Included in Debian Edu / Skolelinux, there are quite a lot of educational software. Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn. We have tried to tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the debtag field. Here it is. Click on a image to learn more about the program. field::arts field::astronomy field::biology:structural field::chemistry [viewmol] field::electronics [gpsim] field::geography field::linguistics field::mathematics [geomview] field::physics field::TODO In total, 61 applications. 3 of them lacked screen shots on screenshot.debian.net. If you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us know on IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org, or our mailing list debian-edu@.