As Paul already posted, desktop-base 7.0 was uploaded to Debian unstable.
I worked on the KDE related integration of Adrien Aubourg s Joy Wallpapers (Congratulations again). I am pretty happy with how well they work with KDE, hence I am sharing the result.

This is what KDE s login manager kdm will look like in debian wheezy:

As you can see, the chooser got a whole rework. It s now based on the kdm theme I prepared for my Roj proposal. The new ksplash theme then includes the Debian logo:
For your workspace wallpaper there also exisits the ink splatted alternative:
I am pretty happy with the artwork. I like it s minimalism and it s not getting boring after using it for a while.

Today, OFCOM issued a press release entitled "New measures to protect online copyright and inform consumers". According to the announcement, internet users will be encouraged to download music and films through legal channels under the measures. Ofcom has published a draft code for consultation that would require large internet service providers (ISPs) to inform customers of allegations that their internet connection has been used to infringe copyright. There does seem to have been a number of concessions made, which is welcome, but I do still have a number of concerns. The code 'only' covers ISPs with more than 400k fixed lines - BT, Everything Everywhere, O2, Sky, TalkTalk Group and Virgin Media. This covers about 93% of the UK retail market. If an allegation of copyright infringement is made, the ISP would need to write to the customer with notice that an infringement has occurred, and in a new change, the number of copyright infringement reports connected to their account. If more than three letters are received in a year, anonymous information may be provided on request to copyright owners showing them which infringement reports are linked to that customer s account. The copyright owner may then seek a court order requiring the ISP to reveal the identity of the customer. Two more changes have been implemented:

• Copyright owners procedures for gathering evidence of infringement must now be approved by Ofcom, rather than by the copyright owners themselves.
• Ofcom has decided that subscribers should have 20 working days to appeal an allegation of infringement, but only on grounds specified in the Digital Economy Act.

Obviously the former of these will require further scrutiny, but I'm happier that this is not with the vested interest themselves. As for the latter, this gets a bit interesting. The Act states that

an appeal on any grounds must be determined in favour of the subscriber unless the copyright owner or internet service provider shows that a) the apparent infringement was an infringement of copyright, and b) the report relates to the subscriber s IP address at the time of that infringement.

This is good as it puts the burden of proof on the copyright owner, although it still uses IP addresses which is problematic. For example, New York Judge Gary Brown has ruled IP addresses are insufficient evidence to identify pirates, and has provided a lengthy and thoughtful explanation in his ruling. There has also been a consultation published on the how to share costs costs. The suggestion is fairly simple:

"Copyright Owners should bear all of the costs incurred by Ofcom, the majority of costs incurred by the appeals body, and 75% of the costs efficiently and reasonably incurred by Qualifying ISPs in carrying out their obligations."

This has the risk of driving up internet access prices as ISPs have to recover the costs of these notifications. Additionally:

"Under the Order, subscribers will have to pay a 20 fee to make an appeal against a report of infringement, which will be refunded in the event the appeal succeeds; the remaining costs of determining an appeal will be met by the Copyright Owner who submitted the CIR which has been appealed."

I disagree with the concept of having to pay for an appeal in this way. If accused, someone should be able to refute the argument without cost. This will introduce a barrier to entry, and even if it is refundable is something I believe should be avoided. Finally, the exact costs of implementing this have been set out. It looks like the Copyright Owners would have to pay 60p per letter (with the ISPs shouldering the remaining 20p), a similar split around capital costs - which are the ones that are actually significant. Taking the above, it seems that in total that content owners will have to shell out 15M to use the DEA scheme. The cost seems to be more or less fixed which could encourage content owners to send out frivolous accusations. There's an iterative process which will run to determine the estimated number of notifications, and if eventually the Content Owners don't agree with the pricing, they will have elected not to take advantage of the provisions of the Initial Obligations Code, as they have not been able to make binding commitments to fund CIR processing. So, in summary, this is something to keep an eye on. It certainly hasn't gone away, it's due to start in March 2014. The revised draft code and consultation, which closes on 26 July 2012, can be found here, and the sharing of costs consultation runs until 18th September 2012, found here.

I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time we get to know Jos Luis Redrejo Rodr guez, one of our great helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published Debian Edu Squeeze version. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of ICT in schools How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are been used everyday inside Debian Edu. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or economical and technical resources in the different countries don't allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the technologies in school. Which free software do you use daily? Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time between Iceweasel, Geany and Terminator. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I think there is not a single strategy because there are very different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc. Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even universities. So different strategies are needed. But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue working there.

Review: Quiet, by Susan Cain

Publisher:	Crown
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	0-307-45220-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	263

I've always been an introvert. This is something that surprises some people when they first meet me since they equate introversion with shyness, and I'm not at all shy. It surprises others because I'm quite vocal and outspoken in meetings, but introversion also doesn't imply a lack of self-confidence. I can run meetings, give presentations, and argue my perspective in front of just about anyone, but I don't like parties, I crave time by myself, and I could happily go for weeks without seeing another human being. I'm an introvert because I find people draining rather than invigorating, written communication far easier and more comfortable than spoken, and superficial social contact more irritating and frustrating than enjoyable. If you think think that means there may be something wrong with me, or that I would be happier if "drawn out of my shell," I wish you would read this book. But I suspect its core audience will be people like me: those who are tired of being pushed to conform with extrovert beliefs about social interaction, those who are deeply disgusted by the word "antisocial" or feel pangs of irrational guilt when hearing it, or those who just want to read an examination of interpersonal interactions that, for once, is written by and about people who like quiet and solitude just like they do. I first encountered Susan Cain via her TED talk, which I think is both the best possible summary of this book and the best advertisement for it. If you've not already seen it, watch it; it's one of the best TED talks I've seen, good enough that I've watched it three times. If you then want more of the same, buy Quiet. Quiet has, I think, three messages. First, it's a tour of the science: what is introversion and extroversion? Is there evidence that these are real physiological differences? (Spoiler: yes.) What do we know about introversion? How do we know those things what experiments have been done and what methods have been used? Here, it's a good general introduction, although Cain is careful to point out that it only scratches the surface and there's much more scientific depth. For example, she touches on the connections between introversion and sensitivity to stimulus and points out that they're two separate, if related, categorizations, but doesn't have the space here to clarify the distinctions and tease them apart. But she lays a reasonable foundation, particularly in defense of introversion as a natural, physiologically grounded, scientifically analyzable, common, and healthy way of interacting with the world. (For those who are curious about the distinctions between introversion and sensitivity, and the argument that most of what Cain says here about introversion is actually about sensitivity, see the blog post by Elaine Aron.) The second message, the one that resonated with me the most, was Cain's passionate defense of introversion. Business culture (at least in the United States, which is what both Cain and I know) is strongly biased towards extroversion; at least faking extroversion seems to be required for some career advancement. Extrovert culture dominates politics and most public discourse. It's common to find people who consider introversion, particularly in children, to be a sign of unhappiness, poor social adjustment, psychological problems, or other issues that should be "cured" or changed. Cain's gentle but firm passion in defense of introversion is a breath of fresh air. She attacks open plan offices, the current obsession with group learning and social school settings, and the modern group-think bias towards collaboration over solitude and concentration, and she does that with a combination of polite frustration and the conclusions of multiple studies. Introverts will be cheering as she constructs solid arguments and musters evidence against things that we've always found miserable and then been told we were wrong, short-sighted, or socially inept for finding miserable. I am so utterly on her side in this argument that I have no way of knowing how persuasive it will be, but it's lovely just to hear someone put into words what I feel. This defense does skew the book. Quiet is not, and does not purport to be, an even-handed presentation of introversion and extroversion. It's written proudly and unabashedly from the introvert's point of view. I'm fine with that: I, like Cain, think the US is saturated in extrovert perspectives and extrovert advice, particularly in the business world, and could use some balancing by activism from the other perspective. But be aware that this is not the book to look to for an objective study of all angles of the introvert/extrovert dichotomy, and I'm not sure her descriptions of extroversion are entirely fair or analogous to those of introversion. The extroversion described here seems somewhat extreme to me. I'm dubious how many extroverts would recognize themselves in it, which partly undermines the argument. The third message of the book, once Cain has won the introvert's heart, is some advice on how to be a proud introvert, to make the space and find the quiet that one desires, and to balance that against places where one may want and need to act like an extrovert for a while. Cain thankfully does not try to make this too much of the book, nor does she hold up any particular approach as The Answer. All the answers are going to be individual. But she does offer some food for thought, particularly around how to be conscious of and make delibrate choices about one's energy expenditures and one's recharge space. She also captures beautifully something that I've not seen explained this well before: the relief that an introvert can feel in the company of an extrovert who helps navigate social situations, make conversation, and keep discussions going until they can reach the depth and comfort level where the introvert can engage. I wish anyone in a position of authority over social situations would read this book, or at least watch the TED talk and be aware of the issues. Particularly managers, since (at least in my relatively limited experience) workplace culture is so far skewed towards extroversion that it can be toxic to introverts. Many of the techniques used by extrovert managers, and the goals and advice they give their employees, are simply wrong for introverts, and even damaging. Cain speaks well to the difficulties of empathy between people with very different interaction preferences, such as the problems with extroverts trying to "draw out" introverts who have hit social overload (or sensitive people who have hit stimulus overload). She also discusses something that I'd previously not thought about, namely how the pressure towards extroversion leads people to act extroverted even when naturally introverted, and how it's therefore very difficult to tell from behavior (and sometimes even to tell internally!) what one's natural interaction style is. But mostly I recommend this book if you're an introvert, if the TED talk linked above speaks to you. Even if we can't convince the world to respect introversion more, or at least stop treating it as abnormal, it's a lovely feeling to read a book from someone who gets it. Who understands. Who fills a book with great stories about introverts and how they construct their worlds and create quiet space in which to be themselves. Rating: 9 out of 10

Today, photo-uploader just got it's new maintainer. I've basically lost interest in maintaining it two years ago, what resulted in dropping package from Debian year ago. I thought this is end of the software, but I seem to be wrong. As a consequence of Debian bug #677220 Andrew Shadura stepped up as an upstream maintainer. At least Imageshack support is now working in git and maybe some new features will come or the package will be reintroduced to Debian. But that's all up to Andrew. Good luck!

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I have recently read Test Driven Development with Embedded C by James W. Grenning and published by Pragmatic Programmers. I really enjoyed the book: while I was aware of the huge benefits of having a comprehensive test suite, I never studied seriously the principles behind Test Driven Development (TDD) and this book makes a good introduction to the topic. At the same time it focuses on the C language and contains lots of examples on how you can create tests even for projects which have to interact with hardware or other unpredictable components (the key is to create many abstractions) using all the possibilities that C offers. The author convincingly argues that developing code with TDD forces you to create a modular design that is easier to evolve when the underlying requirements change. He also highlights how the tests serve as reference documentation of the API. James W. Grenning recommends CppUTest as his xUnit test framework of choice. When I wanted to try this test framework, I discovered that it was not available in Debian. I decided to package it because it has some interesting features not offered by the contenders (at least not to my knowledge). It s now available in Debian and in Ubuntu. First, it doesn t require any explicit registration of tests and has a very lightweight syntax. The small downside is that CppUTest requires the usage of C++ for the tests. But C++ is compatible with C so it doesn t matter much if you have a C++ compiler for your target. On the contrary, usage of variables and methods scoped to the test group makes it easy to write clear tests. Here s a short sample of test code: To run those tests, you just need this boilerplate code in a main.cpp: Another interesting feature is its integrated memory leak detection system. Any test that hasn t released allocated memory at the end of the teardown process will be marked as failed. The upstream developers have made some unusual choices (static library only, installation in a private directory) but this will likely change with the switch to an automake and autoconf-based build system. I have reported the oddities that I found and I requested them to provide a pkg-config file to make it easier to compile and link unit tests exploiting CppUTest. I already used CppUTest to develop a small application running on an embedded Linux. At some point, I might try to use CppUTest for dpkg development. I believe that it makes for a good fit. dpkg is already C++ ready since dselect is written in C++ and reuses a good part of dpkg s code. In any case, if you like Test Driven Development and are writing C or C++ based applications, I invite you to try CppUTest.

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Don Marti has written another blog post about targeted advertising [1]. His main point is that when a company uses the most targeted adverts (such as Google advertising) everyone knows that they are paying a small number of cents per click and nothing for the people who don t click. This compares to TV adverts which cost a lot of money and for which most viewers either leave the room or use fast-forward. Therefore using Google adverts doesn t send a signal about the amount of money invested in the products. Don also cited an example of a company sponsoring an OK Go film clip, that was a great idea, it shows that the company can do expensive things which are also a bit creative and fans will thank them (watch all the OK Go videos on Youtube, they are great). The next question is how else companies can advertise? One thing I d really like to see is sponsorship of authors. Pick an author and pay them a salary with paid editorial services for releasing a book a year for free in HTML and ebook formats. Having a fixed salary is a significant benefit when it comes time to apply for a mortgage or plan a holiday and being able to freely distribute books would be a significant benefit for an author who hasn t got a large fan base. In the computer industry it seems that there s a lot of potential for sponsoring people who produce free things. That ranges from free software and designs for free hardware to blog posts and documentation. Five years ago Sun had a blogging contest and my friend Dave Hall won a server that was worth $21K [2]. It would be nice if some other companies started doing similar things and if Sun did a repeat so some other people I like could get some free kit.

• [1] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/business/small-business-targeting/
• [2] http://davehall.com.au/blog/dave/2007/06/25/warm-glow-sun

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Phil blogged about DebConf12 having many fewer attendees than past DebConfs (10 and 11). Dealing with registration for several years, I can say these numbers tell a different story.First and foremost, these numbers tell me that DebConf12 hasn't happened yet, DC10 and DC11 have. People are told to sign up register early and reconfirm, but in reality, only the people who have accommodations with us have a significant motivation to do it. Once DebConf starts, lots of day-attendees will drop by, be told to register, and greatly inflate our numbers without staying for a very long time. The number of advance registrants also depends on how much advertisement is done. In terms of people who have both dates in the registration system (Phil's updated graph), I don't place much weight on this number, either.It's my opinion that number of beds occupied is a better indication of the scale of a DebConf, and especially at this stage. This also roughly correlates to number of Debian developers staying, though for years with cheap rooms or lots of external funding, even this number can get inflated. We need some things like t-shirts and badges for every attendee (possibly registered before a certain time), but for now, the number of rooms is what matters.In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if DebConf13 had lower "reconfirmed" numbers, because it is further away form population centers, yet still was a "bigger" conference because there are more people staying on-site or coming for multiple days.For DebConf12, I see an average of 130 people/night, for DebConf11, I see an average of 240 people/night, and for DebConf10, I see an average of 200 people/night. So, DebConf12 is smaller, but in a different way than it seems, and even this is subject to change or variable interpretation. I'm not really wanting to predict DebConf sizes at this stage.So basically, one does not simply expect DebConf registration data to make sense. One should not simply dismiss any DebConf before it happens. And most importantly, one can not simply use this data to plan a conference. The registration team has been frantically running around trying to correct every possible inconsistency you can imagine.Tags: debconf

Update 2: Richard and especially Moray debunked my statistics and given that they're actually on the DebConf team, they simply know it better what to look at and which numbers cannot be trusted. So look over to Moray's post for some numbers about DC11 and DC12.

Oops. At least the average count of days per person seems slightly higher. (But then the stats may likely be off, given that any part of the day counts as full.)
This year's DebConf will have remote participation through video streams and IRC chat, as usual. But they will be late at night for Europeans. Despite those hurdles, let's make this conference a success! The same procedure as every year. ;-)

Update: I don't have any privileged access to Pentabarf and hence I was just working on the exported data at the link above. When perusing the "Statistics for ONLY people who have both dates in Penta" I get this:
That's because this year seems to have a much higher percentage of people filling out both fields (~58% for DC10/DC11 and 85% for DC12). I'm still unsure if Penta was set to filter out those who did not reconfirm. But after all the others would not be very meaningful for room planning.

You've been there: you are about to install a package, upgrade, or get the source package, and the mirror fails. It is offline, it is out of date, etc. Whatever the reason, you couldn't do it.

That's only one of the issues that http.debian.net attempts to address. In a nutshell: it works as an http-only content distribution network. It uses the network and geographic location to select the best online and up-to-date mirrors.

APT's sources.list one liner:

deb http://http.debian.net/debian stable main

Use /debian-backports for backports, and /debian-archive for archive.debian.org.

Originally introduced to the Debian mirrors community back in January, the code on the server and client sides has improved since. All is needed is squeeze's APT (or aptitude), but wheezy's and sid's will perform better.

Advantages and more details are discussed at the Debian mirrors redirector's website.

(Thanks to the early testers, everyone who has provided feedback, my friends at PuffinHost, and all the mirrors-related people, obviously including those who sponsor them!)

I ve just uploaded a new SE Linux policy for Debian/Wheezy. It now works correctly with systemd and Chromium, two significant features that I wanted for Wheezy. Now it turns out that we have until the end of the month for Wheezy updates, so I may get another version of the policy uploaded before then. If so it will only be for relatively minor changes, I think that most SE Linux users would be reasonably happy with policy the way it is. Anything that doesn t work now can probably be solved by local configuration changes. execmem The current version of KDE in Debian is 4.8.4, it seems that large parts of the KDE environment depend on execmem access, this includes kwin and plasma-desktop. Basically there is no possibility of having a KDE desktop environment without those programs and therefore KDE depends on execmem access. Debugging this is difficult as the important programs SEGV when denied execmem access and the KDE crash handler really gets in the way of debugging it running /usr/bin/plasma-desktop results in the process forking a child and detaching from the gdb session. The most clear example of an execmem issue in KDE is from the program /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/kwin_opengl_test which gives the following error:
LLVM ERROR: Allocation failed when allocating new memory in the JIT
Can t allocate RWX Memory: Permission denied To make this work you run the command setsebool -P allow_execmem 1 which gives many domains the ability to create writable-executable memory regions. I raised this issue for discussion on the SE Linux mailing list and Hinnerk van Bruinehsen wrote an informative message in response summarising the situation [1]. It seems that it s possible to compile some of the programs in question to not use the JIT and therefore not require such access and there is a build option in Gentoo to allow it. But it s impractically difficult for me to fork KDE in Debian so the only option is to recommend that people enable the allow_execmem boolean for Debian desktop systems running SE Linux.

• [1] http://marc.info/?l=selinux&m=134011618909818&w=2

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I am trying to get used to fish as a default shell. I like some things in it, but can not quite get used to other things, so I wonder maybe I am cooking it wrong? So here are things that I could not find a solution for, while switching from bash.

• bash$ DISPLAY=:1 gedit very simple thing, how do I set and environment variable for just one command execution in the most simple possible way.
• bash$ scp hostname:somedir/*.jpg . when I try to run this in fish, for some reason I get fish: Warning: No match for wildcard hostname:somedir/*.jpg . The command will not be executed. and I could not figure out how to actually run the command in a quick Googling.
• I have (almost) come to terms that while and for syntax is different, but I still wonder maybe there is some bash compatibility mode that I missed that would allow me to use my old ways?

I do like the colors, the shortened cwd in the prompt, the univeral history and univeral variables, lower memory usage and funkier completions. Any other fish features people like? Especially I am interested in features that are not enabled by default.

Two years ago, Jacob (then 3) and I built his first computer together. I installed Debian on it, but never put a GUI on the thing. It s command-line, and has provided lots of enjoyment off and on over the last couple of years. I ve written extensively about what our boys like to do, and the delight they have at learning things on the command line. The looks of shock I get from people when I explain, as if it s perfectly natural, that my child has been able to log in by himself to a Linux shell since age 3, are amusing and astounding. Especially considering that it is really not that hard. Instead of learning how to run an Xbox, he s learned how to run bash. I like that. Lately, Jacob (now 5) hasn t been spending much time with it. He isn t really at a stage where he wants to push his limits too far, I think, but yet also gets bored with the familiar. So I thought it was time to introduce a GUI in a limited fashion, perhaps to let him download photos and video from his Vtech toy camera (that takes real low-res photos and videos which can be downloaded over a USB1 link). He s familiar with the concept, at least somewhat, having seen GUIs on Terah s computer (Gnome 2) and mine (xfce4 + xmonad). So last night, Oliver (age 2) and I went down to the basement on a mouse-finding expedition. Sure enough, I had an old PS/2 mouse down there that would work fine. The boys both helped string it through the desk up on our play room, and were tremendously excited to see the red light underneath it when the computer came on. Barely able to contain the excitement, really. A bit like I remember being when I got my first mouse (at a bit of an older age, I suppose.) I helped him them in as root for the very first time. (Jacob typed root , and I typed the password, and provided the explanation for why we were telling the computer we were root .) Jacob and Oliver alternated typing bits of some apt-get command lines. Then while we waited for software to download, I had to answer repeated questions of how soon will the mouse work? and what does install mean? Finally it was there, and I told Jacob to type startx. I intentionally did not install a display manager; more on that later. He pressed Enter, the screen went blank for about 5 seconds, and then X appeared. Excited can t begin to describe how they acted. They took turns playing with the mouse. They loved how the trash can icon (I started with XFCE) showed trash IN the trash can. But they are just learning the mouse, and there s a lot about a typical GUI that is unfriendly to someone that isn t yet proficient with a mouse. The close buttons are disappointingly small, things can be too easily dragged on and off the panel and menus. When I sat down to think about it, the typical GUI design does not present a very good it always works the same interface that would be good for a child. And then it occurred to me: the perfect GUI for a child would be simply xmonad (a tiling window manager that can be controlled almost entirely by keyboard and has no need for mouse movements in most cases.) No desktop environment, no file manager in the root window. Just a window manager in the classic X way. Of course! So after the boys were in bed, I installed xmonad. I gave Jacob s account a simple .xsession that starts a terminal and xmonad. Today, Jacob informed me that he wanted his computer to look just like yours. Playing right into my hands, that was! But when he excitedly typed startx, he said it wasn t just like mine. Uh oh. Turns out he wanted the same wallpaper as my computer uses. Whew. We found it, I figured out that xli(1) loads it in the root window, and so I added a third line to .xsession. More delight unlocked! Jacob mastered the basics of xmonad really quickly. Alt-Shift-C to close a window. Alt-Shift-Q to quit back to the big black screen . Alt-Shift-Enter to get a terminal window. We launched thunar (the XFCE file manager) and plugged in his camera. He had a good deal of fun looking at photos and videos from it. But then I dropped the true highlight of the day for him: I offered to install Tuxpaint for him. That s probably his favorite program of all time. He watched impatiently as apt-get counted down 1m30s for tuxpaint and its libraries. Then we launched it, and he wanted to skip supper so he could keep playing Tuxpaint on my VERY OWN COMPUTER! I d been debating how to introduce GUIs for a very long time. It has not escaped my attention that children that used Commodores or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS. I didn t want our boys to skip an entire phase of learning how their technology works. I am pleased with this solution; they still run commands to launch things, yet get to play with more than text-based programs. At bedtime, Jacob asked me, very seriously: Dad, how do I start tuxpaint again? First you log in and type startx. Then you can use the mouse. Jacob nods, a contemplative look on his face.. Then, I continue, you type tuxpaint in the terminal, and it comes right up. Jacob nodded very seriously a second time, as if committing this very important information to long-term memory. Then gave a single excited clap, yelled Great! , and dashed off.

2000, Bordeaux, France. 2001, Bordeaux, France. 2002, Ottawa, Canada. 2003, Oslo, Norway. 2004, Porto Alegre, Brazil. 2005, Helsinki, Finland. 2006, Oaxtepec, Mexico. 2007, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. 2008, Mar del Plata, Argentina. 2009, C ceres, Spain. 2010, New York, United States. 2011, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 2012, Managua, Nicaragua. 2013, Vaumarcus, Switzerland. We have gone to all different latitudes (although not yet longitudes!). We have had very hot and very cold weather. Great cities and small villages have hosted us. What will be the next addition to this great list? As we approach DebConf12 (10 days to DebCamp and counting, yay!), we should keep the future in mind. So, as every year in recent history, we will once again have a DebConf session presenting possible venues for the next year. Organizing DebConf in your city means a lot of hard work. It also means one of the greatest personal experiences you can imagine. And it is a great way to contribute to Debian. The decision process for every DebConf venue starts two years before, with presentations during DebConf(n-2). That means, if you consider presenting a bid for DebConf14, now is the moment to act! Do you have to be present at Managua to propose your bid? No. You can proxy via somebody I d suggest to do it via somebody who knows the location you are suggesting, but basically, choose a friend that you trust that trusts you. Of course, you can participate in the presentation session via IRC. Do you have to be a Debian Developer to propose a bid? No. For DebConf9, none of the C ceres guys was a DD; for DebConf10, some of the people most involved from the local New Yorkers were not DDs. For DC11, none of our hosts in Bosnia are DDs. And for DC12, the dear and overworked Nicaraguan crew is also made from people interested in getting closer to the Debian project, but not DDs. Do you have to decide now? No. This is just a call for a first presentation, but the decision regarding DC14 will be taken probably around March 2013. However, giving a nice presentation at DebConf helps a lot, gives you visibility, and will get the ball rolling. Is there a geographical bias? Slight. So far, and since the second DebConf, we have kept the tradition not to repeat continents on two successive DebConfs. This is not a hard condition, however! While there is some probability that DebConf14 will be somewhere in America (the continent, of course), it depends on the proposals more than on any pseudo-rule. What do you need to start thinking about? Go visit our prospective location checklist. You can also look at what other teams have historically presented. And of course, go to the DebConf14 wiki planning page Register there, even if you are just in the early phases of finding data.

Sarah and I are running in the 5K Packard Summer Scamper on Saturday. Sarah's been working on her fitness for a few months now, and I belatedly started working on mine about a 6 weeks ago. (Sarah's fund raising, so if you'd like to sponsor her, her page is here) I've been using the Couch to 5K program to get my fitness up, but I haven't managed to stick to it exactly, due to a combination of injury and wet weather. I have still managed to get myself to the point where I can run for 28 minutes solidly, which is close to 5K (I'm doing my last training run tomorrow, so I'll see what the distance comes out to). I've been doing up to three runs a week at lunchtime around the Shoreline Amphitheatre area, using my Galaxy Nexus and some Bluetooth headphones, and I've got a pretty nice little setup. I'm using Pandora for some music to listen to, C25K Pro for the actual running intervals. It has voice prompts that tell me when to run, or to start a walk interval. Finally, I'm using Strava Run for recording the run and getting some additional statistics during the run (kilometre markers, split times and time elapsed). These also come through as voice prompts. I'm not currently wearing a watch, and I want to keep track of the wall time, so I've also found Audio Clock, which verbally announces the time (I've set it to do it every 15 minutes that a Bluetooth headset is connected). What I really like about all of this is that I get spoken voice prompts and information, seamlessly mixed in with the music from Pandora, all while I'm running. I've got my phone strapped to my arm, and I don't have to look at it during the run, and there's no wires. I'm a huge personal metrics junkie, and that was why I previously eschewed running outdoors. I wanted that information on the treadmill display so I could push myself that little bit further. Sure, I'm not getting the constant information as much as if I had a treadmill display in front of me the whole time, but I'll settle for running in the great outdoors and getting some feedback every kilometre (if I get really desperate, Strava will do it every half kilometre). Not to diss optical augmented reality efforts too much, but I'd rather go for a combination of discreet audio announcements through a Bluetooth earpiece, perhaps complemented with something I choose to look at like a Pebble watch, than an in-your-face pair of glasses. My Bluetooth headphones are the around the back of the head variety that aren't going to bounce off during a run. I've really enjoyed doing the runs during the week, and when I was doing the full 3 runs a week of a given week of the Couch to 5K program, I'd really notice a difference by run number 3. I'm currently planning on sticking with doing a 5K run hopefully at least twice a week after this weekend. It's certainly done wonders for my waistline.

After upgrading a mail server to Debian/Unstable (which will soon be released as Wheezy) I started getting SASL errors. 535 5.7.8 Error: authentication failed: no mechanism available The SMTP protocol gave the above error for both LOGIN and PLAIN methods. SASL LOGIN authentication failed: no mechanism available The postfix/smtpd process logged messages like the above in syslog. It turned out that the auxprop_plugin: mysql line had to be removed and replaced with the following two lines due to a change in the way SQL plugins are managed: auxprop_plugin: sql
sql_engine: mysql Also the SQL query needed to have %u replaced with %u@%r because we now have user and realm provided separately. Related posts:

1. MySQL security in Debian Currently there is a problem with the MySQL default install...
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3. new release of postal Today I have released a significant new version of my...

Upgrading the local version of subversion against a large subversion repository has so far taken three DAYS. It goes through this multi-gigabyte repository in no perceivable order, it goes through every single directory in every single tag and every single branch and refuses to run in any sub-directory. (Even after clearing out some older tags, the tags/ directory is still nearly 8Gb and that doesn't include any binary files.) Each tag within tags/ is 500Mb and contains nearly 6000 sub-directories. Yes, it's large but svn upgrade should still be able to handle it without crippling every machine.

I can't image how svn is going to manage when the server finally gets upgraded. Probably be quicker to dump the entire repo and reimport it.

When I finally give up the will to proceed or simply need to use this LAPTOP for something else, I have to interrupt it with Ctrl-C at which point is starts all over again!

This isn't a slow machine, it's a i5 quad-core T410 with 8Gb of RAM and 1Tb of storage - and svn has made it crawl for days. The only way to pair down the working copy is to delete every tag and branch which means losing data like old build logs and old packages. The repository is this large because it's tracking the development of multiple commercial products which share common code but which also have numerous releases and release updates.

I can't even use svn st on this repo without this completing - I haven't been able to work on this repo since this started. Absolutely insane.

Pondering filing an RC bug on the basis of unjustifiable data loss. We have many machines at work with this repository checked out and if we ever migrate to Wheezy, it's going to mean a WEEK of lost work!!

subversion                    1.7.5-1

So, a warning for anyone else using subversion 1.7.5 with a very large repository: DELETE ALL TAGS and BRANCHES and any other directory anywhere in every single working copy tree on every machine which ever wants to use that copy again before even thinking about upgrading to 1.7.5.

The tags directories don't even need to be upgraded because we only use those to rebuild the code as it was in chroots.

Unspeakably furious about such a completely dumb tool being thrown into the mix DAYS before the Wheezy freeze. Now I have to kill it AGAIN just so that I can suspend the laptop. IDIOTS.

So status displays are cool. Seeing what is happening in real time is cool. As a proof of concept I put together a trivial load-graph:

• http://static.steve.org.uk/load/

This is broken down into three parts:

Load Client

The load client is a trivial script which reads /proc/loadavg, and sends the 1-minute entry to a remote server, via a single UDP packet.

Load Server

The load-server is a service which listens for UDP traffic, and when it receives a new integer records that in a redis data-store.

Load Display

This is a HTML page which has the values from the store in it, which is then plotted using javscript.

So the UDP-server which receives load will receive two things:

• load:N - The load figure. The text "load:" is literal, and present in case I decide to extend the stats..
• x.x.x.x - The IP address from which it received the message.

This is inserted into a Redis database as an array. This array could then be fetched via an AJAX script to update the HTML display in real-time, but at the moment I just have a shell script which updates it in near-real time. The idea of having a UDP-server receive values from remote clients is interesting. We just need to define a mapping to redis. For me I've just done this:

receive a UDP packet with value "load:1.2" from source 1.2.3.4
append "1.2" to key "1.2.3.4-load".
append the value "1.2.3.4" to the global "known_hosts"

The values received can be truncated (i.e. keep only the most recent 60 entries) with ease, due to the available Redis primitives, and we can easily graph these using the qjplot library. Adding more metrics just means updating the clients to send "memfree:400m", "disk-free:50%", "users:2", "uptime:12345s", or similar. The storage is wonderfully abstract - all you need to do is get the graph-drawing code to a) Know which source to display, and b) which metric. For example, if we did extend the client to send that data I could draw a graph of the memory on host foo.example.com just by selecting "memfree" against the origin "1.2.3.4". ObQuote: "Come here, damn you, I want to touch you. " - Hellraiser