Search Results: "ag"

27 December 2015

Steinar H. Gunderson: Going to FOSDEM 2016

I've ordered my tickets and my hotel room, so it's clear; I'm going to FOSDEM 2016! I'll be having a talk in the Open Media devroom (H.2214), Saturday 17:00, about my new project, Nageru. (Actually, it's sort of a launch as well, since the source code isn't out yet.) So, what is Nageru, might you ask? Well it has to do with video. And it's made for 2016, not 1996, so it uses your GPU via Movit, also released at FOSDEM two years ago. For the rest, come see my talk :-)

Vincent Sanders: The only pleasure I get from moving house is stumbling across books I had forgotton I owned

I have to agree with John Burnside on that statement, after having recently moved house again rediscovering our book collection has been a salve for an otherwise exhausting undertaking. I returned to Cambridge four years ago, initially on my own and then subsequently the family moved down to be with me.

We rented a house but, with two growing teenagers, the accommodation was becoming a little crowded. Melodie and I decided the relocation was permanent and started looking for our own property, eventually finding something to our liking in Cottenham village.

Melodie took the opportunity to have the house cleaned and decorated while empty because of overlapping time with our rental property. This meant we had to be a little careful while moving in as there was still wet paint in places.

Some of our books
Moving weekend was made bearable by Steve, Jonathan and Jo lending a hand especially on the trips to Yorkshire to retrieve, amongst other things, the aforementioned book collection. We were also fortunate to have Andy and Jane doing many other important jobs around the place while the rest of us were messing about in vans.

The desk in the study
The seemingly obligatory trip to IKEA to acquire furniture was made much more fun by trying to park a luton van which was only possible because Steve and Jonathan helped me. Though it turns out IKEA ship mattresses rolled up so tight they can be moved in an estate car so taking the van was unnecessary.

Alex under his loft bed
Having moved in it seems like every weekend is filled with a never ending "todo" list of jobs. From clearing gutters to building a desk in the study. Eight weeks on and the list seems to be slowly shrinking meaning I can even do some lower priority things like the server rack which was actually a fun project.


Joshua in his completed roomThe holidays this year afforded me some time to finish the boys bedrooms. They both got loft beds with a substantial area underneath. This allows them both to have double beds along with a desk and plenty of storage. Completing the rooms required the construction of some flat pack furniture which rather than simply do myself I supervised the boys doing it themselves.

Alexander building flat pack furniture
Teaching them by letting them get on with it was a surprisingly effective and both of them got the hang of the construction method pretty quickly. There was only a couple of errors from which they learned immediately and did not repeat (draw bottoms having a finished side and front becomes back when you are constructing upside down)

Joshua assembling flat pack furniture
The house is starting to feel like home and soon all the problems will fade from memory while the good will remain. Certainly our first holiday season has been comfortable here and I look forward to many more re-reading our books.

Steve Kemp: Some things are universal?

I don't often do retrospectives, but this year has been an unusual one for me, as I moved to Finland almost six months ago. The topic has come up in conversation a lot over the past few months, so when people ask me what I think I can give some simple answers without too much thought. Here's a brief summary. There are some obvious changes:
The Traffic
The traffic drives on the right-hand side of the roads, which took a bit of getting used to, but isn't a huge surprise as I've travelled in Europe in the past. There aren't so many countries that drive on the left after all so most people probably wouldn't even notice this as odd. When it comes to traffic one thing nice about Helsinki is that most junctions are "zebra crossings". Sure they don't have flashing lights, but they have shaded areas, and pedestrians have right of way. As for transport the city of Helsinki has local trains, trams, buses and taxis. The trams and buses all use the same card for payment so transport is integrated very well. I buy a time-based card, spending about 50 for a month of unlimited travel. If you prefer you may add euros to your card and pay for distinct journeys - but that works out more expensive if you travel twice, or more, a day.
The Money
Finland uses the Euro these days, having switched from the Finnish markka in 2002. Enough said. Costs are largely in line with what I'd expect: Cigarettes are cheap, beer is expensive. Some things are very expensive, some things are very cheap. Largely the expensive things are those that are imported. It is a very small country after all.
The Language
Finnish is .. complex. But I've not struggled too much. Mostly I can buy what I want without difficulty. There are weird exceptions though for example I went out to buy soup one day and had to return carrying only shame and disappointment: I can't read the language on the tins and what I thought was soup turned out to be a can of chopped tomatoes. Food is good though, and available easily (!!). The only significant surprise when it comes to shopping is that loose goods must be weighed yourself. You pick up a bunch of bananas, take it to the scales, press the button that has a picture of a banana on it, and it prints out a label you attach to them - at the till the cashier will scan the label and charge you. If you forget, or don't know how to do it they'll tut and complain. In daily life I use two phrases frequently and they are sufficient for communcation:
  • "minua haluan ... kahvi kakku olut"
    • "I want ... coffee cake beer".
  • "kiitos"
    • "Thanks"
Usually people speak to me in English, which is a little annoying as it means I'm not learning as much as I could. But that said over the past few months I've had proper conversations entirely in Finnish with shop-keepers, and similar. So I'm getting better.
The Culture
Finnish people are friendly, but terse. That's the reputation. The Finnish people are alcoholics, and have high rates of suicide. Also the reputation. Finally we know that the Finnish people consume more coffee than the rest of the world. All those things are true, but they're not enough by far to describe the people. Obviously they're all different, and we have a lot of people from other parts of the world here too - Russians, Asians, Somalians. So culture is complex .. but markedly different than in the UK. I could write more about this, but I think for the moment I'll just draw a line under culture and say that I'm enjoying the interactions with people here, and while many things are slightly "off", it's not bad. Just different. Also saunas are fun. I've never had any qualms about being naked with strangers, so I don't really understand why Americans, and others, find this so difficult/surprising. But yeah, saunas are great. Things that Finland is known for internationally: The invention of the molotov cocktail, rally-driving, hockey, world's strongest man, Moomins, Tom of Finland, Salmiakki.
The Weather
Not too hot. Not too cold. But that's largely because I'm one of those "hot" people who doesn't really get cold even at the best of times. My ideal temperatures are about 13 C. My wife prefers 15 C, or more. We don't fight any more. Mostly. Winter is apparently full of snow, but this year has been poor. We had the first snowfall yesterday, here in Helsinki, and we woke this morning a blanket of snow about two inches high. It looks pretty. The biggest thing about weather in Finland is the constant darkness in winter, and the constant sun in Summer. In Summer there were like 22 hours of sunlight a day which made sleeping hard when we moved into our flat - with no curtains. In winter it feels like there is 20 minutes of sunlight a day. It's not that bad here in the south, although I think it is something like five hours and less in the north. I've never had any real issues with depression, or similar: People have good days and bad days, I'd generally be "OK" or "great". In the darkness? I've been grumpy at colleagues, I've made bad choices, I've lapsed attention. I'm not sure I can blame it on the weather, or my reaction to the weather, but I know I've not been as "happy" as I "should". It requires effort to be enthusiastic in a way I've never experienced before. Thankfully once I (slowly) realized this I took action and I think I'm good now. Unlike the UK the buildings here are relatively modern. I think that's the biggest contributing factor to how houses are "warm". Houses have all been built in the last 50-100 years, so you have proper insulation. Even though it might be very very cold outdoors indoors you can be naked without heating. Try that in the UK and you might freeze in some of the older leakier houses! You do have to laugh, though, when people point out "the oldest pub" in the city though. Where I come from if I pub isn't 500+ years old you wouldn't give it a seconds thought - places like The Golden Fleece, etc.
I could write more. I probably should. But it has been an interesting year, and although there are things I miss about the UK, and Edinburgh specifically, I have no regrets. I'm glad I came. What triggered this post? I said "Some things are universal" to my wife, when I saw a child riding a bicycle they'd obviously just received for Christmas. Her reaction "No Finnish person would buy a bicycle at Christmas - they'd expect too much snow!". So perhaps it was another immigrant family. Christmas bicycles universal, or not, it doesn't really matter.

Russ Allbery: Review: The Outskirter's Secret

Review: The Outskirter's Secret, by Rosemary Kirstein
Series: Steerswomen #2
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 1992, 2001
Printing: 2001
ISBN: 0-345-46105-3
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 389
This is a direct sequel to The Steerswoman, and I don't recommend starting here. I read this novel as part of The Steerswoman's Road omnibus, which is the edition reflected in the metadata (except for the page count, which is just this novel). There are a few plot constructs that occur depressingly often in SFF and almost always annoy me. One is books where nearly all of the book is just a journey from one place to another, without much interesting landscape along the way. Subtract additional points if the land is hostile and there are constant worries about food. Another is illness, or being unable to trust one's senses, or, worse, both. Somehow, this book manages to do both of those things and was still thoroughly enjoyable. This is exceptionally rare. After the conclusions reached in the previous book, Rowan and Bel are even more determined to reach the origin of the jewels on Bel's belt and gather more information. This means travel into the Outskirts, where Rowan has never been (and where people from the Inner Land almost never go). It also means close contact with Bel's people, who have an entirely different set of social rituals and who are notoriously prickly. Nearly all of The Outskirter's Secret is travel through the Outskirts while navigating Outskirter society, politics, and customs. It's anthropological fiction of a sort, particularly given the inquisitive and analytical mindset that Rowan brings to anything new. Anthropological SFF is another one of those things that normally leaves me cold, but which totally worked for me in this book. I rarely remember being this engaged in, or caring this much about, the customs and traditions of an invented and relatively primitive culture. Partly this is because Rowan's mindset continues to be fascinating and contagious. I kind of want to compare this series to Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but where Stephenson's novel was about the practice of organized science, the Steerswomen series is about the individual scholar and scientist. This could go badly in the hands of a lesser author, but Kirstein brilliantly balances analysis and theories with Rowan's child-like wonder in learning, peculiar and determined ethics, and emotional growth. She isn't a disinterested observer or an engineer with a wrench. She lets the world change her, works hard at finding her place and her own strength, and engages with it emotionally as much as she does intellectually. She's a wonderfully compelling character. Another significant factor to this book's success is the slow and deliberate way Kirstein mixes world-building revelations with the day-to-day struggles of the characters. There's much more to that than just the target of Rowan's investigations, and far more complexity and significance to the Outskirters than showed in first appearances. The world is also set up in a way that lets the readers guess various details before the characters, with their more limited knowledge, can work out: another tricky technique that Kirstein gets almost perfect. I never wanted to shake the characters for being dumb; usually, both Rowan and Bel leap to correct conclusions just shortly after the reader, and long before the reader is tired of following their thought processes. There was only one bit of world-building that took Rowan most of the book to figure out despite being obvious to me early in this novel, and I think that one was fair. She didn't have anywhere near enough information to work it out. Bel continues to be wonderful in numerous ways. But even better, Kirstein introduces us to Bel's people and highlights both similarities and differences. It's an excellent job of building a complex culture that feels human: varied, tradition-laden, practical, but also well-adapted to their environment and situation, and far more sophisticated than they might appear. I'm normally a hard sell for this sort of thing, but Kirstein got me thoroughly invested. One scene late in this novel where a tribe welcomes a newcomer is masterful and probably my favorite single moment of the series so far. Once again, unfortunately, the conclusion is a bit less than satisfying. The characters come away knowing more, planning more, but still with numerous unanswered questions. This is not a series that's in a hurry to get to major plot payoffs. Instead, it's a series that takes a close look at the cultures, relationships, emotions, and lives that it touches, and describes them in deft and engaging ways. The Outskirter's Secret is even better than The Steerswoman. Recommended. I bought the third and fourth books while only a little ways into this one and am eager to read them. Followed by The Lost Steersman. Rating: 9 out of 10

Benjamin Mako Hill: Trust your technolust.

"Trust your technolust." from Hackers (1995)If you ve ever lusted for a Trust your technolust. poster like the one seen in background of the climactic sequence in the 1995 film Hackers, you re in luck. Just print this PDF template (also an SVG) onto a piece of yellow US letter paper. Although I m not even the first person I know to reproduce the poster, I did spend some time making sure that I got the typeface, kerning, wordspacing, and placement on the page just right. I figured I would share.

26 December 2015

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2015.20151226-1

Before I disappear into the Japanese winter holidays, here the Christmas update of all TeX Live packages. Nothing spectacular here, just the usual bunch of updates of loads of packages. There is a bug with respect to a file move from one package to another, will be fixed in an upload soon. Debian - TeX Live 2015 Updated packages apnum, appendix, archaeologie, babel, babel-french, babel-greek, babel-hungarian, bangorcsthesis, beamer-verona, bhcexam, bibarts, bidi, bxjscls, chemfig, commado, comprehensive, context, cslatex, csplain, ctanify, doclicense, dvips, ejpecp, exsheets, fbb, fibeamer, fithesis, fontools, francais-bst, gitinfo2, glossaries, gnuplottex, greek-fontenc, hyph-utf8, indextools, ksp-thesis, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexcourse-rug, lollipop, lstbayes, lualibs, luaotfload, luatexja, luatexko, luatodonotes, make4ht, mcf2graph, media9, mex, mfirstuc, mhchem, mptopdf, nameauth, nevelok, newtx, nicetext, nucleardata, ocgx2, pageslts, petri-nets, phonrule, pkuthss, powerdot, proofread, proposal, pst-labo, pst-solides3d, reledmac, sapthesis, serbian-lig, showlabels, t2, tcolorbox, tempora, testhyphens, tetex, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, texsis, thuthesis, toptesi, tudscr, ucharcat, versonotes, xcharter, xepersian, xifthen, xindy, xint. New packages beamertheme-detlevcm, beamertheme-metropolis, beamertheme-phnompenh, beamer-verona, bitpattern, carbohydrates, delimseasy, drawmatrix, einfuehrung2, ellipse, ffslides, gitlog, greektonoi, ksp-thesis, longfbox, options, simpler-wick, unicode-data. Enjoy.

Julian Andres Klode: Much faster incremental apt updates

APT s performance in applying the Pdiffs files, which are the diff format used for Packages, Sources, and other files in the archive has been slow. Improving performance for uncompressed files The reason for this is that our I/O is unbuffered, and we were reading one byte at a time in order to read lines. This changed on December 24, by adding read buffering for reading lines, vastly improving the performance of rred. But it was still slow, so today I profiled using gperftools the rred method running on a 430MB uncompressed Contents file with a 75 KB large patch. I noticed that our ReadLine() method was calling some method which took a long time (google-pprof told me it was some _nss method, but that was wrong [thank you, addr2line]). After some further look into the code, I noticed that we set the length of the buffer using the length of the line. And whenever we moved some data out of the buffer, we called memmove() to move the remaining data to the front of the buffer. So, I tried to use a fixed buffer size of 4096 (commit). Now memmove() would spend less time moving memory around inside the buffer. This helped a lot, bringing the run time on my example file down from 46 seconds to about 2 seconds. Later on, I rewrote the code to not use memmove() at all opting for start and end variables instead; and increasing the start variable when reading from the buffer (commit). This in turn further improved things, bringing it down to about 1.6 seconds. We could now increase the buffer size again, without any negative effect. Effects on apt-get update I measured the run-time of apt-get update, excluding appstream and apt-file files, for the update from todays 07:52 to the 13:52 dinstall run. Configured sources are unstable and experimental with amd64 and i386 architectures. appstream and apt-file indexes are disabled for testing, so only Packages and Sources indexes are fetched. The results are impressive: That s a tenfold increase in performance. By the way, running without PDiffs took 20 seconds, so there s no reason not to use them. Future work Writes are still unbuffered, and account for about 75% to 80% of our runtime. That s an obvious area for improvements. rred-profile Performance for patching compressed files Contents files are usually compressed with gzip, and kept compressed locally because they are about 500 MB uncompressed and only 30MB compressed. I profiled this, and it turns out there is not much we can do about it: The majority of the time is spent inside zlib, mostly combining CRC checksums: rred-gz-profile Going forward, I think a reasonable option might be to recompress Contents files using lzo they will be a bit bigger (50MB instead of 30MB), but lzo is about 6 times as fast (compressing a 430MB Contents file took 1 second instead of 6).
Filed under: Debian, Uncategorized

Lucas Nussbaum: Debian packages with /outdated/ packaging style

(This is just a copy of this debian-devel@ email) Following my blog post yesterday with graphs about Debian packaging evolution, I prepared lists of packages for each kind of outdatedness. Of course not all practices highlighted below are deprecated, and there are good reasons to continue to do some of them. But still, given that they all represent a clear minority of packages, I thought that it would be useful to list the related packages. (I honestly didn t know if some of my packages would show up in the lists!) The lists are available at https://people.debian.org/~lucas/qa-20151226/ I also pushed them to alioth, so you can either do:
ssh people.debian.org 'grep -A 10 YOURNAME ~lucas/public_html/qa-20151226/*ddlist'
or:
ssh alioth.debian.org 'grep -A 10 YOURNAME ~lucas/qa-20151226/*ddlist' the meaning of the lists is: If you don t understand why your package is listed, you can have a look at allpackages-20151226.yaml that provides more details. If you still don t understand, just ask me. Excluding duplicates, a total of 5469 packages are listed. The dd-list output for the merged list is also available (which isn t very useful, except to know if you are listed).

Russ Allbery: Review: The Steerswoman

Review: The Steerswoman, by Rosemary Kirstein
Series: Steerswomen #1
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 1989, 2003
Printing: 2003
ISBN: 0-345-46105-3
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 264
I read this novel as part of The Steerswoman's Road omnibus, which is the edition reflected in the metadata (except for the page count, which is just this novel). Rowan is a steerswoman, a member of an order of traveling scholars in a world of generally medieval customs. This is a world of small villages and town blacksmiths, of swords, sailing ships, and lots of walking. Steerswomen (the order does include some men, but only rarely; the gender balance is left delightfully unexplained and unremarked) mostly travel routes through the Inner Lands until they decide to retire and do research and study. Sometimes, though, they get on the trail of something unexplained, and are driven to explain it. That's the case for Rowan at the start of this book: she's run across several peculiar flat jewels. No one seems to know what they are, their pattern of distribution is odd, and they're discovered in some decidedly strange places, such as embedded deep in a tree. It's a puzzle, and Rowan is determined to understand it. The Steerswoman opens with Rowan investigating a jewel owned by an innkeeper, and a chance meeting in his inn with an Outskirter who wears a whole belt of the same jewels. The Outskirters are nomadic tribes from the far west known for their prickly attitude, their ability in warfare, and their occasional raids. Those who live in the Inner Lands consider them barbarians. But Bel is curious, thoughtful, and happy to tell Rowan of the origin of her belt: her father found a huge number of the jewels embedded in the side of a cliff, far into the Outskirts. Rowan is immediately tempted to go there, but she has to report to the Archives first. Much to her surprise, Bel asks to accompany her. And then wizards start trying to kill them. The steerswomen are Kirstein's best bit of world-building and the anchor around which the rest of the story is told. Steerswomen have to answer all questions they're asked, truthfully. In return, they can ask a question of anyone and have to be answered truthfully. If anyone refuses to answer, or tells a deliberate lie, they're placed under the steerswomen's ban, and no steerswoman will answer their questions. This is woven deep into the culture of the Inner Lands... except for the wizards, who refuse to explain what they're doing or how to anyone, are under the ban, and don't care. They protect cities from dragons, build magical lighting, and occasionally start wars with other wizards in which numerous people die. They're effectively the rulers of this world insofar as it has rulers, and they're apparently quite interested in Rowan's search for these unexplained jewels. Rowan is a wonderful character. At the start of the book, she's the only steerswoman that the reader knows, so much of her early behavior is also world-building, showing us steerswomen. But as the story develops, we meet other steerswomen and Rowan develops into her own character: innocent in a way, but determined, ethical, and with a very deep store of self-knowledge and inner contemplation. I found the middle part of the book somewhat frustrating for the same reasons Rowan did. The ending lets her shine, in her own way, and it's deeply satisfying. The Steerswoman does pick up a third character along the way, a young boy named Will who hopes to become a wizard's apprentice, and to whom I never warmed. Part of the problem was structural: he's very suspicious of characters that the reader knows are entirely honorable. This is a difficult tone to pull off without irritating me, and Kirstein doesn't quite manage. She also shifts the story to the Will's perspective from time to time, and I never found his viewpoint very interesting. I warmed to him a bit by the climax, but I still don't think he added much to the story. Bel, though... Bel competes with Rowan as best character of this book. The other characters all have roles to play: Rowan is the steerswoman, integral to the world-building, and Will exemplifies another corner of the analytical process so central to this book and represents the appeal of the wizards. But Bel is just herself: irreverent, curious, loyal, dangerous, decisive, and adventurous. Rowan is the heart of the book and the primary protagonist, but I think Bel is its soul. I haven't said too much about the themes of this book, intentionally. Kirstein is doing something very interesting and subtle with the reader's expectations of a medieval world with wizards, and I think it's better experienced without spoilers. But it's also a character-driven story, a story of unlikely friendship between two very different women, and a story about the value of being true to yourself even when it's exceptionally dangerous. Rowan delighted me immediately, Bel grew on me over the course of the story, and the rough patches in the middle of the book faded in comparison to an excellent ending. Unfortunately, this is only part of a story. There is a climax, and we do know what the jewels are by the end of the book. But the journey has raised many more questions, most of which are not solved. The world has become far more complicated. Rowan has a lot left to learn and investigate. I recommend the omnibus, or getting the ebooks from Amazon where you can quickly get more, because you'll probably want to immediately start the second book. Followed by The Outskirter's Secret. Rating: 8 out of 10

Russ Allbery: kstart 4.2

kstart is a collection of two utilities for managing Kerberos tickets, particularly focused on the needs of long-running commands or daemons. This release has taken embarassingly long to release, given that the last release was in January of 2012. Sorry about that, particularly those who were stuck on various bugs! This code base, particularly the test suite, is in dire need of significant refactoring, which reduces my desire to work on it, and then I ran very, very short on free software time. This release is important because I think I've finally worked through all the various tricky complexity of startup when running a command under k5start. The core problem: the original k5start exited when authentication failed. However, it's very nice to start daemons that need a Kerberos ticket by running them via k5start. But if this is done during system startup, the network may not be up yet, and one may not be able to contact the KDC. It's very difficult to get the timing right just by adjusting init scripts. The core fix in this release is that k5start run as a daemon or with a command, and krenew run with the -i option, now keeps retrying the authentication or renewal until it succeeds. It's retried immediately and then with exponential backoff, starting with a delay of a second, until intervals of one minute, and then retried at a delay of one minute until it succeeds. Any command isn't run until the authentication works, so (unlike previous versions) k5start won't start the command without a Kerberos ticket. That should fix various problems people are having. There are also some new options to tweak the renewal behavior. -H can now be used in combination with -K to specify how long of a minimum ticket lifetime k5start or krenew should try to maintain. Alternately, there's now a -a flag that tells both to attempt an authentication or renewal every time they wake up (at the interval specified with -K). This probably should have been the default for -K originally, but I didn't change the original behavior for backwards compatibility. There are also a couple of bug fixes: the temporary ticket cache created by k5start is cleaned up properly, and the programs no longer incorrectly reject the combination of -b and -K or a command. You can get the latest version from the kstart distribution page.

25 December 2015

Lucas Nussbaum: Debian is still changing

Here is an update to the usual graphs generated from snapshot.d.o. See my previous blog post for the background info. In all graphs, it s easy to see the effect of the Jessie freeze (and the previous freezes since 2005, too). Team maintenance comaint-2015 It s interesting to see that, while the number of team-maintained packages increases, the number of packages that aren t co-maintained is very stable. Maintenance using a VCS vcs-2015 Git is the clear winner now, with the migration rate increasing recently. Packaging helpers helpers-2015 As usual, the number of packages using CDBS is quite stable. The number of packages using traditional debhelper might soon be lower than those using CDBS. Patch systems and packaging formats formats-patches-2015 3.0 is the clear winner, even if we still have 3000+ packages using 1.0, and ~1000 of those modifying files directly. The other patch systems have basically disappeared.
 So, all those graphs are kind-of boring now. Any good ideas of additional things to track, that be can identified reliably by looking at source packages? For those interested, below are links to the graphs with percentages of packages. comaint-percent-2015 formats-patches-percent-2015 vcs-percent-2015 helpers-percent-2015

Norbert Preining: Plex Home Theater becomes OpenPHT release 1.5.0 for Debian sid and jessie

The nice guys from RasPlex have forked the abandoned Plex Home Theater into OpenPHT (github, Plex forum) and updated it with several improvements. Plex itself is now developing a new player called Plex Media Player, which unfortunately uses closed source components. I tried to build also the Plex Media Player for Debian, but a hitherto unreleased Qt versions is necessary, so I gave up for now. So here is a new built of OpenPHT for Debian/sid and jessie, amd64 and i386. This new package conflicts with the old plexhometheater. plex-debian-new Note also that the lines for sources.list have changed again. I will also remove the builds of plexhometheater from my server soon. sid and testing For sid use the following lines: 
deb http://www.preining.info/debian/ openpht-sid main
deb-src http://www.preining.info/debian/ openpht-sid main
You can also grab the binary for amd64 directly here for amd64 and i386, you can get the source package with 
dget http://www.preining.info/debian/pool/main/o/openpht/openpht_1.5.0.502-1.dsc
jessie For the stable release jessie, use the following lines: 
deb http://www.preining.info/debian/ openpht-jessie main
deb-src http://www.preining.info/debian/ openpht-jessie main
You can also grab the binary for amd64 directly here for amd64 and i386, you can get the source package with 
dget http://www.preining.info/debian/pool/main/o/openpht/openpht_1.5.0.502-1~bpo8+1.dsc
The release file and changes file are signed with my official Debian key 0x860CDC13. Now be ready for enjoying the next movie!

24 December 2015

Clint Adams: Before the Tet Offensive

Kurt has trouble keeping his mouth shut. This became widely apparent when he was expelled from Catholic school for telling a visiting dignitary to go fuck himself. WB used to preach angrily against casual sex. Kurt enlisted in the Army, and due to his high IQ he ended up in the Army Security Agency. After training, he was stationed in Germany where he performed signals intelligence functions like direction finding and passing on information to the CIA and NSA. One day WB shagged a boy with a leather hat. Contrary to what one might assume, Kurt had awareness of consequences. He refused officer training because that would have extended his commitment from 4 to 6 years. He purposefully flunked his French language proficiency exam. He wanted there to be no chance of him getting transferred to Vietnam. The following day, WB found herself confronted and asked to explain why she had had a change of heart about casual sex. Oh, it wasn't casual sex, she explained. He came over and said, I've been dying to make love with you for the past three hours, so it was special, she clarified. Thus the nature of the past communication failure became clear to everyone but WB. Despite all his efforts to avoid Vietnam, Kurt, of course, had trouble keeping his mouth shut. So in 1967 he pissed off the wrong person and found himself having to choose between Leavenworth and Saigon. He chose life of alcoholism over prison.

Zlatan Todori : Deepin switches to Debian Sid

Distribution that I feel fond of their work on UX for Linux ecosystem has switched from Ubuntu to Debian. So now pabs will probably invite them to our Derivate Census and they start packaging their stack into Debian directly. More about their latest RC release and the mention of switch is on their blog

Michal Čihař: Going to FOSDEM

It has become almost tradition for me, so yes, I'm attending FOSDEM 2016. It's probably the best conference in Europe to meet other free software guys and that was always motivation for me to come - to see people I meet on mailing lists for rest of the year. This time it will be slightly different for me - I will be giving talk there for first time. Originally I wanted to do lightning talk only, but in the end I got persuaded and it's full length talk now. It will be in the Coding for Language Communities devroom and you might guess from the devroom topic that it will be about Weblate.

Filed under: English phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments

23 December 2015

David Bremner: Offline key signing with caff

After a mildly ridiculous amount of effort I made a bootable-usb key. I then layered a bash script on top of a perl script on top of gpg. What could possibly go wrong? 
 #!/bin/bash
 infile=$1
 keys=$(gpg --with-colons  $infile   sed -n 's/^pub//p'   cut -f5 -d: )
 gpg --homedir $HOME/.caff/gnupghome --import $infile
 caff -R -m no "$ keys[*] "
 today=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")
 output="$(pwd)/keys-$today.tar"
 for key in $ keys[*] ; do
     (cd $HOME/.caff/keys/;   tar rvf "$output" $today/$key.mail*)
 done
The idea is that keys are exported to files on a networked host, the files are processed on an offline host, and the resulting tarball of mail messages sneakernetted back to the connected host.

Petter Reinholdtsen: OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software

When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to call the car license plate numbers in those days. I would write the numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some exotic or special region codes and numbers. It was a fun game to pass time, as we kids have plenty of it. A few days I came across the OpenALPR project, a free software project to automatically discover and report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the "car numbers" in a machine readable format. I've been looking for such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the automatic number plate recognition tool only is available in the hands of the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance. I discovered the developer wanted to get the tool into Debian, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian archive. Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded it into Debian, where it currently waits in the NEW queue for review by the Debian ftpmasters. I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful for the common folks, ie those not running a large government surveillance system? Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified when number plates on my watch list are discovered. Another use case was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his car. When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway. I guess for such use case it make sense. I am sure there are other use cases too, for those with imagination and a vision. If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/ before running "debuild" to build the source. Or wait a bit until the package show up in unstable.

22 December 2015

John Goerzen: Amtrak Airlines

I came downstairs this morning and found a surprise waiting for me. Chairs from all over had been gathered up and arranged in rows, airline style. Taped to the wall was a food court sign. At the front was a picture of an airplane, decked out with the Amtrak logo of all things, and a timetable taped to our dining room table. IMG_6123 Jacob soon got out string to be seatbelts, too. And, using his copy machine, printed out a picture of a wing to tape to the side of the airplane . IMG_6128 And here is the food court sign Oliver made: IMG_6126 This plane was, according to the boys, scheduled to leave at 9:30. It left a fashionable 2 hours late or so. They told me I would be the pilot, and had me find headphones to be my headset . (I didn t wear my real headset on the grounds that then I wouldn t be able to hear them.) Jacob decided he would be a flight attendant, his grandma would be the co-pilot, and Oliver would be the food court worker. The food court somehow seemed to travel with the plane. Oliver made up a menu for the food court. It consisted of, and I quote: trail mix, banana, trail mix, half banana, trail mix, trail mix, trail mix . He s already got the limited selection of airport food down pat, I can see. Jacob said the flight would be from Chicago to Los Angeles, and so it was. Since it was Amtrak Airlines, we were supposed to pretend to fly over the train tracks the whole way. If it s not Christmas yet, we just invent some fun, eh? Pretty clever.

Ian Wienand: Platform bootstrap for OpenStack Infrastructure

This is a terse guide on bootstrapping virtual-machine images for OpenStack infrastructure, with the goal of adding continuous-integration support for new platforms. It might also be handy if you are trying to replicate the upstream CI environment. It covers deployment to Rackspace for testing; Rackspace is one of the major providers of capacity for the OpenStack Infrastructure project, so it makes a good place to start when building up your support story. Firstly, get an Ubuntu Trusty environment to build the image in (other environments, like CentOS or Fedora, probably work -- but take this step to minimise differences to what the automated machinery of what upstream does). You want a fair bit of memory, and plenty of disk-space. The tool used for building virtual-machine images is diskimage-builder. In short, it takes a series of elements, which are really just scripts run in different phases of the build process. I'll describe building a Fedora image, since that's been my focus lately. We will use a fedora-minimal element -- this means the system is bootstrapped from nothing inside a chroot environment, before eventually being turned into a virtual-machine image (contrast this to the fedora element, which bases itself off the qcow2 images provided by the official Fedora cloud project). Thus you'll need a few things installed on the Ubuntu host to deal with bootstrapping a Fedora chroot 
apt-get install yum yum-utils python-lzma
You will hit stuff like that python-lzma dependency on this road-less-travelled -- technically it is a bug that yum packages on Ubuntu don't depend on it; without it you will get strange yum errors about unsupported compression. At this point, you can bootstrap your diskimage-builder environment. You probably want diskimage-builder from git, and then build up a virtualenv for your support bits and pieces. 
git clone git://git.openstack.org/openstack/diskimage-builder
virtualenv dib_env
. dib_env/bin/activate
pip install dib-utils
dib-utils is a small part of diskimage-builder that is split-out; don't think too much about it. While diskimage-builder is responsible for the creation of the basic image, there are a number of elements provided by the OpenStack project-config repository that bootstrap the OpenStack environment. This does a lot of stuff, including caching all git trees (so CI jobs aren't cloning everything constantly) and running puppet setup. 
git clone git://git.openstack.org/openstack-infra/project-config
There's one more trick required for building the VHD images that Rackspace requires; make sure you install the patched vhd-util as described in the script help. At this point, you can probably build an image. Here's something approximating what you will want to do 
break=after-error \
TMP_DIR=~/tmp \
ELEMENTS_PATH=~/project-config/nodepool/elements \
DIB_DEV_USER_PASSWORD="password"  DIB_DEV_USER_PWDLESS_SUDO=1 \
DISTRO=23 \
./bin/disk-image-create -x --no-tmpfs -t vhd \
   fedora-minimal vm devuser simple-init \
   openstack-repos puppet nodepool-base node-devstack
To break some of this down This goes and does its thing; it will take about 20 minutes. Depending on how far your platform diverges from the existing support, it will require a lot of work to get everything working so you can get an image out the other side. To see a rough example of what should be happening, see the logs of the official image builds that happen for a variety of platforms. At some point, you should get a file image.vhd which is now ready to be deployed. The only reasonable way to do this is with shade. You can quickly grab this into the virtualenv we created before 
pip install shade
Now you'll need to setup a clouds.yaml file to give yourself the permissions to upload the image. It should look something like 
clouds:
  rax:
    profile: rackspace
    auth:
       username: your_rax_username
       password: your_rax_password
       project_id: your_rax_accountnum
    regions:
    - IAD
You should know your user-name and password (whatever you log into the website with), and when you login to Rackspace your project_id value is listed in the drop-down box labeled with your username as Account #. shade has no UI as such, so a simple script will do the upload. 
import shade
shade.simple_logging(debug=True)
cloud = shade.openstack_cloud(cloud='rax')
image = cloud.create_image('image-name', filename='image.vhd', wait=True)
Now wait -- this will also take a while. Even after upload it takes a fair while to process (you will see the shade debug output looping around some glance calls seeing if it is ready). If everything works, the script should return and you should be able to see the new image in the output of nova list-images. At this point, you're ready to try booting! One caveat is that the Rackspace web interface does not seem to give you the option to boot with a configuration drive available to the host, essential for simple-init to bring up the network. So boot via the API with something like 
nova boot --flavor=2 --image=image-uuid --config-drive 1 test-image
This should build and boot your image! This will allow you to open a whole new door of debugging to get your image booting correctly. You can now iterate by rebuilding/uploading/booting as required. Note these are pretty big images, and uploaded in broken-up swift files, so I find swift delete --all helpful to reset between builds (obviously, I have nothing else in swift that I want to keep). The Rackspace java-based console UI is rather annoying; it cuts itself off every time the host reboots. This makes it quite difficult to catch the early bootup, or modify grub options via the boot-loader, etc. You might need to fiddle timeout options, etc in the image build. If you've managed to get your image booting and listening on the network, you're a good-deal of the way towards having your platform supported in upstream OpenStack CI. At this point, you likely want to peruse the nodepool configuration and get an official build happening here. Once that is up, you can start the process of adding jobs that use your platform to test! Don't worry, there's plenty more that can go wrong from here -- but you're on the way! OpenStack infra is a very dynamic environment, which many changes in progress; so in general, #openstack-infra on freenode is going to be a great place to start looking for help.

Jonas Smedegaard: Hamara Linux

Siri and I are on a journey through India and Nepal, with the aim of learning about needs of Debian derivatives, to improve Debian and encourage closer integration.

Distribution Hamara Linux is a distribution based on Trisquel, hence descending from Debian via Ubuntu. Next release will be a direct derivative of Debian. We recommended to package missing parts for Debian itself, even if Hamara needs them faster than deemed "stable" in Debian. ITP bugreports is since filed for theme and install routine.

Visual design Hamara Linux ships with a coherent visual style, covering widget theme, install routine, boot and login, and a range of wallpapers. Siri has begun comparing widget theme against Debian. We might try distill diffs for each Debian Ubuntu Trisquel Hamara derivation.

System contents and setup Hamara Linux comes in two flavors: Hamara Namaste with a GNOME desktop, and Hamara Sugam with an Lxde desktop. I have begun decomposing the package sets into classes for Boxer, at the same time extending Boxer.

Next.

Previous.