Recently after changing my blog to use jekyll and Github I came across the hyde.el an emacs plugin which allows to maintain a jekyll powered blog from emacs. You can find the post by author here and source code here on Github. At first site I was very happy about plugin and started using it but I could successfully use it only once properly then whenever I launch the plugin I get error message

*zsh:cd blog path no such directory*

(Note: I'm a zsh user not sure if this error is particular to zsh only. If you face same error on other shell please let me know) After error hyde mode never showed jekyll blog properly. Looking at the source code I saw all the statements which were commands were executed using shell-command elisp function similar to following The cd command in the string was failing some how spoiling all other stuff!.. Probably the ~ in the path to blog was not properly expanded by shell-command, So I thought why not use elisp in built cd function instead and bingo the hyde mode works perfectly fine now!.. I've raised a pull request as I don't like to maintain a fork. Hope author will consider merging my changes. Hope this fix helps others too. Cya.

With the generous help of the Ubuntu kernel team, Will Drewry s seccomp filter code has landed in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in time for Beta 2, and will be in Chrome OS shortly. Hopefully this will be in upstream soon, and filter (pun intended) to the rest of the distributions quickly. One of the questions I ve been asked by several people while they developed policy for earlier mode 2 seccomp implementations was How do I figure out which syscalls my program is going to need? To help answer this question, and to show a simple use of seccomp filter, I ve written up a little tutorial that walks through several steps of building a seccomp filter. It includes a header file ( seccomp-bpf.h ) for implementing the filter, and a collection of other files used to assist in syscall discovery. It should be portable, so it can build even on systems that do not have seccomp available yet. Read more in the seccomp filter tutorial. Enjoy!

2012, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Linux 3.3 was released earlier this week. Aside from a few regmap related updates it was an extremely quiet release for the ASoC framework, the next few releases look like they will be much more active:

• Conversion of a number of CODEC drivers to use regmap directly. This is especially beneficial for drivers for devices which are part of MFDs as they can use a central cache for all operations and means that the process of factoring out the more complex register management code in ASoC can begin.
• As a result of the move of drivers to regmap the rbtree and LZO cache types have been removed, leaving only the the basic flat cache in ASoC. Drivers which need the more complex cache types should use regmap directly.
• Lots of cleanups and fixes from Axel Lin.
• New CODEC drivers for Cirrus CS42L73 and Realtek ALC5632.

It took a while to get it out, but finally, 3 years after the latest release (1.2), the version of 1.3 of xpyb (the XCB Python bindngs) is out. This version has a lot of improvement, and major bug fixes (memory corruption and memory leak were tracked down and fixed). One amazing feature that is now shipped with that release, is my code to export the xpyb API to other Python modules, allowing to draw with Pycairo in Python using XCB. Here is an example of a Python program that draws a spiral in a window using xpyb and Pycairo. You need xpyb >= 1.3 and Pycairo >= 1.10 to make this works.

import cairo
import xcb
from xcb.xproto import *
WIDTH, HEIGHT = 600, 600
def draw_spiral(ctx, width, height):
    """Draw a spiral with lines!"""
    wd = .02 * width
    hd = .02 * height
    width -= 2
    height -= 2
    ctx.move_to (width + 1, 1-hd)
    for i in range(9):
    ctx.rel_line_to (0, height - hd * (2 * i - 1))
    ctx.rel_line_to (- (width - wd * (2 *i)), 0)
    ctx.rel_line_to (0, - (height - hd * (2*i)))
    ctx.rel_line_to (width - wd * (2 * i + 1), 0)
    ctx.set_source_rgb (0, 0, 1)
    ctx.stroke()
# Connect to the X server
conn = xcb.connect()
# Get the X server setup
setup = conn.get_setup()
# Generate X ID for our X "objects"
window = conn.generate_id()
pixmap = conn.generate_id()
gc = conn.generate_id()
# Create a new window
conn.core.CreateWindow(setup.roots[0].root_depth, window,
                       # Parent is the root window
                       setup.roots[0].root,
                       0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT, 0, WindowClass.InputOutput,
                       setup.roots[0].root_visual,
                       CW.BackPixel   CW.EventMask,
                       [ setup.roots[0].white_pixel, EventMask.ButtonPress   EventMask.EnterWindow   EventMask.LeaveWindow   EventMask.Exposure ])
# Create a pixmap: it will be used to draw with cairo
conn.core.CreatePixmap(setup.roots[0].root_depth, pixmap, setup.roots[0].root,
                       WIDTH, HEIGHT)
# We just need a GC to copy later the pixmap on the window, so create one
# very simple
conn.core.CreateGC(gc, setup.roots[0].root, GC.Foreground   GC.Background,
                   [ setup.roots[0].black_pixel, setup.roots[0].white_pixel ])
# Create a cairo surface
surface = cairo.XCBSurface (conn, pixmap,
                            setup.roots[0].allowed_depths[0].visuals[0], WIDTH, HEIGHT)
# Create a cairo context with that surface
ctx = cairo.Context(surface)
# Paint everything in white
ctx.set_source_rgb (1, 1, 1)
ctx.set_operator (cairo.OPERATOR_SOURCE)
ctx.paint()
# Draw our spiral
draw_spiral (ctx, WIDTH, HEIGHT)
# Map the window on the screen so it gets visible
conn.core.MapWindow(window)
# Flush all X requests to the X server
conn.flush()
while True:
    try:
        event = conn.wait_for_event()
    except xcb.ProtocolException, error:
        print "Protocol error %s received!" % error.__class__.__name__
        break
    except:
        break
    # ExposeEvent are received when we need to refresh the content of the
    # window, so we copy the content of the pixmap (where cairo drew) in the
    # window
    if isinstance(event, ExposeEvent):
        conn.core.CopyArea(pixmap, window, gc, 0, 0, 0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT)
    # You click, I quit.
    elif isinstance(event, ButtonPressEvent):
        break
    conn.flush()

Seeing the complexity it is to draw something simple with this technology, I somehow understand why nobody bothered to release or use the code during the last 3 years. But hey, now that it's out, you can build the next Python based desktop environment with bleeding edge technologies. :-)

Actually, that's not true - I've produced plenty of open source software over the years. However, in a sense, it is true: only the very best actually get paid to work on open source software full time, and I'm not one of them. People like Linus Torvalds. People like Guido van Rossum, although even he supposedly divides his time, and does not work on Python full-time. Think about that. Python is a hugely popular programming language used by many companies and individuals who get a lot of value out of it. But the creator doesn't even work on it full-time. Now, that's just one example - perhaps Guido enjoys the things that Google sends his way to work on outside of Python in any event - but I think it's representative of open source in general. Back to me: I've produced some small bits of open source code that other people find useful. Several people have even built products on Hecl that make money. But I'm not good enough to work on open source full time - I'm not one of those famous, brilliant coders who is so good that someone will find a way to pay them to work on stuff that gets given away for free. I am, however, a good enough programmer to work on people's proprietary code, and have never had too much trouble finding someone with a project they're happy to pay me for. Why is that? Because it's so much easier to funnel money back into a proprietary project. If people like the product and buy it, the company gets money, which can be used to pay the developers. With open source, millions of people might use it and get a lot of value from it, but the developer has no right to receive any of that back as cash, which he or she can use to pay for things like food and rent. So, I can code tolerably well, and I could conceivably contribute more open source code, but instead I spend my time working on proprietary code because it pays the bills. Clearly, when I can, I use open source software in these endeavors, and contribute back whenever I can, but the "secret sauce" remains closed. That's a pair of hands lost to the creation of more open source. I know I'm not alone in this, either - tons of people work on mostly proprietary projects the world over, but relatively few people get paid to work on open source code full time. So when I read about people debating the utility of copyright bring up the existence of open source as some sort of counterexample, it irritates me a bit. The right level of protection and enforcement of copyright is a complex debate that I'm not going to get into here. What I want to point out is "that which is not seen". Sure, open source exists. But how much more of it would exist it there were more money to fund work on it? How much open source software remains an idea in the developers head that does not get realized for lack of time? People often criticize the "Linux desktop" despite its extraordinary strides in recent years. Well, how much farther along would it be if there were more people paid to work on the 'boring stuff', like usability testing? Ubuntu and Redhat pay a few people to do that kind of stuff, but how many more people do Microsoft and Apple have for that kind of work? That's not to say that open source "doesn't work" or some such nonsense. It obviously works quite well, but it really shines where the currency is code, not money. Developers can and do give back lots, in terms of code, bug reports, suggestions, documentation, and so on to open source projects, which make them better for all involved. Where open source doesn't seem to work quite as well are in small, fast-moving, consumer-oriented products. My guess is that 99% of iPhone users could care less about the source code for their apps, but on the other hand, a large portion of the Emacs user base more than likely has written at least a few lines of Elisp. In any event, the point isn't to beat up on open source software, but to counter this idea that "intellectual property" is in no way shape or form necessary because the existence of open source software somehow "proves" that "things will get made just the same". Yes, maybe they will, but in lower quantities than consumers might find desirable. After all, most of us aren't good enough to work on open source software.

Washington s Blog has an informative summary of recent articles about corporate psychopaths [1]. Including the fact that some banks deliberately hire psychopaths. Anu Partanen wrote an insightful article for The Atlantic about the difference between Finnish and American education systems [2]. It seems that Finland has achieved great educational success by aiming for equality with no private schools and giving the teachers and principals enough responsibility to do the job properly. Ramona Pierson gave an interesting TED talk about how she recovered from being run over by a drunk driver with the help of the residents of a senior citizens home [3]. Quyen Nguyen gave a very interesting TED talk about the use of fluorescent dyes in cancer surgery [4]. They can make cancer glow one color and nerves glow with a different color which makes it a much easier task to remove ALL the cancer without cutting the smaller nerves. James Fallows wrote an interesting article for The Atlantic about the experience of having his wife s Gmail account cracked [5]. She stored EVERYTHING in her Gmail account so this was a lot worse for her than for the typical Geek who doesn t use such accounts for storing much. James describes what the attacker did, how they did it, and what needed to be done to recover. When running a mail server it s worth considering what you would do to help a user who was attacked in that way. Charles Stross has written an interesting blog post trying to predict some future psychological and social changes [6]. Matthew Wright of Beyond Zero Emissions has written an informative article about how solar panels on home roofs save everyone money [7]. Mikko Hypponen gave an interesting TED talk about different types of online attack and how they can affect us [8]. Among other things he describes how online attacks can result in people dying. Scott Rickard gave an interesting TED talk about using maths to create SONAR pings without repitition and also the worst music ever created [9]. I found it entertaining to watch Michael Lindel (the director of chamber music for the New York Symphony) play the music, he obviously didn t enjoy that performance. Sheena Iyengar gave an interesting TED talk about the way people make choices [10]. It s useful for anyone who is going to prepare a set of options for someone else to choose from. ASD Aid is a project that uses Lego to encourage kids on the Autism Spectrum to socialise [11]. They have training manuals for using Lego in therapy. Unfortunately they have not been supported by the Lego corporation. Bilal Bomani gave an interesting and informative TED talk about NASA research into renewable aviation fuel [12]. The most interesting thing to me was the way that they were aiming for a sustainable lifecycle that didn t use resources that coule be used for food and which required minimal input once it was started. Alain de Botton gave an interesting TED talk about Atheism 2.0 [13]. He suggests that we adopt some ideas from religious organisations including lectures (sermons), celebrations, and rituals. It s interesting to think of a technology conference as a pilgrimage. Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche from Moto restaurant in Chicago gave an interesting talk about some of the unusual foods that they have produced [14]. If I visit the US again I will try and go to Chicago to eat there!

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/7lwx3z7
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/dyec99u
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/ramona_pierson_an_unexpected_place_of_healing.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/quyen_nguyen_color_coded_surgery.html
• [5] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/1/
• [6] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/world-building-302-psychology.html
• [7] http://beyondzeroemissions.org/media/releases/solar-programs-pay-themselves-and-reduce-cost-electricity-120117
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack.html
• [9] http://www.youtube.com/v/RENk9PK06AQ
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose.html
• [11] http://asdaid.org/
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/bilal_bomani_plant_fuels_that_could_power_a_jet.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/homaro_cantu_ben_roche_cooking_as_alchemy.html

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2. Links February 2012 Sociological Images has an interesting article about the attempts to...
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Svalbard The things you find when cleaning out a disk; preparing for re-installation of your laptop on a larger disk once the laptop comes back from repair... I thought I had posted this in early January, but apparently not. As it would be a shame to just throw this away, here goes: I am sitting in the Oslo airport, waiting for boarding back home to start. Seeing the sun after a week of darkness still feels strange. Inital trouble It's been a very interesting week, starting with our trip to Oslo in the other direction. We spent New Year's Eve in Oslo, timing our forced overnight stay before reaching Svalbard to coincide with something interesting. The close timing of our travel meant that there was exactly one flight to Oslo we could take. Never having heard of Air Baltic before and finding out that they are a discount airline, my gut feeling told me to be be wary. I refuse to fly with those airlines on principle, not wanting to support their business model while hurting airlines with decent treatment of customers. Unfortunately, I was forced to book with them in this case. As it turns out, my gut was right. More on that below. Our plane was late in landing and my luggage was lost. As it was New Year's Eve, the staff at Oslo airport understandably wanted to be home, not at work. Still, getting them to file a report was tedious and finding out days later that the report was incomplete was, well, not good. The express train from the airport to Oslo central station had closed early without any advance notice or local signs, presumably because of NYE. The gates were simply closed and that's that. We figured out how the bus system worked, got our tickets from a vending machine, saw the one bus to central station drive away, and proceeded to wait in the outside waiting area; at least we had a front spot in the queue. While we don't get cold easily, it was funny to see Norwegians in thin clothes stand around in the biting wind, apparently being comfortable. A young mother with a baby, who didn't anticipate being forced to wait outside at -15C, as opposed to just sitting down in a train, had no warm clothes for her son; something that was fixed by wrapping him in spare clothes from Ilona's luggage. After waiting for about thirty minutes for the next bus to appear, it parked twenty or thirty meters away from the designated parking spot. The rough queue disintegrated and if not for Ilona's leaving me with luggage and backpacks and storming off to fight the masses, said mother with baby and ourselves would have waited for another thirty minutes. More than hundred people were left stranded at the airport to celebrate there or on the bus. Meh. We hurried, by taxi, from central station to hotel to harbour and arrived about five minutes to twelve. NYE itself was nice. We stood on top of the opera house and watched a rather impressive show of fireworks through the thickening mists. Norwegian fireworks pack lot more punch than German ones; you actually feel your clothes shake when they go off. Getting to Longyearbyen The flight from Troms to Longyearbyen had free in-flight Wi-Fi and flying over the edge of satellite coverage demonstrated how far we were from everywhere else rather impressively. Arriving at Longyearbyen, I fixed the lost luggage claim with the help of an extremely nice woman working at the airport. She confirmed that Air Baltic is legally required to reimburse me after an arcane system based on a virtual IMF currency to the tune of about 1.500. That may sound like a lot, but seeing as I had most of my scuba gear with me, that's not even half of what my luggage was worth. I was forced to get by New Years with what I had on my body and went shopping the next day when I could buy at least a few things. I got by with spending about 180 by going for non-fitting bargain bin clothes, wanting to reduce impact on Air Baltic. Shortly after that, my luggage arrived, unannounced. Air Baltic refused to reimburse me even though they are legally required to, again the airport staff confirmed this. But unless I sue in the country of destination, Norway, I won't see any money. Long story short: Avoid Air Baltic if possible. They will break the law to cheat you out of money when they have a reasonable expectation of getting away with it. Update: Yep, seems they got away with it unless I take legal measures. You have been warned. Longyearbyen itself was very nice. We started off with a short, guided taxi tour around the city, seeing literally everything of it as there's not a lot of Longyearbyen to start with. Dogsledding Next day, as noted earlier, we went shopping and spent the "evening" with dogsledding which turned out to be tons of fun. We helped with harnessing the dogs which is somewhat cumbersome as the dogs are so eager to burn off their energy that they want to run all over the place, not being put into a harness and snapped onto the pull-line. Never having been dogsledding before I was a bit wary, but riding over not too rough terrain is almost trivial once you get the hang of it; listen to what the musher in front of you yells and emulate the same shouts with your own dogs. If the dogs become too fast, step onto the brake pad which simply drives spikes into the snow. If the dogs slow down while going uphill, skate with one foot to help them. That's it for speed. As the dogs are following the musher's sled anyway, steering the dogs was not a concern. Fun fact: The musher used a laser pointer to steer his dogs; simple, efficient, and presumably fun. We learned, by demonstration, that sledding dogs can eat snow, take a leak, and take a dump while running at full speed and pretty much all at the same time. The dogs are left either in cages or on long chains far away from the city as they tend to bark and howl a lot. We were surprised to learn that, even when there are seals left to hang dry as dog food nearby, there are no problems with bear attacks. Apparently even the extremely aggressive and hungry one year old males will not go near dogs. Still, while out in the ice and snow, our guide carefully flooded all crevices and cliff bases to root out female bears with young ones early. They hide their children from the wind and they will attack, dogs and all, if we get too close. That's why our musher carried rifle in his sled and flare gun on his body. Snowmobile The next "morning", we drove around by snowmobile. This turned out to be extremely boring as it was a curated trip with over half a dozen snowmobiles in our group; a stark contrast to our two-sled tour the day before. The last time I went snowmobiling, we raced each other up and down a two-star black (i.e. steep, bumpy, and curvy) ski slope, jumping several meters when racing over larger bumps and crossing streets, so riding single file at 30 km/h was... anticlimatic. Again, the guide had rifle and flare gun with him. We spent the afternoon and evening walking around the city. Ice bears, part I As the ice caves and the glacier were still closed, we decided to have another walk around the city. Having planned make it a quick tour, we lost track of time due to lack of sun and ended up walking around for seven hours. A note about that trip.. If you are alone with your wife, unarmed, climbing up a very steep and slippery mountainside over a sheet of ice with deep snow underneath and loose rocks in between, and then start shining around with your flashlight under the stilts of an abandoned mine that looks like in a horror movie, the correct answer to "What are you doing?" is never ever "Looking for ice bears". Even if it's the truth, this is not an acceptable answer. I crawled up the last part on all fours, camera and tripod in hand while Ilona stayed about two dozen meters below the mines' entrance, refusing to go another step towards the mine. As soon I made it up the creaky and shaky, for a lack of a better word, let's call it ladder, she forced me to come down again. Bleh, but I guess I deserved that. Armed photographer Next day, we got final confirmation that we would not be allowed to rent snowmobiles to explore the hinterland on our own and that other for some, and I quote, "crazy Russians", no one would even attempt to cross over to Barentsburg. Thus, we ended up renting a car for the ~20 kilometers of total road length. That turned out to be a great idea as it allowed us to get away from the light and take some very nice long exposures. It was then that I got a rental rifle, as well. There is a law against leaving the town unarmed and I was not about to test my luck too much. Turns out that, as part of Germany's WWII reparations, Norway received our all hand guns and as they still function perfectly when dirty and in cold climate which makes them still popular in Svalbard, today. The Karabiner 98 Kurz which I received is built incredibly well. It's somewhat scary inasmuch every detail is designed to make this weapon ready to fire. If you hurry or are inexperienced, you will end up with an unlocked and loaded rifle after putting in the bolt. Putting the safety in and not chambering a bullet takes conscious effort and knowledge of the weapon. This is in stark contrast to other weapons I had the chance to dissect, which all defaulted to being safe. Even other military weapons such as the AK74 and the M4A1 are inherently more secure, designed to be locked and safe. The Mauser K98... not so much. As an aside, they didn't bother to remove the Reichsadler and Swastika from the rifle, contending themselves with striking out the German registration number and stamping the rifle with a Norwegian one. I guess Norwegians don't really "care" about these signs as much as we Germans do. In a way, that's a good thing I guess, at least as long as it's an indication of indifference towards the sign, not one of forgetting or ignoring the underlying issues. Still, I was very glad to have rented the rifle. While Ilona tended to stay in the running car with heat and lights on, I went out and away from the car. Even when standing near a street, a medium snow storm will make you appreciate the four powerful arguments against being eaten by a random bear which are at the ready over your shoulder. We even went to the shooting range so I could get some practice. The procedure is very trusting, as is anything in Longyearbyen. After accessing the interior of one of the houses in a particular way which I won't specify here, you simply switch on the floodlights, put up the red flag, position a target and write your name into the guest book. Once you're done shooting, toss a few coins into the bowl next to the guest book, remove the targets and flag, turn off the lights, close the door and that's that. Unfortunately, the way in was under a few meters of snow so I couldn't get in any practice shots. Ice bears, part II Later, as I was standing on a wind-polished slate of ice taking pictures of the Seed Vault (located here), I heard an ice bear roar behind (i.e. to the north of) me. I consciously remember hearing the bear, I consciously remember facing the other way around, half-crouched, rifle raised in the direction of the roar. I also consciously remember smacking the safety off and chambering a bullet after having regained control of my body. I do not remember spinning around on a wind-polished slate of ice, so treacherous I hand to balance with my arms and didn't even lift my feet when walking over it, without losing balance or footing, nor do I remember crouching and raising the gun. Evolution really is amazing; no matter what primal chord that roar struck, it certainly saved a ton of people over the years. In my case, thankfully, there was no bear to be seen down the slope. There may be no sun or anything, but the snow reflects the starlight so you tend to see surprisingly far and as I was on on the mountainside and the roar came from down from the coast, and as I had my rifle, I decided to finish the photo session while keeping the slope in close view. In hindsight, I am still glad I decided to do that as the shots came out rather nice. Next day, we drove out to Mine 12, the farthest you can away from Longyearbyen. The dump truck transporting coal alternated between driving a full load of coal back to the city and being its own snowplow. One quick trip to get coal, one slow and empty trip to plow away snow, rinse, repeat. If not for that, our 4WD would never have made it all the way up to the mine. Neither snow storms in North America nor around the Alps prepared me for what people on Longyearbyen consider normal wind in their backyard. This is where the word wind-swept was invented. The main reason that Svalbard is inhabited at all, other than the Gulf Stream, is coal. We have been told that the coal up there is of extremely high quality and while I can't say much about that, I can say that it's hard as stone. This is nice as it does not smear when you get coal all over yourself. Just shake out your jacket and pants and you are good as new. On our way back, we met two locals who had just prepared the glacier and ice caves for tourists. Had I known that in advance, I would have tried to go with them to take pictures completely away from all artificial light. Oh well, can't have everything. Speaking of not being able to have everything, the outdoor hot tub in our hotel which integrated ice bar and BBQ grill was still under several meters of snow so we couldn't use that, either. Finally, the few divers who are in Longyearbyen didn't have time to take me onto a trip while I was there. As I already missed my opportunity to dive the Arctic circle when the one diver on Gr msey happened to be on the mainland and barely missing it by diving Str tan instead, this was kind of a bummer. On the plus side, this has given me a goal to pursue and achieve. Random notes For the rest of my notes, I will resort to a largely unsorted list of bullet points as there's just too much to talk about in prose.

• There are a lot of things in Norway that are similar to the Iceland (where we spent our honeymoon over June, experiencing permanent sunshine)
  • Norway uses Torx screws everywhere and for everything. This makes sense and I can't understand why Germany is lagging behind so severely.
  • There is free coffee everywhere.
  • The coffee is horrible.
  • Roads are built onto an artificial ridge, increasing wind speed. This ensures that sand, snow, and debris are always swept off the road and can't pile up too much.
  • As easy as it is to lose track of time when the sun is always up (in Iceland, we come down from a mountain after an extended walk at 01:30 in the morning and never realizing how late it was until we wanted to drive a few more kilometers), it's just as easy to lose track of time when it's always dark. We went for a "short" walk to take a few pictures and, on coming back to the hotel, realized that it had taken us seven hours.
  • You start to realize where sagas, trolls, little people and other folklore is coming from when exposed to raw nature. Especially once vision becomes bad and you see shadows dance in the snow (and sand, in Iceland's case) storm.
  • The concept of Common Land is pervasive. Just walk anywhere, no one cares.
  • No one has ever heard of OpenStreetMap, which is weird as people up there rely on GPS a lot.
• Locals tend to keep all lights on 24/7. I guess that's understandable.
• There is an eerie shine all over the land as the snow reflects and re-reflects the little light given off by the moon and stars.
• Almost all houses are built from wood. Drift-wood in the early days, imported wood today. The few concrete cause massive problems when the cold makes their floors and walls crack. Also, concrete is very hard to heat when it's sitting right on the perma-frost.
• Houses are not built on the ground, but on stilts. Drill a few holes into the ground, put long trunks into them, wait a few months for the perma-frost to freeze them into place and build your house on that. This insulates your house and gives you storage space below. Simple and efficient.
• Winter is so cold that people in Longyearbyen are forced to build water, sewage, and electricity infrastructure over ground, on stilts, and put in active heating. Else, it would burst or rupture.
• Our hotel had the taps running 24/7 as they already had a pipe burst a week before we arrived.
• The air is incredibly dry even though Longyearbyen is a coastal city. This is great as snow does not stick to anything, including clothes and camera lenses during long exposures against the wall in a snowstorm. Not so much when you suddenly realize that this means all rocks will be loose, scraping your shin open quite thoroughly.
• It's very hard to judge distances in permanent darkness; you will usually underestimate distances by a lot.
• This also means that you should not trust people when they tell you that Mine 2 is "not far away".
• Ice bear danger is real.
• Locals will not tell you about hiking trails unless you assure them that you are armed.
• Snow storms are amazing, impressive, and frightening. They will also make distances appear a lot farther, all of a sudden.
• While Longyearbyen does not have any sales or alcohol taxes and alcohol is still more expensive than in Germany.
• Stating that you won't drink before the sun goes down is a neat trick.
• Coldness and dryness mean your lips will burst open within seconds after holding a flashlight in your mouth as I usually do. As it's dark all the time, I tended to do that a lot. I learned quickly not to, though.
• I saw an arctic fox run through Longyearbyen, we saw two reindeer and we saw what we think are ice bear tracks behind our hotel.
• Timing your travel to catch the Quadrantids is useless when there are several independently moving layers of clouds for a full week.
• The Aurora Borealisis an elusive thing. We have a few long exposures with it showing, but we didn't see anything with our bare eyes.
• The few minutes when we saw stars, meteors, the moon, Jupiter, and Venus all at once were worth it and more.
• Survival is no joke up there. They keep a coal mine running just to power their local plant.
• That plant has its own storage facility for coal in case the mine shuts down.
• There are several independent "fire houses" that can provide energy and heat in case the power plant shuts down.
• The seed vault is somewhat boring on the outside, but it's one of the most important sites on Earth and visiting it was nice.

All in all, it was well worth it. PS: If you know anyone working with Google Maps, ask them to consider improving their coverage of the Arctic. This is a real pity. As is the rest of the Arctic and the fact that Google Earth cheats you out of the North and South Pole by stretching adjacent tiles into and over them.

As there has been a lot of feedback to my post regarding Lenovo's hardware quality, I thought it would only be fair to follow this up now that my laptop returned from Lenovo. After waiting about 15 minutes on the phone, I got to speak to an actual human. While I really do not have a problem with foreigners and love to talk to people from other cultures, I do firmly believe that someone working in a telephone support position should have at least basic language skills, both spoken and written. This was not the case and communicating my issues, and making sure that they would be written down correctly, took a long time and was generally frustrating. I put four things into the returns package:

• A letter describing all problems in depth
• Lenovo ThinkPad x220 (no HDD, no battery)
• UMTS micro-PCIe card
• Broken power adapter

In said letter, I specified all my issues with the laptop, how removing the UMTS card will improve, but not fix the situation, and that the power brick will deliver power for a split second and then go off for a second; rinse repeat. Not having heard from them for a week, I decided to follow up on the status. As Lenovo's web interface claimed my ticket number did not exist, I spent a total of 1 hour 47 minutes in the waiting loop, not counting the menu selections. I never even managed to even reach a human. The day before I left for Open Source Days, the laptop arrived. The ticket number still did not exist according to the web interface and they never sent email even though they had my address, but at least my issue was fixed. Or so I thought. The repair slip claimed they switched out the mainboard, a claim I can not prove/disprove.

• The laptop is still not fixed, something that was obvious after literally less than five minutes of testing.
• They never even put the UMTS micro-PCIe card back into the laptop to test with.
• The power brick does not deliver any power at all, but when I plug it into my laptop, the laptop starts to hum on a low noise and sing in a high-pitched one, alternatively.

It's OK not to find a bug in the first try, especially when it's not as simple as "display cracked". It's not quite as OK to not properly test a machine before sending it back. It's definitely not OK to not care in the least and just send back a machine which you obviously did not even try to debug. How they could not replace the power brick is beyond me. Thankfully, I ordered three separate ones and that was just my on-desk one so I have two others. Still. Overall, I am not impressed.

As Christian already wrote, there s an Aptitude revival ongoing. We already saw this young team releasing aptitude 0.6.5 about 6 weeks ago, more commits have been made, and now we re heading towards an 0.6.6 release quickly. But this revival mostly covers the well-known and loved curses interface (TUI) of aptitude and not the seldomly installed GTK interface, which unfortunately never really took off: While aptitude itself (i.e. the curses and commandline interface) is installed on nearly 99% of all Debian installations which take part in Debian s Popularity Contest statistics, aptitude-gtk is only installed on 0.42% of all these installations. One reason is likely that aptitude-gtk still hasn t all the neat features of the curses interface. And another reason is probably that it s still quite buggy. Since nobody from the current Aptitude Team has the experience, leisure or time to resurrect (or even complete) aptitude-gtk, the plan is to stop building aptitude-gtk from the aptitude source package soon, i.e. to remove it from Debian for now. Like the even less finished Qt interface of aptitude, its code will stay in the VCS, but will be unmaintained unless someone steps up to continue aptitude-gtk (or aptitude-qt, or both), maybe even as its own source package. So if you like aptitude-gtk so much that you re still using it and want to continue using it, please think about contributing by joining the Aptitude Team and getting aptitude s GUI interface(s) back in shape. Another option would be to find a mentor so that resurrecting (one of) aptitude s GUI interfaces could become (again) a potential project at Debian s participation at Google s Summer of Code. Please direct any questions about aptitude-gtk or aptitude-qt to the Aptitude Development Mailing List. Or even better, join the discussion in this thread.

I gave a brief introductory talk about Android at this month s LUV meeting. Here are the slides with a brief description. All the screen-shots were made on a Samsung Galaxy S running Cyanogenmod version 7.1 [1] (Android version 2.3.7). With that build of Cyanogenmod you can press the power button for about 1.5 seconds to get a menu which gives an option to take a screen shot. The aim of the talk was to give an overview of what Android can do. I also gave some random commentary about Android such as explaining why it doesn t make a good phone. Most of the pictures in this post have links to the Android applications in question. Essential and Important Apps I started by explaining why having root access to your system is really important, including the issue of backing up an Android phone [2]. Cyanogenmod includes a terminal program which allows you to run su - . Running a shell as root isn t generally that useful, what you really want is to be able to run programs such as Titanium Backup which can only work properly if given root access. When you run an OS that allows root access you can run su - at a terminal prompt and you can also have an application use a GUI to request root access. I recommend rooting and modding an Android phone immediately after buying it. However that takes some time which is somewhat equivalent to money and is a significant hidden cost to purchasing an Android phone. The business models of telephone companies seem to involve hidding users for unexpected fees and extra fees for excess bandwidth can be really expensive. 3G Watchdog is one app that can monitor bandwidth and disable data transfers if too much is used. Onavo is an alternative that allows tracking data use on a per-application basis, but it only runs on Android 2.3.x while 3G Watchdog works on Android 2.1. EBay has an official app which is handy for searching for items. So far I ve only used it to get price estimates and have used a PC for buying. K9 seems to be the best MUA for Android. The MUA that ships with Android 2.1 isn t nearly as good and K9 is good enough that I didn t even bother testing the MUA from Cyanogenmod. The above picture shows a list of mail in my SE Linux folder. The Opticron Grapher is a good graphing calculator. I won t claim it s the best because I didn t seriously test such programs, but for the basic tests I ve done it has worked well. The Google Maps client comes with every Android system, the above shows the location of the LUV meeting. Osmand is an Android client for the Open Street Map project. Here is the web site for the Open Street Map project [3]. One significant advantage of OSM over the Google Maps is that OSM is free, the data is all contributed by users like Wikipedia. Another significant advantage is that you can download as much data as you need to your phone, for example the entire dataset for Australia is about 200M. Storing 200M of data on your phone is no big deal when you consider the availability of phones with more than 16G of storage and the ability to use a map when offline is a real benefit. So far I ve used Osmand while waiting for a train at an underground station and I plan to use it to track my progress the next time I m on a cruise. Serval is a mesh networking application for Android that supports VOIP phone calls and distributing messages and files. It s designed to be used in disaster areas, but there are lots of other potential uses of the technology. The Serval Project blog has an article about the presentation they gave at LCA 2012 [4].
Periodic Droid is my favorite Periodic Table viewing program. The Tomfusion AU Weather forecast app seemed to be better than the one from the BoM last time I checked. It s probably the best weather app for Australia.
The Opera Mini browser is often faster than other browsers because it uses a compressing proxy run by Opera. It s not so good for privacy though I have been using Wapedia for browsing Wikipedia. Since giving the talk I discovered the Official Wikipedia browser from the Wikimedia foundation [5] which is a better fit for my needs and I ve uninstalled Wapedia. As an aside modern phones have 16G of storage or more and could easily have a copy of the entire English text of Wikipedia on internal storage. It would be good if someone like Jason King (who is known for work on stand-alone DVD images for Wikipedia) was to write an Android program to do this. Handy Apps
Androsensor is a program to display output from most (all?) of the sensors on your phone. The results aren t as accurate as one would hope, for example Earth s gravity is 9.81m/s^2 not the 10.26m/s^2 my phone registered. But they are a useful indication.

The Zxing Barcode scanner is one of many programs that will scan barcodes with the camera in an Android phone. It can launch a Google search on a product code or open a URL from a
QR Code. The above pictures show it scanning a Coke can (the can and other background was displayed on the full screen before the screen capture program activated), doing a Google search on the can barcode, and looking up a QR code that was on an advertisment outside the LUV venue. Cruise Cams allows you to download pictures from cruise ships. Some cruise ships have several cameras on different parts of the ship uploading pictures regularly so that people around the world can see what s happening. The c:geo opensource program allows you to get information on Geocaches and see a compass or map showing the location. This program has been getting an increasing number of features to do everything you might want to do related to Geocaching. The above picture shows some caches that are close to where I made the screen-shot, in a park a couple of Km from the meeting location. The Google Sky map uses augmented reality techniques to display stars in the direction that your phone is pointing along with their names and the names of the constellations.


The Marine Traffic program shows the locations of ships as well as lots of information about them. The above pictures show me discovering that the Pacific Sun was nearby, viewing it s location on Google Maps, seeing the details, and then viewing fan pictures. The developer s web site allows viewing all the same data without an Android phone [6]. Anyone can join the project by buying an Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver and configuring a PC to take data from AIS and send it to the MarineTraffic.com servers. As an aside they seem to be missing coverage in western Victoria, so it would be good if someone near Apollo Bay or Warrnambool could install an AIS receiver and help out. Satellite AR uses augmented reality to show the location of satellites and other things in spare. Unfortunately the screen capture process turned off the camera as I had a sign advertising fast food positioned in an amusing location in the background.
Shipmate publishes a set of programs giving information on cruise ships, they have one program for each cruise line. Above is the program for the Princess cruise line, the above pictures give information on the Dawn Princess. Unfortunately the program wasn t usable without net access when I tried to use it on a cruise ship. Games Air Attack HD is an entertaining game that demonstrates the capability of Android phones to run action games. Like many Android games it has a free version and paid versions if you want more. Angry Birds is one of the most well known games for touch-screen devices. It has also spawned a huge line of merchandise.
Labyrinth Lite is one of the many Android games based on the old mechanical game where you tilt a toy to roll a ball-bearing through a maze. It s free and is better than most of the free games in that genre. Minecraft Pocket Edition allows you to play Minecraft on your phone. The demo version doesn t allow saving the game, you have to buy the game for about $5 if you want to do that. It also lacked the full features of the game last time I checked, it didn t have monsters.
Paradise Island is one of many business simulation games for Android. It s more playable than most and has very detailed graphics, but the down-side is that it s a memory hog and will crash if you don t have enough RAM. It s one of the games that are free to download but encourage you to pay money to level up, for some players it s probably a very expensive game. Tower Raiders 2 is one of the better tower defense games for Android.

• [1] http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/07/5-principles-backup/
• [3] http://www.openstreetmap.org/
• [4] http://www.servalproject.org/archives/862
• [5] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia
• [6] http://www.marinetraffic.com/

Related posts:

1. Choosing an Android Phone My phone contract ends in a few months, so I m...
2. Galaxy S vs Xperia X10 and Android Network Access Galaxy S Review I ve just been given an indefinite loan...
3. Standardising Android Don Marti wrote an amusing post about the lack of...

The annoucement below just went to the R-SIG-Finance list. More information is as usual the the R / Finance page:

Now open for registrations: R / Finance 2012: Applied Finance with R
May 11 and 12, 2012
Chicago, IL, USA
The registration for R/Finance 2012 -- which will take place May 11 and 12 in Chicago -- is NOW OPEN! Building on the success of the three previous conferences in 2009, 2010, and 2011, we expect more than 250 attendees from around the world. R users from industry, academia, and government will join 40+ presenters covering all areas of finance with R. This year's conference will start earlier in the day on Friday, to accommodate the tremendous line up of speakers for 2012, as well as to provide more time between talks for networking. We are very excited about the four keynotes by Paul Gilbert, Blair Hull, Rob McCulloch, and Simon Urbanek. The main agenda includes nineteen full presentations and eighteen shorter "lightning talks". We are also excited to offer six optional pre-conference seminars on Friday morning. Once again, we are hosting the R/Finance conference dinner on Friday evening, where you can continue conversations while dining and drinking atop a West Loop restaurant overlooking the Chicago skyline. More details of the agenda are available at:

http://www.RinFinance.com/agenda/

Registration information is available at

http://www.RinFinance.com/register/

and can also be directly accessed by going to

http://www.regonline.com/RFinance2012

On behalf of the committee and sponsors, we look forward to seeing you in Chicago!

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson,
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

Our 2012 Sponsors:

International Center for Futures and Derivatives at UIC Revolution Analytics
Sybase
MS-Computational Finance at University of Washington Google
lemnica
OpenGamma
OneTick
RStudio
Tick Data

See you in Chicago in May!!

Following Xavier's steps, last week a new patch set has been commited to GNOME Online Account master repo, this time to add support for Facebook client-side auth flow, which does not require secret keys to work.

This means that since GNOME 3.4 it will be possible to enable Facebook support at configure time (yep, by default it's still disabled. Distributions will explicitly need to enable it for now). Currently only chat is supported.


The steps to enable it are easy:
Use --enable-facebook at configure time and compile+install as usual.A default FB application id is used, so you don't need to provide it.
Using the freshly updated goa-daemon (use --replace in case you're unsure) select online accounts from the control panel, add a facebook account (which should be now possible to select, along with at Google and Windows live if you've enabled it) and follow the on-screen instruction.
You'll need to authenticate yourself against Facebook and authorize the GNOME application.
Once your account has been created, set your presence to Available using Empathy or gnome-shell.
Now chat with your Facebook buddies \o/

It requires empathy (>=3.3.2), telepathy-gabble (>= 0.15.0) and of course gnome-online-accounts (the soon soon to be released 3.4.0, or directly git master)

Thanks to Xavier who backported to 3.4 my patches, originally meant for 3.6, and to Collabora who allowed us to improve Gnome Online Accounts!

After the rush of new features in version 3.2 this has been a fairly quiet cycle for the regmap API, the main change being the wider usage by drivers. In terms of development of the subsystem itself this release sees:

I ve just seen a mailing list post from someone who needs an ancient printer to work with their old software. As the printer is no longer manufactured and changing the software is expensive this puts them in a difficult situation which can be profitable for someone who happens to own an ancient printer that still works. This sort of thing is not uncommon at all. Ebay is a nice auction and online store site but it doesn t cater for long term personal adverts. I ve got a lot of old computer equipment that I keep because it might be useful at some time and it s a shame to throw away working equipment. I d like to be able to list that stuff on a sale site and have the adverts stay online for years just in case someone wants to pay a decent amount of money for it. If there was such a site I would also list all the systems in my test network, I can test software just as well with different hardware if someone wants to pay decent money for what I ve currently got. Storage space is pretty cheap and searching for keywords isn t that difficult either. The cost of running an online personal sale site for items that sell every few years isn t going to be much greater than running one that sells items after 10 days. But the profit in many cases will be a lot greater, an old printer that sells for $10 on Ebay could go for $200 or more if the seller could wait for a buyer who had some enterprise software that absolutely depended on that particular printer. Does anyone know of such an online sale site? If not does anyone want to start one? Related posts:

1. Dear Magazines Please Publish Your Adverts Online When reading a magazine I often see an advert for...
2. Friends and Adverts For some time I have been running Google Adsense adverts...
3. Used Car Prices There is an interesting article in The Age about the...

Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:22:10 +0000
From: James Troup <troup@samosa.debian.org>
To: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>
Cc: da-manager@debian.org
Subject: New Debian maintainer Aurelien Jarno [ This is a long (automatically-generated) mail, but it contains
important information, please read it all carefully. ] Dear Aurelien Jarno! An account has been created for you on developer-accessible machines with username aurel32 . The password for this account can be found encrypted with your PGP or GPG key and appended to this message. A list of machines available to Debian developers can be found at <URL:http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi>. Please take a minute now to familiarize yourself with the Debian Machine Usage Policy, available at <URL:http://www.debian.org/devel/dmup> You have been subscribed to the debian-private mailing list as <aurel32@debian.org>. Please respect the privacy of that list and don t forward mail from it elsewhere. E-mail to <aurel32@debian.org> will be forwarded to <aurelien@aurel32.net>. To change this, please see <URL:http://db.debian.org/forward.html> Also, please subscribe to debian-devel-announce, if you haven t done so already. We strongly suggest that you use your aurel32@debian.org address for the maintainer field in your packages, because that one will be valid as long as you are a Debian developer, even if you change jobs, leave university or change Internet Service providers. If you do so, please add that address to your PGP/GPG key(s) (using gpg edit-key YOUR USER ID ) and send it to the keyring server at keyring.debian.org with gpg keyserver keyring.debian.org send-keys YOUR USER ID . You can find more information useful to developers at <URL:http://www.debian.org/devel/> (in particular, see the subsection titled Debian Developer s reference ). We suggest that you subscribe to debian-mentors@lists.debian.org. This list is for new maintainers who seek help with initial packaging and other developer-related issues. Those who prefer one-on-one help can also post to the list, and an experienced developer may volunteer to help you. You can get online help on IRC, too, if you join the channel #debian-devel on irc.debian.org. Take a look at the support section on www.debian.org in order to find out more information. You should have read these documents before working on your packages. o The Debian Social Contract
<URL:http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html> o The Debian Policy Manual
<URL:http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/> If you have some spare time and want to contribute it to Debian you may wish to take a look at the Work-Needing and Prospective Packages for Debian GNU/Linux also known as WNPP that can be found at <URL:http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/> If you plan to make a Debian package from a not yet packaged piece of software you *must* announce your intention on the debian-devel mailing list to make sure nobody else is working on them. The machine ftp-master.debian.org is our main archive server. Every uploaded package finds it s way there (except for Packages covered by US crypto laws which go to non-us.debian.org) eventually. master.debian.org is the home of our bug tracking system. Project web pages and CVS archives are hosted on klecker.debian.org (aka cvs/www.debian.org), klecker is also our general shell server. Web pages should be placed in public_html on klecker and refered to by http://people.debian.org/~aurel32 You should use ssh to log into the machines instead of regular telnet or rlogin. Our LDAP directory is able to share ssh RSA keys among machines, please see <URL:http://db.debian.org/doc-mail.html> Otherwise when you first login a ~/.ssh directory will be created with the appropriate permissions. Please be aware of the security implications of using RSA authentication and ssh agents. Finally, please take a minute to visit <URL:http://db.debian.org/>.
Login using the password information appended to this email, and update your personal information. The information is used to maintain your accounts on various Debian machines, and also to allow other developers and general users to find out more about you. Many of the fields are only visible to other registered Debian developers. This is also the only way to change your password. The passwd program does not yet work. Welcome to the project!
The Debian New Maintainer Team

I couldn't find an end-to-end document online about this just bits and pieces here and there. Let me describe how to install Debian testing (wheezy) without a keyboard using an USB flash drive and ssh.

I've got an HP Microserver a month or so ago and this is the step by step of my second install. The first one was also keyboardless but didn't involve an USB flash drive to bootstrap. I've used tftpd and dhcp from my laptop, but forgot to capture the notes to make a blog post. Shame on me.

Here's what you need:

• A machine that will boot from USB. (HP Microserver comes with USB, Net and Disk boot order by default);
• USB flash drive (>=256MB, mine is 1GB);
• Machine with an ssh client to answer d-i's questions;
• A DHCP server in your network.

• Download the right debian installer boot image. Pay attention to "amd64" here since your architecture might be different. - http://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/amd64/daily/hd-media/boot.img.gz

• Gunzip boot.img.gz.

• Transfer the image to the USB flash drive using dd if=boot.img of=/dev/<tokendev> . It will give you a few files in the USB flash drive. It's like you are mirroring what's in boot.img into it. Syslinux will be there.

• Download an ISO image - http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/. I've got netinst. Pay attention again to the architecture (amd64).

• Mount the USB flash drive.

• Copy the ISO image as is to the root directory of the USB flash drive. Using cp, yeah.

At this point you have all that you need to do a regular install using an USB flash drive and it's kinda of well documented. Well, we still need to change it to make it work without a keyboard and give you the ability to ssh into the installer.

Create a preseed.cfg in the root directory of the USB flash drive containing the following:

d-i netcfg/get_hostname string HOSTNAME
d-i netcfg/get_domain string DOMAIN
d-i anna/choose_modules string network-console
d-i network-console/password password INSERT_A_PASSWORD_HERE
d-i network-console/password-again password INSERT_A_PASSWORD_HERE

Edit syslinux.cfg in the root directory of the USB flash drive to look like this:

default netinst
prompt 0
timeout 5
label netinst
menu label netinst
 kernel linux
 append auto=true vga=normal file=/preseed.cfg initrd=initrd.gz priority=critical

• Umount the USB flash drive.

• Boot your new machine using the USB flash drive.

• d-i should do its thing and show and only stop to show you the screen pointing out that you can ssh as installer@<ip>.

• ssh from another machine as user installer to <ip>. Remember you've provided the password in the preseed.cfg above. You will be all set to install from there.

The Debian Project s annual conference is slowly coming closer. Visiting places around the world since 2000, DebConf will take place this year in Managua, Nicaragua, in July and will again provide an opportunity for people who contribute to Debian to meet in person for face-to-face collaboration and discussions. At DebConf we try to bring together as many Debian contributors as possible, including those who could not afford to attend from their own resources. You can help make DebConf12 a success by your organisation becoming a sponsor, or by donating money as an individual. Individual donations can be made online in either US dollars or euros. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can find more information about DebConf12 sponsor page or directly contact <sponsors@debconf.org>. In addition to monetary donations, sponsorship can be provided in the form of in-kind donations, or by lending equipment for the conference period.

We're now 2.5 months in 2012 and I'm indeed getting closer of my first big goal of the year : the 80km run of Paris Ecotrail. The race takes place next Saturday, March 24th, with a start at 12:00 in the South-West of Paris area (close to our place). The race is mostly a trail race in woods and forests in the neighbourhood of Paris, going up and down in our small hills and valleys, passing along pools and lakes and indeed showing the natural beauties we have less than 20km away from center Paris. The race ends at the Eiffel Tower. And they really mean it! The race ends at Eiffel Tower's *first floor* after climbing the steps there. Those of you who have been there can imagine the surprise of tourists from all over the world when hundreds of "road warriors" wearing water backpacks, head lamps and looking a bit tired come and climb the Old Lady's stairs. So, in case you happen to be touring in Paris on the week-end of March 24-25, just pop up at Eiffel Tower around 10-11pm (yes, at night) and try to spot a bubulle crawling up there to reach the finish line..:-) To prepare this, I already ran 538km in 2012, mostly done either with my daily commute runs...or with week-end long runs (up to 37km on march 4th, and many others above 20km). I ran two half-marathons as well: one in February, where I nearly broke my record, finishing it in 1h37'45" even though this is a quite though race with two hills. I was very in shape that day and was lucky to run with a friend setting the pace for me, which helps a lot. Another half-marathon last Sunday in Rambouillet was also a good race, though I was secretly hoping to break my record there (the race is flat, much more than the former one). I had however to slow down from a 4'35"/km pace to 4'50"/km in order to preserve my condition. And, finally, I completed the race in 1h39'53". So, two half-marathons in less than 1h40 again. That sounds promising for the Ecotrail (even if there nothing similar between a flat half-marathon and a hilly ultra-trail) and also for the next marathon, in June. I'll keep you posted about the Ecotrail race but I can announce in advance that I'll be using the Runtastic app on my brand new Android phone, and people will be able to follow my race live here. And you'll even be able to cheer at /me..:-) Next running update on Sunday 25th to give you the outcome....

Hello As maintainer of libwx-scintilla-perl, I had to update the package to update a dependency declation to close bug #662427. The dependency was good enough for the package to work but it blocked the linpng15 transition. This is yet another detail to remember when updating package: whether the dependencies are impacted by a transition. As I m really bad at remembering such details, I ve added the relevant check in the dpkg control source model used by cme. Now running cme check dpkg will warn you if a dependency impacts a transition. And cme fix dpkg will fix you dependency list as resquested by a transition. Well, that holds true for the transition I m aware of. Feel free to contact me if more transition checks are needed. For those who are curious (or want to send me a patch for another transition), here s the actual implementation of these new checks. All the best

So, since Wednesday, we have no more teenagers among our children. Indeed, our youngest, Magali, turned 20 and we happily celebrated that in a japanese restaurant in Paris : Magali is living in a (very) small flat in Paris as she attends preparation courses for exams meant to enter physical therapist schools. She's currently working very hard to prepare these and is left with only one week before the first exam. We're 100% confident that she'll succeed. Really, the days where our little shrimp was crawling across her bed, turning clockwise and finally sleeping in the width of the bed....do not seem so far. And still, these folks we call "our kids" are now grown-up persons living their own lives : Jean-Baptiste (some of my friends reading this blog have met him at DebConf 10) will soon enter profesionnal life after graduating an engineering school in electronics, at 24. Sophie, now 22, will resume her social worker school in Bordeaux in September and will probably start working as social worker ("assistante sociale", in French) afterwards. And we hope that our little shrimp (which her sister calls "mini-poop") starts a physical therapist school next year. So, well, more and more, Elisabeth and I are old parents and weeks where we're indeed both alone at home are now common (not to mention weeks where only one of us is alone either because she has professionnal commitments on some other side of the planet or I have some free software event on another side of the planet). It is indeed really likely that this year's holidays will be the first ones where we have a distant travel...which we'll be doing alone. Holidays in Nicaragua (you probably guess why Nicaragua) are much awaited and will be enjoyed a lot, but still...:-) So, well, to all those of you who read this and are parents, or plan to become parents, be happy. The wonder that it is lasts for years and it's very hard to describe precisely the link that connects parents and their children. At least the one we have with our children, which both us and them are proud of. And that pride and this link have no price. I really wish you guys to develop the same with your newborns (particularly those of you who very very very recently became parents anbd, yes I mean you who know who you are...).