Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Did further significant work on a beta/stealth healthcare project released under a free-software license.
• Added support to the Reddit Enhancement Suite to avoid potential double-posting on CTRL+Enter. (#2537)
• Added the ability to specify the Vault password from the environment in Ansible. (#13206)
• Submitted a proof-of-concept patch to Django to workaround the latest release shipping invalid .py files that are used as templates. (#5735)
• Wrote django-template-tests, a tool to perform static analysis on Django templates prior to production. (code)
• Fixed a long-standing attachment encoding issue and added a "subjects" command to my tickle-me-email GTD email toolbox.
• Corrected the output of a template subsystem deprecation warning in Django. (#5681)
• Added Django 1.9 support to django-setuptest. (#26)
• Packaged django-switch-templatetag to avoid embedding this functionality in a number of projects of mine. (code)
• Corrected the exit semantics of blockfinder's testsuite. (#89)
• Corrected the queue documentation and worked with Bastian Hoyer to merge Python 3 support into django-slack. (#12)
• Added Python 3 support to django-auto-one-to-one. (diff)
• Adjusted first-commit.com's regex to be more lenient. (#3)
• Worked with @freeyoung to merge support for an improved config file format into dns-filter. (#4)
• Added audiobook support to my personal music library.
• Moved my TP-Link TR-ML3020 router to OpenWRT and started to configure it using Ansible, without requiring Python to be installed on the target device. (code)

---

After 1.5 years of work we released APT 1.1 this week! I m very excited about this milestone. The new 1.1 has some nice new features but it also improves a lot of stuff under the hood. With APT 1.0 we did add a lot of UI improvements, this time the focus is on the reliability of the acquire system and the library. Some of the UI highlights include:

• apt install local-file.deb works
• apt build-dep foo.dsc works
• apt supports most of the common apt-get/apt-cache commands so you save some typing :)
• apt update progress reporting much more accurate
• apt-cache showsrc --only-source srcpkgname does the right thing
• The --force-yes option is split into the more fine grained --allow- downgrades, remove-essential, change-held options
• Documentation and help output improvements
• apt-mark supports more states
• Support for deb822 style sources.list.d files

Under the hood:

• No more guessing when fetching files (we did this to support old repository formats) only download stuff that is listed in the ,In release file).
• support for by-hash index downloads (once the servers support that no more hashsum-mismatch errors because of proxies or transparent proxies)
• we support downloading additional files that are opaque for apt itself (like apt-file or appstream data)
• the acquire system is more atomic and more robust, no more issues with captive portals
• protection about a class of endless-data attacks from hostile MITM
• disallow signed repositories from ever becoming unsigned
• privilege dropping in the acquire methods
• if ,In Release did not change, do not bother checking the other indexes (lot less HITs on the mirrors on not-modified resources)
• SRV record support
• improved policy engine
• key pinning for sources
• deprecation of some library functions
• support for IDN domains

Whats also very nice is that apt is now the exact same version on Ubuntu and Debian (no more delta between the packages)! If you want to know more, there is nice video from David Kalnischkies Debconf 2015 talk about apt at https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/216/this-apt-has-super-cow-powers/. Julian Andres Klode also wrote about the new apt some weeks ago here. The (impressive) full changelog is available at http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/a/apt/apt_1.1.3_changelog. And git has an even more detailed log if you are even more curious :) Enjoy the new apt!

A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled "The GPL is not magic pixie dust" explain the importance of making sure the GPL is enforced. I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:

The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.
The first step is to choose a copyleft license for your code.
The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license, it must be enforced
and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of work
is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.

-- Bradley Kuhn, in FaiF episode 0x57 As the Debian Website used to imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or software products. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but such licenses are not enough. With the ongoing adoption of Free Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always. As Karen and Bradley explained in FaiF episode 0x57, copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court to protect it. The reality of today's world is that legal representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming. With gpl-violations.org in hiatus until some time in 2016, the Software Freedom Conservancy (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations. In March the SFC supported a lawsuit by Christoph Hellwig against VMware for refusing to comply with the GPL in relation to their use of parts of the Linux kernel. Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and conferences blocked or cancelled their talks. As a result they have decided to rely less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of individuals who support Free Software and copyleft. So the SFC has launched a campaign to create a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free Software. If you support Free Software, like what the SFC do, agree with their compliance principles, are happy about their successes in 2015, work on a project that is an SFC member and or just want to stand up for copyleft, please join Christopher Allan Webber, Carol Smith, Jono Bacon, myself and others in becoming a supporter. For the next week your donation will be matched by an anonymous donor. Please also consider asking your employer to match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC. Don't forget to spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or social media accounts.

I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter of Software Freedom Conservancy myself. Perhaps you should be a supporter too?

Yesterday, Gammu 1.36.7 has been released. This time the list of changes got bigger, improving compatibility with many devices:

• Support devices which do not report full network status.
• Disable Huawei unsolicited messages on startup.
• Various improvements for Huawei modems.
• Fixed compilation on Windows.
• Fixed regression with Siemens AX75.
• Improved decoding of USSD responses.
• Properly decode emojis to console or files backend.
• Added support for proxying the connection through arbitrary command.
• SMSD now tracks retries count per message.

You an support further Gammu development at Bountysource salt.

Filed under: English Gammu Wammu 0 comments

The following is a short summary of my open source work in November. My hope is that keeping better track of what I m doing will help me reflect on how I spend my time, and help me to focus my efforts better.

Debian

• Completed the NM process and became a Debian Developer in the end of October.
• Joined the Debian Python Modules Team (DPMT).
• Fixed RC bug #803662 and uploaded sphinxcontrib-spelling 2.1.2-1.
• Uploaded python-uritools 1.0.1-2: Moved to DPMT. Now runs tests when building.
• Uploaded python-ws4py 0.3.4-2: Moved to DPMT. Migrated to git-dpm and pybuild. Now runs tests when building.
• Uploaded python-pykka 1.2.1-2: Moved to DPMT. Migrated to git-dpm and pybuild. Now runs tests when building.
• Tested the upcoming Debian packaging of the Let s Encrypt client software on Ubuntu 15.10, and reported a missing dependency. (Successfully created and deployed five free TLS certificates in a few minutes.)
• Uploaded mopidy-dleyna 1.0.4-1: New upstream release.
• Uploaded mopidy-podcast 1.1.2-1: New upstream release. Now runs tests when building.
• Uploaded mopidy-soundcloud 2.0.1-1: New upstream release.

Mopidy

• Released Mopidy-Spotify 2.2.0: Fixes related to duplicate Starred playlists and albums from year 0.
• Moved Mopidy s Travis CI testing from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 14.04, to prepare for GStreamer 1.x, and eventually testing with Python 3.4. PR #1341
• Worked on porting Mopidy from GStreamer 0.10 to PyGI and GStreamer 1.x. PR #1339
• Briefly looked at what remains to get Mopidy running on both Python 2.7 and 3.4+ when we ve landed the port to GStreamer 1.x. Doesn t look too bad, except that ConfigParser doesn t want to work with bytes in Python 3, so there s no easy way to read a config file referring to a path on a non-UTF-8 file system.

Comics

• Fixed two old crawlers. Added two new crawlers.
• Needs to upgrade to Django 1.8 before the Django 1.7 security support ends this December.

Sometime earlier last year, I started to help Philippe Massicotte with his gtrendsR package---which was then still "hiding" in relatively obscurity on BitBucket. I was able to assist with a few things related to internal data handling as well as package setup and package builds--but the package is really largely Philippe's. But then we both got busy, and it wasn't until this summer at the excellent useR! 2015 conference that we met and concluded that we really should finish the package. And we both remained busy... Lo and behold, following a recent transfer to this GitHub repository, we finalised a number of outstanding issues. And Philippe was even kind enough to label me a co-author. And now the package is on CRAN as of yesterday. So install.packages("gtrendsR") away and enjoy! Here is a quiick demo:

## load the package, and if options() are set appropriately, connect
## alternatively, also run   gconnect("someuser", "somepassword")
library(gtrendsR)
## using the default connection, run a query for three terms
res <- gtrends(c("nhl", "nba", "nfl"))
## plot (in default mode) as time series
plot(res)
## plot via googeVis to browser
## highlighting regions (probably countries) and cities
plot(res, type = "region")
plot(res, type = "cities")

The time series (default) plot for this query came out as follows a couple of days ago:

One really nice feature of the package is the rather rich data structure. The result set for the query above is actually stored in the package and can be accessed. It contains a number of components:

R> data(sport_trend)
R> names(sport_trend)
[1] "query"     "meta"      "trend"     "regions"   "topmetros"
[6] "cities"    "searches"  "rising"    "headers"  
R>

So not only can one look at trends, but also at regions, metropolitan areas, and cities --- even plot this easily via package googleVis which is accessed via options in the default plot method. Furthermore, related searches and rising queries may give leads to dynamics within the search. Please use the standard GitHub issue system for bug reports, suggestions and alike.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I'm happy to chip in and help the awesome folks at the Software Freedom Conservancy with funding for their work, standing up for copyleft. It's clear that there are a lot of people who will ignore the terms of Free Software licensing, whether by oversight or deliberately, so the SFC are doing an important job working to defend the Freedoms that lots of us are using every day as developers and users. It seems that some of SFC's corporate supporters have stopped sponsorship since the beginning of their lawsuit in Germany against VMware for GPL violations. Maybe some folks are happy to support SFC, but not when they really push things like this. Let's hope that we can find many more individual supporters to cover SFC's funding needs instead. This week, there's an anonymous pledge to match donations from new supporters so right now is an even better time to sign up! Thanks to Paul Wise for posting about this and indirectly prodding me to sign up too.

Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar (an important work describing the effectiveness of open collaboration and development), recently wrote a piece calling for "Social Justice Warriors" to be ejected from the hacker community. The primary thrust of his argument is that by calling for a removal of the "cult of meritocracy", these SJWs are attacking the central aspect of hacker culture - that the quality of code is all that matters.

This argument is simply wrong.

Eric's been involved in software development for a long time. In that time he's seen a number of significant changes. We've gone from computers being the playthings of the privileged few to being nearly ubiquitous. We've moved from the internet being something you found in universities to something you carry around in your pocket. You can now own a computer whose CPU executes only free software from the moment you press the power button. And, as Eric wrote almost 20 years ago, we've identified that the "Bazaar" model of open collaborative development works better than the "Cathedral" model of closed centralised development.

These are huge shifts in how computers are used, how available they are, how important they are in people's lives, and, as a consequence, how we develop software. It's not a surprise that the rise of Linux and the victory of the bazaar model coincided with internet access becoming more widely available. As the potential pool of developers grew larger, development methods had to be altered. It was no longer possible to insist that somebody spend a significant period of time winning the trust of the core developers before being permitted to give feedback on code. Communities had to change in order to accept these offers of work, and the communities were better for that change.

The increasing ubiquity of computing has had another outcome. People are much more aware of the role of computing in their lives. They are more likely to understand how proprietary software can restrict them, how not having the freedom to share software can impair people's lives, how not being able to involve themselves in software development means software doesn't meet their needs. The largest triumph of free software has not been amongst people from a traditional software development background - it's been the fact that we've grown our communities to include people from a huge number of different walks of life. Free software has helped bring computing to under-served populations all over the world. It's aided circumvention of censorship. It's inspired people who would never have considered software development as something they could be involved in to develop entire careers in the field. We will not win because we are better developers. We will win because our software meets the needs of many more people, needs the proprietary software industry either can not or will not satisfy. We will win because our software is shaped not only by people who have a university degree and a six figure salary in San Francisco, but because our contributors include people whose native language is spoken by so few people that proprietary operating system vendors won't support it, people who live in a heavily censored regime and rely on free software for free communication, people who rely on free software because they can't otherwise afford the tools they would need to participate in development.

In other words, we will win because free software is accessible to more of society than proprietary software. And for that to be true, it must be possible for our communities to be accessible to anybody who can contribute, regardless of their background.

Up until this point, I don't think I've made any controversial claims. In fact, I suspect that Eric would agree. He would argue that because hacker culture defines itself through the quality of contributions, the background of the contributor is irrelevant. On the internet, nobody knows that you're contributing from a basement in an active warzone, or from a refuge shelter after escaping an abusive relationship, or with the aid of assistive technology. If you can write the code, you can participate.

Of course, this kind of viewpoint is overly naive. Humans are wonderful at noticing indications of "otherness". Eric even wrote about his struggle to stop having a viscerally negative reaction to people of a particular race. This happened within the past few years, so before then we can assume that he was less aware of the issue. If Eric received a patch from someone whose name indicated membership of this group, would there have been part of his subconscious that reacted negatively? Would he have rationalised this into a more critical analysis of the patch, increasing the probability of rejection? We don't know, and it's unlikely that Eric does either.

Hacker culture has long been concerned with good design, and a core concept of good design is that code should fail safe - ie, if something unexpected happens or an assumption turns out to be untrue, the desirable outcome is the one that does least harm. A command that fails to receive a filename as an argument shouldn't assume that it should modify all files. A network transfer that fails a checksum shouldn't be permitted to overwrite the existing data. An authentication server that receives an unexpected error shouldn't default to granting access. And a development process that may be subject to unconscious bias should have processes in place that make it less likely that said bias will result in the rejection of useful contributions.

When people criticise meritocracy, they're not criticising the concept of treating contributions based on their merit. They're criticising the idea that humans are sufficiently self-aware that they will be able to identify and reject every subconscious prejudice that will affect their treatment of others. It's not a criticism of a desirable goal, it's a criticism of a flawed implementation. There's evidence that organisations that claim to embody meritocratic principles are more likely to reward men than women even when everything else is equal. The "cult of meritocracy" isn't the belief that meritocracy is a good thing, it's the belief that a project founded on meritocracy will automatically be free of bias.

Projects like the Contributor Covenant that Eric finds so objectionable exist to help create processes that (at least partially) compensate for our flaws. Review of our processes to determine whether we're making poor social decisions is just as important as review of our code to determine whether we're making poor technical decisions. Just as the bazaar overtook the cathedral by making it easier for developers to be involved, inclusive communities will overtake "pure meritocracies" because, in the long run, these communities will produce better output - not just in terms of the quality of the code, but also in terms of the ability of the project to meet the needs of a wider range of people.

The fight between the cathedral and the bazaar came from people who were outside the cathedral. Those fighting against the assumption that meritocracies work may be outside what Eric considers to be hacker culture, but they're already part of our communities, already making contributions to our projects, already bringing free software to more people than ever before. This time it's Eric building a cathedral and decrying the decadent hordes in their bazaar, Eric who's failed to notice the shift in the culture that surrounds him. And, like those who continued building their cathedrals in the 90s, it's Eric who's now irrelevant to hacker culture.

(Edited to add: for two quite different perspectives on why Eric's wrong, see Tim's and Coraline's posts)

comments

This weekend I've mostly been tidying up some personal projects and things.

http://debian-administration.org/

This was updated to use recaptcha on the sign-up page, which is my attempt to cut down on the 400+ spam-registrations it receives every day. I've purged a few thousand bogus-accounts, which largely existed to point to spam-sites in their profile-pages. I go through phases where I do this, but my heuristics have always been a little weak.

http://dhcp.io/

This site offers free dynamic DNS for a few hundred users. I closed fresh signups due to it being abused by spammers, but it does have some users and I sometimes add new people who ask politely. Unfortunately some users hammer it, trying to update their DNS records every 60 seconds or so. (One user has spent the past few months updating their IP address every 30 seconds, ironically their external IP hadn't changed in all that time!) So I suspended a few users, and implemented a minimum-update threshold: Nobody can update their IP address more than once every fifteen minutes now.

Literate Emacs Configuration File

Working towards my stateless home-directory I've been tweaking my dotfiles, and the last thing I did today was move my Emacs configuration over to a literate fashion. My main emacs configuration-file is now a markdown file, which contains inline-code. The inline-code is parsed at runtime, and executed when Emacs launches. The init.el file which parses/evals is pretty simple, and I'm quite pleased with it. Over time I'll extend the documantion and move some of the small snippets into it.

Offsite backups

My home system(s) always had a local backup, maintained on an external 2Tb disk-drive, along with a remote copy of some static files which were maintained using rsync. I've now switched to having a virtual machine host the external backups with proper incrementals - via attic, which beats my previous "only one copy" setup.

Virtual Machine Backups

On a whim a few years ago I registered rsync.io which I use to maintain backups of my personal virtual machines. That still works, though I'll probably drop the domain and use backup.steve.org.uk or similar in the future.

FWIW the external backups are hosted on BigV, which gives me a 2Tb "archive" disk for a 40 a month. Perfect.

podlators is the distribution that includes the Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules for Perl, plus the pod2man and pod2text driver scripts (among a few other, more minor things). I've been working on a new release of this for a couple of years and got trapped in a cycle of always wanting to finish up one more thing before making a release. (Really need to fix Unicode handling once and for all! Oh, I have a much better idea for how to do testing! I should really revise all of this code for my current coding style!) But some discussions elsewhere reminded me of the merits of release early and often, so I decided to finally put something out. There are quite a few accumulated changes, although not as many as the major version increase would indicate. I did that so that I could standardize on the same version number in all of the modules and switch to a much simpler versioning scheme. That required increasing the major version to something higher than all the component modules. Other than that, there are mostly a bunch of bug fixes, but also a lot of changes to Pod::Man to support Debian's reproducible build effort. The code is now more predictable and reliable about how it generates dates, and supports two new ways of forcing the date in generated documentation to a particular value so that builds are more predictable. I also changed the build system over to Module::Build, although it also provides a Makefile.PL file so that it can be built as part of Perl core. You can get the latest version from the podlators distribution page.

If you install the xfonts-base package from my APT repository you now not only get the FixedMisc [MirOS] type from The MirOS Project type foundry for the X Window System, but now also for GNU GRUB2: (read more )

I have just assembled and upgraded to a new computer (ct 11 Watt PC with Skylake i5-6500) and chose to go from BIOS/MBR to UEFI/GPT. The computer needs to also run Windows (in this case 10) and so I had googled in vain before for a matching dual-boot howto. It turned out to be unnecessary, it is straightforward.

1. Install Windows and leave some space for Linux. (I used rufus to build a UEFI USB install image).
2. Install Debian. Stretch-Alpha4 di just worked and adds a entry for Windows to the grub menu
3. Reboot and enter UEFI setup, and select the Debian installation as boot option.

remctl is a simple and secure remote command execution protocol using GSS-API. Essentially, it's the thinnest and simplest possible way to deploy remote network APIs for commands using Kerberos authentication and encryption. Most of the work in this release is around supporting anonymous authentication for an upcoming project of mine. This included cleaning up ACL handling so that clients that authenticated with anonymous PKINIT didn't count as ANYUSER (it's not likely this would have been a security problem for existing users, since you would have had to enable anonymous service tickets in your KDC), and adding new anyuser:auth and anyuser:anonymous ACLs that are explicit about whether anonymous users are included. With this change, it's possible, using a KDC with anonymous service tickets enabled, to use anonymous PKINIT to make entirely unauthenticated remctl calls. I plan on using this with wallet to support initial system key bootstrapping using external validation of whether a system is currently allowed to bootstrap keys. Note that you need to be very careful when enabling anonymous service tickets, since many other Kerberos applications (including remctl prior to this release) assume that any client that can get a service ticket is in some way authenticated. Also new in this release, the server now sets the REMOTE_EXPIRES environment variable to the time when the authenticated remote session will expire. This is usually th expiration time of the user's credentials. I'm planning on using this as part of a better kx509 replacement to issue temporary X.509 certificates from Kerberos tickets, limited in lifetime to the lifetime of the Kerberos ticket. This release also includes some portability fixes, a bug fix for the localgroup ACL for users who are members of lots of local groups, and some (mildly backwards-incompatible) fixes for the Python RemctlError exception class. You can get the latest release from the remctl distribution page.

I have been using Replicant on the Samsung SIII I9300 for over two years. I have written before on taking a backup of the phone using rsync but recently I automated my setup as described below. This work was prompted by a screen accident with my phone that caused it to die, and I noticed that I hadn t taken regular backups. I did not lose any data this time, since typically all content I create on the device is immediately synchronized to my clouds. Photos are uploaded by the ownCloud app, SMS Backup+ saves SMS and call logs to my IMAP server, and I use DAVDroid for synchronizing contacts, calendar and task lists with my instance of ownCloud. Still, I strongly believe in regular backups of everything, so it was time to automate this. For my use-case, taking backups of the phone whenever I connect it to one of my laptops is sufficient. I typically connect it to my laptops for charging at least every other day. My laptops are all running Debian, but this should be applicable to most modern GNU/Linux system. This is not Replicant-specific, although you need a rooted phone. I thought that automating this would be simple, but I got to learn the ins and outs of systemd and udev in the process and this ended up taking the better part of an evening. I started out adding an udev rule and a small script, thinking I could invoke the backup process from the udev rule. However rsync would magically die after running a few seconds. After an embarrassing long debugging session, finally I found someone with a similar problem which led me to a nice writeup on the topic of running long-running services on udev events. I created a file /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android-backup.rules with the following content:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ENV ID_SERIAL_SHORT =="323048a5ae82918b", TAG+="systemd", ENV SYSTEMD_WANTS +="android-backup@$env ID_SERIAL_SHORT .service"
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ENV ID_SERIAL_SHORT =="4df9e09c25e75f63", TAG+="systemd", ENV SYSTEMD_WANTS +="android-backup@$env ID_SERIAL_SHORT .service"

The serial numbers correspond to the device serial numbers of the two devices I wish to backup. The adb devices command will print them for you, and you need to replace my values with the values from your phones. Next I created a systemd service to describe a oneshot service. The file /etc/systemd/system/android-backup@.service have the following content:

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/android-backup %I

The at-sign ( @ ) in the service filename signal that this is a service that takes a parameter. I m not enough of an udev/systemd person to explain these two files using the proper terminology, but at least you can pattern-match and follow the basic idea of them: the udev rule matches the devices that I m interested in (I don t want this to happen to all random Android devices I attach, hence matching against known serial numbers), and it causes a systemd service with a parameter to be started. The systemd service file describe the script to run, and passes on the parameter. Now for the juicy part, the script. I have /usr/local/sbin/android-backup with the following content.

#!/bin/bash
DIRBASE=/var/backups/android
export ANDROID_SERIAL="$1"
exec 2>&1   logger
if ! test -d "$DIRBASE-$ANDROID_SERIAL"; then
    echo "could not find directory: $DIRBASE-$ANDROID_SERIAL"
    exit 1
fi
set -x
adb wait-for-device
adb root
adb wait-for-device
adb shell printf "address 127.0.0.1\nuid = root\ngid = root\n[root]\n\tpath = /\n" \> /mnt/secure/rsyncd.conf
adb shell rsync --daemon --no-detach --config=/mnt/secure/rsyncd.conf &
adb forward tcp:6010 tcp:873
sleep 2
rsync -av --delete --exclude /dev --exclude /acct --exclude /sys --exclude /proc rsync://localhost:6010/root/ $DIRBASE-$ANDROID_SERIAL/
: rc $?
adb forward --remove tcp:6010
adb shell rm -f /mnt/secure/rsyncd.conf

This script warrant more detailed explanation. Backups are placed under, e.g., /var/backups/android-323048a5ae82918b/ for later off-site backup (you do backup your laptop, right?). You have to manually create this directory, as a safety catch to not wildly rsync data into non-existing directories. The script logs everything using syslog, so run a tail -F /var/log/syslog& when setting this up. You may want to reduce verbosity of rsync if you prefer (replace rsync -av with rsync -a). The script runs adb wait-for-device which you rightly guessed will wait for the device to settle. Next adb root is invoked to get root on the device (reading all files from the system naturally requires root). It takes some time to switch, so another wait-for-device call is needed. Next a small rsyncd configuration file is created in /mnt/secure/rsyncd.conf on the phone. The file tells rsync do listen on localhost, run as root, and use / as the path. By default, rsyncd is read-only so the host will not be able to upload any data over rsync, just read data out. Next rsync is started on the phone. The adb forward command forwards port 6010 on the laptop to port 873 on the phone (873 is the default rsyncd port). Unfortunately, setting up the TCP forward appears to take some time, and adb wait-for-device will not wait for that to complete, hence an ugly sleep 2 at this point. Next is the rsync invocation itself, which just pulls in everything from the phone to the laptop, excluding some usual suspects. The somewhat cryptic : rc $? merely logs the exit code of the rsync process into syslog. Finally we clean up the TCP forward and remove the rsyncd.conf file that was temporarily created. This setup appears stable to me. I can plug in a phone and a backup will be taken. I can even plug in both my devices at the same time, and they will run at the same time. If I unplug a device, the script or rsync will error out and systemd cleans up. If anyone has ideas on how to avoid the ugly temporary rsyncd.conf file or the ugly sleep 2, I m interested. It would also be nice to not have to do the adb root dance, and instead have the phone start the rsync daemon when connecting to my laptop somehow. TCP forwarding might be troublesome on a multi-user system, but my laptops aren t. Killing rsync on the phone is probably a good idea too. If you have ideas on how to fix any of this, other feedback, or questions, please let me know!

A minor release of my C utility library, including some changes required for the previous release of pam-afs-session and the upcoming release of remctl. The Kerberos portability layer now correctly defines the strings for dealing with anonymous principals when built with Heimdal, and adds KRB5_ANON_REALM (required for doing the authentication). The PAM testing framework has some improvements for handling pam_modutil_getpwnam and supports testing against PAM_SESSION_ERR. You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.

For the past fifteen years, I have been tweaking my ~/.emacs continously, most recently by switching to Spacemacs. With that switch done, I started to migrate a few more things to Emacs, an Atom/RSS reader being one that's been in the queue for years - ever since Google Reader shut down. Since March 2013, I have been a Feedly user, but I wanted to migrate to something better for a long time. I wanted to use Free Software, for one.I saw a mention of Elfeed somewhere a little while ago, and in the past few days, I decided to give it a go. The results are pretty amazing.blah

I just have pushed a new version of the Slick Google Map plugin for WordPress to the servers. There are not many changes, but a crucial fix for parsing coordinates in DMS (degree-minute-second) format. The documentation described that all kind of DMS formats can be used to specify a location, but these DMS encoded locations were sent to Google for geocoding. Unfortunately it seems Google is incapable of handling DMS formats, and returns slightly of coordinates. By using a library for DMS conversion, which I adapted slightly, it is now possible to use a wide variety of location formats. Practically everything that can reasonably interpreted as a location will be properly converted to decimal coordinates. Plans for the next release are:

• prepare for translation via the WordPress translation team
• add html support for the marker text via uuencoding

Please see the dedicated page or the WordPress page for more details and downloads. Enjoy.

The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.
The first step is to choose a copyleft license for your code.
The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license, it must be enforced
and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of work
is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.

-- Bradley Kuhn, in FaiF episode 0x57 As the Debian Website used to imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or software products. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but such licenses are not enough. With the ongoing adoption of Free Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always. As Karen and Bradley explained in FaiF episode 0x57, copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court to protect it. The reality of today's world is that legal representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming. With gpl-violations.org in hiatus until some time in 2016, the Software Freedom Conservancy (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations. In March the SFC supported a lawsuit by Christoph Hellwig against VMware for refusing to comply with the GPL in relation to their use of parts of the Linux kernel. Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and conferences blocked or cancelled their talks. As a result they have decided to rely less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of individuals who support Free Software and copyleft. So the SFC has launched a campaign to create a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free Software. If you support Free Software, like what the SFC do, agree with their compliance principles, are happy about their successes in 2015, work on a project that is an SFC member and or just want to stand up for copyleft, please join Christopher Allan Webber, Carol Smith, Jono Bacon, myself and others in becoming a supporter. For the next week your donation will be matched by an anonymous donor. Please also consider asking your employer to match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC. Don't forget to spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or social media accounts.