Daniel Pocock: Databases of Muslims and homosexuals?
One US presidential candidate has said a lot recently, but the comments about making a database of Muslims may qualify as the most extreme.
Of course, if he really wanted to, somebody with this mindset could find all the Muslims anyway. A quick and easy solution would involve tracing all the mobile phone signals around mosques on a Friday. Mr would-be President could compel Facebook and other social networks to disclose lists of users who identify as Muslim.
Databases are a dangerous side-effect of gay marriage
In 2014 there was significant discussion about Brendan Eich's donation to the campaign against gay marriage.
One fact that never ranked very highly in the debate at the time is that not all gay people actually support gay marriage. Even where these marriages are permitted, not everybody who can marry now is choosing to do so.
The reasons for this are varied, but one key point that has often been missed is that there are two routes to marriage equality: one involves permitting gay couples to visit the register office and fill in a form just as other couples do. The other route to equality is to remove all the legal artifacts around marriage altogether.
When the government does issue a marriage certificate, it is not long before other organizations start asking for confirmation of the marriage. Everybody from banks to letting agents and Facebook wants to know about it. Many companies outsource that data into cloud CRM systems such as Salesforce. Before you know it, there are numerous databases that somebody could mine to make a list of confirmed homosexuals.
Of course, if everybody in the world was going to live happily ever after none of this would be a problem. But the reality is different.
While discrimination: either against Muslims or homosexuals - is prohibited and can even lead to criminal sanctions in some countries, this attitude is not shared globally. Once gay people have their marriage status documented in the frequent flyer or hotel loyalty program, or in the public part of their Facebook profile, there are various countries where they are going to be at much higher risk of prosecution/persecution. The equality to marry in the US or UK may mean they have less equality when choosing travel destinations.
Those places are not as obscure as you might think: even in Australia, regarded as a civilized and laid-back western democracy, the state of Tasmania fought tooth-and-nail to retain the criminalization of virtually all homosexual conduct until 1997 when the combined actions of the federal government and high court compelled the state to reform. Despite the changes, people with some of the most offensive attitudes are able to achieve and retain a position of significant authority. The same Australian senator who infamously linked gay marriage with bestiality has successfully used his position to set up a Senate inquiry as a platform for conspiracy theories linking Halal certification with terrorism.
There are many ways a database can fall into the wrong hands
Ironically, one of the most valuable lessons about the risk of registering Muslims and homosexuals was an injustice against the very same tea-party supporters a certain presidential candidate is trying to woo. In 2013, it was revealed IRS employees had started applying a different process to discriminate against groups with Tea party in their name.
It is not hard to imagine other types of rogue or misinformed behavior by people in positions of authority when they are presented with information that they don't actually need about somebody's religion or sexuality.
Beyond this type of rogue behavior by individual officials and departments, there is also the more sinister proposition that somebody truly unpleasant is elected into power and can immediately use things like a Muslim database, surveillance data or the marriage database for a program of systematic discrimination. France had a close shave with this scenario in the 2002 presidential election when
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has at least six convictions for racism or inciting racial hatred made it to the final round in a two-candidate run-off with Jacques Chirac. The best data security The best way to be safe- wherever you go, both now and in the future - is not to have data about yourself on any database. When filling out forms, think need-to-know. If some company doesn't really need your personal mobile number, your date of birth, your religion or your marriage status, don't give it to them.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has at least six convictions for racism or inciting racial hatred made it to the final round in a two-candidate run-off with Jacques Chirac. The best data security The best way to be safe- wherever you go, both now and in the future - is not to have data about yourself on any database. When filling out forms, think need-to-know. If some company doesn't really need your personal mobile number, your date of birth, your religion or your marriage status, don't give it to them.
Even though I spend more time staring at the screen than typing, there are times when I - after lots and lots of prior brain work - sit down and start typing, a lot. A couple of years ago, I started to feel pain in my wrists, and there were multiple occasions when I had to completely stop writing for longer periods of time. These were situations I obviously did not want repeated, so I started to look for remedies. First, I bought a new keyboard, a 
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There is a companion logrotate script, to avoid filling the file system:
And in some cases like Android Support Repository [not Library] I didn't even find the proper source code, only an old prebuilt.
Would you be interested in contributing, and would you recommend a structure that would promote Free, rebuilt Android *DK?
The legalese
Anti-fork clause:
This is a burst of notes that I wrote in an e-mail in June when asked about it, and I'm not going to have any better steps since I don't remember even that amount as back then. I figured it's better to have it out than not.
FOSDEM 2016 is going to be great (again!) and you still have the chance to be one of the stars.
Have you submitted your talk to the Desktops DevRoom yet?
No?
Remember: we will only accept proposals until December 6th. After that, the Organization Team will get busy and vote and choose the talks.
Here is the full Call for Participation, in case you need to check the details on how to submit:
I've previously written about Canonical's 
The Debian Project includes many people, groups and teams with different goals, priorities and ways of doing things. 
One month has passed since the big 
I cannot recall anything particular to mention here, so this time let me go with the list of updated and new packages only:
Updated packages
alegreya, algorithm2e, animate, archaeologie, articleingud, attachfile, bankstatement, beebe, biber, biblatex, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, bidi, br-lex, bytefield, catcodes, chemfig, chemformula, chemgreek, comprehensive, computational-complexity, ctable, datetime2, dowith, dvipdfmx, dvipdfmx-def, dynamicnumber, e-french, epspdf, etoc, fetamont, findhyph, fix2col, gitinfo2, gradstudentresume, indextools, kotex-oblivoir, kotex-utils, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex, latex2e-help-texinfo, lisp-on-tex, ltxfileinfo, luatexja, makedtx, mathastext, mathtools, mcf2graph, media9, medstarbeamer, morehype, nameauth, nicetext, ocgx2, perltex, preview, prftree, pst-eucl, pstricks, reledmac, resphilosophica, selnolig, substances, tcolorbox, tetex, teubner, tex4ht, texdoc, texinfo, texlive-scripts, toptesi, translations, turabian-formatting, uptex, xepersian, xetex, xetex-def, xint.
New packages
asciilist, babel-macedonian, bestpapers, bibtexperllibs, fixcmex, iffont, nucleardata, srcredact, texvc, xassoccnt.
Enjoy.
A new version of 
Now you should see all the video sequence editor controls:
Setup the properties for your project
Click the context menu under the strip editor panel and change the panel to a Properties panel:
The video file we are playing with is 720p, so it seems reasonable to use 720p for the output too. Change that here:
The input file is 25fps so we need to use exactly the same frame rate for the output, otherwise you will either observe the video going at the wrong speed or there will be a conversion that is CPU intensive and degrades the quality. Also check that the resolution_percentage setting under the picture dimensions is 100%:
Now specify output to PNG files. Later we will combine them into a WebM file with a script. Specify the directory where the files will be placed and use the # placeholder to specify the number of digits to use to embed the frame number in the filename:
Now your basic rendering properties are set. When you want to generate the output file, come back to this panel and use the Animation button at the top.
Editing the video
Use the context menu to change the properties panel back to the strip view panel:
Add the video file:
and then right click the video strip (the lower strip) to highlight it and then add a transform strip:
Audio waveform
Right click the audio strip to highlight it and then go to the properties on the right hand side and click to show the waveform:
Rendering length
By default, Blender assumes you want to render 250 frames of output. Looking in the properties to the right of the audio or video strip you can see the actual number of frames. Put that value in the box at the bottom of the window where it says 250:
Enable AV-sync
Also at the bottom of the window is a control to enable AV-sync. If your audio and video are not in sync when you preview, you need to set this AV-sync option and also make sure you set the frame rate correctly in the properties:
Add the other sound strip
Now add the other sound file that was recorded using the lapel microphone:
Enable the waveform display for that sound strip too, this will allow you to align the sound strips precisely:
You will need to listen to the strips to make an estimate of the time difference. Use this estimate to set the "start frame" in the properties for your audio strip, it will be a negative value if the audio strip starts before the video. You can then zoom the strip panel to show about 3 to 5 seconds of sound and try to align the peaks. An easy way to do this is to look for applause at the end of the audio strips, the applause generates a large peak that is easily visible.
Once you have synced the audio, you can play the track and you should not be able to hear any echo. You can then silence the audio track from the camera by right clicking it, look in the properties to the right and change volume to 0.
Make any transforms you require
For example, to zoom in on the speaker, right click the transform strip (3rd from the bottom) and then in the panel on the right, click to enable "Uniform Scale" and then set the scale factor as required:
Render the video output to PNG
Click the context menu under the Curves panel and choose Properties again.
Click the Animation button to generate a sequence of PNG files for each frame.
Render the audio output
On the Properties panel, click the Audio button near the top. Choose a filename for the generated audio file.
Look on the bottom left-hand side of the window for the audio file settings, change it to the ogg container and Vorbis codec:
Ensure the filename has a .ogg extension
Now look at the top right-hand corner of the window for the Mixdown button. Click it and wait for Blender to generate the audio file.
Combine the PNG files and audio file into a WebM video file
You will need to have a few command line tools installed for manipulating the files from scripts. Install them using the package manager, for example, on a Debian or Ubuntu system:
I'm pleased with the way that 
Writing programs is fun, but making them fast can be a pain. Python programs
are no exception to that, but the basic profiling toolchain is actually not
that complicated to use. Here, I would like to show you how you can quickly
profile and analyze your Python code to find what part of the code you should
optimize.
What's profiling?
Profiling a Python program is doing a dynamic analysis that measures the
execution time of the program and everything that compose it. That means
measuring the time spent in each of its functions. This will give you data
about where your program is spending time, and what area might be worth
optimizing.
It's a very interesting exercise. Many people focus on local optimizations,
such as determining e.g. which of the Python functions 
