Search Results: "ed"

28 March 2016

Rhonda D'Vine: Ich bin was ich bin

As my readers probably are well aware, I wrote my transgender coming out poem Mermaids over 10 years ago, to make it clear to people how I define, what I am and how I would hope they could accept me. I did put it publicly into my blog so I could point people to it. And I still do so regularly. It still comes from the bottom of my heart. And I am very happy that I got the chance to present it in a Poetry Slam last year, it was even recorded and uploaded to YouTube. There is just one thing that I was also told over the time every now and then by some people that I would have liked to understand what's going on: Why is it in English, my English isn't that good. My usual response was along the lines of that the events that triggered me writing it were in an international context and I wanted to make sure that they understood what I wrote. At that time I didn't realize that I am cutting out a different group of people from being able to understand what's going on inside me. So this year there was a similar event: the Flawless Poetry Slam which touched the topics of Feminist? Queer? Gender? Rolemodels? - Let's talk about it. I took that as motivation to finally write another text on the topic, and this time in German. Unfortunately though I wasn't able to present it that evening, I wasn't drawn for the lineup. But, I was told that there was another slam going on just last wednesday, so I went there ... and made it onto the stage! And this is the text that I presented there. I am uncertain how well online translators work for you, but I hope you get the core points if you don't understand German:
Ich bin was ich bin
F nf Worte mit wahrem Sinn:
Ich bin was ich bin Du denkst: "Mann im Rock?
Das ist ja wohl l cherlich,
der ist sicher schwul." "Fingernagellack?
Na da schau ich nicht mehr hin,
wer will das schon seh'n." Jedoch liegst du falsch,
Mit all deinen Punkten, denn:
Ich bin was ich bin. Ich bin Transgender
Und erlebe mich selber,
ich bin eine Frau. "Haha, eine Frau?
Wem willst du das weismachen?
Heb mal den Rock hoch!" Und wie ist's bei dir?
Was ist zwischen den Beinen?
Geht mich das nichts an? Warum fragst du mich?
Da ist's dann in Ordnung?
Oder vielleicht nicht? Ich bin was ich bin
F nf Worte mit ernstem Sinn:
Ich bin was ich bin Ich steh weiblich hier
Und das hier ist mein K rper
Mein Geschlecht ist's auch Oberfl chlichkeit
Das ist mein gr tes Problem
Schl gt mir entgegen Wenn ich mich ffne
Verst ndnis fast berall
Es wird akzeptiert Doch gelegentlich
und das schmerzt mich am meisten
sagt doch mal wer "er" Von Fremden? Egal
Doch hab ich mich ge ffnet
Ist es eine Qual "Ich seh dich als Mann"
Da ist, was es transportiert
Akzeptanz? Dahin Meine Pronomen
Wenn ihr ber mich redet
sind sie, ihr, ihres Ich leb was ich leb
F nf Worte mit tiefem Sinn:
Ich bin was ich bin "Doch, wie der erst spricht!
Ich meinte, wie sie denn spricht!
Das ist nicht normal." Ich schreib hier Haikus:
Japanische Gedichtsform
Mit fixem Versmars Sind f nf, sieben, f nf
Silben in jeder Zeile
Haikus sind simpel Probier es mal aus
Transportier eine Message
Es macht auch viel Spa Wortwahl ist wichtig
Ein guter Thesaurus hilft
Sei kurz und pr gnant Ich sag was ich sag
F nf Worte mit klugem Sinn:
Ich bin was ich bin Doch ich schweife ab
Verst ndnis fast berall?
Wird es akzeptiert? Erstaunlicherweise
Doch ich bin auch was and'res
Und hier geht's bergab Eine Sache gibt's
Die erw h'n ich besser nicht
f r die steck ich ein "Deshalb bin ich hier"
So der Titel eines Lieds
verfasst von Thomas D "Wenn ich erkl re
warum ich mich wie ern hr"
So weit komm ich nicht Man erw hnt Vegan
Die Intoleranz ist da
Man ist unten durch "Mangelerscheinung!"
"Das Essen meines Essens!"
Akzeptanz ade Hab 'ne Theorie:
Vegan sein: 'ne Entscheidung
Transgender sein nicht Mensch f hlt sich dann schlecht
dass bei sich selbst die Kraft fehlt
und greift damit an "Ich k nnte das nicht"
Ich verurteile dich nicht
Iss doch was du willst Ich zwing es nicht auf
Aber R cksicht w r schon fein
Statt nur Hohn und Schm h Ich ess was ich ess
F nf Worte zum nachdenken:
Ich bin was ich bin
Hope you get the idea. The audience definitely liked it, the jury wasn't so much on board but that's fine, it's five random people and it's mostly for fun anyway. Later that night though some things happened that didn't make me feel so comfortable anymore. I went to the loo, waiting in line with the other ladies, a bit later the waitress came along telling me "the men's room is over there". I told her that I'm aware of that and thanked her, which got her confused and said something along the lines of "so you are both, or what?" but went away after that. Her tone and response wasn't really giving me much comfort, though none of the other ladies in the line did look strangely.
But the most disturbing event after that was to find out about North Carolina signed the bathroom bill making it illegal for trans people to use the bathroom for their gender and insisting on using the one for the gender they were assigned at birth. So men like James Sheffield are now forced to go to the lady's restroom, or face getting arrested. Brave new world. :/ So, enjoy the text and don't get too wound up by stupid laws and hope for time to fix people's discriminatory minds for fixing issues that already are regulated: Assaults are assaults and are already banned. Arguing with people might get assaulted and thus discriminating trans people is totally missing the point, by miles.

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Lucy Wayland: Stuffed Butternut Squash

This is a fusion recipe from a rather bland just stuff it with ricotta recipe I saw, David Scott s The Peniless Vegetarian , and my own mutations on those themes. I can t give you exact quantities, just make a little more than you will make the hollowed mound (grin), and the rest will make an excellent pasta sauce. Ingredients For an average sized butternut squash, you will need:
1 onion (I prefer red)
3 cloves of garlic
1 capsicum pepper (I prefer green, my ex- preferred red)
Some red lentils
Optional green or brown lentils for texture and flavour. I used some puy
The lentil quantity is hard to estimate, but I ratio 4 red to 1 optional.
Roughly one handful of chopped mushrooms i.e. when chopped, it is one handful
1 tin tinned tomatoes
Some tomato puree
A generous amout of garam masala garam masala is what brings out the flavout in lentils
Some paprike
Optional chilli if using chilli, I recommend fresh of course.
Optional Balsamic vinegar
Optional Marmite Preperation of the Squash
1. Cut the butternut squash in half, length ways. This is very hard, you will need a good large knife, and may require you jumping up and down into the air. This is the second most hard of the procedure. 2. For each half, scoop out the seeds, and pare back the bowl till it is no longer overly fibrous. Discard this, or find a use for the seeds. 3. For each half, scoop a channel of the softer flesh up from the baisin up near the top. This has to be done by feel, is hard and thankless work. Also experimentation required. Reserve this flesh. Preperation of the Filling This is just basically a nice lentil sauce that can be used with pasta, rice, toast etc. Important: this is not a stir fry, but a largish, heavy bottom pan is recommended. 1. Finely peel then chopp the onions and the garlic. Chopp the chillis if used (I am a chilli gal). Please observe Chilli Protocol[0] 2. Wash and chop the pepper and mushrooms. Not finely diced, but not crudite-sized slices. Remember that peppers shrivel down a little, mushrooms a lot. 3. Start frying the onions for a while in some oil (I prefer olive, but others are acceptible), until they just about to go translucent. Then add the garlic and optional chillis until the garlic is just cooking nicely. 4. Add the spices, turn over until all the containts of the pan are covered, and cook for another 30 seconds or so. Then add the tinned tomato, and then add half a can of cold water water which rinsed the tin out with. Stir this around, and make sure it is now at just at a simmer or pre-simmer. 5. Add the lentils. You want 0.5-1 cm of water above the lentils when you have added and stirred. Let these cook and expand for about 5 mins, stirring all the while, all the lentils will stick to the bottom. 6. Add the pepper, mushroom, reserved squash flesh, and optional dash of balsamic vinegar, and half a tea spoon of marmite. Cook and stir until the pepper goes soft. This is the hard part. Add boiling water if really too thick, or some tomato puree if too thin. There is no hard science to this, you want at the end of 10 minutes or so something resembling the thickness in texture of a stiff bolognaise sauce. Assembly
1. Have a baking tray. Whether you prefer to grease, line with foil, or line with baking parchment is up to you. I prefer baking parchment. 2. Stuff those two halves of butternut squash with that sauce you made. It should make a mound of about 1cm about the level. If you feel extravagent, and are not vegan, sprinkle a little grated cheese on top. 3. Place in a pre-heated oven of 200oC. Cooking time should be about 20 mins, but larger ones take longer. The acid test is to briefly take them out, and prod the lower side with a fork. It should go through the skin with little resistance. When ready, serve. It s really a dish in itself, but some people might like a bit of salad, or maybe a light green risotto.

Andreas Metzler: exim4 stable update - testing requested

I have prepared an update for exim4, targeted at stable and would appreciate some testing / second eyes. https://people.debian.org/~ametzler/exim-dsa/
git repo on alioth Changes: Please send your feedback to ametzler(at)debian.org or exim4(at)packages.debian.org.

Lars Wirzenius: Obnam user survey, 2016

In January and February of 2016 I ran an Obnam user survey. I'm not a statistician, but here is my analysis of the results. Executive summary: Obnam is slow, buggy, and the name is bad. But they'd like to buy stickers and t-shirts. Method I wrote up a long list of questions about things I felt were of interest to me. I used Google Forms to collect responses, and exported them as a CSV file, and analysed based on that. I used Google Forms, even though it is not free software, as it was the easiest service I got to work that also seemed it'd be nice for people to use. I could have run the survey using Ikiwiki, but it wouldn't have been nearly as nice. I could have found and hosted some free software for this, but that would have been much more work. Most questions had free form text responses, and this was both good and bad. It was good, because many of the responses included things I could never have expected. It was bad, because it took me a lot more time and effort to process those. I think next time I'll keep the number of free text responses down. For some of the questions, I hand-processed the responses to a more or less systematic form, in order to count things with a bit of code. For others, I did not, and show the full list of responses (I'm lazy, we don't need a survey to determine that). The responses See http://code.liw.fi/obnam/survey-2016.html for the responses, after hand-processing. For the questions for which it makes sense, a script has tabulated the various responses and calculated percentages. I haven't produced graphs, as I don't know how to do that easily. (Maybe next time I'll enlist the help of statisticians.) Conclusions

Joey Hess: type safe multi-OS Propellor

Propellor was recently ported to FreeBSD, by Evan Cofsky. This new feature led me down a two week long rabbit hole to make it type safe. In particular, Propellor needed to be taught that some properties work on Debian, others on FreeBSD, and others on both. The user shouldn't need to worry about making a mistake like this; the type checker should tell them they're asking for something that can't fly. 
-- Is this a Debian or a FreeBSD host? I can't remember, let's use both package managers!
host "example.com" $ props
    & aptUpgraded
    & pkgUpgraded
As of propellor 3.0.0 (in git now; to be released soon), the type checker will catch such mistakes. Also, it's really easy to combine two OS-specific properties into a property that supports both OS's: 
upgraded = aptUpgraded  pickOS  pkgUpgraded
type level lists and functions The magick making this work is type-level lists. A property has a metatypes list as part of its type. (So called because it's additional types describing the type, and I couldn't find a better name.) This list can contain one or more OS's targeted by the property: 
aptUpgraded :: Property (MetaTypes '[ 'Targeting 'OSDebian, 'Targeting 'OSBuntish ])
pkgUpgraded :: Property (MetaTypes '[ 'Targeting 'OSFreeBSD ])
In Haskell type-level lists and other DataKinds are indicated by the ' if you have not seen that before. There are some convenience aliases and type operators, which let the same types be expressed more cleanly: 
aptUpgraded :: Property (Debian + Buntish)
pkgUpgraded :: Property FreeBSD
Whenever two properties are combined, their metatypes are combined using a type-level function. Combining aptUpgraded and pkgUpgraded will yield a metatypes that targets no OS's, since they have none in common. So will fail to type check. My implementation of the metatypes lists is hundreds of lines of code, consisting entirely of types and type families. It includes a basic implementation of singletons, and is portable back to ghc 7.6 to support Debian stable. While it takes some contortions to support such an old version of ghc, it's pretty awesome that the ghc in Debian stable supports this stuff. extending beyond targeted OS's Before this change, Propellor's Property type had already been slightly refined, tagging them with HasInfo or NoInfo, as described in making propellor safer with GADTs and type families. I needed to keep that HasInfo in the type of properties. But, it seemed unnecessary verbose to have types like Property NoInfo Debian. Especially if I want to add even more information to Property types later. Property NoInfo Debian NoPortsOpen would be a real mouthful to need to write for every property. Luckily I now have this handy type-level list. So, I can shove more types into it, so Property (HasInfo + Debian) is used where necessary, and Property Debian can be used everywhere else. Since I can add more types to the type-level list, without affecting other properties, I expect to be able to implement type-level port conflict detection next. Should be fairly easy to do without changing the API except for properties that use ports. singletons As shown here, pickOS makes a property that decides which of two properties to use based on the host's OS. 
aptUpgraded :: Property DebianLike
aptUpgraded = property "apt upgraded" (apt "upgrade"  requires  apt "update")
pkgUpgraded :: Property FreeBSD
pkgUpgraded = property "pkg upgraded" (pkg "upgrade")
    
upgraded :: Property UnixLike
upgraded = (aptUpgraded  pickOS  pkgUpgraded)
     describe  "OS upgraded"
Any number of OS's can be chained this way, to build a property that is super-portable out of simple little non-portable properties. This is a sweet combinator! Singletons are types that are inhabited by a single value. This lets the value be inferred from the type, which came in handy in building the pickOS property combinator. Its implementation needs to be able to look at each of the properties at runtime, to compare the OS's they target with the actial OS of the host. That's done by stashing a target list value inside a property. The target list value is inferred from the type of the property, thanks to singletons, and so does not need to be passed in to property. That saves keyboard time and avoids mistakes. is it worth it? It's important to consider whether more complicated types are a net benefit. Of course, opinions vary widely on that question in general! But let's consider it in light of my main goals for Propellor:
  1. Help save the user from pushing a broken configuration to their machines at a time when they're down in the trenches dealing with some urgent problem at 3 am.
  2. Advance the state of the art in configuration management by taking advantage of the state of the art in strongly typed haskell.
This change definitely meets both criteria. But there is a tradeoff; it got a little bit harder to write new propellor properties. Not only do new properties need to have their type set to target appropriate systems, but the more polymorphic code is, the more likely the type checker can't figure out all the types without some help. A simple example of this problem is as follows. 
foo :: Property UnixLike
foo = p  requires  bar
  where
    p = property "foo" $ do
        ...
The type checker will complain that "The type variable metatypes1 is ambiguous". Problem is that it can't infer the type of p because many different types could be combined with the bar property and all would yield a Property UnixLike. The solution is simply to add a type signature like p :: Property UnixLike Since this only affects creating new properties, and not combining existing properties (which have known types), it seems like a reasonable tradeoff. things to improve later There are a few warts that I'm willing to live with for now... Currently, Property (HasInfo + Debian) is different than Property (Debian + HasInfo), but they should really be considered to be the same type. That is, I need type-level sets, not lists. While there's a type level sets library for hackage, it still seems to require a specific order of the set items when writing down a type signature. Also, using ensureProperty, which runs one property inside the action of another property, got complicated by the need to pass it a type witness. 
foo = Property Debian
foo = property' $ \witness -> do
    ensureProperty witness (aptInstall "foo")
That witness is used to type check that the inner property targets every OS that the outer property targets. I think it might be possible to store the witness in the monad, and have ensureProperty read it, but it might complicate the type of the monad too much, since it would have to be parameterized on the type of the witness. Oh no, I mentioned monads. While type level lists and type functions and generally bending the type checker to my will is all well and good, I know most readers stop reading at "monad". So, I'll stop writing. ;) thanks Thanks to David Miani who answered my first tentative question with a big hunk of example code that got me on the right track. Also to many other people who answered increasingly esoteric Haskell type system questions. Also thanks to the Shuttleworth foundation, which funded this work by way of a Flash Grant.

27 March 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 48 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 20th and March 26th:

Toolchain fixes
  • Sebastian Ramacher uploaded breathe/4.2.0-1 which makes its output deterministic. Original patch by Chris Lamb, merged uptream.
  • Rafael Laboissiere uploaded octave/4.0.1-1 which allows packages to be built in place and avoid unreproducible builds due to temporary build directories appearing in the .oct files.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor worked on removing build path from build symbols submitting a patch adding -fdebug-prefix-map to clang to match GCC, another patch against gcc-5 to backport the removal of -fdebug-prefix-map from DW_AT_producer, and finally by proposing the addition of a normalizedebugpath to the reproducible feature set of dpkg-buildflags that would use -fdebug-prefix-map to replace the current directory with . using -fdebug-prefix-map. As succesful result of lobbying at LibrePlanet 2016, the --clamp-mtime option will be featured in the next Tar release. This option is likely to be used by dpkg-deb to implement deterministic mtimes for packaged files.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: augeas, gmtkbabel, ktikz, octave-control, octave-general, octave-image, octave-ltfat, octave-miscellaneous, octave-mpi, octave-nurbs, octave-octcdf, octave-sockets, octave-strings, openlayers, python-structlog, signond. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #818742 on milkytracker by Reiner Herrmann: sorts the list of source files.
  • #818752 on tcl8.4 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818753 on tk8.6 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818754 on tk8.5 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818755 on tk8.4 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818952 on marionnet by ceridwen: dummy out build date and uname to make build reproducible.
  • #819334 on avahi by Reiner Herrmann: ship upstream changelog instead of the one generated by gettextize (although duplicate of #804141 by Santiago Vila).

tests.reproducible-builds.org i386 build nodes have been setup by converting 2 of the 4 amd64 nodes to i386. (h01ger)

Package reviews 92 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 31 updated in the previous week. New issues: timestamps_generated_by_xbean_spring, timestamps_generated_by_mangosdk_spiprocessor. Chris Lamb filed 7 FTBFS bugs.

Misc. On March 20th, Chris Lamb gave a talk at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore. The very same day, but a few timezones apart, h01ger did a presentation at LibrePlanet 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seven GSoC/Outreachy applications were made by potential interns to work on various aspects of the reproducible builds effort. On top of interacting with several applicants, prospective mentors gathered to review the applications. Huge thanks to Linda Naeun Lee for the new hackergotchi visible on Planet Debian.

Bits from Debian: Debian Project Leader elections 2016

It's that time of year again for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader! Neil McGovern who has held the office for the last year will not be seeking reelection. Debian Developers will have to choose between voting for the only candidate running Mehdi Dogguy or None Of The Above. If None Of The Above wins the election then the election procedure is repeated, many times if necessary. Mehdi Dogguy was a candidate for the DPL position last year, finishing second with a close amount of votes to the winner Neil McGovern. We are in the middle of the campaigning period that will last until April 2nd. The candidate and Debian contributors are expected to engage in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list. The voting period starts on April 3rd, and during the following two weeks, Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year. The results will be published on April 17th with the term for new the project leader starting immediately that same day.

Chris Lamb: Generating dynamic Python tests using metaclasses

One common testing anti-pattern is a single testcase that loops over multiple yet independent inputs: 
from django.test import TestCase
class MyTests(TestCase):
    def test_all(self):
        for x in (
            'foo',
            'bar',
            'baz',
            # etc.
        ):
            self.assertEqual(test(x), None)

Whilst this code style typically occurs in an honourable attempt to avoid a DRY violation, these tests:
  1. Can only report the first failure
  2. Prevent individual inputs from being tested independently
  3. Are typically slower than their neighbours, or a performance hotspot generally
  4. Do not allow for parallel computation, a feature recently added to Django 1.9

(Note that whilst foo, bar, etc. are defined statically above for simplicity, the values could be determined dynamically by, for example, iterating over the filesystem.)
If you have such tests, consider splitting them out using a metaclass like so: 
class MyTestsMeta(type):
    def __new__(cls, name, bases, attrs):
        for x in (
            'foo',
            'bar',
            'baz',
        ):
            attrs['test_%s' % x] = cls.gen(x)
        return super(MyTestsMeta, cls).__new__(cls, name, bases, attrs)
    @classmethod
    def gen(cls, x):
        # Return a testcase that tests  x .
        def fn(self):
            self.assertEqual(test(x), None)
        return fn
class MyTests(TestCase):
    __metaclass__ = MyTestsMeta
This has the effect of replacing the single testcase with individual test_foo, test_bar & test_baz testcases. Each test can then be run separately: 
$ ./manage.py test myproject.myapp.tests.MyTests.test_baz
Creating test database for alias 'default'...
.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 0.039s
OK
Destroying test database for alias 'default'...
... or we can test them all in parallel: 
$ ./manage.py test myproject.myapp.tests.MyTests --parallel
Creating test database for alias 'default'...
.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 3 tests in 0.065s
OK
Destroying test database for alias 'default'...


You must ensure that the tests have unique names to avoid cases masking each other. In the above example we could simply use the input string itself, but if you have no obvious candidate you could try using Python's enumerate method to generate a unique, if somewhat opaque, suffix: 
for idx, x in enumerate((
    'foo',
    'bar',
    'baz',
)):
    attrs['test_%d' % idx] = cls.gen(x)
One alternative approach to a metaclass is to generate the test methods and use setattr, to bind them to the TestCase class. However, using a metaclass:
  1. Is cleaner and/or more "Pythonic"
  2. Avoids a number of subtle pitfalls with parameter binding
  3. Prevents your TestCase class from being polluted with loop variables, etc.
  4. Can be composed or abstracted into reusable testing components


Note that you can still use setUp and all the other unittest.TestCase and django.test.TestCase methods as before: 
from .utils import MyBaseTestCase # custom superclass
class MyTestsMeta(type):
    # <snip>
    @classmethod
    def gen(cls, x):
        def fn(self):
            self.assertRedirects(...)
        return fn
class MyTests(MyBaseTestCase):
    __metaclass__ = MyTestsMeta
    def setUp(self):
        super(MyTests, self).setUp()
        # Code here is run before every test
    def test_other(self):
        # Test some other functionality here


UPDATE: Stu Cox asked: Do you even need the metaclass, or could you do this with __new__ straight on the TestCase? Curiously, unittest does not initialise classes in the typical way if you do not explicitly define at least one test_ method.

26 March 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.12.4: And another one

The fourth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp has now arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R, and has just been pushed to Debian as well. This follows four days of idleness in the incoming/ directory: Word is that the tireless CRAN maintainers were traveling and only covering simpler packages. The 0.12.4 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, and the 0.12.3 release in January -- making it the eight release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. As before, this release is more of a maintenance release addressing a number of small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 615 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by more than sixty packages from the last release in January! As during the last few releases, we have new first-time contributors. Kirill Mueller extended Nullable<> to const objects. James "coatless" Balamuta helped with a much-needed update to the Rcpp FAQ concerning recommendations for OS X installations. Colin Gillespie corrected another (small) vignette issue. Contributions from the rest of the gang as well as by-now regular contributors such as Nathan or Dan are detailed below.
Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.4 (2016-03-22)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • New accessors as() and clone() were added to the Nullable class (Dan in PR #423 closing #421)
    • The Nullable<>::operator SEXP() and Nullable<>::get() now also work for const objects (Kirill Mueller in PR #417).
    • A subsetting error was fixed (Qiang via #432 closing #431).
  • Changes in Rcpp Sugar:
    • Added new Sugar function median() (Nathan in PR #425 closing #424)
    • Added new Sugar function cbind() (Nathan in PR #447 closing #407)
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • A plugin for C++14 was added (Dan in PR #427)
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • An entry was added to the Rcpp-FAQ vignette describing the required packages for vignette building (#422).
    • Use on OS X was further detailed (James Balamuta in #433 with further review by Bob Rudis).
    • An entry was added concerning the hard-code limit of arguments to some constructor and function (cf #435).
    • The Rcpp-FAQ vignette now contains a table of content.
    • Typos and indentation were corrected in the Rcpp Sugar vignette (#445 by Colin Gillespie).
Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

Jonathan McDowell: Dr Stoll: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the GPL

[I wrote this as part of BelFOSS but I think it s worth posting here.] My Free Software journey starts with The Cuckoo s Egg. Back in the early 90s a family friend suggested I might enjoy reading it. He was right; I was fascinated by the world of interconnected machines it introduced me to. That helped start my involvement in FidoNet, but it also got me interested in Unix. So when I saw a Linux book at the Queen s University bookshop (sadly no longer with us) with a Slackware CD in the back I had to have it. The motivation at this point was to have a low cost version of Unix I could run on the PC hardware I already owned. I had no knowledge of the GNU Project before this point, and as I wasn t a C programmer I had no interest in looking at the source code. I spent some time futzing around with it and that partition (I was dual booting with DOS 6.22) fell into disuse. It wasn t until I d learnt some C and turned up to university, which provided me with an internet connection and others who were either already using Linux or interested in doing so, that I started running a Linux box full time. Once I was doing that I became a lot more interested in the Open Source side of the equation. Rather than running a closed operating system that even the API for wasn t properly specified (or I wouldn t have needed my copy of Undocumented DOS) I had the complete source to both the underlying OS and all the utilities that it was using. For someone doing a computer science degree this was invaluable. Minix may have been the OS discussed in the OS Design module I studied, but Linux was a much more feature complete option that I was running on my desktop and could also peer under the hood of. In my professional career I ve always welcomed the opportunities to work with Open Source. A long time ago I experienced a particularly annoying issue when writing a device driver under QNX. The documentation didn t seem to match the observed behaviour of the subsystem I was interfacing with. However due to licensing issues only a small number of people in the organisation were able to actually look at the QNX source. So I ended up wasting a much more senior engineer s time with queries like I think it s actually doing x, y and z instead of a, b and c; can you confirm? . Instances where I can look directly at the source code myself make me much more productive. Commercial development also started to make me more understanding of the Free Software nature of the code I was running. It wasn t just the ability to look at the code which was useful, but also the fact there was no need to reinvent the wheel. Need a base OS to build an appliance on? Debian ensures that the main component is Free for all usage. No need to worry about rolling your own compilers, base libraries etc. From a commercial perspective that allows you to concentrate on the actual product. And when you hit problems, the source is available and you can potentially fix it yourself or at least more easily find out if there s been a fix for that issue released (being able to see code development in version control systems rather than getting a new upstream release with a whole heap on unrelated fixes in it really helps with that). I had thus progressed from using FLOSS because it was free-as-in-beer, to appreciating the benefits of Open Source in my own learning and employment experiences, to a deeper understanding of the free-as-in-speech benefits that could be gained. However at this point I was still thinking very much from a developer mindset. Even my thoughts about how users can benefit from Free Software were in the context of businesses being able to easily switch suppliers or continue to maintain legacy software because they had the source to their systems available. One of the major factors that has helped me to see beyond this is the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). With desktop or server software there is by and large a choice about what to use. This is not the case with appliances. While manufacturers will often produce a few revisions of software for their devices, usually eventually there is a newer and shiny model and the old one is abandoned. This is problematic for many reasons. For example, historically TVs have been long lived devices (I had one I bought second hand that happily lasted me 7+ years). However the smart capabilities of the TV I purchased in 2012 are already of limited usefulness, and LG have moved on to their current models. I have no intention of replacing the device any time soon, so have had to accept it is largely acting as a dumb display. More serious is the lack of security updates. For a TV that doesn t require a network connection to function this is not as important, but the IoT is a trickier proposition. For example Matthew Garrett had an awful experience with some intelligent light bulbs, which effectively circumvented any home network security you might have set up. The manufacturer s defence? No longer manufactured or supported. It s cases like these that have slowly led me to a more complete understanding of the freedom that Free Software truly offers to users. It s not just about cost free/low cost software. It s not just about being able to learn from looking at the source to the programs you are running. It s not even about the freedom to be able to modify the programs that we use. It s about giving users true Freedom to use and modify their devices as they see fit. From this viewpoint it is much easier to understand the protections against Tivoization that were introduced with GPLv3, and better appreciate the argument sometimes made that the GPL offers more freedom than BSD style licenses.

Ben Hutchings: Depression vs fever

There was a connection I meant to draw, and then forgot to do before publishing my last entry. In severe cases of depression, ECT may still be used as a last resort, and is often effective. I had the idea that the lesser shock to the brain of a high fever might somehow have an effect on less serious depression. It doesn't seem terribly likely, though, and we never did find a thermometer to check just how high my temperature was.

Gunnar Wolf: Yes! I can confirm that...

I am very very (very very very!) happy to confirm that... This year, and after many years of not being able to, I will cross the Atlantic. To do this, I will take my favorite excuse: Attending DebConf! So, yes, this image I am pasting here is as far as you can imagine from official promotional material. But, having bought my plane tickets, I have to start bragging about it ;-) In case it is of use to others (at least, to people from my general geographic roundabouts), I searched for plane tickets straight from Mexico. I was accepting my lack of luck, facing an over-36-hour trip(!!) and at very high prices. Most routes were Mexico- central_europe -Arab Emirates-South Africa... Great for collecting frequent-flier miles, but terrible for anything else. Of course, requesting a more logical route (say, via Sao Paulo in Brazil) resulted in a price hike to over US$3500. Not good. I found out that Mexico-Argentina tickets for that season were quite agreeable at US$800, so I booked our family vacation to visit the relatives, and will fly from there at US$1400. So, yes, in a 48-hr timespan I will do MEX-GRU-ROS, then (by land) Rosario to Buenos Aires, then AEP-GRU-JNB-CPT. But while I am at DebConf, Regina and the kids will be at home with the grandparents and family and friends. In the end, win-win with just an extra bit of jetlag for me ;-) I *really* expect flights to be saner for USians, Europeans, and those coming from further far away. But we have grown to have many Latin Americans, and I hope we can all meet in CPT for the most intense weeks of the year! See you all in South Africa!

25 March 2016

Daniel Pocock: With Facebook, everybody can betray Jesus

It's Easter time again and many of those who are Christian will be familiar with the story of the Last Supper and the subsequent betrayal of Jesus by his friend Judas. If Jesus was around today and didn't immediately die from a heart attack after hearing about the Bishop of Bling (who spent $500,000 just renovating his closet and flew first class to visit the poor in India), how many more of his disciples would betray him and each other by tagging him in selfies on Facebook? Why do people put the short term indulgence of social media ahead of protecting privacy in the long term? Is this how you treat your friends?

Jonathan Carter: DebConf 16 Updates

debconf16-blogRegistration now open DebConf 16 is taking place in Cape Town, South Africa. For more information read the registration opening announcement. Quick summary Call for talk proposals open If you have a proposal for a session at DC16, please read the full call for proposals announcement. Quick info Video team If you re on the video team, or are planning to get involved then you might want to join the video team mailing list and #debconf-video IRC channel on oftc. Meetings are kicking off soon, if you re planning to join an IRC meeting, you can mark your availability on Framadate. Sponsoring DebConf 16 We have some great sponsors for DebConf 16 already, but sadly we don t have any local sponsors yet. Sponsorship is open to all, but if you know of a South African company in particular who might be interested, then feel free to send them a copy of the DebConf 16 Sponsorship Brochure which contains all the options and how to get in touch with the sponsorship team. Sponsoring DebConf has never been more accessible to South African companies so if you d like to get your company name on the Debian map and get some great exposure, then this is the perfect opportunity!

Guido G nther: More sandboxing

More sandboxing When working on untrusted code or data it's impossible to predict what happens when one does a: 
bundle install --path=vendor
or 
npm install
Does this phone out your private SSH and GPG keys? Does a 
evince Downloads/justdownloaded.pdf
try to exploit the PDF viewer? While you can run stuff in separate virtual machines this can get cumbersome. libvirt-sandbox to the rescue! It allows to sandbox applications using libvirt's virtualization drivers. It took us a couple of years (The ITP is from 2012) but we finally have it in Debian's NEW queue. When libvirt-sandbox creates a sandbox it uses your root filesystem mounted read only by default so you have access to all installed programs (this can be changed with the --root option though). It can use either libvirt's QEMU or LXC drivers. We're using the later in the examples below: So in order to make sure the above bundler call has no access to your $HOME you can use: 
sudo virt-sandbox \
   -m ram:/tmp=10M \
   -m ram:$HOME=10M \
   -m ram:/var/run/screen=1M \
   -m host-bind:/path/to/your/ruby-stuff=/path/to/your/ruby-stuff \
   -c lxc:/// \
   -S $USER \
   -n rubydev-sandbox \
   -N dhcp,source=default \
   /bin/bash
This will make your $HOME unaccessible by mounting a tmpfs over it and using separate network, ipc, mount, pid and utc namespaces allowing you to invoke bundler with less worries. /path/to/your/ruby-stuff is bind mounted read-write into the sandbox so you can change files there. Bundler can fetch new gems using libvirt's default network connection. And for the PDF case: 
sudo virt-sandbox \
  -m ram:$HOME=10M \
  -m ram:/dev/shm=10M \
  -m host-bind:$HOME/Downloads=$HOME/Downloads \
  -c lxc:/// \
  -S $USER \
  -n evince-sandbox \
  --env="DISPLAY=:0" \
  --env="XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY" \
  /usr/bin/evince Downloads/justdownloaded.pdf
Note that the above example shares /tmp with the sandbox in order to give it access to the X11 socket. A better isolation can probably be achieved using xpra or xvnc but I haven't looked into this yet. Besides the command line program virt-sandbox there's also the library libvirt-sandbox which makes it simpler to build new sandboxing applications. We're not yet shipping virt-sandbox-service (a tool to provision sandboxed system services) in the Debian packages since it's RPM distro specific. Help on porting this to Debian is greatly appreciated.

24 March 2016

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: stardicter 0.9

For quite some time I maintain set of scripts to convert some freely available dictionaries to StarDict format. I think it's time to make it easily available to others as well, so it has seen first release on PyPI after the code is almost 10 years old. The project originally started for English - Czech dictionary, but over the time support for more sources have been introduced and you can generate StarDict dictionaries from many other sources. So we now have German - Czech dictionary as well. There is also support for dicts.info which provides many bilingual dictionaries, unfortunately it's license doesn't allow to distribute them.

Filed under: English StarDict 0 comments

Bits from Debian: DebConf16: Call for Proposals

The DebConf Content team is pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for the DebConf16 conference, to be held in Cape Town, South Africa from 2 through 9 July 2016. Submitting an Event In order to submit an event, go to "Submit a talk" on your profile page in the DebConf16 website and describe your proposal. Please note, events are not limited to traditional presentations or informal sessions (BoFs). We welcome submissions of tutorials, performances, art installations, debates, or any other format of event that you think would be beneficial to the Debian community. Please include a short title, suitable for a compact schedule, and an engaging description of the event. You should use the field "Notes" to provide us information such as additional speakers, scheduling restrictions, or any special requirements we should consider for your event. Regular sessions may either be 20 or 45 minutes long (including time for questions), other kinds of sessions (like workshops) could have different durations. Please choose the most suitable duration for your event and explain any special requests. Timeline The first batch of accepted proposals will be announced in April. If you depend on having your proposal accepted in order to attend the conference, please submit it as soon as possible so that it can be considered during this first evaluation period. All proposals must be submitted before Sunday 1 May 2016 to be evaluated for the official schedule. Topics and Tracks Though we invite proposals on any Debian or FLOSS related subject, we have some broad topics on which we encourage people to submit proposals, including: Video Coverage Providing video of sessions amplifies DebConf achievements and is one of the conference goals. Unless speakers opt-out, official events will be streamed live over the Internet to promote remote participation. Recordings will be published later under the DebConf license, as well as presentation slides and papers whenever available. Contact and Thanks to Sponsors DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our platinum sponsor HPE. DebConf16 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, please get in touch! You are welcome to contact the Content Team with any concerns about your event, or with any ideas or questions about DebConf events in general. You can reach us at content@debconf.org. Registration Reminder Registration for DebConf is open. Please log into the DebConf16 website and register from your profile page. To request bursaries (sponsorship) for food, accommodation, or travel, you must be registered by Sunday, 10 April 2016. After this date, registrations will still be accepted in any of the basic, professional, and corporate categories. However, accommodation on the campus will no longer be guaranteed, and requests for sponsorship will no longer be accepted. Even if you are not certain you will be able to attend, we recommend registering now. You can always cancel your registration, before the deadline. We do suggest that attendees begin making travel arrangements as soon as possible, of course. We hope to see you all in Cape Town!

23 March 2016

John Goerzen: Free cars, sunsets, and Kansas

Will you have a car I can borrow? I asked. Sure. No charge. There s a sign telling you where to find the key. It is pretty common for small airports to have a car for a pilot to borrow when flying in. This lets a person go into town for lunch, or visit friends. And it s usually free, with a can to donate a few bucks or a polite request to fill up the tank when you re done. Still, when I had called ahead to ask about flying into the airport in a small town in north-central Kansas, I hadn t expected to be told to just waltz into the place and take the key. But they had no staff at the airport most of the time. So, to me another person from a small town it made perfect sense. Somehow, because of that phone call, this town I had visited once, maybe 25 years ago, seemed instantly familiar. My mom grew up in a small town near there. She wanted me to see where she grew up, to meet some people that meant a lot to her. As it s quite a distance from home, I offered to fly her there. So, Laura, mom, and I climbed into a Cessna one morning for the flight northwest. We touched down at the airport, and I pulled the plane up to the little terminal building. Smith Center, KS airport terminal After I took care of parking the plane, I went to find the car. Except the car was missing. Some other pilot had flown in the same day and was using it, according to the logbook on the desk. I called the number on a sign which rang to the sheriff s office and they confirmed it. According to the logbook, this was only the third time that car had been driven since Thanksgiving. Were we stuck at the airport a few miles out of down? Nope. Mom called the people we were going to meet, a wonderful couple in their upper 80s. They drove out to pick us up. I m rather glad the car was gone, because I had such a great time visiting with them. Norris told me about the days when the state highways were gravel how they d have to re-blade them every few days due to all the traffic. I heard about what happened when the people in that community heard of some folks in Africa in need of car equipment they modified a tractor to fit in a shipping container and shipped it to Africa, along with a lot of books, blankets, supplies, and anything else needed to fill up a huge shipping container. Sounds like something people around here would do. We drove around a couple of the small towns. The town my mom grew up in has seen better days. Its schools closed years ago, the old hotel whose owner gave her piano lessons is condemned, and many houses have been lost. But the town lives on. A new community center was built a few years ago. The grain elevator is expanding. Every time a business on Main Street closes, the grocery store expands a little bit: it s now a grocery store with a little hardware store and a little restaurant mixed in. The mall , as the locals jokingly call it. And, of course, two beautiful small churches still meet every Sunday. Here s the one my mom attended as a child. IMG_7085 We drove past the marker at the geographic center of the contiguous United States. Norris saw some other visitors, rolled down his windows, and treated them and us to an unexpected story of the time thousands of people banded together to completely build a house in a single day, just down the road. Smiles all around. So here I was, nearly 200 miles from home, in an unfamiliar town but one where I could just feel the goodness. After spending a few hours with these people, I felt like they were old friends. As I flew us home, I spotted one of my favorite Kansas sights: a beautiful sunset. From the plane, it almost looks like the land at the horizon turns blue like the ocean, and above it the last hint of sun paints the canvas-sky. In this week of controversy, politics, and reports of violence, it reminds me that we all get the privilege of sharing this beautiful Earth. I didn t ask anybody on that trip about their politics, religion, or opinions on any of the divisive issues of the day. Whether they agree with me on those things or not is irrelevant. I got to spend a day with good-hearted and delightful people, so I flew back with a smile. IMG_7099

Petter Reinholdtsen: Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian

Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for later processing and graphing. The original collector store the battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design full level, last full level and current battery level. This make it possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging. The new tools are available in /usr/share/battery-stats/ in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable. Get the new battery level graph and lifetime prediction by running: 
/usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu. The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu entry yet): 
/usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least when there are few data points. The graphs look a bit better with a few years of data. A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats collector broke in Debian. The scripts in /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/ were no longer executed. I suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not know. The issue is reported as bug #818649 against pm-utils. I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call the collector script every time the power connector is connected and disconnected. With this fix in place it was finally time to make a new release of the package, and get it into Debian. If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please check out the battery-stats in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from github. As always, patches are very welcome.

Ingo Juergensmann: Xen randomly crashing server

It's a long story... an oddessey of almost two years... But to start from the beginning: Back then I rented a server at Hetzner until they decided to bill for every IP address you got from them. I got a /26 in the past and so I would have to pay for every IP address of that subnet in addition to the server rent of 79.- EUR/month. That would have meant nearly doubling the monthly costs. So I moved with my server from Hetzner to rrbone Net, which offered me a /26 on a rented Cisco C200 M2 server for a competitve price. After migrating the VMs from Hetzner to rrbone with the same setup that was running just fine at Hetzner I experienced spontaneous reboots of the server, sometimes several times per day and in short time frame. The hosting provider was very, very helpful in debugging this like exchanging the memory, setting up a remote logging service for the CIMC and such. But in the end we found no root cause for this. The CIMC logs showed that the OS was rebooting the machine. Anyway, I then bought my own server and exchanged the Cisco C200 by my own hardware, but the reboots still happen as before. Sometimes the servers runs for weeks, sometimes the server crashes 4-6 times a day, but usually it's like a pattern: when it crashes and reboots, it will do that again within a few hours and after the second reboot the chances are high that the server will run for several days without a reboot - or even weeks. The strange thing is, that there are absolutely no hints in the logs, neither syslog or in the Xen logs, so I assume that's something quite deep in the kernel that causes the reboot. Another hint is, that the reboots fairly often happened, when I used my Squid proxy on one of the VMs to access the net. I'm connecting for example by SSH with portforwarding to one VM, whereas the proxy runs on another VM, which led to network traffic between the VMs. Sometimes the server crashed on the very firsts proxy requests. So, I exchanged Squid by tinyproxy or other proxies, moved the proxy from one VM to that VM I connect to using SSH, because I thought that the inter-VM traffic may cause the machine to reboot. Moving the proxy to another virtual server I rented at another hosting provider to host my secondary nameserver did help a little bit, but with no real hard proof and statistics, just an impression of mine. I moved from xm toolstack to xl toolstack as well, but didn't help either. The reboots are still happening and in the last few days very frequent. Even with the new server I exchanged the memory, used memory mirroring as well, because I thought that it might be a faulty memory module or something, but still rebooting out of the blue. During the last weekend I configured grub to include "noreboot" command line and then got my first proof that somehow the Xen network stack is causing the reboots: This is a screenshot of the IPMI console, so it's not showing the full information of that kernel oops, but as you can see, there are most likely such parts involved like bridge, netif, xenvif and the physical igb NIC. Here's another screenshot of a crash from this night: Slightly different information, but still somehow network involved as you can see in the first line (net_rx_action). So the big question is: is this a bug Xen or with my setup? I'm using xl toolstack, the xl.conf is basically the default, I think:
## Global XL config file ##

# automatically balloon down dom0 when xen doesn't have enough free
# memory to create a domain
autoballoon=0

# full path of the lockfile used by xl during domain creation
#lockfile="/var/lock/xl"

# default vif script
#vif.default.script="vif-bridge"
With this the default network scripts of the distribution (i.e. Debian stable) should be used. The network setup consists of two brdiges:
auto xenbr0
iface xenbr0 inet static
address 31.172.31.193
netmask 255.255.255.192
gateway 31.172.31.254
bridge_ports eth0
pre-up brctl addbr xenbr0 auto xenbr1
iface xenbr1 inet static
address 192.168.254.254
netmask 255.255.255.0
pre-up brctl addbr xenbr1
There are some more lines to that config like setting up some iptables rules with up commands and such. But as you can see my eth0 NIC is part of the "main" xen bridge with all the IP addresses that are reachable from the outside. The second bridge is used for internal networking like database connections and such. I would rather like to use a netconsole to capture the full debug output in case of a new crash, but unfortunately this only works until the bridge is brought up and in place:
[ 0.000000] Command line: placeholder root=UUID=c3....22 ro debug ignore_loglevel loglevel=7 netconsole=port@31.172.31.193/eth0,514@5.45.x.y/e0:ac:f1:4c:y:x
[ 32.565624] netpoll: netconsole: local port $port
[ 32.565683] netpoll: netconsole: local IPv4 address 31.172.31.193
[ 32.565742] netpoll: netconsole: interface 'eth0'
[ 32.565799] netpoll: netconsole: remote port 514
[ 32.565855] netpoll: netconsole: remote IPv4 address 5.45.x.y
[ 32.565914] netpoll: netconsole: remote ethernet address e0:ac:f1:4c:y:x
[ 32.565982] netpoll: netconsole: device eth0 not up yet, forcing it
[ 36.126294] netconsole: network logging started
[ 49.802600] netconsole: network logging stopped on interface eth0 as it is joining a master device
So, the first question is: how to use netconsole with an interface that is used on a bridge? The second question is: is the setup with two bridges with Xen ok? I've been using this setup for years now and it worked fairly well on the Hetzner server as well, although I used there xm toolstack with a mix of bridge and routed setup, because Hetzner didn't like to see the MAC addresses of the other VMs on the switch and shut the port down if that happens.
Kategorie:
Debian
Tags:
Debian
Xen
Server
Bug

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