Search Results: "ed"

9 January 2016

Iain R. Learmonth: Trust

This is not a new world, this is simply an extension of the old one. I'm not going to write here about sweeping changes that are happening now, but changes that have been taking place in plain sight for many decades. No one has flipped a switch, only tweaked and tuned variables here and there to lead us down this path. I'd like to reflect on where we are now but there is no way I could describe how it is we got here, the journey was far too complex and filled with ommissions, half-truths and outright lies. It's likely we will never know what has brought us here. I live in Scotland, a country that is a part of the United Kingdom and a member of the European Union. We have a Scottish Government, although certain matters are still handled by the UK Government. The European Government also handles some matters and these can take effect across the entire European Union. I do not feel that I can hold trust in any of these bodies anymore. The European Convention on Human Rights was, for me at least, a beacon of hope. A series of fundamental rights guaranteed to be upheld for every person within the European Union. A series of fundamental rights that has been ignored by governments repeatedly:

1999: it was held the UK had violated the human rights of several homosexual soldiers who had been dismissed from the armed forces because of their sexuality
2002: it was held the UK had violated the human rights of a widower regarding entitlement to receive bereavement benefits who had been discriminated against on account of his gender
2005: it was held that the UK violated the human rights of prisoners by denying them the ability to vote
2010: the stop and search procedures used by the UK police pursuant to the Terrorism Act 2000 were considered illegal under the ECHR because they did not require the police to have grounds for suspicion before using them

This is not an exhaustive list, just select cross-sections of our recent history. It is important to remember that in each of these cases, it took a citizen to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. These rights were violated by the UK government until the actions were challenged, the legislation that allowed them was currently enacted into UK law without regard for the ECHR. It should also be noted that the ban on prisoners voting is still in effect in the UK. We've learnt that the ECHR is not an effective safeguard against the abuse of powers by government. The UK government also sees the Human Rights Act as a problem, although at least scrapping it has been delayed for now. Much of these breaches of human rights are justified by the government as in the interest of the runaway train known as "national security". I have recently had direct contact with one aspect of this during my journey home from 32c3. You can read about my experiences with airport security here and here. My experiences at these airports angered me for a number of reasons. The first of which was that I was asked to expose my genitals as part of the routine screening, which I do not believe to be proportionate at all. At Luton, I was at the point where I was intending to leave the airport and take the train instead before I was allowed to excercise my right to opt-out of the nude body scanner. Since these incidents, I have conducted some research into these scanners and started an article on the Open Rights Group wiki. While the security officer at Luton had tried to tell me that the radio waves used could not penetrate clothing, they in fact can and this is the entire purpose of them. While the security officer at Luton told me that the machines did not generate an image, they are in fact doing exactly that, even if that image is processed by computer vision algorithms as opposed to being viewed by a human reviewer. A leaflet by the Department for Transport, made available on the Aberdeen Airport website, also states that no image is created, and yet this is exactly how the scanners work. I have never seen this leaflet printed and available in the airport itself, although I admit I do not fly regularly and may have missed it. That said, it does not provide a true representation of the scan process and I would go as far to say it contains an outright lie. In a document published by the UK Government titled "Response to the consultation on the use of security scanners in an aviation security environment", they state:

"nearly all passengers, if they fully understand the procedures, would be unlikely to opt for [the alternative of a private search]"

Even with this display of confidence that they believe the public are happy with the invasion of privacy brought by the security scanners, they have still chosen to not fully inform the public in the way in which the scanner operates. It is the lies that anger me the most. We claim to live in a democracy and you cannot have a democracy without transparency. It is not too late for the Government to earn back my trust, but for now, they haven't given me good reason to believe anything they produce. If you have read this article and you would like to support efforts for change in the United Kingdom, please consider joining the Open Rights Group and perhaps getting involved in their work.

Guido G nther: Debian Fun in December 2015

Debian LTS December was the eighth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. It was a bit of a funny month since most of the time most open CVEs were already taken care of by other team members (which is nice) but it resulted in me not releasing a single DLA which feels weird. Nevertheless in total I spent nine hours working on:

LTS Frontdesk duties like the triaging of 16 CVEs and patch reviews (which actually found an error reassuring me that spending time on this is useful).
Finding a fix for CVE-2015-7555 in giflib. I did not release a DLA yet since I hoped upstream would comment if this is the proper fix.
nss/nspr:
- Discussion on using the same nss in all suites continued.
- I did further upgrade test for nss focusing on Java this time (which is a heavy user of nss for its certificate handling).
- Enabled the internal testsuite of nspr as well since nss and nspr often get updated in lockstep. This resulted in 809723 and upstream bugs 1236333, 1236334, 1236244 (which were already merged thanks to Wan-Teh Chang). The current modifications are available here. Overall the test suite needs more cleanups but it's already useful as is.

On unpaid time I introduced some usertags for tracking our non DLA related activities (although it seems I'm currently the only user). Other Debian stuff

I uploaded libvirt 1.3.0~rc1 and 1.3.0~rc2 to experimental and 1.3.0 final to unstable.
I uploaded libvirt-python 1.3.0 with newly added autopkg tests
Filed bugs reminding that libvirt-bin is a transitional package that will be dropped soon.
Finally released gbp 0.7.1 with lots of changes most of these where already mentioned in the December installment of this post but there's more:
- git-pbuilder updates to 1.37 and 1.38
- fixes for 791759 and 766350,
- doc updates including the addition of the patch queue handling
Still looking for time to finish gbp import-orig's rollback support.
I added a function to link to the Debian BTS to my emacs config to ease writing these kind of posts.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: digest 0.6.9

A new release, now at version number 0.6.9, of the digest package is now on CRAN. I also just prepared the Debian upload. This release is very large part the work of Thierry Onkelinx who added stable sha1 support in a new function sha1(). Here, stable means that numerically equivalent numbers (in the sense of the semi-famous R FAQ entry 7.31) result in identical hashes. This is useful for hashing results from numerical analysis---where the representation may differ bitwise between, say, 32 and 64-bit platforms. We started to write a little more about this in a (at this very point still rather unfinished) little vignette. We also had a nice pull request from fellow Rcpp hacker Qiang Kou who updated the code to use XLENGTH so that large vectors can be supported. CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version.

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

Jan Wagner: New blogging engine

Exactly 3 years after I moved on from Wordpress to Octopress I thought it's time for something new. Some of you might have noticed that I've not much blogged in the past. A new Octopress version was promised a year ago. While I've liked writing in Markdown, the deployment workflow was horribly broken and keeping Octopress up to date was impossible. I blogged so seldom that I needed to consult the documentation every time in the recent days. After looking into several projects, Ghost seems most promising. And the good news: it has a split-screen Markdown editor with integrated live preview.

There are several migration scripts out there, but I only found one which was able to also export tags. The import into Ghost worked like a charm.

8 January 2016

Jonathan Dowland: Game boxes

computer game boxes

My brother and I found these whilst tidying up the stuff that we've left at our parent's house. What on earth should we do with them? I have a small number of older game boxes (Doom, Doom 2, Civ 2, etc.) which I use as drawer dividers (both the lid and the 'seat' of the box), but most of these are newer designs, more like a box of cereal, with their openings at the top, so they can't be used as such. (and there's only so many drawer dividers that you need...) This is loosely related to my stalled Amiga floppy disk recovery project, which hasn't made any progress since I last wrote about it.

Norbert Preining: WordPress 4.4 and older themes how to break backward compatibility

Since quite some time I was wondering why my blog suddenly does not display a title in the browser bar. Hmm, Of course I thought I broke something, but it turned out that this is a feature of a recent WordPress update. Mentioned in a blog entry on the development or should I say, hidden there so that nobody knows about it the changes stirred quite some reactions, not the least because a lot, if not all older themes, are suddenly broken. Congratulations WordPress developer to this great move. wordpress-breaks-themes

So what has happened? Many themes use the wp_title function to ship out title tags. After a short period of deprecation WordPress developers instantiated the function, but in a way that it doesn t work with older themes. Perfect. To quote from the kind of annoucement:

This latest change makes the new API (almost) feature complete and theme authors are discouraged from using wp_title() in the future. If it was decided to add a UI to let users choose the make up of their document title, or another improvement to how title generation works, we now have a forward compatible way to handle these things. To upgrade themes from using wp_title() to declaring theme support for core s title-tag without breaking backwards compatibility with WordPress 4.0 and older, theme authors can check if the callback function exists and add a shiv in case it does not:

Well, thanks for putting this well hidden in a development blog. Furthermore, one needs to read the following code quite carefully, otherwise one overlooks that it is necessary to delete the calls to wp_title. Fortunately, on blog of the Theme Review Team the this post was found, which explains what has to be done:

add an action hook:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'theme_slug_setup' );
function theme_slug_setup()   add_theme_support( 'title-tag' );

and above all, (quote) Also, make sure the following is not in your header.php template: <title><?php wp_title( ' ', true, 'right' ); ?></title>

Indeed, that worked. Since I am already a child theme the changes were minimal, once one found them. Coming from a TeX world, things like backward compatibility in other products always strike me as funny

Carl Chenet: My Free Activities in December 2015

I was quite busy in December 2015, especially with my new Python projects related to automatize Twitter actions. Have a look at my Github home for more information ! 1. Personal projects

db2twitter 0.5 released (Github stars appreciated :) )- new option to circle through a ring of the last N tweets in order to resend them on a regular basis
new project Twitterwatch (Github stars appreciated :) )- find how old is the last sent tweet and triggers an alert if the user-defined duration is exceeded, allowing to know that an automated toolchain of sending tweets is broken
new project Feed2tweet (Github stars appreciated :) ) send tweets from a RSS feed. It s a fork from rss2twitter, improving hashtag management, configuration options and documentation.

2. Journal du hacker

setting up the Journal du hacker blog (PluXML)
feedDiasp allowing RSS feeds to Diaspora* was fixed. The issue was from the diaspy dependency. I could not wait for the upstream (16 days is way too long) and fixed the issue by myself.

That s all folks! See you next month!

Alessio Treglia: OpenStack: a .deb guy on (the) board

The elections for the new OpenStack board are coming closer
and this time the Open Source community has a great
opportunity of representation: Giuseppe Patern is standing as a candidate for the board.
Although Giuseppe is considered by HP and Forrester Research
among the top talented consultants in the world,
Gippa (as he s largely known in the industry) is still one of us ,
a nerd that grew up with a keyboard on his hands.
As he s one of the candidates of the OpenStack board,
Fabio Marzocca wishing to know more has interviewed him.

[FM] The hard question. You re a techie. Why the hell are you running for the board?

[GP] This is indeed a good question It all started as a challenge from some clients and friends that are working in the OpenStack project. The truth is that the board and most of the management of the foundation are from vendors. I m not questioning here if they do a good job or not, it is very likely that they tend to protect their own interests. In my opinion it lacks some community spirit that have fostered Linux development such as Debian and Ubuntu. That s why I m running for it, to bring the community where it should be.

[FM] Back to Debian and Ubuntu, could you tell us your story with Linux?

[GP] I discovered Linux in 1994, but only in 1996 things were serious. By the time I just finished high school and I applied for a job in a local Internet Service Provider. At 15 years I was well known in the local community as I was installing and maintaining several BBSes, so it wasn t hard to get the job. I can say it was love at first sight. I started with Slackware (was the first distro), but I moved into redhat first and then debian. When I was working for the IBM Linux Technology Center, I was in charge of helping porting Linux to PowerPC and backporting LVM to make it similar to AIX. Sun was also a good playground as they acquired Cobalt, a hardware appliance based on debian. Then I shifted more towards Enterprise Linux adoption with 6 years in RedHat and then I went to Canonical. I was happy to go back to Debian and Ubuntu community, because I still believe that Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) were the real spirit of a Linux community.

[FM] Another hard question. We know you re somehow involved in the rebellion of Devuan.org. What is your opinion about systemd?

[GP] Let me tell you that it s not totally black/white and let s see the two sides here. Something like systemd was indeed needed. Each distro has its own way of init ing the system and for a package maintainer or commercial software maker, maintaining different init behaviour is insane. And as an init replacement it totally makes sense. However, IMHO systemd went too far away, incorporating into its code something that should not happen. A DHCP client into an init system, seriously? I doubt it was in the spirit of the Unix and Linux system
However, in the real world of pets vs cattle , where application matters more than systems, having a systemd as it is, doesn t change that much.

[FM] OpenStack was incubated in Ubuntu and the roots are quite clear. Is there something else that you would like to see from Debian and Ubuntu in OpenStack?

[GP] Stability, if I can name just one. Currently OpenStack is released every 6 months, which was probably the best choice to speed up the development. However, this is now becoming a weakness, as enterprise customers can t upgrade their critical infrastructures every 6 months. Traditionally Debian is maniacally focused on given a bullet-proof distribution, this is something that in my opinion is missing from OpenStack.

[FM] Gippa, tell us just 2 or 3 topics you will bring to action in case of election

[GP] I d like to introduce an OpenStack LTS process, following the Ubuntu approach: while releasing every 6 months is fair enough for development and testing environments, having a stable release every 2-3 years can give enterprise customers the peace of mind they need while running production environments.
I d also love to see a consolidation of the core (Nova/Neutron/Cinder/Swift): vendors and developers are introducing new features and projects while I d love to see for example- a more stable and scalable Neutron and a more stable connection to Oslo (in particular rabbitmq).
In general, I would encourage more attention to who is actually deploying, integrating and using OpenStack every day. I would also try to foster the ecosystem of ISVs in order to release and certify their software for OpenStack. And last but not least- to see interoperation between regional datacenters: I dream of a world where companies in a given territory can work together , and this is only possible through standards. I hope that OpenStack can represent this standard.

[FM] When are the elections and how can we vote?

[GP] Individual Member Director elections for the 2016 Board will be held online from Monday January 11, 2016 to Friday January 15, 2016. More informations on the website.

Norbert Preining: Fighting with IPv6

During the last weeks I finally got my hands dirty with IPv6. A comment on my blog and an email informed me that my server (hosting this blog) is not reachable via IPv6, albeit it has an IPv6 address. That said, I tried to get that running and fell into several holes, due to firewalls, my home provider not doing IPv6, and not the least due to my own ignorance of IPv6. ipv6-pain

Fortunately, with the help of some good souls and the technical support I finally got IPv6 connectivity on both my server, as well as at home, up. Server So my server is still running wheezy, which is a bit old, but upgrading with lots of hand-installed stuff is a bit a pain. The network interface was configured via a static IPv4 address, and no traces of IPv6 for now. Simple minded as I am, I assumed that this is the problem and started playing around with all kind of IPv6 configurations in the interfaces file, from using dhcp, and static configuration. The static configuration somehow worked out, but I never got a proper default route set. So I was really puzzled. In addition, at home I don t have IPv6, my provider is not distributing IPv6, so I couldn t test it (but on this a bit later). Fortunately, the good soul from the Netherland Filip B., did a lot of testing and also send permanent suggestions and analysis of the IPv6 situation, I am very much indebted to him. Anyway, his last advice about the problem with the default route was contacting the technical support of my provider, who within a very short time sent me an answer which made it clear to me: My firewall was blocking some ports that are necessary for IPv6 route autonegotiation. As firewall I use ferm, kind of a meta iptables language. In my server s setup the firewall blocks most of the ip traffic outside the expected servers, as well as does rate limit checks on ssh connections (those script kiddies). And while I have had some of the icmpv6 types allowed, it seemed that was insufficient. The solution at the end was to open icmpv6-type s 1-4, 133-137, 141, 142, 148, 149, as well as 130-132 from link-local adresses (fe80::/10). After having changed my ferm.conf, even removing everything related to IPv6 from the interfaces file and rebooting finally provided the server with an IPv6 address and a proper route. Wow, first step done. For Apache, fortunately I am doing already wildcard definitions, so no change was necessary and voil , the server is reachable via IPv6. Home As already mentioned, my provider at home does not provide IPv6 addresses. In addition, the DNS server of the provider is also very, well, peculiar about resolving IPv6 (i.e., AAAA records). Trying to get the AAAA record for ipv6.google.com works without a problem:

$ host -t AAAA ipv6.google.com
ipv6.google.com is an alias for ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4002:803::1003

but trying this with my own server, or for that matter any other server, resulted in no answer (preining.info has no AAAA record). Well, that didn t help. Despite these problems, I tried to get an IPv6 address via 6-in-4 tunneling (tunnelbroker), but that didn t work either, probably due to some reverse lookup and the fact that between the world and me there is a cable modem and a wlan router that all on top of the slightly funny infrastructure here in Japan, where you have to rent lines from NTT, but use a different company as Internet provider. I finally found the solution that worked for me, and that is installing miredo, available in Debian. Installation of the package, and starting the miredo service with systemctl start miredo (or /etc/init.d/miredo start) gave me in an instant a working IPv6 connectivity. ping6 worked on IPv6 addresses. Still, I couldn t fix the DNS lookup problem, so for the time being I have added IPv6 addresses for my own server in /etc/hosts, and by using the SixOrNot Firefox plugin I can actually check that it works. Conclusion It is 2016, and we are still far from end-to-end IPv6, and I have to admit that also my IPv6 knowledge is quite meager, and that I only recently have started to grasp some understanding. The good point was that Debian wheezy already works out of the box with IPv6 (if one is not as clumsy as me and blocks the necessary ports), including web servers and mail servers. I have also contacted my provider (AsahiNet) in the hope that they can update their DNS server, and learned that they are planning to roll out IPv6 addresses in the near future whatever that might mean in Japan, maybe next century?

Dirk Eddelbuettel: AsioHeaders 1.11.0-1

Making it easier to use C++ in R has been a really nice and rewarding side effect of the work on Rcpp. One really good idea came from something Jay Emerson, Michael Kane and had I kicked about for way too long: shipping Boost headers for easier use by R and CRAN packages (such as their family of packages around bigmemory). The key idea here is headers: Experienced C++ authors such as library writers can organise C++ code in such a way that one can (almost always) get by without any linking. Which makes deployment so much easier in most use cases, and surely also with R which knows how to set an include path. So after years of "yes we really should", Jay deserves the credit for actually sitting down almost three years ago and creating the first version. So at the end of January 2013, we released BH version 1.51.0-0. By now the package is used fifty-four other CRAN packages --- clearly a much stronger uptake then we ever expected. I took over maintenance at some point, and we are currently in-line with the most recent Boost release 1.60.0. But some people were always lusting after (some) parts of Boost which also require linking. For some libraries (such as Boost.Date_Time in my RcppBDT package) you can set a #define to not require linking (and forego some string formatting or parsing we get from R anyway). Some others are trickier; Boost Regex is one example. I do not think you can use it without linking (but then C++11 helps and finally brings regular expression in the default library). Another library which the systems / network programmers at work would frequently rely upon is Boost.Asio, a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming. It was already used on CRAN by the iptools package by Bob Rudis and Oliver Keyes which shied away from building on Windoze (while 'doze and Boost do get along, but the CRAN system makes it a little more involved). A couple of days ago, I somehow learned that the Asio library actually comes in two flavours: the well-known Boost.Asio (requiring linking), and also as a header-only standalone library! Well, well, well -- so I ran that by Bob and Oliver asking if that would be useful. And the response was a resounding and pretty much immediate Hell, Yes!. So I wrapped it in a package, told Bob about it, who tested it and gave the thumbs up. And after a slightly longer-than-usual on-boarding, the package is now on CRAN. As network (and systems) programming is not entirely uncommon even at CRAN, I hope that this package may find a few more use cases. A new version of iptools should be forthcoming "shortly", including for the first time a Windows build thanks to this package. The indefatigable Martin Morgan already spotted our GitHub repo and scored the first fork. Comments and suggestions about AsioHeaders are welcome via the issue tracker at the GitHub GitHub repo.

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

7 January 2016

Elena 'valhalla' Grandi: Smartphones, ownership and hope for the fate of humanity

Smartphones, ownership and hope for the fate of humanity
Do you own your phone or does it own you? DanielPocock.com

I have conflicting opinions about this article.

Usually I carry a dumb phone, so I'm not completely disconnected, but I'm mostly self-limited to "useful" communications by the fact that I have to pay for calls and SMSs. It also has a few useful features like showing the time , an alarm clock and a led torch, but that's it.

I also carry a smartphone, but I've never been able to trust it with my personal data, so there is no email on it and no communication software. It's also always offline to preserve battery, unless I'm actually using it for something (usually maps). It does have an offline wikipedia reader, which is the second thing I use it more often for. About half of the time I try to use it, however, it is off because I forgot to charge it, unless I've planned in advance to use it (which usually means I'm also carrying a laptop and will need to tether it).

So I guess that I should be agreeing with the article that offline life is better, and that we shouldn't depend on phones in our daily life, and mostly I do.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure that all of the people who seem to be interacting with a phone are actually disconnected from the local reality.

More than once I've experienced the use of smartphones as part of a local interaction: one typical case involves people having a conversation IRL and checking some fact on the internet and then sharing the results with the rest of the local group.

Actually, most of the time I've seen a smartphone being used at our table while eating with friends or collegues it was being passed around to show something to the people at the table, or at the very least being read aloud from, so it was part of the local experience, not a way to disconnect from it.

I'm sure that there are cases of abuse, but I still have hope that most of the connected humanity is managing to find a good balance between online and offline.

I don't want to go back carrying a wrist watch. I remember them as something unconfortable that ended up hitting stuff as I moved my hands, and I'd rather have my wrists free while I type, thanks. Pocket watches, OTOH...

the main exception involved one young adult in the middle of significantly older relatives, which is a somewhat different issue, and one that I believe predated smartphones (IIRC in my case similar situations involved trying to be somewhere else by reading a book).

Francois Marier: Streamzap remotes and evdev in MythTV

Modern versions of Linux and MythTV enable infrared remote controls without the need for lirc. Here's how I migrated my Streamzap remote to evdev.

Installing packages In order to avoid conflicts between evdev and lirc, I started by removing lirc and its config:

apt purge lirc

and then I installed this tool:

apt install ir-keytable

Remapping keys While my Streamzap remote works out of the box with kernel 3.16, the keycodes that it sends to Xorg are not the ones that MythTV expects. I therefore copied the existing mapping:

cp /lib/udev/rc_keymaps/streamzap /home/mythtv/

and changed it to this:

0x28c0 KEY_0
0x28c1 KEY_1
0x28c2 KEY_2
0x28c3 KEY_3
0x28c4 KEY_4
0x28c5 KEY_5
0x28c6 KEY_6
0x28c7 KEY_7
0x28c8 KEY_8
0x28c9 KEY_9
0x28ca KEY_ESC
0x28cb KEY_MUTE #  
0x28cc KEY_UP
0x28cd KEY_RIGHTBRACE
0x28ce KEY_DOWN
0x28cf KEY_LEFTBRACE
0x28d0 KEY_UP
0x28d1 KEY_LEFT
0x28d2 KEY_ENTER
0x28d3 KEY_RIGHT
0x28d4 KEY_DOWN
0x28d5 KEY_M
0x28d6 KEY_ESC
0x28d7 KEY_L
0x28d8 KEY_P
0x28d9 KEY_ESC
0x28da KEY_BACK # <
0x28db KEY_FORWARD # >
0x28dc KEY_R
0x28dd KEY_PAGEUP
0x28de KEY_PAGEDOWN
0x28e0 KEY_D
0x28e1 KEY_I
0x28e2 KEY_END
0x28e3 KEY_A

The complete list of all EV_KEY keycodes can be found in the kernel. The following command will write this mapping to the driver:

/usr/bin/ir-keytable w /home/mythtv/streamzap -d /dev/input/by-id/usb-Streamzap__Inc._Streamzap_Remote_Control-event-if00

and they should take effect once MythTV is restarted.

Applying the mapping at boot While the na ve solution is to apply the mapping at boot (for example, by sticking it in /etc/rc.local), that only works if the right modules are loaded before rc.local runs. A much better solution is to write a udev rule so that the mapping is written after the driver is loaded. I created /etc/udev/rules.d/streamzap.rules with the following:

# Configure remote control for MythTV
# https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User_Manual:IR_control_via_evdev#Modify_key_codes
ACTION=="add", ATTRS idVendor =="0e9c", ATTRS idProduct =="0000", RUN+="/usr/bin/ir-keytable -c -w /home/mythtv/streamzap -D 1000 -P 250 -d /dev/input/by-id/usb-Streamzap__Inc._Streamzap_Remote_Control-event-if00"

and got the vendor and product IDs using:

grep '^[IN]:' /proc/bus/input/devices

The -D and -P parameters control what happens when a button on the remote is held down and the keypress must be repeated. These delays are in milliseconds.

Michal Čihař: Enca 1.18

It seems that I did mess it up with last version of Enca and it was not possible to install it without error. Now comes hotfix which fixes tat. If you don't know Enca, it is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs. Full list of changes for 1.18 release:

fix installation of devhelp documentation

Still enca is in maintenance mode only and I have no intentions to write new features. However there is no limitation to other contributors, join the project at GitHub :-). You can download from http://cihar.com/software/enca/.

Filed under: Enca English 0 comments

Sven Hoexter: Failing with F5: stderr, stdout - who cares

[root@adc:Standby:In Sync] config # tmsh save /sys ucs /var/tmp/foo.ucs
Saving active configuration...
/var/tmp/foo.ucs is saved.
[root@adc:Standby:In Sync] config # tmsh save /sys ucs /var/tmp/foo.ucs > /dev/null
Saving active configuration...
[root@adc:Standby:In Sync] config # tmsh save /sys ucs /var/tmp/foo.ucs 2> /dev/null
/var/tmp/foo.ucs is saved.
[root@adc:Standby:In Sync] config #

Seems F5 is not alone with such glorious ideas. A coworker pointed out that the "ipspace list" command on our old NetApps outputs a space and a backspace in some places.

Zlatan Todori : Merry Christmas

Today it is Christmas here (Serbs are majority Orthodox and so is my family). While I am not religious, it has a great tradition here and probably the only day when majority of family gathers on one place. I also today remember my Debian family and want to express love to it. I will try this year to dedicate much more time to Debian and hope I keep this pace going on for many years (lifetime?) to come. Cheers to all and happy hacking.

Daniel Pocock: Do you own your phone or does it own you?

Have you started thinking about new year's resolutions for 2016? Back to the gym or giving up sugary drinks? Many new year's resolutions have a health theme. Unless you have a heroin addiction, there may not be anything else in your life that is more addictive and has potentially more impact on your health and quality of life than your mobile phone. Almost every week there is some new report about the negative impact of phone use on rest or leisure time. Children are particularly at risk and evidence strongly suggests their grades at school are tanking as a consequence. Can you imagine your life changing for the better if you switched off your mobile phone or left it at home for one day per week in 2016? If you have children, can you think of anything more powerful than the example you set yourself to help them stay in control of their phones? Children have a remarkable ability to emulate the bad habits they observe in their parents. Are you in control? Turning it off is a powerful act of showing who is in charge. If you feel you can't live without it, then you are putting your life in the hands of the people who expect an immediate answer of their calls, your phone company and the Silicon Valley executives who make all those apps you can't stop using. As security expert Jacob Appelbaum puts it, cell phones are tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. Isn't that a chilling thought to reflect on the next time you give one as Christmas gift? For your health, your children and your bank balance Not so long ago we were having lunch in a pizza restaurant in Luzern, a picturesque lakeside town at the base of the Swiss Alps. Luzern is a popular first stop for tourists from all around the world. A Korean family came along and sat at the table next to us. After ordering their food, they all immediately took out their mobile devices and sat there in complete silence, the mother and father, a girl of eight and a boy of five, oblivious to the world around them and even each other, tapping and swiping for the next ten minutes until their food arrived. We wanted to say hello to them, I joked that I should beep first, initiating communication with the sound of a text message notification. Is this how all holidays will be in future? Is it how all families will spend time together? Can you imagine your grandchildren and their children sharing a meal like this in the year 2050 or beyond?

Which gadgets does Bond bring to Switzerland? On Her Majesty's Secret Service is one of the more memorable Bond movies for its spectacular setting in the Swiss Alps, the location now transformed into a mountain-top revolving restaurant visited by thousands of tourists every day with a comfortable cable car service and hiking trails with breathtaking views that never become boring. Can you imagine Bond leaving behind his gun and his skis and visiting Switzerland with a smartphone instead? Eating a pizza with one hand while using the fingertips of the other to operate an app for making drone strikes on villains, swiping through Tinder for a new girl to replace the one who died (from boredom) in his previous "adventure" and letting his gelati melt while engrossed in a downhill ski or motorcycle game in all the glory of a 5.7" 24-bit colour display? Of course its absurd. Would you want to live like that yourself? We see more and more of it in people who are supposedly in Switzerland on the trip of a lifetime. Would you tolerate it in a movie? The mobile phone industry has paid big money to have their technology appear on the silver screen but audience feedback shows people are frustrated with movies that plaster the contents of text messages across the screen every few minutes; hopefully Bond movies will continue to plaster bullets and blood across the screen instead.

Time for freedom How would you live for a day or a weekend or an entire holiday without your mobile phone? There are many small frustrations you may experience but the biggest one and the indirect cause of many other problems you will experience may be the inability to tell the time. Many people today have stopped wearing a watch, relying instead upon their mobile phone to tell the time. Without either a phone or a watch, frustration is not far away. If you feel apprehension just at the thought of leaving your phone at home, the lack of a watch may be a subconcious factor behind your hesitation. Trying is better than reading Many articles and blogs give opinions about how to buy a watch, how much to spend and what you can wear it with. Don't spend a lot of time reading any of it, if you don't know where to start, simply go down to the local high street or mall and try them. Start with the most glamorous and expensive models from Swiss manufacturers, as these are what everything else is compared to and then perhaps proceed to look more widely. While Swiss brands tend to sell through the stores, vendors on Amazon and eBay now distribute a range of watches from manufacturers in Japan, China and other locations, such as Orient and Invicta, at a fraction of the price of those in the stores. You still need to try a few first to identify your preferred style and case size though. Google can also turn up many options for different budgets.

Copying or competition? Similarity of Invicta (from Amazon) and Rolex Submariner You may not know whether you want a watch that is manually wound, automatically wound or battery operated. Buying a low-cost automatic model online could be a good way to familiarize yourself before buying anything serious. Mechanical watches have a smoother and more elegant second-hand movement and will survive the next Carrington event but may come to grief around magnets - a brief encounter with a low-cost de-gausser fixes that. Is it smart to buy a smart watch? If you genuinely want to have the feeling of complete freedom and control over technology, you may want to think twice about buying a smart watch. While it may be interesting to own and experiment with it some of the time, being free from your phone means being free from other electronic technology too. If you do go for a smart watch (and there are many valid reasons for trying one some of the time), maybe make it a second (or third) watch. Smart watches are likely to be controversial for some time to come due to their impact in schools (where mobile phones are usually banned) and various privacy factors. Help those around you achieve phone freedom in 2016 There will be further blogs on this theme during 2016, each looking at the pressures people face when with or without the mobile phone. As a developer of communications technology myself, you may be surprised to see me encouraging people not to use it every waking minute. Working on this technology makes me more conscious of its impact on those around me and society in general. A powerful factor to consider when talking about any communications technology is the presence of peer pressure and the behavior of those around you. Going phone-free may involve helping them to consider taking control too. Helping them out with a new watch as a gift (be careful to seek advice on the style that they are likely to prefer or ensure the purchase can be exchanged) may be an interesting way to help them engage with the idea and every time they look at the time, they may also be reminded of your concern for their freedom.

Rhonda D'Vine: Chipzel

Happy new year everyone! Let's start with another round of nice music, this time it is coming from Chipzel who is a great chiptune composer. Given that I'm coming from a c64 background I love chip tunes, and she does a really great job in that area. Check it out!

Focus: The first tune I heard and I still like it. I had it as ringtone for a while. :)
To The Sky: Nice one too, always set your high goals.
Interstellaria OST - Credits: While listening to the soundtrack I thought I might give the game a try, too.

And like always, enjoy!

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Michal Čihař: Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 15/52-53

Okay, this report is not weekly and is a bit late, but anyway here comes report covering last two weeks in 2015. As you might expect there were some days off, but still quite some work has been done. I've focused on encoding conversions and usage of mb_* functions. One of results was cleanup PR and some opened questions. The PR is already merged meanwhile and we will probably make again the mbstring dependency options. Rest was pretty much just bug fixing. Fixed issues:

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Enrico Zini: downgrading-network-manager

Downgrading network-manager This morning I woke up. Bad idea. I find in the work mail a compiler error that I cannot reproduce, so I need to log into a machine at work. But #809195. I decided to downgrade network-manager. I recall there was a tool to download packages from snapshots.debian.org, I discussed it recently on IRC, let's sync the IRC logs from my server. Or not (#810212). Never mind, I'll log into the server and grep. Ooh, it's debsnap. However, it doesn't quite do what I hoped (#667712). After some help from #debian-devel (thanks jcristau and LebedevRI), here is how to downgrade network-manager:

# echo "deb http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20151125T155830Z/ sid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tmp-downgrade-nm.list
# apt -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update
# apt -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false install network-manager=1.0.6-1
# rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tmp-downgrade-nm.list
# service network-manager restart

And as user:

$ killall nm-applet
$ nm-applet &

The yak is now nice and shaved, I can now go and see what those compiler errors are all about. Actually, no, there was still an unshaved patch on the yak, and now we have a debcya script.

Thorsten Glaser: git find published; test, review, fix it please

I just published the first version of git find on gh/mirabilos/git-find for easy collaboration. The repository deliberately only contains the script and the manual page so it can easily be merged into git.git with complete history later, should they accept it. git find is MirOS licenced. It does require a recent mksh (Update: I did start it in POSIX sh first, but it eventually turned out to require arrays, and I don t know perl(1) and am not going to rewrite it in C) and some common utility extensions to deal with NUL-separated lines (sort -z, grep -z, git ls-tree -z); also, support for '\0' in tr(1) and a comm(1) that does not choke on embedded NULs in lines.

To install or uninstall it, run

	$ git clone git@github.com:mirabilos/git-find.git
	$ cd git-find
	$ sudo ln -sf $PWD/git-find /usr/lib/git-core/
	$ sudo cp git-find.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
	  hack  
	$ sudo rm /usr/lib/git-core/git-find \
	    /usr/local/share/man/man1/git-find.1

then you can call it as git find and look at the documentation with git help find , as is customary. The idea behind this utility is to have a tool like git grep that acts on the list of files known to git (and not e.g. ignored files) to quickly search for, say, all PNG files in the repository (but not the generated ones). git find acts on the index for the HEAD, i.e. whatever commit is currently checked-out (unlike git grep which also knows about git add ed files; fix welcome) and then offers a filter syntax similar to find(1) to follow up: parenthes s, ! for negation, -a and -o for boolean are supported, as well as -name, -regex and -wholename and their case-insensitive variants, although regex uses grep(1) without (or, if the global option -E is given, with) -E, and the pattern matches use mksh(1) s, which ignores the locale and doesn t do [[:alpha:]] character classes yet. On the plus side, the output is guaranteed to be sorted; on the minus side, it is rather wastefully using temporary files (under $TMPDIR of course, so use of tmpfs is recommended). -print0 is the only output option (-print being the default). Another mode forwards the file list to the system find; since it doesn t support DOS-style response files, this only works if the amount of files is smaller than the operating system s limit; this mode supports the full range (except -maxdepth) of the system find(1) filters, e.g. -mmin -1 and -ls, but it occurs filesystem access penalty for the entire tree and doesn t sort the output, but can do -ls or even -exec. The idea here is that it can collaboratively be improved, reviewed, fixed, etc. and then, should they agree, with the entire history, subtree-merged into git.git and shipped to the world. Part of the development was sponsored by tarent solutions GmbH, the rest and the entire manual page were done in my vacation.

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