Search Results: "evo"

25 February 2014

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Habits and engagement

Nir Eyal Automatic customers: How to design user habits at WordCamp San Francisco 2012:
I came across this video by Nir Eyal about his model for analyzing and designing user engagement through habits. Successful services, he says, develop habits through triggers, actions, rewards and investments. A trigger is some kind of prompt that suggest an action promising a reward, these can be external (Twitter notification) or internal (boredom). Promising because our brains are wired for the thrill of search, of promise, rather than results. That s why we keep reloading the Twitter feed hoping for good tweets this time. Then comes the investment. Asking users to devote effort (following friends) in exchange of further rewards (better content) loads the value and triggers that will get the user to come back: direct messages, replies, suggested content. Or, simply put: the more you use Twitter, the more triggers and rewards you create, the more you hook yourself. This is really interesting as it is not limited to technology, the science behind it is actually nothing new. I m curious to see how this can be applied to Free Software and personal projects. Check out the abridged version linked above, and the longer workshop as soon as you have the time.
Nir Eyal: Automatic customers: How to design user habits

24 February 2014

Andrew Pollock: [life] Day 27, Kindergarten, Debian, Hawthorne Road

I realised yesterday morning that I will have biked up Hawthorne Road at least once a day for 5 days in a row by tomorrow (unless it happens to rain). It's not a bad hill, really, it has a sort of a stair-step gradient. There's a short, gentle incline, just to get your heart going, then there's a flat bit, to recover, then there's a less friendly incline, which is both more unfriendly and longer. Then you get to the top, gasping for breath, before there's a short decline and usually a red traffic light. This morning I had the bright idea of leaving the bike trailer at Kindergarten, so it made the journey home much more pleasant, as was the aforementioned climb up Hawthorne Road in the afternoon. I spent the day doing Debian stuff, but unfortunately didn't result in a package upload to show for it. Library packages are tricky, and I'm far from experienced or competent at maintaining them. Zoe didn't nap today at Kindergarten, and wasn't too worse for wear for it. When we got home, Zoe wanted to make a crown for Mummy like the one she made at Playgroup last week. Unfortunately we didn't really have any good crown-sized paper, so I made a little crown out of some surplus Letter-sized paper, and then Zoe decided to do some painting. The painting devolved into a lot of hand painting of her cardboard box rocket, inside and out. We managed to keep the mess to a minimum. After we cleaned up, Zoe watched a bit of TV, and my girlfriend came over and together we all made a vegetable stir fry for dinner. After dinner we walked down to the Hawthorne Garage to get some unwanted cardboard fruit boxes, to help with packing for our two night trip to Coochiemudlo Island later this week. Bedtime went pretty smoothly. Zoe managed to get a bunch of insect bites yesterday, which was the cause of a 4am wake up this morning. They're still giving her grief, so I'm expecting some sort of disturbance overnight tonight.

22 February 2014

Sylvestre Ledru: Some updates on llvm.org/apt/

I made some changes on http://llvm.org/apt/ for the last 2 months.

20 February 2014

Francois Marier: Hardening ssh Servers

Basic configuration There are a few basic things that most admins will already know (and that tiger will warn you about if you forget):
  • only allow version 2 of the protocol
  • disable root logins
  • disable password authentication
This is what /etc/ssh/sshd_config should contain:
Protocol 2
PasswordAuthentication no
PermitRootLogin no

Whitelist approach to giving users ssh access To ensure that only a few users have ssh access to the server and that newly created users don't have it enabled by default, create a new group:
addgroup sshuser
and then add the relevant users to it:
adduser francois sshuser
Finally, add this to /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
AllowGroups sshuser

Deterring brute-force (or dictionary) attacks One way to ban attackers who try to brute-force your ssh server is to install the fail2ban package. It keeps an eye on the ssh log file (/var/log/auth.log) and temporarily blocks IP addresses after a number of failed login attempts. Another approach is to hide the ssh service using Single-Packet Authentication. I have fwknop installed on some of my servers and use small wrapper scripts to connect to them.

Using restricted shells For those users who only need an ssh account on the server in order to transfer files (using scp or rsync), it's a good idea to set their shell (via chsh) to a restricted one like rssh. Should they attempt to log into the server, these users will be greeted with the following error message:
This account is restricted by rssh.
Allowed commands: rsync 
If you believe this is in error, please contact your system administrator.
Connection to server.example.com closed.

Restricting authorized keys to certain IP addresses In addition to listing all of the public keys that are allowed to log into a user account, the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file also allows (as the man page points out) a user to impose a number of restrictions. Perhaps the most useful option is from which allows a user to restrict the IP addresses which can login using a specific key. Here's what one of my authorized_keys looks like:
from="192.0.2.2" ssh-rsa AAAAB3Nz...zvCn bot@example
You may also want to include the following options to each entry: no-X11-forwarding, no-user-rc, no-pty, no-agent-forwarding and no-port-forwarding.

Increasing the amount of logging The first thing I'd recommend is to increase the level of verbosity in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
LogLevel VERBOSE
which will, amongst other things, log the fingerprints of keys used to login:
sshd: Connection from 192.0.2.2 port 39671
sshd: Found matching RSA key: de:ad:be:ef:ca:fe
sshd: Postponed publickey for francois from 192.0.2.2 port 39671 ssh2 [preauth]
sshd: Accepted publickey for francois from 192.0.2.2 port 39671 ssh2 
Secondly, if you run logcheck and would like to whitelist the "Accepted publickey" messages on your server, you'll have to start by deleting the first line of /etc/logcheck/ignore.d.server/sshd. Then you can add an entry for all of the usernames and IP addresses that you expect to see. Finally, it is also possible to log all commands issued by a specific user over ssh by enabling the pam_tty_audit module in /etc/pam.d/sshd:
session required pam_tty_audit.so enable=francois
However this module is not included in wheezy and has only recently been re-added to Debian.

Identitying stolen keys One thing I'd love to have is a way to identify a stolen public key. Given the IP restrictions described above, if a public key is stolen and used from a different IP, I will see something like this in /var/log/auth.log:
sshd: Connection from 198.51.100.10 port 39492
sshd: Authentication tried for francois with correct key but not from a permitted host (host=198.51.100.10, ip=198.51.100.10).
sshd: Failed publickey for francois from 198.51.100.10 port 39492 ssh2
sshd: Connection closed by 198.51.100.10 [preauth]
So I can get the IP address of the attacker (likely to be a random VPS or a Tor exit node), but unfortunately, the key fingerprints don't appear for failed connections like they do for successful ones. So I don't know which key to revoke. Is there any way to identify which key was used in a failed login attempt or is the solution to only ever have a single public key in each authorized_keys file and create a separate user account for each user?

16 February 2014

Mark Brown: Human factors

An issue which I always find depressing but sadly unsurprising in discussions of process with software is the frequent disregard for human elements; indeed often the goal people have in creating process is to try to control and eliminate human elements. Little thought is given to what is going to motivate people to do what s asked and if they are going to follow it at all, or in the spirit it was intended. One example I ve seen several times is the idea that some engineers work on irrelevant things and that this can be fixed by requiring every commit to be tied to the project plan or a bug so off project work is obvious. This isn t really attacking the problem so much as putting a roadblock in place to try to avert it; the real problem is normally people not communicating about what they re doing and what s important but those problems are really hard to address. Sadly what tends to happen is that people work around the roadblock and cause some collateral damage; for example devaluing the bug tracker by referencing irrelevant bugs or creating meaningless bugs solely to allow commits, while continuing to behave like they did originally. This is often worse than the original situation. This sort of issue is one of the things I appreciate most about working on Linux there s quite a bit of process but because of the way it has been evolved the incentives are usually right to make sure they are followed in the spirit in which they were intended. For example the patch submission process is essentially just best practices for making sure changes go to people who care in a form which makes it easy for them to work with it; there is a bunch of tooling around it which built on those practices (and in turn influenced the practices) but it all comes back to that basic thing of getting attention for changes and making them easy to work with. As a result people mostly do the right thing (or close enough) so everything runs smoothly. The trick is to remember to standardize and write things down when it s needed notice the good practice and spread its adoption. The key difference here seems to be if process is viewed as something to solve problems for people or if it is viewed as a way to solve problems with people. If the problem is with the people then the view starts off negative and it s perhaps unsurprising that there is little consideration of how they will react. Sometimes it s not so much that a problem is seen with people as that the people doing don t have any real interest in the process (write only timesheets often bear no relation to reality for example) but there is an assumption that they are going to just do what they re asked (but instead they for example don t fill in their time sheets or don t provide accurate information). The end result is the same, their needs don t get considered and their actions end up being counterproductive. Starting to avoid these problems is fairly straightforward take a step back and consider why the people expected to carry out the process are going to want to do so. How does it help them? How will they see it helping others? Generally what s in it for them? If these are difficult questions to answer then there may be a problem it is likely people will ignore the process or do it badly without a lot of active enforcement, but perhaps that s OK for the situation. Beware of using metrics to provide incentives, metrics are gameable and that game can cause problems without care. But do think about people; making software is all about people.

11 February 2014

Jonathan McDowell: Choosing a new laptop

Recently I've been thinking about getting a new laptop. I have this rule that a laptop should last me at least 3 years (ideally more) and my old laptop was bought in September 2010. So for the past few months I've been trying to work out if there's something suitable on the market that is a good replacement (last time I didn't manage to find something that ticked all the boxes, but did pretty well for the price I paid). To start with I decided to track my laptops over time - largely because one of my concerns was about the size of a replacement, because I have a significant leaning towards subnotebooks. In the end the reason I decided to upgrade was for some extra CPU grunt; my old machine had a tendency to get pretty hot under any sort of load.
DateModelCPUScreenRAMStorageW (mm)H (mm)D (mm)WeightCost
1991Amstrad PPC 640DNEC V30 8MHz9" 640x200 non-backlit green LCD640k2 x 3.5" FDD45023010010kg???
August 1997Compaq Aero 4/33c486sx337.8" 640x480 CSTN LCD4MB80MB260190431.6kg???
July 2002Compaq Evo N200P-III 700MHz10.4" 1024x768 TFT192MB20GB251198201.1kg 939.99
August 2005Toshiba Portege R200Pentium M 753 1.2GHz12.1" 1024x768 TFT1280MB60GB286229201.29kg 1313.58
September 2008Asus EEE 901Atom N270 1.6GHz8.9" 1024x600 TFT2GB4GB + 16GB SSD248175231.1kg 299.99
September 2010Acer Aspire 1830TCore-i5 470UM 1.33GHz11.6" 1366x768 TFT8GB500GB284203281.4kg$699.99 (~ 480)
The EEE didn't actually replace the Toshiba, but I mention it for completeness. It was actually the only machine I moved to the US with, but after about a month of it as my primary machine I realized it wasn't an option for day to day use - though it was fantastic as a machine to throw in an overnight bag, especially when coupled with a 3G dongle. I wasn't keen on significantly increasing the size of my laptop. There are a number of decent 13" Ultrabook options out there, and I looked at a few of them, but nothing grabbed me as being worth the increase in size. Also I wanted something better than the Acer - one of the major problems was finding something smaller than 13" that had 8G RAM, let alone more. There's a significant trend towards everything soldered in for the smaller/slimmer notebooks, which makes some sense but means that the base spec had better be right. Much to my surprise the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 looked like an option. It comes with an i5-4300U processor (at least since around Christmas 2013), and the 256/512G SSD models have 8G RAM. Screen resolution is an attractive true HD (1920x1080) and the 10" display means it's smaller than the Aspire. Unfortunately the keyboard lets it down. It's fine given a flat surface, but not great if you want to support the whole thing on your lap. Which is something I tend to do with my laptop, whether that's on the sofa, or in bed, or on a bus/train. Another option was the Sony Vaio Pro 11. This is a pretty sweet laptop (I managed to get to play with one at a Sony store in the US). Super slim and light. 8GB RAM. True HD screen. However I have bad memories of the build quality of the older Vaios and the fact that there was /no/ user replaceable parts put me off - it's a safe bet that a laptop battery is going to need replaced in a 3 year lifespan. What I managed to find, and purchase, was a Dell Latitude E7240. I admit that the Dell brand made me wary - while I've not had any issue with their desktops I didn't associated their laptops as being particularly high quality. Mind you, I could say the same for Acer and I've been very pleased with the Aspire (if they'd had a more up to date model I'd have bought it). I bought the E7240 with the Core-i5 4300U (so the same as the Surface Pro 2) and True HD touch screen. It has a replaceable battery, expandable RAM (up to 16G) and the storage is an mSATA SSD. It also came with a built in 3G card. At 12.5" it's a little bigger than my old machine, but I decided that was a reasonable idea given the higher resolution. I'm typing this article on it now, having finally completed the setup and migration of the data from the old laptop to it this evening. More details once I've been using it for a little bit I think.

Sylvestre Ledru: Hello Planet Mozilla

Hello Planet Mozilla I started as a new employee a few weeks ago. I am working as Release Manager for the next releases of Firefox (both on desktop + android).
As a start, Lukas and I will be working on Firefox 29 (no pressure at all to start with Australis + Firefox account).
I grew up with the first versions of Netscape, followed the Phoenix/Firebird adventures and I have been a supporter of Firefox since then.
I am glad to join such an important project, especially in the perspective of the recent privacy scandals. I think that Mozilla is in the best position to communicate to the public, to denounce certain activities and provides technologies to bypass them. Besides that, let me introduce myself. I have been in free software for almost a decade.
My previous work as working on Scilab (from Inria to Scilab Enterprises) where I stayed for almost 8 years. Over the years, I worked on various development (C, C++, Java, Python, Scilab, etc), user experience, roadmap definition, release management, R and D / customer project management, management, board member, etc. During this period, I learnt tons of things from coding, release and product management, QA, etc. In parallel, I worked part time at IRILL, a free software research center (hosted by Inria). I was involved as community management ie organizing event like GNU Hacker meeting, FOSDEM, Euro LLVM, etc and recording them. I had the chance to meet plenty of people from the FLOSS world (including folks from Mozilla who suggested me to join the adventure). I am also involved in two communities: Debian and LLVM. The first one is Debian. I started to contribute in Debian to get Scilab properly packaged. 7 years
after, I am now maintaining
important packages
like LLVM, Clang, libedit, emscripten (!) or BLAS/LAPACK, treasurer of the French representative association and organizing the French mini Debian Conference (Debconf) / Meetup. For the last couple of years, I contributed to LLVM, Clang and LLDB. I participated to the release 3.3 and 3.4. My technical contributions were mainly driven by the packaging, the nightly Debian/Ubuntu packages and also by the rebuild of the Debian archive using Clang (instead of gcc). And when I am not behind my laptop, I am teaching scuba diving with my girlfriend or hiking, mountaineering, ski touring, climbing, etc. Yeh, I am a bit hyperactive.

10 February 2014

Mario Lang: Neurofunkcasts

I have always loved Drum and Bass. In 2013 I rediscovered my love for Darkstep and Neurofunk, and found that these genres have developed quite a lot in the recent years. Some labels like Black Sun Empire and Evol Intent produce mixes/sets on a regular basis as podcasts these days. This article aggregates some neurofunk podcasts I like a lot, most recent first. Enjoy 33 hours and 57 minutes of fun with dark and energizing beats. Thanks to BSE Contrax and Evol Intent for providing such high quality sets. You can also see the Python source for the program that was used to generate this page.

5 February 2014

Daniel Pocock: Debian SIP without reading the manual

Most people don't have time to read manuals. The Debian SIP service has a reasonably thorough user guide with screenshots but some people may just want to have this level of detail if they really have to troubleshoot a problem. WebRTC is the fastest way to start Just set up your db.debian.org RTC password and use it to log in to the https://rtc.debian.org site. It all runs in the browser, no plugin or configuration required. Firewall/NAT trouble The current range of WebRTC browsers seem to work well for consumer and small office networks with NAT routers or mobile/cell networks. Corporate networks with an outright block on UDP will be supported soon. Supported browsers The Chromium 31 package on wheezy appears to work fine and was used in some of the demos at DebConf13 For Iceweasel/Firefox users, it is not possible to use the version 17 package from wheezy at all. At the time of writing, Iceweasel 24 is in jessie and sid while version 27 is available upstream. Mozilla gradually introduced WebRTC support on both desktop and Android between versions 20 to 24 and it is still evolving. If you don't want to use Chromium and don't want to upgrade your desktop/laptop beyond wheezy, consider trying Firefox on an Android device. Your friends can call you too There is no excuse for them to pester you with proprietary solutions any more. They can dial your debian.org SIP address from https://freephonebox.net. You can even link to it from your web site or blog by adding the dial parameter to the URL, like https://freephonebox.net?dial=pocock%40debian.org Please complain Bug reports and questions are always welcome. A good place for questions or complaints where the cause of the bug is not obvious is the Free-RTC mailing list.

4 February 2014

Enrico Zini: debops

Debops What I like the most about being a Developer is building tools to (hopefully) make someone's life better. I like it when my software gets used, and people thank me for it, because there was a need they had that wasn't met before, and thanks to my software now it is being met. I am maintaining software for meteorological research that is soon going to be 10 years old, and is still evolving and getting Real Work done. I like to develop software as if it is going to become a part of human cultural heritage, developing beyond my capacity, eventually surviving me, allowing society to declare that the need, small as it was, is now met, and move on to worry about some other problem. I feel that if I'm not thinking of my software in that way, then I am not being serious. Then I am not developing something fit for other people to use and rely on. This involves Development as much as it involves Operations: tracking security updates for all the components that make up a system. Testing. Quality assurance. Scalability. Stability. Hardening. Monitoring. Maintenance requirements. Deployment and upgrade workflows. Security. I came to learn that the requirements put forward by sysadmins are to be taken seriously, because they are the ones whose phone will ring in the middle of the night when your software breaks. I am also involved in more than one software project. I am responsible for about a dozen web applications deployed out there in the wild, and possibly another dozen of non-web projects, from terabyte-sized specialised archival tools to little utilities that are essential links in someone's complex toolchain. I build my software targeting Debian Stable + Backports. At FOSDEM I noticed that some people consider it uncool. I was perplexed. It provides me with a vast and reasonably recent set of parts to use to build my systems. It provides me with a single bug tracking system for all of them, and tools to track known issues in the systems I deployed. It provides me with a stable platform, with a well documented upgrade path to the next version. It gives me a release rhythm that allows me to enjoy the sweet hum of spinning fans thinking about my next mischief, instead of spending my waking time chasing configuration file changes and API changes deep down in my dependency chain. It allows me to rely on Debian for security updates, so I don't have to track upstream activity for each one of the building blocks of the systems I deploy. It allows me not to worry about a lot of obscure domain specific integration issues. Coinstallability of libraries with different ABI versions. Flawless support for different versions of Python, or Lua, or for different versions of C++ compilers. It has often happened to me to hear someone rant about a frustrating situation, wonder how come it had never happened to me, and realise that someone in Debian, who happens to be more expert than I can possibly be, had thought hard about how to deal with that issue, years before. I know I cannot be an expert of the entire stack from bare iron all the way up, and I have learnt to stand on the shoulders of giants. 'Devops' makes sense for me in that it hints at this cooperation between developers and operators, having constructive communication, knowing that each side has their own needs, trying their best to meet them all. It hints at a perfect world where developers and operators finally come to understand and trust each other's judgement. I don't know that perfect world, but I, a developer, do like to try to understand and trust the judgement of sysadmins. I sympathise with my sysadmin friends who feel that devops is turning into a trend of developers thinking they can do without sysadmins. Reinventing package managers. Bundling dependencies. Building "apps" instead of components. I wish that people who deploy a system built on such premises, have it become so successful that they end up being paid to maintain them for their whole career. That is certainly what I wish and strive for, for me and my own projects. In my experience, a sustainable and maintainable system won't come out of the startup mindset of building something quick&dirty, then sell it and move on to something else. In my experience, the basis for having sustainable and maintainable systems have been well known and tested in Debian, and several other distributions, for over two decades. At FOSDEM, we thought that we need a name for such a mindset. Between beers, that name came to be "debops". (It's not just Debian, though: many other distributions get it right, too)

31 January 2014

Daniel Pocock: If you thought systemd proponents were bad....

Just imagine for a moment if something like the iPhone App Store approval process was applied to every application for a domain name. Delays and unexplained rejections killing many great ideas before they even get off the ground. In the worse cases, like that of Greg Hughes, the great firewall of the app store has been used to quash ideas that it appears Apple may have been planning to compete with or copy. If domain applicants had to go through such a process or if other core technologies fell into a rut like that then it would throw Charles Darwin's long established theory of evolution out the window and society would end up eating each other. Once companies had established their position and were happily making money they would do everything possible to stomp out any innovation that may undermine them. This is exactly the kind of non-evolution that has plagued the telecoms sector for many years now. You don't have to look past the price of a simple SMS to see the truth of this situation. Your 160 bytes can cost anywhere between $US0.10 - $US0.50 throughout the western world, even on a network that is otherwise charging maybe $10 per 1MiB (the equivalent of 6,000 text messages) when roaming. One of the compelling features of free software is that it empowers innovation and efficiency. Telecoms executives may argue that by charging you these extortionate fees, they are keeping spam out of your phone. Think again: technologies like XMPP and SIP are doing that even more effectively and without any price to pay. Software for managing buddy lists and algorithms for spam detection put those telecoms executives out of a job. If SIP, XMPP or both become dominant, evolution may succeed yet. Despite having these great technologies available for messaging and multimedia communications and despite having a range of free software success stories in products such as Firefox or whole distributions like Fedora, Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu, non-free communications solutions like Skype and Viber continue to run rampant in the voice and video domain. As it turns out, this is a very dangerous area for the free software community to neglect. How many people know somebody who tried running Linux but went back to a proprietary solution so they could use a non-free softphone? In these cases, it is not the phone software itself that appeals to the user: it is the people that software lets them communicate with, their friends, family, professional community and beyond. For people who don't truly perceive the benefits of free software or those who don't have the confidence or experience to defend those benefits, the power of Metcalfe's law hits them like a tsunami and violently sweeps away all the rest of the free software they had started to use. While Skype is currently available for some distributions of Linux, it is not free software: amongst other things, there is no published source code and no independent review of the code has been possible. Leveraging the power of Metcalfe's law, the publisher of that software gains significant power over those who choose to install it. Any day now, they could even use it to offer users a one-click "free trial" upgrade to some "Windows Lite" or install other components that obstruct effective upgrades to newer versions of the free operating system. To make an analogy, the potential for dirty tricks in this area is far more scary than the things systemd proponents have been accused of. For those with an interest in solving these problems or at least giving free real-time communications software a try, On the init system issue itself Note: the reference to systemd is not itself an opinion for or against any particular init system in Debian nor is it a suggestion that any one side is badder than any other.

30 January 2014

Russell Coker: The Movie Experience

Phandroid has one of many articles about a man being detained for wearing Google Glass in a cinema [1]. The article states as a fact that it s probably not smart to bring a recording device into a movie theater which is totally bogus. I ve visited a government office where recording devices were prohibited, they provided a locker for me to store everything that could be used for electronic storage outside their main security zone, that s what you do when you ban recording devices. Any place that doesn t have such facilities really isn t banning recording. The Gadgeteer has the original story with more detail with an update showing that the Department of Homeland Security were responsible for detaining the victim [2]. There are lots of issues here with DHS continuing to do nothing good and more bad things than most people suspect and with the music and film industry organisations attacking innocent people. But one thing that seems to be ignored is that movies are a recreational activity, so it s an experience that they are selling not just a movie. Any organisation that wants to make money out of movies really should be trying to make movies fun. The movie experience has always involved queuing, paying a lot of money for tickets ($20 per seat seems common), buying expensive drinks/snacks, and having to waste time on anti-piracy adverts. Now they are adding the risk of assault, false-arrest, and harassment under color of law to the down-sides of watching a movie. Downloading a movie via Bittorrent takes between 20 minutes and a few hours (depending on size and internet connectivity). Sometimes it can be quicker to download a movie than to drive to a cinema and if you are organising a group to watch a movie it will definitely be easier to download it. When you watch a movie at home you can pause it for a toilet break and consume alcoholic drinks while watching (I miss the Dutch cinemas where an intermission and a bar were standard features). It s just a better experience to download a movie via Bittorrent. I ve previously written about the way that downloading movies is better than buying a DVD [3], now they are making the cinema a worse experience too. I sometimes wonder if groups like the MPAA are actually trying to make money from movies or whether they just want to oppress their audiences for fun or psychological research. I could imagine someone like the young Phillip Zimbardo working for the MPAA and doing experiments to determine how badly movie industry employees can treat their customers before the customers revolt. Anyone who watches a Jack Ryan movie (or any movie with a Marty-Stu/Gary-Stu character) obviously doesn t even want to experience the stress of an unhappy ending to a movie. It seems obvious that such people won t want the stress of potentially being assaulted in the cinema. In terms of economics it seems a bad idea to do anything about recording in the cinema. When I was 11 I was offered the opportunity to watch a movie that had been recorded by a video camera in the US before it was released in Australia, I wasn t interested because watching a low quality recording wouldn t be fun. It seems to me that if The Pirate Bay (the main site for Bittorrent downloads of movies) [4] was filled with awful camera recordings of movies then it would discourage people from using it. A quick search shows some camera recordings on The Pirate Bay, it seems that if you want to download a movie of reasonable quality then you have to read the Wikipedia page about Pirated Movie Release Types [5] to make sure that you get a good quality download. But if you buy a DVD in a store or visit a cinema then you are assured of image and sound quality. If the movie industry were smarter they would start uploading camera recordings of movies described as Blue-Ray rips to mess with Bittorrent users and put newbies off downloading movies.

29 January 2014

Alexander Wirt: everything comes to an end

I was a member of the credativ family for almost 10 years. It was a great and and demanding time where I did things I never imagined I would have to do them :). I started as an apprentice and finished as a technical lead. In the last summer one of my best friends - if not my best - and I developed the idea of me joining his company hs42 as their new Head of IT. The whole concept is interesting, most time I ll do home-office and for ~ 1 week in a month I ll join the company in Oldenburg. After a lot of thinking I accepted that offer. That means that I left credativ in December. Being an open source consultant is interesting on the one hand, but somewhat annoying on the other hand. You will always do new things, but often you are not in the position of designing, deciding or even running them. I was always something that is nowadays known as a devop - a long time before this was getting hip . Now I have the opportunity to design, develop and run my own systems. That also means a little bit windows, but opsi exists :). Running systems on your own is different from the usual consultant work. Being a consultant often means that you design and implement something and after it works you have to give your baby into the hands of someone else. Running them on your own also means you can do constant improvement to something, not only when its broken. The job should give me more time for open source and my family, which is a good thing. It is still a little bit odd to work from home, but being together with your family most of the time is a great thing - and I don t want to miss it. The new job also allows me to work as consultant on my own, so if you need a Debian, E-Mail, Linux or whatever guy that helps you in doing things - get in touch with me. The time at credativ was a great one and I look back with a smile to all the good things. If you need Open Source Support they are the people you should ask. I will stay connected with credativ in many ways.

Enrico Zini: correctness

On political correctness I am reading "Four ways to forgiveness" by Ursula Le Guin. This is how the book begins:
On the planet 0 there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war. She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly, not gobble words down in chunks the way Tikuli gulped his food. There has never been a war : in her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief.
That made me realise that several times I perceived political correctness as "only a denial that the war is going on". Last night I watched this video, which I felt was very relevant to this. Indeed, I have more respect for someone who listens to me and makes a good effort to understand what I said, then rudely disagrees, than for someone who is very politely ignoring everything I am trying to say. This is how I feel like this experience can be distilled into an actionable item:
Replying to an email is probably going to be useless, unless I am willing to make an effort to understand what the other person is trying to say, from their own point of view.

27 January 2014

Jo Shields: Dear Debian Developers, lrn2gpg

For some strange reason, I ve been receiving a lot of GPG-signed mail from Debian Developers and Maintainers lately. In response to each of these mails, I need to send a GPG-encrypted reply. The rate at which I m able to send replies has been significantly hampered by the poor state in which many DD/DM s maintain their GPG keys. Here are a few common mistakes, so you can consider correcting them. Ensure you have a UID for the email address(es) you use When I send an encrypted mail, I need to be sure that the recipient is legit. This means any decent mail client should refuse to send an encrypted message to foo@bar.com unless that email address is known somehow to GPG. In many cases, someone with a valid key for foo@bar.com would send their signed mail from foobar@gmail.com without that being a valid UID. In some cases, foo@bar.com isn t even a valid email address anymore (i.e. the bar.com mail server says no such mailbox). You should have a UID for each address you use. Signatures are per-UID You may well have a valid UID for foo@debian.org, foo@bar.com, and foobar@gmail.com but the PGP trust model doesn t automatically trust every UID as much as its peers. Each individual UID needs to be trusted (i.e. signed/uploaded) by others. What if you added billg@microsoft.com as a UID should that automatically be trusted? Clearly not. Just because you have foo@debian.org doesn t mean it s trusted for encryption without some signatures. Make sure you actually have an encrypting subkey GPG sucks, and as a result, it reports Skipping unusable pubkey when the issue is a lack of valid encrypting subkeys. If you have revoked all encrypting subkeys, or allowed them to expire, then I cannot send you encrypted mail. Exact naming matters Bob Bobbertson <foo@bar.com> and B b B bb rts n <foo@bar.com> are different people. Check your mail client s From: setting, to ensure it matches your UID. If not, fix one of them. Check your webmail plugin isn t shit Some people use third party plugins to integrate GPG into their webmail client (e.g. Hotmail or GMail). Make sure this actually works. Don t use Enigmail Enigmail is a popular plugin to integrate GPG into Mozilla Thunderbird. It doesn t work, in most cases. Almost every single BADSIG in my inbox is due to Enigmail. Thunderbird will insert spurious line wraps and escape characters into your mail after signing, resulting in invalid signatures. It s mostly okay if you never quote mail, and restrict messages to about 70 characters. I know plenty of Debian Developers don t care about GPG other than for package signing but please, for the sanity of the rest of us, take an occasional moment to care a little. I should note that the worst offenders for keys which don t just work were Developers with 1024D keys the best behaved were Maintainers of all stripes.

25 January 2014

Russell Coker: Links January 2014

Fast Coexist has an interesting article about the art that Simon Beck creates by walking in snow [1]. If you are an artist you can create art in any way, even by walking in patterns in the snow. Russ Altman gave an interesting TED talk about using DNA testing before prescribing drugs [2]. I was surprised by the amount of variation in effects of codeine based on genetics, presumably many other drugs have a similar range. Helen Epstein wrote an interesting article about Dr. Sara Josephine Baker who revolutionised child care and saved the lives of a huge number of children [3]. Her tenacity is inspiring. Also it s interesting to note that the US Republican party was awful even before the Southern Strategy . The part about some doctors opposing child care because it s the will of God for children to die and keep them in employment is chilling. Jonathan Weiler wrote an insightful article about the problems with American journalism in defending the government [4]. He criticises the media for paying more attention to policing decorum than to content. Tobias Buckell wrote an interesting post about the so-called socialised health-care in the US [5]. He suggests that Ronald Reagan socialised health-care by preventing hospitals from dumping dying people on the street. I guess if doing nothing for people until they have a medical emergency counts as socialised health-care then the US has it. Kelvin Thomson MP made some insightful comments about climate change, the recent heat-wave in Australia, and renewable energy [6]. Iwan Baan gave an interesting TED talk about ways that people have built cheap homes in unexpected places [7], lots of good pictures. Racialicious has an interesting article by Arturo R. Garc a about research into the effects of concussion and the way the NFL in the US tried to prevent Dr. Bennet Omalu publicising the results of his research [8]. Stani (Jan Schmidt) wrote an interesting post about how they won a competition to design a commemerative Dutch 5 Euro coin [9]. The coin design is really good (a candidate for the geekiest coin ever), I want one! Seriously if anyone knows how to get one at a reasonable price (IE close to face value for circulated or not unreasonably expensive for uncirculated) then please let me know. When writing about Edward Snowden, Nathan says Imagine how great a country would be if if it were governed entirely by people who Dick Cheney would call Traitor [10]. That s so right, that might make the US a country I d be prepared to live in. Andrew Solomon gave an interesting TED talk Love No Matter What about raising different children [11]. Aditi Shankardass gave an interesting TED talk about using an ECG to analyse people diagnosed wit severe Autism and other developmental disorders [12]. Apparently some severe cases of Autism have a root cause that can be treated with anti-seizure medication. George Monbiot wrote an insightful article about the way that Bono and Bob Geldoff promote G8 government intervention in Africa and steal air-time that might be given to allow Africans to represent themselves in public debates [13]. Daniel Pocock wrote an informative article about racism in Australian politics and how it is bad for job-seekers and the economy (in addition to being horribly wrong) [14]. Aeon Magazine has an interesting article by Anne Buchanan about the difference between scientists and farmers [15]. She has some interesting points about the way that the lack of general knowledge impacts research, but misses the point that in most fields of study there is a huge problem of people not knowing about recent developments in their own field. I don t think it s a pipe dream to be well educated in humanities and science, but I guess that depends on the definition of well educated . Brian Cox gave an interesting TED talk titled Why We Need the Explorers about the benefits of scientific research [16]. Yupu Zhang, Abhishek Rajimwale, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau from the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote an interesting paper about ZFS corruption in the face of disk and memory errors [17]. One thing to note is that turning off atime can reduce the probability of a memory error leading to corrupt data being written to disk, run zfs set atime=off tank to fix this. The comedian Solomon Georgio celebrated Martin Luther King day by tweeting I love you to racists [18]. It s an interesting approach and appears to have worked well.

22 January 2014

Clint Adams: December 2013 debian-keyring analysis

Total keys: 996
Key versions:
    996 4
Primary key pubkey algorithms:
    623 "DSA"
    373 "RSA"
Primary key pubkey sizes:
    624 1024
     27 2048
      2 3072
    340 4096
      2 8192
      1 10240
Total number of UIDs + UAts: 4394
Hash algorithm used for most recent self-sig:
      1 "RIPEMD160"
   3188 "SHA1"
   1041 "SHA256"
      1 "SHA384"
    163 "SHA512"
Judgment on preferred hash algorithms:
   1776 null
   2618 "weak hash with higher preference"
Judgment on expiration times:
     53 "expiration passed"
    111 "expiration too far in future"
   3887 "no expiration set"
    343 null
This was generated with debian-keyring 2013.12.13, hopenpgp-tools 0.4-1, jshon 20131010-3, and the following inefficient script:
#!/bin/zsh
infile=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg
tempfile=$(mktemp)
trap 'rm $ tempfile ' EXIT
hokey lint --output-format JSON <$ infile  >$ tempfile 
print -n "Total keys: "
jshon -a -e keyFingerprint <$ tempfile    wc -l
print "Key versions: "
jshon -a -e keyVer -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Primary key pubkey algorithms: "
jshon -a -e keyAlgorithmAndSize -e pubkeyalgo -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Primary key pubkey sizes: "
jshon -a -e keyAlgorithmAndSize -e pubkeysize -e val <$ tempfile    sort -n   uniq -c
print -n "Total number of UIDs + UAts: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -k <$ tempfile    wc -l
print "Hash algorithm used for most recent self-sig: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidSelfSigHashAlgorithms -a -e val <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Judgment on preferred hash algorithms: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidPreferredHashAlgorithms -a -e explanation <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
print "Judgment on expiration times: "
jshon -a -e keyUIDsAndUAts -a -e uidKeyExpirationTimes -a -e explanation <$ tempfile    sort   uniq -c
This represents incorrect handling of revoked UIDs and user attributes, and possibly unknown bugs. "Judgments" are based on this document and are not generalized per key.

Gunnar Wolf: Finally: A student once again

Formally, today is my first day as a student on a formal, scholarized institution Basically for the first time in almost twenty years! Yes, those that know me know that I aspire to live the life of academia. I have worked at public universities for almost all of my adult life (between 1997 and 1999 I worked at a local ISP and at a private school), and have had a minor academic position ( T cnico Acad mico ) for almost ten years. And not having a proper degree limited me from pursuing anything further. Then, in early 2010 I presented the written exam. By late 2010, the corresponding oral exam. That allowed me to get my formal diploma in December 2010. By the end of 2011, I requested to be a teacher in the Engineering Faculty of UNAM, and started teaching Operating Systems a year ago, in January 2012. So, a good advance in the last few years... But I know that if I just sit here, I won't be able to advance my position towards really entering the Sacred Halls of Academia. And there are some rituals I have to comply with. One of those rituals is... Devoting some long time to studying under the formal structures. Ok, so I'm finally a postgraduate student I have enrolled in Especialidad en Seguridad Inform tica y Tecnolog as de la Informaci n, a short (one year) postgraduate program in ESIME Culhuac n, of Instituto Polit cnico Nacional (a small campus of Mexico's second-largest university). Some friends have asked me, why am I starting with a Specialization and not a Masters degree. Some simple reasons: Just as when I went to Tijuana in 2010 to do my written exam, once I got and started with the paperwork, I didn't want to let it go If I postpone it, I will probably lose the push to do it by May-July, when the Masters admission process starts. Also, this specialization can be linked with the masters degree on the same topic given at the same campus. This program is one year long, and the masters two But having them both takes 2.5 years. So, not such a bad deal after all. And finally, because, after such a long time without being scholarized, I fear not having an easy time getting to grips with the discipline. I can commit to overworking myself for a year If it's too much for me, I'll just stay with that degree and give up. I expect to like it and continue... But it's also a safe bet :-) Now, there has to be a downside to picking up this path: Of course, my free time will be harshly reduced. I have reduced my Debian involvement in the last year, as I devoted a huge chunk of my time to teaching and book-writing... This year... We shall see what happens. I can for now only confirm what I have said publicly but inside our team only: I have requested to my peers and to our DPL to step down as a DebConf chair. I love organizing DebConf, but I don't want to be formally committed to a position I just cannot fulfill as I did when I started with it. As for package maintenance, by far most of my packges are team maintained, and those that are not are relatively easy to keep track of. And of course, I'll keep an eye on my keyring-maint duties as well Will even try to link that work with what I do at school! Anyway, lets see what comes now!

20 January 2014

Enrico Zini: terminal-emulators

Quest for a terminal emulator The requirements I need a terminal emulator. This is a checklist of the features that I need: My experience is that getting all of this to work is not being as easy as it seems, so I'm creating this page to track progress. gnome-terminal I've been happily using this for years, and it did everything I needed, until some months ago it started to open new tabs in the terminal's working directory instead of the last tab's working directory. This is a big point of frustration for me. It also started opening https urls with Firefox, although the preferred browser was Chromium. There seemed to be no way to control it: I looked for firefox or iceweasel in all gconf and dconf settings and found nothing. The browser issue was fixed by accident when I used Xfce4's settings application to change the browser from Chromium to Firefox and then back to Chromium. update, thanks to Mathieu Parent, Josh Triplett, Peter De Wachter, Julien Cristau, and Charles Plessy: It is also possible to restore the "new tab opened inside the same directory of the last tab I was in" behaviour, by enabling "run command as a login shell" so that /etc/profile.d/vte.sh is run (thanks Mathieu Parent for the link). That in turn spawned extra cleanup work in my .bashrc/.bash_profile/.profile setup, which has been randomly evolving since even before my first Debian "buzz" system. I found that it was setting PROMPT_COMMAND to something else to set the terminal title, conflicting with what vte.sh wants to do. With regards to loading /etc/profile.d/vte.sh by default, Peter De Watcher sent pointers to relevant bugs: here, here, and here. An alternative strategy is to work using the prompt rather than PROMPT_COMMAND; an example is in Josh Triplett's .bashrc from git://joshtriplett.org/git/home. Josh Triplett also said:
To fix the browser launched for URLs, you either need to use a desktop environment following GNOME's mechanism for setting the default browser, or edit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list and make sure x-scheme-handler/http, x-scheme-handler/https, and x-scheme-handler/ftp are set to your preferred browser's desktop file basename under [Added Associations].
All my issues with gnome-terminal are now gone and I'm only too happy to go back to it. rxvt-unicode-256color urxvt took some work. This is where I got with configuration:
URxvt.font: xft:Monospace-10:antialias=true
URxvt.foreground: #aaaaaa
URxvt.background: black
URxvt.scrollBar_right: true
URxvt.cursorBlink: true
URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher,tabbedex
URxvt.url-launcher: /usr/bin/x-www-browser
URxvt.matcher.button: 1
URxvt.perl-lib: /home/enrico/.urxvt/perl
URxvt.color0: black
URxvt.color1: #aa0000
URxvt.color2: #00aa00umask
URxvt.color3: #aa5500
URxvt.color4: #0000aa
URxvt.color5: #aa00aa
URxvt.color6: #00aaaa
URxvt.color7: #aaaaaa
URxvt.color8: #555555
URxvt.color9: #ff5555
URxvt.color10: #55ff55
URxvt.color11: #ffff55
URxvt.color12: #5555ff
URxvt.color13: #ff55ff
URxvt.color14: #55ffff
URxvt.color15: #ffffff
I got all of the tab behaviour that I need by "customizing" the tab script (yuck github :( ). Missing sakura Configuration is in .config/sakura/sakura.conf and these bits help:
colorset1_fore=rgb(170,170,170)
colorset1_back=rgb(0,0,0)
colorset1_opacity=99
colorset2_fore=rgb(0,0,0)
colorset2_back=rgb(254,254,254)
colorset2_opacity=99
font=Monospace 10
show_always_first_tab=No
scrollbar=false
fullscreen_key=F11
palette=linux
Missing lxterminal Configuration is in .config/lxterminal/lxterminal.conf and this is relevant to me:
[general]
fontname=DejaVu Sans Mono 10
fgcolor=#aaaaaaaaaaaa
disallowbold=false
cursorblinks=true
tabpos=top
hidescrollbar=false
hidemenubar=true
hideclosebutton=true
disablef10=true
disablealt=true
Also, to open a url directly you control+click it. Missing terminator Configuration is in .config/terminator/config and this is relevant to me:
[global_config]
  use_custom_url_handler = True
  custom_url_handler = x-www-browser
  inactive_color_offset = 1.0
[keybindings]
  close_term = None
  close_window = None
  copy = None
  cycle_next = None
  cycle_prev = None
  go_down = None
  go_next = None
  go_prev = None
  go_up = None
  group_all = None
  group_tab = None
  hide_window = None
  move_tab_left = None
  move_tab_right = None
  new_tab = None
  new_terminator = None
  new_window = None
  next_tab = None
  paste = None
  prev_tab = None
  reset_clear = None
  reset = None
  resize_down = None
  resize_left = None
  resize_right = None
  resize_up = None
  rotate_ccw = None
  rotate_cw = None
  scaled_zoom = None
  search = None
  split_horiz = None
  split_vert = None
  switch_to_tab_1 = <Alt>F1
  switch_to_tab_2 = <Alt>F2
  switch_to_tab_3 = <Alt>F3
  switch_to_tab_4 = <Alt>F4
  switch_to_tab_5 = <Alt>F5
  switch_to_tab_6 = <Alt>F6
  switch_to_tab_7 = <Alt>F7
  switch_to_tab_8 = <Alt>F8
  switch_to_tab_9 = <Alt>F9
  switch_to_tab_10 = <Alt>F10
  toggle_scrollbar = None
  toggle_zoom = None
  ungroup_all = None
  ungroup_tab = None
[profiles]
  <span class="createlink">default</span>
    palette = "#000000:#aa0000:#00aa00:#aa5500:#0000aa:#aa00aa:#00aaaa:#aaaaaa:#555555:#ff5555:#55ff55:#ffff55:#5555ff:#ff55ff:#55ffff:#ffffff"
    copy_on_selection = True
    icon_bell = False
    background_image = None
    show_titlebar = False
Missing update: Richard Hartmann pointed out that terminator's upstream maintainer now changed after the old one didn't have time any more, and it should have a release with a ton of improvements anytime soon. xfce4-terminal Configuration is in .config/xfce4/terminal, and this is relevant to me: terminalrc:
[Configuration]
FontName=Monospace 10
MiscAlwaysShowTabs=FALSE
MiscBell=FALSE
MiscBordersDefault=TRUE
MiscCursorBlinks=FALSE
MiscCursorShape=TERMINAL_CURSOR_SHAPE_BLOCK
MiscDefaultGeometry=80x24
MiscInheritGeometry=FALSE
MiscMenubarDefault=FALSE
MiscMouseAutohide=FALSE
MiscToolbarDefault=FALSE
MiscConfirmClose=TRUE
MiscCycleTabs=TRUE
MiscTabCloseButtons=TRUE
MiscTabCloseMiddleClick=TRUE
MiscTabPosition=GTK_POS_TOP
MiscHighlightUrls=TRUE
ShortcutsNoMenukey=TRUE
ShortcutsNoMnemonics=TRUE
ColorForeground=#aaaaaaaaaaaa
accels.scm:
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-1" "<Alt>F1")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-2" "<Alt>F2")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-3" "<Alt>F3")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-4" "<Alt>F4")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-5" "<Alt>F5")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-6" "<Alt>F6")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-7" "<Alt>F7")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-8" "<Alt>F8")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-9" "<Alt>F9")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-10" "<Alt>F10")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-11" "<Alt>F11")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-12" "<Alt>F12")
update: Yves-Alexis Perez points out that to disable the F1 for help in the terminal, you need to remove the accelerator. I tried this and this and didn't have success, but I confess I did not dig too much into it. Although xfce4-terminal -e does not work as I expect, xfce4-terminal registers a wrapper for x-terminal-emulator that does the right thing with respect to -e (also thanks Yves-Alexis Perez). Missing roxterm Configuration is in .config/roxterm.sourceforge.net/ split in several files corresponding to profiles. This is a reasonable starting point for me: Profiles/Default:
[roxterm profile]
colour_scheme=Default
disable_menu_access=1
disable_menu_shortcuts=1
disable_tab_menu_shortcuts=0
tab_close_btn=0
hide_menubar=1
always_show_tabs=0
Colours/Default:
[roxterm colour scheme]
0=#000000000000
1=#aaaa00000000
2=#0000aaaa0000
3=#aaaa55550000
4=#00000000aaaa
5=#aaaa0000aaaa
6=#0000aaaaaaaa
7=#aaaaaaaaaaaa
8=#555555555555
9=#ffff55555555
10=#5555ffff5555
11=#ffffffff5555
12=#55555555ffff
13=#ffff5555ffff
14=#5555ffffffff
15=#ffffffffffff
palette_size=16
foreground=#aaaaaaaaaaaa
background=#000000000000
cursor=#cccccccccccc
bold=
dim=
Shortcuts/Default:
[roxterm shortcuts scheme]
File/New Window=
File/New Tab=
File/Close Window=
File/Close Tab=
Tabs/Previous Tab=
Tabs/Next Tab=
Edit/Copy=
Edit/Paste=
View/Zoom In=<Control>plus
View/Zoom Out=<Control>minus
View/Normal Size=<Control>0
View/Full Screen=F11
View/Scroll Up One Line=
View/Scroll Down One Line=
Help/Help=
Edit/Copy & Paste=
Search/Find...=
Search/Find Next=
Search/Find Previous=
File/New Window With Profile/Default=
File/New Tab With Profile/Default=
Tabs/Select_Tab_0=<Alt>F1
Tabs/Select_Tab_1=<Alt>F2
Tabs/Select_Tab_2=<Alt>F3
Tabs/Select_Tab_3=<Alt>F4
Tabs/Select_Tab_4=<Alt>F5
Tabs/Select_Tab_5=<Alt>F6
Tabs/Select_Tab_6=<Alt>F7
Tabs/Select_Tab_7=<Alt>F8
Tabs/Select_Tab_8=<Alt>F9
Tabs/Select_Tab_9=<Alt>F9
Tabs/Select_Tab_10=<Alt>F10
Tabs/Select_Tab_11=<Alt>F11
Tabs/Select_Tab_12=<Alt>F12
Global:
[roxterm options]
edit_shortcuts=0
prefer_dark_theme=1
colour_scheme=Default
warn_close=1
Missing Nothing of my initial requirements seems to be missing, really, so I'm sticking to it for a while to see what happens. The first itch to scratch is that when the menubar is hidden, the popup menu becomes the entire menubar contents, which does not fit the general use case to have a contextual menu with the most common shortcuts. I'll just declare it useless and get myself used to some new hotkey for starting a new terminal. update: after fixing my issues with gnome-terminal I've switched back to gnome-terminal: its interface feels less clunky as I'm already used to it. Other references Guillem Jover made a similar analysis in 2009, it can be found here. Thomas Koch mentioned that termit should be able to do all I need, and is scriptable in Lua. I like the sound of that, and it's definitely one I should look next time I find myself shopping for terminal emulators.

17 January 2014

Sylvestre Ledru: Debian & LLVM events

Being a bit hyperactive, I have been involved in the organization of two events. I am the main organizer with Alexandre Delano of the Mini Debconf 2014 in Paris, January 18 & 19th. The (great) planning is available here:
https://france.debian.net/events/minidebconf2014/
Saturday morning presentations will be general public, the beginning of Saturday afternoon will be used by the Debian France association to vote the new status (1901 law and Debian Trusted Organization).
Sunday will be more focused on Debian itself.
During the week end, I will be talking about the Debile project, the finance of Debian France and be part of the round table on compiler selection for Debian.
The (mandatory) registration should be done on the Wiki or meetup.com In parallel, with Tobias Grosser, we organized the LLVM devroom track at FOSDEM (Bruxelles), February 2nd (Sunday).
The schedule is a mix between core developers, third party software using LLVM / Clang and academic users.
https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/llvm/
I will be talking on how to become a LLVM contributor. Both events should be recorded.

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