Search Results: "ed"

13 September 2015

Norbert Preining: Gaming: The Talos Principle

Over the last weekends I finally managed to finish The Talos Principle, all of its endings. Compared to the actual play time I needed for Portal 2, namely about 12 hours, The Talos Principle challenged me much longer, about 36 hours. An enjoyable ride through many different and stunningly created worlds filled with many many puzzles that need to be solved.
Combined with three different endings the games offers great fun for those who love riddle games. Comparing it to my favorite riddle game (series), Myst, the graphics have of course developed and provide stunning views. I haven t played games in a landscape since the Myst series (Portal is indoors), so I was taken by surprise about all the details and love that has been put into the graphics. Maybe its only me because it was the first game of this quality I have played. And above all, I could actually play it on my normal Intel GPU laptop (but surprisingly only on Linux, the Windows version refused to play on my under-powered laptop).
There are only two slightly negative points I have to mention: Due to the nature of very restricted tool set, the riddles feel a bit repetitive. Some of them stand out, but after having played through the A and B worlds, you feel like you have seen that before when entering a new riddle. Still challenging, and that is what I was looking for, but a bit more variation would be nice. Here is a riddle that stood out due to its funny nature.
The game also has a long list of Easter Eggs, some of which I could find, some of which I surely missed. Most funny of those I found was the Developer World where funny characters lounge. Another I found was this money throwing guy called Fork Parker, who happens to be the financial officer of the developers team. Did they really make sooo much money from the game?
Something a bit uncommon or new to me was the fact that there are three (3!) endings, depending on what you choose to do. The first and easiest one is the ending of the good student you collect enough sigils, and follow Elohims words and ascent to eternity rather boring. Reminds me of an old Viennese song how boring it is to be an angel in heaven.
Bit more challenging is the bad student ending: You ignore Elohim s warnings and ascent the tower, solve several more riddles, and via a few more twists manage to escape to the real world. Nice graphics, great ending.
The most challenging ending is the enlighted student ending. To manage to reach this ending, one needs to collect each and everything that is to be found in the game, including all hidden stars and grey sigils. Here I have to mention the second slightly negative point: Finding the stars is rather luck then problem solving ability. Often one needs to guess a location of a reflector, or stumble over a hidden staircase, or press some arbitrary buttons. For my feeling the riddles for the stars were to arbitrary. So I managed to collect several of the stars by myself, but for many I needed hints on how to solve the riddles. Anyway, in case you managed to listen to all recordings, collect all texts, get all stars and collect all sigils from the extra worlds, you might ascend to the last floor of the tower and become a messenger yourself. Not sure if I want to become a messenger there, though.
Just in time with me finishing the game, the developers shipped out an extension called Road to Gehenna . Stunning graphics, even better, waiting ahead now I only need the time!
All in all a great piece of game, lovingly crafted graphics, interesting game play, lots of small levels, which helps people like me who cannot play for hours overnight, but need to do riddles one by one in short gaming sessions. So if you are in for riddle games, watch out for the next offer on Steam. Enjoy.

Russ Allbery: Accumulated haul

I haven't posted one of these in a while, but now that I'm finally caught up with writing reviews (although not posting them yet), I've been feeling about reading again. And of course the backlog always grows. Let's see if I can figure out what I've picked up since the last post. Catherine Asaro The Phoenix Code (sff)
Annie Bellet Justice Calling (sff)
Annie Bellet Murder of Crows (sff)
Annie Bellet Pack of Lies (sff)
Zen Cho Sorcerer to the Crown (sff)
J.J. Gribble Steel Victory (sff)
Judith L. Herman Trauma and Recovery (non-fiction)
Janis Ian & Mike Resnick Stars: The Anthology (sff anthology)
Megg Jensen Hidden (sff)
T. Kingfisher Bryony and Roses (sff)
T. Kingfisher The Seventh Bride (sff)
Nancy Kress Crossfire (sff)
Edmond Lau The Effective Engineer (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee The Fox's Tower and Other Tales (sff collection)
Lozzi Roma Rome and the Vatican (non-fiction)
Elizabeth Lynn The Dancers of Arun (sff)
Elizabeth Lynn The Northern Girl (sff)
Rhonda Mason Empress Game (sff)
Vonda N. McIntyre Starfarers (sff)
Linda Nagata Memory (sff)
Jody Lynn Nye Strong Arm Tactics (sff)
Cat Rambo Near + Far (sff)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch The Diving Bundle (sff collection)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch Recovering Apollo 8 (sff)
L. Shelby Serendipity's Tide (sff)
L. Shelby Treachery's Harbor (sff)
L. Shelby Fealty's Shore (sff)
K.B. Spangler Digital Divide (sff)
Judith Tarr Forgotten Suns (sff)
Greg van Eekhout California Bones (sff) Hm, that's quite a lot. Most of it is various ebooks I picked up from various places, including a Humble Bundle. I've been impulse-buying a lot of stuff based on James Nicoll's reviews. The travel guide was a gift from a friend from a vacation in Italy.

Russ Allbery: Review: My Real Children

Review: My Real Children, by Jo Walton
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: May 2014
ISBN: 0-7653-3265-5
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 317
Patricia, the one form of her name that she's never used, is what the staff in the nursing home call her. "VC" is the frequent annotation on her daily chart: very confused. She's old, and forgetful, and trying very hard not to be her mother, and she remembers two lives. Not only remembers but lives: the nursing home isn't the same from day to day. They keep misplacing the lift, and the staff keep changing. But the memories are the strongest. She has two lives, two sets of children, all of whom she recognizes. When someone from one life visits, the other feels like a dream, but both of them persist. Two lives that divided at the most significant decision of her life. My Real Children is one of those books that fits in the broader speculative fiction genre as alternate history, but also has many of the virtues of mimetic fiction. It's the story of one woman's life, told, except for the opening frame, chronologically from start to finish. At the start, it's simple biography, telling Patty's story from childhood, through World War II, until the moment of her fateful decision in 1949. From there the narrative splits, and she lives two lives. And the world splits as well: in one, Kennedy was assassinated by a bomb; in another, the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into something much worse. Much is still unchanged, including the general lives of people Patty knew well in one life and not in another, but the worlds keep diverging from each other and from ours. The exact nature of the divergence is not, however, a significant part of the book. This is not the type of alternate history that is obsessed with the point of change, or even the implications for the world. Rather, this novel is about one woman, one decision, and two very different paths through life. Different friends, different challenges, different careers... different hopes and dreams, and different children. But always the same person, the same sense of practicality, the same ethics. It's beautifully told, striking just the right balance of showing important moments in detail and passing quickly, but smoothly, over some years. And, as with Among Others, Walton strikes the perfect emotional balance, leaving some reactions understated, letting the reader bring their own reactions to the book, and filling it with small bits of telling, factual detail rather than internal monologues. This is also one of the most heart-wrenching books I've ever read. My Real Children is a whole life, and not an easy one, complete with the heartaches and betrayals, the good and bad decisions, care for elderly relatives, dementia, tragedy, and even abuse. And moments of shining joy or profound satisfaction, but made all the more poignant because they're fleeting. The reader knows, in a sense, how the story ends, which casts a shadow over the rest of the book. But, even without that shadow, life can be hard, or cruel, alongside the wonder and joy. And it ends, and the ending is not neat and clean and uplifting, although one can choose how one meets it. This is the story of a life, all of it, and how choices can divide that life, and how they can cast a long shadow over how one later defines oneself. This book hurts. A lot. Enough that I want to warn you in advance I was in tears through the last third of the book. But it hurts because it's so very real and deep, not via a blow-by-blow description of daily actions, but by striding unafraid into the deep complications of choice and consequence. It's also a profoundly feminist book, in a quiet and descriptive way. It shared the Tiptree award for 2015 and fully deserved it. Both of the protagonist's lives are struggles against expectations, around gender, sexuality, and the role of women in society. Those struggles take very different forms, but they share some deep similarities. Walton shows the impact from the bottom up: the effects on specific lives, specific people, specific situations. It's brilliantly done. One can't help but think of The Female Man given the telling of parallel lives, but this is a case study, whereas Russ's novel was a battle cry. It gets under your skin instead of in your face. (Use of subtlety on this topic is easier now, forty years of occasional progress past when Russ wrote her classic.) This is a much harder book to read than Among Others. It's less forgiving, less reassuring, less willing to provide a happy ending. Lives rarely have clean, happy endings; one has to construct them, by choosing the material to build the ending on. But it's a brilliant, profound book, in that way that stories about people in all their complexity can be. Be cautious about your mood when you read this, particularly if you've had the experience of caring for a dying relative, but it's a book I will remember for a very long time. Rating: 9 out of 10

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2015/31-37

during the last weeks, I spent time mostly with RC bug prevention but I at least managed to also fix a couple of actual RC bugs:

Steve Kemp: All about sharing files easily

Although I've been writing a bit recently about file-storage, this post is about something much more simple: Just making a random file or two available on an ad-hoc basis. In the past I used to have my email and website(s) hosted on the same machine, and that machine was well connected. Making a file visible just involved running ~/bin/publish, which used scp to write a file beneath an apache document-root. These days I use "my computer", "my work computer", and "my work laptop", amongst other hosts. The SSH-keys required to access my personal boxes are not necessarily available on all of these hosts. Add in firewall constraints and suddenly there isn't an obvious way for me to say "Publish this file online, and show me the root". I asked on twitter but nothing useful jumped out. So I ended up writing a simple server, via sinatra which would allow: This worked, and was even secure-enough, given that I run SSL if you import my CA file. But using basic auth felt like cheating, and I've been learning more Go recently, and I figured I should start taking it more seriously, so I created a small repository of learning-programs. The learning programs started out simply, but I did wire up a simple TOTP authenticator. Having TOTP available made me rethink things - suddenly even if you're not using SSL having an eavesdropper doesn't compromise future uploads. I'd also spent a few hours working out how to make extensible commands in go, the kind of thing that lets you run: 
cmd sub-command1 arg1 arg2
cmd sub-command2 arg1 .. argN
The solution I came up with wasn't perfect, but did work, and allow the seperation of different sub-command logic. So suddenly I have the ability to run "subcommands", and the ability to authenticate against a time-based secret. What is next? Well the hard part with golang is that there are so many things to choose from - I went with gorilla/mux as my HTTP-router, then I spend several hours filling in the blanks. The upshot is now that I have a TOTP-protected file upload site: 
publishr init    - Generates the secret
publishr secret  - Shows you the secret for import to your authenticator
publishr serve   - Starts the HTTP daemon
Other than a lack of comments, and test-cases, it is complete. And stand-alone. Uploads get dropped into ./public, and short-links are generated for free. If you want to take a peak the code is here: The only annoyance is the handling of dependencies - which need to be "go got ..". I guess I need to look at godep or similar, for my next learning project. I guess there's a minor gain in making this service available via golang. I've gained protection against replay attacks, assuming non-SSL environment, and I've simplified deployment. The downside is I can no longer login over the web, and I must use curl, or similar, to upload. Acceptible tradeoff.

Russ Allbery: Review: The Sea Thy Mistress

Review: The Sea Thy Mistress, by Elizabeth Bear
Series: Edda of Burdens #3
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: February 2011
ISBN: 0-7653-1884-9
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 334
The Sea Thy Mistress is the third book in the Edda of Burdens series, but the second book (By the Mountain Bound) was a prequel to the first, telling the story of an earlier world and the betrayal that ended it. This one is a direct sequel to All the Windwracked Stars, a complex and idea-rich book that I read more than six years ago. A challenging property of Bear's fiction is that it's short on explanation and doesn't hold your hand. This makes it lean, sharp, and effective if you're fully invested in it and can keep the context in your head. It becomes very hard to understand if you've mostly forgotten the plot of an earlier book. (Once again, I bemoan the death of the previous book synopsis in series fiction.) The Sea Thy Mistress is all about aftermath, loss, despair, unhealed wounds, old grudges, and complicated personal histories, and it relies very heavily on the reader being invested enough in the characters to care about all of those things. I wish I'd read this entire series closer together so that I could retain more of the state. The start of this story was therefore somewhat frustrating, as I scrambled to rebuild my memory of the first book and piece together the large cast. Thankfully, most of the characters are easy to care about. Aethelred reliably brought a smile to my face, and the opening scene of him finding a baby on the sea shore is a great piece of writing. Selene is back; she was one of my favorite characters in the first book. And Bear pulls off something I didn't think she could: the Grey Wolf is also back, for the third book, and he actually won me over. I think he grew up a bit; there's at least less whining and angst, and more effective action. It probably also helped that less of the story was told from his perspective. The Sea Thy Mistress is primarily the story of Cathoair and his son, Cathmar, and their encounter with a truly nasty threat: a goddess who has way more knowledge of how their world works than they do, and is out to destroy it. This review will necessarily be sketchy on details; most of them would partly spoil All the Windwracked Stars. (I suppose I'm spoiling it a bit anyway just by listing characters who are still around.) Cathmar is... not too irritating. He's young and stupid, and the first half of the book is a bit painful as he plays into the hands of the plot with much less information than the reader has available. But I was okay with him by the end of the book. Cathoair is a more complicated matter. I suspect whether you like this book will depend mostly on whether you can find some sympathy for his personal angst and self-destructive behavior, or at least tolerate him long enough to get to the ending. Quite a lot of this book consists of people behaving stupidly and horribly while those who love them stand by helplessly, unable to figure out how to break the cycle. If that sounds frustrating, you have the right impression. I really struggled with the first two-thirds of the book and started regretting reading it. But there is a payoff: one that's uncomfortable, raw, perilous, and sad, but also beautiful and honest and effective. Muire's role in this book may be minor, but it's very memorable. Despite the difficulties of the early book, I was very glad to have read it for the payoff. I'm not sure whether to recommend this or not, but I think it's worth reading if you enjoyed All the Windwracked Stars. If you do read it, though, try to read the whole series in close proximity. You'll want to remember the details between books. I'm now somewhat tempted to go back and re-read the whole series to experience it in context. Rating: 6 out of 10

12 September 2015

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Google Take Action - Encryption

So I got an email yesterday from Google's Jess Hemerly, talking about how they care about encryption To quote a small snippet of the email: 
We use locks to keep our homes and our possessions safe offline. But how can we protect our digital things, like photos on a smartphone or email traveling across the web? The answer is encryption.
To change, it has to start from home. That means, add encryption support to Gmail. Add encryption to Google Photos. To every service you provide. So that, if tomorrow, your service is compromised, you don't public our data. What all the service providers need to realize, is that it is not the tool that needs encryption, but the data. You could claim that newer Androids are safer because encryption is enabled by default. But the data that you are backing up on your cloud, is not encrypted. It only makes sense to have an end-to-end encryption, or rather, encryption at source. Had you just stacked the interface to have write() transparently call encrypt() for any and all data, there'd be no worry about privacy. But wait, then how'd you munch.

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Lars Wirzenius: Obnam 1.17 released (backup software)

I have just released version 1.17 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what's new in this version. It includes highlights for 1.15 and 1.16 as well, as I didn't announce those in this blog. Version 1.17, released 2015-09-12
  • Luk Pol ek added the --fsck-skip-checksums setting to greatly speed up obnam fsck.
  • Lars Wirzenius fixed a bug that caused Obnam to sometimes back up the parent of the backup live data root. In other words, if running obnam backup $HOME/important, then Obnam might backup the whole of the home directory, instead of just the important subdirectory.
Version 1.16, released 2015-09-06
  • Fixed another typo in a variable name ("netloc"), found by Benedikt Neuffer.
  • Fixed a lot of missing module imports, unnecessary module imports, and other minor bugs and style issues found by pylint. Pylint now gets run automatically by the test suite. This includes a fix in exclude_pathnames_plugin.py to add a missing import and fix variable namaes, by Diane Trout. A similar fix was also contributed by Mesar Hameed.
  • Luk Pol ek fixed an unlocking problem when GnuPG fails during an Obnam run. The lock should now be removed rather than left behind.
Version 1.15, released 2015-08-19
  • Fixed a typo in a variable name ("netloc"), found by Dirk.

Michal Čihař: Weblate for translating everything

Weblate is not only useful for translating software, it can help in translating any content. Let's look where our users are using it. Software translation is the most usual use case. This is actually where Weblate was used for first time and still provides great support for that. As an example (and oldest project hosted in Weblate) you can look at phpMyAdmin, where Weblate also helps to keep in sync translation for different maintenance branches. It can also help you in using same terminology in command line utility and graphical one like it is done in Gammu and Wammu translations. Weblate also supports localization of mobile application. Android support was originally implemented for OsmAnd project, but now they also translate iOS application using Weblate. Another use case is for translating documentation. You need to have some infrastructure to do, but there are several free software project to help here as well. For phpMyAdmin documentation or documentation for python module Odorik the Sphinx documentation generator is used, which has support for translation of the documentation. I've recently published quick howto for this setup. Another great tool for translating documentation is Publican, it is Docbook based tool and is used for translating The Debian Administrator's Handbook. Last but not least, you can use Weblate to translate your website. For example website for Weblate itself is translated this way. Did you miss your use case for Weblate? Please let me know. PS: I've heard that one Linux distribution will start using Weblate soon.

Filed under: English phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments

11 September 2015

Matthias Klumpp: Deploying Limba packages: Ideas & current status

LimbaHubThe Limba project does not only have the goal to allow developers to deploy their applications directly on multiple Linux distributions while reducing duplication of shared resources, it should also make it easy for developers to build software for Limba. Limba is worth nothing without good tooling to make it fun to use. That s why I am working on that too, and I want to share some ideas of how things could work in future and which services I would like to have running. I will also show what is working today already (and that s quite something!). This time I look at things from a developer s perspective (since the last posts on Limba were more end-user centric). If you read on, you will also find a nice video of the developer workflow 1. Creating metadata and building the software To make building Limba packages as simple as possible, Limba reuses already existing metadata, like AppStream metadata to find information about the software you want to create your package for. To ensure upstreams can build their software in a clean environment, Limba makes using one as simple as possible: The limba-build CLI tool creates a clean chroot environment quickly by using an environment created by debootstrap (or a comparable tool suitable for the Linux distribution), and then using OverlayFS to have all changes to the environment done during the build process land in a separate directory. To define build instructions, limba-build uses the same YAML format TravisCI uses as well for continuous integration. So there is a chance this data is already present as well (if not, it s trivial to write). In case upstream projects don t want to use these tools, e.g. because they have well-working CI already, then all commands needed to build a Limba package can be called individually as well (ideally, building a Limba package is just one call to lipkgen). I am currently planning DeveloperIPK packages containing resources needed to develop against another Limba package. With that in place and integrated with the automatic build-environment creation, upstream developers can be sure the application they just built is built against the right libraries as present in the package they depend on. The build tool could even fetch the build-dependencies automatically from a central repository. 2. Uploading the software to a repository While everyone can set up their own Limba repository, and the limba-build repo command will help with that, there are lots of benefits in having a central place where upstream developers can upload their software to. I am currently developing a service like that, called LimbaHub . LimbaHub will contain different repositories distributors can make available to their users by default, e.g. there will be one with only free software, and one for proprietary software. It will also later allow upstreams to create private repositories, e.g. for beta-releases. 3. Security in LimbaHub Every Limba package is signed with they key of its creator anyway, so in order to get a package into LimbaHub, one needs to get their OpenPGP key accepted by the service first. Additionally, the Hub service works with a per-package permission system. This means I can e.g. allow the Mozilla release team members to upload a package with the component-ID org.mozilla.firefox.desktop or even allow those user(s) to own the whole org.mozilla.* namespace. This should prevent people hijacking other people s uploads accidentally or on purpose. 4. QA with LimbaHub LimbaHub should also act as guardian over ABI stability and general quality of the software. We could for example warn upstreams that they broke ABI without declaring that in the package information, or even reject the package then. We could validate .desktop files and AppStream metadata, or even check if a package was built using hardening flags. This should help both developers to improve their software as well as users who benefit from that effort. In case something really bad gets submitted to LimbaHub, we always have the ability to remove the package from the repositories as a last resort (which might trigger Limba to issue a warning for the user that he won t receive updates anymore). What works Limba, LimbaHub and the tools around it are developing nicely, so far no big issues have been encountered yet. That s why I made a video showing how Limba and LimbaHub work together at time: Still, there is a lot of room for improvement Limba has not yet received enough testing, and LimbaHub is merely a proof-of-concept at time. Also, lots of high-priority features are not yet implemented. LimbaHub and Limba need help! At time I am developing LimbaHub and Limba alone with only occasional contributions from others (which are amazing and highly welcomed!). So, if you like Python and Flask, and want to help developing LimbaHub, please contact me the LimbaHub software could benefit from a more experienced Python web developer than I am (and maybe having a designer look over the frontend later makes sense as well). If you are not afraid of C and GLib, and like to chase bugs or play with building Limba packages, consider helping Limba development :-)

Russell Coker: Running a Shell in a Daemon Domain

allow unconfined_t logrotate_t:process transition;
allow logrotate_t shell_exec_t bin_t :file entrypoint;
allow logrotate_t unconfined_t:fd use;
allow logrotate_t unconfined_t:process sigchld; I recently had a problem with SE Linux policy related to logrotate. To test it out I decided to run a shell in the domain logrotate_t to interactively perform some of the operations that logrotate performs when run from cron. I used the above policy to allow unconfined_t (the default domain for a sysadmin shell) to enter the daemon domain. Then I used the command runcon -r system_r -t logrotate_t bash to run a shell in the domain logrotate_t. The utility runcon will attempt to run a program in any SE Linux context you specify, but to succeed the system has to be in permissive mode or you need policy to permit it. I could have written policy to allow the logrotate_t domain to be in the role unconfined_r but it was easier to just use runcon to change roles. Then I had a shell in the logrotate_t command to test out the post-rotate scripts. It turned out that I didn t really need to do this (I had misread the output of an earlier sesearch command). But this technique can be used for debugging other SE Linux related problems so it seemed worth blogging about.
Related posts:
  1. Xen CPU use per Domain The command xm list displays the number of seconds of...
  2. SE Linux Lenny Status Update I previously described four levels of SE Linux support on...
  3. UBAC and SE Linux in Debian A recent development in SE Linux policy is the concept...

Daniel Pocock: Payment for shadow work

A significant court ruling yesterday means that companies in the EU have to pay employees for time spent traveling to and from work. If something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Once you get past the headline, you find that it only applies to workers who are going to appointments outside their workplace. Some companies have been careless about scheduling such appointments, sometimes leaving an employee more than 2 hours from his home at the end of the day and this new ruling may just force them to either try a little harder to schedule appointments with consideration for the employee or pay for the extra time if excessive travel sometimes occurs. The ruling may be good news for IT workers, road congestion and the environment. With companies now becoming more efficient in managing travel time, they may well need to improve the software they use for scheduling the employee's time. With certain types of employee potentially having a shorter journey after the last appointment, this means less road congestion and less pollution. Professionals who have to fly may also be taking note: if you work in Paris but have to fly to London one day for meetings, then your working time starts when you leave your home at 05:30 and finishes at 22:00 when you get home. Shadow work comes in many forms It is good to see society taking note of the hidden cost of shadow work. What about all those other nasty and inefficient practices that take time but you don't get paid for them? Have you ever wondered why some companies send bills and statements to you by email or post, but others expect you to waste 5 minutes of your time logging in to their web site to download the bill or statement? Should people be paid for this time too and would that force these companies to stop being so lazy? Some companies have been trying to avoid doing the right thing by arguing that email is not secure, but this just doesn't add up: the original PGP MIME specs for email encryption were published through the IETF process in 1996. Barclaycard recently began offering to send credit card statements using encrypted PDF, proving that many of the excuses given by other companies are just that: excuses. For developers For people who are interested in improving the way their organization sends communications to customers, a popular choice is the Apache Camel integration framework. I've deployed Camel for customer trade notification and other purposes at several large and well known firms in financial services. It has a rich set of features for transforming messages, including a PGP data format for encryption and it is able to send messages out using a vast number of connectivity options, including many of the basic ones like SMTP, SMPP (for SMS), XMPP/Jabber and message queues.

10 September 2015

Gunnar Wolf: So you want to get our book?

OK, I already bragged that our book on Operating Systems is finally printed and has, thus, been formally published. What I had not yet mentioned is how we planned its physical distribution. Yes, it is available for sale at some UNAM libraries... But coming to UNAM is sadly an option only for people who are in Mexico City. I have been quite busy, and was unable to come up with anything earlier, but I have finally finished setting up a decent although minimal web page for the book. In it, I mention the possible ways you can get your own printed copy of Fundamentos de sistemas operativos:
  • If you are in Mexico, the advised way is to call or mail the library at Instituto de Investigaciones Econ micas (+52-55)5623-0080 or ventiiec@unam.mx.
    They will ship the book (they would ship it overseas, but it'd be too expensive!) and are able to process electronic payment opetions.
    The book printed at UNAM has substantive part of its pages printed in color, and let me tell you... It's worth it.
  • If you are not in Mexico or you prefer not to deal with a human, you can buy the book from the on-demand printing service lulu.com.
    For cost reasons, it is printed in black and white, but it is the same content (minus two typos ;-) ). Lulu.com is an international company, so they will get it shipped to you cheaper and faster And I have requested the book to be made available to libraries such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble (and was told it should take a couple of weeks to have it ready there).
Of course, the book is and will always be free for downloading, and its sources are online so you can easily derive from it as well. Enjoy! (and please report me any bugs you see!)

Gunnar Wolf: UNAM, more open than ever before.

Today I was refered to the publication of an "agreement" signed by my university's Rector: The Agreement that establishes the General Guidelines for the Open Access Policy of Universidad Nacional Aut noma de M xico. This is a document we have been waiting and pushing for throughout several years; I got involved in the Network of Digital Collections (Red de Acervos Digitales), RAD-UNAM back in 2011, and am honored to be its current coordinator, but this group has roots back in 2005. And, of course, by then several other people had been working on the topic without formal coordination. Not only we are happy because the agreement explicitly mentions our group as one of The Venues for Open Access publishing and dissemination in UNAM. In its seventh point, it mentions:
In the matters of Open Access, academic entities and university dependencies have the following obligations:
(...)
VII. Promote and support the creation and maintenance of institutional repositories, as well as the deposit of the digital resources produced by its academic community, which should be incorporated into Red de Acervos Digitales de la UNAM
(...)
So... We have done a good job. And there will be surely more to follow! I'm including here a copy of the agreement by itself (without the whole number of the Gaceta UNAM) because I will surely have to refer to it in the future.
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Lineamientos generales para la pol tica de acceso abierto de la Universidad Nacional Aut noma de M xico89.83 KB

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.12.1: First boat load of fixes!

The first updated in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R this morning, and I will push a Debian package. This follows the 0.12.0 release from late July which started to some serious new features. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 461 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further. This release once again features contributions from a number of new contributors, with Florian Plaza O ate and Dan Dillon joining the fray with several pull requests each. Kurt Hornik also helped with a fix for a bad interaction between very recent R (3.2.2) changes and Rcpp; another related one was also addressed. A big Thanks! to everybody helping with code, bug reports or documentation, See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.
Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.1 (2015-09-10)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Correct use of WIN32 instead of _WIN32 to please Windows 10
    • Add an assignment operator to DimNameProxy (PR #339 by Florian)
    • Add vector and matrix accessors .at() with bounds checking (PR #342 by Florian)
    • Correct character vector conversion from single char (PR #344 by Florian fixing issue #343)
    • Correct on use of R_xlen_t back to size_t (PR #348 by Romain)
    • Correct subsetting code to allow for single assignment (PR #349 by Florian)
    • Enable subset assignment on left and righ-hand side (PR #353 by Qiang, fixing issue #345)
    • Refreshed to included tinyformat template library (PR #357 by Dirk, issue #356)
    • Add operator<<() for vectors and matrices (PR #361 by Dan fixing issue #239)
    • Make String and String_Proxy objects comparable (PR #366 and PR #372 by Dan, fixing issue #191)
    • Add a new class Nullable for objects which may be NULL (PR #368 by Dirk and Dan, fixing issue #363)
    • Correct creation and access of large matrices (PR #370 by Florian, fixing issue #369)
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • Correctly reset directory in case of no-rebuilding but Windows code (PR #335 by Dirk)
  • Changes in Rcpp Modules:
    • We no longer define multiple Modules objects named World in the unit tests with was seen to have a bad effect with R 3.2.2 or later (PR #351 by Dirk fixing issue #350).
    • Applied patch by Kurt Hornik which improves how Rcpp loads Modules (PR #353 by Dirk)
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • The Rcpp.bib file with bibliographic references was updated.
Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

Chris Lamb: Joining strings in POSIX shell

A common programming task is to glue (or "join") items together to create a single string. For example: 
>>> ', '.join(['foo', 'bar', 'baz'])
"foo, bar, baz"
Notice that we have three items but only two commas this can be important if the tool we passing doesn't support trailing delimiters or we simply want the result to be human-readable. Unfortunately, this can be inconvenient in POSIX shell where we construct strings via explicit concatenation. A na ve solution of: 
RESULT=""
for X in foo bar baz
do
    RESULT="$ RESULT , $ X "
done
... incorrectly returns ", foo, bar, baz". We can solve this with a (cumbersome) counter or flag to only attach the delimiter when we need it: 
COUNT=0
RESULT=""
for X in foo bar baz
do
    if [ "$ COUNT " = 0 ]
    then
        RESULT="$ X "
    else
        RESULT="$ RESULT , $ X "
    fi
    COUNT=$((COUNT + 1))
done
One alternative is to use the little-known ":+" expansion modifier. Many people are familiar with ":-" for returning default values: 
$ echo $ VAR:-fallback
By contrast, the ":+" modifier inverts this logic, returning the fallback if the specified variable is actually set. This results in the elegant: 
RESULT=""
for X in foo bar baz
do
    RESULT="$ RESULT:+$ RESULT ,  $ X "
done

Norbert Preining: Getting CafeOBJ via MacPorts

I have finally finished the Portfile for CafeOBJ, which allows users to install CafeOBJ via the usual port command of MacPorts. For one needs to add our local source (which only ships CafeOBJ port), but I hope to get the port into the standard distribution soon. cafeobj-logo Necessary steps:
  • Add the following line to your MacPorts sources.conf, which usually resides in /opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf: 
    http://cafeobj.org/macport/ports.tar.gz
  • After that, call the following two commands (as root or with sudo), the first syncronizing the ports, the second one installing CafeOBJ: 
    port sync
port install cafeobj
This should give you a working installation of CafeOBJ 1.5.3. The port will be updated as soon as 1.5.4 is released (which should be rather soon). Enjoy, and please leave comments and suggestions how to improve the port file here, per email, or at our bug tracker.

Antoine Beaupr : Switched to bootstrap theme

I finally gave up and drank the cool-aid of the Bootstrap theme. The main reason was that I noticed the site was basically unusable on any mobile device, including tablet computers like the iPad, which are unfortunately very, very common. Phones wouldn't render the site in a legible way either, unfortunately. The change is rather drastic, so I figured it was important to mention it here. I am not so satisfied pretty exctied with the result: the theme is very basic, if not absent. I actually like that purified form now, and it works across devices now much better. But I do feel I just made my blog look like everyone else that uses Bootstrap. We seem to enter an era where non-graphic designers (like me) are back to building web pages that all look the same, not very different, in a way, from the old days of plain HTML, like the default ikiwiki theme. I did some work to change the look at least minimally, but the top black navbar is really a killer giveaway this is a bootstrap theme. Bootstrap does a lot for the typography, at least when checking the presslabs checklist or the practical typography checklist, but I still had to change the main body width, which helped a lot I think. Anyways, the old Night City theme is still available for download and I could still flip it back on here if I need to.

What changed The new theme keeps the distractions away, but ironically, it's slower than the previous theme even though there are no images and basically no colors at all. On my tests, it now loads in about 3.42 seconds on the "Regular 2G (250Kbps)" simulation of Chromium with 72KB in 12 requests. Whereas my tests with the previous theme were taking 3.25 seconds with 43.5KB in 17 requests. This is due to the Bootstrap CSS, which takes a whopping 19KB itself, but especially because I now load JQuery, which takes a whopping 32.8KB! And that is probably gzip-compressed, as the original is more around 90KB. But at least the thing is readable on phones and tablets now. Compare:

Samsung S3, before Screenshot of a fake rendering on the Samsung Galaxy S3 in night city

Samsung S3, after Screenshot of a fake rendering on the Samsung Galaxy S3 in bootstrap I like this: much simpler, purer version on smaller devices. And we see what counts: the freaking text. Of course, on tablets, it doesn't fare as well: the top menu gets wrapped around...

Apple iPad, before Screenshot of a fake rendering on the iPad in night city

Apple iPad, after Screenshot of a fake rendering on the iPad in bootstrap Apparently, the fix would be for me to "customize the @grid-float-breakpoint variable" in LESS (which I thought was a pager, but seems to be a CSS preprocessor, graaah). Still, I think it's better that way, more readable, and less crufty.

How it was done After doing a thorough evaluation of all the Bootstrap ikiwiki themes I could find (there are more than 4 at least!), I figured I prefered the Jak Linux one. It seemed to be better implemented than the others, cleaner, and I liked the mean black border on top. Black is cool. Oh, and I liked the subtle footer as well. Subtle is cool. Unfortunately, that theme originally required a custom plugin to have a menu on top, which i thought was silly. So I patched it to make it work with the sidebar plugin, which turned out to be trivially simple: just dump the sidebar content, and make the sidebar page have explicit HTML tags in it that match Bootstrap's required classes. I also added the regular action links in the top navbar, but that does overload it quite a bit. I also did some code cleanups and various other small changes, all of which are available in my personnal git repo.

What doesn't work So of course, there are always problems. The first problem is the extra bandwidth usage. Not sure that can be fixed, other than switching to the upcoming Bootstrap 4, which is smaller than Bootstrap 3, bizarrely. The more annoying problems are weird alignment issues. If the screen gets two narrow without kicking some collapse rules in place (the iPad bug above), the navbar rows overflow and look ugly. Even more bizarre, in some cases the right navbar can just completely disappear, in fact, that's the only fix I could find: to assign the hidden-xs and hidden-sm classes to the navbar-right <UL> element. But then it just goes away, which is pretty darn stupid. Still - I assigned the classes to a few actions that seemed low priority, both in the theme and in the sidebar page. Similarly, the search form at the bottom of the page doesn't seem to want to fit in the footer properly. No idea why and I can't bother to figure that one out. I ended up merging this with the backlinks, tags and trails navigation items. Oh, and amazingly enough: comments are simply not rendered at all right now. Oops. I seemed to have picked the single bootstrap Ikiwiki theme that does *not* have comments rendering... Aaaargh. For now I just copy-pasted stuff from the [ramseydsilva][] theme and it looks pretty ugly, but at least it works. I ended up theming comments the same way i did for Night City, which looks pretty good, but is not in sync with the LESS stuff in Bootstrap. I also add to add back trails, backlinks and favicon... looks like the Jak theme wasn't made for a blog after all... but that's now fixed! :) Another improvement would be to change the font from the canonical Helvetica to something prettier, like suggested in Practical Typography, in the font recommendations section, or the presslabs checklist. So far I have settled on Mozilla's Fira font (which means, yes, one set of objects is actually loading from the CDN, sorry). Feedback welcome.

9 September 2015

Carl Chenet: Retweet 0.3: retweet given tweet popularity

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter or Diaspora*diaspora-banner Don t know Retweet? My last post about it introduced this small Twitter bot whichs aims to retweet every tweets from a Twitter account to another one. Retweet The new features of this release:
  • retweet a tweet only if it was already retweeted a number of times you can specify
  • define the duration to wait before processing the next tweet to possibly retweet (useful if you want to control the delay between two tweets).
Retweet was created in order to improve the Journal du hacker Twitter account. The Journal du hacker is a Hacker News-like French-speaking website. logo-journal-du-hacker Especially useful to broadcast news through a network of Twitter accounts, Retweet was also improved to improve pep8 compliance and code readability (wip). The project is also well documented and should be quite simple to install, configure and use. Twitter_logo_blue What about you? If you try it, please tell me what you think about it, opening a bug request or ask for new features. Or just write your comment here ;)

Mike Gabriel: MATE 1.10 has fully arrived in Debian unstable

Yesterday, I uploaded the last missing piece for fully having MATE Desktop Environment 1.10 in Debian unstable and soon in Debian stretch and Ubuntu 15.10. Providing MATE in Debian is, in the first place, a team effort. People from four Linux distributions plus the developers from upstream work on providing the MATE experience to the users of Debian. There are many people to thank. This time I will only mention two of them. Two guys that have worked really hard on the MATE 1.10 release in Debian: Martin Wimpress (from the Ubuntu MATE team, aka flexiondotorg) and Vlad Orlov (from MATE upstream, aka monsta). May the MATE Desktop Environment be of use to all of you... light+love,
Mike (aka sunweaver)

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