I have just released a wastly improved new version of the Kobo Japanese Dictionary Enhancer. It allows you to enhance the Kobo Japanese dictionary with English translations. The new version provides now 326064 translated entries, which covers most non-compound words, including Hiragana. In my daily life reading Harry Potter and some other books in Japanese, I haven t found many untranslated words by now. Please head over to the main page of the project for details and download instructions. If you need my help in creating the updated dictionary, please feel free to contact me. Enjoy.

Debconf is a great opportunity to meet people in real life, to express and share ideas in a different way, and to work on all sort of stuff.

I therefore spent some time to finish a couple of features in the editor for sources.debian.net. Here are some of the changes:

• Compare the source file with that of another version of the package
• And in order to present that: tabs! editor tabs!
• at the same time: generated diffs are now presented in a new editor tab, from where you can download it or email it

Get it for chromium, and iceweasel.

If your browser performs automatic updates of the extensions (the default), you should soon be upgraded to version 0.1.0 or later, bringing all those changes to your browser.

Want to see more? multi-file editing? in-browser storage of the editing session? that and more can be done, so feel free to join me and contribute to the Debian sources online editor!

Even though the week of DebCamp took its toll and the stress level will not go down any time soon... ...DebConf15 has finally started! :)

Even though Debian has moved to systemd as default a long while ago now, I've stayed with sysv as I have somewhat custom setups (self-built trimmed down kernels, separate /usr not pre-mounted by initrd, etc.). After installing a new system with Jessie and playing a bit with systemd on it a couple of months ago, I said it's finally time to upgrade. Easier said than starting to actually do it . The first system I upgraded was a recent (~1 year old) install. It was a trimmed-down system with Debian's kernel, so everything went smoothly. So smoothly that I soon forgot I made the change, and didn't do any more switches for a while. Systemd was therefore out of my mind until this recent Friday when I got a bug report about mt's rcS init script and shipping a proper systemd unit. The first step should be to actually start using systemd, so I said - let's convert some more things! During the weekend I upgraded one system, still a reasonably small install, but older - probably 6-7 years. First reboot into systemd flagged the fact that I had some forced-load modules which no longer exist, fact that was too easy to ignore with sysv. Nice! The only downside was that there seems to be some race condition between and ntp, as it fails to start on boot (port listen conflict). I'll see if it repeats. Another small issue is that systemd doesn't like duplicate fstab entries (i.e. two devices which both refer to the same mount point), while this works fine for mount itself (when specifying the block device). I said that after that system, I'll wait a while until to upgrade the next. But so it happened that today another system had an issue and I had to reboot it (damn lost uptimes!). The kernel was old so I booted into a newer one (this time compiled with the required systemd options), so I had a though - what if I take the opportunity and also switch to systemd on this system? Caution said to wait, since this was the oldest system - installed sometime during or before 2004. Plus it doesn't use an initrd (long story), and it has a split /usr. Caution excitement caution lost and I proceeded. It turns out that systemd does warn about split /usr but itself has no problems. I learned that I also had very old sysfs entries that no longer exist, and which I didn't know about as sysv doesn't make it obvious. I also had a crypttab entry which was obsolete, and I forgot about it, until I met the nice red moving ASCII bar which fortunately had a timeout. To be honest, I believed I'll have to rescue boot and fix things on this "always-unstable" machine, on which I install and run random things, and which has a hackish /etc/fstab setup. I'm quite surprised it just worked. On unstable. So thanks a lot to the Debian systemd team. It was much simpler than I thought, and now, on to exploring systemd! P.S.: the sad part is that usually I'm a strong proponent of declarative configuration, but for some reason I was reluctant to migrate to systemd also on account on losing the "power" of shell scripts. Humans

There are a bunch of things I mean to blog about, but as I have just got fully home from Heidelberg and DebConf15 this afternoon that seems most appropriate to start with. It s a bit of a set of disjoint thoughts, but I figure I should write them down while they re in my head. DebConf is an interesting conference. It s the best opportunity the Debian project has every year to come together and actually spend a decent amount of time with each other. As a result it s a fairly full on experience, with lots of planned talks as a basis and a wide range of technical discussions and general social interaction filling in whatever gaps are available. I always find it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, but equally I m glad to be home and doing delightfully dull things like washing my clothes and buying fresh milk. I have always been of the opinion that the key aspect of DebConf is the face time. It was thus great to see so many people there - we were told several times that this was the largest DebConf so far (~ 570 people IIRC). That s good in the sense that it meant I got to speak to a lot of people (both old friends and new), but does mean that there are various people I know I didn t spend enough, or in some cases any, time with. My apologies, but I think many of us were in the same situation. I don t feel it made the conference any less productive for me - I managed to get a bunch of hacking done, discuss a number of open questions in person with various people and get pulled into various interesting discussions I hadn t expected. In short, a typical DebConf. Also I d like to say that the venue worked out really well. I ll admit I was dubious when I heard it was in a hostel, but it was well located (about a 30 minute walk into town, and a reasonable bus service available from just outside the door), self-contained with decent facilities (I m a big believer in having DebConf talks + accommodation be as close as possible to each other) and the room was much better than expected (well, aside from the snoring but I can t blame the DebConf organisers for that). One of the surprising and interesting things for me that was different from previous DebConfs was the opportunity to have more conversations with a legal leaning. I expect to go to DebConf and do OpenPGP/general crypto related bits. I wasn t expecting affirmation about the things I have learnt on my course over the past year, in terms of feeling that I could use that knowledge in the process of helping Debian. It provided me with some hope that I ll be able to tie my technology and law skills together in a way that I will find suitably entertaining (as did various conversations where people expressed significant interest in the crossover). Next year is in Cape Town, South Africa. It s a long way (though I suppose no worse than Portland and I get to stay in the same time zone), and a quick look at flights indicates they re quite expensive at the moment. The bid presentation did look pretty good though so as soon as the dates are confirmed (I believe this will happen as soon as there are signed contracts in place) I ll take another look at flights. In short, excellent DebConf, thanks to the organisers, lovely to see everyone I managed to speak to, apologies to those of you I didn t manage to speak to. Hopefully see you in Cape Town next year.

A pure maintenance release 0.1.3 of the RcppDE package arrived on CRAN yesterday. RcppDE is a "port" of DEoptim, a popular package for derivative-free optimisation using differential optimization, to C++. By using RcppArmadillo, the code becomes a lot shorter and more legible. This version simply fixes a typo in the vignette metadata noticed by Kurt, and updates the package in a few other spots to update it to current CRAN Repository Policy standards. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

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

Triggered by all the bugs around font problems I spent my weekend instead of mountaineering with crawling through the TeX Live history for changes and fixes to dvipdfm-x. Thanks to for his hints, I have pulled out the changes necessary to fix Type1 support in dvipdfm-x and have reincluded them into the Debian texlive-bin package. The uploaded binaries (version 2015.20150524.37493-6) are already compiled against the new C++ ABI, see the Debian transition, so most systems will still need to wait for the update to be installable. At the same time I did an update to the whole set of arch: all packages (texlive-base, texlive-lang, texlive-extra (version 2015.20150823-1). This was triggered by bug that seems to be caused by bad interplay between fontspec and l3 packages. Furthermore, I needed to remove the activation for fontconfig of the URW++ Base35 fonts, to ensure that fontconfig returns always the ones from the gsfonts package, instead of a mixture between TeX Live and gsfonts. Unrelated bug fix: libpaper intergration has been fixed and should work again. So for now all the bugs are now hopefully settled and we are back to normal. What remains is trying to fix jessie which is also broken in some respects. Updated packages acro, animate, babel-bosnian, babel-french, babel-latin, beamer-FUBerlin, beebe, breqn, chemformula, chet, cnltx, crossrefware, dantelogo, datetime2-it-fulltext, disser, drm, dvipdfmx-def, ecclesiastic, eledform, gradstudentresume, idxcmds, l3build, mcf2graph, media9, pageslts, pdfpages, reledmac, siunitx, tcolorbox, tex4ht, texlive-docindex, texlive-scripts, udesoftec, upmethodology, xindy. New packages blochsphere, e-french, fitbox, nar Enjoy.

As I m writing this, DebConf 15 is coming to an end. I spend most of my time improving the situation of the Haskell Packages in Debian, by improving the tooling and upgrading our packages to match Stackage 3.0 and build against GHC 7.10. But that is mostly of special interest (see this mail for a partial summary), so I d like to use this post to advertise a very small and simple package I just uploaded to Debian: During one of the discussion here I noticed that it is rather tricky to make a locally built package available to apt-get. The latest version in unstable allows one to install a debian package simply by running apt-get install on it, but in some cases, e.g. when you want a convenient way to list all packages that you made available for local use, this is insufficient. So the usual approach is to create a local apt repository with your packages. Which is non-trivial: You can use dpkg-scanpackage, apt-ftparchive or reprepro. You need to create the directories, run the commands, add the repository to your local sources. You need to worry about signing it or setting the right options to make apt-get accept it without signing. It is precisely this work that my new package local-apt-repository automates for you: Once it is installed, you simply drop the .deb file into /srv/local-apt-repository/ and after the next apt-get update the package can be installed like any other package from the archive. I chose to use the advanced features that systemd provides namely activation upon path changes so works best with systemd as the init system. If you want to contribute, or test it before it passes the NEW queue, check out the git repository.

Hello dear readers, Next week, I'll be running the "Echappee Belle" race : 144km and 10.000 meters positive climb, in French Alps (Belledonne range, this time). That will be, by far, my longest race ever and indeed a great challenge for me with very difficult tracks (when there are tracks). I expect to run for about 48 hours, or even up to 55, two nights out.....or maybe less as I'm in very good shape. You can follow me on the live tracking site. The race starts on Friday August 28th, 06:00 CET DST.

Having had personal contact with Amazon employees, and having read the NYT article Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, I have only a few things to say:

• Most Japanese companies have different methods, but work hours are similar, and exploitation even worse (voluntary service etc)
• I loved one comment in the MobileRead thread on the article, link to the post:
  

  All you need to do is make one assumption: dishonest people will outperform honest people over the short term. Then every year Amazon s culling will get rid of the honest people and keep the dishonest ones. Rinse and repeat. Soon only the sociopaths are left. Best supporting quote from the article: You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus.

What remains I guess I would be a horrible performer at Amazon, and I am proud of it.

I tried to start to write this blog entry like I usually do: Type along what goes through my mind and see where I'm heading. This won't work out right now for various reasons, mostly because there is so much going on that I don't have the time to finish that in a reasonable time and I want to publish this today still. So please excuse me for being way more brief than I usually am, and hopefully I'll find the time to expand some things when asked or come back to that later. Part of the reason of me being short on time is different stuff going on in my private life which requires additional attention. A small part of this is also something that I hinted in a former blog entry: I switched my job in June. I really was looking forward to this. I made them aware of what the name Rhonda means to me and it's definitely extremely nice to be addressed with female pronouns at work. And also I'm back in a system administration job which means there is an interest overlap with my work on Debian, so a win-win situation on sooo many levels! I'm at DebConf15 since almost two weeks now. On my way here I was complimented on my outfit by a security guard at the Vienna airport which surprised me but definitely made my day. I was wearing one of these baggy hippie pants (which was sent to me by a fine lady I met at MiniDebConf Bucharest) but pulled up the leg parts to the knees so it could be perceived as a skirt instead. Since I came here I was pretty busy with taking care of DCschedule bot adjustments (like, changing topic and twittering from @DebConf at the start of the talks), helping out with the video team when I noticed there was a lack of people (which is a hint for that you might want to help with the video team in the future too, it's important for remote people but also for yourself because you can't attend multiple sessions at the same time). And I have to repeat myself, this is the place I feel home amongst my extended family, even though I it still is sometimes for me to get to speak up in certain groups. I though believe it's more an issue of certain individuals taking up a lot of space in discussions without giving (more shy) people in the round the space to also join in. I guess it might be the time that we need a session on dominant talking patterns for next year and how to work against them. I absolutely enjoyed such a session during last year's FemCamp in Vienna which set the tone for the rest of the conference, and it was simply great. And then there was the DebConf Poetry Night. I'm kinda disappointed with the outcome this year. It wasn't able to attract as much people anticipated, which I to some degree account to me not making people aware of it well enough, overlapping with a really great band playing at the same time in competition, and even though the place where we did it sounded like a good idea at first, it didn't had enough light for someone to read something from a book (but that was solved through smartphone lights). I know that most people did enjoy it, so it was good to do it, but I'm still a fair bit disappointed with the outcome and will try to work on improving on that grounds for next year. :) With all this going on there unfortunately wasn't as much time as I would have liked to spend with people I haven't seen for a long time, or new people I haven't met yet. Given that this year's DebConf had an height in attendees (526 being here at certain times during the two weeks, and just today someone new arrived too, so that doesn't even have to be the final number) it makes it a bit painful to have picked up so many tasks and thus lost some chances to socialize as much as I would have liked to. So, if you are still here and have the feeling we should have talked more, please look for me. As Bdale pointed out correctly in the New to DebConf BoF (paraphrased): When you see us DebConf old timers speaking to someone else and you feel like you don't want to disturb, please do disturb and speak to us. I always enjoyed to get to know new people. This for me always is one of the important aspects of DebConf. Also, I am very very happy to have received feedback from different people about both my tweets and my blog, thank you a lot of that. It is really motivating to keep going. So, lets enjoy the last few hours of DebConf! Another last side notice: While my old name in the Debian LDAP did manage to find some wrongly displayed names in the DebConf website, like for speakers, or volunteers, it was clear to me that having it exposed through SSO.debian.org isn't really something I appreciate. So I took the chance and spoke to Luca from the DSA team right here today, and ... got it fixed. I love it! Next step is getting my gpg key exchanged, RT ticket is coming up. :)

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Well, here are the stats for the final week of the DUCK challenge as well as DebConf15:

• Yao Wei uploaded big-cursor
• Denis Briand abook
• Salvatore Bonaccorso uploaded libtext-simpletable-perl, libstring-bufferstack-perl and libcarp-clan-perl
• Sandro Tois uploaded dot2txt
• Florian Schlichting uploaded libxml-dom-perl, libtie-array-sorted-perl, libvalidate-net-perl and libtext-typography-perl
• Enrico Tassi uploaded lua-sec
• Bas Couwenberg uploaded modestmaps-py
• Riku Voipo uploaded device-tree-compiler
• Lucas Kanashiro uploaded libclass-gomor-perl and libclass-c3-adopt-perl
• Bernd Zeimez uploaded lua-json
• Olivier Sallou uploaded biojava4-live
• Kari Pahula uploaded gearhead
• Gregor Hermann uploaded libnet-tclink-perl
• Jakub Wilk uploaded pebl

So we had 21 packages fixed and uploaded by 14 different uploaders. People were really working hard on this during DebConf. A big "Thank You" to you!! Since the start of this challenge, a total of 89 packages, were fixed. Here is a quick overview:

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6	Week 7
# Packages	10	15	10	14	10	9	21
Total	10	25	35	49	59	68	89

Thank you all for participating - either on purpose or "accidentially": Some people were really surprised as i sneaked up on them at DebConf15, confronting them with a green lighter! I just tried to put even more fun into Debian, i hope this worked out Pevious articles are here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5,Week 6.

The URW Base35 fonts are a great set of fonts, available for free as in free software. They have been part of various distributions and systems since long time. Big thanks to URW for their work. But these fonts don t have Cyrillic or Greek glyphs. Be it as it is, world would be easy. People would need to use different fonts for these languages. Comes around someone who did the unthinkable namely adding the Cyrillic and Greek glyphs to the fonts (by now nothing bad), but then NOT renaming the fonts. Here we see one point of the stupidity of GPL and absolute freedom. Because what we now have is that documents produced several TeX engines (in particular XeTeX and LuaTeX) which use fontconfig to search the fonts, suddenly pick up these changed fonts that fake their identity, and what comes out is this, a complete rubbish: And now we are suffering huge pain from that. Look at the bug reports of that are coming in:

• 796120 xdvipdfmx broken
• 789391 developers reference fonts broken
• 787759 fonts broken in dblatex

Just to name a few. And there is a simple way to circumvent this: Don t install gsfonts which guarantees that fontconfig finds the real original URW fonts within the TeX Live tree first. I have now spent many hours to track down these problems, find the reason, and at the end of the day there is always gsfonts with its broken fonts with added Cyrillic glyphs. I honestly don t care about the history, there are now many fonts with Cyrillic and Greek glyphs, there is no need to fake fonts, and incorrectly take over font names. This should be a lesson to all the GPL zealots that require absolute freedom of each and everything. Unfortunately things don t work like that. Using AND RENAMING is ok, the Knuth license as I would say, but anything else is just a source of much pain. End for today, I have to go to work now. Real work instead of fighting sins of the past. Nothing to enjoy here. Additional information Just to let you know, before starting a flame war, I have already contacted the upstream developers, that is TeX Live, and explained them the situation. I don t see much chance for fixing, since the problem is with fonts without upstream and support, which are probably only used in Debian (I haven t seen them anywhere else but some mentioning in RH), and which are not officially supported or distributed. It really needs a nice developer to look into why this breakage appeared. Let us hope. And instead of flaming, anyone here is invited to dig into the code him/herself and search for changes. Additional information 2015-08-22 Just to back up my complaints and counteract several of the comments: I am quoting from an email of a colleague on the list where we are discussing the problem:

However, the fonts extended by Valek Filippov are quite problematic. The Type1 spec clearly requires that there may not exist two different fonts with the same /FontName. The modified fonts shipped with Ghostscript have the same /FontName as the original fonts donated by URW and not even the /UniqueID was changed. IMO they are broken because they don t comply with the Type1 specification.

I hope that convinced also the last in doubt.

Thursday was our big day: After more than 2.5 years of working in the hidden, ups and downs, Frank Hofmann and myself were able to announce the availability of our book project Debian Package Management under a free license (Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License, short CC BY-SA 4.0 ) during a Lightning Talk at DebConf15 in Heidelberg. This became possible because we found Onyx Neon, a publishing company which is specialised on books with contents under free licenses. Its founder does not only have a faible for Perl but also for Debian. (Since the question already came up: We also thought about self-publishing, e.g. via Lulu or Epubli and it would have been our fallback solution , but we prefer the professionalism and services of a real publisher. I m though happy to share what I found out about self-publishing in the past few months.) The source code of the book is written in the AsciiDoc format and available on GitHub. The book is still work in progress. But if you want, you can already build an e-book out of the publically available source code:

sudo apt-get install asciidoc dblatex git
git clone git://github.com/dpmb/dpmb.git
cd dpmb
make

(Works fine on Debian 7 Wheezy, Debian 8 Jessie and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty. Does not work on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise.) If you find an error in the book, please file an issue on GitHub. If you also know how to fix the error, please for the Git repository on GitHub, fix the error in your Git repository and file a pull request. (The first pull request already happenend and has been applied.) Initially there will be only a German written issue as e-book (at least in HTML, PDF and EPUB formats, maybe also KF8/MOBI and EPUB3) and at some point in the future also as printed book at Onyx Neon. But we re also planning a translation to English as well as a Debian package. If your want to get informed when we publish a printed book, a translation or an official e-book release, please subscribe to one of our mailing lists: There s one in German and one in English.

Based on a discussion around breakfast, and encouraged by the people at the table, I hereby call for a new release goal (or challenge, whatever you prefer to call it):


Every package maintainer should remove one of their packages from the archive.


It's dead simple. It is acceptable to adopt a package to replace the one that has been removed, or to add a new one to the archive.
For tracking purposes please include "for RG" (release goal) in the removal request to ftp.debian.org.


And how about a debconf challenge? how about filing over 100 removal requests before the end of Debconf 15 on Saturday night? blog about it, dent/twit about it, spam IRC about it!


The idea came up after discussing about how us as package maintainers refuse to remove our obsolete or unused packages. So yes, that may also include the very first package that you got into the archive.


Sad news, good news.

Following the tradition of Love Locks, apparently there is someone really in love with vim in Heidelberg! Found at the Old Bridge in Heidelberg during DebConf15.

There is more people with blue hair at Debconf than at an average Akademy. KDE we need to do better :)

Thanks to Takahiro Seino we are now having a gentle introduction to CafeOBJ for beginners, in both English and Japanese, available. Please head over to the CafeOBJ web site for details, or jump directly to the English or Japanese version. We are also preparing for a new release with largely improved CITP support and better term inspection. Stay tuned.

Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few years arrived in the mail. I had to fake a cover to get the interior printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is irrelevant at this point. I asked for a printed pocket book version to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the pocket book version would look like. After receiving the 500 page pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too small for this book. I believe the book is too thick, and several tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that small page sizes. I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size instead. A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the URLs look in print. They are very hard to read in the colophon page. The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper. I need to change the color of links somehow to look better. But there is a printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :) Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof readers before the book is ready for proper printing. Cover artists willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as a graphics designer are mostly missing.

Poetry for Debconf15 poetry night

Debian's reached the age of 22
I wish I could be there with you
In Heidelberg, fair German city
To share, in person, this my ditty

Rhonda's worked hard - the work is done
With poems now begins the fun
While others play cards or hack new code
Or dream of running down the road

Free software, arguments, warmth, good cheer
Too soon all over 'til next year
All of the best are there / on 'Net
Here's hope that it's the best Debconf yet