A bi-lingual poem created on inspiration from Debconf15 and in honor of Debconf Poetry Night by Rhonda
Du ... Du hast ... Du hast apt ... Du hast apt gebrochen! Reconsider your disk usage, And APT might work again.(as usual - licenced as CC-BY V3+ or GPLv2+)
pull requests.
Watching people figuring out how to use a Danish cheese slicer is kind interesting. But by using enough force most people succeeding in getting a lump of cheese.
The long awaited group photo from Debconf15 is now available: here and here.
Due to its spectacular glory, the Google Photos could not handle the massive 52 Mb, and 19283*8740=168.5Mpix of awesomness, so there is only a half-size version.
Also I plan to have a lightning talk on Thursday on how exactly such things are made :)
I bumped into Mark Shuttleworth today at Linuxcon and we had a brief conversation about Canonical's IP policy. The short summary:
Dear Lazyweb,
I m currently trying to find a way to port python-debianbts to Python3. Debian s standard bugreport tool reportbug depends on python-debianbts and can thus not convert to Python3 if python-debianbts does not as well. Unfortunately python-debianbts depends on SoapPy for parsing the Debian bugtracker s responses, and that library is not ported to Python3 yet, and probably never will.
I m planning to replace SoapPy with pysimplesoap which is available for Python2 and Python3. Unfortunately debbugs does not support WSDL which makes parsing of the replies extremely painful and error-prone. I wonder if there is a SOAP/Python expert out there who d be willing to give some assistance in porting python-reportbug to pysimplesoap? python-reportbug s repository is on GitHub and patches are very welcome.
Since SOAP is quite a beast and debbugs uses it for read-only purposes only, another attractive solution would be to replace/augment debbugs API with something much more simple, like JSON. That would make parsing extremely easy as many programming languages including Python support JSON without any external libraries. In theory this could be quite easy but requires some serious Perl skills.
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. (Emma Goldman, on several things including mailing list flamewars)Fascinating A da's "Dogging" song. Look for "dogging etiquette" for more examples of code of conducts. Just don't take your computer for repair immediately afterwards . Introduction
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian. (Emma Goldman, on the Debian Social Contract)I am going to talk about many topics that we all know have so much in common:
A person is no less a slave because they are allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. (Lysander Spooner about proprietary cloud service providers)If you thought you've seen it all with recursive acronyms, here's a chain acronym: Bondage Discipline, Dominance Submission, Sado Masochism. Why I think BDSM is interesting: not (just) because of whips, but for having a lot of awareness about power releationships. Why should one accept from a coworker a level of abuse that would be considered a hard limit when negotiating with a trusted dom? The BDSM Free Software definition: "I refuse to be bound by software I cannot negotiate with". YKINMKBYKIOK (Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is Okay) is a nice example of dealing with diversity, and it also definitely solves the emacs vs vi debate. Comfort zones, safewords, traffic light flow control, safety. "No means no", unless there has been a long discussion first, and a safeword is in place, in which case "Fuzzy purple unicorn" means "no" "No means no", and if someone insists after a "no", it becomes harassment. "No means no" is a precondition for being able to say "yes": http://pervocracy.blogspot.de/2011/03/no-and-no-and-no-and-yes.html Aftercare! Aftercare! Release parties! High fives! Solidarity after flamewars or votes! Poliamory
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus. (Emma Goldman, on volunteer projects)Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of intimate relationships that are not exclusive with respect to other sexual or intimate relationships, with knowledge and consent of everyone involved. Compersion, n: the feeling you get when someone else also takes good care of one of your packages. We currently allow only one value in the Maintainer field: * takeover is traumatic, because values can only be replaced * if values could be added instead, and removed when they don't make sense anymore... What is your definition of love? My current one is: my world is better with you in it. Relationship anarchy is the practice of forming relationships which are not bound by rules aside from what the people involved mutually agree on. How do you call a relationship that is bound by rules that the people involved do not agree on? From discussions after the talk New Relationship Energy, the excitement when you start to maintain a new package, and the risk of been carried away by the excitement and neglecting all the other ones. Consent
Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship. (Voltairine de Cleyre about trusting lintian warnings)You need to know what you are doing, and what situation you're putting yourself into. You need to know that the person asking a question really is able to accept any answer, and take it seriously. You need to feel that you have alternatives. Be selfish when you ask, honest when you reply, and when others reply, take them seriously. If any of this doesn't stand, I find it hard to trust that we are in a consensual situation. When is one supposed to learn about consent?
Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, Freedom. Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully. (Lucy Parsons about the DFSG)Relationship advice and work advice have a lot in common:
A new Armadillo release 5.400.2 was just released by Conrad. Consequently, a new RcppArmadillo release 0.5.400.2.0 went out to CRAN and into Debian.
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab.
This release contains the following extensions:
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.5.400.2.0 (2015-08-17)Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.
- Upgraded to Armadillo 5.400.2 ("Plutocracy Incorporated Deluxe")
- added
find_unique()for finding indices of unique values- added
diff()for calculating differences between consecutive elements- added
cumprod()for calculating cumulative product- added
null()for finding the orthonormal basis of null space- expanded
interp1()to handle repeated locations- expanded
unique()to handle complex numbers- faster
flupud()- faster row-wise
cumsum()- fix for k-means clustering in gmm_diag class
- corrected use of
kitten()thanks to Grant Brown
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Birds flying around - almost check, fast focus (both with just the
lens and with the TC), although I learned that shooting flying birds
while panning needs 1/2000s - my initial attempt at 1/1000s was not
enough to eliminate either panning blur or wing-tip blur (both depend
on the speed of the respective action); in any case, initial focus
acquisition is speedy enough for me. A couple of examples (first
without, second with the TC; in the second one, I was unprepared when
the I saw the bird from the corner of my eye, and managed to bring up
the camera and take exactly one photo before the bird was gone):
Another attempt was to focus on dogs jumping in the water. Here the
problem was different: focusing on the correct object! The splashing
around meant that there were lots of water droplets both in front and
behind the dog, the dog being partially obscured by them. I don't know
what AF settings would have helped here (maybe 3D tracking pre-focused
on the black dog)? I had a low success rate on the first attempt, so
I'll have to try again. The lens did correctly track the wrong thing,
though . Examples:
Once the dog caught its target, the lens focused well enough, of
course, but not perfect; it might need some AF fine-tuning or
photographer upgrade :
At one point, I was lucky to have a dog running towards me; focus
tracking on a subject approaching the camera is a good test for the
lens (and camera) auto-focus performance. I was pleasantly surprised,
given my failure to track left-to-right flying birds (which should be
easier!):
In any case, I was walking and thinking on how to improve on my
technique, when I saw in the distance a pair of dogs (Husky's, I
believe) which were very active. This case was relatively easy for the
camera and lens, since they were moving only left-to-right, instead of
forward-backward, so the focus distance was mostly constant, and I
just had to pan. Full gallery here, two examples:
These two dogs had an education value beyond the "how is the lens
performing"; they were so fast, active (they kept going at it non-stop
for a good number of minutes) and playful that they made my day
brighter .
So, that concludes my first test of this lens and the 1.4
tele-converter. Conclusion: equipment good, need to upgrade the
photographer!
<Sigh/>
For the second time since I joined Debian, I missed DebConf. This time, mostly for two completely happy reasons (which have, of course, grown up quite significatively):
But adding to that very important factor, early-to-mid August is possibly the worst date for me to attend DebConf As that's when we start classes at UNAM, and I really don't want to delegate introducing my class to somebody else (besides it being or not possible).
Life has been quite busy here. Besides starting my seventh semester as a teacher (finally being able to present my book on operating systems to the students!), I also took on teaching two modules for a diploma-course on embedded Linux. I'm co- teaching the "User-space Linux" module together with Gabriel Salda a, and will teach the "Boot process" module with Sandino Araico. There are many things that should be improved about the covered program, but we are having good fun working our way on it; Gabriel and I have given two (out of six) 6hr sessions each, and have reached the point where it is actually becoming fun :)
As for Debian... I have been doing minimal maintenance work. Answering to some keyring tickets, or taking care of only high-profile important issues. I do not have time to do much. I have been wanting to do some interesting analysis on the evolution of our keyring for several months, but have not had the time to follow it up. Will do at some point, /mehopes.
Anyway... This post is probably just because I need to somehow be there at our community's highest social, technical exchange period in the year. That is, there's not much to report, it's only me waving from home!
A question that I'm asked repeatedly recently is why I chose not to
use an existing library for serialising data structures in Obnam.
This blog post is the answer.
Obnam is a backup program, and it needs to store various data about
files. This includes stat(2) information about each file in the
live data, as well as data Obnam needs to keep track of everything. At
run-time, Obnam keeps this data in memory data structures, such as
Python dicts. For storage, these data structures need to be converted,
serialised, to and from streams of bytes.
The are a variety of libraries for doing this, designed for different
purposes and with their own constraints and pitfalls. Python's
standard library comes with the cPickle library, for example, but its
serialisation format is not guaranteed to be compatible with any other
version of Python.
For Obnam, I need something that will last a long time. I do not want
to have to deal with a library changing its serialisation format, as
that would mean either that Obnam can't handle old backups, or that I
need to start maintaining the old version of the library.
A way to look at this is that any dependencies your software have a
cost, and that cost should be smaller than the benefit you get from
them.
For example, Obnam depends on the paramiko library to implement the
SSH protocol. This library has some cost, and I've run into one or two
bugs in it that have been rather unfortunate. However, the benefit it
brings is huge: I don't have to implement SSH myself. I'm happy to
have Obnam depend on paramiko.
For the serialisation thing, I wrote my own library, after a small
about of research into existing ones. Research time is a cost, too.
Mine is somewhat Obnam specific, in that it can make some assumptions
about the data to be serialised, and this allows a simpler library. A
generic library would have to handle a number of special cases that
mine can ignore.
It took me less than an hour to write this twice. I first wrote a
quick prototype and a little microbenchmark to see if my approach
would be feasible. Then I deleted that code, and started from scratch,
TDD style, to make sure the code was reliable. The cost of writing my
own serialisation code was less than the cost of finding, let alone
evaluating existing libraries.
It may be that my own library turns out to be inadequate. Then, and
only then, is when I start researching other libraries. Until then,
I'll avoid the cost of research to find a suitable library, the cost
of learning the chosen one, the cost of integrating it into Obnam, the
cost to porters of Obnam of dealing with a new dependency, and the
risk of the library changing in ways that are unsuitable for Obnam.
Obviously, writing your own code has costs, too. Designing and
implementing a library is a cost, as is maintaining it (debugging,
changes in requirements, etc).
Write your own or use existing code? It's a cost/benefit analysis.
There's no clear one answer that's always correct.
-A or --architecture flag to specify
which build architecture to pass to pdebuild. I have no idea if this
works, but it at least should in theory.
You can get the latest version of my backport script from
my scripts page.
Next.