Search Results: "brad"

3 September 2013

Jan Wagner: nagios-plugins: Call for testing

Some of you might have noticed there is a new nagios-plugins version in the row. To support upstream in evaluating bugs and bringing the code to a wider audience, I uploaded the latest development version into Debian unstable. Since this package version contrib/ is dropped by upstream. But we stopped shipping the latest plugins of contrib/ with Debian wheezy. We also removed perlmods/ from the upstream tarball, as this was never used by our package. The packaging changes are: 
* New upstream git snapshot (b15adb7762)
  - Adjust debian/copyright
* Droped the following upstream integrated patches
  - 05_fix_gets_undefined_in_iso_c11.dpatch
  - 10_check_apt_perfdata.dpatch
  - 11_check_nt_npe.dpatch
  - 12_check_smtp_double_threshold.dpatch
* Fix removing empty /usr/include
* Add new check_dbi into nagios-plugins-standard
* Remove whois from Recommands, as check_bgpstate is removed
* Cleanup debian/rules from unused stuff
* Provide information about repackaging
  - Extend debian/README.source
  - Add debian/bin/repack.sh
* Updating standards version to 3.9.4 (no changes needed)
* Add libfreeradius-client-dev to build-deps and remove libradiusclient-ng-dev
  (Closes: #721621)
* Remove traces of contrib/ from debian/copyright
* Remove command.cfg from examples in nagios-plugins-common, it was removed
  upstream
The Debian Nagios Maintainer and Upstream Developer are asking you to try out this new package on non production systems. Not that we think there might be a high risk for damage, but you know .. :) The latest version of the plugins are running on several systems already, but it is nearly impossible to test all scenarios even automated. If you find bugs, please report all packaging bugs into the BTS. Upstream bugs you might consider to report in the upstream bugtracker. If you want to give it a try on Debian wheezy, you could install the packages from our wheezy-backports repository: 
    # wget "http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list" \
        -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list
    # aptitude update
    # aptitude -t wheezy-backports install nagios-plugins
For adding our archive key, you can just install the package "debian-cyconet-archive-keyring"

2 August 2013

Rob Bradford: GUADEC: Wayland talks today

The order of the Wayland talks are going to be flipped compared to the printed schedule. This means my introductory talk to Wayland will be before the panel discussion which should give valuable background for the subsequent discussions. Hopefully see you there!

30 July 2013

Rob Bradford: The Waylanders are coming

This GUADEC there will be a couple of sessions on Friday afternoon from 2pm about Wayland. I ll be giving a presentation with a brief introduction to what Wayland is, what new features we ve worked on in the last cycle as well as what s planned for the next one. As this is GUADEC i ll of course be covering how we re doing with getting Wayland integrated into GNOME. There will also be a Wayland panel discussion where you can ask your tricky questions of myself, Owen Taylor, Robert Bragg and Kristian H gsberg to get things started i ve got some already prepared! And if that s not enough Wayland for you, on Monday we ll be BoF ing between 10am and 2pm in room A218. It would be great to see you there.

15 July 2013

Rob Bradford: Clutter & Cogl Wayland update

Lots of us over at Intel towers are working hard to bring you a great new Wayland powered experience. Cogl and Clutter have now been updated to work with the latest Wayland master. You need to compile master Cogl with: ./configure --enable-wayland-egl-platform=yes --enable-gl And then to run any applications using Cogl on Wayland you need to setup the environment variable COGL_RENDERER=egl_wayland then you can run cogl-crate! For Clutter you need to compile Clutter master with: ./configure --enable-wayland-backend You also need to set an environment variable to choose the Clutter backend too in this case it s CLUTTER_BACKEND=wayland (and you need to set COGL_RENDERER too) then you can run test-actors! Or just look at the video below :-) <iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="300" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/33734847?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="400"></iframe> Direct Vimeo link! A big kudos needs to go to Robert Bragg, Neil Roberts and Emmanuele Bassi for helping make this happen. The Clutter client side support is basically complete so i ve now moved onto working on GTK and MX watch this space for updates!

Rob Bradford: Wayland & Weston 1.2.0 is out

The latest release of the Wayland protocol and support library along with the Weston compositor is now out. For the GNOME community this release is particularly interesting: At GUADEC i ll be speaking about the current state of the Wayland project and plans going forward. If you have a particular topic or question you d like me to cover please let me know in the comments.

16 June 2013

Daniel Pocock: Monitoring with Ganglia: an O'Reilly community book project

I recently had the opportunity to contribute to an O'Reilly community book project, developing the book Monitoring with Ganglia in collaboration with other members of the Ganglia team

The project itself, as a community book, pays no royalties back to the contributors, as we have chosen to donate all proceeds to charity. People who contributed to the book include
Robert Alexander, Jeff Buchbinder, Frederiko Costa, Alex Dean, Dave Josephsen, Bernard Li, Matt Massie, Brad Nicholes, Peter Phaal and Vladimir Vuksan and we also had generous assistance from various members of the open source community who assisted in the review process. Ganglia itself started at University of California, Berkeley as an initiative of Matt Massie, for monitoring HPC cloud infrastructure My own contact with Ganglia only began in 2008 when I was offered the opportunity to work full-time on the enterprise-wide monitoring systems for a large investment bank. Ganglia had been chosen for this huge project due to it's small footprint, support for many platforms and it's ability to work on a heterogeneous network as well as providing dedicated features for the bank's HPC grid. This brings me to one important point about Ganglia: it's not just about HPC any more. While it is extremely useful for clusters, grids and clouds, it is also quite suitable for a mixed network of web servers, mail servers, databases and all the other applications you may find in a small business, education or ISP environment. Instantly up and running with packages One of the most compelling features, even for small sites with less than 10 nodes, is the ease of installation: install the packages on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenCSW and some other platforms, and it just works. Ganglia nodes will find each other over multicast, instantly, no manual configuration changes necessary. On one of the nodes, the web interface must be installed for viewing the statistics. Dare I say it: it is so easy, you hardly even need the book for a small installation. Where the book is really compelling is if you have hundreds or thousands of nodes, if you want custom charts or custom metrics or anything else beyond just installing the package. If monitoring is more than 10% of your job, the book is probably a must-have. Excellent open source architecture Ganglia's simplicity is largely thanks to the way it leverages other open source projects such as Tobi Oetiker's RRDtool and PHP Anybody familiar with these tools will find Ganglia is particularly easy to work with and customise. Custom metrics: IO service times One of my own contributions to the project has been the creation of ganglia-modules-linux, some plugins for Linux-specific metrics and ganglia-modules-solaris providing some similar metrics for Solaris. These projects on github provide an excellent base for people to fork and implement their own custom metrics in C or C++ The book provides a more detailed account of how to work with the various APIs for Python, C/C++, gmetric (command line/shell scripts) and Java. The new web interface For people who had tried earlier versions of Ganglia (and for those people who installed versions < 3.3.0 and still haven't updated), the new web interface is a major improvement and well worth the effort to install. It is available on the most recent packages (for example, it is in Debian 7 (wheezy) but not in Debian 6.) It was originally promoted as a standalone project (code-named gweb2) but was adopted as the official Ganglia web interface around the release of Ganglia 3.3.0. This web page provides a useful overview of what has changed and here is the original release announcement.

9 June 2013

Ingo Juergensmann: Edward Snowden whistleblowed PRISM

Sometimes there are true heros. Even today. Like Edward Snowden who made PRISM publically known. There's an interview by The Guardian with Edward Snowden:
In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant." [...] He has had "a very comfortable life" that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
Neither Bradley Manning nor Edward Snowden should be sentenced, but the Government that is responsible for such surveilance programs like PRISM should.
Kategorie:
Debian
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Debian

7 June 2013

Daniel Pocock: "Do as we say, not as we do"

When I was preparing my blog entry about the Gold Standard in Free communications, I had absolutely no idea that The Guardian (another Ganglia user) would be hot on my heels with dramatic revelations about US Government surveillance of dangerous terrorists and maybe sucking up a little bit of data about a few hundred million of their own citizens and another 90% of the world's population for good measure. Some people even thought I've been a bit paranoid with my concerns about excessive surveillance. However, it is just remarkable to see that in the same week that the trial of Bradley Manning is getting under way for inappropriate use of his employer's computer, the US has been exposed plotting cyber attacks and setting a very bad example for all those little script kiddies out there. Practical questions for every one of us Is it time to start blocking email to and from sites like gmail and hotmail? What about the reports that the US Government was engineering back doors in the OpenBSD operating system? Have any open source projects actually been comprised in this way? Will spammers and other criminals take this as a cue that there is nothing morally wrong with hacking? Have certificate authorities been infiltrated too? They may well be the elephant in the room - while everybody was joking about the NSA key hidden in the depths of Microsoft Windows, maybe one or more of the well known trusted root certificates, right under our noses, is also a back door? The danger is real Anybody wondering about the practical implications of all this data gathering doesn't have to look very far to find out what can go wrong. In the same week as all these things were exposed, there have been more dramatic revelations about law enforcement officers selling private data for their own commercial gain. While the vast majority of police are surely good citizens, every organisation has it's bad apples and as Bradley Manning demonstrated so well, it only takes one person to breach security and enormous volumes of data can end up escaping.

17 May 2013

Rob Bradford: GNOME in Moblin: Myzone

Howdy, i m sure most people are aware of the recent release of Moblin 2.0; a user experience for netbooks. I m going to write a few blog posts about how the Moblin user experience is built on the awesome technologies in the GNOME platform. So first up, let s look at the Myzone, we re starting here since this is the first thing I really worked on in the Moblin UX and i ve been able to see it through from early ideas to the 2.0 and 2.1 releases. So, deep breath, the idea behind the Myzone is to provide a springboard to things that matter to you most: your recent files and web pages you ve visited, your upcoming events and things you need to do, things that are happening on social web services and your favourite applications. Now then, that s the theory, how does it work:

Rob Bradford: GNOME in Moblin: People panel

Previously i d talked about how we use GNOME technologies in the Moblin Myzone. Now i m going to talk about another component that i m responsible for, the People Panel. An important aspect of the Moblin user experience is about communicating with others and this panel provides quick access to do this. The core of the content is provided by an abstraction, simplification and aggregation library called Anerley. This provides a feed of items (an addressbook of people) that aggregates across the system addressbook, powered by EDS, and your IM roster, powered by Telepathy. You have small set of actions you can do on these people such as start an IM conversation / email / edit them with Contacts. The core of our IM experience is supplied by the awesome Empathy. We ve been working with the upstream maintainers to accomodate some of the needs of Moblin into the upstream source. This included the improvements to the accounts dialog and wizard that landed for GNOME 2.28. One of the biggest problems with the IM experience in Moblin 2.0 was that it was easy to miss when somebody was talking to you. If you were looking away when the notification popped up, whoops, it s gone. With our switch to Mission Control 5 I was able to integrate a Telepathy Observer into Anerley and the People Panel. An Observer will be informed of channels that are requested on the system. This allows us to show ongoing conversations in the panel and by exploiting channel requests and window presentation allow the user to switch between ongoing conversations. This wouldn t have been possible without the assistance of the nice folks in #telepathy and at Collabora: Sjoerd, Will, Jonny and countless others.

4 May 2013

Ian Campbell: Taking over qcontrol upstream, releasing qcontrol 0.5.0

Taking over Qcontrol upstream When I took over the qcontrol package in Debian, back in October 2012, I was aware that upstream hadn't been active for quite a while (since late 2009). I figured that would be OK since the software was pretty simple and pretty much feature complete. Nevertheless since I've been maintaining the package I've had a small number of wishlist bugs (many with patches, thanks guys!) which are really upstream issues. While I could carry them as patches in the Debian package they would really be better taken care of by an upstream. With that in mind I mailed the previous upstream (and original author) Byron Bradley back in February to ask if he would mind if I took over as upstream. Unfortunately I haven't yet heard back, given how long upstream has been inactive for this isn't terribly surprising so having waited several months I have decided to just go ahead and take over upstream development. Thanks Byron for all your work on the project, I hope you don't mind me taking over. Since it is unlikely that I will be able to access the old website or Subversion repository I have converted the repository to git and uploaded it to gitorious: I don't expect I'll be doing an awful lot of proactive upstream development but at least now I have a hat I can put on when someone reports an "upstream" issue against qcontrol and somewhere which can accept upstream patches from myself and others. I'm still deciding what to do about a website etc. I may just enable the gitorious wiki or I may setup an ikiwiki software site type setup, which has the advantage of being a little more flexible and providing a neat way of dealing with bug reports without being too much overhead to setup up. In the meantime its been almost 5 years since the last release, so... New Release: qcontrol 0.5.0 This is a rollup of some changes which were made in the old upstream SVN repository but never released and some patches which had been made in the Debian packaging. What's here corresponds to the Debian 0.4.2+svn-r40-3 package. The 0.4.2 release was untagged in SVN, but corresponds to r14, new stuff since then includes: As well as the change of maintainer I think the addition of the daemon mode warrants the bump to 0.5.0. Get the new release from git or http://www.hellion.org.uk/qcontrol/releases/0.5.0/.

18 February 2013

John Sullivan: SCALE

I will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo (and yes, given the topics covered, it's missing a GNU). My talk, "Four Freedoms for Freedom," is on Sunday, February 24, 2013 from 16:30 to 17:30.
The most obvious people affected by all four of the freedoms that define free software are the programmers. They are the ones who will likely want to -- and are able to -- modify software running on their computers. But free software is a movement to advance and defend freedom for anyone and everyone using any computing device, not just programmers. In many countries now, given the ubiquity of tablets, phones, laptops and desktops, "anyone and everyone using any computing device" means nearly all citizens. But new technological innovations in these areas keep coming with new restrictions, frustrating and controlling users even while creating a perception of empowerment. The Free Software Foundation wants to gain the support and protect the interests of everyone, not just programmers. How do we reach people who have no intention of ever modifying a program, and how do we help them?
Other presentations on my list to check out (in chronological order, some conflicting): If you will be there and want to meet up, drop me a line.

17 January 2013

Benjamin Mako Hill: 1-800-INTERNET.COM

I just returned home from Aaron Swartz s funeral in Chicago. Aaron was a good friend. The home I ve returned to is an apartment that was Aaron s before it was mine, that I have lived in with Aaron during several stints, and that I still share with many of his old books and posters. Although, I ve spent what feels like most of the last five days reading things that people have written about Aaron, I m still processing and digesting myself. Right now, I m very sad and at a loss for words. While I reflect, I wanted to share this video recently put online by Finne Boonen. The video was made in 2006 at a Web 1.0 Elevator Pitch Competition held at Wikimania 2006 about a year after that both Aaron and I moved to Cambridge and met. The goal of the contest was to pitch Web 1.0 DotCom business ideas to a team of real Web 1.0 investors like it was still 1999. Aaron and I formed a team along with SJ Klein (who I traveled to the funeral with this week), and Wikimania general counsel and interim executive director Brad Patrick. The video shows how as Danny O Brien has reminded us Aaron was funny. He came up with many our teams best lines in addition to checking our Web 1.0 boxes for tech guru and Stanford dropout. Our pitch for 1-800-INTERNET.COM is in the video below. The transcript was done by Phoebe Ayers in Facebook and the video is also available in WebM. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NzFjWY6Fd_g" width="420"></iframe>
SJ: You know, Mako and I had some pretty good ideas for improving connectivity to the internet, and we think we can reach 90% of the world s population. So think about this. You re sitting in a Starbucks, and you need to connect to the internet. But you can t, because there s no internet. But what is there, near every Starbucks? There s a payphone! You pick up the payphone, and you call . 1-800-INTERNET. You can connect to our bank of researchers on our fast T1 connections and get any information you need! So, we don t actually have 1-800-INTERNET yet, we have 1-800-225-3224, so the first thing we need to do is buy the number. So here s Mako, who is our web designer from UC Santa Cruz and Bradford, our financial guru, and Aaron, who s handling all of our technical implementation. But Mako, you should explain the earballs. Mako: So, so, so yeah, so most people on the Internet are going for the eyeballs, but they ve just left all of these earballs. So I have some experience in web design, and it s true that this isn t really a website, but we still need good web design. So, so, I ve actually got a really experienced team, we can go into later, and we have some really great earcons not icons, but earcons.. And it s going to be all together, not apart like some of the websites. It s going to be together. Brad: so how does this work technically? Aaron: Well, I mean, so I only spent one year at Stanford but that s Ok, because there are new developmental technologies, we re going to throw away all that old stuff, we re going to use really reliable and efficient well-designed code that everyone can clearly understand, and write the whole thing in Perl. I know this is a risk, but I am confident that Perl is going to destroy those old C websites. No one will write websites in C anymore once we do this, it s going to be so much faster, and so dynamic, everythings going to be like, on top of everything. It s going to be great. Bradford: So here s the business model. It s really really simple, and it s a really really great idea. It s all about the licensing. Because what we re going to have are these underlying audio ads, While you re on the phone you re going to hear this subliminal advertising message. And the way it works is really really cool, because it s really really low volume, it s high impact! And it s even better, because we license it, and the way it works is when a caller calls 1-800-Internet, they re hearing the ad, but so is the representative, so we get to bill em twice! So that s it: All: 1-800-INTERNET.COM
We did not win and I still believe that we were robbed.

4 January 2013

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for December 2012

Happy new year, Debian! To celebrate, here are some freshly posted, bits from the DPL for December 2012.
Dear Project Members, happy new year! Here goes another report of DPL activities, this time for December 2012. This issue of the DPL-monthly is skinnier than usual: during the past month I've been struck by the catastrophe also known as "family holiday season", enjoying a solid 10 day break from computer-related activities. Talks Assets DPL helpers Collaboration with the outer world That's all for last year, enjoy the new one, which will soon see a new Debian release out of the door. And to make it happen sooner, let's go back fix RC bugs! Cheers.
PS the day-to-day activity log for December 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201212

31 December 2012

Joey Hess: no longer a perl programmer

This year, I've gradually realized that I no longer identify as a perl programmer. For a decade and a half, perl was the language I reached for to solve any problem that didn't have a good reason to be solved in some other language. Now I only reach for it in the occasional one-liner -- and even then I'm more likely to find myself in ghci and end up with a small haskell program. I still maintain plenty of perl code, but even when I do, I'm not thinking in perl, but traslating from some internal lambda calculus. There's quite a few new-ish perl features that I have not bothered to learn, and I can feel some of the trivia that perl encourages be kept in mind slipping gradually away. Although the evil gotchas remain fresh in my mind! More importantly, my brain's own evaluation of code has changed; it doesn't evaluate it imperatively (unless forced to by an appropriate monad), but sees the gesalt, sees the data flow, and operates lazily and sometimes, I think in parallel. The closest I can come to explaining the feeling is how you might feel when thinking about a shell pipeline, rather than a for loop. Revisiting some of my older haskell code, I could see the perl thinking that led to it. And rewriting it into pure, type-driven, code that took advantage of laziness for automatic memoization, I saw, conclusively that the way I think about code has changed. (See the difference for yourself: before after ) I hear of many people who enjoy learning lots of programming languages, one after the other. A new one every month, or year. I suspect this is a fairly shallow learning. I like to dive deep. It took me probably 6 years to fully explore every depth of perl. And I never saw a reason to do the same with python or ruby or their ilk; they're too similar to perl for it to seem worth the bother. Though they have less arcania in their learning curves and are probably better, there's not enough value to redo that process. I'm glad haskell came along as a language that is significantly different enough that it was worth learning. The deep dive for haskell goes deep indeed. I'm already 5 years in, and have more to learn now than I ever did before. I'm glad I didn't get stuck on perl. But I may be stuck on haskell now instead, for the foreseeable future. I'd sort of like to get really fluent in javascript, but only as a means to an end -- and haskell to javascript compilers are getting sufficiently good that I may avoid it. Other than that, I sense adga and coq beckoning with their promises of proof. Perhaps one of these years. Of course if Bradley Kuhn is right and perl is the new cobol, I know what I'll be doing come the unix rollover in 2038. ;)

18 December 2012

Petter Reinholdtsen: Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format

A few days ago I came across a blog post from Joey Hess describing ledger and hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting. I found it interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with the different web based systems we use. I find it hard to find what I look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of the systems. Ledger seem different. The accounting data is kept in text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there are at least five different implementations able to read the format. An example entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank: 
2004-05-27 Book Store
      Expenses:Books                 $20.00
      Liabilities:Visa
The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and look for others using it. I found blog posts from Christine Spang, Pete Keen, Andrew Cantino and Ronald Ip describing how they use it, as well as a post from Bradley M. Kuhn at the Software Freedom Conservancy. All seemed like good recommendations fitting my need. The ledger package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the hledger package only is available in Debian Sid. As I use Squeeze, ledger seemed the best choice to get started. To get some real data to test on, I wrote a web scraper for LODO, the accounting system used by the NUUG association, and started to play with the data set. I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example using the "ledger balance" command. But I will have to gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit for the organisations I am involved in.

23 November 2012

Benjamin Mako Hill: Cultivated Disinterest in Professional Sports

Like many of my friends, I have treated professional sports with cultivated indifference. But a year and a half ago, I decided to become a football fan. Several years ago, I was at a talk by Michael Albert at MIT where he chastised American intellectuals for what he claimed was cultivated disdain of professional sports. Albert suggested that sports reflect the go-to topic for small talk and building rapport across class and context. But he suggested that almost everybody who used the term "working class struggle" was incapable of making small talk with members of the working class because unlike most working class people (and most people in general) educated people systematically cultivate ignorance in sports. Professional sports are deeply popular. In the US, Sunday Night Football is now the most popular television show among women in its time slot and the third most popular television in America among 18-49 year old women. That it is also the most popular television show in general is old news. There are very few things that anywhere near half of Americans have in common. Interest in football is one of them. An enormous proportion of the US population watches the Superbowl each year. I recognized myself in Albert's critique. So I decided to follow a local team. I picked football because it is the most popular sport in America and because their strong revenue sharing system means that either team has a chance to win any given match. My local team is the New England Patriots and I've watched many of the team's games or highlights over the last season and a half. I've also followed a couple football blogs. A year and half in, I can call myself a football fan. And I've learned a few things in the process:
  1. With a little effort, getting into sports is easy. Although learning the rules of a sport can be complicated, sports are popular because people, in general, find them fun to watch. If you watch a few games with someone who can explain the rules, and if you begin to cheer for a team, you will find yourself getting emotionally invested and excited.
  2. Sports really do, as Albert implied, allow one to build rapport and small talk across society. I used to dread the local cab driver who would try to make small talk by mentioning Tom Brady or the Red Sox. No more! Some of these conversations turn into broader conversations about life and politics.
  3. Interest in sports can expand or shrink to fill the time you're willing to give it. It can mean just glancing through the sports sections of the paper and watching some highlights here or there. Or it can turn into a lifestyle.
  4. It's not all great. Football, like most professional sports, is deeply permeated with advertisements, commercialism, and money. Like other sports, it is also violent. I don't think I could ever get behind a fight sport where the goal is to hurt someone else. The machoness and absence of women in the highest levels of most professional sports bothers me deeply.
I've also tried to think a lot about why I, like most of my friends, avoided sports in the past. Disinterest in sports among academics and the highly educated is, in my experience, far from passive. I've heard people almost compete to explain the depth of their ignorance in sports one doesn't even know the rules, one doesn't own a television, one doesn't know the first thing about the game. I did the same thing myself. Bethany Bryson, a sociologist at JMU has shown that increased education is associated with increased inclusiveness in musical taste (i.e., highly educated people like more types of music) but that these people are most likely to reject music that is highly favored by the least educated people. Her paper's title sums up the attitude: "Anything But Heavy Metal". For highly educated folks, it's a sign of cultivation to be eclectic in one's tastes. But to signal to others that you belong in the intellectual elite, it can pay in cultural capital to dislike things, like sports, that are enormously popular among the least educated parts of society. This ignorance among highly educated people limits our ability to communicate, bond, and build relationships across different segments of society. It limits our ability to engage in conversations and build a common culture that crosses our highly stratified and segmented societies. Sports are not politically or culturally unproblematic. But they provide an easy and enjoyable way to build common ground with our neighbors and fellow citizens that transcend social boundaries.

2 September 2012

Emanuele Rocca: Story of a bug in Ubuntu

Some months ago I have run into a pretty interesting bug while working on a Ubuntu-based remote desktop system. The whole OS was installed on a server somewhere and users could access their desktop remotely. Some call this stuff Desktop-as-a-Service. The operating system we chose was Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10) and the remote access part was implemented with x2go, which uses nxagent to provide NX transport of X sessions. Users could access their Ubuntu machines remotely, with sound, video, youtube, and all you would expect from a desktop machine. The whole thing was working quite well. Now, as I said that was in May. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was available, and the choice of upgrading to it sounded pretty much obvious. So we upgraded our test system to Precise and everything seemed to work smoothly. Till we tried to open a PDF document, actually. It took evince about 50 seconds to display a relatively small document. Same story with images opened with the default image viewer, eog. The fix delivered to our users was simple: we have set shotwell-viewer as the default image viewer, and epdfview as the default PDF viewer. Everybody happy. In the meantime, obviously, I was interested in this issue so I ve tried to run run evince from a terminal, getting the following output: 
(evince:15833): GRIP-WARNING **: Failed to initialize gesture manager.
Funny. On another test system running Debian Sid (unstable) everything was working smoothly. The diff between Ubuntu s version of evince and Debian s is a 6MB monster. Among other changes, I noticed that Ubuntu s version build-depends on libgrip-dev, which depends on libutouch-geis. Multitouch stuff. Why should multitouch support break my remote session? So on May the 10th I filed a bug on launchpad. How this issue got handled is in my opinion one of the many fine examples of the inherent superiority of free software, coupled with a we won t hide problems mindset. For an example of how bad is the proprietary approach, just check a random bug in Adobe s bug tracking system. But let s go back to the evince bug. Other users reported that their VNC sessions were also affected by the same problem. After a few days it was clear that the culprit was utouch-geis, and a patch appeared. Unfortunately it did not actually address the issue. Somebody else reported that RDP sessions were broken too. At the beginning of June Precise was still affected. Finally, on August the 6th a working patch was submitted by Bradley M. Froehle and included by Chase Douglas (thank you guys). End of August, fixed version of geis accepted into precise-updates, case closed. Now for some considerations. The problem was clearly of a certain importance. A Long Term Support, stable version of Ubuntu shipped with broken PDF and image viewing functionalities. It got fixed properly, even though 3 good months are quite a long time for such a bug to get solved. However, the issue only affected a pretty limited number of users, also certainly not Ubuntu s main target audience. This bug never affected Debian, simply because utouch-geis has not made its way into the archive yet. It takes longer to make changes like this in Debian, but for some categories of users stability is more important than new, cool features. Choice is a good thing.

15 July 2012

Paul Tagliamonte: usage of vcs-git in the Debian archive

I ve recently gone through some of the unpacked source sitting in the lintian lab, and I ve got a few cool stats. First of all, the types of VCS tags I ve found: 
      1 vcs-git
    123 Vcs-git
   6480 Vcs-Git
      1 Vcs-GIT
      5 VCS-git
     86 VCS-Git
Interesting! It seems the (IMHO correct) Vcs-Git style has a lot of adoption 
     17 XS-Vcs-Git
and a few old style git tags :) Well, let s take a look at the most common prefixes: 
   6498 git
    196 http
     15 https
All pretty stock, when I see (to my shock) a: 
      4 git+ssh
Oh noes! Let s get rid of those, folks! :) So, let s check out the most popular domains to host git packages: 
    5375 git.debian.org
     555 anonscm.debian.org
     171 github.com
OK, I d like to stop right here. As much as I hate nonfree software, and I think relying on as part of our infrastructure sucks, there is a degree of sense to keeping stuff on GitHub. If upstream is on GitHub, it may make it easier to coordinate and work with them. However! These are repos sitting in people s personal accounts which means taking over the package in the event someone needed to is not practical. The person with the highest number of Debian repos on GitHub is 19, followed by 12, 5 and a few 4s. Enter github.com/debian IMHO, we should consider putting the repos that are already on GitHub under Debian namespace, so that the team of maintainers may be able to add new collaborators. I mean, we have the account and some friendly DDs who offered to take care of this organization outside the project. That, or get us off GitHub entirely. I m not sure that s wise, though. However, even though there are a ton of repos on GitHub, it s about 1/40th of the total number of VCS tagged packages in Debian. On with the show: 
      60 git.debian-maintainers.org
      39 gitorious.org
      26 git.b9.com
      22 git.lxde.org
      19 git.kitenet.net
      19 git.brad-smith.co.uk
      18 git.gag.com
And some of the more interesting ones: 
      1 code.launchpad.net
for Vcs-Git??? :) 
      1 git.debian.org:
Looks like it was a login@git.d.o: URL that was just changed slightly. Let s double-check our VCS tags, people :) The breakdown of Debian VCS d URLs: 
      1 anonscm.alioth.debian.org
      1 anonscp.debian.org
      1 git.debian.org:
      2 scm.alioth.debian.org
     12 alioth.debian.org
    555 anonscm.debian.org
   5375 git.debian.org
And out of git.d.o, 2544 of them use the git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-foo pattern rather then the git://git.debian.org/pkg-foo pattern. Interesting! roughly 78 use /users and roughly 113 use /git/users I had no idea we had so many complexities in our VCS pointers :) When I get some more time, I ll go through and figure out which team has the most Git VCS tags :)

31 May 2012

Russell Coker: Links May 2012

Vijay Kumar gave an interesting TED talk about autonomous UAVs [1]. His research is based on helicopters with 4 sets of blades and his group has developed software to allow them to develop maps, fly in formation, and more. Hadiyah wrote an interesting post about networking at TED 2012 [2]. It seems that giving every delegate the opportunity to have their bio posted is a good conference feature that others could copy. Bruce Schneier wrote a good summary of the harm that post-911 airport security has caused [3]. Chris Neugebauer wrote an insightful post about the drinking culture in conferences, how it excludes people and distracts everyone from the educational purpose of the conference [4]. Matthew Wright wrote an informative article for Beyond Zero Emissions comparing current options for renewable power with the unproven plans for new nuclear and fossil fuel power plants [5]. The Free Universal Construction Kit is a set of design files to allow 3D printing of connectors between different types of construction kits (Lego, Fischer Technic, etc) [6]. Jay Bradner gave an interesting TED talk about the use of Open Source principles in cancer research [7]. He described his research into drugs which block cancer by converting certain types of cancer cell into normal cells and how he shared that research to allow the drugs to be developed for clinical use as fast as possible. Christopher Priest wrote an epic blog post roasting everyone currently associated with the Arthur C. Clarke awards, he took particular care to flame Charles Stross who celebrated The Prestige of such a great flaming by releasing a t-shirt [8]. For a while I ve been hoping that an author like Charles Stross would manage to make more money from t-shirt sales than from book sales, Charles is already publishing some of his work for free on the Internet and it would be good if he could publish it all for free. Erich Schubert wrote an interesting post about the utility and evolution of Favebook likes [9]. Richard Hartmann wrote an interesting summary of the problems with Google products that annoy him the most [10]. Sam Varghese wrote an insightful article about the political situation in China [11]. The part about the downside of allowing poorly educated people to vote seems to apply to the US as well. Sociological Images has an article about the increased rate of Autism diagnosis as social contagion [12]. People who get their children diagnosed encourage others with similar children to do the same. Vivek wrote a great little post about setting up WPA on Debian [13]. It was much easier than expected once I followed that post. Of course I probably could have read the documentation for ifupdown, but who reads docs when Google is available? Related posts:
  1. Links March 2012 Washington s Blog has an informative summary of recent articles about...
  2. Links April 2012 Karen Tse gave an interesting TED talk about how to...
  3. Links February 2012 Sociological Images has an interesting article about the attempts to...

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