Search Results: "charles"

20 February 2017

Norbert Preining: Ryu Murakami Tokyo Decadence

The other Murakami, Ryu Murakami ( ), is hard to compare to the more famous Haruki. His collection of stories reflects the dark sides of Tokyo, far removed from the happy world of AKB48 and the like. Criminals, prostitutes, depression, loss. A bleak image onto a bleak society.
This collection of short stories is a consequent deconstruction of happiness, love, everything we believe to make our lives worthwhile. The protagonists are idealistic students loosing their faith, office ladies on aberrations, drunkards, movie directors, the usual mixture. But the topic remains constant the unfulfilled search for happiness and love.
I felt I was beginning to understand what happiness is about. It isn t about guzzling ten or twenty energy drinks a day, barreling down the highway for hours at a time, turning over your paycheck to your wife without even opening the envelope, and trying to force your family to respect you. Happiness is based on secrets and lies.Ryu Murakami, It all started just about a year and a half ago
A deep pessimistic undertone is echoing through these stories, and the atmosphere and writing reminds of Charles Bukowski. This pessimism resonates in the melancholy of the running themes in the stories, Cuban music. Murakami was active in disseminating Cuban music in Japan, which included founding his own label. Javier Olmo s pieces are often the connecting parts, as well as lending the short stories their title: Historia de un amor, Se fu .
The belief that what s missing now used to be available to us is just an illusion, if you ask me. But the social pressure of You ve got everything you need, what s your problem? is more powerful than you might ever think, and it s hard to defend yourself against it. In this country it s taboo even to think about looking for something more in life.Ryu Murakami, Historia de un amor
It is interesting to see that on the surface, the women in the stories are the broken characters, leading feminists to incredible rants about the book, see the rant^Wreview of Blake Fraina at Goodreads:
I ll start by saying that, as a feminist, I m deeply suspicious of male writers who obsess over the sex lives of women and, further, have the audacity to write from a female viewpoint
female characters are pretty much all pathetic victims of the male characters
I wish there was absolutely no market for stuff like this and I particularly discourage women readers from buying it Blake Fraina, Goodreads review
On first sight it might look like that the female characters are pretty much all pathetic victims of the male characters, but in fact it is the other way round, the desperate characters, the slaves of their own desperation, are the men, and not the women, in these stories. It is dual to the situation in Hitomi Kanehara s Snakes and Earrings, where on first sight the tattooist and the outlaw friends are the broken characters, but the really cracked one is the sweet Tokyo girly.
Male-female relationships are always in transition. If there s no forward progress, things tend to slip backwards.Ryu Murakami, Se fu
Final verdict: Great reading, hard to put down, very much readable and enjoyable, if one is in the mood of dark and depressing stories. And last but not least, don t trust feminist book reviews.

9 February 2017

Charles Plessy: Beware of libinput 1.6.0-1

Since I updated this evening, touch to click with my touchpad is almost totally broken. Fortunately, a correction is pending. update: To reinstall packages version 1.5.5-4 solves the problem in the meantime.

11 December 2016

Charles Plessy: apt purge ifupdown

...oh wow, it still works... I never had realised that network-manager did not need ifupdown.

29 November 2016

Shirish Agarwal: The Iziko South African Museum

This would be a bit long on my stay in Cape Town, South Africa after Debconf16. Before I start, let me share the gallery works, you can see some photos that I have been able to upload to my gallery . It seems we are using gallery 2 while upstream had made gallery 3 and then it sort of died. I actually asked in softwarerecs stackexchange site if somebody knows of a drop-in replacement for gallery and was told/shared about Pwigo . I am sure the admin knows about it. There would be costs to probably migrate from gallery to Pwigo with the only benefit that it would be something which would perhaps be more maintainable. The issues I face with the current gallery system are few things a. There is no way to know how much your progress your upload has taken.
b. After it has submit, it gives a fake error message saying some error has occurred. This has happened on every occasion/attempt. Now I don t know whether it is because I have slow upload speeds or something else altogether. I had shared the error page last time in the blog post hence not sharing again. Although, all the pictures which would be shared in this blog post would be from the same gallery Another thing I would like to share is a small beginner article I wrote about why I like Debian. Another interesting/tit-bit of news I came to know few days back that both Singapore and Qatar have given 96 hours visa free stopovers for Indians for select destinations. Now to start with the story/experience due to some unknown miracle/angel looking upon me I got the chance to go to Debconf16, South Africa. I m sure there was lot of backend discussions but in the end I was given the opportunity to be part of Debcamp and Debconf. While I hope to recount my Debcamp and Debconf experience in another or two blog posts, this would be exclusively the Post-Debconf Experiences I had. As such opportunities to visit another country are rare, I wanted to make the most of it. Before starting from Pune, I had talked with Amey about Visas, about Debconf as he had just been to Debconf15 the year before and various things related to travel. He was instrumental in me having a bit more knowledge about how to approach things. I was also lucky to have both Graham and Bernelle who also suggested, advised and made it possible to have a pleasant stay both during Debcamp and Debconf. The only quibble is I didn t know heaters were being made available to us without any cost. Moving on, a day or two before Debconf was about to conclude, I asked Bernelle s help even though she was battling a burn-out I believe as I was totally clueless about Cape Town. She accepted my request and asked me to look at hostels near Longmarket Street. I had two conditions a. It should not be very far from the airport
b. It should be near to all or most cultural experiences the city has to offer. We looked at hostelworld and from the options listed, it looked like Homebasecapetown looked to be a perfect fit. It was one of the cheaper options and they also had breakfast included in the pricing. I booked through hostelworld for a mixed dorm for 2 days as I was unsure how it would be (the first night effect I have shared about previously) . When I reached there, I found it to be as good as the pictures shared were, the dorm was clean (most important), people were friendly (also important) as well as toilets and shower were also clean while the water was hot, so all in all it was a win-win situation for me. Posters I saw at homebasecapetown While I m not much of an adrenaline-junkie it was nice to know the activities that could be done/taken. Brochures and Condoms just left of main hall. This was again interesting. While apologies for the poor shaky quality of the picture, I believe it is easy to figure out. There were Brochures of the city attractions as well as condoms that people could discreetly use if need be. I had seen such condoms in few toilets during and around Debconf and it felt good that the public were aware and prioritizing safety for their guests and students instead of having fake holier than thou attitudes that many places have. For instance, you wouldn t find something like this in toilets of most colleges in India or anywhere else for that matter. There are few vending machines in what are termed as red light areas or where prostitution is known/infamous to happen and even then most times it is empty. I have 2-3 social workers as friends and they are a source of news on such things. While I went to few places and each had an attraction to it, the one which had my literally eyes out of socket was the Iziko South African Museum . I have been lucky to been quite a few museums in India, the best rated science museum in India in my limited experience has been the Visvesvaraya Industrial & Technological Museum, Bengaluru India . A beer from me if a European can get it right. Don t worry if you mispronounce it, I mispronounce it couple of times till I get it right . Looking up the word Iziko the meaning of the word seems to be the hearth and if you look at the range of collections in the museum, you would think it fits. I was lucky to find couple of friends, one of whom was living at homebase and we decided to go to the museum together. Making friends on the road So Eduardo, my friend on the left and his friend, we went to the museum. While viewing the museum, there were no adjectives to describe it other than Wow and Endless . See fossils of fish-whale-shark ? OR Giant fish-whale-dolphin-shark some million years ago. and Reminder of JAWS ;) While I have more than a few pictures, the point is easily made. It seems almost inconceivable that creatures of such masses actually were on earth. While I played with the model of the jaws of a whale/shark in reality if something like that happened, I would have been fighting for my life. The only thing I missed or could have been better if they had some interactive installations to showcase the now universally accepted Charles Darwin s On the Origin of Species I had never seen anything like this. Sadly, there was nobody around to help us figure out things as I had read that most species of fish don t leave a skeleton behind so how were these models made? It just boggles the mind. Apart from the Science Museum I was also introduced to the bloody history that South Africa had. I saw The 1913 native land act which was not honored . I had been under the impression that India had got a raw deal when it was under British rule but looking at South African history I don t know. While we got our freedom in 1947 they got rid of apartheid about 20 years+ . I talked to lot of young African males and there was lot of naked hostility for the Europeans even today. It was a bit depressing but could relate to their point of view as similar sentiments were echoed by our forefathers. I read in the newspapers and it seemed to be a pretty mixed picture. I can t comment as only South Africans can figure out the way forward. For me, it was enough to know and see that we both had similar political histories as nations. It seemed the racial divide and anger was much more highly pronounced towards Europeans and divisive then the caste divisions here between Indians. I also shared with them my limited knowledge and understanding of the Indian history (as history is re-written all the time) and it was clear to them that we had common/similar pasts. As a result, what was surprising (actually not) is that many South Africans have no knowledge of Indian history. as well otherwise the political differences that South Africa and India has in the current scenario wouldn t have been. In the end, the trip proved to be fun, stimulating, educative, thought-provoking as questions about self-identity , national identity, our place in the Universe kinda questions which should be asked all the time. Thank you Bremmer and the team for letting me experience Cape Town, South Africa, I would have been poorer if I hadn t had the experience.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Debconf16, #Dinosaur Fishes, #gallery, #Identity, #Iziko South African Museum, #Nation-state Identity, #pwigo

8 October 2016

Charles Plessy: I just finished to read the Imperial Radch trilogy.

I liked it a lot. There are already many comments on Internet (thanks Russ for making me discover these novels), so I will not go into details. And it is hard to summarise without spoiling. In brief: The first tome, Ancillary Justice, makes us visit various worlds and cultures, and give us an impression of what it feels to be a demigod. The main culture does not make a difference between the two sexes, and the grammar of its language does not have genders. This gives an original taste to the story, for instance when the hero speaks a foreign language, he has difficulties to correctly address people without risking to frown them. Unfortunately the English language itself does not use gender very much, so the literary effect is a bit weakened. Perhaps the French translation (which I have not read) could be more interesting in that respect? The second tome, Ancillary Sword, shows us how one can communicate things in a surveillance society without privacy, by subtle variations on how to serve tea. Gallons of tea are drunk in this tome, of which the main interest is the relation between the characters and heir conversations. In the third tome, Ancillary Mercy, asks the question of what makes us human. Among the most interesting characters, there is a kind of synthetic human, who acts as ambassador for an alien race. At first, he indeed behaves completely alien, but in the end, he is not very different from a newborn who would happen by miracle to know how to speak: in the beginning the World makes no sense, but step by step and by experimenting, he deduces how it works. This is how this character ends up understanding that what is called "war" is a complex phenomenon where one of the consequences is a shortage of fish sauce. I was a bit surprised that no book lead us at the heart of the Radch empire, but I just see on Wikipedia that one more novel is in preparation... One can speculate that central Radch resembles to a future dystopian West, in which surveillance of everybody is total and constant, but where people think they are happy, and peace and well-being inside are kept possible thanks to military operations outside, mostly performed by killer robots controlled by artificial intelligences. A not so distant future ? It is a matter of course that there does not seem to by any Free software in the Radch empire. That reminds me that I did not contribute much to Debian while I was reading...

17 August 2016

Charles Plessy: Who finished DEP 5?

Many people worked on finishing DEP 5. I think that the blog of Lars does not show enough how collective the effort was. Looking in the specification's text, one finds: 
The following alphabetical list is incomplete; please suggest missing people:
Russ Allbery, Ben Finney, Sam Hocevar, Steve Langasek, Charles Plessy, Noah
Slater, Jonas Smedegaard, Lars Wirzenius.
The Policy's changelog mentions: 
  * Include the new (optional) copyright format that was drafted as
    DEP-5.  This is not yet a final version; that's expected to come in
    the 3.9.3.0 release.  Thanks to all the DEP-5 contributors and to
    Lars Wirzenius and Charles Plessy for the integration into the
    Policy package.  (Closes: #609160)
 -- Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>  Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:48:55 -0700
and 
debian-policy (3.9.3.0) unstable; urgency=low
  [ Russ Allbery ]
  * Update the copyright format document to the version of DEP-5 from the
    DEP web site and apply additional changes from subsequent discussion
    in debian-devel and debian-project.  Revise for clarity, to add more
    examples, and to update the GFDL license versions.  Thanks, Steve
    Langasek, Charles Plessy, Justin B Rye, and Jonathan Nieder.
    (Closes: #658209, #648387)
On my side, I am very grateful to Bill Alombert for having committed the document in the Git repository, which ended the debates.

9 August 2016

Shirish Agarwal: Doha and the Supreme Court of DFSG Free

Hi, I am in two minds of what to write about Doha. My job has been vastly simplified by a friend when he shared with me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdrAd-44LW0 . That video is more relevant and more closer to the truth than whatever I can share. As can be seen it is funny but more sad the way Qatarians are trying to figure out how things will be and as can be seen it seems to heading towards a real estate bubble . They would have to let go of the Sharia if they are thinking of wealthy westerners coming to stay put. I am just sad to know that many of my country-men are stuck there and although I hope the best for them, I dread it may turn out the way it has turned out for many people of Indians, and especially from Kerala in Saudi Arabia. I would touch about the Kerala situation probably in another blog post as this time is exclusively for legal aspects which were discussed in Debconf. A bit of backgrounder here, one part of my family is lawyers which means I have somewhat notion of law as practiced in our land. As probably everybody knows, India was ruled by the British for around 150 odd years. One of the things that they gave while leaving was/is the IPC (Indian Penal Code) and is practiced with the common law concept. The concept means precedence of any judgement goes quite some way in framing rulings and law of the land as time goes on besides the lobbying and the politics which happens in any democracy. Free software would not have been there without the GPL The General Public License. And the license is as much a legal document as it s something that the developers can work without becoming deranged, as it is one of the more simpler licenses to work with. My own understanding of the legal, ethical and moral issues around me were framed by two-three different TV shows, books (fiction and non-fiction alike) apart from what little news I heard in family. One was M*A*S*H* (with Alan Alda and his frailness, anarchism, humanism, civil rights), the Practise and Boston Legal which does lay bare the many grey areas that lawyers have to deal with ( The Practice also influenced a lot of civil rights understanding and First amendment, but as it is a TV show, how much of it is actually practiced for lawyers and how much moral dilemma they are can only be guessed at.) . In books it is artists like John Grisham, Michael Connelly as well as Perry Mason Agatha Christie. In non-fiction look at the treasures under bombayhighcourt e-books corner and series of Hamlyn Lectures. I would have to warn that all of the above are major time-sinks but rewarding in their own way. Also haven t read all of them as time and interests are constrained but do know they are good for understanding bit of our history. I do crave for a meetup kind of scenario when non-lawyers can read and discuss about facets of law . All that understanding was vastly amplified by Groklaw.net which made non-lawyers at the very least be able to decipher and understand what is going on in the free software world. After PJ (Pamela Jones) closed it in 2013 due to total surveillance by the Free World (i.e. the United States of America, NSA) we have been thirsty. We do get occasionally somewhat mildly interesting articles in lwn.net or arstechnica.net but nowhere the sheer brilliance of groklaw. So, it was a sheer stroke of luck that I met Mr. Bradley M. Kuhn who works with Karen Sandler on Software Conservancy. While I wanted to be there for his presentation, it was just one of those days which doesn t go as planned. However, as we met socially and over e-mail there were two basic questions which I asked him which also imbibes why we need to fight for software freedom in the court of law. Below is a re-wording of what he shared . Q1. why do people think that GPL still needs to be challenged in the court of law while there are gpl-violations which has been more or less successfully defended in the court of law ? Bradley Kuhn the GPL violations is basically a violation of one or more clauses of the GPL license and not the GPL license as a whole and my effort during my lifetime would be to make/have such precedents that the GPL is held as a valid license in the court of law. Q2. Let s say IF GPL is held to be valid in the court of law, would FSF benefit monetarily, at least to my mind it might be so, as more people and comapnies could be convinced to use strong copyleft licenses such as GPLv3 or AGPLv3 . Bradley Kuhn It may or may not. It is possible that even after winning, that people and especially companies may go for weak copyleft licenses if it suits them. The only benefit would probably would be to those people who are already using GPLv3 as the law could be used to protect them as well. Although we would want and welcome companies who would use strong copyleft license such as the GPL, the future is in future and hence uncertain. Both possibilities co-exist. While Bradley didn t say it, I would add further here it probably would mean also moving from being a more offensive mode (which GPL-violations is based upon where a violation occurs and somebody either from the victim s side or a by-stander notices the violation, brings it to the notice of the victim and the GPL-volations team.) to perhaps it being defended by the DMCA people themselves, once GPL is held as a valid license in the eyes of law. Although should you use the DMCA or not is a matter of choice, personal belief system as well as your legal recourses. I have to share that the FSF and the GPL-violations team are probably very discerning when they take up the fight as most of the work done by them is pro-bono (i.e. they don t make a single penny/paisa from the work done therein.) and hence in view of scarce resources, it makes sense to go only for the biggest violators in the hopes that you can either make them agree to compensate and agree to the terms of license of any software/hardware combination or sue them and take a bigger share of the reward/compensation awarded by the Court to help the defendant and maybe some of the proceeds donated by the defendant and people like you and me to make sure that Conservancy and the GPL-violations team is still around to help the next time something similar happens.
Bradley Kuhn presenting at #Debconf 16

Bradley Kuhn presenting at #Debconf 16

Now, as far as his presentation is concerned, whose video can be seen at http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/The_Supreme_Court_of_DFSGFree.webm , I thought it was tame. While he talked about gaming the system in some sense, he was sharing that the system debian-legal works (most-of-the-time). The list actually works because many far more brilliant people than me take time to understand the intricacies of various licenses and how they should be interpreted through the excellently written Debian Free Software Guidelines and whether the license under discussion contravenes the DFSG or is part of it. I do agree with his point though that the ftp-master/s and the team may not be the right person to judge the license in adherence to the DFSG, or her/is not giving a reason for rejecting a package to not entering into the package archive. I actually asked the same question on debian-legal and while I had guessed, it seems there is enough review of the licenses per-se as answer from Paul Wise shows. Charles Pessley also shared an idea he has documented which probably didn t get much traction as involves more work on DD s without any benefit to show for it. All in all I hope it sheds some light on why there is need to be more aware of law in software freedom. Two Organizations which work on software freedom from legal standpoint are SFLC (Delhi) headed by the charming Mr. Eben Moglen and ALF (Bangalore). I do hope more people, especially developers take a bit more interest in some of the resources mentioned above.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Alternative Law Forum, #bombayhighcourt e-library, #Common Law, #Debconf16, #Fiction, #Hewlyn lectures, #India, #Jurispudence, #legal fiction, #real estate bubble, #SFLC.in, #Software Freedom, #timesink, Doha, Law

1 August 2016

Charles Plessy: Amazon cloud: refreshing my skills.

For a few years I did not attempt any serious task on the Amazon cloud. It took me a bit of time to get back my automatisms and adapt myself to the changes. In particular, the cheapest instances, t2.nano, are only accessible via virtual private clouds (VPC), and it was a bit difficult for me to find how to create a simple one. Perhaps this is because all AWS accounts created after March 18, 2013, automatically have a default VPC, and everybody else who needed their own simple VPC have created it a long time ago already. In the end, this was not complicated at all. This is probably why I could not find a tutorial. In brief, one needs first to create a VPC. If it is just for spawning an instance from time to time, the IP range does not matter much. Default VPCs are using 172.31.0.0/16, so let's do the same. 
CIDR_BLOCK=172.31.0.0/16
aws ec2 create-vpc --cidr-block $CIDR_BLOCK
In the command's output, there is the VPC's identifier, that I paste by hand in a variable called VPC. The same pattern will be repeated for each command creating something. One can also find the VPC's identifier with the command aws ec2 describe-vpcs. 
VPC=vpc-XXXXXXXX
Then, create a subnet. Again, no need for complications, in our simple case one can give the full IP range. I cut and paste the returned identifier in the variable SUBNET. In order that the instances receive a public IP address like in default VPCs and like in the usual behaviour of the VPC-less Cloud, one needs to set the attribute MapPublicIpOnLaunch. 
aws ec2 create-subnet --vpc-id $VPC --cidr-block $CIDR_BLOCK
SUBNET=subnet-XXXXXXXX
aws ec2 modify-subnet-attribute --subnet-id $SUBNET --map-public-ip-on-launch
Then, create a gateway (paste the identifier in GATEWAY) and attach it to the VPC. 
aws ec2 create-internet-gateway
GATEWAY=igw-XXXXXXXX
aws ec2 attach-internet-gateway --internet-gateway-id $GATEWAY --vpc-id $VPC
A routing table was created automatically, and one can find its identifier via the command describe-route-tables. Then, create a default route to the gateway. 
aws ec2 describe-route-tables
ROUTETABLE=rtb-XXXXXXXX
aws ec2 create-route --route-table-id $ROUTETABLE --destination-cidr-block 0.0.0.0/0 --gateway-id $GATEWAY
Of course, if one does not open the traffic, no instance can be contacted from outside... Here I open port 22 for SSH. 
aws ec2 describe-security-groups
SECURITY_GROUP=sg-XXXXXXXX
aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-id $SECURITY_GROUP --protocol tcp --port 22 --cidr 0.0.0.0/0
Other novelty, now Amazon distributes some Free tools for the command line, that are more comprehensive than euca2ools. Next, I will try again the Debian Installer in the Cloud.

29 July 2016

Norbert Preining: TUG 2016 Day 4 Books, ooh Books (and Boats)

Talks have been finished, and as a special present to the participants, Pavneet has organized an excursion that probably was one of the best I ever had. First we visited the Toronto Reference Library where we were treated to a delicious collection of rare books (not to mention all the other books and architecture), and then a trip through the Ismaili Centre Toronto and the Aga Khan Museum.
Page from "A Dream of John Ball", Kelmscott Press Edition, 1892.
(Kelmscott press edition from 1892 of William Morris A Dream of John Ball.) All these places were great pieces of architecture with excellent samples of the writing and printing art. And after all that and not to be mentioned, the conference dinner evening cruise! Our first stop was the Toronto Reference Library. Designed by Raymond Moriyama, it features a large open atrium with skylights, and it gives the library an open and welcoming feeling. We were told that it resembles a tea cup that needs to be filled with knowledge.
The Toronto Reference Library's atrium
The library also features running water at several places the architect had the idea that natural ambient noise is more natural for a library than the eclectic silence that anyway never happens. Originally there were lots of greens hanging down into the Atrium, resembling the Hanging Gardens, but they have been scrapped due to financial reasons. But there are still green oasis like this beautiful green wall in a corner of the library.
Wall of Green in the middle of the library
We were guided first to the fifth floor where the special collection is housed. And what a special collection. The librarian in charge has laid out about 20 exquisite books starting from early illuminated manuscripts over incunabula to high pieces of printing art from the 18th and 19th century. Here we have a illuminated script in Carolingian minuscule.
Illuminated script in Carolingian minuscule
What was really surprising for all of us in this special collection that all these books were simply laid out in front of us, that the librarian touched and used it without gloves, and above all, that he told us that if one wants it is common practice to check out these books for study sessions and enjoy them on the spot in the reading room. I don t know any other library that allows you to actually handle these rare and beauty specimens! The library not only featured lots of great books, it also had some art installation like these light rods.
Art Light installation in the Toronto Reference Library
In one of the books I found by chance a map of my hometown of Vienna. Looking at this map from very old times, the place where I grew up is still uninhabited somewhere in the far upper right corner of the map. Times have changed.
Map op Vienna found in the Toronto Reference Library
After we left this open and welcoming treasure house of beautiful books, we moved to the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre Toronto, which are standing face-to-face separated by some water ponds in the Aga Khan park a bit outside of central Toronto. Here we see the Ismaili Centre from the Aga Khan Museum entrance. The big glass dome is the central prayer room, and is illuminated at night. Just one detail one can see in the outer wall one part that looks like glass, too. This is the prayer alcove in the back of the prayer hall, and is made from huge slabs of Onyx that are also lit up in the night.
View onto the Ismaili Centre's Prayer Hall formed by a glass dome
The Ismaili Centre, designed by Charles Correa combines modern functional and simple style with the wonderful ornamental art of the Islam heritage. The inside of the Ismaili Centre features many pieces of exquisite art calligraphy, murals, stone work, etc here is a medallion made from precious stone and set onto a hand-carved wall.
Medaillon made of precious stones in hand carved wall, Ismaili Centre Toronto
A calligraphy on the wall in the Ismaili Centre
Wall Calligraphy in the Ismaili Centre Toronto
Following the Ismaili Centre we turned to the Aga Khan museum which documents Islamic art, science, and history with an extensive collection. We didn t have much time, and in addition I had to do some fire-fighting over the phone, but the short trip through the permanent collection with samples of excellent calligraphy was amazing.
Koran Calligraphy, Aga Khan Museum Toronto
After returning from this lovely excursion and a short break, we set off for the last stop for tonight, the dinner cruise. After a short bus ride we could board our ship and off we go. Although the beer selection was not on par with what we are used from carft breweries, the perfectly sized boat with two decks and lots of places to hang around invited us to many discussions and chitchats. And finally I could enjoy also the skyline of Toronto.
View onto Toronto from the boat
After the dinner we had some sweets, one of which was a specially made cake with the TUG 2016 logo on it. I have to say, it was not only this cake but the whole excellent and overboarding food we had during all these days, that will make me go on diet when I am back in Japan. Pavneet organized for the lunch breaks three different style of kitchens (Thai, Indian, Italian), then the excursions to local brewers and and and If it wouldn t be for TeX, I would call it a Mastkur .
TUG 2016 cake
During the cruise we also had a little ceremony thanking Jim for his work as president of the TUG, but above all Pavneet for this incredible well organized conference. I think everyone agreed that this was the best TUG conference since long.
Sunset near Toronto
pensDuring the ceremony, Pavneet also announced the winners of the TUG 2016 fountain pen auction. These pens have a long history/travel behind them, see details on the linked page, and were presented to the special guests of the conference. Two remaining pens were auctioned with funds going to the TUG. The first one was handed over to Steve Grathwohl, and to my utter surprise the second one to myself. So now I am a happy owner of a TUG 2016 fountain pen. What a special feature! Just one more detail about these pens: They are traditional style, so without ink capsules, but one needs to insert the ink with a syringe. I guess I need to stack up a bit at home, and more importantly, train my really ugly hand-writing, otherwise it would be a shame to use this exquisite tool. We returned to the harbor around 10pm, and back to the hotel, where there was much greeting and thanking, as many people will return the following day.
Heading back to Toronto
I will also leave on Friday morning to meet with friends, thus I will not be participating in (and not reporting on) the last excursion of the TUG 2016. I will leave Toronto and the TUG 2016 with (nearly) exclusively good memories of excellent talks, great presentations, wonderful excursions, and lots of things I have learned. I hope to see all of the participants on next year s TUG meeting and I hope I will be able to attend it. Thanks a lot to Pavneet, you have done an incredible job. And last but not least, thanks to your lovely wife for letting you do all this, I know how much time we did steal from her. A few more photos can be found at the album Day 4 Books, ooh books.

28 July 2016

Norbert Preining: TUG 2016 Day 3 Stories and Histories

The last day of TUG 2016, or at least the last day of talks, brought four one-hour talks from special guests, and several others, where many talks told us personal stories and various histories.
tug2016-biglow A great finish of a great conference. Jennifer Claudio The case for justified text Due to a strange timezone bug in my calendar program, I completely overslept a morning meeting and breakfast, as well as the first talk, so unfortunately I don t have anything to report about this surely intersting talk comparing justification in various word processors and TeX. Leyla Akhmadeeva, Rinat Gizatullin, Boris Veytsman Are justification and hyphenation good or bad for the reader? Still half dizzy and without coffee, I couldn t really follow this talk, and only woke up till the end when there was a lot of interesting discussion about speed reading and its non-existence (because it is simply skimming over text), and improvements on reading comprehension. Charles Bigelow Looking for legibility Another special guest, Charles Bigelow, presented a huge pool of research and work into readability, and how attitude and usage of fonts change over time. A very involving and well laid out talk, full of interesting background images and personal opinions and thoughts. Charles also touched onto topics of readability on modern devices like e-readers and mobiles. He compared the recent developments in font design for mobile devices with their work on Lucida 20+ years ago, and concluded that both arrived at the same solutions. A very educating and amusing talk packed full with information on readability. I surely will revisit the recording in a study session. David Walden Some notes on the history of digital typography David touches on many topics of the history of digital typography which he has experienced himself over the years: First the development of newspaper production and printing, then the evolvement of editors from simple text editors over word processors to full-fledged DTP programs. Finally he touches on various algorithmic problems that appear in the publishing business. Tim Inkster The beginning of my career Tim, our fanatastic guide through his print shop the Procupine s Quill on the second excursion day, talked about his private ups and downs in the printing business, all filled with an infinite flow of funny stories and surprising anecdotes. Without slides and anything but his voice and his stories, he kept us hanging on his lips without a break. I recommend watching the recording of his talk because one cannot convey the funny comments and great stories he shared with us in this simple blog. Joe Clark Type and tiles on the TTC Joe unveils the history of rise and fall of the underground types and
tiles in Toronto. It is surprising to me that a small metro network as in Toronto can have such a long history of changes of design, layout, presentation. Some of the photos completely stymed me how can anyone put up signs like that? I was thinking. To quote Joe (hopefully I remember correctly):
You see what happens without adult supervision.
Abdelouahad Bayar Towards an operational (La)TeX package supporting optical scaling of dynamic mathematical symbols A technical talk about a trial in providing optical scaling of mathematical symbols. As far as I understand it tries to improve on the TeX way of doing extensible math symbols by glueing things together. It seems to be highly involved and technically interesting project, but I couldn t completely grasp the aim of it. Michael Cohen, Blanca Mancilla, John Plaice Zebrackets: A score of years and delimiters John introduced us to Zebrackets, stripped parentheses and brackets, to help us keep track of pairing of those beasts. But as we know, Zebras are very elusive animals, and so we saw lots of stripped brackets around. The idea of better markup of matching parentheses is definitely worth developing. Charles Bigelow Probably approximately not quite correct: Revise, repeat The second talk of Charles, this time on the history of the Lucida fonts, from the early beginnings drawn on graph paper to recent developments using FontLab producing OpenType fonts. A truly unique crash course through the development of one of the very big families of fonts, and one of the first outside Computer Modern that had also support for proper math typesetting in TeX.
Aggressively legible!
One of the key phrases that popped up again and again was aggressively legible, mostly in negative connotations as far to fat symbols or far to big Arabic letters. But for me this font family is still close to my heart. I purchased it back than from Y&Y for my PhD thesis, and since then have upgraded to the TUG version including the OpenType fonts, and I use them for most of my presentation. Maybe I like the aggressive legibility! Chuck slided in lots of nice comments about Kris Holmes, the development practice in their cooperation, stories of business contacts, and many more, making this talk a very lively and amusing, and at the same time very educating talk.
This concluded the TUG conference talks, and we thanked Pavneet for his excellent organization. But since we still have up to two days of excursions, many people dispersed quickly, just to meet again for a optional Type and Tile Tour 3-5 subway stops with discussion of typesetting This guided tour through the underground of Toronto, guided by Joe Clark who spoke in the morning about this topic, was attended by far too many participants. I think there were around 25 when we left. I thought that this will not work out properly, and so decided to leave the group and wander around alone. The last program point for today was dinner with a blues music concert in the near by Jazz Bistro:
jazz-bistro Excellent life music in a bit schick/sophisticated atmosphere was a good finish for this excellent day. With Herb from MacTeX and his wife we killed two bottles of red wine, before slowly tingling back to the hotel. A great finishing day of talks.

9 July 2016

Charles Plessy: Congratulations, Marga!

For the first time in our history, a woman joins the Technical Committee. Congratulations, Marga, and thanks for volunteering.

19 April 2016

Craig Sanders: Book Review: Trader s World by Charles Sheffield

One line review: Boys Own Dale Carnegie Post-Apocalyptic Adventures with casual racism and misogyny. That tells you everything you need to know about this book. I wasn t expecting much from it, but it was much worse than I anticipated. I m about half-way through it at the moment, and can t decide whether to just give up in disgust or keep reading in horrified fascination to see if it gets even worse (which is all that s kept me going with it so far). Book Review: Trader s World by Charles Sheffield is a post from: Errata

7 April 2016

Charles Plessy: FreeDesktop entries enter in the Debian Policy.

After a long journey that lasted almost three years, the use of FreeDesktop entries is now documented in our Policy. An as a bonus, this new version 3.9.8 of the Policy also reminds that new media types should be registered to the IANA. Thanks to everybody who made this possible.

2 January 2016

Daniel Pocock: The great life of Ian Murdock and police brutality in context

Tributes: (You can Follow or Tweet about this blog on Twitter) Over the last week, people have been saying a lot about the wonderful life of Ian Murdock and his contributions to Debian and the world of free software. According to one news site, a San Francisco police officer, Grace Gatpandan, has been doing the opposite, starting a PR spin operation, leaking snippets of information about what may have happened during Ian's final 24 hours. Sadly, these things are now starting to be regurgitated without proper scrutiny by the mainstream press (note the erroneous reference to SFGate with link to SFBay.ca, this is British tabloid media at its best). The report talks about somebody (no suggestion that it was even Ian) "trying to break into a residence". Let's translate that from the spin-doctor-speak back to English: it is the silly season, when many people have a couple of extra drinks and do silly things like losing their keys. "a residence", or just their own home perhaps? Maybe some AirBNB guest arriving late to the irritation of annoyed neighbours? Doesn't the choice of words make the motive sound so much more sinister? Nobody knows the full story and nobody knows if this was Ian, so snippets of information like this are inappropriate, especially when somebody is deceased. Did they really mean to leave people with the impression that one of the greatest visionaries of the Linux world was also a cat burglar? That somebody who spent his life giving selflessly and generously for the benefit of the whole world (his legacy is far greater than Steve Jobs, as Debian comes with no strings attached) spends the Christmas weekend taking things from other people's houses in the dark of the night? The report doesn't mention any evidence of a break-in or any charges for breaking-in. If having a few drinks and losing your keys in December is such a sorry state to be in, many of us could potentially be framed in the same terms at some point in our lives. That is one of the reasons I feel so compelled to write this: somebody else could be going through exactly the same experience at the moment you are reading this. Any of us could end up facing an assault as unpleasant as the tweets imply at some point in the future. At least I can console myself that as a privileged white male, the risk to myself is much lower than for those with mental illness, the homeless, transgender, Muslim or black people but as the tweets suggest, it could be any of us. The story reports that officers didn't actually come across Ian breaking in to anything, they encountered him at a nearby street corner. If he had weapons or drugs or he was known to police that would have almost certainly been emphasized. Is it right to rush in and deprive somebody of their liberties without first giving them an opportunity to identify themselves and possibly confirm if they had a reason to be there? The report goes on, "he was belligerent", "he became violent", "banging his head" all by himself. How often do you see intelligent and successful people like Ian Murdock spontaneously harming themselves in that way? Can you find anything like that in any of the 4,390 Ian Murdock videos on YouTube? How much more frequently do you see reports that somebody "banged their head", all by themselves of course, during some encounter with law enforcement? Do police never make mistakes like other human beings? If any person was genuinely trying to spontaneously inflict a head injury on himself, as the police have suggested, why wouldn't the police leave them in the hospital or other suitable care? Do they really think that when people are displaying signs of self-harm, rounding them up and taking them to jail will be in their best interests? Now, I'm not suggesting this started out with some sort of conspiracy. Police may have been at the end of a long shift (and it is a disgrace that many US police are not paid for their overtime) or just had a rough experience with somebody far more sinister. On the other hand, there may have been a mistake, gaps in police training or an inappropriate use of a procedure that is not always justified, like a strip search, that causes profound suffering for many victims. A select number of US police forces have been shamed around the world for a series of incidents of extreme violence in recent times, including the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, shooting Walter Scott in the back, death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the attempts of Chicago's police to run an on-shore version of Guantanamo Bay. Beyond those highly violent incidents, the world has also seen the abuse of Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim schoolboy arrested for his interest in electronics and in 2013, the suicide of Aaron Swartz which appears to be a direct consequence of the "Justice" department's obsession with him. What have the police learned from all this bad publicity? Are they changing their methods, or just hiring more spin doctors? If that is their response, then doesn't it leave them with a cruel advantage over those people who were deceased? Isn't it standard practice for some police to simply round up anybody who is a bit lost and write up a charge sheet for resisting arrest or assaulting an officer as insurance against questions about their own excessive use of force? When British police executed Jean Charles de Menezes on a crowded tube train and realized they had just done something incredibly outrageous, their PR office went to great lengths to try and protect their image, even photoshopping images of Menezes to make him look more like some other suspect in a wanted poster. To this day, they continue to refer to Menezes as a victim of the terrorists, could they be any more arrogant? While nobody believes the police woke up that morning thinking "let's kill some random guy on the tube", it is clear they made a mistake and like many people (not just police), they immediately prioritized protecting their reputation over protecting the truth. Nobody else knows exactly what Ian was doing and exactly what the police did to him. We may never know. However, any disparaging or irrelevant comments from the police should be viewed with some caution. The horrors of incarceration It would be hard for any of us to understand everything that an innocent person goes through when detained by the police. The recently released movie about The Stanford Prison Experiment may be an interesting place to start, a German version produced in 2001, Das Experiment, is also very highly respected. The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the second-highest per-capita incarceration rate. Many, including some on death row, are actually innocent, in the wrong place at the wrong time, without the funds to hire an attorney. The system, and the police and prison officers who operate it, treat these people as packages on a conveyor belt, without even the most basic human dignity. Whether their encounter lasts for just a few hours or decades, is it any surprise that something dies inside them when they discover this cruel side of American society? Worldwide, there is an increasing trend to make incarceration as degrading as possible. People may be innocent until proven guilty, but this hasn't stopped police in the UK from locking up and strip-searching over 4,500 children in a five year period, would these children go away feeling any different than if they had an encounter with Jimmy Saville or Rolf Harris? One can only wonder what they do to adults. What all this boils down to is that people shouldn't really be incarcerated unless it is clear the danger they pose to society is greater than the danger they may face in a prison. What can people do for Ian and for justice? Now that these unfortunate smears have appeared, it would be great to try and fill the Internet with stories of the great things Ian has done for the world. Write whatever you feel about Ian's work and your own experience of Debian. While the circumstances of the final tweets from his Twitter account are confusing, the tweets appear to be consistent with many other complaints about US law enforcement. Are there positive things that people can do in their community to help reduce the harm? Sending books to prisoners (the UK tried to ban this) can make a difference. Treat them like humans, even if the system doesn't. Recording incidents of police activities can also make a huge difference, such as the video of the shooting of Walter Scott or the UK police making a brutal unprovoked attack on a newspaper vendor. Don't just walk past a situation and assume everything is under control. People making recordings may find themselves in danger, it is recommended to use software that automatically duplicates each recording, preferably to the cloud, so that if the police ask you to delete such evidence, you can let them watch you delete it and still have a copy. Can anybody think of awards that Ian Murdock should be nominated for, either in free software, computing or engineering in general? Some, like the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering can't be awarded posthumously but others may be within reach. Come and share your ideas on the debian-project mailing list, there are already some here. Best of all, Ian didn't just build software, he built an organization, Debian. Debian's principles have helped to unite many people from otherwise different backgrounds and carry on those principles even when Ian is no longer among us. Find out more, install it on your computer or even look for ways to participate in the project.

25 October 2015

Russ Allbery: Review: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Review: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua
Publisher: Pantheon
Copyright: 2015
ISBN: 0-307-90827-5
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 317
I seem to be writing a lot of reviews lately where any reader can easily do their own research and see if this is something they'd like. This is another of those, but perhaps a bit more obscure. As Padua explains in the preface, the first Lovelace and Babbage strip was intended to be a one-off joke. A friend suggested that she draw a comic telling the (short and rather tragic) life of Ada Lovelace, widely considered the first computer programmer even though the computer for which she wrote programs was never built: Charles Babbage's Analytic Engine. Padua found the story of Babbage and Lovelace's collaboration fascinating but too grim, and so wrote an alternate ending involving a pocket universe in which Babbage and Lovelace lived on to fight crime! Or at least fought against street organs and poetry. Padua meant this as a joke. The Internet took it as a teaser. Quite to her surprise, she found herself writing occasional additional episodes and getting lost in fascinating research about Lovelace and Babbage. The result is all at 2dgoggles.com. This book is a curated collection of those comics, including much of their (extensive) footnotes and research notes, in a very attractive and well-constructed book form. The best review, therefore, would be to go read some of the comics yourself, easily accessible via the Comics tab on the web site, and see if this is the sort of thing you'd enjoy. There is some material in the book that isn't on the web site, but most of it is there (including one full story that didn't make it into the book). There are a few reasons to buy a collection like this of material that previously appeared on the Internet. One, of course, is out of gratitude to support the author, which is the main reason I bought it. If you want to do that, though, you probably already know you do. Another reason is for additional unpublished material, but that's not really the case here. But a third is that, despite all the technology of the web, books can sometimes provide a more elegant and beautiful presentation. And that's very much the case for The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. The hardcover is a beautiful work of art. It has what you would expect from a hardcover graphic novel, of course: sturdy paper, lovely story headings in the form of Victorian-style posters, and very nice artwork beneath the dust jacket. (I've been so happy to see that in the last few hardcovers I've reviewed.) But, best of all, it presents the primary research notes on each page underneath comic panels. Those who have been reading Lovelace and Babbage as it appears on the web know Padua's copious research notes. But they're normally presented at the end of each complete part, and I found myself often not reading them in detail. This might not be the case for everyone, but at least for me this presentation works so much better. Historical notes are at the bottom of (nearly) every page, in context. This might sound like it would distract from and break up the flow of the story, but at least for me it does the opposite. The comics feel so much richer when intermixed with the actual history (which in some cases is surprisingly similar to what seemed to be wild, invented scenarios). The historical notes also have end notes, and quite substantial ones. I found that organization less successful (readers of my reviews will know I have a long-standing antipathy towards end notes for anything other than cross-references), but I have to admit I have no idea how Padua would have fit those on the same page as footnotes. They're also written well enough, and with sufficient detail, that I could usually read a chapter and then read all the end notes and mostly remember what they referred to. Padua also takes advantage of the format to play a few neat games with frame breaks: characters commenting on the notes, stabbing things into them, or otherwise affecting them. I have to admit to some mild frustration where this makes the notes unreadable, since they're nearly as fascinating as the comics, but the overall effect is still worth it. (And, of course, the full notes are available on the web if one wishes to look them up.) Rounding out the book version are a few of the best original source documents that Padua found, thankfully excerpted and well-edited to not outlive their welcome for those of us who don't like poring over Victorian letters. And, finally, some beautiful illustrations of the mechanisms of the Analytic Engine with supporting descriptions of how they were supposed to work. I'm not particularly mechanically inclined, nor that fascinated by steampunk, and I still found these diagrams impressive and fun to look at. Someone more interested in such things will be in for a treat. I've been thoroughly enjoying the (sadly infrequent) installments of Lovelace and Babbage for years now, and am utterly delighted by their hardcover appearance. If you already knew about Padua's work and have any interest in nice hardcovers of such things, I don't think you'll regret the purchase. If you haven't heard of her, or this series, before, some quick reading at the web site should quickly reveal whether this is something you'd enjoy. Rating: 9 out of 10

15 October 2015

Charles Plessy: The slippery slope.

Step by step, one slips towards the bottom:
  1. One should be blunt with those who are wrong.
  2. One is blunt when one is right.
  3. When one thinks to be right, one is blunt.
  4. One is wrong and blunt.
Let's note anyway that one can slip to the bottom without being vulgar or insulting. In any large project like Debian, one can find people who know how to be very oppressive, while keeping a very correct communication style. Debian is a broad project, and it is easy to avoid them, unless one tries make contributions that can be related to keywords like committee , code , policy , delegation , etc. In that case, it is better to retrieve the good old thick skin from the cupboard where we stored it after our code of conduct was adopted...

15 September 2015

Norbert Preining: In Memoriam Adrian Frutiger

Just a few days ago another great font designer has passed away, Adrian Frutiger, 24 May 1928 10 September 2015. Famous in particular for his fonts Frutiger, Avenir, and the Univers family. His fonts are used throughout the worlds for visual communication like road signs. Much has been written about him: Linotype s excellent obituary, Adam Twardoch, David Airey, New York Times article. For an interview conducted with Frutiger in 1999, see this Eye Magazine article. An interesting article on Frutiger s typefaces by Charles Bigelow.
frutiger1 Here I want to recall a different quality of Adrian Frutiger his interest in the visual language of symbols, their development and interaction. His book Der Mensch und seine Zeichen (Signs and Symbols) is a profound study on the development, history, and use of all kind of symbols. In this book, translated into many languages, Frutiger explores the depth and breath of symbols, but the most important part for him, easily to be seen from the German title, is the human part ( Der Mensch ). Symbols are created, changed, and used by and for humans. His studies exhibit connections between various cultures when it comes to sign usage and design.
frutiger5 He also explores signets as modern sign language, and their importance for visual communcation and identity building.
frutiger4 The book also discusses the development of the Roman alphabet, and of course passes the Univers font family.
frutiger2 My favorite piece is this overlay of a s from different fonts, to show that there is a common pattern in these fonts.
frutiger3 He concludes this book with a very wise statement:
Zum Festhalten des Gedankens, zur Vermittlung der Aussage gen gen seit langem schon die Alphabet-Zeichen nicht mehr allein. Orientierung und Kommunikation sind heute unm glich ohne Schemata, Zeichen und Signale. Der geschriebene Ausdruck wird durch die Bildvermittlung notwendig erg nzt.
SInce long the alphabet letters alone do not suffice to take hold of thoughts and to transmit statements. Nowadays, orientation and communication are impossible without schemata, signs and signals. The written expression is necessarily enhanced through image transmission.
(my translation) After Hermann Zapf, this is now the second loss of the typographic world in this year. We will miss both of them.

10 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 15 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Guillem Jover uploaded dpkg/1.18.2 which makes dependency comparisons deep by comparing not only the first dependency alternative, to get them sorted in a reproducible way. Original patch by Chris Lamb. Dhole updated the patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in gettext. A modified package is in the experimental reproducible repository. Valentin Lorentz submitted a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to ocamldoc. Valentin Lorentz also opened a bug about the inability to set an arbitrary RNG seed for ocamlopt which would be a way to fix an issue affecting many OCaml packages. Dhole submitted a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in qhelpgenerator. A modified package has been sent to the experimental repository as well. Several packages have been updated for the experimental toolchain: doxygen (akira), and dpkg (h01ger). Also, h01ger has built and uploaded all experimental packages having arch:any packages for armhf: dpkg, gettext, doxygen, fontforge, libxslt and texlive-bin. We are now providing our toolchain for armhf and amd64. Packages fixed As you might have noticed, Debian sid is currently largely uninstallable, due to the GCC 5 transition, which also can be see in our reproducibility test setup. Please help! The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: glosstex, indent, ktikz, liblouis, libmicrohttpd, linkchecker, multiboot, qterm, rrep, trueprint, twittering-mode. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Lunar reported an issue on an unstable ABI from a generated header in icedove reminding of an issue affecting libical-dev. The bug has since been fixed by Carsten Schoenert. akira identified an unreferenced embeded code copy (causing unreproducibility!) in gperf. reproducible.debian.net The scheduler has temporarily been changed to not schedule any already tested packages for sid and experimental, due to the the GCC 5 transitions, which are well visible in our graphs now. On the plus side this has caused our stretch testing to catch up (and improve stats). (h01ger) depwait packages (packages where the Build-Depends cannot be satisfied) are now listed in the last 24h and last 48h pages (Mattia Rizzolo) Two new amd64 build nodes (with 8 cores and 32 GB RAM each) have been added, kindly sponsored by Profitbricks. (h01ger) The 4 armhf (setup last week by Vagrant Cascadian) and 2 amd64 build nodes have been made available to Jenkins. Remote job scheduling has been implemented and 35 new jobs have been added for pbuilder and schroot creation and maintenance of the nodes. (h01ger) The manual scheduler gained a flag (-a/--architecture) to select which arch to schedule in. (Mattia Rizzolo) armhf will only be testing stretch for now, due to limited hardware ressources. (h01ger) The page listing maintainers of unreproducible packages gained internal anchors. As an example, one can now link to unreproducible orphaned packages. (Mattia Rizzolo) Packages with a bug tagged pending are marked using a new symbol: a brown P (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development debbindiff is now called diffoscope! It also has a website at diffoscope.org. The name was changed to better reflect that it became a general purpose tool, capable of comparing many different archive formats, or directories. Version 29 is the renaming release. Amongst a couple of other cosmetic changes a favicon showing the new logo has been added to the generated HTML reports. Version 30 replaces the file matching algorithm for files listed in .changes to a smarter one that removes only the version number. It also fixes a bug where squashfs directories were being extracted even if their content was being compared at a later stage. It also fixes an issue with the test suite that was detected by debci. Documentation update More rationale have been added for supporting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH The unfinished Reproducible Builds HOWTO is now visible on the web, feedback and patches most welcome. Package reviews 261 obsolete reviews have been removed, 73 added and 145 updated this week.

27 July 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Evading the "Hadley tax": Faster Travis tests for R

Hadley is a popular figure, and rightly so as he successfully introduced many newcomers to the wonders offered by R. His approach strikes some of us old greybeards as wrong---I particularly take exception with some of his writing which frequently portrays a particular approach as both the best and only one. Real programming, I think, is often a little more nuanced and aware of tradeoffs which need to be balanced. As a book on another language once popularized: "There is more than one way to do things." But let us leave this discussion for another time. As the reach of the Hadleyverse keeps spreading, we sometimes find ourselves at the receiving end of a cost/benefit tradeoff. That is what this post is about, and it uses a very concrete case I encountered yesterday. As blogged earlier, the RcppZiggurat package was updated. I had not touched it in a year, but Brian Ripley had sent a brief and detailed note concerning something flagged by the Solaris compiler (correctly suggesting I replace fabs() with abs() on integer types). (Allow me to stray from the main story line here for a second to stress just how insane a work load he is carrying, essentially for all of us. R and the R community are so just so indebted to him for all his work---which makes the usual social media banter about him so unfortunate. But that too shall be left for another time.) Upon making the simple fix, and submitting to GitHub the usual Travis CI was triggered. And here is what I saw: first travis build in a year
All happy, all green. Previous build a year ago, most recent build yesterday, both passed. But hold on: test time went from 2:54 minutes to 7:47 minutes for an increase of almost five minutes! And I knew that I had not added any new dependencies, or altered any build options. What did happen was that among the dependencies of my package, one had decided to now also depend on ggplot2. Which leads to a chain of sixteen additional packages being loaded besides the four I depend upon---when it used to be just one. And that took five minutes as all those packages are installed from source, and some are big and take a long time to compile. There is however and easy alternative, and for that we have to praise Michael Rutter who looks after a number of things for R on Ubuntu. Among these are the R builds for Ubuntu but also the rrutter PPA as well as the c2d4u PPA. If you have not heard this alphabet soup before, a PPA is a package repository for Ubuntu where anyone (who wants to sign up) can upload (properly setup) source files which are then turned into Ubuntu binaries. With full dependency resolution and all other goodies we have come to expect from the Debian / Ubuntu universe. And Michael uses this facility with great skill and calm to provide us all with Ubuntu binaries for R itself (rebuilding what yours truly uploads into Debian), as well as a number of key packages available via the CRAN mirrors. Less know however is this "c2d4u" which stands for CRAN to Debian for Ubuntu. And this builds on something Charles Blundell once built under my mentorship in a Google Summer of Code. And Michael does a tremdous job covering well over a thousand CRAN source packages---and providing binaries for all. Which we can use for Travis! What all that means is that I could now replace the line 
 - ./travis-tool.sh install_r RcppGSL rbenchmark microbenchmark highlight
which implies source builds of the four listed packages and all their dependencies with the following line implying binary installations of already built packages: 
 - ./travis-tool.sh install_aptget libgsl0-dev r-cran-rcppgsl r-cran-rbenchmark r-cran-microbenchmark r-cran-highlight
In this particular case I also needed to build a binary package of my RcppGSL package as this one is not (yet) handled by Michael. I happen to have (re-)discovered the beauty of PPAs for Travis earlier this year and revitalized an older and largely dormant launchpad account I had for this PPA of mine. How to build a simple .deb package will also have to left for a future post to keep this more concise. This can be used with the existing r-travis setup---but one needs to use the older, initial variant in order to have the ability to install .deb packages. So in the .travis.yml of RcppZiggurat I just use 
before_install:
## PPA for Rcpp and some other packages
- sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:edd/misc
## r-travis by Craig Citro et al
- curl -OL http://raw.github.com/craigcitro/r-travis/master/scripts/travis-tool.sh
- chmod 755 ./travis-tool.sh
- ./travis-tool.sh bootstrap
to add my own PPA and all is good. If you do not have a PPA, or do not want to create your own packages you can still benefit from the PPAs by Michael and "mix and match" by installing from binary what is available, and from source what is not. Here we were able to use an all-binary approach, so let's see the resulting performance: latest travis build
Now we are at 1:03 to 1:15 minutes---much better. So to conclude, while the every expanding universe of R packages is fantastic for us as users, it can be seen to be placing a burden on us as developers when installing and testing. Fortunately, the packaging infrastructure built on top of Debian / Ubuntu packages can help and dramatically reduce build (and hence test) times. Learning about PPAs can be a helpful complement to learning about Travis and continued integration. So maybe now I need a new reason to blame Hadley? Well, there is always snake case ...

Follow-up: The post got some pretty immediate feedback shortly after I posted it. Craig Citro pointed out (quite correctly) that I could use r_binary_install which would also install the Ubuntu binaries based on their R packages names. Having built R/CRAN packages for Debian for so long, I am simply more used to the r-cran-* notations, and I think I was also the one contributing install_aptget to r-travis ... Yihui Xie spoke up for the "new" Travis approach deploying containers, caching of packages and explicit whitelists. It was in that very (GH-based) discussion that I started to really lose faith in the new Travis approach as they want use to whitelist each and every package. With 6900 and counting at CRAN I fear this simply does not scale. But different approaches are certainly welcome. I posted my 1:03 to 1:15 minutes result. If the "New School" can do it faster, I'd be all ears.

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

6 May 2015

Charles Plessy: Long life to Jessie!

Debian published Jessie last month. Big congratulations to the release team and all the contributors; quality is again at the rendez-vous! This time, I could not contribute much, being busy with parental activities (hello my son, if you read me), apart from making sure that my packages are ready for the D Day. This work was made easy by the automated removals of buggy packages set up by the release team. Many thanks for that development. I hope to use Jessie for a long time without the need of upgrading to Testing. At the moment, it provides everything I need, including the input of Japanese characters together with the possibility to switch between Japanese (or American) and multilingual Canadian keyboard layouts, which was not easy to do anymore in Wheezy. Many thanks again.

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