As the flow of incoming bugs for upcoming 4.6.0 has slowed down a bit it was more time for code cleanups and related tasks. But it's also time where potential Google Summer of Code students come to our organization and want to get involved. On the cleanup side the biggest was change to remove embedded PHP libraries which are available on Packagist from our Git and use Composer to manage the dependencies. This change will happen in 4.7.0, so it's still some time ahead, but it's already in our master branch. There still some third party libraries which we use and can not be installed using Composer, so we keep these for now. Besides the usual bug fixing stuff, I've noticed that we lack issues which can be easily understood and fixed by potential Google Summer of Code. We require them to get involved before the program starts, so that we can see they are capable of useful contributions and also to see how they behave if asked for patch improvements. To fix this deficit we're prepared few small cleanup or refactoring tasks, where the students can show their skills. All handled issues:

• #11980 Fix #11979 DECLARE not accepted as valid SQL
• #11609 Errors when Analyzer fails
• #11974 debug event in phpmyadmin for day and month (error)
• #11975 unrecognized keyword left in where clause
• #11973 Tracker won't track some queries executed from SQL tab
• #11907 Update query shows twice
• #11850 CSV import to new table broken
• #11958 Bug Fix #11907
• #11470 Impossible to cancel "Drop files here" overlay
• #6146 Syslog authentication requests / brute-force protection
• #6261 All-Languages version via composer/packagist.org
• #11947 Notice in sql.lib
• #11669 Can't edit rows if table name has one upper case char (OS X)
• #11968 Syntax-errored ALTER TABLE is exported
• #11967 Warning on loading corrupted XML
• #11959 Uncaught ReferenceError: isStorageSupported is not defined
• #22 Make INI settings configurable via environment variables

Filed under: English phpMyAdmin 2 comments

The Linux Foundation is an industry organisation dedicated to promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software[1]. The majority of its board is chosen by the member companies - 10 by platinum members (platinum membership costs $500,000 a year), 3 by gold members (gold membership costs $100,000 a year) and 1 by silver members (silver membership costs between $5,000 and $20,000 a year, depending on company size). Up until recently individual members ($99 a year) could also elect two board members, allowing for community perspectives to be represented at the board level.

As of last Friday, this is no longer true. The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors. Section 3.3(a) now says that no affiliate members may be involved in the election of directors, and section 5.3(d) still permits at-large directors but does not require them[2]. The old version of the bylaws are here - the only non-whitespace differences are in sections 3.3(a) and 5.3(d).

These changes all happened shortly after Karen Sandler announced that she planned to stand for the Linux Foundation board during a presentation last September. A short time later, the "Individual membership" program was quietly renamed to the "Individual supporter" program and the promised benefit of being allowed to stand for and participate in board elections was dropped (compare the old page to the new one). Karen is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organisation involved in the vitally important work of GPL enforcement. The Linux Foundation has historically been less than enthusiastic about GPL enforcement, and the SFC is funding a lawsuit against one of the Foundation's members for violating the terms of the GPL. The timing may be coincidental, but it certainly looks like the Linux Foundation was willing to throw out any semblance of community representation just to ensure that there was no risk of someone in favour of GPL enforcement ending up on their board.

Much of the code in Linux is written by employees paid to do this work, but significant parts of both Linux and the huge range of software that it depends on are written by community members who now have no representation in the Linux Foundation. Ignoring them makes it look like the Linux Foundation is interested only in promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software if doing so benefits their corporate membership rather than the community as a whole. This isn't a positive step.

[1] Article II of the bylaws
[2] Other than in the case of the TAB representative, an individual chosen by a board elected via in-person voting at a conference

comments

Today I have released a small module for Python 3 that implements cached lazy infinite sequences. Here are some examples that demonstrate what this module can do: Slicing works: A somewhat reverse operation: Various arithmetic operations are supported: More magic methods: For the complete API overview, please look at the documentation. You can install the module from PyPI. It is licensed under 3-clause BSD license. The source code is available on GitHub.

Today I have released a small module for Python 3 that implements cached lazy infinite sequences. Here are some examples that demonstrate what this module can do: Slicing works: A somewhat reverse operation: Various arithmetic operations are supported: More magic methods: For the complete API overview, please look at the documentation. You can install the module from PyPI. It is licensed under 3-clause BSD license. The source code is available on GitHub.

Going back to Android recently, I saw that all tools binaries from the Android project are now click-wrapped by a quite ugly proprietary license, among others an anti-fork clause (details below). Apparently those T&C are years old, but the click-wrapping is newer. This applies to the SDK, the NDK, Android Studio, and all the essentials you download through the Android SDK Manager. Since I keep my hands clean of smelly EULAs, I'm working on rebuilding the Android tools I need.
We're talking about hours-long, quad-core + 8GB-RAM + 100GB-disk-eating builds here, so I'd like to publish them as part of a project who cares. As a proof-of-concept, the Replicant project ships a 4.2 SDK and I contributed build instructions for ADT and NDK (which I now use daily). (Replicant is currently stuck to a 2013 code base though.) I also have in-progress instructions on my hard-drive to rebuild various newer versions of the SDK/API levels, and for the NDK whose releases are quite hard to reproduce (no git tags, requires fixes committed after the release, updates are partial rebuilds, etc.) - not to mention that Google doesn't publish the source code until after the official release (closed development) And in some cases like Android Support Repository [not Library] I didn't even find the proper source code, only an old prebuilt. Would you be interested in contributing, and would you recommend a structure that would promote Free, rebuilt Android *DK? The legalese Anti-fork clause:

3.4 You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK.

So basically the source is Apache 2 + GPL, but the binaries are non-free. By the way this is not a GPL violation because right after:

3.5 Use, reproduction and distribution of components of the SDK licensed under an open source software license are governed solely by the terms of that open source software license and not this License Agreement.

Still, AFAIU by clicking "Accept" to get the binary you still accept the non-free "Terms and Conditions". (Incidentally, if Google wanted SDK forks to spread and increase fragmentation, introducing an obnoxious EULA is probably the first thing I'd have recommended. What was its legal team thinking?) Indemnification clause:

12.1 To the maximum extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Google, its affiliates and their respective directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any and all claims, actions, suits or proceedings, as well as any and all losses, liabilities, damages, costs and expenses (including reasonable attorneys fees) arising out of or accruing from (a) your use of the SDK, (b) any application you develop on the SDK that infringes any copyright, trademark, trade secret, trade dress, patent or other intellectual property right of any person or defames any person or violates their rights of publicity or privacy, and (c) any non-compliance by you with this License Agreement.

Usage restriction:

3.1 Subject to the terms of this License Agreement, Google grants you a limited, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to use the SDK solely to develop applications to run on the Android platform. 3.3 You may not use the SDK for any purpose not expressly permitted by this License Agreement. Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not: (a) copy (except for backup purposes), modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK or any part of the SDK; or (b) load any part of the SDK onto a mobile handset or any other hardware device except a personal computer, combine any part of the SDK with other software, or distribute any software or device incorporating a part of the SDK.

If you know the URLs, you can still direct-download some of the binaries which don't embed the license, but all this feels fishy. GNU licensing didn't answer me (yet). Maybe debian-legal has an opinion? In any case, the difficulty to reproduce the *DK builds is worrying enough to warrant an independent rebuild. Did you notice this?

In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices. Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal - OEP) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting journal entries . In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that piqued my interest. The title of the document was "Internet Governance and how it affects national security" (Norwegian: "Internet Governance og p virkning p nasjonal sikkerhet"). The document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations". I asked for a copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it (offentleglova 20, letter c) and an explanation that the document was exempt because of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar. I was told the information in the document related to the ongoing negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance (World Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12) had just ended, reportedly in chaos when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries including Norway refused to sign the new treaty. It seemed reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later. Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the Norwegian Communications Authority and the Ministry of Transport and Communications. This might be the reason the letter was sent to the ministry. As I was unable to find the document in the mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was over now. This time I asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the receiver and asked the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender for a copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the public. The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a different clause (offentleglova 20 letter b), claiming that they were required to keep the content of the document from the public because it contained information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation that the information should not be made public. I asked the permanent mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content of the meeting to be publicly known. They explained that giving me a copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway. They also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of this had not listed it in their mail journal. Armed with this knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications. The ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of the document. According to a government report the author was with the Permanent Mission of Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending the report initially and asked them for a copy but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there when the document was written. Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. The Foreign Ministry also upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attach with the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. I do not know if this is the same person as the author of the document. If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attach in Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. It is truly amazing what can be derived from mere meta-data. I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting? And what exactly was said and done at the meeting? Anyone know?

Review: Watchtower, by Elizabeth A. Lynn

Series:	Chronicles of Tornor #1
Publisher:	Berkley
Copyright:	February 1979
Printing:	November 1982
ISBN:	0-425-06195-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	226

Ryke is a soldier in service to Athor, lord of Tornor Keep. Or, at least, he was. Shortly before the opening lines of this book, Tornor Keep was taken by a southerner named Col Istor, and Athor was killed. Ryke is about to change sides under duress: his service to Col as a watch commander is the price of keeping Errel, Athor's son, alive. Alive does not mean treated with dignity, however; Errel's new place is to become court jester for Col's small domain. At the start of this book, I had no idea who Col Istor was or why he'd want to take over one of the border keeps that guard the country of Arun against its northern neighbor Anhard. At the end of this book, I still had little idea. Watchtower's relationship with world-building is not what you'd normally expect from a fantasy novel. There are only a few locations in this novel, and they're described in close detail but without much historical or strategic context. The narrative, despite being third person, follows Ryke very closely, and Ryke is not interested in thinking much about the history of his world that he knows and the reader doesn't. Or he may not care. Ryke does not come across as a curious or thoughtful person. He's a soldier, he lives to serve his lord, and that service transfers from Athor to Errel and simply stays there, with little discussion or argument. The opening section of this novel shows Ryke trying to take care of Errel while serving Col and listening to his plans to take over the rest of the northern keeps. I found it slow, claustrophobic, and not very interesting. It reads a bit like a day in the life in some grim medieval military, with little world-building or context. Watchtower is technically fantasy, but mostly because the geography and politics are imaginary. Magic is limited to a very tiny bit of (essentially) Tarot card reading and has little impact on the plot. The story does get somewhat more interesting when two green clan messengers enter the story, and Ryke and Errel escape. Lynn introduces another community and another way of life into the story than the one Ryke is used to, one that seemed modeled after monastic orders (but with the religion toned down to nearly nonexistent). I think the intended conflict of the story is between those ways of life, their draws and implications, but even that conflict is never clearly stated. Ryke seems to move from one inevitability to another, and while he does question some of his previous views and seems to open his mind a bit, actual growth is limited in this story. I reached the end of the book feeling the world was largely unchanged from its start. This story won the World Fantasy award for best novel in 1980. I have to admit I'm baffled, although partly that's because this is not really my thing. I prefer my fantasy to have more epic sweep and a lot more world-building. But perhaps the award was for the writing, which is evocative and fills the moments of the story with closely-observed detail. It has a distinctive, choppy feel, full of short declarative sentences:

The wind blew. Like some night creature caught in a trap, Col Istor's banner flapped on its pole. Ryke wondered where his wolfhound was. Sheltering, he hoped, in some warm and windless corner. He thrust his hands beneath his armpits to warm them. He entered the kitchen, nodding at the guard who stood there, and went toward the scullery. The kitchenboys huddled together in sleep like dogs in front of the oven. He stepped over their legs. The iron pots on the walls vibrated softly.

That's a paragraph chosen at random from the start of the book and should give you a good feel for the style. I think I would have liked this novel better if it had followed anyone other than Ryke. Not only did I not care for him and his simplistic loyalties, he's the least interesting character in this story. Everyone else Col, Errel, Sorren, Van, and others is more complex and more thoughtful than he is, and I think many of them would have made a better protagonist. He spends much of the center part of the book being suspicious and closed and incurious, which means the reader can only guess at what's going on between the other characters. I can't really recommend this book, but the writing is solid and it has some interesting properties for late 1970s fantasy, including both a frank look at the role of women in this society and same-sex relationships. If your taste in fantasy leans towards the gritty and realistic, you might like it more than I did. I may try the later books of the series in the hope that they have more interesting protagonists. Followed by Dancers of Arun. Rating: 6 out of 10

I published some Free rebuilds of the Android SDK, NDK and ADT at: http://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/ As described in my previous post, Google is click-wrapping all developer binaries (including preview versions for which source code isn't published yet) with a non-free EULA, notably an anti-fork clause. There's been some discussion on where to host this project at the android@lists.fsfe.org campaign list. Build instructions are provided, so feel free to check if the builds are reproducible, and contribute instructions for more tools!

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.

Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15

Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Toolchain fixes

• Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-12 which makes class and modules ordering predictable (#795835) and fixes __repr__ so memory addresses don't appear in docs (#795826). Patches by Val Lorentz.
• Sergei Golovan uploaded erlang/1:18.0-dfsg-2 which adds support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to erlc. Patch by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb.
• Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-5 which make grammar, inventory, and JavaScript locales generation deterministic. Original patch by Val Lorentz.
• St phane Glondu uploaded ocaml/4.02.3-2 to experimental, making startup files and native packed libraries deterministic. The patch adds deterministic .file to the assembler output.
• Enrico Tassi uploaded lua-ldoc/1.4.3-3 which now pass the -d option to txt2man and add the --date option to override the current date.

Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware.

• #796330 on d-shlibs by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.

St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apr/1.5.2-3 by Stefan Fritsch.
• aprx/2.08.svn593+dfsg-2 uploaded by Colin Tuckley, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• blkreplay/1.0-3 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, patch by Dhole.
• cal3d/0.11.0-6 uploaded by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, patch by akira.
• cgsi-gsoap/1.3.8-1 by Mattias Ellert.
• eyefiserver/2.4+dfsg-1 by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gnujump/1.0.8-3 uploaded by Evgeni Golov, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• hkgerman/1:2-29 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• jove/4.16.0.73-4 by Cord Beermann.
• libevhtp/1.2.10-3 by Vincent Bernat.
• libmkdoc-xml-perl/0.75-4 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• libparse-debianchangelog-perl/1.2.0-6 by Niko Tyni.
• librostlab-blast/1.0.1-5 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libxray-absorption-perl/3.0.1-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• lua-penlight/1.3.2-2 by Enrico Tassi.
• mosquitto/1.4.3-1 by Roger A. Light.
• nagios-plugins-contrib/15.20150818 by Jan Wagner and Bernd Zeimetz.
• nn/6.7.3-10 uploaded by Cord Beermann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pybik/2.1-1 by B. Clausius.
• pyepr/0.9.3-1 uploaded by Antonio Valentino, original patch by Juan Picca.
• python-xlrd/0.9.4-1 by Vincent Bernat.
• transmissionrpc/0.11-2 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Juan Picca.
• unoconv/0.7-1.1 sponsored by Vincent Bernat, fix by Dhole.
• vim-latexsuite/20141116.812-1 uploaded by Johann Felix Soden, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• volk/1.0.2-2 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• xbmc/2:13.2+dfsg1-5 by Balint Reczey.
• xdotool/1:3.20150503.1-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, initial patch by Chris Lamb.
• xfig/1:3.2.5.c-5 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• xfireworks/1.3-10 uploaded by Yukiharu YABUKI, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xul-ext-monkeysphere/0.8-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, original patch by Dhole.

Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues:

• brian/1.4.1-3 uploaded by Yaroslav Halchenko, original patch by Juan Picca.
• opennebula/4.12.3+dfsg-1 by Dmitry Smirnov.
• pcsx2/1.3.1-1008-g9f291a6+dfsg-1 by Miguel A. Col n V lez.
• webassets/3:0.11-1 uploaded by Agustin Henze, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• apache2/2.4.16-3 uploaded by Stefan Fritsch, original patch by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gerris/20131206+dfsg-6 uploaded by Anton Gladky, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• kodi/15.1+dfsg1-1 by Balint Reczey.
• zshdb/0.05+git20101031-4 uploaded by Iain R. Learmonth, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #795861 on fakeroot by Val Lorentz: set the mtime of all files to the time of the last debian/changelog entry.
• #795870 on fatresize by Chris Lamb: set build date to the time of the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795945 on projectl by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #795977 on dahdi-tools by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795981 on x11proto-input by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795983 on dbusada by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795984 on postgresql-plproxy by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795985 on xorg by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795987 on pngcheck by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795997 on python-babel by Val Lorentz: make build timestamp independent from the timezone and remove the name of the build system locale from the documentation.
• #796092 on a7xpg by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796212 on bittornado by Chris Lamb: remove umask-varying permissions.
• #796251 on liblucy-perl by Niko Tyni: generate lib/Lucy.xs in a deterministic order.
• #796271 on tcsh by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796275 on hspell by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamp from aff files generated by mk_he_affix.
• #796324 on fftw3 by Reiner Herrmann: remove date from documentation files.
• #796335 on nasm by Val Lorentz: remove extra timestamps from the build system.
• #796360 on libical by Chris Lamb: removes randomess caused Perl in generated icalderivedvalue.c.
• #796375 on wcd by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796376 on mapivi by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796527 on vserver-debiantools by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.

St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21^st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) why they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with the MPEG LA, I was wiser, but still confused. So I asked MPEG LA if their understanding matched that of NRK. As far as I can tell, it does not. I started by asking for more information about the various licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:

According to a MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02, there is no charge when using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me. What exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not? The only source of more information I have been able to find is a PDF named AVC Patent Portfolio License Briefing, which states this about the fees:

• Where End User pays for AVC Video
  • Subscription (not limited by title) 100,000 or fewer subscribers/yr = no royalty; > 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr = $25,000; >250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; >500,000 to 1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; >1M subscribers/yr = $100,000
  • Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; >12 minutes in length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title
• Where remuneration is from other sources
  • Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for > 100,000 HH rising to maximum $10,000 for >1,000,000 HH
  • Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription) no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License

Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into one of the other three categories? Can you point me to a good source explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in the license terms for AVC/H.264? Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio license? Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get access to personalized services? Note, this request and all answers will be published on the Internet.

The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate with the MPEG LA:

Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA. We appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you. As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10). Specifically, coverage is provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264 technology. Accordingly, the party offering such end products and video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for paying the applicable royalties. Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over the Internet free-of-charge. Therefore, if a party offers a service which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC License. This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free AVC Video content. In other words, as long as the End User is given access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then no royalties would be payable under our AVC License. On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such video would constitute Subscription AVC Video. In cases where AVC Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video. If a party offers Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below. Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be subject to the applicable royalties. For your reference, I have attached a .pdf copy of the AVC License. You will find the relevant sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4. You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video, Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License. Please note that the electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot be used for execution. I hope the above information is helpful. If you have additional questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel free to contact me directly.

Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong. But I still had a few questions:

I have a small followup question. Would it be possible for me to get a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid? The reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA. The clauses typically look similar to this:

This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b) decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.

It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA. I suspect it will differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway. What is MPEG LAs view on this?

According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:

With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License reads: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC Product as their own branded AVC Product). Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were payable under the License. On the other hand, if that party (either a Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC Products by the licensed supplier. Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including Norway. I hope this clarification is helpful. If I may be of any further assistance, just let me know.

The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I asked for more information:

But one minor question at the end. If I understand you correctly, you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent Portfolio that are valid in Norway. This make me believe I read the list available from <URL: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx > incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi Electric Corporation expired in 2012. Which patents are you referring to that are relevant for Norway?

Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents in that list:

Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012. Therefore, where AVC Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License. With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before the last Norwegian AVC patent expired. I would also like to clarify that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents. Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example, Norway). Similarly, a party would need to conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.

As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the content. I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid. Will the copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because the patents are not valid in Norway?

We recently had an intensive phase while reconsidering the DFSG-compliancy of the nx-libs(-lite) code base. TL;DR; In May 2015, all versions of DXPC released before version 3.8.1 (sometime in 2002) have retroactively been re-licensed by all previous maintainers of DXPC as BSD-2-clause. This blog arcticle is a modified version of the nxcomp/README.on-retroactive-DXPC-license file [1] and gives an overview of the discussion thread that lead to the retroactive re-licensing of DXPC. For the full discussion, see doc/DXPC_re-licensed::debbug_784565.mbox [2] in the nx-libs source project or #784565 on the Debian bug tracker [3]. [1] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/nxcomp/README.on-re...
[2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/doc/DXPC_re-license...
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=784565 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ STEP 1 In May 2015, a serious license issue around the nxcomp code shipped in this source project was raised and solved on the Debian bug tracker (thanks to Francesco Poli and many others): http://bugs.debian.org/784565

From: "Francesco Poli \(wintermute\)" 
To: Debian Bug Tracking System 
Date: Wed, 06 May 2015 19:35:32 +0200
I noticed that the debian/copyright states:
[...]
  Parts of this software are derived from DXPC project. These copyright
  notices apply to original DXPC code:
 

read more

What happened about the reproducible builds effort for this week: Media coverage Debian's effort on reproducible builds has been covered in the June 2015 issue of Linux Magazin in Germany. Toolchain fixes

• gregor herrmann uploaded libextutils-depends-perl/0.404-1 which makes its output deterministic.
• Christian Hofstaedtler uploaded yard/0.8.7.4-2 which will not write timestamps in the generated documentation. Original patch by Chris Lamb, does not write timestamps in the generated documentation anymore.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven-plugin-tools/3.3-2 which removes the date from the plugin descriptor. Patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven-archiver/2.6-1 which now uses the date set in the DEB_CHANGELOG_DATETIME environment variable for the timestamp in the pom.properties file embedded in the jar files. Original patch by Chris West.
• Nicolas Boulenguez uploaded dh-ada-library/6.4 which will warn against non deterministic ALI for sources newer than changelog.

josch rebased the experimental version of debhelper on 9.20150507. Packages fixed The following 515 packages became reproducible due to changes of their build dependencies: airport-utils, airspy-host, all-in-one-sidebar, ampache, aptfs, arpack, asciio, aspell-kk, asused, balance, batmand, binutils-avr, bioperl, bpm-tools, c2050, cakephp-instaweb, carton, cbp2make, checkbot, checksecurity, chemeq, chronicle, cube2-data, cucumber, darkstat, debci, desktop-file-utils, dh-linktree, django-pagination, dosbox, eekboek, emboss-explorer, encfs, exabgp, fbasics, fife, fonts-lexi-saebom, gdnsd, glances, gnome-clocks, gunicorn, haproxy, haskell-aws, haskell-base-unicode-symbols, haskell-base64-bytestring, haskell-basic-prelude, haskell-binary-shared, haskell-binary, haskell-bitarray, haskell-bool-extras, haskell-boolean, haskell-boomerang, haskell-bytestring-lexing, haskell-bytestring-mmap, haskell-config-value, haskell-mueval, haskell-tasty-kat, itk3, jnr-constants, jshon, kalternatives, kdepim-runtime, kdevplatform, kwalletcli, lemonldap-ng, libalgorithm-combinatorics-perl, libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl, libany-uri-escape-perl, libanyevent-http-scopedclient-perl, libanyevent-perl, libanyevent-processor-perl, libapache-session-wrapper-perl, libapache-sessionx-perl, libapp-options-perl, libarch-perl, libarchive-peek-perl, libaudio-flac-header-perl, libaudio-wav-perl, libaudio-wma-perl, libauth-yubikey-decrypter-perl, libauthen-krb5-simple-perl, libauthen-simple-perl, libautobox-dump-perl, libb-keywords-perl, libbarcode-code128-perl, libbio-das-lite-perl, libbio-mage-perl, libbrowser-open-perl, libbusiness-creditcard-perl, libbusiness-edifact-interchange-perl, libbusiness-isbn-data-perl, libbusiness-tax-vat-validation-perl, libcache-historical-perl, libcache-memcached-perl, libcairo-gobject-perl, libcarp-always-perl, libcarp-fix-1-25-perl, libcatalyst-action-serialize-data-serializer-perl, libcatalyst-controller-formbuilder-perl, libcatalyst-dispatchtype-regex-perl, libcatalyst-plugin-authentication-perl, libcatalyst-plugin-authorization-acl-perl, libcatalyst-plugin-session-store-cache-perl, libcatalyst-plugin-session-store-fastmmap-perl, libcatalyst-plugin-static-simple-perl, libcatalyst-view-gd-perl, libcgi-application-dispatch-perl, libcgi-application-plugin-authentication-perl, libcgi-application-plugin-logdispatch-perl, libcgi-application-plugin-session-perl, libcgi-application-server-perl, libcgi-compile-perl, libcgi-xmlform-perl, libclass-accessor-classy-perl, libclass-accessor-lvalue-perl, libclass-accessor-perl, libclass-c3-adopt-next-perl, libclass-dbi-plugin-type-perl, libclass-field-perl, libclass-handle-perl, libclass-load-perl, libclass-ooorno-perl, libclass-prototyped-perl, libclass-returnvalue-perl, libclass-singleton-perl, libclass-std-fast-perl, libclone-perl, libconfig-auto-perl, libconfig-jfdi-perl, libconfig-simple-perl, libconvert-basen-perl, libconvert-ber-perl, libcpan-checksums-perl, libcpanplus-dist-build-perl, libcriticism-perl, libcrypt-cracklib-perl, libcrypt-dh-gmp-perl, libcrypt-mysql-perl, libcrypt-passwdmd5-perl, libcrypt-simple-perl, libcss-packer-perl, libcss-tiny-perl, libcurses-widgets-perl, libdaemon-control-perl, libdancer-plugin-database-perl, libdancer-session-cookie-perl, libdancer2-plugin-database-perl, libdata-format-html-perl, libdata-uuid-libuuid-perl, libdata-validate-domain-perl, libdate-jd-perl, libdate-simple-perl, libdatetime-astro-sunrise-perl, libdatetime-event-cron-perl, libdatetime-format-dbi-perl, libdatetime-format-epoch-perl, libdatetime-format-mail-perl, libdatetime-tiny-perl, libdatrie, libdb-file-lock-perl, libdbd-firebird-perl, libdbix-abstract-perl, libdbix-class-datetime-epoch-perl, libdbix-class-dynamicdefault-perl, libdbix-class-introspectablem2m-perl, libdbix-class-timestamp-perl, libdbix-connector-perl, libdbix-oo-perl, libdbix-searchbuilder-perl, libdbix-xml-rdb-perl, libdevel-stacktrace-ashtml-perl, libdigest-hmac-perl, libdist-zilla-plugin-emailnotify-perl, libemail-date-format-perl, libemail-mime-perl, libemail-received-perl, libemail-sender-perl, libemail-simple-perl, libencode-detect-perl, libexporter-tidy-perl, libextutils-cchecker-perl, libextutils-installpaths-perl, libextutils-libbuilder-perl, libextutils-makemaker-cpanfile-perl, libextutils-typemap-perl, libfile-counterfile-perl, libfile-pushd-perl, libfile-read-perl, libfile-touch-perl, libfile-type-perl, libfinance-bank-ie-permanenttsb-perl, libfont-freetype-perl, libfrontier-rpc-perl, libgd-securityimage-perl, libgeo-coordinates-utm-perl, libgit-pureperl-perl, libgnome2-canvas-perl, libgnome2-wnck-perl, libgraph-readwrite-perl, libgraphics-colornames-www-perl, libgssapi-perl, libgtk2-appindicator-perl, libgtk2-gladexml-simple-perl, libgtk2-notify-perl, libhash-asobject-perl, libhash-moreutils-perl, libhtml-calendarmonthsimple-perl, libhtml-display-perl, libhtml-fillinform-perl, libhtml-form-perl, libhtml-formhandler-model-dbic-perl, libhtml-html5-entities-perl, libhtml-linkextractor-perl, libhtml-tableextract-perl, libhtml-widget-perl, libhtml-widgets-selectlayers-perl, libhtml-wikiconverter-mediawiki-perl, libhttp-async-perl, libhttp-body-perl, libhttp-date-perl, libimage-imlib2-perl, libimdb-film-perl, libimport-into-perl, libindirect-perl, libio-bufferedselect-perl, libio-compress-lzma-perl, libio-compress-perl, libio-handle-util-perl, libio-interface-perl, libio-multiplex-perl, libio-socket-inet6-perl, libipc-system-simple-perl, libiptables-chainmgr-perl, libjoda-time-java, libjsr305-java, libkiokudb-perl, liblemonldap-ng-cli-perl, liblexical-var-perl, liblingua-en-fathom-perl, liblinux-dvb-perl, liblocales-perl, liblog-dispatch-configurator-any-perl, liblog-log4perl-perl, liblog-report-lexicon-perl, liblwp-mediatypes-perl, liblwp-protocol-https-perl, liblwpx-paranoidagent-perl, libmail-sendeasy-perl, libmarc-xml-perl, libmason-plugin-routersimple-perl, libmasonx-processdir-perl, libmath-base85-perl, libmath-basecalc-perl, libmath-basecnv-perl, libmath-bigint-perl, libmath-convexhull-perl, libmath-gmp-perl, libmath-gradient-perl, libmath-random-isaac-perl, libmath-random-oo-perl, libmath-random-tt800-perl, libmath-tamuanova-perl, libmemoize-expirelru-perl, libmemoize-memcached-perl, libmime-base32-perl, libmime-lite-tt-perl, libmixin-extrafields-param-perl, libmock-quick-perl, libmodule-cpanfile-perl, libmodule-load-conditional-perl, libmodule-starter-pbp-perl, libmodule-util-perl, libmodule-versions-report-perl, libmongodbx-class-perl, libmoo-perl, libmoosex-app-cmd-perl, libmoosex-attributehelpers-perl, libmoosex-blessed-reconstruct-perl, libmoosex-insideout-perl, libmoosex-relatedclassroles-perl, libmoosex-role-timer-perl, libmoosex-role-withoverloading-perl, libmoosex-storage-perl, libmoosex-types-common-perl, libmoosex-types-uri-perl, libmoox-singleton-perl, libmoox-types-mooselike-numeric-perl, libmousex-foreign-perl, libmp3-tag-perl, libmysql-diff-perl, libnamespace-clean-perl, libnet-bonjour-perl, libnet-cli-interact-perl, libnet-daap-dmap-perl, libnet-dbus-glib-perl, libnet-dns-perl, libnet-frame-perl, libnet-google-authsub-perl, libnet-https-any-perl, libnet-https-nb-perl, libnet-idn-encode-perl, libnet-idn-nameprep-perl, libnet-imap-client-perl, libnet-irc-perl, libnet-mac-vendor-perl, libnet-openid-server-perl, libnet-smtp-ssl-perl, libnet-smtp-tls-perl, libnet-smtpauth-perl, libnet-snpp-perl, libnet-sslglue-perl, libnet-telnet-perl, libnhgri-blastall-perl, libnumber-range-perl, libobject-signature-perl, libogg-vorbis-header-pureperl-perl, libopenoffice-oodoc-perl, libparse-cpan-packages-perl, libparse-debian-packages-perl, libparse-fixedlength-perl, libparse-syslog-perl, libparse-win32registry-perl, libpdf-create-perl, libpdf-report-perl, libperl-destruct-level-perl, libperl-metrics-simple-perl, libperl-minimumversion-perl, libperl6-slurp-perl, libpgobject-simple-perl, libplack-middleware-fixmissingbodyinredirect-perl, libplack-test-externalserver-perl, libplucene-perl, libpod-tests-perl, libpoe-component-client-ping-perl, libpoe-component-jabber-perl, libpoe-component-resolver-perl, libpoe-component-server-soap-perl, libpoe-component-syndicator-perl, libposix-strftime-compiler-perl, libposix-strptime-perl, libpostscript-simple-perl, libproc-processtable-perl, libprotocol-osc-perl, librcs-perl, libreadonly-xs-perl, libreturn-multilevel-perl, librivescript-perl, librouter-simple-perl, librrd-simple-perl, libsafe-isa-perl, libscope-guard-perl, libsemver-perl, libset-tiny-perl, libsharyanto-file-util-perl, libshell-command-perl, libsnmp-info-perl, libsoap-lite-perl, libstat-lsmode-perl, libstatistics-online-perl, libstring-compare-constanttime-perl, libstring-format-perl, libstring-toidentifier-en-perl, libstring-tt-perl, libsub-recursive-perl, libsvg-tt-graph-perl, libsvn-notify-perl, libswish-api-common-perl, libtap-formatter-junit-perl, libtap-harness-archive-perl, libtemplate-plugin-number-format-perl, libtemplate-plugin-yaml-perl, libtemplate-tiny-perl, libtenjin-perl, libterm-visual-perl, libtest-block-perl, libtest-carp-perl, libtest-classapi-perl, libtest-cmd-perl, libtest-consistentversion-perl, libtest-data-perl, libtest-databaserow-perl, libtest-differences-perl, libtest-file-sharedir-perl, libtest-hasversion-perl, libtest-kwalitee-perl, libtest-lectrotest-perl, libtest-module-used-perl, libtest-object-perl, libtest-perl-critic-perl, libtest-pod-coverage-perl, libtest-script-perl, libtest-script-run-perl, libtest-spelling-perl, libtest-strict-perl, libtest-synopsis-perl, libtest-trap-perl, libtest-unit-perl, libtest-utf8-perl, libtest-without-module-perl, libtest-www-selenium-perl, libtest-xml-simple-perl, libtest-yaml-perl, libtex-encode-perl, libtext-bibtex-perl, libtext-csv-encoded-perl, libtext-csv-perl, libtext-dhcpleases-perl, libtext-diff-perl, libtext-quoted-perl, libtext-trac-perl, libtext-vfile-asdata-perl, libthai, libthread-conveyor-perl, libthread-sigmask-perl, libtie-cphash-perl, libtie-ical-perl, libtime-stopwatch-perl, libtk-dirselect-perl, libtk-pod-perl, libtorrent, libturpial, libunicode-japanese-perl, libunicode-maputf8-perl, libunicode-stringprep-perl, libuniversal-isa-perl, libuniversal-moniker-perl, liburi-encode-perl, libvi-quickfix-perl, libvideo-capture-v4l-perl, libvideo-fourcc-info-perl, libwiki-toolkit-plugin-rss-reader-perl, libwww-mechanize-formfiller-perl, libwww-mechanize-gzip-perl, libwww-mechanize-perl, libwww-opensearch-perl, libx11-freedesktop-desktopentry-perl, libxc, libxml-dtdparser-perl, libxml-easy-perl, libxml-handler-trees-perl, libxml-libxml-iterator-perl, libxml-libxslt-perl, libxml-rss-perl, libxml-validator-schema-perl, libxml-xpathengine-perl, libxml-xql-perl, llvm-py, madbomber, makefs, mdpress, media-player-info, meta-kde-telepathy, metamonger, mmm-mode, mupen64plus-audio-sdl, mupen64plus-rsp-hle, mupen64plus-ui-console, mupen64plus-video-z64, mussort, newpid, node-formidable, node-github-url-from-git, node-transformers, nsnake, odin, otcl, parsley, pax, pcsc-perl, pd-purepd, pen, prank, proj, proot, puppet-module-puppetlabs-postgresql, python-async, python-pysnmp4, qrencode, r-bioc-graph, r-bioc-hypergraph, r-bioc-iranges, r-bioc-xvector, r-cran-pscl, rbenv, rlinetd, rs, ruby-ascii85, ruby-cutest, ruby-ejs, ruby-factory-girl, ruby-hdfeos5, ruby-kpeg, ruby-libxml, ruby-password, ruby-zip-zip, sdl-sound1.2, stterm, systemd, taktuk, tcc, tryton-modules-account-invoice, ttf-summersby, tupi, tuxpuck, unknown-horizons, unsafe-mock, vcheck, versiontools, vim-addon-manager, vlfeat, vsearch, xacobeo, xen-tools, yubikey-personalization-gui, yubikey-personalization. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• cwirc/2.0.0-8 uploaded by Colin Tuckley, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• darkplaces/0~20140513+svn12208-1 by Simon McVittie.
• exactimage/0.9.1-4 by Sven Eckelmann.
• gnupg/1.4.19-1 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• httpunit/1.7+dfsg-11 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• hy/0.10.1-2 uploaded by Tianon Gravi, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• ioquake3/1.36+u20150412+dfsg1-2 by Simon McVittie, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• kiwi/1.9.22-3 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• lava-server/2015.05-1 uploaded by Neil Williams, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libelixirfm-perl/1.1.976-4 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• littler/0.2.3-2 by Dirk Eddelbuettel.
• mednafen/0.9.38.1-1 by Stephen Kitt.
• nftables/0.4-4 by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.
• ntdb/1.0-7 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• onioncat/0.2.2+svn566-1 by intrigeri.
• openarena/0.8.8-13 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-085-data/0.8.5split-6 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-088-data/0.8.8-3 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-data/0.8.5split-6 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-maps/0.8.5split-6 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-players/0.8.5split-6 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-players-mature/0.8.5split-6 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-textures/0.8.5split-6 by Simon McVittie.
• pybik/2.0-1 by B. Clausius.
• python-xmp-toolkit/2.0.1+git20140309.5437b0a-1 by Daniel Stender.
• quakespasm/0.90.0-3 by Stephen Kitt.
• traceroute/1:2.0.21-1 uploaded by Laszlo Boszormenyi, original patch by Lunar.
• unar/1.8.1-4 uploaded by Matt Kraai, original patch by Lunar.
• websvn/2.3.3-1.3 uploaded by Thijs Kinkhorst, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xd/3.23.01-2 uploaded by Frank B. Brokken, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• ada-reference-manual/1:2012.2-5 by Nicolas Boulenguez.
• apparmor/2.9.2-2 by intrigeri.
• argyll/1.7.0+repack-1 by J rg Frings-F rst.
• lava-dispatcher/2015.05-1 by Neil Williams.
• libaunit/3.7.1-2 by Nicolas Boulenguez.
• libflorist/2014-2 by Nicolas Boulenguez.
• mailcrypt/3.5.9-8 uploaded by Barak A. Pearlmutter, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• openchange/1:2.2-7 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• sane-backends/1.0.24-11 by J rg Frings-F rst timestamps in .dvi and .ps
• tomcat6/6.0.41-4 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• tomcat7/7.0.61-1 by Emmanuel Bourg; currently FTBFS.
• tomcat8/8.0.22-2 by Emmanuel Bourg.

Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet:

• #784541 on yasm by Lunar: remove build date from version strings.
• #784694 on smcroute by Micha Lenk: remove build date from version string.
• #784672 on gnumeric by Daniel Kahn Gillmor: remove timestamps in embedded gzip'ed data in shared library.
• #774347 on sed by Lunar: fix permissions before creating the package.
• #784352 on icebreaker by Reiner Herrmann: use UTC timezone when calculating version date.
• #784325 on kde-workspace by Lunar: make the output of kdm confproc.pl stable.
• #784602 on monkeysign by Daniel Kahn Gillmor: use time of debian/changelog entry when generating documentation.
• #784723 on alot by Juan Picca: pass time of debian/changelog entry to Sphinx.
• #784538 on file-rc by Lunar: use sed instead of grep+mv to keep correct file permissions.
• #784335 on libapache2-mod-perl2 by Lunar: set PERL_HASH_SEED=0 during configure to make the generated .c and .h files stable.
• #784267 on mpv by Lunar: pass --disable-build-date to ./configure.
• #784793 on bugs-everywhere by Daniel Kahn Gillmor: use time of debian/changelog entry as build date.
• #784318 on gnome-desktop3 by Lunar: use time of debian/chanelog entry as build date.
• #774504 on debianutils by Lunar: fix file permissions.

reproducible.debian.net Alioth now hosts a script that can be used to redo builds and test for a package. This was preliminary done manually through requests over the IRC channel. This should reduce the number of interruptions for jenkins' maintainers The graph of the oldest build per day has been fixed. Maintainance scripts will not error out when they are no files to remove. Holger Levsen started work on being able to test variations of CPU features and build date (as in build in another month of 1984) by using virtual machines. debbindiff development Version 18 has been released. It will uses proper comparators for pk3 and info files. Tar member names are now assumed to be UTF-8 encoded. The limit for the maximum number of different lines has been removed. Let's see on reproducible.debian.net how it goes for pathological cases. It's now possible to specify both --html and --text output. When neither of them is specified, the default will be to print a text report on the standard output (thanks to Paul Wise for the suggestion). Documentation update Nicolas Boulenguez investigated Ada libraries. Package reviews 451 obsolete reviews have been removed and 156 added this week. New identified issues: running kernel version getting captured, random filenames in GHC debug symbols, and timestamps in headers generated by qdbusxml2cpp. Misc. Holger Levsen went to re:publica and talked about reproducible builds to developers and users there. Holger also had a chance to meet FreeBSD developers and discuss the status of FreeBSD. Investigations have started on how it could be made part of our current test system. Laurent Guerby gave Lunar access to systems in the GCC Compile Farm. Hopefully access to these powerful machines will help to fix packages for GCC, Iceweasel, and similar packages requiring long build times.

Hello In my opinion, creating and maintaining Debian copyright file is the most boring task required to create a Debian package. Unfortunately, this file is also one of the most important of a package: it specifies some legal aspect regarding the use of the software. Debian copyright file is scrutinized by ftp masters gatekeepers when accepting a new package in Debian project: this file must accurately describe the copyright and licenses of all files of a source package, preferably using a specific syntax. (Kudos to the ftp-masters team: reading copyright files must be even more boring than writing them). The content of the copyright file must reflect accurately the license of all files. This license is often specified in the comments of a source files. The licencecheck command is able to scan sources files and reports the copyright and licenses declared in there. But it does not summarize this information: a copyright line is generated for each file of a package. licensecheck2dep5 (provided by cdbs package as /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5) does better: the output of licensecheck is consolidated and translated in Debian copyright format. The result is better, but must be heavily edited to be reviewable by ftp-masters team. The new update subcommand of cme (available with libconfig-model-dpkg-perl 2.061 currently in experimental) goes further than licensecheck2deb:

• copyright are coalesced when possible (i.e. 2001,2002,2003-2005 is changed to 2001-2005)
• file entries same copyright owner and license are grouped, group of files may be represented with a wild card ( * )
• license text is filled with actual text for the most popular licenses

For instance, here s the (slightly edited) output of cme run for pan package starting without debian/copyright file:

$ cme update dpkg-copyright -quiet
Adding dummy license text for license public-domain 
for path pan/general/sorted-vector.h
Adding dummy license text for license BSD-2-clause 
for path pan/usenet-utils/MersenneTwister.h
$ cat debian/copyright
Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
Files: *
Copyright: 1994-2001, Frank Pilhofer. The author may
License: GPL-2+
Files: pan/*
Copyright: 2002-2007, Charles Kerr 
License: GPL-2
Files: pan/data/cert-store.cc
  pan/data/cert-store.h
Copyright: 2011, Heinrich M ller 
  2002-2006, Charles Kerr 
License: GPL-2
Files: pan/general/e-util.cc
  pan/general/e-util.h
Copyright: 2000, 2001, Ximian, Inc
License: LGPL-2
Files: pan/general/locking.h
  pan/general/worker-pool.cc
  pan/general/worker-pool.h
Copyright: 2007, Calin Culianu 
  2002-2007, Charles Kerr 
License: LGPL-2+
Files: pan/general/sorted-vector.h
Copyright: 2002, Martin Holzherr (holzherr@infobrain.com).
License: public-domain
 Please fill license public-domain from header
 of pan/general/sorted-vector.h
[ about 100 more lines including license text for Zlib and several 
  GPL licenses ]

This is a good start, but some modifications must be applied to get a correct license file:

• add missing upstream information (Upstream-Name, Upstream-Contact and Source items)
• remove irrelevant text from some copyright owner (e.g. remove The author may from Files: * entry).
• add some missing license text (e.g. include text from sorted-vector.h comments to specify upstream author s version of public-domain)

These modifications can be done:

• directly after update by running cme update dpkg-copyright --edit
• after update by running cme edit dpkg-copyright
• with your favorite editor

This post has mentioned creation of Debian copyright file, but does not address the problem of updating an existing copyright file when packaging a new version of a software. This will be the subject of a next post. I hope this new feature of cme will save hours of work for Debian packagers. As usual comments and suggestions are welcome All the best

In my part 1 post yesterday, I wrote about the start of the home automation project. I mentioned that I was using Insteon switches, and they mostly were working well (I forgot to mention an annoyance: you can dim, but not totally shut off, their LED status light.) Anyhow, the Insteon battery-operated sensors seem to not be as good as their Z-Wave competition. Setting up Z-Wave Z-Wave devices get joined to the Z-Wave network in much the same way Bluetooth devices get paired with each other. The first time you use a Z-Wave device, you join it to the controller. The controller assigns it an ID on your network, and both devices discover the best route to communicate with each other. I discovered that the Z-Wave module on the ISY-994i has particularly poor reception. Combined with the generally short range of battery-operated Z-wave devices, this meant that my sensors didn t work reliably. As with Insteon, AC-powered Z-wave devices tend to be repeaters, but I didn t have any AC-powered Z-wave devices. I went looking for Z-wave repeaters, and found some. But then I discovered that a Z-wave relay-based appliance switch was actually $5 cheaper, acted as a repeater, and could be used as a switch down the road if needed. A couple of those solved my communications issues. You join them to the network as usual, but then either re-join the battery-powered sensors (so they see the new route) or do a network heal (every device on the network re-learns about its neighbors and routes to the other devices) so they see the new route. Z-Wave Motion / Occupancy Sensors If you have been in new buildings, chances are you have seen light switches with built-in occupancy sensors. My doctor s office has these. They are typically the same size as a regular light switch, but with a passive infrared (PIR) motion sensor used to automatically turn the lights off after a timeout (or even on, when someone walks into the room.) These work fine for small rooms, but if you ve ever been in a bathroom with a PIR lightswitch that goes off while you re still in the room, you are aware of their faults for larger rooms! Most of the time, when you read about occupancy sensors , it s really a PIR sensor, and the term is used interchangeably with motion detector. Motion detectors in home automation systems are commonly used for a number of purposes: detecting occuption of rooms for automatic control of lighting or HVAC systems, triggering alerts, or even locking or unlocking doors. My friend told me he had poor luck with the Insteon PIR sensors, so I tried two different Z-Wave models: the $48 Aeon/Aeotec multi-sensor and the $30 Ecolink PIRZWAVE2-ECO. The Aeon device is clearly the more capable; it can be used indoors or out, and has a lot of options that can be configured by Z-Wave configuration parameters. It also has a ball/socket mount, so it can be easily aimed in different directions. It can draw power from 4 AAA batteries, or a mini USB cable (cable, but not power supply, included). The Aeon multi-sensor also has a temperature, humidity, and illumination (lux) sensor but, as you ll see, they have some drawbacks. The Ecolink device is more basic; it has a few settings that can be altered via jumpers, but none that can be altered via Z-Wave configuration commands. That makes it a bit of a hassle, since you have to open it up to change, and when you do, it triggers a tamper alarm that is both undocumented and never seems to go away. It is powered by a single CR123A 3V Lithium battery, which are about $2 each on Amazon. Both units have a default PIR timeout of 4 minutes. That means that after sensing motion, they will transmit the on signal (meaning motion detected) and then transmit no further signals for at least 4 minutes. This is because operating the radio consumes far more battery power than simply monitoring the PIR sensor, and it cuts down on repeated on/off transmissions. In this configuration, both units should have battery life of 6 months to a year, I figure, with an edge for the Ecolink, perhaps. Both can also be configured to transmit more frequently; the Ecolink has a jumper that can change its timeout to 10 seconds, whereas the Aeon can be configured over Z-Wave for any timeout between 10 seconds and 65535 seconds (values above 4 minutes are rounded to the nearest minute, for some reason.) Both also have adjustable sensitivity; on the Aeon this is via an adjustment knob, and on the Ecolink it s via jumpers. And both can report their battery level to enable software alerts when it s getting low. The Aeon ships with its temperature, humidity, battery, and lux sensors disabled. This appears to be the cause of much confusion online, as they send one transmission and then no more. Sadly, one has to resort to the hard-to-find but very helpful MultiSensor engineering spec document to figure out the way to enable those sensors and set their interval. (It must be said, however, that I doubt most consumers will understand how to set bitfields, and this is either not covered or covered incorrectly in their other manuals.) This can be a real power drain, so I just set it to report battery level every 6 hours (so I can alert myself if it gets low) and leave it at that. The Ecolink manual claims a detection radius of 39 feet and a total angle of 90deg (45deg left or right from center) and a 3-year battery life (I m skeptical). It also is rated for indoor use only. Aeotec claims a detection radius of 16 feet and a total angle of 120 deg. Be skeptical of all these figures. Once set up with good reception, both devices have been working fine. Programming the controller The ISY-994i-Zw Pro controller I mentioned in Part 1 has its own sort of programming language. It s a lot better than the sort of GUI clicky mess that is found in most of these things, but it still has a sort of annoying Java-based editor where you select keywords from a menu and such. Although you can backup and restore the device, and import and export the programs, the file formats are XML and not really suitable for hand-editing. Sigh. The language is limited, but gets the job done. Here is a simple program that turns off the fan in a bathroom 30 minutes after the light was turned off:

If
        Status  '1st Floor / Bathroom + Laundry / Main Bath Fan' is On
    And Status  '1st Floor / Bathroom + Laundry / Main Bath Light' is Off
 
Then
        Wait  30 minutes 
        Set '1st Floor / Bathroom + Laundry / Main Bath Fan' Off
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

The if/then/else clauses should probably be more properly called when/do/finally. The if clauses are evaluated whenever a relevant event occurs. If the If evaluates to true, if executes the Then section. The program in Then is uninterruptible except for wait and repeat statements. So in this case, the program begins, and if the light stays off and the fan stays on, 30 minutes later it turns off the fan. But if the light comes back on, the program aborts (since there is nothing in else ). Similarly, if the fan goes off, the program aborts. A more complicated example: motion-activated lamp There is a table lamp in our living room controlled by Insteon. By adding a motion sensor in that room, it can be automatically turned on by someone walking through the room. Now, to be useful, I don t want it to turn on during the day. I also don t want it to turn on or adjust itself if other lights are on in the room, or if I turned it on myself; that could cause it to go on and off while I m watching TV, for instance. It s just to be helpful at night. Because the ISY-994i is pretty limited, having almost no control flow operations, this as with many tasks requires several programs . First, here s my main :

If
        Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' is Off
    And $LR_Lamp_Lockout is 0
    And Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / ZW 005 Binary Sensor' is On
    And From    Sunset 
        To      Sunrise (next day)
    And $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working is not 0
    And Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Floor Lamp' is Off
    And Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / Dining Light' is Off
    And Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Light' is Off
 
Then
        Set '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' 22%
        Set '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR S Remote (Table Lamp)' 22%
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

So, let s look at the conditions. This program triggers if the lamp is off, the sensor is on, the time is between sunset and sunrise, and three other lights are off. (I will explain the lockout and motion_working variables later). If this is the case, it sets the lamp to 22% (and also informs the wall switch for it that the lamp is at 22%). I pick this precise value because it is unlikely I would manually set it via the wall switch, and therefore lamp is 22% bright doubles as a lamp was turned on by this program flag. So this is the turning the lamp on bit. Let s look at the program that turns it back off later:

If
        Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' is 22%
    And (
             Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / ZW 005 Binary Sensor' is Off
          Or $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working is 0
          Or Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Light' is not Off
          Or Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Floor Lamp' is not Off
          Or Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / Dining Light' is not Off
        )
 
Then
        Wait  15 seconds
        Set '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR S Remote (Table Lamp)' Off
        Set '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' Off
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')
 

This is using a sensor with a 4-minute timeout, so the lamp will always be on for at least 4 minutes and 15 seconds. This program runs if the lamp is still at the program-set level (so if, for instance, I turned the lamp full on, the program does nothing to override my setting.) Then, it looks for a condition to trigger turning the lamp off, which could be any of the sensor indicating no more motion, another program detecting it s lost communication with the sensor, or somebody turning on one of the bigger lights in the room. Then it simply sets the light (and the wall switch controlling it) to off. There are a couple more bits to this puzzle. What if the system turned the lamp on, but I really want it off? If I walked up to the wall switch and pushed off , the lamp would go off. And then, a couple seconds later, come back on, since the state of the system met the conditions for the lamp-on program. So we need a lockout that prevents this from happening. Here s my trigger lockout program:

If
        Control '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' is switched Off
     Or Control '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' is switched Fast Off
     Or Control '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR S Remote (Table Lamp)' is switched Fast Off
     Or Control '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR S Remote (Table Lamp)' is switched Off
 
Then
        $LR_Lamp_Lockout += 1
        Run Program 'LR Lamp Clear Lockout' (If)
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action') 

So if someone pushes the off button at the lamp switch box at the outlet it s plugged into (unlikely), or at the wall switch, it increments the lockout variable and runs another program. This other program is unique in that it is flagged disabled , meaning it is never run automatically by the system, only when called by another program. Here s the clear lockout program:

If
        $LR_Lamp_Lockout > 0
 
Then
        Wait  5 minutes 
        $LR_Lamp_Lockout  = 0
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

Thus by pushing the off button on the switch, the motion-triggered program won t turn the lamp back on for at least 5 minutes. Before I had reliable Z-Wave communication to the device, I had some times where it would simply drop off the Z-Wave network until a reboot. This was particularly annoying if it occured after having detected motion, since the state of the sensor in the ISY controller is simply whatever state it last received. Therefore, I wrote this program to check if it believes the motion sensor is working:

If
        Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / ZW 005 Binary Sensor' is On
 
Then
        $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working  = 1
        Wait  1 hour 
        $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working  = 0
 
Else
        $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working  = 1

We don t really care if the motion sensor is broken when the status is off; all that happens then is no lamp turns on. So this program activates when the status is set to on. It flips the working flag to true, then waits for an hour. If the sensor shows no motion within that hour, the program skips to the else (keeping the flag true). But if it is still on after an hour, it decides it must not be working and sets the working flag to false. You can see that flag used in the other programs logic. But because of the Else, which is run whenever the conditions that caused the Then clause to run become false, as soon as the system receives no motion , it will flag the sensor as working again. The final piece to this puzzle is a program flagged to run at boot time of the controller:

If
   - No Conditions - (To add one, press 'Schedule' or 'Condition')
 
Then
        $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working  = 1
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

This simply initializes the motion working variable to a known state. Keypads The Insteon KeypadLinc is a nice device. It can control a single load directly, but all 8 buttons are fully responsive in the Insteon system. They each also have individually-addressible LED backlights. They are commonly used to do things like ALL OFF , TV (to set lights for watching TV), AWAY (to set the system for everyone being out of the house for awhile), etc. They are the size of a regular Decora switch, and I have installed one already, but haven t programmed much of it yet. REST API The ISY has an extensive REST API, which I ve used to integrate it a bit with my Debian systems. More on that another time. Mobile app Mobile apps are a common thing people look for in these systems. You can t use the Insteon app with the ISY, but they recommend Mobilinc Pro. It does the job. Mobilinc tries to sell a $10/mo connection service, which is totally unnecessary if you can figure out SSL, and has on-screen buttons to bypass, but judging by the Google Play reviews, a lot of people thought they had to pay for that and uninstalled it afterwards. Future directions Many people put in electronic door locks. I don t plan to do that. I do plan to have the house systems be aware of the general state of things (is the house empty? is everyone asleep?) and do appropriate things with lighting and HVAC. I don t really expect the savings in power for lighting control to pay for the system anytime soon. However, if it can achieve some savings in heating and cooling, it may well be able to pay for itself in a few years. So my big next step is thermostats that can integrate with all this. I have had a water mess in my basement before, and water leak sensors are a very common item people deploy in these setups. I certainly plan to add a few of them. Door-open sensors are also useful; they trigger more instantly and reliably than motion detectors and can be used in some nice ways (is it after dark and the door is opening when the house is vacant? If so, turn on the light nearby in case their hands are full.) Issues Some issues I ran into so far are already discussed above. One other major one involves SSL on the ISY-994i Pro. The method for adding SSL keys is cumbersome, but the processor on the device which appears to run some sort of Java is just not up to working with SSL. Apparently they only recently got it fast enough to work with 2048-bit keys. This is rather undocumented, though, so I obtained a cert for a 4096-bit key, my usual. Attempting to connect to the box with SSL appeared to hang not just that but confuse a lot of other things on it as well. Turned out it wasn t hung; it just too a minute and 45 seconds to complete the SSL handshake. Moral of the story: use 2048-bit keys, or stunnel4 or some such to re-wrap the SSL communications with a stronger key. The KeypadLinc backlights can be completely shut off, and both their on and off levels can be customized. I have it set to shut off the backlight during the day and turn it on at night. The wall switches, however, can t have their brightness status LED bar entirely shut off. They can be made dim, but don t ever go away. That s rather annoying. Also annoying is that Insteon doesn t make switches in the traditional toggle switch style in colors other than white. As our house had mostly black switches, I was forced into the Decora style. Overall thoughts This has been a great learning experience for me in a number of ways. I have only begun to tap what the system can do, and the real benefits will probably come once I get the heating and cooling into the mix. It s quite a nice way for a geek to go, and the improvements in lighting have also been popular with everyone else in the house.

In the middle of OPW internship I originally thought taking part in FOSSOPW is a great chance to lift my coding skills and I shouldn t miss it. As time passes by, I now have a new thought towards it. # 1 It do improves your coding skill. Zack, Matthieu and I often have discussions on coding style. For example, once Zack said, For code like this, you should explicitly use an if/else clause, not if-return. I was totally unaware of this sort of issue. Actually I even didn t know how I should call this problem. Matthieu gave me a detailed FYI link on this in no time. Besides, my completeness of thinking is also trained. Recently, I was fixing a HTTP GET Method ?suite=suite-name issue. It s a trivial task. And you know most trivial tasks require lots of scattered modification on the source code base. I did have fixed most places, such as the pages of /src/packagename and /search/ . Zack did a thorough review, and pointed out that the pages rendered by /prefix has some malformed urls in the HTML. Waiiiit, I should have noticed it. But somehow I missed it. Maybe because my mind was wandering at that time? This made me think, I shall have a thorough view of what I should do before getting my hands dirty. Or more preferably, if I could write down what I exactly want to achieve before coding, then silly problems definitely wouldn t occur. This may sound a little bit like TDD. ;). # 2 It makes you look like a (not-that-good) ninja. I use a macbook. It s not my fault! I ve tried several times, but I never successfully find a laptop that is not capable of boiling eggs when running Debian. (and especially KDE+Debian). So I have no way but switched to OSX. The development of Debsources happens on a remote Ubuntu LTS (now Debian SID, haha) virtual machine. Of course I have to install all the dependency on my own, e.g., Postgres, set up port-forwarding, e.g., ssh -D, write automate shell scripts, e.g., dash, but more importantly, I am forced to live under the dark terminal with no GUI. You know the feeling when pain hurts? Yes, exactly! But I survived. How shall I call myself now? A dedicated with-a-lot-of-useless-plugin-installed vimmer? A fond-of-fancy-window tmux-er? Yep, both. I finally found a comfort zone under the black-white-blinking screen. I wonder how people feel when they see a girl hanging out in the library, facing a full-screened black console, typing at a speed of 140wpm (Yeah, I am kidding). I don t know, but please don t call me a geek. Show me your respect, I am a ninja! # 3 It tells you communication is the most important. I bet anyone who has participated in a group-based project would understand what I mean. For one perspective, communication helps to eliminate misunderstanding. So I won t doing some useless stuff for all day and finally find out that it totally doesn t meet the requirement. On the other hand, it speeds up your learning process. I often have problems on git. So in the email I will complain if I mess up with the git repo. After a short while, my dear mentors will reply in detail on how to correctly do the git stuff. My OPW journey is cool! ;).

Here is a slightly overdue status on Jessie.

• We are not ready to set a date on a Jessie release yet. Even if we were, it would be unlikely that said date would be in January. Accordingly, it is safe to assume that the rapid automatic removals clause of the freeze policy will be applied before our release. If your package (or a package you use) depend on any package in this list, then they are at risk.
• It is unclear to me whether our CD1s are able to contain all the necessary packages. This was a major issue for Wheezy. So far I have only done some minor prodding here. However, I really want this item done soon as it can easily take a month or more to resolve this.
• While the release notes have been improved quite a bit, I am certain that there are more cases we can cover. As an example, I am looking for input on #773386.
• Despite the declining number of RC bugs, we still have some particular unhealthy ones left. E.g. #759530. There is also a view of some of the known unfixed Jessie blockers.
• We have had a number of issues with APT and dpkg (e.g. trigger cycles, APT breaking under puppet) that caused upgrade failures or were a severe regression. Most of these have been resolved now. There are some trigger issues left and I have pushed for a fixed dpkg at the cost of possibly removing some packages. See #772866 (among others).

Stricter freeze policy per January 5th The next timed change of the freeze policy will apply per January 5th. After that date, we will only accept RC bugs fixes. Which means it is final chance for translation updates. More on RC bugs In absolute numbers, the RC bugs have declined quite well. We are below 150 now. We lost quite a bit of traction in December compared to November. However, November was an extremely efficient month. However, we still need the final push here. Debian installer release pending Yesterday, we received a list of packages that needed to be unblocked for d-i with a remark that a release of d-i might follow. Based on what we have unblocked previously, it will likely contain some (improved?) UEFI support. Pending Debian 7.8 release While not directly relevant to Jessie, we also got a pending Wheezy release planned for the 10th of January. The window for getting changes into the 7.8 release closes this weekend. Want to help?

• File bugs against release-notes (source at [RN source]) and installation-guide for missing or outdated documentation. Patches and drafts especially welcome.
• Fix RC bugs especially the known Jessie blockers.
• Test upgrade paths and installation media. Although in both cases, you may want to wait a bit (for the new dpkg to migrate and for the new debian-installer release respectively).
• Consider offering your help to teams such as the CD team or debian-installer team.

Thank you, [RN source]: https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/ddp/manuals/trunk/release-notes/ svn co https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/ddp/manuals/trunk/release-notes/ Git Repo: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/jcristau/release-notes.git/
Filed under: Debian, Release-Team

Here is a slightly overdue status on Jessie.

• We are not ready to set a date on a Jessie release yet. Even if we were, it would be unlikely that said date would be in January. Accordingly, it is safe to assume that the rapid automatic removals clause of the freeze policy will be applied before our release. If your package (or a package you use) depend on any package in this list, then they are at risk.
• It is unclear to me whether our CD1s are able to contain all the necessary packages. This was a major issue for Wheezy. So far I have only done some minor prodding here. However, I really want this item done soon as it can easily take a month or more to resolve this.
• While the release notes have been improved quite a bit, I am certain that there are more cases we can cover. As an example, I am looking for input on #773386.
• Despite the declining number of RC bugs, we still have some particular unhealthy ones left. E.g. #759530. There is also a view of some of the known unfixed Jessie blockers.
• We have had a number of issues with APT and dpkg (e.g. trigger cycles, APT breaking under puppet) that caused upgrade failures or were a severe regression. Most of these have been resolved now. There are some trigger issues left and I have pushed for a fixed dpkg at the cost of possibly removing some packages. See #772866 (among others).

Stricter freeze policy per January 5th The next timed change of the freeze policy will apply per January 5th. After that date, we will only accept RC bugs fixes. Which means it is final chance for translation updates. More on RC bugs In absolute numbers, the RC bugs have declined quite well. We are below 150 now. We lost quite a bit of traction in December compared to November. However, November was an extremely efficient month. However, we still need the final push here. Debian installer release pending Yesterday, we received a list of packages that needed to be unblocked for d-i with a remark that a release of d-i might follow. Based on what we have unblocked previously, it will likely contain some (improved?) UEFI support. Pending Debian 7.8 release While not directly relevant to Jessie, we also got a pending Wheezy release planned for the 10th of January. The window for getting changes into the 7.8 release closes this weekend. Want to help?

• File bugs against release-notes (source at [RN source]) and installation-guide for missing or outdated documentation. Patches and drafts especially welcome.
• Fix RC bugs especially the known Jessie blockers.
• Test upgrade paths and installation media. Although in both cases, you may want to wait a bit (for the new dpkg to migrate and for the new debian-installer release respectively).
• Consider offering your help to teams such as the CD team or debian-installer team.

Thank you, [RN source]: https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/ddp/manuals/trunk/release-notes/ svn co https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/ddp/manuals/trunk/release-notes/ Git Repo: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/jcristau/release-notes.git/
Filed under: Debian, Release-Team

New set of metapackagesThe version number of debian-med metapackages was bumped to 1.99 as a signal that we plan to release version 2.0 with Jessie. As usual the metapackages will be recreated shortly before the final release to include potential changes in the package pool. Feel free to install the metapackages med-* with the package installer of your choice. As always you can have a look at the packages in our focus by visiting our tasks pages. Please note that there may be new packages that aren t ready for release and that won t be installed by using the current metapackages. This is because we don t stop packaging software when the current testing is in freeze. Some support for Hospital Information SystemsThis release contains, for the first time some support for Hospital Information Systems (HIS) with the dependency fis-gtm of the med-his metapackage. This was made possible due to the work of Luis Ibanez (at kitware at the time when working on the packaging) and Amul Shah (fisglobal). Thanks to a fruitful cooperation between upstream FIS and Debian the build system of fis-gtm was adapted to enable an easier packaging. The availability of fis-gtm will simplify running Vista-foia on Debian systems and we are finally working on packaging Vista as well to make Debian fit for running inside hospitals. There was some interesting work done by Emilien Klein who was working hard to get GNUHealthpackaged. Emilien has given a detailed explanation on the Debian Med mailing list giving reasons why he removed the existing packages from the Debian package pool again. While this is a shame for GNUHealth users there might be an opportunity to revive this effort if there was better coordination between upstream and Tryton (which is the framework GNUHealth is based upon). In any case the packaging code in SVN as a useful resource to base private packages on. Feel free to contact us via the Debian Med mailing list if you consider creating GNUHealth Debian packages. Packages moved from non-free to mainThe Debian Med team worked hard to finally enable DFSG free licenses for PHYLIPand other package based on this tool. PHYLIP is well known in bioinformatics and actually one of the first packages in this field inside Debian (oldest changelog entry 28 Aug 1998). Since then it was considered non-free because its use was restricted to scientific / non-commercial use and also has the condition that you need to pay a fee to the University of Washington if you intend to use it commercially. Since Debian Med was started we were in continuous discussion with the author Joe Felsenstein. We even started an online petition to show how large the interest in a DFSG free PHYLIP might be. As a side note: This petition was *not* presented to the authors since they happily decided to move to a free license because of previous discussion and since they realised that the money they "gained" over they years was only minimal. The petition is mentioned here to demonstrate that it is possible to gather support to see positive changes implemented that benefit all users and that this approach can be used for similar cases. So finally PHYLIP was released in September under a BSD-2-clause license and in turn SeaView (a similarly famous program and also long term non-free citizen) depending on PHYLIP code was freed as well. There are several other tools like python-biopython and python-cogent which are calling PHYLIP if it exists. So not only is PHYLIP freed we can now stop removing those parts of the test suites of these other tools that are using PHYLIP. Thanks to all who participated in freeing PHYLIP specifically its author Joe Felsenstein. Autopkgtest in Debian Med packagesWe tried hard to add autopkgtests to all packages where some upstream test suite exists and we also tried to create some tests on our own. Since we consider testing of scientific software a very important feature this work was highly focused on for the Jessie release. When doing so we were able to drastically enhance the reliability of packages and found new formerly hidden dependency relations. Perhaps the hardest work was to run the full test suite of python-biopython which also has uncovered some hidden bugs in the upstream code on architectures that are not so frequently used in the field of bioinformatics. This was made possible by the very good support of upstream who were very helpful in solving the issues we reported. However, we are not at 100% coverage of autopkgtest and we will keep on working on our packages in the next release cycle for Jessie+1. General quality assuranceA general inspection of all Debian Med packages was done to check all packages which were uploaded before the Wheezy release and never touched since then. Those packages where checked for changed upstream locations which might have been hidden from uscan and in some cases new upstream releases were spotted by doing this investigation. Other old packages were re-uploaded conforming to current policy and packaging tools also polishing lintian issues. Publication with Debian Med involvementThe Debian Med team is involved in a paper which is in BioMed Central (in press). The title will be "Community-driven development for computational biology at Sprints, Hackathons and Codefests" Updated team metricsThe team metrics graphs on the Debian Med Blend entry page were updated. At the bottom you will find a 3D Bar chart of dependencies of selected metapackages over different versions. It shows our continuous work in several fields. Thanks to all Debian Med team members for their rigorous work on our common goal to make Debian the best operating system for medicine and biology. Please note that VCS stat calculation is currently broken and does not reflect the latest commits this year. Blends installable via d-i?In bug #758116 it is requested to list all Blends and thus also Debian Med in the initial tasksel selection. This would solve a long term open issue which was addessed more than eleven years ago (in #186085) in a more general and better way. This would add a frequently requested feature by our users who always wonder how to install Debian Med. While there is no final decision on bug #758116 and we are quite late with the request to get this implemented in Jessie feel free to contribute ideas so that this selection of Blends can be done in the best possible manner. Debian Med Bug Squashing Advent Calendar 2014The Debian Med team will again do the Bug Squashing Advent Calendar. Feel free to join us in our bug squashing effort where we close bugs while other people are opening doors. :-)

[Warning: quite a bit of pics in this post] [Edit: changed the post title, while I love the music, the actual lyrics of "Shake Rattle and Roll" made me facepalm. Ronnie Dawson's song is better :)] Last weekend I've been in Senigallia for the 15th edition of Summer Jamboree.
It was my first time there, and it was epic. Really.
If you are into roots music and early rock'n'roll and/or into vintage 40s and 50s clothes, go there.
You won't regret it! (You have time until August 10th, hurry up!) If you follow my identi.ca account (whooo! shameless plug!), you may know that I love music in general and Blues, Jazz and Rockabilly in particular.
If you read my blog, you may know that I make clothes - particularly reproductions of 50s and retro clothes.
So, it's not much of a surprise that going to the Summer Jamboree has been a mindblowing experience to me.
What surprised me it's that I've felt the very same wonder of my first Debconf: the amazing feeling that you are not alone, there are other people like you out there, who love the same things you love, who are silly about the same little details (yes, I equally despise historically innacurate pin up shoes and non free software), who dance - metaphorically and not - at your same beat.
Same wonder I felt when I first read some authors - Orwell and David Foster Wallace, just to mention a couple - or when I first delved in anarchist thinkers.
By nature I'm not much of a social person, and I tend to live and love alone. But that sense of being part of something, to find like-minded people always blows me away. I'm not much of a blog writer, so I won't probably be able to give you a good impression of the awesomness of it.
But hey, watch me trying. The Vintage Market I spent most of the morning travelling by train to reach Senigallia (and met the most beautiful French girl ever in the process, who sketched me in her notebook because, hey!, I was already in full Rockabilly gear).
The hotel was pretty close to the station, and to the part of the city where the festival was taking place, so I spent a couple of hours sleeping, then started the adventure.
The festival takes place mostly near the Rocca Roveresca, a beautiful fifteenth century castle, and on its gardens, but the all the other venues are in walking distance.
All around the Rocca there is a market with vintage clothes, records, shoes, retro jewelry. A special mention for two fantastic dressmakers: Laura of Bloody Edith Atelier from Rome and Debora of The Black Pinafore from Sarzana. I bought just a piece from each of them, but I was able to do that only with a huge amount of self restraint. Guitars! Tattoos! Yes, I may have spent a bit drooling on the Gibson Cherry Red, and I tried (without amp, though) that beautiful orange Gretsch Electromatic. And Greg Gregory of the Travel Ink Tattoo Studio from UK was there, with his shiny Airstream. I also spent a while among the records in the Bear Family Records booth. They are a Germany based independent record label specialised in reissues of country and 50s rock'n'roll. Couldn't resist, and I bought a beautiful Sun Records' tshirt. Just Rockin' and Rollin'. Aka: dance time After that, it was time to dance. I missed the dance camp of the afternoon, but the DJ sets were fantastic, all 40s and 50s stuff, and I fell in love with Lindy Hop and Boogie Woogie, and well, obviously, Jive. I could have spent hours watching the people dancing, and clumsily trying the most basic moves myself. People And the people, did I mention the people?
They were cosplaying the 40s and 50s so wonderfully I couldn't help but take some photos (and find a new fetish of mine: men in 40s clothes. Sexy as hell). For instance, Angelo Di Liberto, artistic director of the festival with the beautiful burlesque artist Grace Hall. Or the amazingly dressed German couple I met in via Carducci. And this couple too, was pretty cool. The Prettiest Smile award goes to these lovely ladies! Cars Who knows me, can tell that I don't love cars.
They stink, they are noisy, they are big.
But these ones where shiny and looked beautiful. Also, the black Cadillac had the terrible effect on me of putting "Santa Claus is Back in Town" in my head (or, more precisely, Elvis tomcatting his way through the song, singing "Got no sleigh with reindeer / No sack on my back / You're gonna see me comin' in a big black Cadillac"). Music! Sadly, I missed Stray Cat's Slim Jim Phantom but I was just in time for Ben E. King.
It was lovely: backed by the house band (The Good Fellas), he sang a lot of old Drifters hits, from On Broadway to Save the Last Dance for Me to - obviously - the great Stand By Me. Then a bit of hillbilly country, with Shorty Tom and the Longshots, a French combo consisting of a double bass, a rhythm guitar and a steel guitar. And, well, more dancing: the dj sets on the three stages went on until 3 am. Day 2 The next morning I took advantage of the early opening of Rocca Roveresca to visit it. The Rocca itself is beautiful and very well maintained, and hosts various exhibitions.
"Marilyn In White" shows the incredible photos taken by George Barris on the set of "The Seven Year Itch" as well as some taken in 1962. Beautiful, really, especially the series on the beach. But the ones moving me were the pics from "Buddy Holly, The Day The Music Dies": a collection of photos taken by Bill Francis during the (sadly brief) career of Buddy Holly from the very beginnings to his death. After that, it was time to come back to year 2014, but really I felt like I've walked for a while in another decade and planet. And the cool thing is that I could enjoy the great 40s and 50s music and dances (and clothes!) without the horrible stereotypes and cultural norms of the time period. A total win. :) So, ehm, that's it. I'm a bit sad to be back, and to cheer myself up I'm already planning to attend Wanda Jackson gig in Aarburg (CH) next month.
And take Lindy Hop and Boogie lessons, obviously.

Late last year I compared the prices of mobile providers after Aldi started getting greedy [1]. Now Aldi have dramatically changed their offerings [2] so at least some of the phones I manage have to be switched to another provider. There are three types of use that are of interest to me. One is for significant use, that means hours of calls per month, lots of SMS, and at least 2G of data transfer. Another is for very light use, maybe a few minutes of calls per month where the aim is to have the lowest annual price for an almost unused phone. The third is somewhere in between and being able to easily switch between plans for moderate and significant use is a major benefit. Firstly please note that I have no plans to try and compare all telcos, I ll only compare ones that seem to have good offers. Ones with excessive penalty clauses or other potential traps are excluded. Sensible Plans The following table has the minimum costs for plans where the amount paid counts as credit for calls and data, this makes it easy to compare those plans.

Plan	Cost per min or SMS	Data	Minimum cost
AmaySIM As You Go [3]	$0.12	$0.05/meg, $19.90 for 2.5G in 30 days, $99.90 for 10G in 365days	$10 per 90 days
AmaySIM Flexi [4]	$0.09	500M included, free calls to other AmaySIM users, $19.90 for 2.5G in 30 days, $99.90 for 10G in 365days	$19.90 per 30 days
Aldi pre-paid [5]	$0.12	$0.05/meg, $30 for 3G in 30 days	$15 per 365 days

Amaysim has a $39.90 Unlimited plan which doesn t have any specific limits on the number of calls and SMS (unlike Aldi Unlimited ) [6], that plan also offers 4G of data per month. The only down-side is that changing between plans is difficult enough to discourage people from doing so, but if you use your phone a lot every month then this would be OK. AmaySIM uses the Optus network. Lebara has a $29.90 National Unlimited plan that offers unlimited calls and SMS and 2G of data [7]. The Lebara web site doesn t seem to include details such as how long pre-paid credit lasts, the lack of such detail doesn t give me confidence in their service. Lebara uses the Vodafone network which used to have significant problems, hopefully they fixed it. My lack of confidence in the Vodafone network and in Lebara s operations makes me inclined to avoid them. Obscure Plans Telechoice has a $28 per month i28 plan that offers unlimited SMS, $650 of calls (which can be international) at a rate of over $1 per minute, unlimited SMS, unlimited calls to other Telechoice customers, and 2G of data [8]. According to the Whirlpool forum they use the Telstra network although the TeleChoice web site doesn t state this (one of many failings of a horrible site). The TeleChoice Global Liberty Starter plan costs $20 per month and includes unlimited calls to other TeleChoice customers, unlimited SMS, $500 of calls at a rate of over $1 per minute, and 1G of data [9]. Which One to Choose For my relatives who only rarely use their phones the best options are the AmaySIM As You Go [3] plan which costs $40 per 360 days and the Aldi prepaid which costs $15 per year. Those relatives are already on Aldi and it seems that the best option for them is to keep using it. My wife typically uses slightly less than 1G of data per month and makes about 25 minutes of calls and SMS. For her use the best option is the AmaySIM As You Go [3] plan which will cost her about $4 in calls per month and $99.90 for 10G of data which will last 10 months. That will average out to about $13 per month. It could end up being a bit less because the 10G of data that can be used in a year gives an incentive to reduce data use while previously with Aldi she had no reason to use less than 2G of data per month. Her average cost will be $11.30 per month if she can make 10G of data last a year. The TeleChoice Global Liberty Starter [9] plan is also appealing, but it is a little more expensive at $20 per month, it would be good value for someone who averages more than 83 minutes per month and also uses almost 1G of data. Some of my relatives use significantly less than 1G of data per month. For someone who uses less than 166MB of billable data per month then the Aldi pre-paid rate of $0.05 per meg [5] is the best, but with a modern phone that does so many things in the background and a plan that rounds up data use it seems almost impossible to be billed for less than 300MB/month. Even when you tell the phone not to use any mobile data some phones still do, on a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 5 I ve found that the only way to prevent being billed for 3G data transfer is to delete the APN from the phone s configuration. So it seems that the AmaySIM As You Go [3] plan with a 10G annual data pack is the best option. One of my relatives needs less than 1G of data per month and not many calls, but needs to be on the Telstra network because their holiday home is out of range of Optus. For them the TeleChoice Global Liberty Starter [9] plan seems best. I have been averaging a bit less than 2G of data transfer per month. If I use the AmaySIM As You Go [3] plan with the 10G data packs then I would probably average about $18 worth of data per month. If I could keep my average number of phone calls below $10 (83 minutes) then that would be the cheapest option. However I sometimes spend longer than that on the phone (one client with a difficult problem can involve an hour on the phone). So the TeleChoice i28 plan looks like the best option for me, it gives $650 of calls at a rate of $0.97 per minute + $0.40 connection (that s $58.60 for a hour long call I can do 11 of those calls in a month) and 2G of data. The Telstra coverage is an advantage for TeleChoice, I can run my phone as a Wifi access point so my wife can use the Internet when we are out of Optus range. Please let me know if there are any good Australian telcos you think I ve missed or if there are any problems with the above telcos that I m not aware of.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/11/10/aldi-changes/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/03/23/aldi-misleading/
• [3] http://www.amaysim.com.au/mobile-plans/amaysim-as-you-go.html
• [4] http://www.amaysim.com.au/mobile-plans/amaysim-flexi.html
• [5] https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans
• [6] http://www.amaysim.com.au/mobile-plans/amaysim-unlimited.html
• [7] http://www.lebara.com.au/national-unlimited
• [8] http://www.telechoice.com.au/about/news/mobile-plans/i28-global-sim-plan-for-your-iphone
• [9] http://www.telechoice.com.au/about/news/mobile-plans/global-liberty-starter-sim-plans