Search Results: "dz"

13 April 2017

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2017

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In March, about 190 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours has been unchanged but will likely decrease slightly next month as one sponsor will not renew his support (because they have switched to CentOS). The security tracker currently lists 52 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 40. The number of open issues continued its slight increase not worrisome yet but we need to keep an eye on this situation. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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28 March 2017

Axel Beckert: System Tray Icon to Monitor a Linux Software RAID Locally

About a year ago I bought a new workstation computer for myself at home. It s a Tuxedo XUX_Cube which is advertised as gaming PC. But I ordered a slightly atypical non-gamer configuration: Of course the box runs Debian. To be more precise, it runs Debian Sid with sysvinit-core as init system and i3 as window manager. As I usually have no monitoring clients on my laptops and private workstations, I rather often felt the urge to do a cat /proc/mdstat on that box. So at some point I wanted something like smart-notifier, but for Linux Software (MD) RAIDs. And since I found nothing, I did what Open Source guys usually do in such cases: I wrote it myself of course in Perl and called it systray-mdstat. First I wondered about which build system would be most suitable for that task, but in the end I once again went with Dist::Zilla for the upstream build system and hence dh-dist-zilla for the Debian packaging. Ideas for the actual implementation were taken from Wouter s fdpowermon for the systray icon framework in Perl and Myon s mdstat Xymon plugin for an already proven logic to parse /proc/mdstat. (Both, Wouter and Myon have stated in a GnuPG-signed e-mail that I copied less code than would validate their copyrights, so I was able to license it under a single license, namely GNU GPL version 3.) As of now, systray-mdstat is also available as package in Debian Unstable. It won t make it to Stretch as its first line of code has been written after the soft-freeze for Stretch was already in place.

Axel Beckert: Maintaining Debian Packages of Perl Modules with dh-dist-zilla

Maintaining Debian packages of Perl modules usually can be done with the common git-buildpackage (aka gbp) workflow with its three git branches master (or debian), upstream and pristine-tar: This also works more or less fine for Perl modules, where the Debian package maintainer is also the upstream developer. In that case mostly the upstream branch is used (and then maybe called master while the Debian packaging branch is then called debian). But the files needed for a proper so called CPAN distribution of a Perl module often contain redundant information (version numbers, required modules, etc.) which needs to be maintained. And for that, many people prefer Don t Repeat Yourself (DRY) as a principle. Dist::Zilla One nice and common tool for that is Dist::Zilla or short dzil. It generates most redundant but required data out of a central source, e.g. Dist::Zilla s dist.ini or the contained .pm files, etc. dzil build creates tar ball which contains all files necessary by CPAN. But now we have a dilemma: Debian expects those generated files inside the upstream branch while the files are only generated from other files in that branch. There are multiple solutions, but all of them involve committing generated files to the git repository: librun-parts-perl aka Run::Parts (a Perl wrapper around and a pure-perl implementation of Debian s run-parts tool) was initially maintained in the latter way. But especially in cases where we just need a Perl module packaged as .deb without uploading it to CPAN (e.g. project-internal modules), this is a tedious workflow and overkill. It would be much nicer if debhelper would just call dzil to generate all the stuff it needs to build the package. dh-dist-zilla Well, you can do that now, at least with Debian Jessie. This is what dh-dist-zilla does: It is a debhelper sequence plugin which calls dzil build and dzil clean in the right moment and takes care that all dh_auto_* commands look in the directory with the generated files instead of the rather clean project root directory. To use dh-dist-zilla, you just need to add a build-dependency on it and the Dist::Zilla plugins you use, and add --with dist-zilla to your minimal dh-style debian/rules file: 
#!/usr/bin/make -f
%:
	dh $@ --with dist-zilla
That s it. With regards to workflow and git branches, you may still want to use separate branches for upstream work and debian work, and you may want to continue to use pristine-tar, but you don t have to commit generated files to git anymore and you can maintain a clean master branch with nearly no redundancy. And if you need to generate to final upstream tar ball for you debian package, just call dh get-orig-source or maybe easier to use with tab completion dh_dist_zilla_origtar. This is how the librun-parts-perl package is maintained nowadays. There s otherwise not much difference to the old, classically maintained versions. More DRY Next step in the DRY evolution is to reduce redundancies between upstream (Dist::Zilla based) packaging and the Debian packaging. There are a few tools available, partially brand new, partially not yet packaged: I wouldn t be surprised if there s more to come in this area. P.S.: I actually started this blog posting in September 2014 and never finished it until now. Had to kick out some already outdated again stuff, but also could add some more recent things.

1 March 2017

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities February 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: do the samhain dance, ask for new local contacts at one site, ask local admins to reset one machine, powercycle 2 dead machines, redirect 1 user to the support channels, redirect 1 user to a service admin, redirect 1 spam reporter to the right mechanisms, investigate mail logs for a missing bug report, ping bugs-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka and remove data, poke cdimage-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka, update a cron job on denis.d.o for the rename of letsencrypt.sh to dehydrated, debug planet.d.o issue and remove stray cron job lock file, check if ftp is used on a couple of security.d.o mirrors, discuss storage upgrade for LeaseWeb for snapshot.d.o/deriv.d.n/etc, investigate SSD SMART error and ignore the unknown attribute, ask 9 users to restart their processes, investigate apt-get update failure in nagios, swapoff/swapon a swap file to drain it, restart/disable some failed services, help restore the backup server, debug stretch /dev/log issue,
  • Debian QA: deploy merged PTS/tracker patches,
  • Debian wiki: answer 1 IP-blocked VPN user, pinged 1 user on IRC about their bouncing mail, disabled 4 accounts due to bouncing mail, redirect 1 person to documentation/lists, whitelist 5 email addresses, forward 1 password reset token, killed 1 spammer account, reverted 1 spammer edit,
  • Debian mentors: security upgrades, check which email a user signed up with
  • Openmoko: security upgrades, daemon restarts, reboot

Debian derivatives
  • Turned off the census cron job because it ran out of disk space
  • Update Armbian sources.list
  • Ping siduction folks about updating their sources.list
  • Start a discussion about DebConf17
  • Notify the derivatives based on jessie or older that stretch is frozen
  • Invite Rebellin Linux (again)

Sponsors The libesedb Debian backport was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

27 December 2016

Dominique Dumont: New dzil command to install author dependencies as Debian packages

Hello Dist::Zilla is a great tool to limit tedious tasks while working on Perl modules. For instance, dzil provides tools like dzil authordeps or dzil listdeps to list dependencies.
This list of Perl modules can then be installed with cpanm: 
dzil authordeps --missing   cpanm
dzil listdeps --missing   cpanm
On a Debian system, one may prefer to install Perl modules using Debian packages. Installing build dependencies can be done with apt build-dep, but apt does not handle Dist::Zilla author dependencies. The new authordebs Dist::Zilla sub-command was wriiten to fill this gap. When run in a directory containing the source of a Perl module that uses Dist::Zilla, you can run dzil installdebs to list the Debian packages required to run the dzil command. You can also run dzil installdebs -install to install author dependencies (using sudo under the hood). See: On Debian, authordebs is provided by libdist-zilla-app-command-authordebs-perl All the best
Tagged: debian, dist-zilla, Perl

17 November 2016

Uwe Kleine-K nig: Installing Debian Stretch on a Turris Omnia

Recently I got "my" Turris Omnia and it didn't take long to replace the original firmware with Debian. If you want to reproduce, here is what you have to do: Open the case of the Turris Omnia, connect the hacker pack (or an RS232-to-TTL adapter) to access the U-Boot prompt (see Turris Omnia: How to use the "Hacker pack"). Then download the installer and device tree: 
# cd /srv/tftp
# wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/vmlinuz
# wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/initrd.gz
# wget https://www.kleine-koenig.org/tmp/armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb
(The latter is not included yet in Debian, but I'm working on that.) and after connecting the Turris Omnia's WAN to a dhcp managed network start it in U-Boot: 
dhcp
setenv serverip 192.168.1.17
tftpboot 0x01000000 vmlinuz
tftpboot 0x02000000 armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb
tftpboot 0x03000000 initrd.gz
bootz 0x01000000 0x03000000:$filesize 0x02000000
With 192.168.1.17 being the IPv4 of the machine you have the tftp server running. I suggest to use btrfs as rootfs because that works well with U-Boot. Before finishing the installation put the dtb in the rootfs as /boot/dtb. To then boot into Debian do in U-Boot: 
setenv mmcboot=btrload mmc 0 0x01000000 boot/vmlinuz\; btrload mmc 0 0x02000000 boot/dtb\; btrload mmc 0 0x03000000 boot/initrd.img\; bootz 0x01000000 0x03000000:$filesize 0x02000000
setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 rootfstype=btrfs rootdelay=2 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootflags=commit=5 rw
saveenv
boot
Known issues: If you have problems, don't hesitate to contact me. Also check the Debian Wiki for further details.

8 November 2016

Uwe Kleine-K nig: Installing Debian Stretch on an Omnia Turris

Recently I got "my" Omnia Turris and it didn't take long to replace the original firmware with Debian. If you want to reproduce, here is what you have to do: Open the case of the Omnia Turris, connect the hacker pack (or an RS232-to-TTL adapter) to access the U-Boot prompt (see Turris Omnia: How to use the "Hacker pack"). Then download the installer and device tree: 
# cd /srv/tftp
# wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/vmlinuz
# wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/initrd.gz
# wget https://www.kleine-koenig.org/tmp/armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb
(The latter is not included yet in Debian, but I'm working on that.) and after connecting the Omnia Turris's WAN to a dhcp managed network start it in U-Boot: 
dhcp
setenv serverip 192.168.1.17
tftpboot 0x01000000 vmlinuz
tftpboot 0x02000000 armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb
tftpboot 0x03000000 initrd.gz
bootz 0x01000000 0x03000000:$filesize 0x02000000
With 192.168.1.17 being the IPv4 of the machine you have the tftp server running. I suggest to use btrfs as rootfs because that works well with U-Boot. Before finishing the installation put the dtb in the rootfs as /boot/dtb. To then boot into Debian do in U-Boot: 
setenv mmcboot=btrload mmc 0 0x01000000 boot/vmlinuz\; btrload mmc 0 0x02000000 boot/dtb\; btrload mmc 0 0x03000000 boot/initrd.img\; bootz 0x01000000 0x03000000:$filesize 0x02000000
setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 rootfstype=btrfs rootdelay=2 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootflags=commit=5 rw
saveenv
boot
Known issues: If you have problems, don't hesitate to contact me.

25 October 2016

Laura Arjona Reina: Rankings, Condorcet and free software: Calculating the results for the Stretch Artwork Survey

We had 12 candidates for the Debian Stretch Artwork and a survey was set up for allowing people to vote which one they prefer.

The survey was run in my LimeSurvey instance, surveys.larjona.net. LimeSurvey its a nice free software with a lot of features. It provides a Ranking question type, and it was very easy for allowing people to vote in the Debian style (Debian uses the Condorcet method in its elections).

However, although LimeSurvey offers statistics and even graphics to show the results of many type of questions, its output for the Ranking type is not useful, so I had to export the data and use another tool to find the winner.
Export the data from LimeSurvey
I ve created a read-only user to visit the survey site. With this visitor you can explore the survey questionnaire, its results, and export the data.
Username: stretch
Password: artwork
First attempt, the quick and easy (and nonfree, I guess)
There is an online tool to calculate the Condorcet winner, http://www.ericgorr.net/condorcet/
The steps I followed to feed the tool with the data from LimeSurvey were these:
1.- Went to admin interface of lime survey, selected the stretch artwork survey, responses and statistics, export results to application
2.- Selected Completed responses only , Question codes , Answer codes , and exported to CSV. (results_stretch1.csv)
3.- Opened the CSV with LibreOffice Calc, and removed these columns:
id submitdate lastpage startlanguage
4.- Remove the first row containing the headers and saved the result (results_stretch2.csv)
5.- In commandline:
sort results_stretch2.csv   uniq -c > results_stretch3.csv
6.- Opened results_stretch3.csv with LibreOffice Calc and merge delimitors when importing.
7.- Removed the first column (blank) and added a column between the numbers and the first ranked option, and fulfilled that column with : value. Saved (results_stretch4.csv)
8.- Opened results_stretch4.csv with my preferred editor and search and replace ,:, for : and after that, search and replace , for > . Save the result (results_stretch5.csv)
9.- Went to http://condorcet.ericgorr.net/, selected Condorcet basic, tell me some things , and pasted the contents of results_stretch5.csv there.
The results are in results_stretch1.html
But where is the source code of this Condorcet tool?
I couldn t find the source code (nor license) of the solver by Eric Gorr.
The tool is mentioned in http://www.accuratedemocracy.com/z_tools.htm where other tools are listed and when the tool is libre software, is noted so. But not in this case.
There, I found another tool, VoteEngine, which is open source, so I tried with that.
Second attempt: VoteEngine, a Free Open Source Software tool made with Python
I used a modification of voteengine-0.99 (the original zip is available in http://vote.sourceforge.net/ and a diff with the changes I made (basically, Numeric -> numpy and Int -> int, inorder that works in Debian stable), here.
Steps 1 to 4 are the same as in the first attempt.
5.- Sorted alphabetically the different 12 options to vote, and
assigned a letter to each one (saved the assignments in a file called
6.- Opened results_stretch2.csv with my favorite editor, and search
and replace the name of the different options, for their corresponding
letter in stretch_key.txt file.
Searched and replaced , for (space). Then, saved the results into
7.- Copied the input.txt file from voteengine-0.99 into stretch.txt and edited the options
to our needs. Pasted the contents of results_stretch3_voteengine.cvs
at the end of stretch.txt
8.-In the commandline
./voteengine.py <stretch.txt  > winner.txt
(winner.txt contains the results for the Condorcet method).
9.- I edited again stretch.txt to change the method to shulze and
calculated the results, and again with the smith method. The winner in
the 3 methods is the same. I pasted the summary of these 3 methods
(shulze and smith provide a ranked list) in stretch_results.txt
If it can be done, it can be done with R
I found the algstat R package:
which includes a condorcet function but I couldn t make it work with the data.
I m not sure how the data needs to be shaped. I m sure that this can be done in R and the problem is me, in this case. Comments are welcome, and I ll try to ask to a friend whose R skills are better than mine!
And another SaaS
I found https://www.condorcet.vote/ and its source code. It would be interesting to deploy a local instance to drive future surveys, but for this time I didn t want to fight with PHP in order to use only the solver part, nor install another SaaS in my home server just to find that I need some other dependency or whatever.
I ll keep an eye on this, though, because it looks like a modern and active project.
Finally, devotee
Well and which software Debian uses for its elections?
There is a git repository with devotee, you can clone it:
I found that although the tool is quite modular, it s written specifically for the Debian case (votes received by mail, GPG signed, there is a quorum, and other particularities) and I was not sure if I could use it with my data. It is written in Perl and then I understood it worse than the Python from VoteEngine.
Maybe I ll return to it, though, when I have more time, to try to put our data in the shape of a typicall tally.txt file and then see if the module solving the condorcet winner can work for me.
That s all, folks! (for now )
Comments
You can coment on this blog post in this pump.io thread

Filed under: Tools Tagged: data mining, Debian, English, SaaS, statistics

28 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 70 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 21 and Saturday August 27 2016: GSoC and Outreachy updates Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Reviews of unreproducible packages 10 package reviews have been added and 6 have been updated this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A large number of issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work 29 FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development Holger also created another test job for diffoscope on jenkins.debian.net, so that now also all commits to branches other than master are being tested. strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.023-1 was uploaded by Chris Lamb: 
 * Support Android .apk files with the JAR normalizer.
 * handlers/png.pm: Drop unused Archive::Zip import
 * Remove hyphen from non-determinism and non-deterministic.
 * javaproperties.pm: Match more styles of .properties and loosen filename matching.
 * Improve tests:
   - Make fixture runner generic to all normalizer types.
   - Replace (single) pearregistry test with a fixture.
   - Set a canonical time for fixture tests.
   - Add gzip testcase fixture.
   - Replace t/javadoc.t with fixture
   - Replace t/ar.t with a fixture.
   - t/javaproperties: move pom.properties and version.properties tests to fixtures
   - t/fixtures.t: move to using subtests
   - t/fixtures.t: Explicitly test that we can find a normalizer
   - t/fixtures.t: Don't run normalizer if we didn't find one.
strip-nondeterminism 0.023-2 uploaded by Mattia Rizzolo to allow stderr in autopkgtest. disorderfs development tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: Somewhat related to reproducible builds there has been a first Debian jenkins team maintainance meeting on the #debian-qa IRC channel, to discuss current issues with the setup and to start the work of migrating jenkins.debian.net to jenkins.debian.org. The next meeting will take place on September 28th 2016 at 19 UTC. Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

31 March 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in March 2016

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
Debian
  • Presented Reproducible Builds - fulfilling the original promise of free software at FOSSASIA '16.
  • Uploaded libfiu (0.94-4), adding a patch from Logan Rose to fix a FTBFS with ld --as-needed.
My work in the Reproducible Builds project was also covered in more depth in Lunar's weekly reports (#44, #45, #46, #47).
LTS

This month I have been paid to work 7 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). Whilst the LTS team will take over support from the Security Team on April 26, 2016, in the meantime I did the following:
  • Archived the squeeze distribution (via the FTPteam).
  • Assisted in preparing updates for python-django.
  • Helping end-users migrate to wheezy now that squeeze LTS has reached end-of-life.
FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 143 packages: acme-tiny, berkshelf-api, circlator, cloud-utils, corsix-th, cronic, diaspora-installer, dub, dumb-init, firehol, firetools, flask-bcrypt, flask-oldsessions, flycheck, ganeti, geany-plugins, git-build-recipe, git-phab, gnome-shell-extension-caffeine, gnome-shell-extension-mediaplayer, golang-github-cheggaaa-pb, golang-github-coreos-ioprogress, golang-github-cyberdelia-go-metrics-graphite, golang-github-cznic-ql, golang-github-elazarl-goproxy, golang-github-hashicorp-hil, golang-github-mitchellh-go-wordwrap, golang-github-mvdan-xurls, golang-github-paulrosania-go-charset, golang-github-xeipuuv-gojsonreference, golang-github-xeipuuv-gojsonschema, grilo-plugins, gtk3-nocsd, herisvm, identity4c, lemonldap-ng, libisal, libmath-gsl-perl, libmemcached-libmemcached-perl, libplack-middleware-logany-perl, libplack-middleware-logwarn-perl, libpng1.6, libqmi, librdf-generator-http-perl, libtime-moment-perl, libvirt-php, libxml-compile-soap-perl, libxml-compile-wsdl11-perl, linux, linux-tools, mdk-doc, mesa, mpdecimal, msi-keyboard, nauty, node-addressparser, node-ansi-regex, node-argparse, node-array-find-index, node-base62, node-co, node-component-consoler, node-crypto-cacerts, node-decamelize, node-delve, node-for-in, node-function-bind, node-generator-supported, node-invert-kv, node-json-localizer, node-normalize-git-url, node-nth-check, node-obj-util, node-read-file, node-require-dir, node-require-main-filename, node-seq, node-starttls, node-through, node-uid-number, node-uri-path, node-url-join, node-xmlhttprequest-ssl, ocrmypdf, octave-netcdf, open-infrastructure-container-tools, osmose-emulator, pdal, pep8, pg-backup-ctl, php-guzzle, printrun, pydocstyle, pysynphot, python-antlr3, python-biom-format, python-brainstorm, python-django-adminsortable, python-feather-format, python-gevent, python-lxc, python-mongoengine, python-nameparser, python-pdal, python-pefile, python-phabricator, python-pika-pool, python-pynlpl, python-qtawesome, python-requests-unixsocket, python-saharaclient, python-stringtemplate3, r-cran-adegraphics, r-cran-assertthat, r-cran-bold, r-cran-curl, r-cran-data.table, r-cran-htmltools, r-cran-httr, r-cran-lazyeval, r-cran-mcmc, r-cran-openssl, r-cran-pbdzmq, r-cran-rncl, r-cran-uuid, rawtran, reel, ruby-certificate-authority, ruby-rspec-pending-for, ruby-ruby-engine, ruby-ruby-version, scribus-ng, specutils, symfony, tandem-mass, tdb, thrift, udfclient, vala, why3, wmaker, xdg-app & xiccd.

7 March 2016

Hideki Yamane: Debian meeting in Tokyo (2016 March)

5th March, we've held Debian (Debian meeting) in Tokyo. (Cybozu, Inc.) kindly provides their office for meeting, thanks for folks in Cybozu.



This time, three talks were given:

    • Kentaro is "groonga"(an open-source fulltext search engine and column store) upstream author and package maintainer in Debian and Fedora. This talk is about his experience how to use Debian "porterbox" for non-DDs.
  • "Porting Debian to tilegx" by @wskoka
    • About his experience porting Debian to tilegx architecture, multicore processor family by Tilera. He is not porting expert ("I'm sale person", he said :), but did try&error and now apt is working on that machine.
  • "Introduction to Debian Ports" by John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
    • Adrian comes from Germany(!) and gave a talk about debian-ports.


During break time, did some discussion, GPG keysigning and enjoyed coffee and sweets provided by Cybozu, thanks!

And thanks for all participates!

5 March 2016

Mart n Ferrari: Serendipity

So I was reading G+, and saw there a post by Bernd Zeimetz about some "marble machine". Which turns out to be a very cool device that is programmed to play a single tune, and it is just mesmerising to watch:
Youtube video
So, naturally, I click through to see if there is more music made with this machine. It turns out the machine has been on the making for a while, and the first complete song (the one embedded above) was released only a few days ago. It is obviously porn for nerds, and Wired had already posted an article about it. So instead I found a band called like the machine: Wintergatan, which sounds pretty great. It took me a while to realise the guy who built the machine is one of the members of the band. They even have a page collecting all the videos about the machine.
Youtube video
After a while, and noticing the suggestions from Youtube, I realise that two of the members of Wintergatan were previously in Detektivbyr n, which is another band I love, and about which I wrote a post on this very blog, 7.5 years ago!1. So the sad news is that Detektivbyran disbanded, the good news is that this guy keeps making great music, now with insane machines.
Youtube video
I only discovered Detektivbyran in the first place thanks to an article the -now sadly defunct- Coilhouse Magazine. I find this 8-year long loop that closes unexpectedly during a late-night idle browsing session pretty amusing.
  1. I keep telling my friends that I was a hipster before it was cool to do so...
Comment

1 March 2016

Erich Schubert: Stop abusing lambda expressions - this is not functional programming

I know, all the Scala fanboys are going to hate me now. But:
Stop overusing lambda expressions.
Most of the time when you are using lambdas, you are not even doing functional programming, because you often are violating one key rule of functional programming: no side effects.
For example: 
collection.forEach(System.out::println);
is of course very cute to use, and is (wow) 10 characters shorter than: 
for (Object o : collection) System.out.println(o);
but this is not functional programming because it has side effects.
What you are doing are anonymous methods/objects, using a shorthand notion. It's sometimes convenient, it is usually short, and unfortunately often unreadable, once you start cramming complex problems into this framework.
It does not offer efficiency improvements, unless you have the propery of side-effect freeness (and a language compiler that can exploit this, or parallelism that can then call the function concurrently in arbitrary order and still yield the same result).
Here is an examples of how to not use lambdas:
DZone Java 8 Factorial (with boilerplate such as the Pair class omitted): 
Stream<Pair> allFactorials = Stream.iterate(
  new Pair(BigInteger.ONE, BigInteger.ONE),
  x -> new Pair(
    x.num.add(BigInteger.ONE),
    x.value.multiply(x.num.add(BigInteger.ONE))));
return allFactorials.filter(
  (x) -> x.num.equals(num)).findAny().get().value;
When you are fresh out of the functional programming class, this may seem like a good idea to you... (and in contrast to the examples mentioned above, this is really a functional program).
But such code is a pain to read, and will not scale well either. Rewriting this to classic Java yields: 
BigInteger cur = BigInteger.ONE, acc = BigInteger.ONE;
while(cur.compareTo(num) <= 0)  
  cur = cur.add(BigInteger.ONE); // Unfortunately, BigInteger is immutable!
  acc = acc.multiply(cur);
 
return acc;
Sorry, but the traditional loop is much more readable. It will still not perform very well (because of BigInteger not being designed for efficiency - it does not even make sense to allow BigInteger for num - the factorial of 2**63-1, the maximum of a Java long, needs 1020 bytes to store, i.e. about 500 exabyte.
For some, I did some benchmarking. One hundred random values num (of course the same for all methods) from the range 1 to 1000.
I also included this even more traditional version: 
BigInteger acc = BigInteger.ONE;
for(long i = 2; i <=x; i++)  
  acc = acc.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(i));
 
return acc;
Here are the results (Microbenchmark, using JMH, 10 warum iterations, 20 measurement iterations of 1 second each): 
functional    1000     100  avgt   20  9748276,035   222981,283  ns/op
biginteger    1000     100  avgt   20  7920254,491   247454,534  ns/op
traditional   1000     100  avgt   20  6360620,309   135236,735  ns/op
As you can see, this "functional" approach above is about 50% slower than the classic for-loop. This will be mostly due to the Pair and additional BigInteger objects created and garbage collected.
Apart from being substantially faster, the iterative approach is also much simpler to follow. (To some extend it is faster because it is also easier for the compiler!)
There was a recent blog post by Robert Br utigam that discussed exception throwing in Java lambdas and the pitfalls associated with this. The discussed approach involves abusing generics for throwing unknown checked exceptions in the lambdas, ouch.
Don't get me wrong. There are cases where the use of lambdas is perfectly reasonable. There are also cases where it adheres to the "functional programming" principle. For example, a stream.filter(x -> x.name.equals("John Doe")) can be a readable shorthand when selecting or preprocessing data. If it is really functional (side-effect free), then it can safely be run in parallel and give you some speedup.
Also, Java lambdas were carefully designed, and the hotspot VM tries hard to optimize them. That is why Java lambdas are not closures - that would be much less performant. Also, the stack traces of Java lambdas remain somewhat readable (although still much worse than those of traditional code). This blog post by Takipi showcases how bad the stacktraces become (in the Java example, the stream function is more to blame than the actual lambda - nevertheless, the actual lambda application shows up as the cryptic LmbdaMain$$Lambda$1/821270929.apply(Unknown Source) without line number information). Java 8 added new bytecodes to be able to optimize Lambdas better - earlier JVM-based languages may not yet make good use of this.
But you really should use lambdas only for one-liners. If it is a more complex method, you should give it a name to encourage reuse and improve debugging.
Beware of the cost of .boxed() streams!
And do not overuse lambdas. Most often, non-Lambda code is just as compact, and much more readable. Similar to foreach-loops, you do lose some flexibility compared to the "raw" APIs such as Iterators: 
for(Iterator<Something>> it = collection.iterator(); it.hasNext(); )  
  Something s = it.next();
  if (someTest(s)) continue; // Skip
  if (otherTest(s)) it.remove(); // Remove
  if (thirdTest(s)) process(s); // Call-out to a complex function
  if (fourthTest(s)) break; // Stop early
In many cases, this code is preferrable to the lambda hacks we see pop up everywhere these days. Above code is efficient, and readable.
If you can solve it with a for loop, use a for loop!
Code quality is not measured by how much functionality you can do without typing a semicolon or a newline!
On the contrary: the key ingredient to writing high-performance code is the memory layout (usually) - something you need to do low-level.
Instead of going crazy about Lambdas, I'm more looking forward to real value types (similar to a struct in C, reference-free objects) maybe in Java 9 (Project Valhalla), as they will allow reducing the memory impact for many scenarios considerably. I'd prefer a mutable design, however - I understand why this is proposed, but the uses cases I have in mind become much less elegant when having to overwrite instead of modify all the time.

16 February 2016

Vincent Fourmond: QSoas tips and tricks: better baselines using the "save points" feature

During data processing in our team, we often subtract plain polynomial baselines to our data, drawn by hand using the b command. Note that this is legitimate because we know that the signal we are looking for quickly drops to 0 outside a given range. The usual workflow is to just load the data, use b to draw a baseline and subtract it, and then have further fun with the baseline-subtracted data. This was the only possibility in the old SOAS. However, I don't like so much this kind of workflow, because such a baseline is arbitrary, and once it's subtracted, it's hard to reassess the baseline afterwards.
This is why I've designed a better way in QSoas: when you are done creating a baseline, push p: this exits pushing only the interpolation nodes:
Above, the baseline subtraction interface, and below, the resulting nodes:
The nodes can be reloaded by hitting uppercase L from within b and giving a buffer number (admittedly, the interface as of now isn't that good, I'll have to work on it). Alternatively, you can greenerate the baseline by using interpolate, and then further subtract it using S:
QSoas> interpolate 1 0
where 1 is the original buffer (in fact, only its X values will be used, so you don't have to use the same buffer) and 0 is the buffer containing the interpolation nodes. Saving only the interpolation nodes makes it possible to reedit the baseline easily, and regenerate the baseline-subtracted data using a script. This is my favorite approach, because I like to be able to trace every single step from the raw data to processed data. Another neat feature is that, from within b, you can reload only the X values of nodes using lowercase l (and giving buffer number): the Y values are computed as if you had clicked at the corresponding positions. This is very useful is you have a whole series of similar baselines to make: most often, you won't even need manual adjustment to get a good baseline. I hope you'll find this tip useful !

1 January 2016

Mehdi Dogguy: In memoriam: Ian Murdock

It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of Ian Murdock. I have never had the chance to meet him. Several persons testify for his kindness and talent. We will always remember him. His legacy influences our lives everyday!

Looking at his latest blog posts, he seemed a bit nostalgic about Debian and still very proud of it.

Later, he wrote about how he came to find Linux and the importance of telling the story of hackers of his generation. In his memory, I'll reread Stephen Levy s Hackers for the nth time too.

When (if?) his webserver will shut down, you will still be able to read his past blog posts using the archived version of his website or a static mirror that has been set up.

RIP Ian.

17 October 2015

Simon Richter: Key Transition

So, since several years I've had a second gpg key, 4096R/6AABE354. Several of you have already signed it, and I've been using it in Debian for some time already, but I've not announced it more widely yet, and I occasionally still get mail encrypted to the old key (which remains valid and usable, but it's 1024R). Of course, I've also made a formal transition statement: 
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
OpenPGP Key Transition Statement for Simon Richter
I have created a new OpenPGP key and will be transitioning away from
my old key.  The old key has not been compromised and will continue to
be valid for some time, but I prefer all future correspondence to be
encrypted to the new key, and will be making signatures with the new
key going forward.
I would like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust.
This message is signed by both keys to certify the transition.  My new
and old keys are signed by each other.  If you have signed my old key,
I would appreciate signatures on my new key as well, provided that
your signing policy permits that without re-authenticating me.
The old key, which I am transitioning away from, is:
pub   1024D/5706A4B4 2002-02-26
      Key fingerprint = 040E B5F7 84F1 4FBC CEAD  ADC6 18A0 CC8D 5706 A4B4
The new key, to which I am transitioning, is:
pub   4096R/6AABE354 2009-11-19
      Key fingerprint = 9C43 2534 95E4 DCA8 3794  5F5B EBF6 7A84 6AAB E354
The entire key may be downloaded from: http://www.simonrichter.eu/simon.asc
To fetch the full new key from a public key server using GnuPG, run:
  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key 6AABE354
If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is
signed by the old one:
  gpg --check-sigs 6AABE354
If you are satisfied that you've got the right key, and the User IDs
match what you expect, I would appreciate it if you would sign my key:
  gpg --sign-key 6AABE354
You can upload your signatures to a public keyserver directly:
  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --send-key 6AABE354
Or email sr@simonrichter.eu (possibly encrypted) the output from:
  gpg --armor --export 6AABE354
If you'd like any further verification or have any questions about the
transition please contact me directly.
To verify the integrity of this statement:
  wget -q -O- http://www.simonrichter.eu/key-transition-2015-03-09.txt   gpg --verify
   Simon
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1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=o61r
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

15 October 2015

Laura Arjona: Long summer story, Welcome team, and I am a Debian Developer now

Note: 2015/10/16: I need to add some links but I won t delay this more, posting now, will edit later. Summer ended long time ago, but believe me, I m still catching up with all the things that I began in June/July, all the things I left in August when I went holidays, and more things that appeared in August and September. This is a long overdue post, I hope you bear with me for waiting so long, and writing (now) so long too! June In June, I was 100% sure that I would not attend DebConf15 (well, I was 98% sure until then), and when the new Outreach Sponsorship grants were announced, I decided to write some mails to several Debian contributors, so they consider applying for the grant and attend DebConf (and maybe trigger some i18n/l10n meeting ). They kindly declined, and I understood their reasons, but also wondered what would have happened if the proposal would have come from somebody more official instead of a random contributor that they don t know. I also hoped that lots of other Debianites also write to newbies or not-yet-DD-contributors or non-packaging contributors to invite them to DebConf, and I hoped that they had better luck than me in convincing them :) July In July I usually work hard preparing the computer labs for next academic year at my workplace in the University, but I also have more free time in the long afternoons and evenings, since I don t sleep much, and there is not much to do outside with the summer hot. So I used that month to go on contributing to DebConf publicity and think a bit more about Debian and the other free software communities. I didn t put much time in advancing my selfhosting (no SSL yet in *.larjona.net! booooo!) but I decided to deep my toe in Sandstorm.io, and try to selfhost an instance ( http://lacaja.larjona.net ) and try Etherpad inside Sandstorm (since I failed in deploying Etherpad by myself in my jessie+nginx+postgres box). Sandstorm worked, and Etherpad was packaged in Sandstorm so it worked too; and I have my free-software-base pads now for writing and share. So I joined #sandstorm IRC channel since then, and there I learnt that Asheesh Laroia (who works in Sandstorm.io and is also a Debian Developer and was going to give a talk about Sandstorm.io in DebConf15) was offering mentorship for people wanting to learn Sandstorm packaging, and his proposal was to begin packaging Framadate. I also failed in selfhosting Dudle (prepared for Apache + FastCGI, couldn t make it work in my Nginx), so Asheesh s proposal looked suitable for me. We talked and decided to invest the rest of July and first days of August in learning to package Framadate. I learned a lot, but couldn t finish the task. I encountered many issues (setting my dev environment, and later trying to package), and we solved some of them but my time ran out. I posted my work in the list, and I hope that my feedback on the documentation and the issues I encountered helped Asheesh and the Sandstorm community. Framadate is packaged in Sandstorm.io now, Drew Fisher packaged it, not sure if my stuff was useful or not (it s been useful for me, for learning, at least). I ll talk more about Sandstorm.io in a future blog post updating on my selfhosting adventures. What I liked most was the kind of proposal of mentoring that Asheesh made. It was very detailed in every aspect: the task, the things you need to accomplish it, details about his availability for mentorship I try to be welcoming in the teams in which I participate, but the fact is that I fail in actually mentor, maybe because of not making specific proposals to people (until now, I was like Hi, newcomer! Go read this, this and this, and try for yourself any task you feel you like it, and come back if you have issues , la Debian ). This, plus the thoughts about my mails in June for diversity outreach in DebConf, made me feel the need of having a team where people willing to welcome newcomers share tricks and procedures, write together more specific proposals, and follow up the newcomers experiences in a regular way. I talked with Enrico Zini and we wrote down some notes for a Welcome Team in Debian; he said he would spread the word during DebCamp/DebConf and we would see what people thinks about it. August August came, and the day before going on holidays I was really tired: too much luggage to prepare, too many hours in front of the computer, and the usual stress of traveling; and I took the bad decision of signing some GPG keys of several Debianites that I met in July. I say bad decision because the lack of sleep showed its black magic and I accidentally deleted my secring.gpg file. I knew I had a backup but I didn t have too much time to invest and I didn t want to mess it with the backup too, and my laptop was going to stay at home, powered off, during the whole month, so I just went on holidays and left the GPG issue for later. The day after, meanwhile I was waiting in the airport for my boarding time, I received a mail accepting me as Debian Developer. Wow!! Really, I was not expecting that the process was already finished, I had interchanged several mails with my Application Manager (who happens to be the current DPL!) and I thought that his summer could be quite packed of Debian/DebConf work and my process could wait a bit. So it was a very happy news and very motivating after one month (July) full of free software work. On the other side, I was a bit scared: what type of Debian Developer are you, larjona, not capable to sign some GPG keys without breaking your setup?! but I answered myself well, I m the type of Debian Developer that has backups :) and then, with that mixed feelings of excitement and impostor syndrome, I took my plane and went on holidays, not expecting to touch any computer until the end of the month. August is probably the month in the year when I have more free time (holidays), but less time to dedicate to free software. I devote most of the month to visit family and stay with them, with no internet connection available or no free time to look at the mailbox or social networks or IRC But DebCamp and DebConf15 were happening during my holidays. And this DebConf15 was the first one in which I participated in the organization, and the first one in which I felt more than being a consumer of Debian videos . I could not follow the streamings, my only internet-capable device was my Android 2.x phone, but when I had wifi I fetched the mail, and during the nights, while everybody else was sleeping and I was laying on the terrace, below the sky full of stars, I could read batches of hundred of mails from debconf-discuss mailing list. And I could get some feeling from DebConf life, because I learned about the ad-hoc BoFs and discussions, the morning bike rides and swimming proposals, and the dancing classes, the i18m/l10n meeting, and many other things. I could answer some mail from time to time, and I also knew that a fellow Debianite from Madrid was going to bring me some stickers, maybe a t-shirt, and shake hands in my name to some persons. September and October September was about finishing reading all the mails and try to answer the pending ones, and preparing my computer to use my new Debian identity (and stop using larjona-guest). I still have some things to do, pending technical work, and some mails that I should have answered and I ve forgotten, for sure (if you sent me a mail that needs answer or would be fine that I answer (even if it was months ago!), please resend or ping me). I recovered my secring.gpg but and just now I added larjona@debian.org to the ID in my GPG key, but didn t signed the pending keys again (sorry dkg and holger! will catch up there soon). My subkeys expired and I m trying to find out how to proceed (they are in my FSFE SmartCard) :/ About the Debian teams, I ve resumed my work in publicity team (this year I ll try to be more involved, in Debian Project News in particular), partially in the website team, and recently I ve finished catching up with the Spanish translation of the website. I ve also joined the DebConf team again (for DebConf16, no matter I probably won t attend) and documented the Publicity task for DebConf, and I try to engage the mailing list and the IRC meetings. I finally could have time to watch some DebConf15 videos and Andreas Tille s talk ( Creating a more inviting environment for newcomers New experiences from MoM, SoB, Teammetrics ) helped me to step ahead in welcoming people with more useful stuff than Hi, newcomer! Go read this (general URLs), try for yourself whatever you like . I have made specific proposals for two people. In mid September I accepted an interview about Debian for a podcast with quite a lot audience (in Spanish), in which I explained the idea of the Welcome Team and offered myself as first-contact. Since then, two more people have contacted me and I have offered specific tasks I think are suitable for them. I also try to be more available in the IRC and offer some time spans for new contributors to DebConf to explain the git setup, the wiki, and all this stuff that looks more complicated than what it is. And I think that s all. My Debianite friend kindly brought me some stickers and a DebConf t-shirt, plus the organization t-shirt that the team gave me as present for my contributions in DebConf15. Neil McGovern kindly sent me a certificate of my new Debian Developer status (thanks!!), and it s posted in my wall at work. Here you are a photo! larjona_dd.JPG (Note: my wall is full of stickers and pieces of papers with things I need, things I like and things I use to explain my work (sometimes sarcastically/ironically ). Maybe some day I ll make a blog post about that!) I feel very proud and happy. Still, a lot of things to learn and work to do, but my intentions are: to keep on progressing (sometimes fast, sometimes slowly), never give up, and enjoy the multiple flowers I find in my way :) Thanks everybody! October and future Some other ideas/plans for the future (the ones I didn t say yet):
  • Try to catch up with Debian Contributors development/news, adopt some data source (www.debian.org?), try to create some new data source (about translators, for example).
  • Clean spam in the archive lists (now that I am DD I may help in not only Mark as spam , but actually remove the spam from the archive)
  • Help in the review/updates of the Debian website (ongoing: /users; future: children-distros/derivatives, /partners).
  • Try to get more involved in the Debian i18n team, at least in the part of internationalizing the Debian infrastructure (make translatable via PO files/templates many texts that used repetitively in the Debian website, for example) and in welcoming new members in translation teams or helping the weak ones (although I don t know many languages, the workflow and tools are common, so I think I could help new translators at least to get hands on the matter).
  • Maybe some short screencasts/videos about the Debian infrastructure, for newcomers? (mailing lists, IRC, wiki, Alioth )
Comments? If you want to comment you can use this pump.io thread.
Filed under: My experiences and opinion, News Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, Developer motivations, encryption, English, Free Software, gpg, libre software

25 July 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.12.0: Now with more Big Data!

big-data image A new release 0.12.0 of Rcpp arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R this morning, and I also pushed a Debian package upload. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 423 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further. Note that this is 60 more packages since the last release in May! Also, BioConductor adds another 57 packages, and casual searches on GitHub suggests many more. And according to Andrie De Vries, Rcpp has now page rank of one on CRAN as well! And with this release, Rcpp also becomes ready for Big Data, or, as they call it in Texas, Data. Thanks to a lot of work and several pull requests by Qiang Kou, support for R_xlen_t has been added. That means we can now do stunts like 
R> library(Rcpp)
R> big <- 2^31-1
R> bigM <- rep(NA, big)
R> bigM2 <- c(bigM, bigM)
R> cppFunction("double getSz(LogicalVector x)   return x.length();  ")
R> getSz(bigM)
[1] 2147483647
R> getSz(bigM2)
[1] 4294967294
R>
where prior versions of Rcpp would just have said 
> getSz(bigM2)
Error in getSz(bigM2) :
  long vectors not supported yet: ../../src/include/Rinlinedfuns.h:137
>
which is clearly not Texas-style. Another wellcome change, also thanks to Qiang Kou, adds encoding support for strings. A lot of other things got polished. We are still improving exception handling as we still get the odd curveballs in a corner cases. Matt Dziubinski corrected the var() computation to use the proper two-pass method and added better support for lambda functions in Sugar expression using sapply(), Qiang Kou added more pull requests mostly for string initialization, and Romain added a pull request which made data frame creation a little more robust, and JJ was his usual self in tirelessly looking after all aspects of Rcpp Attributes. As always, you can follow the development via the GitHub repo and particularly the Issue tickets and Pull Requests. And any discussions, questions, ... regarding Rcpp are always welcome at the rcpp-devel mailing list. Last but not least, we are also extremely pleased to annouce that Qiang Kou has joined us in the Rcpp-Core team. We are looking forward to a lot more awesome! See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.
Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.0 (2015-07-24)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Rcpp_eval() no longer uses R_ToplevelExec when evaluating R expressions; this should resolve errors where calling handlers (e.g. through suppressMessages()) were not properly respected.
    • All internal length variables have been changed from R_len_t to R_xlen_t to support vectors longer than 2^31-1 elements (via pull request 303 by Qiang Kou).
    • The sugar function sapply now supports lambda functions (addressing issue 213 thanks to Matt Dziubinski)
    • The var sugar function now uses a more robust two-pass method, supports complex numbers, with new unit tests added (via pull request 320 by Matt Dziubinski)
    • String constructors now allow encodings (via pull request 310 by Qiang Kou)
    • String objects are preserving the underlying SEXP objects better, and are more careful about initializations (via pull requests 322 and 329 by Qiang Kou)
    • DataFrame constructors are now a little more careful (via pull request 301 by Romain Francois)
    • For R 3.2.0 or newer, Rf_installChar() is used instead of Rf_install(CHAR()) (via pull request 332).
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • Use more robust method of ensuring unique paths for generated shared libraries.
    • The evalCpp function now also supports the plugins argument.
    • Correctly handle signature termination characters (' ' or ';') contained in quotes.
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • The Rcpp-FAQ vignette was once again updated with respect to OS X issues and Fortran libraries needed for e.g. RcppArmadillo.
    • The included Rcpp.bib bibtex file (which is also used by other Rcpp* packages) was updated with respect to its CRAN references.
Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

28 March 2015

Eddy Petri&#537;or: Net Neutrality

I have seen this awesomeness way too late, but is still awesome.

Matt Zimmerman: What I think about thought

Only parts of us will ever
touch o n l y parts of others
one s own truth is just that really one s own truth.
We can only share the part that is u n d e r s t o o d b y within another s knowing acceptable t o t h e o t h e r t h e r e f o r e so one
is for most part alone.
As it is meant to be in
evidently in nature at best t h o u g h perhaps it could make
our understanding seek
another s loneliness out.
unpublished poem by Marilyn Monroe, via berlin-artparasites This poem inspired me to put some ideas into words this morning, an attempt to summarize my current working theory of consciousness. Ideas travel through space and time. An idea that exists in my mind is filtered through my ability to express it somehow (words, art, body language, ), and is then interpreted by your mind and its models for understanding the world. This shifts your perspective in some way, some or all of which may be unconscious. When our minds encounter new ideas, they are accepted or rejected, reframed, and integrated with our existing mental models. This process forms a sort of living ecosystem, which maintains equilibrium within the realm of thought. Ideas are born, divide, mutate, and die in the process. Language, culture, education and so on are stable structures which form and support this ecosystem. Consciousness also has analogues of the immune system, for example strongly held beliefs and models which tend to reject certain ideas. Here again these can be unconscious or conscious. I ve seen it happen that if someone hears an idea they simply cannot integrate, they will behave as if they did not hear it at all. Some ideas can be identified as such a serious threat that ignoring them is not enough to feel safe: we feel compelled to eliminate the idea in the external world. The story of Christianity describes a scenario where an idea was so threatening to some people that they felt compelled to kill someone who expressed it. A microcosm of this ecosystem also exists within each individual mind. There are mental structures which we can directly introspect and understand, and others which we can only infer by observing our thoughts and behaviors. These structures communicate with each other, and this communication is limited by their ability to speak each other s language . A dream, for example, is the conveyance of an idea from an unconscious place to a conscious one. Sometimes we get the message, and sometimes we don t. We can learn to interpret, but we can t directly examine and confirm if we re right. As in biology, each part of this process introduces uncountable errors , but the overall system is surprisingly robust and stable. This whole system, with all its many minds interacting, can be thought of as an intelligence unto itself, a gestalt consciousness. This interpretation leads to some interesting further conclusions:
  • The notion that an individual person possesses a single, coherent point of view seems nonsensical
  • The separation between my mind and your mind seems arbitrary
  • The attribution of consciousness only to humans, or only to living beings, seems absurd
Naturally, this is by no means an original idea (can such a thing exist?). It is my own take on the subject, informed both consciously and unconsciously by my own study, first-hand experience, conversations I ve had with others, and so on. It s informed by the countless thinkers who have influenced me. Its expression is limited by my ability to write about it in a way that makes sense to other people.
Maybe some of this makes sense to you, and maybe I seem insane, or maybe both. Hopefully you don t find that you have an inexplicable unconscious desire to kill me!

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