Before starting, have to say hindsight as they say is always 20/20. I was moaning about my 6/7 hour trip few blog posts back but now came to know about the 17.5 hr. flights (17.5x800km/hr=14000 km.) which are happening around me. I would say I was whining about nothing seeing those flights. I can t even imagine how people would feel in those flights. Six hours were too much in the tin-can, thankfully though I was in the aisle seat. In 14 hours most people would probably give to Air rage . I just saw an excellent article on the subject. I also came to know that seat-selection and food on a long-haul flights are a luxury, hence that changes the equation quite a bit as well. So on these facts, it seems Qatar Airways treated me quite well as I was able to use both those options. Disclaimer My knowledge about birds/avian is almost non-existent, Hence feel free to correct me if I do go wrong anywhere. Coming back to earth literally , I will have to share a bit of South Africa as that is part and parcel of what I m going to share next. Also many of the pictures shared in this particular blog post belong to KK who has shared them with me with permission to share it with the rest of the world. When I was in South Africa, in the first couple of days as well as what little reading of South African History I had read before travelling, had known that the Europeans, specifically the Dutch ruled on South Africa for many years. What was shared to me in the first day or two that Afrikaans is mostly spoken by Europeans still living in South Africa, some spoken by the coloured people as well. This tied in with the literature I had already read. The Wikipedia page shares which language is spoken by whom and how the demographics play out if people are interested to know that. One of the words or part of the word for places we came to know is bosch as is used in many a places. Bosch means wood or forest. After this we came to know about many places which were known as somethingbosch which signified to us that area is or was a forest. On the second/third day Chirayu (pictured, extreme left) shared the idea of going to Eagle Encounters. Other people pictured in the picture are yours truly, some of the people from GSOC, KK is in the middle, the driver Leonard something who took us to Eagle Encounters on the right (pictured extreme right). Update I was informed that it was a joint plan between Chirayu and KK. They also had some other options planned which later got dropped by the wayside. It was supposed to be somewhat near, (Spier, Stellenbosch). While I was not able to able to see/figure out where Eagle Encounters is on Openstreetmap, somebody named Firefishy added Spier to OSM few years back. So thank you for that Firefishy so I can at least pin-point a closer place. I didn t see/know/try to figure out about the place as Chirayu said it s a zoo . I wasn t enthusiastic as much as I had been depressed by most zoos in India, while you do have national reserves/Parks in India where you see animals in their full glory. I have been lucky to been able to seen Tadoba and Ranthambore National parks and spend some quality time (about a week) to have some idea as to what can/happens in forests and people living in the buffer-zones but those stories are for a different day altogether. I have to say I do hope to be part of the Ranthambore experience again somewhere in the future, it really is a beautiful place for flora and fauna and fortunately or unfortunately this is the best time apart from spring, as you have the game of mist/fog and animals . North India this time of the year is something to be experienced. I wasn t much enthused as zoos in India are claustrophobic for animals and people both. There are small cages and you see and smell the shit/piss of the animals, generally not a good feeling. Chirayu shared with us also the possibility of being able to ride of Segways and range of bicycles which relieved me so that in case we didn t enjoy the zoo we would enjoy the Segway at least and have a good time (although it would have different expenses than the ones at Eagle Encounters). My whole education about what a zoo could be was turned around at Eagle Encounters as it seems to be somewhere between a zoo and what I know as national parks where animals roam free. We purchased the tickets and went in, the first event/happening was Eagle Encounters itself. Our introduction to the place started by two beautiful volunteer/trainers who were in charge of all the birds in the Eagle Encounters vicinity. The introduction started by every one of us who came for the Eagle Encounter show to wear a glove and to have/hold one of the pair of snowy owls to sit on the glove. That picture is of a family who was part of our show. Before my turn came, I was a little apprehensive/worried about holding a Owl -period. To my surprise, they were so soft and easy-going, I could hardly feel the weight on my hand. While the trainer/volunteers were constantly feeding them earthworm-bits (I didn t ask, just guessing) and we were all happy as they along with the visitors were constantly playing and interacting with the birds, sharing with us the life-cycle of the snowy Owl. It s only then I understood why in the Harry Potter Universe, the owl plays such an important part. They seem to be a nice, curious, easy-going, proud creatures which fits perfectly in the HP Universe. In hind-sight I should have videod the whole experience as the trainer/volunteer showed a battery of owls, eagles, vultures, Hawks (different birds of prey) what have you. I have to confess my knowledge of birds is and was non-existent. Vulture, One of the larger birds we saw at the Eagle Encounters show. Some of the birds could be dangerous, especially in the wild. That was the other Volunteer-Trainer who was showing off the birds. I especially liked the t-shirt she was wearing. The shop at Eagle Encounters had whole lot of them, they were a bit expensive and just not my size Tidbit Just a few years ago, it was a shocker to me to know/realize that what commonly goes/known in the country as a parrot by most people is actually a Parakeet. As can be seen in the article linked, they are widely distributed in India. While I was young, I used to see the rose-ringed parakeets quite a bit around but nowadays due to probably pollution and other factors, they are noticeably less. They are popular as pets in India. I don t know what Pollito would think about that, don t think he would think good. As I cannot differentiate between Hawk, Vulture, Eagle, etc. I would safely say a Bird of Prey as that was what he was holding. This photo was taken after the event was over where we all were curious to know about the volunteer/trainer, their day job and what it meant for them to be taking care of these birds. Update KK has shared with me what those specific birds are called, so in case the names or species are wrong, please take the truck with her and not me. While I don t remember the name of the trainer/volunteer, among other things it was shared that the volunteers/trainers aren t paid enough and they never have enough funds to take care of all the birds who come to them. Where the picture was shot (both this and earlier) was sort of open-office. If you look closely, you will see that there are names of the birds, for instance, people who loved LOTR would easily see Gandalf . that board lists how much food (probably in grams) did the bird eat in a day and week. While it was not shared, I m sure there would be a lot of paperwork, studies to get the birds as well as possible. From a computer science perspective, there seemed to be lot of potential for avian and big-data professionals to do lot of computer modelling and analysis and give more insight into the rehabilitation efforts so the process could be more fine-tuned, efficient and economic perhaps. This is how we saw the majority of the birds. Most of them had a metal/plastic string which was tied to small artificial branches as the one above. I forgot to share a very important point. Eagle Encounters is not a zoo but a Rehabilitation Centre. While the cynic/skeptic part of me tried to not feel or see the before and after pictures of the birds bought to the rehabilitation centre, the caring part was moved to see most of the birds being treated with love and affection. From our conversations with the Volunteer-Trainer it emerged that every week they had to turn away lots of birds due to space constraints. It is only the most serious/life-threatening cases for which they could provide care in a sustainable way they would keep. Some of the birds who were in the cages were large, airy. I wouldn t say clean as what little I read before as well later is that birds shit enormously so cleaning cages is quite an effort. Most of the cages and near those artificial branches there were placards of people who were sponsoring a bird or two to look after them. From what was shared, many of the birds who came had been abused in many ways. Some of them had their bones crushed or/and other cruel ways. As I had shared that I had been wonderfully surprised by seeing birds come so close to me and most of my friends, I felt rage about those who had treated the birds in such evil, bad ways. What was shared with us that while they try to heal the birds as much as possible, it is always suspect how well the birds would survive on their own in nature, hence many of these birds would go to the sponsor or to some other place when they are well. If you look at the picture closely, maybe look at the higher resolution photo in the gallery, you will see that both the birds have been adopted by two different couples. The birds as the name tag shows are called Secretaries . The Secretaries make a typical sound which is similar to the sound made by old typewriters. Just as woodpeckers make Morse Code noises when they are pecking with their beaks on trees, something similar to the sound of keys emitted by Old Remington typewriters when clicked on was done by the Secretaries. This is one of the birds in one of the few cages. If you see a higher-resolution picture of the earlier picture, the one which has Secretaries . Also as can be seen in the picture, there is wood-working happening and they are trying to expand the Rehabilitation Centre. All in all, an excursion which was supposed to be for just an hour, extended to something like 3 odd hours. KK shot more than a 1000 odd pictures while trying to teach/converse in Malyalam to some of the birds. She shot well over 1000 photos which would have filled something like 30 odd traditional photo albums. Jaminy (KK s partner-in-crime) used her selfie stick to desired effect, taking pictures with most of the birds as one does with celebrities. I had also taken some but most of them were over-exposed as was new to mobile photography at that time, still am but mostly it works. That is the lake we discovered/saw after coming back from Eagle Encounters. We had good times. Lastly, a virtual prize distribution ceremony a. Chirayu and KK A platinum trophy for actually thinking and pitching the place in the first place. b. Shirish and Deven Bansod Metal cups for not taking more than 10 minutes to freshen up and be back after hearing the plan to go to Eagle Encounters. c. All the girls/women Spoons for actually making it to the day. All the girls took quite sometime to freshen up, otherwise it might have been possible to also experience the Segways, who knows. All-in-all an enjoyable day spent in being part of Eagle Encounters .
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Birds of Prey, #Debconf16, #Eagle Encounters, #Rehabilitation, #South African History, #Stellenbosch

Debian LTS November marked the nineteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 7 hours allocated which I used completely by:

• Being at LTS frontdesk twice (at the beginning and end of November) triaging about ~30 CVEs.
• Preparing and releasing DLA-698-1 for QEMU fixing 9 CVEs
• Putting out DLA-699-1 for xen, the acutal xen update was prepared by Bastian Blank

Other Debian stuff

• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads (osinfo-db-tools, libvirt-python, libosinfo)
• Sponsored svn2git upload
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.7 to unstable (list of changes)

Some other Free Software activites

• Created foreman_influxdb: a plugin to forward foreman metrics to influxdb
• Released of first version of ldapsp: a Foreman realm smartproxy to create arbitrary LDAP entries
• Fixed updating compute resources in ansible-module-foreman
• Fixed a bug in fog-vsphere that would make massive parallel vm creation in Foreman fail
• Helped to update influxdb-rails so the gem is compatible with influxdb-ruby again.

Let me set a scene for you. Two children, ages 7 and 10, are jostling for position. There s a little pushing and shoving to get the best view. This is pretty typical for siblings this age. But what, you may wonder, are they trying to see? A TV? Video game? No. Jacob and Oliver were in a library, trying to see a 98-year-old map of the property owners in Township 23, range 1 East, Harvey County, Kansas. And they were super excited about it, somewhat to the astonishment of the research librarian, who I am sure is more used to children jostling for position over the DVDs in the youth section than poring over maps in the non-circulating historical archives! All this started with giant concrete arrows in the middle of nowhere. Nearly a century ago, the US government installed a series of arrows on the ground in Kansas. These were part of a primitive air navigation system that led to the first transcontinental airmail service. Every so often, people stumble upon these abandoned arrows and there is a big discussion online. Even Snopes has had to verify their authenticity (verdict: true). Entire websites exist to tracking and locating the remnants of these arrows. And as one of the early air mail routes went through Kansas, every so often people find these arrows around here. I got the idea that it would be fun to replicate a journey along the old routes. Maybe I d spot a few old arrows and such. So I started collecting old maps: a Contract Airmail Route #34 (CAM 34) map from 1927, aviation sectionals from 1933 and 1946, etc. I noticed an odd thing on these maps: the Newton, KS airport was on the other side of the city from its present location, sometimes even several miles outside the city. What was going on?
(1927 Airway Map)
(1946 Wichita sectional) So one foggy morning, I explained my puzzlement to the boys. I highlighted all the mysteries: were these maps correct? Were there really two Newton airports at one time? How many airports were there, and where were they? Why did they move? What was the story behind them? And I offered them the chance to be history detectives with me. And oh my goodness, were they ever excited! We had some information from a very helpful person at the Harvey County Historical Museum (thanks Kris!) So we suspected one airport at least was established in 1927. We also had a description of its location, though given in terms of township maps. So the boys and I made the short drive over to the museum. We reviewed their property maps, though they were all a little older than the time period we needed. We looked through books and at pictures. Oliver pored over a railroad map of Newton from a century ago, fascinated. Jacob was excited to discover on one map that there used to be a train track down the middle of Main Street! I was interested that the present Newton Airport was once known as Wirt Field, rather to my surprise. I somehow suspect most 2nd and 4th graders spend a lot less excited time on their research floor! Then on to the Newton Public Library to see if they d have anything more and that s when the map that produced all the excitement came out. It, by itself, didn t answer the question, but by piecing together a number of pieces of information newspaper stories, information from the museum, and the maps we were able to come up with a pretty good explanation, much to their excitement. Apparently, a man named Tangeman owned a golf course (the golf links according to the paper), and around 1927 the city of Newton purchased it, because of all the planes that were landing there. They turned it into a real airport. Later, they bought land east of the city and moved the airport there. However, during World War II, the Navy took over that location, so they built a third airport a few miles west of the city but moved back to the current east location after the Navy returned that field to them. Of course, a project like this just opens up all sorts of extra questions: why isn t it called Wirt Field anymore? What s the story of Frank Wirt? What led the Navy to take over Newton s airport? Why did planes start landing on the golf course? Where precisely was the west airport located? How long was it there? (I found an aerial photo from 1956 that looks like it may have a plane in that general area, but it seems later than I d have expected) So now I have the boys interested in going to the courthouse with me to research the property records out there. Jacob is continually astounded that we are discovering things that aren t in Wikipedia, and also excited that he could be the one to add them. To be continued, apparently!

This is morning. Time to fly. Two boys, happy to open the hangar door and get the plane ready. It s been a year since I passed the FAA exam and became a pilot. Memories like these are my favorite reminders why I did. It is such fun to see people s faces light up with the joy of flying a few thousand feet above ground, of the beauty and freedom and peace of the skies. I ve flown 14 different passengers in that time; almost every flight I ve taken has been with people, which I enjoy. I ve heard wow or beautiful so many times, and said it myself even more times. I ve landed in two state parks, visited any number of wonderful small towns, seen historic sites and placid lakes, ascended magically over forests and plains. I ve landed at 31 airports in 10 states, flying over 13,000 miles. Not once have I encountered anyone other than friendly, kind, and outgoing. And why not? After all, we re working around magic flying carpet machines, right? (That s my brother before a flight with me, by the way) Some weeks it is easy to be glum. This week has been that way for many, myself included. But then, whether you are in the air or on the ground, if you pay attention, you realize we still live in a beautiful world with many wonderful people. And, in fact, I got a reminder of that this week. Not long after the election, I got in a plane, pushed in the throttle, and started the takeoff roll down a runway in the midst of an Indiana forest. The skies were the best kind of clear blue, and pretty soon I lifted off and could see for miles. Off in the distance, I could see the last cottony remnants of the morning s fog, lying still in the valleys, surrounding the little farms and houses as if to give them a loving hug. Wow. Sometimes the flight is bumpy. Sometimes the weather doesn t cooperate, and it doesn t happen at all. Sometimes you can fly across four large states and it feels as smooth as glass the whole way. Whatever happens, at the end of the day, the magic flying carpet machine gets locked up again. We go home, rest our heads on our soft pillows, and if we so choose, remember the beauty we experienced that day. Really, this post is not about being a pilot. This post is a reminder to pay attention to all that is beautiful in this world. It surrounds us; the smell of pine trees in the forest, the delight in the faces of children, the gentle breeze in our hair, the kind word from a stranger, the very sunrise. I hope that more of us will pay attention to the moments of clear skies and wind at our back. Even at those moments when we pull the hangar door shut.

Back in August, I was looking for a Homeserver replacement. During FrOSCon I was then reminded of the Turris Omnia project by NIC.cz. The basic SoC (Marvel Armada 38x) seemed to be nice hand have decent mainline support (and, with the turris, users interested in keeping it working). Only I don't want any WIFI and I wasn't sure the standard case would be all that usefully. Fortunately, there's also a simple board available with the same SoC called ClearFog and so I got one of these (the Base version). With shipping and the SSD (the only 2242 M.2 SSD with 250 GiB I could find, a ADATA SP600) it slightly exceeds the budget but well. When installing the machine, the obvious goal was to use mainline FOSS components only if possible. Fortunately there's mainline kernel support for the device as well as mainline U-Boot. First attempts to boot from a micro SD card did not work out at all, both with mainline U-Boot and the vendor version though. Turns out the eMMC version of the board does not support any micro SD cards at all, a fact that is documented but others failed to notice as well. U-Boot As the board does not come with any loader on eMMC and booting directly from M.2 requires removing some resistors from the board, the easiest way is using UART for booting. The vendor wiki has some shell script wrapping an included C fragment to feed U-Boot to the device but all that is really needed is U-Boot's kwboot utility. For some reason the SPL didn't properly detect UART booting on my device (wrong magic number) but patching the if (in arch-mvebu's spl.c) and always assume UART boot is an easy way around. The plan then was to boot a Debian armhf rootfs with a defconfig kernel from USB stick. and install U-Boot and the rootfs to eMMC from within that system. Unfortunately U-Boot seems to be unable to talk to the USB3 port so no kernel loading from there. One could probably make UART loading work but switching between screen for serial console and xmodem seemed somewhat fragile and I never got it working. However ethernet can be made to work, though you need to set eth1addr to eth3addr (or just the right one of these) in U-Boot, saveenv and reboot. After that TFTP works (but is somewhat slow). eMMC There's one last step required to allow U-Boot and Linux to access the eMMC. eMMC is wired to the same PINs as the SD card would be. However the SD card has an additional indicator pin showing whether a card is present. You might be lucky inserting a dummy card into the slot or go the clean route and remove the pin specification from the device tree.

--- a/arch/arm/dts/armada-388-clearfog.dts
+++ b/arch/arm/dts/armada-388-clearfog.dts
@@ -306,7 +307,6 @@
                        sdhci@d8000  
                                bus-width = <4>;
-                               cd-gpios = <&gpio0 20 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>;
                                no-1-8-v;
                                pinctrl-0 = <&clearfog_sdhci_pins
                                             &clearfog_sdhci_cd_pins>;

Next Up is flashing the U-Boot to eMMC. This seems to work with the vendor U-Boot but proves to be tricky with mainline. The fun part boils down to the fact that the boot firmware reads the first block from eMMC, but the second from SD card. If you write the mainline U-Boot, which was written and tested for SD card, to eMMC the SPL will try to load the main U-Boot starting from it's second sector from flash -- obviously resulting in garbage. This one took me several tries to figure out and made me read most of the SPL code for the device. The fix however is trivial (apart from the question on how to support all different variants from one codebase, which I'll leave to the U-Boot developers):

--- a/include/configs/clearfog.h
+++ b/include/configs/clearfog.h
@@ -143,8 +143,7 @@
 #define CONFIG_SPL_LIBDISK_SUPPORT
 #define CONFIG_SYS_MMC_U_BOOT_OFFS             (160 << 10)
 #define CONFIG_SYS_U_BOOT_OFFS                 CONFIG_SYS_MMC_U_BOOT_OFFS
-#define CONFIG_SYS_MMCSD_RAW_MODE_U_BOOT_SECTOR        ((CONFIG_SYS_U_BOOT_OFFS / 512)\
-                                                + 1)
+#define CONFIG_SYS_MMCSD_RAW_MODE_U_BOOT_SECTOR        (CONFIG_SYS_U_BOOT_OFFS / 512)
 #define CONFIG_SYS_U_BOOT_MAX_SIZE_SECTORS     ((512 << 10) / 512) /* 512KiB */
 #ifdef CONFIG_SPL_BUILD
 #define CONFIG_FIXED_SDHCI_ALIGNED_BUFFER      0x00180000      /* in SDRAM */

Linux Now we have a System booting from eMMC with mainline U-Boot (which is a most welcome speedup compared to the UART and TFTP combination from the beginning). Getting to fine-tune linux on the device -- we want to install the armmp Debian kernel and have it work. As all the drivers are build as modules for that kernel this also means initrd support. Funnily U-Boots bootz allows booting a plain vmlinux kernel but I couldn't get it to boot a plain initrd. Passing a uImage initrd and a normal kernel however works pretty well. Back when I first tried there were some modules missing and ethernet didn't work with the PHY driver built as a module. In the meantime the PHY problem was fixed in the Debian kernel and almost all modules already added. Ben then only added the USB3 module on my suggestion and as a result, unstable's armhf armmp kernel should work perfectly well on the device (you still need to patch the device tree similar to the patch above). Still missing is an updated flash-kernel to automatically generate the initrd uImage which is work in progress but got stalled until I fixed the U-Boot on eMMC problem and everything should be fine -- maybe get debian u-boot builds for that board. Pro versus Base The main difference so far between the Pro and the Base version of the ClearFog is the switch chip which is included on the Pro. The Base instead "just" has two gigabit ethernet ports and a SFP. Both, linux' and U-Boot's device tree are intended for the Pro version which makes on of the ethernet ports unusable (it tries to find the switch behind the ethernet port which isn't there). To get both ports working (or the one you settled on earlier) there's a second patch to the device tree (my version might be sub-optimal but works), U-Boot -- the linux-kernel version is a trivial adaption:

--- a/arch/arm/dts/armada-388-clearfog.dts
+++ b/arch/arm/dts/armada-388-clearfog.dts
@@ -89,13 +89,10 @@
                internal-regs  
                        ethernet@30000  
                                mac-address = [00 50 43 02 02 02];
+                               managed = "in-band-status";
+                               phy = <&phy1>;
                                phy-mode = "sgmii";
                                status = "okay";
-
-                               fixed-link  
-                                       speed = <1000>;
-                                       full-duplex;
-                                ;
                         ;
                        ethernet@34000  
@@ -227,6 +224,10 @@
                                pinctrl-0 = <&mdio_pins>;
                                pinctrl-names = "default";
+                               phy1: ethernet-phy@1   /* Marvell 88E1512 */
+                                    reg = <1>;
+                                ;
+
                                phy_dedicated: ethernet-phy@0  
                                        /*
                                         * Annoyingly, the marvell phy driver
@@ -386,62 +386,6 @@
                tx-fault-gpio = <&expander0 13 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH>;
         ;
-       dsa@0  
-               compatible = "marvell,dsa";
-               dsa,ethernet = <&eth1>;
-               dsa,mii-bus = <&mdio>;
-               pinctrl-0 = <&clearfog_dsa0_clk_pins &clearfog_dsa0_pins>;
-               pinctrl-names = "default";
-               #address-cells = <2>;
-               #size-cells = <0>;
-
-               switch@0  
-                       #address-cells = <1>;
-                       #size-cells = <0>;
-                       reg = <4 0>;
-
-                       port@0  
-                               reg = <0>;
-                               label = "lan1";
-                        ;
-
-                       port@1  
-                               reg = <1>;
-                               label = "lan2";
-                        ;
-
-                       port@2  
-                               reg = <2>;
-                               label = "lan3";
-                        ;
-
-                       port@3  
-                               reg = <3>;
-                               label = "lan4";
-                        ;
-
-                       port@4  
-                               reg = <4>;
-                               label = "lan5";
-                        ;
-
-                       port@5  
-                               reg = <5>;
-                               label = "cpu";
-                        ;
-
-                       port@6  
-                               /* 88E1512 external phy */
-                               reg = <6>;
-                               label = "lan6";
-                               fixed-link  
-                                       speed = <1000>;
-                                       full-duplex;
-                                ;
-                        ;
-                ;
-        ;
-
        gpio-keys  
                compatible = "gpio-keys";
                pinctrl-0 = <&rear_button_pins>;

Conclusion Apart from the mess with eMMC this seems to be a pretty nice device. It's now happily running with a M.2 SSD providing enough storage for now and still has a mSATA/mPCIe plug left for future journeys. It seems to be drawing around 5.5 Watts with SSD and one Ethernet connected while mostly idle and can feed around 500 Mb/s from disk over an encrypted ethernet connection which is, I guess, not too bad. My plans now include helping to finish flash-kernel support, creating a nice case and probably get it deployed. I might bring it to FOSDEM first though. Working on it was really quite some fun (apart from the frustrating parts finding the one-block-offset ..) and people were really helpful. Big thanks here to Debian's arm folks, Ben Hutchings the kernel maintainer and U-Boot upstream (especially Tom Rini and Stefan Roese)

Every year since 2010 the Whitley Bay Film Festival has put on a programme of movies in my home town, often with some quirk or gimmick. A few years back we watched "Dawn Of The Dead" in a shopping centre the last act was interrupted by a fake film-reel break, then a load of zombies emerged from the shops. Sometime after that, we saw "The Graduate" within a Church as part of their annual "Secret Cinema" showing. Other famous stunts (which I personally did not witness) include a screening of Jaws on the beach and John Carpenter's "The Fog" in Whitley Bay Lighthouse.

Massive thanks to Hunter North Recruitment for sponsoring Metropolis https://t.co/mphzHPCQ6O @snattaz pic.twitter.com/S9MNQmeLWZ Whitley Film Fest (@wbayfilmfest) August 14, 2016

This year I only went to one showing, Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Two twists this time: it was being shown in The Rendezvous Cafe, an Art-Deco themed building on the sea front; the whole film was accompanied by a live, improvised synthesizer jam by a group of friends and synth/sound enthusiasts who branded themselves "The Mediators" for the evening.

Metropolis live soundtrack preparations at the Rendezvous Cafe. Doors open 19.30 #metropolis pic.twitter.com/AdAqNVdEdx Whitley Film Fest (@wbayfilmfest) August 14, 2016

I've been meaning to watch Metropolis for a long time (I've got the Blu-Ray still sat in the shrink-wrap) and it was great to see the newly restored version, but the live synth accompaniment was what really made the night special for me. They used a bunch of equipment, most notably a set of Korg Volcas. The soundtrack varied in style and intensity to suit the scenes, with the various under-city scenes backed by a pumping, industrial-style improvisation which sounded quite excellent. I've had an interest in playing with synthesisers and making music for years, but haven't put the time in to do it properly. I left newly inspired and energised to finally try to make the time to explore it.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Worked on nsntrace, a userspace tool to perform network traces on processes using kernel namespaces:
  • Overhauled error handling to ensure the return code of the wrapped process is returned to the surrounding environment. (#10).
  • Permit the -u argument to also accept uids as well as usernames. (#16).
  • Always kill the (hard-looping) udp_send utility, even on test failures. (#13).
  • Updated configure.ac to look for iptables in /sbin & /usr/sbin (#11) and to raise an error if pcap.h is missing (#15).
  • Drop bashisms in #!/bin/sh script (#14) and ignore the generated manpage in the Git repository (#12).
• Independently discovered an regression in the Django web development framework where field__isnull=False filters were not working with some foreign keys, resulting in extending the testsuite and release documentation. (#7104).
• Proposed a change to django-enumfield (a custom field for type-safe constants) to ensure passing a string type to Enum.get returned None on error to match the documentation. (#36).
• Fixed an issue in the Mopidy music player's podcast extension where the testsuite was failing tests in extreme timezones. (#40).
• Proposed changes to make various upstream's reproducible:
  • botan, a crypto/TLS library for C++11. (#587).
  • cookiecutter, a project template generator, removing nondeterministic keyword arguments from appearing in the documentation. (#800).
  • pyicu, a Python wraper for the IBM Unicode library. (#27).
• Integrated a number of issues raised by @piotr1212 to python-fadvise, my Python interface to posix_fadvise(2), where the API was not being applied to open file descriptors (#1) and moving the .so to a module directory (#2).
• Various improvements to try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content-aware diff utility, including introducing an HTTP API (#21), updating the SSL certificate and correcting a logic issue where errors in diffoscope itself were not being detected correctly (b0ff49). Continued thanks to Bytemark for sponsoring the hardware.
• Fixed a bug in django-slack, my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility, correcting an EncodeError exception under Python 3 (#53) and updated the minimum required version of Django to 1.7 (#54).
• Various updates to tickle-me-email, my Getting Things Done-inspired email toolbox, to also match / in IMAP's LIST separators (#6) and to encode the folder list as UTF-7 (#7). Thanks to @resiak.
• Clarified the documentation for travis.debian.net my hosted script to easily test and build Debian packages on the Travis CI continuous integration platform regarding how to integrate with Github (#20).

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Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Presented "Reproducible Builds status update" at DebConf16, the annual Debian GNU/Linux developer conference.
• Attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting. The CII was set up in the wake of the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability to support software projects that are critical to the functioning of the internet.

• Ensured that the Webconverger web kiosk operating system builds reproducibly. I may rework some of the patches to libisoburn and libisofs before sending them upstream. This work was sponsored by Webconverger.
• Proposed a pull request for Regex Replace (a Chrome extension to automatically replace text on webpages) to ensure that the rules were correctly HTML encoded on the options page. (#3)
• Proposed a change to ronn, a documentation generator that "is the opposite of roff", to make the output reproducible. (#98)
• Fixed an issue in django-enumfield, a custom Django web development field for type-safe named constants, to make the Enum.get interface more consistent. (#36)
• Proposed a change to txt2tags to make the output use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and non-timezone timestamps. (#204).

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I moved my blog around a bit and it appears that static pages are now in favour, so I switched to that, by way of Hugo. CSS and such needs more tweaking, but it ll make do for now. As part of this, RSS feeds and such changed, if you want to subscribe to this (very seldomly updated) blog, use https://err.no/personal/blog/index.xml

Let's see if I can scrounge through all of my now-organized directories of ebooks and figure out what I haven't recorded here yet. At least the paper books make that relatively easy, since I don't shelve them until I post them. (Yeah, yeah, I should actually make a database.) Hugh Aldersey-Williams Periodic Tales (nonfiction)
Sandra Ulbrich Almazan SF Women A-Z (nonfiction)
Radley Balko Rise of the Warrior Cop (nonfiction)
Peter V. Brett The Warded Man (sff)
Lois McMaster Bujold Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (sff)
Fred Clark The Anti-Christ Handbook Vol. 2 (nonfiction)
Dave Duncan West of January (sff)
Karl Fogel Producing Open Source Software (nonfiction)
Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (nonfiction)
Andrew Groen Empires of EVE (nonfiction)
John Harris @ Play (nonfiction)
David Hellman & Tevis Thompson Second Quest (graphic novel)
M.C.A. Hogarth Earthrise (sff)
S.L. Huang An Examination of Collegial Dynamics... (sff)
S.L. Huang & Kurt Hunt Up and Coming (sff anthology)
Kameron Hurley Infidel (sff)
Kevin Jackson-Mead & J. Robinson Wheeler IF Theory Reader (nonfiction)
Rosemary Kirstein The Lost Steersman (sff)
Rosemary Kirstein The Language of Power (sff)
Merritt Kopas Videogames for Humans (nonfiction)
Alisa Krasnostein & Alexandra Pierce (ed.) Letters to Tiptree (nonfiction)
Mathew Kumar Exp. Negatives (nonfiction)
Ken Liu The Grace of Kings (sff)
Susan MacGregor The Tattooed Witch (sff)
Helen Marshall Gifts for the One Who Comes After (sff collection)
Jack McDevitt Coming Home (sff)
Seanan McGuire A Red-Rose Chain (sff)
Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs. The Multiverse (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Winter Long (sff)
Marc Miller Agent of the Imperium (sff)
Randal Munroe Thing Explainer (graphic nonfiction)
Marguerite Reed Archangel (sff)
J.K. Rowling Harry Potter: The Complete Collection (sff)
K.J. Russell Tides of Possibility (sff anthology)
Robert J. Sawyer Starplex (sff)
Bruce Schneier Secrets & Lies (nonfiction)
Mike Selinker (ed.) The Kobold Game to Board Game Design (nonfiction)
Douglas Smith Chimerascope (sff collection)
Jonathan Strahan Fearsome Journeys (sff anthology)
Nick Suttner Shadow of the Colossus (nonfiction)
Aaron Swartz The Boy Who Could Change the World (essays)
Caitlin Sweet The Pattern Scars (sff)
John Szczepaniak The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers I (nonfiction)
John Szczepaniak The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers II (nonfiction)
Jeffrey Toobin The Run of His Life (nonfiction)
Hayden Trenholm Blood and Water (sff anthology)
Coen Teulings & Richard Baldwin (ed.) Secular Stagnation (nonfiction)
Ursula Vernon Book of the Wombat 2015 (graphic nonfiction)
Ursula Vernon Digger (graphic novel) Phew, that was a ton of stuff. A bunch of these were from two large StoryBundle bundles, which is a great source of cheap DRM-free ebooks, although still rather hit and miss. There's a lot of just fairly random stuff that's been accumulating for a while, even though I've not had a chance to read very much. Vacation upcoming, which will be a nice time to catch up on reading.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 28th and March 5th:

Toolchain fixes

• Antonio Terceiro uploaded gem2deb/0.27 that forces generated gemspecs to use the date from debian/changelog.
• Antonio Terceiro uploaded gem2deb/0.28 that forces generated gemspecs to have their contains file lists sorted.
• Robert Luberda uploaded ispell/3.4.00-5 which make builds of hashes reproducible.
• C dric Boutillier uploaded ruby-ronn/0.7.3-4 which will make the output locale agnostic. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
• Markus Koschany uploaded spring/101.0+dfsg-1. Fixed by Alexandre Detiste.

Ximin Luo resubmitted the patch adding the --clamp-mtime option to Tar on Savannah's bug tracker. Lunar rebased our experimental dpkg on top of the current master branch. Changes in the test infrastructure are required before uploading a new version to our experimental repository. Reiner Herrmann rebased our custom texlive-bin against the latest uploaded version.

Packages fixed The following 77 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: asciidoctor, atig, fuel-astute, jekyll, libphone-ui-shr, linkchecker, maven-plugin-testing, node-iscroll, origami-pdf, plexus-digest, pry, python-avro, python-odf, rails, ruby-actionpack-xml-parser, ruby-active-model-serializers, ruby-activerecord-session-store, ruby-api-pagination, ruby-babosa, ruby-carrierwave, ruby-classifier-reborn, ruby-compass, ruby-concurrent, ruby-configurate, ruby-crack, ruby-css-parser, ruby-cucumber-rails, ruby-delorean, ruby-encryptor, ruby-fakeweb, ruby-flexmock, ruby-fog-vsphere, ruby-gemojione, ruby-git, ruby-grack, ruby-htmlentities, ruby-jekyll-feed, ruby-json-schema, ruby-listen, ruby-markerb, ruby-mathml, ruby-mini-magick, ruby-net-telnet, ruby-omniauth-azure-oauth2, ruby-omniauth-saml, ruby-org, ruby-origin, ruby-prawn, ruby-pygments.rb, ruby-raemon, ruby-rails-deprecated-sanitizer, ruby-raindrops, ruby-rbpdf, ruby-rbvmomi, ruby-recaptcha, ruby-ref, ruby-responders, ruby-rjb, ruby-rspec-rails, ruby-rspec, ruby-rufus-scheduler, ruby-sass-rails, ruby-sass, ruby-sentry-raven, ruby-sequel-pg, ruby-sequel, ruby-settingslogic, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-slack-notifier, ruby-symboltable, ruby-timers, ruby-zip, ticgit, tmuxinator, vagrant, wagon, yard. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• air-quality-sensor/0.1.4-1 uploaded by Benedikt Wildenhain, fixed upstream, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• device3dfx/2013.08.08-4 by Guillem Jover.
• fldigi/3.23.08-1 by Kamal Mostafa.
• fltk1.1/1.1.10-22 by Aaron M. Ucko.
• freeimage/3.17.0+ds1-2 by Ghislain Antony Vaillant.
• gimagereader/3.1.2+git368fa8f-2 by Philip Rinn.
• ginkgocadx/3.7.5-1 by Gert Wollny, fixed upstream.
• jadetex/3.13-17 by Norbert Preining.
• opensips/2.1.2-1 by Razvan Crainea.
• ruby-sqlite3/1.3.11-2 uploaded by C dric Boutillier, original patch by Lunar.
• runawk/1.6.0-2 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• systraq/20160303-1 by Joost van Baal-Ili .

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

• auto-multiple-choice/1.2.1-4 by Georges Khaznadar.
• avfs/1.0.3-1 uploaded by Michael Meskes, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• console-setup/1.138 uploaded by Anton Zinoviev, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• gromacs/5.1.2-1 by Nicholas Breen.
• mrrescue/1.02c-2 by Alexandre Detiste.
• usb-modeswitch-data/20160112-2 by Didier Raboud.

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

• #816209 on elog by Reiner Herrmann: use printf instead of echo which is shell-independent.
• #816214 on python-pip by Reiner Herrmann: removes timestamp from generated Python scripts.
• #816230 on rows by Reiner Herrmann: tell grep to always treat the input as text.
• #816232 on eficas by Reiner Herrmann: use printf instead of echo which is shell-independent.

Florent Daigniere and bancfc reported that linux-grsec was currently built with GRKERNSEC_RANDSTRUCT which will prevent reproducible builds with the current packaging.

tests.reproducible-builds.org pbuilder has been updated to the last version to be able to support Build-Depends-Arch and Build-Conflicts-Arch. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) New package sets have been added for Subgraph OS, which is based on Debian Stretch: packages and build dependencies. (h01ger) Two new armhf build nodes have been added (thanks Vagrant Cascadian) and integrated in our Jenkins setup with 8 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger)

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism version 0.016-1 was released on Sunday 28th. It will now normalize the POT-Creation-Date field in GNU Gettext .mo files. (Reiner Herrmann) Several improvements to the packages metadata have also been made. (h01ger, Ben Finney)

Package reviews 185 reviews have been removed, 91 added and 33 updated in the previous week. New issue: fileorder_in_gemspec_files_list. 43 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb, Martin Michlmayr, and gregor herrmann.

Misc. After merging the patch from Dhiru Kholia adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in rpm, Florian Festi opened a discussion on the rpm-ecosystem mailing list about reproducible builds. On March 4th, Lunar gave an overview of the general reproducible builds effort at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia.

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Various improvements to django-slack, a library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility from projects using the Django web development framework:
  • Added explicit support to send messages asynchronously via the Celery distributed task queue. (#29)
  • Worked with Patrick Clope to add an escapeslack template filter to ensure the correct characters for Slack's API are escaped using Django's built-in safe is too invasive. (#36)
  • Corrected an issue where custom endpoints and channel names were incompatible. (#27)
  • Overhaul of the field/option/block parsing. (49ff3c4)
  • Moved away from using a django.template.Context instance, preventing a deprecation warning. (#31)
• Added a create-folders subcommand to my tickle-me-email Getting Things Done (GTD) email toolbox to create numbered folders for the rotate "tickler" functionality. (#3)
• Wrote and released a Django template tag to collapse multiple whitespace/newline characters in order to correctly format, for example, plaintext emails that make extensive use of for-loops. These would normally require careful and fragile placement of the % for .. % and % endfor % tags. (Repo)
• Pushed a number of updates to my Strava Enhancement Suite, a Chrome extension that improves and fixes annoyances in the web interface of the Strava cycling and running tracker:
  • Fix unit conversion where the element was wrapped in an another HTML element. (#48)
  • Hide premium indicator from top-level navigation. (#45)
  • Correct matching of the "shop" link in top-level navigation and footer module. (#47 & #46)
  • Remove "premium" pages on Club pages. (#44)
• Added a security-oriented warning to Ansible's documentation regarding the behaviour if an UFW firewall application profile is added and subsequently removed. (#1740)
• Added support to my django-staticfiles-dotd "staticfiles" library which concatenates Javascript and CSS files from .d-style directories to support an arbitrary file rendering method. This allows the use of media pre-processors such as SASS within such directories. (#1)
• Corrected my Chrome extension for the FastMail web interface to correctly hook into the internal "send" mechanism. (#2)
• Moved my stravabot IRC bot to use dh-virtualenv and systemd, improving security and reliability. (1c48709)
• Updated django-pedantic-http-methods a tool to raise an exception during development when attempting to perform side effects in GET and HEAD HTTP methods to support the latest version of Django. (#1)

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Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Changed Django's project/app templates to use a py-tpl suffix to workaround the 1.9 release series shipping invalid .py files that are used as templates. (#5735)
• Pushed a number of updates to my Strava Enhancement Suite Chrome extension:
  • Added the ability to sort starred segments first. (#42)
  • Added an option to display hidden segments by default. (#34)
  • Also hide "Yearly Goals" as part of hiding upcoming data. (#41)
  • Removed more "premium" badges. (#43)
  • Fixed an issue where removing feed entries didn't correctly cleanup subsequently-empty date headers. (commit)
• Released a work-in-progress django.contrib.staticfiles library to recursively transparently concatenate Javascript and CSS files using "Debian-style" .d directories. I had previously been doing this manually via the various release processes and bespoke views during development as the idea pre-dated the existence of the staticfiles framework. (Repo)
• Updated travis.debian.net, a hosted script to easily test and build Debian packages on Travis CI, to support the wheezy distribution and to improve error-handling in general. (Repo)
• Ensured that try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content aware diff utility, periodically cleans up containers.
• Moved my personal music library to use dh-virtualenv and to deploy to its own server via Ansible. I also updated the codebase to the latest version of Django at the same time, taking advantage of a large number of new features and recommendations.
• Fixed a strange issue with empty IMAP messages in my tickle-me-email GTD email toolbox.
• It was also a month of significant bug reports and feature requests being sent to my private email.

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Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Released try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content aware diff utility. Thanks to Bytemark for sponsoring the hardware.
• Announced travis.debian.net, a hosted script to easily test and build Debian packages on Travis CI.
• Wrote an Chrome extension for the FastMail web interface that reminds you if you neglect to attach a file if you mention one in the body. (Repo)
• Added graphical image comparison using to diffoscope using libcaca. (commit)
• Did further work on a free-software healthcare project.
• Added the ability to hide Zwift activities in my Strava Enhancement Suite Chrome extension. (#40)
• Updated the Django web framework documentation to discourage the use of filenames in /tmp with predictable names. (#5864)
• Corrected a Python 3.5-ism and a double-encoding issue in django-slack.
• Increased the size of the search form on codesearch.debian.net. (#59)
• Added support for filenames alongside the existing URL support for book cover images in my media database. (code)
• Corrected a trivial typo in FreeBSD's pkg package management tool. (#1353)
• Attended the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress.

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What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Markus Koschany uploaded antlr3/3.5.2-3 which includes a fix by Emmanuel Bourg to make the generated parser reproducible.
• Markus Koschany uploaded maven-bundle-plugin/2.4.0-2 which includes a fix by Emmanuel Bourg to use the date in the DEB_CHANGELOG_DATETIME variable in the pom.properties file embedded in the jar files.
• Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper/9.20151116 which makes the timestamp of directories created by dh_install, dh_installdocs, and dh_installexamples reproducible. Patch by Niko Tyni.

Mattia Rizzolo uploaded a version of perl to the reproducible repository including the patch written by Niko Tyni to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Pod::Man. Dhole sent an updated version of his patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in GCC to the upstream mailing list. Several comments have been made in response which have been quickly addressed by Dhole. Dhole also forwarded his patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in libxslt upstream. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: antlr3/3.5.2-3, clusterssh, cme, libdatetime-set-perl, libgraphviz-perl, liblingua-translit-perl, libparse-cpan-packages-perl, libsgmls-perl, license-reconcile, maven-bundle-plugin/2.4.0-2, siggen, stunnel4, systemd, x11proto-kb. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• bindex/2.2+svn101-3 by Markus Koschany.
• glyr/1.0.8-2 by Etienne Millon.
• jenkins-json/2.4-jenkins-3-4 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• pkg-config/0.29-1 uploaded by Tollef Fog Heen, original patch by Juan Picca.
• plexus-containers1.5/1.6-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• polyglot-maven/0.8~tobrien+git20120905-5 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• sigil/0.9.0+dfsg-3 uploaded by Mattia Rizzolo, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• simutrans/120.1.1+repack-2 uploaded by J rg Frings-F rst, fix by Markus Koschany.
• torrus/2.08-4 by Bernhard Schmidt.
• trigger-rally-data/0.6.1-2 uploaded by Bertrand Marc, patch by Mattia Rizzolo.

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

• castle-game-engine/5.2.0-1 by Paul Gevers.
• libam7xxx/0.1.6-2 by Antonio Ospite.
• libpdfbox-java/1:1.8.10-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• xfaces/3.3-29 uploaded by Hakan Ardo, original patch by Chris Lamb.

reproducible.debian.net Vagrant Cascadian has set up a new armhf node using a Raspberry Pi 2. It should soon be added to the Jenkins infrastructure. diffoscope development diffoscope version 42 was release on November 20th. It adds a missing dependency on python3-pkg-resources and to prevent similar regression another autopkgtest to ensure that the command line is functional when Recommends are not installed. Two more encoding related problems have been fixed (#804061, #805418). A missing Build-Depends has also been added on binutils-multiarch to make the test suite pass on architectures other than amd64. Package reviews 180 reviews have been removed, 268 added and 59 updated this week. 70 new fail to build from source bugs have been reported by Chris West, Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. New issue this week: randomness_in_ocaml_preprocessed_files. Misc. Jim MacArthur started to work on a system to rebuild and compare packages built on reproducible.debian.net using .buildinfo and snapshot.debian.org. On December 1-3rd 2015, a meeting of about 40 participants from 18 different free software projects will be held in Athens, Greece with the intent of improving the collaboration between projects, helping new efforts to be started, and brainstorming on end-user aspects of reproducible builds.

I've had a half-broken temperature monitoring setup at home for quite some time. It started out with a Atom-based NAS, a USB-serial adapter and a passive 1-wire adapter. It sometimes worked, then stopped working, then started when poked with a stick. Later, the NAS was moved under the stairs and I put a Beaglebone Black in its old place. The temperature monitoring thereafter never really worked, but I didn't have the time to fix it. Over the last few days, I've managed to get it working again, of course by replacing nearly all the existing components. I'm using the DS18B20 sensors. They're about USD 1 a piece on Ebay (when buying small quantities) and seems to work quite ok. My first task was to address the reliability problems: Dropouts and really poor performance. I thought the passive adapter was problematic, in particular with the wire lengths I'm using and I therefore wanted to replace it with something else. The BBB has GPIO support, and various blog posts suggested using that. However, I'm running Debian on my BBB which doesn't have support for DTB overrides, so I needed to patch the kernel DTB. (Apparently, DTB overrides are landing upstream, but obviously not in time for Jessie.) I've never even looked at Device Tree before, but the structure was reasonably simple and with a sample override from bonebrews it was easy enough to come up with my patch. This uses pin 11 (yes, 11, not 13, read the bonebrews article for explanation on the numbering) on the P8 block. This needs to be compiled into a .dtb. I found the easiest way was just to drop the patched .dts into an unpacked kernel tree and then running make dtbs. Once this works, you need to compile the w1-gpio kernel module, since Debian hasn't yet enabled that. Run make menuconfig, find it under "Device drivers", "1-wire", "1-wire bus master", build it as a module. I then had to build a full kernel to get the symversions right, then build the modules. I think there is or should be an easier way to do that, but as I cross-built it on a fast AMD64 machine, I didn't investigate too much. Insmod-ing w1-gpio then works, but for me, it failed to detect any sensors. Reading the data sheet, it looked like a pull-up resistor on the data line was needed. I had enabled the internal pull-up, but apparently that wasn't enough, so I added a 4.7kOhm resistor between pin 3 (VDD_3V3) on P9 and pin (GPIO_45) on P8. With that in place, my sensors showed up in /sys/bus/w1/devices and you can read the values using cat. In my case, I wanted the data to go into collectd and then to graphite. I first tried using an Exec plugin, but never got it to work properly. Using a [python plugin] worked much better and my graphite installation is now showing me temperatures. Now I just need to add more probes around the house. The most useful references were

• Bonebrews article
• Cross compiling official kernel packages
• Verifying pin usage. This is useful for double checking that your DTB actually exports the pins you expect it to.

In addition, various searches for DS18B20 pinout and similar, of course.

Apparently, people care when you, as privileged person (white, male, long-time Debian Developer) throw in the towel because the amount of crap thrown your way just becomes too much. I guess that's good, both because it gives me a soap box for a short while, but also because if enough people talk about how poisonous the well that Debian is has become, we can fix it. This morning, I resigned as a member of the systemd maintainer team. I then proceeded to leave the relevant IRC channels and announced this on twitter. The responses I've gotten have been almost all been heartwarming. People have generally been offering hugs, saying thanks for the work put into systemd in Debian and so on. I've greatly appreciated those (and I've been getting those before I resigned too, so this isn't just a response to that). I feel bad about leaving the rest of the team, they're a great bunch: competent, caring, funny, wonderful people. On the other hand, at some point I had to draw a line and say "no further". Debian and its various maintainer teams are a bunch of tribes (with possibly Debian itself being a supertribe). Unlike many other situations, you can be part of multiple tribes. I'm still a member of the DSA tribe for instance. Leaving pkg-systemd means leaving one of my tribes. That hurts. It hurts even more because it feels like a forced exit rather than because I've lost interest or been distracted by other shiny things for long enough that you don't really feel like part of a tribe. That happened with me with debian-installer. It was my baby for a while (with a then quite small team), then a bunch of real life thing interfered and other people picked it up and ran with it and made it greater and more fantastic than before. I kinda lost touch, and while it's still dear to me, I no longer identify as part of the debian-boot tribe. Now, how did I, standing stout and tall, get forced out of my tribe? I've been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any storm, shouldn't I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn down by the rain. It's not a single hurtful comment here and there. There's a constant drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy and there are sometimes flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of incompetence. Our code of conduct says, "assume good faith". If you ever find yourself not doing that, step back, breathe. See if there's a reasonable explanation for why somebody is saying something or behaving in a way that doesn't make sense to you. It might be as simple as your native tongue being English and their being something else. If you do genuinely disagree with somebody (something which is entirely fine), try not to escalate, even if the stakes are high. Examples from the last year include talking about this as a war and talking about "increasingly bitter rear-guard battles". By using and accepting this terminology, we, as a project, poison ourselves. Sam Hartman puts this better than me:

I'm hoping that we can all take a few minutes to gain empathy for those who disagree with us. Then I'm hoping we can use that understanding to reassure them that they are valued and respected and their concerns considered even when we end up strongly disagreeing with them or valuing different things.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't ever feel the urge to demonise my opponents in discussions. That they're worse, as people, than I am. However, it is imperative to never give in to this, since doing that will diminish us as humans and make the entire project poorer. Civil disagreements with reasonable discussions lead to better technical outcomes, happier humans and a healthier projects.

Day trip on the Olympic Peninsula TL;DR: drove many kilometres on very nice roads, took lots of pictures, saw sunshine and fog and clouds, an angry ocean and a calm one, a quiet lake and lots and lots of trees: a very well spent day. Pictures at http://photos.k1024.org/Daytrips/Olympic-Peninsula-2014/. Sometimes I travel to the US on business, and as such I've been a few times in the Seattle area. Until this summer, when I had my last trip there, I was content to spend any extra days (weekend or such) just visiting Seattle itself, or shopping (I can spend hours in the REI store!), or working on my laptop in the hotel. This summer though, I thought - I should do something a bit different. Not too much, but still - no sense in wasting both days of the weekend. So I thought maybe driving to Mount Rainier, or something like that. On the Wednesday of my first week in Kirkland, as I was preparing my drive to the mountain, I made the mistake of scrolling the map westwards, and I saw for the first time the Olympic Peninsula; furthermore, I was zoomed in enough that I saw there was a small road right up to the north-west corner. Intrigued, I zoomed further and learned about Cape Flattery ( the northwestern-most point of the contiguous United States! ), so after spending a bit time reading about it, I was determined to go there. Easier said than done - from Kirkland, it's a 4h 40m drive (according to Google Maps), so it would be a full day on the road. I was thinking of maybe spending the night somewhere on the peninsula then, in order to actually explore the area a bit, but from Wednesday to Saturday it was a too short notice - all hotels that seemed OK-ish were fully booked. I spent some time trying to find something, even not directly on my way, but I failed to find any room. What I did manage to do though, is to learn a bit about the area, and to realise that there's a nice loop around the whole peninsula - the 104 from Kirkland up to where it meets the 101N on the eastern side, then take the 101 all the way to Port Angeles, Lake Crescent, near Lake Pleasant, then south toward Forks, crossing the Hoh river, down to Ruby Beach, down along the coast, crossing the Queets River, east toward Lake Quinault, south toward Aberdeen, then east towards Olympia and back out of the wilderness, into the highway network and back to Kirkland. This looked like an awesome road trip, but it is as long as it sounds - around 8 hours (continuous) drive, though skipping Cape Flattery. Well, I said to myself, something to keep in mind for a future trip to this area, with a night in between. I was still planning to go just to Cape Flattery and back, without realising at that point that this trip was actually longer (as you drive on smaller, lower-speed roads). Preparing my route, I read about the queues at the Edmonds-Kingston ferry, so I was planning to wake up early on the weekend, go to Cape Flattery, and go right back (maybe stop by Lake Crescent). Saturday comes, I - of course - sleep longer than my trip schedule said, and start the day in a somewhat cloudy weather, driving north from my hotel on Simonds Road, which was quite nicer than the usual East-West or North-South roads in this area. The weather was becoming nicer, however as I was nearing the ferry terminal and the traffic was getting denser, I started suspecting that I'll spend a quite a bit of time waiting to board the ferry. And unfortunately so it was (photo altered to hide some personal information): . The weather at least was nice, so I tried to enjoy it and simply observe the crowd - people were looking forward to a weekend relaxing, so nobody seemed annoyed by the wait. After almost half an hour, time to get on the ferry - my first time on a ferry in US, yay! But it was quite the same as in Europe, just that the ship was much larger. Once I secured the car, I went up deck, and was very surprised to be treated with some excellent views: The crossing was not very short, but it seemed so, because of the view, the sun, the water and the wind. Soon we were nearing the other shore; also, see how well panorama software deals with waves :P! And I was finally on the "real" part of the trip. The road was quite interesting. Taking the 104 North, crossing the "Hood Canal Floating Bridge" (my, what a boring name), then finally joining the 101 North. The environment was quite varied, from bare plains and hills, to wooded areas, to quite dense forests, then into inhabited areas - quite a long stretch of human presence, from the Sequim Bay to Port Angeles. Port Angeles surprised me: it had nice views of the ocean, and an interesting port (a few big ships), but it was much smaller than I expected. The 101 crosses it, and in less than 10 minutes or so it was already over. I expected something nicer, based on the name, but Anyway, onwards! Soon I was at a crossroads and had to decide: I could either follow the 101, crossing the Elwha River and then to Lake Crescent, then go north on the 113/112, or go right off 101 onto 112, and follow it until close to my goal. I took the 112, because on the map it looked "nicer", and closer to the shore. Well, the road itself was nice, but quite narrow and twisty here and there, and there was some annoying traffic, so I didn't enjoy this segment very much. At least it had the very interesting property (to me) that whenever I got closer to the ocean, the sun suddenly disappeared, and I was finding myself in the fog: So my plan to drive nicely along the coast failed. At one point, there was even heavy smoke (not fog!), and I wondered for a moment how safe was to drive out there in the wilderness (there were other cars though, so I was not alone). Only quite a bit later, close to Neah Bay, did I finally see the ocean: I saw a small parking spot, stopped, and crossing a small line of trees I found myself in a small cove? bay? In any case, I had the impression I stepped out of the daily life in the city and out into the far far wilderness: There was a couple, sitting on chairs, just enjoying the view. I felt very much intruding, behaving like I did as a tourist: running in, taking pictures, etc., so I tried at least to be quiet . I then quickly moved on, since I still had some road ahead of me. Soon I entered Neah Bay, and was surprised to see once more blue, and even more blue. I'm a sucker for blue, whether sky blue or sea blue , so I took a few more pictures (watch out for the evil fog in the second one): Well, the town had some event, and there were lots of people, so I just drove on, now on the last stretch towards the cape. The road here was also very interesting, yet another environment - I was driving on Cape Flattery Road, which cuts across the tip of the peninsula (quite narrow here) along the Waatch River and through its flooding plains (at least this is how it looked to me). Then it finally starts going up through the dense forest, until it reaches the parking lot, and from there, one goes on foot towards the cape. It's a very easy and nice walk (not a hike), and the sun was shining very nicely through the trees: But as I reached the peak of the walk, and started descending towards the coast, I was surprised, yet again, by fog: I realised that probably this means the cape is fully in fog, so I won't have any chance to enjoy the view. Boy, was I wrong! There are three viewpoints on the cape, and at each one I was just "wow" and "aah" at the view. Even thought it was not a sunny summer view, and there was no blue in sight, the combination between the fog (which was hiding the horizon and even the closer islands), the angry ocean which was throwing wave after wave at the shore, making a loud noise, and the fact that even this seemingly inhospitable area was just teeming with life, was both unexpected and awesome. I took here waay to many pictures, here are just a couple inlined: I spent around half an hour here, just enjoying the rawness of nature. It was so amazing to see life encroaching on each bit of land, even though it was not what I would consider a nice place. Ah, how we see everything through our own eyes! The walk back was through fog again, and at one point it switched over back to sunny. Driving back on the same road was quite different, knowing what lies at its end. On this side, the road had some parking spots, so I managed to stop and take a picture - even though this area was much less wild, it still has that outdoors flavour, at least for me: Back in Neah Bay, I stopped to eat. I had a place in mind from TripAdvisor, and indeed - I was able to get a custom order pizza at "Linda's Woodfired Kitchen". Quite good, and I ate without hurry, looking at the people walking outside, as they were coming back from the fair or event that was taking place. While eating, a somewhat disturbing thought was going through my mind. It was still early, around two to half past two, so if I went straight back to Kirkland I would be early at the hotel. But it was also early enough that I could - in theory at least - still do the "big round-trip". I was still rummaging the thought as I left On the drive back I passed once more near Sekiu, Washington, which is a very small place but the map tells me it even has an airport! Fun, and the view was quite nice (a bit of blue before the sea is swallowed by the fog): After passing Sekiu and Clallam Bay, the 112 curves inland and goes on a bit until you are at the crossroads: to the left the 112 continues, back the same way I came; to the right, it's the 113, going south until it meets the 101. I looked left - remembering the not-so-nice road back, I looked south - where a very appealing, early afternoon sun was beckoning - so I said, let's take the long way home! It's just a short stretch on the 113, and then you're on the 101. The 101 is a very nice road, wide enough, and it goes through very very nice areas. Here, west to south-west of the Olympic Mountains, it's a very different atmosphere from the 112/101 that I drove on in the morning; much warmer colours, a bit different tree types (I think), and more flat. I soon passed through Forks, which is one of the places I looked at when searching for hotels. I did so without any knowledge of the town itself (its wikipedia page is quite drab), so imagine my surprise when a month later I learned from a colleague that this is actually a very important place for vampire-book fans. Oh my, and I didn't even stop! This town also had some event, so I just drove on, enjoying the (mostly empty) road. My next planned waypoint was Ruby Beach, and I was looking forward to relaxing a bit under the warm sun - the drive was excellent, weather perfect, so I was watching the distance countdown on my Garmin. At two miles out, the "Near waypoint Ruby Beach" message appeared, and two seconds later the sun went out. What the I was hoping this is something temporary, but as I slowly drove the remaining mile I couldn't believe my eyes that I was, yet again, finding myself in the fog I park the car, thinking that asking for a refund would at least allow me to feel better - but it was I who planned the trip! So I resigned myself, thinking that possibly this beach is another special location that is always in the fog. However, getting near the beach it was clear that it was not so - some people were still in their bathing suits, just getting dressed, so it seems I was just unlucky with regards to timing. However, I the beach itself was nice, even in the fog (I later saw online sunny pictures, and it is quite beautiful), the the lush trees reach almost to the shore, and the way the rocks are sitting on the beach: Since the weather was not that nice, I took a few more pictures, then headed back and started driving again. I was soo happy that the weather didn't clear at the 2 mile mark (it was not just Ruby Beach!), but alas - it cleared as soon as the 101 turns left and leaves the shore, as it crosses the Queets river. Driving towards my next planned stop was again a nice drive in the afternoon sun, so I think it simply was not a sunny day on the Pacific shore. Maybe seas and oceans have something to do with fog and clouds ! In Switzerland, I'm very happy when I see fog, since it's a somewhat rare event (and seeing mountains disappearing in the fog is nice, since it gives the impression of a wider space). After this day, I was a bit fed up with fog for a while Along the 101 one reaches Lake Quinault, which seemed pretty nice on the map, and driving a bit along the lake - a local symbol, the "World's largest spruce tree". I don't know what a spruce tree is, but I like trees, so I was planning to go there, weather allowing. And the weather did cooperate, except that the tree was not so imposing as I thought! In any case, I was glad to stretch my legs a bit: However, the most interesting thing here in Quinault was not this tree, but rather - the quiet little town and the view on the lake, in the late afternoon sun: The entire town was very very quiet, and the sun shining down on the lake gave an even stronger sense of tranquillity. No wind, not many noises that tell of human presence, just a few, and an overall sense of peace. It was quite the opposite of the Cape Flattery and a very nice way to end the trip. Well, almost end - I still had a bit of driving ahead. Starting from Quinault, driving back and entering the 101, driving down to Aberdeen: then turning east towards Olympia, and back onto the highways. As to Aberdeen and Olympia, I just drove through, so I couldn't make any impression of them. The old harbour and the rusted things in Aberdeen were a bit interesting, but the day was late so I didn't stop. And since the day shouldn't end without any surprises, during the last profile change between walking and driving in Quinault, my GPS decided to reset its active maps list and I ended up with all maps activated. This usually is not a problem, at least if you follow a pre-calculated route, but I did trigger recalculation as I restarted my driving, so the Montana was trying to decide on which map to route me - between the Garmin North America map and the Open StreeMap one, the result was that it never understood which road I was on. It always said "Drive to I5", even though I was on I5. Anyway, thanks to road signs, and no thanks to "just this evening ramp closures", I was able to arrive safely at my hotel. Overall, a very successful, if long trip: around 725 kilometres, 10h:30m moving, 13h:30m total: There were many individual good parts, but the overall think about this road trip was that I was able to experience lots of different environments of the peninsula on the same day, and that overall it's a very very nice area. The downside was that I was in a rush, without being able to actually stop and enjoy the locations I visited. And there's still so much to see! A two nights trip sound just about right, with some long hikes in the rain forest, and afternoons spent on a lake somewhere. Another not so optimal part was that I only had my "travel" camera (a Nikon 1 series camera, with a small sensor), which was a bit overwhelmed here and there by the situation. It was fortunate that the light was more or less good, but looking back at the pictures, how I wish that I had my "serious" DSLR So, that means I have two reasons to go back! Not too soon though, since Mount Rainier is also a good location to visit . If the pictures didn't bore you yet, the entire gallery is on my smugmug site. In any case, thanks for reading!

Five years ago, I opened The Eye of the World, the first book in the Wheel of Time series, and read:

Lord of the Morning, he said, I have come for you.

On the island, the air shimmered and coalesced. The black-clad man stood staring at the fiery mountain rising out of the plain. His face twisted in rage and contempt. You cannot escape so easily, Dragon. It is not done between us. It will not be done until the end of time. Then he was gone, and the mountain and the island stood alone. Waiting.

And then, as often, Robert Jordan began books citing some of the prophecy he invented:

And it came to pass in those days, as it had come before and would come again, that the Dark lay heavy on the land and weighed down the hearts of men, and the green things failed, and hope died. And men cried out to the Creator, saying, O Light of the Heavens, Light of the World, let the Promised One be born of the mountain, according to the prophecies, as he was in ages past and will be in ages to come. Let the Prince of the Morning sing to the land that green things will grow and the valleys give forth lambs. Let the arm of the Lord of the Dawn shelter us from the Dark, and the great sword of justice defend us. Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time. from Charal Drianaan to Calamon,
The Cycle of the Dragon.
Author unknown, the Fourth Age

And then, the grand opening to each of the books in the 11,000-page series, something like this:

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. Born below the ever cloud-capped peaks that gave the mountains their name, the wind blew east, out across the Sand Hills, once the shore of a great ocean, before the Breaking of the World. Down it flailed into the Two Rivers, into the tangled forest called the Westwood, and beat at two men walking with a cart and horse down the rock-strewn track called the Quarry Road.

And yesterday, 11,000 pages later, I have completed the series. Really, how could I have put down a book with such a majestic beginning as that? It hinted at the epic that was to come, the amazing literature I was going to read. I didn t read it straight through; I enjoyed books like War and Peace along the way. But what a trip the Wheel of Time series was. The characters were so detailed, so deep, the setting so elaborate, the plots so grand and also so small everyone from servants to queens were well-represented in the books. Not every section was a page-turner; in fact, around the 4th or 5th book, the series started to plod for a thousand pages or two, reading more like a history book than a novel. Sometimes the prejudices and stereotypes of the characters, particularly the sexism that both the men and women displayed, were frustrating to read. I never quite figured out of this was brilliant writing (making the reader feel frustrated at the plodding pace of the book when it was describing characters being frustrated at the plodding pace of events), or if it could have been trimmed down by 2/3 in some places. But really, the number of brilliant endings, laugh-out-loud situations, and page-turning suspense that somehow managed to build over hundreds, and then even thousands of pages, outweighed the flaws.

Politics is a foggy mire full of snakes. - The Eye of the World

Ah. Furlan washed his hands in one direction, then rubbed them in the other. Ah. Forgive me, Master Andra, but Lady Alys is a fierce sounding woman. Only with those who displease her, Lan said blandly. Her bite is far worse than her bark. Ah. Ah. Ah. Your rooms are this way. . . - The Dragon Reborn

One of the marks of truly good writing is that I leave a book or series with a sense of sadness or nostalgia, leaving characters that seem almost like friends. I felt that after finishing the last book in the series, A Memory of Light. The ending was deep, and satisfying, but ultimately left me wanting even more even more than 11,000 pages, somehow.

Elienda and Briain woke from the dream. She might have been speaking of the weather rather than two deaths among women she knew. We all must wake eventually. - Knife of Dreams

I was often touched by the way the Aiel referred to each other. A desert people, their fond farewall was may you always find water and shade. A fitting metaphor for anyone s life, I think. And they referred to their spouse as shade of my heart. Jordan touched on quite a few themes of religion and philosophy. In that quote above, he has the Aiel referring to death as waking from a dream. An intriguing metaphor, isn t it? He even writes conflicts of philosophy, religion, and culture into the series. I was particularly impressed with his treatment of theodicy and the problem of evil (the argument and religious response relating to the presence of evil in the world in the face of a loving God.) It is the most impressive treatment I have seen in fiction, and does a better job of advancing the theodistic argument than many philosophers have, I suspect. It is hard to really go into that one here because of the length and potential for spoilers. I can, however, comment on his treatment of existential nihilism the theory that life and the universe is without meaning, and the sometimes-related comment that what does anything matter then anyway? Here are a couple of quotes:

In Maradon, I saw what had been done to men who followed me. I saw Light in them, Min. Defying the Dark One no matter the length of his shadow. We will live, that defiance said. We will love and we will hope. And I saw him trying so hard to destroy that. He knows that if he could break them, it would mean something. Something much more than Maradon. Breaking the spirit of men he thirsts for that. He struck far harder than he otherwise would have because he wanted to break my spirit. His voice grew softer and he opened his eyes, looking down at her. And so I stood against him. - Towers of Midnight

What if I think it s all meaningless? he demanded with the loud voice of a king. What if I don t want it to keep turning? We live our lives by the blood of others! And those others become forgotten. What good is it if everything we know will fade? Great deeds or great tragedies, neither means anything! They will become legends, then those legends will be forgotten, then it will all start over again!

Why? Rand thought with wonder. Because each time we live, we get to love again.

It felt relaxing to stare out at that distant light, so welcoming and noble. Storms will soon come, it seemed to say. But for now, I am here. I am here. - The Gathering Storm

I unfortunately can t put in in its proper context due to spoilers, but it is a pivotal turning point in the series, relating to the preservation of the world. By giving what we might normally call a characteristic or behavior evil an almost-human voice and character, it can be discussed in interesting ways.

We are always more afraid than we wish to be, but we can always be braver than we expect. Hold on to your heart, and the Aes Sedai cannot harm what is really you, your heart. They are not nearly so far above us as we believed. May you always find water and shade, Egwene. And always remember your heart. - Lord of Chaos

Eben is dead. Would you want to forget your pain if you lost that hulking giant of yours? Have your feelings for him cut away like some spoiled chunk of flesh in an otherwise good roast? - The Gathering Storm

These quotes are examples of characters in the series dealing with difficult situations. In one, a character is yelled at for offering to use her special powers to numb the pain of another person over a death. It brings up a question that those of us that have known pain might find interesting: would we really have wanted our pain erased? And suggests perhaps not. That there is a benefit to it. That we get through it by embracing it by embracing it while still being true to our heart.

He had four rules concerning action and information. Never make a plan without knowing as much as you can of the enemy. Never be afraid to change your plans when you receive new information. Never believe you know everything. And never wait to know everything. - Lord of Chaos

Sometimes the series treats us to logical thinkers, whether they are generals or innkeepers, and gives us little tidbits like this one.

Androl brushed off his hands, smiling. Children were so adaptable. Before them, centuries of tradition, terror and superstition could melt away like butter left too long in the sun. - Towers of Midnight

And sometimes, things to chew over. Isn t that an interesting comment on prejudice? Children aren t born prejudiced; we can see how easily they make friends with anyone. It is sad that we teach them to be, isn t it? Wheel of Time is a fine story, expertly woven. But it is not just a story. It is true, in the sense that it illuminates truths, just like Romeo and Juliet can. In it, I see lessons and echoes of the civil rights era, comments on what makes good leaders, characters wrestling with decisions without adequate data, people putting on a mask of emotions, sacrifice, and the overall theme of the entire series: the power of love and compassion. The inspiration of the series for me well, it is there, but it may take a few more days to figure it out. I think it has something to do with this: The wind rose high and free, to soar in an open sky with no clouds.