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Congratulations to everyone who has played a part in the creation of Debian GNU/Linux 9.0! It s a great release, I ve installed the pre-release versions for friends, family and colleagues and so far the feedback has been very positive. This release is dedicated to Ian Murdock, who founded the Debian project in 1993, and sadly passed away on 28 December 2015. On the Debian ISO files a dedication statement is available on /doc/dedication/dedication-9.0.txt Here s a copy of the dedication text:

Dedicated to Ian Murdock
------------------------
Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian project, passed away
on 28th December 2015 at his home in San Francisco. He was 42.
It is difficult to exaggerate Ian's contribution to Free
Software. He led the Debian Project from its inception in
1993 to 1996, wrote the Debian manifesto in January 1994 and
nurtured the fledgling project throughout his studies at
Purdue University.
Ian went on to be founding director of Linux International,
CTO of the Free Standards Group and later the Linux
Foundation, and leader of Project Indiana at Sun
Microsystems, which he described as "taking the lesson
that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing
that for Solaris".
Debian's success is testament to Ian's vision. He inspired
countless people around the world to contribute their own free
time and skills. More than 350 distributions are known to be
derived from Debian.
We therefore dedicate Debian 9 "stretch" to Ian.
-- The Debian Developers

During this development cycle, the amount of source packages in Debian grew from around 21 000 to around 25 000 packages, which means that there s a whole bunch of new things Debian can make your computer do. If you find something new in this release that you like, post about it on your favourite social networks, using the hashtag #newinstretch or look it up to see what others have discovered!

Review: Chimes at Midnight, by Seanan McGuire

Series:	October Daye #7
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	2013
ISBN:	1-101-63566-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	346

Chimes at Midnight is the seventh book of the October Daye series and builds heavily on the previous books. Toby has gathered quite the group of allies by this point, and events here would casually spoil some of the previous books in the series (particularly One Salt Sea, which you absolutely do not want spoiled). I strongly recommend starting at the beginning, even if the series is getting stronger as it goes along. This time, rather than being asked for help, the book opens with Toby on a mission. Goblin fruit is becoming increasingly common on the streets of San Francisco, and while she's doing all she can to find and stop the dealers, she's finding dead changelings. Goblin fruit is a pleasant narcotic to purebloods, but to changelings it's instantly and fatally addictive. The growth of the drug trade means disaster for the local changelings, particularly since previous events in the series have broken a prominent local changeling gang. That was for the best, but they were keeping goblin fruit out, and now it's flooding into the power vacuum. In the sort of idealistic but hopelessly politically naive move that Toby is prone to, she takes her evidence to the highest local authority in faerie: the Queen of the Mists. The queen loathes Toby and the feeling is mutual, but Toby's opinion is that this shouldn't matter: these are her subjects and goblin fruit is widely recognized as a menace. Even if she cares nothing for their lives, a faerie drug being widely sold on the street runs the substantial risk that someone will give it to humans, potentially leading to the discovery of faerie. Sadly, but predictably, Toby has underestimated the Queen's malevolence. She leaves the court burdened not only with the knowledge that the Queen herself is helping with the distribution of goblin fruit, but also an impending banishment thanks to her reaction. She has three days to get out of the Queen's territory, permanently. Three days that the Luidaeg suggests she spend talking to people who knew King Gilad, the former and well-respected king of the local territory who died in the 1906 earthquake, apparently leaving the kingdom to the current Queen. Or perhaps not. As usual, crossing Toby is a very bad idea, and getting Toby involved in politics means that one should start betting heavily against the status quo. Also, as usual, things initially go far too well, and then Toby ends up in serious trouble. (I realize the usefulness of raising the stakes of the story, but I do prefer the books of this series that don't involve Toby spending much of the book ill.) However, there is a vast improvement over previous books in the story: one key relationship (which I'll still avoid spoiling) is finally out of the precarious will-they, won't-they stage and firmly on the page, and it's a relationship that I absolutely love. Watching Toby stomp people who deserve to be stomped makes me happy, but watching Toby let herself be happy and show it makes me even happier. McGuire also gives us some more long-pending revelations. I probably should have guessed the one about one of Toby's long-time friends and companions much earlier, although at least I did so a few pages before Toby found out. I have some strong suspicions about Toby's own background that were reinforced by this book, and will be curious to see if I'm right. And I'm starting to have guesses about the overall arc of the series, although not firm ones. One of my favorite things in long-running series is the slow revelation of more and more world background, and McGuire does it in just the way I like: lots of underlying complexity, reveals timed for emotional impact but without dragging on things that the characters should obviously be able to figure out, and a whole bunch of layered secrets that continue to provide more mystery even after one layer is removed. The plot here is typical of the plot of the last couple of novels in the series, which is fine by me since my favorite part of this series is the political intrigue (and Toby realizing that she has far more influence than she thinks). It helps that I thought Arden was great, given how central she is to this story. I liked her realistic reactions to her situation, and I liked her arguments with Toby. I'm dubious how correct Toby actually was, but we've learned by now that arguments from duty are always going to hold sway with her. And I loved Mags and the Library, and hope we'll be seeing more of them in future novels. The one quibble I'll close with, since the book closed with it, is that I found the ending rather abrupt. There were several things I wanted to see in the aftermath, and the book ended before they could happen. Hopefully that means they'll be the start of the next book (although a bit of poking around makes me think they may be in a novella). If you've liked the series so far, particularly the couple of books before this one, this is more of what you liked. Recommended. Followed by The Winter Long. Rating: 8 out of 10

I still remember vividly my first visit to Europe, back in 2010. I had just barely gotten off a plane in Hamburg and on to a bus to Lubeck, and struck up a conversation with a friendly, well-educated German classical musician next to me. We soon started to discuss politics and religion. Over the course of the conversation, in response to his questions, I explained I had twice voted against George W. Bush, that I opposed the war in Iraq for many reasons, that I did thought there was an ethical imperative to work to defeat climate change, that I viewed health care as an important ethical and religious issue, that I thought evolution was well-established, and that I am a Christian. Finally, without any hint of insult intended, and rather a lot of surprise written all over his face, he said: Wow. You re an American, and a Christian, and you re so . normal! This, it seems to me, has a lot to do with Trump. Ouch It felt like a punch to the gut. The day after the election, having known that a man that appeared to stand for everything that honorable people are against won the election, like people all around the world, I was trying to make sense of how could this happen? As I ve watched since, as he stacks government with wealthy cronies with records nearly as colorful as his own, it is easy to feel even more depressed. Based on how Trump spoke and acted, it would be easy to conclude that the deplorables won the day that he was elected by a contingent of sexists or racists ascendent in power. But that would be too simple an explanation. This is, after all, the same country that elected Barack Obama twice. There are a many people that voted twice for a black man, and then for Trump. Why? Racism, while doubtless a factor, can t explain it all. How Trump could happen Russ Allbery made some excellent points recently:

[Many Americans are] hurt, and they re scared, and they feel like a lot of the United States just slammed the door in their faces. The status quo is not working for people. Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances. Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I m part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too. The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country.

Russ is, of course, right. The Democrats have been either complicit in policies damaging to many, or ineffective in preventing them. They have often appeared unconcerned with the plight of people outside cities (even if that wasn t really the case). And it goes deeper. When s the last time you visited Kansas? I live in Kansas. The nearest paved road is about a 3-mile drive from my home. The nearest town, population 600, is a 6-mile drive. My governor whom I did not vote for cut taxes on the wealthy so much that our excellent local schools have been struggling for years. But my community is amazing, full of loving and caring people, the sort of people who you know you ll be living with for 40 years, and so you make sure you get along well with. I have visited tourist sites in Berlin, enjoyed an opera and a Broadway show in New York, taken a train across the country to Portland, explored San Francisco. I ve enjoyed all of them. Many rural people do get out and experience the world. I have been in so many conversations where I try to explain where I live to people that simply cannot fathom it. I have explained how the 18 acres I own is a very small amount where I am. How, yes, I do actually have electricity and Internet. How a bad traffic day is one where I have to wait for three cars to go past before turning onto the paved road. How I occasionally find a bull in my front yard, how I can walk a quarter mile and be at the creek on the edge of my property, how I can get to an airport faster than most New Yorkers and my kids can walk out the front door and play in a spot more peaceful than Central Park, and how all this is way cheaper than a studio apartment in a bad part of San Francisco. It is rare indeed to see visitors actually traveling to Kansas as a destination. People have no concept of the fact that my mechanic would drop everything and help me get my broken-down car to the shop for no charge, that any number of neighbors or uncles would bring a tractor and come plow the snow off my 1/4-mile driveway out of sheer kindness, that people around here really care for each other in a way you don t see in a city. There are people that I know see politics way differently than me, but I know them to be good people. They would also do anything for a person in need, no matter who they are. I may find the people that they vote for to be repugnant, but I cannot say I ve looked this person in the eyes and they are nothing but deplorable. And so, people in rural areas feel misunderstood. And they are right. Some perspectives on Trump As I ve said, I do find Trump to be deplorable, but not everyone that voted for him is. How, then, do people wind up voting for him? The New Yorker had an excellent story about a man named Mark Frisbie, owner of a welding and fab shop. The recession had been hard on his business. His wife s day-care center also closed. Health care was hard to find, and the long, slow decline had spanned politicians of every stripe. Mark and his wife supposedly did everything they were supposed to: they worked hard, were honest, were entrepreneurial, and yet he had lost his business, his family house, his health coverage, everything. He doesn t want a handout. He wants to be able to earn a living. Asked who he d vote for, he said, Is none of the above an option? The Washington Post had another insightful article, about a professor from Madison, WI interviewing people in rural areas. She said people would often say: All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody s listening to us. Nobody s paying attention, nobody s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them. She pushed back, hard, on the idea that Trump supporters are ignorant, and added that liberals that push that line of thinking are only making the problem worse. I would agree; seeing all the talk about universities dis-inviting speakers that don t hew to certain political views doesn t help either. A related article talks about the lack of empathy for Trump voters. And then we have a more recent CNN article: Where Tump support and Obamacare use soar together, explaining in great detail how it can be logical for someone to be on Obamacare but not like it. We can all argue that the Republicans may have as much to do with that as anything, but the problem exists. And finally, a US News article makes this point:

His supporters realize he s a joke. They do not care. They know he s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who ve long ignored their interests. When you re earning $32,000 a year and haven t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price. According to the Republican Party, the biggest threat to rural America was Islamic terrorism. According to the Democratic Party it was gun violence. In reality it was prescription drug abuse and neither party noticed until it was too late.

Are we leaving people out? All this reminded me of reading about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist and something of the father of modern computing, writing about his feelings of trepidation about sharing with his university colleagues that he was working on a project related to the Bible. I am concerned about the complaints about the PC culture , because I think it is good that people aren t making racist or anti-semitic jokes in public anymore. But, as some of these articles point out, in many circles, making fun of Christians and conservatives is still one of the accepted targets. Does that really help anything? (And as a Christian that is liberal, have all of you that aren t Christians so quickly forgotten how churches like the Episcopals blazed the way for marriage equality many years ago already?) But they don t get a free pass I have found a few things, however, absolutely scary. One was an article from December showing that Trump voters actually changed their views on Russia after Trump became the nominee. Another one from just today was a study on how people reacted when showed inauguration crowd photos. NPR ran a story today as well, on how Trump is treating journalists like China does. Chilling stuff indeed. Conclusion So where does this leave us? Heading into uncertain times, for sure, but perhaps just maybe with a greater understanding of our neighbors. Perhaps we will all be able to see past the rhetoric and polarization, and understand that there is something, well, normal about each other. Doing that is going to be the only way we can really take our country back.

I dated Appelbaum! she said. I gotta go, I said.

This year, Outreachy featured internships from organizations such as Debian, Fedora, GNOME, the Linux Kernel, Mozilla, Python, and Wikimedia, just to name a few. Each organization features mentored projects and in order to apply, applicants must contact the mentor, introduce themselves on the appropriate channels and make a small contribution to the project. After that, applicants might be required to fulfill additional tasks to demonstrate their abilities. Successful applicants will make quality contributions, communicate effectively with mentors, ask questions, fulfill tasks, help out their peers via mailing lists, and/or blog about their experience. One of the projects I applied to was the Clean Room for PGP and X.509 (PKI) Key Management. The project aims to create a Live Disc that enables users to create and manage their PGP keys easily and securely, using a text-based UI. I ve been a Debian user for about a year, but before applying to the project I didn t know much about GnuPG or public key encryption. Since then, I ve made some contributions and attended my first keysigning event in San Francisco featuring a lecture by Neal Walfield (more on that below). For my initial contribution, Daniel Pocock, the mentor for this project, asked that I write a script that lists the USB flash devices connected to the system and specifies which device the system booted from. Here s the bash script that I wrote, and that was enough to submit an application for Debian. My next task was to write a dns hook script for the dehydrated project, a shell client for signing certificates with Let s Encrypt (for free!). The script completes a dns challenge sent by the ACME-server by provisioning a TXT record for a given domain in order to prove ownership of the domain. I chose to write it in python and used the dnspython API. I posted my solution on github and there are many more here. At the lecture, Neal talked about good practices for key creation and management. Here are a few of those points:

Don t store your master key locally
Store your master key offline on a smartcard such as GnuK or NitroKey and store backups on a USB stick.
Neal mentioned that the OpenPGP card is not open hardware and according to this recent post neither is the Yubikey
To manage the key, use a dedicated offline computer such as a relatively cheap x40 or x60 Thinkpad (my two cents: use a Thinkpad like X200 or T400 flashed with Libreboot, which solves the proprietary firmware problem) and remove the wireless network card.
Use Tails which wipes memory on shutdown.
Use subkeys an encryption subkey is automatically created with gpg2 --gen-key. Create an additional signing subkey.
Generate a secure passphrase for your master key using 5-12 words. Example: pipe after harm horse split seize radar bulb
- Funny cartoon illustrating this concept
Refresh your keys regularly for new preferences and revokation certificates. An alternative to gpg2 --refresh-keys is parcimonie, which uses tor and refreshes keys one at a time.
Don t back up .gnupg/random_seed
More OpenPGP Best Practices

See the slides for Neal s full presentation.

Don t store your master key locally
Store your master key offline on a smartcard such as GnuK or NitroKey and store backups on a USB stick.
Neal mentioned that the OpenPGP card is not open hardware and according to this recent post neither is the Yubikey
To manage the key, use a dedicated offline computer such as a relatively cheap x40 or x60 Thinkpad (my two cents: use a Thinkpad like X200 or T400 flashed with Libreboot, which solves the proprietary firmware problem) and remove the wireless network card.
Use Tails which wipes memory on shutdown.
Use subkeys an encryption subkey is automatically created with gpg2 --gen-key. Create an additional signing subkey.
Generate a secure passphrase for your master key using 5-12 words. Example: pipe after harm horse split seize radar bulb
- Funny cartoon illustrating this concept
Refresh your keys regularly for new preferences and revokation certificates. An alternative to gpg2 --refresh-keys is parcimonie, which uses tor and refreshes keys one at a time.
Don t back up .gnupg/random_seed
More OpenPGP Best Practices

See the slides for Neal s full presentation.

This weekend, I traveled to Columbus, Ohio to attend Ohio Linux Fest. I departed San Francisco early on Thursday. It was interesting getting to experience the luxurious side of flying as I enjoyed a mimosa in the American Express Centurion lounge for the first time. I even happend to cross paths with Corey Quinn, who was on his way to [DevOpsDays Boise]. While connecting in Houston, I met up with the always awesome Jos Antonio Rey, who was to be my travel companion for this trip. The long day of travel took its toll on us, so we had a lazy Friday morning before checking in for the conference around lunch time. I was not that interested in the afternoon sessions, so I spent the majority of the first day helping out at the Ubuntu booth and catching up with friends and colleagues. The day ended with a nice Happy Hour sponsored by Oracle. Saturday was the main day for the conference. Ethan Galstad, Founder and CEO of Nagios, started the day with a Keynote about Becoming the Next Tech Entrepreneur. Next up was Elizabeth K. Joseph with A Tour of OpenStack Deployment Scenarios. While I ve read plenty about OpenStack, I ve never actually used it before. As a result, this demo and introduction was great to watch. It was entertaining to watch her login to CirrOS with the default password of cubswin:), as the Chicago Cubs are currently playing the San Francisco Giants in the National League Divisional Series (and winning). Unfortunately, I was not able to win a copy of her new Common OpenStack Deployments book, but it was great getting to watch her signing copies for other attendees after all of the hard work that went into writing the book. For lunch, Jos , Elizabeth, and Svetlana Belkin all gathered together for an informal Ubuntu lunch. Finally, it was time for me to give my talk. This was the same talk I gave at FOSSCON, but this time, I had a significantly larger audience. Practice definitely makes perfect, as my delivery was a lot better the second time giving this talk. Afterwards, I had a number of people come up to me to let me know that they really enjoyed the presentation. Pro Tip: If you ever attend a talk, the speaker will really appreciate any feedback you send their way. Even if it is a simple, Thank You , it really means a lot. One of the people who came up to me after the talk was Unit193. We have known each other through Ubuntu for years, but there has never been an opportunity to meet in person. I am proud to be able to say with 99% confidence that he is not a robot, and is in fact a real person. Next up was a lesson about the /proc filesystem. While I ve explored it a bit on my own before, I still learned a few tips and tricks about information that can be gained from the files in this magical directory. Following this was a talk about Leading When You re Not the Boss. It was even partially taught by a dummy (the speaker was a ventriloquist). The last regular talk of the day was one of the more interesting ones I attended. It was a talk by Patrick Shuff from Facebook about how they have built a load balancer than can handle a billion users. The slide deck was well-made with very clear diagrams. The speaker was also very knowledgeable and dealt with the plethora of questions he received. Prior to the closing keynote was a series of lightning talks. These served as a great means to get people laughing after a long day of talks. The closing keynote was given by father and daughter Joe and Lilly Born about The Democratization of Invention. Both of them had very interesting stories, and Lily was quite impressive given her age. We skipped the Nagios After Party in favor of a more casual pizza dinner. Overall, it was a great conference, and I am very glad to have had the opportunity to attend. A big thanks to Canonical and the Ubuntu Community for fudning my travel through the Ubuntu Community Fund and to the Ohio Linux Fest staff for allowing me the opportunity to speak at such a great conference.

This post is long past due, but I figured it is better late than never. At the start of the year, I set a goal to get more involved with attending and speaking at conferences. Through work, I was able to attend the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Pasadena, CA in January. I also got to give a talk at O'Relly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Austin, TX in May. However, I really wanted to give a talk about my experience contributing in the Ubuntu community. Jos Antonio Rey encouraged me to submit the talk to FOSSCON. While I've been aware of FOSSCON for years thanks to my involvement with the freenode IRC network (which has had a reference to FOSSCON in the /motd for years), I had never actually attended it before. I also wasn't quite sure how I would handle traveling from San Francisco, CA to Philadelphia, PA. Regardless, I decided to go ahead and apply. Fast forward a few weeks, and imagine my surprise when I woke up to an email saying that my talk proposal was accepted. People were actually interested in me and what I had to say. I immediately began researching flights. While they weren't crazy expensive, they were still more money than I was comfortable spending. Luckily, Jos had a solution to this problem as well; he suggested applying for funding through the Ubuntu Community Donations fund. While I've been an Ubuntu Member for over 8 years, I've never used this resource before. However, I was happy when I received a very quick approval. The conference itself was smaller than I was expecting. However, it was packed with lots of friendly and familiar faces of people I've interacted with online and in person over the years at various Open Source events. I started off the day by learning from Jos how to use Juju to quickly setup applications in the cloud. While Juju has definitely come a long way over the last couple of years, and it appears t be quite easy to learn and use, it still appears to be lacking some of the features needed to take full control over how the underlying applications interact with each other. However, I look forward to continuing to watch it grow and mature. Net up, we had a lunch break. There was no catered lunch at this conference, so we decided to get some cheesesteak at Abner's (is any trip to Philadelphia complete without cheesesteak?). Following lunch, I took some time to make a few last minute changes to my presentation and rehearse a bit. Finally, it was time. I got up in front of the audience and gave my presentation. Overall, I was quite pleased. It was not perfect, but for the first time giving the talk, I thought it went pretty well. I will work hard to make it even better for next tme. Following my talk was a series of brief lightning talks prior to the closing keynote. Another long time friend of mine, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph, was giving the keynote about listening to the needs of your global open source community. While I have seen her speak on several other occassions, I really enjoyed this particular talk. It was full of great examples and anecdotes that were easy for the audience to relate to and start applying to their own communities. After the conference, a few of us went off and played tourist, paying the Liberty Bell a visit before concluding our trip in Philadelpha. Overall, I had a great time as FOSSCON. It was great being re-united with so many friends. A big thank you to Jos for his constant support and encouragement and to Canonical and the Ubuntu Community for helping to make it possible for me to attend this conference. Finally, thanks to the terrific FOSSCON staff for volunteering so much time to put on this great event.

Hello friend, family, fellow Outreachy participants, and the Debian community!
This blog's primary purpose will be to track the progress of the Outreachy project in which I'm participating this summer This post is to introduce myself and my project (working on the Debian reproducible builds project).
What is Outreachy? You might not know! Let me empower you: Outreachy is an organization connecting woman and minorities to mentors in the free (as in freedom) software community, /and/ funding for three months to work with the mentors and contribute to a free software project. If you are a woman or minority human that likes free software, or if you know anyone in this situation, please tell them about Outreachy Or put them in touch with me, I'd happily tell them more.
So who am I?
My name is Valerie Young. I live in the Boston Metropolitan Area (any other outreachy participants here?) and hella love free software.
Some bullet pointed Val facts in rough reverse chronological order:
- I run Debian but only began contributing during the Outreachy application process
- If you went to DebConf2015, you might have seen me dye nine people's hair blue, blond or Debian swirl.
- If you stop through Boston I could be easily convinced to dye your hair.
- I worked on electronic medical records web application for the last two years (lotsa Javascriptin' and Perlin' at athenahealth)
- Before that I taught a programming summer program at University of Moratuwain Sri Lanka.
- Before that I got a degrees in physics and computer science at Boston University.
- At BU I helped start a hackerspace where my interest in technology, free software, hacker culture, anarchy, the internet all began.
- I grew up in the very fine San Francisco Bay Area.
What will I be working on?
Reproducible builds!
In the near future I'll write a What is reproducible builds? Why is it so hot right now? post. For now, from a high (and not technical) level, reproducible builds is a broad effort to verify that the computer executable binary programs you run on your computer come from the human readable source code they claim to. It is not presently /impossible/ to do this verification, but it's not easy, and there are a lot of nuanced computer quirks that make it difficult for the most experienced programmer and straight-up impossible for a user with no technical expertise. And without this ability to verify -- the state we are in now -- any executable piece of software could be hiding secret code.
The first step towards the goal of verifiability is to make reproducibility a essential part of software development. Reproducible builds means this: when you compile a program from the source code, it should always be identical, bit by bit. If the program is always identical, you can compare your version of the software to any trusted programmer with very little effort. If it is identical, you can trust it -- if it's not, you have reason to worry.
The Debian project is undergoing an effort to make the entire Debian operating system verifiable reproducible (hurray!). My outreachy-funded summer contribution involves the improving and updating tests.reproducible-builds.org a site that presently presently surfaces the results of reproducibility testing of several free software projects (including Debian, Fedora, coreboot, OpenWrt, NetBSD, FreeBSD and ArchLinux). However, the design of test.r-b.org is a bit confusing, making it difficult for a user to find how to check on the reproducibility of a given package for one of the aforementioned projects, or understand the reasons for failure. Additional, the backend test results of Debian are outgrowing the original SQLite database, and many projects do not log the results of package testing at all. I hope, by the end of the summer, we'll have a more beefed-out and pretty site as well as better organized backend data
This summer there will be 3 other Outreachy participants working on the Debian reproducible builds project! Check out their blogs/projects:
Scarlett
Satyam
Ceridwen
Thanks to our Debian mentors -- Lunar, Holger Levsen, and Mattia Rizzolo -- for taking us on

I spent last night in San Francisco on my way from Tucson to Seoul. This morning as I headed to the airport, I caught the end of a shouted conversation between a down-and-out and a couple of middle school-aged girls, who ran away back to the Asian Art museum as the conversation ended. A security guard told the man that he needed him to go away. The wealth divide so visible here just isn t something you really see around Tucson. I m working on a new module for Propellor that s complicated enough that I need to think carefully about the Haskell in order to write produce a flexible and maintainable module. I ve only been doing an hour or so of work on it per day, but the past few days I wake up each day with an idea for restructuring yesterday s code. These ideas aren t anything new to me: I think I m just dredging up the understanding of Haskell I developed last year when I was studying it more actively. Hopefully this summer I can learn some new things about Haskell. Riding on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) feels like stepping back in time to the years of Microsoft s ascendency, before we had a tech world dominated by Google and Facebook: the platform announcements are in a computerised voice that sounds like it was developed in the nineties. They ll eventually replace the old trains apparently some new ones are coming in 2017 so I feel privileged to have been able to ride the older ones. I feel the same about the Tube in London. I really appreciate old but supremely reliable and effective public transport. It reminds me of the Debian toolchain: a bit creaky, but maintained over a sufficiently long period that it serves everyone a lot better than newer offerings, which tend to be produced with ulterior corporate motives.

I recently completed and released some work on Debian s tooling for packaging Emacs Lisp addons to GNU Emacs. Emacs grew a package manager called package.el a few years ago, and last year David Bremner wrote the dh_elpa tool to simplify packaging addons for Debian by leveraging package.el features. Packaging a series of addons for Debian left me with a wishlist of features for dh_elpa and I was recently able to implement them. Debian tooling generally uses Perl, a language I didn t know before starting on this project. I was fortunate enough to receive a free review copy of Perl 5 by Example when I attended a meeting of the Bay Area Linux Users Group while I was visiting San Francisco a few months ago. I accepted the book with the intent of doing this work. dh_make_elpa dh_make_elpa (at present available from Debian experimental) is a Perl script to convert a git repository cloned from the upstream of an Emacs Lisp addon to a rudimentary Debian package. It performs a lot of guesswork, and its simple heuristics are something I hope to improve on. Since I am new to object-oriented program design in Perl and I wanted to leverage object-oriented Debian tooling library code, I took the structure of my project from dh_make_perl. In this manner I found it easy and pleasant to write a maintainable script. dh_elpa_test A lot of Emacs Lisp addon packages use a program called Cask to manage the Emacs Lisp dependencies needed to run their test suites. That meant that dh_auto_test often fails to run Emacs Lisp addon package test suites. Since the Debian packaging toolchain already has advanced dependency management, it s undesirable to involve Cask in the package build pipeline if it can be avoided. I had been copying and pasting the code needed to make the tests run in our environment to the debian/rules files of each package whose test suite I wanted to run. dh_elpa_test tries to detect Emacs Lisp addon package test suites and run them with the workarounds needed in our environment. This avoids boilerplate in debian/rules. dh_elpa_test also disables dh_auto_test to avoid a inadvertent Cask invocation. Future & acknowledgements My hope for this work was to make it easier and faster to package Emacs Lisp addon packages for Debian, for my own sake and for anyone new who is interested in joining the pkg-emacsen team. In the future, I want to have dh_elpa_test generate an autopkgtest definition so that a Testsuite: pkg-emacsen line in debian/control is enough to have an Emacs Lisp addon package test suite run on Debian CI. I m very grateful to David Bremner for reviewing and supporting this work, and also for supporting my Emacs Lisp addon packaging work more generally.

Last night I got back from spending around 5 days in the Bay Area for Spring Break. I stayed in a hostel in downtown SF for three nights and then I stayed with a friend who is doing a PhD at Stanford. When initially planning this trip my aim was just to visit somewhere interesting on the west coast of the continental United States. I chose the Bay Area because I wanted to get my PGP key signed by some Debian Developers and that area has a high concentration of DDs, and because I wanted to see my friend at Stanford. But in the end I liked San Francisco a lot more than expected to and am very glad that I had an opportunity to visit. The first thing that I liked was how easy it seemed to be to find people interested in the same kind of tech stuff that I am. I spent my first afternoon in the city exploring the famous Mission district, and at one point while sitting in the original Philz Coffee I found that the person sitting next to me was running Debian on her laptop and blogs about data privacy. We had an discussion about how viable OpenPGP is as a component of a technically unsophisticated user s attempts to stay safe online. Later that same day while riding the subway train, someone next to me fired up Emacs on their laptop. And over the course of my trip I met five Debian Developers doing all sorts of different kinds of work both in and outside of Debian, and some Debian users including one of Stanford s UNIX sysadmins. This is a far cry from my day-to-day life down in the Sonoran Desert where new releases of iOS are all anyone seems to be interested in. Perhaps I should have expected this before my trip, but I think I had assumed that most of the work being done in San Francisco was writing web apps, so I was pleased to find people working on the same kind of things that I am currently putting time into. And in saying the above, I don t mean to demean the interests of the people around me in Arizona for a moment (nor those writing web apps; I d like to learn how to write good ones at some point). I m very grateful to be able to discuss my philosophical interests with the other graduate students. It s just that I miss being able to discuss tech stuff. I guess you can t have everything you want! One particular encouraging meeting I had was with a Debian Developer employed by Google and working on Git. While my maths background sets me up with the right thinking skills to write programs, I don t have knowledge typically gained from an education in computer science that enables one to work on the most interesting software. In particular, low-level programming in C is something that I had thought it wouldn t be possible for me to get started with. So it was encouraging to meet the DD working on Git at Google because his situation was similar: his undergraduate background is in maths and he was able to learn how to code in C by himself and is now working on a exciting project at a company that it is hard to get hired by. I don t mean that doing exactly what he s doing is something that I aiming for, just that it is very encouraging to know the field is more open to me than I had thought. I was also reminded of how fortunate I am to have the Internet to learn from and projects like Debian to get involved with. Moving on from tech, I enjoyed the streets of San Francisco, and the Stanford campus. San Francisco is fantastically multicultural though with clear class and wealth divisions. A very few minutes walk from the Twitter headquarters with its tech bros , as the maths PhD students I met at Stanford call them, are legions of the un- and barely-employed passing their time on the concrete. I enjoyed riding one of the old cable cars through the aesthetically revealing and stark combination of a west coast grid system on some very steep hills. I was fortunate to be able to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge on a perfectly clear and mist-free day. Meeting people involved with Debian and meeting my old friend at Stanford had me reflecting on and questioning my life in the desert even more than usual. I try to remind myself that there is an end date in sight and I will regret spending my time here just thinking about leaving. I sometimes worry that I could easily find myself moving to the big city London, San Francisco or elsewhere and letting myself be carried by the imagined self-importance of that, sidelining and procrastinating things that I should prize more highly. I should remember that the world of writing software in big cities isn t going away and my time in the desert is an opportunity to prepare myself better for that, building my resistance to being swept away by the tides of fashion.

I m organizing an event at the University of Washington in Seattle that involves a reading, the screening of a documentary film, and a Q&A about Aaron Swartz. The event coincides with the third anniversary of Aaron s death and the release of a new book of Swartz s writing that I contributed to.

The event is free and open the public and details are below:

WHEN: Wednesday, January 13 at 6:30-9:30 p.m.

WHERE: Communications Building (CMU) 120, University of Washington

We invite you to celebrate the life and activism efforts of Aaron Swartz, hosted by UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill. The event is next week and will consist of a short book reading, a screening of a documentary about Aaron s life, and a Q&A with Mako who knew Aaron well details are below. No RSVP required; we hope you can join us.

Aaron Swartz was a programming prodigy, entrepreneur, and information activist who contributed to the core Internet protocol RSS and co-founded Reddit, among other groundbreaking work. However, it was his efforts in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to promoting increased access to information that entangled him in a two-year legal nightmare that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26.

January 11, 2016 marks the third anniversary of his death. Join us two days later for a reading from a new posthumous collection of Swartz s writing published by New Press, a showing of The Internet s Own Boy (a documentary about his life), and a Q&A with UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill a former roommate and friend of Swartz and a contributor to and co-editor of the first section of the new book. If you re not in Seattle, there are events with similar programs being organized in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. All of these other events will be on Monday January 11 and registration is required for all of them. I will be speaking at the event in San Francisco.

Tributes:

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

1 year of Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant As announced last year, starting January 2015 I've benefited from a "Flash Grant" kindly awarded to me by the Shuttleworth Foundation. This post reports publicly about how I've used the money to promote Free Software via my own activism, over the period January-December 2015. I'm lucky to have a full-time academic job that provides me with a salary and basic computer hardware. But Free Software not being the only focus of my job, it gets difficult at times to get travel funding to specific Free Software events. So that is what I've mostly used the grant money for: attend Free Software events that I wouldn't have been able to attend otherwise. On grant money I've attended LibrePlanet 2015 (2015-03-19-boston-libreplanet label in the financial reports below), where I've given the talk Distributions and the Free "Cloud", and FSFE's LLW 2015 (2015-04-15-barcelona-fsfe-legal) workshop. Furthermore I've used the grant to reimburse otherwise not reimbursed out of pocket expenses in a trip to San Francisco (2015-11-06-san-francisco-gsoc+osi) that have been otherwise sponsored by Google (to attend the Summer of Code Mentor Summit) and OSI (to attend a F2F meeting of the Board of Directors). Finally, I've used grant money to offer lunch to invited lecturers in my master-level Free Software class at the university (label 2015-foss-class). Actual financial reports are reported below, in ledger format. It should be noted that, contrary to the usual expected 6-month duration of flash grants, I've used only about half the grant amount over a 12-month period; I do not plan to pocket what remains, but rather keep on using it over the next year, reporting again publicly at the end of the period. Also, I did not breakdown further out of pocket expenses, but they invariably stand for public transport tickets and meals. Balance sheet Overall:

         1966,11 EUR  Assets:Funds
        -4052,52 EUR  Equity:Opening balances
         2086,41 EUR  Expenses
           15,90 EUR    Bank:Commissions
          424,00 EUR    Conference:Registration
           56,50 EUR    Teaching:Speaker-invitation
         1590,01 EUR    Travel
          249,02 EUR      Lodgement
          562,51 EUR      Out-of-pocket
          778,48 EUR      Plane
--------------------
                   0

Breakdown by purpose:

2015-03-19-boston-libreplanet

        -1265,22 EUR  Assets:Funds
         1265,22 EUR  Expenses
          424,00 EUR    Conference:Registration
          841,22 EUR    Travel
          213,38 EUR      Out-of-pocket
          627,84 EUR      Plane
--------------------
                   0

2015-04-15-barcelona-fsfe-legal

         -479,66 EUR  Assets:Funds
          479,66 EUR  Expenses:Travel
          249,02 EUR    Lodgement
           80,00 EUR    Out-of-pocket
          150,64 EUR    Plane
--------------------
                   0

2015-11-06-san-francisco-gsoc+osi

         -269,13 EUR  Assets:Funds
          269,13 EUR  Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket
--------------------
                   0

2015-foss-class

          -56,50 EUR  Assets:Funds
           56,50 EUR  Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation
--------------------
                   0

Journal

2014-12-03 Shuttleworth Foundation flash grant                                    Equity:Opening balances                     -4052,52 EUR    -4052,52 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 4052,52 EUR               0
2014-12-04 bank commissions on incoming transfer                                  Expenses:Bank:Commissions                      15,90 EUR       15,90 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                  -15,90 EUR               0
2014-12-24 plane tickets Paris-Boston round trip to attend LibrePlanet 2015       Expenses:Travel:Plane                         627,84 EUR      627,84 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -627,84 EUR               0
2015-01-02 LibrePlanet 2015 registration + travel fund contribution               Expenses:Conference:Registration              424,00 EUR      424,00 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -424,00 EUR               0
2015-03-02 plane tickets Paris-Barcelona round trip to attend LLW 2015            Expenses:Travel:Plane                         150,64 EUR      150,64 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -150,64 EUR               0
2015-03-19 lunch with invited speaker for lecture about FOSS release management   Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation           28,00 EUR       28,00 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                  -28,00 EUR               0
2015-03-25 lunch with invited speaker for lecture about FOSS business models      Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation           28,50 EUR       28,50 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                  -28,50 EUR               0
2015-04-03 LibrePlanet 2015 out of pocket expenses                                Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket                 213,38 EUR      213,38 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -213,38 EUR               0
2015-04-15 LLW 2015 out of pocket expenses                                        Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket                  80,00 EUR       80,00 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                  -80,00 EUR               0
2015-05-06 hotel in Barcelona for LLW 2015 (3 nights)                             Expenses:Travel:Lodgement                     249,02 EUR      249,02 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -249,02 EUR               0
2015-11-29 OSI F2F Fall 2015 out of pocket expenses                               Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket                 269,13 EUR      269,13 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -269,13 EUR               0

Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar (an important work describing the effectiveness of open collaboration and development), recently wrote a piece calling for "Social Justice Warriors" to be ejected from the hacker community. The primary thrust of his argument is that by calling for a removal of the "cult of meritocracy", these SJWs are attacking the central aspect of hacker culture - that the quality of code is all that matters.

This argument is simply wrong.

Eric's been involved in software development for a long time. In that time he's seen a number of significant changes. We've gone from computers being the playthings of the privileged few to being nearly ubiquitous. We've moved from the internet being something you found in universities to something you carry around in your pocket. You can now own a computer whose CPU executes only free software from the moment you press the power button. And, as Eric wrote almost 20 years ago, we've identified that the "Bazaar" model of open collaborative development works better than the "Cathedral" model of closed centralised development.

These are huge shifts in how computers are used, how available they are, how important they are in people's lives, and, as a consequence, how we develop software. It's not a surprise that the rise of Linux and the victory of the bazaar model coincided with internet access becoming more widely available. As the potential pool of developers grew larger, development methods had to be altered. It was no longer possible to insist that somebody spend a significant period of time winning the trust of the core developers before being permitted to give feedback on code. Communities had to change in order to accept these offers of work, and the communities were better for that change.

The increasing ubiquity of computing has had another outcome. People are much more aware of the role of computing in their lives. They are more likely to understand how proprietary software can restrict them, how not having the freedom to share software can impair people's lives, how not being able to involve themselves in software development means software doesn't meet their needs. The largest triumph of free software has not been amongst people from a traditional software development background - it's been the fact that we've grown our communities to include people from a huge number of different walks of life. Free software has helped bring computing to under-served populations all over the world. It's aided circumvention of censorship. It's inspired people who would never have considered software development as something they could be involved in to develop entire careers in the field. We will not win because we are better developers. We will win because our software meets the needs of many more people, needs the proprietary software industry either can not or will not satisfy. We will win because our software is shaped not only by people who have a university degree and a six figure salary in San Francisco, but because our contributors include people whose native language is spoken by so few people that proprietary operating system vendors won't support it, people who live in a heavily censored regime and rely on free software for free communication, people who rely on free software because they can't otherwise afford the tools they would need to participate in development.

In other words, we will win because free software is accessible to more of society than proprietary software. And for that to be true, it must be possible for our communities to be accessible to anybody who can contribute, regardless of their background.

Up until this point, I don't think I've made any controversial claims. In fact, I suspect that Eric would agree. He would argue that because hacker culture defines itself through the quality of contributions, the background of the contributor is irrelevant. On the internet, nobody knows that you're contributing from a basement in an active warzone, or from a refuge shelter after escaping an abusive relationship, or with the aid of assistive technology. If you can write the code, you can participate.

Of course, this kind of viewpoint is overly naive. Humans are wonderful at noticing indications of "otherness". Eric even wrote about his struggle to stop having a viscerally negative reaction to people of a particular race. This happened within the past few years, so before then we can assume that he was less aware of the issue. If Eric received a patch from someone whose name indicated membership of this group, would there have been part of his subconscious that reacted negatively? Would he have rationalised this into a more critical analysis of the patch, increasing the probability of rejection? We don't know, and it's unlikely that Eric does either.

Hacker culture has long been concerned with good design, and a core concept of good design is that code should fail safe - ie, if something unexpected happens or an assumption turns out to be untrue, the desirable outcome is the one that does least harm. A command that fails to receive a filename as an argument shouldn't assume that it should modify all files. A network transfer that fails a checksum shouldn't be permitted to overwrite the existing data. An authentication server that receives an unexpected error shouldn't default to granting access. And a development process that may be subject to unconscious bias should have processes in place that make it less likely that said bias will result in the rejection of useful contributions.

When people criticise meritocracy, they're not criticising the concept of treating contributions based on their merit. They're criticising the idea that humans are sufficiently self-aware that they will be able to identify and reject every subconscious prejudice that will affect their treatment of others. It's not a criticism of a desirable goal, it's a criticism of a flawed implementation. There's evidence that organisations that claim to embody meritocratic principles are more likely to reward men than women even when everything else is equal. The "cult of meritocracy" isn't the belief that meritocracy is a good thing, it's the belief that a project founded on meritocracy will automatically be free of bias.

Projects like the Contributor Covenant that Eric finds so objectionable exist to help create processes that (at least partially) compensate for our flaws. Review of our processes to determine whether we're making poor social decisions is just as important as review of our code to determine whether we're making poor technical decisions. Just as the bazaar overtook the cathedral by making it easier for developers to be involved, inclusive communities will overtake "pure meritocracies" because, in the long run, these communities will produce better output - not just in terms of the quality of the code, but also in terms of the ability of the project to meet the needs of a wider range of people.

The fight between the cathedral and the bazaar came from people who were outside the cathedral. Those fighting against the assumption that meritocracies work may be outside what Eric considers to be hacker culture, but they're already part of our communities, already making contributions to our projects, already bringing free software to more people than ever before. This time it's Eric building a cathedral and decrying the decadent hordes in their bazaar, Eric who's failed to notice the shift in the culture that surrounds him. And, like those who continued building their cathedrals in the 90s, it's Eric who's now irrelevant to hacker culture.

(Edited to add: for two quite different perspectives on why Eric's wrong, see Tim's and Coraline's posts)

comments

On Thursday, October 22, 2015, Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) was released. To celebrate, some San Francisco members of the Ubuntu California LoCo Team held a small release party. Yelp was gracious enough to host the event and provide us with food and drinks. Canonical also sent us a box of swag for the event. Unfortunately, it did not arrive in time. Luckily, James Ouyang had some extra goodies from a previous event for us to hand out. Despite having a rather small turnout for the event, it was still a fun night. Several people borrowed the USB flash drives I had setup with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu 15.10 in order to install Ubuntu on their machines. Other people were happy to play around with the new release in a virtual machine on my computer. Overall, it was a good night. Hopefully, we can put together an even better and larger release party for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

I've mentored a number of students in 2013, 2014 and 2015 for Debian and Ganglia and most of the companies I've worked with have run internships and graduate programs from time to time. GSoC 2015 has just finished and with all the excitement, many students are already asking what they can do to prepare and be selected for Outreachy or GSoC in 2016. My own observation is that the more time the organization has to get to know the student, the more confident they can be selecting that student. Furthermore, the more time that the student has spent getting to know the free software community, the more easily they can complete GSoC. Here I present a list of things that students can do to maximize their chance of selection and career opportunities at the same time. These tips are useful for people applying for GSoC itself and related programs such as GNOME's Outreachy or graduate placements in companies. Disclaimers There is no guarantee that Google will run the program again in 2016 or any future year until the Google announcement. There is no guarantee that any organization or mentor (including myself) will be involved until the official list of organizations is published by Google.

Do not follow the advice of web sites that invite you to send pizza or anything else of value to prospective mentors. Following the steps in this page doesn't guarantee selection. That said, people who do follow these steps are much more likely to be considered and interviewed than somebody who hasn't done any of the things in this list. Understand what free software really is You may hear terms like free software and open source software used interchangeably. They don't mean exactly the same thing and many people use the term free software for the wrong things. Not all projects declaring themselves to be "free" or "open source" meet the definition of free software. Those that don't, usually as a result of deficiencies in their licenses, are fundamentally incompatible with the majority of software that does use genuinely free licenses. Google Summer of Code is about both writing and publishing your code and it is also about community. It is fundamental that you know the basics of licensing and how to choose a free license that empowers the community to collaborate on your code well after GSoC has finished. Please review the definition of free software early on and come back and review it from time to time. The The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation have excellent resources to help you understand what a free software license is and how it works to maximize community collaboration. Don't look for shortcuts There is no shortcut to GSoC selection and there is no shortcut to GSoC completion. The student stipend (USD $5,500 in 2014) is not paid to students unless they complete a minimum amount of valid code. This means that even if a student did find some shortcut to selection, it is unlikely they would be paid without completing meaningful work. If you are the right candidate for GSoC, you will not need a shortcut anyway. Are you the sort of person who can't leave a coding problem until you really feel it is fixed, even if you keep going all night? Have you ever woken up in the night with a dream about writing code still in your head? Do you become irritated by tedious or repetitive tasks and often think of ways to write code to eliminate such tasks? Does your family get cross with you because you take your laptop to Christmas dinner or some other significant occasion and start coding? If some of these statements summarize the way you think or feel you are probably a natural fit for GSoC. An opportunity money can't buy The GSoC stipend will not make you rich. It is intended to make sure you have enough money to survive through the summer and focus on your project. Professional developers make this much money in a week in leading business centers like New York, London and Singapore. When you get to that stage in 3-5 years, you will not even be thinking about exactly how much you made during internships. GSoC gives you an edge over other internships because it involves publicly promoting your work. Many companies still try to hide the potential of their best recruits for fear they will be poached or that they will be able to demand higher salaries. Everything you complete in GSoC is intended to be published and you get full credit for it. Imagine a young musician getting the opportunity to perform on the main stage at a rock festival. This is how the free software community works. It is a meritocracy and there is nobody to hold you back.

Having a portfolio of free software that you have created or collaborated on and a wide network of professional contacts that you develop before, during and after GSoC will continue to pay you back for years to come. While other graduates are being screened through group interviews and testing days run by employers, people with a track record in a free software project often find they go straight to the final interview round. Register your domain name and make a permanent email address Free software is all about community and collaboration. Register your own domain name as this will become a focal point for your work and for people to get to know you as you become part of the community. This is sound advice for anybody working in IT, not just programmers. It gives the impression that you are confident and have a long term interest in a technology career. Choosing the provider: as a minimum, you want a provider that offers DNS management, static web site hosting, email forwarding and XMPP services all linked to your domain. You do not need to choose the provider that is linked to your internet connection at home and that is often not the best choice anyway. The XMPP foundation maintains a list of providers known to support XMPP. Create an email address within your domain name. The most basic domain hosting providers will let you forward the email address to a webmail or university email account of your choice. Configure your webmail to send replies using your personalized email address in the From header. Update your ~/.gitconfig file to use your personalized email address in your Git commits. Create a web site and blog Start writing a blog. Host it using your domain name. Some people blog every day, other people just blog once every two or three months. Create links from your web site to your other profiles, such as a Github profile page. This helps reinforce the pages/profiles that are genuinely related to you and avoid confusion with the pages of other developers. Many mentors are keen to see their students writing a weekly report on a blog during GSoC so starting a blog now gives you a head start. Mentors look at blogs during the selection process to try and gain insight into which topics a student is most suitable for. Create a profile on Github Github is one of the most widely used software development web sites. Github makes it quick and easy for you to publish your work and collaborate on the work of other people. Create an account today and get in the habbit of forking other projects, improving them, committing your changes and pushing the work back into your Github account. Github will quickly build a profile of your commits and this allows mentors to see and understand your interests and your strengths. In your Github profile, add a link to your web site/blog and make sure the email address you are using for Git commits (in the ~/.gitconfig file) is based on your personal domain. Start using PGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the industry standard in protecting your identity online. All serious free software projects use PGP to sign tags in Git, to sign official emails and to sign official release files. The most common way to start using PGP is with the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) utility. It is installed by the package manager on most Linux systems. When you create your own PGP key, use the email address involving your domain name. This is the most permanent and stable solution. Print your key fingerprint using the gpg-key2ps command, it is in the signing-party package on most Linux systems. Keep copies of the fingerprint slips with you.

This is what my own PGP fingerprint slip looks like. You can also print the key fingerprint on a business card for a more professional look. Using PGP, it is recommend that you sign any important messages you send but you do not have to encrypt the messages you send, especially if some of the people you send messages to (like family and friends) do not yet have the PGP software to decrypt them. If using the Thunderbird (Icedove) email client from Mozilla, you can easily send signed messages and validate the messages you receive using the Enigmail plugin. Get your PGP key signed Once you have a PGP key, you will need to find other developers to sign it. For people I mentor personally in GSoC, I'm keen to see that you try and find another Debian Developer in your area to sign your key as early as possible. Free software events Try and find all the free software events in your area in the months between now and the end of the next Google Summer of Code season. Aim to attend at least two of them before GSoC. Look closely at the schedules and find out about the individual speakers, the companies and the free software projects that are participating. For events that span more than one day, find out about the dinners, pub nights and other social parts of the event. Try and identify people who will attend the event who have been GSoC mentors or who intend to be. Contact them before the event, if you are keen to work on something in their domain they may be able to make time to discuss it with you in person. Take your PGP fingerprint slips. Even if you don't participate in a formal key-signing party at the event, you will still find some developers to sign your PGP key individually. You must take a photo ID document (such as your passport) for the other developer to check the name on your fingerprint but you do not give them a copy of the ID document. Events come in all shapes and sizes. FOSDEM is an example of one of the bigger events in Europe, linux.conf.au is a similarly large event in Australia. There are many, many more local events such as the Debian UK mini-DebConf in Cambridge, November 2015. Many events are either free or free for students but please check carefully if there is a requirement to register before attending. On your blog, discuss which events you are attending and which sessions interest you. Write a blog during or after the event too, including photos.

Quantcast generously hosted the Ganglia community meeting in San Francisco, October 2013. We had a wild time in their offices with mini-scooters, burgers, beers and the Ganglia book. That's me on the pink mini-scooter and Bernard Li, one of the other Ganglia GSoC 2014 admins is on the right. Install Linux GSoC is fundamentally about free software. Linux is to free software what a tree is to the forest. Using Linux every day on your personal computer dramatically increases your ability to interact with the free software community and increases the number of potential GSoC projects that you can participate in. This is not to say that people using Mac OS or Windows are unwelcome. I have worked with some great developers who were not Linux users. Linux gives you an edge though and the best time to gain that edge is now, while you are a student and well before you apply for GSoC. If you must run Windows for some applications used in your course, it will run just fine in a virtual machine using Virtual Box, a free software solution for desktop virtualization. Use Linux as the primary operating system. Here are links to download ISO DVD (and CD) images for some of the main Linux distributions:

If you are nervous about getting started with Linux, install it on a spare PC or in a virtual machine before you install it on your main PC or laptop. Linux is much less demanding on the hardware than Windows so you can easily run it on a machine that is 5-10 years old. Having just 4GB of RAM and 20GB of hard disk is usually more than enough for a basic graphical desktop environment although having better hardware makes it faster. Your experiences installing and running Linux, especially if it requires some special effort to make it work with some of your hardware, make interesting topics for your blog. Decide which technologies you know best Personally, I have mentored students working with C, C++, Java, Python and JavaScript/HTML5. In a GSoC program, you will typically do most of your work in just one of these languages. From the outset, decide which language you will focus on and do everything you can to improve your competence with that language. For example, if you have already used Java in most of your course, plan on using Java in GSoC and make sure you read Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch. Decide which themes appeal to you Find a topic that has long-term appeal for you. Maybe the topic relates to your course or maybe you already know what type of company you would like to work in. Here is a list of some topics and some of the relevant software projects:

System administration, servers and networking: consider projects involving monitoring, automation, packaging. Ganglia is a great community to get involved with and you will encounter the Ganglia software in many large companies and academic/research networks. Contributing to a Linux distribution like Debian or Fedora packaging is another great way to get into system administration.
Desktop and user interface: consider projects involving window managers and desktop tools or adding to the user interface of just about any other software.
Big data and data science: this can apply to just about any other theme. For example, data science techniques are frequently used now to improve system administration.
Business and accounting: consider accounting, CRM and ERP software.
Finance and trading: consider projects like R, market data software like OpenMAMA and connectivity software (Apache Camel)
Real-time communication (RTC), VoIP, webcam and chat: look at the JSCommunicator or the Jitsi project
Web (JavaScript, HTML5): look at the JSCommunicator

Before the GSoC application process begins, you should aim to learn as much as possible about the theme you prefer and also gain practical experience using the software relating to that theme. For example, if you are attracted to the business and accounting theme, install the PostBooks suite and get to know it. Maybe you know somebody who runs a small business: help them to upgrade to PostBooks and use it to prepare some reports. Make something Make some small project, less than two week's work, to demonstrate your skills. It is important to make something that somebody will use for a practical purpose, this will help you gain experience communicating with other users through Github. For an example, see the servlet Juliana Louback created for fixing phone numbers in December 2013. It has since been used as part of the Lumicall web site and Juliana was selected for a GSoC 2014 project with Debian. There is no better way to demonstrate to a prospective mentor that you are ready for GSoC than by completing and publishing some small project like this yourself. If you don't have any immediate project ideas, many developers will also be able to give you tips on small projects like this that you can attempt, just come and ask us on one of the mailing lists. Ideally, the project will be something that you would use anyway even if you do not end up participating in GSoC. Such projects are the most motivating and rewarding and usually end up becoming an example of your best work. To continue the example of somebody with a preference for business and accounting software, a small project you might create is a plugin or extension for PostBooks. Getting to know prospective mentors Many web sites provide useful information about the developers who contribute to free software projects. Some of these developers may be willing to be a GSoC mentor. For example, look through some of the following:

Planet / Blog aggregation sites: these sites all have links to the blogs of many developers. They are useful sources of information about events and also finding out who works on what.
Developer profile pages. Many projects publish a page about each developer and the packages, modules or other components he/she is responsible for. Look through these lists for areas of mutual interest.
- my package list in Debian
- my package list in Fedora
Developer github profiles. Github makes it easy to see what projects a developer has contributed to. To see many of my own projects, browse through the history at my own Github profile

Getting on the mentor's shortlist Once you have identified projects that are interesting to you and developers who work on those projects, it is important to get yourself on the developer's shortlist. Basically, the shortlist is a list of all students who the developer believes can complete the project. If I feel that a student is unlikely to complete a project or if I don't have enough information to judge a student's probability of success, that student will not be on my shortlist. If I don't have any student on my shortlist, then a project will not go ahead at all. If there are multiple students on the shortlist, then I will be looking more closely at each of them to try and work out who is the best match. One way to get a developer's attention is to look at bug reports they have created. Github makes it easy to see complaints or bug reports they have made about their own projects or other projects they depend on. Another way to do this is to search through their code for strings like FIXME and TODO. Projects with standalone bug trackers like the Debian bug tracker also provide an easy way to search for bug reports that a specific person has created or commented on. Once you find some relevant bug reports, email the developer. Ask if anybody else is working on those issues. Try and start with an issue that is particularly easy and where the solution is interesting for you. This will help you learn to compile and test the program before you try to fix any more complicated bugs. It may even be something you can work on as part of your academic program. Find successful projects from the previous year Contact organizations and ask them which GSoC projects were most successful. In many organizations, you can find the past students' project plans and their final reports published on the web. Read through the plans submitted by the students who were chosen. Then read through the final reports by the same students and see how they compare to the original plans. Start building your project proposal now Don't wait for the application period to begin. Start writing a project proposal now. When writing a proposal, it is important to include several things:

Think big: what is the goal at the end of the project? Does your work help the greater good in some way, such as increasing the market share of Linux on the desktop?
Details: what are specific challenges? What tools will you use?
Time management: what will you do each week? Are there weeks where you will not work on GSoC due to vacation or other events? These things are permitted but they must be in your plan if you know them in advance. If an accident or death in the family cut a week out of your GSoC project, which work would you skip and would your project still be useful without that? Having two weeks of flexible time in your plan makes it more resilient against interruptions.
Communication: are you on mailing lists, IRC and XMPP chat? Will you make a weekly report on your blog?
Users: who will benefit from your work?
Testing: who will test and validate your work throughout the project? Ideally, this should involve more than just the mentor.

If your project plan is good enough, could you put it on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site? This is a good test of whether or not a project is going to be supported by a GSoC mentor. Learn about packaging and distributing software Packaging is a vital part of the free software lifecycle. It is very easy to upload a project to Github but it takes more effort to have it become an official package in systems like Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Packaging and the communities around Linux distributions help you reach out to users of your software and get valuable feedback and new contributors. This boosts the impact of your work. To start with, you may want to help the maintainer of an existing package. Debian packaging teams are existing communities that work in a team and welcome new contributors. The Debian Mentors initiative is another great starting place. In the Fedora world, the place to start may be in one of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Think from the mentor's perspective After the application deadline, mentors have just 2 or 3 weeks to choose the students. This is actually not a lot of time to be certain if a particular student is capable of completing a project. If the student has a published history of free software activity, the mentor feels a lot more confident about choosing the student. Some mentors have more than one good student while other mentors receive no applications from capable students. In this situation, it is very common for mentors to send each other details of students who may be suitable. Once again, if a student has a good Github profile and a blog, it is much easier for mentors to try and match that student with another project.

Conclusion Getting into the world of software engineering is much like joining any other profession or even joining a new hobby or sporting activity. If you run, you probably have various types of shoe and a running watch and you may even spend a couple of nights at the track each week. If you enjoy playing a musical instrument, you probably have a collection of sheet music, accessories for your instrument and you may even aspire to build a recording studio in your garage (or you probably know somebody else who already did that). The things listed on this page will not just help you walk the walk and talk the talk of a software developer, they will put you on a track to being one of the leaders. If you look over the profiles of other software developers on the Internet, you will find they are doing most of the things on this page already. Even if you are not selected for GSoC at all or decide not to apply, working through the steps on this page will help you clarify your own ideas about your career and help you make new friends in the software engineering community.

I previously wrote about tracking a ship around the world, but never followed up with the practical details involved with shipping my life from the San Francisco Bay Area back to Belfast. So here they are, in the hope they provide a useful data point for anyone considering a similar move. Firstly, move out. I was in a one bedroom apartment in Fremont, CA. At the time I was leaving the US I didn t have anywhere for my belongs to go - the hope was I d be back in the Bay Area, but there was a reasonable chance I was going to end up in Belfast or somewhere in England. So on January 24th 2014 I had my all of my belongings moved out and put into storage, pending some information about where I might be longer term. When I say all of my belongings I mean that; I took 2 suitcases and everything else went into storage. That means all the furniture for probably a 2 bed apartment (I d moved out of somewhere a bit larger) - the US doesn t really seem to go in for the concept of a furnished lease the same way as the UK does. I had deliberately picked a moving company that could handle the move out, the storage and the (potential) shipping. They handed off to a 3rd party for the far end bit, but that was to be expected. Having only one contact to deal with throughout the process really helped. Fast forward 8 months and on September 21st I contacted my storage company to ask about getting some sort of rough shipping quote and timescales to Belfast. The estimate came back as around a 4-6 week shipping time, which was a lot faster than I was expecting. However it turned out this was the slow option. On October 27th (delay largely due to waiting for confirmation of when I d definitely have keys on the new place) I gave the go ahead. Container pickup (I ended up with exclusive use of a 20ft container - not quite full, but not worth part shipment) from the storage location was originally due on November 7th. Various delays at the Port of Oakland meant this didn t happen until November 17th. It then sat in Oakland until December 2nd. At that point the ETA into Southampton was January 8th. Various other delays, including a week off the coast of LA (yay West Coast Port Backups) meant that the ship finally arrived in Southampton on January 13th. It then had to get to Belfast and clear customs. On January 22nd 2015, 2 days shy of a year since I d seen them, my belongings and I were reunited. So, on the face of it, the actual time on the ship was only slightly over 6 weeks, but all of the extra bits meant that the total time from Ship it to I have it was nearly 3 months. Which to be honest is more like what I was expecting. The lesson: don t forget to factor in delays at every stage. The relocation cost in the region of US$8000. It was more than I d expected, but far cheaper than the cost of buying all my furniture again (plus the fact there were various things I couldn t easily replace that were in storage). That cost didn t cover the initial move into storage or the storage fees - it covered taking things out, packing them up for shipment and everything after that. Including delivery to a (UK) 3rd floor apartment at the far end and insurance. It s important to note that I d included this detail before shipment - the quote specifically mentioned it, which was useful when the local end tried to levy an additional charge for the 3rd floor aspect. They were fine once I showed them the quote as including that detail. Getting an entire apartment worth of things I hadn t seen in so long really did feel a bit like a second Christmas. I d forgotten a lot of the things I had, and it was lovely to basically get a home in a container delivered.

I'm not a huge fan of Hacker News[1]. My impression continues to be that it ends up promoting stories that align with the Silicon Valley narrative of meritocracy, technology will fix everything, regulation is the cancer killing agile startups, and discouraging stories that suggest that the world of technology is, broadly speaking, awful and we should all be ashamed of ourselves.

But as a good data-driven person[2], wouldn't it be nice to have numbers rather than just handwaving? In the absence of a good public dataset, I scraped Hacker Slide to get just over two months of data in the form of hourly snapshots of stories, their age, their score and their position. I then applied a trivial test:

If the story is younger than any other story
and the story has a higher score than that other story
and the story has a worse ranking than that other story
and at least one of these two stories is on the front page

then the story is considered to have been penalised.

(note: "penalised" can have several meanings. It may be due to explicit flagging, or it may be due to an automated system deciding that the story is controversial or appears to be supported by a voting ring. There may be other reasons. I haven't attempted to separate them, because for my purposes it doesn't matter. The algorithm is discussed here.)

Now, ideally I'd classify my dataset based on manual analysis and classification of stories, but I'm lazy (see [2]) and so just tried some keyword analysis:

Keyword	Penalised	Unpenalised
Women	13	4
Harass	2	0
Female	5	1
Intel	2	3
x86	3	4
ARM	3	4
Airplane	1	2
Startup	46	26

A few things to note:

Lots of stories are penalised. Of the front page stories in my dataset, I count 3240 stories that have some kind of penalty applied, against 2848 that don't. The default seems to be that some kind of detection will kick in.
Stories containing keywords that suggest they refer to issues around social justice appear more likely to be penalised than stories that refer to technical matters
There are other topics that are also disproportionately likely to be penalised. That's interesting, but not really relevant - I'm not necessarily arguing that social issues are penalised out of an active desire to make them go away, merely that the existing ranking system tends to result in it happening anyway.

This clearly isn't an especially rigorous analysis, and in future I hope to do a better job. But for now the evidence appears consistent with my innate prejudice - the Hacker News ranking algorithm tends to penalise stories that address social issues. An interesting next step would be to attempt to infer whether the reasons for the penalties are similar between different categories of penalised stories[3], but I'm not sure how practical that is with the publicly available data.

(Raw data is here, penalised stories are here, unpenalised stories are here)

[1] Moving to San Francisco has resulted in it making more sense, but really that just makes me even more depressed.
[2] Ha ha like fuck my PhD's in biology
[3] Perhaps stories about startups tend to get penalised because of voter ring detection from people trying to promote their startup, while stories about social issues tend to get penalised because of controversy detection?

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