Review: Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #13
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	February 1994
Printing:	March 2008
ISBN:	0-06-109217-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	357

Small Gods is the thirteenth Discworld novel, but it features new characters and is unrelated to any of the previous books. Some reading order guides show it as following Pyramids in an "ancient civilizations" track, but its only relationship with that book is some minor thematic similarities. You could start here with Discworld if you wanted to. Brutha is a novice in the hierarchy of the church of the Great God Om, and his elders are convinced he'll probably die a novice. He's just not particularly bright, you see. But he is very obedient, and he doesn't mind doing hard work, and there's nothing exactly wrong with him, except that he looks at people with startling intensity when they're talking to him. Almost as if he's listening. All that seems about to change, however, when the Great God Om himself approaches Brutha and starts talking to him. Not that Brutha is at all convinced at first that this is happening, particularly given that Om appears in the form of a small, battered, one-eyed tortoise who was dropped into the church garden by an eagle attempting to break his shell. Small Gods is, as you might have guessed, a parody of religion, at least large, organized religion with fixed hierarchies, organizations called the Quisition that like to torture people, and terrifyingly devout deacons who are certain of themselves in ways that no human ever should be. It's also an interesting bit of Discworld metaphysics: gods gain power from worship (a very old idea in fantasy), and when they don't get enough worship, they end up much diminished and even adrift in the desert. Or trapped in the form of a small tortoise. One might wonder how Om ended up in his present condition given the vast and extremely authoritarian church devoted to his worship, but that's the heart of Pratchett's rather pointed parody: large religious organizations end up being about themselves, rather than about the god they supposedly worship, to such an extent that they don't provide any worship at all. Brutha is not thinking of things like this. Once he's finally convinced that Om is who he claims to be, he provides worship and belief of a very practical but wholehearted and unshakable sort, just as he does everything else in life. That makes him the eighth prophet of Om as prophecy foretold, but it's far from clear how that will be of any practical use. Or how Om will come back into power. And meanwhile, Brutha has come to the attention of Vorbis, the head of the Exquisitors, who does not know about the tortoise (and wouldn't believe if he did), but who has a use for Brutha's other talent: his eidetic memory. In typical Pratchett fashion, the story expands to include a variety of other memorable characters from the neighboring city of Ephebe, a country full of gods and philosophers. Vorbis's aims here are unclear at the start of the book, but Vorbis being who he is, they can't be good. Brutha is drawn along in his wake. Meanwhile, Om is constantly watching for an opportunity to regain his lost power and worshipful following, and also to avoid being eaten. Despite the humorous components, Small Gods is rather serious about religion and about its villain. It's also a touch repetitive; Om's lack of power and constant fretting about it, Brutha's earnest but naive loyalty, and Vorbis's malevolent determination are repeatedly stressed and get a little old. Some bits in Ephebe are quite fun, but the action is a bit disjointed, partly because the protagonist is rarely the motive force in the plot. There are also some extended scenes of trudging through the desert that I thought dragged a bit. But Pratchett hits some powerful notes in his critique of religion, and there are a few bits with Death at the end of the book that I thought were among the better pieces of Discworld philosophy. And when Brutha gets a chance to use his one talent of memory, I greatly enjoyed the resulting scenes. He hits just the right combination of modesty, capability, and earnestness. I know a lot of Pratchett readers really like Small Gods. I'm not one of those; I thought it was about average for the Discworld series (at least among the books I've read so far). But average for Discworld is still pretty good, and its new setting makes it a plausible place to start (or to take a break from the other Discworld plot threads). Followed, in publication order, by Lords and Ladies. I don't believe it has a direct plot sequel. Rating: 7 out of 10

Ok, I have been silent about systemd and its being forced onto us in Debian like force-feeding Foie gras gooses. I have complained about systemd a few times (here and here), but what I read today really made me loose my last drips of trust I had in this monster-piece of software. If you are up for some really surprising read about the main figure behind systemd, enjoy this github issue. It s about a bug that simply does the equivalent of rm -rf / in some cases. The OP gave clear indications, the bug was fixes immediately, but then a comment from the God Poettering himself appeared that made the case drip over:

I am not sure I d consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it s a UNIX pitfall, but rm -rf /foo/.* will work the exact same way, no?Lennart Poettering, systemd issue 5644

Well, no, a total of 1min would have shown him that this is not the case. But we trust this guy the whole management of the init process, servers, logs (and soon our toilet and fridge management, X, DNS, whatever you ask for). There are two issues here: One is that such a bug is lurking in systemd since probably years. The reason is simple we pay with these kinds of bugs for the incredible complexity increase of the init process which takes over too much services. Referring back to the Turing Award lecture given by Hoare, we see that systemd took the later path:

I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. Antony Hoare, Turing Award Lecture 1980

The other issue is how systemd developers deal with bug reports. I have reported several cases here, this is just another one: Close the issue for comments, shut up, put it under the carpet. (Image credit: The musings of an Indian Faust)

A book about being woman, mother in a modern but still traditional society. About happiness and fulfillment, love and sex, responsibility and dependency, about life: Stella Stejskal s Im Mezzanin (in German).
Written by a friend back from my old times in Vienna, Stella Stejskal, like me an emigrant, I saw parts of this book during writing, and I was happy to see the final product and read it. The first novel of Stella turns around Anna, the protagonist, a wife, mother, and woman, trying to find her balance between the house, family, kids, work, and her incredible power and thrive to live, live to the fullest.

Dein Leben in der Vorstadt, im Einfamilienhaus mit dem Garten, macht Dich nicht gl cklich. Vordergr ndig hast Du alles, was eine Frau sich w nscht und doch fehlt Dir etwas Wesentliches: Verlangen und Leidenschaft.

(Your life in the suburb, in the one-family home with garden, it doesn t make you happy. On the surface you do have everything what a woman could wish for, but you are missing something essential: desire and passion) The author does not shy away from explicit language without ever dropping into the Vernacolo, the banalities. She manages to convey the incredible tension many of those being stretched out between the necessities of daily life and the need for a more personal life. Last but not least, I loved this book for quoting one of my most favorite lines from a song:

Konstantin Weckers Was passiert in den Jahren, drangen leise durch den Raum. Komm, wir gehen mit der Flut und verwandeln mit den Wellen unsere Angst in neuen Mut , sang ich mit und dachte an den Sommer

For those capable of German, very recommendable.

Apologies the first blog post got sent out by mistake. Weather comparisons between the two countries Last year, I had come to know that this year s debconf is happening in Canada, a cold country. Hence, few weeks/month back, I started trying to find information online when I stumbled across few discussion boards where people were discussing about Innerwear and Outerwear and I couldn t understand what that was all about. Then somehow stumbled across this Video, which is of a game called the Long Dark and just seeing couple of episodes it became pretty clear to me why the people there were obsessing with getting the right clothes and everything about it. Couple of Debconf people were talking about the weather in Montreal, and surprise, surprise it was snowing there, in fact supposed to be near the storm of the century. Was amazed to see that they have a website to track how much snow has been lifted. If we compare that to Pune, India weather-wise we are polar opposites. There used to be a time, when I was very young, maybe 5 yrs. old that once the weather went above 30 degree celsius, rains would fall, but now its gonna touch 40 degrees soon. And April and May, the two hottest months are yet to come. China Gate Before I venture further, I was gifted the book China Gate written by an author named William Arnold. When I read the cover and the back cover, it seemed the story was set between China and Taiwan, later when I started reading it, it shares history of Taiwan going back 200 or so odd years. This became relevant as next year s Debconf, Debconf 2018 will be in Taiwan, yes in Asia very much near to India. I am ashamed to say that except for the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Chinese High-Speed Rail there wasn t much that I knew. According to the book, and I m paraphrasing here the gist I got was that for a long time, the Americans promised Taiwan it will be an Independent country forever, but due to budgetary and other political constraints, the United States took the same stand as China from 1979. Interestingly, now it seems Mr. Trump wants to again recognize Taiwan as a separate entity from China itself but as is with Mr. Trump you can t be sure of why he does, what he does. Is it just a manoeuvrer designed to out-smart the chinese and have a trade war or something else, only time will tell. One thing which hasn t been shared in the book but came to know via web is that Taiwan calls itself Republic of China . If Taiwan wants to be independent then why the name Republic of China ? Doesn t that strengthen China s claim that Taiwan is an integral part of China. I don t understand it. The book does seduce you into thinking that the events are happening in real-time, as in happening now. That s enough OT for now. Population Density As well in the game and whatever I could find on the web, Canada seems to be on the lower side as far as population is concerned. IIRC, few years back, Canadians invited Indian farmers and gave them large land-holdings for over 100 years on some small pittance. While the link I have shared is from 2006, I read it online and in newspapers even as late as in 2013/2014. The point being there seems to be lot of open spaces in Canada, whereas in India we fight for even one inch literally, due to overpopulation. This sharing reminded me of Mark of Gideon . While I was young, I didn t understand the political meaning of it and still struggle to understand about whom the show was talking about. Was it India, Africa or some other continent they were talking about ? This also becomes obvious when you figure out the surface area of the two countries. When I had started to learn about Canada, I had no idea, nor a clue that Canada is three times the size of India. And this is when I know India is a large country. but seeing that Canada is thrice larger just boggled my mind. As a typical urbanite, would probably become mad if in a rural area in Canada. Montreal, however seems to be something like Gwalior or Bangalore before IT stormed in, seems to be a place where people can work, play and have quite a few gardens as well. Rail This is one thing that is similar in both the great countries. India has Indian Railways and while the Canadians have their own mountain railway called viarail. India chugs on its 68k kilometre network, Canada is at fourth position with 52k network. With thrice the land size, it should have been somewhere where Russia is or even better than them. It would be interesting if a Canadian/s comment about their railway network and why it is so bad in terms of reach. As far as food is concerned, somebody shared this Also, have no idea if Canadian trains are as entertaining as Indian ones, in terms of diverse group of people as well as variety of food to eat as also shared a bit in the video. I am not aware whether Via Rail is the only network operator and there are other network operators unlike Indian Railways which has monopoly on most of the operations. Business houses, Political Families This is again something that is similar in both the countries, it seems (from afar) that its only few business houses and more importantly political families which have governed for years. From what little I could understand, both India and Canada have first past the post system which as shared by its critics is unfair to new and small parties. It would be interesting to see if Canada does a re-think. For India, it would need a massive public education outreach policy and implementation. We just had elections in 5 states of India with U.P. (with respect to area-size and population density) and from the last several years, the EVM s (Electronic Voting Machines) tries to make sure that nobody could know which area which party got the most votes. This is to make sure the winning party is not able to take revenge on people or areas which did not vote for them. Instead you have general region counting of votes with probably even the Election Commission not knowing which EVM went to what area and what results are there in sort of double-blind methodology. As far as Business houses are concerned, I am guessing it s the same world-over, only certain people hold the wealth while majority of us are in hard-working, non-wealthy status. Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis Apart from all the social activities that Montreal is famous for, somebody told/shared with me that it is possible to see the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis can be seen in Canada. I dunno how true or not it is, while probably in Montreal it isn t possible to see due to light pollution, but maybe around 40-50 kms. from the city ? Can people see it from Canada ? IF yes, how far would you have to go ? Are there any companies or people who take people to see the Northern Lights. While I still have to apply for bursary, and if that gets ok, then try getting the visa, but if that goes through, apart from debconf and social activities happening in and around Montreal, Museums, Music etc. , this would be something I would like to experience if it s possible. While I certainly would have to be prepared for the cold that would be, if it s possible, no offence to debconf or anybody else but it probably would be the highlight of the entire trip if its possible. This should be called/labelled as the greatest show on earth TM.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: # Population Density, #Area size, #Aurora Borealis, #Canada, #Trains, DebConf, India, politics

Weather comparisons between the two countries Few days/weeks back, I had come to know that Canada, where this year s debconf is happening is cold country. I started trying to find information online when I stumbled across few boards where people were discussing about innerwear and outerwear and I couldn t understand what that was all about. Then somehow stumbled across this game, it s called the Long Dark and just seeing couple of episodes it became pretty clear to me why the people there were obsessing with getting the right clothes and everything about it. Couple of Debconf people were talking about weather in Montreal, and surprise, surprise it was snowing there, in fact supposed to be near the storm of the century. Was amazed to see that they have a website to track how much snow has been lifted. If we compare that to Pune, India weather-wise we are polar opposites. There used to be a time, when I was very young, maybe 5 yrs. old that once the weather went above 30 degree celcius, rains would fall, but now its gonna touch 40 degrees soon. And April and May, the two hottest months are yet to come. China Gate Before I venture further, I was gifted the book China Gate written by an author named William Arnold. When I read the cover and the backcover, it seemed the story was set between China and Taiwan, later when I started reading it, it shares history of Taiwan going back 200 or so odd years. This became relevant as next year s Debconf, Debconf 2018 will be in Taiwan, yes in Asia very much near to India. I am ashamed to say that except for the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Chinese High-Speed Rail there wasn t much that I knew. According to the book, and I m paraphrasing here the gist I got was that for a long time, the Americans promised Taiwan it will be an Independent country forever, but due to budgetary and other political constraints, the United States took the same stand as China from 1979 and now it seems Mr. Trump wants to again recognize Taiwan as a separate entity from China itself. One thing which hasn t been shared in the book but came to know via web is that Taiwan calls itself Republic of China . If Taiwan wants to be independent then why the name Republic of China ? Doesn t that strengthen China s claim that Taiwan is an integral part of China. I don t understand it. The book does seduce you into thinking that the events are happening in real-time, as in happening now. That s enough OT for now. Population Density As well in the game and whatever I could find on the web, Canada seems to be on the lower side as far as population is concerned. IIRC, few years back, Canadians invited Indian farmers and gave them large land-holdings for over 100 years on some small pittance. While the link I have shared is from 2006, I read it online and in newspapers even as late as in 2013/2014. The point being there seems to be lot of open spaces in Canada, whereas in India we fight for even one inch literally, due to overpopulation. This sharing reminded me of Mark of Gideon . While I was young, I didn t understand the political meaning of it and still struggle to understand about whom the show was talking about. Was it India, Africa or some other continent they were talking about ? This also becomes obvious when you figure out the surface area of the two countries. When I had started to learn about Canada, I had no idea, nor a clue that Canada is three times the size of India. And this is when I know India is a large country. but seeing that Canada is thrice larger just boggled my mind. As a typical urbanite, would probably become mad if in a rural area in Canada. Montreal, however seems to be something like Gwalior or Bangalore before IT stormed in, seems to be a place where people can work, play and have quite a few gardens as well. Rail This is one thing that is similar in both the great countries. India has Indian Railways and while the Canadians have their own mountain railway called viarail. India chugs on its 68k kilometre network, Canada is at fourth position with 52k network. With thrice the land size, it should have been somewhere where Russia is or even better than them. It would be interesting if Canadians comment about their railway network and why it is so bad in terms of reach. Business houses, Political Families This is again something that is similar in both the countries, it seems (from afar) that its only few business houses and more importantly political families which have governed for years.
Filed under: Miscellenous

Dear Friends, I have shared a few times that I had a privileged childhood. I never had led a hand-to-mouth existence but more than that I was privileged to have made the acquaintance of Jaipur wale Mausaji while I was very young. I have been called miserly by my cousin sisters whenever they write letters to me and I don t answer simply because whatever I feel for them, words feel inadequate and meaningless. The same thing applies in this as well. I am sharing few bits here as there are too many memories of a golden past which will not let me go till I have shared a few of them. First let me start by sharing the relation I had with him. By relation he was my mother s-sister s husband. In English, he would probably be termed as Maternal Uncle although he was much more than that. My one of the first remembrances of him was during Madhu Didi s Shaadi (marriage). Madhu Didi is uncle s daughter and I would have been a impish 4-5 year old at the time. This was the first time I was gonna be part of The Great North Indian Wedding and I didn t know what was in store for me as I had grown in Pune. I remember finishing my semester tests and mummy taking me to Pune Station. I was just excited that I would be travelling somewhere and had no clue what would be happening. We landed in Agra, took another train and landed in Jaipur in the middle of the night at their home at Sangram Colony. While I had known few of the cousins, I was stumped to see so many cousins jumping out of everywhere. The look on my face was one of stupefaction and surprise . The only thing which would closely resemble that would be Bilbo s 111st Birthday party in Lord of the Rings (Part 1). In fact, by a curious quirk/twist of fate, I came to know of a Naniji or somebody like that who by relation was far elder to me, while she was either my age or below my age. As was customary, had to bow down sheepishly. As a somewhat alone boy, to be thrown in this rambunctious bunch and be the babe in the woods, I was quickly chopped and eaten up but had no complaints. I would get into trouble onto a drop of a hat. While Mausiji would threaten me, Mausaji would almost always defend me. While Mausiji could see through me, the twinkle in Mausaji s eyes used to tell me that while he knew what I was upto, for reasons unknown, he would always defend me. Mausaji s Sangram Colony s house became my cricket ground, football ground and all and any ground to play and be. Mausaji and his brothers used to live near each other and the lane they had, had hardly any vehicles on it, so all the cousins could play all they want with me being the longest, perhaps unconsciously trying either to make for lost time or knowing/unknowing this was too good to last. Today s Pokemon generation might not be able to get it but that s alright. They also had a beautiful garden where Mausiji used to grow vegetables. While playing, we sometimes used to hurt her veggies (unconsciously) or just have shower with the garden hose. Mausaji used to enjoy seeing our antics. One of the relatives even had a dog who used to join in the fun sometimes. When mummy and Mausiji expressed concern about the dog biting, Mausaji would gently brush it aside. One of the other things in Didi s marriage is we got a whole lot of sweets. While Mausiji tried to keep us in check with sweets, both Manish Bhaiya and Mausaji used to secrete sweets from time to time. When I was hungry and used to steal food (can t wait till the appointed time) either Bhaiya or Mausaji would help me with the condition I would have to take the blame if and when we got caught as we invariably did. Mausaji s house had a basement where all the secreted sweets and food used to get in. Both me and Manish Bhaiya would be there and we would have a riot in ourselves. We would enjoy the adrenaline when we were stealing the food. As I was pretty young, I was crazy about the Tom and Jerry cartoons that used to come on Television that time. I and Bhaiya used to act like Jerry and/or his cronies while Mausiji would invariably be the Tom with Mausaji all-knowing about it but acting as a mere bystander. I remember him egging me for many of the antics I would do and get in trouble in but as shared would also be defended by him. The basement was also when I was becoming a teenager where Manish Bhaiya showed me his collection and we had a heart-to-heart about birds and bees. While whatever little I had known till that time was from school-friends and my peers at school and I didn t know what was right or wrong. Bhaiya clarified lot of things, concepts which I was either clueless or confused about. When I look back now, it is possible that Mausaji might have instructed Bhaiya to be my tutor as I used to be somewhat angry and lash out by the confusing times. As we used to go there for part of holidays, I remember doing all sorts of antics to make sure I would get an extra day, an extra hour to be there. I never used to understand why we had to go to meet the other relatives when all the fun I could have was right there only, couldn t Mummy know/see that I used to enjoy the most here. Mausaji was a clothier as we understand the term today and a gentleman to the core. He was the co-owner of Rajputana Cloth Store in Jaipur. Many VIP s as well as regular people used to visit him for getting clothes designed and stitched under his watchful eyes. I never saw him raise his voice against any of the personnel working under him and used to be a thorough gentleman to one and all. Later, as I grew up I came to know and see that people would phone up and just ask him to do the needful. He would get the right cloth, stitch it right and people used to trust him for that. He was such an expert on cloth and type of clothes, that by mere touch he could talk/share about what sort of cloth it is. One of his passions was driving and from the money he had saved, he had got an Ambassador Car. Every day or every other day or whenever he felt like it, he used to take either the gang or me with mummy or me with anybody else. Each ride used to be an adventure in itself, with a start beginning and an end. I always used to watch out for the car-rides as I knew we would get sweets or something as well as he would regale us with stories about a place here and there. There was a childlike curiosity and interest in him which was infectious to one and all. The only weakness that he had was he liked to drink wine once in a while. When I was a kid, I was never able to give him company, only few years back, for the first time I was able to share wine with him which was also a memory I treasure. Those who know him closely knew the many up and downs that he went through, but as a gentleman he never let on the hurts he had or didn t curse his fate or anything else that we do when things go bad from our perspective. While there is much to write about him, it will not accomplish anything that is not known about him. I ll add with the private joke that was between him and me. When I was little, I used to call him Mausaji, Samosaji for a) I liked Samosa and b) Samosa has a bit thick skin outside and underneath it s all gravy. In reality though, he was butter all the way. I miss you Mausaji and wish I could turn the clock back and come with Mummy to visit both Mausiji and you. I hope your new journey takes you to even further heights than this life. Savouring the memories mummy and I, hope we meet you again in some new Avataar
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #antics, #growing up, #holidays, #Manish Bhiaya, #Mausaji, #Sangram Colony

Some of the content may be NSFW. viewer discretion advised. I have had a life-long fascination with trains. One of my first memories was that of 5-7 year old, clutching my mother or grandmother s hand seeing the steam engine lumbering down whistling and smoking at the same time. I was both afraid and strangely drawn to the iron beast and the first time I knew and then slowly understood that if we come with luggage and the steam-engine comes, it means we are going to travel. I have travelled some, but there are lots to explore still and I do hope that I cover some more of it during my lifetime. The reason I am writing about trains is an article which caught my eye couple of days. Besides seeing the changing geography, the variety of food one can get on train and in stations is one of the primary reasons that Indians love to travel by trains. It is one place where you could have incredible conversations over cup of tea or favourite food and unlike air travel and the famed IFE (In-flight entertainment) people are actually pretty social even with all the gadgets. For those who are wondering, the author was travelling between Jamshedpur, Gujarat to Kolkatta, a train ride which has now gone on my bucket list for the delectable items the author has described To add to the above, it is still cheaper than air travel, although that is changing a bit as Indian Railways seeks to modernize Railways and make it into world-class bullet trains. Indian Railways has a long, rich culture and some of the most interesting nuggets you learn over time adds to the fascination of the Railways. For instance I m sharing this letter which I read first in book and then saw in the New Delhi Railway Museum. The letter I am sharing below was written by a certain Shri Okhil Chandra Sen to the Sahibganj Railway Office in year 1909, almost 38 years before India became independent. I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station. This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report! to papers. If it were not for Mr. Okhil Chandra Sen we would still be running with water bottle (improvement) and jeans/shorts/whatever (again improvement) while the possibility of falling over would always be omnipresent in a hurry. Now we do have toilets and some of the better trains even have Bio-toilets which should make things better as well.(/NSFW) For the plane bit, most of my flights have been domestic flying. Some of my most memorable flights is when flying from Mumbai on a clear sky overlooking the Queen s necklace, loving it and landing in Bangalore during mist or rain or both. Delhi is also good as airports go but nothing much adventurous about it. It was only with the experience of my first international flight, I realized the same feeling again, nervousness and sense of adventure as you meet new people. Nowadays every week I do try and broaden my horizon by seeking and learning a bit about International Travel. In this I came across an article on National Geographic site which also evoked similar feelings. While I can t go back to the past and even if I did (in distant past before I was born), I wouldn t want to improve my financial situation at all (as otherwise I would hit the Grandfather Paradox or/and the Butterfly effect (essentially saying there s no free lunch), it still makes you wonder about a time when people had lot more adventure and lot more moving parts. I do wish they had a much bigger snapshot of that plane so I could really see how people sat in the old aircraft. The low-resolution picture doesn t do justice to the poster and the idea of that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder for an implementation of Butterfly effect. The Grandfather Paradox has been seen plenty of times in fantasy movies like the Back to the Future, Planet of the Apes and many others so will not go there. For the average joe today, s/he has to navigate security,check bags, get her/imself processed through passport control, get boarding pass, get to the gate on-time, get to the aircraft via bridge or bus, get to the seat, somehow make it through the ascent and use your IFE and get snacks and meals till it s time to touch-down and re-do the whole drill again as many times you are connecting. I really admire Gunnar Wolf for the tenacity he showed for the x number of connections he made both ways. While leafing through the interweb today, came across an article . While you can slice and dice the report anyway you want, for me if ever I get a chance again for an International Travel, I would try to see I get a layover at these three airports in order of preference (this is on the basis that none of these airports need a transit visa for the activities shared) a. Changi International Airport It is supposed to have shower amenities, has a movie theatre (+1), free tour of the city (+1) and of course as many Indians do go to Singapore as a destination in itself would have multiple vegetarian options (+2) so would be nice if I need to layover. b. Zurich Airport (ZRH) For passengers with an extended layover, Zurich Airport offers bicycle and inline-skate rentals and excursions to the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne. From business-insider.com. While I m not much of a bicycle and inline-skating freak, if the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne is anything to the scale of Isiko Museum which I shared in a blog post sometime before, it would be worth by itself. I haven t tried to find the site but can imagine, for e.g. if it has a full-scale model of a submarine or train engine, either steam-engines or ones like SNCF or any of the other bullet-trains and early aircraft, it would just blow my mind. When you are talking about transport, there is so much science, business, logistics etc. that I m sure I ll overload with information, photos and any trinkets they have to buy. c. Central Japan International Airport (NGO) It has a 1,000-foot-long sky deck where passengers can watch ships sail into Nagoya Port. There s also a traditional Japanese bathhouse where you can have a relaxing soak while watching the sunset over the bay. BusinessInsider.com Not a bad place to be if you need a layover. Just sink yourself in the bathhouse and see the bay and ships coming in. Luxury indeed. Honourable mention d. Munich Airport (MUC) A nearby visitors park features mini golf and a display of historic aircraft. Business-Insider.com . Now this would have made my list but I guess one would need a Schengen visa to access the visitors park but then if you have that, then why just stay in the Airport itself, could travel through Europe itself and have a longish stop-over. So all in all, it s indeed a fascinating time to be alive, dreaming and just being. Till later. Update I had forgotten to share one more reason why I was writing this article. Although somewhat of a cynic, am hopeful that Pune metro happens. Also, if I had just waited a day, would have been able to add couple of wonderful articles that would make people wanderlust more
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Best Airports, #Central Japan International Airport, #Changi International Airport, #Food, #Loo, #Nostalgia, #NSFW, #Planes, #Steam Engine, #Trains, #Zurich Airport, Indian Railways, memories

The Isenkram system I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still going strong. It is a system to look up the hardware present on or connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian packages. It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or using the user space daemon in the isenkram package. The latter will notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to install to get the dongle working. It will even provide a button to click on to ask packagekit to install the packages. Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:

% isenkram-lookup  
bluez
cheese
ethtool
fprintd
fprintd-demo
gkrellm-thinkbat
hdapsd
libpam-fprintd
pidgin-blinklight
thinkfan
tlp
tp-smapi-dkms
tp-smapi-source
tpb
%

It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because I have all the firmware my machine need:

% /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
%

The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250 packages in Debian with udev rules. These seem like good candidates to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found several that should be proposed by isenkram. I have not had time to check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram. 11 of these packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram. These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment. The marked packages are also announcing their hardware support using AppStream, for everyone to use: air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll, array-info, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter, bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, brltty, broadcom-sta-dkms, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord, colorhug-client, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux, dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd, fprintd-demo, galileo, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2, gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus, gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip, ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup, libnxt, libpam-fprintd, lomoco, madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel, nbc, nqc, nut-hal-drivers, ola, open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils, pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix, pymissile, python-nxt, qlandkartegt, qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl, soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools, t2n, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms, tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking, virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse, xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl, xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and zd1211-firmware If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package maintainer to add AppStream metadata according to the guidelines to provide the information for everyone. In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream. Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet card. See bug #838735 for the details. I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon. In the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.

Today I released man-db 2.7.6 (announcement, NEWS, git log), and uploaded it to Debian unstable. The major change in this release was a set of fixes for two security vulnerabilities, one of which affected all man-db installations since 2.3.12 (or 2.3.10-66 in Debian), and the other of which was specific to Debian and its derivatives. It s probably obvious from the dates here that this has not been my finest hour in terms of responding to security issues in a timely fashion, and I apologise for that. Some of this is just the usual life reasons, which I shan t bore you by reciting, but some of it has been that fixing this properly in man-db was genuinely rather complicated and delicate. Since I ve previously advocated man-db over some of its competitors on the basis of a better security posture, I think it behooves me to write up a longer description. I took over maintaining man-db over fifteen years ago in slightly unexpected circumstances (I got annoyed with its bug list and made a couple of non-maintainer uploads, and then the previous maintainer died, so I ended up taking over both in Debian and upstream). I was a fairly new developer at the time, and there weren t a lot of people I could ask questions of, but I did my best to recover as much of the history as I could and learn from it. One thing that became clear very quickly, both from my own inspection and from the bug list, was that most of the code had been written in a rather more innocent time. It was absolutely riddled with dangerous uses of the shell, poor temporary file handling, buffer overruns, and various common-or-garden deficiencies of that kind. I spent several years reworking large swathes of the codebase to be more robust against those kinds of bugs by design, and for example libpipeline came out of that effort. The most subtle and risky set of problems came from the fact that the man and mandb programs were installed set-user-id to the man user. Part of this was so that man could maintain preformatted cat pages , and part of it was so that users could run mandb if the system databases were out of date (this is now much less useful since most package managers, including dpkg, support some kind of trigger mechanism that can run mandb whenever new system-level manual pages are installed). One of the first things I did was to make this optional, and this has been a disabled-by-default debconf option in Debian for a long time now. But it s still a supported option and is enabled by default upstream, and when running setuid man and mandb need to take care to drop privileges when dealing with user-controlled data and to write files with the appropriate ownership and permissions. My predecessor had problems related to this such as Debian #26002, and one of the ways they dealt with them was to make /var/cache/man/ set-group-id root, in order that files written to that directory would have consistent group ownership. This always struck me as rather strange and I meant to do something about it at some point, but until the first vulnerability report above I regarded it as mainly a curiosity, since nothing in there was group-writeable anyway. As a result, with the more immediate aim of making the system behave consistently and dealing with bug reports, various bits of code had accreted that assumed that /var/cache/man/ would be man:root 2755, and not all of it was immediately obvious. This interacted with the second vulnerability report in two ways. Firstly, at some level it caused it because I was dealing with the day-to-day problems rather than thinking at a higher level: a series of bugs led me down the path of whacking problems over the head with a recursive chown of /var/cache/man/ from cron, rather than working out why things got that way in the first place. Secondly, once I d done that, I couldn t remove the chown without a much more extensive excursion into all the code that dealt with cache files, for fear of reintroducing those bugs. So although the fix for the second vulnerability is very simple in itself, I couldn t get there without dealing with the first vulnerability. In some ways, of course, cat pages are a bit of an anachronism. Most modern systems can format pages quickly enough that it s not much of an issue. However, I m loath to drop the feature entirely: I m generally wary of assuming that just because I have a fast system that everyone does. So, instead, I did what I should have done years ago: make man and mandb set-group-id man as well as set-user-id man, at which point we can simply make all the cache files and directories be owned by man:man and drop the setgid bit on cache directories. This should be simpler and less prone to difficult-to-understand problems. I expect that my next substantial upstream release will switch to --disable-setuid by default to reduce exposure, though, and distributions can start thinking about whether they want to follow that (Fedora already does, for example). If this becomes widely disabled without complaints then that would be good evidence that it s reasonable to drop the feature entirely. I m not in a rush, but if you do need cat pages then now is a good time to write to me and tell me why. This is the fiddliest set of vulnerabilities I ve dealt with in man-db for quite some time, so I hope that if there are more then I can get back to my previous quick response time.

DebConf16 Firstly, thanks to everyone who came out and added their own uniqueness and expertise to the pool. The feedback received so far has been very positive and I feel that the few problems we did experience was dealt with very efficiently. Having a DebConf in your hometown is a great experience, consider a bid for hosting a DebConf in your city! DebConf16 Open Festival (5 August) The Open Festival (usually Debian Open Day) turned out pretty good. It was a collection of talks, a job fair, and some demos of what can be done with Debian. I particularly liked Hetzner s stand. I got to show off some 20 year old+ Super Mario skills and they had some fun brain teasers as well. It s really great to see a job stand that s so interactive and I think many companies can learn from them.

At #Debconf? Join the #HetznerSA #Supermariobros challenge and stand a chance to win a case of #Leagueofbeers pic.twitter.com/DpkOj6wmZb HetznerSA Careers (@HetznerCareers) July 2, 2016

The demo that probably drew the most attention was from my friend Georg who demoed some LulzBot Mini 3D Printers. They really seem to love Debian which is great!

LulzBot Mini #3Dprinters were on the scene at @DebConf Open Festival in South Africa. We re powered by @debian! pic.twitter.com/AOBS64ZtiJ LulzBot (@lulzbot3D) July 13, 2016

DebConf (6 August to 12 August) If I try to write up all my thoughts and feeling about DC16, I ll never get this post finished. Instead, here as some tweets from DebConf that other have written:

@o0karen0o delivering today s #DebConf16 keynote pic.twitter.com/hG1wD5MBhH Michael Banck (@mbanck) July 3, 2016

Great to see Sicelo Mhlongo speaking about issues using @debian in Swaziland #debconf16 pic.twitter.com/U6z7HA8zd5 Neil McGovern (@nmcgovern) July 7, 2016

What happened at #DebConf16 yesterday? Sandstorm Principles talking about the freedom to choose #software #sandbox pic.twitter.com/ltYaw3dAmP Obsidian Systems (@obsidianza) July 5, 2016

All @DebConf end with similar feelings: we re an incredible crowd working together for a incredibly important cause. https://t.co/DYuUWT5eKt Didier Raboud (@OdyX_) July 9, 2016

My congratulations to the #DebConf video team. As usual, they are doing an amazing work at #DebConf16
Marcelo Santana (@mgsantana) July 8, 2016

Day Trip We had 3 day trips:

• Trip out to sea point and penguin spotting (Dominic Hargreaves has some beautiful photos up on Flickr)
• Hike up Table Mountaing to Kirstenbosch gardens
• Safari tour (I went on this one and you can see some of my photos on Gallery)

Brought to you by See you in Montr al! DebConf17 dates:

• DebCamp: 31 July to 4 August 2017
• DebConf: 6 August to 12 August 2017
• More details on the DebConf Wiki.

The DC17 sponsorship brochure contains a good deal of information, please share it with anyone who might be interested in sponsoring DebConf! Media

• Official (and some unofficial) photos are on the DebConf gallery site (you can add yours, too)
• All official DebConf videos can be found on the video meeting archives

Slightly belated... Another year, another OMGWTFBBQ. By my count, we had 49 people (and a dog) in my house and garden at the peak on Saturday evening. It was excellent to see people from all over coming together again, old friends and new. This year we had some weather issues, but due to the delights of gazebo technology most people stayed mostly dry. :-) Also: thanks to a number of companies near and far who sponsored the important refreshments for the weekend:

• Mythic Beasts
• Metail
• Collabora
• Codethink
• QvarnLabs

As far as I could tell, everybody enjoyed themselves; I know I definitely did!

A masterpiece by Yukio Mishima Patriotism the story of love and dead. A short story about the double suicide of a Lieutenant and his wife following the Ni Ni Roku Incident where some parts of the military tried to overthrow government and military leaders. Although Lieutenant Takeyama wasn t involved into the coup, because his friends wanted to safeguard him and his new wife, he found himself facing a fight and execution of his friends. Not being able to cope with this situation he commits suicide, followed by his wife.
Written in 1960 by one of the most interesting writers of Japanese modern history, Yukio Mishima, this book and the movie made by Mishima himself, are very disturbing images of the relation between human and state. Although the English title says Patriotism, the Japanese one is (Yukoku) which is closer to Concern for one s own country. This concern, and the feeling of devotion to the Imperial system and the country that leads the two into their deed. We are guided through the whole book and movie by a large scroll with (shisei, devotion) written on it. But indeed, Patriotism is a good title I think one of the most dangerous concepts mankind has brought forth. If Patriotism would be only the love for one s own country, all would be fine. But reality shows that patriotism unfailingly brings along xenophobia and the feeling of superiority. For someone coming from a small and unimportant country, I never had even the slightest allure to be patriotic in the bad sense. And looking at the world and people around me, I often have the feeling that mainly big countries produce the biggest and worst style of patriotism. This is obvious in countries like China, but having recently learned that all US pupils have to recite (obviously without understanding) the Pledge of Allegiance, the shock of how bad patriotism can start washing the brains of even the smallest kids in a seemingly free country is still present. But back to the book: Here the patriotism is exhibited by the presence of the Imperial images and shrine in the entrance, in front of which the two pray the last time before executing themselves. Not only the book is a masterpiece by itself, also the movie is a special piece of art: Filmed in silent movie style with text inserts, the whole story takes place on a Noh stage. This is in particular interesting as Mishima was one of the few, if not the only, modern Noh play writer. He has written several Noh plays. Another very impressive scene for me was when, after her husbands suicide, Reiko returns from putting up her final make-up into the central room. Her kimono is already blood soaked and the trailing kimono leaves traces on the Noh stage resembling the strokes of a calligraphy, as if her movement is guided, too, by . The final scene of the movie shows the two of them in a Zen stone garden, forming the stone, the unreachable island of happiness. Very impressive, both the book as well as the movie.

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

Short trip to Opio en Provence I had a short work-related trip this week to Opio en Provence. It was not a working trip, but rather a team event, which means almost a vacation! Getting there and back I dislike taking the plane for very short flights (and Z rich-Nice is indeed only around one hour), as that means you're spending 3 as much going to the airport, at the airport, waiting to take off, waiting to get off the plane, and then going from the airport to the actual destination. So I took the opportunity to drive there, since I've never driven that way, and on the map the route seemed reasonably interesting. Not that it's a shorter trip by any measure, but seemed more interesting. Leaving Z rich I went over San Bernardino pass, as I never did that before. On the north side, the pass is actually much less suited to traffic than the Gotthard pass (also on the north side), as you basically climb around 300m in a very short distance, with very sharp hairpins. There was still snow on the top, and the small lake had lots of slush/ice floating on it. As to the south side, it looked much more driveable, but I'm not sure as I made the mistake of re-joining the highway, so instead of driving reasonably nice on the empty pass road, I spent half an hour in a slow moving line. Lesson learned Entering Italy was the usual Como-Milan route, but as opposed to my other trips, this time it was around Milan on the west (A50) and then south on the A7 until it meets the A26 and then down to the coast. From here, along the E80 (Italian A10, French A8) until somewhere near Nice, and then exiting the highway system to get on the small local roads towards Opio. What I read in advance on the internet was that the coastal highway is very nice, and has better views of the sea than the actual seaside drive (which goes through towns and is much slower). I should know better than trust the internet , and I should read maps instead, which would have shown me the fact that the Alps are reaching to the sea in this region, so The road was OK, but it definitely didn't feel like a highway: maximum allowed speed was usually either 90km/h or 110km/h, and half the time you're in a short tunnel, so it's sun, tunnel/dark, sun, dark, and you're eyes get quite tired from this continuous switching. The few glimpses of the sea were nice, but the road required enough concentration (both due to traffic and the amount of curves) that one couldn't look left or right. So that was that a semi-failure; I expected a nice drive, but instead it was a challenge drive If I had even more time to spend, going back via the Rhone valley (Grenoble, Geneva, Z rich) would have been a more interesting alternative. France Going to France always feels strange for me. I learned (some) French way before German, so the French language feels much more familiar to me, even without never actually having used it on a day-to-day basis; so going to France feels like getting back to somewhere where I never lived. Somewhat similar with Italian due to the language closeness between Romanian and Italian, but not the same feeling as I didn't actually hear or learn Italian in the childhood. So I go to France, and I start partially understand what I hear, and I can somewhat talk/communicate. Very weird, while I still struggle with German in my daily life in Z rich. For example, I would hesitate before asking for directions in German, but not so in French, unrelated to my actual understanding of either language. The brain is funny The hotel We stayed at Club Med Opio-en-Provence, which was interesting. Much bigger than I thought from quick looks on the internet (this internet seems quite unreliable), but also better than I expected from a family-oriented, all-inclusive hotel. The biggest problem was the food - French P tisserie is one of my weaknesses, and I failed to resist. I mean, it was much better than I expected, and I indulged a bit too much. I'll have to pay that back on the bike or running The other interesting part of the hotel was the wide range of activities. Again, this being a family hotel, I thought the organised activities would be pretty mild; but at least for our group, they weren't. The mountain bike ride included an easy single-trail section, but while easy it was single-trail and rocky, so complete beginners might have had a small surprise. Overall it was about 50 minutes, 13.5km, with 230m altitude gain, which again for sedentary people might be unusual. I probably spent during the ride one of the deserts I ate later that day The "hike" they organised for another sub-group was also interesting, involving going through old tunnels and something with broken water pipes that caused people to either get their feet wet or monkey-spidering along the walls. Fun! After the bike ride, on the same afternoon, while walking around the hotel, we found the Ecole de Trap ze volant open, which looked way to exciting not to try it. Try and fail to do things right, but nevertheless it was excellent and unexpected fun. I'll have to do that again some day when I'll be more fit! Plus that the hotel itself had a very nice location and olive garden, so short runs in the morning were very pleasant. Only one cookie though each Back home and then it was over; short, but quite good. The Provence area is nice, and I'd like to be back again someday, for a proper vacation longer and more relaxed. And do the trap ze thing again, properly this time.

Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and started making the slides again from memory, to have something to present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand. Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great program to make slides. The point I'm trying to make is that we expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is embarrassing to its developers if it can't. Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data files from the desktop file browser? It is not a uncommon problem. A while back I discovered that the screencast recorder gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file browser would refuse to open. No video player claimed to understand such file. I tracked down the cause being file --mime-type returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had installed listed as a MIME type they would understand. I asked for file to change its behavour and use the MIME type video/ogg instead. I also asked several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files. After a while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly. But history repeats itself. A few days ago I tested the music system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files (*.rg). I've reported the rosegarden problem to BTS and a fix is commited to git and will be included in the next upload. To increase the chance of me remembering how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it. The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types. There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file. The output from file --mime-type mentioned above, and the content of the shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/). The file MIME type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this information is collected from the desktop files available in /usr/share/applications/. If there is one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is activated when asking to open a given file. If there are more, one can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar. In general this work well. But it depend on each program picking a good MIME type (preferably a MIME type registered with IANA), file and/or the shared MIME registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME type in its list of supported MIME types. The /usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml entry for the Shared MIME database look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">
  <mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden">
    <sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/>
    <comment>Rosegarden project file</comment>
    <glob pattern="*.rg"/>
  </mime-type>
</mime-info>

This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip (it is a gzipped XML file). Note, it is much better to use an official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden. The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:

% grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
%

The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the MimeType= line. If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when selected from the file browser, please check out the output from file --mime-type for the file, ensure the file ending and MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming support for this MIME type. If not, please report a bug to have it fixed. :)

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 4th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. I spent half of the month away on a vacation so little work was done, especially since I tried to tackle rather large uploads like NSS and Xen. I also worked on the frontdesk shift last week.

Frontdesk That work mainly consisted of figuring out how to best help the security team with the last uploads to the Wheezy release. For those who don't know, Debian 7 Wheezy, or "oldstable", is going to be unsupported by the security team starting end of april, and the Debian 6 Squeeze (the previous LTS) is now unsupported. The PGP signatures on the archived release have started yielding expiration errors which can be ignored but that are really a strong reminder that it is really time to upgrade. So the LTS team is now working towards backporting a few security issues from squeeze to wheezy, and this is what I focused on during triage work. I have identified the following high priority packages I will work on after I complete my work on the Xen and NSS packages (detailed below):

• libidn
• icu
• phpmyadmin
• tomcat6
• optipng
• srtp
• dhcpcd
• python-tornado

Updates to NSS and Xen I have spent a lot of time testing and building packages for NSS and Xen. To be fair, Brian May did most of the work on the Xen packages, and I merely did some work to test the packages on Koumbit's infrastructure, something which I will continue doing in the next month. For NSS, wheezy and jessie are in this weird state where patches were provided to the security team all the way back in November yet were never tested. Since then, yet more issues came up and I worked hard to review and port patches for those new security issues to wheezy. I'll followup on both packages in the following month.

Other free software work

Android TL;DR: there's an even longer version of this with the step-by-step procedures and that I will update as time goes on in my wiki. I somehow inherited an Android phone recently, on a loan from a friend because the phone broke one too many times and she got a new one from her provider. This phone is a HTC One S "Ville", which is fairly old, but good enough to play with and give me a mobile computing platform to listen to podcasts, play music, access maps and create GPS traces. I was previously doing this with my N900, but that device is really showing its age: very little development is happening on it, the SDK is closed source and the device itself is fairly big, compared to the "Ville". Plus, the SIM card actually works on the Ville so, even though I do not have an actual contract with a cell phone provider (too expensive, too invasive on my privacy), I can still make emergency phone calls (911)! Plus, since there is good wifi on the machine, I can use it to connect to the phone system with the built-in SIP client, send text messages through SMS (thanks to VoIP.ms SMS support) or Jabber. I have also played around with LibreSignal, the free software replacement for Signal, which uses proprietary google services. Yes, the VoIP.ms SMS app also uses GCM, but hopefully that can be fixed. (While I was writing this, another Debian Developer wrote a good review of Signal so I am happy to skip that step. Go read that.)

See also my apps list for a more complete list of the apps I have installed on the phone. I welcome recommendations on cool free software apps I should use!

I have replaced the stock firmware on the phone with Cyanogenmod 12.1, which was a fairly painful experience, partly because of the difficult ambiance on the #cyanogenmod channel on Freenode, where I had extreme experiences: a brave soul helped me through the first flashing process for around 2 hours, nicely holding my hand at every step. Other times, I have seen flames and obtuse comments from people being vulgar, brutal, obnoxious, if not sometimes downright homophobic and sexist from other users. It is clearly a community that needs to fix their attitude. I have documented everything I could in details in this wiki page, in case others want to resuscitate their old phones, but also because I ended up reinstalling the freaking phone about 4 times, and was getting tired of forgetting how to do it every time. I am somewhat fascinated by Android: here is the Linux-based device that should save us all from the proprietary Apple nightmares of fenced in gardens and censorship. Yet, public Android downloads are hidden behind license agreements, even though the code itself is free, which has led fellow Debian developers to work on making libre rebuilds of Androids to workaround this insanity. But worse: all phones are basically proprietary devices down to the core. You need custom firmware to be loaded on the machine for it to boot at all, from the bootloader all the way down to the GSM baseband and Wifi drivers. It is a minefield of closed source software, and trying to run free software on there is a bit of a delusion, especially since the baseband has so much power over the phone. Still, I think it is really interesting to run free software on those machines, and help people that are stuck with cell phones get familiar with software freedom. It seems especially important to me to make Android developers aware of software freedom considering how many apps are available for free yet on which it is not possible to contribute significantly because the source code is not published at all, or published only on the Google Store, instead of the more open and public F-Droid repository which publishes only free software. So I did contribute. This month, I am happy to announce that I contributed to the following free software projects on Android:

• listmyapps: feature request, patch
• Locker: bug report, added to f-droid
• Sensorium: bug report
• LibreSignal: feature request and testing

I have also reviewed the literature surrounding Telegram, a popular messaging app rival to Signal and Whatsapp. Oddly enough, my contributions to Wikipedia on that subject were promptly reverted which made me bring up the subject on the page's Talk page. This lead to an interesting response from the article's main editors which at least added that the "its security features have been contested by security researchers and cryptography experts". Considering the history of Telegram, I would keep people away from it and direct people to use Signal instead, even though Signal has similar metadata issues, mostly because Telegram's lack of response to the security issues that were outlined by fellow security researchers. Both systems suffer from a lack of federation as well, which is a shame in this era of increasing centralization. I am not sure I will put much more work in developing for Android for now. It seems like a fairly hostile platform to work on, and unless I have specific pain points I want to fix, it feels so much better to work on my own stuff in Debian. Which brings me to my usual plethora of free software projects I got stuck in this month.

IRC projects irssi-plugin-otr had a bunch of idiotic bugs lying around, and I had a patch that I hadn't submitted upstream from the Debian package, which needed a rebuild because the irssi version changed, which is a major annoyance. The version in sid is now a snapshot because upstream needs to make a new release but at least it should fix things for my friends running unstable and testing. Hopefully those silly uploads won't be necessary in the future. That's for the client side. On the server side, I have worked on updating the Atheme-services package to the latest version, which actually failed because the upstream libmowgli is missing release tags, which means the Debian package for it is not up-to-date either. Still, it is nice to have a somewhat newer version, even though it is not the latest and some bugs were fixed. I have also looked at making atheme reproducible but was surprised at the hostility of the upstream. In the end, it looks like they are still interested in patches, but they will be a little harder to deploy than for Charybdis, so this could take some time. Hopefully I will find time in the coming weeks to test the new atheme services daemon on the IRC network I operate.

Syncthing I have also re-discovered Syncthing, a file synchronization software. Amazingly, I was having trouble transferring a single file between two phones. I couldn't use Bluetooth (not sure why), the "Wifi sharing" app was available only on one phone (and is proprietary, and has a limit of 4MB files), and everything else requires an account, the cloud, or cabling. So. Just heading to f-droid, install syncthing, flash a few qr-codes around and voil : files are copied over! Pretty amazing: the files were actually copied over the local network, using IPv6 link-local addresses, encryption and the DHT. Which is a real geeky way of saying it's completely fast, secure and fast. Now, I found a few usability issues, so much that I wrote a whole usability story for the developers, which were really appreciative of my review. Some of the issues were already fixed, others were pretty minor. Syncthing has a great community, and it seems like a great project I encourage everyone to get familiar with.

Battery stats The battery-status project I mentionned previously has been merged with the battery-stats project (yes, the names are almost the same, which is confusing) and so I had to do some work to fix my Python graph script, which was accepted upstream and will be part of Debian officially from now on, which is cool. The previous package was unofficial. I have also noticed that my battery has a significantly than when I wrote the script. Whereas it was basically full back then, it seems now it has lost almost 15% of its capacity in about 6 months. According to the calculations of the script:

this battery will reach end of life (5%) in 935 days, 19:07:58.336480, on 2018-10-23 12:06:07.270290

Which is, to be fair, a good life: it will somewhat work for about three more years.

Playlist, git-annex and MPD in Python On top of my previously mentioned photos-import script, I have worked on two more small programs. One is called get-playlist and is an extension to git-annex to easily copy to the local git-annex repository all files present in a given M3U playlist. This is useful for me because my phone cannot possibly fit my whole MP3 collection, and I use playlists in GMPC to tag certain files, particularly the Favorites list which is populated by the "star" button in the UI. I had a lot of fun writing this script. I started using elpy as an IDE in Emacs. (Notice how Emacs got a new webpage, which is a huge improvement was had been basically unchanged since the original version, now almost 20 years old, and probably written by RMS himself.) I wonder how I managed to stay away from Elpy for so long, as it glues together key components of Emacs in an elegant and functional bundle:

• Company: the "vim-like" completion mode i had been waiting for forever
• Jedi: context-sensitive autocompletion for Python
• Flymake: to outline style and syntax errors (unfortunately not the more modern Flycheck)
• inline documentation...

In short, it's amazing and makes everything so much easier to work with that I wrote another script. The first program wouldn't work very well because some songs in the playlists had been moved, so I made another program, this time to repair playlists which refer to missing files. The script is simply called fix-playlists, and can operate transparently on multiple playlists. It has a bunch of heuristics to find files and uses a MPD server as a directory to search into. It can edit files in place or just act as a filter.

Useful snippets Writing so many scripts, so often, I figured I needed to stop wasting time always writing the same boilerplate stuff on top of every file, so I started publishing Yasnippet-compatible file snippets, in my snippets repository. For example, this report is based on the humble lts snippet. I also have a base license snippet which slaps the AGPLv3 license on top of a Python file. But the most interesting snippet, for me, is this simple script snippet which is a basic scaffolding for a commandline script that includes argument processing, logging and filtering of files, something which I was always copy-pasting around.

Other projects And finally, a list of interesting issues en vrac:

• there's a new Bootstrap 4 theme for Ikiwiki. It was delivering content over CDNs, which is bad for privacy issues, so I filed an issue which was almost immediately fixed by the author!
• I found out about BitHub, a tool to make payments with Bitcoins for patches submitted on OWS projects. It wasn't clear to me where to find the demo, but when I did, I quickly filed a PR to fix the documentation. Given the number of open PRs there and the lack of activity, I wonder if the model is working at all...
• a fellow Debian Developer shared his photos workflow, which was interesting to me because I have my own peculiar script, which I never mentionned here, but which I ended up sharing with the author

Earlier today I was made aware by Holger of the results of our reproducibility efforts during the sprint. I would like to thank Lunar for pinging us about the issue, and Holger for pointing me to updated results. The figure below depicts a stacked area chart where the X axis is time and the green area is reproducible packages. Red is packages that fail to build, and Orange are unreproducible packages I was able to book accommodation for the sprint attendees very close to both my place and the sprint venue, what was very useful but also had this downside of them not being able to see much of city. As the final day of the sprint was getting closer, we decided to have a different lunch to allow them to see one of the most famous local landmarks, the botanical gardens. So we headed down to the botanical gardens, grabbed a few items for lunch at the park coffee shop, and set out to visit this very beautiful place. I have to say that there is the place were I usually take every visitor I have. We were joined by Gioavani who had just arrived for the the MiniDebconf on the following weekend. The final lists of accomplishments of the day was again very impressive

• r10k 2.1.1-2
• run massive update on team repositories
  • bump Standards-Version
  • fix Vcs-* fields
  • drop version in gem2deb build-dependency
  • set debhelper compatibility level to 9
  • update the default ruby-tests.rake
• day 4 report
• uploaded ruby-faraday-middleware-multi-json 0.0.6-2
• uploaded ruby-powerpack 0.1.1-2
• uploaded ruby-contracts 0.13.0-1
• uploaded ruby-chef-config 12.7.2-1 (NEW)
• uploaded ruby-foreigner #808530 and asked it removal from the NEW queue (was already ROMed)
• filled for RM ruby-opengraph-parser (#816752)
• new how-can-i-help version developed and uploaded
• uploaded ruby-romkan to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded ruby-rinku to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded ruby-ole to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded ruby-net-ldap to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded ruby-rack-mobile-detect to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded gem2deb 0.28 to help with reproducible builds: filenames are now sorted
• uploaded rails 2:4.2.5.2-2 with packaging improvements
  • run unit tests during the build and on CI
  • apply upstream patch to fix ActiveRecord breakage under Ruby 2.3
• pushed a ton of tags for existing uploads
• merged improvements to the team master repository
  • review/cleanup the contents of the repository
  • improved helper scripts to automate the workflow (upload, build, new-upstream, etc)
• followed up on ruby2.3 transition, filed #816698 against subversion because of ftbfs on mips, mipsel
• put ruby-cocoon into a better state
• uploaded ruby-plist
• gem2deb: gem2tgz will now create foo.gemspec (easier to patch) instead of metadata.yml
• gemwatch: ditto
• close #794139 jekyll bug (unreproducible)
• close #798934 ruby-ffi-rzmq bug (unreproducible)
• closed ftbfs #816586 #800057 #784699 as unreproducible
• reassigned #760952 #680297 to ruby2.3 (from ruby2.2)
• investigated how to list packages with non-buildd-binary uploads
• ScottK has removed ruby2.1 from unstable!

By the end of the afternoon I asked everyone to fill out a simple retrospective list, what we can use later to make future sprints better and better. Below are the results we got. What was good:

• restricted room hours actually made for a nice rhythm (did not apply for a long time )
• very good food
• very cheap food!
• longer period makes the effort of travel more worthwhile
• many participants and longer sprint than usual allowing more work to be done
• good preparation with clear goals, make the sprint usefull
• patience with the less experienced participants
• RFS very fast
• Ant nio is an excellent host
• You all are so helpful
• great dinners

What could be better:

• room too close to the street, too much vehicle noise, but sometimes nice music
• more coffee ^W meat
• could know more portugues so ordering food would have been easier
• debian infra could have not been down during the sprint

The night ended at Bar do Alem o ( The German s Bar ). Both their beer and their food are very good, but I don t have enough elements to vouch for their authenticity. :) We were joined by Giovani (who we also met earlier in the botanic gardens), and by Paulo and Daniel who are organizing the MiniDebconf. And that is the end of this year s Debian Ruby team sprint. I hope we do it all over again next year.

How corporations killed the web I have read with fascination what we would have called before a blog post, except it was featured on The Guardian: Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web The "blogfather" is Hossein Derakshan or h0d3r, an author from Teheran that was jailed for almost a decade for his blogging. The article is very interesting both because it shows how fast things changed in the last few years, technology-wise, but more importantly, how content-free the web have become, where Facebook's last acquisition, Instagram, is not even censored by Iran. Those platforms have stopped being censored, not because of democratic progress but because they have become totally inoffensive (in the case of Iran) or become a tool of surveillance for the government and targeted advertisement for companies (in the case of, well, most of the world). This struck a chord, personally, at the political level: we are losing control of the internet (if we ever had it). The defeat isn't directly political: we have some institutions like ICANN and the IETF that we can still have an effect on, even if only at the technological level. The defeat is economic, and, of course, through economy comes enormous power. That defeat meant that we have first lost free and open access to the internet (yes, dialup used to be free) and then free hosting of our content (no, Google and Facebook are not free, you are the product). This marked a major change in the way content is treated online. H0d3r explains this as the shift from a link-based internet to a stream-based internet, a "deparure from a books-internet towards a television-internet". I have been warning about this "television-internet" in my talks and conversation for a while and with Netflix taking the crown off Youtube (and making you pay for it, of course), we can assuredly say that H0d3r is right and the television, far from disappearing, is finally being resurrected and taking over the internet.

The Downloadable internet and open standards But I would like to add to that: it is not merely that we had "links" before. We had, and still have, open standards. This made the internet "downloadable" (and by extension, uploadable) and decentralized. (In fact, I still remember my earlier days on the web when I would actually download images (as in "right-click" and "Save as..." images, not just have the browser download and display it on the fly). I would download images because they were big! It could take a minute or sometimes more to download images on older modems. Later, I would do the same with music: I would download WAV files before the rise of the MP3 format, of which I ended up building a significant collection (just fair use copies from friends and owned CDs, of course) and eventually video files.) The downloadable internet is what still allows me to type this article in a text editor, without internet access, while reading H0d3r's blog post on my e-reader, because I downloaded his article off an RSS feed. It is what makes it possible for anyone to download a full copy of this blog post and connected web pages as a git repository and this way get the full history of modifications on all the pages, but also be able to edit it offline and push modifications back in. Wikipedia is downloadable (there are even offline apps for your phone). Open standards like RSS feeds and HTML are downloadable. Heck, even the Internet Archive is downloadable (and I mean, all of it, not just the parts you want), surprisingly enough.

The app-based internet and proprietary software App-based websites like Google Plus and Facebook are not really downloadable. They are meant to be browsed through an app, so what you actually see through your web browser is really more an application, downloaded software than a downloaded piece of content. If you turn off Javascript, you will see that visiting Facebook actually shows no content: everything is downloaded on the fly by an application itself downloaded, on the fly, by your browser. In a way, your browser has become an operating system that runs proprietary, untrusted and unverified applications from the web. (The software is generally completely proprietary, except some frameworks that are published as free software in what looks like the lenient act of a godly king, but is actually more an economic decision of a clever corporation which outsources, for free, R&D and testing to the larger free software community. The real "secret sauce" is basically always proprietary, if only so that we don't freak out on stuff like PRISM that reports everything we do to the government.) Technology is political. This new "app design" is not a simple optimization or an cosmetic accident of a fancy engineer: by moving content through an application, Facebook, Twitter and the like can see exactly what you do on a web page, what you actually read (as opposed to what you click on) and how long. By adding a proprietary interface between you and the content online, the advertisement-surveillance complex can track every move you make online. This is a very fine-tuned surveillance system, and because of the App, you cannot escape it. You cannot share the content outside of Facebook, as you can't download it. Or at least, it's not obvious how you can. Projects like youtube-dl are doing an amazing job reverse-engineering what is becoming the proprietary Youtube streaming protocol, which is constantly changing and is not really documented. But it's a hack: it's a Sisyphus struggle which is bound to fail, and it does, all the time, until we figure out how to either turn those corporations into good netizens respecting and contributing to open standards (unlikely) or destroy those corporations (most likely). You are trapped in their walled garden. No wonder internet.org is Facebook only: for most people nowadays, the internet is the web, and the web is Facebook, Twitter and Google, or an iPad with a bunch of apps, each their own cute little walled garden, crafted just for you. If you think you like the Internet, you should really reconsider what you are watching, what you are consuming, or rather, how it is consuming you. There are alternatives. Facebook is a though nut to crack for free software activists because we lack the critical mass. But Facebook it is also an addiction for a lot of people, and spending less time on that spying machine could be a great improvement for you I am sure. For everything else, we have good free software alternatives and open standards, use them. "Big brother ain't watching you, you're watching him." - CRASS, Nineteen Eighty Bore (audio)

This post is intended to document some elements of workflow that I ve setup to manage videos produced for a MOOC, where different colleagues work collaboratively on a set of video sequences, in a remote way. We are a team of several schools working on the same course, and we have an incremental process, so we need some collaboration over a quite long period of many remote authors, over a set of video sequences. We re probably going to review some of the videos and make changes, so we need to monitor changes, and submit versions to colleagues on remote sites so they can criticize and get later edits. We may have more that one site doing video production. Thus we need to share videos along the flow of production, editing and revision of the course contents, in a way that is manageable by power users (we re all computer scientists, used to SVN or Git). I ve decided to start an experiment with Git and Git-Annex to try and manage the videos like we use to do for slides sources in LaTeX. Obviously the main issue is that videos are big files, demanding in storage space and bandwidth for transfers. We want to keep a track of everything which is done during the production of the videos, so that we can later re-do some of the video editing, for instance if we change the graphic design elements (logos, subtitles, frame dimensions, additional effects, etc.), for instance in the case where we would improve the classes over the seasons. On the other hand, not all colleagues want to have to download a full copy of all rushes on their laptop if they just want to review on particular sequence of the course. They will only need to download the final edit MP4. Even if they re interested in being able to fetch all the rushes, should they want to try and improve the videos. Git-Annex brings us the ability to decouple the presence of files in directories, managed by regular Git commands, from the presence of the file contents (the big stuff), which is managed by Git-Annex. Here s a quick description of our setup :

• we do screen capture and video editing with Camtasia on a Windows 7 system. Camtasia (although proprietary) is quite manageable without being a video editing expert, and suits quite well our needs in terms of screen capture, green background shooting and later face insertion over slides capture, additional motion design -like enhancement, etc.
• the rushes captured (audio, video) are kept on that machine
• the MP4 rendering of the edits are performed on that same machine
• all these files are stored locally on that computer, but we perform regular backups, on demand, on a remote system, with rsync+SSH. We have installed git for Windows so we use bash and rsync and ssh from git s install. SSH happens using a public key without a passphrase, to connect easily to the Linux remote, but that isn t mandatory.
• the mirrored files appear on a Linux filesystem on another host (running Debian), where the target is actually managed with git and git-annex.
• there we handle all the files added, removed or modified with git-annex.
• we have 2 more git-annex remote repos, accessed through SSH (again using a passphrase-less public key), run by GitoLite, to which git-annex rsyncs copies of all the file contents. These repos are on different machines keeping backups in case of crashes. git-annex is setup to mandate keeping at least 2 copies of files (numcopies).
• colleagues in turn clone from either of these repos and git-annex get to download the video contents, only for files which they are interested in (for instance final edits, but not rushes), which they can then play locally on their preferred OS and video player.

Why didn t we use git-annex on windows directly, on the Windows host which is the source of the files ? We tried, but that didn t make it. Git-Annex assistant somehow crashed on us, thus causing the Git history to be strange, so that became unmanageable, and more important, we need robust backups, so we can t allow to handle something we don t fully trust: shooting again a video is really costly (setting up again a shooting set, with lighting, cameras, and a professor who has to repeat again the speech!). The rsync (with delete on destination) from windows to Linux is robust. Git-Annex on Linux seems robust so far. That s enough for now The drawback is that we need manual intervention for starting the rsync, and also that we must make sure that the rsync target is ready to get a backup. The target of the rsync on Linux is a git-annex clone using the default indirect mode, which handles the files as symlinks to the actual copies managed by git-annex inside the .git/ directory. But that ain t suitable to be compared to the origin of the rsync mirror which are plain files on the Windows computer. We must then do a git-annex edit on the whole target of the rsync mirror before the rsync, so that the files are there as regular video files. This is costly, in terms of storage, and also copying time (our repo contains around 50 Gb, and the Linux host is a rather tiny laptop). After the rsync, all the files need to be compared to the SHA256 known to git-annex so that only modified files are taken into account in the commit. We perform a git-annex add on the whole files (for new files having appeared at rsync time), and then a git-annex sync . That takes a lot of time, since all SHA256 computations are quite long for such a set of big files (the video rushes and edited videos are in HD). So the process needs to be the following, on the target Linux host:

1. git annex add .
2. git annex sync
3. git annex copy . to server1
4. git annex copy . to server2
5. git annex edit .
6. only then : rsync

Iterate ad lib I would have preferred to have a working git-annex on windows, but that is a much more manageable process for me for now, and until we have more videos to handle in our repo that our Linux laptop can hold, we re quite safe. Next steps will probably involve gardening the contents of the repo on the Linux host so we re only keeping copies of current files, and older copies are only kept on the 2 servers, in case of later need. I hope this can be useful to others, and I d welcome suggestions on how to improve our process.

Last weekend the yearly Craft Beer Kanazawa Festival took place in central Kanazawa. This year 14 different producers brought about 80 different kind of beers for us to taste. Compared with 6 years ago when I came to Japan and Japan was still more or less Kirin-Asahi-Sapporo country without any distinguishable taste, the situation as improved vastly, and we can now enjoy lots of excellent local beers!
Returning from a trip to Swansea and a conference in Fukuoka, I arrived at Kanazawa train station and went directly to the beer festival. A great welcome back in Kanazawa, but due to excessive sleep deprivation and the feeling of finally I want to come home , I only enjoyed 6 beers from 6 different producers. In the gardens behind the Shinoki Cultural Center lots of small tents with beer and food were set up. Lots of tables and chairs were also available, but most people enjoyed flocking around in the grass around the tents. What a difference to last year s rainy and cold beer festival!
This year s producers were (in order from left to right, page links according to language):

• Swanlake Beer ( )
• Ise Kadoya Brewery ( )
• Yoho Brewing ( )
• Wakuwaku Farm Kawakita ( )
• Minoh Brewery ( )
• Ohya Brasserie ( )
• Shiga Kogen Beer ( )
• Harvest Moon ( )
• Ushitora Brewery ( )
• Johana Brewery ( )
• Fujizakura Brewery ( )
• North Island Brewery ( )
• Minami Shinshu Brewery ( )
• Heart&Beer Nihonkai Club ( )

With only 6 beers to my avail (due to ticket system), I choose the ones I don t have nearby. Mind that the following comments are purely personal and do not define a quality standards I just say what I like from worst to best:

• Ohya Brasserie, Kitokito Hop : A desaster, I was close to throw this beer away, but then thought (what a waste!). Strange and disturbing taste.
• Ushitora Brewery, Pure Street Session IPA: Ok, but nothing special. Too light and not taste a bit unclear to me.
• Minoh Brewery, Momo Weizen: Typical Weizen Beer, light and refreshing taste. Good.
• Swanlake Brewery, some seasonal IPA: good, not so extremely bitter, nice taste.
• Ise Kadoya Brewery, Pale Ale: very good, full taste
• Yoho Brewery, Red Ale: my absolute favorite I don t know why, but this brewery simply produces absolutely stunning ales. Their Aooni IPA is my day-in-day-out beer, world class. Their Yona Yona Ale, less bitter than the Aooni, is already famous, and this Red Ale was a perfect addition.

A great beer festival and I am looking for next years festival to try a few more. In the mean time I will stock up beers at home, so that I have always a good Yoho Brewery beer at hand! Enjoy